133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells

I got the scan and when I walked back into his office, he was kind of white and he looked at me and he said, dave, I thought there was nothing wrong with you. When I see your brain scan, he said, inside your brain is total chaos. I don't know how you're standing here in front of me. It was chemically induced toxic mold brain damage that different toxins or nutrient deficiencies cause problems in the brain, all driven.

By this mold toxicity.

Well, by mold and mthfr, which makes mold worse.

You literally just blew my mind.

Oh, there's more. Before I was 30, I had most of the diseases of aging, arthritis, high blood sugar, pre diabetes, high risk of stroke and heart attack, in part because I was constantly inflamed because I was sleeping in a moldy bedroom. So I went on this path of saying, how do I get rid of this stuff? And it turns out that it's all mold poisoning mitochondria.

So what do you do? What did you do?

If you have mold, you gotta bind the toxins, you gotta get rid of the mold growing in your body. And you should do some ozone therapy and you should take the supplements that allow you to methylate. If you do those things, you're probably going to get better.

What are the people watching this do? Where do they start? They get a mold test. Everything pops red.

This is going to shock you, Gary.

Ultimate human. Hey, guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Breca, where we go down the road of everything anti aging, longevity, biohacking, and everything in between. And today, I'm blessed enough to sit with the father of biohacking, someone who has, unbeknownst to him, been a mentor of mine for many years. I've read a lot of his books, followed a lot of his teaching. He really opened my eyes to the entire world of biohacking and longevity and anti aging and life extension. He's a vast world of knowledge. We had just had an incredible podcast together. So welcome to the ultimate human, Dave Asprey.

Gary, it was an honor to get to interview you on the Human Upgrade and an even bigger honor to be on your show. I've been watching all the things you're sharing. I just love it when you talk about mthfr, which has been a big part of my biohacking journey as well. So kudos for just teaching millions of people the stuff that matters.

Thank you so much, man. You know, I've been just fascinated. Like, I have this childlike fascination with human biology and human physiology. And just human optimization and performance. And you clearly do too. I think you were the one that really drew my attention to inside the cell through the cytoplasm, down into the mitochondria. You've written books on bio optimization and I think they're really excellent roadmaps. I'm going to put links to those in the show. Notes for the people that are not familiar with your work. They should be familiar with your work. We went down so many rabbit holes on, on your podcast. I want to isolate a couple of those. I loved what you said right before the cameras started rolling because he said, well, what do you want to talk about? And I said, you know, I live in the mold capital of the world. We've seen a lot of mold and mycotoxin exposure in Miami and our clients. And you had a really gnarly experience with it, which I think when I look back at the most impactful podcasts that I've ever had, it is always with people that solved a problem in their life. And so you had to solve that problem. And then I also want to go down the road of this emerging science behind microdosing mushrooms and these neurotropics that are gaining so much popularity because it's the fringes of my expertise, but I'm very interested in it. So I want to talk about your, your, your thoughts there. And then of course we're going to dive into the mitochondria a little later, but if you don't mind, let's. And, and then I also want to get into your new book. Heavily meditated. I'm halfway through the book now than sending me a pre release copy. You know, we also talked about both of our beliefs that one of the most overlooked things of all of human performance and human life extension and happiness is the spiritual side of things, the community, the connection. And actually, why don't we start there? Because, you know, we talked about the Blue zone studies and how there wasn't really any continuity between diets, but there was continuity in this sense of purpose and sense of community. You know, a lot of those zones don't even have assisted care living facilities. Assisted care living is mom and dad move back in with the kids until they die. And I remember watching the documentary and thinking, wow, this elderly woman's only purpose is to go out and get vegetables for each meal that the family makes every day. And. But she did it with such intention and her contribution was meaningful. And they actually linked that to why, you know, her life had been extended for such a long Period of time. She was. I think she was 109 years old in the documentary Fresh Is a Fiddle looking too, by the way.

Absolutely.

I hope I look that good at 80, much less 109.

Something else is happening in there. It wasn't just that she had purpose. So I started the first all grass fed, no bad seed oil restaurant in LA and ran it for eight years. And you can put love in food. This is why the Dalai Lama limits the number of people who touch his food before he eats it. Cause he doesn't want it to pick those vibes up. So not only was she getting value for her longevity, she was putting love in the food that makes the food do something different in our cells.

Wow. Wow. That's. You know, I'm on the fringes of frequency medicine, right? Frequency and some of these bioresonance machines. I know that water can store frequency. Given the volume of water that we have in our body, it makes much. It makes sense to me that we can store frequency. We know that what we refer to as intuition is more than likely a sensitivity to frequency and picking up somebody else's frequency. Are they authentic or they lack authenticity? My wife is very good at that. So talk a little bit about the impact of spirituality, community meditation.

I have a quick rife story for you.

Oh, do you? Okay. I have a good positive rice story too. Oh, cool. Yeah, very good.

I went through a lot of health stuff before I was 30. I had most of the diseases of aging, arthritis, high blood sugar, prediabetes, high risk of stroke and heart attack. I'd been on antibiotics for 15 years for chronic strep and sinus issues, wrecked gut, massive brain fog. I mean, it was pretty bad. And my career was taking off and I said, okay, I must have Lyme disease. One of the doctors taught that to be really clear.

Sounds like it.

By the way, 90% of people with Lyme actually have toxic mold, which is why they have Lyme. Lyme is a symptom of toxic mold. And I say that based on genetic studies out of ucla.

So in other words, not a tick bite.

Well, they might have got a tick bite, but they would have recovered if they didn't have something suppressing their immune system, which is mold. Clear the mold and the Lyme magically gets better. So I didn't know this at the time, and so I bought a rife machine in about 1997. This was a little old school one you held with the, with the aluminum charged gas tube. Okay. So this is the kind that radiates through gas. The machines where you hold the handles are called rife barr machines. B A R R E. So my partner at the time was also living in a moldy house like I was, and she had developed herpes lesions in her sinuses. Terribly painful. She's sitting reading something in the living room and I thought, I'm just going to type in the frequency for herpes. And I didn't tell her what I was doing. She had no idea. And I hit start. Within five seconds, she screams, drops her book, grabs her nose and goes, turn it off, turn it off, turn it off. There couldn't have been placebo there. She didn't even know she was part of the experiment.

Wow.

That is how powerful a rife machine can be if you have the right frequency. And so a lot of people, especially you go back 20 years, would say that's not possible, therefore it isn't. And it's this anti science view that's holding back longevity, holding back functional medicine. Because people have these stories that I have to know why it works or it doesn't work. That's not real. So my favorite answer for people, when I say, well, it looks like in a study there's results from this thing and they say, well, without a mechanism of action, I can't accept it. I go, no problem. The mechanism is leprechauns. And they get really mad. I'm like, well, okay. Every mechanism of action we've ever figured out, they're all stories to explain reality that our bodies do not know how to sense. And we know beyond a doubt that time and space are both illusions created by the way we see the world through our brains. However, if you were to try and live as if those aren't real, you're not going to like what happens. So this is just how we see the quantum reality that we all live in. There's a view called biocentrism that really says all of reality comes about as a manifestation of consciousness. We also know that the human body is a quantum system. And there was a study I posted about it, and it didn't blow up the world the way I thought it would. And for the first time ever within the last five years, we figured out how to look at something called proton spin in living cells.

Okay?

And scientists found out that every time your heart beats, the proton spin of all of the molecules in the brain changes direction instantly with no lag time, which means there's a quantum coherence between your heart and your brain, in between all the cells in your brain. This Means that our brains are quantum, our biology is quantum, the microtubules inside our mitochondria are quantum. So of course they're picking up quantum messages.

Yeah. I would, of course believe that.

Right?

Yeah.

And it doesn't mean that it's easy for us to sense that, but this is where intuition comes from. And people might be saying, well, Dave, you're a biohacker. I know you from ketosis and putting butter in coffee. I've also written a major New York Times bestselling longevity book and a neuroscience book. And I've run a neuroscience clinic for now, 12 years called 40 years of Zen in Seattle, where the world's top performing executives and athletes and celebrities come and do decades of meditation in five days with computers attached to their heads. And I've studied intuition. And what happens in reality is your body, your mitochondria, it's like a distributed network. A separate consciousness from your brain is constantly scanning reality. The mitochondria are the frontline sensors of reality, and they sense reality a third of a second before your brain gets a signal. And you're saying, a third of a second. Really? Yeah. If I clap my hands. You're a smart guy. You know, it took the sound some amount of time to hit your ears, and then you heard it, right?

Right.

It's not real. What's not real? The third of a second lag time is invisible to you. So when the sound hit your body, your consciousness didn't get the first electrical signal of the sound until a third of a second went past. So there's a censorship window that all humans have. Just like when they do live broadcasts, there's an eight second window in case someone has a wardrobe malfunction. They can shut it off, Right?

Right. Drops the F bomb, Right? Right.

Our body reserves a third of a second to decide whether it's going to let you hear that or see it, or whether it was worth your attention or time. And it is the mitochondria that are the frontline sensors.

