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

What if I told you that right now, inside every cell of your body, there's a 2-billion-year-old battle being fought that could be the key to your energy, mental clarity, and overall health? In this groundbreaking conversation with biohacking pioneer Dave Asprey, we uncover the fascinating connection between toxic mold exposure and mitochondrial function that's revolutionizing our understanding of human performance. The reality is 90% of chronic fatigue cases trace back to toxic mold exposure. Understanding this ancient cellular battle could be the key to unlocking your peak performance! Gain exclusive access to Gary Brecka’s proven wellness protocols, designed to empower you with peak health, vitality, & mental clarity: https://bit.ly/4ai0Xwg Pre-order Dave Asprey’s book, “Heavily Meditated,” here: https://amzn.to/3E1yDm5 Get Dave Asprey’s books, “Smarter Not Harder,” “Fast This Way,” et al. here: https://theultimatehuman.com/book-recs Listen to "The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey": Spotify: ⁠https://spoti.fi/3CgdAvn⁠ Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://apple.co/4hk9PUw⁠ Connect with Dave Asprey: Website: ⁠https://bit.ly/4hlfyti⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://bit.ly/3E3Aaba⁠ Instagram: ⁠https://bit.ly/3PNsgFe⁠ TikTok: ⁠https://bit.ly/3Wr8Iuk⁠ Facebook: ⁠https://bit.ly/3Wqc6Wa⁠ X.com: ⁠https://bit.ly/3WtQMiB⁠ Thank you to our partners: BODY HEALTH - USE CODE “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: http://bit.ly/4e5IjsV BAJA GOLD - USE CODE "ULTIMATE10" FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3WSBqUa EIGHT SLEEP - SAVE $350 ON THE POD 4 ULTRA WITH CODE “GARY”: https://bit.ly/3WkLd6E STRENGTH TRAINING EQUIPMENT - THE ULTIMATE HUMAN: https://bit.ly/3zYwtSl COLD LIFE - THE ULTIMATE HUMAN PLUNGE: https://bit.ly/4eULUKp WHOOP - GET 1 FREE MONTH WHEN YOU JOIN!: https://bit.ly/3VQ0nzW MASA CHIPS - GET 20% OFF YOUR FIRST $50+ ORDER: https://bit.ly/40LVY4y PARKER PASTURES - PREMIUM GRASS-FED MEATS: https://bit.ly/4hHcbhc AION - USE CODE “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4h6KHAD VANDY - USE CODE “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: https://bit.ly/49Qr7WE HAPBEE - FEEL BETTER & PERFORM AT YOUR BEST: https://bit.ly/4a6glfo Connect with Gary Brecka: Instagram: https://bit.ly/3RPpnFs YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RPQYX8 TikTok: https://bit.ly/4coJ8fo X.com: https://bit.ly/3Opc8tf Facebook: https://bit.ly/464VA1H Website: https://bit.ly/4eLDbdU Merch: https://bit.ly/4aBpOM1 Newsletter: https://bit.ly/47ejrws Ask Gary: https://bit.ly/3PEAJuG Timestamps: 00:00 Intro of Show 04:11 Sense of Purpose and Community for Human Life Extension 06:28 Impact of Spirituality 09:52 Human Body as a Quantum System 18:36 New Book: Heavily Meditated 18:57 Dave’s Experience in Mastering Biohacking and Longevity 22:20 Happiness vs. Safety 30:12 Mitochondria and Feeling of Safety 31:30 MCTs and Fats in Your Coffee 43:45 Psychedelic Mushrooms vs. Medicinal Mushrooms 47:15 Toxins in Coffee 54:13 Living in an Environment with Toxic Mold 1:01:23 Mycotoxin Test for Mold Toxins Inside Your Body 1:04:58 Big Pharma Earning Millions of Dollars a Year for Poisoning Cows with Mold Toxins 1:06:35 Ways to Combat Mold Toxins in Our Body 1:22:15 Resetting Circadian Rhythm 1:33:09 Final Question: What does it mean to you to be an “Ultimate Human?” Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not provide medical advice. It is not intended for diagnosing or treating any health condition. Always consult a licensed healthcare professional before making health or wellness decisions. Gary Brecka is the owner of Ultimate Human, LLC which operates The Ultimate Human podcast and promotes certain third-party products used by Gary Brecka in his personal health and wellness protocols and daily life and for which Ultimate Human LLC and / or Gary Brecka directly or indirectly holds an economic interest or receives compensation. Accordingly, statements made by Gary Brecka and others (including on The Ultimate Human podcast) may be considered promotional in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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 caused problems in the brain.

• 0:20Gary Brecka?

  All driven by this mold toxicity.

• 0:22Speaker 00

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

• 0:26Gary Brecka?

  You literally just blew my mind.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  Oh, there's more. Before I was 30, I had most of the diseases of aging, arthritis, high blood sugar, prediabetes, 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.

• 0:48Gary Brecka?

  So what do you do? What did you do?

• 0:50Speaker 00

  If you have mold, you got to bind the toxins. You got to 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.

• 1:01Gary Brecka?

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

• 1:06Speaker 00

  This is going to shock you, Gary.

• 1:20Gary Brecka?

  Hey, guys. Welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka, 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.

• 2:01Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:20Gary Brecka?

