Forgiveness: The Ultimate Biohack With Dave Asprey

When it comes to health and wellness, technological shortcuts and gadgets only take us so far. Dave Asprey, the “father of biohacking,” CEO of Upgrade Labs and the author of “Heavily Meditated”, explains how forgiveness may be the best “biohack” of all.

Today, Dave focuses on ancient traditions like forgiveness, meditation, and spiritual and emotional growth for wellbeing. He goes over techniques for getting the most out of meditation and specific tips for how to “reset” the body, spirit, and mind.

Visit Dave’s website: daveasprey.com
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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Dave Asprey.

Dave Asprey, the Father of Biohacking, joins us on this episode, which focuses on ancestral wisdom. Wait, what? This is Episode 557 and our guest is Dave. He is the CEO of Upgrade Labs and the host of The Human Upgrade Podcast, and he is the man who coined the term biohacking. Dave is also a four-time New York Times bestselling author, including his latest book called Heavily Meditated.

I caught up with Dave in May 2025 at his biohacking conference in Austin, Texas, and I was curious about his transition from being the king of gadgets and hacks, as I saw him anyway, to a man eager to explore ancient traditions like forgiveness, meditation, and spiritual and emotional growth. He tells all in this episode, covering the gamut, including his take on how to hack meditation and how to reset the body, spirit, and mind for optimal health.

Before we get into the conversation, have you heard of the Health Freedom Defense Fund? It was established by Leslie Manookian and its mission is to rectify health injustice through education and advocacy. Leslie and her team at the Health Freedom Defense Fund support those whose health rights have been infringed and they support legal challenges to unjust laws that undermine our health and our sovereignty. To support the work and to find out more, go to HealthFreedomDefense.org.

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Welcome to the show, Dave.

I’m so happy to be here, Hilda.

Building Resilience: Are We Doomed By EMFs And Modern Toxins?

We are surrounded by non-native electromagnetic frequencies, all kinds of stressors and toxins. Are we doomed or is there a way to build resilience?

I’m pretty sure there’s a way to build resilience because we’ll say maybe I wasn’t the most resilient human. I used to weigh 300 pounds before I was 30. High risk of stroke and heart attack, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, toxic mold poisoning, pre-diabetes, a massive brain fog and a few other things that we don’t have to go into detail about.

Basically, three knee surgeries before I’m 23. If I can be as energetic and resilient as I am now, and apparently the calendar thinks I’m 52, but my lab tests think I’m 35. It’s very confusing. I’m the worst case for this. I would’ve probably had MS or some other degenerative thing by now and I would not have had the career. I was on disability insurance when I was 26. My doctors say I’m fine, but I can’t remember anything. Something’s wrong. I was failing out of my classes at business school when I was 30. If I can do this, it’s going to be easier for anyone reading.

You want to help so many people. You’ve built this huge biohacking empire.

It’s not really that. I don’t want to help so many people. I just want to help the people who want help. It’s different. There are people out there who I respect who are like, “I’m going to feed a billion people,” or whatever. I’m not counting numbers because that’s not how it works. Especially when we’re talking about healers. It’s not about the number of people you heal. It’s about you were of service when you were called for the people who needed your help. If you help 3 people in your life or you help 3 million, it doesn’t make any difference. Were they the right ones to help?

It’s not about the number of people you heal. It’s about being of service where you are called, for the people who need your help.

Why The “Father Of Biohacking” Is Obsessed With Forgiveness And The Ego

I have to tell you something. It’s very surprising to me that you just used that word egoic and that in your book, Heavily Meditated, you talk about dissolving the ego and learning to recognize it and to reset. These are not things I would expect a biohacker to care about.

Maybe you had some egoic judgment about biohackers.

Maybe I did.

I’m just messing with you. If you look at the definition of biohacking, it’s changed the environment around you and inside of you. You have full control of your biology or of your state. I had the honor actually, at the event where you spoke. I shared the ideas in my book, Heavily Meditated. Victor Chan, the Dalai Lama’s best friend, stood up in front of the audience unexpectedly for me, and said, “Now that I’ve heard that framework, all this stuff that Dalai Lama says makes a lot more sense.”

