Hey everyone! Welcome to The Covenant Eyes Podcast, where we explore practical tools, timeless wisdom, and inspiring stories that help you live with purpose and freedom and integrity. I'm your host, Karen Potter, and today we are thrilled to welcome a true pioneer in the world of human performance and biohacking, Dave Asprey, Welcome to The Covenant Eyes Podcast. I'm super happy to be here. Karen, thanks for having me on. Of course, I'm a longtime follower of your work. I have a bag of Danger coffee sitting next to me. It's one of my favorites. So we are just really grateful to have you joining us. For those that don't know a lot about you, you really are known as the father of biohacking. So let's talk a little bit about your journey and how you got started with the work that you're doing and the new book that you have coming out. Well, I got started because I used to weigh 300 pounds and I actually was full of anxiety, chronic fatigue syndrome, all sorts of unfun it, mental, emotional and physical issues going on. And I've been on a 25 year journey of repairing my hardware and rewiring my nervous system in my mind. And I wanted to write Heavily Meditated my course, my ninth book, talking about that side of what I do versus just fixing your body or becoming faster, stronger, smarter. All that. This is about becoming more conscious. I love that, and I think for a lot of our listeners on this show, that, concept that, certainly is not unknown to us in the faith space. So talk to us a little bit about your book, how you combine neuroscience and biohacking. And, you know, couple that with meditation and steps to dissolve stress in our lives. Well. When you pay attention to what's going on, in reality, you learn that your nervous system is giving you signals about the world that you probably don't even notice at, but they feel real. So you can look at something and let's say that it's a couch and a bag of chips. It's going to feel really attractive, even though you know that going to the gym should be more attractive, except if you're sitting from the perspective of your body. But it's like if you go to the gym, you could run out of energy. And I don't know that there's food coming down the road, so going to the gym is a terrible idea. Let's make it look unattractive and let's make the easiest, highest calorie option look more attractive. So your body is manipulating you based on a set of rules. And in the history of making the biohacking movement, figured out what the rules are. And that's what's in Heavily Meditated under. This can create a lot of peace, because instead of judging yourself for what your body is trying to do, you can have awareness of the why, and you can have the tools to reprogram what the body is, is attempting to do. I like to think about if you pick up your phone and you turn off all the alerts that are constantly interrupting you, your phone is more useful. What if you went into your nervous system and you turned off all the alerts so that you just didn't have to deal with them anymore? And that's the path that I've gone down. And to do this about 11 years ago, I started a neuroscience company called 40 Years of Zen, and we've had more than a thousand entrepreneurs, CEOs, celebrity athlete types come through for five days. We hook electrodes to their head and we teach them a structured process that combines showing your brain what it's doing in real time and teaching you the steps to go in and turn off your triggers. And what functioning adults normally do. It's like we're sitting in a meeting and someone says something that gets under our skin and we put on a smile and we're like, thank you very much. And everyone knows that you're pissed, right? But at least you're behaving yourself. And like, that's step one. But when you're congruent, when they said the rude thing but you didn't get triggered and you didn't act triggered, everyone's like, oh, that person has integrity. That person has authenticity, and it puts you back in a place of power. Would you like to know the order that your body processes reality and how it prioritizes things before it allows you to think. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. This is straight out of the early parts of Heavily Meditated. And this is original stuff. It's never been, explained this way before, but it makes so much sense. So the cells in your body, each one has its own unique dumb little consciousness. But it is aware, just like a single bacteria can be aware and avoid things. So you have trillions of these things floating around inside your cells as part of your cells. They're processing reality first and they say, okay, is it scary? Right. They're not that smart. So lots of things feel scary. About nine times more energy goes into things that might be scary because if a tiger eats you, it's game over. So it's going to make things look like tigers all the time, just in case. And then if it's like, okay, that wasn't a tiger. So that's fear is the first "F" word, second"F" word food. Eat everything you might run out of food. Best strategy eat everything. And then the third "F" word is something that all life has to do to stay around forever. Can you guess what that "F" word is? Nope, I don't know. It's fertility or the other. Okay, yes. It could be the other "F" word. Whatever. So your food and the other "F" word? Yeah. In order. So literally, your body, this isn't happening in a third of a second before your brain even gets a signal. It's like, should I try to kill it? Should I try to hump it? And should I actually. And should I try to kill it? Should I try to eat it? And should I try to hump it? And and then we feel guilty. Like, well, I should have not felt afraid. I should have not wanted to eat all the Ben and Jerry's, and I should have not wanted to hump it. Dude, I'm sorry. You're not your body. Your body makes you want to do those things to keep the species alive. The same way a turtle will eat everything, and a turtle will try to run away from things or go into a shell. And the jellyfish? It doesn't matter. All life does this before the brain can engage. Right? So everything that you're ashamed of, that you've ever done is a mitochondrial survival imperative. And what brings me great hope, and the reason I wrote, Heavily Meditated, is that the fourth "F" word after those three is friend. We are wired in our bones to be kind to others, to help the little lady across the street, to take care of kids even if they're not ours. It's just like, hey, are you okay? This is the goodness of human nature. It's just if we're stuck in fear and hunger and lust, we don't have enough energy for our community. And the final “F” word that is most profound is forgiveness. Ooh, that's a good one. Right. And so if you're out of energy because you don't know how to eat and you're you're not healthy enough, right, then. Oh my gosh, I haven't had enough energy for fear and hunger and maybe some lust and maybe, you know, once a year I go to some of my friends and I got nothing left for evolution, for prayer, for meditation, for the things that make you, more connected. And we have an innate desire and need for transcendence as human beings. And you've probably heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? Yes. Of course. What I'm talking about is not Maslow's hierarchy. Maslow is brilliant, and he's talking about needs of our whole organism. I'm talking about how a single cell in your organism processes reality, and why it makes things look a certain way. Maslow died early and unexpectedly before he could publish the final step of his of his research. And the final top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs was for transcendence. So we're wired to enter sacred altered states, ecstatic prayer and Heavily Meditated is a guide to how to use meditation awareness. This can be breathwork, can be technologies. It can be specific meditation techniques and many other ways to enter sacred states that let you reprogram your nervous system, to let you connect with the divine, that let you get there without spending two hours a day meditating in a cave, or, you know, in a on your knees in prayer or anything else. Because we all have jobs and we have kids. And every minute you spend meditating is a minute you didn't spend being there for your kids. So I don't want to spend 12 hours a week in the gym, and I don't and I don't want to spend 12 hours a week meditating, and I don't, but I will if I have to heavily meditate. It says, you don't have to, and here's why and how. Well that's awesome. Thank you so much for explaining that. I think that's amazing. And I love the concept of integrating this meditation into our life on a daily basis, but doing it in an appropriate manner. You know, I love how you are always finding ways to hack. You know you don't have to work out, like you said, 12 hours a week. You can find ways to get the most effective workout in the shortest period of time. And I think your book also kind of leads us down that path with meditation techniques. So talk to us a little bit about for beginners, you know, in for a lot of our listeners, their faith based and, you know, the Bible talks a lot about meditation and spending time in meditation. So this is not something that's foreign to our listeners, but how do you get started if you've never really done this before? Well, I am a huge fan of the history of Christianity. I'm actually one, one course away from a minor in religious studies in my undergrad. Oh, wow. And and Heavily Meditated. Incorporates studies from religions and traditions around the world. It's non-denominational, but there's sort of three big pillars that you want to, if you go well to get started. Well, which is the one that I want to work on and the one that is the centerpiece of Heavily Meditated, it comes out of Christianity. It's forgiveness. Forgiveness is the specific neurological altered state that lets you go in and stop holding grudges, so they stop costing your nervous system things so you can literally forgive them because they know not what they do kind of a thing. Yeah, right. Well, wow. How do we bring that in in a structured eight step process that makes it so I'm not going to be