How to Biohack the Brain to Remove Emotional Triggers | Dave Asprey - EP 739

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So since it was already there before your prefrontal cortex formed, you're going to believe it to be true until it's questioned and it'll create suffering in your life. Like this is just part of growing up. Welcome to Passion Struck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters. Each week, I sit down with changemakers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection, and impact is choosing to live like you matter. hey friends and welcome back to episode 739 of passion struck for the past few episodes we've been exploring a theme that sits at the center of the series life beyond the script what happens when the version of life you've been living the identity the role the path you thought you were supposed to follow stops fitting. Last week in my conversation with Joan London, we explored what it means to step beyond the identities that once defined us. After decades as the face of Good Morning America, Joan shared what it was like to leave that chapter behind and how life sometimes asks us to rewrite the script entirely. Then on Thursday in my conversation with Professor Leslie John, we looked at another dimension of that process. Because once you start evolving, once you begin questioning the roles you've been living, another question emerges. How much of yourself are you actually willing to reveal? Leslie's research shows how the moments we hold back, what we don't say, what we don't share, quietly shape our relationships and our sense of connection. But today, we explore another layer of this transformation. Because rewriting your life isn't only psychological, it's also biological. The clarity you're seeking, the resilience you're trying to build, the emotional regulation that helps you navigate uncertainty, all of it is influenced by something deeper, your brain, your body, your internal energy systems. And that's where today's guest comes in. My guest today is Dave Asprey, entrepreneur, author, and widely known as the founder of the biohacking movement. Over the past two decades, Dave has helped millions of people rethink how the human system works, how our biology, environment, and mindset combine to shape performance, health, and longevity. But his journey into this work began with his own struggle. In his 20s, while working in Silicon Valley, Dave was battling chronic fatigue, brain fog, inflammation, and a body that simply wasn't functioning the way it should. At one point, he weighed nearly 300 pounds and felt like his mind and body were failing him. That experience launched a decades-long quest to understand how the human system actually works and how we can optimize it from the inside out. In his newest book, Heavily Meditated, Dave explores the deeper side of that journey, not just optimizing your biology, but understanding and dissolving the emotional triggers that quietly shape how we experience life. In this conversation, we explore why emotional triggers often live in the nervous system, not just the mind. How injustice and betrayal become some of the hardest emotions for humans to process. The connection between biohacking, meditation, and emotional regulation, and how resetting your internal state can transform how you show up in life. Before we dive in, a quick ask. If this episode resonates with you, share it with someone who might benefit from hearing it. You can also watch the full conversation on YouTube. And if you haven't yet, leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify helps more people discover these conversations. Now, let's dive into my conversation with Dave Asprey. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. I am absolutely thrilled and honored today to welcome Dave Asprey to PassionStruck. Welcome, Dave. How are you today? I'm great, John. I can't tell you how long I've wanted to have you on the show and how big an honor it is to have you here. The last time we actually saw each other was at our mutual friend Jim Quick's book launch in Miami. And that was one heck of a night. It's the first time I think I've ever sat on top of a platform over a swimming pool. Right? Isn't that weird? Yeah. It was pretty awesome that he was able to capitalize on his friends who were doing that for another event. But what stood out to you most about that evening of big ideas, big names, and human potential? The human potential movement has been kind of fringe for a long time. It was a group that maybe in the 70s, there was some human potential that went up and then it fell off into this maybe personal development or meditation, maybe fragmented. But what I really noticed there is that there are so many people united around this idea of biohacking and this idea that if you want your brain to work better, you work on your body. You want your body to work better, you work on your brain. And instead of having these like separate domains, we're realizing that it's one seamless system and that you can't push one end without the other end moving. And it's this mind to body integration and the idea that the environment around you controls it. And we have a big community. There's tens of millions of biohackers working on the complete system. And it's like back when we were both computer hackers in another life, you pay attention to the hardware and the software. You can't do just one without the other because they're linked and our bodies are the same way. So I just feel like that awareness in that whole group was so high. It was really cool. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. And I'm going to just touch on that hacking because you've spent years biohacking the body from the inside out, optimizing biology, mitochondria, brain states. My work is a parallel track, but I focus on biohacking the brain from the outside in, how emotional regulation, mattering, and purpose shape how we show up in the world. And from your vantage point, how do you see the relationship between optimizing the inner biology of the brain and cultivating that outer psychological environment? And where do these two worlds meet? I don't think you can separate them. They're exactly the same world. and I say this because people know me for putting butter in coffee and talking about mitochondria and a bunch of books. I started out at the very beginning when I was obese, 300 pounds, and had really serious chronic fatigue syndrome. We didn't really know much about it back then. My career in Silicon Valley was taking off. I'm like, I feel like a zombie here. So I got into cognitive enhancement and making my brain work better. and I managed to do enough there that I could go in and figure out all the weird pathways in the body and that's part of what started the biohacking movement but the other side of it I've been hooking my brain up to computers for 25 years and traveling