May 17, 2025

Dave Asprey - Biohacking Pioneer & Performance Expert | How Biohacking Your Mind Transforms Entrepreneurial Success

Dave Asprey - Biohacking Pioneer & Performance Expert | How Biohacking Your Mind Transforms Entrepreneurial Success
Success Story with Scott Clary
Dave Asprey - Biohacking Pioneer & Performance Expert | How Biohacking Your Mind Transforms Entrepreneurial Success
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Dave Asprey is an American entrepreneur, author, and biohacker best known as the founder of Bulletproof Coffee and a leading figure in the biohacking movement. A former Silicon Valley executive, Asprey has dedicated his career to optimizing human performance through science, technology, and nutrition. He popularized the concept of using butter and MCT oil in coffee to enhance energy and cognitive function, and has authored several best-selling books on health, including The Bulletproof Diet, Super Human, and Heavily Meditated. Asprey is also the host of a long-running podcast focused on wellness, longevity, and personal development.


➡️ Show Links

https://www.instagram.com/dave.asprey/

https://x.com/daveasprey/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/asprey/


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➡️ Talking Points

00:00 – Intro

01:39 – Blending Ancient Wisdom with Science

05:30 – Dave’s Wake-Up Call

12:02 – The Brain Science Breakdown

19:31 – Sponsor Break

23:23 – Healing Trauma at the Root

37:27 – Sponsor Break

41:33 – Trauma Beyond Childhood

53:05 – Dave’s Peak Performance Meditation

56:55 – Why Sex Matters for Entrepreneurs

1:04:56 – #1 Takeaway from Dave’s Book

1:06:30 – Psychedelics & Peak Mental States

Transcript

One of the few entrepreneurs to go from zero to $140 million a year in revenue, writing a whole bunch of New York Times bestsellers and then getting removed from your own company. I'm here and I'm happy and these are the kind of things that can break people. He's the father of biohacking, the man who turned coffee into a global movement and aging into a solvable problem. Dave Asprey isn't just chasing longevity, he's engineering it. It's the things that every leader needs to know. Know yourself, know your target state, know how to get there with everything on the planet and then you can be in a state you want all the time. If you can manage to be unprogrammable, you get to choose your state and you can choose success. With four New York Times bestselling books, hundreds of millions of podcasts downloads and a company built on optimizing human potential, Dave's mission is simple, to help you live longer, think faster and become the best version of yourself. If you think that you're going to make money or be rewarded for doing the right thing, you have a childlike view of the world, where trauma comes from if not from growing up. One of them is generational trauma. If your parents went through a famine in World War Two, your chances of having type 2 diabetes are substantially higher. In this episode, we go deep into what it really takes to upgrade your body, your brain and your beliefs. This isn't self-help, it's self-mastery. Everything you've ever done that you're ashamed of wasn't you. It was an ancient network of bacteria conspiring to keep you alive. Stop feeling shame about it and start doing something about it. So Dave, I'm excited to do this. Your new book heavily meditated. There's a lot of ideas that come from this book, but there's one that really resonated with me and I want to read it and then I want to understand what you were thinking or what prompted this idea. So you said in the book, I quote, by combining ancient wisdom with modern science, I discovered that you can achieve profound changes in your mental and physical states whether through biohacking techniques, neurofeedback, or simply understanding how your body responds to stress and stimuli. There are ways to take control of your brain and your body's performance, but you need enough energy for your efforts to be effective. Where did this idea come from? Obviously, this is probably the culmination of a body and a life's work that led to this, but give us some context. One of the few entrepreneurs to go from zero to 140 million dollars a year in revenue. There's only 17,000 companies in the US that big. And to do that and to take all the hits you take along the way, well simultaneously building a Webby Award-winning podcast, you know a lot about building podcasts and writing a whole bunch of New York Times best sellers and having a couple kids. And then getting removed from your own company and having it sold out from underneath you for peanuts. I'm here and I'm happy and these are the kind of things that can break people. And the only reason I can do that I'm nine companies in my portfolio right now, just wrote this book is because of the things in the book. This is my most important book ever and heavily meditated. It's the things that every leader needs to know. And it's that you've got to know how to regulate yourself. And if you're the kind of of leader in your life or in your family or in your company or your community who gets dysregulated and you're the person in charge, there will be people who will be attracted to that and they're going to come in and they're going to dysregulate you. And reality is if you can be triggered, it means you're carrying a loaded gun and someone else has their finger on the trigger. Now that's fine. If you just have a 95 job, it's actually not fine. But if you're leading a company and you have hundreds of people relying on you for their income and maybe hundreds of thousands of customers and you get triggered, you're not just carrying a gun, you're carrying a nuclear weapon. So the bigger your influence, the more the need for self-regulation and they don't teach this at warden business school. They don't teach it anywhere except maybe in monasteries. Probably monasteries. Scott, I don't have 20 years to go sit in a monastery. Do you? Okay, I got stuff to do. Nope. So that's why the book is called The Fast Path to remove your triggers because I don't want to spend two hours day meditating. I will if I have to, but I'd rather spend 10 minutes and then take the rest of the time and maybe go live something heavy or cook a ribeye or be with family or come up with a new idea. Like it's your time. You gotta invest it. Everyone listening tracks their row as, but do you track your roms? Return on meditation spend. Every minute you spend meditating, you're not doing some other stuff. So this is why I wrote the book. It's all the techniques that are or are not meditation to shift the state of your biology and your mental state and your emotional state so that you can have the performance you want. Do you want to show up this way? Calm or do you want to go into an intuitive creative state? Or do you want to trip balls without taking psychedelics? There's ways to do all those and all of them have merit. So know yourself, know your target state now to get there with everything on the planet and then you can be in a state you want all the time and I think that's freedom. I think that I think that so many people just drift through life with really no focus, no self-aware and there's no understanding of their own mental state. And to your point, that is a that is a nuclear bomb. If you end up being successful, I would say I would make the argument that's actually highly difficult to be successful without a little bit of introspection and understanding your own mental state. But if you manage to do it, then you have the lives of hundreds or thousands plus employees and stakeholders and people that are basically potential targets for your lack of self-care for really lack of a better description. Was there a point? I mean, I read this little paragraph from your book that sort of speaks about combining physical and mental and understanding yourself and modern science and ancient wisdom. And even before we press record, you said, I only write about things that I actually care about and you've written nine books and you only you can't be, you know, you really can't be persuaded to write about shit that is just sort of run to the mill that 10 other people, 20 other people have written about. And this is very unique. What was the thing in your life that prompted you to care so much about understanding your mental state, but not just from a modern perspective, including some of these ancient techniques? When I was 26, I