Dave Asprey on Healing the Cell Danger Response Through Neurofeedback

Introduction to Biohacking and Nervous System Threat Responses 0:00

This is how all biohacking works. Number one is fear. It's run away from kill or hide from scary things. And you do this, and you do this with all of your energy right now. Okay. And after that is food. Eat everything. Because think about it, if you're a single cell bacteria, you don't have time, you can't understand time that takes thinking. All you know is, Something might eat me and I need to have enough food. So life does this without thinking. It's an automated thing and you are a collection of a quadrillion plus little mitochondria pulling your strings and they pull your strings in a third of a second before your brain gets any signal from reality.

So when I'm speaking right now. You think you're hearing me as soon as the sound gets to your head, but it turns out when the sound hits your ear, there's a third of a second delay before your auditory processing gets it. And that's when the mitochondria get to decide whether there's a threat, whether they're going to show it to you, and how you're going to feel about it. This is Dr. Talks. So I'm here today with Dave Ashbery, who is an absolute expert in biohacking, neurofeedback, nervous system regulation, which is a massive topic that we talk about all the time.

So I'm really excited to have you today. You're talking about some of my favorite things on earth that a lot of people don't know about. So I'd love it if you help me tune in how nerdy you want to get in my answers. All the way, completely down the rabbit hole. So danger response, mass cells. Okay, let's go. All right, we can do that. How about catecholamines? You like catecholamines? All right. Well, how about we just do a little bit to influence my catecholamines. This is about half of what I do in a day.

And I'm on a plan to live to at least 180. And I'm not joking about that number. The reason is that our current best is 120-ish. So why can't we do 50% better in the next hundred years? I've had gene therapy that makes you nine years younger. I reset the central aging lock in my brain using stem cells. And I've written a major New York Times book on longevity. And I'm between 15 and 20 years younger than my calendar age, depending on which test you want to believe. And I used to weigh 300 pounds and have chronic fatigue syndrome and toxic mold poisoning and Lyme disease and Bartonella and high lead and high mercury and arthritis since I was 14 and high risk of stroke and heart attack before I was 30. And really bad brain fog in my mid 20s as my career was taken off.

Oh, and at 26, my testosterone was lower than my mom's and my thyroid was almost undetectable. So if I can do this, it's probably going to be really easy for you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, mind if I just kind of get some get some utropics in there? What do you think? Dive in. Let's see it. Hmm. For all those people that can't take one pill at a time. Did those people not drink beer in college? I have no idea. I talk to people all the time like, they're like, it tastes bad. Those herbs taste so bad. And I go, put a shot glass and make it disappear.

Mm-hmm. So Q-top catecholamines, you've got all kinds of things in there. All right. I've had mast cell activation issues since I was a kid and didn't know it. I also lived in a basemode toxic mold, which will set off mast cell activation stuff. It also messes with your vagal nerve. I've had high vagal tongue. Didn't know it my whole life. Low cortisol variant of POTS. And if you're new to this, this means that you see stars when you stand up and you're at higher risk of passing out. And the taller you are and the more muscular you are, the higher your risk of this.

This is why football players pass out more often than their fans. But not knowing any of this stuff. For me, even growing up, it was just a struggle to pay attention. I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, ADHD, ODD.

Dave Ashberyu2019s Health Journey and Longevity Goals 4:20

You know that one? Oh, yeah. I've got so many kids that I work with with ODD. Yeah. Oppositional Defiant Disorder. It's that Rage Against the Machine song. F you, I won't do what you told me. It just runs in your head all the time. It makes you a good entrepreneur, though. And I had OCD and like a little bit of stutter, all that stuff. And my career though, took off anyway. So I'm about 26. I make $6 million in Silicon Valley, the company that held Google's first two servers. And I lost it when I was 28, but that sucked.

But during that time, My brain was not doing well. I bought disability insurance because the doctor said I was fine. Like, I get nosebleeds all the time. My brain doesn't work half the time. I'm so exhausted, but no one believes me. So I did what any good entrepreneur do. I decided to get an MBA from Wharton while I'm at a tech startup. Double down. Yeah, double down. Oh, if it hurts, make it hurt more. I don't know what I was thinking, but I started failing out of my classes. So I read Dr. Danny Amen's first book.

And I said, went to a psychiatrist trained by Dr. Amon said, I want to get tested to see what's going on in there. And he looks at me and goes, oh, tech bro wants Adderall. I know this one. I didn't want Adderall. I just wanted to not fail in my classes. And I knew something was wrong. And a lot of people who've had some kind of mast cell activation, which is behind all of CFS, as far as I'm concerned, they no one believes you. So this guy didn't believe me. And I got my brain scan. And I came back and he's kind of white.

And he looks at my skin, he looks at me and he says, Dave, inside your brain is total chaos. You have the best camouflage I've ever seen. I don't know how you're standing here in front of me. And I thought, finally, someone believes me. This is fantastic. And he called me an interesting referral in his notes, the last thing you ever want to be. But for me, it was this huge relaxing moment. Because number one, I felt seen and believed. And number two, I have a hardware problem. All this time, there was a part of me that thought, I'm not trying hard enough, I'm not pushing hard enough, maybe I'm just dumb.

I'm not dumb, right? But you start questioning yourself because you do what seems to work for other people and it doesn't work. But then the thing that matters most is that camouflage comment. Because you think I'm the only one with camouflage? One of the people who put $90 million in my last company, Bulletproof, I got nothing to do with Bulletproof anymore, Danger Coffee is my new company. But one of the VCs wrote an article. He didn't even tell me this. And he said, two months after meeting Dave and doing what he told me, I walked outside, sat in my BMW on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley, and I started crying.

And I'm like, number one, venture capitalists don't cry. This is hard to believe. But number two, in this article, he says, I never told anyone, but my entire adult life, I have struggled with crippling brain fog and exhaustion. And I never told anyone. And the reason I started crying is this was the first time in my adult life that I went through the day without having an energy crash. And this guy is a major VC and a good friend. And understand, and I'm also a regenerative farmer in one of my lives.

