The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - Nootropics, Gut Healing, Sneaky Tips for Optimization with Dave Asprey ｜ EP 209

00:00:00.000 What if I'm addicted to stress?

00:00:01.280 Have you tried nootropics?

00:00:02.640 How do you feel about nicotine?

00:00:03.680 Let me check.

00:00:04.900 Is that what that spray is?

00:00:09.760 Losing your mind, your ability to think is so scary.

00:00:12.640 It's terrifying.

00:00:13.560 My career was taken off in Silicon Valley, but my brain was gone.

00:00:16.880 Even though I had this killer job, I'm like, I'm faking it half the time.

00:00:20.080 I don't remember anything.

00:00:21.360 And I went to a psychiatrist and he looked at me.

00:00:23.600 It was like, oh, tech bro wants Adderall.

00:00:25.880 I've seen this before.

00:00:27.240 I'm like, no, get me one of Dr. Amon's brain scans.

00:00:29.420 I came back into his office and he looked at the scan. He looked at me and he said, Dave, inside your brain is total chaos.

00:00:35.400 You have the best camouflage I've ever seen. I don't know how you're standing here in front of me.

00:00:39.280 And I was like, thank God, I have a hardware problem. I can fix that.

00:00:43.380 It's not that I'm not trying. It's not that it's like a moral failing. I'm not stupid.

00:00:47.480 It's that my hardware is jacked. And since then, I've just been interested in cognitive performance and longevity.

00:00:53.900 I have more energy than I ever have, and I don't have pain in my body. It's ridiculous.

00:00:58.640 What they teach doctors in medical school is if they have more than three or four symptoms, 0.97

00:01:02.400 they're a hypochondriac by definition.

00:01:03.920 And this is why I think biohacking is so important.

00:01:06.040 It's not your doctor's job to make you well.

00:01:09.160 It's only your job.

00:01:10.500 You hire your doctor, you hire your health coach, you go online and go to Reddit, wherever.

00:01:16.060 Only you own this.

00:01:19.580 Dave Asprey, welcome back to my podcast.

00:01:22.140 Michaela, it's great to see you in person.

00:01:24.640 Yeah, this is fun.

00:01:25.760 It's so much better doing podcasts in person.

00:01:27.260 Yeah. I love them in person. Whenever you can get a chance to make eye contact, it's different than

00:01:31.020 over zoom. Yeah. And there's no awkward pauses where you talk over somebody and your audience

00:01:34.880 thinks you're a moron. I like that part too. Yeah. Okay. I want to talk to you specifically 1.00

00:01:40.320 about your bulletproof diet, because I think we had a similar health realization. You came to a

00:01:45.740 lot sooner than I did. So maybe before we get started, can you give a brief background for

00:01:51.160 anyone who's not familiar with you about how you became biohacking king when i was a kid i was on

00:01:57.720 antibiotics every month for strep throat or sinus infections for 15 years i had arthritis when i was 0.86

00:02:04.420 14 i remember walking out of the doctor's office and i'm like that's what old people get and i'm

00:02:09.780 a teenager and they didn't tell me anything other than your knees are screwed i've had three knee

00:02:13.660 surgeries before I was 23. And then I was diagnosed of having high risk of stroke and

00:02:21.740 heart attack before I was 30. I was pre-diabetic. I hit 300 pounds when I was 23 years old.

00:02:27.100 My career was taken off in Silicon Valley, but my brain was gone. And I bought disability 0.98

00:02:35.440 insurance when I was 26, even though I had this killer job. I'm like, I'm faking it half the time.

00:02:40.020 remember anything and just constant pain in my body, massive, just horrible digestion all the

00:02:47.440 time. Um, and I was, it's supposed to hurt to walk and just terrible pain, multiple toxic mold

00:02:54.220 exposures. I figured out mold was a big part of it. And it was very early on that and got rid of

00:03:01.500 the mold, got rid of the mold toxins and did a documentary about it. Even it's free. It's called

00:03:05.640 moldy movie. It's good. I've seen that moldy movie.com. Um, and since then I've just been

00:03:12.940 interested in cognitive performance and longevity. So I'm in my mid twenties and I start hanging out

00:03:18.680 at a nonprofit for longevity. One of the early ones in Silicon Valley. And they said, would you

00:03:23.420 be president? I'm like, I'm under 30 and everyone in the room is over 60. And I said, yes. So I was

00:03:29.720 mentored by the leaders in the field of longevity from two generations ago and all the stuff that

00:03:35.240 made old people young made me healthy and strong. And Michaela, I'm 4.8% body fat right now. I'm

00:03:42.640 never hungry. I just have stretch marks and extra skin from when I was fat. And I have more energy

00:03:48.120 than I ever have. And I don't have pain in my body. It's ridiculous. My biological age is,

00:03:56.560 depending on how you want to measure it, 15 or 20 years younger than my actual age.

00:04:00.100 and I have never been healthier along the way I tried elimination diets in fact I spent about

00:04:08.080 two million dollars well some probably about a million dollars getting fully well which is 0.94

00:04:13.020 stupid you shouldn't have to spend that much it's because we didn't know what to do and then the

00:04:16.200 other million or million and a half is just on longevity but what I figured out was I'm going 1.00

00:04:21.540 to try an elimination diet and so I went through for two years and you have to track which category

00:04:27.020 it's no one can do that it's crazy and it didn't work anyway and I eventually said well what would

00:04:32.900 happen if I just removed most things very similar thinking right yeah yeah and I found grass-fed

00:04:38.740 beef really mattered I went on a trip to Tibet oh along the way I tried being a vegan and a raw

00:04:44.640 vegan which trashed me oh my god I shattered three teeth got autoimmune stuff I didn't have before

00:04:50.880 um huge amounts of pain in the body from oxalate buildup and other plant toxins

00:04:55.980 and then i went to tibet and i'm on the side of the holiest mountain in the world called mount

00:05:00.900 kailash and a little tibetan woman like four foot tall gives me yak butter tea

00:05:06.080 it's kind of gross but it's 10 degrees below zero and i feel like crap because it's 18 000 0.92

00:05:11.260 feet so i drank it i'm like my brain worked for the first time oh my gosh i'm like i i want to

00:05:16.980 dance. I should feel like I'm dying at this altitude. So I went back to Silicon Valley and

00:05:21.540 I started trying different butters and teas and normal butter and normal tea just tastes like 0.99

00:05:27.180 crap. It doesn't work. And I tried 25 butters and grass fed butter does something different. 0.90

00:05:31.880 And I quit coffee for five years because I would drink it and then I would feel good.

00:05:37.040 An hour later, I get like tension in my chest and I get sugar cravings and I just felt crappy.

00:05:42.440 So I drink more and had my first cup of coffee in five years.

00:05:48.060 And it was like the angels started singing and like, I love my brain on coffee. 0.98

00:05:53.220 And then the next day I had different coffee and I felt like crap. 0.65

00:05:56.100 I'm like, wait, I couldn't have got allergic to coffee overnight.

00:06:00.500 It has to be, there's something in the coffee.

00:06:02.540 And I really dug in on toxic mold because I already knew about mold in the environment,

00:06:06.240 but it turns out a coffee, especially in America is full of mold.

00:06:10.340 So I started a big company called Bulletproof.

00:06:11.980 I'm no longer involved with the company. My new coffee company is called Danger Coffee.