In its first week, Heavily Meditated is the number one philosophy book in the US, at least. It’s the number one meditation book. It’s the number one Zen Buddhism book. It’s not really even about Zen, but I will explain exactly where the Zen concept of ego comes from. It is biological in its origin. We know where it lives. We know its operating system. We know how it makes decisions. We know why it makes decisions. Funny enough, you mentioned toxins and EMFs. It’s listening to those too.

I have to go a little deeper here with you. What do you mean you know where it lives, the ego in the body where it resides?

The ego is a part of the operating system of life. All life on the planet runs the same operating system. When you say operating system, what are you talking about? Operating systems handle the most basic functions that have to be there. In order, this is what a tree will do, what a bacteria will do, what a lion will do, anything alive. It runs on F words.

The ego is a part of the operating system of life.

This is really important because they have to be so simple that a single-celled organism, which doesn’t have much of a brain in there, but they do protect themselves. They do make decisions. In fact, some, like slime molds, can solve a maze faster than humans can. It’s crazy. There’s an innate intelligence in life and it goes like this. Fear is the first thing. Don’t get eaten. This has worked for bacteria. If something is scary, you must, in your own form, run away from kill or hide from it.

If you look at this, that’s fear. My data says that we put about nine times more energy into fear than anything else. If you meditate, it’s only six times more. That’s pretty profound because we’re really, at the end of the day, allocating the amount of electricity we make from 30 pounds of air and some amount of food. We combine those and we get our life force energy out of that. That’s fear. The next thing would be food. Eat everything.

Wise Traditions | Dave Asprey | Forgiveness — Forgiveness: We put about nine times more energy into fear than anything else, but if you meditate, it’s only six times more.

Eat everything that’s edible because you’ve got to survive.

Sometimes, things like ultra processed food that’s barely edible. There’s another F word that all life has to do to stay around for multiple generations. Do you know that one?

Friendship?

No, it’s the with benefits friendship. We’ll call it fertility for polite company. There are four letter versions of that. Fear, food, fertility, and then friend. All life on earth do these things in order. Friendship, that’s how we form an ecosystem. It’s how we form a tribe, how we form a community. It’s how a forest forms. All life will take care of its own species and those around it in a way that is beautiful and elegant. You don’t have to have a brain in there to do that because it works at the lowest level of life.

We think we’re special. We’re this high level of life. In fact, 2 billion years ago, there was a cell in the ocean, seventh-grade biology, that harnessed these little bacteria called mitochondria to be its mobile power source. That is so wrong. What happened is bacteria found a cell and they said, “Look, a mobile Petri dish. Let’s move in, take over and never let go.”

The other way round.

Inside your body, there are trillions of ancient bacteria inside your cells. More of them than there are cells in your body. More of them than there are bacteria in your gut. They are the part of your biology that senses reality first, decides using dumb little computers, runs it through the F words, they talk to each other with quantum entanglement. It’s a distributed consciousness throughout the body and it is not your consciousness. It is different from you.

Are Your Microbes Really Running The Ship? Mitochondria And Distributed Consciousness

I’ve heard this before. The microbes are in charge. They make decisions. They’re running the ship. What if we could flip the script and put them in their place so that we could be more present and more loving. Even more connected with each other and with sources.

You can and that’s really what biohacking is about. I’m saying this and people could say, “Those are some big claims, Mr. Asprey.” I’ve run a neuroscience clinic for years called 40 Years of Zen. It’s called that because you have the same brain state after 5 days of intense deep work with a computer sector head showing you how to do it that you would get from 20 to 40 years of daily meditation practice. This is just science. Here’s what we learned. There’s about a third of a second, I can clap my hands. The sound got to me. I know that takes some time and I heard it. That’s a lie because if we have electrodes measuring your auditory cortex, you don’t get any signal for one third of a second.