There are some species of animals like cats. If a cat's sick, it'll like run away and die in a hole somewhere and you can't find it. But my sheep, if one of them's sick, they'll hide it because they know that if they're a little bit sick or a little bit injured, they'll get kicked out of the flock. And we're more like sheep. So we hide when we're sick until we really hit the wall. And this is why I think a lot of your patients, a lot of people who seek you out, they're desperate. because they think they're the only one.

But if they were to look around and we were all showing that, you'd find that probably 20% of people are dealing with serious and maybe higher serious crippling issues that they don't show. In my longevity book, which is called Superhuman, I found some statistics. 48% of people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial dysfunction. And everyone over age 40 has mitochondrial dysfunction. We just call it aging. So what does that have to do with catecholamines and all the other neurotransmitters and mitochondrial things?

Tell me what you want to hear, man. Like, let's talk. We talk about neurofeedback, stress response, whatever you want. Well, I mean, just to unpack some of the things you said, like immediately you said, grew up in mold. You're having nosebleeds and going, okay, we've got colonization in the sinuses of mold. Pandas. Pandas. From the strep. Yep. Absolutely. And I mean, I've done a thousand plus labs on autoimmunity in the brain. Yep. Those glial cells are a pain in the ass, right? If you're exhausted, fog you're feeling off and nothing you've tried has helped, it could be deeper.

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Mold, Mast Cells, and Chronic Illness Root Causes 10:20

Man, but here's something that's interesting that's not published anywhere, because it's just me looking for patterns. I ran a hundred tests for kids that had diagnoses of PANDAS. So this is a strep-mediated immune response creating inflammation to the brain where these kids end up with ODD, OCD, depression, tics. They can be diagnosed with Tourette's or all these other things. Ninety-eight out of the hundred came back with urine mycotocins. 100%, that's completely real. What's happening is that environmental mold, and I lived in a basement that had been flooded and hadn't been remediated.

It was the late 70s, early 80s. We didn't know anything about that. It looked pretty good. So I was getting these nosebleeds, which are a clear sign of pretty strong mycotoxin exposure, mold exposure, and mast cell activation, which is what's causing the nosebleeds. So I had this, but no one knew. If you think about what penicillin is, it's a tiny extract of mold. And look what it does to bacteria. So fungus is a threat to bacteria. So the fungus that I was breathing made the strep that's present in most of our sinuses in small amounts, it made it feel threatened.

And when bacteria feels threatened, It makes biofilm and becomes much more aggressive. So I had strep and I had strep every single month for 15 years. I was on antibiotics. And they took my tonsils out, which was a bad idea. And the next week I got a sinus infection instead of strep throat. And you realize the bacterial toxins were causing problems and the mycotoxins caused the bacterial toxins. So anytime I see a parent and I've worked with the autism community and so many sick parents with sick kids and it's like, look, if your kids have chronic strep throat, number one, you have to do something about it because it will affect them neurologically if you let it keep going.

Number two, if it happens more than once, you have mold. And you've got to find it. And I've worked with mold testing companies with air filtering companies, I started a company called home biotic that makes a probiotic spray, you can spray around a house that that helps to minimize mycotoxins, because these are soil bacteria that eat mycotoxins. I kind of think mold personally, because I've had it several times in my life that has just taken me out. But now, doing the kind of things that you talk about, When I moved to Austin three years ago, I lived in a house for the first four months, finally had it tested, 42 water leaks in the house, complete mold bomb, all the toxic species.

You know how much collagen dysfunction I had? None. You know how much weight gain I had? None. So you can build a body that is resilient in a way you never have been to the point that I moved out, I never got sick from it. I noticed the mold in the closet. This is ridiculous. I did all the things you do for mold, and I still have some microtoxins in my system from that. But when you train your body to not have that panic response when you smell mold, it changes your life. And I've done that work as well.

So my cells work better. My mitochondria works better. My cell membranes work better. My brain has been trained. And my stress response is under conscious control. And anyone who just feels like if I smell mold or even smell perfume, and I've been in both of those situations, I have to run away because literally I'm going to die. Actually, I got a quick story for you if you have time. Before I figured all this out, I was working for some kind of tech company in England. I decided on this one Saturday I had time, I'm going to take the underground, the tube or whatever they call it, not the tube, just the subway over there.

So I'm in it. I'm like, wow, this is not good. So number one, if you have mold or you have MCAS or cell danger response, your vestibular system is probably jacked, which means your body doesn't know where it is, which means riding on a train or a car can be a little disorienting. So I'm sure you had some of that, but the air is full of mold. And I walked down this long hallway that just smells like the worst mold ever. Like I'm going to die. So I took a deep breath. I'm like, I'm going to hold my breath.

And I just walk. I start walking faster and faster and faster. And then you get this signal like you're going to die. So I'm taking the escalator like two stairs at a time. And I hear this kind of ghostly voice. It's like, would the gentleman charging the escalators, please stop. And I'm like, how would you buy an escalator on a credit card? Because charging in English, you know, but my brain was so jacked up and I was just so stressed I went outside and I sat for like an hour on a bench and just the world was spinning not from lack of oxygen from mold toxins and If that happened today, I'd be like this is not really good for me.

I'll take some charcoal later So teaching your body to chill teaches the cell danger response to chill But it will never chill if you haven't solved the underlying problems like mineral deficiencies or like oxalate One of the things I'm doing for my mineral deficiencies is, this is danger coffee I'm drinking, not wine, and it has a high dose of trace minerals in it that can actually increase electrical activity in cells and it helps to remineralize bones. I've tried being a vegan, a raw vegan. I've tried all the diets, so I came up with the Bulletproof Diet.

Low on plant toxins, man-made toxins, and fungal toxins, with the things that allow your nervous system to heal. And people lost millions of pounds on the Bulletproof Diet. I did that because when I was raw vegan, I shattered three teeth because I was mineral deficient. I had to have surgery on my foot to repair an old yoga injury, and they cut through the bone. That was a wake for it. And well, I mean, it was numb. I couldn't feel anything. But you hear the bone saw. It's like. And Dr. Ali Sadra, the surgeon, he looks at the nurse and goes, I'm having a hard time getting through the bone.

