56. The Deeper Reason You Still Feel Stuck (And How to Shift It) with Dave Asprey

Welcome to Rooted in Wellness with me, wellness advocate and holistic nutritionist, Mona Sharma. Together we will take a journey to discover natural healing practices from imbalance to balance, guided by ancient wisdom and modern scientific insights. I was raised living summers on an ashram, so I learned early on that food is medicine and your kitchen is your greatest source of health care and prevention. After facing two heart surgeries, anxiety and weight challenges, I discovered that just because your symptoms are common doesn't mean that they are normal. Together with some incredible guests, we will explore the power of our mind, body and soul connection, returning to our roots to rediscover our greatest wellbeing. What if the stress, fatigue, and emotional patterns that you can't seem to shake aren't mindset issues at all, but built into your biology? In this episode, I sit down with four-time New York Times bestselling author, entrepreneur, and founder of Bulletproof Coffee, Dave Asprey, to explore the science of how our biology shapes our state of being and how we can rewire it. We dive into why so many of us are stuck in survival mode without even knowing it, the real roots of anxiety, people-pleasing, and burnout, and why healing is only the first step to becoming who you truly are. Dave and I talk about how mitochondria, brain waves, fasting, and even sexual energy influence your emotional resilience, your intuition, and even your longevity. We explore why biohacking isn't about doing more, but about clearing the patterns that drain your life force. If you're on a healing journey and ready to move from survival into deep vitality, This conversation is a must. Dave Asprey is the founder of Bulletproof Coffee and Upgrade Labs, a pioneer in the biohacking movement and author of Heavily Meditated, you, Roadmap to Untangling Anxiety and Moving Through Depression and Reclaiming youg Life. Dave, welcome to Rooted in Wellness.

Mona, I'm super happy to be here for you. Me too.

I'm so excited to talk to you again. You've been such an inspiration to so many of the people that I've worked with. Before we dive in, you should know this podcast really is inspired from my healing journey, which you know a bit about. So I always say Western medicine really helped me, but Eastern medicine really is what saved me. So to dive in, you know, all of these ancient wisdom practices that we have in our modern world, and how we can become more rooted in them. What are some practices that you have every day? I have a feeling I know what one of them is going to be. How do you become more rooted in yourself, but mostly your inner wisdom that you have to heal?

It's all about the coffee, really.

Upon rising.

You know, having a wake up ritual is really important. And some people get a little obsessive about their wake up ritual. So, mine is I set aside at least an hour and usually two hours to do something to improve myself. And it might be infrared sauna, it might be a cold plunge, might be both, it might be any of the other technology around meditation or around biohacking that extends my life or increases my consciousness. Because end of the day, anyone who starts biohacking becomes a longevity advocate. and someone interested in consciousness. Because if you're going to live for hundreds of years, you might want to have a lot of energy and you might want to actually be kind and just be happy instead of being an angry person. Because angry people don't live longer and life sucks anyway.

Yeah, seriously. So, you know, do you treat it like a checklist though? I have a feeling you have a couple things in your roster that you go to upon rising.

The only critically important thing in the morning is light exposure because it sets the timing for your mitochondria, your circadian biology. You'll sleep better at night if you get some sunlight in the morning. So the most important thing is either red light and ideally full spectrum sunlight as early as I can when I wake up. And that always happens. And coffee somehow always happens too.

I'm with you on that. I ask those things, no matter who I have on the other end, the expert, the doctor that's sitting on the other side of this conversation, to date, I would say 99% of the things that they recommend have been free or they're nominal. And it's something that's so simple because to your point, what you just mentioned, some people treat their morning, you know, rooting practice as this checklist that they might not even feel is uprooting them. So as somebody who's gone through a healing journey, do you notice when there's certain practices that cause you to drift and become uprooted that maybe they're the source of your inflammation or lack of energy?

Sure. I mean, perfectionism. is a major problem because you stress about it. But an unlisted or an unacknowledged problem is believing something works when it doesn't. And I've had lots of times like that. When I was 300 pounds in my 20s, oh, I have chronic fatigue syndrome that I don't know about. So I'll go to the gym six days a week, 90 minutes a day, and I'll do it with all my willpower. And I did that for a year and a half. Never lost a pound. I started at 300 pounds, I finished at 300 pounds, I started with a 46 inch waist, I ended with a 46 inch waist. I did get stronger, but I was not helping my health. So believing something works without measuring it and tracking it, it's not a good idea because we have 100 plus years of people trying to sell you things that actually harm you so they can sell you other things that make you healthy. and if you just blindly believe, oh, working out more makes you lose weight, that is not the science. And there are angry influencers out there who will stand up and be like, you, can cancel out your Snickers bar with a diet soda. They're angry because they think it works and they do it and it messes with their mitochondria.

It's so true. I don't think it's a surprise or coincidence people who've built these beautiful platforms and written so many books like you, it takes really going through something and like the introspection that's required in order for you to just ask questions about your physiology to understand what you need. And I really hope that more people just start to do that. You know, I have to share a little story just in terms of my connection with you. I've always looked up to you. Your books have been like a go-to for so many of my clients, and I love the science of biohacking. I really do. But I would say that after COVID, after my heart surgeries, after going through miscarriages, after mold toxicity, I don't know, the word biohack for me or hacking, it just felt so aggressive. I hope that, let's see how this lands, but it really just like, it's caused me to like, just go on this journey back into myself and the messaging about nourishing your terrain and honoring your constitution and building your body's resilience back. And now the messaging with my clients is helping them understand that they are the healer. And what's fascinating in that and now coming back to you and your work, I feel that this is so beautifully aligned with your book. Like, I'm glued to every page. I feel like it aligns with me. Do you, you know, maybe in diving into this, would you say that you've shifted from this essence of biohacking, which I know that you believe in, but there's an essence of brain peace or, you know, through heavily meditated, is it a journey that you've been on? I know that it's been about 10 years in the making.

Tell us a little bit about that. Well, I wanted to bring a new mindset to the world. And it came about from two things. I started getting education from my elders. The leaders in the longevity field in the 1990s were considered to be crazy, even though there were licensed doctors. Just like Bobby Kennedy was considered crazy, except he was right. So they were mentoring me in my 20s, and they taught me the science of longevity. But I could get no one young to come. And at the same time, our sister organization to the nonprofit I ran was called the Institute for Noetic Sciences, which is studying esoteric phenomena. So part of my life, I'm hardcore Silicon Valley, work my ass off. The other part of it is the part that went to remote parts of Nepal and Tibet. The idea for bulletproof coffee and biohacking came on the side of the holiest mountain in the world that takes five days driving on dirt roads to get there. I talked about ayahuasca that I did in 1999 where they're like, you're white. Why would you want to do that? Because it wasn't a tourist industry. You had to seek it out and find the shaman. So I've been on a spiritual path, but I will tell you, when I decided to start the biohacking movement, there had to be a word for people who can heal themselves but can also upgrade themselves. I don't want to just be well. Like, I want to be so abundantly well that I am bursting with energy and I have the power to do all the things in the world that matter. and that I have the control, I have the power to do that. And it's not about willpower, the very definition of biohacking from day one, change the environment around you and inside of you so you have full control of your own biology and your state. So when you talk about being your own healer, you're just getting going. I had to be my own healer too. It cost about $300,000, maybe a half a million to really get rid of all the toxin mold and chronic fatigue and arthritis, like all the stuff I was dealing with. It's a long list. It shouldn't cost that much. And I'm lucky I could have spent that. And I was desperate when I spent that. The other million and a half, actually it's about 2 million now that I've spent, that is extending my life. It is becoming more conscious than I could have become in one lifetime. Literally, if you meditate every day for 20 or 40 years, your brain will shift in a reliable way. You can do it in five days. with computers, you can show your brand new states. And I've spent six months of my life doing that. And it has changed the way I interact with, with everyone and with myself and with the world. Problem is, if I say that all at once in the biohacking movement, it, no one would, trust me, when I told you shine a laser on your brain, try earthing and put butter in your coffee. Oh, and, and do an ice bath. Oh, an intermittent fast. That was plenty. Do you have any angry doctors? Like, how dare you? And Now that I have heavily meditated, I'm like, if you can be triggered, it means someone else has their finger on the trigger. But there's only so much people will absorb. So I put the sprinkles of spirituality in there. And Mona, I really mean this. You're talking about your healing journey. When are you done healing and you're on another journey that's about radically expanding and improving yourself and tapping into the powers that you have that you don't know you have, because that's not healing. that's evolving, it's transcending, it's enhancing, and it's being more than you ever thought you could be. Healing is where it starts, but it's not where it ends. And I use biohacking in part because it allows consciousness and longevity to come together. It also accounts for epigenetics and creating an environment where you can heal. And it also, it gets people who would never listen to a healing journey. I come from Silicon Valley where I talk about the layers of your networking stack in your social life. And I have a spreadsheet to just like, these are engineers, right? So you can go, Hey, engineer, would you like to have a blissful healing journey? Because they're just like, no, you're dumb. What's the code for that? Show me evidence that it works. I showed them all evidence. I got them to try it and they felt different. And now they went on a healing journey. And now They're all biohackers. And if you become a biohacker, you will enter the road to consciousness. It's inevitable.