  Thank you so much, man. You know, I 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 your podcast. I want to isolate a couple of those. I loved what you said right before the camera started rolling because he said, well, what

• 3:04Gary Brecka?

  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 norotropics 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 thoughts there. And then, of course, we're going to dive into the mitochondria a little later.

• 3:49Gary Brecka?

  But if you don't mind, and then I also want to get into your new book, Heavily Meditated. I'm halfway through the book now. Thank you for sending me a pre-release copy. 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?

• 4:20Gary Brecka?

  You know, we talked about the Blue Zone studies and how there wasn't really any continuity between diets, but there was continuity in the sense of purpose and sense of community. You know, a lot of those zones don't even have a 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. 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.

• 5:05Gary Brecka?

  She was, I think she was 109 years old in the documentary. Fresh is a fiddle looking too, by the way.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 5:11Gary Brecka?

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

• 5:15Speaker 00

  There's something else is happening in there. It wasn't just that she had purpose. 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 because 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 ourselves.

• 5:48Gary Brecka?

  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? Do they lack authenticity? My wife is very good at that. So talk a little bit about the impact of spirituality, community, meditation.

• 6:32Speaker 00

  I have a quick Rife story for you.

• 6:35Gary Brecka?

  Oh, do you? Okay. I have a good positive Rife story too.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  Oh, cool.

• 6:41Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, very good.

• 6:43Speaker 00

  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, it was pretty bad. And my career was taking off. And I said, okay, I must have Lyme disease. One of the doctors thought that. I had to be really clear.

• 7:13Gary Brecka?

  Sounds like it, by the way.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:23Gary Brecka?

  So in other words, not a tick bite?

• 7:24Speaker 00

  Well, they might've got a tick bite, but they would've 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-

• 7:39Gary Brecka?

  Old school one you held with the-

• 7:40Speaker 00

  Yes, with the-

• 7:41Gary Brecka?

  Lumina-

• 7:42Speaker 00

  Charged gas tube.

• 7:43Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  So this is the kind that radiates through gas. The machines where you hold the handles are called Rife bar 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. Sitting, reading something in the living room, and I thought, I'm just gonna 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.

• 8:25Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 8:26Speaker 00

  That is how powerful a Rife machine could 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.

• 8:49Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  That's not real. So my, my favorite answer for people, when I say, well, it looks like in a study, there's results from this thing.

• 8:58Gary Brecka?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  And they say, well, without a mechanism of action, I can't accept it. I go, no problem. The mechanism is leprechauns.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  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. And however, if you were to try and live as if those aren't real, you're not going to like what happens.

• 9:35Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  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 like 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.

• 10:07Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  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 and 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.

• 10:34Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I would of course believe that.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  Right?

• 10:36Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 10:37Speaker 00

  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, you know, 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

• 11:16Speaker 00

  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 say, "A third of a second, really?" Yeah, if I clap my hands.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  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?

• 11:42Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 11:42Speaker 00

  It's not real.

• 11:44Gary Brecka?

  What's not real?

• 11:44Speaker 00

  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.

• 12:05Gary Brecka?

  Right, right. Drops CF long.

• 12:07Speaker 00

  Fred, our body reserves a third of a second to decide whether it's gonna 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.

• 12:17Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 12:18Speaker 00

  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?

• 12:40Speaker 00

  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.

• 12:53Gary Brecka?

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

• 13:02Speaker 00

  They are the buffer.

• 13:03Gary Brecka?

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

• 13:11Speaker 00

  They're like a firewall for reality. And

• 13:15Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  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?

• 13:32Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 13:33Speaker 00

  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 troubleshoot 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.

• 13:54Gary Brecka?

  Hmm.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  It's called quorum sensing. And they do this simultaneously with photons, with chemicals, with magnetism, and with quantum coherence.

• 14:04Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 14:05Speaker 00

  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."

• 14:19Gary Brecka?

  I like how you said slime molds and then politicians.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  I know. Was that on purpose?

• 14:23Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Depends on the politician, right?

• 14:25Gary Brecka?

  So slime molds and politicians.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  And humans, just to be clear.

• 14:31Gary Brecka?

  That one got me. You got me with that one.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  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.

• 15:01Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  And if you're a human, you either hide in a cave or get a spear, right? Like, all life will do this.

• 15:06Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  So that's fear. These are all F-words. It 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.

• 15:27Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  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?

• 15:52Gary Brecka?

  Function?

• 15:53Speaker 00

  No, like, multi-generational stuff.

• 15:55Gary Brecka?

  Hmm.

• 15:57Gary Brecka?

  Family frequency?

• 15:58Speaker 00

  Fear, food, fertility.

• 16:01Gary Brecka?

  Ah, fertility.

• 16:03Speaker 00

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

• 16:05Gary Brecka?

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

• 16:10Speaker 00

  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?

• 16:21Gary Brecka?

  Hmm.

• 16:22Speaker 00

  Okay, now.

• 16:24Gary Brecka?

  Like most men, I feel like most men think about that.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  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.

• 16:33Gary Brecka?

  Can't wait to tell my wife.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  Exactly. It wasn't your fault. It was your mitochondria's fault.

• 16:37Gary Brecka?

  Can't wait to tell my wife.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  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 gonna eat next? So 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 toxins. So fear, food, fertility, that's kind of dark. But the next one is the most important one, and it's friend.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  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 gonna call it fertility, but it's really intimate love, which is a source of nourishment.