Like, is this guy even human? And afterwards, he says, Dave, I did the same surgery on someone half your age, and their bones cut like butter. What are you doing? Well, I take something called vitamin DAKE, which is a specific mix of D, A, K, and E in the right ratios, vitamin DAKE.com. I do that with the multi minerals formula on the site. And I do my daily coffee. And it's to the point that I have an armored skeleton. And what does a really strong bone density mean for your metabolic function?

I mean, if you have strong bone density, not only are you not going to break bones or be sawed through, but your nervous system is going to feel calmer and it's going to be healthier. I run tests on people constantly, hair tissue mineral tests, organic acid tests, and people that are living in just today's society, much less mold toxicity. You can see plummeting numbers in sodium and potassium because their body's burning right through it. Yes. You know, having strong bone density is a great marker that you don't have insulin resistance and that you have a working metabolism and you won't get diabetes or cancer or heart disease, which all come down from diabetes.

So many people with mold and with toxins end up going down the path of pre-diabetes that I had when I was in my late 20s because our metabolisms can't work because there's fat soluble toxins in our cell membranes, because there's crystals in our cell membranes that stop them from working. So unpacking all that's hard because on one hand, you have poisons from bacteria in your sinuses or in your gut. You have poisons from your environment coming in. And most likely, if you lived in mold for a while, you have on board mold infections as well.

So you're thinking, this just feels like everything messes with me. But understanding that those are the areas that we get the mold out of the body, get the other toxins out of the body, stop them coming in and then do the restoring work on the biology. All of the biohacking work that I use starts inside the cells and works outwards, but you get to the nervous system quickly, and you've got to retrain the nervous system if the body felt like it was under threat from toxins. Can I walk you through the model I use in biohacking that explains cell behavior and nervous system behavior?

I would absolutely love it because one of the things that I talk about within my note is it pre-populates for me so that all my practitioners make sure that they don't miss it. You must live in a safe environment. And we've got several checkboxes, one being air, water, food, hygiene, all these things. But the next box is once you have this environment that is safe, You have to feel safe in the environment, which so many people don't understand that. They're like, well, if it's safe, I should feel safe.

I'm like, not if you've lived in mold and not if you've been in an unsafe environment, it imprints on you until you do something about it. So take us through. All right. Along the way to walking through how all life makes these decisions about stress. One of the biggest learning points in my life that led me to start my neurofeedback clinic in Seattle was first personal development thing I ever did on 30. And they were doing that primal therapy where people hit pillows. And I don't want to hit a pillow, but I couldn't stand the sound of it.

Environmental Toxicity, Biohacking, and Mineral Support 19:40

It pushed some old button for me. And as a hyper rational in my head Asperger's computer software guy, I'm sitting there with some very wise practitioners. And they said, well, maybe you can just sit here. So there's three women with like weighted blankets holding me down. I'm like, I'm not feeling good. And they're like, well, what do you feel? So I feel pissed off because this is stupid. Right. A little bit of ego there. And then they said, you must feel something out. And so when my stomach feels a little weird and and they said, great, there's a name for that.

What is it? And they said, it's fear. And I looked straight in the eye and I said, There's nothing here to be afraid of, therefore it's not fear. And this woman who's 84, who's the founder of the American Pre-Imperanatal Psychology Association, she looks me right in the eye. She goes, Dave, fear is an emotion. It doesn't have to be rational. And I was like, oh, now I have to learn all these emotions? Good God. So I did all the work to do that. But as a teaching thing for all of our listeners, it's so important to understand your body can feel fear for reasons you do not comprehend.

And it turns out though, the body is hyper rational. It just doesn't see the world the way you do. So here's what all life does. And this means if you're a single cell bacteria or a fungus, or you're a tree, or like some kind of weasel, like a politician, doesn't matter, or even a human. Number one, and this is how all biohacking works. Number one is fear. It's run away from kill or hide from scary things. And you do this, and you do this with all of your energy right now. And after that is food.

Eat everything. Because think about it, if you're a single cell bacteria, you don't have time. You can't understand time. That takes thinking. All you know is Something might eat me and I need to have enough food. So life does this without thinking. It's an automated thing. And you are a collection of a quadrillion plus little mitochondria pulling your strings. And they pull your strings in a third of a second before your brain gets any signal from reality. So when I'm speaking right now, You think you're hearing me as soon as the sound gets to your head, but it turns out when the sound hits your ear, there's a third of a second delay before your auditory processing gets it.

And that's when the mitochondria get to decide whether there's a threat, whether they're going to show it to you and how you're going to feel about it. So they are rational, but they're like, is it scary? Is it scary? And they don't understand anything. They don't understand there's a security guard or that you're safe. They just felt unsafe. And they're very fast. The good news is wean on a hot stove. You pull your hand away. No one on earth has said, you know, that feels pretty hot. I think I'll pull my hand away now.

what happens you jerk your hand away and then you take credit for it but some someone else a different consciousness that has a different view of the world did this and this is the part of you that's afraid of mold so fear food these are all f-words the next thing that all life has to do to stay around forever that's an f-word what you don't know this one i think you do fear food Fertility. Ah, okay. Almost got you. Fear of food, fertility. So, before you have a chance to think, is it scary, can I eat it, and can I hump it?

Okay, I just explained everything you've ever done that you're ashamed of in your life. These are mitochondrial behaviors that happen before you can think, right? And a thinking human who has a working nervous system most of the time has the prefrontal cortex ability to say, OK, I'm not going to say the mean things because I got triggered. I'm not going to eat all the Twinkies except that one time. And I'm not going to go on the date that's going to be really good, but I know it's going to be really bad for me.

All these things that we do, it's because your body convinced you to do them. And this is very dark, except the fourth F word is friend. And this applies to all life. And this means you support your own species and you support the world around you. And you do it by default. But you only do it when you're not afraid, at least not very afraid. There's enough energy that goes into the fear bucket and the fear bucket is small enough that it flows over. Am I nourished? And no, if you have mold, you're not nourished because things are stealing your minerals and other things.

