Elevating Human Consciousness: Psychedelics, Neurofeedback, & Biohacking Wisdom

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Episode 233

Dave Asprey

In this episode of The Psychedelic Podcast, Paul F. Austin is joined by Dave Asprey, the “father of biohacking," to explore altered states—from psychedelics to neurofeedback.

Dave shares his journey from discovering yak butter tea in the Himalayas to revolutionizing biohacking. He unravels the intersection of biohacking and psychedelics, highlighting the potential benefits and risks of substances like ayahuasca. Then, Dave unpacks his 40 Years of Zen program, its unique neurofeedback approach, and the nuanced differences between neurofeedback and psychedelics.
Finally, Dave shares his vision for the evolution of humanity, emphasizing biohacking, consciousness, and reclaiming sovereignty.

Dave Asprey:

Dave Asprey is an award-winning entrepreneur and tech innovator known around the world as "The Father of Biohacking." He's a multi-New York Times and national bestselling author of Game Changers, Head Strong, The Bulletproof Diet, and Smarter Not Harder, the creator of Bulletproof Coffee, and the host of the Webby Award-winning #1 rated health show, The Human Upgrade Podcast (formerly Bulletproof Radio). Dave is the founder and CEO of Upgrade Labs, the first franchise of biohacking gyms, and Danger Coffee, his mineralized, mold-free coffee.

Over the last two decades Dave has worked with world-renowned doctors, researchers, scientists, and global mavericks to uncover the latest, most innovative methods, techniques, and products for enhancing mental and physical performance. Dave has personally spent over $2 million taking control of his own biology, pushing the bounds of human possibility all in the name of science evolution and revolution. The creator of the Bulletproof diet and innovator of Bulletproof Coffee, Collagen Protein supplements, and many more advances in commercial wellness products, Dave’s mission is to empower the entire globe with information and knowledge that unlocks the Super Human in everyone at any age. The proof of these advancements are better sleep, energy, and expanded capacity for all.

Podcast Highlights

  • Discovering yak butter tea in the Himalayas
  • The power of coffee and nicotine
  • The journey of Bulletproof Coffee
  • Taking control of your biology through biohacking
  • Exploring altered states, from psychedelics to neurofeedback
  • The importance of psychedelic integration
  • The nexus of biohacking and psychedelics
  • Cautions around Ayahuasca and other psychedelics
  • Cultivating the ‘skills’ of forgiveness and gratitude
  • 40 Years of Zen and neurofeedback
  • Dave’s vision for his own longevity and current projects
  • Shifting from victimhood to sovereignty
  • Final thoughts and recommendations

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Podcast Transcript

0:00:00.0 Paul F. Austin: Hey listeners, welcome back to The Psychedelic Podcast by Third Wave, connecting you to the leaders and pioneers of the Psychedelic Renaissance. This is your host, Paul F. Austin, and today I'm speaking with the father of Biohacking, the one and only Dave Asprey.

0:00:18.1 Dave Asprey: I wanted to create a change in consciousness around putting us back in charge of our own biology. That's the definition of biohacking. It includes you're in charge, shamanically, you're in charge of the psychedelics you use. You're in charge of your mental state, your emotional state, your spiritual state. And what I discovered over all of this research is that huge numbers of the things that people think are outside of them are actually inside of them.

0:00:43.0 Paul F. Austin: Welcome to The Psychedelic Podcast by Third Wave, Audio Mycelium, connecting you to the luminaries and thought leaders of the psychedelic renaissance. We bring you illuminating conversations with scientists, therapists, entrepreneurs, coaches, doctors, and shamanic practitioners, exploring how we can best use psychedelic medicine to accelerate personal healing, peak performance, and collective transformation.

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0:04:08.2 Paul F. Austin: Hey listeners, this is Paul F. Austin, founder and CEO at Third Wave, and welcome back to the show. Today, I'm excited to bring you a very special guest, someone who is a pioneer in the world of biohacking, neurofeedback, longevity, and consciousness. For most of you, Dave Asprey probably doesn't need much of an introduction, but here's his bio. Dave Asprey is an award-winning entrepreneur and tech innovator known around the world as the father of biohacking. He's a multi-New York Times and national bestselling author of Game Changers, Headstrong, the Bulletproof Diet, and Smarter not Harder, the creator of Bulletproof Coffee, and the host of The Human Upgrade Podcast. Dave is the founder and CEO of Upgrade Labs, the first franchise of biohacking gyms, and Danger Coffee, his mineralized mold-free coffee. Over the last two decades, Dave has worked with doctors, researchers, scientists, and global mavericks to uncover the latest and most innovative methods, techniques, and products for enhancing mental and physical performance.

0:05:09.8 Paul F. Austin: He's personally spent over $2 million taking control of his own biology, pushing the bounds of human possibility, all in the name of science, evolution, and revolution, the creator of The Bulletproof Diet and innovator of Bulletproof Coffee, collagen protein supplements, and many more advances in commercial wellness products. Dave's mission is to empower the entire globe with information and knowledge that unlocks the superhuman in everyone at any age. So as you can likely imagine the experience of interviewing Dave was interesting. If nothing else, we got into Dave's journey of discovering yak butter tea in the Himalayas and how it led to the creation of Bulletproof Coffee, and we explored what Dave sees as the true meaning and potential of biohacking, taking control of our biology to improve our health and happiness. We touch on the intersection of biohacking and psychedelics, as well as the potential benefits and risks of working with particular medicines.

0:06:04.8 Paul F. Austin: For example, ayahuasca. Dave walks us through his 40 years of Zen program and its unique approach to neurofeedback in spiritual states. And finally, Dave waxes on his vision for the future, including his focus on biohacking consciousness and healing the masculine and feminine divide. He emphasizes the need to move away from victim energy and take control of one's own life. As always, a quick reminder that if you want us to bring you more conversations like this one, make sure you follow The Psychedelic Podcast wherever you're listening or like, and subscribe on YouTube. Whether you've been here for a while or you're tuning in for the first time, we're happy to have you with us here on this journey. We have a ton of amazing episodes coming up that you won't wanna miss, so make sure that you follow the podcast and while you're at it, leave a rating and review to help others find the podcast. Alright, without further ado, here's my conversation with Dave Asprey. Dave, it's great to have you here. Thanks for joining.

0:07:00.7 Dave Asprey: Paul. Thanks for having me.

0:07:03.9 Paul F. Austin: Absolutely. So I was telling you about this a little bit before we went live, which was many, many years ago I stumbled upon literally using stumble upon that old tech thing that we had back.

0:07:13.8 Dave Asprey: I remember that.

0:07:14.8 Paul F. Austin: 10, 12 years ago.

0:07:18.1 Dave Asprey: Right after AOL, right?

