How To Biohack The Ultimate Healthy Home: Part 3, with Bulletproof Exec Dave Asprey

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Foreign. Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And part of our popular how to Biohack the Ultimate Healthy Home series has consisted of me promising to you that I was gonna get a real expert on the show when it comes to making your home a healthy place to live in. And today, the mighty Dave Asprey joins us and he's gonna put the free icing on the cake with this part three of the how to Biohack the Ultimate Healthy Home series. Now, if you missed part one and two, we talked to Dr. Jack Cruz in part one about lowering exposure to EMF and artificial light and other biological assailants. And in part two, we talked to green architect Stephanie Horowitz about ways you could build your home or modify your home. And today, Dave and I are going to delve into the truth about mold in your home and mycotoxins in your body and what you can do about it. And if you don't know who Dave is, you may have actually heard of him before as the bulletproof exec. He's pretty famous in the realm of biohacking, health, ancestral living, and he's also a Silicon Valley investor. He's a technology entrepreneur. The guy has spent 15 years and I believe over a quarter million dollars to hack his own biology. He lost over 100 pounds without counting calories or engaging in excessive exercise. He's upgraded his brain by more than 20 IQ points. He's lowered his biological age all at the same time while learning to sleep more efficiently in less time. And he's done all these things to transform himself not only into a better entrepreneur, but also a better husband and a better father. So he's got private brain, EEG facilities hidden in a Canadian forest. He's been on remote monasteries in Tibet. The guy really is a wealth of info. And I'm going to put a link to Dave's website to everything that we talk about in the show notes for this episode over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com but I'm going to shut up now and welcome Dave, to the show.

Hey, Ben. Thanks, man. Good to see you again. It was really cool to be at your conference last year too.

Yeah, that was fun. And for those of you who don't know, Dave came up to Spokane and did a talk on mold and mycotoxins, specifically in food. And today we're kind of gonna go above and beyond food. Because, Dave, you've talked a lot about everything from like coffee to cheese to chocolate. But one of the things that I think might fly under the radar sometimes or something that people might not think about so much is mold in their home. So I know that you kind of have your own story about something that happened to you as far as mold in the home and the issue with that. So can you kind of delve into why this is an issue and what you experienced?

Sure, Ben. When we talk about biohacking, the idea is you're changing the environment around you to increase your performance, and you're changing the environment inside yourself to increase performance. And one of the big things in the environment around you is actually your house. However, what's going on with toxic mold in houses today didn't start in houses. It started a While ago, probably 30 plus years ago, Dupont made a pesticide called Benomyl. And Benomyl causes rapid mutation, like X men level mutation of basically normal, semi healthy soil fungi.

And can you remind me what dupont is? Is that basically like the seed company?

Oh, they're actually a giant chemical company who bought seed companies, so they're more of a pesticide chemical company. It's just that they happen to also be competing with Monsanto for the world's most evil seed hackers. But got it. That's another kind of contest I wouldn't want to be the winner or the loser of. So what dupont did, though, in their business of selling pesticides, they found this thing that killed 98% of fungus and soil, which is great if you don't want your food to spoil. The only problem is the other 2% that's left becomes highly mutagenic and they can swap their mutated genes, it's called a plasmid level mutation, with other fungus that's in soil or other fungus, actually, that's in your gut as well. So what we did is we hacked the planet's biome and we took relatively innocuous soil fungus and we made it into a much more powerful toxin breeding entity just because of this little thing we did. Honestly, without knowledge, some of the fields that were sprayed with this actually developed species of soil microbes that created cyanide. And to this day, these are nurseries and they're still sterile. Nothing will grow in that Soil because oops. So this is a major thing that people don't talk about. But since we're growing our food in this farmland and our food changes the biome in our gut, that's scary. What it also does in our homes though is these bacteria start growing at the same time that we made the X Men fungus. Actually more so than bacteria, although both can be a problem in your home. We started lowering building standards. We went for safe buildings which are sealed to make sure that we stay warm. The only problem is that if you don't have air circulation in the walls or in the subfloor or in the ceiling and all the other places, you actually get an explosion of mold. And, and this has happened particularly in cold climates like where you live Ben up in Spokane where it's wet and cold. And it's happened in Alaska and it's happened actually in Sweden. It was one of the first places to have big problems with this and to acknowledge it. And since we now have these old houses that have been there long enough that they can get toxins in them because molds grow and new species of mold that were imported from the environment, it's almost impossible to have a spore free environment. So we find mold spores from the Sahara growing in coral reefs 5,000 miles away.

