138: Dave Asprey: Unlocking the Secrets to Optimal Health

Hello again, everyone, and welcome to today's show. If you're one of the 130 million people that are dealing with Sirs Lyme disease, autoimmune disease, or other conditions that are impacted by mold on a daily basis, and you need to learn how to eliminate that exposure, then you're in the right place. My name is Brian Carr, and you're listening to Mold Finders Radio.

All right, everyone. Super pumped today. I've actually, I haven't told him this. I was gonna wait for it, but when I started going down this road years ago. So I. I've been doing, you know, what we do for over 10 years, and I knew at some point that me and this guest would get connected at some point. I saw this, I envisioned this, I manifested this. I knew this was going to happen just because of his story, and I'm really excited for him to share that with everyone today because I think that it's really important to do so. With all of that said, I'm just going to jump into it, everybody. Today we have Dave Asprey, the Dave Asprey, the father of biohacking and all the things that we know. And for. I'm really, really excited for him to come on. We're going to talk about some really exciting stuff that he has going on. He has a new book coming out we're going to get into, and we're also going to talk a little bit about sort of how he started going down this road. And there's a portion of it that's mold related, and I think it's. It's really relatable to a lot of us. So with. With that being said, let me just kind of throw it out to you, Dave. How's it going, man?

I'm doing great, Brian, and thanks for. Thanks for your show and the work you're doing. Toxic mold is one of the major reasons that I used to weigh 300 pounds and I'm about 8% body fat today, which is awesome.

I had a diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia and arthritis and high risk of stroke and heart attack and pre diabetes before I was 30, because I grew up in a basement that had toxic mold. And I got out of that place. You know, we didn't know in the 80s that that was a thing. And then I went off to college and got another mold exposure when there was a water leak in my dorm room. Dorms are notoriously moldy anyway, and my body was already primed for mold, so I'm. I'm basically fat in pain, massive brain fog. The physical anxiety that comes from mold. Nosebleeds 10 times a day, frequent bruising, unexplained rashes. And then I moved into my first condo And I gained 30 pounds. I already lost 50 pounds. I gained 30 pounds back. My wife at the time also gained a bunch of weight and had crazy dreams, emotional reactions. I didn't know about mold yet. And right after we sold the place, I just went and I looked and the neighbor's water heater was leaking behind the wall in the master bedroom and it was covered with slimy black, probably stachybotrys. And it explained so much. And during that time I went to my doctor, I said, I feel like I've been poisoned. Like I babysat my or dog sat my, my parents dog and after three days there, the dog got pneumonia and almost died. Okay, this was a really toxic place. But I didn't know and no one knew back then. And when I finally figured this out, I went through and I detox myself. I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars doing this. Thankfully, I worked in Silicon Valley so I could do that. And I fully believe to this day if I hadn't have done the things that I did and had the privilege to be able to do that I would either be disabled, I would have a severe thing like lupus or something, or I'd be dead. I bought disability insurance when I was 26 years old and my career was taking off and I was panicking because I couldn't remember anything and I don't know how I drove home every night. I would just get home and it was a complete fog. And.

That was once I reversed that stuff, that was what caused me to start the biohacking movement. And now as we're recording this, I'm in the process of launching a book called Smarter Not Harder. And my mold journey has been something like that where I just want to do what works. One of the big problems as a mold exposed person that I had was that I thought, well, I know that I'm supposed to exercise. And there was a time in my life when I was trying to lose the £300. Well, just lose 100 of the £300. I went to the gym. This was when I was living in a non moldy house and I went to the gym 90 minutes a day, six days a week, religiously, no matter what. And I went on a low fat, low calorie, vegetarian, semi vegetarian diet. And magically I still weighed 300 pounds at the end of that. So I spent 702 hours in the gym and I got strong, but I didn't lose any weight. And it probably didn't do that much good stuff for my health. So I wrote Smarter Not Harder as a revenge for that, because it turns out when you're mold exposed, and a couple of years after that, when I had another exposure, I tried to exercise and I'd exercise and I'd be dead for three days. And this inability to tolerate exercise happens to a lot of people who've had toxic mold exposures. And I thought, well, maybe there's another way to get a signal into the body to be strong and fit. And it turns out there is. And Smarter, Not Harder is, here's the stuff we know that works better than meditation, that works better than lifting weights, it works better than cardio. So you can spend a tiny fraction of your life on recovery or on exercise and more on recovery. Because it turns out that the trick to getting your body to do what you want it to do and all mold people want that is how do you get a signal into the body that doesn't overwhelm the body when it's already overwhelmed? And it turns out you can get a small signal in, but it's how you recover that matters. And that's the thesis of Smarter, Not Harder. And like, I'm going to do like the complete Internet douchebag thing, but I want you guys to understand I was a 300 pound guy and like, yes, look at those guns, right? But there's stretch marks in there, right? I'm covered in stretch marks from toxic mold and things like that. And.