0:07:19.4 Paul F. Austin: Exactly. Yeah. An article of yours where you had talked about going to the Himalayas and not feeling well and finding this yak butter tea and sort of how that was the origin to Bulletproof Coffee, and the evolution of that. And I'd love to start there and really just unpack why in the first place were you even in the Himalayas and what was the story of finding this yak butter tea and how did that sort of blossom from there?

0:07:53.2 Dave Asprey: So in my late teens and my early 20s, I hit 300 pounds. I'm about 195 right now and at 5.4% body fat, not really trying, I just figured out that I cracked the code on biohacking. So it's actually very easy for me to do that. And I had realized that all the things that were supposed to work to make me lose weight and even just to be happy didn't work. I tried being famous in another life. I was the first person to sell anything over the internet before the browser was invented. So the first e-commerce was a T-shirt that said, Caffeine My Drug of Choice. And I sold it out of my dorm room. And my proof of fat picture is when, from Entrepreneur Magazine, when I'm 23 and I'm wearing a double extra-large T-shirt, and people are like, you weren't fat.

0:08:40.0 Dave Asprey: I'm like, I don't know. I'm pretty sure that's a real picture. And it's so funny. So I've tried all this stuff. So I tried being famous once and I was like, wow, I was happy for 10 minutes, right? And then it didn't change my life. And then I made $6 million when I was 26 at the company that started the data center business, which is now a major part of cloud computing and all that. And I was a co-founder part of the company. So I made like real money. And when I had $6 million, I looked at a friend at the company and I said, I'll be happy when I have 10. And this was back when $6 million was worth $6 million, thank you, Biden, now $6 million is worth 40% less than it was last year. Right? I would drop f-bombs if I hadn't done so many psychedelics that I was now peaceful [laughter]

0:09:23.3 Dave Asprey: But what's happening there is I'm like, I want to feel happy and I don't want to hurt all the time. I don't wanna be exhausted and tired. And so I've started learning longevity from people or people who were two or three times my age. Like people in their 80s teach me how to have more energy. These are wise people, these are our elders. And I said, all right. One of the sister groups in a nonprofit that I ran was called the Institute for Noetic Sciences which is into advanced consciousness stuff, which borders on psychedelics doesn't require them, but psychedelics are part of consciousness work. I'm actually more of a neurofeedback guy when it comes to consciousness. One of my portfolio companies that I started does that kind of work called 40 Years of Zen. And so I said, all right, I've decided that after I've exhausted all the stuff that's supposed to work in the west, both for my health and for my happiness I'm gonna go to Nepal and Tibet and spend a few months just tripe sing around in Asia, and I wanna learn meditation from the masters.

0:10:32.9 Dave Asprey: I don't want to go to a yoga studio. I want to go to where they invented it [laughter], like find a guy in a cave. So I did end up going to a monastery in Nepal based on Tibetan Buddhism. And I met someone there and who said, I'm gonna go to Mount Kailash. I'm like, seriously? That's been on my bucket list. Mount Kailash, for people who haven't heard of it. And if you're white, you probably haven't. But in most of the world, if you're a Buddhist or Hindu, this is the Mountain Olympus of those faiths. It's the holiest mountain in the world. You're not allowed to climb it. But once in a lifetime, if you're lucky, you get to go there and walk in a 26-mile very rugged trail at very high altitude around, and it's called a Cora, and just do a sacred circumambulation of it.

0:11:15.8 Dave Asprey: So the universe aligned that. So I find myself in a bus, like a rickety old bus driving from Kathmandu to Lhasa. And unfortunately, because I've been trekking there, I have destroyed my knees, I can't even walk across the street without like two crutches. I'm like, how am I gonna walk around this mountain in six more days? So along that trip, the only source of collagen I could find was pigs ears. So I ate a huge bowl of pigs ears in a little mud hut. They were heated over yak dung. It was horrible. But my knees healed the next day. I made collagen into a billion-dollar industry at Bulletproof. That was my wow, collagen really can heal you when you need it. And then I continue on and another week or two later, I find myself on the side of Mount Kailash under a full moon.

0:12:07.0 Dave Asprey: Unfortunately, I'm there after all the tourists and people have left. There's only maybe 10 people still living there because winter is coming. It's 10 degrees below zero, 30-mile an-hour winds. And I feel like I'm dying 'cause that's how you feel at high altitude. I'm trained for mountaineering and I'm just feeling like crap. Well, there's some other spiritual parts of that thing I probably won't talk about in public, but there was some other spiritual stuff happening that I was helping out with. But I just felt like crap. And I walked into this room. I still have a photo of her, this little Tibetan woman, like half my height. I'm 6'4" and you're just not tall if you're at high altitude Tibetan, she gives me a bowl of yak butter tea. Okay, this is what it is, it's yak butter. And then they put it in a butter churn with tea, and then they churn it for 10 minutes.

0:12:58.8 Dave Asprey: You can't drink it right away. You have to let it churn. And the lady is sitting there going, cha chunk cha chunk cha chunk. So I drink it, and five minutes later I'm like, what just happened? I hadn't felt this good in years. I'd been a vegan, I'd been a raw vegan. I was recovering from all the damage I did to my biology with that diet. I tried everything to lose the weight before that. And I was at a reasonable weight when I did this, and I'd recovered enough health to go to the Himalayas. Okay? So I'm doing all right, but I just remember it was like someone turned the lights back on in a way I'd forgotten. So I said, give me more. And I drank all of the yak butter tea [laughter] And then I came back to Silicon Valley and I said, all right, something happened.

0:13:40.5 Dave Asprey: So I bought, oh, maybe some tea and some butter just randomly it tasted like crap didn't work. I spent a thousand dollars on that expensive tea at the Chinese Tea House in Mountain View, California, and it didn't work. So I went to the high-end stores, and I bought 24 kinds of butter. I'm a scientist. I'm like, I'm just gonna test the variables, right? And it turns out two kinds of butter worked. The grass-fed kinds. I'm like, oh, they're closest to yak butter. They have different components than grain-fed and soy fed butter. So this works pretty well, but man, I've been off coffee for five years because I decided I was allergic to coffee. Every time I drank it. I'd get jittery and cranky and hungry. And sometimes a headache, you get like a brownout an hour or two after drinking it.

0:14:26.3 Dave Asprey: So I drank a cup of coffee too, and I was like, "oh my God, I got my life back. I'm not allergic." And then the next day I drank a different cup of coffee and it hit me. I'm like, wait, it's not me, it's the coffee. And that led me down the path to create mold-free coffee. And people know me for Bulletproof. I've left Bulletproof and my new coffee company is called Danger Coffee, which is my newest mold standards plus trace minerals and electrolytes that are in the coffee. So it tastes just even more like coffee if that's possible. But the idea here is I just want it to feel better. I would argue that coffee is mother nature's oldest and most important nootropic and psychedelic. Now you could say, well, does it make you trip? If you have enough of it, but you probably don't want to do that. But it does enhance so many things. The second one, and by the way, where is it? This on my arm, that's caffeine.