So as part of this, these are not molds that we necessarily evolved with or have had to experience for a very long time as human beings. And so they're relatively new exposures for us.

Not really. Aspergillus is a very common one in the home. Penicillium is another one. These have been around for a gazillion years. The problem is that they just sort of evolved and they evolve every 20 minutes. That's when they reproduce anyway. So there's a constant evolution. And so 30 years times 20 minutes, times however many. There's even a number that big for the number of different colonies of that stuff on the planet. So it's essentially, it's not a new species. It's the same base model, but they've got a lot of features that aren't necessarily good for us. So now you've got homes with less circulation, more humidity, and you've got much more aggressive toxin forming. Species of these molds that have been around forever have been causing human health problems forever. And that's why we're seeing an explosion in the sick building syndrome. In fact, these are so old that there's a passage in the Bible, and I'm sorry, don't ask me to quote which section. I Don't remember, but it's easily Googleable where they talk about, if there's black mold, you should burn the house. And I'm sure I'm phrasing that entirely wrong. It had some like herewith and therefore kind of language in it, I'm sure. But it's a known thing. If you go back into Ayurvedic medicine, they know that a fungus has an effect. You go to American Indian things, they tell you, oh, a tiny pinch of corn smut, which is Fusarium, which has known estrogenic effects in people and is on about 98% of corn. Fusarium is used as a treatment around certain monthly cycle things in women or even around pregnancy, because they knew it had estrogenic effects a long time ago. The problem is, if that stuff is growing in your walls, in your bedroom, it's going to have estrogenic effects on you and you're not going to like it. And that's why. That's kind of the long history of why this mold is becoming a problem in our houses. More aggressive mold and poorer construction techniques.

So how did you first kind of get interested in this?

Well, it turns out I have a long and unhealthy relationship with mold. I grew up in a basement in a house that had been flooded. It was a nice house, nice basement, didn't look like it was moldy. But I was always inflamed growing up. I had autoimmune conditions, rashes. I got nosebleeds like five to ten times a day. So often growing up, I get frequent bruising for reasons I couldn't understand because no one hit me there. And all of this never made sense. And had asthma, too, until years later when I'm like, wait. I had every single symptom of the signs of mold exposure, and my immune system is hypersensitive to molds. A couple other times in my life, I also had mold, but hadn't quite yet identified why my digestion went away, why it stopped working as well as it should have. And now I'm to the point where I'm sensitive to the environment. Roughly 28% of the population has genes that make them more susceptible to mold. So even if you're not one of those people, molds can cause cancer, heart disease, they can cause diabetes. They can certainly, I would say they're the number one cause of atherosclerosis. And that is a huge claim. But I think that toxic mold in the environment is more dangerous than eating margarine. And I think both of them are really bad ideas. Wow.

I definitely want to get back to that genetics thing in a little bit here, because I have a few questions about that. But even before we talk about that, Dave, how can people know? I mean, a lot of people don't live in old dank apartments necessarily. A lot of people are just living in the average townhome, for example. I mean, is there a way that you can. That you can test? Is there something you can look for? Is there something you can smell? Or what's the best way to kind of find out?

There's definitely something you can do. But don't make the mistake of assuming that because you live in a newer thing or a townhome that you don't have a problem with it. And two examples there. One is, my friend Dana had a multimillion dollar house built, and the contractors used wet wood in part of it, which a lot of contractors do now. Her child, who was born in the house, had came down with severe autism, and she was now.

Wet wood. You mean like the wood got wet while they were building? Or is that. Is that the way that the wood kind of comes?