I just didn't tell them that up front. Oh, yeah. That's what gets me going. I have goosebumps right now. I would say the people that I've worked with, I see the transition that goes from, you know, the doing and I have to heal and the protocol, but the people who evolve, it's almost like they're like cleaning up the tubes. They have to get through all that shit in order to make some more space for the expansion to actually happen. and even your word upgrade, like upgrade for me is a turn on. It's like you want to upgrade who you are, upgrade your life. Literally, it's like the evolution that comes with that. And I know that you've really pushed the boundaries with body optimization. I think that we live in a society that like they're turned on by that. But now the lens.

Did you see the abs on this guy? What the hell?

That's from meditating, right?

Oh, yeah.

But tell us now, why would you say mastering your mind and meditation in particular, why is this the real biohacker's edge?

I'm gonna argue that having control over your state is the biohacker's edge and that meditation is a slow way to get there.

Yeah. Right. I agree.

And what do you mean, Dave? Did you just say you're not into meditating? No, I am. I've meditated in caves while fasting. But I was doing fasting on top of meditation, which changes the effects. And I wrote a whole book a few years ago on like the spiritual side of fasting and why it works. Heavily meditated is, I am quite certain when I say this, my most important book because it explains why we make the decisions we make and why any technique or technology that gives you access to your system control panel in your body.

Mm-.

Why that is the most important thing you can do. It'll change your stress response. It changes everything.

It's like our operating system, right? You're operating your operating system.

In fact, I call it the meat operating system in the book, because you're made out of meat and it's not you. And I want to walk through all the F words because I think that would be useful.

Yeah, yeah, it's coming up. Let's go into them.

So here's how it works. You have about a third of a second before your brain gets any notice of what's happening in the world and it's invisible. Have you ever seen like the Super Bowl and they're saying it's broadcast live? No, it's not. There's an eight second censorship window in case there's a wardrobe malfunction that someone didn't pay for. Right. So you think it's live, it feels live, but it's on delay. All of reality is on delay. And during that time, something is happening. like, well, what is it? It is the operating system decides whether it's worth your attention and how you're going to feel about it. So if I do this, a third of a second later, your auditory cortex gets the signal, and then about the rest of the second later, your conscious brain gets a chance to think about what it is. Now, people are going, what, there's another consciousness in there? Yeah, there is. And here's my proof. Mona, have you ever leaned on a hot surface accidentally?

Mm-.

And then you look down and you're like, you know, that's really hot. I think I should move my hand.

No one's ever- seconds later. Yeah. Right.

You would be blistered by then. So your hand moves itself or another distributed consciousness throughout your meat, your operating system moved it for you and made you think you did it. So I want to explain why your body does what it does, where are the behaviors that frustrate you come from, and this all ties into why meditation or these other techniques give you Here's what all life on Earth will do. It has to work for single celled bacteria. Because we are made out of mitochondria, we have more of those than we do cells in our body, and they're ancient bacteria. So it has to work for bacteria, it has to work for slime molds, for politicians, any kind of animal you can think of, even the most repellent ones, well, and even humans. So number one, fear. If something is scary, Run away from, kill, or hide from it. Now, keep in mind, bacteria are not very smart. So they're going to be afraid of things that aren't really scary because if something eats them, it's game over. And for us humans, we spend about nine times more energy on things that might be scary unless we meditate. Then we spend only six times more energy on them. But we're constantly wired inside our cells to be reactive before our brain ever gets a signal. And this helps because if you're about to fall off a ladder or there's a ball coming towards your head, you're going to duck, right? And this is good. This is your body keeping you alive. That's why it's an operating system. So fear, second F word, is food. One third of the average person's thoughts is about tacos. Okay, about food anyway. There are studies that show this and you're saying what? Yeah, so it doesn't have to that, but that's a wasted thought. You could have had emptiness. You could have thought about something that mattered, or you could have been like, I'm so hungry. What do I have for lunch? Pancakes, fried chicken, like whatever, like what, what is going on here? So you can tame that thought. And the third one is my favorite one. All life has to do it to stay around forever. And this is one of your favorites too, I hear. It's an F word.

You're gonna say fertility or the, no.

I was gonna say fucking.

I told you you could swear. Okay.

Anyone who's working I always try to get the person to say the F word and you knew it, so I reversed it. So fear of food and fucking, your body evaluates reality to see if those three things are possible. And if so, it's going to make you feel a certain way about it. And then you get to think about it after you already feel about it and you didn't get to pick the feeling. That is such a screwed up way of walking around in a meat body, but that's how reality works.

Yeah.

So Mona, have you done anything that you're ashamed of that wasn't one of those three F words? They were all from the three F words, right?

All of them. All of them. Fear especially, and reactivity, which I think is so relevant today. They're all relevant. Oh my gosh. Yeah. But you've added in a powerful other two.

It's a framework there because a lot of people feel shame, right? Even that perfectionist wellness thing. Right. That's born out of fear.

Right.

And then all the times you ate all the Ben and Jerry's and all the pizza and all the times, well, you went on a date with those three people at the same time and you know you shouldn't have done it, but like all the bad decisions we make, it's not you. It's an automated system trying to keep you alive. And it's a consciousness. It's very fast and very dumb. So, this is the source of the seven deadly sins. This is the source of the Buddhist hindrances. It's the source of in Western psychology, the ego. It is your mitochondria. And this is original work that I've been working on for 25 years to come to this understanding. And it's really dark because, oh, my gosh, that's all that life is. No, because there's another F word. It's friend. All life forms ecosystems. Like, we help each other and the plants form a forest and the animals work with other animals and their own. Their own species. So you don't have to think about it. You're wired to be kind to each other inside your bones. But if you're stuck in fear, you're stuck in hunger, you're stuck in lust, there's no energy left. Or if you're like, you're stuck in anger.

Yeah. Yeah.

So friend is critically important. That's where community comes from. That's where our desire to make a difference in the world comes from. Yeah. And the final F word is forgiveness. and that's how life evolves. And it's really easy for most life. So if you're a deer on National Geographic and the tiger is running after you and you get away, then you're like, just start shaking. And then you start eating grass. That's letting go of the stress hormones and being done with it. Humans aren't that good at that because in addition to our operating system, we have a brain and we just think about it. What if that's a tiger? What if that's a tiger? What if my mother-in-law's a tiger? And we try to make up stories to justify our emotions. so in the east or in a therapist's office, they're going to do pretty much the same thing. What I learned in the monastery was sit in Lotus pose. Imagine the Muda. Notice the intrusive thoughts. Gently set them aside. Notice them again. Gently. I'm like, how many times do we have to notice these freaking thoughts?

Yeah. Yeah.

