The creator of biohacking talks psychedelics, plant intelligence, integration, surrender, and why optimizing the human machine was never the final destination.
Psychedelic culture loves a breakthrough. The vision. The revelation. The moment everything suddenly makes sense. We talk endlessly about ego death, mystical experiences, and those flashes of clarity that can make a single night feel like it rearranged an entire life.
Dave Asprey is more interested in what happens after that.
The creator of the biohacking movement has spent decades thinking about how to change the human body and brain. He founded Bulletproof Coffee and the Bulletproof Diet, hosts The Human Upgrade, has written multiple bestselling books, and runs 40 Years of Zen, a neurofeedback program built around accessing and studying altered states.
Ahead of Wonderland, the psychedelics and consciousness conference coming to Austin this October, Asprey and I talked about ayahuasca, plant intelligence, integration, ego, cannabis, spiritual risk, and the limits of chasing transformation for transformation’s sake.
For someone who built a career around taking greater control of the human experience, he kept coming back to a surprisingly simple idea. Surrender.
Science Meets Spirit
I wanted to start with a tension I run into constantly in psychedelic conversations. There are people who want to talk about receptors, brain scans, and clinical trials. Then there are people who want to talk about consciousness, entities, ancestral knowledge and plant spirits. Asprey thinks separating the two is a mistake.
“People who make that division between science and spirit don’t understand where the Enlightenment came from, the creation of the scientific method,” he told me.
His broader point is that reality contains plenty we don’t fully perceive. Humans see only a narrow slice of the electromagnetic spectrum. Forces act on our bodies without ever entering conscious awareness. For Asprey, altered states can change that filter. Psychedelics, he says, “offer you a glimpse into the universe” from a perspective different from ordinary waking consciousness.
What exactly we’re glimpsing is where things get weird. And I mean that as a compliment.
Talking to the Capital-P Plant
Asprey first drank ayahuasca in Peru in 1999. He has worked with it only a handful of times since, and for someone known for radical self-experimentation, his position on the medicine is remarkably cautious.
“I think aya is a relatively dangerous, spiritually dangerous substance if you don’t have the right people with you,” he said.
When I asked what he meant, Asprey told me he had two hats he could put on: the Western science hat and the one shaped by years of studying with shamans and spiritual teachers. For this answer, he chose the latter.
Asprey believes certain plant medicines carry something beyond their pharmacology, what he describes as an energetic or informational consciousness.
“You’re not talking to the plant, you’re talking to the capital-P Plant,” he said.
He believes ayahuasca in particular demands experienced guidance and has little patience for the freshly minted Western “shaman” who attends a few ceremonies and suddenly decides they’re qualified to guide others.
“If I’m going to do aya, it’s going to be on sacred land with someone who’s trained for more than 10 years with the lineage,” he said.
He learned some of that caution personally. Asprey told me he had one deeply negative ayahuasca experience without what he considers a proper shamanic container. His framework gets even more provocative when he compares substances. Mushrooms, he says, have their own consciousness. MDMA has “no agenda.” LSD is an “elevator.”
“I tend to look at substances that are chemicals that are man-made as having less external risk than the things that come from nature,” he said.
That is very much Asprey’s own framework, not an established scientific model. But it points toward a question psychedelic culture can’t avoid: Chemistry is only part of the experience. Set matters. Setting matters. The people around you matter. The meaning you assign to what happens matters. And sometimes whatever you encounter feels extremely real. The harder question is what happens when you come back.
Your Ego Took the Drugs, Too
“Integration” has become so ubiquitous in psychedelic culture that it risks becoming wellness wallpaper.
Journal. Meditate. Take a walk. Sit with it.
All useful. But when I asked Asprey what integration actually means, his answer went somewhere more interesting.
“Every time you go on a journey, you learn something about yourself or about the world, but you forget most of it,” he said. “The problem is your ego doesn’t forget.”
Without meaningful integration, Asprey believes psychedelic work can reinforce the very patterns someone hoped to escape.
“If you do psychedelic work without integration, what happens? Well, you strengthen the ego. You don’t release it.”
That stopped me. Because we talk constantly about psychedelics dissolving the ego. Yet anyone who has spent enough time in psychedelic spaces has probably encountered the opposite: someone whose experiences have made them more certain, more enlightened, more special, more convinced they have access to truths everyone else simply can’t understand.