It’s a censorship window for your mitochondria to decide, “Was that scary? Should I make the body drop to the floor? Should I even show it to you? Is it worth attention?” After you process the sound, it takes the rest of the second for your prefrontal cortex to kick in and decide what it was. We perceive that we heard it in real time. If you think that’s true, I have two examples for you. One is, how do cats do that? They only have a 30-millisecond window. They are ten times faster than we are. They can move faster than they want because they get the signal faster. The best example ever. Have you ever leaned on a hot stove?

If I did, I stopped immediately.

Obviously, you’re like, “That’s really hot. I guess I should hold for a second here. Will I figure out what that sensation is and then move my hand?” What we always do. We think we feel it. We don’t even feel it. Our mitochondria and our nerves, the local network feels, it goes, “Pull that away,” and we go, “Look at me. I’m so good, I pulled my hand away.” You never decided to do that. Someone else pulled your hand away.

Thank God because someone else is responsible for making sure your heart beats, making sure you breathe, you blink and squeezing little sphincters. Could you imagine if your conscious brain had to do all of that and pay attention to everything in the world around you and decide what to ignore consciously? You could not function.

We’d be overwhelmed. We’d be in bed with the covers pulled over our head.

The role of the ego is to keep your meat alive as if you’re not in there. It’s so frustrating because your ego hates it that you’re in there. It’s like, “It’s my job to keep this body alive and I choose to be fearful, hungry, make sure that I hump everything that might possibly give me a baby, even if it’s a cactus,” because a libido thing is weird. “If there’s anything left over after that, let’s form a tribe. Let’s only do it to be safe.” That’s all you need to do.

The role of biohacking is first, teach your body to have a lot more energy because mitochondria can be bad at making energy or they can be good at making energy. When they’re good at making energy, it turns on your spiritual powers. I’ve had multiple gurus come through 40 Years of Zen. I’ve worked with millions of people at this point through my content and some of them directly. The people with spiritual awareness, when they turn on their mitochondria, every time they say, “My power’s increased.”

In fact, one of the most touching times was a master just revered in his country in his 80s. I put him on a bunch of mitochondrial enhancing supplements and he called me up with tears in his eyes and he said, “You gave me my powers back.” As your mitochondria go down, your powers go down. This gets a little more esoteric. Some of this isn’t even in Heavily Meditated. Have you heard of microtubules?

I don’t know.

There’s a guy named Sheldrake, who’s well known in consciousness circles. He hypothesizes that these little tiny structures inside our cells, inside our brain, that they’re the seed of consciousness because they collapse quantum probabilities into particles, into things that actually happen. I don’t believe that’s true. What I’ve learned through this process, mitochondria cluster around these microtubules. The microtubules, the antenna to sense reality, quantum reality, the actual reality that we are not supposed to see as humans. They aim the antennas based on the F words. If you can train the ego, which will exist as long as you have a body, you train it so that it spends less energy on fear, it transforms fear into the opposite of fear. What is the opposite of fear?

Love.

I don’t agree.

What do you think it is?

It’s peace. Love happens naturally when there is peace. It can happen but there are seven different kinds of love. The deep one, like one with everything, love for your fellow human, that only happens when there’s peace. Otherwise, it becomes a grasping, needy love, which is still better than no love. Transactional love is not exactly the highest level. I look at peace first and then love. Love helps to dispel fear. It doesn’t always.

Dave Asprey’s Story: The Spiritual Journey That Began Before Bulletproof Coffee

Correct me if I’m wrong. You were this overweight techie guy, knowing that something had to shift. You were in Asia when you came across the herders with the yak butter in the tea. I thought you started growing in understanding how we needed to manipulate our environment to benefit our bodies but it wasn’t just a physical journey, it was a spiritual one too. Is that right?

The reason I was on the side of the holiest mountain in the world when I had yak butter tea was because I was on a spiritual journey. Much before that, in the late ‘90s, I went down to Peru and I said, “I want to try ayahuasca.” This is a time no one could spell it. No one knew what it was. It was not a tourist industry. They looked at me and they said, “You’re White.” “Yeah, I noticed, but I actually know what I’m doing here.” They introduced me to a shaman and I tried a ceremony and I think it has great spiritual risk, but if you do it with the right people, it can be amazingly beneficial.

