Mold ruined my life (and it might be ruining yours too)

Hey guys, so last year I got really sick. I got a chronic condition called SIRS from mold poisoning from a house that I was living in. It essentially derailed my life for an entire calendar year, and I've seen a lot of people struggle with this recently, and it's one of those things— am I seeing this because I'm aware of it? Has it always been here, or is there actually a surge in autoimmune conditions and weird stealth conditions like SIRS, like Lyme, Bartonella, and and all of these stealth pathogens? And I think there's a little bit of both, right? But what I am noticing is a lot of people are getting these weird sicknesses that don't make sense. And the problem with a lot of these ailments is that they're not well and fully accepted by traditional medical literature and medical practice. So a lot of these go masked or covered up as other symptoms and other side effects. And most importantly, they share symptomology with a lot of other conditions. So a lot of people are dealing with a certain condition And they're being told it's something else, or even worse, they're being told that they're making it up. And that's kind of what happened to me. I didn't necessarily have anyone telling me like, this is what you have, but I was like, what's wrong with me? I have all of these weird side effects and I couldn't figure it out. And I couldn't actually take into consideration the fact that it was the environment that I was living in, although I had a hunch because I didn't expect it to have that much of an effect on me. So what I want to do with this video is kind of just have a conversation with you guys about what happened to me. And now that I've been dealing with this for a year and a half, it effectively put my life on pause for an entire year, and I'm finally coming out to the other side and truly realizing this condition for what it is. Some of the nuance and context that I don't see a lot of people addressing, but I believe to be crucially important for not only dealing with SIRS and mold poisoning, but for understanding pathology and our physiology as a whole and our nervous system and the role that that plays in chronic health conditions. So first and foremost, for context, you know, I spent most of the last 5 years living in tropical environments. I was in Mexico for 3 years straight. You know, after that I've spent 2 years plus in Florida. And in between that, I've been in places like Southeast Asia and Central America. So I spent a majority of my time in places where mold loves to grow, right? Because mold loves hot, humid environments. They love dampness. I never got truly sick from places that I was living in, although I was absolutely living in places with When I was living in the west coast of Mexico, I remember going back to get my stuff that I was storing at my buddy's house, and my entire duffel bag had mold growing all over it with all my stuff in it. I was like, I don't really care, I'm gonna wash it off. Now looking back, I was actually able to identify that there were environments that I felt objectively better in, right? There were environments where I noticed that my face was less puffy, where I noticed that my mood was better, that I had more energy, that I had more creative spark. But I can look back and I can see, I'm like, I performed significantly better in this house than this house, right? Right? My routine was the same, everything was the same, but I was livelier. I could see it in my face. Environments do have an impact on who you are and how you act. But I got wrecked so hard when I moved into a place after the hurricanes that was a little bit more inland. And there's a number of reasons for why this place wrecked me more than all the other places, and I'll get into that. But what I want to talk about is what that actually looked like so you can kind of get a sense of whether or not something that you're dealing with may be related to your environment. So mold is a fungus, and fungi are actually very intelligent, right? And we can see this in the fact that their mycelium networks are some of the most impressive structural organisms in the entire world. Fungi are incredibly impressive, and they're not just impressive, you know, by what they do. They're impressive by what they are. They're unique. They're not like a plant or an animal, right? They're this separate entity, this separate group, and they're very powerful, right? Some mushrooms can kill you, some mushrooms can make you trip balls and see the universe, and other mushrooms can make you a little bit smarter. They can improve your VO2 max. So they're very powerful bioactive organisms. Not all mold is bad mold, right? Penicillin is a type of mold that's very powerful. There are a few types of mold that really do not jive well with the human organism. And they do that because they produce something that are called mycotoxins. And mycotoxins are the defense mechanism of fungi. Just like how animals have claws and teeth that they can scratch you with, and plants have