Meditation is a Waste of Time: Becoming Heavily Meditated With Dave Asprey

Episode Highlights With Dave

• What led to him writing a book about meditation and what surprised him most
• Why meditation is one of the most impactful tools he uses 
• How he went from learning to put butter in coffee on the side of a mountain in Tibet to the father of biohacking
• What makes this book different from any other books about meditation
• Meditation as it's typically understood is a waste of time- here’s why
• False: Everyone should meditate more (not necessarily)
• 98% of humans were involved in agriculture for the last few thousand years, and how this matters for the personalization of meditation
• “ If I can trigger you, it means you are a loaded gun”
• He's woken up at 5 am to meditate for long periods of time and what he learned from this
• Techniques that go beyond meditation to amplify the results
• Understanding the actual goal of meditation to get real results and not just waste time
• Somatic practices and why these can work most quickly 
• The recipe he uses with top executives called the RESET method, which is a somatic practice
• Dark is one of the most underrated supplements in the world… here’s why
• How to change your state, just with light
• How he and I both experienced absolute darkness in a cave (separately), and what we learned from this
• Your body processes reality before you have time to think
• What's missing from meditation and psychology teaching and how understanding this can be life-changing

Resources Mentioned

• Heavily Meditated: The Fast Path to Remove Your Triggers, Dissolve Stress, and Activate Inner Peace by Dave Asprey
• Smarter Not Harder: The Biohacker's Guide to Getting the Body and Mind You Want by Dave Asprey

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
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n E. Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast.
I'm Katie from wellness Mama dot com and this episode

(03:39):
is controversially about how meditation is a waste of time
and why there there's a lot of caveat to that statement. However,
I love that we'd dove into that controversial statement and
how to become heavily meditated. And I am here with
a friend and the founder of Voltproof Coffee and the
father of biohacking, Dave Asbury, who have had on before.

(04:01):
He's often referred to, as I said, the father biohacking.
He has multiple best selling books, but I love that
he gets a little controversial in tackles a lot of
different topics that all interrelate in his new book, Heavily Meditated.
We go into what led to this book, how it
ties together the science and the mystical, how we're seeing
this trend more across society, Why he stands behind that

(04:24):
statement and that meditation is a waste of time, and
what to understand about it. He mentions that he can
trigger you in this episode. It means we were a
loaded gun, and what to do about that. I feel
like this is a very practical and applicable episode that
gives some breathwork tools, some tools we can do, including
when he calls bicep, which I had never heard anywhere
but him, and we get to talk about how we

(04:45):
both integrate this in our personal life, including I talk
about my experience in complete darkness in a cave as
well as going through these past few months the dark
Knight of the Soul of sorts and what I learned
from that. I hope that you enjoy this episode as
much as I did. So let's join Dave Aspery. Dave
asked forre you. Welcome back, Thank you for being here again.
It's always such a joy.

Speaker 1 (05:04):
I'm so happy to be here, Katie. We've known each
other for so many years that getting to just sit
down for an hour and talk is kind of cool.

Speaker 2 (05:12):
It is, and I feel like it's been quite the
evolution this past like over a decade that we've known
each other, for you in biohacking and all of the
kind of leading the charge of all these waves of biohacking. Recently,
I was at your biohacking conference, which I think was
the best one you've put on yet. It was phenomenal
and oh thank you got to see everyone in one place,
which was amazing. And what I'm really actually excited to

(05:33):
go into today because this is a topic that in
now almost one thousand podcast episodes, is recurring advice among
high achievers, health experts, and mindset experts, which is the
topic of meditation. And I also feel like this is elusive,
especially for busy parents, For moms especially, I hear this
being it's difficult to make this a practice when our

(05:54):
lives are so busy. Your parent also, and you run
companies and have a very busy life. So and first
of all, I love the title of your new book,
which is heavily meditated. Great job on the title, But
I would love to delve into this topic today because
you have the reputation as kind of the ultimate biohacker,
and I love that you decided to bring meditation into
the focus of that. But I would love to hear

(06:16):
what led to and what surprised you most in writing
a book about meditation.

Speaker 1 (06:20):
Well, meditation has always been a part of biohacking. When
I first came up with the idea for biohacking, I
published this infographic on Twitter and I was saying, Okay,
there's mind, body, and spirit, and if you want to
change the environment around you and inside of you so
you have control of your state and control of your biology,

(06:41):
what does that mean. Well, it turns out the easy
things are food and nutrition and sleep and circadian biology
and cold and hot and all the environmental signals and
things that at this point a lot of people have
heard about intermittent fasting, Clan Keto, like all this stuff
where I've led the charge and really, you know, fourteen
hundred episodes on the podcast and nine books, like I'm

(07:03):
just sharing the best experts in the world I can find,
so like, this stuff is real, it works, It's worth
your time. But along the way, I talked about discovering
this idea of putting buttering coffee on the side of
the holiest mountain in the world in a remote part
of Tibet and doing training with shamans. And I've studied

(07:23):
over the last twenty five years with a lot of
spiritual lineages and gone deep on practices and breath work.
Every morning. For five years, I ran a breath workshop
with a guy who invented holotropic breathing, Stan Groff, who's
also the father of what I would call psychedelic therapy
at this point, so I've been one foot in the
mystical and one foot in the science. About ten years ago,

(07:48):
right after I started Bulletproof, I started a company called
forty Years of Zen. This is a facility in Seattle
where executives and powerful people and influencers and you know,
family office people. They come and they spend five days
with me and my team reprogramming their brains. And it

(08:08):
is the equivalent from a brain wave perspective of meditating
every day for twenty thirty forty years, and with more
than a thousand people who have spent five days with
electroes glued to their brain doing specific meditations I teach them.
I have enough data and enough training from these different
ancient practices to write a book that is different than

(08:31):
any book ever written. And it's actually not about meditation.
It's about this ridiculous and offensive idea that meditation by
itself is a waste of time.