around the world to meet with gurus and mystics and learning different lineages and doing advanced yoga and breath work and all that stuff back when anyone who did that was insane I literally I'd put in my LinkedIn profile yoga and modafinil and people would what and then after these meetings where people would thought i was nuts but i was high enough up in my field that it didn't matter and then one or two people after the meeting be like hey so like i do that same stuff it was like an underground secret that some of us were enhancing our performance and we were using these personal development techniques in order to feel better and be happier and perform better i remember every saturday morning in very early, I would meet in Saratoga, California with a group of high-end entrepreneurs and we would all do art of living breath work together. So there's probably half the guys are Indian because it was Silicon Valley and I always worked for Indian companies, but we're all sitting there like in these weird poses going, so hum, so hum, and doing this stuff. And afterwards, my friend Provacare goes, I don't know why we do this, except when I do this every Saturday, I feel like I took a mental shower for the whole week. So if you want to be a present CEO, that makes a difference. And then about 10 years ago, I started a company called 40 Years of Zen. And we've had more than a thousand high-end CEO types come through and spend five days reprogramming their brains. And the end result is happiness, better relationships, less anxiety, less feelings of depression. And this long list of personal development parameters all get better by changing the programming in the brain. But what that experience taught me more than anything is that if I fed them right and gave them the right supplements, they can do two and a half times more intense meditation with a computer holding them honest than if they just came in with their normal diet. So if you eat right, your spiritual powers, your fulfillment powers, your ability to remain regulated, even if your board of directors is acting crazy, all that stuff, it goes through the roof. So if your cells are weak and you can't make enough energy, your willpower is lower. And It doesn't matter how much you want. It's still harder. And having had the honor of doing neurofeedback or mitochondrial enhancement with top shamans and people really who do big stuff, all of them say, wow, I never would have thought my awareness increased when my mitochondria increased. So I look at the two as going hand in hand. So half what I'm doing with upgrade labs, opening facilities around the country where people can come in and do AI longevity, there's neurofeedback so that they can change their mindset and their cellular enhancement. So I don't know how to separate the two in me anymore. Like what's wrong right now if I'm feeling anxious? Is it that I'm telling myself a story about the person in front of me? Or is it that my cells aren't working very well right now? And when they don't work well, they send an alarm signal. I don't know. I got to unpack that. It's one of the two or both. So you have pioneered this movement that's changed how millions of people around the world have thought about their bodies and brains. And I want to go into your backstory for a second, but first I wanted to share a little bit about mine because ironically they were similar. You just experienced yours earlier than mine. So I found myself following when I was the CIO at Dell at this period of time where I was way overweight. I was having debilitating brain fog. I was having emotional numbness and it just felt the worst I ever did in my entire life. And I remember thinking I had, well, almost hoping that I had some type of brain tumor because I could not understand what was going on with me. And I understand that there is a less known journey of you that before you fueled this biohacking revolution, you were in a similar spot. Can you take us back to that spot? In my mid-20s, I was actually a co-founder of a part of the first data center company. Data centers are really hot again right now, but Web 1.0 was hosted mostly in buildings that my company created, and we put in the bandwidth. with and I'm 26 years old. They allow me to attend board meetings at a $36 billion publicly traded company, but my brain was turning off and I was in constant physical pain. I was pissed off all the time and I couldn't remember anything. And I remember thinking I would fire myself. So I went to the doctor and I'd already tried working out. Actually, I did this for 18 months straight, six days a week, 90 minutes of exercise on a low-fat, low-calorie diet, and I never lost one pound. And I was just so annoyed. What am I supposed to do here? And I just gave up on medicine because the doctor told me vitamin C would kill me in Palo Alto. I was helpless. But I just said, I'm going to power through anyway. And I did. And I made $6 million. Then I lost $6 million. That sucked. And I'm going to Wharton Business School, and I'm about 30. and I'm doing this while working full-time because hey it's Silicon Valley that's what we do and I was failing out of my classes I was actually not going to graduate so I went and I read Dr. Daniel Amon's first book and he described this new way of looking at the brain so I went and I got a spec scan with one of his specialists and when I sat down the guy looked at me it's like oh tech bro wants Adderall I know this one I didn't even want Adderall I don't like Adderall I I tried it for about six weeks at a small dose in business school and it just made me feel horrible But when I came back to the guy office after he saw the scan his face was white And he said inside your brain is total chaos I don't know how you're standing here in front of me right now. You have the best camouflage I've ever seen. And I thought, oh, thank God. It's not a willpower issue. It's not a moral issue. It's not about pushing the accelerator harder. It's already to the floor. There's no pushing left. it's that I have a harder problem. I can fix a harder problem. But if I'm just dumb or weak or just don't have something that I need, then there's no hope. And that was one of the things that helped to create the biohacking movement. And years later, I'm on Dr. Heyman's board of directors, and he's become a dear friend. And I look at that moment of saying, it's not about effort. It's not about desire. It's not about technique or knowledge or intelligence. It's about, is the system working? And that was one of those things that really led me down the path of saying, I'm going to fix the system starting from the ground up and starting from the highest belief systems and software and emotional processing down. And it's that combination of hardware and mindset and software that matters. And the single biggest contributor to both is the environment around you. So you set up the