That didn't have to happen. None of that had to happen. So I'm hoping that people who are mold exposed read Smarter, Not Harder, and they realize they can recover much faster than they think they can. And part of it is detox, which isn't the focus of the book. But I'll tell you, mold triggers so much on the emotional and the psychological front as well as the physical front, that if you take on the guilt of that, you're like, well, I tried hard. It's not about trying at all. It's about understanding toxins, understanding metabolic energy, and then getting the right signal. And that's what Smarter Not Harder is about.

I think that piece, that piece is so overlooked all the time.

You know, the. There are so many homes that I've been into, or we sit down, kind of talk through, hey, what's going on? You know, give me the walk through the house history, previous water, you know, things like that, you know, sit down at like the kitchen table with, you know, with. With whoever's there and, and they start crying. And they're not crying because like they're upset or anything like that. But there's such an emotional toll that comes with all of this. Like everyone's so focused on the physical stuff because it's an obvious thing. Like you have to handle the physical, but the emotional trauma that comes on the back end of what somebody's dealing with physically. Like it's no different than some other physical trauma that you have. And you have an emotional piece that ties to it. It comes. Nobody thinks about it, but man, it is such an important part to be able to manage that piece of it and understand that. And having people that understand the journey can provide advice that can help support you along that journey. And the judgment piece that you're talking about is so important. Listen, everyone, it's not your fault that there was the leak in your house 15 years ago and there's still mold hidden in the walls and in the H Vac. It's not your fault, right? But what it's about, and I think a lot of what Sparta, Not Harder is about as well as empowering people to understand the things that they can do to make improvements, right?

And without spending your whole life, most people get to the point where you're willing to spend every bit of money and time that you have on just feeling normal. And it's a feeling of overwhelm. And I say this. I started a company that's $100 million a year. I have six other companies. I have a neurofeedback company that fixes brains. All of that came about because I had toxic mold exposure. I'm like, I will win. I would point people to moldymovie.com it's a free documentary, like a full on full budget. I paid out of my pocket and I don't charge for it because I want people to know this is real. So that's worth watching for all of your listeners. And I don't want anything from you for it. I just want you to know it's real and I want you to show it to your doctor because that was my motivation there. I went into a doctor and geez, in the 90s when I lived in that condo that had Stacky and I remember saying, I feel like I've been poisoned. You know, one thing I notice helps a little bit is I take vitamin C. The reason for this is vitamin C increases glutathione in the liver and your body can better handle this overwhelming toxic load. And the doctor looks at me and says, stop. Vitamin C could kill you. And I looked at him and I go, what about Linus Pauling? Now, if you're a listener who's not into health, you wouldn't know linus Pauling took 90 grams of vitamin C a day. The only guy with two Nobel prizes and in biochemistry. So when my doctor didn't know who he was, I said, look, you're fired. But this doctor told me that. That yeast and mold were not my problem, even though my first inclination when I went in saying, I think I might have a problem, maybe with Candida or some kind of a mold thing, said, no, you'd be in the hospital if you had that. So normal doctors are not equipped for this. And even worse.

Many times, because mold is so foundational, it comes very low in your. In your system, in your body. It's affecting subcel components. That means that the manifestation, for you, it might be, nah, I'm a little puffy in the morning, and I have love handles I didn't have. But your spouse is like, I'm losing my mind. I'm having nightmares. And it looks like I've been punched in the face because you touched me. And I get a bruise, Right? Totally unrelated if you go to the doctor. But they're exactly the same, caused by mold activating mast cells within the body. So my favorite interview in moldy movie is a couple. They're both doctors. They lived in a moldy house, and she was flat out disabled by this. But because she's a doctor, she says, Well, I have 20 symptoms. I've been taught in medical school that if you have more than three symptoms, you're a hypochondriac. That's their training. And she said, but my body temperature was 1 degree too high, so I knew it wasn't all in my head. So she biopsied every organ in her body. That means going into the liver and taking out a piece of liver to look at it.

And.

