Meditation: The Ultimate Biohack for a Longer Life | Dave Asprey | Align Podcast #544
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Dave Asprey, what the heck does meditation do to the brain? Pretty much a time waster. A big waste of time. I'm sort of joking about that. Meditation has been a profound part of my path and it takes a huge amount of time. So I'm always interested in understanding why I'm meditating. And so it's like asking, what does eating do? Well, what are you eating?

So depending on your brain and your desired state, you can use meditation to leave your body. You can use meditation to go to a state where you can deeply heal yourself, a deeply altered state. You can use it to calm your nervous system. You can use it to become very focused, to go into a flow state. So

I like to have a set of meditation playlists, not on my phone, but in my body. So what meditation do I want to do to get what results? And ultimately, biohacking is control over the state of your body and your consciousness and encompasses longevity, encompasses physical and cognitive performance, and it encompasses altered states.

And meditation is one of the paths to get there and you can accelerate meditation. And just like one food may be really good for you, but not good for me or vice versa. There are certain types of meditation that might not be compatible with some people. Throughout most of recorded history, 98% of people were involved in agriculture. That means that we've genetically selected for farmers. And if there's a explosion or a fire,

some small percentage of people will automatically run towards it to help other people. Right. And everyone else will run away. If you're a person who's wired in your soul to do that, a meditation meant for farmers may just be like Valium to you and not beneficial.

And if you're saying, well, I tried meditating and it didn't work. It's like saying I tried eating or I tried a diet and it didn't work. Well, the Twinkie diet probably was the wrong diet for you, but maybe it worked for someone else. Probably not. So what is meditation or what's it good for? What's it do to the brain? It alters your state and every good state is an altered state.

at the end of the day and an average state, pretty good. And there's a bunch of negative altered states that you probably don't want to go to like anger or fear, but

Meditation gives you the ability to choose your state ultimately. And the more types you know, the more techniques you know, and the more accelerators of meditation you know, the better off you are. - Something I took some notes from your most recent book that will probably come out around the time of this, "Heavily Meditated."

And it was around the frequencies of our brains. And just this is an extra. This might have actually been for like the introduction of the book. But imagine your brain is a complex orchestra producing different types of brainwaves. They operate at different frequencies measured in hertz.

Delta, 1 to 4 hertz. Theta, 4 to 8 hertz. Alpha, 8 to 12 hertz. Beta, 13 to 37 hertz. And gamma, 38 to 100 hertz. Each play a unique role in your mental and emotional well-being. These brainwaves are the electrical symphony that conducts everything from your moments of stress to your most profound states of relaxation. Talk to me about frequencies. If you think about music, you have, say, the ability to play a C note or an F note.

Well, are you playing a beautiful song or are you playing a song that's not very beautiful even though you have the right note? Yeah, so the frequency of your brain is one thing that you can manipulate with lots of different consciousness exercises including meditation including breath work, but

When you really learn how to meditate and you really learn how to alter your state, you're changing the frequency. You're also changing the height of the waves of your brain. So they're happening at the same rhythm, but they're stronger now and they're more rhythmic and they're matching other brainwaves that happen at the same time. So now instead of you're just playing the tuba, that's just one part of the orchestra. And the more orderly your brainwaves,

And the more that the different states either crossover or match or complement each other, the more magical your state is. Why would the frequencies be cacophonous or disorderly? It's either because of physiological problems. So your mitochondria can't make enough energy. You have toxins blocking things. Or very commonly, it's because you have a brain injury.

I've looked at the brains of more than a thousand high-performing executives over the last 10 years at 40 years of Zen. And if I sit down and say, have you ever hit your head? No. And if you ask five times, they'll be like, oh yeah, there was that time when I was five and I was unconscious for three days after I hit my head. Yeah, you can still see it in your brain waves. So that can be a part of it. And then it can just be patterns your brain learned in its effort to figure out the world when you were very young. And this can be called trauma.

And trauma is really basic. It's any time that you felt unsafe and no one helped you regulate afterwards. And all of us have this, no matter how good our parents or teachers or whoever it was in our life or how bad we think they were. Well, they're all doing their best, but there's a time when, you know, you wanted a biscuit and your parents said no for good reason. And for whatever reason, it really pissed you off and it stuck.

And there's actually a rhyme and a reason to it. But if that really stuck later in life, you don't know why you're feeling an emotion around something, but it's an emotion that isn't benefiting you. God, I have no idea what to do. Meditation can help you get in touch with that. And then the techniques in heavily meditated, this is, you know, it takes five days with electrodes on your head.

at 40 Years of Zen to really do the detailed work on resetting those things. But the core gem from 40 Years of Zen is something called the reset process that I've evolved over years. And I give that away in Heavily Meditated. It's a new kind of meditation that you can do. And instead of what you and I have both learned, you go to an ashram or go to a temple somewhere, meditation teacher, and they're going to tell you, close your eyes.

become aware of the emotions. Do not react to them. Observe them. Let them flow through you." And I'm like, "Fuck that." It's very hard. Well, I'm willing to do it. I learned how to do it. It'd be very frustrating though. Yeah. And it takes energy. And as a functioning adult, you better learn how to do that. And that's why we start meditating. And because I have a lot of things I want to do, including improve myself, including be there for my family, my loved ones, my community,

I don't want to spend time every single day being triggered and then letting the feeling flow through me, setting it aside and acting like a grownup. I would rather figure out why is this a trigger and how do I turn off that alert in my nervous system? What would be the most efficient way to disinhibit or inhibit a trigger or regulate yourself when you're experiencing a trigger from your experience?