And then is there appropriate levels of love and touch in my life and sex if you're an adult? And these are necessary for nourishing you and making you feel safe and complete in the world. And then do I have a community and friends? And disconnection is a major source of we'll call it emotional toxin. And the final F word that is where my work is today is forgiveness. And maybe for animals, they don't have to forgive because they don't really have brains, most of them, but they have evolution. So forgiveness is how humans reset the fear so that the bucket is smaller.

And at the same time with biohacking, you have a lot more energy. So now I can handle this. I've got, you know, who knows what I might do? That's why it's called danger copy. Danger, who knows what I might do? Like all the good stuff, right? So less fear. Appropriate nourishment, which means you have less toxins as well. I have so much room for my relationship now. I don't yell at my wife and kids anymore. And now I have room to do something that matters in the world for my community. And at the end of the day, I could still meditate or work out or something because my buckets are all full.

And all life does this. And it is entirely rational. It is before you can think. And it's without any context. Your cells don't know there's a refrigerator. Your cells don't understand there's no reason to be afraid. They were already afraid because they mapped a pattern. Even worse, most mycotoxins, these mold toxins, they are very small molecules that look a lot like cholesterol. So your immune system doesn't know how to see them very well. And that means that you can get an immune response to the mold fragments themselves or to all sorts of other chemicals.

You want to explain multiple chemical sensitivity? Your body is looking for the threat because it knows something is bothering you. This is why when you first get into mold, you'll have very vivid nightmares. This is your body telling you there's a threat and I don't know what it is. Like, let's figure out what it is. And so if you have nosebleeds and nightmares and frequent bruising and dark circles on your eyes, move. You can avoid a lot of pain. But it all makes sense when you understand these biohacking principles that these F words, these five F words, they drive everything.

Getting out of this involves the biochemistry, the testing, but it also involves learning how to generate an internal sense of safety. And this is where neurofeedback and some of the other technologies come. And when you can generate safety right here in your chest, it's not a thought, it's a feeling. Not only will your kids or the people around you feel safe, but your cells will feel safe and you can calm them down. And this has been a major part of my recovery. There's the biological side, but you can take someone in mold, get rid of all the toxins, at least as many as you can.

And you give them a toxin binder, you test their pee, there's no toxins. Great, they're healed. Then you have them do some emotional release work. And then you test their P and it's full of toxins the body wouldn't let go of. Yep. So these go together and understanding that your body's running those F words all the time. It means it's not your fault. You didn't choose it. It's not a moral effort. It's not a lack of trying. It's not because you're dumb. It's not because you're high strung. I've thought all these things about myself.

It's because your hardware isn't working right and your body has its own consciousness that is not you. It doesn't even like that you're in there because your body wants to do the job to keep itself alive. And every time you do something that it didn't want you to do, it's going to manipulate you with fear or with stress or with hunger or lust or all the seven deadly sins are just mitochondrial behaviors remapped for religion. What do you think? I think it's very well spoken, broken down to be very understandable because most every client I'm working with, they are describing all of these things without using the words you're using.

I'm irritable. I don't feel like myself. I react to my entire environment. My libido is gone. I don't like to be in social situations anymore. my mind is constantly ruminating to where I can never meditate, pray, feel safe, feel comfortable. So all of their responses to me are telling me, at the core, they feel unsafe, and they probably are unsafe in the environment they're in, which may have put them here, or They were there 20 years ago and they still have colonizing mold in their body. If we want to go down the mold road, but the mold road also allows for the dysfunction of the immune system that leads to bacterial dysbiosis, like you described with the strep in the nose, parasites, other fungal infections, and the road just keeps going.

And the farther they go down at the longer they pattern themselves and these behaviors, the harder it is to get out of it. And you mentioned you were angry. when you first went into this and every male I work with one they don't want to do any brain work. It's just kind of a universal I'm male I get it I didn't want to do a lot of that either but they get so angry like they release all of this this anger

The Five Fu2019s: Fear, Food, Fertility, Friends, and Forgiveness 29:20

and I go you know that's just your body saying it's just a defense mechanism it is the defense mechanism of it doesn't feel safe to let go of the defense mechanisms. So then men react in anger. One of the women I work with, it's not anger, but it's all the emotions are coming out. So it's just different based off of the person, but they it gets uncomfortable. I've seen people have detox reactions, detox reactions from breathing. Mm hmm. Just from deep breath, I will tell you the first time, many, many years ago, when I started doing breath work, and I have a lot written in my next book called heavily meditated about breath work and neurofeedback and technologies for resetting the nervous system.

But first time I just held my breath empty in a box breath, I had a panic attack. Now, as a man, I wouldn't acknowledge it was a panic attack. I just had this really strong sense of doom and dread in my chest, and I told to shut the F up. But I'm like, why am I scared? Because my lungs were empty for one second. I'm like, OK, I can train myself through this, and I can do one breath a minute kind of things now. And learning to be calm in the nervous system is a skill. and mold makes it so hard. And I can think of a couple times, and you know about mold rage, people are totally normally go into the wrong kind of mold.

One of the worst cities for mold is San Diego. I think it's because the military base there has who knows what chemicals and EMFs and also mold there is hyper aggressive and you got dry, dry desert air. So there's lots of ACs and you got cold, moist air coming in. So I check into a hotel room, And I'm in there for a half hour and decided to go get some lunch. And my contractor, who's getting some work done on my house, called me. And I was like, is someone trying to take advantage of me because I'm on that?

They want to charge 10 times what it actually cost to do something. So I just got so I'm like, you know what? Tell them I will burn the house down. And I was like, what just happened? And I'd done enough work to almost laugh at myself. And I called him up. I apologized. I was like, all right. I got some work. I go into the hotel room. And I stand on the bed and around the register, black slimy mold, probably stacking, I guess. So all right, that for me is a sign. So if I notice that my brain just went to nothing, or that I'm super angry, I look for an environmental cause instead of a moral failing.

Right. Another time, I noticed that there's some kinds of areas, I used to live in a very moldy environment on Bank of Ireland, where the soil has been disturbed by lots of heavy industrial machinery. The mold is much more aggressive. And where it's just a normal forest, it's not so bad. So I'm riding my bike with my kids by a quarry, which has been disturbed. Same thing. And all of a sudden, I'm yelling at the kids for riding their bikes. We're there to ride bikes. And when I caught myself, I'm like, oh, man, all right, guys, I apologize.