And they couldn't find what it was. And then after two years of just being disabled with her medical doctor husband going, I feel fine. And they're sitting there on camera, and he says, when they found it was mold and she got it all fixed and came back, he said, you know, I never felt anything, but I acknowledge it's real because I saw it all myself. So it's totally fine. If you're listening to this and you're in a house with mold and you think your Spouse or your kid or whoever it is who's really affected is crazy. No, it's genetically related. And it hits very differently. And if you think you're safe because you don't feel it. No. Your risk of cancer and other diseases is going through the roof. And there are connections with toxic mold with cardiovascular disease, with diabetes, with cancer, with breast cancer specifically. This is bad stuff. It does not belong in our homes. It belongs outside in the soil with natural bacteria that eat mold for fun. And one of the ways I've gotten revenge on toxic mold, aside from doing the documentary so everyone knows it's in our homes and especially in our schools, is I created a company called homebiotic. And Home Biotic makes a natural bacteria spray from soil bacteria. And these are soil bacteria that eat mycotoxins, and they eat the hyphae little roots when mold starts to grow. So I missed my house every couple of weeks. And this is like a $20 thing. It's not expensive. And I do that because if there is moisture, even moisture in the shower, anywhere like that where you get a little bit of grime around the windows, it eats that before it can happen. And it's called Home Biotic, like Probiotic. And this is a small company. It's one of several companies that I have, but it's so important for mold people. I travel with it, and if I go to Hawaii, where half the places you go is moldy, I miss the bathroom in the hotel room that smells funky, and by the next morning, I don't react to it. So that's cool.

That's an. I mean, it's an awesome travel hack, too, because every hotel. I mean, I. I can't even tell you when my family, when. When I had my wedding a few. A few years ago, my whole family. So I'm a. Our business, a family business. So our father's taught it down to us. So, like, the whole. Knows all this stuff. And whenever you put the entire family in one hotel, watch out, hotel, because rooms are getting switched over and over and over again. We're inspecting every room. We just traveled for our company annual meeting. You know, a month ago, we went and looked at 13 different rooms when I was at the hotel. No, no, no. My wife is sensitive. Like, it's. You can't mess around with that stuff. So it's like a really awesome thing that we can kind of throw into the travel hack kit when we're going.

There's. There's a problem, though, Brian. So one thing you could do is say, I want A new hotel. The thing is, most people who get mold exposure end up with chemical sensitivity, which means a new hotel that's brand new is going to have too much formaldehyde, and that's going to knock you out. So you want a hotel that was built in the last five years, but has been airing out for at least a year. And the problem is those are expensive.

Those are expensive, Yeah.

I went to an event at a place in San Diego. $600 a night, beautiful hotel. Every single room was incredibly moldy with stuff that I don't smell, but knocks me out. I'm very resilient. I can handle mold. I would say I'm 10% as sensitive as I used to be. Like, my, my health is back. And this place was like taking a Valium. So I ended up sleeping on the lounger outside the hotel, in the little garden area outside my, my back porch because it was so gross. And you just have to be militant and the idea that you're going to take the hit. When I started this journey, I would get a mold exposure. I was a zombie for six weeks. Now if I get a mold exposure, it's usually, even if it's a very severe one, for a long period of time, it usually is about three days to recover. Because I know all the hacks. That's why smarter, not harder, is important. And that's why learning how to eat my bulletproof diet book. So many mold people learn how to eat that way because one of the things that mold toxins do, they enter the body and they're called lipophoric. They dissolve into the fat in your body. And you might say, oh, I just have fat, you know, around my midsection or something. But that's not it. It's the fat that your cell membranes are made of. Every cell is surrounded by a thin envelope of fat. And imagine if you put a drop of blue dye in a cup of water, the blue dye spreads out, and if you want to get rid of that, you pour more water in there and you dilute it. So what you end up doing is for about two years, you eat a diet that's high in clean fats. This is saturated fat, like butter, coconut oil, egg yolks, things like that. And that flushes the fat through the body and it rinses out those fat soluble toxins and they get into your brain, the sheath on your nerves. And it takes about two years to replace half the fat in your body. So after two years of drinking your butter and coffee, I'm going to plug Danger Coffee, my newest coffee company, Danger Coffee, is full of trace minerals that bind to mold toxins. So when you drink the coffee, it's something that can bind to other toxins and help to get it out. Nice coffee in there.

Here it is. Yeah.

And what, by the way, danger coffee.com. and what you're going to find is that you feel.