Wow.

So they're not power plants, they're environmental sensors. And then they're computers that run a simple program. They are dumb little bacteria. And then after that happens, the program decides. Will I make stress molecules? Inflammation molecules, Will I make electricity? Will I make heat? Or will I make some proteins? The mitochondrial proteins? So there's a decision that's made long before your brain is even involved, and it's entirely invisible to us. And I believe, after a lot of research, that mitochondria are the source of our intuitive sense of the world.

Wow. It makes perfect sense because they're the first to receive the signal. Signal. So therefore they are transmitting the signal, and therefore they're the buffer.

They are the buffer.

They interpret, for lack of better words. I don't want to take liberty with your words. They interpret it and transmit it. So their interpretation is important.

They're like a firewall for reality. And wow, imagine what would happen if you and I picked up everything happening right now. Our little brains that are actually really intelligent, but very slow, they'd be overwhelmed. It'd be like you were on a high dose of LSD all the time. Right. It would just. There's so much going on. Right. Like, what do I pay attention to?

Right.

So mitochondria, they have to have a decision making hierarchy. And I figured out what it is because I'm a computer hacker and I created distributed systems and I troubleshot them for a decade. So if you assume that there's billions of mitochondria all independently sensing reality, they vote with each other to decide what's real. It's called quorum sensing. And they do this simultaneously with photons, with chemicals, with magnetism, and with quantum coherence.

Wow.

And they go, all right, what's going on? Well, what do mitochondria care about? They care about life. And they run the operating system of all life on the planet. Even trees, slime molds, politicians, all of them.

I like how you said slime molds and then politicians.

Is that on purpose? Depends on the politician.

Right.

So slime molds and politicians and humans.

Just to be clear, that one got me. He got me with that one.

So what do they do? Here's the operating system for life. Okay? Number one, run away from, kill or hide from scary things. All life does this. Now, if you're a peanut. Well, let's see. I can't run away. I have roots. So I'll put a shell on it and I'll fill myself with lectins and some other things that make it so it's less attractive to eat. Me. Yeah, mycotoxins for sure. Right. And if you're a skunk, you spray someone with something stinky. And if you're a human, you either hide in a cave or get a spear. Right. Like all life will do this.

Right?

So that's fear. These are all F words, which makes it easy to remember fear comes first. This is also why we ruminate on things, because our body says, emphasis on fear. Put more energy into fear. Because if something eats you, it's Game over. And these dumb little mitochondria that run your reality, they don't understand time. They just know they might be the last on Earth and they better not get eaten. Right, and speaking of getting eaten, the second F word. Fear. Sorry, second F word. Food. Right, so eat everything. Because famines have wiped out everything. Throughout the last four and a half billion years or so, the Earth has been here. So fear, Food. Third F word. All life has to do to stay around forever. Gary, do you know what that one is?

Function.

No, like multi generational stuff.

Family frequency.

Fear. Food. Fertility.

Ah, fertility.

It could be the other F word. I was like wondering if I was going to get you with that.

Yeah, you will. I knew you were baiting me after you said slime mold.

Right, so fear, food, fertility in order. Okay, so before you get a chance to think as a human, is it scary? Can I eat it and can I hump it?

Okay, now like most men, I feel like most men think about that.

Well, I just excused everything you've ever done that you're ashamed of. It was your mitochondria, not you. They are a separate intelligence inside you.

Can't wait to tell my wife.

Exactly. It wasn't your fault. It was your outer country's fault.

Can't wait to tell my wife.

And it's funny because energy allocates in order and in amount. So the most energy to fear, the second most to food. And in some of my books I write about studies, a third of the average person's thoughts are about burritos. It's what am I going to eat next? Or a third of the thoughts in your conscious brain are food, food, food. That's just your mitochondria yanking your chain because of nutrient deficiencies or because of to. So fear food, fertility. That's kind of dark. But the next one is the most important one and it's friend, Right? And friend is all life is wired to support its own species and the species around it. And all of these are automated systems that happen before you can think. And the final F word is forgiveness. And I use that for humans in particular. But it really, it's evolution. All life is designed to improve itself, to become stronger, to become faster, to evolve. And the way humans do it, it's via forgiveness. Because forgiveness lets you put less energy into fear, so you have more energy for food. You eat food the right way, you have more energy for. I'm going to call it fertility, but it's really intimate love, which is a source of nourishment and now that you're not wasting energy on fear and on being hungry and on feeling unloved, you have so much energy for your community that now you have a purpose in the world. And you have energy after that because your community is now nourishing you that you have so much energy left to grow and evolve and transform and transcend. That's why biohacking is so important. Because at first, how do we have more energy to fill all these buckets in order to.

Yeah.

And then how do we reallocate the energy more effectively across the buckets and heavily meditated? My new book is about what everyone wants. You might enter biohacking because, like me, you need to lose 100 pounds or because you had crippling brain fog. But once that's solved, you go, you know, I think I want to live longer.

Yeah.

But then you go, I don't want to live longer unless I'm happy. So biohacking is ultimately about consciousness and longevity. You will always end up with these two as your primary goals, no matter if you're starting with, my knee hurts all the time.

Yeah. Penis.

Yeah. It's happiness. And happiness is hard. But we understand so much about what to do. And along with learning from the masters of longevity, I was able to start the biohacking movement because in my mid-20s, I was so sick. I hung out in one of the first anti aging groups in Palo Alto, a nonprofit. And they asked me to run it. I was the only guy under 60 in the room. And we brought in the luminaries in the field to come and present every month about a mile from Stanford in Palo Alto. And so I learned from these masters and like, wait. The things that make old people young make young people powerful, but no young people will come to this thing. I'm four minutes from Google's headquarters and no Googlers will ever show up. So I thought, I have a branding problem and I'm walking around in remote parts of Tibet and just meditating and thinking, like, biohacking. That's the word. It's about what I do as a computer hacker. I take control of systems I don't fully understand because I can't see in them yet, because I don't own them yet. I'm going to take control of my system because my doctor won't help me lose £100. Working out for 18 months, six days a week didn't help me lose any weight at all.

Wow.

And trying wasn't the thing. Believing something works wasn't the thing. I just made this vow I am going to measure results. I'm only gonna do what works. And I don't care if it's supposed to work. I'll try the obvious things. That's why I started out going to the doctor, taking antibiotics, going on a low fat, low calorie diet, and over exercising. Well, when that didn't work, all right, fine, I'll go to Tibet. I think meditation is bullshit, to be honest. At the time, I'm a computer science guy. But maybe thousands of years of tradition, maybe they're not all dumb. Maybe I'm just arrogant. So I became just deeply curious. And I learned about acupuncture. I learned about meditation. I went to Peru in 1999, and I asked for ayahuasca. And they looked at me and they said, you're white. I said, yeah, I know. And today, I don't actually recommend ayahuasca. There's much safer molecules for altered states, unless you're on a very specific path.

Ketamine.

Ketamine is much safer and less spiritual risk and less medical risk. And I'm not opposed to Aya. Like I said, I did it in 1999, but it wasn't a tourist business then, and it wasn't being used to target wealthy people and sort of manipulate them the way it is today. But all these things were not what I thought was going to work. I was desperate because I was miserable. I tried being wealthy. When I was 26, I made $6 million. These are pre biden dollars.

Yeah.

So that was real money. And it was like 2 billion today.

Yeah.

Yeah. But I made and lost it before I was 30. I was an entrepreneur magazine for selling the first thing ever sold over the Internet. When I was 23, I tried fame. I tried getting married early. I tried, you know, not being lonely. None of those made me happy. And I just realized I got to get my energy back. I got to make my brain work. I need my power back. And then I need to reallocate the power so that I can have the opposite of those afterwards. What do you think the opposite of fear is?

Happiness or safety?

It's interesting. Different people have different answers to it. And after talking with a lot of people and considering it, some people say love, some people say safety. In my world, it's peace. And if you have peace, you have safety. If you have peace, love can flourish. So the opposite of being afraid isn't just safety. It's more than safety. It's a sense of deep peacefulness. And this comes from studying lots of different spiritual lineages and safety is a state you can measure with neuroscience. You can measure it looking at your catecholamines, looking at your adrenal levels, looking at your cortisol levels.

Wow.

Looking at all kinds of things like the amount of micro sweat, something called galvanic skin response. And strangely, you can train yourself to consciously change your state of peacefulness through.

Meditation or just being. Or mindfulness.

You can do it through meditation and mindfulness. It's a very slow process. It takes 20 years to be able to get to the advanced states of doing an hour a day. I started 40 years of Zen because I didn't have 20 years to do this. I was kind of miserable. So 40 years of Zen is in Seattle. It takes five days, and after five days, you have the same brain states of an advanced Zen meditator. And it changes everything when you realize, okay, I can turn on peacefulness. You can do it through neurofeedback. You can do it through breath work. You can do it through various kinds of biofeedback or through heart rate variability. Most people know about that from wearing our rings and our whoops and whatever. I actually have two different rings. Ultra Human and Aura. On right now.