0:15:16.1 Paul F. Austin: Yeah I was wondering what that was.

0:15:17.5 Dave Asprey: It's not oxytocin and it's not DMT for all you psychedelics...

0:15:20.0 Paul F. Austin: I have LSD on my ankle.

0:15:21.0 Dave Asprey: There you go.

0:15:23.7 Paul F. Austin: Like a tattoo. Yeah.

0:15:25.8 Dave Asprey: And it's interesting. And the other one, if I was gonna get another tattoo over here, it would be nicotine. And there nicotine is anti-Alzheimer's. I've written about it in my Longevity book. It's also something that apart from smoking, will amplify almost every psychedelic, the number of times I've given one milligram of nicotine to someone who's really in need of it, or someone who's coming down. I've even shared it with like jungle-trained shamans, and they're like, I'm gonna incorporate this in ceremony now. Like, yeah, like you get another bump in your journey just from using nicotine. And there's reasons in the brain with nicotinic acid and things like that. So that's the other original psychedelic or smart drug. And nicotine is a psychedelic because we have tobacceros who like ayahuasceros, they use it to trip. And I do use it if I'm doing journey kind of work.

0:16:14.5 Paul F. Austin: Well, that's what I was gonna mention is we had Jeremy Narby, who's a anthropologist, who wrote The Cosmic Serpent. And the most recent book he published is about ayahuasca and tobacco together.

0:16:25.8 Dave Asprey: Oh. He has a new book on that. I read The Cosmic Serpent. I didn't know about his new one. Will you hook me up with him after the show? I wanna interview him about that.

0:16:32.0 Paul F. Austin: Yeah, I'm happy to introduce you. Yeah. And talking about the relationship between those, because we perceive tobacco and nicotine as this very sort of evil thing. And the way that cigarettes have been industrialized and the cancer that they cause is clear. But right now, I haven't been... I've been traveling the last 26 hours. I'm chewing nicotine gum [laughter] 'cause It's 8:00 PM here in Europe, but I gotta interview you, so I'm, there's... And it's clean, it's good, it's easy...

0:16:58.6 Dave Asprey: Is that Lucy gum?

0:17:01.0 Paul F. Austin: But I love that emphasis... It's Lucy.

0:17:05.2 Dave Asprey: Nice.

0:17:05.9 Paul F. Austin: So you go to Tibet, you go to Nepal, you have your pilgrimage, you discover this yak butter tea. When you come back, not only are you a scientist, but you're also a marketing genius. How does Bulletproof Coffee become so prominent and well-known? How is it that you take that from being this thing in Tibet to being something that millions, if not tens of millions of people are drinking within four or five years?

0:17:35.0 Dave Asprey: Well, it actually wasn't that fast. I went to Nepal in 2004. And I continued doing my work. I tested a whole bunch of recipes. I mean, people think, I'm like, no, do you know how hard it was to figure out how to make a clean coffee? I had to like try them and feel like shit all day because the coffee was moldy. And then throw away a $23 bag of coffee and buy another one the next day and find the patterns. And then to figure out which lab tests mattered and worked. This is real intellectual property development back in the day. And now it's easier to do testing in part 'cause I pushed the issue. So when I look at what happened back then with coffee, I'd say I had R&D and then I would start testing. I'd make these different formulas. Some had butter, some had coconut cream, some had MCT, different kinds of MCT. And I remember my friend Akhsana, she comes over and I made her a pre-Bulletproof, right? And I think it had butter and coconut milk and some MCTs. And I said we'll just put a tablespoon in here. And she goes, "this is really good."

0:18:49.0 Dave Asprey: She's a relatively thin European. And, man, she goes, I want more. And she puts, like, a lot, like, probably 100 grams of fat. I'm like, I don't think you want to do that. She goes, no, no, I need this. I need this. And this is the feeling people get when they put butter in their coffee to this day, if you've never tried it, you have to blend it. That's what the Tibetans taught me with their blending for 10 minutes in a butter churn. It doesn't work if you eat the stick of butter, but...

0:19:14.3 Paul F. Austin: Right.

0:19:15.1 Dave Asprey: If your body is deficient in fatty acids, which mine was, oh, my God, it's like manna from heaven. So she had that effect. And she calls me up an hour later. She's like, I think I'm going to be sick. I'm like, no one can handle that much fat. That's not normal, right? So I went through all these things and testing it and just having different people try it. So this is just passion-driven product development. There was no entrepreneurial thoughts at all.

0:19:37.6 Paul F. Austin: Right.

0:19:38.0 Dave Asprey: I just wanted to feel good all the time. Then I started the blog. Now people say you were are successful overnight. Starting in my mid-20s, I have led a nonprofit, longevity focused anti-aging research group outside Stanford University. I spent...

0:19:56.8 Paul F. Austin: Oh wow.

0:19:57.7 Dave Asprey: Actually a little bit more than 10 years as president or chairman. Every month we'd have a meeting in person where I'd bring in the luminaries in the field. Before there was much of a field, and all of my members were 60, 70, 80, 90 years old and reversing their aging. And I'm 27, 28 years old, learning from these people because I was so sick that I had the diseases of aging in my 20s. So that's my passion. I started the Bulletproof blog. It was going to be under the nonprofit, but my board of directors couldn't decide on what URL they liked. And I said, guys, I know marketing. I work in tech. So just, I got this, and they went back and forth and finally decided, I'll put it on my own blog. I just got to get this out the door. The time is now.

0:20:43.4 Paul F. Austin: Yeah.

0:20:45.4 Dave Asprey: You can feel things. So it turns out there was a lot of interest in it. But my goal, if five people avoided the hell that I went through from being that sick, I would have done a major service. That was my entire goal. I already made a quarter million dollars a year in Silicon Valley. I had two young kids, didn't need to start a company. When I put up the thing for Coffee, it was like, hey, anyone want to join me in a lab-tested Coffee? It's really expensive to lab test, like $10,000 expensive. But if you guys are up for it, let's see, maybe 100 people are going to do this, and then Mark is, oh, cool, looks like I have a company. But it wasn't by design. It was, I wanted to create a change in consciousness around putting us back in charge of our own biology. That's the definition of biohacking, and it's a...

0:21:29.4 Paul F. Austin: Right it's not empty basically.