environment around you. That includes the community you're with, the team you're with, the partners you're with, as well as the air and the sound and the light and the food and the temperature and all the things. And you can make an incredibly resilient system that's capable of doing superhuman things. And I did write a book called Superhuman. But the even when i'm sitting here now i am allegedly 52 years old my lab tests don't agree with that but i'm leaner on the cover of my last book i'm on five percent body fat and i have more energy and more focus and i've got nine companies in my portfolio and i do a podcast with 500 million downloads and i could list this long list of things i achieve but the reality is i'm doing that without breaking and generally being pretty happy. I couldn't do this in my 20s or 30s when you're supposed to have more energy. And it's because I got my hardware working and then I got my software working. Well, thank you for sharing that. And I do want to comment on Dr. Amen, because I've wanted to have him on the show forever. And about six weeks ago, I thought he was coming on. And then about 10 days later, he got overcommitted. So he had to drop-offs, but he's one of the most requested people like you are to come on the show. So that's my little- Well, fingers crossed. Next time I see him, I'll put in a good word for you. I know he's incredibly busy just helping with a lot of the stuff happening in the Maha movement as well, where there's just so much demand now for real health instead of like the pharmaceutical approach. And the reason I liked Dr. Amen is he said, look, I'm taking all the hits for this. I'm the only psychiatrist who says, what if we looked at the organ we're treating instead of just treating smoke signals? So he's very scientific about it and very data-driven, but also willing to talk about how do you feel? Because ultimately, who cares if the data is right and you feel like crap? But that was what I faced. I go to the doctor. There's nothing wrong with you. Well, why do I want to buy disability insurance? But since you said there's nothing wrong, I'll buy the policy because there is nothing wrong that science can find. but I feel like I don't have the vibe. You're supposed to wake up with a desire. And some of the things I discovered, I had lower testosterone than my mom. I had toxic mold poisoning and I had chemically induced brain damage from that. And I recovered from all that. When I did my scan years later, it's fixed. So what I found with these biohacking techniques, they took off first in Silicon Valley with entrepreneurs and developers, then hedge fund managers, and then Hollywood and recording artists. And then it spread to the entire country where people are saying, yes, it sounds weird, but I'm drinking my mold-free coffee and I'm putting butter in it. But it's making a huge difference. And today, host Bulletproof, my new coffee company is called Danger Coffee. And Danger has a therapeutic dose of trace minerals in it that change how the coffee lands. And of course it's mold free and all. And the difference I've heard from people even without putting butter in it, which I still do sometimes, it's a massive shift. Just the quality of the stuff you put in to your day changes things. I want people to do whatever works for them. And since most of us don't have a good monitoring system to know what works for us, well, how about we tell you things most likely to work for you and tell you what to track so that you can change what you do. And what this does is takes decades of meandering. Oh, I don't know which meditation practice. I don't know what kind of diet works for me. By the time you're 60, you might figure it out, but your body's pretty jacked up, right? And you've wasted 60 years on this. What if we could dial you in when you're 20? And all the 3,000 articles I've written and the nine books, they're written for someone who's 19 years old, if you just knew this stuff, you would save millions of dollars. I spent two and a half million dollars reversing my age and all that. A little bit before Brian Johnson went out and spends 2 million a year, I don't think it takes that. I spent two and a half million over 20 years, but everyone could do everyone. But I just see so much wasted potential and so much useless, meaningless suffering, because people just don't know how it works. And that's what fuels me every day if someone had just told me in a way I could have heard. And it's so powerful when, especially for young people right now, there's so much chemical disruption and the pandemic just completely screwed up people's psychology. So all of that's reversible in relative short order. You just have to know what to do. And that's what motivates me. Before we continue the conversation with Dave, I want to pause for a moment. One of the things this Life Beyond the Script series is really exploring is the intersection between who we are internally and how we show up externally. Sometimes the shifts we need are psychological, sometimes they're relational, and sometimes they're biological. But in every case, the real transformation begins with awareness. On the ignitedlife.net, I'm sharing companion reflections and articles for each episode in this series, designed to help you think more deeply about your own life because awareness creates insight, but action creates change. If you want to explore the reflections for this episode, you can visit the ignitedlife.net. And now a quick break for our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. You're listening to Passion Strap on the Passion Strap Network. Now let's return to the conversation with my guest, Dave Asprey. After that event that I told you about years ago when I was leaving Dell, I really got into following your work and others. And today I'm in my fifties too, but my biological age, the last time I had it tested was 38. So this stuff really works. Well, you mentioned your nine books, many of them, New York Times best. Today, we're going to concentrate on one of those, your newest one, titled Heavily Meditated, The Fast Path to Remove Your Triggers, Dissolve Stress, and Activate Inner Peace, which came out earlier this year. But I'm going to start from a different point. I want to talk about resets. You have faced crucible moments that would crush most entrepreneurs, like the period with toxic mold that you talked about. But later, when the Joe Rogan smear campaign and the death squad targeted you publicly. Both were destabilizing in completely different ways, one biological and one social. But I want to talk about this through the lens of resets. What did those extremes teach you about emotional resilience and the ability to return to what you now call as energetic peace? Well, emotional resilience does start in your body. If your body's dysregulated, your blood sugar is going up and crashing. If you have other just basic