You can do this. And I learned how to do it, and I became a good meditator. The problem is. Taking energy to notice thoughts that are not really thoughts. It's your operating system telling you, think about something scary.

Yeah.

That is possible. And if you go to the West, well, cognitive behavioral therapy, notice your feelings and then change your behavior. Dude, it takes so much energy and intention. How am I supposed to have anything left over for my kids if I'm just noticing my feelings all the time?

Yeah. And people don't want to do it either, right? Until they actually feel that feeling, right? They just they don't want to do it. I think forgiveness is powerful. This is exactly actually why I got into NLP. I have a feeling like the majority of people out there, they know what to eat, but I couldn't figure out why after, you know, just some basic conversation around talking about their past, I'm often met with tears, something that happened in their childhood or while they're not choosing themselves or why they're holding on to so much anger and resentment. And obviously, you know, I've shared with you my heart palpitations have nothing to do with the the structure of my heart. It was everything that I was holding on to. And while I wish everyone could have experiences like you and I have shared about going to these monasteries and ashrams and stuff like that where the stage is set, I agree with you. It's also really complicated and it takes a lot of time and you have to be a willing participant. But how does forgiving then in your mind, how does it become this neurological upgrade and not this like the spiritual thing that people often hear? I'll never forget when I used the word vibration 10 years ago, people would just immediately roll their eyes. But now we understand frequency and we understand, and I know that you've even looked at mapping this out on how someone's physiology literally changes.

Well, forgiveness is not what people think it is. In fact, it's a trigger word. And most people get triggered hundreds of times a day and they don't know it. And someone says something, and it activates your operating system going, well, there's that one time, you know, Mr. Johnson in second grade said that one thing and it made you feel dumb or whatever it made you feel. So now your spouse is saying something to you that happened to match that pattern and my spouse is saying things to make me feel dumb. It's not real, but it feels real, right? So what forgiveness is, is going in and permanently turning off reactivity to something. So there is no trigger left. that way when you're sitting, visualizing the Buddha, there are no intrusive thoughts because you went through and instead of learning to over time gently train the thoughts away to just find a faster way to go in and say, Hey, body, I understand you're trying to keep me safe. You're like a firewall here and you're going, oh, that might be scary. It might be scary. Let's just go through and turn off everything. Or the best model ever. Think about your phone. Okay, you got your phone. If your therapist said, you know what? I know there's a lot of alerts from TikTok and Messenger and all the other things going off all the time. I want you to just gently swipe them to the left and just keep doing your work. Just you could do that, but you would hate it.

But why did it never go back? Yeah.

Why do they tell us to do that with meditation? Because that's what they're doing. It is possible to access the control panel for your reactivity and pick something and say, please don't alert me about that anymore. And then the body won't. And it is so freeing. So I've spent months and months of my life with electrodes glued to my head doing this for anything I can find that's a trigger. So when I wrote heavily meditated, I am giving away, there's it, there it is, trying to get on camera, I am giving away the recipe that I've used with more than a thousand executives. And they'd spend about $20,000 to be with me and my team for five days. And they teach them how to do this. We have computers on their head, neuroscientists, chefs, like it's a big deal at 40 years of Zen. But 10 years of that work in order to be able to write this book and to say, well, I know what forgiveness is. I know what it looks like in the brain. I know what it feels like in the body and I can teach it reliably. And when you truly forgive something and you structure it the right way, it will never push your buttons again. You are done with it forever. And it is the most freeing, most peace generating thing you can do. So that's in the book and that's just one of the chapters. It's my most precious book, all the most important things. If you want to be happy, you want to be aware and conscious, this is the thing.

And I think it's beautiful that you're sharing everything with 40 Years of Zen. It's something that I've always wanted to experience. But I'm curious, you know, with these emotional triggers, unresolved emotional triggers, we go about our daily life, we're doing all the things, we're eating healthy, but it's almost like these, like the back door is open, this like draining of our energy, like those background apps. So when people are there or in your book, people listening, what's your go-to method for simply identifying them? Because a lot of people, you know, from my lens, for who I work with, oh, you know, I'm an adult. I forgive Madame Michelle. I was a little kid. She didn't know any better. But meanwhile, you know, that moment is the instigation of all your anger and fear and rage, maybe.

The reason that we do that is most of us are fully triggered by forgiveness. And it's because your mom told you or your dad, you forgive your brother or your sister. Forgiveness is not a thought. It's not even really a choice unless you know how to do it. It is a state change. So forgiveness is an altered state. And it's as important as, you know, a tantric orgasm or as important as Satori or Samadhi or any of these amazing states that meditation people can go to. It is a, it feels weird to forgive and it feels weird in your chest and your brain waves shift. And when that happens, that's when the trigger gets turned off forever. So someone saying, all right, I'm an adult. I decided I forgave mom. No, you didn't. Unless someone taught you how to forgive, you don't even know what forgiveness is. Number one. Number two, you think forgiveness is a thought. And number three, you can't just forgive mom because mom is a complex thing. You forgive certain situations with mom until you're done. And so structuring it is the hard part. And that's why I took a chapter in the book to say, well, here's how we do it when we're running our CEOs through the program at 40 years of Zen. And so number one, understand you probably haven't forgiven the people you think you've, if you told them you forgave them, forgiveness is not telling someone anything. And it's not even convincing yourself that what they did was okay. And I have had people come through who have been tortured, like physically tortured. Right? If they forgive their torturer, they're not gonna say, Hey, Mr. Torturer, I forgive you. And they're not gonna say, you know, it's a good thing that they tortured me. No, but they are going to be non-reactive to it. And they'll come in the door and say, I was horribly tortured. And they walk out the door five days later going, yeah, that was tortured, but there's no energy in it anymore.

Right?

And so how would you go about identifying it? Here's what you do. You go, all right, what's the emotion I'm working on dealing with? What does it feel like? All right, what's the most recent time you can remember feeling that? So you're sitting there, take a couple deep breaths, and then you say, what's the first time I can remember feeling that? And then something weird will pop into your head. This seems like it has no relevance. It doesn't matter what it is. You just do that and you'll be surprised how they're connected. And I talk in the book about a place where I was really stuck as an entrepreneur. And this was around actually Joe Rogan, of all things. I was on his show three years ago.

Yeah, I read that last night. Yeah.

And it was like the injustice of the situation, and I won't get into details here, but it actually pushed my operating system. Something happened in first grade where I got blamed for something someone else did.

Right?

And you're like, what? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. I had forgotten that situation entirely, but you sit down, you go, oh, and it just came into my head, all right, I'll run the reset process on that. And when I did it, It was like all of a sudden the reality came clear. Every time someone who's got an agenda against you says your name, they're still saying your name. So every time Joe Rogan says, Dave Asprey is a bad man because I have an investment in a competitive company to him, he might not have said that part, but it sure looks like that's what was going on.

Right.

But every time he said that, I sold more coffee. It didn't matter what he said, but I was so reactive and it wasn't because of Joe. It's because I had a reactive pattern from my own childhood. And once I went in and did that, it stopped bothering me.

And isn't it wild looking at the things that happen like that? First of all, people are mean also. I went from being so reactive reading that to like, people are mean. You know, I often think that our journey is chosen for us, but it's going through those things that cause you to have to do the work to see where it comes from so that you can evolve and then energetically you know, your, your numbers kept going up or your sales kept going up. I think that energetically, when you're detached from whatever that state is in your body, you're good. You are clear and you know it. But unfortunately, we've got to go through it. This is where we got to do the work.