0:21:30.4 Dave Asprey: New word in the english language. In 2018, it was added. My name is in Merriam-Webster's now. It's a movement. I didn't trademark the name biohacking. It's a word for us as humans. But the idea you're in charge, it includes you're in charge shamanically. You're in charge of the psychedelics you use. You're in charge of your mental state, your emotional state, your spiritual state. And what I discovered over all this research is that huge numbers of the things that people think are outside of them are actually inside of them. And when you use psychedelics, when you do holotropic breathwork, I actually ran a workshop with Stan Grof, the guy who, the first guy to treat anyone with LSD in a therapeutic setting and who now uses breathwork instead. I breathe with them several times and interviewed them on stage.

0:22:18.3 Paul F. Austin: Wow.

0:22:19.7 Dave Asprey: So with guys like that or with the neurofeedback work I do at 40 years of Zen and some other things like extended fasting, sleep deprivation, there's other ways to put yourself in these psychedelic states. Extreme endurance athletics will do that, by the way. Almost everyone doing that is micro-dosing acid, even if they don't tell you that.

0:22:41.8 Paul F. Austin: Yeah.

0:22:43.8 Dave Asprey: But all of these things, they're ways for us to peer inside first and look at what I call our operating system in my books, and it looks very weird when your brain is seeing what's really going on in there. The body's job is to shield us from reality because our brains can't handle reality most of the time. And so your body is a filter. So what I teach people to do is to go in and reprogram their filter on reality. So you see reality better and you find the parts of reality you want better. And that includes sometimes you need to have help doing that. Sometimes it takes a team. I just find technology is a really good way to do that. And at 40 years of Zen, I'm always investigating newer technologies, which may include psychedelics in order to get people there faster. I never even tried mushrooms or pot till I was 26, and I flew to Amsterdam to do it where it was legal, because I'm like, I want to know what I'm getting. And now I would say I've experienced a good number of the things with the exception of ibogaine, which I haven't tried, but it's on the list and I know the right people. I just got a schedule, the right time. Just about all that.

0:23:53.2 Paul F. Austin: We're the same in that way. We're the same, I have five and ayahuasca and Wachuma Huachuma, LSD, 2C-B, MDMA, ketamine, other more. But I began Iboga. It's sort of like, I feel like that's the daddy of them all. It is intense, intense experience.

0:24:14.3 Dave Asprey: It's a tough one because one of the ones that I'm not going to try is Datura.

0:24:22.0 Paul F. Austin: Right.

0:24:23.9 Dave Asprey: But that's something, I know someone who uses it, who's very powerful, and she loves it, and she has a relationship with it, but for most people, it just causes psychic damage. From all the research I've seen on it, and so I look at each of these as keys to experiences, and it's how much of it you can learn and remember and take back. And a lot of this comes out of doing integration work. So for eight years, I've taken people really deep. With neurofeedback, you don't need drugs to see your past lives. You don't need drugs to become one with the universe. You can do this just with seeing your own brainwaves and going deep. And I've had more experiences that way than I have on plants. But from guiding people on that, what you realize is that there are systems in your body.

0:25:12.7 Dave Asprey: Their goal is to make sure that you forget you're in charge. And this is why when you're on ketamine or something, or in any of these really deep states and hero's dose or of whatever it is you take, you have all this awareness, and then you come back and you can't remember it. And some people, I'm thinking of another friend, I don't think she's public. Another big podcast who's talked about some of this kind of spiritual stuff. I don't want to disclose that, but I can say what she said. She said I learned the secrets of the universe, but I couldn't remember them all because there wasn't space in my head that's real.

0:25:56.2 Paul F. Austin: Right.

0:25:57.1 Dave Asprey: Your brain can't do that, but your energy field probably can. And people would say, Dave, you're not scientific. Okay, whatever. Said that I'm not scientific, but this is how I see it. So what oftentimes happens, though, is it can fit in your head. You have a realization about a relationship or about your childhood, or a trauma, or about some part of your mission, and then you're crystal clear. And as you're coming off your journey, you sleep and you wake up, and it's like a dream that goes away because you didn't tell someone. And I would say 90% of what you receive or intuit or discover, whatever your word is when you're in a really altered state over time, it goes away. You don't remember it. You remember a good feeling about it. You remember it was transformative. But what was the specific message? Well, you don't remember, but your operating system in the body that's keeping you alive, it remembers everything. So your job when you're on a substance is the integration afterwards. And that's why I've transformed the integration process. I do it at 40 years of Zen, and I worry when I see people kind of the weekend Aya warrior types, and there's some well-known ones here in Austin.

0:27:06.5 Dave Asprey: I'm like, it's not about doing the medicine. It's about attaining wisdom from it. And that requires the post-work. And so that's my, kind of, my concern about doing stuff recreationally, especially at heavier doses. But if you're at a party and you do a half a tab or a half a dose of mushroom or something I would rather...

0:27:31.2 Paul F. Austin: There's a time in a place for doing that.

0:27:33.0 Dave Asprey: I'd rather do that than drink alcohol. I mean, in terms of.

0:27:35.4 Paul F. Austin: For sure.

0:27:35.6 Dave Asprey: Longevity and cognitive function and consciousness, for sure. But maybe you don't need either one. You could just drink some TRU KAVA, which is kind of my favorite new thing. I've helped those guys. They're just, they just launched in Sprouts. I've helped them since they were...

0:27:47.3 Paul F. Austin: Oh, nice.

0:27:47.8 Dave Asprey: Very, very young. I've been an advisor and investor there as well. And KAVA is one of those things that should be out there instead of alcohol. And if you're listening to this show and you're, I'm going to have some beer and take some acids, I'm telling you you're probably doing it wrong. Just got to say.

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0:28:09.6 Joseph Anew: If you are struggling with depression or anxiety, Joyous can help. Created by medical, psychological, and technology experts, Joyous offers a subscription of very low-dose ketamine that produces quick release and sparks the beginning of gradual and consistent mental health improvements. Ketamine is FDA-approved, proven to be safe and effective, and can be taken with other anti-depressants. Plus, it's one of the World Health Organization's most widely used medications. Joyous believes there is no health without mental health, and that each individual should have access to mental health care, regardless of their financial needs. Joyous is an affordable alternative for those who have tried other treatments that did not work. You deserve to thrive, not merely survive. Change your mind with joyous. Visit joyous.team to get started today. That's J-O-Y-O-U-S.team Joyous.team. So, Dave Asprey, is Cali Sober? I think that's the new phrase that they use for.

0:29:27.1 Dave Asprey: Cali Sober.

0:29:30.5 Paul F. Austin: No alcohol, but there's still unique and novel ways to.

0:29:34.3 Dave Asprey: Yeah.

0:29:34.6 Paul F. Austin: Alter our consciousness.

