Heavily Meditated: Dave Asprey’s Path to Peace and Biohacked Consciousness

Opening on spirituality and altered states 0:00

I come from a family of, you know, computer science and, other kinds of hard science people who would reject anything spiritual or possibly who was being for stupid people. I only started opening my mind to it because nothing that was supposed to work would make me better. Like, I, I tried all this stuff, and then I ended up going to this transpersonal psychology personal development workshop that just ripped my head open. I was doing holographic breathwork, which is like as strong as taking LSD without any psychedelics.

And I actually had a flashback that I couldn't even process as being a past life. And I, since then, without psychedelics or sometimes with, I have experienced lots of things that you could interpret as being a past life experience. Welcome to Doctor Talks, the podcast where every episode leads to a healthier you. Join us as we navigate the world of optimal health, uncovering groundbreaking strategies to conquer chronic disease. In each episode, we'll bring you the latest insights from leading health experts, medical innovators, and wellness warriors.

If you're seeking to transform your health journey, or if you're looking for answers to burning questions, you've come to the right place. Get ready to unlock the secrets of lifelong health and vitality. This is Doctor Talks, real talk from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most. Hi, welcome to another episode of the Recharged Biomedical Podcast.

Introducing the podcast and Heavy Meditated 1:30

I'm your host, Doctor Ed Park, and today we're very lucky to be with Dave Asprey. Hey, Dave, I really appreciate getting a chance to chat again. Yeah, it's always fun. Yeah, I know you don't like to watch your old ones, but I went back, finally watched our podcast. It was pretty hilarious. We got some pretty strange and interesting and fascinating things, and I think that's what I want to talk about more than anything. Is your new book coming out heavily meditated? It's really a beautiful mix of your personal story and how I think more of a gift to people, how they can kind of emerge.

And I think out of all the things we see now that biohacking is such a huge thing, everyone's coming to the space and they're finally realizing that, hey, your doctor might have gotten, you know, 90 minutes of nutrition. He doesn't know what to eat, you know, so you've kind of been out there in the wilderness taking the flak and pioneering a lot of that. So kudos to you. You know, thank you that this this felt like a book that needed to happen. It's not like any meditation book that it's out there.

In fact, the guy who coauthors the Dalai Lama's books and has been his best friend for 50 years just, sat for, a summary of the main points and heavily meditated. And afterwards he went on stage and said, you know, all this stuff the Dalai Lama has been saying for the last 50 years makes a lot more sense with this framework from the book. So that was amazing and unexpected. High praise. The deal is, there's so much written about meditation, hundreds of thousands of books going back thousands of years.

This is a book that does that has things in it that have not been written before, and it includes things like hurry, meditate, faster. Yeah, yeah. The reality is I don't have time to spend four hours a day in a cave, and I will do it if I have to, to double my life span or become enlightened or something. Even then, not a lot of people would. So maybe there's ways to enter specific altered states that work with meditation or work better than meditation. Absolutely. And healing is an altered state.

Becoming untreatable is an altered state living longer because you've turned off your stress as an altered state, and intuition and focus and flow state all of these. There's a recipe for how to get to them, and meditation is sometimes an ingredient, but not always. This is the recipe book. I love it, and I think you have a real gift. And I'm saying this because I've written a couple of books. I know this is like your sixth or seventh now, and to translate something to an audience that doesn't know the jargon or the scientific background, and to really explain it in a way that's accessible is quite a gift.

So just for those that don't know, I was, able. The book launches May 20th, but I read it twice and it covers a lot of really deeply granular technical aspects of consciousness that the brain waves. But then it goes into different forms of theologians or dissociative hallucinogenic drugs. But the whole tone and the through line, it's just like you're a person. I'm a person. We all have struggles, but it can definitely get better. And here's how. It's very much of a practical explanation. It's practical and look, I talk about psychedelics.

It's one of the chapters. They're a way to enter. And I'll just say I talk about tantra and conscious kink. 20% of people report meeting God during orgasm at least once in their life. So why is that? Why are those kinds of sacred connection practices right? Not in the same conversation as psychedelics and breathwork, because they should be right and they're honestly no different than prayer. If you do them with intention. Right? So so yeah, you know, my first guest was, psychedelic therapist. Right.

And so, you're my sixth guest. I think. So it's a new podcast, but I think you're exactly right. The reason I didn't do, you know, you did the nasal twice. Now, I don't know how that affected you. And so we'll talk about the exosomes that you did in Costa Rica, which I am too scared to try. But I'm really interested to know your experience. But the reason the first treatment I did was a nasal exosome, and it caused me to have voluntary pilot reaction. So I was like, oh, this isn't good. This is like permanent neurological change.

So I finally did it to help some lady try and get over her phobia. So I did it and it really took me up a level. But I thought naively, and I like your feedback, that more brain power would be more anxiety and depression, but on the contrary, it actually gave me more computing power to ignore the stuff that was triggering me. So I, I thought more thinking, more time in the future, in the past.

Meditation, altered states, and the default mode network 6:00

Right. Let's be present. But that was my intention. And like I said, it's all about intention. There are multiple studies showing that the prefrontal cortex is the most energy demanding part of the brain, and it's the part of your brain that you use for willpower that overcomes or impulses. So having better mitochondrial function because of exosomes, assuming they can get into your brain, is it's a reason that it would become easier. But there are other altered states that you can pursue if you have enough energy that can make a big difference.

Oh yeah, just breathing. Like I know you have a sponsor at your at your conference, but I tried a lesser knockoff version of his neuro visor and I chose Microdose and for 11 minutes I was completely dissociate. You could have told me to go into the ambassador Hotel and shoot a presidential cat. I would have done it like so. Yeah, I stuff I know you talked about doing EMT eye movement, stuff. There's many ways to get into an altered state, but let's talk about the default state or the default mode network.

