Dave Asprey: "I've Never Focused On Wellness." Why Human Performance Is The Fast Path To Healing.

I'm biologically 38 and I'm chronologically 50. I have some of the most expensive PE on the planet, Holotropic breathing, which is a replacement for lsd, which has been profound for me and has a lot of commonalities with Wim Hof's methods. But you just do it for longer. Don't try that at home. You want someone sitting for you, you will have a hard trip. Like, you'll leave your body, you'll see past lives. You. I've seen people rip their clothes off in the world of neurofeedback. We're gonna do some brain training. We know what an average brain looks like. Training to averages, it's a terrible idea. So what we're doing, we have 1500 high performance brains of people who have done big things in the world, even some gurus, and we're training brains towards that. You could use psychedelics or improperly applied neurofeedback to rapidly build a cult. I'm gonna tell you a trick and foreign.

Dave. Welcome to the podcast.

Josh.

Glad to be here, man. I'm so excited about this. I gotta tell you, I'm excited about this because you're my first guest at the new table.

This table is legit. I was just admiring it.

It's a beauty, man.

It's got holes in it.

Yes. It's got little lacquer where you can see this is a solid piece of wood and beautiful. There was so much prep that went into this. And I'm just thinking about the. All the beliefs that I've had up to this point and all the things that I've learned from Wellness and these 500 shows. I'm like, okay, what is the belief that Dave has? What is this belief about himself that really allows you to operate at this high level? Because, dude, you do so much. Like you're traveling, you're going around, you're meeting people, you're showing up and you're doing all these things. Like, what is, what is the belief inside of you that allows you to operate at this high level?

Why do you assume that it's a belief that allows me to do that?

Well, because I think some people believe that they're not good enough, they're not worthy enough. I think there's a way that we can biohack our beliefs. Essentially, tons of people believe that.

Were you at the conference with a you are not enough meditation?

No, but I don't like the phrase you are not enough. I think we're all enough.

At the very end of this was probably three years ago at the biohacking conference. I had everyone close your eyes. This is the closer at the conference. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. We're going to do the box breathing now. Tell yourself, you are enough. And then I said, actually, fuck that. Seriously, you could ask for anything you want. And that was it. To just be enough instead of, I am way more than enough. So I like that belief better, but that's not how I do what I do.

How do you do what you do? I mean, there's. There's a place that you came from. We've talked about fasting on the podcast before. You spent some time in a cave. Like, you've been through it, man. You've really. You've really been through an emotional journey. So what did you pull from that in order to show up and. And really, honestly, Dave, like, be calm on a stage. And there's. There's a belief that you hold, right? And those beliefs weren't there forever.

A belief is a story you tell yourself, and it may or may not be true. And we are unfortunately wired to usually believe our own story. I have legion powers of self deception. So do you. So does everyone. So beliefs are actually really dangerous because once you get a belief and they're infectious, if it's not an accurate belief, you will possibly spend your entire life doing something based on that belief, like trying to stop beta amyloid plaque in the brain to stop Alzheimer's, based on a belief from a falsified 2006 study. So if that's your belief that Alzheimer's is caused by this or what I did, my belief is that I'm a bad person because I eat too much and I don't exercise enough because I weigh 300 pounds. Now, the belief was false. When I actually went and I did the year and a half of exercise, six days a week for an hour and a half every day, and I went on a low fat, low calorie, even vegetarian some of the time diet, and I stayed fat. I told myself, because of my infectious toxic belief, it's because I'm eating too much lettuce. So beliefs are terribly dangerous. What I do is not belief based.

So what is it then? If it's not belief based, Is it just an awareness? Is it like a level of consciousness that you've grown?

I think it's awareness and it's consciousness based. And to do that, yes, I have traveled to South America and done work in the Andes. I have gone to Nepal and Tibet and learned meditation from the Masters. I've studied multiple lineages. I have trained in shamanic training with Alberto Viotto, and I spent six months of my life with electrodes glued to my head developing and doing the 40 years of Zen program, which is my brain upgrade thing. At this point we've had 1500 entrepreneurs and high performers come through. We have the largest database of high performing brains. So if you and I were to say, you know, we're going to take our cars in and we're going to compare them to all the other cars on the road and we're going to compare them to the average of all cars and that's our. Would you even be interested in doing that if you like to drive? No. If you wanted a high performance car, you would compare it to other cars in your category. Brain science doesn't do that, but I do. So what I've done is I've gone through and I've removed every one of the voices in my head, the critical, mean voices that have been there for a long time. There's a technique called the reset technique. It's at 40 years in. I've written about it a little bit in a couple of my books. My next book has a more concise summary in it. Even Vishen Lakhiani mentions it in his new Six Phase meditation book. So this is a thing and what it does, it lets you identify a belief that's usually based on a trauma or a feeling, not a reality, and then remove the trauma and the negative feelings and then you can assess whether that belief is reality or not. And what you'll find is most of the time the beliefs you have were not reality based, they were programmed into you without your consent. And oh, toss it, toss it, toss it, toss it. And what's left is a whole lot of capacity to do stuff that matters and to show up on stage. Man, at this conference, people are like, that was a great talk. I'm like, you have no idea the AV screw ups that were going on and the fact that halfway through I stopped looking at my confidence monitor because it was broken. And I gave a killer talk because I didn't have the voice in my head going, what are they going to think about me? What are. Whatever you can have inner peace and calmness. I don't always have it. I'm not perfect by a long shot. I'm just way better than I used to be. And that's the challenge. Don't compare yourself to others, compare yourself to yourself.

I've definitely been down that route for sure. One thing that I've been present to recently has been a father wound that I'm still recovering from. I think so many people that are health and wellness entrepreneurs, they're driven to create buildings and do big things from the wound itself. Like, in other words, the fuel source of how you achieve things. Was it ever from a wound?

Oh, fuck, yeah. What was the wound, man? I had a lot of birth trauma. I was born with a cord wrapped around my neck. And that means that I came into the world thinking that something was trying to kill me. And as soon as I came into the world in 1970s medical land, like, oh, he might be cold, let's take him away from human contact and put him in a box with a light birth is crazy. And I don't know. I delivered both my own kids myself, caught them at home. So that was very sane for them because I learned what birth traumas do to people. So I had a lot of that. And that creates ptsd. I had bullying. Everyone alive has parenting issues because parents are as good as they can be and no parents are perfect. So you go through all this stuff and there's always a teacher makes an offhanded comment and has no idea that it left a mark. So I've gone through and I've reset each of those things in my nervous system so the story around them goes away. Our brains store our memories based on emotion. So you use an emotion to come up with a thought. And this is research going all the way back to the 80s. David Hawkins talks about this in one of his books. So what that means is that if you can take away all these negative emotions, when you go back and you remember that thing, it's just flat. You just remember a fact instead of, you know, this bad thing happened to me, I'm just going to tell it to you. And there's people who do this, I call it kind of vulnerability porn. They're going to go on stage and they're going to share this tragic story and everyone kind of to get empathy. And sharing your story is great, but some people wallow in it. And it's not an intentional technique, I don't think. But I don't know that it's healthy for them or the audience where you're like, here's what it was. You can feel this just enough. And here's what I did about it versus where a lot of society is going today. Here's what's wrong, and we're all victims. And if we just complain enough, maybe Mommy or Daddy will come. I'm like, you're 45 years old, mom. Your daddy isn't going to come. That's your job.

Yeah.

And if we could just get a lot more. I went and I solved a problem versus I whined about it. A classic example. There's a teenager who went out and designed a boom to collect plastic in the ocean and actually got it funded. And you got him versus Greta Grundelberg. I'm going to skip school on Fridays. I'm very angry that someone didn't do something. I'm like, screw you, Greta. Like, you go get to work. Yeah.

The inner work that we do is a representation of how aware we are that we actually need the work. So there was some. There was something along the way where you really felt like, okay, in order for me to grow Bulletproof, which, by the way, did they kick you out of Bulletproof? Did you leave Bulletproof? Like, what happened with that? That's a huge, huge lever for change.

I'm off the board. And Bulletproof is its own independent entity. It's my. You know, it's my baby. It's the company I started. So I very much want Bulletproof to succeed, and I'm doing what I can to help them. So it's growing. It's beautiful. I was just at Whole Foods. I was just at Erewhon, and you see coffee's right there. It's flying off the shelves. And what I'm doing now, though, is I'm doing Upgrade labs. And upgrade labs is a human biohacking clinic. It's a franchise. Anyone listening could do a franchise. You go to ownandupgradelabs.com and, okay, it's one thing to fix big food, or at least to show people this is how you're supposed to feel when you eat. That's a bulletproof thing. Then what are all the technologies and techniques for hacking your brain, hacking your body? In fact, I'm taking the 40 years of Zen technology and we're rolling it out. So when you get a membership at an Upgrade Labs, yeah, we'll put on muscle or remove fat or give you energy or give you resilience so you can handle stress better. But it takes so little time compared to what you think you have to do today. The story or the belief you have. There's also enough time in there to do neurofeedback based on the tech that I built from the ground up for 40 years of Zen. So give me an hour, tell me what you want, and we'll give you so much better results than you could Possibly. Imagine. To do that though, I needed a different thing. My newest coffee company is called Danger Coffee. Danger coffee is ultra clean coffee, but it's loaded with trace minerals. Because you and me and everyone listening, our bodies won't do what they're capable of when we're depleted of minerals. And all this plant based nonsense people are eating, as well as a lot of the pesticides and medications we have, are sucking minerals out of our bodies. When you put them back in, in your Danger coffee, magically, when you drink it, you go, I don't know why I want more of this coffee. It must be really good coffee. And it is really good coffee. It's really expensive coffee just to even get the green coffee to roast. But the body wants it because it knows the minerals are like, yes. So you drink it and you get that yes feeling. And it's a different thing than bulletproof.