You feel different when you start binding toxins and all that. And you've got to get them out of your body. And the way you get them out is by binding and by flushing fat through the system, increasing bile flow. And I'm also going to just plug. You need to buy a home ozone machine. I've got several episodes on doing ozone therapy. This isn't for treating the air. Although, Brian, you know, we've probably talked about ozone in the air before. This is about. You can go to the doctor and do intravenous ozone, which is expensive, or you can go home and do rectal ozone therapy, where you put a little tube, a very tiny, tiny tube in that hole. I hashtag reverse fart whenever I'm doing this and I do it on. On. I'm like, sitting there, you know, doing a Facebook live or something, and I'm like, hey, guys, guess what I'm doing right now? And a tiny trickle of ozone gas goes in. And the first time I did that, I had five minutes of mental clarity that I hadn't felt in years. I'm like, oh, my God. I did that every night for 18 months as part of my mold recovery. And it's.

So that's the same mechanism as an enema. How it gets in the bloodstream that, like, if we do coffee enemas, is that.

Yeah, they call the. In the third lung because during some surgical procedures, they put oxygen in your colon so you absorb through the sides of your oxygen. And this is a very affordable thing to do. Buying an ozone machine is going to cost you around a thousand dollars for a complete setup. And you can treat yourself an infinite number of times for that and your entire family.

So this is interesting because I. So, by the way, I. Superhuman. I think it's my favorite book. I haven't read Smarter, not harder yet. I just got it, so I need to read it. But Superhuman was my favorite book, and you talked about 10 passes and other things that you could do in there. It was all, like, super interesting. So is this like a. I don't know if you would call it a substitute or an alternate kind of approach to being.

It's an alternate. The gold standard. If you're wrecked and you have enough money. The problem is mold drains your resilience. So everything feels hard, right? And the things that just shouldn't be difficult at all, like, oh, my God, how am I ever going to do that? And then you feel guilty because you're procrastinating, right? Most procrastination is driven by. By fear. Like, and that there's psychology that does that. I do a lot of that psychology in my neurofeedback healing practice. But this isn't that kind of procrastination. This is exhaustion driven where, you know, walking across the house is just too much work. You just can't do it right now. Right? So, um, when you do rectal ozone, it isn't. I would say it's 80% as good as going to the doctor and doing the intravenous stuff. But you don't have to go to the doctor, and you don't have to pay for it every time. So for me, it was every single night when I wasn't traveling for 18 months. And by the end of that, man, I got my brain back, I got my energy back. I feel that vibe again. And so amazing. On top of that, most people with toxic mold, you've got to look at your thyroid. Your thyroid is the energy thermostat for your body. And if it's low, you'll be tired all the time. Well, mold gives you Hashimoto's thyroiditis, which I've had since I was 26, at least diagnosed. And when you treat that. Oh, so your job is to say it doesn't matter if you do too many things. We have this fear something. Something I'm doing might not work. Well, who the f cares if you had to get your energy back? That's what superhuman is about. Okay, what are all the things you can do? And just do all of them that are affordable and convenient enough. And if one or the combination of them works, you got your life back. And then you can stop doing some of them. And as long as you keep your life, you're fine. And I used to try and do. I'll just take one thing for a month, and then if it doesn't work, I'll do another thing for the next month. If you think about it, let's say I wanted to invent bread. And I'm like, okay, I baked the water, I baked the yeast, I baked the flour. There's no such thing as bread. Or you mix them together and you bake them and you get bread, Right? It's that way for healing, it's usually you need to be on the two things that you learn about in smarter, not harder that all mold people have to know about. One of them is called vitamin D. That's D, A, K and E. These are all the fat soluble vitamins. These are the things that control mineral entry into your cells. And then you have to have your minerals, your trace minerals and your macro minerals. And you can be doing all these expensive mold treatments. You can be doing, you know, $50 a month cognitive enhancing supplements. But if you don't have vitamin D and you don't have your minerals, it's not going to work. That's why I put minerals in danger coffee. So when you're drinking your coffee, you get your trace minerals and those are foundational to recovering from mold.

Yeah, you know, so let's dive into the book is when I was looking through what's included and I thumbed through and read, you know, different portions and stuff as quickly as I could. It really feels like it's set up where like section one is really about the foundation. Like, you actually talk about minerals in the foundation. You know, you talk or excuse in that first section and then section two kind of dives into, which is what I think most people probably like, they're looking for the answer to something, right? So section two is like, what do you want? You want strength, you want your cardio fitness, you want energy levels back, you want your brain back? Like, here's different ways to basically help execute that. And then the third section is ultimately about how you kind of go beyond where we are now and kind of have this kind of ongoing improvement. Am I kind of, am I getting the vibe of this right As I look through this?