Sure. You know, I a lot of people don't know what that is. I went to another lecture and the guy was like, that's you. Your personality, the software that you identify with that you choose to load every day. But even that can be upgraded in terms of like firmware. I know you come from a tech background, and so it's funny, I wrote a book and I and I it kind of rhymes with your book. And I talk about consciousness as software, like people wake up in the morning and I would say the majority of humanity in the Western world lives a life kind of in the prison of their personality and their ego.

So it's so refreshing to have you talk about techniques of breathing, of meditation. And so you lived it, actually. You had a very active what you would call, neuro atypical neurodivergent mind. And there are a lot of people I know in my family with this, but somehow you managed to find a way to use all that power, upgrade it, and not go nuts because a lot of people in the Ted Kaczynski style. Right? Yeah, it's and the first part of the book I talk about some of my own story there, in part because a lot of people think that that the brain is somehow locked in, or that if you have Asperger's or autism or ADHD or any of that stuff, you just have it.

And that it's incurable or you can't change it. You can change a lot of things about the mind that people don't think you can. And there's a framework for understanding this, that is is it's profound. And it's the most important thing that's emerged from creating and leading the biohacking movement for all this time. And it's that it's the beginning of this whole process. You have some amount of available energy if your mitochondria are working. Because we did some stem cells or telomeres are longer, all kinds of good stuff going on.

But okay, you have more or less energy okay. That's the input. And then the operating system of the body I didn't have the mind of the body. It runs a very specific set of decisions. And it does this before you can think all of the time as a third of a second. It's the basically it's called the P300 de, but it's a censorship window where your body gets to take its time to decide how it's going to make you feel and perceive things. Right. So are you going to see the shadow as a threat or are you going to ignore it?

Well, the body needs a little bit of time to decide that, and it's not going to show you the shadow. You won't even know it's there unless it decides it's worth noticing, and then it's going to flag it for you. But it need a time so that what's running the operating system in the body, it's your mitochondria, their distributed consciousness that controls your meat in real time. And you get a story from them a third of a second later. And the third of a second is very eminently measurable in neuroscience.

And a lot of people say, Dave, I don't believe you. Okay. You ever lean on a hot stove and then go, you know, it's pretty hot. I'm getting burned. I should move my hand. No, never done that. No. Magically, your hand jerks that stuff away. And then without even thinking about it, you say, good thing I move my hand. You didn't move your hand. A mysterious personality living inside your meat alongside you moved your hand anyway. Do you think you did it? That's hilarious. What would you agree with me in my statement?

That I, as a person, like when I used to look at the mirror or the looking glass, had a bunch of different negative thoughts or whatever, and through a Kundalini awakening that my shaman friend did that kind of got purged. I mean, it's a cycle you repeat. But would you agree that a lot of people don't even know that there is a default mode network in their ego construct, and that they just think, you know, they're just like a non-player character? What do you think about that? Most people wouldn't be aware of it because that's what's called default mode network.

And when you're in, when it's turned down but not off, you're an active mode. You really focus on something. The default mode kind of goes away and you start focusing, and all the mean critical voices and thoughts come up in your head, and all the fears and all all of those things emerge from what I write about in heavily meditated. And it's okay, you got some amount of energy and where's it going to go first, the indices are all f words. It makes it really easy. Understand the first f word is fear.

So if if something is scary, run away from kill or hide from it. Okay? Those voices in your head when you're not focusing on anything, they've identified criticism or whatever your story is as a threat, and they're going to make you pay attention to that as soon as you're not paying attention to something actively. So your default mode becomes criticism shame. But it's all around fear. So if you're operating system determines there isn't something that's fearful, it's already used a bunch of energy on maybe things that are phantom fearful.

But whatever energy is left goes to the next step. Food. A third of your thoughts every day are about tacos or something similar. If you're an average human right, neuroscience studies prove this so you can learn intermittent fasting and just not think about food. It frees up a third of your thoughts. And this makes sense because if you're a bacteria or a tree or a person, it doesn't matter. Jellyfish is something scary. You got to do something about it, and you got to make sure you eat right, cause your body's going to make sure you do that even if if you're not in there.

So fear food. Third F-word. You got to do it to stay alive for multiple generations. Yeah, we got that one. But what are you thinking? Yeah. Fire truck, that one. Oh, yeah. I was thinking fertility about. Oh, okay. Oh, crap. My bad, my bad. Doctor Park. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. No, I'm just messing with you. Yeah. Fear food. The other F-word. Okay, so all life has to reproduce, and everyone has been on a diet that, you know, you probably shouldn't have gone on, but there was some magical force in you that made you go on that date.

The same magical force that made you eat all the Ben and Jerry's. Yeah, and the same magical force that made you shy away from an opportunity. They're all f words are all mitochondria, and they're all processing reality before you get to and making you feel a certain way about it. Yeah, they make mountains look taller than they are. They make ice cream look better tasting than it is all of it. So is there anything you've ever done that you're ashamed of that isn't one of those three F words? Probably, yeah. So yeah, I don't think so.

No one I've ever met has been able to name something. I'm like, thinking I was better at, trading stock options than I really was because there's some lucky strikes that probably messed me up. That's a combination of food and fear. No, I don't I definitely appreciate your point, but I think that the human experience is really what you're talking about in this wonderful book, and you break it down in such a great way, but you give like at least 7 or 8 different ways of breathing to access this. So you've kind of taken all these great traditions of yoga in the broadest definition.