made six million dollars. And this was pre-bidened dollars, so it was worth something. And I lost when I was 28. And I made that money because I was convinced it would make me happy. And I looked at a friend, this is a true story. We're there in Santa Clara, California, Silicon Valley. And I'll be happy to when I have 10 million dollars, I actually said that. So what a douchebag. But I fully believed that that would make me happy. I also tried getting married very briefly in my 20s. And oh, let's try fame. That will make you happy. So I met entrepreneur magazine. If you go to my Instagram account, the fat picture there is me from entrepreneur magazine when I'm 23 is the first guy to sell anything over the internet. And I can tell you, I had 15 minutes of happiness from the magazine article. I had 15 minutes of happiness and a lot of misery from the money. And a bunch of other things, like you just realized none of it works. So by the time I'm 30, like I've made and lost more than most people ever make in their life. And I am freaking miserable. And it was only when my relationship at the time just fell apart. I got to do something. I'm a computer science guy. I'm actually a computer hacker. So I tried all this stuff that was supposed to work. None of it worked. So then I tried this stuff that only idiots would try. I went to Tibet and Nepal. And I studied shamanism. I did all this stuff that my family and my life taught me were worthless because I was desperate. And I I had already tried all this stuff. The reality is I finally committed to only doing things that work. Which means I'm going to measure. And I'm going to believe something works. And then I'm going to test it. And if it doesn't all change before I went to the gym six days a week, 90 minutes a day for 18 months on a low fat diet, I never lost an inch off my waist or a pound of weight. I probably lost some fat, gained some muscle, but I was still fat. And I could either say it's because I didn't try hard enough or because I had terrible advice. So this has led to so many of the businesses I'm running today, like upgrade labs. We're doing 187 million data points across people's minds and bodies. So don't just come in and think it's going to work. We'll show you it's working every time because it does. And this is why the basis for heavily meditated is 40 years of zen. This is my what we'll call it entrepreneur CEO brain upgrade program in Seattle. People come in. They have for 10 years more than a thousand high performing brains have taught me what's in heavily meditated. They come in, spend five days with my team of neuroscientists and facilitators and custom tech. And we show you what's going on in your brain, how triggers happen and how to go and edit them out. People spend 20 grand to do that. And it works. But if you read heavily meditated, I give away the process I use. It works better with the computers and all the other stuff, but you can do this at home. And even if you're just getting started, the end of the day someone got under your skin, they're controlling you. And you need to install a firewall in your consciousness so that you no longer have that vulnerability. And it's not about being tough and inflexible. Step one, if you have a company, hopefully you've done this. Someone says something that pisses you off or does something. And if you were a 10 year old, you'd get really mad and probably punch them. But you're a functioning adult. So you do what most people do. You smile, the fake smile, put on your game face. And everyone in the room knows that you're pissed, but you act like you're not. And well, okay, at least we have civil society. But everyone knows you're no longer in congruence. Your interstate and outer state don't match. And your customers can feel it, your team can feel it. And it comes across as well, you're probably a con artist, even if you're not, it just comes across that way. So learning how to actually have congruence is the only way to have authentic leadership, which means you own your own shit. And every single time something triggers me, I'm going to write it down and say, I wonder what that is. And then I'm going to run this reset process that's in the book. And I'm going to track it down. And I'm going to edit the vulnerability out of my settings. What do you mean vulnerability? Think of it like this. If you went to the therapist and you said, Hey, I have this problem focusing on my phone. All these alerts keep popping up all the time. This is all the time. And the therapist says, Oh, that's okay. Every time one of them pops up, just take a deep breath and gently swipe it to the side so you can focus on your work. You would fire that therapist. But if you go in there and say, I keep getting mad every time my girlfriend says this or my mother-in-law says that or my boss says this, it's the same thing. Turn off the alerts. Stop managing them. And the difference is incredible capacity. I think that this is one of the most useful tools for any high performing individual entrepreneur. Otherwise, like you mentioned before, like even people in jobs, you're not, you're not, you're not, you know, achieving peak performance. You're not getting the, you're not getting the promotion. If you can't manage and regulate yourself. When you, when you think about, this is one of the other ideas that you write about. I will talk about the reset process in a second. One of the ideas you write about just so people can understand and sort of we can go through some definitions or some some basics as to how the brain works. They can see what's happening here. Because you write about exploring pathways to inner peace and meditation. It's very crucial to understand the science behind your brain states. So can we talk about brain states because you, you mentioned that the brain is like this complex orchestra producing all these different types of brain ways. I don't think many people even understand how their own brain works. So what are the brain states that people should be aware of? For, and why do they matter for, for example, mental performance? If you're an entrepreneur, you want to be able to have energy and be focused all the time. So you could have the energy of running a sprint all day long. You think that would work? No, you'd burn out. No, it wouldn't work. So a lot of the times we get triggered. And it's not a big trigger, but you're just like irritable. That's a beta brain state. And beta brain states are great for performing well physically. They're not great for intuition and creativity and working in collaboration with the team. So you would want to know, how does it feel when I'm in a high beta state versus when I'm in an alpha state? And alpha has nothing to do with alpha males. And even alpha male was a complete myth from the guy who studied wolves and made a mistake. So when an alpha state is slower brain waves than a beta state, this is a relaxed and alert. A lot of meditation takes you there. And you can drop down from there into theta where we have dream states and day dreaming and more intuition and creativity and weird visions. And then delta is the dreamless deep state where your brain is refreshing itself. And you have a mix of all these all the time. So that makes it sound really easy. Well, I'll just dial my brain up or down. The reality is think of these as music notes. You have a C note or a D note or a G note or whatever. It's not about the note. It's what song are you playing in the note? So say, look, I manage to have alpha brain waves. I'm like, yes, and you're playing a Metallica song, right? Ride the lightning in alpha is probably not the brain that you want, right? So on one hand, knowing brain states is beautiful because we can measure those when people come in, we do a clinical grade scan on their brain. Like, oh, look, here's your likely behavior patterns based on your brain waves. By the way, these two parts of the brain, you know, the cello and the the drums, whatever they're not talking to each other, they're not playing the same notes. If you want, we can teach you how to align those. And here's what happens to your behaviors when those are aligned. And that's a pretty profound shift because otherwise, the brain doesn't know what's happening. In fact, the only nerve that goes inside the brain is the fifth cranial nerve. And that comes from your molars. Other than that, the brain is blind to itself. That's why you can see the Hannibal Lecter movie and it takes off the guy's