Speaker 2 (08:42):
I love that. That's definitely a controversial statement, so I'm
going to need you to elaborate on that. But to
touch on something else you said that I think seems
to be kind of rising in the collective consciousness right now.
Is that idea of the mystical and the science. And
it seems like those while they seem to be very
separate in the past, are now we're realizing how much
they converge. But okay, let's talk about why meditation as

(09:04):
it's typically understood is a waste of time?

Speaker 1 (09:06):
Okay, And then I want to go back to your
point made there, because that's a really important point that
is I think really interesting about like the history of science.
But why would meditation be a waste of time? This
is something you're gonna love, Katie. And it's because if
someone told you to drink eight glasses of water a day,

(09:27):
is that good advice?

Speaker 2 (09:29):
Arguably with caveats?

Speaker 1 (09:31):
Oh, arguably with caveats. So it's actually crappy advice because
it's too simplified to be meaningful. Was there electrolyte in
the water, how hot was it, how much did you breathe?
And how big are you?

Speaker 2 (09:41):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (09:41):
And how big were they? Eight glasses? Anyway, and when
did you drink them? Because all of those really matter.
So the reality is that having properly hydrated cells and
adequate blood volume are critically important for living a long time,
performing all and being healthy. But drinking glasses the water
don't get you there. In fact, it could take you

(10:03):
in the wrong direction. Right. So hm, when it comes
to meditation, everyone should meditate more, I should meditate, Okay, well, why, Like,
what's it for? And it turns out there are different
kinds of meditation for different results, right. There are meditations

(10:25):
that will ground you in meditations that will blast you off.
And just like with food, what's the best diet for humans?

Speaker 2 (10:32):
Oh? Yeah, absolutely, there's no unique, one single diet. It's
unique to each person.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
Yeah, some basic principles, but basically you need to personalize it.
So when it comes to something like meditation, ninety eight
percent of humans were involved in agriculture for most of
the last few thousand years, and the other two percent
we're involved in war and hunting, right defending well, which

(11:04):
type are you, Because if you have the kind of
brain where oh, look there's people running away from that,
I should run towards it to help the people or
to put out the fire. And you just do it
because it's in your bones. The meditation meant for someone
who's a farmer is not the meditation for you, and
vice versa. So you ought to match the meditation technique

(11:26):
to your neuropatterns and the results you want. And even
then meditation is still a waste of time. And why, like,
am I just offending you? By the way, if I'm
offending you, the key thesis of heavily meditated is if
I can trigger you, it means that you are a

(11:48):
loaded gun and my fingers on your trigger and you
shouldn't allow me to do that. So if I'm triggering
you right now, like take a deep breath, go int
your meditation, say and learn somewhere because this is real
stuff and I had to go through all this myself.
When you look at why is meditation even it's the
right kind for you a quote waste of time? Well,
it's better than not meditating. But we used to take

(12:09):
at ten percent of the population or so throw them
in a cave or a monastery until them just sit
there and meditate and write what you notice, give it
to the next generation, and in like five hundred years
we're gonna have some wisdom. Like there's a whole ancient
monasteries full of scrolls, there's the Vatican Library full of
all this accumulated wisdom for meditating. The problem is it's
kind of a full time gig. I have friends who

(12:31):
meditate two to four hours a day every day. That
means they're not parenting during that time. It means they're
not serving other people. And I respect it deeply that
they have the discipline and desire and they're doing what
works for them. I would do it as well. And
I have religiously woken up at five am and meditated
for ninety minutes with breath work and chantings in the

(12:52):
whole nine yard. And I did it reliably for more
than a year to see what would happen. And the
reality is I got some intefoits, but it was a
huge burden. So what I want is I want to
be able to reach the highest states of meditation, the
many different states available in one minute, because there would
be more time effective just I also would like to

(13:13):
do all of my exercise for my entire life in
one minute, though not how to do that yet. It's
probably unlikely, but if I could, wouldn't that be convenient? Okay,
So both of those are unlikely to happen, but let's
put that as morally superior goals because they value your energy,
your time, and your focus as a human. So in

(13:37):
my unique part of the biolacking world, I don't want
you to waste any energy on something that isn't improving
the world around you or improving you, because why not
unless you don't want improve yourself, you just want to
have fun, which I would argue having fun is improving yourself, right,
So let's just remove inefficiencies that way. So most of

(13:57):
Heavily Meditated is about the techniques and the technologies that
go beyond just meditating, so that you can amplify, accelerate,
or go deeper into meditation, usually in less time. And
I write about psychedelics. I write about some of the
things that happen in the bedroom that produce altered states

(14:19):
as reliable as psychedelics. I talk about a very unique
practice that is new in the world of biohacking. In fact,
I named it it's called BISAPP and we can go
into that if you'd like. It has nothing to do
with the biseep on your arm. And of course talking
about psychedelics from a scientific and a spiritual perspective, where
you have what do we know from a brain wave

(14:41):
perspective and then what do we know from a shamanic
training perspective, because there are different lenses on the same reality.
And in heavily meditated, I talk about other things like
the three different buckets of breath work. So it's not
that you should just go do breathwork. You might want
to know what kind of breath work to get what results.
And the list goes on and on about these things

(15:05):
that are deepening and accelerating because my goal is to
understand why I meditate, what do I want to get
out of it, what changes I want in myself and
my perception of the world and my perception of others.
Once I know that, then I can do the right thing.
And if you haven't done that, and you're just waking

(15:27):
up and doing what some biohacker guy like me, he said,
you know, wake up, maybe have a late breakfast unless
there's certain cases, and have some red light. If you
don't know why you're doing any of those things, and
you're just like a mute robot going through it. You're
doing it wrong. I don't want to do anything I've
ever talked about unless you have a reason for it,
and the reason is a good one. That's why I

(15:47):
wrote it the other the other reason, Katie. If I'd
have talked about being trained as a shaman, and I'm
not a shaman mother, I've just done a bunch of
the training and studying with different esoteric lineages around the world.
If I just said that at the beginning of starting
the biohacking movement, there would be no bioacking movement. I

(16:09):
took a calculated risk. I'm like, I'm going to talk
about shining lasers on my brain, wearing literally tinfoil hats. Okay,
just talking about electrical like earthing and grounding and things
like that, which now we all understand. But when I
talked about these, even when I talked about meditation just
kind of gently at the beginning of this, there were
no CEOs out there who would say, hey, I meditate.