Like, that was not me. So just owning it and recognizing it's just because my body just lost its mind, but it wasn't a choice. And it wasn't because I didn't try. It's because the voice gets so loud in your head. And this doesn't happen to me anymore at all. And it took a lot of healing work, both the emotional, the neurofeedback, and it took getting the toxins out. And it's to the point now that if I am re-exposed to toxins, I don't have a response anymore. I still want to bind the toxins. I don't want them in my body.

But just to understand, if you feel really guilty about something that you said to your partner, Some of you said to your kids, just own it, whether you're a man or woman, just say, you know what, sometimes stuff in the environment gets in the way, and I'm sorry. And just say, I'm not proud that I did that, and I understand why, and I'm working on it. Owning it that way, Prevents you from taking mold trauma and handing it off to your kids Because your kids don't have to have mold for them to hand it to their kids if you had a moldy brain and you're raising your kids and If you do have a moldy brain and you're raising your kids understand You are working twice as hard or ten times as hard as everyone else and you look the same And you're doing this because your cells don't make enough energy.

These mold toxins are they poison the membrane in your mitochondria that are responsible for making energy. So willpower takes energy. You're working on parenting, which takes the most willpower and you have half the energy. So no wonder it's really stressful and it's fixable and it makes life a lot easier. Absolutely. I tell people when you when you feel not yourself, look for something. Like blame your partner, right? No, we're not going there. But we'll often do that. We will. Yeah. No, you know, if you have a runny nose when you're eating food at a restaurant, there's something going on.

It's becoming aware of self. But I like where you're coming from, because it's not becoming aware of self and blaming self or thinking that there's something wrong with me. It's going, oh, there's something going on. If it's mold, let's take a binder when we leave. If it's once we're well, once we're strong, once we're healthy, and we can get to that point. Because I also see people to get stuck in the fear mode of mold they they they're running from mold all the time and it's it's Controlling their lives once they have a little bit of energy back and then that's when we know we need to get into the forgiveness section of yeah Yeah, I've I've been there once I got my brain back It is so precious to have a working brain that you will do anything to keep it.

And people who've always had a brain that works kind of OK, they don't mind having a few drinks, doing things like MSG or NutriSweet or whatever. And like, yeah, whatever. It's always within 30% of normal. And if you just got back to 50% and you were at 10%, you're going to fight with every ounce of your being to stay present, to stay focused, to have your brain work, to remember stuff. And it's scary to think it might go back. And developing self-compassion is the hardest thing. And when people come to my five-day neurofeedback program in Seattle, it's a very high-end, executive thing.

We've developed technology, our own EEG amplifiers and software, and a process called the reset process, which is about permanently editing a trigger out of your meat network, your ego, your mitochondria. So if what's really happening in reality is something happens, your body senses it, your body does really rapid threat analysis goes probably a threat and then sends a threat signal. Well, if you meditate, and you're like, Okay, what they taught me in the monasteries in Tibet, allow the feeling to wash through you notice the feeling, do not react to the feeling.

You have time to do that. You have kids. You have a job. You have stuff to do. It's not effective from an energetic perspective. It's much better than reacting. But it's expensive. And it requires constant vigilance. What if there was a way to go in and tell the mitochondrial network, you don't have to do that anymore? So the next time the situation arises, you don't have to let the feeling wash through you because you didn't get a feeling. You just saw reality. And this has been the major thrust of my work.

For 10 years, I've been doing this. I've had more than 2,000 entrepreneurs, pro-athletes, and celebrity people come through. And the learnings from this around forgiveness are profound. And that's why I wrote, heavily meditated, which is my new book. And this is all the things you can do that are faster than meditation. It includes meditation, just ways to accelerate it, as well as the crown jewel of the program. This is a $16,000 program. Pour a little bit more if you want to have ketamine as an optional add-on.

Ketamine makes neuroplasticity happen, helping you repair mold toxin in your brain. Once the toxin is out, if you have dysfunction the way I did. So It's called the reset process. And it's a structured meditation thing. You can do it without neurofeedback. It's better with it that allows you to say, all right, how does my body react when I'm involved? How does my emotional system react? And then what's the opposing thing? So you imagine like you draw one of those sine waves. Well, if this is the reactive thing, there must be a pattern that's the opposite of that.

And if you can just show the body in the right order, these things, they cancel each other out and they don't just cancel out for that one time. They cancel out for your response system in the future. So what you're going to find when you read, heavily meditated, or if you go to 40 years of Zen is there's a real important question. You're feeling unsafe around mold. What's the first time you ever felt that way? It wasn't the mold. You felt unsafe when you were two and someone almost dropped you, or when you were seven and someone bullied you, or a coach yelled at you.

These are frankly dumb things. But they left a mark on your nervous system when you were little. And so your nervous system being stupid and fast, and your brain being very smart but very slow compared to your nervous system, well, there's going to be a mismatch. And that mismatch is called a lack of congruence. And a lack of congruence is uncomfortable and scary. So if you think one thing and you feel another, You get uncertainty, right, and then people can sense it in you as well. And the act of healing is get rid of all the toxins, make your body work the way it was meant to work.

Make sure you're eating the right foods and all of that. But once that happens, to bring congruence in, you either change your thoughts, Maybe that person who feels scary actually is and you need to run away from the narcissist. That's okay. Right. Or maybe that person wasn't scary and you're going to change either your mental framing or you're going to change the reactivity of your nervous system. So you're in congruence all the time. Another word for congruence is consciousness. And another word for that is safety.

Neurofeedback, Resetting Triggers, and Emotional Regulation 39:20

You can generate a field of safety so strong in yourself that your cells will listen and your kids will feel it and your partner will feel it and everyone in the room will feel it because you finally brought yourself into alignment. And this is why healing from mold and metals and mast cells and cell danger response, it's so critical because it's very hard to achieve a feeling of peace if you haven't done that work as well. extremely well spoken. I've used neurofeedback, limbic, somatic, EMDR, talk therapy with clients.