0:29:35.7 Dave Asprey: Right? It's really funny, too. I have a dear friend, someone that I've dated in the past who's very, very sober because of past alcohol use years ago, and she's like I won't do any of that stuff. No way no how. And she saw an interview I did with someone who was talking about using Aya to maintain sobriety, and she said, I really don't like that. That's disturbing, because I used to have a black-and-white definition of sobriety, and now maybe it's more gray than I thought, and I don't like that because it's kind of easy if you're like, just never do this. But what if you do it that one time and it's good for you? Right? So I think we're also in the realms of addiction. We're reaching this understanding that some psychedelics probably can help to treat addiction, especially ibogaine. And maybe having an altered state of consciousness isn't the problem. It's needing an altered state of consciousness for emotional or spiritual reasons or maybe biochemical reasons in the case of some things, right? And even then, needing something for biochemical reasons, that's called breathing.

0:30:58.1 Paul F. Austin: Right.

0:31:00.9 Dave Asprey: So, and people say...

0:31:01.1 Paul F. Austin: Always accessible.

0:31:03.2 Dave Asprey: Yeah. People say, what about coffee? I don't like being addicted. I'm like if there was something that you did every day that made you feel good and perform better, and when you stopped doing it, you didn't feel as good, you'd be addicted, right? Like, yeah, I'm talking about exercise.

0:31:23.5 Paul F. Austin: Right.

0:31:24.5 Dave Asprey: Looking at the preponderance of evidence, I think coffee is generally good for the vast majority of people, and there's hundreds and hundreds of studies that would support what I'm saying, not to mention all the ancient wisdom and whatever. So I look at the realm of psychedelics in the same way, should you be using the Stamets stack? I'm also an investor in Paul Stamets' pharma company that's regrowing whole brains, not just the hippocampus. And he's doing that using psilocybin along with lion's mane, which I've been talking about in the realm of nootropics for more than a decade, along with a couple other things, like a B vitamin called niacin. So that kind of thing. And Paul's been on your show. He's been on my show, I've had dinner at his house. And just. What an amazing human being, right? Connected to the fungal kingdom in a unique way. So all this is in the background of biohacking. It's, you wanted a better brain or spiritual access or personal development.

0:32:18.0 Dave Asprey: Those are aspects, they're just a lot easier if your brain works in the first place, if your mitochondria work if you can make energy if you're not going to be starving all day while you're doing a ceremony, because you actually have a functioning metabolism. I just found all personal development works better when your biology works better. And when you're doing heavy-duty plant work, knowing how to manipulate your biology is meaningfully important, both for safety and for experience. Like when I go to Burning man, I mentioned the 1 milligram nicotine that I've offered to people in need. There's something else. That's a supplement that I formulated back when I was at Bulletproof. I don't know if they still make it. It was called. What's this stuff called? It was called KetoPrime, with the ingredients called oxaloacetate. And what it is is a compound that restarts the Krebs cycle. Krebs cycle is how your cells make ATP, make electrons, make energy and heat in the body. So this stuff, oxaloacetate, it primes the pump for it to start again. And half of people under age 40, and everyone over age 40 who doesn't hack their age, has deficiency in mitochondrial energy.

0:33:36.0 Dave Asprey: So you take one of these little lozenges, and then your mitochondria can make energy again. So you take someone who's starting to come down, or they're starting to feel like crap, and they suck on that, and five minutes later, I'm back in it, and I got my energy back, and now I can continue my journey. Like, wow, isn't that weird? We catalyze this ATP production in someone while they're on a substance, and their brain, which takes 20% of their energy, can use the substance better. It actually makes sense. But that combination of biohacking and the psychedelic world, it's still not as wedded together as it's going to be.

0:34:17.1 Paul F. Austin: It should be and as it's going to be.

0:34:18.7 Dave Asprey: And wait till you see what I'm doing with neuro-feedback and psychedelics at 40 years of Zen, I've got some cool stuff, but I can't share that data publicly.

0:34:24.2 Paul F. Austin: Can't disclose that yet. Yeah. Well, and sort of what you're hitting at to zoom out is some of the most transformative medicine work I've done, and I've talked about it on the show before, so it won't take anybody by too much surprise is rectal ketamine with bodywork. There's a fantastic body worker who's a Nor Cal, and there's this lit. And there's this...

0:34:44.9 Dave Asprey: I think you should change your instagram handle to Boofer. You'll be fine.

0:34:49.2 Paul F. Austin: There we go. Yeah, yeah. Just like your butter here on the show. I'll be boofer. And there's this sort of conversation of, your body keeps a score, which is Bessel Van Der Kolk, the unconscious. And then a lot of people say just everything starts in the brain, and everything is downstream of the brain, right?

0:35:05.7 Dave Asprey: No it's the other way around, they're wrong. It starts in the body and goes up to the brain.

0:35:13.1 Paul F. Austin: Well, and there's a relationship of reciprocity, meaning, as you were saying, as you optimize brain health, then naturally your body will also get healthier. And as you work on getting trauma out of the body, naturally you're going to have more neuroplasticity in the brain because of the sort of vagus nerve and the sort of brain gut connection. So I think that context is a good even way to think about biohacking, because when we think about biohacking, we often, at least I do think more about the brain stuff. And when it comes to psychedelics, right when we have this sort of spiritual awakening and opening, we come to realize, no, it's all connected. And so it's physical, it's also emotional, it's also spiritual, it's also relational. Right it's not, We're not just these sort of computers. There's something deeper to transformation.

0:36:02.0 Dave Asprey: It's actually really cool that you talk about. We're not just these computers. There's a group of people in the world, some in government, and a lot of them in Silicon Valley, where I, cut my teeth in my career, they actually think we are meat robots. They're very reductionistic, and it's actually kind of an evil way to view life. And it doesn't reflect reality very well. But if you believe that, it allows you to do great harm without seeing it as great harm because one of your core assumptions is wrong, it's false about reality, and it's an untested one. So I always laugh because I started out there. My grandparents are PhD scientists. Grandmother's a PhD nuclear engineer. My Grandfather helped to design the process that purifies plutonium for working thereafter.

0:36:55.5 Paul F. Austin: Oh cool.

0:36:56.8 Dave Asprey: So deep nerds. And they subscribe to the Skeptic Inquirer, which is a magazine. It's basically Snopes but for boomers. Or maybe they're pre-boomers, whatever that is.

0:37:07.0 Paul F. Austin: Post-boomers.

0:37:10.0 Dave Asprey: Yeah. The greatest generation, I think we call them. Yeah. But maybe they named themselves that. Anyway, our elders. So what that means is I didn't believe any of the spiritual stuff, right? And it was only because I'm curious and I'm scientific with a little ass, which means I don't believe.