I'm testing on Ultra humans. Different than Aura. I use the Whoop.

Yeah. I'd say the three that are most reliable.

Whoop.

Ultra human and Aura. And ultrahuman's a new entrant, but I think I like it better than aura, even though I was an advisor to aura many years ago.

Okay.

I was also the CTO of the first company to get heart rate from the Wrist back in 2008. The stuff that your Apple watch does today or that the Whoop does. So I've been involved in this how do I get the signal off the body so I can hack it kind of thing. But going through all that stuff, the peacefulness thing was most important. And it's a trainable state. And I know the inhibitors to peacefulness. And it's the stuff that you and I talk about all the time. It's toxins from your environment, it's lack of nutrients, it's lack of methylation.

Right.

It's. Something is stopping the hardware from working.

One of my favorite biohacks outside of breathwork by far, is mineral salts. Baja gold, sea salt. It's got all of the trace minerals that the body needs. You know, most of us are not just protein deficient, meaning amino acid deficient, or fatty acid deficient. We are mineral deficient. So a quarter teaspoon of this in Water first thing in the morning will make sure that you get all of the essential minerals that you need. It tastes amazing. In fact, I made a steak today. I actually made a grass fed steak with grass fed butter. And I put just mushrooms and a little bit of rosemary, and I sprinkled Baja gold sea salt all over the top. Try it. It'll be your new favorite for cooking, too. It's the cheapest and one of my favorite biohacks. I don't know, a 15 or $20 bag of this will probably last you five years. This is literally the world's best biohacking sink. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast.

I remember back when I was 30, I was going to Wharton Business School. I'd already made and lost millions, and I started failing out of my classes. I thought, God, there's something wrong with me. Maybe I'm not as smart as I think I am. I'm dumber than my classmates. Maybe I'm just not trying hard enough. But I know I'm trying and I know I'm smart, but I just couldn't bring it.

And brain fog.

It was brain fog. So I went to Dr. Daniel Amen's clinic. I read his first book, and I got a brain scan. And I remember the psychiatrist in Palo Alto there, he looked at me like a tech bro wants Adderall. Like, we know this one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I didn't want Adderall, so I got the scan, and when I walked back into his office, he was kind of white, and he looked at me and he said, dave, I thought there was nothing wrong with you. And when I see your brain scan, I'll never forget the words he said. Inside your brain is total chaos.

Wow.

You have the best camouflage I've ever seen. I don't know how. You're standing here in front of me, really. And I almost felt like crying because finally a doctor believed me. And at that moment, I'm like, thank God I have a hardware problem. I don't have a moral failing. I thought it was something wrong with me. It was chemically induced toxic mold, brain damage.

Wow.

And today I sit on Dr. Amen's board of directors, and he has proven conclusively that different toxins or nutrient deficiencies cause problems in the brain.

Oh, my God, I want to go down that road so bad.

Well, the connection between toxicity and feeling a sense of peace and is dramatic. So I had so much anxiety and fear that I didn't even recognize because it was my constant state in my teens and twenties. I just thought everyone was that way.

All driven by this mold toxicity.

Well, by mold and mthfr, which makes.

Mold worse or elimination.

Right. And then constant cravings. I didn't know the difference between hunger and cravings because I only felt cravings. I remember ending a meeting when I was at a big tech company where I made all that money, and it was 11:45, and I just looked at people and I said, guys, I am so hungry, I'm going to kill one of you and eat you if we don't continue this in the cafeteria.

Right, Right.

And that's a craving. And hunger's peaceful. It's like, you know, I should probably eat in the next day or two, but I'm fine either way. And my first fast, and the bulletproof diet was the first big intermittent fasting book more than 10 years ago now. And I wrote that after I hired a shaman to drop me off in a cave all by myself, because I knew I ate if I was lonely. And I knew that I ate if I was just feeling this sense of craving. So a loneliness thing. And I was terrified of being hypoglybitschy or hangry because I knew I was an asshole if I was hungry. So if I'm by myself in a cave, I'm going to deal with my loneliness. I'll have no food, and if I get angry, I'll yell at the walls.

Right, Right.

And I did this. And after four days of not eating, I had so much energy that I climbed to the wrong mountain to meet the shaman to pick me up. I ended up walking 10 miles in the desert with felt so good. And I just realized I am not going to die if I'm without food. And I broke that thing. And so now I've learned how to deal with fear. I've learned how to deal with food where my body no longer believes I'll die if I don't eat. I know I have at least 60 days of not eating before I'll die. So fear, food. And, oh, my God, if we talk about the other F word there. We are nourished by feeling safe. We're nourished by eating food, and we're nourished through intimacy. And I realized I haven't studied this, so I studied that, including trying to disprove a Taoist equation around frequency of ejaculation and longevity for men. And I published the data in one of my books. And it turns out that every time a man ejaculates for 24 to 48 hours, his testosterone drops precipitously, and his prolactin levels rise. And prolactin makes you tired and unmotivated, and low testosterone makes you tired and unmotivated. So, oh, my gosh. Frequency of lovemaking is good for you. Ejaculating too often during lovemaking is going to deplete you, just like they've been saying for 10,000 years in traditional Chinese medicine and in tantra and all these things. So I studied all that, and these are all mitochondrial imperatives. So it's about, okay, do my mitochondria feel safe in the world? That's peace. Do they feel safe if there is or isn't calories right now? And do they feel safe whether or not I'm frequently having sex to full completion? And the reality is, all of those were dysregulating me. And when I trained my mitochondrial networks to be peaceful in all of those states, I became kind and peaceful.

Wow.

I stopped having cravings and worrying about food, and I became a much better lover.

Now, was this before you did anything to specifically address mold? This is a very spiritual journey.

It was a spiritual journey, and I was working on mold at the same time. So I had realized something was going on. And the reason I was attending this nonprofit group for Longevity is was because they were the only people who had tools that helped me. Not knowing it was mold, not knowing it was mthfr, not knowing the weaknesses that my biology had that I thought were moral weaknesses, but they would teach me stuff. This was the first group to bring coconut oil into the US after 30 years of no one importing it, because we had the first study on Alzheimer's and ketones and just coconut oil. That's what inspired me to add the C8MCT into bulletproof coffee. But the butter from bulletproof coffee, that came from walking around Mount Kyla, the holiest mountain in the world, and having yak butter tea. And it restored my mitochondrial function. I'm like, what just happened? And so I have the spiritual side and the longevity side that were inspiring me. And the name for biohacking came to me on the side of Mount Kailash.

Wow.

Even collagen, which I made collagen. A billion dollar industry. And I had injured my knees so severely in Nepal that I couldn't walk across the street without two trekking poles. And I had six days of recovery before I walked around Mount Kailash. Halfway to Mount Kailash, I'm at this little restaurant on a dirt road, and they're cooking the food over yak dung and I asked a Chinese friend who I'd met on the road, I said, can you read this menu? I'm just looking for some collagen because I know for my longevity work I need collagen to fix my knees, but I don't have any. And he said, well, this one says pig's ears. I said, oh. So I ordered it and I got a bowl of about 18 cold boiled pig's ears. The most horrible thing I've experienced in a long time. And I said, can I have some soup? So I'm like, warm them up in the soup. And the next day I could walk because I just needed the building blocks to make coffee. So you fast forward a few years and I've got bulletproof coffee. I have nothing to do with bulletproof. My new coffee company is called Danger Coffee and it's truly mold free and it has trace minerals added at therapeutic doses.

Wow.

Danger Coffee is my new one, but at the time it was bulky. I approved that and butter MCT oil. I knew it worked because I tested a thousand recipes when I got back to Silicon Valley. And years Later, I gave $50,000 to Dr. Gerald Pollack. Have you ever interviewed him, Joe? Who? He has you heard of exclusion zone water?

Yes.

This is the man who discovered exclusion zone water at the University of Washington. And what exclusion zone water is, is a fourth phase of water. And your body makes exclusion zone water by drinking regular water. And then your body holds it up against fat molecules that are your cell membranes and exposes it to 1200 nanometer light. That's called body heat.

Wow.

So body heat plus water plus fat equals a special form of water that allows ATP to form, that allows proteins to. Without easy water, your body doesn't work. Sunlight makes easy water, not deuterium depleted water. No, it doesn't need to be deuterium depleted. That's. There's evidence for deuterium. It's also, unless you're a billionaire dying of cancer, it's just not worth it. I've gone down the deuterium rat hole, spent a lot of money on it. It's just not. It's not a meaningful thing in the average thing. Of all the things you could move, it's not deuterium. Okay, so this exclusion zone water, well, the research I funded showed that when you expose water to different types of fats, you get different amounts of exclusion zone water. The two fats that created the most exclusion zone water were C8MCT oil and butter oil. And this is why you have to blend butter and MCT in your danger, coffee in order to get exclusions on water. This is why people talk about drinking vegetable juice. That's also exclusions on water. It's just probably full of some toxins you might not want want. So what you end up finding is, wait, all of this revolves around mitochondria because they need the exclusions on water. So these Tibetans drinking their yak butter tea, they didn't have the story about mitochondria, they had a different story about Tibetan science. But the results were it improves brain function, improves performance, and now we know why it works. We also know why so many other biohacks like red light therapy and infrared light therapy work. They're affecting water in cells, which affects mitochondrial function.