You're getting the vibe of it, right? Because for most of us, if you, if you just ask a person who isn't necessarily mold exposed, do you want to be healthy, they say, yeah, yeah, I want to be healthy. Okay. No. If you ask someone who's got enough health, even if they're just a 5 out of 10 on health, if they were to wake up in the morning and you wake up, the first thing you think about, if you're like most people, it's, I want to eat delicious food, I want sex and I want power and I want money. Because we're wired that way as human beings. There's nothing wrong with that, right? This is why we improve the world. This is why we help other people. Those are core drives. And when you have mold, suddenly you're one of the few people who says, you know what? I would give everything not to date a supermodel, not to have a million dollars, just to have your health back. And I've been there. And there was a time, actually many years, where I'd spend 20% of my income on health because I was just trying to shore up what I had before I got it all back. And.

So that said, okay, Brian, how would you measure your health? What does that mean when you say, I want to be healthy? Do you know?

That's a great question. What? Yeah, so let's talk about it. What?

I mean, I'll ask you straight up. Okay. So how would you decide if you were healthy or not? How do you know? What's the goal?

Well, you know, I think the goal is that you could wake up and you could be yourself and you can not feel limited in any way and you don't feel pain and you can do what you want to do without feeling like you're being held back. But I think in some cases that's the short term view on it. It's interesting what you said earlier, where you were talking about, yeah, I might not be affected by mold right now, but my chances for heart attack went up. My chances for Alzheimer's are going up. My chances for all these other things are going up. So one thing that I, because I know all of this as well, that I'm really trying to do is I'm lucky. Like, I used to go into these houses. I would go to my doctor who, who referred a lot of her patients to me, right. So she knew what she was looking at. She would treat me basically at a discount because of what I was doing.

Can you say your name? Who is it? Or is it private?

No, it's not private. Her name is Dr. Sunny Raleigh. She's out of Restoration Healthcare in Irvine.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, and she's great.

Anyway, so I went in and she ran your mycotoxin panel on me and some other things. And she looks at it and she's like, I know the houses that you're in. I see them, I see the patients. I know every house that you're in and I'm looking at what's in your body right now. She's like, and you luckily are able to kind of move this stuff through, immobilize it, and do what you need to do relatively well. I would expect this to. To look way worse than what it looks like from knowing everywhere that you've been. And so that kind of talks to what you're. What we were Just talking about a little bit. Like, for me, I also have an infrared sauna in my house. I have a red light machine in my house. I do cold thermogenesis, you know, at least for showers anyway.

It's almost like you're using biohacking to recover and make yourself more resilient. Who would have thought?

It's almost like I read Superhuman and took notes like I was in college, because that's actually what happened. You should see my book. It's freaking thumbtacked and highlighted and all kinds of stuff in there. And honestly, like, that's why I said I think it was my favorite of. Of your books to this point. Bulletproof Diet was great as well, because it really changed how I looked at just like, what is kind of viewed as like, good to eat, not good to eat. Like, you know, my dad, when I was younger, he went on the Atkins diet. He ultimately got heart disease and he ended up having. That's how he passed away. But you look back at it, you're like, this is all that you were doing. Like, okay, like, I'm starting to make sense. It was, it was just kind of what he was eating. And you kind of see that. I just, I think it's a weird thing to say. I almost feel like as an entire, like, society of people who are starting to see this in more of a mass view of how you've helped to make it more of a mass viewed thing, that we almost kind of need to thank Mold a little bit because I really feel like it was the catalyst that drove you to bring awareness to all.

Yeah. If I hadn't have had Mold, man, I probably would have done a different career. And people who are familiar with my story, I was a computer hacker, and I'm the first guy to sell anything over the Internet. Like, the first E Commerce product ever was a caffeine T shirt out of my dorm room.

And I. Caffeine is my drug of choice, right?

Yeah. In fact, there's the. I've got the tattoo to prove it. Right. That's caffeine on my. On my bicep. And what's, what's funny, there is, you know, cloud computing. The first shipping instance of cloud computing was my product, and I shipped it two days before Marc Andreessen did. And now cloud computing drives everything we do. So, like, I've been a tech innovator. I had a great career in Silicon Valley. I've worked for a VC and all that. And the idea that me, as a fat computer hacker would be in men's health with my shirt off or in vogue, like, what the hell? That is so unlikely. And that's because of mold. Ultimately, if I hadn't have had to just say, look, I have to hack my body because my doctor won't do it. We didn't have mycotoxin panels when I had mold illness. It was really, really bad.