brain and folks at it doesn't do anything. You can't feel your brain. So your brain doesn't know what it's doing. But if you ever see the mirror experiment where they hang a mirror up in the jungle and an ape walks up and looks like, oh, that's me. And it'll like find lettuce in its teeth or whatever they're eating, right? And that's amazing. Your brain is doing that. So when you do neurofeedback, you start learning how to control the states and the song that's playing. And the special thing about 40 years of Zen is we figured out a way to shift from one state to another in order to permanently turn off the source of a trigger. And it's very different than just maintaining your cool. That's a waste of time. So maintaining your cool is almost like you're trying to put a bandaid on this open wound where with 40 years of Zen, with basically everything that you teach, you're talking about it's almost like a leading indicator of a trigger. You're stopping it before it even impacts you. That's what you're trying to do. It's more than just stopping it. You're permanently removing it from your reality. Wow. Right. So that way there's nothing to stop. It's kind of like you're in a boxing ring. Right. And I go, okay, I'm going to be tough. And, okay, do the rope a dope strategy. I'm just going to let him hit me. I'm going to pretend like it doesn't hurt. I'll take the hit and I'll be tough and I'll counterattack to that is not a good path. What you want is for him to hit you and it goes through you with no effect. Right. Yeah. Like what that's what's possible when you permanently remove this, the thing that just got under your skin, it doesn't matter. And the best example for this for a lot of a lot of just a lot of people in general, it's driving. Someone cuts you off in traffic. Everyone gets mad until they learn to do something about it. Right. And it's just this feeling. Well, if you're on the reset process on that feeling, there was some time earlier in your life where you felt disrespected and it really hurt your feelings. So your automated defense systems, which are based in the body, not even the mind. Oh, this matches that other situation. Therefore, it's a threat. Therefore, have some anger. And then you're going to make up a story about what's going on. The other guy said, like, you don't know if the guy's about to fill his pants. You don't know if you really thinks you're a jerk and he's cutting off and you don't know if he's on the way to the hospital to go, you know, deliver someone's baby. You just don't have any information at all. All the story you have is BS. If you could do something. So the next time someone cut you off, you just didn't care. You wouldn't make up a story. Your heart rate wouldn't change and you wouldn't remember it because it's irrelevant. And we want to live in that state. And that means if you're running your company and you get the phone call that anyone with any level of success has that some employee who you fired for doing something that was well-deserving of firing decides to sue you. Right. Because many employees, in fact, the lowest performing employees will almost always try to sue you. Because it couldn't be them, it must be you, right? And they're a little twisted reality. So that can really, really push buttons for people. And when you've run through your reset process on that, oh, look, it's happening. Okay, I got the attorney's handling it. Like, it's going to happen, but the amount of suffering and therefore the amount of wasted energy goes down. And that's what that's what just gives you resilience and business. And if you can manage to be unprogrammable, you get to choose your state and you can choose success. And if you're programmable, some asshole somewhere is going to program you when you're not looking and you're going to act like a jerk and it's going to affect your team. It's going to affect your customers. It's going to affect how you sleep. It'll affect your relationships at home. And it affects, it affects everything. It affects your performance. Everything. Everything. Everything. Langota is a partner of success story. Look, I'll be real with you. My French used to be solid. I learned it in school. I even had decent pronunciation. But when I booked trip to France last year, it was a total blank. I could barely order a croissant without sounding like a tourist. So I jumped into the Langota sprint challenge and man, it changed everything. I'd take live classes late at night after podcasting, only five students max, real teachers, real conversations. And in just two months, I went from a bonjour to holding full conversations at a Paris cafe. Confidence unlocked. Now here's the play. 30 or 60 classes in 60 days. And if you finish them all, you get 50% cash back. That's basically four euros or five dollars per class. That's insane value. Go to try.lingota.com slash success underscore sprint and then use my code Scott sprint for an extra 20 euro off on top of their current deal. Let's get fluent. Fresh books is supporting today's episode. And if you've ever wondered how successful I'm going to understand top of their finances while growing their business, the answer is fresh books. The numbers don't lie. Over 30 million people have chosen fresh books, processing more than 60 billion in invoices and saving an incredible 192 hours every year on accounting tasks. Think about it. That's nearly eight full days. You can get back to focus on what really matters, growing your business. Fresh books is more than just accounting software. It's your all-in-one financial command center, create professional estimates, track time, automatically bill clients, and capture expenses on the go. Plus, it integrates seamlessly with over 100 business tools you already use all backed by award-winning customer service. If you're ready to stop drowning in receipts and you're ready to stop chasing down payments, here's what I want you to do. Head over to freshbooks.com to start your 30-day free trial, no credit card required. And for all you success story listeners out there, I've got something special. Get an exclusive 60% off for six months when you visit freshbooks.com slash pricing dash offer. Transform your business with fresh books today. That's freshbooks.com slash pricing dash offer for 60% off. Today's episode is brought to you by Vanta. Now listen up. This matters for your business. And today's digital landscape security isn't optional. It's essential. Without it, deal stall. Sales cycle stretch on and scaling becomes very difficult. Now why? Because investors, customers, and partners, all expect businesses to demonstrate strong security practices before they commit. If you can't prove trust, you lose opportunities. So whether you're a startup founder, trying to land that first big client or an established company scaling your security program, Vanta helps businesses of all sizes prove that they're trustworthy by automating compliance across 35 frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA. The exact certifications your prospects are demanding. Here's why you need to pay attention. Vanta gives you back precious time that you're currently wasting on compliance. Their platform automates up to 90% of the tedious compliance work. It helps you respond to those endless security questionnaires at the five times faster and it connects you with experts to get your security program running immediately. The results speak for themselves. A recent IDC report found that Vanta customers achieve over $535,000 per year in benefits and the platform pays for itself in just three months. So you're going to join over 10,000 global companies like Atlassian, Korra and Factory who use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time. And don't miss this for a limited time only. My listeners can get $1,000 off Vanta. That's real money back in your pocket. Visit Vanta.com slash Scott right now before the software expires. That is V-A-N-T-A dot com slash Scott. There's in the book there's an eight step process for the reset process. We're not going to go through everything now, but before you even start that process, you speak about time traveling and going back in time and figuring out the root cause of the trigger. And I've always thought this is important because I think that trauma, whether or not the early childhood trauma or later trauma that happens because you experienced an event once and now it's imprinted in your brain and you can never forget it. And that's probably