• 17:58Speaker 00

  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?

• 18:25Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 18:26Speaker 00

  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.

• 18:46Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  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.

• 18:59Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, penis.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's happiness.

• 19:00Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  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 twenties, 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.

• 19:28Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  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 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. Cause 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 pounds. Working out for 18 months, six days a week, didn't help me lose any weight at all.

• 20:12Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  And trying wasn't the thing.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  Believing something works wasn't the thing. I just made this, this vow. I am going to measure results. I'm only going to 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.

• 20:38Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  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.

• 20:48Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  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.

• 21:01Speaker 00

  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.

• 21:11Gary Brecka?

  Ketamine.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  Ketamine is, is much safer and, and yeah, less spiritual risk and less medical risk. And I'm not opposed to Ayah. 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

• 21:27Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 21:28Speaker 00

  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 and I tried being wealthy. When I was 26, I made $6 million. These are pre Biden dollars.

• 21:42Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 21:42Speaker 00

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

• 21:47Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:49Speaker 00

  I made and lost it before I was 30. I was in 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 gotta get my energy back. I gotta make my brain work. I need my power back.

• 22:07Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 22:08Speaker 00

  And then I need to reallocate the power so that I can have the opposite of those F words. What do you think the opposite of fear is?

• 22:15Gary Brecka?

  Happiness or safety?

• 22:19Speaker 00

  It's interesting. Different people have different answers to it. And after talking with a lot of people and considering it, some people will say love, some people say safety.

• 22:29Speaker 00

  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.

• 22:59Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 23:00Speaker 00

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

• 23:12Gary Brecka?

  Through meditation or just being or mindfulness?

• 23:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 23:50Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  I actually have two different rings, UltraHuman and Aura on right now.

• 23:55Gary Brecka?

  UltraHuman's different than Aura? I use the Whoop.

• 23:58Speaker 00

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

• 24:10Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  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?

• 24:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 24:43Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 24:44Speaker 00

  It's something is stopping the hardware from working.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  One of my favorite biohacks outside of breath work 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 dollar bag of this will probably last you five years. And it's literally the world's best biohacking secret.

• 25:29Gary Brecka?

  Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  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. And 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

• 25:56Gary Brecka?

  Brain fog.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  It was brain fog. So I went to Dr. Daniel Amen's clinic, 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.

• 26:11Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  I didn't want Adderall. So I, I got the scan. And when I walked back to 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 just, I'll never forget the words. He said, inside your brain is total chaos.

• 26:29Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  You have the best camouflage I've ever seen. I don't know how you're standing here in front of me.

• 26:35Gary Brecka?

  Really?

• 26:36Speaker 00

  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.

• 26:54Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  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.

• 27:05Gary Brecka?

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

• 27:08Speaker 00

  Well, the connection between toxicity and feeling a sense of peace 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.

• 27:24Gary Brecka?

  All driven by this mold toxicity.

• 27:26Speaker 00

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

• 27:29Gary Brecka?

  Or elimination.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  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?

• 27:53Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  And that's a craving and hunger is 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 you know, the bulletproof diet was the first big intermittent fasting book more than 10 years ago now.

• 28:09Speaker 00

  And I wrote that after I hired a shaman to drop me off in a cave all by myself. Cause I knew I ate if I was lonely and I knew that I ate if I was just feeling this sense of craving. So like a loneliness thing. And I was terrified of being hypoglycemic or hangry because I know I was an asshole. If I was hungry. So like if I'm by myself in a cave, I'm going to deal with my loneliness. I'll have no food. And if I, you know, get angry, I'll yell at the walls, right? And I did this. And after four days of not eating, I had so much energy that I climbed the wrong mountain to meet the shaman to pick me up. I ended up walking 10 miles in

• 28:49Speaker 00

  the desert with, I 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'm, 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

• 29:30Speaker 00

  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.

• 29:49Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 29:50Speaker 00

  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.

• 30:03Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  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, you know, 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.

• 30:36Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 30:37Speaker 00

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

• 30:42Gary Brecka?

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

• 30:49Speaker 00

  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 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 Kailash, the

• 31:34Speaker 00

  holiest mountain in the world, and having yak butter tea, and it restored my mitochondrial function. I'm like, what just happened? 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. Wow. Halfway to Mount Kailash, I'm at this little restaurant on a dirt road, and they're cooking the food over yak dung.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  And I asked a Chinese friend who I'd met on the road, can you read this menu? I'm just looking for some collagen because I know from my longevity work, I need collagen to fix my knees, but I don't have any. And he said, well, this, this one says pigs' ears. I said, oh. So I ordered it, and I got a bowl of about 18 cold boiled pigs' ears. Oh. The most horrible thing I've experienced in a long time. And I said, can I have some soup? It's like warmed them up in the soup and. Yeah. The next day I could walk because I just needed the building blocks to make collagen. Right. So you fast forward a few years and I've got Bulletproof Coffee. I'm nothing to Bulletproof. My new coffee company is called Danger Coffee, and it's, it's truly mold free and it has trace minerals added at therapeutic doses. Wow.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  Danger Coffee is my new one, but at the time it was Bulletproof. 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 Pollak. Have you ever interviewed him? Do you know who he is? Have you heard of exclusion zone water?

• 33:21Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  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 1,200 nanometer light. That's called body heat.