phytochemicals like phytic acid and oxalates and lectins, and poison ivy has poisonous, you know, itchy stuff. Fungi, being the intelligent organism it is, created mycotoxins, which are a very powerful defense mechanism. And mycotoxins, their objective and their purpose is to stop you the aggressor from destroying them, and potentially even to use you as a host, because mycotoxins— excuse me, because fungi like to colonize in you. And at any given point, you're going to have a small amount of fungi populating, whether it's your skin or your gut or your nasal cavities. The problem is when it becomes outlandish, no different than the problem with H. pylori or strep or staph, is when it becomes outpowering the rest of your microbiome. So I'm not really that concerned of colonization, although that is a thing. You have things like Marcon. What I'm really worried about is just the immune system collapse that comes from mycotoxin exposure. So I'm in this house and you know I'm not spending as much time outside. I'm not spending as much time on the beach because I'm locking in, right? And I'm further away, and I'm trying to live a more you know steady life and all these bullshit things that I told myself. But as I was making that transition, I started to notice that I was kind of losing my spark. I would wake up in the morning and I would look puffy. I was realizing that my body composition was becoming less sharp. You know, I was losing that androgenic IGF touch where my shoulders were capped and I was lean and I was chiseled and I was defined and I felt explosive. I started becoming softer. I started becoming similar to the body composition changes I had when I got nuked by SSRIs. And I also noticed that my cognition started changing. The first thing that I noticed was sensitivity. in my nervous system. Lights were brighter, noises were more distracting and stimulating, and more things started being perceived as threats, right? People started being perceived as threats. Noises started being perceived as threats. I noticed when I was driving, I was more on edge. I noticed things that typically wouldn't bother me would now kind of set me off and make me almost become avoidant and get in this freeze state, which is the 3rd sympathetic nervous system state. You've got fight, you've got flight, and you also have freeze. In conjunction with all this, I noticed I started getting sensitive to supplements that I was taking. I wasn't able to take neurotransmitter precursors like L-tyrosine without getting overstimulated. B vitamins made me feel crazy. Even things like caffeine were too much for me. I started becoming sensitive to foods as well. I wasn't able to eat whatever I wanted. I couldn't digest a lot of things. My stomach would constantly be in this state of being hungry but having nothing be satiable and nothing truly digesting properly. Additionally, I stopped recovering from training. I would go and I would train and I would get injured and when I would come home from training, my nervous system would be shot where I couldn't even work for the rest of the day. I couldn't think straight. I just felt awful. And my body composition started getting worse. I was training more than ever. I was trying to brute force my way through it, but I wasn't looking good. My body was literally breaking down. My joints started aching. My tendons became so much weaker. My muscle bellies Got so small it looked like I had some sort of disease, and I genuinely thought I had a disease. I was having night sweats. I was waking up in the middle of night just drenched in sweat, and when I'd wake up in the morning, that interstitial period between me being awake and me being asleep, I would be met with this level of existential dread, like everything was wrong in my life, like I was dying. And the worst part about it was I lost the cognitive capacity to do something about it. I was not able to see. 2 or 3 steps in the future. I could not plan things linearly because my brain was fundamentally not working. The amount of neuroinflammation that I had and hypoxia to areas like my frontal lobe made it impossible for me to do the things that I needed to do to get healthier. Really, the only time that I was able to work is when I was able to get on a call and just power through, you know, 45 minutes of work. But that was pretty much my cap. I would sit down and I would try to read and I could not actually comprehend the words on paper. I would sit down and I would try to record a video like this. And the words would not come to mind. I would try to write and I would draw blanks, and it was the most frustrating thing in the world. I've never been so frustrated. I have never been so down in the dumps ever. And the worst part about it was I couldn't do anything about it. The effect that these mycotoxins had on my brain made it where I was unable to take actions on the thing I knew I needed to take action for. I have ADHD, so I feel like that a lot, but this was ADHD on steroids, right? Because quite literally it is causing ADHD-like symptoms by reducing