That was part of it. What really got me on this path was I tried all the stuff that’s supposed to make you happy. I had Asperger’s syndrome when I was younger. This means social connection is just not working. Brain doesn’t work right. There’s a lot of autoimmunity. It even means that your ability to perceive the world is limited because when your body was learning how to present reality to you, there’s a lot of static in the system. You just ignore a bunch of stuff that normal people would see.

I didn’t even used to have peripheral vision, believe it or not. You don’t need that to survive. I didn’t have enough energy. My brain was like, “Not necessary. Just look right here. That’s enough.” I didn’t know I was doing that because I thought everyone did. I went through this in my late 20s and early 30s of rewiring my mind and my body and my senses. I say rewiring, literally, I went to different specialists and used technology to learn how to hear again, to learn how to see again, how to move again. When I had my full faculties, it was because I fixed my mitochondrial networks.

However, I was still an angry jerk. I believed fervently that if I could just make enough money, I’d be happy. At the ripe age of 26, I make $6 million. Pre-Biden dollars. That was a lot of money. I looked at a friend at this tech company and I said, “I’ll be happy when I have $10 million.” I didn’t understand dopamine, didn’t understand that you get motivation for pursuing a goal, but achieving the goal doesn’t do anything for you. I said, “I really want to be happy and I have big issues with loneliness, so let me try getting married to the first person I can get married to in my earlier mid-twenties.” That was a very short and tumultuous and not very well-chosen marriage.

Let’s see. Marriage didn’t help. Money didn’t help. I’ll try being famous. When I was 23, I was the first person to sell anything over the internet, before the word eCommerce was invented. It was a T-shirt that said, “Caffeine, my drug of choice,” on it. It had this caffeine molecule on it. I’ve tried being famous. I was in 80 magazines when I was 23. Same thing. Fifteen minutes of happiness. That didn’t do anything that I thought I would. Fame and fortune and companionship don’t make you happy.

As I was ending that relationship, I had also lost $6 million. I was traumatized, too, because I was born with a cord on my neck. I had PTSD from birth thatI didn’t know about. A friend says, “Dave, you’ve got to go to this retreat.” I’m like, “Retreat is for cowards. I don’t retreat.” I might have had a little bit of armoring in there. “What do they do there?” She said, “I’m not going to tell you because then you won’t go.”

I was so desperate that I called my boss at the tech company, I worked and I said, “I’ve got to go away for ten days next week.” He’s like, “This is startup. What are you talking about?” I said, “Gordon, I’m getting divorced.” He just sat down and said, “Seriously?” I said, “Yeah.” He goes, “How long has this been going on?” I said, “Six months.” He’s like, “You never said a thing. You never changed your work.” I’m like, “That’s my personal stuff. It’s not supposed to affect work.”

Emotional Trauma & Rewiring Your Brain: Lessons From A Personal Development Retreat

That was not a healthy place to be. I don’t know how to handle this. At that personal development retreat, it was one of the first transpersonal psychology retreats in existence. It’s called the Star Foundation. I did homotropic breath work, I did internal family systems, hearts work, rebirthing, all this crazy stuff. I’m a computer science guy from a family of phds for multiple generations. My grandmother’s a phd in Nuclear Engineering. We don’t believe any of that woo crap. In fact, only the world’s dumbest, most gullible people would believe in that.

I tried everything that was supposed to work and none of it worked. I said, “I’m going to do this weird thing.” I came out of that going, “Reality is so different than I thought it was, I’m going to have to learn some things.” One of the other things that happened. They did this thing where you take a whiffle ball bat and beat on a pillow and scream. Have you ever seen that?

I’ve heard of that. I’ve never done it.

It’s the dumbest sounding thing ever, but it’s not about whether it’s dumb or smart. I looked at that, I’m like, “This is stupid. I’m not going to do it.” The sound of all these people wailing, I couldn’t handle it. It activated some ancient PTSD. I’m like, “I’m going to go sit in my car and turn on the radio, have to listen to it.” The therapist came out and he would just sit in the room with it. There’s three kind women with pillows holding me down. I’m like a strong, capable young man, I have no idea what’s going on.