And saying, here's what you do if you're feeling this way, which I love, and that alone is worth the price of admission. But, you know, I the one quote that stuck with me was like, you know, people always ask you to help fix their brains and make them smarter, but really, what they wanted was to be more peaceful. Talk about that. Well, if you look at the opposite of fear, what is it? It's peace. It's not love, it's not safety, it's not safety and trust and all that good stuff can emerge out of peace.

But if you're not feeling safe, nothing else works. So if you want to step out of fear, you step into a sense of inner peace, an inner safety is an aspect of that where, like, I've got this. Yeah. And then you turn hunger into nourishment and you turn lust into a sacred connection or a divine union with others. And now all of a sudden, these things are sucking huge amounts of energy. They just go away and all the energy flows through the next word, which is friend, we're wired like all life forms, to support our own life form in tribes and whatever and the world around us.

We form ecosystems like everything else by design, and it's not because of our brains, it's because of our sub cellular biology. Yeah. So you're wired to be kind to others, and once that happens, your community starts nourishing you the way it's supposed to because you nourish it. And wow, there's so much energy left for the final word, which is forgiveness.

Fear, food, fertility, and forgiveness 15:00

And forgiveness is not about telling anything that anyone that what they did was okay. And it's not about telling them that you forgive them. Forgiveness is an altered state. It's a feeling inside the body, not even really inside the mind. And it's the same thing you do when you pick up your phone. You're going to settings and you turn off alerts for all the apps. Forgiveness is turning off all of the alerts from your nervous system that are not appropriate for the world you live in. Yeah. And when you do that, oh my God, whatever energy you can make, you know, waste it on fear, you don't waste on hunger.

You know, we some loneliness. It just goes into service to others which returns more energy. And then evolving yourself and love. And it sets up this beautiful loop. That's why I wrote heavily meditated. It's taken me like millions of dollars to reverse my age and, God knows, tens of millions of dollars on 40 years of Zen, on measuring brain waves and figuring all this stuff out. Yeah, this is how it actually works, is how reality processing works. This is where your ego comes from. It's your stupid mitochondria. Thank God they're fast in that.

They're hyperconnected and all that, but they're still stupid. You can train them like you train a dog. You know, that's really interesting. Yeah, I know a lot of people are into the mitochondria health, and I know that sometimes I see patients with Doctor Jordan who, mapped out your brain and heated up your hypothalamus like a gas station burrito so that you could have better penetration of your blood brain barrier. And did you notice that your consciousness was more didn't use the burrito thing?

You had the hot dog roller. He had me lay on the thing and it rolled me up and down the mirror. I don't know that one. No. I'm just I'm just kidding. I like the gas station better. So, like, for example, my dreaming changed when I did the second I had a third. The third time I did it was because of brain damage from a fire. But but that's another story. But the second time I did it at five weeks out, my dream states changed. It's that lucid dreaming. It's actually in the dream, I became totally conscious of all my thoughts and decisions and thinking it was immersive.

So have you noticed any change in your current state of consciousness? Oh yeah. So number one, I've been studying the qualitative state of consciousness for 20 years or something. So I'm really finely attuned to subtle shifts in my cognition because my brain was so broken. It's not like I'm, you know, holier than thou. Literally. I had such bad brain dysfunction that I became a little obsessive compulsive about it. And I got over that finally. But the awareness remains. So, I will feel subtle shifts.

When I did, I did this on my, Doctor Shelly Jordan's, thing where they open up the blood brain barrier and introduce themselves and exosomes into the brain. I described it as, shifting to 4K. Anyone who remembers the first time they got a 4k TV, like, whoa, that's how am I? I'm going to call it energetic or spiritual perception of the world shifted. My vision is good for good now, but there is a shift in my awareness that was already pretty good. I mean, I could do energy work on people and like I, I do very deep healing work with people.

At 40 years of Zen, my my sense of that and the level of clarity really went up deep. But it could have been placebo. So one of the things I do, I work with people who are highly perceptive and have been doing this kind of work for a long time, so, and I never believe them either. I always have two of them that don't know each other, so I can get better. If they both say the same thing and haven't been programed to say it. That's interesting. And the main people I work with on personal development stuff, they just took a look at me were like, what did you do?

Like your energy doesn't read like it did before. You don't. You don't look like you're 50, like with their eyes closed. That would say that. So again, that's very esoteric stuff. But these are people who know your energy and the the change of state is profound. And it's because you're recharging and making the part of the brain, the mitochondria, making them younger, which makes the central timing clockwork better and makes it okay. Yeah. No, I had patients come. Yeah. And tell me, oh, they measured my mitochondrial function indirectly through glutathione on measurement.

But I guess they're really, trying to figure out what parts of your brain are less metabolically active. And then hopefully with the regenerative medicine, coax it back to life. You know, that's good. So you like, experienced some improvement in your, you know, processing. I guess it wasn't just processing and cognition. In fact, I would say it was as much that as it was awareness. So there's an I, I share kind of the steps of this because the advanced layers of training at 40 years is an involved training intuition, not just running the reset process or making something faster.

And what that means is intuition is the first thing you experience and it you experience it. It's very small and very fast. And right after it comes an emotion that's usually based on an old trigger that you could reset. And then after that is a thought and either the emotion or the thought will almost always tell you to ignore or crush or, or think something other than your intuition. So if you can just have the peace of mind to catch the very first subtle thing, that's intuition and that can guide you so well.

And my increase in intuition was really dramatic. Wow. From doing this on par with what happens when people do 40 years of Zen and I spent six months doing that. Don't know. You develop this program for people that you can get trained, and it's a lot of the techniques in practice. So it's like a training ground for people who want to for. Yeah, 40 Years of Zen is a neuroscience company in Seattle. I started at ten years ago, and I can write heavily, meditated because I've looked at more than a thousand people's brains using clinical grade neuroscience gear while teaching them meditation techniques to go in and turn off reactive patterns to reality that don't serve them.