Well, it can. Both things can happen. But in this case, there was a building defect. There's some details of it I don't even know. But what typically happens is they use particle board, which is terribly moldy, just the way it's made these large, like, actually, they call it chipboard more than particle board. And this stuff gets wet on trucks. It's stored in places without environmental controls. And then they'll build the house when it's raining. If you went back 25 years ago, they would use tarps or not build during the rain to keep the wood dry. But now it's like build, build, build.

So. So what happened to this girl?

Child had a severe case of autism. She went to court, and she was the first person in the country to have a court announce that there was a direct causative relationship between toxin mold and autism in children. And she's started some nonprofits doing work around that. But this is a real serious thing. And it's not just that it could cause autoimmune conditions in your kids. Mold in your environment, especially aerosolized mold that you breathe, causes cross reactivity to dairy and gluten, dairy protein and gluten, wheat protein. So if you're exposed to these things, your chances of having autoimmune conditions or having food allergies go up dramatically. The way you can tell if something like this is in your house is well, the most obvious thing, look for old water stains and then get rid of them. And it's not just the stain. You probably need to go inside the wall and figure out why there was water there if there was. Oh, just a little leak in the ceiling. Well, okay, if you see a little leak there, how much water is sitting on top of the sheetrock above that? Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you. If there's a leak in the ceiling in my house, I get out a hammer and I break out the sheetrock until there's no more moisture up there, and then I have it repaired. But there's no way I'm going to let it just sit up there because, well, it'll probably go away. You build a toxic building that way. But the worst problems come from things like, oh, it's nice and hot and moist inside your house and it's freezing outside. And the moisture barrier in the walls, instead of allowing them to breathe, there's a piece of plastic there. Well, what happens when ice cold surfaces hit warm, moist air condensation. And this is why so many places in Alaska and Sweden and Russia and all end up getting these kinds of problems. But if you're, say, in England and you're in an older house that's drafty, you don't get these problems. You're just cold all the time.

Interesting. My wife's going to be giving me weird looks when I walk around the house with a sledgehammer looking at the ceiling after we record this.

I might sound paranoid, Ben, to be honest, I'll tell you, a third of the rental houses I've looked at in the Bay Area, they have toxic mold. And how do I know this? I'm a damn canary. I've been exposed enough times. Once from a leak behind a dishwasher. It'd been leaking for two years. Just a slow drip.

Drip.

When they pulled the dishwasher out to replace it, I walked into the room like, I feel really kind of strange. The next day, I had intestinal problems like I hadn't had in a decade. And I had severe brain fog for months after that. Of course, I was continuing to expose myself to it regularly because I hadn't figured it out. And when I did figure it out, we did a test. And this is the test that people can run themselves called ermi. Environmental Relative Mold Index.

Environmental Relative Mold Index.

Yep. So what happened here is the guys came in, they sucked some air from around the house into little petri dishes, cultured them, and then came back in astronaut suits. Wow. And said, we will remediate this. And the remediation was kind of expensive. They ripped the kitchen out down to studs. They scrubbed the air aggressively. They wet wiped everything in the house. They dry cleaned every piece of fabric or other thing that could be moved because the spores from these molds move around. But worse than the spores, the toxins that are created as a self defense mechanism. Basically the mold is saying, stay off my cheese. This is my wood. I'm going to eat this. No other mold species, no bacteria. Mine, mine, mine. And there's no natural competition. So this is a really seriously dangerous problem and it's happening everywhere because we have too much hygiene inside the house and we have poor moisture and temperature control and poor maintenance of our buildings.

How do you figure out how to get one of these tests? Like where do you go?

You can Google mold testing in the name of your city. There's mold testing all over the place in the Bay Area. I've got to drop some credit there for John and Laura Riera at American Air Testing. Those guys are some of the most knowledgeable I've ever come across and very friendly and easy to work with. They're just, they're friends and.

Okay, got it.

Cool.

If you shoot me their URL, I'll put it up in the show notes for people who live in the Bay Area that want to look into that.

Sure. It's just americanairtesting.com. okay, cool. What you'll find is that when you have a mold testing company come in, they're going to test, but they shouldn't also do remediation. And it's an interesting thing because it's just too easy. Oh no, you've got terrible mold. We have to burn your house down and then build you a new one. And it's only going to be a quarter million dollars. So you want to get an opinion from a testing company and then get a quote on remediation from a remediation company. They're different animals.