00:06:16.300 It's lab tested, mold free, says it on the label, which is important. You should check whether

00:06:20.940 something that was mold free is still mold free that you might be drinking. And Danger Coffee has

00:06:26.640 trace minerals and electrolytes that specifically bind to toxins in the gut. So when you drink it,

00:06:33.080 you're getting a higher potential to make electricity in your cells because it's restoring

00:06:37.720 minerals. And anyone who's eaten a lot of these superfood plant things, they suck minerals out

00:06:43.120 of your bones. I have incredibly high bone density. And I think it's because of my minerals

00:06:47.920 and because I like butter, specifically grass-fed butter. And that led me to launch the biohacking

00:06:53.320 movement. And it's a new word in the English language in 2018. I've run a 4,000 person

00:06:59.040 conference at biohackingconference.com. We have 30 locations of upgrade labs opening across the

00:07:04.580 US where you can do biohacking stuff based on data. So you come in and we turn off the pain in

00:07:10.220 the body and it's all medical tech, but it's a non-medical thing. We're just helping you perform

00:07:14.440 better. And I've just never been healthier or happier or had a brain that works this well ever

00:07:21.860 in my life. If you give me the foods that are triggers for me and a lot of people who don't

00:07:27.880 know it's a trigger, I go back to having ADHD. Oh, I had Asperger's syndrome as a kid too. And

00:07:33.360 that's gone. And I would go back to having ODD and OCD, all of which I've had. You know what

00:07:39.560 ODD is? No. I think you, you probably should. Cause I think your dad might have it. Oh no.

00:07:46.520 What is it? It stands for oppositional defiant disorder. It means when someone tells you to

00:07:52.600 do something, you're just wired to say F you, I won't do what you told me. I might have that.

00:07:57.200 Well, it can be a gift, but I was actually diagnosed with that as a kid. Wow. Wow. And

00:08:02.300 These all go together with this immune sensitivity and autoimmunity, and food is a major trigger.

00:08:08.900 And I understand the pathways now.

00:08:11.160 I ended up writing a book called The Bulletproof Diet.

00:08:13.400 People have lost more than a million pounds, and somewhere around 600,000, 700,000 copies sold.

00:08:19.760 And in it, I'm like, well, maybe you don't have to go full carnivore.

00:08:24.260 But I did go full carnivore when I was testing the diet.

00:08:27.380 After three months, though, I started getting leaky gut.

00:08:29.720 My sleep score went way down.

00:08:31.220 Yeah. Let's talk about that. Yeah. And I think there's reasons for that. So what I'm doing now

00:08:35.820 is the foods that have the most benefit and the least toxins and it's different for different

00:08:41.100 people, but a little bit of flexibility is good. And frankly, if I didn't eat carbs, I'm 5% body

00:08:45.960 fat. Like I would be 3%. There's a certain point where it's not healthy to be lean and I'm pushing

00:08:52.540 that point right now. Okay. Okay. So a couple of questions. So I've been doing just like just beef,

00:09:00.160 lamb runa meat it's going to be seven years in december very long time my pro so compared to

00:09:06.640 how i was i'm a completely different person now through testing i know my gut's still leaky

00:09:12.280 it's still leaky now it was re in really bad shape before the diet but the diet hasn't fixed

00:09:18.040 it my original theory was go down to the base heal the gut reintroduce these like low inflammatory

00:09:23.860 safer foods and then that would be the optimal diet and i haven't been able to do that i've

00:09:29.080 been exposed to mold i i took cholestyramine actually which was it's a life it's oh it's like

00:09:34.320 activated charcoal on steroids i it's one of the only supplements i've been able to tolerate but

00:09:38.860 i'm in the position where i could barely tolerate supplements i can tolerate some but anything plant

00:09:43.360 related or anything my guts and such kind of disarray even through lab work that i can barely

00:09:50.000 tolerate oral vitamins it's crazy what happens when you take an oral vitamin so zinc for example

00:09:55.420 And I get the, like, as pure as I can get.

00:09:57.960 So there aren't fillers.

00:09:58.740 I'm not reacting to anything else.

00:10:00.640 It's usually insomnia and heart palpitations, stuff like that.

00:10:04.620 It's the cognitive stuff that really gets me, though.

00:10:07.340 And so mostly when I try to reintroduce something, I can't think.

00:10:12.300 So part of it's that.

00:10:13.700 And I just, I hate that.

00:10:16.760 Oh, man.

00:10:17.880 Losing your mind, your ability to think is so scary.

00:10:20.800 It's terrifying.

00:10:21.600 I got my degree at Wharton when I was like 31 and this was the program where

00:10:29.220 they fly the professors out to San Francisco and I was failing out of the

00:10:33.380 program and like something is wrong with me and I went to a psychiatrist and he

00:10:38.420 looked at me it was like a tech bro wants Adderall I've seen this before

00:10:41.940 yeah like no get me one of dr. Amon's brain scans mmm and I I came back into

00:10:48.060 to his office and he looked at the scan. He looked at me and he said, Dave, inside your brain is

00:10:52.720 total chaos. You have the best camouflage I've ever seen. I don't know how you're standing here 0.90

00:10:57.940 in front of me. And I was like, thank God I have a hardware problem. I can fix that. It's not that

00:11:04.620 I'm not trying. It's not that it's like a moral failing. I'm not stupid. It's that my hardware

00:11:09.440 is jacked. So that was a major thing that made me launch the biohacking movement. Like we can fix

00:11:16.120 our cells we fix our systems and then our brain works and then our emotions regulate better and

00:11:21.800 it's so different you guys want to purchase this magical supplement see how it shines and reduce

00:11:29.640 your poisoning by alcohol we're available on amazon now and if you type in after party and

00:11:35.720 scroll around or go to fullerhealth.com or check the link in the description or pinned comment

00:11:41.560 it's there look at this packaging it glistens how extra is this can I do this without ripping

00:11:51.080 I can I can indeed here it is after party there we go it's available on Amazon and I will link it

00:12:00.320 below but please reduce your damage from alcohol if you drink because it's silly not to there's a

00:12:06.840 money back guarantee. It really works. I hope you're enjoying this episode. What's going on

00:12:11.940 with you? Very likely there's something called mass cell activation syndrome. A hundred percent.

00:12:17.100 Okay. And there's a book on this. I'm going to recommend. And for people listening, I apologize.

00:12:23.100 This is the worst written book on the planet. And the author admits it. His name is Dr. Afrin.

00:12:28.340 And the book is called Occam's razor. And this is a doctor says, look, there's all these people

00:12:33.560 with all these symptoms, and we think they're different specialties, but they're all the

00:12:38.100 same thing. Mast cells are, think them like landmines in the body, and they're in the

00:12:44.220 immune system. And their job is that when there's a threat, let's say it's a real landmine,

00:12:49.240 when a tank is on it, it's supposed to blow up. But if someone turns the sensitivity down,

00:12:54.300 a puff of wind blows it up. And then it blows up the one next to it, and the one next to

00:12:57.960 it, and the one next to it. And we have a lot of mast cells in the brain. And when mast cells

00:13:02.160 blow up. It's called degranulation, but they release histamine, which I have a huge problem

00:13:09.400 with that. Yep. How do I know? I've had the same, I know, I just don't know what to do about it.

00:13:14.260 We're going to get there. This is going to be so fun. And I hope a lot of listeners benefit from

00:13:17.440 this too. So number one is, um, histamine, but there's a hundred other inflammatory cytokines.