So I didn't know what to do about it. And we weren't sure what happened. And I went to this great doctor, one of the guys who today we call a functional medicine doctor. But he was from two generations before that, what we would call an orthomolecular doctor back in the day. And he said, dave.

Can I run an HIV test on you? Because I don't think you have it. But my patients see me twice, and their allergies are healed and they're done, and you're not responding to any of my treatments. And this guy was, you know, he was a master. And I don't have hiv. I didn't have it. And he did run a mold allergy panel. And I was allergic to eight of the top 10 species of toxic mold. So we couldn't measure the toxins, but we could measure my immune reactivity to it. And that was how I knew to go after mold. And I went after it, and I got better. And then I moved into a place in Palo Alto, California. Nice house. And we had the dishwasher changed. And behind the dishwasher, there'd been a leak for several years. And when they pulled it out, both my dogs stopped eating. I immediately like the lining of my gut shed. It was such a strong reaction to it, I got this brain fog, um, and I'm like, oh, my God, I'm back in it. And because even though I knew about mold at the time, but mold makes you dumb, and it makes it so you just can't make a decision. Cause it's just too much work to make a decision. Your decision fatigue is. Is enormous. So I. Instead of moving out immediately, I kind of sat there for a couple months while they hung up a tarp and turned on a fan, or I don't even remember because it. It. Mold blanks things out. And we did get it all. All remediated properly, down to the studs and all that stuff. But it took about six months to recover from that. And that was my kind of my big lesson. And now that I'm more resilient, I moved to Austin about, oh, two months ago from when we're recording this and the house I'm in now, since I moved in, has had five leaks because it's a 70 year old house and I haven't had any mold symptoms. I had some from bacterial stuff because one of them was a sewage leak under the house. And we've had all of them cleaned and remediated. And I'm standing here and I've completely Fine. Because part of what we haven't talked about very much yet and part of smarter, not harder in here, there's a part about recovery. And we tend to think as people who are just alive. Okay, if exercise is good, more is better. But the idea here is how do we get a signal into our body so that we push ourselves right to the edge of dysregulating, but not dysregulate. And what you do is you get a little bit of exercise and then you use recovery techniques and technologies to recover quickly. Mold people are always under recovered. Right. So our job is a little push and then strong recovery.

And.

And those recovery technologies aren't well, well documented. Since I do those all the time, I'm in a different place.

When you give an example of a couple of those.

There's breathing exercises, there's cold therapy. Even just a cold shower for three days in a row will change the ratio of fats in cardio lipin, which is part of your mitochondrial membrane. Mold people universally have less functioning mitochondria. In other words, we do a terrible job of turning 30 pounds of air plus some food into electricity. So we're running on like batteries that are almost empty all the time. And that's why it's hard to make decisions, because it takes power to make a decision. And it's, you know, it's like your phone's at 1% all the time.

And I mean for people to like to put this into some sort of tactical thing. So after reading Superhuman, I got a red light machine.

Did you get the true light from my company or did you get one of those cheap ones?

I got one from Platinum led.

Okay.

Which, which I liked. And I was on it for. I would do it every day, 20 minutes in the morning, 10 on the front, 10 on the backside. I did it every day for six weeks. And I just felt. You're talking about like the battery thing, right? I just felt like supercharged. Right. And then for a few days, like we went out of town or something, I couldn't do it. And I felt so drained. I felt like when you, you know, you plug your phone in at night and you're like, oh, dang, it wasn't fully plugged in the wall. I opened it up, it's still on low power. Like, that's what I felt like every day. It was unbelievable. That's all driving mitochondrial function to help drive that energy, right?

Get this, Brian. I created this idea of a biohacking lab or a biohacking facility. And I've had one in Santa Monica, California for about eight years. We're franchising it. You can go to ownandupgradelabs.com and open one anywhere in the country. And what we've got there is every one of the recovery technologies. So for instance, we're opening three in Austin. We've got ones going in the Bay Area in Seattle. And there are people now, like, calling up and getting franchises where we have all of the gear that makes you recover and all of the gear that gets a signal in your body faster. So if you're lucky enough to live in an area that has an upgrade labs, that's the easiest thing to do because, frankly, I have a million dollars worth of biohacking gear.