Maybe I'm a hard learner, because I, I definitely went through some, some big stuff. And it's really funny. Right before you're interviewing me now, another influencer who's just terrible health bully and has been for 10 plus years. Just did a big thing about how Dave asks spray, you know, mispronounced man, just like the most childish thing. You know, I'm a bad man and, and just lots of anger and rage. I don't know the guy, but he's a troll, right? And you get a million followers as a troll. You just have to live with yourself. So I'm like, okay. And literally I hit send on an email to him and I was like, Hey man, I just wanted to thank you for all the mentions on social media. Because you've really increased my sales and I will be using your Instagram handle as a coupon code the next time you want to post about me. I really appreciate it. I'm looking forward to it. And I will. I mean, and it's hilarious, right? And you can see the right. What's going on is something like 80% of people are stuck in 12 year old consciousness. And it's not their fault. It's not cuz you're a bad person. It's because your operating system stopped there. And you didn't have the role models to teach you how to regulate your system. And no one teaches this in school. So you can get out of that stuff. And I'm like, I genuinely wish these bullies well. I have no issue with it, but I am going to play with them. And it's okay. You want to be a 12th grade playing? Let's play. I'm rubber, you're glue. Let's go. And we can be joyful about it. And not fearful, not defensive. Just going through life like that is much better. And it's just so liberating.

It is liberating. And you know, you talk about enlightenment. I think that the enlightenment truly comes in those moments when you know that, you know, the saying your outer world is a direct reflection of your inner world. If somebody has that much anger to put out in the world, it's a clear reflection. You can almost, I have a feeling just knowing you a little bit, you could probably have a little bit of empathy for this person too. And Whatever the reason is that's driving his actions, right?

Well, online trolls were almost universally bullied.

Yeah.

They grew up, they're stuck in bully energy, and now they're gonna bully people online and they're gonna, you know, I don't believe what you said, therefore I'm gonna attack you. And they're like, really? Are we still doing that? You know, it doesn't matter how many people a person has helped or whether their message, they'll find something, I write about sociopathy and narcissism and how to detect it as part of heavily meditated. And what you realize is that when people are so frightened that their operating system says, I'm going to erase something from your reality. I'm going to tell you a story to make you safe enough to survive. You will hold on to the story as if your life depends on it. And when someone comes along who questions your story without even knowing it, You will believe they're the devil and you will set, you'll set an agenda to destroy them unless you do the healing. So all of us have been targeted at least once or twice by narcissists in our life and they, they make you feel crazy. And I've had the culture just ruined at one of my companies before I figured it out. I was like, oh my gosh, like why didn't I let that person go sooner? Like this is on me. But I was so just like, what is happening? I'm questioning my reality. And I brought in a organizational consultant and She sat out for first meeting with me. She said, I talked with a teammate that there's a problem with and I just want you to know you're not crazy. And I was like, oh my God, somebody believes me.

You see me.

Yeah, because if someone's hanging onto their story that they're right, even if they're actually wrong, and they're hanging onto it as if their life depends on it, they will lie, cheat, and steal to make sure that you don't change their reality with your truth. And this is not a grown up functional behavior. It's a flaw in our operating system. And I feel nothing but compassion for them. I also, with extreme discretion, remove them from my environment because the definition of firehacking is changing the environment around you. You will not be at peace if there are people trying to ruin your life to make themselves feel safe. And this is what's going on. Like, guys, do the work. If you're one of those people who's angry all the time, it's not other people, it's you. Yeah.

And this is one of those areas I look up to you. I was bullied too, and it sucked, man. And I feel the anger that wants to come up sometimes, but then even having the courage to have a voice like you do, it takes having courage, right? And then just setting the tone for what you're going to put out into the world is going to be supportive. So thank you for sharing that story. I think the story is really, really helped.

I try to be really real in the book. I mean, I'm talking about my life in there.

Yeah, you do.

Not because I'm, you know, the best example of anything, but just that if I can weigh 300 pounds and be where I am now, and I can be as messed up and angry as I was and be where I am now, it's probably going to be easier for you.

You've humanized yourself for a lot of us, which I think is human.

I've always been human, but I'm not sure.

Next podcast. Let's take a quick break from this episode to talk about something that's really helped me stay grounded in my health routine this summer, and that's Symbiotica. I'm often asked how I stay consistent with my wellness practices when life gets full, and honestly, this is one of the easiest ways. I keep a few of my favorite Symbiotica supplements on hand, and they make such a difference. Right now, I'm loving their Irish Seamoss. It supports gut health, digestion, and that radiant skin that we all want. I also take their liposomal glutathione daily for skin, gut health, and overall vitality, and their magnesium L- threonate has really helped me with focus, calming my nervous system, and supporting restful sleep. It's a small ritual that keeps me feeling aligned and supported, and I think that you're going to love it too. You can go to symbiotica.com/Monasharma. Again, that's symbiotica.com/Monasharma, and you'll get 20% off plus free shipping. And as always, I'll have the link for you in the show notes. Let's talk about the concept of neurofeedback. I hope that neurofeedback is something that's used in, you know, just everyday doctor's offices. It comes up, you know, I think it's a, something that was practiced in ancient wisdom. But how has your experience with neurofeedback kind of fueled your mind that it can rewire your brain faster than traditional practices.

I was really desperate in Silicon Valley. I'm in my mid 20s and my brain is not working. I can't remember things in meetings and I don't know how I got home at the end of the day. And I'm actually scared to the point I bought disability insurance. Because I'm like, something's wrong. Doctors say I'm fine. I have no evidence there's anything wrong with me, but I bought the insurance because I'm like, I don't know what's going on. And I went to one of First neurofeedback places you could ever go to was a chiropractor's office in the South Bay area. And this little kid walks in and starts screaming and running in circles not once or twice, like, wah! And I'm freaking out going, this is neurologically, like I'm jangled. But I went and I did the work and I did it once a week and I came back in about six weeks and the same kid sit there in the waiting room. And I'm thinking, should I get weight in my car? And he walks up and goes, hi, you know, my name's Bobby or whatever his name was. Shakes my hand. And I'm like, what just happened? His mom says, oh yeah, this has changed his whole brain. I thought, okay, I'm buying one of these machines. So I've had a computer I could hook up to my brain to see what's going on in there for 25 years. And after a year or two of that, maybe doing brain surgery on yourself is a bad idea. So I started working with different types of neurofeedback with experts all over the place. And I finally realized they're all trying to fix something broken. and I'm trying to create enhancement and new states. And then I found that the Dalai Lama had actually put up a bounty of like a hundred thousand dollars. This was back in the 90s before her currency was debased. This was a huge amount of money. And he says, look, it takes me four hours of meditation to reach this one state. If you can get me there in an hour, I'll give you a hundred thousand dollars. Wow. Right. Wow. And so there was a whole conference with neuroscience and Zen. And I'm so fascinated because I'm a network engineer in Silicon Valley building data centers, cloud computing, and going, I want to hack into my brain. So it was that weird mindset of thinking about how do I change the settings? And I was not about healing anything. I was about opening up to new things. And I tried all the stuff, the different sound waves, the different things like binaural beats. I made my own. and I tried nootropics and I got better and better at neurofeedback. And one day I just said, you know, I need a Formula One level race car mechanic for my brain. I do not want to fix my brain. I want to make it into something magical. And that was why I started 40 Years of Zen. And fortunately, you know, it's been really about 1500 CEOs, I'd say a thousand, because some people go more than once. But about 1500 people have gone through the program. And it worked for them and it worked for me. And it allowed me to learn how to go through and turn these things off and access these profound states that usually take decades of daily practice to get into. So I can do things that most people don't think are possible. And I didn't think were possible in my 20s. In fact, I was very skeptical. But when you read the science and you look at Dean Radin's work or Joe Dispenza's work, there is deep science behind this. In fact, Joe Dispenza is speaking at my biohacking conference in what, eight days? Eight days, yeah. Here on the 28th in Austin, Texas, and at the biohacking conference, we'll probably sell out. We have maybe 80 tickets left. Incredible. It's, but Joe's talking about the science of meditation and breathwork, and it's thousands of data points. We've got genetics, looking at inflammatory markers, looking at healing. The reality is, People who meditate can develop superpowers. And I'm not the one saying this. It's actually ancient yogic texts.

It's proven. Yeah. It's proven.