00:13:24.280 These are things that cause other mast cells to go off. So the combination of toxic mold,

00:13:30.700 eating these stupid plant foods full of oxalates is really bad because toxic mold raises levels 0.98

00:13:39.100 of oxalate in the body and a lot of these foods that were peasant foods for survival even though 0.99

00:13:43.360 they're not very good for you they're better than having no energy these things when they

00:13:48.200 raise oxalate oxalate enters the body it makes razor sharp crystals out of calcium and they

00:13:54.680 circulate they are proven to be directly toxic to mitochondria and they can form in your nerves

00:14:00.520 which causes pain and they cause musculoskeletal pain. So I was in my quest to be healthy doing the

00:14:07.900 figs, raspberries, kale, spinach, sweet potatoes, almonds, lots of cacao. Yeah. All the things,

00:14:15.960 those are on beets. Beets are really high. So I was eating these every day and I was in constant

00:14:21.400 pain. And when you go to carnivore or the lion diet, um, or you go to any diet, even if it

00:14:28.000 includes some carbohydrate that doesn't raise those levels, it can be transformative. There's

00:14:33.480 just one problem. When you go cold turkey off of oxalates, your body tries to release them all

00:14:40.020 and you'll get all the symptoms even worse. So tapering off, if you eat beets every day,

00:14:45.560 eat half as many beets for a week and then go down and down. And the last one for me

00:14:50.460 was eliminating chocolate. Now I love good dark chocolate. I've actually made a line in one of

00:14:56.160 my companies and chocolates just high in oxalates. And when I don't eat it, I have zero pain anywhere

00:15:03.500 in my body. And when I eat foods that have oxalates, I feel it. And anyone listening

00:15:08.460 knows you eat like a spinach salad. You get that like rough feeling on your teeth. Those are razor

00:15:13.180 sharp calcium crystals forming on your teeth and they form everywhere in the body. We can tolerate

00:15:20.320 200 milligrams a day. And a lot of people are getting a gram a day from superfoods. So if you

00:15:25.780 were to eat the lion diet and say a vegetable that was low in oxalate, you'll have a very

00:15:32.520 different response than if you were to eat one that was high. So not all veggies are the same

00:15:37.180 and not everyone is as sensitive. What I did is I took steps to remove oxalates from my diet

00:15:45.560 and then, and this is a protocol you might want to try. It is two ounces or more of lemon juice

00:15:53.640 because you need citric acid can you tolerate lemon juice I cannot tolerate citric acid at all

00:16:00.060 like lemons the first thing that we found out made gave me arthritis were oranges and lemons

00:16:05.220 when I was in grade two no other food it was oranges and lemons interesting um and then citric

00:16:09.560 acid specifically like not at all not even in my new quantities you can't have like potassium

00:16:14.660 citrate or anything like that no that was one of the I figured that out about four years ago

00:16:18.860 okay so then i'd like no idea why i thought it had something to do with maybe where it was sourced

00:16:24.920 from like if it had anything to do with mold i'm not sure i have some theories there so for you

00:16:30.520 we're going to get a little bit technical uh you should get a urine organic acid test and this is

00:16:37.120 something any functional medicine doctor can order and that's going to tell you how your mitochondria

00:16:41.600 are functioning and where there might be a blockade and if there's a blockade we can figure out why

00:16:45.960 Okay. And it might be you need a certain form of B6 or B3 or any of the other ones, but that's a

00:16:51.860 solvable problem. Um, there's for most people though, who can tolerate lemon juice, you do that.

00:16:59.420 And if you take a pinch of baking soda at the end of that, that's really a good thing. So you don't

00:17:05.580 dissolve your teeth, but, and you can dilute it with water, whatever you want to do. You do that

00:17:10.780 because that is a solvent for oxalate in your tissues but here's what's missing from a lot of

00:17:16.240 the online conversations about oxalate you also need biotin in order to detox this stuff so i've

00:17:23.480 been taking higher doses of biotin and i've been doing lemon juice it took like a couple years and

00:17:29.200 the more i did that the more i avoided oxalates the better and better and better i felt even though

00:17:33.480 i'm no longer sensitive to toxic mold like i used to be i've lived in a house with 42 water leaks

00:17:39.180 for four months and I didn't get sick like what that's how healed from mold you can be yeah I

00:17:44.480 need to get to that but so what's going on with you you don't handle citric acid I don't handle

00:17:49.980 anything like Dave I don't handle anything I can drink Topo Chico um if I drink vodka I know how

00:17:56.420 this sounds I know it's bad for the gut but it doesn't cause an autoimmune flare-up like I don't

00:18:00.600 have a negative reaction to it other than a hangover and getting drunk and I know like I know

00:18:05.240 it's bad for you but it doesn't cause arthritis and and brain fog and all these things it's funny

00:18:09.440 and beef and lamb i literally uh published a alcohol roadmap of a best alcohol to worst

00:18:17.180 alcohol for inflammation and vodka is the cleanest alcohol yeah yeah i can feel it like i can't do i

00:18:23.220 can't do gin because it has botanicals like i've had full-on allergic reactions to gin i can do

00:18:27.100 vodka though so let's go back to these mast cells yeah okay mast cells are like these landmines but

00:18:33.020 they replace themselves every six months and yours are in a constant state of

00:18:37.140 stress. So what you do is you find the pharmaceuticals that cause them to be

00:18:44.140 calm and you take those for six months. Okay. What are those? Well, the two that

00:18:49.480 work for 80% of people, you have to do both of these. And funny enough, it's

00:18:52.760 ketodafin. Um, that's number three on the list. Okay. So check this out. Chronic

00:18:59.960 fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. I've been diagnosed with both of those in my 20s.

00:19:05.060 Toxic mold, chronic immune activation syndrome, all that stuff, and long COVID, they're all the

00:19:11.360 same thing. It's mast cell activation. So for 80% of people, you take Claritin and Pepsid AC in the

00:19:19.300 morning. I can't take Claritin. What happens? I get crawling sensations all over my body. Can you

00:19:25.060 take it compounded? I was, I can, no, I can't do Claritin specifically. I also get really severe

00:19:28.840 lower back pain. I was on cetirizine for years. That's even worse than Claritin. I can take

00:19:34.700 Benadryl, then I'm fatigued all the time. That's like the one hand t-histamine I can tolerate

00:19:39.080 is Benadryl, which I hate, but I can tolerate it. I don't have a problem with people taking

00:19:43.940 Benadryl at night to go to sleep for a certain period of time. You don't want to be on it all

00:19:48.460 the time because it makes you tired and there's probably long-term negatives from it. But there

00:19:54.020 are about 19 different drugs that work for mast cells specifically. And so what you want to do

00:20:01.140 is go through like you did with food elimination and find the ones that you tolerate. And for most

00:20:07.120 listeners, it's pepsid AC and claritin in the morning and at night. So you're double dosing.

00:20:12.160 Is pepsid bismuth or no? Pepsid AC is a histamine blocker. You take it. Oh, they sell it for stomach

00:20:19.740 acid, but it blocks the histamine two receptor and claritin or Benadryl block histamine one.

00:20:24.100 Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. So you need to block both receptors for six months. And after six months,

00:20:29.560 your mast cells are renewed with new ones. And they were raised in an environment where they

00:20:34.040 weren't chronically activated. So they chill out and people have long-term resolution of these

00:20:39.200 things. You're, you're the second person who's told me that I need to get the mast cells under

00:20:43.880 control by taking a pharmaceutical to calm them down. Cause they're just going crazy.