what is causing the negative response the next time you experience that. So before this process even starts, you're going back in time. This is I'm assuming what the time travel portion of this process is. What is the guide for somebody to even sort of go down this path and to start looking back and figuring out what was the thing that happened to them that's now eliciting this behavior 20 years later. That's what therapists charge you a lot of money for and seem to never fix. So how are you doing it in like a very short period of time? It's pretty incredible. You, instead of thinking about it and let's face it, if you're on a business, you've probably spent a lot of time in your head thinking. All of the stuff we're dealing with is pre-thinking. It's in the tissues is in the body. And I want to walk you through how the body makes decisions that you're taking credit for all the time. But to answer your question really directly, you're going to say, what does it feel like in my body? The hairs on the back of the neck, my stomach, my jaw tension, and my sweating. And you turn on all the senses to feel what it feels like during that trigger. Because you can replay any emotion good or bad you've ever had like a Spotify playlist. Your body can do that. You just have to decide to try it like, oh, that's gross. I don't want to feel that. But you feel it anyway. And then you ask yourself the question, what was the first time I felt that way? And it doesn't matter if you get it right. Just whatever pops into your head is probably the first time. And that's how you know. And here's an example of this that I put in the book. I was on the Joe Rogan show three times. And more to the companies that Joe owns decided to copy the product set that I had. And the day that launched, Joe suddenly came out and said, Dave Asprey is a bad man and a liar. And I'm like, funny how that works, right? I'm like, I didn't do anything here. I mean, and it was it was pretty targeted. And to be really honest, it, it really messed with my head. And that's on me. So for a few months there, I'm like, should I hire a crisis PR? Like this guy's just saying all these things about me. And again, my team, he was a convoy commander in Iraq. I mean, he drives around explosive stuff with generals in the car. So he's like, Dave, why are you so reactive to this? I don't know. So I sat down, did the reset process. What's the first time I've felt this way? And this thing popped into my mind. I had no memory of in first grade. Another kid did something he shouldn't have done. And I titled, I told the teacher, hey teacher teacher, you know, little Johnny did that. And she goes, little Johnny, did you do that? And he goes, I didn't do it. Dave did it. And then I got sent to the principal's office for what someone else did. And this is injustice. Do you know what the biggest trigger is for entrepreneurs? It's injustice. I did the right thing. And then they punish me for it. And this is actually a childhood thing. If you think that you're going to make money or be rewarded for doing the right thing, you have a childlike view of the world. You got to learn to be a little bit more grown up than that. Right? Doing the right thing is something that I choose to do. There are times when I probably could make a lot more money by doing the wrong thing. I don't want to live like that. So I don't. But there are people who will make the other choice. The other big trauma that every one processes when they come to 40 years is then is even worse. And it's betrayal. I trusted this person. I did the right thing and they intentionally harmed me. When I give talks to entrepreneurs, I just did one three days ago in Phoenix, about a hundred plus entrepreneurs. How many of us have had people steal money in a bezel? 90% of the hands go up. That leaves a scar. How am I ever going to trust my employees again? And if you don't learn how to reset that, betrayal and injustice, you learn to not let those get under your skin because people will betray you. All that you can do for that is have better discernment, learn how to feel it and have better processes so that your culture and your team can spot it before it becomes a problem. And if you don't do that, it's no one's fault but yours. And I didn't do a great job with that. I do a better job now. At least I think. And if I'm not, guess what's going to happen? I'll get betrayed and I'll learn from it because that's how it works. Listen, it's it's so true. It's so, so, so true. And the worst part is if you just push all this stuff down, all the trauma, an employee sued you, an employee stole money from you or just personal trauma, somebody cheated on you, somebody lied to you. If you just push it down and you never deal with it or you deal with it in an ineffective way, it just builds up over time and then it makes you this on the surface, a seemingly effective person that is just, you know, a moment away from the wrong trigger to blow up their own life. And I think that that's what's so scary. And you probably see the tons of entrepreneurs too and not entrepreneurs, just people that have bottled up these traumas. It is so scary that if you haven't mapped out your emotional triggers, you're not running your company, your past is. Like, imagine that, you're not in charge, you just think you are. And let's walk through the main framework that has come up just in the world of biohacking and the one that we teach people at 40 years of Zen. And it's that we like to, we like to think that we see everything that's happening and we don't. And here's an example. Cloud my hands. You know that it took so amount of time for the sound to get to you and then you heard it, right? Because that's what you see. That's not true. So if we put electrodes on your head and measure your brain waves, your auditory cortex won't hear the sound for a third of a second after it hit your body. You mean there's some other force listening for a third of a second? Yeah, there is. And that's a useful force. You ever lean on a hot stove accidentally? Unfortunately, you've all done that. And of course, what we did is we noticed it was hot, thought about it for a minute and said, yeah, I guess I should move my hand, right? No, you jerk your hand away. And then you say, good thing I jerk my hand away. That's a lie. Some other system that was not you pulled the hand away. It's provable. You'd have time to move, but it moved. That system has a third of a second to fuck with your reality. And it is based on a network, a distributed consciousness of ancient bacteria that basically filters reality for you and decides based on the algorithm of all life on the planet, what it's going to make you feel to manipulate how you behave. And that sounds dark and I can prove all this. Here's the operating system for life. This applies to slime molds and applies to politicians. There might be a relation there. It applies to humans and single-celled organisms. Number one, if something is scary, run away from kill or hide. It's fear. They're all F words, right? And you do this first, always. Because if something eats you, there's no point of the rest of the operating system of life. It has to come first. Fear will always come first. Even if you're the best meditator on the planet, your body will watch out for real physical threats. It's just not very good at that because single-celled organisms are stupider than hell and your behavior is based on single-celled organisms. So fear, next thing, food, eat everything. Because famines are bad and these are dumb little bacteria making sure they don't run out of energy and they're really scared of that. So fear then food, the third F word, all life has to do it to stay around for multiple generations. You know that one? Yes, I know that one too. For tillies, the one you think it of. Of course, that was it. Exactly, that was it. So, you don't know how many people I've checked into dropping NF bombs? I was about to, but I was like, you know what? I know you. I know you. I know you're messing with me somehow. Very good. That's my 12th grade sense of humor. Sorry, 12-year-old sense of humor. So it's fertility, but that means that before you get a chance to see or hear anything, your body looked at it and said, should I kill it? Can I eat it and should I hump it? And only after it's made those judgments, is it going to get passed into your consciousness? And it will get passed along with the flavor, along with the manipulation, along with an