0:37:27.0 Dave Asprey: I how things work. I believe I have a story about how things work and I look for things that make the story false and if you do that you find yourself in Tibet. Or the other thing I did, because just kind of following intuition, is in 1999 I went down to Peru and I mostly see Machu Picchu but I'm like, I'm here, I want to try ayahuasca. I will tell you in 1999 no one could spell ayahuasca. It's just, it's not a, it was not a thing. And I asked around at the guest house where I was staying and they're like, you're white. I said, yeah, yeah, I noticed. They said, no, it's not for gringos. Like, you won't like it. You're going to throw up. And It's for locals. I said, look, I've done my work.

0:38:14.4 Dave Asprey: I know what I'm doing. And I really want this. So they found a shaman who comes a couple days later and I had an experience before it was a tourist thing. It was a very authentic experience. I'm not, it, it was, it was eerie and strange. I'm not sure that it that it was that magical healing for me. And for my partner at the time, she changed religions after doing it. So it was probably more impactful to her and got dysentery. That's a different one, but I just, that's one of those drugs that I do worry about. I think I if you don't have a jungle shaman, someone who spent eight years with the Shipibo people, there's a dark side to it that, that you're not going to know about.

0:39:06.7 Dave Asprey: And, and I'm, I'm forever grateful, even though I'm a skeptical person from, by, by upbringing and I'm not, I'm still, I'm just curious now, like the glasses, just, there's something in the glass. Let's see what it is before I just, I just have full or half empty. I finished early. I tend to process, I've done it twice in my life. It is not a drug that I think people should start with. It's like the last drug you should do after you try all the other ones because of the downside risk. If you don't have a good shaman, what this guy taught me early in my journey is that it's the shaman's job to keep out the bad stuff, including from Aya itself. So I finished early and I walked and I said I'm going to go for a hike.

0:39:51.1 Dave Asprey: He goes, no, you're still in the, in the, I said okay, look at this. I'm fine. I can touch my nose. I'm lucid. I can still see some sparkly stuff. I'm going to walk up the hill and walk up the hill and like, look down and he goes, do you see the ring of stones around the tent? I said, yeah. He goes, they're not to keep you in. I said, what do you mean? He said, no, they're to keep other stuff out. If you go out there, all kinds of things are going to stick to you. And then I'm going to have to clean them off. And it's a lot of work and I don't want to do it. Okay. So I can trust the expert who's been doing this and has been taught for generations, or I could say that can't be, therefore it isn't.

0:40:30.9 Dave Asprey: And I could go out there and deal with it. And I have dealt with those kinds of things in other situations. And I would just caution listeners, man do DMT. You don't need to do Aya. If you really want to like go out there, maybe do a little bit of Syrian Rue. Be careful. It's not medical advice or anything. But if you do DMT with an MAO inhibitor, that's what Aya is. Syrian Rue is an MAO inhibitor. So is L'Deprenyl, which is a longevity substance that I use. I don't know the doses on that. And you could get a serotonin crisis and you could need IV benzodiazepines or you could blow a gasket with high blood pressure. It's not like this stuff is safe. By the way, you could do that without MAO inhibitors if you have the wrong genetics, which are one in 40 people from Eastern Europe.

0:41:16.6 Dave Asprey: So there's all kinds of stuff. Like nothing's without risk in the world. But it's okay to take risks that are worth it. So I'll just tell you doing Aya, especially without someone who's been trained for eight-plus years with the people in the jungle carries substantial risks that you won't know about until now. The last time, and like I said, I've only done it twice, only when I'm called. There's one time I was try... I almost got, what's a good way to put that? I was in a situation where there was a lot of pressure to do Aya. And my guides were just, no, I truly didn't want to do it. It wasn't the right thing for me. And it was energetically and spiritually a very expensive experience, even though I didn't take anything because of that.

0:42:04.1 Dave Asprey: And I don't want to go into great details on that here. But I'll just say, you got to, you got to watch out and understand that that that's the side of Aya that isn't necessarily what you want. But then, like I said, twice, I've done it the second time I did it, I was called to do it. It was with people I know very well, a room full of masters took three and a half times the normal dose. And I invented yoga poses that probably I don't know, I was doing unnatural things. And I had a beautiful experience. Right? But I just for someone who's new to the space or... You can get the states with DMT and MAO inhibitors without the risk of full Aya. And you probably won't barf and you probably won't shit yourself.

0:42:50.1 Dave Asprey: So I would say go to Peru and do it and go to a true master if you're going to do that. But you might as well go through the other stack of psychedelics, including breathwork. Go on a vision quest in a cave. I wrote one of my big books about a vision quest in a cave with all the spiritual stuff that happens. And I wasn't on substances, then you don't need to be just have different experiences. So I just I would urge caution on that substance. And then for the other ones, you mentioned a bunch at the front you can do mushrooms, you can do 2C-B and LSD and all those, as long as you know what you're getting, as long as you're in a good set, and setting and you're with good people.

0:43:28.7 Dave Asprey: The challenge, especially for people in their 20s and 30s is you don't know who's a good person yet unless you have an unusual level of wisdom. It usually takes getting screwed over by a narcissist or two, and realizing how if you're not a lying person, you will assume others are like you. And then you realize, oh, my God, there are people who look you straight in the eyes and tell you a lie. And they'll believe the lie they're telling you because they want to. It's creepy and gross. But until you can spot those people, they will be in your circle. And the more progress you're having, the more of them you'll have in your circle. Oh, let's add some psychedelics to that and see what happens. It's not pretty. That's why the integrity of the people you do it with is so important.

0:44:10.3 Paul F. Austin: And they could even be the shamans they could be the people exactly. So that that level of discernment is critical. And it's it's wise words of advice. But we often tell we have a training program for executive coaches and performance coaches and whatnot to work with psychedelics because every other program is doing clinical therapeutic and I'm much more interested in the leadership performance wellbeing and what we say is, we use this lotus flower analogy, which is start with something like MDMA or ketamine or microdosing maybe then go into LSD or higher doses of psilocybin. And only if you know a really like you you know, with absolute certainty, a really great provider, facilitator, shaman, then potentially consider something like ayahuasca or 5-MeO, because these are incredibly intense. And like you said, if you're energetically not held, then they can be retraumatizing.

0:45:02.9 Paul F. Austin: They can cause psychotic breaks, you can get entities on you, there's a sort of host of really nasty shit that people can go through that they don't know about necessarily. Let's talk more about 40 years of Zen. So I first heard about 40 years of Zen, four or five years ago. And because I'm so deep in the psychedelic space what initially caught my attention is Johns Hopkins did some really interesting research where they scan the brains of monks who had meditated for 40 years. And they scan the brains of people who are doing high doses of psilocybin. And they found there to be some commonality when people were deep in a high-dose psilocybin state. Now, I've done both neurofeedback with a really, really great practitioner, and I've done a lot of psychedelics. I'd love to hear your take on what's the difference between the two? How do how do those two play together? Tell go tell us a little bit about that.