So there's God knows how many books on meditation, and some of them are fantastic, heavily meditated as well. This is science informed, and this is people spend $20,000. It's been five days with my team of neuroscientists and facilitators, all this kind of stuff. Or you can read the book and I'll teach you the exact same process I think works better with a computer hooked up to your head. But you don't have to. In my first nonfiction book, you know, the one of the chapter, you know, quotes was intuition is the Royal Road to wisdom.

And I think that's true. You know, it's your gut feeling, but it's, it's integration of all the chakras. If you will. Right. You're using all the senses. So, yeah. You know, let's talk about a couple of months ago. We're at A360. Right. And even before I knew about telomeres, you know, we met I don't know if you were at Silicon Valley. Was it smart life? Yeah, I was the president. Right? Yeah, I think I came in before you were the president. They asked me to do a lecture like 15, 16 years ago. And then at that time, what was your weight like?

Were you heavy? You were already thin by then. If it was 15 or 16 years ago, I would have already moved away. Yeah. I was there in like 1999 or 98 through the early aughts. Oh, okay. Okay. So anyway, so I gave a lecture on the 65, and you started taking it to 65 for a little bit, and then I all. Yeah. Did that seem to help you in the early days? You know, I couldn't tell, to be honest, I and to be truthful, I wasn't taking the 65 branded stuff as I couldn't afford it back then. This is before I started bulletproof and all know I, and it was just outside my budget.

But I did take some cycle. RSA general I took a real high asking about that at David Avocado Wolfe's thing. I remember you flew it on three hours of sleep, and we gave a very breathy lecture to a roomful of vegans. How beef is the most eco friendly food. So I thought it was hilarious. You know what? At that time you said, yeah, I just stopped taking the cyclic strides that you were taking. So yeah, here's the funny thing. I walked in and I said, guys, I'm a lacto ovo bfo pork go vegetarian. I hope we can be friends.

And then I came back the next year, and two thirds of the room was no longer vegan because they were all eating ghee, because I taught him the he was going well, you know, it's kind of funny the power that you have. And it's really an awesome thing that, yeah, you're kind of fearless in that regard. Like the other patient I treated at abundance was by my friend, who also went out about 15, 16 years ago on his own. And now he's built this huge empire. And like you, he'll get up in front of 5000 people and just love it and enjoy it, get energy.

But most people from the exosomes get a little bit sleepy. But I know you guys get kind of activated, which I think is really interesting. Have you ever done your mBTI or do you know what it tends to? It was, n t f or p, I was running the lounge and FNP, if I remember right. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Entp. Okay. All right. Well, you have to be careful when you're a prophet. You know, you have a lot of people just listen to you. They'll just take your advice. You know, I have, I have a solution for that because I don't want to be a guru like that.

I would like people to to do the learning so they can personalize it. So every now and then I throw in complete BS just to make sure they're doing it. I've done this as a parent with my kids, and when I was at the biohacking conference, a couple of years ago, like, all right, everyone, let's do a meditation. Take a deep breath. Yeah. Now repeat after me. I am enough, right? And everyone does it. And then I have, the sound guy do, like, a scratching sound, like, I don't actually have that. You could ask for anything you want, and you just want it to be enough.

Why would you let me do that to you? Like, how about more than enough? So I have a little extra to share. Yeah. And and people just like, oh, my God, he's got a point there. But. Right. They all did it. And like, I would just say, how dare you ask just to be enough. Yeah. Like what a victim mindset are you stuck in. Get over it. Like asked to be abundantly powerful and at one with the universe

Mitochondria, intuition, and consciousness training 25:00

you could do the most good. But wouldn't that be? If you're going to ask if you believe you're going to get what you ask. I just want to be enough to know I've had chronic fatigue. I've been wrecked beyond belief. We age because our telomeres shorten and our stem cells deplete. But what if we could support both? I've been taking care 65 for 17 years. It's the only supplement I trust to support better mood, better sleep and exercise recovery. At age 57, I don't have any gray hair and I don't need breathing glasses to 65 is available now.

Go to Recharge Biomedical E-commerce to iPhone 65 and enter promo code Recharge ten to save 10% off. Yeah, just asking to be. Well, that's a sense of helplessness. You know, it's a learned helplessness thing. Like you adjust your expectations down. But I think wanting to feel like you're enough, you know, it's it's so funny going to the abundance thing. It's very expensive to go. And you've been many years in a row. But I felt like as a newcomer to that environment, like you couldn't, they couldn't really even see the water that they were swimming in.

And the irony of the Abundance Festival is that people are very obsessed with money and power, you know, which is fine in and of itself. But there was this sense like, who's going to, you know, be the next unicorn, the next billion dollar, nine figure, blah, blah, blah. And the funniest part of it, which I thought was hugely ironic, was Travis Kalanick, I guess, one of the founders of Uber, and he was talking about the fact that money doesn't make you happy a lot. And I'm like, you know, I think we all knew that.

But when you say that, does it really like it's just so funny. I used to work with Travis. In the company he had before he started Uber. And, yeah, I, I, I could see him working on the happiness thing because I was two in Silicon Valley. I mean, I part of the reason I wrote heavily meditated two, I made $6 million, and I was 26 years old. Right. And then I lost it when I was 28. But when I had it, I looked at a friend. I'm like, I'll be happy when I have ten right back, right? And then I tried getting married in my 20s.

I have my picture in entrepreneur magazine. I'm 23 years old and the first guy to sell anything over the internet. Be the first product ever sold for the brown shirts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like, okay. And I'm going to be happy. Like I'm in 80 different magazines right now. No, I am a nothing works. And that was one of the reasons I started looking at consciousness as well as health. I think I got to dig myself out of this broken body with arthritis and chronic fatigue and obesity and all that, and I don't want to be miserable all the time.