The yogic siddhis, right? These are things that a few people can do. And people who meditate, if you look, they actually can do these things in a way that's statistically significant, but most of them can't. And then they warn you in the instruction manual, on how to move towards enlightenment. It's very old, but it's still an instruction manual. All of these things may emerge on your path of becoming aware. Don't let them distract you. They're distractions. So if you wake up one day and you know someone else's thoughts, you're like, oh, cool. That's great. I'm going to just keep on my path, right? Oh, look at me. I'm a big psychic or whatever, and you can go down that path the rest of your life. So these things emerge. It is real. It is measurable. It is scientific. And it turns out if a computer teaches you the way you do in neurofeedback, it's on one hand worse than a meditation teacher. On the other hand, it's better.

Right.

See, here's why, but unless you have a different question about that.

No, I can see where you're going, but yeah, tell me why. Cause I can see the time piece. It's such a commitment, right? And I think that we're, we're addicted to, to feedback. We want to see data.

We want to see data and. Humans learn really well with real time feedback and we learn really poorly with delayed feedback. So if you eat pizza now and then a week from now you gain a pound, you will not associate it with the pizza, right? And even if you do, you won't feel the pain of the pizza. But if every time you ate a bite of pizza, your pants got tight, you would not ever eat pizza, right? Because it's a real time thing. Good enough. The thing is a good meditation teacher and you know this, they can actually share their state with you. They will calm themselves or put themselves in altered state and they will share it in a way with you and your field will start to match theirs. And you don't consciously know this unless you've got some training. But when you start doing something even better, if you're in a room full of meditators, if the teacher notices, cuz they're looking at 50 people or a thousand people, and then they look at you and then they raise their eyebrow, like, okay, I got my feedback one time today.

Woohoo.

A computer is gonna tell you this a thousand times a second. But a computer will not allow you to co-regulate with it. So what I'm doing at 40 Years In, we have facilitators there who can co-regulate. And then I record things with my voice that is done in a certain way. And we make the sounds have embedded sounds inside them that change your state. So when you're working on this, you go, oh, like I feel the difference and now you are in charge of you. And the risk of a teacher if a teacher becomes a guru, you're dependent on the guru. And you can be like, someone like Aubrey Marcus, like, I've done ayahuasca a hundred times. I'm like, brother, when are you gonna notice it's not working?

Yeah. When do you not have to do it anymore? Yeah.

I also know people say, I've traveled around the world for 10 years with my guru. And I'm like, I am so pleased for you on your path. What's gonna happen when your guru passes?

Yeah.

And people are bereft. They're, they're lost. so what you want to do is you want to appreciate and love the guru, learn from a teacher, and also learn to access your states on your own that do not require medicines. But there's nothing wrong with using a medicine to, to see what a state feels like. And there's a chapter in heavily meditated. It says, well, okay, let's say you don't want to just meditate. We'll try these different types of breath work or try these sounds or try psychedelics in this order. to access altered states, but don't become dependent. And, or even try tantric sex. And 20% of people report meeting God during orgasm at least once in their life. That's just as valid as psychedelics or breathwork.

Such a good point. What I'm hearing is like outsourcing. Craig's hands are up in the air, by the way, at that common. No more outsourcing. And this is for me what I was doing at the ashram, whether it was the swamis there, the teachers there, I was outsourcing everything there. But here's something that I want to hover on. So you've explored ultra states, obviously through psychedelics, you talk about this, but also through breath work. And I want people in this, like, you know, grand rising and awareness around psychedelics, which I'm excited about. I think that especially with psilocybin and mental health issues, like the future could look very bright. However, to your point about the stories of people jumping back in over and over and over and over and over, not doing the work, Can you share maybe, like, do you have a memory for me? I'll share. When I was given my spiritual name at the ashram, we had to chant and meditate for it just seemed like hours and hours. Thought it was nothing, but that when I stood up, I had to walk down this really long path and I was like, shit, I cannot feel my feet on the ground. Oh my God, what is happening? Then I looked up at the trees and it was like the sacred geometry of merging the leaves together. No drugs, no psychedelics, Simply my breath and chanting.

Well, the first time I did any personal development work at all, I was about 30 and I had made and lost $6 million. I had just decided to get divorced from a brief and very chaotic marriage. And I was just like at rock bottom where I'm like, I don't know what to do. I've tried being rich, I've tried being famous. , I've tried being in a relationship, like, I am so miserable. I, I don't know. So I went to this crazy sounding 10 day workshop and they had us do a holotropic breathwork. And this was around 2002 maybe. So in early days of this becoming a modern thing. And I have, I saw more mystical stuff. I had a, a bigger psychedelic experience from that than I've had from any psychedelic. and maybe DMT is on par with it. And I'm like, what is going on? It was life changing, you know, seeing past lives, getting lessons, all this stuff. And it really just, it really changed my, my reality. We also did internal family systems and just a whole bunch of, of transpersonal psychology. Well, two years later, Stan Grof, the inventor of holotropic breath work, comes to Palo Alto and I did breath work with him. Actually with the mother of my children. And then two years later, I ran a breath workshop with Stan Grof, the father of breathwork. And we trained about a hundred of my coaches with Stan when he was 94 years old and full of energy. And he was a psychiatrist in the 50s. I know you know this, but listeners may not. And he's in Czechoslovakia and they made LSD illegal. He used it on 3000 patients, changed their lives, and when they made it illegal, he and his wife invented Holotropic Breathwork as a way to access the same altered states. So, guys, you don't have to do psychedelics even one time to enter these exalted states. There are other paths. And I wrote heavily meditated to say, look, pick the path that resonates most with you. Like, one of them is going to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. That's the one, right? and I'm also concerned, you've probably seen this too, there are people who maybe aren't aware of what they're doing, and maybe some of them are who are targeting successful people, especially with Ayahuasca, but sometimes with other psychedelics, they're not working for your best interests. You know, they have lots of beads, they look like a real shaman, but they don't have the skills or the knowledge. And I think there is risk, spiritual risk to psychedelics and I use them. You just have to use them with the right protections. So, yeah, it's a complex situation.

It is complex. I think there can be a really bright future to that point. But I love that you hovered on that for a second, because I think people without experiencing or maybe having the right teacher, you don't know that that's even a possibility for you. But if you have someone, you know, because I think a lot of people are being targeted, whether it's through public group, somatic events or through psychedelics, but then there's no integration afterwards. It could be dangerous and really scary. So yeah, read heavily meditated for those tips.

One of the things I'll call out is ketamine. Doing ketamine daily is a terrible idea, but ketamine is legal. We've known about it for 70 years. And it's why I added that to the 40 Years of Zen program recently. We're the world's first psychedelic assisted neurofeedback program. because we can use that to create the sense of awe that is necessary for you to go in and reset your triggers. So you have to feel gratitude or awe at a brief moment. And ketamine can help you do that, and it increases neuroplasticity. So a few uses, younger brain, daily use, you're not going to like what happens. And so it's the only one that's really addictive, but it's worth doing.

Absolutely. Yeah. Ketamine has really saved a lot of people who've had that I've worked with who've experienced trauma or for people who they genuinely cannot see a world outside of what they're existing in. So it's almost like just plucking them out of this reality so they can just for a moment experience like, oh, there's awe and wonder and bliss is possible in this lifetime. And so just taking that back into reality. But to your point, not every day, not a drug of choice.

Not every day. And so I go through in order, like start here and go through them in this order until you find what you're looking for and then you can stop.

Yeah.

I interviewed Kimbal Musk about this, Elon Musk's brother who's a restaurateur and a regenerative farming guy and just a great human being. And I said, well, you know, I made a joke about putting DMT sauce on a steak we were cooking together. And he goes, oh, I don't need ayahuasca. He goes, I already met God. I'm like, what? What are you talking about? And he said, oh, yeah, I broke my neck. when I was 36 and I was unconscious in a coma for three days and I met God and I know that state and I don't need the drugs. Wow.