00:20:49.180 It's funny for good reason. I mean, the pharmaceutical industry in the U S really

00:20:55.280 owns a lot of parts of the government. We all saw the pandemic and all that stuff. Yes.

00:20:59.500 So it's really easy to say pharmaceuticals bad. Look, pharmaceuticals are just technology,

00:21:05.340 right? And when someone forces you to take them or lies about them, then, well, I think you have

00:21:10.020 a right to respond with a high speed led, uh, pharmaceutical sent in their direction. But

00:21:15.720 if you look at what they actually do inside the body for my longevity work I take several

00:21:22.820 pharmaceuticals at low doses because they affect pathways in a way that some plants can't do

00:21:28.200 so there's no moral thing about pharmaceuticals just what are the risks what are the benefits

00:21:34.500 I can get behind that too I can get behind that too I wouldn't have like I've been annoyed at

00:21:38.720 the pharmaceutical industries but that's because I wasn't told that the antidepressants I was on

00:21:42.380 were going to cause two years of withdrawal like that would have been good to sign off on

00:21:46.060 and and these kind of problems but for being able to be useful i mean it's a miracle painkillers

00:21:53.320 exist too because some people need them for short periods of time because they're in extreme pain

00:21:57.140 like i'm nothing against that it's just the lies and the corruption oh the lies and corruption

00:22:01.360 one of the reasons i started biohacking was like guys we're going to get the data

00:22:04.920 i don't care what you tell me like like show me the numbers and when you take something and it

00:22:11.000 works and your other numbers don't get worse. Like, okay, this was worth it for a set period

00:22:15.520 of time. So your job is to go through and figure out which of these are going to work. And like I

00:22:21.980 said, for 80% of people, Claritin and Pepcid for six months, you take it in the morning and at

00:22:26.680 night. So it's a double dose. And during that time, you won't make any stomach acid. So you

00:22:31.040 need to take a stomach acid and an enzyme with your meals to make sure you absorb them. It's,

00:22:35.120 it's called uh betaine hcl so you take that you might do you take that i used to try that because

00:22:42.160 i thought my problem maybe it was low stomach acid but your problem it was a lot of problems

00:22:46.540 it's that when you eat a lot of these things that your mast cells are now sensitized to

00:22:49.840 they are causing an inflammatory storm in the body and you feel it in your brain first

00:22:55.520 i i'm the same way the bad news is that your brain has primarily histamine three receptors

00:23:00.780 There's not histamine 1 and 2.

00:23:01.940 It has all three, but more of those.

00:23:04.180 And those are harder to block, but we have drugs for it.

00:23:06.480 But for a lot of listeners who aren't as far along as you or I were,

00:23:10.520 what works is low-dose naltrexone.

00:23:13.100 I've tried that too.

00:23:14.500 Catofephin.

00:23:15.200 Or, if you want to go natural, black cumin seed.

00:23:17.940 Just the oil, not the whole seed.

00:23:20.460 That has a really powerful effect on mast cells as well.

00:23:23.560 Interesting.

00:23:24.220 Okay.

00:23:24.880 Quercetin can help, but not for everyone,

00:23:27.520 because some people with some genetics can't handle it.

00:23:29.660 And if this sounds really technical, bottom line is stop eating everything.

00:23:34.740 But by the way, beef and lamb, I built a regenerative farm so I could grow my own food and we raised

00:23:38.740 lambs and sheep and pigs.

00:23:41.940 And it turns out if you get pork that is from an animal that was fed its native diet.

00:23:47.700 Yeah, it's fine.

00:23:48.800 And it's stored properly.

00:23:50.840 It can actually be really healthy because the fat and pork is very compatible with us.

00:23:55.740 It's just most pork you can buy.

00:23:57.560 is the animals are abused and they're fed a horrible diet.

00:24:00.720 Yeah, so they're full of toxins, right?

00:24:01.920 Yeah, and pork and fish will form histamine.

00:24:06.200 So the reason that these red meats, my two favorites are beef and lamb,

00:24:11.000 the reason that those work is they don't form histamine very well,

00:24:14.280 and they have a really nice fat profile.

00:24:16.540 So I eat a pound of red meat or more every day,

00:24:19.620 and that's the primary part of my diet.

00:24:22.340 but the other thing you might consider is if you look at longevity the volume of bacteria in the

00:24:31.000 gut and the diversity of species are correlated with living a long time if you take an old person

00:24:35.840 you look at their poop they have less species and less bacteria you can predict someone's age based

00:24:40.980 on their poop so you look at someone who's long-term only eating meat you don't have much

00:24:46.560 diversity. So what do you do about it? I said, okay, I'm going to solve this. So when I wrote

00:24:51.920 a superhuman, which was my big longevity book, I formulated a mix of basically tree sap stuff,

00:24:59.420 like acacia gum, which you may or may not. I was going to ask you about this. Okay. Yeah.

00:25:03.780 And it's that, and something called large arabinogalactin call it prebiotic soluble fiber.

00:25:09.780 This is not the scour your gut, clean psyllium husk and all that stuff, which is just not very

00:25:14.440 good for you. But when you're doing these things, they're pretty much flavorless. You put them in

00:25:20.220 hot water and they just go away. So you can put them in coffee if you want to. I did 40 grams a

00:25:26.800 day of that. I had to work my way up to it. And I quadrupled the number of species of bacteria in

00:25:33.220 my gut and I had no negative effects from it. And was that on a very limited diet? It was just

00:25:37.200 meat and soluble fiber. I was just about, this is so funny. I'm glad we're doing this podcast.

00:25:42.860 I was just about to start this, and I wasn't sure what prebiotic I was going to be able to tolerate.

00:25:47.680 I bought, and you might hate this, I bought inulin fiber. 0.89

00:25:50.780 I haven't taken it.

00:25:51.680 Do you hate that?

00:25:52.280 I was like, maybe I won't react to it.

00:25:54.000 I don't know.

00:25:55.560 This is such a nuanced question.

00:25:57.760 I'm really happy that we're covering this.

00:26:00.180 So inulin, also Jerusalem artichoke syrup is the same thing as inulin.

00:26:05.160 It causes irritation of the gut, similar to the way gluten does.

00:26:09.120 So it's poorly tolerated.

00:26:10.620 in the very early days of figuring out how to mix butter and coffee i was like how do i do this

00:26:15.360 and i tried some jerusalem artichoke which is is inulin and i gained like 20 pounds in a week

00:26:22.860 and a half and like just bloats oh no and so i don't use inulin um i have a few supplements a

00:26:28.920 little bit and i tolerate it just fine but if i added a scoop of that i would not like what

00:26:33.800 happened so you're better off with a soluble fiber that's not inulin okay and what did you suggest

00:26:40.440 Acacia gum.

00:26:41.640 Yeah, what is that?

00:26:42.620 I mean, obviously it's from acacia.

00:26:44.060 I don't know what that is.

00:26:44.860 Is that a tree sap?

00:26:45.760 Yes, the sap from the acacia.

00:26:47.320 Okay.

00:26:47.680 It tends to be low reactivity.

00:26:50.540 Yeah, that sounds like it could be.

00:26:51.780 Yeah, and you can also get a large, it's called a rubinogalactin.

00:26:57.760 It's another tree sap from the large tree.

00:27:00.460 And if you look online at soluble fiber mixes, those are the two primary ingredients.