Mitochondria work better chromophores.

So if they work better, now you have more energy to deal with fear. Now you have more energy to say, I'm going to change my diet. Now you have more energy to say, I'm going to work on my relationship. And now you have more energy for your community.

And how do you create that shift in your mitochondria? Is this through the intention of meditation? Is that what you discovered?

It's a lot easier to meditate when your mitochondria work. And this isn't just a story. At 40 Years of Zen, we've had more than 2,000 people come through a five day program to increase their IQ, increase their peacefulness, let go of their triggers and all of that. If I let them eat whatever they normally eat, they can only do so much of this intense meditation with a computer helping you until they just hit the wall. You're like, I can't do anymore. I'm done. If I give them the right diet and I get some ketones going and I blend butter and MCT oil, even in decaf coffee. Two and a half times more meditation before they're tapped out.

Wow.

That's how important this is.

Wow, that's incredible. So people can actually take charge. What was the practice that you went through? What were the stages that you went through to do that?

In order to increase my mitochondria or to. Well, this is gonna sound like I'm a broken record, but if you were to wake up in the morning and you were to have some sodium in water, you can have electrolytes too. I recommended this for years. It is life changing to increase sodium. There's all kinds of reasons we can go into for that. So you have some salt water in the morning instead of regular water. Now hydration goes up, your brain works better. In multiple studies, a gram of sodium is great, and better if you have some magnesium and potassium and things in it. So you do that and then you take. It doesn't have to be a lot, a little bit of ghee or butter and some MCT oil. And for that, more is better. Unless you get disaster pants. And you blend it, and you have to blend it for 20 seconds. You can do it with tea, you can do it with coffee.

You take your hot coffee, put it in the blender, which I remember at your biohacking events, they blended the coffee.

It drove me crazy for years. If I just eat a stick of butter and drink some coffee, it should work, but it doesn't. And the reason is that when you blend it, you're making the water into exclusions on water. And with danger coffee, we've added a large dose of trace minerals and electrolytes that's in the coffee itself. So when you brew it, you're getting a therapeutic dose of 50 different trace minerals. So that improves when you blend it and you drink it. And your body's like, oh, yes. And it's saying yes via that intuitive sense that happens before you have an emotional reaction or a thought. And the intuition is the body says, this is the water I need, and these are the minerals I need, thank God. And you just want it at this deep level. And it tastes like water.

I always tell people to hydrate and mineralize first thing in the morning.

Yes. So that's how I do it, is those things. And then you don't need to eat for a long time after that. And some people, especially young exercise buffs, they get so triggered. When I say, you're still fasting if you have some butter and MCT oil. They say, but. But there's calories. In the studies, the mice only had water. Like mice don't have espresso machines or they would add espresso.

Right.

And the reason that you can have some fat during a fast and it won't break the fast. And I wrote a whole book called Fast this Way to correct some misperceptions about fasting, particularly over fasting. So I've gone deep on the science on this. When you're fasting, your MTOR levels do not rise. And MTOR is a beneficial compound in the body that causes tissues to grow, but if it's constantly elevated, it could increase cancer risk. So you need to have peaks and valleys of mtor. So if you're fasting, you have a valley. You can put Butter in your coffee and your MTOR will stay perfectly low. So number one is, the number one benefit of fasting is mtor stays low. Number two is insulin stays low. In an independent study of 300 different breakfast options, coffee with butter and MCT had the lowest effect, zero on insulin levels. So now I've turned off hunger using a small amount of fat. I've increased exclusions on water so my mitochondria work better. I've had the electrolytes endanger coffee and from the sodium in the water. So now I've got hydration, I've got exclusion zone water. And I just don't care about food because the small amount of fat affected leptin and ghrelin, which are things that cause hunger and cravings. And now I can go all day. I can go till 2 o'. Clock. I could eat or not eat. I'm not going to think about tacos. Right. So that creates peacefulness. No wasted thoughts about food. No sense. Oh my gosh, I'm starving. I'm gonna die if I don't eat. None of that nonsense.

Yeah. And think about taking out that big F, you know? Yeah.

If you want peace, don't be hungry.

Right.

If you want peace. Have so much energy that if someone comes in who would have triggered you, you're like, I have enough energy for my prefrontal cortex to stop me from cursing at them. Or, you know, I used to have this huge muscle in my middle finger from driving. Right?

Yeah.

Just because I, you know, middle finger, middle finger.

Right.

And I don't get triggered like that anymore. And some of that's because I've reprogrammed my threat networks with the stuff in heavily meditated. There's a way to go in to these altered states. You can use psychedelics. You cannot use psychedelics to edit the things that cause your biology to feel a fear without you thinking about it. And then I edited my hunger response. I edited my intimacy needs and abilities so that there's way more spiritual connection from lovemaking. And then I built a powerful community of millions of biohackers. I run the biohacking conference. It's in its, I think, 14th year now.

Yeah.

And 4,000 people showing up. And during World Biohacking Day, there's something like 80 meetups around the world. And. And this is a community of people who care about being happy, about living a lot longer and just having control of your biology. And the number one reason you want control is so you don't yell at your partner or your kids. And you don't do things you're ashamed of. I spent my life doing that. Like, why was I so mean, right?

Why was I so aggressive?

It's because I didn't have enough energy in my prefrontal cortex so that I could intercept my urges and then choose to act like an adult.

Now let's unpack that a little bit. So you're still a big fan of mcts and fats in your coffee in the morning.

Blended, you can use mcts, you can use ketone esters, but if you use not esters, ketone dial is better. You can use exogenous ketones which give you more energy in the brain, but you don't get the exclusion water. So just, it can be a blending.

Drop with a little butter and empty.

Just a little bit. Or funny enough, coffee oil, which is an massive anti inflammatory agent in the brain. The reason espresso is different than coffee is espresso has exclusions on water because the coffee oils are mixed with the coffee. But brewed coffee doesn't do that. So you could drink espresso without blending butter. I'd brew espresso and then I'd put a little bit of fat in it and blend it for 20 seconds.

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Now there's medicinal mushroom use, things like chaga, things like cordyceps, lion's mane, and these are separate from psychedelic mushrooms. And they also have different effects on your immunity, your inflammation or your cognition. I was really excited by lion's mane when I first read the studies because the two pathways to cognitive enhancement and let's see, Headstrong is my big neuroscience book and my little tip of the hat to myself thing, it hit the New York Times Monthly science bestseller list, which is very hard to do. And it was sandwiched between Homo deuce and sapiens.

Wow.

I'm like, whoa, wow. That was one of those days.

That's kind of cool.

You don't forget when you see that and you're like, wow, just so much gratitude. And in that book, the two things that matter are bdnf, which is brain derived nootropic factor. This causes you to have a young person's neuroplasticity, the ability to learn and change and transform and mitochondrial function, upregulate mitochondria upon, regulate BDNF and then personal development is easy. And Lion's mane has great studies behind it. So I tried Lion's mane and it didn't do anything. I actually know what it feels like to raise bdnf and I was so disappointed. And years later I found out why. For lion's mane to work, it needs to be dual extracted. That means you need to use alcohol and you need to use heat in order to drive out the active compounds. If you just eat lion's mane, which is delicious, actually, I like to cook it, you don't get the benefits. So most of the things that you'll get are made from the wrong part of the mushroom because they'll use basically not the fruiting bodies or they're extracted only with heat. So when you take a proper lion's mane tincture that has alcohol and heat extraction, if you take it before you go to bed, you'll have vivid dreams. That's bdnf. And if you take it in the morning, you just like, I'm more dialed In I feel younger, more focused. So sadly I haven't seen a lot of results. Let's see the upgrade Cafe in Santa Monica that I opened, I think 2014, the first no seed oil, all grass fed restaurant in la. We opened for eight years. In its first year, we put Chinese herbs and mushroom in coffee. I stopped doing that because they taste bad. Like really, I don't want to ruin coffee with mushrooms. I'll just take a mushroom tincture or a mushroom capsule and enjoy the coffee. Right, right. And that said, if anyone's using any product that works for them, including the different brands of mushroom coffee, I fully support you doing that. All that matters is does it work for you and are you telling yourself that it works or is it actually working?

Right, right.

So you know, go off of it for a week, go back on for a week and see what the difference is. For me, avoiding toxins in coffee is the most important thing.

Yeah. And there are so many toxins in coffee. And I actually want to turn my audience on to you because now this is because, you know when they harvest coffee, they're dumping it obviously in the back of trucks. Right. And like rice, you know, if you, if you dump a bunch in the bed of the truck and you go to the center of that, it's going to be warm, it's going to be moist and it's going to be dark.