0:46:01.5 Dave Asprey: So what you'll see at 40 years of Zen is a structured program of facilitation and neurofeedback to put you in very precise states. What you're going to find in that setting is that there are very precise spiritual states that come from... The most similar would be like a loving kindness, kind of kind of perspective. And in a loving kindness space, there's a heart opening and people who take MDA or sassafras. And there's a few other Wachuma like heart opener type type of things even like you kind of feel this. Well, it can go much, much, much deeper. It's just very hard to teach it. Right. So someone who says, I'm doing neurofeedback, they just believe in putting a computer on your brain and doing whatever the computer says. The magic happens just like in an ayahuasca ceremony.

0:47:01.6 Dave Asprey: If you drink ayahuasca in your backyard, you have a very different experience than if you have a shaman holding space with a rattle doing the ceremonials and then doing structured integration afterwards. So 40 years of Zen is not just neurofeedback. And what it is, though, is we have four patents in the field of neuroscience. I'm working on a paper with a major university about the nature of alpha brainwaves and how we all have it wrong. And I've got the data to actually adjust a very common setting in the world of neuroscience. Like this is real stuff. So we're constantly developing new tech there. And the goal is not to replace psychedelics. But the goal is to give you this specific skill. And when you achieve the skill, it's related to forgiveness, it's related to gratitude. And it's something that's written about in different lineages.

0:47:56.1 Dave Asprey: I don't think you can achieve that with psychedelics. I've found that once you have the skill, it's called the reset mode in my writing. Once you have that skill, I can I can take you out there and give you psychedelics, you can take psychedelics, and it's much easier to forgive. Like after I had done all this work, I tried ketamine for the first time at a clinic for my podcast six, seven years ago, when the first ketamine clinics were opening. And I'm like, Oh, this is cool. I can forgive effortlessly on this because I had exercised with a computer the skill set to do that. So the chances of having a bad trip, the chances of being retraumatized are much, much lower there. But if instead, you're working with someone who just believes the computer is the God, it doesn't work.

0:48:42.5 Dave Asprey: And if you're just doing neurofeedback at a clinic with someone who's got some years of experience, I actually like that people do that. It's just not what 40 years of Zen is. So every now and then I'll get someone who says, on my team is like, well, it's all about the facilitation. No, it's not. Okay. And it's all about the neuroscience. No, it's not. It's about a dance between the two to teach your brain and your body to simultaneously enter a very spiritual state. And that's a state when you can go in and reprogram the processes that are going on in your body so that you see the world very, very differently. And once that state is installed, like a skill, like ice skating or riding a bike, you can always do it. And that means the next time you're on psychedelics, or the next time someone cuts you off in traffic, it doesn't matter. Because you now have equanimity. And you can't do it without facilitation. And you can't do it without proper neuroscience. Right. So there's a lot of people making a lot of claims. But I will tell you that this is a this is a unique program. And it's like...

0:49:43.5 Paul F. Austin: Well, it's really the most prominent and the best known. And from what I've seen, I mean, I know there's like, I think there's a handful of others, but 40 years of Zen is, by far the best stone.

0:49:56.9 Dave Asprey: There's also like, other coffee brands. In fact, there was one who was like, we invented butter and coffee. I'm like dude. My team helped open your coffee shop. You did not invent that. So that's here in Austin. So there'll be a bunch of people. There's also biohacking labs, no, there's also biohacking labs who they're like, Oh, we have $400 consumer device, and we do brain upgrades. I'm like, really? Because I'm rolling out at the 27 upgrade labs franchises right now, we're rolling out the tech from 40 years of Zen. And that stuff. It's not the same protocols, because I don't have facilitators at every, every, every location of upgrade labs. But when people are there, are they getting world-class spiritual neuroscience, instead of most neurofeedback? It's just designed to fix broken stuff. And I'm like, like, no, we want to reach exalted states that permanently create better human beings. So I'm all in on that. And I'm happy. It's a movement.

0:50:56.4 Dave Asprey: I'm happy. I'm not the only one. Its rising tide floats all boats. I just, I don't like it. When someone says, Look, here's my version of Bulletproof Coffee. And it's like, dude, it's margarine. And like burned grain water. Like, it actually isn't your version of that. And if someone drinks it, and they don't get results, they're going to think that the idea of butter and coffee is bad. So you must do it better than the current standard. Otherwise, you're cheapening the world. And this is just a problem for all entrepreneurs right now, you make something great, and some some low-integrity person who probably needs to do a hero's dose of something. They're gonna say, Oh, look, I can say I'm doing the same thing and sell cardboard. And then they will and then they get some market share. And everyone says it doesn't work. So a lot of really good work gets torn down by copycats over time. So I you know, I've seen this in a bunch of my businesses. And it's it's fine to compete. It's fine to innovate. It's not fine to do something inferior and say it's the same as better than. And that's why we have Amazon selling trash as if it's a product that happens all the time, because like the cheapening of the world.

0:52:00.4 Paul F. Austin: Literally, literally. So you know, you, you've been quoted as saying you want to live to your 180, which is fantastic.

0:52:09.8 Dave Asprey: At least 180.

0:52:11.1 Paul F. Austin: At least 180.

0:52:12.4 Dave Asprey: There you go. Yeah, don't shortchange it.

0:52:13.4 Paul F. Austin: You don't wanna... Yeah. So and you're a powerful being you you've you've Yeah, you've done some incredible stuff. And so I'm just curious to hear you sort of wax on what's the vision of what else you want to create as you look at life. And as you look at sort of meaning and as you look at your contribution to the great unfolding, what what comes up for you and in terms of a vision from here on that?

0:52:41.7 Dave Asprey: The goal isn't really to live to at least 180. That was really good for my, my media campaign around the longevity book. The goal is to die at a time and by a method of my choosing. So wanting to live forever, there's a movie in the '80s or '90s called Highlander about like how horrible it would be to be immortal. I don't want that unless I choose it. And having no fear of death is something that most people don't achieve. And I'm lucky that I was really, really sick in my 20s. I bought disability insurance when I was 26. Because I wasn't sure I'd be able to keep supporting myself in my job because I was my brain was so cooked. And I've had all all these health problems. And then I've I've had a lot of experiences in life.

0:53:37.4 Dave Asprey: I mean, I've had a great career in Silicon Valley, like, like you couldn't imagine the growth and the things we did back then. And then magically to create biohacking and bulletproof. But I have six other companies. And what I'm working on now is something that's always been a part of biohacking. There's a 25-year roadmap for the biohacking world. So I created it, I get to create the roadmap. And did I introduce injecting peptides the first year of bio no, it was too much earthing. And light therapy, and butter and coffee were enough to tweak everyone. Right. And over time, I always added the Kailash story, I always add the spiritual side, I always mentioned some psychedelics. So it was first to make longevity cool. So we would start practicing it when we were younger to make control of your emotions and your biology cool.