How profound is that? So profound and powerful. You know, breaking free through those modalities, it kind of really just makes us aware of how many people day to day are operating with stress and anxiety. The numbers are now showing, you know, the levels of anxiety related disorders amongst adults and children, the amount of prescription drugs that are being written year after year and It's not working like the numbers are going up. In your book, you talk about shifting from feeling anxious to this, to feeling aligned. How do people shift from feeling anxious to align and how can they use brainwave science to really understand what's happening?

Well, if you have anxiety, your F words are off. So you can have fear or peace, which is the opposite of fear. And this is the biggest source of energy. So you move out of fear by turning off your triggers with the reset process from heavily meditated. And then the next source of anxiety is food. So you might think you're eating healthy, but you probably aren't fully nourished in the right way and you haven't trained your body to be perfectly safe and comfortable, whether your stomach is full or empty, right? So we have fear, food, and then when's the last time that you had an intimate act that wasn't goal based? It's not how fast do I get to come? It's how much pleasure can I introduce to my partner? And it doesn't matter whether I come or not. It completely changes this kind of lust-driven porn-derived stuff into something that is a sacred act of intimate connection. And it's really a way of restoring energy. And so that's what you do. And then the next F word is friend.

Yeah.

Community. Like have some friends. And if you're saying, but I'm lonely, there's an epidemic of that. People don't, they're not members of clubs anymore. All right, so go to a yoga class, find a tribe, and do whatever it takes to do that and serve them. And funny enough, when you serve your community, it nourishes you as well. So it's about more peace, less fear, more nourishment, less hunger and cravings, and less loneliness and more connection. And that will resolve anxiety reliably, but start with fear, start with triggers.

Isn't it crazy how this concept of just like having peace with intimacy with yourself is something that's foreign to some people? Yeah.

And a lot of us have guilt. I mean, I dealt with some of this too. You're like, well, who am I? I have a family, right? I gotta provide for the family. I gotta feed the kids. I gotta pay rent. You gotta do all these things. And then if you don't do those things, you're a failure. And the average woman has a slightly different set of things, but it's a similar thing. There's societal judgments about what we're supposed to do and what we're not supposed to do. And either way, whether you've got that provider thing or you've got the mothering, nurturing thing, people pleasing. Perfectionism, it is so painful and that takes people out because it takes your energy. And the other thing is if you have toxic mold, You have heavy metals, you have hormone disruption, you have thyroid disruption. If your metabolism works, you have a huge ball of energy at the beginning of the day. And then you pour it into the fear bucket. You go, okay, what's left? And it goes into the food and cravings bucket. Okay, what's left? Then it goes into the, am I getting some bucket? Because your body thinks the whole universe will end if you don't get to connect with others that way. And okay, well, I'm unsatisfied in that part of my life instead of that spiritual nourishment that comes from sex. And then your community, you got nothing left by that point. But if you can have more energy because your metabolism works, you'll also be less anxious.

Something that you said really ties into what you're saying now, the comfort that comes when you have an empty stomach. Because that's intimacy, right? It forces you to tune in, but most people instantly tune into the discomfort behind it. What does it mean to have to be comfortable? How do we get there?

I was so afraid of being hungry because I'd heard that if I don't eat six meals a day, my body will go into starvation mode and then I'll get fat. I'm already fat. So I hired a shaman to drop me in a cave in 2008 with no food. And my rationale was, well, there'll be nothing to eat, so I won't eat. And I'm really worried that I'll be hypoglycemic because I'd get mean when I didn't eat. So I'm like, I'll be mean to the walls of the cave. Right? And I'm just gonna have to deal with my. And so I did. I wrote fast this way about that in part to correct the over fasting people are doing in part to talk about the spiritual side of this. and what it really comes down to is inside your body is a giant Labrador retriever. Okay, now imagine this dog, it flops into your, into your living room, it chews on your shoes, it pees on your couch, it barks at you, and then it eats everything on the table. Oh, and then it humps your leg there. Now we've got all the, all the egoic behaviors, all the mitochondrial imperatives are handled and, ugh. well, you are an animal inside of you and you have a human brain. And those urges, they're real. Well, you can take the dog, send it to obedient school, and they have a service dog, and they'll sit there with a piece of pepperoni on their nose until you tell them they can eat. This is meditation. This is practicing intermittent fasting. And this is practicing Tantra or conscious kink. Any of the practices. That's why there's a chapter on this.

Look.

If you feel like you're gonna die, if you don't have lunch, you will have anxiety. When your body learns to feel totally safe with or without lunch because you did the work, it's like, okay, I got this. I'm okay. Well, the same thing happens in the bedroom for men, especially about eight seconds before they ejaculate. A voice in their head says, I know you said you weren't going to, but right now is the best idea ever to do it. And then we suddenly believe it's the best idea. And then we let go. And then we take credit for God, dammit, why did I do that? It's the same thing as intermittent fasting. You teach the body you will not die with or without ejaculation. It's something you can do at will. And when that happens, this whole universe of altered states intimacy opens up to you. And it's a very different game when you're playing that game. But same thing. What do you mean I'm going to skip tacos for once? I can't skip tacos. That's insane. In fact, I got angry when someone told me to try fasting. I was like, what? But that's what this is about. It's about teaching your system to be non-reactive and understanding you are not your reactions. You are not your system. You're riding around in this meat body. It's the same as a Labrador. And you want your nervous system and your body and your energetic system to be the service dog for you. And when you do that, all of these things that pop up, they blind you to intuition and reality. And the triggers you have, the more connected to your intuition you are. And that's a part of heavily meditated as well. I teach how to identify what is an intuition versus an emotion versus a thought. And it's really critical knowledge because we've been taught since we were little kids to actively suppress our intuition. And you don't have to do that. And you're not choosing to do it. Your body does it for you.

Right.

Once you turn off the triggers, Wow, isn't that so weird? I just knew that.

It's kind of all been brainwashing, eh? You know, if in building your intuition, I think that's probably the fastest route to tuning in, to taking away the fear of fear and lack of community. Because if you have your intuition and your trust, right? Exactly. Now you're reading my mind.

I'm just being dumb because it makes me laugh.

But it's true, like if you trust your own intuition, then you're set. You're not looking for exterior modalities to test. And I think too, just the, the link between that and fasting, because something else that you're doing with fasting that I know you talk about a lot is what happens to our mitochondria. And you and I have both shared when you and I have been at your sickest, maybe to help, you know, we're, I'm so sick of people like just talking about the powerhouse of yourself, the powerhouse of yourself. Can you paint a picture of what was the state of your mitochondria when.

Your health was at its worst?

Versus the state of your mitochondria right now?

I think my mitochondrial networks were in collapse and they were maybe running at 20% of their capable energy. And what I've noticed consistently at 40 Years of Zen, when I'm working with people who are shamans or gurus, if I can do anything to increase their mitochondrial performance, their powers radically increase. And I've had one older guru I'm not going to call them out, but someone you've probably heard of who actually called in tears and said, Dave, you gave me my powers back. Like, how did I not know? So the model of consciousness I work with now is that your mitochondria are foundational. They're the interface to reality. They're your body and your mitochondria. They're filtering reality to show you a teeny tiny bit of it that they think you need to know. And reality is a quantum foam or something. and what the mitochondria do is they cluster around microtubules. And microtubules are little structures inside cells that are quantum entangled with reality. So your mitochondria are powering them and focusing them, and your mitochondria talk to each other, and they have this whole entire real-time system that's in there. And when you realize mitochondria are environmental sensors, they're a separate consciousness, They're also computers. They sense, they decide, which is a computing thing, and then they can also manufacture. And they can manufacture stress hormones, they can manufacture melatonin, they can manufacture heat, and they can just manufacture stress. So, wow, what would happen if you meditated or you did any of the techniques and heavily meditated, and it allowed your mitochondrial network to become more coherent and more focused and more in tune, and then you turned off all your triggers, You would have a direct interface to reality. And when you chose to enter an altered state, you can enter it at a moment's notice because all the stuff that gets in our way, it's not there anymore.