And what I find is biohacking. I built it to make longevity cool, because the things that make old people young make young people powerful. So it's relevant for all of us if we talk about it in the right language. So it's got longevity. But anytime you start biohacking, you get energy back and you're going to want to live longer, and then you're going to say, oh, I'd like to be conscious so I can learn how to be happy and present. So you you have to do consciousness and longevity. If you're a biohacker, that's really what it's all about.

And so this is heavily mentioned just to kind of tie that up in a bow, so that we really have the tools available. Well, I think it's really something we touched upon on our podcast is that there is this, sort of idea of victim consciousness as being in power. It's like the Stephen Schwartz musical wicked. It's like the the Elphaba, she doesn't have to be green and have that nose she chooses to because that's where she feels powerful and focused. Yeah. So but I think that the greatest gift of the book also is would you say, you know, you forgive the last F or the fourth F?

The penultimate one is you forgive and you take whatever the, the the curse is the lead. That's where you down and you turn to gold. And I thought that was really important for people to realize, because in a fractal sort of way, we're all going on a little hero's journey taming our demons. Yeah. But as a result of some weird, you know, neuro atypical that you have, you have a very promiscuous mind. So you're able to try many, many different things and see what works and make a living out of disseminating that.

But, did you just call me a mental slut? Yeah, yeah. Oh, my gosh, I hear you're so nice. Like highest praise, mentally promiscuous is the highest praise. But we talked a little bit about past lives. And I tell you, until last year, I didn't believe in past lives. But I met this physician who told me about three of his very vivid past lives. And he talks a little bit about the smell of DMT. And, and I was like, oh, okay, I know that smell too. So but I think that, the traditions that you've gone and visited in Nepal with Tibetan Buddhism and the pasta and, you know, talking with these people, it's a it's an ancient tradition of wisdom.

And for you to give it words that make it accessible to the Western reader is quite helpful. I think we all experienced kind of a human thing, but the whole past life thing kind of hit me and we talked a little bit about I'm like, oh, I it's true that maybe your family, some of them reincarnate because they haven't unfinished business. And I started hearing these stories about people's chronic disease being related to past life echoes. So we can all say, like childhood trauma. Yeah, that messes up your psyche.

But maybe, like, past life stuff kind of echoes in chronic illness. What do you think? Like you, I would have said, that's a bunch of nonsense. I come from a family of, you know, computer science and, other kinds of hard science people who would reject anything spiritual or possibly woowoo as being for stupid people. I only started opening my mind to it because nothing that was supposed to work would make me better. Like, I tried all this stuff. And then I ended up coming to this transpersonal psychology personal development workshop that just ripped my head open.

I was doing a Tropic breath work, which is like as strong as taking LSD without any psychedelics. And I actually had a flashback that I couldn't even process as being a past life. And I, since then, without psychedelics or sometimes with, I have experienced lots of things that you could interpret as being a past life experience. I've also done shamanic training, and I've sat with Buddhist gurus and things like that. And most people who think they're having, you know, a past life experience and that they were, you know, King Tut or Cleopatra over there can't really be that many people who did that.

So what's the dilution thing? It can be homeopathic. Cleopatra. What's more likely is, like you were in their sphere of influence or something like that. But I have experienced times where I cannot in any conceivable way believe that it's anything other than a past life. A good friend, has scars on her body. Exactly where the person that she was, was killed. And if you touch the scar, she goes crazy and doesn't know why. Interesting. You know, and she called me once, and she said, Dave, I'm in a state of terror.

I'm like, why? And she said, every year on the specific month and day, I'm not going to say what it is, just out of confidentiality. She said. People in my life die and I'm just falling apart and like, this sounds crazy. But she listed like the previous five years, like people close to her died every and that. You okay? Maybe she's just superstitious, but I don't think so. So I got the autobiography of the person that she was most connected to. Historically like that. Not in her genetics, but just in her.

Her whatever. If you want to read her energy. The day that all those people would die every year. It was the day of her first major battle in a career. This is a person. There's lots of books about them. Right. She went in and did some deep shamanic healing around that lifetime and it stopped happening and she, she stopped. And when you push on that part of the body where the injury was from a past life, it would stop. And so interesting. Okay, that's just one example. But I have like hundreds that have happened in my life and with people around me and the healers.

I work with gurus from different lineages who've who've come to 40 years of Zen or who have met with me and works with me. I am to the point where I fully grasp that the reality we perceive is made up by our bodies to make it so we can comprehend it, but it's not showing us what's real. And I can prove it heavily meant it shows. This is how it works. Yeah, I think you're right. I think the consciousness, you know, I did a shamanic journey with, Loretta. The first person I interviewed, it involved some psilocybin.

And, you know, she kept on saying, well, I've got to give you more. I'm like, well, no, I'm on three grams. I didn't know the dosing until a day later this year before, and then five grams. And my son, who's kind of brilliant in his own right, his life changed when I gave him exosomes and he went on a psilocybin journey with his buddies, kayaking. And so just to spend time outside of your default mode network and see that there is a universe that is so much more rich and difficult to understand, that's the rabbit hole that people rarely go down.

But the gift is like, oh, I am one with consciousness. And my actual, you call it the meet. I was, I was talking to, I was I called it my legacy meat brain that gets tired when you think a lot it gets busy, tired. So to to have that neuroplasticity and that appreciation, that consciousness is actually a barrier to perception. It's a filter. Then you start to understand the gift of autistic spectrum disorder, right? Because they're so connected that they can't parse out and, and, and keep that system tray running with appropriate social cues and mirroring and all that stuff.