Barbara, who was the founder of the American Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology Association, and she’d been running it for 30 years at the time, she goes, “Do you feel anything?” I said, “Yeah, I feel angry because this is dumb and I don’t want to be here.” She goes, “Anything else in your body?” I say, “There’s something in my stomach.” She goes, “Do you know what it is?” I said, “I don’t know. It just feels weird.” She said, “It’s fear.” I said, “There’s nothing in here to be afraid of, therefore it can’t be fear.” She said the words that really influenced me. She said, “Fear is an emotion. It doesn’t have to be logical.”

I’m like, “I’m riding around in this body and I am simultaneously irrational and rational.” What I didn’t know back then is that all of the emotions I feel about the world around me are interpreted by my body and my mitochondria. I went through and I learned the state of every emotion and how it felt and where it felt in my body. I did that as an adult, not as a child. They never teach kids to label feelings anyway.

Pretty soon, I’m hooking devices up to my ear to measure the spacing between my heart rate. I decide to do neurofeedback where you glue electrodes to your head. It was 25 years ago. I’ve had my own machine to read my brainwaves for that amount of time. In the last ten years, I’ve been helping more than 1,000 really high-performance, powerful people get inside and do what we can do to that mitochondrial network.

The Fast Track To Zen: Using Neurofeedback To ‘Hack’ Decades Of Meditation

You don’t really need data, I think, to tap into some of these higher stages of consciousness or do you?

You don’t need data. Talk to an engineer. Talk to a skeptic. Data creates safety. It also guides how quickly you can learn. I’ve spent time at monasteries in the Himalayas. You’re sitting there, you’re in lotus pose. Your butt hurts. It’s a vegan place, so people are tipping sideways because of all the beans. I thought it was a silent retreat. Good god. You’re sitting there and your eyes are closed and the teacher says, “Take a deep breath. Visualize the Buddha. Notice the feelings come in. Gently set them aside. Stay focused.” If you do it right, and when you open your eyes at the end, the teacher nods. That’s your feedback for the whole freaking day.

When I’m doing this 1,000 times a second, over 8 different sites in my brain, I have a computer going warmer, colder. I can learn the state. That would’ve taken me decades of sitting in that monastery to just feel it. No drugs required. Now imagine this. You got your phone and you go to your therapist. I’m trying to focus on my work and all these alerts from Twitter and tiktok and Instagram and text just keep popping up. Your therapist goes, “I have an idea. Gently swipe right on all the alerts and focus on your email. Don’t be distracted.” Could you do it?

That wouldn’t be very helpful.

Why is it that it’s okay on your phone to go into the system settings and turn off alerts but in our subconscious, in our bodies, we’re supposed to just tolerate the alerts and learn to gently ignore them over the course of decades? This does not lead to peace. It is energetically, incredibly intensive, but thank God we can do it because otherwise, we would all probably kill each other because of the first F word or we’d eat each other because of the second F word.

Just to get it straight, you are saying we can approach this completely differently.

Let’s go into the control panel in your nervous system and let’s turn off stupid alerts. I call them stupid because they’re stupid.

Let’s just say someone at work “triggers” me. Something they did makes me feel like, “I’m losing ground on something.” My primal state would be reaction would be fear. My ego would say, “Hold on to that responsibility,” or whatever it is. What we’re trying to do is avoid all that alert triggered state. What did you say about triggering?

This is one of my favorite thoughts. If someone can trigger you, it means you’re a loaded gun and their finger is on the trigger. If something triggers me in my life, anything at all, like thank God I found another one, I’m going to go turn that alert off. The problem is, most of us have been raised to believe that you turn it off through thinking. It happens before you can think that’s not where it is. We’re like, “I’m going to just focus. I’m not going to see all these alerts going off all the time.” That’s not how you do it. Over the course of these years, working with these executives, measuring their brains all the time, teaching them meditation techniques, there’s an eight-step process called The Reset Process.

I saw that in your book.