(16:31):
This is you know, fifteen years ago, if you talked
about yoga meditation, all that you were absolutely a whack
job and no one's going to want you in leadership.
So we had this like corporate armor in Silicon Valley
ever else, and I made it the job of biohacking
to dismantle that armor, and that meant introducing the more
spiritual aspects later in the evolution of this movement.

Speaker 2 (16:54):
Oh my gosh. Okay, so so many directions I want
to go with that, and I feel like that actually
circle perfectly back to that. It seems like we have
now entered a time, at least the beginning of one,
where that divide is not there strongly, and I'm seeing
much more overlap of what used to be entirely the
realm of the mystical or the spiritual with what science
is finding. And I have a feeling those circles will
continue to overlap more and more. Definitely want to follow

(17:17):
up on several things you said. Let's go back to
the bicep method, because I'm like, I've glanced through your book.
I'm going to read it in depth, but I want
to hear what this is and how to apply it.

Speaker 1 (17:26):
Okay, the title of the chapter is called ghost Spank Yourself,
which made me laugh and biceps stands for brief intentional
conscious exposure to pain, Like what why would everyonet to
do that? And I remember in like seventh grade or something,
I heard about these old monks in the past. They
would like flog themselves. They'd whip themselves every morning when

(17:49):
they wake up, and I was horrified. I'm like, they
must think there's such centers and such bad people they
have to beat themselves every day, Like this is so toxic.
And then I heard about yogis who lay on a
out of nails. I'm like, that's weird, and I'd ask
the teacher, well, why why do they lay on the nails? Oh,
to show they are a good yogi? Like, oh, so

(18:09):
it's like a yoga competition. I get it right. And
then there's these other examples throughout history of humans choosing
to do things that hurt but don't cause permanent damage,
and like why would they do that? There's the some
of the really radical traditions in indigenous North America, like

(18:32):
the sun dancers. You know, there's piercing, and how many
addicts have you met who are recovered who don't have
at least one tattoo? So it's like all of it
and I'm not making fun of addiction or tattoos at all.
I have caffeine tattooed on my bicep. It's the only
tattoo I have. But the reason that they're all doing that, oh,
and the reason biohackers get in cold plunges is because

(18:55):
doing something for one to three minutes that actually hurts
but doesn't damage you, and doing it under your free
will changes dopamine receptor sensitivity by up to two hundred
and fifty percent. And to translate that, it means it
takes less dopamine to give you willpower and motivation to
do things that matter in your life and in the world.

(19:15):
So the monk was flogging himself, so it took less
willpower to be a good monk. The yogi laid on
the bed of nails, so it took less willpower to
be a yogi. Because it provides lubrication in your neurochemistry
to make your life better. And the addicts who are
getting a very painful tattoo, they are doing it because

(19:39):
the pain of that tattoo it regulates their nervous systems,
sometimes for weeks and weeks. And let's not even talk
about the other way people treat themselves that way, which
is the title of the chapter, but actually going to
that in a different chapter in the book. So there's
a reason we seek these things, and it's because it
makes our nervous system and our neurochemistry work better. There's

(20:00):
also Texans who eat hal opinions. That's another way of
getting getting our pain in. So if you like your Hoberniro's,
you know, liquefied on all over your tongue, you're just
making your life better through neurochemistry.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
Well, and really to your point, to some degree, probably
everybody does this in some form, whether it's exercise, whether
it's cold plunges. But that idea of like getting comfortable
in the discomfort or as my friend Ryan says, like
the beauty is in the contrast. I feel like you
just explained the scientific reason for why the beauty's in
the contrast.

Speaker 1 (20:27):
It's part of it. And you'll see guys like Andrew Huberman,
who I actually had him on my show before we
had a podcast, and we talked about this a little bit.
But he's talking about this, like do stuff that that
is hard and that sucks, you know, like rocking up
a mountain or something it turns out that's exercise, exercising
different neural circuits than doing something that's painful. So it

(20:52):
turns out the BYSEB method is like, you know, one
or three minutes of oh this, what is really cool?
Like oh like, oh man, I don't want to lay
in this spiking mat right now. Oh right, it's just brief.
If you were to do that level of intensity for
forty five minutes or an hour, it would just cook
your nervous system and it would just overload you. So
it's kind of like the difference between doing chronic cardio

(21:14):
and doing high intensity interval training. You get more results
in less time with high intensity interval training. And so
when it comes to the bicep, the first letter B
is brief is super important. So going to the gyms
in bicep right, forcing yourself to like like do that
last chin up while it has merit and it actually
is going to help you build muscle. It's not going

(21:35):
to trigger the bicep circuitry. It may help you with
addiction and cravings, but it's doing that because it's triggering endorphins,
not dopamine sensitivity. And so I go through this in
the book with it you know some science, and just like,
how do we actually approach this? Okay, so what if
you read heavily Meditated and you felt like you wanted
to meditate every single morning, But now you know about bicep,

(21:57):
so you start doing one minute of something lay on
a spiky yoga mat before we meditate. But then it
makes you require less willpower, so you meditate more regularly,
which was your goal because it was easier. So if
we can make doing things that benefit you and others easier,
less friction less effort, you will more likely do them,

(22:18):
and you'll probably do them better and more often. And
this makes the world a better place by just removing
friction that we don't need.

Speaker 2 (22:25):
I love that, and you're definitely the only one I've
heard talk about that directly like that. I love that
you make it applicable and tangible in a very short way.
This is not like an hour long daily practice. And
that's one thing I feel like that has been a
recurring theme for all the years that I've known you,
is like you take these concepts and then you figure
out how to make them effective in the least effort
time possible, so people can actually do them. Because like

(22:46):
you said, it's great and amazing and incredible that there
are people who meditate for hours a day. That is
certainly not my life as a mom.