Okay, got it. Interesting. That's really good to know. Now what about in your body? These are ways you could test your home. But let's say you want to find out if you've been exposed. Are there things that you can do to test for mold in your body or what do you call them? Mycotoxins that the mold produces?

Yeah, mycotoxins. You can directly measure for the presence of them in your blood. And one of my close friends and someone who used the Better baby book and our coaching as part of getting pregnant, even After a toxic mold exposure went through this, and I'm like, okay, you're getting the brain fog. Your digestion isn't working. You're reaching for words way more than you used to. Your ability to speak in multiple languages and be the brilliant person anymore, it's going away, and you can.

What's that mean, reaching for words?

Well, you know, when you sit there and you say, well, what was the word for that? Like, I was going to say it's like car, but, oh, it's automobile or whatever. Where. When your brain is working in what I call the bulletproof state of high performance, but when it's on all the time and your memory is available and accessible to you, it doesn't work. Even in people who aren't mold sensitive like I am, when they're getting mold toxins, they aren't as fast. They don't recall things as quickly, and it's just like carrying an anchor around with you. So some people are more resilient to those toxins than I am. But that's what happens when you're exposed. And it may be that you're more sensitive to one species versus another, but it's part of the environment you're in. And in her case, what happened was I said, you have all the symptoms, you have all the signs. I would bet money on this. All of them. It's classic. And a good number of my coaching cases, when I talk to them, intractable people, they're high performers who. They hit a wall, and the wall is they're breathing stuff that's bad for them in their bedroom or in their office. And in her case, they had stachybotrys in the bedroom closet. Stachybotrys is one of the more toxic of the molds because it.

Stachybotrys just doesn't sound good.

Exactly. Watch out. There's a stachybotrys under the rock. It'll bite you. But in her case, she had the toxins in her blood, and she was able to use some of the detox protocols that I've written about in order to clean them. Half the time normal. And she had a successful pregnancy and a lovely baby afterwards. The legacy of living in a moldy house, though, can be chronic autoimmune conditions that last for a long time and potentially even for life if you don't figure out a way to treat them.

Wow. So is there any name of a test that people can ask, for example, their doctor about or that people can order online?

Well, you can go to a doctor, usually it takes a specialist and you can say, I'd like a blood mycotoxin panel. And then they'll go through and they'll say, well, which ones do you want to go for? And at that point, it's really good to know what you think you've been exposed to, but sometimes you don't know. So you might want to look for T2, you might want to look for ochratoxin, you might want to look for aflatoxin. Oh, and by the way, there's a really high correlation between Crohn's disease and aflatoxin in the blood. So I think that there's absolutely a fungal relationship there. And it may not be that the fungus grows and causes it. It's that exposure to the fungus makes your immune system act that way. So these molds totally tweak on your immunity. And, you know, they do like penicillin. What does that do to your body? Like a tiny dose has a huge impact on the biome of your body. So it goes stands to reason that if you're inhaling antibiotics, that it's going to do something. Yeah.

Wow. You know, you talked about yourself being a canary in the mine and earlier you mentioned genetics. How much of a role does genetics play here? And kind of as a follow up question to that, like, are there certain genetic tests that you could get to find out if you're one of those people who's susceptible?

The mutations that we're thinking about are on the HLA genes and even just doing a 23andMe and then looking at the methylation panels, methylation pathways. And it's a relatively complex science. We're still learning about it. But all of this research came out of the autism community because they were figuring out, well, people with these problems with things like B12 and folic acid, they're also more susceptible to these toxins. So what it comes down to is, especially if you have Northern European ancestry, you are optimized to live in an environment where you're basically a marauder. So your job is to go to a town where there's foreign bacteria that you're not used to, run around, steal stuff and burn, loot and pillage. Take an arrow or two, not die from the arrows. Enjoy the spoils for a few weeks, recover and then do it again. That means your blood clots quickly so you don't burn to death. And it means you have a hyperactive immune system so you don't keep getting sick. When you go into a new town and you fast forward a Thousand, two thousand years. And those same genes that keep you clotting in response to a threat, well, they clot in response to environmental mold. And so you get sticky blood. And that hyperactive immune response is like, well, I gotta attack something here, let me attack the nervous system. And there you go, there's Ms. Now.