00:27:04.760 you also might like something called HMOs which are human milk oligosaccharides I

00:27:11.300 have some of those too I've been too scared to try anything because I don't

00:27:14.540 want to deal with brain fog okay can we change directions a little bit yeah okay

00:27:18.740 I have a really good friend who didn't sleep for more than an hour a night for

00:27:24.860 four years that's horrible and he's a well-known guy and I've been working

00:27:31.160 with him on it but he developed was a fear of not sleeping i get that right and i went through this

00:27:39.640 phase in life where i was i don't say terrified like rationally my body would react i get one

00:27:45.160 tiny smell of mold and my whole yeah like my whole body would change and my blood pressure would drop

00:27:51.720 and and it was like i turned gray i know where you're going with this right and like i said i

00:27:57.400 I lived in a house that had way more mold than it should have and I was fine.

00:28:00.800 So there's an inner peace that is something you can cultivate and you have to tell your

00:28:07.520 cells, you have to tell your vagus nerve, you have to tell your immune system that you're

00:28:12.180 safe.

00:28:12.640 Stop freaking out.

00:28:13.860 Yeah.

00:28:14.720 Right.

00:28:14.980 And this has nothing to do with cognitive stuff and has nothing to do with morality.

00:28:19.900 It's that your body has its own intelligence.

00:28:22.300 And when I say intelligence, it's a distributed system of billions of little computer nodes

00:28:26.120 called mitochondria. And they have noticed for good cause that these things might be dangerous.

00:28:31.060 So they react as if there's danger. You can make a signal with your mind and with your heart that

00:28:37.240 tells your body that it's safe. And that's part of healing from any of these extreme reactivity

00:28:42.680 things, which I've had. And that's been a major part of what's made me well. Um, I, it's gotten

00:28:49.820 to the point where I started a neuroscience company 11 years ago in part, cause I want a

00:28:54.580 neuroscientist to look at my brainwaves and work with them on teaching myself how to generate that

00:29:00.220 state. And you can do this with heart rate variability training, breath works, breath work

00:29:07.800 works, psychedelics work. Actually, my book comes out about this in Q1 of next year. It's called

00:29:13.840 heavily meditated, but it's not about meditation. It's like, what are the techniques and technologies

00:29:19.000 they'll let you get into your body and tell to chill the f out right and so this is not at all

00:29:24.620 blaming oh no i i told i totally understand and i've wondered i was like what what if

00:29:30.060 because like i'm a logical person yeah and i also know that if i introduce something and i get sick

00:29:34.740 i'm gonna get better like it's fine but i was like what if part of it's me caught like actually

00:29:40.780 causing actual inflammation from just predisposing it to this is bad this is bad i'm i'm totally

00:29:47.420 aware of that I don't think that's the full thing I think prebiotics maybe would help but

00:29:51.140 it could easily be a component it's an amplifier yeah because what what you want to have happen is 0.97

00:29:56.800 you sit down you eat a meal and they don't feel as good afterwards instead of going oh shit here 0.84

00:30:01.240 it comes again and and like ruminating on that you want to go oh okay I know the countermeasures 0.54

00:30:07.620 I'm going to do them right now and I probably won't feel good so I went from at the start of

00:30:12.740 this, if I ate something with histamine or mold, or if I was in a moldy building, I, it was going

00:30:18.440 to take me six weeks to get better. And I could take cholestyramine and charcoal and I could

00:30:21.900 accelerate it a bit. And I got it down to one or two days. And then I got it down to one or two

00:30:27.260 hours. And all of this was from understanding biology, understanding if this happens, how do

00:30:34.560 I stop it right away? And having the tools and then just being at peace with it and knowing I'm

00:30:41.720 going to be okay or I'm not and either one's okay. And that is actually the biggest challenge

00:30:47.400 because that could, it could take care of 50% of your symptoms. As an example, if you do x-rays of

00:30:55.040 people's spines, there's a huge number of people with ruptured discs that have no pain and no

00:30:59.200 mobility issues at all. And other people have the same thing and huge amounts of pain. It's not the

00:31:04.080 ruptured disc. It's how we respond to the ruptured disc. Yeah. I think I've got, like, I think I've

00:31:09.400 improved in that a lot to tell you the truth when we went first yeah and I'm not it doesn't really

00:31:14.900 stress me out like I and I I've I guess what I've done over the years is separate myself from the

00:31:19.420 reaction so I'm like this is happening to me but isn't the fear part isn't there that's helped a

00:31:24.280 lot like a lot I'm sure but I don't know something's still off there oh something is still off

00:31:32.880 and it's it's like a game and there's one change of thinking that you can do there's something

00:31:39.520 that's happening to your body but it's not happening to you because you're not the same

00:31:44.600 as your body right like our consciousness in our brain is different than our body consciousness

00:31:48.980 and in a lot of my neuroscience work it's really entertaining because like if I clap my hands

00:31:55.540 you know that it took some amount of time for the sound to get to you and then you heard it

00:32:01.440 But if we have electrodes on your brain measuring it, it takes a third of a second after the sound

00:32:07.480 gets to you before your body decides to allow your brain to hear the sound. So there's a third

00:32:13.940 of a second lag time. This is on average. If you're 18, it might be 240 milliseconds. If you're

00:32:19.900 getting cognitive dementia, it might be 400, but it's a little bit less than half a second.

00:32:24.880 And this is like on TV when they did live broadcasts, there was an eight second delay

00:32:30.100 in case someone dropped an F bomb, they could like, they could edit it out. Your body is deciding

00:32:35.060 what parts of reality to show you and how you're supposed to feel about something and then handing

00:32:39.600 it to you. And so that means that if the body's decided, I'm going to feel tweaked about these

00:32:45.140 things because they have been dangerous in the past, you're going to get all that emotion and

00:32:50.980 it's going to feel very real. And if you believe you are your body entirely, um, that's hard,

00:32:57.100 But if like, Oh, look what my body's doing again. Isn't that weird? Right. So you sort of separate

00:33:02.200 yourself from the response. The response is there, but it's not you. I I've done that. I think I

00:33:09.040 managed that early on, actually, when I realized that the depression, when I kind of separated my

00:33:13.000 identity from the depression was like these thoughts is when you're depressed, it's hard

00:33:17.200 when you're depressed, having inflammatory reactions that are like foggy and things,

00:33:20.780 it's easier. But with depression, it like convinces it yourself that it's you. But I've

00:33:25.640 manage to separate like those aren't logical thoughts and that's not how i would be thinking

00:33:31.000 something else is happening so i don't think well i think that's very useful for people people need

00:33:36.940 that but i think i managed to do that like i don't have that much fear but i still have some fog

00:33:42.380 you know the fog especially if i travel or like okay oh that's i also wanted to talk to you about

00:33:49.740 how you manage to travel. Okay. Like how are you, how are you so resilient? I'm on 70% travel right

00:33:55.520 now. That's how do you survive? Like that would literally destroy my life. I wouldn't be able to

00:34:01.260 do it. Oh, it was disabling when I tried doing that in my twenties and early thirties. I was

00:34:06.020 wrecked all the time. How do I do it? Yeah. Biohacking. And it turns out recovery is something

00:34:13.320 that's really important. And this is why I started upgrade labs. Like half of our tech is on making

00:34:17.460 people recover faster than they're supposed to i focused on up regulating my mitochondrial

00:34:23.300 function so they work again that urine acid test i make sure i have enough thyroid i make sure i

00:34:29.980 have enough testosterone i tried to take a thyroid medication because i still i have

00:34:36.100 hypothyroidism which is new there's your brain fog um i couldn't take it it made my face swell