So if the trigger happens and you're saying, okay, I'm pissed off right now. The fastest thing to do if you're untrained with meditation is a four second breath in and an eight second breath out. Send the isolation. Yeah. And that'll reset your nervous system. And if you learn any of the different techniques and you can learn these using technology to guide you, you can learn from many different lineages about how to do this. There's a thing you can do inside your nervous system

And it is the physiological and energetic ability to flip a switch to move yourself from sympathetic to parasympathetic. And it is under your conscious control. It's just a switch or a lever that isn't labeled and is invisible until you learn how to see it.

You can imagine that you're sitting in like the cockpit of one of those big jets and there's literally dials and knobs and readouts and switches all over the place and you have no idea what to do and we are riding around in these meat bodies that have all of that and meditation lets you become aware of the techniques that tell you your state that would otherwise be invisible and then how to consciously move to a new state and

So step one would be relatively short breath in, relatively long breath out. You could also say, oh, I have another technique that I learned called ujjayi breath. And this is also known as a seashell breath. And this is where you breathe in slowly through your nose and you want to tighten your palate almost like you're going to snore. So it's like,

And when you do that, it also has a calming effect similar to the previous breath. And if you can't go to sleep, try both of those and magically, oh, look, I just woke up. I fell asleep. I didn't even know I fell asleep. And those are simple ways. But when you're trained, you can literally say, oh, nervous system shift. And it will. How do you do that? Yeah.

This is why when you go to a monastery, they use a whole bunch of words to talk about, oh, visualize, you know, a sphere of glowing something around your heart. And that stuff works. It just takes a long time for what the teacher is working to express for you to get it and then do it right. Because words do a terrible job of describing our inner states. And my preference there is,

is either work one-on-one with someone who's very attuned and their nervous system can actually track yours and tell you, no, no, on that one, halfway through the breath, you clinched or you did something. And so let's try it again. And since that's expensive and hard to find, technology can do a great job of that.

That's why a lot of my deepest evolution has come from having a computer show me what my brain's doing. So that'd be like neurofeedback. It's neurofeedback. Yeah. And that's 40 years of Zen. What's the most accessible version of neurofeedback for people? And what's the cost of 40 years of Zen? And what's the barriers to entry to something like that? Is there like a lower barrier to entry of entering into neurofeedback? And then...

getting to the point of actually the 40 years of that, because I don't actually know a lot about 40 years of that. I'd be interested to explore more of it, but I don't know a lot about it. I would recommend finding a local neurofeedback practitioner who has a lot of experience.

and working with them if you're just getting going, if that's accessible. It's going to cost you $150. What about the at-home neurofeedback things? I have one. I don't remember what it's called right now. Probably the Muse. I have the Muse. There's another one that I have. I haven't used it. I have the app things that I haven't actually used because it's too complicated for me. But what about the at-home things? Can you get by with that? There's...

probably five or six companies working on that. I haven't found anyone yet who's solved the problem of putting the electrodes in the right place. Yeah. Right. Right. So when people come into upgrade labs, which is a franchise for biohacking and longevity, I own it. I started it 10 plus years ago. We do 20 minute sessions with properly placed electrodes and

It's more important than you might think. And so step one is, am I getting a clean signal? And step two is, okay, now that it's in, what is the right music to teach the brain to play? And the way neurofeedback works is it's reading electricity from the brain in a specific location, and then it's providing you either a visual or an auditory signal or both.

So there are a variety of home things and I would encourage people, you can try them. And for my brain, when I use those, I usually just fall asleep because it's not the right for my brain. When people come to 40 Years Zen, this is for high performing athletes and celebrities and entrepreneurs and people like that, people on the spiritual path quite often.

We spend five days and we're figuring out the custom thing to do for you. So it's like taking your car into a racing mechanic and like, do you want to accelerate faster or do you want to break faster? Or do you want to handle better? And so you can tune performance. And then a big part of it is just getting rid of friction and getting rid of wasted ruminations. And that is the reset process. The reset process you can do for free at home.

And I've tried just about all the things out there for home use. And the thing that it's not technically neurofeedback, but is most powerful is called all these made up words. Trust me nuts. Let's ask Chad GPT. Should have taken more aniracetam. Let's see. What is the consumer HEG feedback device?

- Out of Sweden. - Is neurofeedback, is it, it's pretty much like classically conditioning yourself to tune into certain brain wave frequencies. So it's like you're rewarded when your brain waves are in a certain frequency. And when you go out of that frequency,

you don't get the reward. Is that pretty much what it is? Like you're flying through rings and when you're in that frequency, you're through the ring and you can kind of guide yourself through that. And then you do that for long enough, you just kind of like grease the groove neurologically. Pretty much what you're describing is eyes open neurofeedback. And neurofeedback means based on the electrical signaling, right? However, some companies, including the one whose name I couldn't think of because it's- It'll come. No, I found it. It's called Mendi.

It's M-E-N-D-I. And in my brain, I'm like, that is not a word. So my brain doesn't like words. Sounds like Wendy's. Yeah. What was your favorite fast food growing up? Yeah.

It would have been Carl's Jr., the double Western bacon cheeseburgers. But it's been a very, very long time since I would touch one of those. Good for you. I like Burger King a lot. Yeah. It felt like Regal. Yeah, there you go. It felt like proper. Little paper crown. Great burgers. They had like the artificial barbecue kind of flavor. It was like really grilled. Oh, yeah. Good times. Yeah. And you know, this is something that there's something about the McRib in the old days that I kind of like. Oh, yeah. What was your favorite French fries?

That would have been McDonald's back in the day. Yeah, they did a good job. Yeah, but man, I have not eaten that stuff in probably 20 years. Now RFK is ruining everything with the tallow. I'm just joking. I was like, what are you talking about? There's still a bunch of weird chemicals in there for us, but man, if we can bring tallow back, make America tallow again, I'm all over that. I hope you built that. So back to neurofeedback. Yeah, back to neurofeedback. If we were measuring your brainwaves, all your pleasure centers would have lit up. Yeah, exactly. So...