Sometimes ego death apparently comes with a resurrection. Asprey jokes about people taking endless “god bombs” and emerging with increasingly grandiose revelations. The joke works because the phenomenon is recognizable. Feeling profound doesn’t automatically make something true.
Asprey’s approach to integration emphasizes witnesses. At 40 Years of Zen, participants process experiences in small groups, which he believes makes it harder for the mind to quietly rewrite what happened. Writing and recording can serve a similar purpose. The revelation is the beginning. Then you have to live with it.
The Biohacker’s Paradox
Eventually, Asprey said something that made me stop him again. When he teaches people to access altered states, whether through neurofeedback, medicine, or other practices, he said the lesson is surrender.
“You just have to let go and stop trying,” he told me. “The more you push, the more you struggle, the more you suffer.”
Which is pretty funny coming from Dave Asprey. Biohacking is practically an industry built around trying. Track your sleep. Measure your glucose. Fix the inputs. Upgrade the output. If biohacking is about intentionally pushing toward a better state, isn’t surrender almost the opposite?
“You have to understand why I made biohacking,” Asprey said. “It’s a Trojan horse for longevity and consciousness work.”
There it was.
Asprey argues that optimizing the body was never the final destination. Get the hardware working better, he says, and you have more capacity for relationships, community, introspection, forgiveness, and consciousness itself.
“If you don’t believe in spiritual work and you become a biohacker, news flash, you’re gonna have a spiritual experience,” he said. “And I designed it that way.”
There’s something wonderfully subversive about that admission. One of the most famous optimization movements on the planet was apparently smuggling in enlightenment. And after decades of measuring, tweaking, and upgrading the human machine, Asprey’s philosophy ultimately lands on one of the oldest spiritual lessons around:
Stop trying so fucking hard.
The Door Isn’t the Destination
Psychedelics aren’t Asprey’s only route into altered consciousness. He has practiced meditation and holotropic breathwork and spent years working with neurofeedback. At 40 Years of Zen, participants learn to access altered states through neurofeedback, with ketamine also used in the program.
Asprey says some experiences through breathwork and neurofeedback have been more powerful for him than psychedelics, which is particularly relevant because psychedelic culture can become overly attached to the substance itself. Take the medicine. Have the breakthrough. Repeat. Asprey thinks that misses the point.
“The substance opens the door,” he said, “but you should learn to find the door on your own.”
Psychedelics can disrupt patterns, shake loose assumptions, and show us that another way of perceiving ourselves is possible. But if compassion, awe, forgiveness or connection only become accessible while we’re under the influence of something, how much have we really integrated? Eventually, you have to walk through the door sober.
Wonderland Gets Bigger Than Psychedelics
That philosophy helps explain Asprey’s vision for Wonderland. The conference returns October 13–14 in Austin, bringing together people working across psychedelics, neuroscience, longevity, spirituality and technology. The lineup includes Paul Stamets, MAPS founder Rick Doblin, and Apollo Neuro co-founder Dr. Dave Rabin, alongside programming that ranges from neuroscience to sex and psychedelics.
Asprey stepped in because he believed the conference and its community deserved to continue and had an events infrastructure capable of helping it grow. There will be breathwork. Technology. Neuroscience. Tools designed to alter consciousness without requiring a psychedelic at all.
“The science of consciousness includes psychedelics because they’re one of the easiest ways to study consciousness,” Asprey said, “but they’re not the only way.”
Maybe that’s where the psychedelic conversation needs to go next. We spent decades arguing over whether these substances had legitimate value. Then came the psychedelic renaissance: research, clinics, decriminalization, investment, celebrity testimonials, and increasingly bold promises of transformation.
The door is open now. So what are we actually going to do once we walk through it? How much should we trust what we encounter there? How do we carry an insight back into ordinary life? How do we keep the experience from becoming another thing to chase?
And what if psychedelics eventually teach us that we don’t always need psychedelics?
Wonderland may be a psychedelic conference. But Asprey seems interested in something bigger than the drugs. He wants to know what happens when we stop obsessing over the doorway and start paying attention to what lies beyond it.
For the man who created a movement around taking control of the human machine, that may be the most interesting upgrade yet. Learning when to let go.
Photos courtesy of Beyond Wonderland