00:34:43.700 made my tongue swell have you ever had have you even heard that yeah totally i was like what is

00:34:48.440 this it was like oh it was not a good sound and you know what i think i felt better yeah and my

00:34:55.160 tongue swelled up and i was like well that's unfortunate this is going to be awesome for you

00:34:59.820 okay i'm ready there are times when and i'm like i said i'm pretty darn resilient i just know what

00:35:05.580 foods mess with me so i don't eat them yeah so if i am at a restaurant and there's something that

00:35:12.000 they didn't say I was in there that yeah I know like I feel like a like I want to cough or like

00:35:17.500 I can just feel so you take a Benadryl except if you take a Benadryl you're down for the day yeah

00:35:23.360 so I just nibble the edge off of it okay a micro dose of Benadryl so what I would look at doing to

00:35:28.960 tolerate a medication like that is take like an eighth of a Benadryl not enough to make you tired

00:35:34.140 just enough to locally tell the tongue to chill out and try the thyroid and so this is what I'll

00:35:39.580 too i can drink red wine i don't just i don't drink more than like once a year i drink sake

00:35:44.060 if i'm going to but if you know someone's here with a two thousand dollar bottle of red wine i

00:35:48.500 want to try it so i microdose a little bit of benadryl ahead of time and i get far less symptoms

00:35:53.760 the next morning than i otherwise would and i take charcoal and all this stuff too do you take

00:35:58.680 these medications at night too so they don't hit as hard you kind of sleep through the beginning

00:36:02.160 like i swear whenever i take anything like i don't take anything because yeah half an hour later i

00:36:06.980 could feel it hmm I take it at night or do you just not have that experience if I'm in an

00:36:13.240 inflammatory state which is pretty unusual I would take a Benadryl at night but the rest time I'll

00:36:18.280 take a Claritin in the morning I've had allergies my whole life and they're much better than they

00:36:23.320 were but they're not gone and so I manage that I don't take it all the time but pretty commonly

00:36:29.660 it doesn't make me tired and it's not supposed to but it does for some people the other thing is

00:36:35.200 have you tried nootropics uh depends which ones some i tried a bunch of things back before

00:36:43.140 how about modafinil i tried modafinil it doesn't do anything for me i've got one of those genes

00:36:49.600 that sucks yeah that stuff is magic for some people all right how's your blood pressure

00:36:53.620 um good maybe slightly low but like pretty normal okay most people who've had a reaction 0.92

00:37:01.060 um, over time, whether it's chronic fatigue, long COVID or these immune things,

00:37:06.860 mass cell activation. Um, we have low blood pressure. Yeah. I used to not be able to stand

00:37:12.600 up very well. Okay. I used to eat before I figured out what was going on. And after the meal,

00:37:17.280 I would just have to lay down to get blood into my head. Yeah. Which sounds really weird. And you

00:37:23.520 like i'm like healthier than i've ever been but but managing your blood pressure is something

00:37:32.840 most people don't understand and that's electrolytes so you're taking sodium because

00:37:37.400 you put salt on your meat i used to take elements electrolytes the unflavored kind yeah those are

00:37:42.540 pretty good because they have potassium which you're going to need more of if you're getting

00:37:46.000 more sodium and they have magnesium so the simplest thing is i don't drink water without

00:37:52.040 at least salt in it and usually electrolytes. Never. Uh, I'll drink like San Pellegrino has

00:37:57.840 minerals in it anyway. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And even my danger coffee, it has minerals built into it

00:38:03.420 and electrolytes. So why would you drink water without salt in it when your cells are full of

00:38:09.360 salt water? It's so much more hydrating and it increases blood volume. And one thing that

00:38:14.660 happens with autoimmunity, especially if you've had mold or mast cell things is you just don't

00:38:20.300 make enough blood. Like you have the cells, but you don't have the plasma. So increasing hydration

00:38:25.380 massively stops brain fog. Creatine is another important thing. You need five grams a day with

00:38:31.300 the amount of meat you eat, you probably get five grams a day. I like a pound and a half to two

00:38:36.260 pounds a day. Yeah. You're, you're getting up to it. Uh, for most people though, supplementing

00:38:40.240 creatine can be really helpful. And those two things alone, like, wow, just hydration changed

00:38:44.740 my brain and then the other thing is mother nature's original nootropic is black coffee

00:38:51.920 what happens when you drink coffee you know what i rapidly metabolize caffeine

00:38:58.500 yep and so i've always kind of hated coffee even even before when i was drinking it

00:39:03.700 um my husband loves he takes caffeine pills he's on the diet but he'll take a certain type of

00:39:08.580 caffeine pill but i can't do caffeine pills even i like i crash you crash it makes me like super

00:39:14.020 i don't think i need more energy i've so i can barely keep my energy you have brain fog during

00:39:20.000 brain fog you have too much energy yeah it's like have you you know i'll be able to if i'm

00:39:27.040 foggy i'll be able to zone in on something and and work straight for eight hours

00:39:30.580 but there's like a pressure here and i can't really think and it makes conversations much

00:39:37.460 more difficult but it's not a lack of energy it makes me feel like i'm on adderall which is

00:39:42.160 not the usual I don't like I don't like Adderall at all either but so I get hyper focused I think

00:39:48.000 because I can't connect ideas very well I I think you get hyper focused because your brain's making

00:39:54.140 less energy and it's a compensatory mechanism I can only focus on one thing and the energy goes

00:39:59.460 that could easily be it that's what that's what my brain used to do and ADHD brains always hyper

00:40:05.200 focus right and that's both a gift and a curse so the next time you're in that state check your

00:40:11.680 blood pressure okay i haven't done that it fluctuates rapidly throughout the day especially

00:40:17.880 in people with autoimmunity right so once you and then bump it up with electrolytes yeah drink a

00:40:24.960 big glass of salt water i used to drink electrolytes all the time and then

00:40:29.100 i don't know i've been on this diet for so long when you're eating a high animal protein low

00:40:34.820 plant diet which is what i eat you need more electrolytes than other people you need more

00:40:40.880 minerals so for me the the biggest supplements i take a broad spectrum mineral supplement i make

00:40:47.140 called minerals 101 i take vitamin dake and that's vitamin dake.com which is a mixture of fat soluble

00:40:54.820 vitamins that guide minerals to the right places in the cells so in order to get zinc into your

00:41:00.340 cells you need remember i think it's vitamin a which directs zinc to where it goes and you need

00:41:06.900 vitamin k2 which directs calcium to go into your bones instead of to go into your other soft tissues

00:41:13.500 and you know the end result of that is i used to not be able to touch my toes and i'm super

00:41:19.000 flexible now because i got the calcium out of my tissues so doing those things helps when you're on

00:41:25.840 a high animal protein diet because i think plants mostly we use them as our original supplements

00:41:35.040 so the original trading routes across asia were salt trading routes because salt was so precious

00:41:42.240 because it's an electrolyte because we needed to make electricity and these low salt diets are

00:41:45.980 nonsense so then they became spice trading routes and i remember i asked one of my teachers when i

00:41:53.840 was a kid like it was to make spoiled meat taste better no it's because herbs are medicinal

00:41:59.120 and so if you want plants then eating oregano which has huge amounts of polyphenols and lots

00:42:06.640 of good stuff in it but it's a small volume of plant and it doesn't have a lot of anti-nutrients

00:42:10.880 compared to kale which is very very little nutrient and a lot of anti-nutrients so our

00:42:17.840 ancestors understood this and so they would use herbs medicinally even something like vanilla