emotion, unless you've done something to remove that. I'm manipulation tied back to past lived experience. It will be tied back to, you know what? I'm a dumb network of bacteria, but I'm really fast. And when that guy cut you off, it had enough similarities to that time that, you know, Ms. Johnson in second grade did whatever it was. It was some old thing that, so even that relevant, a dumb network of ancient bacteria that runs your operating system, it's just doing pattern matching. And so you know that pattern matched enough, that I'm going to make sure that you feel fear because it's better to feel fear than to get eaten. Can you just a quick question on that? Can that same system pull patterns from previous generations, or is it only your own lived experience? It can, right? It can. And it gets really interesting there. I'm going to finish the other two F words and then let's talk about that because it's one of the most important things for entrepreneurs to understand is the nature of where your behavior programming comes from. So fear, food, fertility, the next one is friend. All life on earth will form an ecosystem. You'll support your tribe. You'll support the world around you and you do without thinking. So we're wired to be kind to each other in our bones. As long as we're not inappropriately feeling threatened, and we're not malnourished, and we're not lonely. And this is why we build healthy companies or unhealthy companies. And the final F word is forgiveness. It's how you go in, and it's how you evolve as a humans by letting things go. Forgiveness is not, by the way, saying something was okay, and it's not telling someone you forgive them. It's just a matter of adjusting the programming inside your tissues so that you don't have any more reactivity to something. And that's what creates power, and it creates freedom. Because you imagine this, 30 pounds of air and some food every day combine them, make electricity to run little environmental sensors and computers and manufacturing plants called mitochondria. Well, they didn't get triggered by fear. So you have all this energy, most of it's left. Okay, let's look at food. If you have cravings and you're hungry all the time, you don't have to eat. Well, you're going to spend a lot of time on that. In fact, for the average person, one third of their thoughts every day is about pizza. Or tacos, does that matter? That's why it was epic is killing all the food noise, but you know, it's true. It was epic is probably, in fact, not probably, ozempic at low doses is a longevity drug, but that's a different podcast probably. So if you can silence that voice by training yourself to do intermittent fasting, you saved yourself a lot of energy. So we can turn fear into peace. We can turn cravings into nourishment. And then we get to the fertility thing. 20% of people report meeting God during orgasm at least once in their life. So you can use conscious intimacy as a way of powering yourself. And I, not the first guy to say that, you could talk to Napoleon Hill thinking Groveridge has a whole chapter on this. You can talk to Montaccia, who I've interviewed as one of the leaders in the field of studying Taoism and Tantra and just understanding, oh, you mean intimacy is the form of power as well. It's one of the, it's creation energy. This is what makes companies is libido, right? But not if it's all in porn and omifans. And then you go to the next one, your community. If you have enough energy to put into your community, it will always support you back, right? This is why we have all our masterminds. This is why people join a church group or a club or you do all these things because it nourishes you. We need this in our in our cells. If you do that stuff right, you have energy at the end of the day and you're going to do your meditation practice or breath work or whatever it is that just makes you better person. And if you don't understand this, you're triggered all the time. You eat junk food, you're hungry all the time. He's filmed a little energy you have left looking at some kind of porn. And it's no wonder your company is taking a shit. And it's because you wasted your energy everywhere, right? And your company is a reflection of your energetic state. If you are chaotic and low energy, your company will be chaotic low energy. If you get your stuff together, you remove the things that are not serving you, you become present and your company starts to grow. And they're connected. You can't break them, especially if it's an early stage company. 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It gives you one source of truth for your business you get the visibility and control to make quick confident decisions while others are guessing you're working with real time data insights forecasting you're basically looking in the future of your business with actionable data whether your company earns a couple million or even hundreds of millions net suite helps you respond to immediate challenges and helps you grab your biggest opportunities and speaking of opportunities they put together the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning and net suite dot com slash Scott clary this is the playbook for understanding how to use AI for your business the guide is free that is net suite dot com slash Scott clary we will talk about meditation because I haven't even asked about that yet but I need to understand what we were speaking about just briefly how the generational trauma because someone's going to say for example I want to just you know lay out somebody listening to this they're going to be you know what my life has been pretty good nothing really bad has happened even though I'm sure you forget a lot of the bad shit that happened when you were a kid but say for arguments take you're saying your life was pretty good let's talk about where trauma comes from if not from growing up here's here's what happens someone will come in to 40 years in their high performer and they'll do some of these resets and like you know what I work through all the trauma and I still have stuff and they're going to go in one of three directions when they get rid of the obvious stuff one of them is called pre and paranatal trauma the trauma that your mother experienced when you were in the womb does leave a mark and we have almost 40 years of research supporting that so traumatic birth and a traumatic gestation really makes a difference on your psychology but if they didn't have issues there then it gets shamanic and there's a lot of altered state stuff and heavily meditated and it's not that easy to write about that stuff because a lot of people say that can't be there for it isn't which isn't pretty scientific but this is what people do and it's reliable and it works some people are going to say I was doing the meditation and I suddenly was speaking a language I don't know and I saw this stuff from some other time but great why don't you run a reset on wherever that past life was right and I don't care if it's a real past life or just a perceived one it left a mark let's erase the mark right you still remember whatever was you just don't have an emotion associated right I don't attach a value to whether people believe something or not and then the other thing is generational trauma so sometimes people heal their lineage and gee my shamanic teachers been talking about that forever of course people are going to do that when they start running this reset process one of the most profound things that's happened with someone who's gone through 40 years as n is Miriam and I can talk about her name because she's public about this and people who go it's confidential unless they talk about it but Miriam was conceived right after her parents got out of a concentration camp that almost killed them and she's older and she said I've been searching my entire life for peace and I have never felt it until right now so in their 80s that's the power of generational trauma you carry it with you and there's evidence for this if your parents went through a famine in world war two your chances of having typed you diabetes are substantially higher and it only makes sense maybe there's a genetic component and I know a lot of people are starting to argue that there's also a could be an energetic could be quantum or just a learned behavior because if your parents learn to pattern and it's an unconscious pattern it's their triggers they're going to give it to you when you're young right because