Would you say the mitochondria, they're really the solution to longevity, to feeling better? You talk about emotional resilience also with our mitochondria.

They are the source of willpower. And I found a couple studies that backs that up. Right. So they power everything you do. They power your spiritual powers, they power your heart, they power love, they power as long as you're in your body, it's all about the mitochondria and their job every day, 30 pounds of air and some amount of food, they come together and they make that electricity that powers everything. So if no wonder you don't know how to breathe, you don't know how to eat, or you have a mitochondrial problem in your health, you got less energy. And that translates to less spiritual energy, less mojo. But there are some things you can do that are worth talking about. One of them, it's a quick and easy thing and it's a new idea in the world of biohacking. And it's called bicep. And it's not this bicep. It's brief, intentional, conscious exposure to pain. So what? Well, monks used to have one of these.

Right.

And they would like literally flog themselves every morning. And I remember hearing about that going, oh my gosh, that's so bad. Like they think they're such sinners.

Yeah.

And then yogis.

Yeah.

And I asked my teacher, oh, because they want to show they're good yogis. That doesn't make any sense. You ever see a yogi compete? So what's going on there? Why do biohackers get in cold water? Why do addicts get tattoos that hurt? why do tech eat chili peppers? It's all the same. It changes dopamine sensitivity for the rest of the day if you briefly do something that hurts but doesn't damage you. And when you do that, your body says, oh, now it takes less dopamine to motivate you. So you use less willpower, which saves mitochondrial electricity for something else that matters, like folding proteins or playing with your kids. You get to, you get to decide.

Okay. so people understand the modalities. Yeah, I think a lot of the things that you talked about with biohacking and mitochondrial function, what was kind of the awareness with you though around emotional resilience and pain? Like when I finally found a cardiologist who talked to me about having the most concentration of mitochondria around my heart and then asking me about my personal history emotionally, you know, if people are going out there biohacking, doing all the modalities, checking the checklist on how to get rooted, you name it, and yet they're still not, you know, maybe reversing their age or they still come back with high inflammatory markers in their biomarkers. What's the connection to the emotional resilience there?

Well, the more inflammation you have, the more energy your mitochondria are putting into making inflammation instead of making emotional resilience. And this is why oftentimes if you're obese the way I was, you're going to be more emotionally reactive. It's not cuz you're a bad person, it's not cuz you're weak, it's because your system is inflamed, right? And the inflammation, instead of going to the prefrontal cortex to allow you to regulate your emotions, you didn't have enough energy to do that. So your body said, let the emotions run things and like it's not a good place to be. So I have deep compassion for anyone with a health problem and chronic fatigue is when your mitochondria are really, really low and your inflammation is really high. Having willpower. then is incredibly difficult. So the sicker you are and the fatter you are, the more of a willpower athlete you are because you are pushing through it and it, it is like walking in mud and is so hard. And you want to fix your mitochondria and along the way, stop carrying boulders in your backpack because every trigger you have is a boulder. Set those down and you'll get your energy back and then that energy goes into healing.

I love that you painted a picture of that. Thank you, because I still think that there's an addiction for people looking for modalities that are outside of themselves. And I know that's exactly what you're kind of deactivating in your book. I have to pause this episode to share something that's completely transformed how I feel every single day. And it all starts in my gut. I'm talking about Pendulum's Metabolic Daily, and I'm genuinely obsessed. 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy, and so much of that comes down to our gut microbiome. If you're constantly battling afternoon energy crashes, sugar cravings, and that sluggish feeling after meals, Metabolic Daily can change everything. This isn't your typical probiotic. It contains live Akkermansia muciniphila, It's an incredible next generation strain that most of us are deficient in. It literally strengthens your gut lining and helps your body metabolize sugars and carbs so much more efficiently. What I love most is how it makes me feel. My energy is sustained throughout the day. I'm not constantly thinking about my next snack, and I actually feel a little bit more full faster. It's like my body finally learned how to work with the food instead of against it. Plus, my digestion has never been better. What sets Pendulum apart is the science. They were founded by PhD scientists and doctors with the Mayo Clinic as their first investor. They're the first company in the US to bring live Akkermansia to market using DNA sequencing in an oxygen-free facility. I'm so selective about supplements that I recommend, and Metabolic Daily has earned a permanent spot in my routine and recommendation to my clients. Go to pendulumlife.com and use code MONA, M-O-N-A, for 20% off all Pendulum Membership first orders. That's pendulumlife.com with code MONA, your gut and your energy levels will thank you. On the concept of brainwaves and the things that you're listening to, and at 40 Years of Zen, the recordings that you've made for people to listen to, I know you talk about gamma state, and you and I touched on that, you know, whether it was through psychedelics or through breath work. Is there a lot of impact? Like, talk to us about the science and the studies that you've come across with listening to different sound waves or sound healing.

Sure. It comes down to this. Your brain can be in different states at different volumes. So think of a state like a music note. oh look, I made a E note or a D note, right? Well, okay, could I hear it? Was it loud or was it quiet? So those are the big variables. But then what song am I playing? Because you could be playing angry gangster rap in the C note with high volume, or you could be playing Mozart. And if you can learn to play Mozart, that is going to produce a different state. And if you try to play Mozart in A different note of music, it's going to sound different and that would be another different state. So it turns out we think of brain waves because they're easy. But imagine if you went to Spotify and it was like, do you want to hear music in the C note or the D note or the F note? And you're like, well, what kind of music? Sorry, you can only choose the note. So brain waves are kind of over simplistic, but the gamma state, depending on where in the brain it is, is a really unusual state that we only recently learned about. When people are advanced Zen meditation monks or other types of meditation too, most likely. But this was discovered in Zen monks. They generate this very high frequency brainwave, and it tends to ride like a surfer on lower level brainwaves. And gamma is associated with this feeling of like connectedness, joy, oneness. And it's something that most neuroscientists would say you can't train gamma, but we have trained gamma over and over and over. and when people have their largest peak experiences in the pods at 40 years of Zen, they're generating gamma and several other things at the same time in the right parts of the brain. So now we have not just making gamma or alpha brainwaves or something, there's a concert in their brain and they're making the right amount of alpha, the right amount of beta in the right spots, and gamma comes in and takes over the brain. And then they will describe, I saw an angel. I met a dead relative. I let go of a deep thing, and now I can see the world. Miriam came through, and I can talk about her because she posted this and said it was okay. But she was born to parents who just got out of a concentration camp when they conceived her. And there was so much family trauma. And she's in her 80s, and she says, My whole life, I've been looking for peace her whole life. And she spends five days with a computer up to her head, and she said, I finally found it. Like, I know what peace feels like. And how can you spend 80 years not knowing that? And she was trying, like, she was searching, right? And, like, that's why. That's why I do 40 years. And that's why I wrote heavily mented. This is the most important stuff. Like, all that. That I carried for so many years for no good reason. I just carried it because I didn't know I was carrying it because no one told me I was carrying it. And because I didn't have the tools to do it. And it's so much easier now than you would imagine. And I've got my one place in Seattle where executives and billionaires fly. And I'm really working on something that's going to be available in people's homes. And we're not very far away from that because we really are. And meditate, do your breathwork, listen to any of the apps, get the light sound goggles, go to yoga class, learn breathwork, do the breathwork stuff, do a cold plunge, take a class on tantra, Get a spanking if that's the way you want to experience pain. It doesn't matter. There's so many options to enter these altered states that let you, it's not even healed. They let you reprogram your reality. And it's that precious that if you do this early in life, and you do this in your twenties or your thirties, you will live the life uncommon. You're like, how is this even possible? And it's because you got out of your own way early. Or you waited a long time or maybe you never did. I just want you to not spend all of your energy, time and money getting out of your own way, because it's not that hard if you have the right information.

Learn how to change your state. It is so powerful. Nothing matters, right? This is the thing with getting older. I'm still crying from that story.

I know. It was really profound. I mean, yeah.