When you do genetic testing, do you actually have to look for that? Like, if you do, like, 23andMe genetic testing, will it tell you, or is this something you need to go in and look for?

They won't tell you. It's something you have to go in and look for.

And what's the name of the gene you're looking for?

Well, it's actually a whole bunch of genes. What you want to do is look at the work of Yasko, Amy Yasko. She has a great book on pathways to recovery for autism. But she goes through and explains this in pretty good detail about these methylation pathways. Okay.

Amy Yasko is her name.

Yeah, exactly. And what I find is that every one of my coaching clients, these are all actually, there's a few athletes, but there's actually a lot more. CEOs and just high performance business people, like musicians, people who want to perform really well at their game. But they're not endurance athletes like you are, Ben, for the most part. And for this population, when they go on the bulletproof diet, if they don't have just a huge drop in inflammation markers in the first six weeks, then I always look to these tests and I'm like, what's going on genetically? Oh, yeah, gee, why do you think you're inflamed? You can't handle methionine?

Yeah, it flies through the radar, though. A lot of people don't really talk about it, about mold exposure. I mean, that's one of the reasons I'm having you on, is because so many people deal with this stuff and they always look to food. And I think a lot of folks don't. Don't look to their home as well.

One of the other things, Ben, that's worth talking about there, if there's a sudden rapid weight gain for no good reason, you gotta look to mold. There was a water leak. Two weeks later, everyone got fat, everyone got tired, and you started having home. All of those are signs that you're dealing with mold in your house. Nosebleeds, mold, frequent bruising, mold, unexplained rashes. Maybe you're just allergic to some food. But if it corresponds with a bunch of these symptoms, this is seriously, It's In a third of the house. As I walk in there, I'm like, I wouldn't live in this house. This house needs to be remediated.

Yeah, well, let's talk about that. Let's talk about remediation. What do you do? Like, if you find out that you have mold in the home or you suspect you have mold in your home?

Well, you figure out what the species is first. There are normal bathroom molds. Those are still bad for you, but if you have stachybotrys in your bathroom, that's going to be a little bit worse. So you can have problems that are subtle and they don't happen immediately when you walk in the room. But like, why? Why am I fat and foggy all the time? So the remediation thing you do is, well, species specificity matters a lot. You go in and you look at the species and you say, all right, what toxins does this thing produce and how do I remediate that species? But the short answer is you want to remove all contaminated stuff, which means if you can see the mold, if possible, cut it out and get rid of it. The idea of pouring bleach on it doesn't work. Bleach kills the stuff on the surface, but it adds water and the hyphae. The root of the mold goes into the wood or into whatever the surface is and it'll come right back out, but now it'll come out pissed off. And the way you make more toxins out of fungus is you piss it off. And we know this because we hacked Aspergillus a long time ago to make citric acid and a bunch of other industrial biochemical stuff. So to maximize citric acid production, you take the hacked Aspergillus, put it in a vat, you expose the vat to emf, you expose it to heat and temperature fluctuations, you expose it to chemical stressors, and that would be bleach, by the way. And what happens is a massive increase in the amount of toxin for industrial production. Citric acid is the toxin. It's useful. In your house, the toxin is not useful. So this is a problem with pouring bleach on mold. Unless it's on a non porous surface like your bathtub, it's not going to work. It's actually going to make the problem worse.

Interesting. Sounds like the same way you would piss off a human, that you would piss off a toxin. EMF exposure, heat and environmental stressors. Pretty much sounds like it describes a lot of folks office.

I think we're actually all just giant Walking mushrooms.

So how about in your body? What do you do if you find out, like if you get one of these blood mold profiles or mycotoxin panels, I mean, what do you do? How do you clean yourself up?

Well, this is a really interesting challenge because it depends on the specifics of which toxins you got exposed to, but the general protocols that are used by say the U.S. military involvement, activated charcoal. And that's one of the reasons that for my own use, I make the coconut charcoal, the upgraded stuff on my website. I went for the smallest particle you could get.