• 33:46Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  So body heat plus water plus fat equals a special form of water that allows ATP to form, that allows proteins to fold. Without easy water, your body doesn't work. Sunlight makes easy water.

• 34:01Gary Brecka?

  Not deuterium depleted water.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  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 can move, it's not deuterium.

• 34:22Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 34:22Speaker 00

  So this exclusion zone water.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  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 C8 MCT oil and butter oil. And this is why you have to blend butter and MCT in your danger coffee in order to get exclusion zone water. This is why people talk about drinking vegetable juice. That's also exclusion zone water. It's just probably full of some toxins you might not 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.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  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.

• 35:26Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 35:26Speaker 00

  Mitochondria work better.

• 35:27Gary Brecka?

  Red light and chromophores.

• 35:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:29Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 35:29Speaker 00

  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.

• 35:41Gary Brecka?

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

• 35:47Speaker 00

  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.

• 36:23Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  That's how important this is.

• 36:25Gary Brecka?

  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?

• 36:35Speaker 00

  In order to increase my mitochondria or to, well, the, this is going to 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, so regular water. Now hydration goes up, your brain works better in multiple studies. A gram of sodium is great. It better 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.

• 37:17Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 37:19Speaker 00

  You blend it and you have to blend it for 20 seconds. You can do it with tea, you can do it with coffee.

• 37:24Gary Brecka?

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

• 37:29Speaker 00

  It drove me crazy for years. Like 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.

• 37:38Gary Brecka?

  Ah.

• 37:39Speaker 00

  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, 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 it, you're just like want it at this deep level and it tastes like really good coffee.

• 38:12Gary Brecka?

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

• 38:15Speaker 00

  Yes. So that's how I do it.

• 38:17Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  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. Say, but, but there's calories in the studies, the mice only add water. Like mice don't have espresso machines or they would add espresso.

• 38:39Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  And the reason that you can have some fat during a fast and it won't break the fast, and I, 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.

• 39:23Speaker 00

  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 in danger coffee and from the sodium in the water. So now I've got hydration, I've got exclusions on 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 can eat or not eat, I'm not going to think about tacos. Right?

• 40:04Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  So that creates peacefulness, no wasted thoughts about food, no sense, oh my gosh, I'm starving, I'm going to die if I don't eat, none of that nonsense.

• 40:11Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 40:12Speaker 00

  And...

• 40:13Gary Brecka?

  Think about taking out that big F.

• 40:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:15Gary Brecka?

  You know, and I, yeah.

• 40:16Speaker 00

  If you want peace, don't be hungry.

• 40:19Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 40:19Speaker 00

  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?

• 40:37Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  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 and heavily meditated. There's a way to go in to these altered states. You can use psychedelics, you can not 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.

• 41:21Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 41:21Speaker 00

  And 4,000 people showing up. And during World Biohacking Day, there's something like 80 meetups around the world. 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.

• 41:43Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 41:43Speaker 00

  I spent my life doing that. Like, why was I so mean?

• 41:46Gary Brecka?

  Right, why was I so aggressive?

• 41:48Speaker 00

  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.

• 41:55Gary Brecka?

  Hmm, 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?

• 42:04Speaker 00

  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 tiny drop.

• 42:21Gary Brecka?

  So blending the coffee with a little butter and MCT.

• 42:22Speaker 00

  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.

• 42:45Gary Brecka?

  Hmm. If you want protein to build lean muscle, but without the caloric impact or need to cut, you need Perfect Amino. It's pure essential amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, in a precise form and ratio that allows for near 100% utilization in building lean muscle and no caloric impact. So we build protein six times as much as weight, but without the excess body fat we normally get during bulking. This is the new era of protein supplementation, and it's real. If you want to build lean muscle without having to cut, you need Perfect Amino. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. That's your, that's in your morning, that's sort of, that gets the energy into the body and it removes one of the Fs in mitochondria.

• 43:30Gary Brecka?

  But you also started to talk, for a moment, about the psychedelics. And, you know, I think it's the term psychedelics that throws so many people off, or just throws the, you know, the roadblock up. Because as soon as you say psychedelic, people think LSD, mushroom trip, that I did that in college, I don't want to do that as a way. I think the term microdosing, you know, probably a better term, just because people would experiment with microdosing before they experiment with psychedelics, even if they're microdosing psychedelics.

• 44:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 44:03Gary Brecka?

  But, and, you know, the research that I've read is fascinating. I know you know a lot more about this than I do. But what about the truth or validity to these mushroom coffees, like does and cordyceps and reishi and, and these, these mushrooms that you could actually add to these morning blends? I have certainly had clients that have had very, very positive experiences, particularly with anxiety, with microdosing.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  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, my big, my big neuroscience book, and my, my little, like, like 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.

• 45:18Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  And I'm like, whoa.

• 45:20Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  That was one of those days.

• 45:22Gary Brecka?

  That's kind of cool.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  You don't forget when you see that news, like, wow, like, like, just so much gratitude.

• 45:28Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  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, upregulate BDNF, and then growth and 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,

• 46:14Speaker 00

  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're just like, I'm more dialed in. I feel younger, more focused. So sadly, I haven't seen a lot of results. The, let's see, the Upgrade Cafe in Santa Monica that I opened, I think 2014,

• 46:56Speaker 00

  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.

• 47:07Gary Brecka?

  Really?