If we're looking at electricity as the primary thing, what Mendy does that's really interesting

is Mendi trains you to bring blood to the front of your brain where your prefrontal cortex is. If you have attention issues or ADHD, this is really cool stuff. About a decade ago, I sold something called the Upgraded Focus Brain Trainer. I sold maybe 1,000 of these. These were handmade by an unusual human being out of his bedroom somewhere. I use this to train my brain to be able to focus much better than I could before.

And when Mindy came along, they call it neurofeedback, but it's actually HEG or blood flow feedback, not electrical, but whatever.

That device, man, you use it 40, 50 times, your ability to pay attention effortlessly goes through the roof. So that's a really good consumer thing that's very accessible and has great evidence for it. What about, so something that I find interesting that I don't know a ton about that I'm interested in understanding more is the gamma frequency. So it's very common, you know, alpha, beta, well, I guess beta, alpha, delta, theta, you

and then gamma, very high frequency. So I would think that that would be kind of like you're all over the place, but there's something else to it than that. What's happening with the gamma frequency? For a long time, people have believed you can't train gamma. And we've been doing it for a decade at 40 Years of Zen, but it involved creating our own hardware and software as part of the process for it. And this is what advanced Zen meditators generate, but only after decades of regular practice. And

If you think about this, there's always like a background swell in the ocean, right? It doesn't create the waves, it's the big swells that are just kind of rocking around. This is your delta.

These are the very deep dreamless sleep where core biology stuff happens. It's like a red light. Yeah. Oh. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And you go up. Red light also is frequency. It's those long waveforms. It is long, although the numbers are very different. Very different, yeah. But as far as the light spectrum, which again, I don't know a lot about this stuff, but it's an interesting thing to see the crossover of like, oh, wow, everything's kind of like waves. Mm-hmm. It's cool.

- It's just like relaxed. In fact, it's so relaxed you're not even conscious. - Yeah, and long waves from light will calm the nervous system. - It will. - And probably induce more longer waves within the brain, I would think. I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm just guessing.

I want to take a moment and share about something I'm incredibly excited about. It is the release of the Align Breathing Program. What makes the Align Breathing Program different is it actually teaches you how to breathe. Most of the programs and practices and modalities that I see within the breathing space or even yoga or weightlifting or anything that pertains to breath

is there's not much, if any, education on how to breathe, the structure and the mechanics and the function of breathing. If you'd like to learn more about your own breath, I want to invite you guys to take the breathing archetype quiz, where we ask you a few subjective questions and also go through a couple of breathing exercises for you to have a better understanding of how you breathe and how you can breathe better. The breathing quiz is at alignpodcast.com slash quiz. That's A-L-I-G-N podcast.com.

I look forward to seeing you guys over there.

We actually filed a patent on this a while ago, but we just published a study in a medical journal showing that 15 minutes of wearing our specific reddish tint, it's not the same as just red glasses you can get, but 15 minutes of wearing that will put your brain in the same state as meditation. It'll drop the high frequency like the beta brainwaves. It'll increase alpha and theta very reliably. So it's like meditation glasses you put them on or like noise canceling glasses. Why would it do that?

well, your brain is very attuned to the light around you. And there's something else you can do with light. If you blink lights at a certain frequency, that will entrain the brain. So you can turn on Delta with blinky lights, whether they're over, say, a laser or an LED over the brain or over the eyes, assuming it's not bright enough to blind you, the brain will drop into those frequencies. And I write about that in Heavily Meditated as one of the technologies to

entrain the brain. And there's kind of two ways of thinking about controlling your brain. One of them is I chose the state and I went there. The other one is I had something else put me there. And an example of that in the old days, there's Tibetan bells and they ring one bell in this year and a slightly different one in this year.

And if there's a 10 hertz difference between the sound waves, the brain's like, is it this? Is it this? Is it this? Is it this? And it starts going back and forth. And soon the entire brain is at 10 hertz, which is alpha.

Or if the bells are radically different, it can actually be stimulating and put you into beta. It's kind of like when pendulums attune or train to each other. You ever seen that before? I have. That's always such a cool effect. I don't know how that works. It's pretty freaking cool. It's pretty amazing when you watch it in a lab. I wish I had a podcast person with a video right now to do the pendulums attuning to each other. It's pretty fascinating. It really warps a person's materialistic Newtonian mind.

person's perspective on what the heck's going on in the world. It's abundantly clear Newtonian explanations of the world are very useful and completely wrong. Quantum mechanics explains reality much better than Newtonian physics. It's just when we look at reality through our meat bodies,

We see Newtonian physics because it allows us to function in the world. Yeah, it's a layer. Yeah, time doesn't exist. It's very provable mathematically. We just make up time in our consciousness so that we can function in the world. What does that mean to you, time doesn't exist? Well, if you look at...

all of the math behind quantum physics. Time and space are illusions that we create. They're just very useful illusions. But at the end of the day, everything is probably quantum foam. What were things in writing the book, Heavily Meditated, what were things that were surprising to you in the research of that? There's a set of knowledge called biocentrism.

