Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - How Biohacking Your Mind Unlocks Peak Performance | Dave Asprey - Biohacking Pioneer & Performance Expert

Transcript

Lessons - How Biohacking Your Mind Unlocks Peak Performance | Dave Asprey - Biohacking Pioneer & Performance Expert · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  In this lessons episode, discover why self-awareness is essential for lasting success,
• 0:04
  and how emotional triggers silently sabotage performance, learn how to reprogram reactive patterns,
• 0:08
  understand the science behind brain states, and explore how ancient wisdom and neurofeedback
• 0:13
  combine to build unshakable resilience and authentic leadership.
• 0:16
  I think that I think that so many people just drift through life with really no focus,
• 0:30
  no self-awareness, no understanding of their own mental state, and to your point,
• 0:34
  that is a that is a nuclear bomb if you end up being successful. I would make the argument
• 0:40
  that's actually highly difficult to be successful without a little bit of introspection
• 0:44
  and understanding your own mental state, but if you manage to do it, then you have the lives of
• 0:48
  hundreds or thousands plus employees and stakeholders and people that are basically potential targets
• 0:56
  for your lack of self-care, for really lack of a better description, was there a point?
• 1:05
  I read this little paragraph from your book that sort of speaks about combining physical
• 1:11
  and mental and understanding yourself and modern science and ancient wisdom,
• 1:18
  and even before we press record, you said, I only write about things that I actually care about,
• 1:23
  and you've written nine books, and you really can't be persuaded to write about shit that
• 1:30
  is just sort of run of the mill, that 10 other people, 20 other people have written about,
• 1:36
  and this is very unique. What was the thing in your life that prompted you to care so much about
• 1:42
  understanding your mental state, but not just from a modern perspective, including some of these
• 1:47
  ancient techniques? When I was 26, I made six million dollars, and this was pre-bidened dollars,
• 1:54
  so it was worth something, and I lost when I was 28, and I made that money because I was convinced
• 2:01
  it would make me happy, and I looked at a friend, this is a true story, we're there in Santa Clara,
• 2:07
  California, Silicon Valley, and I'll be happy, when I have 10 million dollars, I actually said that,
• 2:14
  so what a douchebag, but I fully believed that that would make me happy. I also tried to getting married
• 2:21
  very briefly in my 20s, and oh, let's try fame, that will make you happy, so I met entrepreneur
• 2:27
  magazine. If you go to my Instagram account, the fat picture there is me from entrepreneur magazine,
• 2:32
  when I'm 23, is the first guy to sell anything over the internet, and I can tell you, I had 15 minutes
• 2:38
  of happiness from the magazine article, I had 15 minutes of happiness and a whole lot of misery
• 2:41
  from the money, and a bunch of other things, like you just realized none of it works, so by the time
• 2:49
  I'm 30, like I've made and lost more than most people ever make in their life, and I am freaking
• 2:55
  miserable, and it was only when my relationship at the time just fell apart, I got to do something,
• 3:01
  I'm a computer science guy, I'm actually a computer hacker, so I tried all this stuff that
• 3:06
  was supposed to work, none of it worked, so then I tried this stuff that only idiots would try,
• 3:11
  I went to Tibet, and Nepal, and I studied shamanism, I did all this stuff that my family and my
• 3:17
  life taught me were worthless, because I was desperate, and I had already tried all this stuff,
• 3:25
  the reality is I finally committed to only doing things that work, which means I'm going to measure,
• 3:32
  and I'm going to believe something works, and then I'm going to test it, and if it doesn't all change,
• 3:37
  before I went to the gym, six days a week, 90 minutes a day, for 18 months on a low fat diet,
• 3:43
  I never lost an inch off my waist or a pound of weight, I probably lost some fat, gained some muscle,
• 3:49
  but I was still fat, and I could either say it's because I didn't try hard enough or because I had
• 3:54
  terrible advice, so this has led to so many of the businesses I'm running today, like upgrade labs,
• 4:01
  we're doing 187 million data points across people's minds and bodies, so don't just come in and
• 4:07
  think it's going to work, we'll show you it's working every time, because it does, and this is why
• 4:14
  the basis for heavily meditated is 40 years of zen. This is my, we'll call it entrepreneur,
• 4:20
  CEO, brain upgrade program in Seattle. People come in, they have for 10 years more than a thousand
• 4:26
  high performing brains, have taught me what's in heavily meditated. They come in, spend five days
• 4:32
  with my team of neuroscientists and facilitators and custom tech, and we show you what's going on in
• 4:38
  your brain, how triggers happen and how to go in and edit them out. People spend 20 grand to do that,
• 4:43
  and it works, but if you read heavily meditated, I give away the process I use, it works better with
• 4:50
  the computers and all the other stuff, but you can do this at home, and even if you're just getting
• 4:54
  started, at the end of the day, someone got under your skin, they're controlling you, and you need to
• 5:01
  install a firewall in your consciousness, so that you no longer have that vulnerability, and it's
• 5:06
  not about being tough and inflexible. Step one, if you have a company, hopefully you've done this,
• 5:14
  someone says something that pisses you off or does something, and if you were a 10-year-old,
• 5:19
  you'd get really mad and probably punch them, but you're a functioning adult, so you do what most
• 5:24
  people do. You smile, the thick smile, put on your game face, and everyone in the room knows that
• 5:32
  you're pissed, but you act like you're not, and well, okay, at least we have civil society,
• 5:37
  but everyone knows you're no longer in congruence, you're interstate and outer state don't match,
• 5:44
  and your customers can feel it, your team can feel it, and it comes across as well you're probably
• 5:49
  a con artist, even if you're not, it just comes across that way. So learning how to actually have
• 5:54
  congruence is the only way to have authentic leadership, which means you own your own shit,
• 6:00
  and every single time something triggers me. I'm going to write it down and say, I wonder what
• 6:07
  that is, and then I'm going to run this reset process that's in the book, and I'm going to track it
• 6:11
  down, and I'm going to edit the vulnerability out of my settings. What do you mean, vulnerability?