I love all those, I've done them all. Get people to go to experts in each one of those things. And I can say that what you just said, you can do all the meditation, therapies, all of these longer term things, which I think you still should do. Yeah. And they give you exercises and they give you ways to help yourself. But there's something about adding neurofeedback in and resetting those mechanisms from a brainwave perspective in the brain that you just, unless you have time to be a monk in a monastery, you just have a really hard time getting to here in the United States.

And I've had people come in into my clinic and they've done an hour long session once, twice a day for a couple of weeks. And you see shifts in the cell danger response that I can't find in any other modality alone, because you'll see somebody that's reacting to every food they eat, reacting to the air they breathe, reacting to the water they drink, and it reduces by 50% in a week with neurofeedback. And it's an incredible flip. Like you said, I just can't find anything else. When you add those other pieces in, the ketamine for the neuroplasticity, Now it's not just during that week.

It becomes habit. One of the things you can do with neurofeedback is you can show the brain how to regulate itself. Teach it a state that it doesn't know naturally because of toxins or fear or trauma, whatever it is. And it's profoundly powerful. And I've recommended this for many years. It's important that you find a good practitioner because I've seen, especially some of the kind of pop-up instant training things where people who aren't well trained do nerve feedback and I had one guy ruin my sleep for six months.

One electrode misplaced or loose with a very powerful clinical grade stuff that I work with can give you brain fog. So you really want to work with someone who knows what they're doing or is using a system that helps the brain stay in certain states. And when you combine neurofeedback at the same time with a structured meditation practice, which is the core of 40 Years of Zen, it's called 40 Years of Zen because, like you said, you could meditate for an hour a day every morning for 40 years to get the same brainwaves that you can do in five days with that form of neurofeedback.

And the visualizations and the meditations are as important as the neurofeedback. And I recommend anyone listening, do an hour, once or twice a week of neurofeedback. It will shift things. And to do the full release things I'm talking about that's deeper than EMDR, that's the reset process. And I'm giving it away and heavily meditated, even though it's the core of the protocol at 40 years in, because it's so important for people to just be able to let go of it. There's another new idea in heavily meditated that I think you'll resonate with.

And it's something I'm bringing into the world of biohacking and the world of mold. It's called bicep. So I thought you'd like it because by the way, that's caffeine. There we go. It's called bicep, but not actually biceps. It stands for brief, intentional, conscious exposure to pain. Now, you can say, what do you mean? Like, that sounds like some kind of weird masochistic thing or something. But if you look throughout human history, Monks used to whip themselves. It's called self-flagellation. And they used to think, what a bunch of weirdos.

They must hate themselves. That's not what they were doing. Or you look at some of the indigenous traditions in North America. There's sun ceremony where they're piercing themselves and doing these intense things. Or people get tattoos when they're feeling stressed. How many more people deal with live tattoos? There's a lot of people that come in that that they are one way walk into mold and they're completely different tattoos being a part of it also searching for adrenaline doing crazy things.

Exactly. I'm gonna walk you through how to fix that. So tattoos are bad for you, by the way. I got this when I was like 49. It's the only one I'm going to do. I use carbon black, the lowest toxin ink, and you shouldn't get tattoos. And I used a laser and some oil on this to reestablish the electron flow. I just, I just feel like caffeine should be somewhere. It's played a major role in my brain working. So we haven't talked about mold in coffee, but danger coffee is lab tested mold free and has humic and fulvic in it, which mines mold toxins.

And yes, right. So every time you drink your coffee, you're not going to get the tweaking that I get from almost all coffee I could buy, which comes from okra toxin a danger coffee doesn't have the mold in it. And it has binders built in. I love the binders and the minerals which come from some of the polar chemists, right? Yep. So that's why I created this because I know mold. I know mast cells and I know mineral deficiency. Like why shouldn't I fix it with my coffee? Plus it tastes good. And everybody does it every morning.

Yeah, exactly. So back to bicep, brief intentional conscious exposure to pain. So people get tattoos and they get more of them after they've been exposed to mold, right? Or people eat insanely hot chili peppers. Or if you're a biohacker, you do an ice bath. Or there's another way people do this, they'll get a good spanking. So I interviewed for the book, heavily meditated, a somatic therapist who ended up becoming a professional dominatrix. And she doesn't do sexual stuff with clients. It's modulating intensity, which creates deep healing in people.

So the idea of one minute every day doing something painful, but not harmful, not damaging. What it does is it resets your dopamine sensitivity. Dopamine is what makes you feel motivated to pursue something. It doesn't give you any happiness when you get the thing. It just makes you want to pursue it. And when we have mold, our electrical system is low, our dopamine is often dysregulated, and it's low. So if you did something that hurt for a brief period of time without harming yourself and without it being like, I'm getting even with my body, no bad vibes at all.

Just I'm in charge. I'm going to do this because I know it's good for me. A cold plunge is a good way to do it or cryotherapy upgrade labs if you live in one of our 32 locations now. And the reason you do it is that throughout the rest of the day, it'll take less dopamine to motivate you. So everything in your day gets easier. And if you have had mold or chronic fatigue or long COVID or any of that kind of stuff, It takes a lot. So if all of a sudden you've made yourself better motivated so that your day feels like it has less friction and it's easier, this is a profound way to regulate the nervous system, which is why people pursue any of those practices, you know, eating the crazy spicy foods, That's me some stuff in the bedroom, or sometimes it's again a really hot sauna that hurts or getting in the cold plunge, or the tattoos are, you know, sometimes extreme, extreme sports.

There's an adrenaline rush that comes from those but it's the same adrenaline rush that happens when you do something that's brief and intense pain. That makes a lot of sense. You know, tying this all together with a story as we're coming to a close here, I have a staff member who's publicly talked about these things, so it's okay for me to go through. She had a very difficult childhood, stolen from, beat, raped, just lots of trauma, tons of trauma, which makes you very motivated in life if you take it that way.

lot of entrepreneurs I've worked with with neurofeedback. They had a lot of bullying, they had a lot of trauma, they had a rough family situation. And she, she I met at a very young age, she was at my CrossFit gym. And she would black herself out, working out. Yeah, a lot of CrossFitters had some trauma. she would go walk down streets and sports bra and the little short shorts in the ghetto to feel something. Good God, poor thing. And as I met her and she started having seizures and she was working as a painter on a 40-foot ladder.