And a guy named Robert Lanza wrote the biggest book about that. I don't go into biocentrism in Halfly Meditated because it's kind of mind-blowing, but it explains a lot of the otherwise unexplainable things that happen to meditated minds. When you know how to meditate, you can heal another person.

you can change the randomness of a random number generator. - It's probably what Jesus was known as, my guess. - All of the-- - Depending on your belief system and stuff, but like healing with hands and all that stuff. And then that's something that, sorry for interrupting you, but that's something in like training, doing body work and things of the sort. One of the things that people will often learn, depending upon who you're learning from, would be like you're doing that work within yourself. So if you're working on something with somebody else, but if you're working with somebody good,

Very good chance what they're doing is they're actually finding that within themself And like releasing and working from that and then kind of transferring that over. Anyway, that's just a you're you're right and when they teach energy work, especially at the beginning levels They'll teach you, you know, you're gonna feel it in your body You're gonna heal it in your body and transfer it to the other person and as you become more advanced I don't really want to let that into my body. So there's a way to bring it in from somewhere else Yeah to bring it down there's

There's so much happening inside your felt experience that matters. And when you learn how to meditate or just enter altered states, it doesn't have to be through meditation. You learn a practice to enter an altered state. Things emerge that don't make sense. Everything that I've said so far, there are studies backing it up. And if you go back to before we did our modern studies, there's the yogic cities from Vedic teachings.

There's also shamanic teachings and ancient Gnostic practices. All over the world, we figure this stuff out in little pockets, traditional Chinese medicine. And the yogic cities are a list of unusual altered states that humans are capable of that are documented in enough people for them to say, this is real. And they also say, as someone works towards enlightenment, they may but don't always have some of these things manifest.

And if they do, they're a distraction to enlightenment. You should basically go, isn't that cool? And then move on with the path. Yeah. So it's like visuals and psychedelics. Sometimes it's kind of just like,

Cool. That's not actually the work part of it. Exactly. It's not the work part of it. And there are people who get stuck like, oh, look, I learned how to do this trick, this hands-on healing where I learned how to read minds. And people are like, Dave, I thought you were a scientific, you're a computer science guy. I am. But the origins of science were about studying consciousness and the world around us.

And then during the Enlightenment, we had this schism between, well, if we can't all see it right now, then it's not real and let's ignore it. But the original, they called them natural philosophers. This is like the origins of all of our modern science. They were all alchemists. They were all studying consciousness. They were studying longevity. They were studying how to transmute the spirit.

And it's exactly the same path that the ancient Egyptians, that ancient Chinese medicine, ancient Middle Eastern arts, ancient Ayurvedic practice, they're all working towards the same. How do we get an understanding of this? And what it means is that when you learn how to control your state and you learn some of these altered states, you can probably affect reality.

Certainly within yourself and maybe outside of yourself. And you could say, Dave, this is nonsense. But if you look at maybe the Institute for Noetic Sciences, this was started by one of the first astronauts. And they met in Palo Alto down the street from the longevity group that I used to run in the late 90s.

And they were a sister organization. They were studying consciousness. We were studying longevity. And if you look at Dean Radin's work, who happens to be the chief scientist for IONS, he has a whole book. I believe it's called Becoming Supernormal, if I remember right. Becoming Supernatural.

He goes through Joe Dispenza. It is Joseph's I always confuse the title of their two books So Joe Dispenza has one and Dean Radin is another one and it's funny because Joe Dispenza is coming to the biohacking conference I know 28th. Yeah, knowing his assistant about trying to a podcast now very cool Joe's great He is a fantastic human being and I love having him on stage at the biohacking conference by the way, cuz biohacking conference calm May 28th Yep. Yeah, I'll be there. Oh sweet. Thank you. Yeah

We're filling up the Fairmont actually, and Joe's not going to lead breathwork. And everyone should go to one of Joe's things. It's pretty incredible what he does.

But you say he's not going to know he's gonna talk about the science backing up what he does and when we're talking about science they're measuring Inflammatory molecules in people's tears when they have tears of ecstasy from meditation. They're measuring saliva They're measuring microbiome and blood and mitochondria working with a professor from UC San Diego Named dr. Hamill Patel who will also be at the conference. So when we talk about meditation what would happen if there was a way to teach your brain

to waste less energy on being reactive to things that don't matter. And all that extra energy went into changing your state and went into improving the world around you. Well, that's what happens. And when you learn how to change your state, things that you would think aren't possible, like having very powerful intuition, that can happen. And it happens in a documented scientific way frequently with people who meditate. So one of the reasons you meditate is because you don't want to be an asshole.

You meditate because you'd like to be peaceful and happy if you're going to live for at least 180 years. You're less reactive. Yeah. In fact, if you can be triggered by anything, it means you're carrying a loaded gun and it means you're programmable.

And I just want a world full of people who cannot be programmed. You're a slave. Yeah. And I know that we are wired in our bones inside our subcellular capacity to be kind to each other and to take care of the world around us. We just don't get there if we're metabolically exhausted and if we're stuck in fear cycles.

so the role of meditation is to make sure that you aren't stuck in fear cycles and the role of biohacking and nutrition and physical wellness is to make sure that you make more than enough energy to overcome any fear that's left so you can put it into turning food into nourishment and after you do that in order you can turn it into turning physical intimacy into a source of nourishment and a way to access altered states and after that

What's left? Energy for your community, for taking care of those around you. And what's left after that, after your community takes care of you back, is so much energy to evolve. And in heavily meditated, it's a framework. Your body, before you can think, will look at, is it scary? That's fear. Is it food? Eat that. Is it something you could have sex with? Make sure you reproduce. And is it your community? Hmm.

Only if you do the first three. And is it evolving yourself? Only if the first four. So the whole point of biohacking or longevity or consciousness work is be peaceful instead of afraid, be nourished instead of hungry, be sexually, spiritually fulfilled instead of lonely and full of lust and sit with a community that you support that supports you. And if you do those things, the entire world around you shifts.