• 6:18
  Think of it like this. If you went to the therapist and you said, hey, I have this problem focusing
• 6:24
  on my phone. All these alerts keep popping up all the time. This is all the time. And the therapist
• 6:29
  says, oh, that's okay. Every time one of them pops up, just take a deep breath and gently swipe it
• 6:35
  to the side so you can focus on your work. You would fire that therapist. But if you go in there and
• 6:40
  say, I keep getting mad every time a girlfriend says this or my mother-in-law says that or my boss
• 6:44
  says this, it's the same thing. Turn off the alerts. Stop managing them. And the difference is
• 6:53
  incredible capacity. I think that this is one of the most useful tools for any high-performing
• 7:00
  individual entrepreneur or otherwise. Like you mentioned before, like even people in jobs,
• 7:05
  you're not achieving peak performance. You're not getting the promotion if you can't manage
• 7:12
  and regulate yourself. When you think about, this is one of the other ideas that you write about,
• 7:18
  I will talk about the reset process in a second, but one of the ideas you write about just so
• 7:21
  people can understand. And sort of we can go through some definitions or some basics as to
• 7:28
  how the brain works. They can see what's happening here. Because you write about exploring pathways
• 7:32
  to inner peace and meditation. It's very crucial to understand the science behind your brain states.
• 7:37
  So can we talk about brain states? Because you mentioned that the brain is like this complex orchestra
• 7:43
  producing all these different types of brain ways. I don't think many people even understand
• 7:47
  how their own brain works. So what are the brain states that people should be aware of?
• 7:52
  And why do they matter for, for example, mental performance?
• 7:56
  If you're an entrepreneur, you want to be able to have energy and be focused all the time.
• 8:01
  So you could have the energy of running a sprint all day long. You think that would work? No,
• 8:08
  you'd burn out. No, it wouldn't work. So a lot of the times we get triggered. And it's not a big
• 8:14
  trigger, but you're just like irritable. That's a beta brain state. And beta brain states are great
• 8:21
  for performing well physically. They're not great for intuition and creativity and working
• 8:27
  in collaboration with the team. So you would want to know, how does it feel when I'm in a high
• 8:34
  beta state versus when I'm in an alpha state? And alpha has nothing to do with alpha males. And
• 8:40
  even alpha male was a complete myth from the guy who studied wolves and made a mistake. So
• 8:45
  when an alpha state is slower brain waves than a beta state, this is a relaxed and alert.
• 8:50
  A lot of meditation takes you there. And you can drop down from there into theta where we have
• 8:57
  dream states and day dreaming and more intuition and creativity and weird visions. And then
• 9:03
  deltas the dreamless deep state where your brain is refreshing itself. And you have a mix of all
• 9:10
  these all the time. So that makes it sound really easy. Well, I'll just dial my brain up or down.
• 9:14
  The reality is think of these as music notes. You have a C note or a D note or a G note or whatever.
• 9:23
  It's not about the note. It's what song are you playing in the note?
• 9:28
  So say, look, I manage to have alpha brain waves. I'm like, yes, and you're playing a Metallica
• 9:33
  song, right? Ride the lightning in alpha is probably not the brain that you want, right? So
• 9:40
  on one hand, knowing brain states is beautiful because we can measure those when people come in,
• 9:44
  we do a clinical grade scan on their brain. Like, oh, look, here's your likely behavior patterns
• 9:50
  based on your brain waves. By the way, these two parts of the brain, you know, the cello and the
• 9:54
  the drums, whatever, they're not talking to each other, they're not playing the same notes.