the amount of oxygen and nutrients that are coming to your frontal lobe, where executive function is happening, by setting your amygdala off to make you feel like you're constantly in this fight-or-flight state and everything is a threat. And this is all a result of this very powerful tool that fungi use to stop you from remediating them. And I believe that a lot of it was amplified because of modern building practices. So long story short is I was fucked up. And my life was miserable and I didn't know what was wrong with me and I was trying to blame everything. It felt like I had 1,000 conditions at once. And that's the hard part is because there were so many symptoms, right? There were so many varying symptoms that like, this is a side effect of X and this is a side effect of Y. But what it really comes down to when understanding if mold is a problem that you are facing is looking at the seemingly unrelatedness of the symptoms. Me waking up with puffy eyes every morning and getting these rashes around my eyes combined with these other cognitive factors were the thing that made me say, okay, this is mold. Now obviously I could see the mold growing from my AC units and I could see the mold growing behind my walls. So I was just so incapacitated that I couldn't think about the logical steps that I would take, which I would normally do in a heartbeat to get out of there. Now the question here is, why did I get one-shotted so hard by this house and not any of the other houses that I was living in? And this is something that I've come down to, and this is what I've spent the majority of my time focusing on. Because it's not that I have some sort of super physiological reaction to all types of mold, otherwise I would be feeling totally one-shotted when I was living in places like Mexico. And it really comes down to 2 factors. The first factor being just the nature of indoor living in the United States. A large majority of us live in houses that use Chinese drywall and wood. Right? We use wood in a swamp. It makes no sense, right? So this wood is getting wet, it's getting dry, it's getting wet, it's getting dry, and then they go and they build the house. And while the wood is still wet, they're putting all this Chinese plaster on it, which is full of this starch residue in the linings that mold just loves to consume. And that's what you need to grow mold, is you need a food substrate, you need darkness, and you need dampness. That sounds like the inside of all of our walls. Now, I live in Florida. We have floods all the time. 60% of houses here have water damage, but that's still not enough, right? Because why can some people live in a water-damaged building and have no problems, and other people live in a water-damaged building and have their life ruined? Now obviously there's the genetic predisposition component. Some people do have a genetic abnormality in their HLA-DR gene variants where they are unable to actually respond properly to the mycotoxin. Their body gets exposed to the mycotoxin, they lack those antibodies, So their immune system just starts shotgunning everything in their system and destroying a bunch of their organs in an attempt to rid themselves of these mycotoxins, which they're unable to do. And they have this constant recirculation of these toxins that are constantly destroying their systems by recirculating that bile and never actually excreting it. So that's one. Number 2 is we're very clearly experiencing some level of mass immunodeficiency. I believe it really started catching on, you know, in 2020, During that whole thing that I can't talk about without getting kicked off of YouTube. Thanks, Google. And that's obviously the start of it, and I think that's a huge factor. And you think about it, we spend all day inside. A majority of the houses that we live in are effectively sealed for energy efficiency where we're not getting a lot of new air intake. You should get a dehumidifier in your house and see how much water that pulls up just by running it for like 20 minutes. I'm getting 3 gallons of water that it's pulling out of the air every single day just to keep my house below 60% humidity. Literally living in the 4 seasons for mold spores. I mean, this is— you can't come up with a better environment. Then on top of that, we're spending all of our time inside. We're not going outside, we're not getting fresh air, and most importantly, we're not getting the immune boosting and anti-inflammatory properties of grounding, sunlight, and fresh air. Now combine that with the mass amino deficiency that we're facing, with the nervous system dysregulation that has a direct impact on our inflammatory markers in our immune system. Chronic stress and chronic cortisol not only depletes you of a bunch of enzymatic cofactors that are required for immune function and foundational nutrient requirements, it also creates this inflammatory loop that I can go to in more detail in another video. But this really, in my opinion, is a root cause to why some people are having such strong reactions to these specific