And there's so much left over that you can become the person you want to be. And there are entire levels of reality and of energy that are possible for humans, but you're never going to even know they exist unless you learn how to become peaceful instead of fearful. That is the primary thing meditation does. Yeah. I feel like in the longevity conversation, when I don't hear enough about, and I feel like that will probably start to shift as the, uh,

trauma and contractions and restrictions that we hold that leave us in a place of fear, guilt, anger, resentment, anything that we might be considered like quote unquote like low vibration. Can I literally say low vibration?

You absolutely can. And when we talk about vibration, there's a whole bunch of new age and I have no issue with new age, but I have an issue with poorly defined new age. If you have a quantum teddy bear, what does that mean? I don't really know. It may not be real or maybe they did some weird quantum thing to it that I don't know about. So what do we mean by low vibration?

Let's define what's vibrating and low vibration in the spiritual sense is usually the Hawkins scale from David Hawkins. And he talks about the, the consciousness vibration of humans or even of animals or of objects. And he,

It's in a way that you can measure if you're trained in this. And as you move up the Hawkins scale, you're becoming more and more conscious. And those of us who work in the field of consciousness will oftentimes use the Hawkins scale in order to measure progress towards, in the East, they would call it enlightenment. In the West, we would call it equanimity, which is full control of your state, no matter what's going on in the world around you. And then so the higher vibration would be compassion, love, gratitude, things of the sort.

Yes. I think I don't remember exactly what are people can look it up. The list is not in the right order, but yeah, it could be in in that neighborhood. Right. Yeah. And is there what would be measured in the it's okay if you don't have an answer to this because I know it might be going outside a little bit. But do you know what actually is that like a

metaphor or is there a literal measurement of frequency within that? In order to read that, you'd want to read Hawkins book or in order to understand that you'd want to read Hawkins book called Letting Go, which is probably his best one where he talks about towards the end of his life and what he's learned about using the scale.

And when you read the book, he says, "Look, if you're an atheist and very low vibration, you actually can't do the testing. You can be tested, but you cannot test another person." And that once you reach a certain point, suddenly you have the ability to tune in. And he describes a process. And it is based on running it through someone's nervous system, so it's subject to ego.

if you have three people check out where you are on the scale, it's pretty accurate. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing if you go from a, you know, most people experienced the gamut of emotions and such, but if you can, any asshole can find themselves in

shame anger resentment you know any of that stuff it's very easy yeah it can be it's it's actually it's also very hard if you're an you're probably in that a lot I know I'm not in that a lot yeah and it really does if you're if you're inculcated in that as you know you're you know that's just who you've been it's going to probably take some work to like pull yourself out of the swamp

And then it is a fascinating thing as a person does rise up through that scale, which I think things are temporary, you can oscillate in and out. But it is fascinating when you're higher up in that scale in maybe that moment or that week or month or part of your life.

you are able to observe all the rest and it almost brings like definition and understanding to those other parts. Whereas if you are kind of stuck riding lower in that scale, you just see the world as hard and you see yourself as a victim. And it's just, it's very materialistic, plain cut and dry.

But if you can raise yourself up through that, through different practices or life experiences or what have you, it's beautiful because it opens up the space for compassion for the entirety of the scale. And then you actually become like a healing instrument for other people because someone that's stuck as an asshole, if they experience genuine compassion and forgiveness from someone, it can kind of soften that a little bit.

And it might feel like you're telepathic or something or like you're an intuitive suddenly, but it's actually probably just that you've actually stretched yourself through a broader range of motion of feeling. You said something really precious in there. You said from someone else. When you're stuck at those low levels, it's unlikely that you're going to get very far without help from your community or at least a teacher or a friend. There are some places you can go where

you're not going to make it out without a tribe. And this is why doing breath work in a group, why doing meditation in a group, it's why 40 years of Zen is based on small group work, because doing it all alone, we're not supposed to do things all alone, especially when you get to the higher levels of meditation. So on the Hawkins scale, or even in traditional, let's say Buddhist teachings from the monasteries, the one I spent time in in Copan,

I was like, "Half a minute, do." What they teach is, well, if you're unconscious or apathetic, that's the lowest level of vibration. And you do some work and you step in empathy, and then you can feel other people's pain. Mother Teresa is an example of that. There's a lot of highly spiritual people who aren't Mother Teresa fans because empathy isn't the state you want to be in. You're a new healer. You pick up other people's pain

and you feel it in your body. And if you are a highly empathetic person, you probably can't go to parties. It's better than being numb, but it's an uncontrolled state. So the teachings to evolve beyond that is to move into compassion. And compassion comes from automatically wishing others well before you have a chance to judge them, and it's something you install in your body's operating system.

And this means you're much harder to trigger. And it means that you can choose to feel someone's feeling if you want to, to connect with them, but you don't have to without control. And the step above that in a monastery, they're going to say that's enlightenment. In the West, we say equanimity or resilience. And the picture for that is the monk who can meditate in the middle of a storm and nothing can take you out of your chosen state. And that's my goal. And it's funny when we get into the world of longevity, we're

I learned when I started working with people three times my age who taught me what is now biohacking. I learned that there's a group of people who are like, how do I live more? How do I live better? How do I show up better? How do I be of service? Like, how do I be full of youthful joy and energy and vigor and chi and this feeling? And it's not born out of fear.

And there's another group of longevity people who are like, "I am terrified of death. I am so terrified I'm going to freeze my body like the Egyptian mummies. I'm so terrified of death that I cannot face death and I will never do it." And to this day- The Egyptian mummies didn't freeze their body, you just mean like the mummification? They would mummify themselves for the afterlife. Or if you look at the terracotta warrior,

Same kind of a thing. Like I'm so afraid of dying that I have to be prepared and all of this. But if you look at shamanic practice or many others, death and birth are the same thing.