• 47:07Speaker 00

  I don't want to ruin coffee with mushrooms. I'll just take a mushroom tincture or a mushroom capsule and enjoy the coffee.

• 47:14Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 47:24Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 47:25Speaker 00

  Like, all that matters is, does it work for you? And are you telling yourself that it works? Or is it actually working?

• 47:32Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 47:33Speaker 00

  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.

• 47:42Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, and there are so many topics 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 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.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  It's worse than that.

• 48:04Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  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 want more coffee in 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 someone turned the lights on. I'm like, oh my God, I love coffee. I'm not allergic anymore.

• 48:39Gary Brecka?

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

• 48:47Speaker 00

  And I, because it was a special thing, I bought really high end, single estate 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.

• 49:08Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  Here's what happens.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  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 and they roast them. The primary mold toxin in coffee is called OTA or okra toxin 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.

• 49:56Gary Brecka?

  Of OTA.

• 49:57Speaker 00

  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 davespry.com that show that this is a heat-stable toxin that survives roasting. It survives brewing.

• 50:17Gary Brecka?

  Wow, it survives roasting?

• 50:19Speaker 00

  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.

• 50:41Speaker 00

  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.

• 51:03Gary Brecka?

  Just clean.

• 51:04Speaker 00

  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 was 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 gonna pull water out of blood

• 51:46Speaker 00

  plasma." Now you get some dehydration. "I'm gonna use it to dilute the toxin, and I'm gonna 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.

• 52:01Gary Brecka?

  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.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  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.

• 52:31Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 52:31Speaker 00

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

• 52:41Gary Brecka?

  So if you have the toxin on the coffee, this OTA, and you, there's no solvent, safe solvent. There's no heat procedure, no boiling procedure.

• 52:53Speaker 00

  There's none.

• 52:53Gary Brecka?

  I'm baffled that it makes it through the boiling process. That's incredible.

• 52:56Speaker 00

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

• 53:04Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  I know there's no mold and there are toxin binding minerals.

• 53:08Gary Brecka?

  I'm a huge fan of both.

• 53:10Speaker 00

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

• 53:14Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  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 like 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.

• 53:37Gary Brecka?

  Right. Very true.

• 53:37Speaker 00

  Right. So that's, that's the whole story. Do you want a discount code for listeners for danger coffee?

• 53:45Gary Brecka?

  We're definitely, I've actually been thinking of the first thing I'm doing is buying this coffee.

• 53:50Speaker 00

  All right.

• 53:50Gary Brecka?

  Can we use like? Gary.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  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.

• 53:58Gary Brecka?

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

• 54:06Speaker 00

  And we got to talk about psychedelics.

• 54:07Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, and psychedelics. Can we talk about mold and then psychedelics? Okay, so let's do mold because 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.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  Oh, cool.

• 54:21Gary Brecka?

  And, and in the VIP Ultimate Humans, you know, my, my group gets to ask, you know, my guests questions directly. And lately, there've been, you know, a lot of people sending in questions about mold toxicity. Now, we treat this in our clinic, but I'm very curious. You know, we use ozone, transdermal ozone. We improve detoxification pathways like glutathione, transfurcation in these people. But, I mean, you had a pretty gnarly journey with it. And so, yeah, how, where did, where did they start? I mean, they get a mold test.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  I'll talk about-

• 54:57Gary Brecka?

  Everything pops red.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  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.

• 55:05Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 55:06Speaker 00

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

• 55:13Gary Brecka?

  I did in college.

• 55:14Speaker 00

  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 rime most of the time. So it turns out places like Phoenix, Albuquerque, San Diego have really bad toxic mold. But I would have nosebleeds 10 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 in flames 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.

• 55:59Speaker 00

  If you or your kid gets strep throat over and over, you have toxic mold.

• 56:03Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 56:04Speaker 00

  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 in a fight. It makes a biofilm. And chronic strep throat is the number one sign that you have toxic mold in your home.

• 56:34Gary Brecka?

  Wow. My youngest daughter has chronic strep throat.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  We've got to get you a dust test. And it's either at her school or it's at your home. It's probably your school because you didn't care if your home.

• 56:46Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 56:46Speaker 00

  And the problem with strep is that if you have chronic strep, your immune system can make something called pandas, which I had. And pandas 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.

• 57:21Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 57:22Speaker 00

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

• 57:26Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 57:26Speaker 00

  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. Frequently bruised, 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.

• 57:54Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 57:55Speaker 00

  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 the dust test.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

• 58:17Speaker 00

  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?

• 58:41Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 58:42Speaker 00

  So I didn't have HIV, but he did give me a mold allergy test because we didn't have a mycotoxin test back then. And I was allergic to eight of the 10 most toxic molds, showing I've 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 leaks from the neighbors.

• 59:02Gary Brecka?

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

• 59:03Speaker 00

  I had mold toxins and I had an allergic response to them, which told me I had them. Yeah, the antibodies. So we couldn't test for the toxins. We could only test for antibodies then.

• 59:12Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 59:13Speaker 00

  And so I had been exposed to saccharobacteris and aspergillus. And, okay, I know that when I moved into this condo that was moldy that I bought, didn't know it was moldy, that suddenly I gained 30 pounds. I'd lost 50 of my 100 pounds. I also am fat again. And my partner at the time had moved in, she also got fat and had emotional reactions that just made no sense. Nightmares and things like that.