triggers. Why they're getting one-shotted by things that other people with very similar genetic and biological makeup are not as affected by. Obviously, this compounds with the genetic component. Like, for me, I have a genetic deficiency in my alpha-melanocyte stimulating hormone, which is one of the primary immune hormones, and that's also why I love sunlight so much. But we can actually look and see that when people go through a particularly stressful period, they are more likely to get one-shotted by by these pathologies. They're likely to get one-shotted by these pathogens that otherwise wouldn't have as much of an impact on them. I mean, that was the case for me. It caught me in a transition period where I was living a life that was very stressful and it really wasn't aligned with what makes my nervous system feel regulated. I was not living in a space that made my nervous system feel safe. I was not doing the things that kept me regulated. I require a lot of nature. I require a lot of time just processing my thoughts. I require an abundant time in and around water and animals. That's just who I am. It's always who I've been. I tried to ignore that fact. I tried to say, no, I'm gonna lock in. I'm gonna work harder. I have a lot of opportunities. Let me do that. It was stupid. I knew myself and I went against my own intuition. Now there's a lesson in there. The lesson is that if you live a life that is not in accordance With what you believe and what you know to be best for yourself, the cognitive dissonance will cause such a load on your nervous system that you will run your body to the ground. And I've seen this with so many guys who are in a similar position as me, albeit a lot more productive and a lot more Type A and a lot more goal-oriented, of them redlining their nervous system for years only to get this weird random stealth issue that they can't hone in on. And And a lot of it comes down to their mast cells, and a lot of it comes down to histamine, but that is merely a manifestation of the deeper problem. Now, when it comes to solving this problem, it's not either A, fix your nervous system, or B, fix the biological functions that were damaged by this condition. It's a multitude of all of them, right? I made a lot of progress and headway by simply focusing on the biological, by detoxing, by improving my glutathione function and synthesis, by using the sauna, by getting out of that environment. That was absolutely essential, right? Right? And those give me marginal returns. But I was not able to reach those upper echelons of healing, which I'm still in, by the way, without addressing my nervous system and without addressing the patterns that allowed me to get into that negative spiral, getting very close to ruining my life. And I believe this to be a primary driving factor in true health. And we see the tropes, we see the clichés online of like, oh, this Italian grandpa Spends all of his day drinking and smoking with his buddies, and he lived longer than Bryan Johnson. There is truth to that, right? And that is such a big factor, but we're looking at it at a divide that you have to choose one or the other. You have to either be biologically optimized or you have to live your life. You really should be doing both. And honestly, like, that's a meta. You should always take what both sides are doing and combine them to have a unique competitive advantage against both. But in reality, like, I realized that my nervous system was the biggest thing that was holding me And I could see it because when I was in environments that were good for my nervous system, I was able to eat tacos all day and drink beer and just have fun. And I looked better, I felt better, and I was better than I ever was sitting in a room trying to optimize. So I'm sharing this not to give you guys tactical advice— that tactical advice will come later. I'm sharing this to let you guys in on what my realization and experience has been dealing with a chronic condition that I got from from mold exposure. So I'm gonna get into the tactics more now that my brain actually works, but it's really important to preface it with this concept that your nervous system is at the core of so many of your biological processes. There is nothing that is not touched by your thoughts and by your behavioral patterns, and those have to be addressed in any system, in any protocol. It does not matter what it is. If you do feel like you are having issues with mold exposure, I would recommend the first thing you do is get out of that house. I don't care if you have to live in a tent. Just do it. I know it sucks, but nothing is more important than your health. I'll be sharing a lot more stuff related to how I actually dealt with it and the way to go about it. It is relatively sensitive stuff. There's a lot of ways where things can go wrong, so I am being very conscientious with it, and I'm making sure that I'm doing my research before I share anything. But this is stuff that just comes from the heart, and I think it's important to share. Anyway, guys, have a good one.