I rented a house that had an entire floor where I could put all the things I use. Yes, infrared saunas are very helpful. And some things you can just purchase, like a red light thing, go to true light.com or it's probably shoptruelight.com, whatever those are the red light devices that I make. And you can use a whole bunch of things, but some of them are very expensive. The pulse electromagnetic frequencies and some of the lymphatic things. So you could go out and you could build it if you have space and money in your house, or you could go to a place where it's all in one place and get it done. Part of my journey recovering from mold was I, oh, I have a day off work. I'll just drive around and I'll go here and I'll do ozone, and I'll go here and I'll do this, I'll go here and I'll do that. You spend easily $500 in a day doing that. And at an upgrade labs, you spend less than that for a monthly membership with unlimited use of all that stuff. And you only have to drive to one place. In addition, we talked earlier that the goal for health, well, most people, when you do our entry survey, we look at how your body's functioning electrically and your body composition with a medical grade device. And then we ask you a series of questions that helps to identify one of the five big areas that you care about first. And one of them Is energy and metabolism. A lot of mold people, that's it. I'm fat, and I don't know why, and I'm tired all the time. Okay, those go together. Let's work on that first. But someone else may come in and say, you know, my goal is actually muscle mass. Like, I know I'm aging and I don't have the muscles I want, or, I'm young and I want to get ripped, but I don't have time. Or maybe it's cardiovascular. Those are different goals. And as a matter of fact, if your goal is, I want to run a marathon, you cannot say, I want to run a marathon and I want to be ripped. Because when you run marathons, you depress your growth hormone. So what I encourage you to do is pick the first goal and then pick the second goal. And that's what I teach you. Doing smarter, not harder. So depending on which mold symptoms you have, that's what drives what behaviors you use to get a signal into the body and then to get the recovery signal back in. And that's why it's worth writing a book about. The five big groups are, there's muscle, there's cardiovascular, there's energy and metabolism, there's stress management, recovery, which is a big one for mold people, and then there's cognitive function. We're the only franchise that's doing.

Neurofeedback. One of the things that happens with mold is your brain gets dysregulated. Your body. I call it the meat operating system in the book. So smarter, not harder. And like, you're in. Welcome to your meat operating system. This is what's happening below the covers where you can't see it. And you imagine there's something in there that's telling your heart when to beat. It's usually not you, unless you've trained yourself to do that, which is, by the way, one of the recovery technologies. And there's something that you're. How much testosterone does your body make? It knows, but you don't. So it does stuff that's invisible. And when it knows it's being poisoned and it can't figure out what the poison is, because mold toxins are very low molecular weight. They're hard to identify for our body systems, it starts looking for the cause, and it's going to say, huh, it's probably the eggs you're eating. And you can get an egg allergy. It's probably. And suddenly you get all these allergies you didn't have before. Oh, now I have chemical sensitivity. It could detect those fragrances, but it couldn't detect the mold. So it's mixing up the signals, and then you end up getting. Frankly, I'm going to call it ptsd.

Yes.

And when you go into a place that has mold that you can smell, you get the sense of doom. And sometimes it comes with brain fog. But part of that is the body going into emergency mode because it knows something's wrong. Well, with neurofeedback, you can actually train the body to not go into panic mode. So you can walk into a moldy house and you can say, I recognize there's mold here. I recognize that it's not good for me. I also recognize that I'm not going to die right now, and I have the tools to recover from this and remove that mold from my body. I'm safe. But people with mold walk around with a feeling that they are not safe all the time. And fear is not a thought. Fear is a sensation derived from the body. And when the body detects mold, it sends you a signal of fear. And that's one of the reasons when we feel angry or when we feel fearful, we use anger to hide our fear. So then we get angry at our spouse, we yell at our boss. Like we do stupid things, and then we feel guilt and shame about that because how could I do that? Look, you did it because you were losing your mind, because your body thought you were dying even though you weren't. So we can train your nervous system to not hyper respond to mold, which means your immune response goes down. That's why I can walk into to incredibly moldy environments now, and I don't have a reaction like I used to. It's taken a lot of work to get there, but it's possible.

It is. It is possible. There's a lot of doctors that are doing forms of. Of brain training and these types of things to help manage that piece of it, too. Because there is a relation there. It's. It's. I've been to one of the bulletproof labs in Santa Monica. I used to live in Santa Monica, so I would, you know, I'd go over there.

You've been there? Yeah, that was. That was the. The first Upgrade Labs. We changed the name to Upgrade Lab. You know, bulletproof coffee is a big thing, but it's a. It's a coffee thing.

Right, right. You're right.