00:42:22.440 it was an aphrodisiac it wasn't a flavoring agent right so i think these are necessary

00:42:29.980 so what do i do i crust my grass-fed ribeye with rosemary powder and oregano powder and high quality

00:42:37.760 salt and so i'm getting way more polyphenols from that and my coffee than most people who think

00:42:44.520 they're eating some kind of weird plants for colors and i'm not getting any of the anti-nutrients

00:42:49.480 and technically there probably are a few in there but the volume of good stuff to the ratio of good

00:42:55.060 stuff to bad stuff is so high interesting that you feel it i'm not saying you should go do that

00:42:59.600 if you react to those things but i do think you want to start guiding the body to be less reactive

00:43:04.360 which means if you're going to try something new take that eighth of a benadryl right at the

00:43:09.600 beginning so you've calmed things a little bit and then you expose yourself to something new

00:43:13.920 I think that's the only only thing I can try that's left I've tried so many things and I

00:43:21.500 think that's probably what I need to do I've been just toying it over because I don't even like how

00:43:25.860 Benadryl makes me feel like if I take it at night of like 50 milligrams too then I'm groggy until

00:43:30.960 like 3 p.m the next day and that's just a coffee deficiency Michaela

00:43:34.880 that could easily be true oh that's funny but no I probably do need to go through like a period of

00:43:46.080 time calming everything down and then trying to reintroduce things that can help instead of just

00:43:50.460 not being able to tolerate anything yeah I think you want to choose the things and then work on

00:43:57.600 work on making yourself more tolerant and this will also sound a little bit weird you know what

00:44:02.980 box breaths are, right? No. Okay. So there's a way to talk to your vagal nerve. The vagal nerve

00:44:11.300 is really interesting. It's the biggest nerve that runs through your whole body, controls digestion,

00:44:15.260 controls fight or flight. And different parts of it do different things. So you can calm the body

00:44:21.220 by doing breathing exercises that calm the vagal nerve. And the easiest one is what the Navy Seals

00:44:27.940 use it's called a box breath and just breathe in for four seconds you hold for four seconds breathe

00:44:34.100 out for four seconds and hold empty for four seconds and you do this like five or six times

00:44:38.440 do it before bed you'll fall asleep faster but do it before you eat with the new food you have

00:44:42.740 to breathe in through your nose or does it not really matter it's better to always breathe through

00:44:46.360 your nose but doesn't really matter for these that's it yeah you just do it over and over and

00:44:51.700 you can do 10 seconds in 10 seconds hold whatever you're comfortable with as long as it's the same

00:44:56.500 amount of time on each side of it if you want to make it more calming make the out breath longer

00:45:00.940 than the in breath right so then it's in some other trapezoid or something breath which no one

00:45:06.600 could do what if i'm addicted to stress um is that a real thing too i know people is it actually

00:45:13.120 is it the cortisol like rush it's more the adrenaline rush but cortisol and adrenaline

00:45:17.880 adrenaline rush so a lot of people who especially if they first go on a plant-free diet they're

00:45:24.920 going to have blood sugar fluctuations until the ketones get turned on and the primary symptom of

00:45:30.820 this and i know a bunch of listeners going oh my god that's me it's you wake up between three and

00:45:35.440 five a.m with racing thoughts you ever have that happen when i was living in mold every day oh yeah

00:45:40.740 not anymore thank goodness but yeah brutal what's happening there is when your blood sugar drops to

00:45:45.840 a certain level and there's no ketones present the body goes this is an emergency i know how to raise

00:45:51.100 blood sugar, have some adrenaline and cortisol, which raised blood sugar very quickly. So it

00:45:56.520 secretes those things. And then you get racing thoughts. You can't go back to sleep. And the

00:45:59.820 body's like, yeah, but I got my blood sugar. Oh, so here's what you can do for that. And again,

00:46:05.280 this is an animal food, barely two teaspoons of raw honey before bed. You might not handle this.

00:46:10.740 You know, I, I can tolerate a little bit of honey. Okay. Thank goodness. Have you noticed

00:46:16.620 the difference between different kinds of honey? No, not really. But to be perfectly honest,

00:46:22.380 I'm really going based on taste. Okay. So here's what you'll notice if you go deep.

00:46:29.540 Honey can be high in histamine or low in histamine, depending on how it's stored and

00:46:32.940 what the bees were eating. So if you try a batch of honey and you feel great on it,

00:46:38.380 that's awesome. But you might, you might buy honey from the same brand. And the next time

00:46:44.540 It just doesn't work. You didn't suddenly get allergic to honey. It's just that honey was high histamine. Okay

00:46:49.120 I've noticed that I didn't know that. Yeah

00:46:52.300 So give that honey to someone who doesn't care and then get another one and higher-end honeys typically have lower histamine in them

00:46:58.260 So the reason you do honey before bed specifically raw honey and if you put in hot water

00:47:02.880 It's not raw anymore raw honey raises something called glycogen in the liver

00:47:06.820 And you don't have much glycogen if you're on a plant-free diet and liver glycogen goes to the brain

00:47:12.540 and muscle glycogen typically goes to the rest of the body first.

00:47:16.740 So you're raising the amount of carbohydrate storage that the brain might need at night

00:47:22.700 and the glial cells in your brain, the immune cells in your brain,

00:47:26.320 they prefer carbohydrate, but the neurons prefer ketones.

00:47:30.840 So if you're long-term on an animal-only diet, your glial cells will suffer.

00:47:37.000 And these are the pruning and repair mechanisms of the brain.

00:47:39.860 so what i figured out worked for the majority of people was be in ketosis five six days a week and

00:47:47.500 then go out and that feeds the lining of the gut and then you go back in so it's cycling and the

00:47:54.400 you would call it like clean keto cycling that's what the bulletproof diet was okay here's a

00:47:59.160 question then so i like i know if you switch over the lion diet or the carnivore diet you get a

00:48:03.980 microbiome switch and like die off if you're on it long enough if you do this cycling thing where

00:48:08.640 you're five or, you said five or six days in ketosis and then you're not in ketosis for the

00:48:14.160 seventh day. Is that not a long enough period to change your microbiome or they only need to be fed

00:48:18.400 that often? Or do you take prebiotics every day during that time? I like taking prebiotics during

00:48:24.100 that time. And does that make you feel, can you directly feel better from that? Like, do you

00:48:28.500 notice it? You can. The other thing that's important to understand is that the primary

00:48:34.100 toxin made by a gut bacteria is called LPS or lipopolysaccharide. Yeah. Mine's sky eye. Yeah.