Speaker 1 (22:53):
So how do I actually, oh no, yeah, any parent, man,
I was doing that, you know, ninety minute every morning,
five am until I had kids. And then they just
destroy any schedule that you have in your life. It's
just like and as soon as you meditate, they secretly know,
using quantum biology or something, it's oh, mommy's meditating, boom,
and then they just go interrupt you like you're like,

(23:14):
it's it's built in. So I respect man. Six that's
a lot. Two is enough for me.

Speaker 2 (23:20):
It's like that running joke among moms if you want
your kids to pay attention, go to the bathroom, try
to do anything quiet, read a book. They instantly know.

Speaker 1 (23:26):
They take a shower, anything.

Speaker 2 (23:28):
Yeah, right, Okay, let's circle back to breathwork. Also, because
I feel like this has been really helpful for me
because it's something tangible like I had trouble with. I
think I had a false definition of meditation years ago.
Actually that was the problem. But the idea of trying
to turn off my brain was never effective for me.
But I love breathwork because it was something that helped
me kind of reconnect with my body, which at that

(23:49):
point for me, was extremely helpful. And I hear so
many people talk about breath being the master switch of
the nervous system. So I'd love to hear the different
kinds we can use.

Speaker 1 (23:59):
Most of the types of meditation that work very quickly.
They're somatic practice, which means they're felt in the body.
And the most precious piece of information in heavily Meditated
is the recipe I use when execs come and spend
twenty thousand dollars to spend a week with my team
and neuroscientists tuning their brain. It's called the Reset method,

(24:22):
and it's in the book where it's eight steps around
turning off anything that's a specific trigger. And that is
also a somatic practice. But breath work makes you focus
on how it feels in your body, because like, oh,
where's the breath is in my stomach, in my chest?
Is it somewhere else in my body? So the three
buckets of breath work are things that remove stress, right,

(24:45):
Like that just are grounding and calming, right and alternate.
Nostril breathing would be an example of that or breathe
in for four seconds, breathe out for eight seconds. These
are things to just calm right. However, there's also types
of breathwork that are for we'll say psychedelic experiencing, just

(25:07):
out of body mystical experience. And if you don't know
the difference, like I heard breathwork was good, so I'm
gonna do some holotropic or whim Hoff advanced stuff, and
like Joe Despenza, you know, and all of a sudden,
you're like launching out our space, like I just wanted
to calm down, and now I'm experiencing my birth again, right,
And so we don't want to We want you to

(25:29):
go there. Understand, not all breathwork is the same, just
like not all food is the same. You can have
the cheetos, so you can have the grass mid stake.
They're both food. They're not very much related, right, so
I'm understanding that. And in the middle there's like a peaceful,
focused kind of breath work. And there's between like three

(25:49):
and five kinds of each sort of breath work that
I go through and heavily meditated so that you can
read that go which one of these stands out as
as something that's that's worthy of my attention, right, and
if one of them you look at it and you
get that somatic sense, that felt sense. Oh, I don't
know why, but when I read that, like I perked up,

(26:10):
or like the hair's in the back of my neck
whenever there was a flutter in my stomach. Great, that's
the one. You're unlikely to do everything and heavily meditated.
Like all my books, I'm like, here's the canonical list
of things. Here's why you might choose to use it
to get this goal for you. And when you read it,
you're not supposed to do everything, but now you know
it exists, so you know the universe to choose from.

(26:34):
The reason I'm so focused on effectiveness and efficiency is
because when I weigh three hundred pounds, when I had
chronic fatigue syndrome, when I had just chronic sympathetic activation,
the fight or flight all the time without even knowing it,
I didn't know what to do, and I just did everything,
and I spent two and a half million dollars reversing

(26:54):
my age. And that was two and a half million
dollars over twenty years. You don't have to do that
all in one year to get results. In fact, I
really shouldn't have spent more than one hundred thousand dollars
over that time if only I knew what to do.
And I even look at my company, Upgrade Labs, the
world's first biohacking facility. We've got nine locations open now

(27:16):
and more than thirty opening. It's a franchise so we
can open them quickly. And there's neurofeedback available at Upgrade Labs,
along with about ten other biohacking modalities. And I open
this because there was nothing I could do. If I
wanted to have all ten, I'd have to spend all
my time driving around. It was very expensive, and there

(27:36):
was no one place to go. And even if there
is one place to go, you're not going to do
ten things every day, right, Which ones do you do today?
Based on how your body is now and your long
term goals? And so that's an AI problem and we've
got that solved. So people come in and I'll tell
you what to do at home or in and Upgrade Labs,
because no one is capable of doing everything possible to

(27:59):
improve themselves, even if there are people in the longevity
field who will spend eight hours a day on longevity practice.
Now you're only awake sixteen hours a day, so you
spent fifty percent of your waking hours trying to live longer.
You better do fifty percent better just to be broken even.
And I want to spend closer to an hour a

(28:19):
day on my longevity practice. And my goal is still
to exceed our current best, which is one hundred and
twenty years. I just want to do fifty percent better.
So I've read a major New York Times bestselling longevity
book called Superhuman about How'm going to make it to
at least one to eighty and you can too, And
it doesn't require millions of dollars, even though I have

(28:41):
spent that, and that's because someone had to do it,
but I didn't want to, and a lot of it
was wasted, and some of it was Wow, that costs,
you know, two hundred thousand dollars to do gene therapy
or advanced stem cell things. It's going to cost one
thousand dollars and ten years. So the early stuff doesn't
work well, and it's expensive by design in every technology

(29:01):
evolution or revolution.