What do you call it? Danger.

Oh man, I love that. Well, I thought about calling it for your own safety coffee, but that makes most people want to punch each other in the face. And that seems wrong. Here's what I'm building. I'm building a world full of incredibly dangerous people. These are people who have so much energy and so much power that who knows what they might do? They might ask that girl out. They might start a company. They might do the right thing when it's hard. They might pull the car over and help an older person across the street. They might say no when they're told to do something stupid that harms children. But if we're all tired and we're all weak, we can have a kind of peace that comes from oppression, or we can have a kind of peace that comes from knowing you have more than what it takes to handle anything in your life. I want that second kind of peace. But to do it, it, that kind of piece is created by profoundly dangerous people because they're powerful.

What creates power is like someone's adaptability to be able to go through hardship without being a victim. And in some ways I feel like that could be an easy thing to intellectualize. Like, oh, yeah, I've been through hard stuff, so therefore I'm hardened. But it's not the case. It's definitely not the case.

There's two things that create power. One of them is 30 pounds of air and food. You have to be able to combine those very effectively to make electricity, which is the seat of your willpower. So once you solve that problem, which is broken right now for most people, we have 93% metabolic dysfunction in the country, that's bad. Maybe we put some minerals back in, maybe we could stop some toxins and some seed oils and there's a whole conversation there. But let's assume you're doing a halfway decent job of making electricity. How do you allocate the electricity? That's what makes power, right? So if you take it and you take most of the electricity and you put it towards worrying about stuff that hasn't happened and may not happen, thinking about the past and how angry and regretful you are being worried. I already said worried. Oh, there it is. Being pissed at family members or co workers and then doom scrolling the rest of the time it's a trickling away and it's a wasting of the power. It's focused intentionally. Plus lots of electrical power from your body that allows you to do pretty much whatever you want. You should be able to literally create a lightsaber of intention because you have the power to turn that thing on and to wield it however you want. And right now we have people who don't make energy. And if they do make energy, it's diffuse because of all the trauma and all the unadmitted beliefs, including the ones that are not reality.

And the phone is there to actually capitalize on all this wasted lightsaber. It's literally an absorption faculty for people to unconsciously keep wounding themselves and wasting that energy. Like you're talking about, what do you mean by the 30 pounds of air? What do you mean by that?

Well, every day you breathe in 30 pounds of air and you combine it with food or maybe from body fat or muscle, you could do that too. But you need some energy substrate. And 30 pounds, that's how much air you're processing every day. And that makes ATP via the Krebs cycle, which makes electrons. And in a couple of my books I've gone through and I've said, look, here's the steps. We know that willpower is based on electricity. The best example of this is the Israeli study on parole. Have you heard about this?

No.

It's one of my favorite studies ever. So Israelis have a unique mindset, I think, because everyone in the country has to go through the military and so they just tend to be less bullshit about certain things. They said, all right, we're going to find out why people parole. What is the common thing? Is it a race thing? Is it a gender thing? Is it what kind of crime did they do? Is it what languages they speak? What is it? So they looked at all these different variables and they found out the number one thing that decided whether you would get out of prison in front of the parole board was what time your hearing was. Because in the morning, when the parole board was fresh, they would consider it and they'd say, okay, and they'd have a good, great chance of you getting out. And then after about 10, they got tired and their blood sugar dropped. And then, no, no, no. They'd have lunch. And you come in right after lunch. There's a brief period where their energy is high before it crashes because they all had MSG and sugar for lunch anyway. And after that, in the afternoon, you had no hope of getting out. Isn't that weird? It didn't matter what you did. We all thought it was fair, but it wasn't fair at all. It was entirely based on decision fatigue, which is driven by mitochondria.

I remember us talking about this a couple years ago. Mitochondria, actually. And you referenced this study about the ant that gets controlled by different mushrooms, different bacteria, Cordyceps, actually. And I watched it on YouTube. We're going to link this in the show. And I remember you telling me that, and I was like, oh, my God. It's this YouTube video called Zombie ants, right? And these ants get controlled to go in the light source so that the mushrooms, the fungi can actually grow. And I wonder, for us, all these foods with all these chemicals, they're not only just taking away our willpower, they're actually shifting our lives in an unconscious way that we don't even know about. In other words, we make decisions that aren't really our decisions because of the food and because of the things that we take in. Can you expand that?

Well, it's completely shown that chemicals can change your behavior and change your mood. And one of my favorite ones, in fact, my favorite two are NutraSweet and MSG. They have very similar effects on the body, although NutraSweet's probably worse systemically, although maybe not. Both of these will cause you to get angry, oftentimes to get headaches, and then cause a predictable blood sugar crash, which is going to drive cravings for more sugar or more of those substances that will slightly make your blood sugar go up again. So a lot of times, people, they eat their, whatever, Fritos dusted in msg, and then they get in a fight or they're like, all of a sudden, my boyfriend is really, really just a bad person. And all these feelings of rage and anxiety and what it is, it's a brain that's firing too fast. And can't turn itself off because glutamate, or. It's a different thing with NutraSweet, but. But it's a similar effect in the brain. And the synapses just keep. They're full, they're flooded with glutamate. And so the neurons keep firing and firing and firing and firing. And your feeling is, ah, someone's causing this. And you look around, it's the driver of the car in front of you, it's the guy on tv, and you're actually angry. So this is an issue. And if you're used to. If you've ever even experienced a feeling of actual calm, which means you haven't eaten crap in the last day or two. When's the last time? For most people in the world right now, it's a problem because we're eating human kibble and we're paying a lot of money for little bags of air with crap in it. But if you back off from that or even fast for a couple days, like, oh, wow, I'm kind of feeling biologically calm. There's biological anxiety. When your cells don't have enough minerals, you'll have this background, subtle. If you're listening for it, almost like a screaming or a sense of angst. That's not you. That's not someone causing it to you. It's your meat. Saying something is deeply and profoundly wrong. It's suffering, but it's not emotional. And so a lot of people equate physical anxiety. You drink some moldy coffee and an hour later you're like, oh, man, I have the jitters. Well, a different cup of coffee might not have done that. That was one of my discoveries that led me to start bulletproof in the very first thing. It's because if you get something that harms the body, you will map it onto someone else as if they caused it to you. The brain's job is to make sense of things that oftentimes we don't have enough information for. So if it knows you're feeling bad, the brain also knows it could never be at fault. That's called the ego. So then the brain looks for a cause. And if an animal or a parasite or lipopolysaccharides, which is the bacterial toxins made by gut bacteria, if those are high and the body is just feeling grrr, well, you're going to act that way towards other people around you. So when we're building a world full of people who are dangerous, these are people who have enough energy they can overcome that or they don't have the physical anxiety, and they're thinking, huh, I can tell what's going on. And now I can tell whether this change in my state was caused by my food, by my environment, or by an interaction with another person or maybe with a government or a company or whatever. And if so, they can choose how they respond. The Buddhist teachings that I came across in Tibet, they start with, when you're on a path of enlightenment, you work to develop empathy. Can I feel someone else's emotions? And that's a good thing to be able to do versus just not caring or being unfeeling. Problem is, if you feel empathy for everyone, especially today, you're probably going to wallow in it. And it's not.

It's going to make you sick in some way, too.

Yeah.

Because empathy without boundaries is illness.

Yeah. You see suffering everywhere. So the level above that that you work towards is compassion. You can sense other people's suffering, but you don't have to. And you can have compassion for them. So you might see a homeless person, you don't have any money, and you can say basically, peace. And you don't feel that unless you choose to. But the real elevated state that they're looking for is built on top of empathy and then compassion. It's called equanimity. And those are the most dangerous people.

Of all, the people that can actually observe without being triggered by the stimulus. I mean, we've heard a lot about this. Like, how can you see yourself from 30,000ft? How do we see ourselves from 30,000ft? You've talked about caring about the body. Like, if I'm not wasting my lightsaber, if I'm not wasting electricity, that's one thing. But I think about all the trauma that people have experienced, and you even mentioned the cord wrapped around your neck. Like, there's a way to slowly and carefully unpack all of this stuff so that it's not weighing down the system. What do you think that is the way to slowly and carefully unpack the stuff, the trauma, the things.

Why would I ever want to do anything slowly and care carefully unless there was no other way?