• 59:38Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 59:38Speaker 00

  This was toxic mold.

• 59:40Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 59:40Speaker 00

  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.

• 59:59Gary Brecka?

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• 1:00:43Gary Brecka?

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• 1:01:00Speaker 00

  So I went on this path of saying, how do I get rid of this stuff? And it turns out that

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  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 do go to the dust test.com and do an air test. You can go to got mold.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 going to tell you the environment you're in. However, if you've been exposed at work, at school, and schools, especially colleges, and they're just full of mold because no one pays for building maintenance. Right. And all it takes is one water leak to get mold in a building.

• 1:01:53Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

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

• 1:02:06Gary Brecka?

  We do.

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  Okay, is it something everyone can get everywhere or?

• 1:02:09Gary Brecka?

  I don't know if they get it. Tell me where to get it. I mean.

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  So my favorite one is called my mycolab.com.

• 1:02:15Gary Brecka?

  I'm actually gonna write that down. Can I have a pen?

• 1:02:18Gary Brecka?

  Because I want a good mold test to recommend.

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  This is the best.

• 1:02:23Gary Brecka?

  Because my mycolab.

• 1:02:25Speaker 00

  Yep. And the guy who runs that,

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  Andrew.

• 1:02:32Speaker 00

  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 toxicologist.

• 1:02:47Gary Brecka?

  You could have the toxin and have no immune response.

• 1:02:49Speaker 00

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

• 1:02:54Gary Brecka?

  And it's the immune response that's really nasty.

• 1:02:56Speaker 00

  It can be both, because the toxins suppress mitochondrial function, which is going to 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.

• 1:03:19Gary Brecka?

  I'm talking about like zeolite or silica clay.

• 1:03:24Speaker 00

  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. Glutathion is terribly important, save 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 zeralenone. And zeralenone 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 twenties.

• 1:04:08Gary Brecka?

  This water retention.

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  Not just water.

• 1:04:10Gary Brecka?

  Massive.

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  Straight up fat, because estrogen makes you fat. Right? This is why women are squishier.

• 1:04:16Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:04:16Speaker 00

  Fortunately, in women, they have EPA and DHA in their fat, which they're going to give to babies if they have babies. So if nature wants that, 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 zeralenone is so bad. This is going to shock you, Gary.

• 1:04:38Speaker 00

  The pharmaceutical industry will concentrate Zeralinal into a drug called Xerinal 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 Zeralinal get fat on 30% less calories.

• 1:05:00Gary Brecka?

  Really?

• 1:05:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:02Gary Brecka?

  Now. So this is a mold toxin?

• 1:05:05Speaker 00

  It's a mold toxin.

• 1:05:06Gary Brecka?

  That they purposely put into their ear?

• 1:05:08Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 1:05:09Gary Brecka?

  Are you kidding me?

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  It's tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue for poisoning cows. But the big thing here is, if you live with Zeralinal, 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.

• 1:05:45Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:05:46Speaker 00

  Isn't that crazy?

• 1:05:46Gary Brecka?

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

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  Think about it.

• 1:05:55Gary Brecka?

  They literally just blew my mind.

• 1:05:56Speaker 00

  Oh, there's more.

• 1:05:58Gary Brecka?

  And there's more!

• 1:05:59Speaker 00

  This is my favorite topic, so it really affected my life.

• 1:06:02Gary Brecka?

  No, I'm so glad we're talking about this.

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  And this is why danger coffee is mold free, because it matters. It really matters.

• 1:06:09Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:10Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:06:35Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  That your body freaks out when there's mold toxins. Of course it does.

• 1:07:02Gary Brecka?

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

• 1:07:12Speaker 00

  It causes strep to proliferate and it direct, 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 Schallenberger, 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 twenties, I had probably 20% of my available mitochondrial function.

• 1:07:53Speaker 00

  Chronic fatigue syndrome, just so exhausted. And, well, is it any wonder 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.

• 1:08:23Gary Brecka?

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

• 1:08:27Speaker 00

  If you get it from my Michaelad.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.

• 1:08:37Gary Brecka?

  Moldymovie.

• 1:08:37Speaker 00

  Moldymovie. 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.

• 1:08:56Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:08:57Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:09:29Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:09:29Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:09:55Gary Brecka?

  Yes, that is the hub of the wheel. I talk about the hub and the spokes all the time.

• 1:09:58Speaker 00

  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 mymico lab 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 HLA-DR4.

• 1:10:38Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 1:10:39Speaker 00

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

• 1:10:41Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I am.

• 1:10:41Speaker 00

  So people with HLA-DR mutations, we were designed to survive in a world where you're going to invade another village or country. You're going to get shot by an arrow. You're going to 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 going to go home and then go do it again next week.

• 1:11:07Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:11:08Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:11:22Gary Brecka?

  The Vikings.

• 1:11:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. Right? And I have those genes. So that's why my blood would clot within 10 seconds of taking out. When I was in my late twenties, 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. Cause 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,

• 1:12:08Speaker 00

  is glucuronation.

• 1:12:10Gary Brecka?

  Glucuronation.

• 1:12:11Speaker 00

  So calcium D glucarate is a relatively affordable supplement. And glucarate is the second way the liver detoxes after glutathione.

• 1:12:22Gary Brecka?

  Calcium what?

• 1:12:23Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:12:52Gary Brecka?