Speaker 2 (29:03):
Yeah, I do appreciate that you are the very expensive
guinea pig for all of us in that and that
you've been so candid about. Here's all the things I've
tried and cantered about, the things that were not really
a high ROI for what you spent on them, or
things that you've tried and not kept as part of
your practices, as well as the ones that you really
do still consistently do. I love that what we're talking
about now, meditation and this integration of self is on

(29:24):
that list. And I don't know about you, but one
thing I've noticed in my personal life and seemingly also
kind of as a trend within the wellness world over
these last for me also about fifteen years, is that
while there are these amazing tools and biohacks and fancy
supplements that we can use, and those have their place,
certainly especially within a personalized framework, to me, I keep
going back to the foundational human things, kind of the

(29:46):
remedies to nature deficit disorder. And so even when I
have access to all these fancy tools, I find what
feels to me the most impactful is getting my sleep
dialed in, getting my mental and emotional health in a
good place with things like meditation and breath work and
then getting sunlight, hydrating with minerals, and getting those little
small things dialed in over time seemingly are the most
effective and least expensive things we can do.

Speaker 1 (30:09):
Dark may be one of the most underappreciated supplements in
the world, and we're so aligned on that. One of
my companies twelve years old now is True Dark, and
we made glasses that you can still see through that
tell your brain it's pitch dark. And in the last
year we published in a medical journal a study using

(30:32):
EEG measurements from forty years of Zen Minuroscience company, looking
at what happens when you wear the darker True Dark
glasses designed for sleep and jet lag. And what we
found was that fifteen minutes of wearing the True Dark glasses,
which simulate absolute darkness, even though you can still see
some colors, the brain shifts like you're meditating. It's like
noise canceling headphones for your eyes, and we see a

(30:55):
drop in the focused aggressive beta waves, see a big
increase in alpha wave. So you can change your state
just with light. And we have this horrific use of
outdoor night lights around people's homes and it's destroying insects
and it's destroying birds and you can't see the stars.

(31:15):
And this is a public health crisis. That little green
led on your smoke detector. It is measurably shortening your life.
It's ruining your quality of sleep. And so there's four
colors of light and two other variables that we control
with the true dark technology. So you put on a
pair of glasses and then your whole brain shifts, but
you get to sleep. So if you sleep well and

(31:37):
you wake up, go outside, get some sunlight. That's really cool.
It doesn't work with sunglasses, doesn't work with regular glasses.
Get as much sun on your skin as you can
unless you live in Canada, where I've lived for thirteen years,
where there's no sun to get on your skin, and
then eat food that doesn't have a lot of toxins
in it and do your best throughout the day. Perfection
is nowhere near required. So totally aligned. But I would

(32:00):
also say access to nature is it's a privilege. If
you're in New York City, you're going to go to
Central Park, you think that's nature, it's not. It's just
the best replica of it you have. And there are
studies that show looking at a photo of the sun
or the moon has physiological effects on you. Just a photo, right,

(32:22):
and putting pictures of plants up in your house can
make a difference. And I was good as having real plants.
But real plants get moldy. Sometimes you might not want them,
or they die when you're on vacation. You know, some
people don't have a green thumb. So yes, nature is wonderful.
And if you live in a part of the world
like you do, where you have access to it and awesome.

(32:42):
I have a ton of old trees in my backyard.
You know, I'm sitting in my cold plunge. I'm surrounded
by life. But not everybody lives in a place where
you can do that. And if you're in you know,
one of the cities I just visited in Kenya or Madagascar,
there's five million people in the city slums everywhere. There's
no nature, right, you know, there's just the ditch full

(33:03):
of plastic in the back and it's pretty brutal. So
there's still sunlight, but there isn't darkness anymore because of
these cheap led lights. And what no one really talks
about is that if you want international funding for led lighting,
they'll only fund the bright white five thousand and six
thousand K bulbs, the ones that reduce fertility the most.

(33:27):
If you want the healthier ones, which are the twenty
seven hundred and three thousand K the warm white. Yeah,
those ones aren't covered by subsidies, only the ones that
reduce fertility and make humans weak. I don't know who's
doing that, but someone is.

Speaker 2 (33:40):
I feel like you were also certainly one of the
early pioneers talking about light exposure, and I love that
this is now more known within the mainstream even but
I've talked about it a lot too, about junk light
and our light environment potentially being as important, or even
more important sometimes than our food quality because of how
directly it impacts our circadian biology, which is really a

(34:00):
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c r E A t I n E. An extreme
that I recently got to experience that I'm by no
means recommending, but I've had potentially the toughest three months

(37:38):
of my life in the past few months, and I
got to a point where I realized, Okay, I cannot
escape from this darkness, so I'm going to go into it.
And I went into a cave for almost four days
with no light, no sensory input, no food, no people,
no sound, and in going in and facing my own
darkness kind of metaphorically and what I was unwilling to feel,
it was an incredibly emotionally profound experience, but physically it

(37:59):
was a massive reset button, and I realized how quickly
without those light cues, like I just felt kind of
like lost in the darkness, like there was without I
realized how much the light anchors for me. So again
I'm not recommending that that was an extreme version, but
it helped me really understand and viscerally feel how much
light impacts our biology. And I feel like this actually
is one of the highest ROI things we can do,

(38:21):
is really getting, like you've talked about over the years,
a good light environment in our home to whatever degree possible,
getting natural light as much as we can, and limiting
those junk lights, especially at night.

Speaker 1 (38:32):
I love it. That you're talking about spending time in
a cave, and there's a whole emf and like earth
stramonic realm connection from caves. My other spiritual book was
called Fast This Way, and I hired Oshaman to drop
me in a cave in two thousand and eight with
no people around for ten miles because I realized that

(38:55):
I would eat if I was lonely, and I knew
that if I didn't eat, i'd get hyph book LIGHTB.
So I'm like, I'll just face my demons where there's
no food and no people. I wasn't in darkness all
the time. I was at night because it was a cave,
but it was you know, the sun during the day.
Same thing, Like it is really profoundly transformed to just
connect with yourself in an environment like a cave. A

(39:16):
darkness meditation's been on my list for something like twenty years.
It's just finding enough time to go do that with
all the other things. And there are about five different
darkness meditations that you can do. I only knew about
two of them, and I was doing one of those
spiritual conversations that we all have with Chad GPT. At