they got it from their parents you got it from their parents who got it from their parents and let's face it most of history in humanity has been pretty dark so someone got traumatized now their kids are and it's going to keep getting passed down it'll get passed into your company it'll get passed into your kids unless you stop it and it gets really sketchy because when you're the top executive in your company if you're a man traumatized employees are going to bring their daddy issues to you and if you're a woman they're mommy issues and if you're an experienced leader you'll see this someone gets triggered they stop acting like an adult they start acting like their ten or twelve or seven or whatever the age of the trauma is and they don't know they're doing it right they become defensive they'll lie they'll just like what is going on here well one thing is oh I'm slow mad the other one is I have a lot of compassion because I understand where this is coming from this is a flawed human being and I'm going to sit them down and I'm going to have a conversation with them and in that conversation I'm going to discover what category of person they are and I write about the categories in heavily meditated because they're so important a spiritual teacher named Dr. Barry Tothi's to me and he learned them from Lao Tzu's direct oral lineage this is basically the Buddha of China on the roots of Shaolin this is part of the training for categories of people category one people are win-win all the time they do something they're gonna make money you're gonna make money category two people they're win-win most of the time but they screw up and if they do something and win and you lose and you call them on it they'll apologize make it right those are the only two kinds of employees you ever want to have category three employees for them to win someone else has to lose but they don't know it they believe their own BS so a story I never fail okay that means they will be unable to see themselves failing and if someone points out their failure they will unconsciously try to destroy that person because that person cannot exist for their story to be real these are really dangerous people category three people are also known as narcissists I was gonna say it sounds like a narcissist I had one of those in one of my businesses you can guess which one every single week reporting to me in the board we're on track to lose a couple million bucks and grow at a large rate at the end of the year you know we might lose five million instead of four million December first okay that's not good but at least we're growing December 31st oopsy I lost 28 million dollars and I'm like what all the board meetings all the financial reports so when we fired this employee for burning through three years of intercapital she says you should give me more stock options and I'm like why wow the delusion absolutely but this is a category person I know that that person did not didn't have the capacity to see what she was doing even though she had great credentials and all that because she was blinded to it because she was a category three I win lose person and it was very very weird anyone has dealt with a narcissist understands like you start to question your reality right and to this day that person is out interviewing and the story is that I wasn't at the company when it happened and I don't think that person is lying I think that person has rewritten history to make themselves not fail isn't that weird but what this means everything wait what is what is category four then if that's that's a narcissist I don't even don't know there's one level one level worse I've dealt with two of them in my life um they are sociopaths sociopaths are win lose and they know it and they're playing you and they're master manipulators and the thing with the narcissist is there's defenses and once you once you realize what's going on if you don't give them any positive or negative energy they can't survive and they'll go stick to someone else and they'll leave you alone you might have to whatever but a sociopath they will intentionally and consciously try to destroy you and this is the world of business and if you started your business and you're a normal category two person you're going to think the whole world is win win because you're striving to be that and you're going to think people are like you and I was one of those and I got the lesson there are people who will look you in the eye and they will lie and they will work to make sure that you lose even if they also lose because they cannot stand it if you win and I was removed from the board at bulletproof the company was sold for less than 10% of the value of when I was removed and how could that have happened this kind of dynamic had just had to be a play right and I write about this with as much details I can without you violating confidentiality and things like that but I've seen it and if you learn the reset process you learned to not carry it with you so I could have easily been broken by that stuff Scott a thousand percent I think most people might have been yeah it was it was rough at the same time I guess because well the best entrepreneurs are really good at suffering according to Elon I think he's right about that his quote about staring into the abyss and eating glass is what makes you good executive I also decided to do a conscious uncoupling that's Austin speak for getting divorced and right prior to all this I had a family member tried to steal one of my other companies out from underneath me all at the same time and man that was a lot and I sat down and I did exactly what's in this book that reset process because otherwise I would have broken so I want people to have this and that's why you've come to 40 years is then like my whole team we will dial your brain in or just read the book understand that it's not you choosing to do these things it is an automated system to keep your hardware alive that's giving all these feelings and you can imagine everything on earth it's a giant fluffy Labrador retriever okay it comes in the door it eats your shoe piece on the couch humps your leg goes into the kitchen and ransacks everything that's your operating system that's what an untrained nervous system will do and it's there for a reason to make sure the species reproduces to make sure you don't starve to death and make sure nothing eats you you can also take that same dog and turn it into service dog takes six months or a year and now it'll sit there do what it's told with a piece of pepperoni on its nose until you tell it it can eat the snack hey you get to run your company with one of those two operating systems and the whole point of heavily meditated is that you don't have 20 years to learn all this crap nobody does in the world we have today so learn it quickly and you may not even like the reset process that's in the book I go through all of the different techniques and technologies in order to enter the altered state that lets you turn off the alerts on your phone that's in your operating system you do that and everything gets easier in your life and it's the highest leverage is to turn off fear the second highest is to turn off food the third highest is something I cover in the book as well and that is to learn how to harness what's called sexual energy to become life force creation energy and this is a longstanding technique so I write about those why are psychedelics special and in altered state in the bedroom is not they're both gateways to the same states you could also access from breathwork or from meditating in a cave for a while you get to pick the path but you need to figure out how to get there I need to just touch on meditation because it's in the title but explain to me how you look at meditation for somebody that just does it casually what is the different interpretation of meditation because you've included if I go through the list of various religions and practices like you bring in things from Buddhism from Christianity you bring in things from all over the world so your version of meditation and I'm assuming that is a gateway to the altered state is a little bit different than probably what most people consider meditation to be so talk to me about optimal meditation through ancient wisdom modern science for peak performance you might hear someone say it's really important to learn how to cook like well doesn't it matter what you're cooking it's the same with meditation so what is the