It's worse than that. Okay, I'll explain kind of how the process for danger coffee works. And I quit coffee for five years before I went to Tibet because every time I would drink it an hour or two later I would feel this incredible tension and pressure in my chest and I would want more sugar and I'd want more coffee and this icky feeling. And I thought, I'm allergic to coffee. This sucks. Coffee is my favorite thing on earth. And I came back from Tibet, had a cup of coffee and it was like something turned the lights on. Like, oh my God, I love coffee. I'm not allergic anymore.

Especially you've been off for five years. That first cup of coffee is kind of plus the caffeine triggered on boy, you were like.

And I, because it was a special thing, I bought really high end single assay coffee. Thank God. And then the next day I bought a different high end coffee and I got the same symptoms. I said I couldn't go from being not allergic to allergic in one day. It's not me, it's the coffee. And I went deep in the literature. Here's what happens. Poorly treated soil makes weak Plants. Weak plants attract insects. Insects carry toxic mold spores in on their feet. They infect the beans. They're sitting in the beans, but they're not growing yet. They bring the beans in the trucks where mold starts, and they put them either in big piles on a tarp, which makes more mold, or they put them in dirty river water for two days, which also makes mold. And then they dry them out in the sun. Then they roast them. The primary mold toxin in coffee is called OTA or ochratoxin A. And it's such a problem that the government of China, Japan, most of South America and all of Europe have legal standards in place at 10 parts per million or less. In Coffee of Oak TA, it's that toxic parts per million. You will not taste it. You're not going to see the mold. It's invisible. But it's linked to direct mitochondrial dysfunction in studies. I published 36 studies on daveasprey.com that show that this is a heat stable toxin that survives roasting. It survives brewing.

Wow.

It survives roasting, Survives roasting, survives brewing. And it's in the coffee when you drink it. Because the US has no legal standards for mold in coffee. When it's illegal to sell coffee in Japan or China or Europe, they send it to the US and we drink it, and then an hour later we want to punch people and we get jittery and we want sugar and. And I'm not making this up. All those governments around the world did this for a very specific reason. And I would support the US Having the same standards as Europe for coffee, since they don't danger coffee. It says on the label mold free. If you look at some of the other brands I've been associated with in the past, it no longer says mold free on it.

Just clean.

Yeah. And here's what people can do. If you want to know if the coffee you're drinking today, and it varies by batch and all that is mold free or not, there's a very simple test. You drink your coffee and then you're gonna have to pee. If you have to pee and your bladder is full, your coffee is clean. But most people, they drink coffee and go, I really have to pee. And you pee and you pee a half a cup. Why did your body tell you you had to pee if your bladder wasn't full? Because OTA is a toxin that targets your bladder and your kidneys and the body actually got a stress response, which you may blame on your spouse, by the way. It's a fear thing, but it's a justified fear. And so your body now says, I'm going to pull water out of blood plasma. Now you get some dehydration, I'm going to use it to dilute the toxin and I'm going to give you a signal that you have to pee. So if you have to pee and your bladder is not full, look at what was in your coffee. That's why Danger Coffee is such a big deal.

Wow. And so what's the process of removing it if you're not using heat? I mean, you've got to be using some kind of.

It turns out you can't remove it. You have to go back to which coffee are you using even who picked the coffee? Because these large coffee conglomerate, they just hire migrant workers who aren't trained. The coffee that we use for Danger coffee is picked by trained coffee pickers. And they don't pick the beans with defects. They don't pick the unripe beans. So it's better tasting coffee.

Wow.

And then the process we're using is carefully controlled. And then we lab test using very specific tests. And the crazy thing, so if you.

Have the toxin on the coffee, this ota, and there's no solvent, safe solvent, there's no heat procedure, no boiling procedure.

There's none.

I have looked that it makes it a boiling process. That's incredible.

The one thing that will bind to OTA is something called humic and fulvic acid. Guess what minerals are in Danger Coffee.

Yeah, I know.

There's no mold and there are toxin binding minerals.

I'm a huge fan.

Well, when you drink your Danger Coffee, you get your daily dose of humic and fulvic in the coffee itself.

Wow.

So I created this because you drink it, your body's like, yes, this coffee is so good. And the reason is that the body's really telling you the minerals are so good and the coffee tastes great, but the minerals add this thing that's not a flavor, it's like a desire. And then the effect of the coffee is different because as you know, if there's electrolytes in water, it absorbs differently.

Right. Very true.

Right. So that's the whole story. Do you want a discount code for listeners for Danger Coffee?

We're definitely. I've actually been thinking of the first thing I'm doing is buying this coffee. All right, can we use like Gary Gary or. Yeah.

So go to dangercoffee.com, use code Gary and we'll give you a discount and we'll figure out what it is. It'll be meaningful, guys.

Okay, But I like this. I want to back things up. I want to get back. Actually, we're on this subject of mold, but I want to talk a little bit about your mold journey.

And we got to talk about psychedelics.

Yeah, and psychedelics. Can we talk about mold? And then. Okay, so let's do mold. Because I, I, I, I have. I have a community called, you know, VIP Ultimate Humans. We're actually going to do a private podcast with them when. When we're done. This podcast.

Oh, cool.

And. And in the VIP Ultimate Humans, you know, my, My group gets to ask my, you know, my guests questions directly. And lately there have been, you know, a lot of people sending in questions about mold toxicity. You know, we treat this in our clinic. But I'm very curious. You know, we use ozone, transdermal ozone. We improve detoxification pathways, like glutathione transulfuration in these people. But, I mean, you had a pretty gnarly journey with it.

Okay.

And so, yeah, how. Where do, where do they start? I mean, okay, they get a mold test.

I'll talk about everything.

Pops red.

Okay, I'll talk about the journey real quick. So people know the symptoms that would drive them to get a test and then what to do.

Okay.

Okay. I grew up living in a basement. That's a red flag if you live in a basement. Almost all of them are molded to.

Some I did in college.

And this is in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which has a huge amount of toxic mold. If you live in a desert environment, mold is much more aggressive in the desert because it has to grow quickly since it's dry most of the time. So it turns out places like Phoenix, Albuquerque, San Diego have really bad toxic mold. But I would have nosebleeds ten times a day. It was just common. I always carried, like, a thing of Afrin and Kleenex, and it's not great in high school to do that. I had arthritis when I was 14 in part because I was constantly inflamed because I was sleeping in a moldy bedroom. I had asthma. I had all these weird rashes, all these weird food allergies, and I'm a bad meth later because I have MTHFR and COMT and chronic strep throat. If you or your kid get strep throat over and over, you have toxic mold.

Wow.

The reason for this is that bacteria and mold are ancient enemies. And when the strep bacteria that naturally lives in your sinuses and in the back of your throat, when it senses Mold. And mold makes antibiotics. Right. It becomes stressed. Remember the F words. Fear. Okay, I'm gonna fight it. Makes a biofilm. And chronic strep throat is the number one sign that you have toxic mold in your home. Wow.

My youngest daughter has chronic strep throats.

We've gotta get you a dust test. And it's either at our school or it's at your home. It's probably at your school. Cause you take care of your home. And the problem with strep is that if you have chronic strep, your immune system can make something called pandos, which I had and pand does is when your immune system starts reacting to a specific protein on strep and it causes things. I used to have OCD and ODD and adhd and I even used to have a stutter and like I would do the facial twitch thing and I couldn't serve the volleyball unless I bounced it three times. And I would constantly have to stim all the time. And I had full on Asperger's syndrome as a kid. And you can reverse autism. It's just a huge amount of work.

Right.

And I know mold was a part of it. I know MTHFR was a part of it.

Yes.

So these are some things, the other things that I want people to know about. If you have really vivid dreams that are disturbing, that's also a sign of mold. And having bruises for no reason is a sign of mold. You frequently bruise, you have nosebleeds, you have chronic strep throat and things like that. You have weird dreams, you have digestive disturbances that don't make any sense. You might want to look at the mold environment.

Wow.

And there's two ways to test for mold in your environment, and one of them is called the dust test. You can go to, I think it's called thedusttest.com and you'll find that the mold toxins are present in dust. Depending on which of the mold toxins you have, they can absorb through your skin or by breathing or by eating. And. And in my case, I figured out I had mold because I went to a doctor who was a very, very knowledgeable guy. The first guy to have liposomal glutathione on the market in Los Altos, California. His name was Tim Guilford. And he said, dave, my patients get better. You're not getting better. I want to give you an HIV test. I don't think you have it, but why is your immune system not functioning? My system immune, so I didn't have hiv, but he did give me a mold allergy test because we didn't have mycotoxin tests back then. And I was allergic to 8 of the 10 most toxic molds showing I'd been exposed. And like, oh, this makes so much sense. I grew up in a moldy basement, and then my first condo in the Bay Area had water leaked from the neighborhood.

You weren't allergic to them. You had them.

