given what's happening with AI given the rate of change of Technology given the last 20 years of research and non-profit work in the anti-aging field if we can't do way better than our current best today to reverse aging I think I'm being conservative at 180 and I have no intent of having 17 of my skin thickness which is what would happen given the current rate of decline of skin thickness if you don't do something about it so no I am going to look as good and be smarter and wiser than I am today when I'm 180. that's the goal foreign podcast I'm your host Dr Michael Gervais by trade and training a high performance psychologist and I'm excited to welcome Dave asprey as our guest for this week's conversation Dave is an entrepreneur and Tech innovator four-time New York Times best-selling author award-winning podcast host and Pioneer of the biohacking movement for those of you who have listened for a while you know that I have issues with the term hacking and at the same time I'm fascinated by folks that create and disrupt David spent Decades of his life to elevate Human Performance and he's created significant Brands like bulletproof and upgrade labs and I wanted to dig underneath the surface to understand the human ow he's disrupted in Industry he also has a new book coming out smarter not harder the biohacker's guide to getting the body and mind you want and he's fully committed to living to be 180 years old that's interesting so with that let's jump right into this week's conversation with Dave asprey Dave I'm stoked to sit down with you it's been it's been really fun to watch from a distance which you've built the community that you've built the influences that you've had over people's lives being better and it's really difficult to get my arms around what you're trying to do what you're trying to sort out and it I think it's probably very easy for you but you've got so many different verticals in a nutshell what are they pointing toward it's only two words and it's in the mission statement for my my companies and it's upgrade Humanity that's what we're doing and there's different levels that you can use to upgrade our Hardware our software our firmware and even the signaling mechanisms between each of the nodes in the great network of humanity but the reality is that it's time for an upgrade and all of my businesses make great sense because whether you're talking about 40 Years of Zen which is a high-end Neuroscience company that trains Executives brains to work better something I've done to myself for six months so I could have eight companies right now that I'm actively running which is ridiculous and you shouldn't do that but to be able to have my brain put on like that okay I did that but to go from there to why would you make a new coffee company that has trace minerals in coffee called danger coffee the uniting element is I want people who perform better and I want people who feel better and have more energy because people who have more energy were wired to naturally be nice to each other so we build a better world by building better individual humans and we build a better species by building better individual humans okay so you're working from the inside out you're working from the individual to be able to do that at scale sometimes from the individual it always starts with you but sometimes if you want to install something in society that is not an individual thing that is a marketing thing or I mean you you could argue that if enough percentage of a group of things gets an upgrade at what point is the whole thing upgraded for instance wireless networks when 80 of them are on 5G have we completed the upgrade but what if there's one that isn't there so what percentage of humans do we have to upgrade to be better at sensing reality to be harder to program malevolently anyway I don't know what that percentage is but it's probably not that big because as a species we're pretty good at copying each other that's good there's one um there's a bit of research that came out for critical mass on shaping culture oh this is good what's the percent it's one in five one in five the most common number I've seen is 15 which is very close you're looking at 20 and I'm looking at 15. it's somewhere around there and I've 18 from another person so let's get one in five of us even if it was one and seven I mean these are not yeah this is one and seven in a coffee shop yeah right one in seven in a business one in seven in a community is you know well the community level is a little bit larger but it feels more doable to get one and seven the the reason I I learned this is that years ago when I was working in Silicon Valley I I was having massive brain fog in it okay I'm 26 I'm allowed to attend board meetings for a 36 billion dollar market cap uh company I'm not allowed to speak but I can at least attend them and I'm just killing in my career and I'm so tired all the time I have such crippling brain fog about disability insurance like I don't even know why they think I'm able to remember all this because my brain is scrambled so I had the accelerator press all the way to the floor and I felt like I was slowing down and I couldn't push any harder so I started really getting into the whole biohacking thing and as I started realizing how much of a shift I could have I went to my LinkedIn profile and I was one of the first hundred thousand people on LinkedIn I'm sure and they put meditation yoga and modafinil in my LinkedIn profile now you didn't do this 20 years ago if you talked about meditation you probably had a tin foil hat and no competent venture-back CEO which I am I've raised 80 million dollars in Venture funding would ever meditate and part of the reason for creating biohacking as a word and as an industry was to take these things that provably increase our performance and normalize them and actually make them cool and that was the role of the biohacking movement okay so you were struggling and then you said I need to I need to figure out I also weighed 300 pounds I mean I was I was a [ __ ] show okay so why how did you turn to meditation well I did everything that's supposed to work as a computer science guy and network engineer I'm like well you know I'll go to the doctor and I'll try to eat healthy I ended up in fact the reason I wrote my newest book smarter not harder I spent 702 hours going to the gym I said the most important thing that matters is losing weight I will go to the gym 90 minutes a day no matter what I don't care if I'm sick I don't care if you know I have a big meeting it just doesn't matter I'm going to go and I did it six days a week Monday through Saturday halfway to have cardio at the end of 18 months of this I'm oh by the way I'm on a low-fat low-calorie diet at the end of this I still had a 46 inch waist and I still weigh 300 pounds and I could max out all the two of the machines at the gym and my first thought was well I didn't try hard enough I'm probably eating too much lettuce because I already had to quit eating the chicken because it was too high calorie no dressing like it's a horrible starved existence yeah it's when a lot of women actually leave now where they over train and under eat because they think it'll make them look good then they can't lose weight because they broke their system and this was it was a miserable existence and I just wasted my time because as we're sitting here I'm eight percent body fat I've had my shirt off in men's health which is the most unlikely thing ever to happen to a 300 pound computer hacker in all of history and something I never would have predicted or even asked for and that was a byproduct of tuning my brain and my metabolism to work the way I wanted and that's why around this movement like look it's the Art and Science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so that you have full control of your own biology I got into meditation because all the stuff that was supposed to work didn't work I tried being Famous by the time I was 23 I was an entrepreneur magazine wearing the first product ever sold over the internet was a caffeine t-shirt that said my drug of choice uh I look like my testosterone was maybe 200 in that I look androgynous in the picture and I'm 300 pounds it's the worst picture ever but okay I tried Fame to make me happy I mean six million bucks went on 26 lost when I was 28. neither one of those made me happy and like what the heck is going on here so when all the stuff that's supposed to work didn't work I might as well try meditation that's what the idiots do so did you have that's what the idiots do that's what I believe 600 years those idiots yeah so did you um the idiots meeting traditional medicine like that approach or the The Fad diets I I was under the the belief that we are meat robots and that we are entirely rational beings and that my thoughts are everything and what I've learned and what I'm really writing about and smarter not harder is that there's an entire complex system it's like your operating system that runs a huge amount of your reality and it's invisible to you and that can be hacked but once I acknowledge that was there and that system may not be rational or it may be rational following a very different set of assumptions than my assumptions about reality in fact they are provably different so once I realized that was the case all right well then how do we address and and modify and take control of that system I am a computer hacker I take control of systems for a living at least I used to actually I still do just a different system they're meat operating systems so let me pause you there yeah the idea of a meat operating system when I was reading your book I was like that's really good it's really good you know because you are you're reducing it's almost inflammatory to how complicated the system is right but your tongue-in-cheek you're saying listen we're we're basically a bag of muscle bag of bones there's a Buddhist play in what you're doing and you're saying like a meat operating system let's upgrade the operating system to get the meat to be more optimized yeah so so you upgrade Humanity right it sounds very egotistical when you say it but we've all got to do it but if we don't admit that we're doing that we will actually will be like your computer if you never apply the updates it just stops working and that's what's happening to our species right now the world is changing and we are changing uh with what we do in our behaviors but we haven't changed ourselves to keep up with the world that we built finding Mastery is brought to you by inside tracker to live your longest and healthiest life possible you do need to understand what's going on inside your body created by experts in aging genetics and biometric data from Harvard Tufts and MIT inside tracker provides a personal analysis and data-driven wellness guide to help you live a 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500 