People spent $20,000 to learn it until I published Heavily Meditated. I’m giving away my most precious technique because it is a step-by-step instruction for going in on a specific trigger and permanently turning it off so that then you’re no longer triggered. At that point, someone does something that would’ve irritated you. Instead of doing what most of us do, like, “I’m a functioning adult, so I’m just going to smile and everyone in the room knows that I’m pissed off, but I’m going to smile, going to nod.” That person knows they got to you, but we’re all going to play the charade. It’s energetically expensive and worse, it’s inauthentic.

If you can be congruent, which means your interstate and your outer state match each other, that means people can feel you. That means that you can lead. It means that you can follow. It means that you can show up the way you choose instead of the way someone else chooses because they’re pushing at your buttons.

The 8-Step ‘Reset Process’: How To Permanently Turn Off Emotional Triggers

Can you just give us one step in the reset process so that we can understand this concept?

I’ll get through the basics. I would encourage anyone reading, find the full thing online or get heavily meditated. There’s an audiobook and all that. Not because I want to sell books. It does not change your life as an author. You write books because they matter, not for income. I’m going to do the brief version. I’m skipping some steps, but I’ll give you the big shape of it. The first thing is notice a trigger. What does it feel like in your body? Where is it? Is it in your stomach? Is it in your throat?

You feel like you got socked in the gut sometimes.

Yeah, or it’s the perineum, hip or the hairs on the back of your neck. Ask yourself, what’s the first time you remember feeling that way. You must re-experience the feeling and then query. You go, “That’s weird. This thing from childhood popped into my head.” Okay, well, let’s work on resetting that because if you can find the first time you felt that way, if you reset that, every memory and experience after that transforms automatically. You go back in time as far as you can, it’s like time travel. This is because every memory we have is accessed by an emotional state. If you change the emotional state on the original memory, all the other ones just get reindexed as they’re not associated with that anymore.

An example would be someone I loved, a relative, used to call me a name, let’s say. Me, as an adult, when somebody calls me a name, it’s almost like I’m going back to that anger that hurt all the things I felt as a child. If I revisit that, I can maybe erase some of that initial reaction so that I don’t get triggered. Is that the idea?

That’s the idea. Here’s what happens for most of us. The person says the mean thing and you fly into a rage. That means you stop thinking and worse, your rational brain gets the feeling of rage. It looks to make up a story that’s logical about the rage. The most obvious story is that person’s a jerk and all the stories we make up about people. In the reset process, it can be just do a reset on the thing happened today but it’s probably something from long ago in childhood. Sometimes it’s even before childhood. It can be perinatal, it can be prenatal, it can be generational, it can be past lives, whatever. It doesn’t matter. Whatever pops into your head, do that. The first thing that comes up, it makes no sense except it works.

You do that. Okay, I’m going to reset that. You imagine the other person sitting across from you and words have enormous power. The reason we call it spelling as I think it helps, you’re casting spells and you say very precisely to this person sitting across from you, “You did X and it made me feel Y.” You cannot say, “You were mean to me.” It doesn’t work. Say, “You did not protect me when I needed protection. You disrespected me and it made me feel less than,” or whatever it was.

This is the big thing missing from all forgiveness research that I’ve been able to do. There’s a set of lineage practices, whether they’re Buddhist or any of the other shamanic things that I’ve studied around gratitude. Gratitude is great, but when do you apply it? You’re feeling this icky thing, you know the state, you actually turn the state on. How did it feel? You tap into the ickiness. You have to replay it.

If you felt a punch in the gut back then, you’ve got to make it in the body. It’s somatic. You get curious and the curiosity, it did kill the cat because it turned off fear. The curiosity is what’s one good thing that happened as a result of this time I was bullied as a kid, let’s say? You can say, “There weren’t any good things.” There actually were and there are an enormous number, but your body didn’t let you think about them because it was stuck on fear.

You find one good thing. It can be the tiniest thing. “I got in a terrible car accident. At least I have both legs.” Great. It doesn’t matter. It just has to be a tiny spark of gratitude. You must have the spark of gratitude to light the fire of forgiveness. Once you do that, then you move into the next part of the reset or you put yourself in the other person’s shoes. You ask yourself, “What had to happen to them to make them act that way?” You realize, “They learned it from their parents. They learned it from a bully.” You start realizing, “This is just a flawed human being. They didn’t do anything to me. They just did something and they did it because their life probably isn’t very good,” or maybe they were having PMS.