mad at my mother in law anymore for that thing she did last year at Christmas. Right. Like this is important. So you can be present and you can be present spiritually. The other two states, one of them is, compassion. And this is more on the Buddhist side of like the big branches of religion. Compassion is also something that that is is Christian. It's not the center point. The center point is forgiveness for Christianity, but it's very important. And compassionate means I automatically wish others well before I have a chance to judge them. Right. Wow. Yeah. And this is also something that happens through the process of forgiveness by specifically and programmatically forgiving the people who have wronged you, not telling them what they did was okay, not even telling them you forgave them, just turning off your reactivity to them internally inside yourself, you can develop compassion. You're like, wow, that guy looks like a sinner over there. But instead of judging me being angry, which is going to cause me, I'd be like, wow, look, there's a sinner. I wish him well. I'm going to go about my my day right? So there's peace inside your heart. Yeah. And then the other one of the three big pillars there would be surrender, right? Which is like letting go of the ego. And this is probably most embodied in the Muslim world, right? Where it's like surrender to the will, sort of a thing. And it turns out if you have a full pack of spiritual tools, you have the ability to forgive anyone who's wronged you. So you don't become reactive. You don't fall into hatred and anger and live your life in a state of just yeah, yeah, right. And you have compassion. I wish others well, even if they have other faiths and all that stuff. That's not to say if they try to hurt me, I'm not going to stop them. Of course you're going to stop them. But now you're going to do it. You're not triggered. You're conscious, you're a peaceful, you're a peaceful warrior. Right? And then surrender is let me let go to God's will. I'm just going to trust right now, even though it looks like I'm, like, about to shit my pants. Pardon my French hair, but like like I'm losing my mind here. Okay, how do I let go? And if you can embody those three states because you learned the tools and maybe the tool was, this is going to sound weird. Glasses that go over your eyes, that blink at a certain state to show your brain how to go into that state so you can feel the state for the first time in your life. Okay, I'm I'm not nomination. All my tools like it may be monks. They used to whip themselves in the morning. And the 14th century Gnostic Christian monks. Why would they whip themselves? Not because they were sinners? Because brief, intentional, conscious exposure to pain, same as a Yogi laying on a bed of nails or a biohacker like me, sitting in cold water doing a cold shower in the morning. So you may say, I want to pray. I want to do breathwork. I want to use a piece of technology that helps me call my nervous system, and it can deepen your relationship with your partner. It can deepen your relationship with God. Right? This is about you being more present in your body, so that you can then sense all the beauty and grace and things in the world. And I very specifically define grace in the book. It's a thing. I love that. Wow. That's amazing. Well, I know our time is running short today, but I do want to make sure because it sounds like there are a ton of practical steps and wisdom in this book. So I want to make sure our listeners know how to get in touch with the book when it comes out. And, just ways that they can connect with you and learn more about what you're doing, which is amazing work. Thank you. You can order Heavily Meditated anywhere books are sold. There's a website that's really common for that. Or better yet, go to a local bookstore and I am at Dave Ass B.Com. And you can, follow me there on all the social stuff and have a big podcast called The Human Upgrade. And I would I would suggest that if you're saying I want to deepen my faith, the fastest path to doing that is to become more aware of the state of your nervous system. So that if you're saying my chosen state is to be in a state of faith, in a state of connection to the divine, well, if someone cuts you off in traffic and you lose your connection to the divine, let's work on that trigger so that you can not be triggered and you can choose your state and hold it no matter what the world brings. That's what we all need. I love that it is an awesome way to wrap up today's episode. And, for our listeners out there, definitely check out the work that Dave is doing. He has got some amazing world class graphs on his show all the time, bringing you the latest and greatest and biohacking and just better understanding how we can age better and live healthier and longer, stronger lives. Dave, it has been such a joy having you on the podcast today. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, Karen, and thanks for your work in the world. Thank you. All right, listeners, take care. We'll talk to you next time on The Covenant Eyes Podcast.