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dot com slash line use code align 10 for discount at checkout this brings me into my greatest curiosity and longevity moment because i'm i'm like personally at this point i feel pretty good about you know living to like a nice strong 95. i don't i'm not i'm like i'm i'm i'm in ease with that my feeling within the longevity space is there's probably a conflation of various different things but one of which

could be a fear of loss of this body and loss of this life and That is something that I believe would actually inject more contraction into the system less play more stress and actually an accentuation of aging and

I agree. If that exists. I agree. So it's like reasoning and intention is everything with most things. There have been kind of two camps in longevity movement since the 90s, and there's actually different conferences for them. And there's what's called the alchemist side of things, which is I want to transform myself and live at the highest vibration that I can as long as I choose. And

So that's the side that I'm on after a lot of consideration. When I started, I would have said, I'm just in that. I don't want to die. Of course I want to be healthy, but I just don't want to die. What do you think of Brian Johnson?

You guys bros? Brian's a friend. I knew Brian before he started the longevity stuff he's working with now. I'm happy we have more people talking about longevity. Are you guys in competition with each other? No, I don't think so. He's selling collagen and MCT oil in his products, which is great. I don't sell those anymore. I brought those out in 2014 and they were part of my longevity book, Superhuman. So I'd say there's alignment there. But where maybe we have a differing of opinion,

is that the Google slogan, don't be evil. Well, what I do know from working with thousands of people and many gurus around the world, which I'm very blessed to have met, when you're working with the unconscious and what I would call cellular consciousness- Yeah, we don't get negatives.

It cannot process a negative, right? It's like if you tell your kids don't forget your shoes. All they hear is forget your shoes Yeah, when I hear don't die. I just I just hear acceleration towards demise I agree and I'm and nothing against for against Brian. I don't know Brian personally I think he seems like a really super person it seems like he's you know doing a good job with his intention of reversing like biological age, but I think there's a lot of nuance and

within that. There's a lot of nuance. And so I'm not in competition with Brian and anyone who's talking about how do we extend human life? How do we use data? I spent two and a half million dollars reversing my age and I've talked about all the techniques I've done. I put up a video of having stem cells injected in my dick in 2015 at my conference. You couldn't see my dick, don't worry.

All you see is my toes when the needle comes down. Was that worth it? Was that a good time? I prefer the wasabi method for that now, but I have had stem cells like four or five times and exosomes injected. Wasabi method is shockwave, which induces angiogenesis, which is like the birth of new blood vessels. So it sends acoustic frequencies into the body and kind of agitates blood vessels to the degree of like

essentially you know hermetic stressor causing the first it'll grow inches for for real and it's it's if you've grown inches in your dung yeah bro like two inches two inches it was only ten percent but girth length you're supposed to laugh at it come on bro ten percent comment yeah that that was just a cross no um it's uh it was length so how do you do that

that's why I started Wasabi Method, because it actually works. I'm not even kidding. So here's the thing. I've never had inadequacy there, but I started doing this and

you get out of the shower and you know how you look when you get out of the shower if you're a guy. And I just do a double take like that doesn't look like myself anymore because I went from being a grower to being a shower and a bigger grower. And I'm not trying to brag or sound like a douchebag. The worst thing you can ever do as a guy is brag about the size of your deck. All right, so I just did that. So there you go. But

Reality is there are guys who are very self-conscious about that. It is hackable. And there are guys with ED and it is hackable. And it turns out that the specific waveforms we're using within Wasabi, there are 19 different factors of longevity and aging that you can influence with the right acoustic waves. So doing it in men or women,

increases nerve growth and blood flow. So you might want to do that on your ankle that's hurt or on the muscle that's tight in your piriformis. And I've seen people who can't do a forward fold and five minutes of the right frequency delivered right on an insertion point. Oh, look, I can do my folding and the problem is gone permanently.

And then you're saying, okay, can you do this? Yeah, you can. And it got to the point where some positions that I would enjoy, I couldn't do with my partner because it was uncomfortable for her. So you just zapping it with the shockwave, like all the way up and down the shaft. You do all up and down the shaft and just know the shaft goes deep inside. So you actually do like perineum and the perineum. Yeah.

It also has beneficial effects on the prostate. But if you're getting a PSA test after a shockwave, the numbers will gently go up because it's causing mechanical vibration, which causes the healing to happen. What do you think about the... What's the suction cups called? What's that called? The vacuum? Yeah. Like a penis pump? Dong pump, yeah. Dong pump. Absolutely. There is... See...

There's a podcast I did a while ago. This is what the people want, Dave. Okay. Let's go there. We can talk about semen retention and longevity if you want to. We should. All right. I'm interested. I'm here for it. We should just start it right here. There you go. You go to moredave.com. There's links to the scientifically validated types of pump. If you pump too hard, it doesn't work and it can be negative.

And so there's a right amount of tension like PSI and time that you'd want to do. And there's good evidence for that as well. And if you stack it with something like the Wasabi method, you can get even more.

You also want to take vasodilators like N-1-O-1, nitric oxide, things like that. And nose breathe and hum. Yeah. Right. And I would say don't eat a lot of beets. It's not a great way to get nitrates. And unfortunately, they come with a lot of oxalate that isn't good for you.

And all of the beetroot powders you can get do not work. They've been inactivated by heat. So there's a lot of marketing around that that doesn't work very well. Did a whole episode with Nathan Bryant where we go really deep on the science. But he's the author of the nitric oxide book over there. What do you think about semen retention, Dave? Well, Taoism is the science of longevity from a very, very long time ago. These are people studying how do I make myself as immortal as I can be?

and a lot of it's conscious practice and a lot of it is physical practice, postures, movement, breaths, and even nutritional practices. But one of the things they're very clear on, if you study this, is ejaculating reduces lifespan in men. Now, I thought this sounded like a lot of BS. So one of my goals with biohacking is to prove ancient practices work or don't work. So I thought, all right, I'm gonna disprove this one. That'll be fun.