I had mold toxins and I had an allergic response to them. You had the antibodies? Yeah, the antibodies. So we couldn't test for the toxins. We could only test for antibodies then. And so I had been exposed to sachybotrys and aspergillus. And okay, I know that when I moved into this condo that was moldy that I bought, didn't know was moldy, that suddenly I gained 30 pounds. I'd lost 50 of my 100 pounds. I also fat again. And my partner at the time, she also got fat and had emotional reactions that just made no sense. Nightmares and things like that. This was toxic mold.

Wow.

And then I move out of that place, move into a 100-year-old house which has water sitting under it when it rains. Mold symptoms through the roof. Physical anxiety, emotional issues, digestive issues, strep. It all comes back and I'm like, okay, I think I've got the message here.

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So I went on this path of saying, how do I get rid of this stuff? And it turns out that replacing methyl donors is really important. So your body can do it. Binding the toxins is really important. So what I recommend people do now is get a dust test. And you can go to thedustest.com and do an air test. You can go to gotmold.com and I don't have any relationship with the dust test other than I interviewed the guy and 10 years ago, I invested in. Got mold a small amount of money. So I have a. Whatever. I'm not gonna. It won't change my life if you do. Don't get it. But just for full disclosure, Right?

Yeah.

And these are gonna tell you the environment you're in. However, if you've been exposed at work, at school and schools, especially colleges, they're just full of mold. Because no one pays for building maintenance.

Right, Right.

And all it takes is one water leak to get mold in a building.

Right.

So you might have it in your body, but not in your home. You just have to get it out of your home for sure. And then if it's in your body, you can get a mycotoxin test. Is that something that you guys offer?

We do.

Okay. Is this something everyone can get everywhere or.

I don't know if they can get. Tell them where to get it.

So my favorite one is called mymycolab.com.

I'm actually going to write that down. Can I pen? Because I want a good mold test to recommend.

This is the best.

My Micolab.

Yep. And the guy who runs that, Andrew. Oh, geez. Andrew Campbell. If I'm remembering right, he's been practicing for 40 years treating mold, and it's the only test that will tell you, do you have the mold toxins and do you have an immune response to the mold toxins themselves? So he's a toxin.

You could have the toxin and have no immune response.

You can have the toxin with just a direct toxic effect, but not have.

It's the immune response that's really nasty.

It can be both because the toxins suppress mitochondrial function, which are gonna cause stress and all kinds of problems. But an immune response on top of that is worse. And once you know what toxins are present in your body at what levels, then you choose binding agents to remove them. The most common one is activated charcoal, which I brought into the biohacking world. It was one of the first products I ever made.

Exactly. What about, like, zeolite or silica clay?

These are all things that help. So there's zeolite and bentonite are the two types. Zeolite oftentimes causes a lot of GI distress. The trick with zeolite is to take a higher dose. So you get first and second pass. Glutathione is terribly important, say, for ota, which is in coffee. But if you have other toxins, it won't touch them at all. And the most horrible of the mold toxins I was exposed to is something called zearolanone. And zearolanone is a synthetic estrogen made by mold. 10,000 times stronger than human estrogen. It'll absorb through the skin. I had man boobs, I had lower testosterone than my mom, and I had obesity in my teens and early 20s. Just water retention, not just water. Massive, straight up fat. Because estrogen makes you fat. This is why women are squishier. Fortunately, in women, they have EPA and DHA in their fat, which they're going to give to babies. Babies if they have babies. So Mother Nature wants that thing. That's why women with curves are considered more attractive, because they're storing fat where it should be, which estrogen helps to do. So zearalenone is so bad. This is going to shock you, Gary. The pharmaceutical industry will concentrate Zearanol into a drug called Xeronol for cattle. And it's just a waxy pellet. And it's so effective, they put the pellet in the cow's ear and the body heat melts the wax and it enters the bloodstream just through the ear canal. Cows on zearolanol get fat on 30% less calories.

Really?

Yeah.

Now, so this is a mold toxin. It's a mold toxin purposely put into their ear. Are you kidding me?

It's tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue for poisoning cows. But the big thing here is, if you live with zarellonone, it doesn't matter if you cut calories, you cannot lose weight. And this is why every young influencer who's never been fat never dealt with obesity. Sitting there saying, I'm canceling out my candy bar with my Diet Coke. It's all about calories in, calories out. It is nonsense. I just proved that there's tens of millions of dollars being spent on a compound that makes you fat on less calories if the compound can exist. Calories in, calories out is nonsense. And it's mold.

Wow.

Isn't that crazy?

That is. I'm going deep down this rabbit hole. My mind's very rarely blown on my mind, but they just blew my mind.

Think about this.

You literally just blew my mind.

Oh, there's more and there's more. This is my favorite topics.

It really affected my Life about this.

And this is why Danger Coffee is mold free. Because it matters. It really matters.

Yeah.

Now, if you go back in time a couple billion years ago, there's kind of two branches of life. There's bacteria and there's fungus. They have been fighting for dominance for 2 billion years. This is why antibiotics are so powerful. We take a bunch of penicillium mold and we extract a tiny amount of penicillin. And that little pill changes all the bacteria in your body. Mitochondria are ancient bacteria. They are terrified of mold. They are part of this ancient battle. They're part of this ancient battle. So is it any wonder that when your body, which is studded with way more mitochondria than you have cells in your body, even more than you have bacteria in your gut, that your body freaks out when there's mold toxins? Of course it does.

That's what causes the strep. You're saying that the mold, mycotoxin causes the strep, which we have low levels of strep in our body, to proliferate.

It causes strep to proliferate. And it directly. And there are dozens of studies on this. Almost all of the mold toxins directly inhibit mitochondrial function. Your body makes less electricity, less heat, less willpower, less testosterone, less glutathione, less of everything you need. And our mutual friend Frank Shallenberger, I quoted him a lot in my longevity book. He says 48% of people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial dysfunction. And everyone over age 40 has it. It's called aging unless you do something about it. In my 20s, I had probably 20% of my available mitochondrial function. Chronic fatigue syndrome. Just so exhausted and. Well, is it any wonderful that taking or just being exposed to a mold toxin in my coffee, in my bedroom, in my school is going to even further inhibit that, and I'm just going to feel like garbage and be unable to recover and unable to sleep and unable to do the things that you're supposed to do to recover, to repair injuries, to have joints that heal and all the things.

So what do you do? What did you do? What are the people watching?

Here's what you do.

If you get it from my michaelab.com.

Number one, go to moldymovie.com this is absolutely free. It's a gift. I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars making this documentary.

Moldy movie.

Moldy movie. It's one hour of your time and there's a dozen top experts in the world and a dozen people like you and me. Who've been affected by mold. No one will tell you you're crazy. Who sees that movie. Your doctor, if they see this movie, will stop gaslighting you.

Wow. Wow.

And one of the most powerful stories in the movie is a couple. They're both doctors and they're married, and they move into a moldy home, and she gets massive disabling symptoms, and he has no symptoms at all. Because she's a doctor, she knows if you have more than five symptoms, you're a hypochondriac. This is standard medical school training. So she thinks she's a hypochondriac, except her body temperature's elevated, so she knows it's real. She biopsies every organ in her body. How painful is that? Right. Probably not her brain. And she can't find it. And finally they realize it's mold, and they're sitting there next to each other on camera. This is in the final cut for the documentary. And he says, I never felt anything, But I believe her and it's real. And she says, I didn't believe myself until I got the data. And the reality is the set of symptoms that come from mitochondrial dysfunction are so broad.

That is the hub of the wheel. I talk about the hub and the spokes all the time.

You nailed it. So one person has massive anxiety and weird dreams. Another person has frequent infections. The other one just gained 40 pounds for no reason. And they think it's different. And it's all mold poisoning mitochondria. So you do the mymycolab test or maybe a similar test, find out what toxins you have. Different toxins get bound by different compounds, and the most broad spectrum compound is activated charcoal. You take it a half hour before you eat. And it's worse because people who have MTHFR are also more likely to have a genetic discrepancy in something called HLADR 4.

Yes.

Okay, I was guessing you'd be super familiar with that.

Yeah, I am.

So people with HLADR mutations, we were designed to survive in a world where you're going to invade another village or country. You're gonna get shot by an arrow, you're gonna clot very quickly so you don't bleed to death, and your immune system is aggressive so that you don't get sick when you eat all the food and get exposed to these new people. And then you're gonna go home and then go do it again next week.

Right.

So quick clotting, aggressive immune response. Put those people in mold. The quick clotting causes all kinds of problems. And the aggressive immune response causes all kinds of problems. So our ancestors were marauders, the Vikings. Right. And I have those genes. So that's why my blood would clot within 10 seconds of taking out. I was in my late 20s. I was at high risk of stroke and heart attack because of that. And it's why I had an aggressive immune response. And it's also tied to that MTHFR thing where I couldn't detox, because methylation is one of the detox pathways. The other one is the primary one, is via glutathione. So intravenous glutathione, oral glutathione really changes things for most mold people, unless they can't handle glutathione because they have a comt problem with sulfur. And then the other one that's less known but is critically important, and I wrote about this in my most recent book before heavily meditated, is glucarination glucaronation. So calcium d glucarate is a relatively affordable supplement. And glucarate is the second way the liver detoxes after glutathione.