• 9:58
  If you want, we can teach you how to align those. And here's what happens to your behaviors when
• 10:03
  those are aligned. And that's a pretty profound shift because otherwise, the brain doesn't know
• 10:10
  what's happening. In fact, the only nerve that goes inside the brain is the fifth cranial nerve.
• 10:17
  And that comes from your molars. Other than that, the brain is blind to itself. That's why you
• 10:22
  can see the Hannibal Lecter movie and it takes off the guy's brain and pokes at it. Doesn't
• 10:27
  do anything. You can't feel your brain. So your brain doesn't know what it's doing.
• 10:30
  But if you ever see the mirror experiment where they hang a mirror up in the jungle and an ape
• 10:35
  walks up and looks like, oh, that's me. And it'll like find lettuce in its teeth or whatever they're
• 10:41
  eating, right? And that's amazing. Your brain is doing that. So when you do neurofeedback, you start
• 10:48
  learning how to control the states and the song that's playing. And the special thing about 40 years
• 10:54
  as n. As we figured out, a way to shift from one state to another in order to permanently turn off
• 11:01
  the source of a trigger. And it's very different than just maintaining your cool. That's a waste of
• 11:07
  time. So maintaining your cool is almost like you're trying to put a bandaid on this open wound where
• 11:15
  with with 40 years of zen, with basically everything that you teach, you're talking about stop like
• 11:22
  it's almost like a leading indicator of a trigger. You're stopping it before it even impacts you.
• 11:27
  That's that's what you're trying to do. It's more than just stopping it. You're permanently
• 11:31
  removing it from your reality. Wow. Right. So that way there's nothing to stop. It's kind of like
• 11:38
  you're you're in a boxing ring, right? And I go, okay, I'm going to be tough. And okay, do the the
• 11:44
  rope a dope strategy? I'm still letting him hit me. I'm going to pretend like it doesn't hurt.
• 11:47
  I'll take the hit and I'll be tough and I'll counter attack to that is not a good path.
• 11:53
  What you want is for him to hit you and it goes through you with no effect.
• 11:58
  Right. Yeah. What that's what's possible when you permanently remove this, the thing that just
• 12:04
  got under your skin, it doesn't matter. And the best example for this for a lot of a lot of
• 12:11
  just a lot of people in general, it's driving. Someone cuts you off in traffic. Everyone gets mad
• 12:18
  until they learn to do something about it, right? And it's just this feeling. Well, if you're on the
• 12:24
  reset process on that feeling, there was some time earlier in your life where you felt disrespected
• 12:29
  and it really hurt your feelings. So your automated defense systems, which are based in the body,
• 12:34
  not even the mind. Oh, this matches that other situation. Therefore, it's a threat. Therefore,
• 12:41
  have some anger. And then you're going to make up a story about what's going on. The other guy's
• 12:44
  head. Like, you don't know if the guy's about to fill his pants. You don't know if you really
• 12:48
  thinks you're a jerk and he's cutting off and you don't know if he's on the way to the hospital
• 12:52
  to go, you know, deliver someone's baby. You just don't have any information at all. All the story
• 12:56
  you have is BS. If you could do something. So the next time someone cut you off, you just didn't
• 13:01
  care. You wouldn't make up a story. Your heart rate wouldn't change and you wouldn't remember it
• 13:06
  because it's irrelevant. And we want to live in that state. And that means if you're running your
• 13:12
  company and you get the phone call that anyone with any level of success has, that some employee who
• 13:19
  you fired for doing something that was well deserving of firing decides to sue you, right? Because
• 13:26
  many employees, in fact, the lowest performing employees will almost always try to sue you.
• 13:31
  Because it couldn't be them, it must be you, right? In their core of little twisted reality.
• 13:37
  So that can really, really push buttons for people. And when you've run through your reset
• 13:45
  process on that, oh, look, it's happening. Okay, I got the attorney's handling it. Like, it's
• 13:49
  going to happen. But the amount of suffering and therefore the amount of wasted energy goes down.
• 13:54
  And that's what, that's what just gives you resilience and business. And if you can manage
• 14:02
  to be unprogrammable, you get to choose your state and you can choose success. And if you're
• 14:07
  programmable, some asshole somewhere is going to program you when you're not looking and you're
• 14:12
  going to act like a jerk and it's going to affect your team. It's going to affect your customer.
• 14:16
  It's going to affect how you sleep. It'll affect your relationships at home. And it affects,
• 14:21
  it affects everything. It affects your performance. Everything. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this
• 14:25
  valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want
• 14:29
  to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full
• 14:34
  episode. See you in the next one.