And the equation for men is age in years minus seven divided by four. Okay. And that yields a number. Don't ejaculate more often than that number of days. Right? So you can do the math and when listening and you're like, okay, so when I'm young, I can ejaculate every couple of days. And as I age, I should do it less. And they're saying, you know, guys lose their chi. In the West, what happens is

for the next 24 to 48 hours after ejaculation, your testosterone levels plummet and your prolactin levels go very high. Prolactin makes you tired and lethargic and low testosterone lowers dopamine and drive. Yeah. It makes you call an Uber. Yeah, exactly. And it makes you just like, will you respect me in the morning? It's like, well, actually my prolactin is high and my testosterone is low. So actually I don't really care about anything today. Right. So I'm like, this all sounds like BS. I didn't understand the prolactin connection back then.

So, for one year, I tested the Taoist equations, daily happiness with life, and I tracked frequency of intercourse or sexual practice and frequency of ejaculation. And there's a very clear ejaculation hangover, and the less you ejaculate, the more sex you'll have. And that's really good for relationships. Why? Just because of higher drive? Yeah. You're always ready to go.

So would you recommend a person edges and just puts it down at the top? Or do you recommend pinching off the perineum and stopping that or doing some type of exercises to be able to manually do that through contractions? Or what's your recommendation? I recommend learning this by edging. And you want to pay attention to the eight-second window before you're going to ejaculate. And if you're watching your consciousness because you've learned meditation and breath work,

You're going to find that you have this voice in your head or decision. I'm not going to come. I'm not going to come. And that'll probably get you coming. Well, fair point. Right. I love that. And then sometime during that eight second window, all of a sudden your mind convinces you, you know what?

It's a really good idea. I'm gonna do it right and and then you do it like why did I do that? It's the same things. I'm not gonna eat the Ben and Jerry's then you eat the whole container. Why did I do that? It's exactly the same voice in your head. It's just on a faster time frame So you start learning what happens physiologically before ejaculation and it turns out your body starts pumping faster and you tighten your butthole and

So what do you do? You relax your butthole. And sometime before that eight seconds, you can just pump really fast as if you've ejaculated and the body goes, oh, I must have. So then you start learning how to extend it. You learn breath work. You learn physiological relaxation of the perineum. And when you do this, you gain control.

And then suddenly after you've done a few sessions with your lover where you sit down and you say, look, I know that the definition of successful sex has always been the guy ejaculates. And this time our definition is I want you to come until you really see stars and I'm not going to ejaculate. And I want you to help me do that so that she doesn't feel like she didn't do a good job.

And if you do this, like, oh, my goal shifted and the goal becomes pleasure instead of getting to a goal. There's a good book everybody ought to read called She Comes First. It's nice about that. And Montauk Chia has been talking about this forever. I interviewed him in person in Oman at a meditation retreat once. And what you find is that equation, it's real. So...

Am I the only one saying this? No, it's an ancient practice. And Napoleon Hill, who wrote Think and Grow Rich, has a whole chapter on sexual sublimation. And since I published my data for one year of experimenting with the Taoist equations, trying to disprove them and ultimately saying they're right, and here's why physiologically, what I found is many, many men, especially men in their 20s and 30s, have approached me and said, I tried that.

And I gave up porn and I stopped ejaculating all over the place. And I got a new job. I started two companies. I got a $30,000 raise. And fighters, you know, as you work with fighters, ejaculating right before a fight, you will have hyperlactin and you will have low testosterone. You do not want to enter a fight in that state or a professional sporting event even if that's not a fight. So...

Most guys who've heard this so far, all they heard me say was,

Don't have sex and what I'm saying is have more sex just don't ejaculate as often Yeah, yeah, and I found that to my happiness went up and the frequency of sex went up and if you want to have a relationship that stays for a long time I've been dating a relationship coach and the loss of sexual energy in a relationship is not good for connectivity because

Sex fills a very different role for men and women. We'll say intimate sacred sex. And

We both need it, but we get different neurohormones from it. But for guys especially, it's one of the primary physiological ways we connect and nourish ourselves with our partners. And if you're starved of that because of all the things that get in the way of that, whether it's hormonal or psychological or just busyness or kids and all the things like that, it's not good for your longevity. What do you think about ball slapping?

You know anything about that? I have studied all this stuff, man. I've never tried ball slap but I see... Like yourself or others actually? No, no, no. Neither. No balls have been slapped. One of the things that I practiced...

I don't think we're going to go here. Okay. And I also have to say, we're here, bro. We're not coming back. There's an entire chapter in heavily meditated on sex as an altered state. And it's a way to access altered states of healing as valid as psychedelics. 20% of people report meeting God during orgasm, at least once in their life. So this matters, not just because it's fun. Right? So ball slapping. Final question. I, when,

When I was, this is God, 10 plus years ago, when I was running this year long experiment on how does ejaculation affect me and are the Taoists right? I went through and I said, okay, one of the things they tell you is if you want to live forever, ejaculate once every 30 days or even less than that, and keep your orgasms as a man to under an hour.

I'm like, "That's not even possible." But over the course of a year of experimenting with this, I've had half hour long orgasms. Is this incorporating prostate massage? No. Oh, wow. No, I mean, it's a part of a practice, but those orgasms are not with prostate massage. Although prostate massage is actually really good for longevity as well. That's why they teach it in Tantra classes, right? Yeah.