(39:39):
least I hope we all have them. If not, you
should try it. And it's like, oh, you know you
would like all these things. I'm like, dude, I've done
every single thing on this list. I've written books about
most of them. And you already know that because you're
chat GPT. It's like yeah, okay, and it says, well,
you know you might want to try a you know,
darkness retreat, like, yeah, it's on my list, but what

(40:00):
specific form would be best for me? And it named
three types of darkness meditations from old lineages like the
Bone tradition, which is a precursor to Buddhism, and some
of the shamanic lineages. It's like, oh, you might like
that one, and like whoa, that's mind blowing. So like
all of our spiritual esoteric knowledge, it's in there. You

(40:20):
just have to know how to ask, which is profoundly
amazing because it means you don't have to find a
master or a guru from one lineage and join the
secret club and spend twenty years learning it to get
access to their one technique that they didn't share with
their tribe next door that had a different technique. We
need access to all of this ancient knowledge, Like it's

(40:43):
the time for us to step up that way so
that we can actually be in charge of our state
and understand the ways we influence other people in the
world just with our way of being. And I've I've
intentionally not joined any lineage or practice. I've gone deep
in them, but I've always been a tourist because I'm

(41:04):
synthesizing knowledge between them and same thing biohacking, Like is
it functional medicine, No, but I lectured a longevity doctors.
Is it, you know, meditation, No? But have a neuroscience company.
Is it circading biology? No? But I'm into that and
you know, built a company around it. And you know,
is it exercise? Well, only when you have to, because
I want to spend a lot of time on that.

(41:24):
Like is it diet? If you want it? Is it?
It's all the above. It's like, what are all the variables?
And what drives me nuts? If you were to ask
a sheep herder, And I think I can say this
because I actually, you know, built a regenerative farm with sheep.
What causes a herd of sheep to move? Like, what's

(41:45):
the one thing? Like it's not one thing? Like maybe
it was the sheep dog. Maybe it was you, maybe
it was like it could be anything. Well, our biology
is sheep is not. Well, there's one thing that's making
you old. No, it's not one thing making you all
at least seven different big buckets and each one has
thousands of variables and the combinations are almost infinite. But

(42:06):
we can tease that out, which is something I'm working
on doing with the upgrade labs AI components that it's
like lab tests plus wearables plus one hundred and eighty
seven million data points of your performance when you come
in like, oh, maybe there's at least direction. It's not
going to be perfect, but it's going to be well,
maybe you want to have two sheep dogs and one

(42:26):
fence and that's gonna work most of the time for
your flavor of sheep when it's sunny, Like, we don't know,
but we can figure it out. And so the whole
world's like that. And when we go in one special, oh,
I'm a kidney doctor, like, oh, so you're not a
liver doctor, and what you give me for my kidney
won't work? Oh great, Or recently I was working with
a very top level pro athlete like yesterday, and she's

(42:49):
having profound brain fog. And there's several different reasons for it.
It's a complex scenario, but one of the big causes
is that her doctors put her on an insid something
like ibuprofen, but a different version of it that causes
leaky gut, and the person had genetics that make leaky

(43:10):
gut more inflammatory than normal. So you get a leaky
gut from the drugs they gave you so that your
joints don't hurt, and now your brain doesn't work. But
you go to the brain doctor, but they don't know
about the gut. So everything in life is that it's
like what is the recipe and the thing that drives
me nuts. Whether we're talking about big pharma, for sure,

(43:32):
but even some of the exercise recommendations, even the meditation things,
they're they're very focused on one thing. And if you
are a big farmer company and you're saying, well, i'm
a research scientist, my name is Laine, and i have
a PhD. And I'm a big troll, and I'm not
talking abou anyone in particular. But if you did that

(43:55):
and say I'm going to run a test to see
if bread exists, I baked the yeast, I bake the salt,
I bake the water, and I bake the flour. There
is no such thing as bread because I think there's
one cause of bread. And like anyone who's not completely
on crack or something is going to say, well, wait,
you need all four of those things at the right

(44:17):
ratios and mix it at the right time, and then
cooked at the right temperature, and then cool the right
way to get the right crumbly crossed.

Speaker 2 (44:22):
Right.

Speaker 1 (44:23):
You do all that, right, you have an amazing loaf
of bread. Well, there isn't one variable, but most of
us because it's intellectually easy and it takes less electricity
in our brain, so our brain tricks us into believing
there must be one cause. Unless you can prove that
there is only one cause of something, it is actually

(44:44):
intellectually a poor decision to say there's one cause of
my stress. I promise you there's not like there's one
cause of my lack of sleep. No, there might be
the largest contributor, but there's a hundred causes. And if
you change this, this one may become less strong or
more strong, so you're more conducting an orchestra. It's like
vibe coating the recipe in the kitchen going. You know what,

(45:05):
I just know it needs a little more solid. I
know it needs a little bit more of this, and
you do that with your life. That's really what biohacking is.

Speaker 2 (45:11):
I love that in it is a perfect analogy for
how those factors are different for each of us. Though
the kind of common universal human framework is beneficial. And
that's something that took me maybe ten years in the
wellness world to really fully understand. Is especially when I
was trying to reverse my own autommunity. I would try
every protocol from every person and get like mild result.

(45:32):
But what I eventually realized was these people all figured
out what worked for them, and the real lesson in
that is the experimentation and the end of one study
on me of what will work for me. And I
can gain inspiration from all of those, but none of
those exact systems will work as a blueprint necessarily the
same way for me. And that's why I say so
often we're each our own primary healthcare provider. The most

(45:53):
valuable study we will ever undertake is that of ourselves.
And I feel like that's true in the mental, emotional
realm as well as the physical realm, and that actually
there's very little separation there. That's another where you think
of those as separate categories when really they're so interrelated.