Wonder what could happen there. So the people out of fire had to let her go. Can't do that job. She ended up being a front desk worker for me. And I had a neurofeedback machine. That must have changed her life. And I'm not the expert in neurofeedback. So I used the low level rudimentary alpha, beta, just like, let's get you into a relaxed state. Maybe the first time she's ever felt it. She, after going through the neurofeedback, started having like Alice in Wonderland moments where she could see color for the first time.

She noticed the sky for the first time in her life. And it started changing her brain, who she wanted to date, who she wanted to talk to, her sensitivity to sound, her enjoyment of food. And she didn't seek hurting herself anymore. So CrossFit became less appealing. going to the ghetto and walking around no longer happens. And these changes just kept going and going and going. And as she's gotten herself into a therapy program and into EMDR and into doing more neurofeedback, and she's dove into more breath work and self-healing, now she prioritizes moving away from toxins.

Yeah, that's really important. She now values cleaner clothing and using better toothpaste and hygiene products. And it's incredible to watch what happens to people when that danger response, because she's now living away from all of the things that initially hurt her and put her there, but the responses were still the same. So now that she's getting further and further in her mental health healing, she has gone from, not that any of this matters, but short hair to extremely thin. And you just see her personality changing.

Everything about her is changing. And it's just so interesting to watch what happens to a person as they become internally regulated and safe.

Brief Intentional Pain, Dopamine, and Performance Hacks 50:40

It's really beautiful. You'll see a lot less anger in everyone and EMDR is a very potent thing. And I've worked with thousands of clients at 40 years and seeing incredible overnight transformations over five days. where 91.7% of people who spend those five days report improvements in their relationships after six months, because it takes a while to do neurofeedback for the brain to fully bake it all in. And about half of them report it within two weeks. And across a dozen other measures, just incredible results that you could not do on a couch with a psychologist in 20 years.

And there are people who walk around with a chip on their shoulder all the time. And they don't know why, and they didn't choose that. And when you learn how to regulate yourself, you start feeling compassion for those people instead of hate. You might also say, I don't want them working for me if they're not going to do the work. What I do is all my senior executives go through my full years of the program. Because it means the whole point of that is anything that triggers you at all, I don't care if it's mold or criticism or whatever else, If you can be triggered, it means you can be controlled.

And if you can be triggered, it means you're carrying a loaded gun. That's what the word means. And you probably should unload it. So you can unload it on your partner, which is not going to end well, because you're just going to end up breaking up. Or you learn how to just set that down. And when you do that, the amount of free energy that comes is so big. And for me, I have nine businesses in my portfolio. And I have a lot of people working with me. And when my senior leaders go through this, it's hard for them to get triggered.

If the numbers aren't where they should be, if an employee misbehaves, there's some trolling. It doesn't matter what it is. I want them to be able to regulate themselves. And they want to be able to regulate themselves. So the difference in the quality of their lives, because they've gone through the program, sticks with them forever. And for the periods of time they work with me, which tends to be a long time because they go every year, they are kinder. And of all these F words we talked about, you know, fear, food, fertility, friends and forgiveness, when you do this work regularly, and you get down to this forgiveness practice, You learn all life on earth is wired to be kind.

But we only do it when we have enough energy and we've got so much energy that we can overcome whatever fear is left. We can make sure that we're nourished with food and minerals. We can make sure that we're nourished with intimacy and that we're nourishing community. If you do that, there is an abundant well of kindness inside every cell in your body that will happen automatically. And it's our job as healers and it's everyone's job as a human being to figure out how to go to that last F word, forgiveness, and just stop holding grudges.

and to get your biology where you want it, because when you do it, you're so much more conscious, and it feels good to be conscious. What I've learned from launching the biohacking movement, and it's big, like tens of millions of people, $16 billion is what analysts say the biohacking market category is worth. It started with a blog post in the biohacking conference about 14 years ago, and still biohackingconference.com is the biggest conference in May. It's coming up here, 4,000 people coming to talk about this kind of stuff.

Jonas Benz is on stage. It's incredible. But it's the kindness thing that is the most precious. And if we can help people tap into that, it doesn't take a lot of people acting that way to help everyone else go, oh, that's possible. So people say, oh, I'm so nervous. Whatever my favorite sports team or political party didn't win. that's dysregulating you, you probably should do some work. And if you want to change things, I don't think that attending the sporting event or voting for your favorite politician is actually going to change very much.

But what is going to change things is if you learn the practices of self-regulation, of forgiveness, of removing toxins so your biology actually works, you will change everyone around you in your orbit. And that is more powerful than anything you could do politically. Agreed. If you behave regulated and safe and just the way fully functioning humans should be, people will either gravitate toward you and want to know how, or they will be like a magnet of the same pole and run far away. But you'll find who your people are too.

This is true. building a narcissist repellent, building predator repellent is a really good thing. And that isn't something that happens cognitively. It's something that happens energetically. And all of these are teachable. It just used to take so long sitting in a monastery. It's so much deep work. I don't think we have the time to do that and do all the things that are important in the world today. The world needs too much. And that's why I do a lot of the practices I do because I want them to be very effective on a per minute basis and heavily meditated.

The book says here's the whole bucket of things you can do that work with meditation. They make it work much faster. Maybe it means you need less meditation to get to the state you want. And there are actual technologies, there are nutrients, there are substances, there are practices, and there are lasers, and there's neurofeedback. And so I go through, here's all the universe of stuff that works better than just sitting and setting those feelings aside. And there is merit to sitting and letting the feelings sit aside.

But you only have an hour to sit, and you have a lot of feelings. How are you going to do this? Well, there are people who know how. And so here's everything. That's what heavily meditative is all about. It sounds like the perfect book that pretty much everyone in the Western world is going to need to understand pieces of that puzzle for themselves. As I go through and work with clients, so many of the topics and tools you're talking about are things that we use constantly because they're irreplaceable, especially in the chronic illness community.