But I have a lot of autistic friends. I just never made it out the other side like I'd have one. One of my good friends met Tony Robbins 40 something years ago, and he was obese. You know, he was having a lot of health problems, but he went to this James Romm thing and they were talking about self-actualization. And boy, did he make a career and a platform out of that. But the fact that there are people that are willing to do the work, come back bigger and then bigger, yet

Supplements, peptides, and longevity basics 35:00

still in their fractal hero's journey is just amazing. And I think you've been one of those people that shows, you know, you walk the walk, you talk the talk, even though you might have a surgical complication or, you know, you might faint on a plane and need an EpiPen, like you're willing to take the risk, which is nature loves courage, as my son always says. The other thing, and thank you, is that curiosity is one of the most reliable ways to extinguish fear. And anytime I can run that reset process from the book, anything that triggers me, if I find out what it is, I'm going to sit down.

I'm going to do that. So I celebrate anything that pushes a button or makes me afraid. And I started some time in my mid 20s, probably because I was still healing from Asperger's. Like if something is scary, if it's pushing my buttons, I'm just going to keep doing it until I learn to not have that response. And I still thought I was my body and I'm like, well, I, I love I think that's great. I mean, creating that space between the 300 milliseconds between stimulus and response is amazing. I had a patient yesterday try and tell me why the Chinese cars aren't as good as the Teslas, because there's only this many milliseconds to react.

But yeah, I think that's the space that the magic happens between stimulus and response. And not everyone is in control, that not everybody wants to be in control of that. You know, I love that interview you did with Brian Johnson where you kind of like were asking him about that. And he's like, you know, I find that the first five ideas I have are derivative and trashy. So I just like kind of ignore them, which I thought was really an interesting metacognitive approach to his own thinking. You know.

Yeah, I would argue that what Brian does and what people with some wisdom built up will do is they think they're thinking of things, but they're actually intuiting things or waiting until they're intuitive system hits on one that feels right, right, right, right. Because how do you know the first five are trash? You're not writing a spreadsheet. And one, one of the things that people routinely report from doing 40 years is and certainly it's been my experience there. Yeah. When you calm down your triggers, so you just don't have a lot of things that push your buttons, the level of perception and clarity that you have goes up.

And that means that when you're sitting there, this intuition will come in and it's very small and short lived, and it's always followed by a larger emotion and then an even larger thought. So usually the emotion and the thought are designed to make you ignore the intuition. No, I mean, I when I write books, I find that a very Zen like experience. Actually, I don't feel like I'm writing anything. And in fact, I'll read screenplays that I wrote many years ago and I don't even remember. I'm like, what's going to happen next?

So it's very much of a channeling thing that you think. But I think that has to do with having the energy channels kind of open or the chakras, you know, you're no longer in control, which creates sort of that, flow state, you know, you know, channeling and intuition are the same thing. Oh, okay. And what you'll find is if you just stop thinking and surrender, which is really hard. It's it can take a couple of weeks to learn how to do that. You already know. Right? And if you want to tune in to a channel you just already know.

But if you try to think about it, trying to think takes you out of already knowing. Because to think you have to not know. And it's the biggest mindfuck ever. And it's taken me literally two weeks of sitting there with electrodes on my head going, why can't I get? Or the system I want? I couldn't enter the state that I wanted because I was trying to enter the state that I want to. Right. No, no, no. Absolutely. Yeah. It's the irony. It's the yeah, Chinese handcuffs of meditation. It's so frustrating. Yeah.

But I think that there's just different hacks. Different. I'm not a meditator. I've never done that. But someone allegedly said, the Dalai Lama says sleep is the best meditation. And indeed in sleep. I do get a lot of restorative, hits. And and anyway, so if you had to recommend to people about all the books you've, you've read, read or, and written like from all the knowledge and wisdom you've garnered from hacking your own system, what I know you, you talk a lot about mold, but what are some of the the go tos?

You know, I'm just starting to take the salmon. Wild caught salmon I think, you know, make it three is good. What are the things that people, you know, don't really get enough of? Because you have to tread lightly with the fat soluble vitamins, don't you? But like, it's so much out there that everyone says is the best thing since the. So that if you had a top five supplements you could take on a desert island, what would they be? Okay, most people are going to go for like sexy adaptogens and like, the nootropics and things I've written about life extending, fasting, memetics.

The reality is that if you don't have the basics covered, fully covered, your meditation, whatever, your weight lifting won't work, your sleep won't work. So the number one missing thing is called minerals. Oh, and our soils depleted minerals. So what I recommend people do is they take two supplements that work synergistically. The first one is called vitamin D. It's a vitamin D Arcom. And this is a mix of for fat soluble and appropriate amounts and ratios to make sure you have those because you're probably not getting those in your food anyway.

And once those are there their job is to orchestrate where minerals go. So they go to the right place. If you take minerals without vitamin D, the minerals won't end up where they're supposed to be. And your job is to not have calcium in your arteries, but have it in your bones, right? And to have zinc wherever you need zinc for hair growth or exercise, for building muscles or testosterone or whatever. And all the different minerals have something that chaperons them in and that's fat soluble. So vitamin and mineral 101, is those are critically important.

I would start with those because thousands of things inside the body are relying on those. And why go for a highly sexy supplement when you haven't got the bases covered? Yeah. And people don't realize just as a side, one of my friends who is avidly a past life believer, she was a nutritional formulator. And then it's all knowledge. But none of the doctors know that trained until recently that without the vitamin K2 the D3 doesn't work properly. And you can actually get pathological calcifications and osteoporosis and immune dysfunction.