Well, that's a great question, because I think sometimes when people dive into their healing too quickly, like, I'm gonna go do 12 ayahuasca sessions, or I'm gonna go do shamanic breath work without ever sitting in a float tank, it can be harmful. That's why I say that now. At your. At your level, I get it. Like, you've spent your life's work unpacking this stuff. You want people to be dangerous. You're leading this mission for people to be dangerous.

I want people to not have to spend their life unpacking this stuff because we have other things to do.

Exactly.

Like create useful systems in society again.

Yeah.

So I don't believe, because we haven't proven it to be true, that it has to be slow to be safe. In the ancient teachings, there's sort of three paths towards enlightenment. I'm talking about enlightenment not because I'm obsessed with it, just because that's where you took the conversation. But there's the slow path where I just like die a bunch of times and eventually you learn some stuff. So it's the less conscious path. There's the middle path, which allows you to have relationships and not live in a cave and all of that kind of stuff. And then there's Fast Path Buddhism. And no, I don't remember the Sanskrit words for each of those three because I'm multi. I study all over the place. So in Fast Path Buddhism they say, well, this is the way you can in one lifetime become enlightened. But you might go crazy. There's a suitable or a reasonable risk of that. But if you do go crazy, don't worry, you'll come back. So it's like, which one is right for you? The reason I became aware of this is that when I was walking around in Kathmandu, when I was on the trip where I first had yak butter tea, that was my inspiration for Bulletproof, I met a former Berkeley philosophy professor and she was in town to go see the dentist. And so I said, hey, let's go to dinner, let's talk. I'm just a tourist kind of wandering around for three months with a backpack. So you just meet random people. She was really interesting. I wish I'd written down her name. And she said, well, I studied at Berkeley, all these different things when I was a professor and I realized I could become enlightened in this life. So that's what I'm doing. I live in a cave up in the hills there and a local family feeds me. And my friends back at Berkeley will send me a new laptop every two years because the humidity destroys my laptop and all I do is meditate every day. But I'm going to do it in this life. That's Fast Path. Maybe she was crazy. I don't know. She seemed pretty cool.

Or she's got great friends that'll send her a laptop. That's a beautiful friend group. Well, the Fast Path seems alluring. And to be honest, I would love to be able to biohack some of the things that are weighing me down. I think a lot of people here with us would.

Let's talk about the quick ways. Let's talk about the dangerous ways.

Yes.

Okay. A lot of people have fallen for the sexiness of psychedelics. And I did ayahuasca in Peru in 1999. And I went down there and they said, excuse me, senor, you're white. I said, yeah, I know, I'm a gringo. They said, this is only for locals. You won't like it, you're going to throw up. I said, no, I've done my work, I've done my research. I really want to do this. And they hooked me up with a proper shaman who was raised in the jungle. And I did it one time. That is the extent of my ayahuasca experience. And I've done psychedelics maybe, maybe 50 times, 40 times in my entire life. And I'm biologically 38 and I'm chronologically 50.

How do you know you're biologically 38? How do you know that?

Because you can get really reliable blood tests that involve DNA methylation using the Horvath clock. And that's what they say. And, well, okay, 400,000 markers of DNA methylation. It seems like some of the anti aging stuff that I'm doing is working.

Is that the glycan age? I took that test.

Glycanage is different. This is a true age test. Glycanage is more reliable. Telomeres we used to use. But telomeres are frankly garbage because you're drawing blood telomeres and blood changes every four months. So blood's all over the place. But just because your blood is longer or shorter from telomeres, it doesn't mean your cardiac tissue or somewhere else is. So right now the gold standard is Steve Horvath's work out of, I think, Harvard and the Horvath clock as a marker of DNA aging. And with a true age test, you can actually use different people's assessments of aging. Yes. So I don't know, maybe I'm 39, maybe I'm 37. It's all pretty much a belief system.

Well, let's go back to the psychedelic conversation. There was a moment where you and I were connected, and we're not going to name the center, but I had a very traumatic experience at this center and we shared some information about that. A lot of people are running for the golden ticket, Dave. Like they Want the fast path. They want to be able to heal. They want to be able to like get rid of the stuff that's weighing them down so they can go and do big things. Is there a danger, is there a danger for people that are going into the fast path of really consciousness of healing? What are the things that we should look out for when we're on the fast path?

Let me give you the, the order of operations for how to do the technologies that are going to help you with this stuff. I don't think we can afford slow path or even middle path anymore. Humanity is becoming a failed species. It's just a fact. So if we're going to fix that, it's going to require an upgrade. And you know, you could say, well, I'd like to be very, very fearful and slow and lack courage. And so I'm just going to sit here and do my small thing and that's all I'm going to do. It's okay to make those choices. You are not my people though. So you can say, I'm going to do everything that I can that I know about and that's a really good place to be. And you can also say, I'm going to go exploring and I'm going to find and the fastest and most likely to work technologies. And I say technologies because psychedelics are a technology. Blankets are a technology, fire is a technology. These are the tools of being human. So how do we go about this? Well, the first thing that you would do is you would do emdr, which is a rapid trauma resolution technique out of transpersonal psychology. Now let's be really clear. Transpersonal psychology came out of psychedelics. Stan Grof, who's the father of this kind of psychology, learned the patterns of it from using LSD in a clinical setting in the 50s in Czechoslovakia. I've had Stan on my show. I've done an event with Stan. He's in his mid to late 90s.

How's he doing?

I hear he's not doing great lately, but that's just very lately and I haven't had a chance to check in.

You make it to 90, you're doing something right.

Yeah, he didn't just make it. I think he was 94 on stage at 9 o' clock at night after leading a breathwork session. And he did an hour long interview in front of an audience, kind of all right.

Yeah.

His brain was sharp. Yes. And he invented holotropic breathing, which is a replacement for lsd, which has been profound for me and has a Lot of commonalities with Wim Hof's methods, but you just do it for longer. So by the way, if you're listening, don't try that at home. You want someone sitting for you, you will have a hard time trip. You'll leave your body, you'll see past lives. I've seen people rip their clothes off. I mean, it is a serious deep work and you need someone who can hold space for you. But you could do holotropic breathing after emdr, which is actually what I recommend. So neither of those is a drug. They just both cause you to access this whole big field of feelings so that you can go in and look at the feelings and then choose to let them go. And there's different techniques for letting them go. I use the reset technique, but it helps to have the technology. With the third thing, which is neurofeedback, you can glue electrodes to your head so your brain knows what it's doing. Because right now the brain doesn't have any internal measurements for itself. It only can see the world around it. So when you kind of hold up a mirror to the brain for the first time, you can regulate it very quickly. The reason my program is called 40 Years of Zen. It's meant to replace 40 years of daily practice with five really intense days. Because your brain can change so quickly when it can see what's happening. So that's a different perspective. But I believe this to be real. And the results from people who go through there in the commentary is profound. It's life changing.

The breath work for me has been the only thing that has really allowed me to have my anchor. It's a. It's written on my arm, which means if I can breathe, I can choose.

Have you tried the other psychedelics other than Aya?

Yeah, I have, I have. They didn't do it for you, right? They didn't do it for me because I think I came from. I didn't have a cord wrapped around my neck, but I was ripped away from my mom. I was put in an incubator for two weeks. I wasn't touched.

Two weeks in an incubator. Everyone who's had incubator or intubation as a baby has profound physical trauma below the conscious layer. You will not see it, you will not feel it. Every single person I've ever worked with at 40 years is in. There's a resolution process. Do you get like the gagging reflex when you get stressed?

I think when I get stressed, my stomach gets in knots, I sweat My hands get sweaty. And so with the psychedelics, I took them so far because I was so hungry for that fast path, but I didn't have the wisdom to know what the lessons really were. And I really feel like the psychedelics are. They're a great tool. Not anti psychedelics. We just did a huge show with Ben about why he's letting go of psychedelics. And I don't necessarily agree with that. Greenfield.

Oh, is he finally getting there? Good.

So. So anyways, what I'm mirroring, what I'm reflecting is like the psychedelics aren't the path for everyone, but they are a path. I think that's why I created the. The Breathe, Breath and Wellness Program is because I knew, Dave, I knew in my heart that psychedelics weren't for me, so that maybe they're not for other people as well. And I think the breath always is.

They can be. But here's what psychedelics do. They kick open a door so you can look at it and then you have to do the work. And breath work is a powerful way to do it. It's these poor people. I mean, look at Aubrey Marcus. The guy means well, but how many hundreds of sessions has he done? Anyone who says, I've done hundreds of sessions of any plant medicine, it's not working. That's just what it means. You're supposed to do very occasional things and then you write down everything you did and you study it and you learn it. And if instead you just say, I'm going to go get high again next weekend. Again next weekend. Again next weekend. My ex wife was a drug and alcohol addiction emergency medicine doctor, and we spent 17 years together. We talked about this all the time. You can use psychedelics as a way to escape from reality, and that's what addicts use psychedelics for. It's very hard to get addicted to psychedelics. There's no physiological thing. These people just don't want to face the trauma of their own life or what they've done. It's based on guilt and it's based on shame. I'm not saying that Aubrey is based on those. I don't know. I just know he's done hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of sessions. I don't think that's wise for anyone unless you're living in the jungle with a shaman and you're on that path where you have one foot in the underworld and one foot here all the time. You can train that. It's just a very rough path.