Calcium. What?

D glucarate. And it's available from a variety of brands. It's not expensive. And calcium d glucarate is so important because some mold toxins only get detoxed by glucarate, and others only get detoxed by glutathione. So if you were to say, I don't really know what I have, I'm saving my money here, you would take some activated charcoal, possibly zeolite, if it doesn't mess up your gut a half hour before you eat.

Every meal.

It could be every meal, yeah. If you get constipated, back off, because that's the risk from it. And don't take those compounds near prescription drugs or expensive supplements, because they'll bind to those as well. And they have an electrical charge that makes them specifically attract toxins, toxins. So you do that. And the reason it's a half hour before is that it'll be right where the bile is secreted into your gut. And mold toxins are fat soluble. They act like cholesterol. They're almost identical chemically. So those of us who are wired for famine and for invasion, we save our bile, we recycle it, which means toxins get recycled over and over. But if you take this a half hour before your meal, you won't recycle your bile. You'll make more bile.

It'll bind It.

Yep. And if you have some coffee, may I suggest danger coffee? It increases bile flow, which is something you want to do anyway. You could also take some bitters. So you start doing this and you're saying, oh, I feel better because I'm binding the toxins. The other thing that I recommend, and this is, I don't know why it's controversial, just people have this anti drug thing. I have no bias for or against any compound on the planet. Show me risks, show me benefits, and I'll decide. Taking an antifungal medication for sometimes a month, sometimes six months, especially for people who've been in mold for years, it changes their entire life kind of antifungal. It's sporonox.

Sporonox.

Itraconazole is the other name for it. So fluconazole is for yeast and itraconazole is for mold. There is a great chance that you have mold growing in your sinuses or elsewhere in your body if you've been exposed to mold for a long period of time. Time. So if binding the toxins doesn't solve the problem, then do this. And here's the thing. Having had chronic fatigue, which is oftentimes caused by toxic mold, I. I've suffered a lot. I've been so tired, so much brain fog. There is no reason to suffer when you're detoxing. It means you don't know about ozone.

That's what I was going to say. Can we go down the other path?

Ozone will stimulate your mitochondria. It also means you haven't given yourself permission to do what it takes to feel good while you recover. And the number one thing you can do is you can have some coffee in the morning, one or two cups, not 10 cups. And you do it in the morning specifically to raise cortisol when it needs to go up. And because coffee, especially with some MCT and butter, it turns your brain back on, there's no reason you can't use Modafinil, which is a high performance drug. I popularized this one on Nightline about 14 years ago. It's much safer than Adderall. It's not a stimulant. And for most people with chronic fatigue, this prescription drug gives you your life back while you're recovering. I've been on Modafinil most days for 20 years. I wouldn't have learned how to meditate the way I know how to do. There would have been no biohacking had I not used a cognitive enhancing drug, especially when I had crippling brain fog and chronic fatigue syndrome. So it's okay to use any means necessary to feel good.

Good, right.

I also learned how to do ozone therapy from an 88 year old dentist who's since passed, who was treating people with brain cancer successfully with ozone, just putting it in their ears. So he took me to his clinic in Sunnyvale, California and said, hey, Dave, I'm going to teach you how to do this. Show me which machines to buy. And this was a long time ago, before ozone was as popular as it is now. And I put ozone in my butt. That's how you do it. Insufflation is the technical term. And I remember for one minute I had mental clarity and I thought, oh, my God, I remember what this is like. And then the next day I did it. I got two minutes and I did it every night for a year. And it turned my mitochondrial networks back on and it changed my life.

So eboo, transdermal, 10 pass, whatever you.

Can do, all of them work. And the cheapest thing is just rectal, because you can do it at home. And I've done lots of intravenous as well. And years later, our mutual friend Mark Hyman reached out and he's been public, we've talked about this on his show so I could share it. His home in New Hampshire had hurricane damage and I was scared for his health. He was really sick. I said, mark, you have all the signs of mold toxicity. Like, you gotta get some ozone, right? You gotta start binding these. And he tested it was mold that was causing it. And so he had his house cleaned up. He added ozone to his clinic as a result of this, and it brought him back online, same way it did for me. So if you have mold, you gotta bind the toxins, you gotta get rid of the mold growing in your body. And you should do some ozone therapy and you should take the supplements that allow you to methylate, that allow you to use glutathione to get rid of it, and allow you to use glucuronation to get rid of it. If you do those things, you're probably going to get better. You might also for a while if your adrenals are blown out. This is also controversial and it shouldn't be. You might take 5 milligrams of bioidentical cortisol in the morning and at lunch and maybe even at dinner time because your body may not be making enough cortisol for you to heal. That was a problem I had as.

Well, for you to heal. I see, yeah.

It also depends on your genetic.

So you started using ozone. I started using ozone because the nice thing is the. The availability of ozone now. I mean, back when you were talking about it even 10 years ago, that was way out there. Five years ago it was, you know, because we started our clinic in 2017, and I remember our clinic director, Dr. Sarda, you know, was going to ozone certification classes, and even I was like, this is a little.

Wow.

I started eating in 2006, and ozone and toxic gas. And then I started really, really, you know, going down the rabbit hole and. And realizing that, you know, it leaves an oxygen molecule. It neutralizes the free radical. It's. It's excellent for. And now I. I. Like I said, I have a hocad. I have a hyperthermic. What does it stand for? Hyperthermic ozone. Carbonic acid transdermal therapy machine.

I. I've got one. I've got one, too.

Bedroom. Yeah, I have it in my bedroom.

And ozone is. Is just so good at restoring mitochondrial function. It's. It's. It's a beneficial oxidant that causes your mitochondria to wake up and turn on their ability to make glutathione. Right? And actually, technically, they don't make glutathione. They make more energy, which they then shuttle over to the glutathione, manufacturing parts of the cells that then get it back.

But. But the. The. I mean, the ozone itself has immediate benefits as well, not just the downstream benefits for supporting having healthy glutathione, but it has immediate detoxifying benefits. And. And, you know, every time I get out of the hoecat, you are shifted from a sympathetic state into a parasympathetic state. You are so rest and digest and so Zen, so clear and so focused. It's awakened calm state, I call it. Yeah, it's like, because most of the time you say awakened states, like I'm stimulated, like I'm on amphetamine or caffeine. But no, no, you're just clear and cognizant. Like, if you ever really need. Needed to concentrate, focus, like really needed to study, or you had to write a white paper, or you really needed your energy and focus. Ozone is incredible for that.

I've got a little cognitive enhancement story that'll make you laugh.

Okay. I'm glad we finished the mold, though. That was. That. That was good. I'm glad.

Mold is so big.

That was the one I wanted to get out.

So my girlfriend saw me doing ozone. She's like, I want to try it. Okay, so it's a tiny little hose, and you put it in your butt, and you put some ozone in, and you get a wave of just powerful energy from it. So it may be half a liter, small amount that goes in. We turn off the ozone machine.

But you feel the pressure, right?

You feel the pressure. It feels like you have to.

But does it dissipate?

It'll dissipate. I mean, you might fart, you might not, but it'll actually absorb in. They call the colon the third lung because anesthesiologists will put oxygen in your butt if you're unconscious so that you can absorb it into your tissues if you're not breathing. So you can absorb the ozone. And usually it just kind of goes away. But if you put too much in, some might leak out. It'll sound like you're farting. So we put it in. She's like, oh, my gosh, I feel like I just had Adderall or something. Like, this is so good. And then she looks at me and she says, I feel like I have to poop. And because I have a sense of humor of a seventh grader, I looked at her, I said, you can't. You could get a blood clot. And she goes, what do I do? And I said, well, try getting on the trampoline. No, poor Christina's on the trampoline.

Clearly, you're not still with this woman, right?

I am.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, we laughed about it. She's jumping on the trampoline, which of course, makes it worse. I'm like, don't laugh, don't laugh, don't laugh. And finally she goes, you're lying to me, aren't you? I go, yeah, yeah, she got even later. Don't worry.

The fact that you're still together speaks volumes for you, brother. I mean, that alone is like, you must have something else going on.