So now the consumer knows that you need the K2, but not all the doctors and all the patients now. So but you can't get overdosed with fat soluble. So that's one thing. So yeah, I do take the mineral supplements just, you know, the usual mag sodium whatever. What else? Are kind of really good mastered. You don't like adaptogens like ashwagandha, psychos, charge and all. I do like adaptogens. I just wouldn't recommend them before people have. They're fat soluble and they're minerals. Okay, for the fatty acids like omega.

So you're a big guy on that or I. It depends on what you eat. If you eat foods that are deficient, you're going to need omega threes. My omega three ratios are insane. And I don't take them. I just eat a lot of grass fed beef. I also take fatty 15, which I think has a lot of really good evidence for it. I don't know what that is. Fatty. Fatty 15 is the first essential fatty acid to be discovered, or the first new one to be discovered in the last 90 years, and it's based on 15 years of trying to figure out why some dolphins age more than others, and the dolphins who eat fish that don't have this one kind of 15 chain.

Saturated fat, they age more quickly. So I've gone deep on the research with the founder a couple times on the podcast, and I think it's very impressive. So I take that, so I want people to have adequate omega threes. It's important EPA and DHA adults need more EPA. When you're younger, you need more DHA. And usually a couple of grams is is all you really need. More than that can lead to bruising and extra bleeding. Or maybe you need it. It's it's a bit personalized. CoQ10 is terribly, terribly important.

And things like ashwagandha, they're just a double edged sword. Ashwagandha every single day. Well, it can cause anhedonia, which is inability to experience joy, pleasure, or even orgasm. All right. So emotionally flattening, but getting the right dose or maybe doing it every other day can have profound stress, rejuvenation effects. So I'm a big fan as long as you're not getting those effects okay. Fair enough. Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right there. You talk about Goldilocks and getting it just right.

I think that's true. You know, and also upregulation of, receptors. Downregulation. I'm talking to an expert in peptides. Do and and indulge in any peptides at all. I've been taking peptides GS for more than a decade. I wrote about them in my big longevity book. Yeah. And I go through phases. Sometimes I'm injecting eight of them, and sometimes I'm like, I'm doing anything for a couple of months. Yeah. Right now I'm using, Milano ten one instead of one and ten to, I think they're both really beneficial.

One has a shorter half life, and I like that for cognitive function and longevity. I have pale skin and this stuff gives you a tannin very small amount. I'm sorry about that one. But yeah like there's anti thymus in this Appleton and BPC. Does the people in those right now. Yeah. At Penn Yellen. GB 500. It's too small. And yeah I don't do tests in Maryland. At least I'm not right now. But I have it and I don't think you need it. Yeah. Yeah. But now you seem like you're pretty optimized. I mean, you're a little younger than I am, but I'm going to my 50th high school reunion this Friday, and it's just crazy, like looking at people and, you know, going to concerts like Rickie Lee Jones concert.

Everyone's got a head of white hair, and you get these people who write a book like, you know, Tia Peter T's like, oh, no one can live a day longer. But his whole reason for living and his body of work is about living longer. So I think that people naturally, Peter Attia was I what he just kind of gave himself blanket immunity by saying people can't live longer doing anything. But then he devotes his whole career in a book to this. So obviously I believe that something he says like, which is a dude, you said we couldn't live longer.

How can I know?

Past lives, intuition, and human consciousness 45:00

I mean, he's like a confusing guy. It's like the, past life doctor was telling me one of his past lives was he was a bombardier, right, in World War two. And he said, you know, it brought my way. I think if I interview you, I'm like, oh, this guy takes a lot of flak. Like he doesn't curator's Wikipedia page, like he said. So I said to myself, how can I used to say, if you're taking a lot of flak, it means you're over the target, right? You're threatening something that makes somebody else rich. So good for you.

Yeah. Have a point there. And yeah, I, I don't mind if people want to get upset at what I say because here's, here's the, the thing. And this is the reason I wrote heavily meditated. If I can trigger you, number one, it means you're carrying a loaded gun and number two, it means I'm in charge, not you. Yeah. So no mean it's it's a great point. And, you know, the thing about I, I became friendly with since that conference and I've been using it talking to it. But I wrote about this like, even before I knew about telomerase.

So the very first thing spur to science fiction, graphic novel and this whole idea of transhumanism, we all saw it coming. Some people think it's the Messiah, some people are ambivalent. But I've been very underwhelmed until the last two years. How large language models. But now they're getting quite good. So my you been in Silicon Valley, you talk to the people, you know, every 1 to 1000 who passed on Uber. No kidding. And they're all like venture capital. They all want to make their next big thing.

But when you look at the emerging promise and threat, I thought that Moka thought was really oppression about we're going to go through a dystopia and it's going to be good. And the amount of dystopia we go through is depending on the people curating it and their ethics. But when you interact, if you do, I don't know if you do morally interact with large language models. What's your perception. Are they, they mirror a lot. They try to repeat back your kids birthdays and schmooze you. But do you really think that the experience of being human and I have a bias is something that can be emulated or even should be emulated like they're talking about programing empathy? Fine.

But to program lust and survival and ego mania, is that a good thing? If I was and could be programed to run the unconscious systems that humans do, it would absolutely 100% destroy itself and humans. I thought you might have an opinion, but that's a pretty strong opinion, don't you think? The the whole point of all this work I'm doing with biohacking all is humanity needs a substantial upgrade. Yeah. And the easiest way to do it is to train our mitochondrial networks to behave themselves instead of letting them run the show.

And thinking we're in charge. So that's the fastest way. But honestly, we may need a mitochondrial upgrade. We just need to turn down the focus on fear, turn it down by 50%. Yeah, or make the default mode network slider switch either more conscious or have more range. Either one of those and suddenly you're just not going to do the things that you feel like you decided to do. Yeah, but every time you say you wake up, I'm going to go to the gym, and then you end up laying on the couch and eating a frozen.