They have to be fit to the person, and you may not do them all. Neurofeedback may not be your ticket. It may be something else. It may be EMDR. So as you read through this book, and you probably should, especially most of the people that are listening to me, this is going to be an incredible tool for them. something's going to resonate. You're going to feel something's going to change over time. Thank you for saying that. When people are new to the biohacking community, especially people who have had chronic illness like I have, you feel like you want to do everything.

And it's overwhelming. And orthorexia is a thing. Oh my gosh, I have to do the right thing or eat the right thing. It's not like anorexia where I can't eat anything. That might be the wrong thing. And this is because you're just trying to make yourself safe and you know eating the wrong stuff will dysregulate you. Well, what happens when there's more stuff than you can do? You can feel stressed or you can do exactly your advice. Pick two. The ones where you read that and the hairs on the back of your neck stood up or your heart beat different.

Just pick those. And the rest of it, know it exists. That's all it's for. And maybe you'll be called to that at some other point. But if you didn't know it existed, and you're just going to keep doing the things the way you have been, you might get the same results you got so far.

Mold, Hormones, Testing, and Practical Next Steps 58:20

And I struggled greatly. I spent two and a half million dollars. About a half a million was to get myself well. And it shouldn't have cost that much. The reason I started blogging was I wanted five people to not go through all the crap I did. The other two million was to reverse my age and develop super abilities and all that kind of stuff. It's what I do for fun and what I write about. But I wish I'd have had this knowledge when I was 19. The other thing we haven't touched on, and I know we're getting to the end, but if we can just have two minutes on this, a lot of mold toxins are xenoestrogen.

And one of them is called zirelinone. Zirelinone is 10,000 times more estrogenic than human estrogen. I had this in my 20s when I weighed 300 pounds, had a nice set of man boobs. And when they tested me and said, your testosterone is lower than your mom. What is going on with this? And it was actually the doctor who had tested my mom's testosterone. That was real. And this is something that they concentrate and they put it in industrial cows because Xarelino makes you fat on 30% less calories. So if you're overweight, and you're exposed to mold and you feel like it's your fault because you're not exercising enough and starving yourself all the time.

I worked out for 702 hours, 90 minutes a day, six days a week for 18 months straight on a low fat, low calorie diet when I had toxic mold. All it did was wreck my immune system, my nervous system even more. I never lost one inch off my 46 inch waist and I never lost a pal even though I could max out the machines. So more exercise is not the solution. What is the solution is being kind to your body, allowing time for recovery and making sure you don't have hormone disruptors like xarelenone. It's, it's just nasty that they allow this in animals because of course it's going to be in the meat you eat.

This is why I prefer grass fed. And I'll tell you if I can't get grass fed or I couldn't afford grass fed, I'll eat regular stuff. I'll just make sure I upregulate my detox pathways. Absolutely. When people walk into my clinic with a C-reactive protein, which is a blood marker above one for HSCRP, you're not going to lose weight. You're just not going to. We got to do something to work. And mold toxins oftentimes raise inflammatory markers. So if all you've had is a blood panel, you can look at certain markers to see this.

And then when you go down the rabbit hole and you start running mold toxins, if you've got mold in your body, I say, I understand mold or I understand weight is a very important topic for you. This is one of your most important concerns. I promise you I'm not going to miss it. However, we've got to do this, this and this, we got to get rid of the molds to get there. So I love that you've dropped into that because that is a topic that's so important to people. It's really important and I'd like to offer something I'm not I'm not trying to sell you anything.

It's not going to change my life if anyone does or doesn't buy my coffee or anything else. I want to help people. One thing that's frustrated me throughout my whole journey, I used to go to the doctor and ask for a test and then beg for a test. And the doctor says, I don't know how to order. I don't know what it is. It's not important. And you kind of get gaslit. And doctors, they only know what they know. And it's not that they're trying to gaslight. They've been trained to know that if you have more than three symptoms, it's all in your head.

this isn't how it actually is, but they're trained this way. So knowing what's going on in your body is a fundamental human right? One of my companies is called Axo.health. And for a few hundred dollars, you can have someone come to your house in most states, draw your blood, and then tell you the results and tell you here's the supplements and here's the lifestyle things that will move the results in the direction you want. And that way, when you have these things that are very cost effective, you can go into your practitioner and you can say here's my C-reactor protein, here's my thyroid, I know it's low, here's my testosterone and estrogen levels, I know they're off.

right? So now, you know, you're not crazy. And it's axo AXO dot health. And if you go there, you get some good advice. But most importantly, now you know, and if you go through that stuff, and you have no inflammation, and your hormones are where they should be, and you have enough free testosterone, and your thyroid's where it should be, you are one in 1,000 people in today's world. And you may not be sick, but you may want to perform better. So you can work on that. Or you may go, my God, look at my C-reactive protein and my homocysteine and my LPPLA2.

These things are all in the red. And we tell you what they are, then they need to go and they need to see you. But when they walk in the door, you've got what you can what you need to have that first appointment be effective. So it's like pre screening for people to know, do I need a pro? Or do I need to just take my vitamin day? They're different animals. Yeah. And it's a few hundred bucks. Perfect. Well, Dave, I want to thank you for jumping on here and talking to me today. It's been amazing. the information is going to change live.

Beautiful. That's what we're all here to do. And for anyone listening to this, if you are just feeling like something's wrong, something's wrong. That feeling is real. And you can do something about it. You can do it with data, with science, you can work with a professional and say, huh, maybe that's all just childhood trauma. The odds are that it's biochemical and there's trauma, because if you're alive, you have at least some trauma that was unintentional and was no one's fault, and you can drop those patterns.

So I would encourage you, do whatever you're most called to do, and if you want the list of what to do, read heavily meditated. That's gonna give you a lot on self-regulation, and they should check out your work, because you're gonna show them you're not crazy. That's the most important thing. If it doesn't feel right, it's not. Thank you for tuning in to Doctor Talks. We hope today's episode has enlightened and inspired you on your path to optimal health. Each day is a new opportunity to make choices that empower your well-being.

For more insights and strategies, subscribe to our podcast and visit our website, www.doctortalks.com. Stay connected, stay healthy, and join us next time on Doctor Talks, real talks from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most.