And now we can franchise it. So. And by the way, the URL own and upgrade labs.com. because I know there's people listening who are like, wait a Minute. You mean I could open one of these in my community? I could help a bunch of people and I could use these things at an unlimited level because it's my company. Yeah, you could. So you can open your own upgrade labs. It's. It's actually a really cool opportunity and the sort of manual for why and how all these recovery technologies work. That's what Smarter, not Harder is there for. And that's why I would just ask people like, if you enjoyed documentary or if this interview is valuable, please do me the favor of ordering Smarter not harder. Because when people order it at the opening, it raises awareness. And I do talk about mold in the book. It raises awareness. It brings this to many, many more people because then it's number one on Amazon and New York Times list and all that. It'll be my fifth New York Times bestseller, but only if you guys order it.

So where do people order it? Where do they go?

Just go to anywhere you like to order books. Or best of all, go to your local bookstore if you still have one. Those places are amazing and you won't know what you'll find. So pick one up at a local store if you want to support having small businesses around you or just go wherever you like to buy books. I do record all of my books as well. People love my audible. They know my voice from the human upgrade for my podcast. So if you like my voice, then get the audible version. And if you like to read, then get the regular book. But I always appreciate local bookstores.

If you're like me, I did the audible version of Superhuman and then was like, whoa, I got way too many notes to take. Then I had to buy the book and like, re go through the whole thing and highlight stuff. It was crazy. And I imagine this is gonna be just good. I mean, just skimming through it, looking through what's being talked about. The way that you broke down, like the targets and the goals that you just outlined a minute ago, it makes it really easy for someone to kind of navigate this and kind of get what they want out of it and then come back later and get something else. It's like their second goal they want.

To do after that.

So I think it's really cool how you put it together.

In fact, Brian, writing books is the lowest pay thing that I do. I write these books because they're so valuable. Hundreds of thousands of people will read the book and it's. It's going to change their lives. If someone had given me this book when I was 19, in mold, poisoned oh my God, it would have saved me a million dollars. So it takes usually about 2,000 hours. That's one year of full time work for me to write a book. And I do this usually in evenings and weekends and all because I'm running six companies. Upgrade Labs is growing. 40 years is in. My neurofeedback company is growing. And Danger Coffee and all these things, and True Light and Home Biotic. So I'm doing all that. But I write these books because it matters so much. But it's not for economics. I read the books for you. That's why I do this. If someone had just given me this book, it would have mattered so much.

You know, books, it's so funny. Like, there's so many ways to get information out. Books are such an inexpensive way to get real information that can have real change on things. So I'm really excited to read it. I've got like, I got the, the PDF version here for prep to start looking through. So I'm excited to get through it. I'll definitely get it when it actually comes out.

Thank you, Brian. You can order it now, by the way, just on Amazon. You just click order and then it all hits the first week. So that's my big goal. I'm doing like probably a hundred podcasts, which is another a hundred hours.

Well, there you go. I'll be hitting, I'll be going to Amazon and doing that as soon as we jump off of this. Everyone else, you should check it out too, guys. It's such a, I mean, honestly, such a minimal investment to get so much amazing information. It's kind of a no brainer at that point. So I know I'm running short with you, so we'll, we'll cut it off here. Thank you so much for coming on. If you need help, like you said, you had five leaks in your house. Like, listen, if you need, if you have stuff like, let me know, we'll, we'll figure out a way.

So Brian, I would love to either get you out here or when you guys. I'm not sure how it all works because I'm working with my landlord who fortunately has been a follower for 10 years and is a friend. So he's been working with me on making sure that when we open up a wall, fortunately these are new leaks as far as we can tell, so there isn't mold in the walls. And that said, the other thing that mold people get is you get bacterial VOCs, which are a major issue. And I suspect I'm dealing with some of those. I haven't had hives in years, but I have some now. But I don't have any other symptoms. So I want to make sure I get everything out of the house. So absolutely. I'm going to give you a call and set up an appointment.

Yeah, let's connect after this and we'll.

Where do I go? Like, where would a normal person go? Like, what's the URL for you?

You can be a normal person, too. It's. It's. Yes. WeInspect.com. that's where anybody can go. It's a quick information form. It's. Our processes run very similar if you go to a functional doc. So the first step, give us history. What's going on with you? Let's figure this out. Then we can make sure that our. That our team of coaches are really prepped to have a good conversation with you and, and help guide you down whatever the next step on your path needs to be.

Lovely. Thanks, Brian. Cool.

Thank you so much. Thanks again. We will. I don't know. Hopefully we'll talk to you soon again.

All right. Looking forward to it. All right.

Bye. Bye.

So that's it for today's show, everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment and subscribe and give a rating wherever you get your podcast. It'll help spread the word to those who really need it the most.