So why is that different than just like going to Amazon and getting activated charcoal?

Well, I take the finest 15% of charcoal that comes only from coconuts, that's acid washed to remove metals that form when you burn things. So if you're going to be taking charcoal for a while, a you want to know it has no metal in it from the production process. You want to know it only comes from coconuts. But the important thing is you care about surface area because the idea behind charcoal is that it adsorbs toxins. It doesn't absorb them, it attracts toxins electrically. And it does. This has a strong negative charge and it has a giant surface area, like a very small amount. The amount you would take in a normal dose can have the surface area of a football field. But the finer the particle, the more surface area. So we really pissed off our manufacturing partners because I specified the finest 15% of the charcoal, which no one else uses in supplements. According to the research I've done. So by getting the ultra ultra fine stuff, it makes a huge mess when we put it in capsules.

I gotcha.

It's really annoying, but it's the finest I could get and we know where it comes from. The average stuff you're getting is the stuff that we reject. The other 85%, that's a larger particle. And as you probably know and people listening to this who recall whenever we learn that in geometry, the smaller, the more particles you have, even if they're just half as big as the other ones, you get exponentially more surface area. So basically I want to stick the toxins as much as possible. You also can take bentonite clay, you can use zeolite clay, although some people have problems with that. Depending on the source, there's a lot of variants in zeolite. And then from a pharmaceutical perspective, you can take cholestyramine, which is one of the oldest anti cholesterol drugs. It doesn't work the way a statin does, which Is harmful. It works by sticking to your bile and making you poop it out. Same way that charcoal works, by the way. That's interesting. Same way bentonite works. And that's because most mold toxins are lipophoric. They like to live in your bile. So that means that even though you. If you're especially of this genetic types, you tend to recycle bile. It costs a lot biologically to make new bile to digest fat and protein, so you tend to reuse it. But if you have these toxins, when you reuse it, you concentrate the toxins. And this is why I recommend everyone for higher performance. Takes some charcoal in order to bind to the bile in order to poop it out. Whether or not you have these toxins, getting an oil change is not a bad idea. And one of the ways you can do that is by helping your body to get rid of some excess oil.

What was the name of that pharmaceutical that you said?

It's cholestyramine.

Cholestyramine?

Yeah. Like cholest. Cholesterol.

Okay, gotcha. Cholesterol. Tyramine.

Got it. Okay, cool. It's one of those things where there's other things you can do, too. I mean, a lot you can do, but just those things can make a huge difference in how you feel and how you perform. And it's surprising when people try this. Even though they don't recognize that they have mold toxicity, or maybe they got the toxins, but they didn't get the autoimmunity that comes with them from a lot of people, they still are like, wow, mental clarity. Or they were having a gap in their day for an hour or two where they just felt like a zombie. And it's like, well, you know, if you're getting exposure in your food or in your environment to these things, the quicker you bind them, the less effect they have on your body and the more mental clarity and performance you have. One of the areas people don't think about this, it drives me nuts being a canary. I just know these things, and I know hundreds of other people who notice exactly the same things. So this isn't just me. This is. Oh, it's a pattern. And when you're going to get on an airplane at a big airport, you go through those jetways. They're carpeted, and the end of the jetway is exposed to rain. I have yet to walk through a jetway that isn't brand new, that doesn't have mold growing in it. I know because I can smell it. So there are Some species of mold and some people where even one breath or two triggers a little autoimmune flare up. So your brain is foggy for a while. And there's a lot more people who have that, they just don't know it. So I'll tell you what I do when I get on an airplane, when I know I usually get on first because I have status, because I fly way too much for sanity. I know I haven't counted last year, but the year before that it was 150 days on the road and more than 100 plus flights. So what I do when I'm walking down, I make sure I'm near the front of the line so I don't have to wait in a long line in the jetway. I can hold my breath for two minutes anyway. I just hold my breath, walk onto the plane and sit down. Nice. It's like the world's oldest hack. Hold my breath.

Right, There you go. Yet another reason to train with the power lung. Right?

Yeah, there you go. I do that. I'll have to get Tim Ferriss to teach me his hold your breath for five minutes trick. I've been meaning to learn that anyway.