Maybe it was just a bad day. A bad day. They had a headache, a migraine. They just got fired. You don’t have no idea. It’s all made-up stories. When you read the book, I describe some of the sensations in the body. It’s around the heart and you open your heart and you connect to them as another fellow human being. It’s easier when I have a computer and you’re with my facilitators, I’m like, “No, you’ve got to get it there,” but you can do it without that. I just did this at the conference for 4,000 people. There were tears all over the room and it takes four minutes.

Forgiveness, in essence, is a bio hack.

Forgiveness is the biggest bio hack of all. All it means is you stop letting your body be reactive to things that don’t serve you. Holding a grudge is neurologically and biologically expensive and it harms you. I actually believe it harms the other person, too, but not nearly as much as it harms you. Why would you waste your precious life doing that?

The reason because you know how to stop holding a grudge. You try to think your way out of a grudge. It doesn’t make any sense to hold a grudge. You felt the grudge before you could think. You don’t get to think your way out of a grudge. You can only feel your way out. The answer is re-experience the feeling, then gratitude, then compassion and forgiveness.

The Most Important Biohacking Advice For The Next Generation

I love that so much. Speaking of that, I sense in you, Dave, that you are at peace. I’ve seen you interact at this conference and in other occasions. I’m like, “That man really is living what he is talking about.” I want to ask you, as the father of biohacking and the head of this big empire, what’s one lasting bit of advice you might want to give your own children or the next generation when it comes to this thing?

It’s that you are more in charge of yourself than you think. Your powers of self-deception are legion.

I know what you mean. We convince ourselves that the world is a certain way but it’s all up here, isn’t it?

It is even worse. The real world is quantum foam, pretty much. There’s a bunch of quantum fields interacting. Your body is designed to ignore 99.999999999% of reality. It does that for a really good reason because you couldn’t function if you had to perceive all of reality. We go back to that example on your phone. You think, “My email’s right here on my phone.” What’s really happening is quantum fields. Let’s go above a little bit. Your finger, it touches the screen and some electrons happen and then there’s a wireless signal that’s spread across all these things and it goes back to a data center and goes from this computer to that computer. You don’t know any of that. You don’t see any of that unless you’re a computer hacker like me, but all that’s in there.

Here’s my emails are on my phone. It’s not on my phone. You are like the phone icon on my phone from my mail. I see you, I perceive you. It’s a very useful way to interact in reality to see people and to see light bulbs and to eat and all that. None of it is real. We just sense it as real because it’s the most effective way for us to survive. If you were a butterfly, you would see in a range of colors that humans cannot see and you’d be hyper-focused on things that move or flowers. I don’t know what, I’m not a butterfly. Their user interface on reality has nothing to do with what we see.

This is hard for me to wrap my head around and I’m sorry that we’re running out of time, but it just seems to me, because I’ve read books about such things, some people go to the extent they go this far with all the consciousness stuff is that you might be thinking that you created me. You created this moment, you created this space. It’s all made up. I have a really hard time with that because this one guy, I read this book and he’s like, “I was really good at creating that scenario just now.” I thought, “I experienced it, but I have a hard time believing that I created it.” I guess that’s normal.

What if you created me and I created you and there really wasn’t any difference?

Mind-bending conversation right now.

It’s not that I just believe this. We have the math in quantum physics that this is how it works. In fact, all of reality emerges as a byproduct of consciousness.

All of reality emerges as a byproduct of consciousness.

One way I think of it is that sometimes I tell people everything that happens is because you had an idea. I think I’m going to go to Texas to this biohacking conference. I’m going to interview Dave Asprey. I thought it, and then I contacted your assistant and we made it happen. It started as a seed of an idea. In that way, I get how we co-create what’s happening, but it’s hard for me to get that. Maybe I need to do 40 Years of Zen to get that far to think of that.

Do you think time exists?

No. I think it’s an artificial construct.