Well, it's a life path. Somebody's called on that path. That's not something you just kind of dabble your foot in.

You should interview Shaman Hamachak. I just had him on my show and we talked about that. He's a shaman from South America who did that sort of thing. And it's fascinating to me because you see these. I'm going to call them neo shamans. Ants. They do not have the ability to stop the dark side. We talked about how cordyceps controls ants.

The zombie ants.

The zombie ants. Right. Well, is it conceivable that a plant from the jungle could control people? I think so.

I think so too.

In fact, a shaman's job, a proper shaman's job, is to be the firewall that stops that from happening while the plant does its work. And I would say, in fact, let's finish this order of operations. For things we had emdr, holotropic breathing. Tantric sex is a very powerful personal development thing. And you can leave your body, you can re resolve trauma. All kinds of really powerful healing can happen from that with the right partner, obviously. And so having the right partner would be part of that. I don't think you can really do tantric sex by yourself, but you can do some tentric Tantric practices.

There's no like tantric masturbation there, is there?

Yeah, but it's, you know, maybe not as powerful. It's not as powerful. You need the masculine, feminine polarity for that. Okay. After that we can get into drugs. But then you say ketamine. Legal, well understood. You can do profound healing on ketamine. And it's. There's clinics, you just go do it. There's no craziness to it. Right. And it's also a very defined duration. And then after that, say, okay, I wanted to go deeper. You could then say, what's next? Mdma or probably even for some people, mda.

Mda.

Yeah, without the M. I prefer that.

Is that because of the narcotic effect of MDMA vs MDA?

The MDMA is real stimmy and MDA is just hard opening. So do you want heart opening and ampi or do you want just hard opening? If you're doing healing work, I think you want the heart opening. If you want healing work and dancing, then that's mdma. MDMA does work, but people can access incredible trauma and work on it. And you can do it with a therapist. These are valuable tools. There's nothing wrong with them. None of those, though, is kicking open these doorways that you do when you get into some of the stronger stuff and we get there. Next, I would actually put LSD because it's a well defined chemical compound. It's still illegal in most places places, but I'd put that as probably safer than mushrooms from a mental standpoint. And you do an occasional thing, you journal, you do this with a therapist. This is not about recreation. That's going to help you tap into some stuff. And after that is mushrooms. Because mushrooms can be of huge differences in dosing, huge differences in quality. And you don't even know what kind of mushrooms you're necessarily getting. And they do different things. And anytime you're interacting with the plant kingdom, you want intention and probably a shamanic presence to help. So I do think though mushrooms are relatively safe, they all represent the fungus kingdom. And just for the record, we are not that we are bacteria, we're powered and controlled largely by our mitochondria. So bacteria and fungus and mold, they kind of have a long standing 2 billion year old war. So they're all kind of in the same bucket. I don't worry that much about those. You just have to know what you're getting. And then after that, DMT, after that 5 Meo DMT and if you still haven't got what you needed, you might want to look at what teachings you're following, what beliefs you have. And then if you really wanted to do ayahuasca, but do it with a shaman who is actually a shaman, not someone who says I did it five times, I woke up and now I'm going to do. I'm really concerned about that. And I. Aya is very powerful. Aya is conscious and you're interacting with a large jungle conscious entity with no nets. If you do this with the wrong people. So I think I would just say be very cautious on that one.

Yeah, that's a really beautiful on ramp. I love the like taking it one step at a time. So that really you are still, from what I heard from you, you're still taking a fast path, but you're doing it in an intelligent way to where you're not overextending yourself and potentially putting yourself in harm's way. Is there anything else on that path where we could not be in harm's way?

I forgot about neurofeedback, I think, or maybe I mentioned it, but that you mentioned it. Yeah, that would be at the very beginning. But within neurofeedback there are some companies who are sort of saying we're going to just kind of give our system out randomly to people but the system isn't clean. The brain will change very rapidly with neurofeedback. There was one that I used, and I'm not going to point fingers at certain companies.

I used Peak Brain about four years ago. Peak Brain, Louisiana.

Unfamiliar, seems a small player. Most of the time people go and they spend an hour and they do training, but you don't necessarily know what you're training. This company had a franchise that they put out there, and I don't know if if Peak Brain had their tech or not. And I used it and I couldn't sleep well for six months. And I talked to a military sleep doctor who had done the same program, same thing. So well meaning company, bad tech, larger opportunity. So people who are listening say, I'm going to go get a neurofeedback session. You want someone with lots of experience, lots of training, who knows what they're doing. And you can go in and you can sort of edit certain behavior sets. You can change things rapidly. And I think it's much faster than meditation and it lasts. Problem is, if one electrode's loose or the person does it wrong, you can really screw yourself up. I started this 25 years ago. I bought my own EEG. And after a year or two of doing this, I realized, oh, my God, I am doing surgery on my own brain. So if you change something, your perception of it, it'll be invisible. And so you can suddenly become angry or tired or whatever. It'll be invisible. I've had times, even when I was testing out the new tech and we just launched another major upgrade at 40 years of Zen with our tech, but I was using a clinical system that's not ours. And I had one electrode loose on my forehead. And I trained for an hour. And I was a zombie producer. I was so tired. So finally I had to call up our neuroscientist. We looked at the logs and. And to put it back on and retrain the bad habit. My brain had learned you just have to understand neurofeedback is powerful. It also can be used for harm. There's another group, one that I had a partnership with many years ago. They were training up something called alpha, one of the brainwaves. And people love to generalize. And if you say alpha, it's like saying protein. Well, snake venom is a protein, but.

There'S the alpha one and alpha two. And alpha two is the holy grail.

Even that. That's like saying animal protein is better than plant protein, but you don't know which animal protein you're talking about. So it turns out alpha is a range of frequencies and the range of frequencies where they happen in the brain in what order determines a lot. So there's a lot of very complex math that goes into a feedback signal that isn't accounted for. In the old days we would say, well, any alpha, alpha one or alpha two and even the line between those two is debatable, but any alpha is good. So yay, go alpha. Which is kind of like saying go protein without knowing what it is or calories are good or calories are bad. Alpha in and of itself. If you want alpha, I'll tell you how to probably triple your alpha. Right now. Close your eyes and focus your attention on the middle of your forehead. There you had alpha. Woohoo. Did it change your life? No. Okay, so it's more complex than that. But if you train a small narrow range of alpha, it radically increases your chances of having hallucinations, not good ones, and some destabilization. And I found out that one of the companies I worked with was actually training that up because they were using older tech that they hadn't evolved and that was causing visual distortion. So I'd come out of that and like, like the whole world would be blinking and it would do that for a while. And that was not a good thing, that was a bad thing. So it just turns out the expertise of the person who's helping you tune your brain is incredibly important. And at this point we had to develop our own hardware for monitoring the brain and our own software to get to some of the very fast brain waves and to be able to do three different types of feedback on top of each other. And it's getting better and better. So every year it's going to happen. But in the world of neurofeedback, imagine if we had the brain waves of everyone in your high school and we said, this is awesome. We're going to do some brain training so we know what an average brain looks like. So we're going to train you for that. So all of the D and F students are like, this is amazing. I'm now a C student. And all the A and B students are like, you're, you suck. You just made me into a C student. So training to averages, especially in a world where 93% of people are unwell, it's a terrible idea. So what we're doing, we have 1500 high performance brains of people who have done big things in the world, people who have done a lot of work, even some gurus and we're training brains towards that versus towards a random collection of people.

Dude. So fascinating what a carefully constructed world it has to be in order to be safe. Because I could see with the tech in the wrong hands, could actually really hurt people. Much like psychedelics. Even though it's technology itself, which is.

You could use psychedelics or improperly applied neurofeedback to rapidly build a cult.

I could feel that.

Yep, you could.

One thing that I feel with you too is there's a deep spirituality in you. I know that a lot of people know you as the father of biohacking and very technology based and using supplements and whatnot. But there's also a part of you that just recently on stage shared with the audience at the conference that you had gotten a divorce from your wife and that you're moving to Austin, which is amazing. So welcome to Austin. I don't know if you're here yet, but.

Well, I'm here today.

Okay.

I signed my lease.

So how have you managed that, Dave? I mean, you know, I consider you to be a very spiritual man. And so how did that spiritual evolution unfold with you and your ex?