Yeah, exactly. I like it. So you've got all of these things that you could put into your body. You've got remediation in the home. But what about, you hear people talking about home filters, HEPA filters, stuff like that. Do you encourage the use of those type of things just for prevention in a home?

You know, there's this hygiene hypothesis about if your house is too clean that it could be bad for you. But HEPA filters are a really good idea. I use them. I think it's a great idea. We have just a lot of crap in the air that shouldn't be there. We have nanoparticles from things like anti stain fabrics in our clothing, all sorts of industrial particles that really were not that well adapted to handle and keeping those levels down in the home, removing smoke, removing air pollution, it seems like a pretty good idea. We'll get plenty of that when we walk outside. So having a clean, sort of a clean place in the home, especially where you sleep, where you know that the air is clean, it just seems like an obvious move to me.

Right, right, gotcha. Do they make anything like, you know, let's say you're, you're traveling because I know you travel a lot and you might wind up in like a hotel room, for example, that might have mold in it. Do they make anything that's portable that you could travel with to help filter the air or do you? Don't worry about that.

If I go to a hotel room that has mold and it's happened, it's even happened at a four star hotel in London, I just go back to the front desk and I say, there's something wrong with that room. I want a different one. There's one hotel near the San Francisco Airport. The whole north tower has mold in it. It's an older hotel. I've been to a conference there. I'm like, sorry, I'm staying in the south tower. I walk into that tower, I can smell it. And funny enough, the people staying in the north tower, they're like, wow, my eyes are itching, they're burning. I don't feel as good. And I'm swelling and they're getting water retention. Yep. I can tell you why. And I don't want to shoot a video with you in this room either. Come to my room. And I've done that. And okay, maybe I'm just like the Harry Met Sally picky food guy. You know what? Okay, fine. I just want to perform well all the time. And I'm willing to go to any length to not feel like crap. So that's one of the things I'll do. There's nothing wrong with going to the front desk and saying my room smells like old cigarette smoke. Or just saying, look, I think that mold, that room smells kind of dank. And I don't do dank. Right, right.

There you go.

And if they say I don't do dank. Yeah. If they say we don't have another room for you, sir, I'll just say, look, it's totally okay with me. I'm going to go to sleep over there in the lobby on that bench. And just so you know, I sleep naked and I walk over. They always find a room. It's amazing. And you know, if you're nice, you don't have to do that. And I've never really had a problem except once where I did say this was in actually Beijing, of all places. I said, look, I'm really sorry. I'm very tired. I cannot stay in this room. I know that you say you're out of rooms, but you're going to have to do something about this. You're going to have to get a shuttle for me to another hotel because I'll be sleeping over here. And they did have a room. It had a king sized bed too. It was amazing.

Yeah. Well, I've come up with the title for this episode. It's going to be. I don't do how to sleep naked in hotel lobbies or why to sleep naked in hotel lobbies works for me.

It's kind of funny, but most hotels are horrified if you say that you think there's mold in a room and they'll look into it and that's good. And honestly, if you've picked this up and you're like, this room doesn't smell right, you're probably doing someone else a favor because there are a ton of people who are going to sleep in the room. They're going to wake up feeling a little bit hungover. Just figure, oh, I didn't sleep well, maybe I shouldn't have that glass of wine last night or whatever. And they'll go about their day just less awake than they otherwise would have been.

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Well, you've obviously talked about a ton of resources in this episode, Dave, and for those of you folks listening in, I'll be sure to put all these resources because I've been taking some mad notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com But Dave, any other resources that you want to point people towards? Books you'd recommend, articles you've written, videos, anything like that?

Sure. There's a post on my website if you just Google bulletproof examples.

Mold.

I gave a whole, I think it was about an hour, hour and a half lecture on mold in the home, mold in the body. That's definitely worth looking at. And there's a whole write up on there. So I would definitely suggest people check that out.

Okay, cool. I'll get a link up to that as well. So, Dave, thank you so much for coming on the call today.

Yeah, you got it, Ben. Always a pleasure. Thank you.

All right, folks. Well, this is Ben Greenfield and Dave Asprey signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

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