All right, well, I love you just fine. Hey, back off the Christmas. I listen, but, you know, I had a really interesting experience the other day, and we talk about what kind of alluding to supernatural quantum like, weird things. I heard some tinnitus ringing in my ear the other night. Right. Yeah. And so I'm like, I don't usually get tonight. So I turn on my phone and record it, and it was exactly like, that's nice to hear when you get transient like nerve hypoxia. And I played it back for my friend.

I go, do you hear this? And they go, yeah, I do hear that. And I go, that was not in my brain. So I'm like trying to parse out how is Big Brother creating tonight's. And it's really kind of like my point is, like I think there are forces that feed on fear and people being tribalistic and incredibly fearful because it allows them to be much easier, easily controlled. Right. He's under in verse ten, like all of propaganda, all of marketing is taking advantage of the efforts. Yeah, fear, food and fertility always in order.

Yeah. Every single ad campaign, every single way of manipulating you. It's always those. So if you can do the reset process in the book, you can just have more energy via any mitochondrial thing. You are harder to manipulate. But I think, you know, that whole idea of techno humanism is kind of an oxymoron. I mean, I'm sitting about, I'm thinking about returning this offering because it kind of makes you obsessed, narcissistic, and slightly fear based, but it does provide some interesting information.

I feel like people with their devices, my 21 year old 22 year old said, people are getting stupid. I'm like, I know, I don't even know what seven times six is anymore. I just look it up. It's like, I feel like this Trojan horse of these devices now they have these hilarious, like, dumb phones. It's like, what we're really missing is that human agency, that empowerment. Like, you know, if you had a good night's sleep, Dave, you don't need an orange to tell you, right. But. So how do people get back to being more human, heart centered and, like, powerful and grow their toroidal field?

You're probably not going to like this answer. If you want to rapidly become conscious of the things you are unconscious of, one way to do it is lock yourself in a cave for 20 years, and eventually you'll figure it out. The other way is hook yourself up to some technology, then use the technology to learn the feeling of a subtle shift in your state of being so that you can reproduce it without the technology. So cool. Yeah, no, it's there, it's there. I learned how to feel the movement of my body into sympathetic versus parasympathetic and consciously control it.

I learned how to move into these different altered states of meditation that usually take a long time to be able to just close my eyes and to drop in and to go there and to do that thing. And it's so fast and it works without any tech. It's it's like trying to learn how to to go bowling. The first time you do it, you have little bumper things on the side and you just kind of throw the ball and you watch it bounce and eventually you learn to do it. Any feedback you can get, your meditation teacher, they sit there and you know, once every hour they raise their eyebrows when you do it right or a thousand times a second, the sounds turn off.

If one part of your brain is a little bit twitchy and your your brain automatically goes, I guess I'll turn that off. So don't rely on the tech. Use the tech to basically print a label next to every knob and dial and lever on this huge control panel inside your brain that you don't even know is there, right? That's what that's what heavily meditated as far as like what are the states you want? What is the path to get there? Press this button. Do this, do that. Yeah. No it's great book. Very user friendly, no jargon, super fun to read.

So I recommend everyone pick it up. It launches May 20th and you also do the audiobook version, which I've done that. It's a lot of work, but it sounds like it was a labor of love for you for sure. You know, you don't write books to make money. Yeah, I would make more money just making shots of coffee in a coffee shop on an hourly basis.

Biohacking, technology, and closing remarks 52:00

I heavily meditated. It's my most important book and I have, you know, 20 languages right now and all the different books. And I've changed some lives and I'm grateful to have done that. This is the big one. So good. Thank you so well, thank you for joining us. And as always, great talking to you. So the zoom shots that we did, the first time in your shoulder and low back has your low back and shoulder. Now you know I think it really helped okay. Especially on the shoulder. Good. The low back is probably more of like a functional movement thing that I've just about got got nailed.

But the shoulder really, really noticed a shift. I mean, you saw low back a lot. I know you're out there dancing, having fun, so. Yeah. And then what about the, abdominal wall? We did a Tania 360. Yeah, that's an interesting one because I had, I have, like, it was your glute and your, Yes, I have, like, a hernia surgery way down here. A very small one a few years ago. No one even knows how it happened. But the reality is, I've had my right knee. I've had three surgeries on it, and my right big toe reconstructed from yoga injuries and soccer injuries.

So that travels up, goes through the midline and comes over here and moves up. Yeah. Yeah. But when they did the repair here, which was successful, my body stopped using a small amount of this and my glutes on this side. So help me just yeah functional exercises to turn this on. And it's it's much better than okay. Yeah I mean a lot of times I'll cut a brand to the Isle of England on there. That'll kind of mess things up. So maybe we can get back. Yeah they did and okay. I think your injections help, so. Thank you.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad your brain is calm and powerful. That's good. Good for you. Just just remember, these are not the droids you're looking for. It's a mix. Star Wars reference. Yeah, exactly. I did Star Wars and Star Trek to piss everybody off. If I triggered you, you need to get them now. There's a great, New York Times crossword where the answers could be Star Trek or Star Wars. Oh. That's cool. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, so great talking to you. And we'll see you in a few weeks. And, Austin, hopefully I'll see you there for the biohacking conference.

Yeah. Everybody sign up. Yep. All right. Thanks, Dave. Thank you for tuning in to Doctor Talks. We hope today's episode has enlightened and inspired you on your path to optimal health. Each day is a new opportunity to make choices that empower your well-being. For more insights and strategies, subscribe to our podcast and visit our website w ww di doctor talks.com. Stay connected, stay healthy and join us next time on Doctor Talks. Real talks from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most.