health problems, you have toxins from your gut floating around, you're spraying Axe body spray or some other endocrine disruptors on, there's a sense of unease. And it's kind of like you put really bad gas in a car. It runs, but it's sputtering. It doesn't have power. Something's not right. And so that's a part of it. So it's very hard if you're in an emotionally intense situation, whether it's with a public thing like what happened with Joe Rogan, or if you're just dealing with a marital issue or a narcissistic employee or all the things that we all deal with. If you don't have your full capabilities because you're carrying a big weight you don't know about, it's going to hit harder and you're going to be less responsive. So if you're sleeping well, if you're taking care of yourself, not overtraining, not under training, not eating junk food, but not starving yourself on an extreme diet, which includes vegan or extreme keto without a break. I've done both of those. The other one is good for you. So the idea is you can cycle in and out whatever you want, but you need to be doing that because the core resilience comes from biology. So in my case, my core resilience was pretty strong. And I went on the Joe Rogan show actually three times. And one of the companies that Joe has an investment in or had an investment in decided to copy my stuff, actually two of them. And the day they launched, it went from Dave's really taught me a lot about grass fed and coffee and all. And I'd done nothing but be as helpful as I know how to be. Joe basically said, Dave's a liar and a bad man. I believe it was commercially motivated. and I tell the story and heavily meditated and this was like 10 years ago but the reason I talk about the story is that this is incredibly I'll just say traumatic so I'm running a company I've helped a lot of people it's already successful and all the comments I see on social all the people run to Dave thanks you saved my life you changed my life I lost 50 pounds and it's very consistent and I'm feeling good like this is what I'm here to do and all of a sudden the next day after Joe did the smear campaign, like a thousand comments calling me like a snake oil salesman and just all this stuff. And it was really ungrounded because it's like, I didn't do anything wrong. Yet I'm just getting punished. I called a crisis PR company. I'm like, what do I do? This isn't fair. Now, really, the world isn't very fair. So the assumption of the world is fair. It was probably that was my fault. So after about three, four months of this, one guy on my team, Zach, who's a convoy commander. He would drive generals past explosive things in Iraq. That'll generally teach you to be calm. He's like, you need to chill out. Like he's just some podcaster. What's going on here? So I went and I hooked myself up to the electrodes at 40 Years of Zen. And 40 Years of Zen is my neuroscience company where I teach executives how to let go of things that trigger them. And I did some work and in the reset process that I'm sharing, people spend 20 grand a week to come in with my team of neuroscientists and sharing it in heavily meditated. I'm just like, guys, everyone needs to know how to do this. And so I went through the steps. And one of the steps is what's the first time you felt the same body sensations? And this memory popped into my head. I had no recollection of it until I was curious. And it was in first grade. I told on some other kid who did something. Yes, I was a narc. First graders will do that. And so then the teacher She says, hey, little Johnny, Dave says you did this. He goes, I didn't do it. Dave did it. And then I got sent to the principal's office. Okay, who cares? This is first grade. The problem is that I was so outraged at the time that it actually stuck. And that is a feeling of injustice. And in heavily meditated, and after working with a thousand execs looking at their brainwaves as they're doing different meditation, as they're doing different forgiveness, Very clearly, it's injustice and betrayal are the two hardest emotions to deal with for adults in normal life, right? And of course, there's extreme trauma and loss of family members, and there's lots of things that are painful out there. But these two are some of the stickiest because betrayal affects your trust in the world. And injustice is like you do the right thing, and then you get punched in the face for it. It doesn't feel good. So in my case, when I resolved my inner trigger around this completely forgotten event, then all of a sudden I could see the world clearly. And the reality is every time Joe Rogan says Dave Asprey is a bad man, I just sell more coffee. It doesn't matter what he says. There's no truth in the words. But I couldn't see it. So I spent six months suffering because I was resistant to doing my own technology that would have allowed me to be untriggered the first day. Right? And I did the same tech to process through my conscious uncoupling and separating from the mother of my children in a clean and kind way instead of being all angry. And I've had some really big things happen that I share in the book that really would have broken me. And it's because every single time I was holding on to a grudge that I didn't see and I thought it was real. I thought it was a reflection of the world. It was just how I was seeing the world, given whatever programming was in my nervous system. So you selectively go in and say, this isn't serving me. And with the Joe Rogan situation, I have no ill will towards Joe. I've been to his comedy show recently. It was really funny here in Austin. I did wear my Bulletproof t-shirt, but I have no idea. What do you think about me? I don't even care, right? Like I'm not seeking a resolution or anything like that. what I do know is that I've helped many millions of people, including Joe, including his followers. And what I learned is there are a group of people who were bullied usually between like fourth and seventh grade Most online trolls are those people And what I do now when someone comes on and mimics whatever it was that Joe was saying, I literally respond almost always the same way because it makes me laugh every time. I go, that's not what your mom said. Because we're literally in fifth grade. Like, okay, let's do it. And every now and then someone will get really triggered. Like, well, that's disrespectful. I go, hold on. I thought we were in fifth grade. Like I'm rubber, you're glue. Like it's your turn. Let's do this because that's all it is. All this mean stuff. It's just people who are highly traumatized and triggered. And now they can be little keyboard warriors, but none of it matters, right? It's not real. It's just people running old programs. So if I run a program where I'm going to respond to them from an emotionally triggered thing, then they got to me. they got their reward. When I'm just playing with them, they don't