employees to qualify how do you articulate if you were to be a reductionist and play the game for a minute so what is the what do you consider to be one of the great sources of pain for people right now the biggest source of pain for people right now is they believe things about reality that are not true and if I were to be concrete I would say that are you are asked are you saying that we don't see the spectrum of colors we don't actually work in the reality that we think we are because of the way that we're processing information we don't have a full command of the smell like are you being sensory in that or are you being more conscious and psychological in that it's actually both our sensory systems are taking in a lot more information than we actually see and there's a great uh there's a great book about this called the case against reality and mother nature optimizes every species user interface on reality to optimize for survival so we don't need to see x-rays or radar therefore we don't see x-rays or radar but if we did need to see those we probably would because both of those have a biological effect that we could technically see brain would be like three times the size yeah or we'd have like weird bumps on our skin that could do that and who the heck knows but there are species you can see some like 27 times more data than we can they're bacteria so that's interesting and imagine if you had a life-size map of Los Angeles it would be useless because you couldn't use it to navigate you'd have to just go there well when I see you am I seeing all of you am I seeing each blood vessel am I seeing each blood cell am I seeing the the spin of the protons inside them no but all that's actually in there so my picture of you right now and my pictures all around us is a tiny tiny tiny sliver of what's actually there where does let's go to Consciousness for a minute okay your take there where what is your take on what it means to be human are we a meat operating system and no or yeah or there's something else and then however you think about that something else I'm going to ask if it's local or non-local um I'm going to qualify that a little bit after I tried the I'm a meat robot approach and it simply failed I started traveling around I went to Peru and I know it's really cool and actually overdone and dangers these days but at the time I did Ayahuasca with the shaman and they actually said you're white I said yeah I know but I've actually read my read myself I've done my work I'm I'm truly seeking this and I found a shaman there was no tourist industry there were no like Neo shamans who don't know what the heck they're doing dishing out powerful slightly dangerous drugs to unsuspecting Executives but I did that and I traveled to Nepal and Tibet and I learned meditation from the Masters and I've studied with different lineages and I don't follow any one lineage and I've done yoga for five years I just interviewed uh Guru Dev Sushi Ravi Shankar out of India I did his practices for five years so I'm across lineage I'm a biohacker I'm curious and I just do what works and that's my what the promise I made to myself I'm not going to go to the gym and beat myself up and do all these things that don't work I'm just gonna measure what works and that's at the core of biohacking how do we measure what works and stop doing things that don't work and if we do that we get on this continuous Improvement thing which Otto really resonate with business Executives if you understand Kaizen or you understand any of the continuous Improvement processes are you is your model following the Kaizen model I don't follow Kaizen continuously and religiously but the idea of continuous Improvement is is important okay and so goes to the Consciousness bit for a minute because and I'll have to precede the idea is that we're much more than what we see so I'm agreeing with you there and then I'm saying that there is another dimension right there Isn't So I I will just just say it my belief based on all the data I've seen is that substantial parts of our Consciousness are non-local and not local yeah and that some of it runs locally but okay I'm a systems architect though like I design content distribution networks and distributed systems and and Ai and stuff like that and if you look at how system signaling works you look at how distributed systems work uh it's it's pretty clear that we're an antenna and when you have a web browser some of your browser runs on your local machine and some of the contents in the cloud I know for certain that some of our content is in the cloud and it's not the cloud that I helped to build it's the cloud that was there when we came onto the planet and I choose out of a rationality to believe in past lives and you have to hear me out here okay if there's no such thing as reincarnation you won't know it when you die so if you choose to believe in reincarnation now you'll be less afraid of dying your whole life and you'll make better choices because you're less fearful and if you're right great if you're wrong you still win it's the only rational choice similar to the model of life after death in most world religions there's something later so be okay now and do right now and the the point Counterpoint is that it's a control mechanism it oh it's a control mechanism when someone else tells you that they get to decide what your your afterlife looks like or what right and wrong are oh yeah and I I don't ascribe to any of those types of structures but I have whether we're talking using Advanced neurofeedback Techniques Advanced breathing techniques shamanic journeying fasting in caves if you do some spiritual inquiry you will see your past lives and they look a very specific way and people who do that kind of work know how they look and I've had way too many things that could not possibly be explained any other way and I'm comfortable with that and if people think I'm crazy for that you can think I'm crazy for that it's all right maybe I am it just my [ __ ] Works do you do you get pushback from actually of course again what is the community that pushes against you most frequently and most loudly there's two of them that are my favorites uh one of them is the calories in calories out crowd and it's this group of like highly traumatized people who were bullied usually and then they grow up and they say a Snickers bar cancels out a Diet Coke because calories and they ignore it like the preponderance of evidence and then they sit around trying to bully people online who might say things that are truthful like putting butter in coffee helps you lose weight because it's an appetite suppressant and it fixes your cell membranes people lost two million pounds on my diet but that crowd they always push back and I love them because they're like the best toy ever and the other one that I love the most is vegans all three Arguments for being vegan fail just grossly fail at the very slightest application of logic and they're always so tired and they're always so easy to trigger it's like it's like having a little little chew toy I can just push on whenever I want to say something funny I just mentioned vegan and I get like a hundred thousand people come in and they're always wrong okay what are the three arguments so I think you you were vegan I was to Devout raw vegan yeah I was a vegan raw vegan it doesn't work so I stopped doing it I was a vegan between it was like 87 to 94. so you lasted a long time yeah I did and you know what um I was not healthy during that phase yeah and so 87 was um there was no Whole Foods there like it was hard yeah it was really hard and and I was like in my athletic kind of Strike Zone and I didn't I mean that definitely didn't help no you need animal protein when you're an athlete even more yeah so I mean I think I I do want to hear the three arguments sure Jimmy Graham was one of the um I mean he looked like he was right chiseled right out of stone he was uh tight end for the Seattle Seahawks amazing specimen six eight it looks probably four percent body fat I don't I don't necessarily know but amazing specimen and he he didn't mess around with me and same with Tony Gonzalez so Tony so it can be done I've seen it there are a few people who get away with it yeah they might have a I don't know some sort of precondition that allowed them to metabolize in a certain way and they did it just absolutely with the greatest help in intelligence they still tend to get injured more like Usain Bolt as soon as he went vegans like I was I've never been faster for One race and after that it was injury injury injury injury injury end of career yeah okay so what are the three arguments well one argument is I'm doing it for my health and and that falls flat on its face for a variety of things some of that isn't smarter not harder at the new book uh one of them is phytic acid in vegetables or oxalic acid these pull minerals out of the body and minerals are what make you a human who's better able to show up cognitively and physically in the world and we're all depleted of minerals and plant-based diets to pleat minerals and then there's the fat thing where you're eating omega-6 fats that don't work with the body and all these we could talk about for a whole show but basically the vegan diet doesn't enhance longevity it doesn't give you higher performance it doesn't make you feel better it makes you weaker and so that's not a good reason to be vegan that's the reason that I was vegan um the second reason that they'll give is well I care about Mother Nature more than you and from that perspective we have to look at habitat destruction and we have to look at the incredible environmental waste of plant-based fake foods and the medical effects of going vegan and spending the last 20 years of your life being in a hospital with Alzheimer's disease and all the other diseases that come when you're malnourished for most of your life so the environmental aspects of it simply don't don't work out because to feed the planet with low quality foods like that it creates a very self-destructive cycle and it also destroys soil at a rate that's alarming because we run out of soil in about 60 years I lived on and built and ran a regenerative Farm in on Vancouver Island and you have to have animals that poop in order to have healthy soil in order to eat the kale and all the other weird stuff that vegans are still eating because they haven't learned how to feel good yet by the way you can see why I like to play with vegans I mean there's a lot of triggering in here right there's yeah vegans I was a vegan I love you I'm just having fun so third argument okay third argument is animal suffering I raise cows sheep pigs but if you eat a cow that's one death per year if I have a pound of beef every day now if you eat a bowl of granola you destroyed habitat completely destroyed and sterilized Land from the soil on up there were no bunnies no