Well, it turns out it's possible to be friends with someone that you had a romantic relationship with. In fact, it's not even uncommon. But the stories we hear all the time are the angst, the trauma, people being mean to each other and all of that. And Lana and I decided jointly that we were better as friends and co parents than we were as romantic partners. And it has to do with geography. It has to do with focus and life. And it has to do with what each of us wants with the other one, which is, I want Lana to be happy. She wants me to be happy. And like this path is better, you can do that completely peacefully. In fact, anyone in any relationship look your partner in the eye and say, I just want you to be happy. And if you really deeply mean that, it means that whatever your partner wants, you're going to help them get. And if what your partner wants is to go meditate in a cave for two months, damn, that's going to be expensive. All right, let's start saving. And if they really want a goldfish, I got you. We'll get a goldfish. And your partner does the same for you, that is a different kind of relationship than a lot of people have. But what that means, and as it worked out for our family, this works very well for our kids, it works well for Lana and me. And of course there's pain and there's sadness, but there's also friendship and support, and I believe that we could do that. And people call this conscious uncoupling because Lana and I have both done enormous amounts of 40 years of Zen. We've done enormous amounts of our own personal development work, and we both have a spiritual practice, and that allows us to sense an emotion but not necessarily act on it. And neither of us is perfect. But, you know, she's a. A friend and the. The mother of my children, and. And so there's just no bad blood there.

There's also a deep reverence and respect. I mean, I. I have, you know, Carrie in my life, and no matter whatever happened with us, there would always be a different way of me loving her and me respecting her because she's the mother of my children. Yep, you feel that with yourself as well. And how do you hold them both, Dave? Like, how do you hold the sad and. And how do you hold the love and reverence and respect? How do you do both?

It turns out grief is interesting. If you're willing to go into grief, it usually lasts for about 10 to 20 minutes and then it stops. But if instead you say, I'm not going to feel grief because I'm not supposed to feel it because I'm angry, because men don't cry, blah, blah, blah, all the beliefs that we have, then it'll last for a very long time. So it's just easier to let it go and just experience it and recognize that it's a normal and healthy emotion. And that because we have meat, we have those emotions. And so, all right, there we go. And it's okay to be sad. It's okay to be happy. And so for me, that's worked well. And also talking about this with, you know, with my kids and stuff, we're an intact family unit. We just now have a different relationship than we had before.

Yeah. There's a level of work that you brought to this, though. I think the average person would go through the mashing down of the grief and not wanting to feel the grief. And I think about just the mystery that we're all in here. I don't know if you have a connection with God. I don't think God is a dude on a hill or a man in the sky. But there's some kind of mystery that we have to honor here, because I think in everyone's hearts they want to be with their partner forever. But sometimes existential powers come in, like in your situation, like, what do you make of that? What's the Meaning you make of it all.

Well, the desire to be with your one partner for your whole life is probably coming from your meat operating system, not really from your heart.

How so?

Well, there's this big debate, and if you interview Chris Ryan from Sex at Dawn, I interviewed him a long time ago, probably the first hundred episodes of the show of the Human Upgrade. He wrote this big book saying, biologically, we're wired to have a partner, but to not be monogamous. And then you've got Esther Perel, who's probably in a similar camp. And then you've got someone who wrote another book called Sex at Dusk that's arguing that monogamy works.

Sex at dawn versus Sex at Dusk.

That was the counterpoint. They were pretty angry.

That's good marketing right there.

It wasn't a great. It wasn't like a big success as a book. But if you want to consider something, don't only read things that agree with you. Read things that don't agree with you. Sure, sure. I don't know. You're asking me some kind of a question.

Yeah. How do you hold them both? And what's the meaning of all this for you at this juncture in your life with all that you do and hold.

Oh, I know where I was going with it. There's a part of you that wants that. There's a part of you that also says, I want my partner to be happy and I want to be happy. And if you realize, you know what, our joint work is done, then your joint work is done. The other thing that especially young people are prone to believe is that. And the world seems like it's getting worse this way. And the other person's responsible for your feelings, you're responsible for their feelings. So there's tons of codependence in relationships, which isn't real. And you also find that people think there's only one soulmate. There are lots of soulmates. There are people you have known in lives before, and they are all around, and you meet them, you're like. Like, why do I know this person? What is that spark, that connection? And the thing that I wish, and this isn't talking specifically about Lana and me, but the thing that I wish that I had known when I was a teenager and the stuff that I'm teaching my kids is that just because someone's attractive, it doesn't mean they're a good relationship, but they might be a good date. And attractiveness is not what you base a relationship on. And that's not the mistake that Lana and I made. We have a deep spiritual connection. But so often it looks good. And this is like going to the store and saying that cake looks great. And it's like the Costco cake, and it's like all vegetable oil, but the frosting is beautiful. And you cut into it, you're like, oh, it's not very good, but it looks really good. So I'm just going to eat the whole cake. That's not what it is. So what you do is you look at someone and say, are they attractive enough? But do they have the qualities of a life partner? And only you know what your qualities are for that. If we taught our children to choose based on that, we would have more relationships. Maybe that lasted forever. I don't know if that should be the goal for relationships, to be honest, but we'd have more relationships that were clean. And when they've worked their way through, they evolve into something else. Else instead of ending in an explosion. So I. I'm very pleased that Lana and I have managed to evolve to something else rather than, you know, rather than falling into the common traps for men.

A lot of men are taught, because, you know, by example and also society to, like, not cry or not show grief, not process grief. Have you. Have you cried? Have you. Have you emoted tears? Have you shed?

If I cried, it would make me vegan, and I. I could never do that. Of course I've cried. Yes.

Yeah. Because I think so many people, they, they. They want to be like the tough rock. Especially men, you know, Two children, right? You have two kids.

Yeah.

And. And so I think that a lot of people can connect with, like, you know, the navigating the. The waters of life. Sometimes things get so challenging, but we still have our responsibilities and, and everything else. So what is it about the. The next phase that allows you to be just as excited about what you're doing now versus doing it with Lana and doing it with the old construct that you had?

I don't even know that I have a good answer for that question. I do what I'm here to do, and sometimes I don't exactly know. It kind of comes from somewhere else. I don't know if we talked about this on the last interview. My very first book was a fertility book. Right. And that's why I'm not worried about a population problem, because I know about infertility rates. We do not have a shortage of people. We have a rapid fall off in pl. But that book, it was either that or write the bulletproof diet. It was One of the two. And I couldn't decide. And I went into this really deep neurofeedback session with 40 years of Zen tac. And I came out after, like, two hours and just picked up a pencil and I wrote the entire outline for the Better Baby book. So I guess I'll write that one first. That was my very first book. And all of my books, I don't know what I'm going to write. And I have this picture, and then all of a sudden I sit down and then it just crystallizes. I don't think that's through focused effort. I think it's just happening. It's in information fields or something. I don't know.

This is your dharma. You talked about soulmates. I think that soulmates don't always have to be romantic. Sometimes a soulmate can just be a friend.

I have tons of friend soulmates.

Tons of soulmates.

It's amazing.

Do you think that there's one twin flame, though? Twin flame is different. Is there like a one twin flame for everyone else? Where?

I don't think so at all.

Why not?

I haven't seen it. Haven't seen enough evidence of it.

Yes.

And I also think it's a harmful belief, because if there's only one, well, is this the one? So then you always have doubt, which is another word for fear, all the time. And it's just perfectionism. I think it's a story to justify perfectionism. Sure.

Yeah. I wonder in my own life, too, at times. I'm 42 years old, and I've had unique challenges in relationships. And I know that it stems from how I was raised and the examples that I had. And now I'm just like, okay, I believe in God. I don't think it's a man or a woman. God directs me in certain ways. Spirit directs me in certain ways that I can't explain to you all the time. I can't tell you exactly why I do what I do. And I heard you say that.

I heard you say that life is an entirely rational. We're not robots. No, it's not so shocked and offended.

But there's some part of this existence, or like you said, I don't exactly have a good answer for that, but I'm here to do what I do. What you do now is essentially the same as when you started, and that was healing yourself so you can heal and help others. That's what I get from you. Is that different or is it.

Well, you could call it healing. And sometimes it's Healing. But I think I stopped my healing a while ago. I had the fibromyalgia, lots of trauma and anxiety and PTSD and arthritis and high risk of stroke and heart attack and pre diabetes, all this crap before I was 30. And I kind of stepped into this and I was 30, 31, and really started the path of healing. But at what point are you saying, I'm healed enough and now I'm improving and now I'm upgrading, and that's where my full focus is now. And if an upgrade is, oh, I'm going to, oh, look, there's a little bubble of rust on my paint. I didn't notice that in the process of my upgrade. I'll take care of that. Am I repairing the car or am I upgrading the car? Do you see what I'm saying? I feel like I've gotten to the point where, sure, there's always room for improvement or there's some unseen little thing, but I think I've got all the big trauma us. The difficult ones, though, are the ones that are entirely invisible. They're just in your tissues. They're not in your conscious mind. And those are the real work. And we know because of Candace Pert's work is a lady who discovered the opiate receptor.

This is the molecules of emotion.