There's one other connection that is biohacking and mold related. It's circadian disruption. So when you have mold, your stress hormones get all screwed up and your ability to regulate your mitochondria with circadian rhythm breaks. Like I said, I grew up in a basement on toxic mold. It affects sleep. I would stay up until 2am Starting at 10 years old, and I would read books. I read a lot. But I was chronically sleep deprived as an adult. It would be really helpful for me to have been able to go to sleep at 10 or 11 and then wake up like a normal human. But I would go to sleep at 2 and not want to start work until 10, my career took off, but I was always tired and I just couldn't do it. And this caused me to, in the mid-2000s, to go really deep on circadian biology and understand the connection between mitochondria and light. And what a lot of people miss is that that mitochondria evolved in the ocean. And so these are dumb little bacteria. They have limited sensing of the environment. They are quantum sensing, though. They can pick up each other and things. But they have light receptors called. I'm going to call it chromophores. I was going to call them photos. Yeah, chromophores. Thank you. And so they need a clock to know how they should be behaving. So the clock starts in the morning. Red light, sunrise. This is why red light's so important in the morning and at night. And then as the sun moves overhead, now we have overhead bright light with lots of blue spectrum, lots of infrared, and it's warmer. And there's the most food between noon and 2pm because they're eating algae that's benefiting from sunlight. And then the sun gets also red again as sunset happens and temperature starts to drop. And then they go into their hibernation phase where they would drop down in the water, sit there at night, and then in the morning, it gets warmer. They come back up to the surface. This is the cycle of life. Since before we had multicellular organisms, we're still yoked to that. And inside your eyes, there are about 5% of light receptors do not receive light that your brain ever sees. So light comes into your eye. 95% of it goes into your visual processing system. The other 5% is received and routed around it directly into the SCN, which is the central clock in your brain that tells all the systems in the body what time it is. And for me to change my circadian rhythm so that I could go to sleep like a normal healthy person. I learned that light is more important than food or temperature or anything else. And this led me for circadian rhythm, for circadian rhythm. And circadian rhythm controls whether your mitochondria work or not.

Wow.

If you have bright light at night, you become insulin resistant.

How do you control this in your home?

Well, you want to have dimmer switches and red night lights. It's dim light, candlelight, dim. In my house, after the sun goes down, when I'm in hotels, there's a couple things that I do. You and I are both wearing true dark glasses.

Yeah.

These are not blue blocking glasses. Blocking blue light will make you Sick because you need blue light to wake up during the day. The mitochondria are looking for it all day long to know that they should be regulating your insulin, they should be making power that you're awake. So these glasses are for indoor use only and they block half of blue light, the toxic half under 490 nanometers. So these are a very specific filter.

For like the man made light.

For the man made lights. You notice how your brain is more relaxed in a studio underneath these LEDs?

Yeah. Yes.

And that's because the TrueDark glasses are not blocking blue. They're blocking toxic blue and allowing beneficial blue in. But then at night I switched to these and these took a lot of time to develop these.

I was just telling you that my staff, my interns did a. They asked me, what do you want for Christmas? I said, I want blue light blocking glasses. As many pairs you can buy me because I lose them and then I want. And I want red light glasses. And I've used these before. I challenge you to put Those on for 30 minutes or more and not get sleepy, which I'm surprised you're putting them on right now because they make me sleepy so fast.

You're not alone. My company, TrueDark, this is the first modern circadian glasses company. We developed these, even filed a patent on them. And there's four colors of light that you have to block. It's not just blue light at night. It's amber, it's green, it's blue and it's violet. And you have to block the brightness and the angle of the light is a really important variable. So they're darker at the top than at the bottom. And there's no other glasses like trudarks on the planet. And it's hard to make these. But we're also the only.

I can take them off too.

Yeah, we're also. It's like taking a sleeping pill.

It really is like taking a.

We published a study in a medical journal and we're the only company to do that. And we used EEG measurements from 40 years of Zen and we showed that 15 minutes of wearing the TrueDark glasses puts your brain in the same state as meditation. Your stressful brainwaves beta drops and alpha goes up so you can put these on and you chill out. And if you're starting to get a migraine or something like, oh, let's have noise canceling headphones for my eyes. And that's what trued our glasses are. And I'm going to fly to Dubai Tomorrow, I will have zero jet lag because when I wear these on the airplane with a baseball hat, my body thinks it's dark even though I can see. And that means I can reset my circadian rhythm. And I will get seven hours of sleep with 90 minutes of deep and 90 minutes of REM. When I land, I get jet, like nowhere on the planet because of truedark.

So when you. When you land, you'll put them on.

I actually put them on on the airplane when I. If it's dark where I'm landing, I wear the glasses. So before I take off, I say, what time zone when I land is it gonna be? And I'm going to put these on when it's dark at my destination. So it might be light where I am now, but I know if it's midnight in Dubai, I'm gonna put the glasses on even if it's bright where I am.

So you take. I usually take the 12:25am flight from Miami, and I fly nonstop to Dubai, and I arrive at 11pm so obviously I'm going straight to bed. So you would put these on the plane before landing.

What you would do then when you take off? It's actually daytime in Dubai. So you tell your eyes and your digestive system that it's daytime. So what you would do then is you say, oh, is it noon in Dubai? No. Glasses have the light on on the airplane and eat something, maybe even have some coffee. Coffee. The idea is get all the signals. And the signals are in order. It's light, then food, then temperature, and then socialization or exercise. So what you want to do on the airplane is like, okay, everyone else around me is sleeping because they don't understand how to not get jet lag. So you have the light on. You can even get weird glasses that shine lights in your eyes if you want to look like a total freak on the airplane. I don't think I need them. I don't feel like that. And then, then when it starts to get about 6pm in Dubai, you put on the truedark sleep glasses. And now your body's going, oh, wait, he stopped eating. And now I'm getting a signal of darkness. Let me reset my clock. And you keep those glasses on religiously when you're checking into your hotel and everything else. It helps to have a baseball hat to keep light from coming in from above you. And then you'll be tired because you're wearing those when you get there. And you think, wow, I know it's noon back where I was but my body now, because of light and food, timing has no jet lag at all. And it has been life changing.

Wow. I do notice. See, I'd be scared to put those on in the plane and try to go to the hotel, because I'm telling you, I put those on and in 30 minutes I'm out. I fall asleep with them on. That will happen because I'm a Kindle reader, because I don't do. The Kindles are better. I don't do the blue light. The phone at night. It's actually been really good for me because when I had a phone, I would look at, like, Instagram and, you know, I'd look at clips of a UFC fight and, you know, all kinds of stuff and all this stimulating stuff. And then I can never help but just go over to my text message and just see if somebody texts me something. And inevitably, it might have been something about work or something that just gets you emotional. With the Kindle, I take the research that I'm. I'm doing. Like, your. Your book is on there, and, you know, I can highlight it, it's only in gray, and I can circle it and I can. Can cut and paste, and I feel like my brain is relaxed, but I'm alert enough to study and I fall asleep. Like, really? But if I have those on, you can set a timer, and it's from the time I put those on till I have to be laying down as 30 minutes.

Well, let's do this too. TrueDark.com, use code Gary, and I'll give you guys a discount as well, by the way.

I didn't start this to be like.

No, doing all the. Both of these are these different things.

That my audience will love.

They're organic, and this is not my largest company by a long shot. We use These glasses at 40 years of Zen to keep people in these advanced meditation states when they come out of the pods. People are using ketamine as an optional thing. At 40 years of Zen, we use truedarks every single time because you can stay in an alpha state for longer. So for me, they're necessary. And it's one of my smallest companies. I'm not trying to sell these.

Right.

They just changed my life, and I couldn't buy them, so I made them. That's what this is about.

Amazing. Amazing. Dave, this has been incredible. I've got a ton of questions here from my vip let's do it group. So. So we're gonna end the regular podcast if you are interested in becoming a VIP, ultimate human. Just go to theultimatehuman.com you can sign up to be a VIP. We go into a private room. You get to ask questions directly to our guests. We're gonna go into the private room now and take some VIP community for. For Dave. I also do one on one coachings. You know, not one on ones, but group coachings to give a couple hours a month. We do challenges, we all kinds of exclusive content. So if you're interested in doing that, go to theultimatehuman.com sign up to be a VIP. Otherwise, thank you guys for watching. Dave, thank you for being on the podcast. It's incredible. It's been a pleasure, man. I mean, I rarely actually take notes during my podcast, but I took a lot of notes during this podcast because mold, micha, mycotoxin, these pathogens are something that we see all the time in our clinic system. And I really appreciate you being vulnerable about the journey that you were on and what you did to solve it. I end every podcast before I go into my VIP community room by asking my guests the same question. And there's no right or wrong answer to this question. And it is, what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

It means that you're always in control of your state. In Buddhism, there's sort of three steps, and the first one is empathy. And this is the ability to feel other people's emotions. It's kind of a problem because a lot of people are tweaked. So empathy isn't that high of a state, but it's better than being apathetic, right?

Right.

So after you tick off empathy, you evolve into compassion. And compassion means instead of feeling other people's issues, you automatically wish them well, even in your mitochondria, like, ah, even if they're a jerk. Whatever. I wish you well and you do it before you judge them. And that's a hard thing to do. And that's a lot of the work at 40 years in is developing compassion for those who you feel have harmed you. But the reason you do compassion is what the Buddhists would call equanimity. And in the west, we call it resilience. And that's the picture of a monk meditating in the middle of a storm because nothing can take you out of your chosen state date. And to me, that's the ultimate.

Wow, that's a great one. Well, I appreciate it, Dave, and as always, guys, that's just science.