salamanders no snakes no cute butterflies and if there were they got chopped up by a tractor into little pieces and bits of them are in your cereal so the deaths per calorie from soybeans is infinitely higher than the dust per calorie from grass-fed regenerative meat which actually increases environmental diversity and causes soil to thicken and hold more water and soil is the biggest carbon sink on the planet now I like the idea of carbon sinks I'm also the guy who wrote the first fifty thousand dollar check that ended up becoming Elon musk's hundred million dollar carbon capture expires to use Tech to pull extra carbon out of the air so I'm about helping the environment you help the environment with cows and sheep and goats and pigs not with Franken food it simply doesn't work there's not an environmental argument there is not a health argument and there's not animal cruelty argument to being vegan it is simply a philosophy that doesn't work it was based on Trauma from World War II the founder of PETA who's been the primary voice behind convincing you that it's healthy to be vegan his own daughter was on my podcast talking about how he was triggered by being in a concentration camp that was why he couldn't eat meat anymore and how she got so sick on a vegan diet that she had to hide eating meat from her family because it was so Politically Incorrect to eat meat but it was the only way she could get her health back dude you went after the daughter of the founder of you no she came to me she wanna be on my show to talk about it after the founder of Peters you had his daughter on uh dude his daughter came to me and said can I tell my story about me and I'm like yeah not to make light of anything you just said because I I can't I can't have an informed decision a conversation with you about it because um I can't go further than you can go in here so I run I run out of information other than like okay you've studied you understand it this is your point of view there's but I do know that there's this is where I get lost in the field of nutrition and I value nutrition and every six months I'm doing a blood draw how often do you do a blood draw I usually do them every quarter yeah okay so uh is is it a full workup or are you looking at specific things I look at specific things at a certain point after 20 years of doing anti-aging and all you kind of know where you stand yeah and I looked for instance recently at my aging stuff because there's new tests with DNA methylation so I was 11 and a quarter years younger biologically than I am chronologically so that was a new thing but you need to track that every quarter do that every couple years so I do a lot of a lot of labs but I tend to mix them up a little bit I was 11 years younger on that same test yeah so I felt that was it's a little bit of a moment when you go you know do you want to know your biological age yeah you know obviously you know you're chronologically it's sort of like saying though do you want to know your cash balances if you're running a business like you tell me what better know them whether you want to know them or not do you think it was that when you were 26 how many do you think you're older or younger I was way older I had all the diseases of Aging before I was 30. like high risk of stroke and heart attack on Labs pre-diabetes cognitive dysfunction arthritis what was your heart doing I had incredibly High rates of clotting factors in my blood okay yeah yeah you were barely keeping the system going oh yeah I was I was really so not only are you 11 years younger than your chronological age but you you're you've probably regressed like 22 years probably I came from behind it yeah anyone listening thinks they can't do it I was the worst case yeah well you know you say that and also you're also presenting with high intelligence big motor um you can go you can Hedgehog down and you can stay wide so you've got a unique capacity and set of abilities that are different than many and most people cannot yeah do and process the way that you're processing and I'm not putting you up on a pedestal I'm saying that you're you're presenting like I'm the everyday guy but I don't see it that way biologically I was worse than the everyday guy cognitively yeah my grandparents met on the Manhattan Project my grandmother's a PhD nuclear engineer and I had Asperger's Syndrome as a kid so my pattern matching skills are unbelievable oh that's interesting and when when I went down and I repaired the neurological problems behind that and then I reprogrammed my sensory systems in my in my brain to change that I retained my ability to sift through lots of information and find patterns and that's why I come up with some of the things I come up with and some of the things like C8 MCT oil which is a part of the Bulletproof Coffee recipe I said started with my book this is the best one it works better and five years later a study comes out and says oh this is the one that raises ketones the most because you can actually sense it when you've done enough usually feedback based work but sometimes meditation to actually listen to what your body is telling you when you have Asperger's or you're somewhere on that Spectrum you actually ignore everything from the neck down because it's too noisy and I just learned to reduce the noise so I could look at what what was left in the signal in terms of there's a lot of crap in there finding Mastery is brought to you by Juve right now many of us are focused on improving our health and wellness and when it comes to technologies that can help you do that Juve is one of my favorites that's because they are leading the way on improving one of the most foundational aspects to our overall health ourselves so how do they do it Juve utilizes red and near infrared light to stimulate the mitochondria in your cells to help you produce more core energy which in return 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and five free travel packs with your first purchase all you have to do is punch over to athletic greens.com finding Mastery again that's athletic greens.com funny Mastery to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance it's interesting because when you're met speaking earlier and you're talking about system architecture and being a systems thinker and I'm watching you manage lots of information and pull it together I was wondering if what is your what is your connection to the your emotional life and the emotional life of others I'll add one more Dimension to it is that when you speak You're emphatic you are this is how it is I am certain that we there's part of us that's non-local yeah you know and some of the brightest mind in the world are like we don't really know and you're like I am certain so I'm so can you just drill underneath because I'm watching what you've built and it's extraordinary and and then underneath like what is your how do you work with emotions well I used to think that they were really annoying uh and would get in the way and that if I could just get rid of those damned things that life would be so much better um that was before I was 30 and then I did uh actually a tent day workshop first time I did any kind of personal development you know I'd already made and lost a fortune and just tried all this stuff and I tried holotropic breathing for the first time which was invented for trauma resolution and it's a replacement for using LSD in therapy so remember it's not talked about much yeah I've been really honored I've had Stan Groff the inventor on my show he's 94 and he actually did a breathing workshop with him where like he we co-letted sort of a thing oh very cool and one of The Luminaries the inventor of transpersonal psychology and I just came out of the going what the heck just happened but there's all this stuff that I had written off as being useless and the woman who ran the workshop who has since passed and it was Barbara van Dyson when I walked in there she said Dave uh what um tell me about your birth like I don't even know why I'm here like a friend told me I had to come to sing my birth at a Hospital's vaginas like what do you want and she says do you know anything I said yeah there was a cord wrapped around my neck but I didn't lose any Oxygen so it didn't make a difference and she goes yeah I thought so and she opens a little PowerPoint like she had to print it out and she goes this is you and it was like a SWOT analysis of my personality like all the [ __ ] that I was dealing with and and I'm like what it actually started crying I was like what do you mean and I'm not a guy who cries normally but it was like someone punched me in the gut and she's like look it's science when people have a traumatic birth they come into the world and they're they get programmed that there's some kind of a threat and then they're always hyper Vigilant and you these are just the signs of a hyper-vigilant person and so later we were sitting down and she's like well are you feeling anything I was really irritated or something are you feeling anything else yeah this is stupid and I don't want to do this anymore you know like I don't even know why I'm here and just lots of ego resistance and she said is there anything else and I said yeah there's a weird feeling in my stomach and she goes hmm there's a name for that feeling do you know what it is I said no she said it's fear and I looked at her and this is what set me on the Journey of bayocking I said Barbara there's no reason for me to be afraid therefore I'm not afraid and she looked at me in her wise way and she said huh fear is an emotion it doesn't have to be rational and I'm like mind blown what the hell like why did no one tell me this so I just decided that emotions were additional sources of information about what's going on inside me and oftentimes in the world around me and then I went down the process of years a lot of it involving neurofeedback of sorting out the difference between an automatic response to the world around me um which is being triggered essentially versus intuition and that to learn that you can consciously turn some emotions on and off like gratitude and forgiveness are programmable tunable emotions that will negate programming that is triggering you and that's what 40 Years of Zen my Neuroscience practice is based on is using a lie detector so you can't tell yourself you forgave your mom for being mean to you when you were three you can tell yourself you did but if the computer doesn't agree you're not done and you're going to keep doing it that kind of a practice has worked really well for me because it's made me stupidly resilient to life stresses in the last year I've moved countries I had an employee embezzle some money I got separated consciously uncoupled moved to a new city and I'm happy and I'm at peace and I could have never done that when I was younger never in a thousand years and it's because of those skills you