get any energy from that. I get energy from it because it's funny, right? Because it's humorous. But at the time, it didn't feel humorous. And the one thing I would offer for people, if you run a social media page and some mean person comes on, you have every right to just click, delete and block. And it takes about one second to block someone and they'll never see your work again. And it took them way more than that to say something mean to you. So if someone comes into your living room and craps on your couch, you're probably going to kick them out and not invite them back in again. But some people feel like they have to hold on to everyone. I'm like, no, if you come in and you're abusive, then you're out. I don't care. But if you come in and you ask a hard question, say, Dave, I think you might be wrong. Here's why fat's bad for you. Tell me more. Let's have a conversation. So I'll talk to anyone who is respectful and curious and disagrees, but I won't engage with people who just want to waste time for their emotional satisfaction because they're not even conscious. They're doing it out of trauma. And when you look at these, some of these guys out there, everyone wants to be fit, right? And there's also a look of I'm covered in tats and I'm like huge amounts of muscle and I could kill anyone in the room. Dude, you never felt safe. Okay. You were bullied or abused and it's okay. Right. And it's okay, but you don't have to pass it on and you can't pass it on to me. Right. And full respect. I think it's awesome. I used to spend huge amounts of time in the gym and I put on 20, 27 pounds of muscle in six weeks. And I've varied my amount of muscle mass quite dramatically and it's all good, but you can be safe no matter how you look. But that feeling of safety, especially for men, a lot of the most successful entrepreneurs that you and I both know, they're doing it because they don't feel like they're good enough. And that's a path to hell. And certainly the first half of my career was based on that. It's just way easier if you're being pulled towards something that you believe is worthy. And that's a shift. And sometimes trolls are there to teach you a lesson. So in heavily meditated, I'm like, thanks, Joe Rogan. It was an expensive, painful lesson. Every time he said I was a bad man, I did sell more coffee. And I think he figured it out after about 18 months of these campaigns and stopped doing it. At the time, I was, I don't know what to do. All I ever did was respond with, here's my 36 scientific PubMed reports supporting that what I said is true. But if I was to go back now, I would have played with it because it would have been more fun. You mentioned a couple of things as you were talking. One of those is you use the word mattering a few times, and you also alluded to so many people today, especially highly successful people feel invisible in their own lives. And I talk a lot on this show about mattering. I've been studying it now for over a decade, and it's that sense that we feel valued and that we're adding value to others. From your vantage point, how does mattering intersect with the neuro neurobiological states you cultivate through neurofeedback, meditation and forgiveness? There are 40 something core traumas that people can tune into at some point or another. And one of them is I don't matter. I'm not lovable. No one loves me. I'm all alone. There's this long list of things that are all nuanced. And any of those beliefs is not actually true, but it feels true if you're stuck in that. And most of this programming comes long before you're an adult, before you even had a prefrontal cortex to judge it. So since it was already there before your prefrontal cortex formed, you're going to believe it to be true until it's questioned and it'll create suffering in your life. Like this is just part of growing up. So especially for men, there's a period usually around late thirties to late forties where you don't matter. If you have kids in a family, like your job is to put fucking meat on the table or maybe bread if you can't afford meat. And to there's needs you have, but you have kids and their needs are bigger than yours. And this is why so many people decline in the forties. I'm not saying women don't do this too. They do. There's a provider role that is still alive and strong because, well, if there is such a thing as masculine and feminine and women burn out in a different way during that time period, they do it hormonally with their stress management hormones. And they do it by over giving usually to their partner and their kids, right? So both partners can feel like they don't matter, but for different reasons, right? And one is if I'm not a provider, I'm not worth anything. And the reality is if you're not a provider, well, you're not having anywhere to live. And then the dynamics that happen in a relationship at home, those generally don't work either. So it's pretty shitty during that time. And studies show that when you enter your 50s and 60s, that your happiness goes up dramatically because you got through that period and maybe you got some wisdom. And then mattering is, do you matter to your partner or your children or your family or closest friends, right? And how is that expressed for you? And do you actually feel it? And do you even know how to let it in? And a lot of the time you do matter and people are expressing gratitude, but especially for hardworking focused guys, I'm just thinking it's, it's a different vibe for women, but there's a similar thing where it's, you don't receive. So I had this going on. People would stop me in the street and say, Dave, like your work changed my life. And I said, oh, thank you. Thank you. And finally, one of my therapists was like, Dave, you're not letting that in at all. And I did some work, some therapy, energetic work on being able to receive true gratitude. There's someone in front of you with tears in their eyes saying how meaningful it was. And I'm like, you know, just not receptive to it. I'm not giving them the gift of receiving what they did. I think that's an undervalued skill is just to be able to receive the feeling of mattering because it's probably there. You just don't know how to look for it. You don't know how to feel it. And the other thing is maybe you've been, I don't know, an investment banker your whole life, in which case your work probably doesn't matter and you're evil, or maybe a venture capitalist, in which case, oh my God, like you should, no, I'm kidding. I have lots of investment banker in DC friends, but you might be in a, in a, in a career space where you realize that what you've done isn't that meaningful. In fact, maybe it was negative. Like I had a guy responsible for the launch of Lunchables at Kraft, like the biggest junk food crap you could ever feed kids. And when he came to work for me, he said, I've got to undo some of the damage I did. Like I