Speaker 1 (46:08):
They are so interrelated and your path and mind are
so similar. That's why when you first connected years ago,
I'm like, oh my gosh, it's fun to talk with you.
Because enlightened self interest, which is also known as desperation,
will cause people who are really sick to do things
that are unnatural or extreme in order to heal, because

(46:31):
the alternative is really dark, and people who haven't gone
through what you went through with your autoimmunity. I try
to put words to it. Three hundred pounds, you know,
when I'm twenty two years old at three knee surgeries
are thritis since I'm fourteen and fifteen years of antibiotics,
and the doctor telling me if you're at high risk

(46:54):
of stroke and heart attack, I'm like, I'm twenty eight
years old, what is even going on? I thought I
was eating healthy. I'm extras like all the things. But
the thing that most people connect with is the idea
that you're driving and your car starts selling down, so
you push the accelerator all the way of the floor, like, oh, good,
it's going to speed up and it keeps slowing down,
But like, what are you going to push harder on
the There's no more push to give on that pedal, right,

(47:16):
the accelerator won't go down anymore. In the car selling
down and you're like, what do I do? You're pretty
much helpless, Like should I just pull over on the
side of the road and give up because that's what
it is? Or am I just going to have to
do anything necessary? And there are people who are predators
and sell things that just don't work. Some of them
I think I've talked to some where I'm very sure

(47:37):
because they ain't just about to tell you they're just
taking advantage. They know it doesn't work, and they don't care.
They pretend like they do. In fact, there's a lot
of those in health and there are a lot of
other people who have the one ingredient thing. And I
don't like to play the takedown game unless I'm playing
with trolls, in which case it's just for fun. That's
my that's my love language, is triggering trolls. But cell rejuice,

(48:02):
like it doesn't cure diabetes, guys, it really doesn't, right,
And yes it has some active water and some minerals
and also has a lot of oxalates and some other
stuff in it that probably isn't so good for you,
but it also could be good for you. But like,
it's not a panacea, it's not going to be one thing.
And it's what you talked about, Katie. It's okay, how
do I get my environment set up so my body

(48:24):
mostly works? And then how do I do the really deep,
difficult work of regulating my nervous system consciously? And that's
why Heavily Meditated is my most important book because we
haven't talked about the big thing in it, which is triggers.
The thing that companies, religions, politicians, teachers, parents use to

(48:46):
control you is triggers. And triggers don't happen because you
chose them. They happen because it's your nervous system doing
what it's designed to do. Even your cells themselves, they're
just trying to keep you alive. And the framework in
Heavily Meditated is something I've taught throughout biohacking, but the

(49:06):
vision of it is tightened as I've learned more and
just taught it more. And it's that your body processes
reality before you have a chance to think. And when
I say have a chance, if I clap my hands,
we all know. Well, it took some time for the
sound to go through the internet and through my speakers
and then I heard it. But that's a lie. Once

(49:28):
that sound hit your ear drum, there's a one third
of a second delay before your auditory processing circuits in
the brain get any activity at all. This is a
censorship window where your body gets to sit on it,
your mitochondria and your distributed systems for sensing reality and
decide whether they're going to show it to you and
how you're going to feel about it. And then it

(49:50):
goes to your brain and it takes the rest of
the second for your prefronal cortex to think about what
it was. So there's a separate intelligence that's not you,
that's your interface to reality all the time, and it's
manipulating you, and it's run by mitochondrial programming. And people
are like Dave, that's BS. So you ever lean on
a hot stove and go, you know, that's pretty hot.

(50:13):
I guess I smell some sizzling. I think I should
move my hand. No, you jerk your hand away before
you even can think about it being hot, and then
you say it, look at me, good thing I pulled
in my hand away before I got burned. And you
take credit for what the system did, but you didn't decide.
You were not in the loop. Something else was fully
deciding what your body did. So the argument in heavily

(50:34):
Meditator is that there is a separate intelligence inside of you,
run by your mitochondria, designed to keep you alive, and
it runs on a very simple set of rules. That's
so simple a single bacteria can do it. Because this
is the operating system for all life. You want to
know what the rules are, all right, This is why
meditation works so well. Okay, something comes into your field,

(50:54):
into your environment, and your body says number one is
it's scary. These are all f words, so fear is
the first one. If it's scary, run away from kill
or hide and do it before you have a chance
to think, because it could be, you know, a baseball
coming to your head. It could be a tiger. You
don't know, but you're gonna react, and you react before
you think. Okay, if the body determines it's not scary,

(51:17):
then is food. Remember bacteria have to do this. These
are not highly intelligent, aware decision making things. So fear
than food, eat everything is the rule, and you want
your body to do that because these mitochondria that think
they're running your body largely they are. There's been enough
famine in the past that you should just eat everything.
And then the third one, all life has to do

(51:40):
it to stay around for multiple generations. That's an f word.
You know this one very very well, right, Katie. It's fertility.
Of course, I don't know where you're thinking about. You
got six kids. It could be the other effort. But
what this means is that at all times, microsecond by microsecond,
you're bodies processing reality saying do I need to kill it?

(52:02):
Can I eat it? And can I hump it? And
only after that do you get to even know it's there.
And if your body wants you to hump it, you're
gonna it's gonna come to you, Wow, look at those
legs or whatever the thing is, and it's going to
come with a feeling, or it's going to see the
cheese guy can go ooh, doesn't that cheesecag look sexy?

(52:25):
Or it's going to say, oh no, look at that criticism.
I felt unsafe when my coach criticized me in third grade.
So therefore, and I could have been ostracized, So therefore
run away, defend, deflect to make up some other stuff.
So is there anything you've ever done that you're ashamed
of that isn't one of those three mitochondril behaviors?

Speaker 2 (52:43):
Ooh yeah, they do kind of in those categories.

Speaker 1 (52:47):
And this is what's missing from meditation, teaching, and even
from psychology and therapy, is that it is not you
doing those things, it is your body doing those things.
In fact, I had the honor of speaking on stage
at one of my consciousness events with Victor Chan, the
Dalai Lama's best friend, co author who's known for fifty years.