can turn that stuff on it we just don't have a control panel that comes default installed to be able to look at at ourselves and say huh how would I do that but just because it's not a default capability that you know about doesn't mean you can't put that control system in place and feedback is what does that feedback lets companies change their behavior to increase the bottom line or to increase growth it's tunable and that's how I learned to think at Wharton as an executive but feedback for your body a lot of those systems are almost near real time feedback and it's so near real time that we don't see it because you and I have about a half a second delay that's invisible to us but it's there and I write about that as in smarter not harder that's part of our meat operating system so all sorts of automated stuff happens in about a third of a second before our brain knows something happened in the world around it that 300 milliseconds is remarkable what's actually taking place and the high road and the low road which you mentioned you don't use those terms but information is coming in right now for all humans in the high road and the low road the low road it's going straight to the limbic the amygdala as people would recognize and or like the threat detection and it takes a little bit longer to get to the high road the cognitive processing it does but that 300 milliseconds is called p300d and that's a neuroscience term but that actually isn't even involving whether it's limbic or not that's just for the brain to get the food yeah yeah so if there's a sound if you're in middle age it's going to be about 350 milliseconds and it gets a little bit slower as you age and if you're maybe 18 or something it'll be about 250 50 milliseconds so I just measured mine last year I have a 250 millisecond lag time so I still have an 18 year old window between reality and my brain getting electricity but after the electricity comes to your brain are you talking about the thalamic gate uh well it actually used even before that so it'll get to the thalamic gate that happens after the third of a second and that's additional processing time so it's usually a third of a second to get the signal plus processing time in the brain to determine what the signal was and then to decide what to do about it so it's a meaningful lag on reality but our operating system edits that out so we can't see it same thing in the middle of each of our Visions there's a circle like the size of a nickel right in the middle of each eye where you have a blind spot I don't see it do you see it no no but it's there and it's just conveniently edited out of reality for us but what the heck else is your operating system editing out of reality well whatever it's been trained to and maybe you should be the one who trains it instead Facebook I love that thought so the the cord around your neck let's call it trauma one yeah what are some of the other traumas there's actually trauma too first trauma actually for most people is in the womb because prenatal trauma affects personality and it's just a fact and you can argue against it because you don't want it to be true but there's what I would consider to be incontrovertible evidence to that oh yeah epigenetics meaning high stress in the in the there's no genetics that changes genetic expression I'm talking about actual trauma meaning that the external world for your mother meaning that if your mother hates you or feels unsafe you felt hated and unsafe because you couldn't differentiate yourself from your mother and then you'll come into the world with an edge so more concretely for you you you had a hostile womb experience I had some my mom wanted me and all that kind of stuff but she had hypothermia almost died on a river trip when I was in there uh and uh and then I had a traumatic birth so I I and I remember this okay I I when I was doing a birth regression at the very beginning of my thing when I didn't have any details about my birth except there was a cord around my neck I was fine I remembered a sequence of events from it and I called my parents what was this and like oh yeah yeah when you came out they did this with you and I'd remember that and I'm like you're not supposed to be able to remember all this stuff what the hell it kind of blew my mind and when I talked with people who do this for a living like yeah um you mostly remember a series of emotions and images but I did right at this right at the point of birth and it blew my mind because I I did not think that was possible or want to do it in particular I was just relaxing and breathing the way that that the person who was working with me told me to do what are you what do you suggest to people who had early trauma like let's say the second trauma you had sure if you in fact if you had a C-section you had a traumatic Birth by definition you're warm and floaty all of a sudden some alien with bright lights reached in and pulled you out and what the heck so what I recommend for that is something called EMDR which is a type of very fast very rapid trauma resolution therapy and what trauma is is simply something that left a mark in your nervous system and your nervous system will be responsive and reactive to that whenever something feels similar even if it's not the same and it will be reactive before you can think it'll send you the emotion and you'll make up a reason for the emotion and you'll yell at your boss you'll yell at your spouse you'll flip off the guy in traffic you don't see this because the operating system doesn't want you to but when you resolve birth trauma everything in life gets easier and I've had the honor of sitting with people at 40 years as in who did that work but the fastest way to get the the most bang for the buck without going to a specific facility is to do EMDR once or twice a week with a therapist it is cheap it's widely available and it's hundreds of times more effective than talk therapy it's amazing the research around EMDR right now it's really it's reset mode for the brand yeah and for trauma the um I think that PTSD got a really bad rap post-traumatic stress disorder yeah because really what's taking place to add to your your commentary on it is that we they reorganize their life to avoid being re-traumatized exactly yeah so it's a it's a mechanism where it's not okay PTSD is like oh they they got screwed up in some way and they're hyper Vigilant okay that's such a callous way of thinking about it but really what's happened is this amazing organism has said let's not do that again and let's not do it again automatically before you think about it yeah your body was so afraid that it was going to die because that was how it felt regardless of what it actually was if it felt that way then it's going to automatically make sure it doesn't come close to dying again and it'll tell you any story necessary in order to make you believe that and this is really important for business people because a large number of business people at higher levels are actually motivated by whether it's early life trauma or quite often by bullying or by family issues to prove they're good enough so they're doing all this career achievement that was certainly the first half of my career you're doing all this career achievement because you've been traumatized you know that failure equals Death so you will do anything the problem is you'll tell yourself any story including one that's a lie and you'll end up being a narcissist the definition of narcissism is I use it as someone who believes their own story when they lie to themselves and others and that's different than a sociopath with someone who knows they're lying when they lie to themselves and others and in business narcissism and sociopathy that's what destroys great organizations that's what pulls them down and it's oftentimes triggered by trauma so if you have people with lots of trauma on your team or you have lots of trauma if you're a leader you just have to do EMDR or some other trauma resolution process so you can sit in a meeting when everything's on fire and people are acting like bratty little children because they just defaulted to that and you are the one person in the room who has what I write about at the end of smarter not harder it's a state the Buddhists put at the highest level it's called Equanimity and you start with empathy and if you're a first level manager you know I can actually sense and feel the emotions of people on my team and that's better than not being able to do that and I started out at the very bottom with no empathy either because I just didn't know any of this emotional [ __ ] mattered until I decided it did and studied after empathy comes compassion and compassion means I don't have to feel other people's pain but I can automatically and cleanly wish them well for everything and everyone and that's hard to do because most of the time someone near you they got a promotion and you didn't and immediately instead of going amazing good for them you go why did I get it that's a lack of compassion so wishing well for others instead of the greeting level two but the highest level is equanimity which is where you can choose your state whether it's Compassion or empathy or any other state and you can hold that state in the middle of a hurricane no matter what's happening around you and that's at the core of of why I called my first big company bulletproof that's the state of of resilience that's the state of equanimity where nothing can touch me I think about and I'm not going to lose track of the the trauma bit here because this is really important this is a fundamental Insight I would say that that I work from is that we're no one's coming through this life without drama big tier Little T could happen and so understanding how to navigate and work with it is essential and stuffing it down ignoring it thinking that those signals are annoying is not it's not it's not highly dysfunctional please don't please don't do that if you're listening and if you if you actually know you're doing it you probably won't know you're doing it but if you know you're doing it no no just blame other people yeah well that's true environment but you'll be external exactly it's not you don't worry except it is finding Master is brought to you by Shopify Shopify is an all-in-one Commerce platform to start run and grow your business whether your thing is succulents or supplements Shopify simplifies selling so you can focus on successfully growing your business in person online and across social media marketplaces packed with industry-leading tools Shopify gives you complete control over your business and your brand without having to learn any new skills in design or code we've been building out a new website here at finding Mastery and I'm stoked to integrate shopify's platform it was a 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approaches that this is what they've been after