goal of meditation you might want to choose the meditation or the meditation replacement based on the desired outcome so you have your return on ad spend I put a dollar in I get four bucks back or more it's great if I put a minute of meditation in how much do I get out of it right and are you measuring dollars are you measuring something else well with meditation you're measuring did I get into the desired state let's say you want to have a really good brainstorming session with your team and you want to go into that creative state instead of like getting stuff done state you would do a meditation or a breath work or run electricity over your brain or take a bump of whatever I don't care you're gonna do that to get into the state you desire and the most precious states are the states where you're blasting off into outer state feeling in outer space you're feeling connected with with everything connected with your partner connected with your team they're just very different goals so when it comes to something like breath work which is provably faster there's three buckets that I mentioned in the book the first bucket is I am feeling tweaked and stressed I need to get my energy back and get aligned right now okay that's the military knows this stuff it's a box breath you know four seconds per side or you want to go a little faster make your out breath twice as long as you're in breath so you would breathe in for for breathe out for eight that will shift your state very reliably so if your goal was to chill that's what you'd want to do I did that before I go on stage every single time okay yeah I do you know I love it then there's another one which is something that's more akin to what I would do before I go on stage which is about dropping yourself into a relaxed aware state versus turning off stress and when you do that instead of instead of we'll say grounding in what you do is you're expanding and calming so you walk in with a big presence but not a big you know all over the place where I suppose it's a big felt presence and this is more like what you would do if you were going to have that brainstorming thing or a really productive meeting where you had a place of peace and you're aware but not fired up right and then there's another set of breath work which is the stuff that replaces taking LSD and I write about my experiences with Stan Groff who treated 3,000 people with LSD as a physician in the 1950s who invented a kind of breath work along with his wife when LSD became illegal so god which of those ones do you want to do or here's another one of my my favorite techniques and this is new in the world of biohacking it's not even a meditation but it's a practice that works really well for entrepreneurs and it's called bicep and it's not this bicep it's brief intentional conscious exposure to pain the last thing that I think would be interesting because you you write about this and I'm curious I'm curious why you think this is an important idea for a high performing individual you write about Cantra and you write about you write about intimacy why because if somebody reads this book they're going to be okay like everything else makes perfect sense I get it I want to be able to perform I want to be in a meeting I want to be able to let go of the of the anger that is associated with the employee that suits me why does sex cross the far in the pond corporate veil and and start to become this important idea for entrepreneurs to understand entrepreneurship is a community effort you are an entrepreneur to make something that the world needs or to do something the world needs the way your body processes reality is is it scary can I eat it and can I fuck it okay if you don't feed those parts of your operating system so that you feel peace you feel nourishment and you feel that intimate connection your body will derail you and you'll be the kind of founder who sleeps with your assistant and it'll be the kind of founder who spends all of your money on hookers and blow and I've seen this so many times and you'll be the kind of founder who leaves chaos in your personal relationships and guess what happens to your business when your marriage fails we all know not good not good not good and it's it happens because this is it relationships are as important as eating for adults your system needs that and if you don't prioritize that the same way you prioritize a bit or the amount of cash in the bank you want to have a bankrupt unhappy relationship at home so your business can grow it doesn't work you'll do that for a few years and then you won't have a relationship you'll only have half your company if you're lucky and your company will be much smaller because you were emotionally taken out now this happens over and over and I know this because this is how it has to work given the way our unconscious mind and our body works but it gets even more interesting because I am dating a relationship coach and we do hot seats hot seat masterminds for entrepreneurs just about relationships not about marketing or business operations and couples and singles come and we work with Annie Lala and Rod Harrison a bunch of others and we do coaching in in front of a small group and then you go oh my gosh these guys work together and this is how they do it these these guys don't work together but it turns out you're not alone and the data shows that the single factor that determines whether your relationship will last is whether you have a community that supports your relationship it's more than anything else so you might as well put at least as much energy into maintaining your relationships and deepening your intimacy as you do grow in your business because you will keep your business and your business will grow much faster when you have you're you're vibing with that creative energy that is the same thing you used to create a baby even if you're not looking to do that that's what creates businesses in the east they call it life force energy or Chi and if your home relationship is depleted your Chi will be depleted so you pay so much attention to what goes on your plate and whether you're doing your red light in the morning but if you're not practicing intimacy as a source of power and nourishment you're missing out on a massive massive energy source and a massive way to enter altered states some of the most sacred altered states come from Tantra or even I interview an expert for the book Kim Yunch she's an excellent conscious kink and what is that she's a somatic therapist and she's like you know I work with a lot of people including entrepreneurs and it turns out some of my clients in order to really feel it like they needed to be kind of restrained so I started doing that with clients and you this this is this is my path now I'm a professional dominatrix who was a somatic therapist but it's healing an altered states work it's not it's not about the sex she's not sex with with her clients she's leading them on a guided journey that is no different than a psychedelic journey it's just accessing the senses through the body the same reason the monks are flogging themselves it's just another gateway in given the number of entrepreneurs who are unnerished in their intimate relationships because they don't get what they need it creates so much pain and suffering and it breaks companies and it causes massive lawsuits when you just can't stand it anymore it's so funny you take someone who's dieting you put a plate of cookies in front of them and half the time they're I just ate half the cookie I just had to you know I said it wasn't you put a bunch of women in short skirts in front of a man who's a good man who is just completely malnourished that way and he's going to fight with all of his willpower and eventually he might eat half the cookie and it'll ruin his life right and that's not an okay thing to do so can we talk about this can we talk about that this is as important for men and women in different ways as food and then we can treat it as something that we respect and then if you met God during a really good orgasm great was it good for you did it nurse you did it make you feel grounded it make you feel connected great you'll be a better entrepreneur and then you can do it Napoleon Hill talks about it and think and grow rich he talks about sublimating that energy and I have taught so many young men here's how to space out your ejaculations so that you don't lose your energy this is an ancient longevity practice and it turns