Having a half hour orgasm is exhausting as a man. And I see why they say, keep it, keep it down. And like, how is that even possible? Your abs hurt for like a week. And it's like, it's fun for the first 10 minutes. And after like, please, can you stop? No. So all of this, it happened to me and it is well-documented. But during that period, I'm like, well, let's push the edge of this. I'm going to do 30 days where I'm not going to do any stimulation, but I'll still have regular stimulation on my partner. That is really, really difficult to do.

At the end of that, I'm like, use it or lose it. It's real. There's shrinkage. So I looked up, this is before I knew about wasabi and all that kind of stuff. I looked up something called the Chinese male deer exercise.

This is something Montauk Chia will teach you, who wrote a book called The Multi-Orgasmic Man and a leader in the field. He'll tell you there's techniques. You grab the cock and you slap it against your leg on the left 67 times. I don't remember the number. Then on the right, and you're doing this to get blood flow in, and you lightly slap the balls.

And you do that because it stimulates blood flow. And it's basically, it's creating little sonic shock waves and the shock waves stimulate the cells. Also, your partner can massage your balls or you can massage your own, or they can apply suction in whatever way you can imagine. All of those are good for testosterone and they're good for enhancing what's called male energy. But something that is worth noting in the Taoist writings, they tell you women walk away undiminished.

and they never produced an equation for the number of orgasms for women or frequency. And so after a lot of detailed study, I came up with an equation for women. This is the first time ever it's been published. You heard what it is? It's until she feels like she's about to die plus two. So there you go. You're just never going to be able to get her there if you don't learn how to control ejaculation

and your desire for ejaculation just like you learn your desire for food. I'm not going to die if I don't have tacos for lunch. I could go a week without eating and I'll be okay. Then suddenly food loses its trance over you. I can have the most amazing date and we can go for hours and I'm not going to die.

And then I can do it again in the morning. That's different. And what that leads to is a sacred connection where both partners are much more likely to enter the sacred altered states. And that's pretty powerful. And that is a part of what's in Heavily Meditated. And there's one other thing that's related to that that I want to bring in before we come to the end of the show. The title of the chapter is called Go Spank Yourself. And I'm introducing a concept in the world of biohacking called BICEP.

And this stands for brief, intentional, conscious exposure to pain. It turns out. Ball slapping. Ball slapping. Freak, yeah. Monks used to whip themselves, right? It's called self-flagellation. And I remember hearing about this and going, that's disgusting. They think they're such sinners. They have to punish themselves. That's not what they're doing. And yogis, they lay on a bed of nails, right? To show off. I don't think yogis are going to show off now that I know something, right? So what's going on there? Or addicts.

How many addicts do you know who don't have tattoos? Yeah, pretty common. Very, very few. Well, tattoos are painful. It turns out intentionally exposing yourself to something painful that doesn't cause harm for a brief period regulates your dopamine receptors so that it takes less dopamine to activate them. And biohackers, we just hop in a cold blunch.

Same kind of a thing. Or flog your nuts. You know, if you're into that. Whatever you're into. The reason it's called Go Spank Yourself, I interviewed a somatic therapist who became a dominatrix.

She's like, you know what? For some of my clients to enter this fully in their body state so they can enter healing, these practices help. Who is this? It's Kimmy Inch. Yeah, yeah. She's a local Austin. I had Kimmy on for a couple of months ago or something like that. She was on the main stage of the biohacking conference, I think, last year. Yeah, she's good. Yeah, she's good. And it's fascinating because, well, I don't care whatever it is that someone's body needs. If you do something...

Every day or usually every day that's briefly unpleasant that may be followed by pleasantness if you're working in You know the realm of BDSM or something. There's such a thing as conscious kink. There's such a thing as Tantra These are ways to access sacred altered states so are psychedelics so is certain types of breath work the kind of things that that you teach and so is neurofeedback and so it certain lights and sounds and

These are part of the menu and so is meditation. So is a correct visualization. So is working with a partner who can do good energy work. Some gurus can put you in an altered state just by looking at you and doing something like what just happened? All of them. The deal is how do you learn how to put yourself into an altered state, either alone or

Or with a technology or with a community or with a partner, because learning control of your altered states makes you unprogrammable and it puts you in charge instead of CNN or Instagram or whatever is going on in the world around you, including the guy who cuts you off in traffic.

That's ultimately why I wrote heavily meditated and I just want to say the sex stuff is just one chapter and it just needed to be in there because Altered states work. It's not about getting high It's about learning all the different places you can go that are part of the gift of being human. Awesome Well, I really enjoyed this. Thank you. Thank you for making time to do this So hella meditated will be out. I believe when does it come out?

Yeah. So we have, Oh no, May 20th. Okay, cool. Uh,

Thank you very much. I appreciate you. I enjoyed this conversation tremendously. Is there anything else before closing up? I would say if you're in the Austin area, come to the Biohacking Conference. May 20th. May 28th. 2025. At biohackingconference.com. And if you love this episode, there's so much more, including the reset process in the book. You can order it now. It'll be there as soon as it's out. I'll read the book for you if you want Audible. It's epic. Amazing. Thank you. Thanks, Aaron. Appreciate you. That's it. That's all. See you all next week.

Hope you guys enjoyed that conversation. I want to invite you over to the Aligned Podcast YouTube channel if you want to see the quality of both of our skins IRL.

or as close to IRL as you can on the internet with video and check it out, subscribe, leave comments. I love reading the comments over there. And also if you have interest in improving the quality of your skin, they did give us a discount code at OneSkin, which was kind of them. You go to oneskin.co slash align. I believe you get 15% off your order.

which is pretty cool. So if you want to try it out and get yourself a discount, jump over to their one skin.co slash align. I appreciate y'all. That's it. That's all. I'll see you next week.