Our bodies make up time because it’s really useful. We have time. We can do all kinds of stuff, but we can prove with math, hard math, that time and space are figments of our imagination. They do not exist when you get down to the fundamentals of reality. Does that mean that I ignore time and space? No, because I would walk off a building and I’d be late to walk off the building. They’re just incredibly useful and we live in that. I am not so enlightened to be able to tell you the reason all that works. However, I do know that if there was one great consciousness in the universe that is this quantum thing, it wouldn’t be able to examine itself unless it broke off pieces of itself and let them look at each other.

If time is an artificial construct, why don’t we stay alive?

Just manifest more.

The Best FREE Biohack: Why Absolute Darkness At Night Is Essential For Health

I like this. I always say, actually I do say, because I do believe words are powerful, “I have all the time in the world.” That really helps me be less anxious when I’m going somewhere. I’m like, “I have time for everything and I have everything I need.” That’s so helpful to sit in that space. I do want to ask you for the sake of the artificial construct of time, the last question I always pose at the end of each episode, Dave, if the reader could only do one thing, maybe one of your favorite bio hacks to improve their health, and it would be helpful if it were free and accessible to everyone, what would you recommend that they do?

Darkness.

What does that mean?

Our bodies are deeply wired to experience darkness at night. Not half-assed darkness with some little blue and green and white leds with street light coming in from around the windows. Absolute pitch black like a cave. There’s a study from Japan of 800 adults and they found that the amount of street light that leaks around normal curtains increases depression by 69%.

If you want to make yourself more peaceful, make your mitochondria happier, they need to know when it’s nighttime, they want to know when it’s daytime. We have lost darkness in the world. If you see pictures of me wearing these crazy red true dark glasses, I invented them years ago. I do that because I want my body to think it’s dark, even if it’s not. We published a study in a medical journal showing the changes in brainwaves from wearing glasses that simulate darkness. Strangely, after fifteen minutes, they put your brain in a state of meditation. Your brain will shift based on darkness. Closing your eyes doesn’t count. It needs to actually be dark.

If you want to make yourself more peaceful, make your mitochondria happier.

Our world is too artificially bright, but you are a natural light in it. Dave Asprey, thank you so much. On behalf of the Weston A. Price Foundation, it has been a pleasure.

I love Weston A. Price and guys, Heavily Meditated. Worth your time.

This was a blessing. I’m so glad we did it. You blew my mind. The conversation did not go where I thought it was going to go.

I thought I was going to talk about butter and coffee.

—

Our guest was Dave Asprey. Check out his website, DaveAsprey.com, to learn more. Now for a recent review from Apple Podcasts. Homebirther says this, “Actually wise. I’ve followed WAPF for years and have healthy kiddos. Don’t dig the colonization conversation in the last episode, though. Come on, guys.” Homebirther, thank you for your honest review. You did give us five stars, which we appreciate and you told us what you thought of the show. You too can go to Apple Podcasts, click on ratings and reviews. Give us a bunch of stars and tell us what you think. We care to hear it, and thank you so much for reading, my friend. Stay well and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

About Dave Asprey

Dave Asprey is the founder of Bulletproof Coffee, The Bulletproof Diet, and the biohacking movement. He is a four-time NYT bestselling author, the author of the recent USA Today Best-Seller, Heavily Meditated: The Fast Path to Remove Your Triggers, Dissolve Stress, and Activate Inner Peace, the CEO of Upgrade Labs and hosts “The Human Upgrade” podcast.

Dave pioneered online sales in the 90s, co-founded an early data center company, and later transformed his own health by losing 100+ pounds and improving his cognitive function. This journey led him to create The Bulletproof Diet and coin “biohacking.” Dave runs the 40 Years of Zen neurofeedback program, the Biohacking Conference, and a regenerative agriculture farm while investing in biohacking startups.

As a leader in the longevity movement, Dave collaborates with medical professionals, researchers, and innovators to develop groundbreaking techniques and products that enhance mental and physical performance. Using science-backed methods, his mission is to help people upgrade their minds to a happier, more conscious state, and optimize their bodies one cell at a time.