Yep, exactly the same of her book. We know that your immune system has its own consciousness. And I know from 40 years in, your meat has its own consciousness as well. So there's actually different computing systems, different thinking systems, and reacting systems inside your body that are invisible to you, which is creepier than hell because they assert themselves and do shit that you don't see without your permission. And then you take credit for it. One of the practices that matters to me, I don't really talk about my body very often. I talk about this body. And so if you identify as your meat bag, you are provably going to have worse results because your meat bag doesn't really exist. By the end of this interview, you'll have shed some cells in various ways and you'll have incorporated the water you're drinking and whatever else into making new cells. So what we really are is we are like a stream through matter. We're like an eddy in a stream. We're a hollow tube. If you figure your mouth and your butt, it's all hollow through there. So we're constantly changing based on the inputs and outputs. Well, so if you want to identify something that doesn't exist and you think, ow, I hurt my arm. Yeah, you could also Say this arm hurts and it's not me. I'm just using it right now. And there's some internal shift of awareness that maybe you're bigger than your bag of meat and you provably are bigger than that.

Especially if you expand enough to know that you can be like you talked about earlier, the observer, the person who's watching the whole thing go down. It's kind of trippy. Like I'm like, are we actually real? Is this a simulation? What are we doing here? Do you ever have thoughts like that that you just have fun with? I mean, I don't attach to those thoughts because it would drive me crazy. But what do you make of that?

I doubt that we're in a simulation, but it would be very difficult to prove it. The biggest evidence perhaps of that would be Planck's length. You know about Planck's length? No, it's a universal constant in advanced physics that you use for most of the equations. And it turns out it's the pixel size of reality is the best way of explaining it. So you can't go smaller than that when you're looking at the universe. So that is kind of creepy. Why wouldn't you be able to? So there's a lot we don't know about reality. A lot.

I was listening to Neil Degrasse Tyson. I'm not a fan of everything that he says, but he.

I think he's kind of a douchebag. But he's done some good stuff.

He was on Rogan and he was saying that when they have the highest powered microscope and they go as deep as the technology can go, that at the bottom of it all is just replicating cells. That's all that anything is. And so it definitely replicating cells.

That's interesting.

It's just replicating cells or replicating matter. I think that was what he said.

Matter, not cells. Because cells are multi. Yeah, they're multi atom.

So if that's the case, what's replicating it all?

The. The most likely thing from what I know. And we're both going way out on, you know, on fences here. It's probably information field fields. Information field theory is the most useful thing that accounts for all of the things that we know are that we know, that we sense and all the other things that we know happen. Sometimes when you get into, say, Joe Dispenza's work saying, that's funny, people meditate can show this effect. People who don't meditate can't. And so a random sample, you don't see Anything. A sample of people who have powers, the power to pay attention, then they can do stuff. And that that stuff is real. And it's kind of creepy because what the heck is going on here? So given all of that caveat, what's really going on in there with information field theory is that if you and I are information fields and everything around us an information field, that would account for the way we interact with each other. The fact that intention does something, we know it does something, the angry skeptics believe it can't do something. By the way, I was one of those for a long time. I'm a computer science engineering guy. I just started paying attention. Same thing with Bruce Lipton, who's a friend. He wrote Biology of Belief, a very influential book on epigenetics. People don't know this. They think he's a hippie dippy guy. Bruce Lipton was one of the first, if not the first guys to clone a human cell. He's a hardcore laboratory researcher and he just realized, realize, dang, we focus on the cells, but the petri dish, what's around the cells is affecting them so profoundly that I have to change my philosophy. And he has books about how intention affects biology. Who would have thought? So we know this to be true. And anyone who takes the time to read any of the seminal books in the field realizes it's hard to argue against that unless you have a very strong belief and you're unwilling to question your belief, in which case you should get a job with either Monsanto or GlaxoSmith.

Yes. What shifted you from being the hardcore skepticist to being the man you are now?

I come from a family of real scientists. My grandfather wrote under the chemistry heading for Encyclopedia Britannica back when that was a thing. Ph.D. physical chemist, grandmother, Ph.D. nuclear engineer. Worked on very early nuclear power plants and things. And so I'm scientific, and I learned the scientific method as a kid. And you observe and then you make a hypothesis, then you test the hypothesis. What's not in the scientific method is observe, ignore anything that doesn't match your belief, and then test. And that is what we've been doing. So what I did is I did everything that was supposed to work. I believed that exercising more and eating less would make me lose weight. So I did it to the point it broke me and I still didn't lose weight. And then I got pissed off and I had chronic strep throat every month. And then sinusitis after they pulled my tonsils. As a teenager. Fifteen Years I was on antibiotics every month because I kept getting sick and had all these weird symptoms that none of my friends had. This crippling brain fog. And when I exhausted all the stuff that was supposed to work in the West, I said, I'm going to have to try the stuff that. That's not supposed to work. But I'm going to be curious because I've got nothing left. What am I going to do? Be wrong? I don't care. I feel like I'm going to die here. I bought disability insurance in my mid-20s because I couldn't tell what was going on. All my tests were fine. Doctors said I was fine, but I wasn't. So I'm lucky I was able to crack the code and to solve all that stuff. And that's made me an expert in this to the point I consult with doctors, I lecture to doctors. Sometimes I'm not a doctor. I just. Just had a deep knowing because I had to read the papers and do the analysis.

You interviewed Gabor Mate recently, and I caught the first 30, 40 minutes of it, and it was so profound because he said that in school, MDs get like zero training on emotional intelligence and trauma, which is also like, you know, nutrition. I think they have like a half day class or something.

Yeah. And the class is basically from Dr. Kellogg.

It's funded by Kraft Foods or something.

Do you know about Dr. Kellogg?

Kellogg? I don't. Let's go into that real quick.

All right. Yeah. Dr. Kellogg, early 1900s, was this creepy, cultish medical doctor who believed that male sexual desire was the root of all evil, and so was masturbation in men or women. So he invented a food called Corn Flakes that was low in fat to suppress testosterone and lower male sexual desire. And that's why we have cereal as a breakfast item in the country today. And he was obsessed with masturbation, so he enc. Encourage circumcision for boys and girls, but they just wouldn't do it to girls, thank God. And they still do it to a lot of men because it will reduce masturbation. It doesn't, but that was his belief. So this was basically a perv who, because of the medical establishment, built our food system and a lot of our medical practices. It's weird. So anyway, Dr. Kellogg could do that. Who knows what other doctor trainings will do? But the half a day of training comes from his lineage, not the stuff that works.

I feel like if you look at corporations and even the government, because the government is a corporation, most. Most corporations, they move so slow. They're like a battleship that takes 20, 50 years to turn around. The speed that you have talked about that we all need to be on right now, where we're actually healing, we're expanding, we're doing our work that actually matters. Maybe to piggyback on the, you know, being a dangerous human. Like, we need to be a little more cautious about people that have deleterious intentions for us that we've just accepted for a hundred years or more, like the Kellogg or even all the conversations around CBD and hemp. I mean, there's an entire podcast there that we don't have time for. But I think about the ways that we have really just been lied to. And I've been lied to for so long. And it feels so good to expose some of this bullshit, doesn't it? What are you excited about? About exposing, like, what's the number one thing or what's something that you're really passionate about exposing that many people have believed for a long time to be true, that just quite simply isn't true.

I actually don't get off on exposing things. That's not my. Not my vibe. And there are people like food babe, who's really motivated by that. And I'm always amused when she's exposing something. I'm like, great, yes, M and M's lied. They said that they would take food coloring out of M&MS. In 2016, and they never did. And she's like, ha. So we need that. The personality type that shines a flashlight on stuff and says, look, there's a cockroach. There's a cockroach. People tend to hate the whistleblowers, but we need them desperately. I think Snowden should get some sort of Nobel Prize for that sort of thing. But what I'm doing is less about exposing lies as about saying this practice is the most effective for you to get to your goals. And if you want help on it, I have a whole book, and here's some worthy goals. A book is called Game Changers. But you've got to find your mission and your purpose. And you can have more than one mission, more than one purpose. That's fine, and it can change over time, but pick one. It's okay if it's not the right one. It'll evolve. It's not that big of a deal. But then choose. Use the tools that are going to give you hundreds of times more results than going with the circumcision and cornflakes route. There's just such a wealth of amazing Things you can do that work so well. Most people don't know how to envision the state they can be in. I used to call it bulletproof, the state of high performance. I don't know what it is, but there's this whole series of upgrades. And if today you a Kia, you wouldn't know what it would ever feel like to be a Ferrari. But you can be a Ferrari. You just don't know the path because it's invisible and it's a path of how you feel. So if I am credible and trustworthy or someone else is and they give you good advice, you can rapidly transform yourself into something. I can't believe that I can do this. Well, it's because you can't believe. It's not that you couldn't do it, it. So I'm working to just show people, yes, you can get younger. You can improve your brain, you can raise your iq. You can cure the incurable. It's just not always going to be easy. It's just easier now than it has been in all of human history.

The come from is different. You're not against something or exposing something. You're pro health, you're actually on the other side. But we need. It's almost like we need both of them to exist in order for the middle to exist as well. So you might fall into the category where you're pro health and you're moving towards that. But like you said, we do need these people on the other side that are exposing things.