  Every meal.

• 1:12:53Speaker 00

  It could be every meal, yeah. If you get constipated, back off. 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. 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 a meal,

• 1:13:37Speaker 00

  you won't recycle your bile, you'll make more bile.

• 1:13:39Gary Brecka?

  Ah, it'll bind it.

• 1:13:40Speaker 00

  Yep. And if you have some coffee, I mean, 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.

• 1:14:18Gary Brecka?

  What kind of antifungal?

• 1:14:20Speaker 00

  It's Sporinox.

• 1:14:21Gary Brecka?

  Sporinox.

• 1:14:24Speaker 00

  It's Recanazol is the other name for it. So Flucanazol is for yeast and Itriconazole 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. 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'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.

• 1:14:59Gary Brecka?

  That's what I was gonna say, and we go down the other path.

• 1:15:01Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:15:46Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:15:59Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:16:00Speaker 00

  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 into his clinic in Sunnyvale, California, and said, "Hey, Dave, I'm gonna teach you how to do this." Showed 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."

• 1:16:39Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:39Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:16:48Gary Brecka?

  So Ebu, transdermal, Ten Pass, whatever you can do.

• 1:16:52Speaker 00

  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 can, I could share it. His home in New Hampshire had hurricane damage. And he, I was, 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's causing it. And so he had his house cleaned up. He's added ozone to his clinic as a result of this. And it, it brought him back online, same way it did for me.

• 1:17:37Speaker 00

  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 gonna 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 five milligrams of bio-identical cortisol in the morning and at lunch, and maybe even at dinnertime. Because your body may not be making enough cortisol for you to heal. That was a problem I had as well.

• 1:18:14Gary Brecka?

  For you to heal, I see.

• 1:18:15Speaker 00

  It also depends on your genetics.

• 1:18:17Gary Brecka?

  So you started using ozone?

• 1:18:19Speaker 00

  I started using ozone.

• 1:18:20Gary Brecka?

  Because the nice thing is the availability of ozone now. I mean, back when you were talking about, 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, hmm, this is a little...

• 1:18:42Speaker 00

  Wow, I started using it in 2006.

• 1:18:44Gary Brecka?

  It's an ozone, a toxic gas. And then I started really, you know, going down the rabbit hole and realizing that, you know, it leaves an oxygen molecule, it neutralizes the radical, it's excellent for... And now, like I said, I have a HoCAT, I have a hyperthermic, what does it stand for? Hyperthermic Ozone Carbonic Acid Transdermal Therapy Machine.

• 1:19:07Speaker 00

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

• 1:19:08Gary Brecka?

  Bedroom.

• 1:19:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:10Gary Brecka?

  I have it in my bedroom.

• 1:19:11Speaker 00

  Ozone is just so good at restoring mitochondrial function. 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 give it back.

• 1:19:33Gary Brecka?

  Peroxyde, but the ozone itself has immediate benefits as well, not just the downstream benefits for supporting healthy glutathione, but it has immediate detoxifying benefits. And, you know, every time I get out of the HoCAT, 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.

• 1:20:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:04Gary Brecka?

  It's like, because most of the time you can say awakened state, it's 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 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.

• 1:20:25Speaker 00

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

• 1:20:28Gary Brecka?

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

• 1:20:32Speaker 00

  Mold is so big.

• 1:20:33Gary Brecka?

  That was the one I wanted to get out.

• 1:20:35Speaker 00

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

• 1:20:56Gary Brecka?

  But you feel the pressure, right?

• 1:20:57Speaker 00

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

• 1:20:59Gary Brecka?

  But does it dissipate?

• 1:21:00Speaker 00

  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, you might, some might leak out. It'll sound like you're farting. So, you know, we put it in, and she's like, oh, my gosh, I feel like I just had Adderall. So I'm like, this is so good. And then she looks at me and says, I, I feel like I have to poop.

• 1:21:30Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:21:38Speaker 00

  And she goes, what do I do? And I said, well, try getting on the trampoline.

• 1:21:42Gary Brecka?

  No.

• 1:21:45Speaker 00

  Poor Christine was on the trampoline.

• 1:21:46Gary Brecka?

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

• 1:21:48Speaker 00

  I am.

• 1:21:48Gary Brecka?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:21:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, we laughed about it, like, she's jumping on the trampoline, which of course makes it worse.

• 1:21:54Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:54Speaker 00

  I'm like, I don't laugh, don't laugh, don't laugh. And finally, she goes, you're lying to me. And I go, yeah?

• 1:21:59Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:00Speaker 00

  She got even later, don't worry.

• 1:22:02Gary Brecka?

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

• 1:22:09Speaker 00

  There's one other connection that's biohacking and mold related. It's circadian disruption. When you have mold, your stress hormones get all screwed up. And your ability to regulate your mitochondria with circadian rhythm breaks.

• 1:22:25Speaker 00

  Like I said, I grew up in a basement toxic mold. It affects sleep. I would stay up until 2 AM, 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 mitochondria evolved in the ocean. And so, these are dumb little bacteria.

• 1:23:10Speaker 00

  They have limited sensing of the environment. They're quantum sensing, though. They can pick up each other and things. But they have light receptors called, I want to call them chromophores. I was going to call them photophores. 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. And 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 2 PM because they're eating algae that's benefiting from sunlight.