out every time a guy ejaculates testosterone drops and prolactin goes up when testosterone drops dopamine drops when prolactin goes up dopamine drops and that will you respect me in the morning thing actually no because you have no testosterone you have no dopamine your prolactin side your apathetic so if you're masturbating all the time or you're ejaculating all the time with your partner it is very likely depleting you and probably harming your business so this is a call to be aware that this is part of your performance stack you can have sex and not ejaculate and if you learn how to do that you'll have a lot more sex you'll become more successful your partner will become happier this only works for men by the way women do not have that problem so if you're a woman who can ejaculate go for it but it's it's something for guys if you're if the goal of your lovemaking is no longer getting yourself to completion you're gonna have a lot more fun your partner's gonna have a lot more fun and when you're done you'll be so incredibly supercharged and I've the young men have said Dave I thought you were full of crap I tried it for 30 days and I got a 30 thousand dollar raise I started two companies I finally got off my ass and I did the thing I wanted to do it's because their testosterone went up and stayed up which made their dopamine go up and maybe they got in a cold plunge which was their brief intentional conscious exposure to pain and all of a sudden they stepped into their power this is how it works so how can I right heavily meditated without talking about what one third of your thoughts every day are about boobs if you're a guy and I don't know what women think about but probably something similar right it does depend on which time of the month by the way they're women are more complex that way but seriously all humans when our hormones are healthy we will spend a huge amount of our energy and thoughts on that why don't we treat it as a sacred nourishing thing instead of something dirty if you wanted somebody who reads this to just take away one message the most important message and they understood nothing else what would that message be and why everything you've ever done that you're ashamed of wasn't you it was an ancient network of bacteria conspiring to keep you alive so you can stop feeling shame about it and start doing something about it where should people go to connect with you I'm assuming this is gonna give me give me the links in the website and there's a link there on the homepage that'll take you to all the bonuses for heavily meditated if you pre-order the book you order it right now you get a hundred ninety nine dollar course from commune about biohacking so that way more than pays for the book and there's about seven hundred fifty dollars in bonuses and discounts that things available and look I'd love for you to come to forty years of zen and not everyone's gonna do that people feel called it's expensive and it's the most valuable thing I've ever done for myself in fact that's why I built the company was to reprogram my own brain even if you never decide to go read the book sit down you have a couple hours of run the reset process on the things that really piss you off if you do this it'll change everything you do and when you buy the book now I will invite you to a webinar where I teach you how to do it I love it I love it okay is there anything else you wanted to go into we should also just touch on psychedelics so we talk about sex and we talk about things like food is a very small part of the book and this understanding of your mental frameworks and breath work and all that so many people are using psychedelics and you can use them as a way to enter some of these altered states and there's no good or bad about it but there is an order of operations if you're new to this and you're considering it and the reason I wrote that chapter as I've done shamanic training I've traveled over the world I've done the great majority of the psychedelics and we use them as an option at forty years of zen the world first psychedelic assisted neurofibic program so wow they could be valuable but I see people usually using ayahuasca and sometimes mushrooms to target wealthy and successful people and I would suggest that you should start with lower risk higher reward psychedelics on your journey and don't be one of those guys and we've all heard them the ayahuasca bros dude I've done eighty seven ayahu journeys I do them between my kettlebells and you know I used to be an MMA fighter and now I'm going to be saved something dude eighty seven times when you're going to notice it's not working and so I would say if you decide to do one of the ancient medicines like that go to the jungle do it with a real shaman because there's more risk there than people realize and the safer ones well ketamine has been around for 70 years and you can do it in a therapist's office and that is very well understood using ketamine at parties bad addictive using it for therapy amazing it regrows your brain MDMA on occasional use relatively safe and very effective for trauma mushrooms reasonably safe effective for trauma and I don't think things like heroin or cocaine those are hard drugs but they're not psychedelics I don't include them in the list and it gets a little bit sketchy I mean you can do DMT DMT can be profound and it's different than doing ayahu and ibogaine is one that should be near the end of your list ibogaine is medically risky I am planning to do that but I'll do it with a cardiac monitor and a doctor nearby because sometimes your heart rate gets a little bit high so just understand start with the foot in the water don't just find some ayah bro who's gonna walk you through those people cannot hold space the way they need to the role of a shaman is to act as a firewall to keep malware out of your brain and there are people those narcissists that we talked about earlier they will target you with psychedelics so be careful if your high visibility or your high wealth there are people who really really really want you to do drugs with them and it's not for your best interest and there are people who really really want you to do drugs with them because they're going to help you heal you're determined better be good if you're going to go down that path especially with drugs towards the end of the list what about LSD about LSD I actually like Elsa I go to Burning Man so I don't have an issue with it I did a podcast and then a breathwork workshop with Stan Groff who's the guy who created trans personal psychology so all the EMDR all the breathwork it all came out of his work he treated three thousand patients with LSD in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s when it was still called that and it created a whole new branch of psychology and psychiatry so there is value for LSD and it's very hard to get addicted to psychedelics it is possible to get addicted to ketamine because it's not really a psychedelic we just talk about it that way it's a dissociative so I would say you're unlikely to get addicted to LSD and occasional use with integration and journaling relatively safe you might want to try mushrooms first but it can be a beautiful experience but ultimately all of these all of these psychedelics they can what expedite improve the the whole reset process they can they can complement it like is it possible to do it without I'm assuming yes but what value do they add you know during the reset process most psychedelics aren't going to be helpful they're gonna create profound awareness and sometimes you may experience forgiveness but it tends to be random right so having awareness and having the felt sense of an altered state can be really powerful and look if you go to an event once a month and you do a psychedelic journey of whatever works or you do a breathwork workshop it's like taking a mental shower it just lets you see the world as connected to everyone with more gratitude and that's really the role of a lot of psychedelics depending on which ones a lot of people want to agree with everything I'm saying here if this is a generalization feeling a sense of awe and gratitude and connectedness is really really grounding and beneficial for people and it's in the middle of the reset process you cannot heal from a trauma unless you know how to feel gratitude or awe and psychedelics can reconnect you to that experience which is a necessary ingredient for forgiveness but they won't cause forgiveness