and when I think of like the good life if you will at 180 years old it's I don't know if we have the same image and I have I don't have great clarity but I'll start because I think you will have great I think you've been choosing 180 because I've said I'm gonna live to at least that's why yeah yeah I'm sorry I should have explained that just for that I've read that you want to live to h180 to at least 180 and the reality is I'd like to die at a time and buy a method of my choice that's Freedom yeah and um I would add to it like for me I'm not I'm not interested in by my choice but I'm interested in a quick one yeah okay and the reason quick it's not out of fear it's like yeah it's the people around me suffering and and I listen I love the Journey of being I think death is a really important part of life it's as important as birth and it should be done with the same amount of beauty very cool so our when that that little kind of comment that you made which is significant about how you want to die are you talking about being able to choose from a pill or a solution or are you talking about that type of dying you know if I decide I'm done at the time I should decide how I want to die and I may say you know the most fun would be to jump out of an airplane so I always wanted to be like to fly and okay then I'm done right or maybe at the time like you know I just want to do a massive dose of morphine and LSD and I'm done or maybe I've learned enough that I can just say guys I'll be walking out of my body tomorrow and then I do that I have no idea so you're not necessarily saying suicide not at all you're saying but maybe when you're done you're done I I have had the great like the great honor when I was in my 20s I started running an anti-aging non-profit group where my board members were 88 years old and I learned from my elders and I've watched people pass and I've watched people pass by choice and when you're done you're done and you can be gone in a day or in three days and some of the great gurus who I've studied uh they they do that they really do call their followers say you know I'm done so I'll be leaving soon and then they sit on a pose and 48 hours later they're not in their body anymore and then they burn their body or whatever I don't know all that stuff works like I'm not there yet and maybe I won't even get there but I I all I'm saying is I don't want to be by accident I don't want it to be by disease I wanted to be conscious um and the accident bit can happen so how do you design your life to reduce accidents or I mean it almost sounds like you want to eliminate them but I can't imagine there's a system no I I pretty much assume that if a bus runs into me it's splitting in two okay do it again um what uh I I am not there yet we'll put it that way and probably none of us that I'm aware ever can be able to do that so really what I do for accidents is I drive a heavy vehicle because physics is your friend and if you just follow basic statistics drive a big pickup truck or a very heavy car and your chances of dying goes down very meaningfully I also uh leave my flying to professional Pilots uh when you are to the point where you can afford a small play and your chances of dying go up quite a lot so even though I'm probably capable of learning to fly and when I lived in Canada the only way to get to the US effectively was on a Cessna I had a guy who was used to f-15s Flying it because he's better than me so I'm taking risks I like to have professionals help me manage those risks and ideally you don't take unreasonable risks but you also recognize that you can handle way more than you think you can handle and that's why my new coffee is called danger coffee is that when you're at your full power like you're unprogrammable and you have resilience and you can handle stuff so I don't spend my life worrying about oh no like what if what if I don't meet my 180 goal because the piano falls out of the sky on my head and you know I have to lock myself in my house and be very very afraid of something with the 0.002 percent death rate I don't do any of that nonsense what I do is I say what can I do to make myself incredibly strong and resilient so that if something unforeseen happens that I can handle it I can handle it biologically I can handle it neurologically and that I have the tools and the people and the team available to help me should something bad happen yeah so I get that you're not a rule follower are you a risk taker or risk manager I would I would have to say I'm a risk manager people who say that that they know that they don't take risks or something like that they usually are are not very good at it in fact one of my one of my favorite interviews on on the human upgrade after a thousand of them was Laura Logan she was the CBS News uh reporter like a war reporter and she went into the most disturbing areas on Earth and as a blonde woman embedded herself like with Taliban commanders and ended up in a very famous segment on uh 60 Minutes uh being gang raped in Egypt and almost died and and I interviewed about like how do you come back from that and I asked her the same question like you know you take such big risks and she got almost angry she didn't get angry about any of the other stuff he was because no I don't take risks what I do is I do my research and I talk to the commanders and I talk to the people and every single thing that I can line up to keep me safe does it but my work matters so I do it because it's worth it and it was such a really cool take on risk from someone who's done things far riskier than I've ever done but how she managed it and when you talk to stun people you talk to Daredevils they're very aware of their risk they're just conscious of it people who avoid risks are usually unconscious of risk they're fearful and avoidant and people who are not fearful and avoidance they say well what's the risk and what's the reward and if the risk isn't too high and the reward is great they do it but they don't do it with fear they just know that if the risk happens I have a contingency plan and that's what I do yeah what I've learned from working in the backcountry in some of the most what people would consider high risk environments they're they don't consider themselves Risk Takers they consider themselves operators in consequential environments and they are so highly skilled mistakes have a greater consequence however they're not haphazardly taking risks they're dangerous people because they know their [ __ ] yeah they're really skilled so okay I appreciate that tone there you're spending your your thriving years right now thinking about extending to where physically you're not going to be as vibrant and buoyant as you are now why do you say that who programmed you that way that your youth right now is more vibrant than your age at 180 yeah all right that is something that seems obviously clear to me well okay so we we have different lenses on reality I can respect that so let's just why is that a true assumption because in your lifetime it used to be that when you were 60 you were elderly and so many 60 year olds in 1990 got pissed off about that that they started measuring their grip strength and they had to change the definition of elderly by 10 years if you look at the Golden Girls the TV show they're the same age you and me are right now and they look really old and we don't yeah what just changed in our life given what's happening with AI given the rate of change of Technology given the last 20 years of research and non-profit work in the anti-aging field if we can't do way better than our current best today to reverse aging I think I'm being conservative at 180 and I have no intent of having 17 of my skin thickness which is what would happen given the current rate of decline of skin thickness if you don't do something about it so no I am going to look as good and be smarter and wiser than I am today when I'm 180. that's the goal I can get down with smarter and wiser I'm also going to be hornier more muscular and better looking okay so I I get the positive affirmations and then but there is no case right now that I can make where a 90 year old has the physical strength of a 26 year old that in both of training over Decades of time well the 20 year olds can't train already one decade okay so they start at 16. got it so a 16 year old a highly trained 16 year old today is stronger than a 90 year old no no let's say 26 year old okay now yeah let's say that the 90 year old now has spent the last 90 years and is a billionaire working on modifying tweaking and upgrading his biology and the 16 year olds is just a young pup I'm betting on the 90 year old no in different forms or different Arenas I would as well however like the decline is noticeable and sure there's not the clip at 40 that we thought it was or 50 that we thought it was and that's but there's still a decline the decline is noticeable if you don't do anything so I'm doing something okay so I just let me get the image right sure at 180 you're as strong as you are today or better you want to bet you know it's a roof I'll win yeah that's about it yeah I mean all right talk me through it all right because I don't I do not have a limitation on imagination so so right now in fact I just texted him this morning my friend David Sinclair uh we both know yep okay you know David good he has announced that he's reversed Aging in cells I'm going to do some stem cell work I've had more stem cells probably than any other person on the planet I've had them injected in my brain and my spine every joint my body um and I'm going to get David Sinclair flavored reverse age stem cells where we take my stem cells and reverse their biological clocks and put them back in what's happening this year I've had my natural killer cells uh cultures expanded and 2 billion of them added back into my body to reverse my immune system's age by 20 years I'm sitting here in front of you and I've done this [ __ ] what do you think it's going like in 20 years okay like like this is happening right now you can do it and the fact that most people don't know about it when the Wright brothers were saying we're going to fly I was like you can't fly if I have a list of quotes from my first web page in like 1993 and one of my favorite ones is that atomic bomb is never going to explode and I speak as an expert on Munitions this was a four-star U.S general talking to the president United States at World War II okay we're at a Quantum change in how we manage our biology the Technologies out there it's in Labs all over the planet it's happening right now and sometimes I go to those labs and I do the stuff and we're just getting going because 20 years ago 25 years ago when I started doing this if you were an academic and you said you were working on aging on reversing aging they would take your credentials because it wasn't possible and now you can actually study that and