I question that because the more you fight against something, the stronger it gets. And this goes back to Mother Teresa, who definitely had her issues, but someone said, will you join our protest against the war, the Vietnam War? And she said, no. And they're like, what do you mean? I thought you were against the war. She said, I'm not against the war. I am for peace. I'll join a march for peace. But I won't join a march against the war. So I don't. I probably do more than I ought to. I don't really say, look, we have to fight Monsanto. In fact, I don't know that I've ever said those words. What I will say is, we have to stop poisoning our soil. It's time we rebuild our soil. And I've taken action. I built an organic farm that rebuilds soil using ruminant animals.

Where's your farm?

Vancouver Island. 32 acres. Three cows now in the freezer. Delicious cows and 25 sheep and 25 pigs and a bunch of chickens and acres of stuff growing on newly created soil. So you can do it? I did that. And yes, I'm lucky I could do that. I also went to part of the world where I could afford land because I couldn't have done that in la. No one can. So if you just start thinking about what your future could look like, it doesn't have to be a future of fighting against something. It can be a future of entirely ignoring something, or better yet, remediating harm that was done. So does my future include bioengineered microbes that eat glyphosate and shit out gold? I hope so. I don't know, but I'm down for that. But is remediating glyphosate something that'll happen? Yes. Does that mean I'm going to fight Monsanto? No. Does that mean we're going to take a body of kids with low glyphosate who are provably in so much better health than other kids and say, guys, this is what's possible. To do this, you need these inputs and you have to remove these other inputs. And suddenly there'll be another hundred billion dollars of lawsuits against Bayer, the owner of Monsanto, until Bayer goes down because of what they've done. And that'll probably happen. And if it doesn't, then there will probably be overthrows of governments around the planet. Either that or everyone will die. One of the two.

This really wise man being for something instead of against something. I think about like, if I were to pick up my son, it's easier to pick up my son than try to push him away when I'm trying to type on the computer. Like pulling things in are so much fundamentally more easy than trying to resist and push against something.

There's a sick energy you get from being a victim. And we're actually teaching kids to be victims in a very nefarious way right now. When you're a victim, you get to feel this energy of being a victim. And it's kind of an addictive energy. And there's all sorts of ways you can.

Is it because it validates the position?

It's validating. It's energetic. You get to feel special. It's energizing. The anger feels good. Let's face it, I'm angry. So for instance, I've got size 16ft and I just want you to know I've been a victim because I can't buy shoes at almost any shoe store.

You have to go to big and tall.

They have ugly shoes there. It's not okay. So I've been victimized by this. In fact, I'm going to become a large shoe activist and I'm going to chain myself to doorknobs in Times Square. Or maybe there's a better way we're teaching this, that there's a merit to being a victim. And it turns out that means that the next step is fighting against something instead of working towards something. So if you set down your victim manacles, and that's what victim training is, and you say instead, what is the world that I want and how do I live in that world? How do I build that world? It's amazing how tearing something down because it's not fair is so dirty compared to building something up. And I think we've lost a lot of that in almost every aspect of psychology in popular culture. So I don't want to be a victim. I don't want to fight against anything. But what I am going to do is I'm going to do what's right because I am dangerous. I will always do what's right. And if it's inconvenient for a company, if it's inconvenient for a government, it's their problem, not mine.

Well, let's end on that note. That was awesome. I really loved when you brought the wisdom about being for instead of against. It's been a thing in my life where I go between. I'm not going to lie. And I think many of us do, like, like it's so alluring to be against something because there's some empathy in me and I don't want people to be harmed and I don't want my family to be harmed. And I think about the war on children's minds. I mean, look at YouTube, man. It's a sea of negativity. It's a sea of confusion for kids.

You're talking about the war on children's minds. When I was in Nepal in 2004 and I'm at, I think it was Kopan Monastery, I'd see this practice and it actually was a little bit triggering for me. And by the way, it's okay to be triggered. There's nothing wrong with being triggered. That just means, like, you have work to do. It doesn't mean the other person did anything wrong. They would take an 8 year old and they'd sit him on the ground in the lotus pose and around him would be like maybe 10 to 14 year old kids, eight boys standing in a circle around one kid sitting on the ground. Okay, Bullying, power, imbalance. That's why it was triggering for me. And then the older kids would all argue at the same time with a younger kid making these aggressive motions. They'd make a point and they'd kind of throw the point at the kid sitting on the ground. Now, that would probably be triggering for most Americans who've been bullied. Right?

Yeah.

What they were doing is they were training equanimity. They were teaching the kid on the ground to hold his ground, hold his space, and to answer the arguments. And he was doing it. I think it was not in my language, but to answer them calmly and succinctly, no matter how much emotion they were throwing at him. This was a very dangerous monk, I'm sure, when he grew up. So we can see our children as swimming in a sea of negativity or nothing actually harms you. If some person who is clearly traumatized and is probably 14 and angry said something mean on your YouTube account, it actually doesn't matter. And if our kids grow up saying, oh, of course there's people who say all sorts of bad stuff. It's about them. It's not about me. Those are the most powerful children of all. But if we allow our children to internalize that and to believe those false statements to be true, then we'll raise a generation of victims. I've dealt with unimaginable levels of criticism because I disrupted how we talk about health. The whole hack your health thing, I did that, man. It made the establishment mad. And then when I went on the Joe Rogan show, Joe, after he had a commercial conflict with me, sent about 20,000 super angry trolls after all my social media accounts and spent 18 months trying to destroy my reputation.

This is over the mold and the coffee and all that conversation.

Oh, yeah. He has investments in a company that tried to actually take the bulletproof name, as I understand it, and another one that was trying to copy my products. So this was just commercial stuff and it's fine. That's the arena that we play in. He deleted the episodes with me. I've done all my forgiveness work and all that. I could give Joe a hug today, and it's fine.

Well, you might see him here in Austin.

I might see him here in Austin. In fact, I'm thinking I might do some stand up comedy. I'm really thinking it's about time for that if I'm not too angry for it. But the thing about that is not at all to pick on Joe. It's that having 25,000 angry people come after me personally all at once because Joe said I was a liar and a snake oil person and whatever else. When before that, my social media was just, dave, thanks for changing my life. I've lost £100. And I mean, lots of that stuff. It was so jarring. It actually activated a trauma that I completely was unaware of from first grade. I had to go and do my own reset stuff.

Did you do the EMDR on yourself?

I did get through that EMDR and. And the reset thing from 40 years was end. And so for. Actually, until I realized this is what was going on for about six months, I was a little ungrounded from that. I'm like, what is going on here? And my whole team's like, dave, what's going on? I'm like, I don't know. And it was like a feeling in my body. And that's the same feeling that kids get when they're bullied. And I would argue that that's the energy that was driving this kind of gang of online bullies who they call themselves the Death Squad. Hey, guys, I love your brothers. I think I still have a page on your account that I didn't make, but it was really interesting. Super hostile stuff. Well, it all came down to a first grade experience. And once I ran EMDR and did the reset process against it, overnight, it became, oh, my God, every time Joe says something bad about me, I sell more coffee. But in the meantime, every time he says something about me, it was like, oh, another shot to the heart. Oh, another blow to the face. So I had to do my own work to reckon with that. And so I'm all right, and it's just a thing, but it's not a thing with a lot of emotion attached to it. I want my kids to learn that in 10th grade or in 9th grade, instead of waiting until they're, whatever, 40 something years old to deal with it. I should have learned that sooner. That was on me.

That's beautiful that you're modeling that for them now.

I'm trying. I'll tell you, if I'm successful in.

10 years, I think there's beautiful truth in what you're saying, and I want to challenge you because I think that as a father, part of my role is to make sure that my son's amygdala isn't hijacked as well. And to have, you know, Jordan Peterson calls it, allow your children to be dangerous and careful. Something like that. Like, allow your kids to be dangerous, but also in a careful way. And so that is our role as parents, is to make sure that we provide a space for our kids, kids to not be susceptible to them really, truly being hurt. But also there's this Goldilocks zone where we have to allow them to do hard and be picked on a little bit. I mean, I was bullied too. Like, it's a deep wound for many people.

So they have to feel pain.

How do we do that as parents? How do you. How old are your kids?

They're 13 and 15.

13 and 15. So they're going into the teenage years, which is a whole different level. So now they're like, how do I look, how do I feel, how am I perceived? How do we as parents walk that road of allowing them to do hard stuff and also being a guardian and shepherd so that they don't get truly fucked up?