Woman, what a life. But sharing that story too, what it made me think of is like, Life is so precious. A lot of the people that I work with are so focused on the outcome, right? And don't get me wrong, like I love the hard things. I love pursuing the hard things because it fuels a part of me that feels really good. Like you said, right? The bicep. But there's also the other part where the reality of getting older and something happened after turning 40, like everything's just on fast forward now. And the relevance of having this vessel and of time passing and of wanting to do so many beautiful things and the experiences that you're sharing, what you're doing is you're putting a reframe on what it means to be alive, on what it means to help people and have friends and eat like you love yourself and getting rid of fear that doesn't serve you anymore. And I think that that is like, this is where it's at now. If we're going to really activate inner peace for our future, we have to do these things. Thank you for the story.

-Oh, you're welcome.

- So I guess, you know, in closing, we've got a couple of questions from our audience. The one thing I forgot to ask you though, for people listening who want to check in on their brain and can't go for brain scans, like, is this something that's accessible to the everyday person?

If you buy heavily meditated and you go to the chapter on the reset process, I teach you step by step how to do exactly the process that we do with computers and with executives and with the whole team. at 40 Years of Zen, this people spend $20,000 to learn this. And this is a really important book. It takes a little bit more time when you're at home. It's necessary to either tell a friend or take notes and write it down because one of the things that your operating system or your ego can do, it'll make you forget the work you just did unless you have it recorded. So just pick something that pisses you off and do the process set aside 20 minutes or an hour or however long you have every Saturday or every day and just start whittling away on your triggers and your load gets lighter every single day. And it is profound.

Would you say that's what helps you stay aligned? Is that the one thing that you would say for people to really stay rooted in their joy? Is that it?

It's the most important thing to do because if you recognize every time you get upset, Like, oh my gosh, I found another one. I gotta do that one. Pretty soon you run out of things to reset and then you go, oh, I wasn't upset at all today. That was a really good day, right?

Yeah. All right, you ready for some questions from our audience?

Let's do it.

All right. So, Meriyns, I feel like you just said that name. How to not attract the same patterns and deal with negative environments?

Well, you are manifesting those patterns with your mitochondria. they're looking for things they recognize. And sadly, the way quantum reality works is that when you observe something, it becomes real. Well, if your mitochondria, this distributed network of detectors, is looking for things that you're attracting, they will tune your antennas to find those things, and then they will happen around you. So you let go of your triggers, you do the deep work on trauma, and you learn how to turn on peace. instead of fear. And when you do that magically, you don't attract those people anymore. At the same time, you have so much energy left over to practice discernment, which is when you check in with your intuition that you can now access and say, you know what? That person feels like they're probably a narcissist. And then you think about it and go, oh, they act like a narcissist. And then you say, I think I.

Won'T hang out with him. And imagine how different your life would be if you could do that. And it's a simple question. What frequency are you tuned into every day?

Right?

I think the awareness is key. Bonnie wants to know, what is the best hack to make oneself find a stopping point and go to bed at a reasonable time?

You can make yourself tired with light. So the very best thing is, and I'm not trying to sell you my stuff, I don't have a pair here, the TrueDark glasses. This is a company, a circadian biology company I started 10 years ago. It's TrueDark. The glasses will make you want to fall asleep. And there is a study in a medical journal Where we did the research, you wear these glasses, the true dark glasses, for 15 minutes and it shifts your brain into the same state as if you're meditating. So if you're not tired at night, it's because it's too bright. So dim all your lights, put on the true dark glasses, or just get red light bulbs everywhere and turn off everything else. And strangely, you'll just want to go to bed on time. And the next morning, wake up and go outside. You do that a few times, you'll shut down at night just fine. I shifted from being a 2:00 a.m. sleeper for my entire life to going to bed last night at 10 o'clock naturally. And it's been really liberating.

We have to sleep train as adults. We talk about it for kids all.

The time, but we need to sleep train as adults too. We do. And for people who have a hard time sleeping, the best URL of my entire life, sleepwithdave.com. Everything I know about sleep, it's free.

Go there. All right, Arlen says, no questions, just love your podcast and fascinated with Dave Asprey. Yes, we are. Thank you for that, Arlen. Taylor wants to know, hey Taylor, what's the best way to increase your vagal tone and heart rate variability?

Breath work is an amazing way to do it, but sticking your face in ice water before bed is another one. And I've written about this, I think, in a couple books, not your whole body, just your face. And it's called the Mammalian Dive Reflex. So do some breath work, especially four seconds in, eight seconds out, and ice water on the face for 20, 30 seconds, and watch what happens to your HRV.

Beautiful. Lisa wants to know, tell me about coffee and my dopamine receptors. I feel really stressed, but I love my morning coffee. Do you have any solutions to that?

Well, I quit coffee for five years because it was making me anxious and it would give me cravings. And then I had a cup of coffee that didn't do it. And the next day, another one that did do it. And I'm like, oh, it's something in the coffee. So try danger coffee. It's called danger because who knows what you might do. It's lab tested. It has electrolytes and a high dose of minerals. In fact, the minerals in there would cost you about 22 bucks if you were just buy a mineral supplement. So it's a good value. But having minerals and electrolytes in your coffee and no mold will change the response to it. And coffee isn't that big of a dopamine kick compared to many of the other things you do. So that can be one to five cups in many, many, many, many studies. It is the best health food, the best superfood. It is better than kale or spinach or whatever. It's associated with living longer and reductions of almost everything. And if you're sensitive to caffeine, decaf coffee works as well.

You got it. Danger comes in decaf too, doesn't it?

It does. And it's the only clean decaf you will find on the planet that goes to those standards.

Absolutely. So Danger Coffee is on my client approved list found on my website, also through Dave's. The last few questions for Rapid Fire. If you Could think about, you know, one thing where people are making healing and health too complicated. What is it?

Feeling like you have to do the same thing every day. That's not how nature works. So don't do the same thing every day. Just set aside a time and do something to improve yourself. And working out every day is bad for you. Doing the same thing every day is just bad for you. Don't do that. Do what your body needs.

How liberating too. It's not about arriving somewhere. It's just like, Tune in, I love that. If you had to pick something about modern medicine that excites you, what would it be?

The number of lawsuits against big pharma for all the evil they've done. Yeah. I also would, I have to have the flip side of that. That was kind of dark, but also kind of funny.

It is funny.

Gene therapy for longevity is real. I've done it, and I plan to continue doing it, and you can reduce your age. Like, we have more control over our biology than ever before. So there's great power in that.

Yeah, beautiful. Dave, tell us about what you're excited for in the future.

Well, I've been really public about the fact that I spent a couple million dollars to reverse my age, and I want to live to at least 180. I'm still on that path, and I'm expanding the things I'm doing. The conference is getting bigger. Steve Aoki is performing at the conference in a week, and the book just hit shelves. There is number one best-selling in meditation books, number 19 in self-help.

Yeah, I saw that this morning.

I'm super stoked and I want to help people and I want to share things so that you don't go through all the crap that I went through when I was young. It's just not necessary. And when I see all these friends who are under 30, I guess we gotta hang out more. So just making things that are accessible because the younger you are when you figure out that consciousness is important, the longevity is important, the less work it takes. if you wait till you're old, it takes a lot of work and a lot of money.

Absolutely. Do you know because of, I guess, inspiration through you, when I think about longevity, I have such a clear picture of myself on a mountain with a grandkid on my back. And when I teach other people about longevity, I teach them to, like, really breathe into it, visualize it, smell it, feel it. What is it going to taste like so that it really becomes a reality? It makes doing the things every single day. more attainable. The purpose becomes so much bigger than yourself. It really does. Dave, thank you for everything. Thank you for being here today. Thank you for merging the worlds of spirituality with high performance and intuition. I really think that the work that you do is just so phenomenal. I think everyone knows where to find you. If you don't have the book, please go and get heavily meditated. Check out daveasprey.com, your books and all of your resources are so helpful.

Thank you so much. Thanks, Mona, and thanks for having me on.