didn't realize at the time. So the meaning, knowing that you're actually of service to others, that raises your testosterone if you're a guy, right? It's very meaningful. And I realize I'm splitting what I'm saying between four men and four women. And I'm doing that for a reason because the energetics are very different. And I actually do a lot of work. I run something called unlimited.life, which is a very high-end longevity. And it's a concierge medicine longevity and fulfillment group. And more than half of the members are women, a lot of them are very powerful senior executive women. And when we have those conversations, there's a biology, but there's also a psychology side of things that's just different than it is for men. And I want to honor that and that we need both masculine leaders and feminine leaders. And the types of biological support are very similar for both of us. And then the understanding of the dynamics within a relationship or within a workplace, they're very different psychologically. And when we try to pretend that they're not different, I think we run into problems for both men and women. And that's why I call them out as being separate. Yeah, I don't know why I'm going here, but I'm going to go here. Last night, I was at an event. I'm on the board of the local chapter of the Naval Academy Alumni Association, and we were doing our annual event where we talked to aspiring teenagers who are thinking about going to one of the service academies. And a couple of them were asking me what was the most difficult part of my time at the academy. And I think most of them thought I was going to say plebe year. And I actually said, Cleve year for me was actually a great year because everyone gives you the sense that you matter. Sometimes it's in a negative way because you've got upperclassmen who are shitting down your throat, but you know that people care about your wellbeing. I said, the hardest thing for me was going into my sophomore or youngster year because all of a sudden no one cares about you. And you go from having all this attention to no attention. And on top of that, I had a bad sports injury, so I couldn't even do the thing I loved. So it is interesting how it affects you during different times of your life. And it really proved to me that you can be surrounded by people and still feel completely alone, depending on the circumstances. Shocking how lonely, the more successful and the more powerful or more famous or more wealthy you become, the more lonely you become. They don't put that on the flyer for whenever it says, I want to be an influencer. But when you have one of those things, you are instantaneously attractive to narcissists and sociopaths and users and takers. And all of a sudden you look around and you have no idea whether you matter or your status matters. And this is why in Hollywood, Hollywood people hang out with other Hollywood people because at least they're not trying to get their fame because they're equally famous. And wealthy people hang out with wealthy people because at least you know you're not going to be a sugar mommy or a sugar daddy. Right? And so no one wants to be used for that stuff. We want to feel that we matter for ourselves. And here's the trick. Your mattering is an internal thing. All of whether you matter to other people, that's a story you tell yourself about what's going on inside their heads. Unless you've done enough meditation that you can read other people's minds and energy fields accurately, and most people haven't done that, then you really don't have any clue. It's just a story that you make up about this and say, oh, I don't matter. They didn't text me back. Meanwhile, I tell all my friends, look, I'm probably not going to text you back. I'm on podcasts or video calls all day long. And I have 2000 and change unread text messages. So if I miss a message, you can respond 911 and I might see it or, you know, meditate and tune in and see if I'm looking at my phone and send me a message right then I don't know, like, I'm not going to live my life based on that. So many people, though, especially new friends will say, Oh, I must not matter to Dave. But it's a story of you matter, it just doesn't mean I stare at my phone all day. Right? So mattering is an internal state, worthiness is an internal state. And what you do needs to matter to you. And if you can, if you consistently do that, you can create something really beautiful. And Rick Rubin, actually made this clear to me. Rick's been on my show a couple of times and we became friends, which was astounding to me. This is one of the most famous music producers out there. He's played a hand in almost every song I love. And he wrote a book called, I think The Creative Act, his most recent book. And in it, he talks about how artists who make the most breakthrough things are not making it for fans. They're making it because they're making it for them. and that's what makes something that's truly beautiful whereas an artist who goes out and says i'm just going to measure everything and make something you can produce like some pop hit or whatever but it isn't truly art so his definition of art is that it's actually a selfish act even so doing things that matter to you that matter greatly even if no one else knows or no one else cares that's the mattering and if you do that consistently and authentically something really beautiful happens. And it's something I write about in Heavily Meditated. It's called congruence. And congruence is when your inner state and your outer state are aligned. And most of us in the world of business, just the world of life, okay, we don't learn skills to be highly regulated. So someone says something or does something, and we're disregulated, we're pissed off about it. But you're in a board meeting. And so you smile and you're like, yes, of course, that's just fine. And everybody knows that person got to you and that you're acting, but at least you're acting instead of standing up and punching them in the face, which is what you wanted to do. So that's civil society requires that level of self-regulation, but enlightened society requires the fact that when the person says that, it doesn't land, right? And you're entirely regulated and you say whatever you were going to say from a place that's authentic and congruent. And when you do that, your words are 10 times more powerful and people feel them and they feel that you're in leadership and they feel that you're safe and they feel like they matter because instead of showing them a fake behavior and a fake face, you're showing them a real face. And we all have the ability to sense authenticity in other people And unfortunately and I read it there a chapter on this about narcissists and sociopaths why they good at bypassing our detectors But we feel this in everyone. So your body will tell you, but most of us just ignore the signals from the