people finally mostly because they read a lot of Science Fiction I think people like Larry and Sergey and Ilana let's put a few billion dollars to work on the problem if we can't do substantially better in the next 50 years than we have in the last 50 given all of the tools at our disposal it's probably because the vegans killed all the cows we have no more soil okay do you think it is a function of imagination I'm sorry I'm just amusing myself yeah you just poked a couple Bears all in one Fell Swoop all right so keep going is this is this a limitation of imagination or is this a limitation of resources that are available or is it knowledge I I think the imagination's there I'm not the only one who's planning to live a very long time and have a high quality of life and be and be one of the people who is an elder who has wisdom of generations and is in a position energetically to have enough desire to give back and to help to guide things uh so I I'm not the only one but there aren't that many of us now but the more of us there are we keep growing them uh my my book on anti-aging was called superhuman and it was a New York Times best-selling book for multiple months people are now saying well wait if there's this thing that increases lifespan by 15 but my doctor told me it's impossible to increase lifespan well maybe that one's wrong but in every chapter there's like five things that are shown to improve lifespan which is different than average length of light but the actual maximum possible life so we're swimming in a possibility of living way longer but one of the things that we're doing is we're doing things that don't work very well that's why okay you're taken right where I wanted to go which is like four people that do not have the access that you have nor um nor the financial Acumen to be able to play those bets because you know what would you say let's go let's go five five things people could do there are some core principles okay behind aging and behind what we believe works and those core principles are things that you can leverage to hack yourself regardless of income and yes I do the craziest stuff that billionaires do and I'm nowhere near a billionaire but I'm more comfortable than I was when I was 20 and working at Auto Parts Warehouse so what what you're going to find is that when you understand the principles and you actually have an accurate model of reality you can do things that you couldn't do when you believed something else so in each of my books I write about the things that are free because of a principle the things that take advantage of new knowledge things that are low cost and then the big expensive crazy stuff so what I'm doing with smarter not harder is I say all right most people don't even know what health means you wake up you want to be healthy was it Well turns out after running upgrade labs in Santa Monica for eight years underneath Arnold Schwarzenegger's office I've realized this is a human upgrade facility it's now franchising across the US so there'll be these in every city and it is meant to make it accessible because it's about the cost of a health club membership but you're getting stuff that works better but assuming you're not even going to go to that level or maybe it hasn't opened yet by the way own and upgradelabs.com you can open one in your own City I'd love that there's a bunch going in in La Seattle San Francisco Salt Lake Nashville I've got named mostly is Austin it's one of the reasons I'm living in Austin so like it's happening all over but in the meantime um let's say that there's these five goals that people have one of them is strength one of them is cardiorespiratory or endurance and those two don't always go together you kind of have to pick a top goal there's cognitive function there's energy metabolism and weight loss they all go together I want my energy back is the same as I want smaller pants they just go together like a teeter-totter and the final thing is cognitive function I want my brain to work better so the idea is that if you understand that each of those goals is distinct and you pick one as a primary goal and another is a secondary goal then you actually have measurable things you can work on and now you can choose what things to do that are going to increase your results in those domains and it's not that different than how you'd solve a business problem like okay what are my actual goals okay which one's more important let's stack rank them now let's choose the Technologies or techniques that help us reach those goals most effectively and efficiently we don't do that with our health we don't do that with our human performance very well so those five domains matter and there's a couple other ones I write about that are sort of frosting on the cake and one of them is I just wanted to improve my Sleep Quality I don't care about the rest the other one is I wanted it to be better in bed which is the other one so those are kind of little little things you can do for those but really if you do these top five you get everything and if you just do one of the top five you get benefits for everything so when we talk about things that help you get your energy back and get your weight loss back or things that that increase resilience let's talk about resilience that's probably an easy one so one thing you could do is you could just say well I'm just going to tough it out which is pretty much how I would have started that's where a lot of people are like yes I'm suffering I'm just going to do it well you can start I'm going to meditate so that would be step one but as I write about in smarter not harder well it turns out breathing and doing breath work actually just works faster than meditating so it's totally fine to say hurry meditate faster I actually wanted to go play with my kids or I wanted to get a promotion so I only wanted to meditate for 10 minutes instead of an hour today and we have built into our operating system not genetically but actually by Society this idea that working hard and suffering makes you a better person I don't actually think that that's reality but that's what we believe being able to work hard having the capability to work hard does make you a better person but actually doing it all the time just makes you tired so what I would suggest is look at the different Technologies and techniques that work most effectively for you to deal with stress and certainly meditation then you add breath work these are free you can do these things but understanding that breath work provably works better than just meditating meditation has there's there's a depth to meditation that breathing doesn't offer and but mechanically breathing training and breath work is um from from so many standpoint metabolic included like it's outrageous it's outrageous yeah and it's awesome and for clarity like do you have a a protocol that you're using that you're liking and I'm doing something which is a one one two one and I'm finding that to be meaningful for every one inhale uh so one five one five seconds five seconds ten seconds five seconds or eight eight sixteen eight okay the thing that I like about what you're doing is as long as the exhale is twice as long as the inhale that triggers parasympathetic function that's right which is which is good but it depends if you're trying to trigger parasympathetic well actually and what I just described so let's call it a um six twelve six one six one twelve one because there's a there's a pause six on the inhale hold for one exhale for twelve and then hold for one okay so that's a sympathetic classical parasympathetic breath okay but the eight eight sixteen eight or whatever the Cadence is for you the the actual metric that actually creates oh it's a starvation for oxygen and on the 16 out and then the eight hold at the bottom at about like second five once you've done let's call it six cycles of that and you're at your threshold your entire body is lit up looking for an escape mechanism do anything you can take it anytime you want it'll stop doing that oh yeah it does you push the capacity that's how you get better and it's an also it's also a moment to be able to work with your own mind you realize that your body's telling you that you're going to die yeah and it's that simple it's your meat operating system lying in fact I I wrote about that in my book on fasting fast this way the last one food's the same way you're going to go 60 days before you starve to death but if you don't have tacos for lunch you're gonna die it's the message you get your meat operating system is just a liar really fasting from Air for a little while to show your body a that you're in charge and B that it's not going to die when it thinks it does it will calm down over time so when I started doing that five seconds with my lungs I feel like I was going to die and sometimes I go 20 or 30 seconds when my lungs empty and I'm just at peace with it and it's it's entirely possible just do two breaths a minute just in Old Slow 100 yeah and people don't know that you can do that and you feel like you're gonna die but you don't that's right and that is an adaptation moment for you and just to add one layer of I think um depth to what we're talking about is when you do that work and let's say you're in that starvation moment for oxygen and your my legs start to move and my feet start to kind of not um they just start to get fidgety right and so just just quiet my body down one more time and then work with my mind staying it you're okay here we go this is what you're doing this you're okay and it's just that's the self-talk mechanism to work um to get to a place of effortless rather than strain and I'll I'll draw a corollary for you you know the Rage of cold right now right and so I think the the benefits of cold are noted and the walking into the cold I think might be as equally important I I believe it's equally important it's the same reason that Tony Robbins will have you walk on Kohl's it's the reason at my conference I had people jump off a three-story platform onto a stuntman thing because showing yourself that you can throw yourself off an edge that is clearly sure death if you listen to your body just realize your body lies to you all I see you all the time yeah yeah well it's designed the meat operating system to use your language is designed to keep you alive not necessarily to keep you happy yeah or to do anything that matters in the world it's just don't die so but back to the the happiness bit for just a moment you said you're happy I most of the time I mean sometimes I am sometimes I'm not yeah very few people can be happy all of this time would you say that you have a sense of joy sometimes I do sometimes it's more happy for you sometimes I have a sense of Joy but I don't I'm not in a state of Joy all the time but yeah certainly there are times how do I experience this sense of joy a kind of daily basis I probably experience