0:54:32.8 Dave Asprey: So you could have enough energy to show up in your life the way you want. And you care about that when you're 25. Because you want to make your mark in the world. And you want to find a life partner. And you want to have control of your emotions. And you care about this when you're 40. Because you just noticed you're getting old. And you care about this when you're 60. Because you're like, some of my friends are getting really old. Fuck that. I'm not going that way. Right. And I because in my 20s, I was hanging out with 80 year olds who were making themselves 60 again. I'm like, Oh, my God, I've seen the lifecycle. And I was mentored by by these masters. So I look at that, you can also call these the Eriksonian stages of adult development. But I like to think I've attained enough wisdom, or attainment, as Buddhists would say, that I'm in a position to keep giving back.

0:55:18.8 Dave Asprey: I have 3000 blog posts, about 1200 podcasts and 400 million downloads, eight major books, half of them New York Times, bestsellers, I'm nowhere near done on that front. It's about teaching and leading the biohacking conference happens in end of May in Dallas, there's about 3000 people in its 10th year, the conference that launched the industry. But where I'm spending more time on is on upgrade labs on bringing the idea that you can have a healthy body. It's not that hard. We have the data now to do it. So it's an AI, AI-powered longevity, human upgrades center come in and we'll make you younger, faster, smarter, stronger, all the good stuff. And we're not going to just wish that it works like you do at the gym, we're actually going to just do the stuff that works and show you it worked.

0:56:04.4 Dave Asprey: So that's got a lot of my attention. And so does 40 years of Zen and just the movement of bringing more consciousness into the world of biohacking, elevating human consciousness. And also, there's a lot of healing and work that that I do most of this behind the scenes with, with leaders and influencers, but healing of the masculine and feminine divide, there's there's just so much to be done there. There's so many really, really powerful women who have been wounded. And it's possible for for healthy guys who've done their work to just make space for for their healing to happen. And you have to know the states. And that's one of the reasons that things like 40 years of Zen and some of the other teachings that I have out there. If you're calm, and you're grounded, and you can can do the things you learn how to do over the course of having a deep spiritual practice, you can facilitate transformation and healing, and change in others.

0:57:05.8 Dave Asprey: So I'm working on scalable ways to teach those kinds of skills. And you know, it's one thing to teach your community or your friends. It's another thing to be able to reach millions of people. And I'm about to cross a million followers on Instagram, I just crossed similar numbers on TikTok on at least on likes or something. I'm less of a TikToker. So like the the platform is getting bigger. The message is important. The message is getting more focused and the world's changing. 2024 is looking to be a very interesting year. So how do you have resilience through this? Well, I'll show you to the best I can.

0:57:40.3 Paul F. Austin: Right. Yeah. And start with start with you. So as we talked about sovereignty, nervous system regulation, and your track record speaks for itself with what you did with sort of in, I mean, reinventing bulletproof coffee for sort of a Western audience, it feels like what I'm hearing is how do you do that with consciousness? And how do you do that with the masculine-feminine? And how do you even amplify more of what it means to be really sovereign in a world of slavery?

0:58:10.6 Dave Asprey: The real answer there is so many people say I want to go I want to be a what's the word I'm looking for? Not a they want to be protesters, like professional victims out there. It drives me nuts. I want to go advocate for this. Now you want to go complain and bully people into doing what you want. If what you're doing is so valuable, then do it and show others the power of doing it. Right. And this is why what's her name? Greta Thunberg? No, she's not a kid. She's 20. And she's a sociopath. Okay, she has done nothing constructive in the world raising awareness. No. She skipped school in high school. There were kids her age who built booms in the ocean and collected millions of pounds of plastic and pulled it out of the water while she complained. Someone should do something is not making the world a better place.

0:59:04.7 Dave Asprey: And anywhere I see victim energy. I know because I've seen the science. That if you see yourself as a victim for any reason, whether it's because you're a member of a group because someone was mean to you because you were traumatized because you dated a narcissist, any of that stuff. If you see yourself as a victim, the first thing you're going to do, you're going to be way more quick to find fault with others. And you are going to be far more statistically likely to call for harsh punishments for those you perceive have violated whatever you think is right. So if you want to be a Karen, be a victim because it's driving that. So it's the victim energy that our big media is feeling. And one of the reasons I like some psychedelics done with proper integration and some neuroscience done with spiritual awareness. That's where you get the magic happening. And that's how you stop being a victim, even a victim to yourself. I had to go through all that work myself. I don't I don't tell people to do anything I haven't had to go through. Unless we're talking about pregnancy and fertility stuff. I just went to the male part of that. So there you go. And that was my first book.

1:00:12.4 Paul F. Austin: Well, Dave, I know I know you got to run this has been a ton of fun. Any final if people want to find out more about 40 years of Zen, danger coffee, any places you're going to point folks.

1:00:22.5 Dave Asprey: Head on over to 40yearsofzen.com. It's five days intensive neuroscience program with facilitation. And a recent attendee just said this, this is the best plant medicine experience I ever had. But without the plants because you go to those places. So it's not just neurofeedback, not by a long shot. And then if you would like to find out about danger coffee, dangercoffee.com, I'll just tell you the minerals, and the electrolytes that are in there, it does not hit you like normal coffee. And if you're going to have coffee...

1:00:58.7 Paul F. Austin: I'm have to try this, I haven't tried it yet. I gotta I gotta pick this up, Dave.

1:01:02.8 Dave Asprey: If you're going to do coffee with insert name of your favorite psychedelic, I'm telling you the clean vibe there, it changes things in a very meaningful way. So there's a lot of a lot of shamans, a lot of leaders in consciousness drink that coffee for a very specific reason. I built it that way.

1:01:18.0 Paul F. Austin: Well, Dave, 40 years of Zen, Danger Coffee, I appreciate your time you hopping on and sharing everything from the heart in a vulnerable way. This is a ton of fun. So thanks for popping on the podcast with us.

1:01:31.6 Dave Asprey: You got it, Paul. My pleasure.

1:01:33.6 Paul F. Austin: Hey, listeners, Paul here, I hope you enjoyed our episode today with Dave Asprey. Remember, you can go deeper into this episode with full show notes, transcripts, and all of the links that we mentioned in this conversation by following the link in the description. Also, you can continue this conversation with us at community.thethirdwave.co. You'll find support and meaningful discussions around all things psychedelic as well as education, resources, and providers across our global ecosystem. You can sign up for free at community.thethirdwave.co.

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