body. And all these meditation and breath work and yogic practices, psychedelics, all the altered States stuff that that's the backbone of heavily meditated there to connect you better to the bodily senses that will tell you the truth about another person or about reality in a way that's much better than your brain will. And it's much faster too. And if we would teach this to our kids, it would be a very different world. Man. Well, you might like this. I have a children's book coming out titled You Matter, Luma, in February. So I'm trying to do exactly that because I was talking to Gary Vaynerchuk and we were talking about that by the time kids get to high school, the value system has already been developed. So the best age to reach them is really when they're four to eight. And that's what I saw with my two kids. So I decided to try to see what I can do here to influence both parents, teachers, as well as the kids themselves. So that's a unworthy activity. And we put so little effort into our kids. As parents, we put effort into it. But as a society, the schools are underfunded. Teachers don't get paid very well at all. And we feed our kids the most god-awful school lunches that you've ever seen. We don't maintain the schools, so they're all full of toxic mold. We put in the crappiest lighting. And then we let the government control the education curriculum. When's the last time the government ever did anything right about education or food or environmental none of it is about human thriving or flourishing it's all about accumulation of power and economics which is okay that's what governments are for but let's not pretend that they know what's best so i i would love to put education and emotional regulation for our children back on the table as being important and worthy and teaching kids that they matter but mattering doesn't mean you get what you want And this is the hard part with kids. Like I remember I was getting into it with my son when he was much younger, like six or seven over some little thing he wanted in the kitchen or something. And it was something that wasn't going to happen. And I told him, it doesn't matter what you want here. You are not the decider, right? So acceptance that you don't get what you want, but you matter, even though you don't get what you want all the time is important. Because otherwise you grow up with this sensation that if I don't get what I want, I don't matter, which generates rage, which generates victimhood, which generates Greta Grundelberg or whatever her name is. How dare you? If you sit in outrage all the time, you are the worst advocate for what you want to do. The best advocates are more like a mother, Teresa, where she sits there and there's a story where some protesters during Vietnam said, will you join us in a rally against the war? And she says, no. And she said, well, I would march in a rally for peace, but I won't march in a rally against the war. And they're saying, isn't it the same thing? It's not. One of them is outrage fighting against something, and the other one is peace and working towards something. And in Heavily Meditated, I write about what is the opposite of fear? And a lot of people say love, but it's actually peace. When you can have internal peace, you can express love. You can also protect your family from a place of peace. But if you are triggered and you go into fear, and fear is an aspect of anger or more anger is an aspect of fear, right? And then you become programmed by the people around you and the environment around you. You're no longer acting mindfully. So the idea here is that we want to build people who get to choose their state no matter what happens in the world around them. And we call that resilience in the West. In the East, they call that enlightenment. it. If you get to pick your state and you can pick the altered state of high performance or of healing or of being extra aware, whatever the many different beautiful altered states that are available, if you can pick that, then you're in charge and then you cannot be manipulated. But if you're easy to trigger and easily programmable and your biology is weak and your psychology is weak, it means you're, if you can be triggered, it means you're carrying a loaded gun. That's what triggered means. And it means my fingers on the trigger. If I trigger you, that's not cool. So you need to unload the gun so that there is no possible way that someone else's finger can be on the trigger. And that's why I wrote this book. And strangely heavily meditated became the number one bestselling philosophy book in the country and the bestselling meditation book. I think it's my most important work. And I've sold more than a million copies of all my books and I don't know, dozens of languages and all that. But this one is, it's really important. And I'm giving away this $20,000 secret that I developed over 10 years of looking at people's brains to say, what is the step-by-step way that you can just stop being bothered by that thing? Let's stop ruminating on it. You're not ruminating because you chose to. In fact, you're probably frustrated that you're doing it, but there's a reason that your system is making you focus on it. And there's a way to go in. I like to imagine you've got your iPhone and you go into the iPhone therapist, by the way, this just came out. I got the new orange one. I'm very fancy. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago too, or a week ago, you're on your phone and all these alerts keep popping up and you go, Hey, meditation teacher, these alerts keep popping up and it's hard to use my phone. And he goes, gently notice the alerts popping up the notifications, gently swipe to the left and stay focused. Continue focusing as you swipe left. Okay, I could do that. At least I'm less triggered by the fact that TikTok is bothering me. But you go to the IT guy, oh, let's go into the system settings, and let's turn off the notifications that you don't want. Your nervous system is the same way. Let's turn off the notifications that are of no value to you. And some people will say, but anger motivates me. Okay. Motivation can come from anger and anger is actually a great spark. But if that is your primary fuel source, you will become Darth Vader. It is the worst way to create hell in your life to be constantly motivated by anger. You will be an asshole. Everyone around you will not like you. And yes, anger and rage feel great. They release cortisol and adrenaline, which are hormones that also feel great. But if you live in that state, you are not fulfilled and it's not a good place to be. So make it different. And what you can do there is you can say, all right, this thing really pissed me off. Why did it piss me off? And then do the work on being able to look at this thing and not be pissed off at all. And then decide from a place of power, am I going to do something about it? Yes or no. And if