joy every day a little bit and when I'm hanging out with friends going to Burning Man or just doing more playful longer term playful things then I have a lot more joy and content do you feel have a sense of peace and content yeah a lot of the time not always and there are some people who are very restless and I've done a lot of of coaching with people and and especially with the neurofeedback practices people go really deep if you have a mission and you're working on your mission making progress on your mission your sense of if you're Mission driven your sense of contentment usually goes up if you're not working on your mission or you're working on your mission and you're not making any progress at all your sense of contentment will go down and you can you can be making great progress and still not have content because most people have that yeah the model is this isn't enough yeah and that that's the definition of suffering I I have something I don't want or I don't have what I do want it it does absolutely create suffering and I've I don't know that I have anything else to prove from a business perspective like very few people have gone from zero to a hundred plus million dollars with a company they found it it's exceptionally rare uh I went to 27 million dollars before I took any Venture funding are you still the founder I'm sorry are you still did you did they bring in edit uh I'm not on the board anymore so I am still of the largest shareholder largest shareholder no longer operating yeah I have I have actually no contact with the company but I'm the largest shareholder and is that company bulletproof yeah yeah absolutely okay yeah because it's now I see it everywhere so they hit the the Go Button we're a national brand and and so there's that and there's oh well you know have I helped people people like hundreds of thousands of people have had their lives changed by my work I mean what do I have to prove I just feel like you had something to prove I think in the early part of my career I did felt like had something to prove and I had a very successful and impactful career in in Tech um but after that with even with bulletproof I was originally going to make it a non-profit and I just it was too slow to do that so I just started a Blog and it wasn't it wasn't going to be a career at all I was I was a VP at Trend Micro I made a quarter million stock options I didn't need a job I had a young kid it was the worst time I ever started company I I was just called to do it so I did it and that's what happened going back to high school smart chip on the shoulder well obese the largest kid in class yeah uh low maybe emotional connection at that point just about none because I had Asperger's I didn't know the names of most of the people in my class at the end of the year brutal experience was it like no I'm actually like I didn't know oh no it was it was it was brutal um plus I grew up in Albuquerque which is not exactly the the Bastion of peaceful and uh there's a lot of bullying going on and when you're the biggest kid in class the smaller ones because the Napoleon's complex always come after you how tall are you I'm 6'4 so when when the 6-4 bully or kid gets bullied what was that like for you well anytime you're you're bullied at some level it tells your meat operating system that that you're at threat of dying and yes I've had knives pulled on me I've probably been in 100 fist fights I never lost a fight because of physics a hundred fist fights you never lost before I graduated from high school yeah it was not true one time I did I was on crutches and I was stuck in the back of a van and the guy boiled on me he probably won the rest of the time I won you and you and Hicks and Grace and I never threw a first punch ever well because um when you weigh like 250 pounds or whatever and these scrawny little guys who are looking to prove something and their meat operating system says they have to attack the largest person especially without any friends well I could just sit on them and they couldn't do anything about it wow I also knew Judo so I put him in a headlock put the Golden Gloves champion of Albuquerque in a headlock and put him in a neck brace because not only was I big I was [ __ ] angry so no it wasn't easy at all but I I went through and I've done all my like forgiveness work and all that kind of stuff and I don't carry a chip on my shoulder and I've had the the honor of being with with dozens of entrepreneurs when they're doing the 40 Years of Zen process and uh my friend Craig he's like Dave I run a 1200 person call center in Mexico I just realized that all of My Career Success comes from being bullied in seventh grade and this is exceptionally common because you just wanted to show you're good enough and I will freely admit the first half of my career up until I was about 30 maybe 32 was about proving that I was good enough and running away from failure it's a strong motivator but it creates misery in your life and when you switch around and say well okay I've done my processing work on that stuff maybe I'm going to move towards something that's Worthy it's just a lot less friction it's a lot easier yeah I hear I hear like your whole physiology changes right now in this part of the conversation yeah you notice that yeah absolutely and so do you I don't want to take you back into another state but do you do you get triggered no that's not even a question how do you get if I'm storytelling I I will take on aspects of the story for that um like kind of channeling how I would have felt during those times um do I get triggered it's pretty hard to trigger me I'm not you know I'm not Invincible um one of my biggest triggers I'll tell you about this is one that that affected me in in business in fact it's one I see a lot and it's a very nuanced one about sometime in 2014 2015 I get a call from some guy and he's like you should be on this other podcast and I'm just gonna I've never listened to podcasts up to this day I'm listening I don't listen to podcasts I have time for that Jesus sorry 100 years I haven't heard mine I haven't read any of them and it's this guy named Joe Rogan so I go down to LA and I go in the studio and I just talk about grass-fed stuff and coffee and he's ADHD and my work's changed his life and this is great and like he talked about bulletproof my sales went up 10 20 and I was already doing pretty well and I was really grateful for it so I realized okay he's got a tribe and all this then I came back down to to did a show again and the same thing he's just saying all this great stuff about me I'm like thank you Joe like this is great I'm like do I do I like offer him so in my company like how do I say thanks this guy's just being a big cheerleader but I've also like like get paid back I've helped him personally helped his his people understand why kale is probably giving them kidney stones and all this kind of stuff like he's doing my best to be a good my entire social media is just like Dave you're changing my life from all these different people well one day Joe just says Dave I decided you lied and this was like like I believe your coffee is full of mold and and my other friends where I have Financial interests these other companies where I'm going to make money that they don't and you're a bad person he told all of his like full-on attack on my character for 18 months and the reality was that every time Joe said my name I sold more coffee it didn't matter what he said but the feeling was like I've been stabbed in the gut and and all of a sudden all these like organized trolls are coming to my social media pages and trashing them and it was like a cancel culture thing it's like a free trauma to the the early stuff you know what it I finally figured it out I had to go back because my team um in fact one of the guys on my team Zach who was a convoy commander in Iraq so he knew about you know these situations like Dave you're acting pretty weird like like he's that guy's a cool cucumber he's like what's going on I don't know so I couldn't figure out what it was I went and I did the the 40 Years of Zen as a reset process that I worked with clients through and you kind of go into this altered state and all of a sudden I had this picture of something that happened in first grade I hadn't thought of in three years out of my conscious memory I was in the bathroom and a little Johnny comes in and pees on the wall I go and hey teacher a little Johnny peed on the wall and you know I know you're not supposed to do that right did the right thing so the little Johnny comes out and goes oh no I didn't pee on the wall Dave feed on the wall and then I got sent to the principal's office and I was so full of outrage for doing the right thing and being punished for doing the right thing that it left like a mark in my in my operating system that I didn't know about it was completely invisible to me as they are designed to be so essentially I don't know whether Joe's psychic and was trying to do that it just worked out that way but man like it pushed some serious buttons for me so I went in once I realized what it was I did the trauma reset forgiveness stuff that I know how to do and then all of a sudden it became abundantly clear Joe thank you like just just keep saying I'm a bad person it's fine like like people see and the fact that a small percentage of bullies adult bullies came to our website I just hit and delete it's about 100 angry dudes they're gone and life is back to normal and so cool very cool that you did the work because what you're pointing to is it's not a mechanical surface solution it's not a tactic that's gonna save this it's like let me go back and see why this is so triggering you went in you find the original time you felt that way and you the first that and all of us or the first related wound yeah yeah and that work is so immensely powerful I'm super surprised that we're talking about this yeah yeah you didn't think I did that kind of work no I did not that's how you hack your Revenue system I knew that you used maybe technology or the physical form to upgrade but I didn't think that you were working on what I would consider the invisible the psychological and emotional or and feeling aspect I do psychological emotional and spiritual I've done shamanic training yeah well you said it really I was like oh this is going to be interesting I do all of that because that's what works like I wish it didn't work it would be a lot easier you know what happened yeah it and so when I was in graduate school they're like if you can't measure you can't if you can't measure it you can't manage it wait I can't see my thoughts man I can't see love either and so how am I gonna how am I what game am I playing here that if I'm only going to work in the physical form there's a whole nother part of any those are the meat robot people and there are some people in business who really truly believe