I think it's harder for moms than dads on average just because of maternal instincts and biological wiring of the brain. And I don't know how to tell a parent how to do it. But when you have empathy for your kids, which everyone does, when your kid is harmed, you feel it. You feel it in your tissues. It's not like they cut their hand, you feel it in your hand. But when you see blood on your kid, every parent has this visceral sense of, I'm dying. What's going on there is that when a baby is very young in the womb, and even the first, really first year, probably two years of life, they're sharing their life field with both parents, but in particular the mom, so they're still a part of, of them. And then around two, they go through this runaway, come back, run away, come back. And one of the easiest and best things you can do then is say it's okay to go, it's okay to come back. And then they'll push the boundaries. They're seeing how far they can go before they get scared or before you yell at them. So creating this is early attachment theory. But anyone listening ought to read a book on attachment theory. And there's a bunch of them out there. I've interviewed kind of the father of that field. His name is Daniel P. Brown out of Harvard and also an expert in hypnotism. But it's really interesting. You start there and then allowing your 5 year old at the airport to get lost. They ran away and you're standing behind the pole right where you were, and they get lost, but you don't let them melt down. You let them feel a lack of concern, feel concern and feel fear. But then you move to where they can see you and you let them do this. And as they get older, it changes. This is what's hard for parents because all the time you're feeling their pain. One of the things that's most powerful you could ever do is you could say, if you do that, it'll hurt. And then you let them do it. Because kids are wired, especially when they turn 13, to ignore what parents say. Mother Nature makes children know their parents and their immediate family are so stupid that the best thing they could do is leave the family, face death on the savannah and go to another tribe. That's to prevent inbreeding of tribes of 150 people. This is the peak fertility window from about 13 up to about 24. And that's when your parents are dumb. And when you turn 24, magically, oh my God, my parents are so smart. So I've been telling my kids since they could understand me, it's okay when your teenagers are, I'm going to become really stupid. And they'd say that could never happen. And now that it happens sometimes, like, I get it, I'm stupid. But what parents need to understand, your children will listen to other children and to other parents with rapt attention, and the other parent can say what you would say and they'll hear it, but they won't hear you. And that's normal and healthy. So your job is to let your kids experience pain until they're about 13. And after that, your job is to have a support system of good friends or other friend's parents who can help your kids when they don't want to come to you and creating a safe space to come to you. That means managing your own emotions, managing your own anger. God knows I'm not a professional at that, but I do my best. And I've read a lot on parenting and I mean, I cannot hold my hand up and say that I'm the world's foremost expert on it because I'm not a child psychologist. I've consulted with a bunch of them. And so people tend to, to make gurus out of people. I don't want to be anyone's guru. I'm a curator of awesome people and of knowledge, and I share it. So I like to think that I'm trustworthy, but I'm not seeking guru status. So people saying, Dave, I want to raise my kids just like Dave would. I probably screwed some stuff up compared to, I don't know. Jordan Peterson's a psychologist. Maybe his kids are much better, maybe Liver King's kids are much better. But I don't think so.

I don't know about Liver King's kids.

I've had my kids eat organs for a long time. But we haven't just eaten the balls on the cob or whatever. So I don't know. But someone somewhere probably did better than me. But I'm willing to listen.

Sure. Well, we're here for this Modern Nirvana conference. What's your talk going to be about at the conference?

I'm going to tell you a trick. I live in the moment. I don't know what day of the week it is today.

So you're just going for it on the stage.

No, no, that's not true. But I don't manage tasks. I manage calendars, so I know I do what's on my calendar. So tomorrow, let's see. Here we go. Dave's keynote, 3:30 at Modern Nirvana. It is five traits of a dangerous person. And to talk about spirituality and biohacking. So I'm going to be talking about actually what I mean by danger. Everyone today says, I want to be safe. But safe is an illusion. A comet can hit your planet. You are going to die because you're alive. So let's just dispense with that and let's move forward with the fact that only you can provide safety. The safest place on earth to be is to say, I've got enough to handle anything that comes to my mind. I have the resilience and I have the energy. I am not depleted. That is a safe place to be. And you can be right on the edge of death with that attitude and that kind of energy and it's a safe place to be. And if you die, you were still safe until you died, in which case, well, either you don't know it or you hit reset, depending on your belief systems and what actually happens. But either way, you're safe. Safe is a feeling. And it's not something that your mommy can give you when you're a baby. She can, but not now. And if your mommy gives you a feeling of safety, it's a lie. Because a comic hit the planet. You are never safe.

You are going to die, no doubt.

So I'm going to talk about that. But the five traits of a dangerous person are the things that are tied in with Danger Coffee. Why it's called Danger Coffee. How you show up in the world where you know what? I am incredibly peaceful because I am in control of myself. That's the kind of piece that we're talking about. And only the most dangerous people are in Control of themselves. And that's where I'm taking people, man.

That's wellness. That's living well. It's a question that I always ask everyone that really I want to answer for myself. That's why I ask it. And it is, how do we live our life well? I mean, in 2015, it's what made me start the podcast. And for you, how do you live life well? How do you define wellness now, especially with the personal changes and the changes of business, the changes of your podcast, like, you've been through some significant changes, Dave, in the past couple years. How do you define living well through the changes of life?

I don't know that I've ever really focused on wellness ever. Do you wake up in the morning and say, today I want to feel well?

I wake up in the morning and I say, God, help me to do the best I possibly can. That's what I say.

Isn't that a lot better than well?

Well, I love wellness. I mean, I love that feeling of being well. You know, that's. That's what lights me up.

I get lit up by the feeling of being in a flow state, the feeling of awe, the feeling of joy, the feeling of curiosity. And for me, well is never up there. Well is something that. It's harder to feel those things if you're not well. But it's possible to feel those things even on your deathbed from cancer. And I have seen it. So I want my body to work flawlessly, but it's okay if it doesn't. And I want to feel amazing today. I don't want to feel healthy. Healthy is at the level of the table, and I want to be up here. And well is at the level of the table. And that's why when people say, dave, you're in the health and wellness industry, I'm like, no, I'm in the human performance industry. They're just a different thing. And it allowed me to assemble these weird technologies that made upgrade labs into a thing, because those are about feeling epic and doing it in less time and reaching states that are not on the map. That's what motivates me all the time. So it's funny. How do I do it? Well, we know that the body optimizes for two things. One is it only lets us see things that are useful for us to survive. We don't see X rays because it's not that useful. There's all kinds of stuff around us that's invisible, proven.

We can't see the RGBs. There's all kinds of colors around us.

Exactly. So we're seeing a very narrow slice of life, and Mother Nature optimized us for that. And the reason for that optimization is the other big thing. It's to save energy, to use as little energy as possible. So my game in life is how do I reach these exalted states with the least possible effort, because that allows more effort to be free, more work to be free for other stuff that matters, whether it's service to others, which also leads to an exalted flow state, or for anything else, like parenting, which can, if you're doing it right, lead to those exalted experiences. And a lot of boring work, to be perfectly honest, for any parent listening would know that answering the same question for the hundredth time isn't very satisfying.

Or changing diapers. That shit's boring.

No kidding, right? So we all deal with this stuff, but for me it's how do I achieve this with the minimal time and energy so that I have the time and energy available for something else? And then how do I amplify the amount of energy that I have to the point of absurdity? That would be my goal. Absurdity.

Is wellness a byproduct of your pursuit of being as high performance as possible, or is it the other way around?

It can be. It's easier to be high performance when you're well. Yeah, but there are stories like there's a skateboarder who broke his ankle and then set a world record.

Danny Way.

Yeah. With a broken ankle.

Paul Check helped him, I believe, heal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a beautiful story.

It is a beautiful story. But if that stuff is possible, wellness is provably not necessary. It's just really helpful. I will tell you though, that my mitochondrial enhancement techniques and all I have helped incredibly. I don't know, I don't think any of them would self identify as enlightened. But some of the most powerful sages, gurus and spiritual workers on the planet, they've used my techniques and gone, oh my God, I'm stronger when I do this. Yeah. Better antennas in your body, better energy production in your body will help you reach exalted states more easily. But it's not necessary. So it's this weird kind of, you know, pushing on a string, you know. Ouroboros. What are you?

Aurora borealis?

No, no, the snake eating its tail.

Oh, yes.

I wrote about my fasting book and it's not sticking in my brain.

Somebody's commenting right now. This is what it is.

Yeah, exactly. Yes, but what's going on there? It's hard to say. You put one before the other. But we know you can have these states when you're broken. We know it's easier to have these states when you're not broken. So there you go.

Dave, thank you for coming on the show. This has been epic. I look forward to the talk at Modern Nirvana. People can learn about you at two websites. One is daveasprey.com Yep. And then the other for the podcast.

I think the podcast is just on daveasprey.com, but you can go to ownandupgradelabs.com and open your own franchise anywhere in North America to become an entrepreneur in the biohacking space. This is new. It's a big deal.

That's exciting. And you have tools to help people do that, or do they need a fairly large amount of capital to do?

It's full franchise. You come in and we get you the equipment and all that kind of stuff.

Amazing. I've really enjoyed this, man. This is the first time us doing a talk in person. And I appreciate what you represent. And also, I don't agree with everything you say, but I like how you say it. You have a calm confidence in you that I think that's why people are drawn to you. And one thing that I took from our conversation was this war between pushing and pulling or being for and against something. So thank you for that wisdom.

You're very welcome. And I just like to remind you that it's okay for you to be wrong.

On that note, y', all, we'll talk to you soon. We're talking about daveoshtrant.com forward slash, community. So until Dave and I see you again, we're both wishing you love and wellness. Hey, thanks for watching the podcast. I appreciate you being here. If you haven't done so already, click the subscribe button and the little notification bell so you never miss any of this free weekly content delivered from my heart with care right to yours. If you love this video, you'll love any of the videos on this page. Just click the one you want to watch next.