you're not going to do something about it, okay. And then you just don't get triggered anymore. And this matters for the biggest events in the world. If you're going to be dysregulated every time you watch the news, one strategy is don't watch the news. The other strategy is watch the news. And every time it pushes your sympathetic nervous system, ask yourself why and whether that's something that you're going to change or not. And then once you change yourself where you can watch it, not without caring, but with just being aware, I'm like, wow, that is truly unjust. I'm going to make a donation or I'm going to go do whatever is necessary. or I'm going to decide that's not my mission and I'm going to stick to my mission, but I'm still regulated. That's what creates power, right? I think people, we drain so much of our energy uselessly on just being fired up and triggered and angered by all these different things. And with AI and just marketing in general, they capitalize on making us angry, on triggering us because it's profitable. So you need a firewall. And that's your own nervous system. And if you can be that person, nope, didn't get to me, sorry, then you weren't manipulated. You didn't buy the crap you didn't need. You didn't vote for the person you didn't want to vote for because they ran some psyop on you. So I just want to create freedom that way. So Dave, if you're up for it, I wanted to do just a quick lightning round given our few minutes we have left. Sure. Okay. What's your favorite brain hack you no longer use? that I no longer use. I use all the brain hacks, depending on the state I want. I'm trying to think of one that I don't use anymore. Some of the first line cognitive enhancers like HydroGene and Lucidril are like late 80s, early 90s cognitive enhancers that I used to rely on when I was fixing my brain in Silicon Valley. I don't use those anymore. It's esoteric, like who the, what's he saying? So I'll just say that the state of cognitive enhancement has progressed so much that I'm all about using the right nootropics, the right herbs, the right minerals, and the right pharmaceuticals to dial in a certain state. That has changed a lot. And that's why one of my big books is about that. So I think I would just say that I've evolved my use of natural substances to create the states I want in a really beautiful way. Okay. Why two tablespoons of olive oil per day? Oh, this is so good. So there are some people saying if olive oil is good, more olive oil is better. These are the same people who say if water is good, more water is better until they drown. So two tablespoons of olive oil a day reduces lipid oxidation. It's really good for lots of different systems in the body. Assuming you even get real olive oil, which is part of the problem. But if you get real olive oil, great. more than two or maybe even four tablespoons a day, but an excess of oleic acid increases oxidation of omega-6 oils by about five or six times in the body. So we have this, about 20 different ways of deciding truth, of thinking about things. And some of them are very easy to think about, and some take a lot of work. And your brain will tell you to use the lowest power solution algorithm and make you believe it's real. And the lowest power is, if something good, do more. If something bad, do less. Unfortunately for olive oil, it doesn't work like that. The Goldilocks zone is two and maybe at most four tablespoons. And above that, not a good idea. Most out there idea you believe could become mainstream in 20 years. Oh, in 20 years. Okay. I think the world is shifting pretty quickly. There's something called biocentrism, which is the idea that our consciousness creates the entire reality around us, that the world we live in is created by us, not the other way around. And more and more quantum biology, philosophy, quantum mechanics, math, it's showing us to be true via all the pathways we know of. The fact that we don't perceive that at all in our human bodies is totally fine. But with 20 years and AI, assuming a comet doesn't hit the planet, I think that we will all really realize this is the foundational part of reality is that we are living in a quantum foam. We just perceive it very differently. And that opens the door to all kinds of magical, mystical things that we used to think were myths that aren't. Well, Dave, it was such an honor to have you here today. I know you're very searchable, but if people want to go to the epicenter of Dave Asprey, where should they turn? You can go to DaveAsprey.com to find all the different things I do, like 40 Years of Zen and Danger Coffee and Dave.Asprey on Instagram. Thank you so much for joining me today. It was such an honor to have you. Likewise, John. Thank you. That brings us to the end of today's conversation with Dave Asprey. What stood out most to me in this discussion is how interconnected everything really is. Our biology, our mindset, our emotional triggers, and the environments we live in. Dave's work reminds us that transformation isn't just psychological. The state of your nervous system, the energy your cells produce, even the signals your body sends to your brain, all influence how you experience the world and how resilient you can be within it. And that insight sets up our next episode perfectly. On Thursday, I'm joined by cardiologist, ABC chief medical correspondent and author, Dr. Tara Nerula. While Dave's work focuses on optimizing the human system, Tara explores something equally powerful, resilience. Through her work treating patients and reporting on health around the world, she has seen how psychological resilience can dramatically influence physical outcomes from recovery after illness to long-term well-being. It's a powerful conversation of the ideas we explored today. Hopefully when we start to realize how damaging stress is to us on a long-term basis, then we start to realize how important turning off the stress response is. And that is where therapy comes in and mindfulness and meditation and exercise and all of the things that we are in control of. So it's not our body in control of us. We can actually flip the switch and release the counter mechanisms to turn dial it down. And that's really my hope too, is that people recognize, okay, stress chronically is bad, even acutely. We know there are things like stress-induced heart attacks when you have a sudden stressor, but that we are empowered and there are ways that we can elicit the reverse reaction. If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who might benefit from it. Leave a five-star rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and explore more reflections from this series on the ignitedlife.net. Until next time, remember, the life you want isn't something you stumble into. It's something you build. One decision, one insight, and one courageous step at a time. I'm John Miles, and you've been PassionStruck.