• 1:23:51Speaker 00

  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 multi-sailor organisms. We're still yoked to that. And inside your eyes, there are about 5% of the 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%

• 1:24:29Speaker 00

  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-

• 1:24:55Gary Brecka?

  For circadian rhythm?

• 1:24:56Speaker 00

  For circadian rhythm, and circadian rhythm controls whether your mitochondria work or not.

• 1:25:00Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:25:01Speaker 00

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

• 1:25:05Gary Brecka?

  How do you control this in your heart?

• 1:25:06Speaker 00

  Well, you want to have dimmer switches and red nightlights. It's dim like candlelight dim in my house after the sun goes down. When I'm in hotels, there's a couple of things that I do. You and I are both wearing True Dark glasses.

• 1:25:19Gary Brecka?

  Yep.

• 1:25:20Speaker 00

  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-

• 1:25:41Gary Brecka?

  For like the manmade light?

• 1:25:43Speaker 00

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

• 1:25:47Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 1:25:47Speaker 00

  And that's because the True Dark 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.

• 1:25:58Gary Brecka?

  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, and I've used these before. And 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.

• 1:26:28Speaker 00

  You're not alone. My company, True Dark, 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 True Dark's on the planet. And it's hard to make these, but we're also the only-

• 1:27:00Gary Brecka?

  I would take them off too.

• 1:27:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. We're also, it's like taking a sleeping pill.

• 1:27:04Gary Brecka?

  It really is like taking a sleeping pill.

• 1:27:06Speaker 00

  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 True Dark 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 counseling headphones for my eyes. And that's what True Dark glasses are. And I'm going to fly to Dubai tomorrow. I will have zero jet lag. Cause 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.

• 1:27:49Speaker 00

  And I will get seven hours of sleep with 90 minutes of deep and 90 minutes of REM. When I land, I get jet lag nowhere on the planet because of True Dark.

• 1:27:57Gary Brecka?

  So when you, when you land, you'll put them on?

• 1:27:59Speaker 00

  I actually put them on, on the airplane. When I, if it's dark where I'm landing, I wear the glasses. So when, before I take off, I say, what time zone when I land is it going to 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 it's, if it's midnight in Dubai, I'm going to put the glasses on, even if it's bright where I am.

• 1:28:21Gary Brecka?

  So you take, I usually take the 12:25 AM flight from Miami. And I fly nonstop to Dubai and I arrive at 11:00 PM. So obviously I'm going straight to bed. So, um, so you would put these on, on the plane before landing?

• 1:28:36Speaker 00

  What you would do then, when you take off, it's actually daytime in Dubai.

• 1:28:41Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:28:41Speaker 00

  So you tell your, your eyes and your digestive system that it's daytime. So what you would do then is just, oh, is it noon in Dubai? No glasses, have a light on on the airplane and eat something, maybe even have some 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.

• 1:29:21Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:29:21Speaker 00

  And then when it starts to get about 6:00 PM in Dubai, you put on the True Dark sleep glasses. And now your body is going, oh, wait, he stopped eating.

• 1:29:32Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:29:56Gary Brecka?

  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.

• 1:30:07Speaker 00

  That will happen.

• 1:30:08Gary Brecka?

  Because I'm a Kindle reader, you know, because I don't do the.

• 1:30:11Speaker 00

  Kindles are better.

• 1:30:12Gary Brecka?

  I don't do the, you know, blue light, the phone at night. It's actually, 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 USC fight. And, you know, all kinds of stuff and all this stimulating stuff. And then I could 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 doing, like 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 cut and paste. And I feel like my brain is relaxed, but I'm alert enough to, to, to study and I fall asleep like really.

• 1:30:56Gary Brecka?

  But if I have those on, you can set a timer and it's from the time I put those on until I have to be laying down is 30 minutes.

• 1:31:03Speaker 00

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

• 1:31:09Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:09Speaker 00

  And this is.

• 1:31:10Gary Brecka?

  By the way, I didn't start this to be like.

• 1:31:12Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:31:14Gary Brecka?

  Both of these are. Things that my audience will love.

• 1:31:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're, they're organic and, and I just, 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 forty years of Zen. We use Trudarks every single time because you can stay in an alpha state for longer.

• 1:31:36Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:31:36Speaker 00

  So like for me, they're necessary and it's one of my smallest companies. This like, I'm not trying to sell these.

• 1:31:43Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:31:43Speaker 00

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

• 1:31:47Gary Brecka?

  Amazing, amazing. Dave, this has been incredible. I've got a ton of questions here from my VIP.

• 1:31:56Speaker 00

  Let's do it.

• 1:31:57Gary Brecka?

  Group. So, so we're going to 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 going to go into the private room now and take some questions from my 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 of hours a month. We do challenges. We all kinds of exclusive content search. 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.

• 1:32:37Speaker 00

  Gary, it's incredible.

• 1:32:38Gary Brecka?

  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, mycotoxin, these pathogens are something that, you know, 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?

• 1:33:09Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:33:11Speaker 00

  It means that you're always in control of your state. In, in Buddhism, there's sort of three, 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?

• 1:33:31Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:33:31Speaker 00

  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 Forty Years' End 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. And to me, that's the ultimate.

• 1:34:09Gary Brecka?

  Wow, that's a great one. Well, I appreciate it, Taven. As always, guys, that's just science.