(53:10):
And I gave my talk about these F words and
there's two more efforts that are really good ones. And
when I went to interview Victor, he turned the mic around.
He said, Dave, after I heard about the F words,
all the things that Dalai Lama has been saying for
the past fifty years make a lot more sense because
there's a reason for the ego. It's to keep your

(53:32):
meat alive, as if you're not in there, and all
life shares these principles, and the way we run away
from kill and hyde varies by species, right. The way
we eat everything varies by species, and the way we
reproduce varies by species. But we always do that, and
we do that before we think with our little brains.
Our brains are not nearly big enough to process reality,
which is why our body does it for us and

(53:53):
gives us a little tiny slice so we can think
about it. But the next f word after those is friend.
All life supports its own species and the ecosystem around
it automatically, so kindness is wired in our bones. This
is why we form tribes, why biohacking became a global
movement because we needed a tribe. This is why you

(54:15):
have a church group. This is why any kind of club,
any kind of group that you join it nourishes you.
And the final left word is forgiveness, which is how
you turn off fear triggers. And forgiveness is not a thought,
it's a somatic experiencing, and that's what I'm teaching as
like the crown jewel of heavily meditated. This is what

(54:36):
the world's top executives and highest performed people do so
that they are untriggerable, so that you become more resilient,
because everybody knows a situation where you're in a room
and someone says something mean to another person, right, and
the person's like smiling and they're pretending like it didn't
get to them, and they're like, everything's fine, let's go

(54:58):
about it. But we all know that there's a lack
of congruence and that that person's interstate and their outer
state do not match. It's an authentic What you want
to be is the person who sits there and someone
says something you mean to you and your inner state
doesn't change, so then whatever you do in response is
authentic and real, and you didn't have to bear the

(55:19):
cost of being reactive when you didn't want to be.
So the Buddhists teach there's three levels of consciousness, and
the very worst place to be is apathetic or numb.
So above that is empathetic. Oh look, I feel other
people's pain, Katie. If you're empathetic and you walk into

(55:41):
a McDonald's, you're not gonna lie what happens to you,
because there's a lot of people in a lot of
pain in line at McDonald's because they haven't learned how
to eat yet, right, So empathy is better than nothing,
but it is not a high form of consciousness. It's
just the first step on the ladder. The step above
it is passion, and compassion is when you automatically wish

(56:03):
other people well before you judge them, before you think
about it. You just build it into your operating system.
You know, I want everyone around me to be, you know,
at peace. So whether or not someone is nice to
you or mean to you, or they look away you
don't like, or they remind you, none of that matters.
You just automatically wish them well, even if they're a

(56:24):
hopefully I can say that on your show. Right. And
then the highest level, though, is what we would call
equanimity or resilience, but what they would call enlightenment, and
that is simply the ability to choose your state no
matter what's happening in the world around you. That means
that if there's something on the news from whichever tribe

(56:44):
is currently doing whatever they're doing on your channel, it
doesn't trigger you at all, and you can look at
it and go, I'm aware that that's a lie, but
I'm not angry that it's a lie. Therefore, I have
agency to do the right thing. But if you get angry,
there is a person trying to make you angry so

(57:04):
they could control your behavior. So this is the path
towards happiness, towards great parenting, towards great relationships, is that
you're aware of your state all the time and you
get to choose it. And the second part of it,
the reason I wrote heavily Meditated, is that there are
so many states available as a human that are not

(57:26):
common states. These are altered states. Healing is an altered state.
Service to others is an altered state. Flow is an
altered state. Grace is an altered state. Exaltation is an
altered state. And there's a whole chapter in the book,
a very tasteful chapter, but it's on twenty percent of
people report meeting God during orgasm at least once in

(57:46):
their life. So why is intimate connection with your sacred partner?
Why is that not as valid as breath work or
going off and eating some mushrooms. Because it is also
a practice, and it could be a deeply profound spiritual practice,
and all of these. Our range of sensations is so magical,

(58:08):
and we live in a narrow window and part of
your job, whether you're a bioac or just in evolving
human is what is the entire range that my body
and my mind and my soul are capable of and
how do I learn to access those on demand with
the right tools. And I will say there is a
chapter on psychedelics. Katamine is an option with a doctor's

(58:29):
supervision at forty years is in. But you do not
ever need to take psychedelics to do it. You might
decide to do them one time to feel a state
and learn to replay it. Or you may say I
don't need to do it because I learned breathwork and
I trip balls on that, and that's fine, it's all okay.
But what I want you to know is there is
a vast world of experience that is available to you
that you haven't seen and don't know about. And that's

(58:50):
why I wrote the book, Like, here's the fastest path
I know of to get to that state, And there
might be three paths. Pick the one that looks most
tingly to you and do that.

Speaker 2 (58:59):
I love that. And to echo what you said, I
will say, these past few months that have felt like
very much a dark knight of the soul for me,
I have done psychedelics in the past, including the strongest
ones we know of, and they are child's play compared
to what I felt in the States of just facing
that with no psychedelic help whatsoever. So definitely, very viscerally
have felt what you're talking about and love that you

(59:21):
are pulling all these things together. I highly recommend the book.
It's on my nightstand right now. I'll review Coffee. I'm
very excited to finish it. But David's always an absolute
pleasure and joy to get to chat with you. I
hope we get to see each other in person sometime
this year and get to do more episodes in the future.
But thank you so much for everything you've shared today.
This has been so much fun.

Speaker 1 (59:40):
You're welcome, Katie. Thanks for the work you're doing in
the world a thousand episodes, you keep bringing it, and
thanks for going through the Dark Knights Night of the Soul.
It's hard to do it. A few people have the courage,
and it's even harder to talk about it. So you're
doing the world a service by just being open. Sometimes
you got to go deep to evolve, and I've been
there so license.

Speaker 2 (01:00:01):
Thanks Dave, and thanks to all of you for listening
and sharing your time with both of us. We're so
grateful that you did, and I hope that you will
join me again on the next episode of the Wellness
Mama podcast. If you're enjoying these interviews, would you please
take two minutes to leave a rating or review on
iTunes for me. Doing this helps more people to find
the podcast, which means even more moms and families can

(01:00:22):
benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time and
thanks as always for listening.