that we're just me robots and I was one of them and we're simultaneously meet robots and something greater and you can be both at the same time so when you when you were talking earlier and you're talking about yoga and shamans and the traditions and the meditation for the the time that you've spent and all of biohacking and the eight businesses I'm going there's there's some [ __ ] here how does this happen right because I know what a full day feels like yeah and I imagine that you're going to say well you're not operating at the highest level I I don't know how you operate but I I don't I go to bed tired but I don't feel tired until the end of the day yeah and a Vibrance yeah that lasts yeah how do you maximize your days because this seems outrageous you know I recognize it's outrageous and I don't want to make the claim that I'm great at running all eight of my companies that's good to know uh I I'd love to say that uh and I mean I've made ginormous mistakes I've hired the wrong people I've trusted the wrong people too much I've learned a lot about narcissism and sociopathy uh so it it's not perfect but one of the things that I learned through my spiritual practices my emotional practices is trust and this is what holds a lot of entrepreneurs back is their control freaks because they're afraid and I'm not afraid so that means I Empower people to do stuff and then I fire them if they don't how do you grow and Empower people and that's how you grow it and I had the the great Fortune of getting to ask Eric Schmidt about this uh and I said Eric you know scaling the tech at Google's not that hard and okay that might sound arrogant but I actually did architecture and we hosted Google's first servers when it was two guys I know how that show works it's not that hard it just requires money and time that's it but hiring a team like that and I said how did you stop the narcissist and sociopaths from tearing up our organization when you grew it that much and he told me something that I've taken in he said Dave there are naves and mavens and uh Maven is someone who's odd who gets a lot of stuff done this is the the engineer who can't work with HR but just gets so much done and you know I was one of those actually in my early life so I get it but then naves are people who might be really good at their job but they're building Empires they're throwing people under the bus they're doing the stuff that we all know people do incorporations and he said well after a lot of thought he decided on a solution which was public and traumatic firing of naves and he said when he did a few of those all the other ones left the organization so what I'm working on in my companies and all this stuff is more empowering more trusting people and if people steal money the way I've had happen this last year or lie straight up I publicly fire them and everyone knows if you don't perform for the team you're out and we're not going to pull punches we're not going to be unkind we're not going to be mean we're going to be truthful and truthful is kind and kind is not nice so that's what I spend my time on and I spend most of my time on being a Content producer and being the champion of biohacking and I started the movement and now I help other entrepreneurs I'm an investor in in a couple dozen companies do a lot of advisory works and board of directors work and I work and Empower my team to do the work because I don't know if I had to know every little thing going on in each of my little companies I couldn't do that but I hold it in my head because I have a strange brain you do have a stranger yeah yeah big appetite it's also highly modified in six months of neurofeedback every single day with hours of electrodes on your head every day there's stuff that all of our brains can do that we don't know yeah so I don't run a base OS anymore do you are you able to get to like can you find a Alpha Theta ratio and kind of have a signature of how to get there like can you for what outcome just let's call it like a deeply relaxed focused State oh those are simple we've known those since no no without your technology oh sorry I didn't finish the thought oh yeah sure so like right now can you go to an uh let's go like can you go to High beta if you want to and just oh I bet it's easy yeah it sure sounds like it's quick and easy aggressive one right and then Alpha is actually a harder one it's hard to find that that hurts but can you can you find an alpha with Theta so it's a focus relaxed State yeah the low alpha alpha Theta crossover sure yeah and can you find that on command or do you need to do some breathing and a little bit of self-talk or a little bit of light movement it'll probably it would probably take like 20 seconds maybe yeah I would guess um the the harder one for me though is going all the way into Theta because one of the things that happens when you have um Asperger's and for actually a lot of people no longer have Asperger's no I I don't you don't you didn't I make eye contact remember people's names my sensory inputs have all been edited and tuned and I would not work if I watched yeah just I I don't present I don't meet the clinical criteria but I did and all of my aunts and uncles and my grandmother do like it runs in my family okay all right so uh it's uh it it's it is not a normal brain I'll give you that uh so where is it going about Alpha Theta yeah we're going to Alpha Theta you said it like 27 Oh for Theta yeah so when people have you'll see my cool glasses here right um it could be because I think I'm Tony Stark or this might be true dark which is one of my companies and these glasses are designed to cut out certain parts of the blue light frequency that create the most visual stress giving your eyes are a part of your brain if I was to stare at the LED light over there for the length of time for this interview my brain would have dropped into an open eye disordered Theta essentially almost like a seizure inside the brain so I developed starting in about 8th grade fluorescent lights and all the lights will do that to me I developed a very very strong Theta suppress so for me going into Theta is the hardest thing to do compared to almost anyone else on the planet because the second it happens I get a danger signal because I'd go into Theta in in high school and just like pass out on my desk yeah so I'm visually sensitive to a certain light but it turns out people wear these during the day get less Cravings their brains work really really well and there's an equivalent one for sleep so I tuned the light that goes into my operating system to make it do what I want this is just a biohack yeah back in let's call it 1993 94 no 1999 I was exposed to Dr erlin oh yeah in fact I was inspired by her at the same time maybe 2001 yeah amazing the work like I put on um you know how she has all the different lenses yeah yeah I'm actually certified as an early learning practitioner oh it's okay so you know this so you'll so this is an early experience for me and I put down it was like wavy lines and dotted lines and whatever and I was an athlete and I put on I think was maybe yellow I can't remember Maybe Pink I don't I don't remember and he said and he looked and he goes wait wait do that again I did it I took it off and did it again he goes the letters started stopped jumping he goes do your do your letters jump I go what letters he goes like when you read a sentence do the letters kind of flutter and jump oh no she was like I didn't know that they could stop yeah and so like everyone thought it was stupid it's and this was a this was not an eye issue this was a wave light yeah Wave light processing yeah some of our brains are better at processing light than others and I think the healthiest brains are more resilient but the blue lights the lower part of the blue spectrum is very stressful for our brains and even if you can handle it at the end of the day you're weaker from sitting under bright office lighting than not so there are like tens of thousands of people who use the true dark glasses now and people had severe problems like I did we'll go see Helen Irwin and uh Helen actually said I was one of the three worst cases she's ever seen in terms of fluorescent lights my whole body without my conscious or even awareness that was why my whole body would just like not up and I just get physically uncomfortable I wish she could scale like I wish yeah I love telling she she's been in my house she's a a phenomenal woman she doesn't have erlin syndrome she just listened to her patients she's rad yeah yeah so Helen yeah if you're listening thank you yeah oh that's very cool okay listen I want to honor your time and I want to say thank you for um the thoughtful conversation I thought we're going to get into some weeds about mitochondria and whatever and like and it's really powerful like what you're on to about mitochondria and it's a complicated it's complicated it's not as clean as oh the whole whole Krebs cycle is you could cover a wall and all the little things that happen with it but here's the thing understanding this about reality even if a listener doesn't understand that you don't have to I'm even asking you to but it points to the fact that there are direct ways to modify your system that you didn't think are possible and I just go through them step by step including ones like you're asking for a quick and easy hack no no it was not asked earlier you did you said what could someone do uh who who doesn't have any things in order to improve more quickly I would call that a hack and what do you call that I call that um good science good science so what if a hack is backed by good science what do you call that because all the hacks I know seem to work which means they're back with science yeah like this you and I talked about when I was on your podcast like the the hacking you know I I have an aversion to it I can appreciate your position I really respect that you introduced a concept and it's taken Wildflower like wildfire but I'm not interested in hacks I'm interested in applica application of really good science you want stuff that's actually going to work and and provably works and I totally get it some of the hacks I can tell you this works I Can't Tell You Why and it drives me crazy but that's where the edge of science is but the vast majority of them like there's studies in here it's like one of them just around putting on muscle all of exercises picking up rocks or running away from tigers in all of history it's just the the duration and the way we do that those five different ways you can put muscle on faster than lifting rocks all right good man so um thank you again where can people find your book where do you want to drive folks to go to Dave asprey.com you get the podcast get the books if upgrade Labs sounds exciting go to own and upgradelabs.com okay that's very cool man appreciate you thank you it's really fun to come in and chat