00:48:40.260 Guess what binds to lipopolysaccharide really well? What activated charcoal? Okay. What about

00:48:46.960 do you think colostyramine does? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, great. Here's the problem with colostyramine

00:48:50.860 will strip everything out. All your vitamin D, vitamin K, all this stuff. So I only like people

00:48:58.420 using colostyramine like three times a week or when they're really exposed. If you take it

00:49:01.580 regularly, you're not going to like what happens long-term. So what you do is you take activated

00:49:06.720 charcoal a half hour before your meal. And that means it'll pass through the stomach. It'll be

00:49:12.160 right in the gut where bile gets excreted and bile six activated charcoal and bile is what carries

00:49:18.700 these lipopolysaccharides, these toxins. So I had high LPS levels too. And with leaky gut, they can

00:49:24.120 go through the leaky gut and your job is to get them out of the system. And the way you do that

00:49:29.140 is activated charcoal. It also just so happens that MCT oil, which I turned into a billion dollar

00:49:36.140 industry category, it also protects the liver from LPS induced toxins. Interesting. You know,

00:49:42.800 that's one thing, like there were some foods I could tolerate for a very long time. I feel like

00:49:47.640 MCT oil was one of those things that was pretty tolerable. And I haven't tried to reintroduce it

00:49:51.900 just because I cut it. There's certain things I tried to reintroduce, but MCT oil wasn't one of

00:49:55.640 them might be tolerable here's the and so mct protects but guess what escorts lipopolysaccharides

00:50:02.860 through the gut lining the most what fat what no yeah no i don't want to hear that i don't want to

00:50:09.560 hear that either so that means if you have bad gut bacteria and you eat fatty steaks which are

00:50:14.220 my favorite food and a ton of butter it is going to help the lps get through so you want to have

00:50:19.540 healthy gut bacteria and you want to bind the toxins and you want to increase your resilience

00:50:23.580 So activated charcoal MCT oil would be things that are worth adding back in

00:50:28.600 Okay, that totally makes sense and to be really clear. I have no affiliation with Bulletproof

00:50:33.940 And so I'm not trying to sell you anything up. Well, I'm danger coffee. I'd like it if you guys try that but

00:50:40.180 I'm not trying to sell you those supplements. Just those are tools that you use in order to

00:50:46.020 specifically affect those things in the gut and then

00:50:48.980 And the prebiotics over time can really make a difference.

00:50:53.280 So even if you're only eating animals, you're on the lion diet,

00:50:56.960 if a prebiotic or even just a probiotic makes a difference,

00:51:02.020 you might have to take it for a while.

00:51:03.260 And there's a variety of them out there.

00:51:05.800 I have an old post on my website where I talk about which probiotics raise histamine.

00:51:14.020 And some do.

00:51:14.880 So I try to low histamine one.

00:51:18.140 i think from smidge has a sensitive one i don't know how you feel about smidge i've never tried

00:51:23.620 it they're they're just like pure you refrigerate them but they're pure um i can't take and i think

00:51:29.780 my gut is too leaky to tolerate probiotics maybe prebiotics or do you think it's the wrong strain

00:51:35.500 i haven't tried saccharomyces i don't think that makes sense because if you have bad gut bacteria

00:51:41.040 that you're not tolerating very well and you take good gut bacteria and you say your gut doesn't

00:51:44.980 Tolerate them no what happened is the good guys came in and they got in a fight with the bad guys

00:51:49.000 You would think that when they get in a fight guess what bacteria make the more stressed they are the more LPS

00:51:55.160 They make so you might try activated charcoal and probiotics and see what happens

00:52:01.220 Okay, so you think it could be like somewhat of a I mean would that be equivalent to a herx reaction?

00:52:05.860 That's the primary just from a little bit of probiotic if it's okay

00:52:09.540 I could get behind that and so if you want to block a herx reaction you take a little bit of Benadryl or

00:52:14.160 Claritin or something like that, but you take the charcoal charcoal is critical for it. And then 0.98

00:52:19.240 for most people who are dealing with this kind of stuff, salt water, especially in the morning,

00:52:24.660 having those electrolytes, raising cortisol in the morning when it's supposed to be high,

00:52:28.880 a cup of coffee is just fine. Unless you just, in your case, you don't tolerate it. Um, different

00:52:33.820 coffee will cause different symptoms that I know of and cortisol is supposed to be high in the

00:52:38.540 morning. That's the normal time. And so if you're just feeling like a zombie, I had stage four

00:52:44.380 adrenal fatigue and all that. It took me a year. The first time I wanted to heal and I felt like

00:52:48.100 crap. The second time it took me a month because I took adrenal extract and I took coffee in the 0.52

00:52:55.160 morning so I could have a healthy circadian curve for cortisol. So this idea that you should skip

00:53:00.740 coffee cause it's somehow addictive. It's those exercise. You probably shouldn't skip that. You

00:53:04.740 You do it every day, you feel better.

00:53:06.360 It's not that.

00:53:07.420 How do you feel about nicotine?

00:53:09.100 Let me check.

00:53:10.660 Is that what that spray is?

00:53:14.160 You're not on the Zin?

00:53:16.020 You're on the spray?

00:53:16.980 I've never seen that spray.

00:53:18.360 I was going to ask you too, and then just, I was like, yeah, that's normal.

00:53:21.820 Yeah, it's normal for me.

00:53:23.020 I go through phases.

00:53:24.120 I'm at a high phase.

00:53:27.500 So it is, other than caffeine, nicotine is the most studied nootropic on the planet.

00:53:32.760 I've never smoked.

00:53:33.740 Smoking is bad for you.

00:53:35.380 And in my longevity book, I talk about a lot of data.

00:53:40.280 In fact, there's someone you might want to interview.

00:53:42.080 I call him Dr. Nicotine.

00:53:44.500 His name is Andrew Campbell, if I remember right.

00:53:47.180 I've had 1,200 guests on my show, so I'm pretty sure.

00:53:50.660 He's a professor at Vanderbilt.

00:53:54.160 His first paper in 1986 that was published showing nicotine prevents and reverses Alzheimer's disease came out.

00:54:03.540 and he's published something like 30 papers that was him okay i've read some of those papers yeah

00:54:07.880 so pharmaceutical nicotine at very low doses one spray of this is one milligram so it's

00:54:14.600 a cigarette has 20 milligrams in it so this is a very low dose you have brain fog and use a little

00:54:21.800 bit of nicotine a little bit of caffeine holy crap your brain fog should go away have you ever

00:54:26.720 tried nicotine what does it do for you i like nicotine nicotine is like the only thing i like

00:54:31.840 okay and i like it's a low enough dose that i can stop whenever i want there's no withdrawal or

00:54:36.420 anything it helps with brain fog if i ever get hit with that it's huge for brain fog it's the

00:54:41.860 only thing i've done not to be a nicotine shill or anything but it's really the only thing i've

00:54:45.740 taken as if you wanted to call it a supplement or a drug of any sort that i haven't seen any

00:54:51.300 negative consequence like even like benadryl makes me foggy the next day alcohol gives you

00:54:56.160 a hangover and it's poisonous but it's fun but nicotine is just like i don't know what the

00:55:01.520 downside is unless you're vaping or smoking or something vaping and smoking are not nicotine

00:55:05.920 there are some there are other stuff and nicotine so is there a downside if you're taking higher

00:55:10.480 doses yes yeah low dose yeah low dose nicotine i like to recommend like five milligrams a day

00:55:16.960 especially over age 40 because people who smoke get cancer but they don't get alzheimer's and

00:55:21.240 parkinson's it's neuroprotective that's weird it also mimics exercise so you know how you go to 0.99

00:55:28.080 south america and you see all these women in crazy bikinis and they're smoking all the time 0.99

00:55:33.520 and they eat like how can you eat that and not be fat like an american and it's because they're 1.00

00:55:37.800 smoking that's funny i'd heard that smoking keeps you thin i thought it reduced your appetite

00:55:43.140 it actually changes something called um p uh yeah pgc1 alpha which is something that goes up when

00:55:53.220 you exercise. Wow. So it's not just, I'm sure it probably suppresses appetite, but interesting.

00:55:59.920 It, it is something that is worth consideration. And just for listeners, nicotine is addictive.

00:56:06.600 The washout period biologically is three days. So for three days, if you go cold Turkey off of

00:56:12.720 nicotine, you're going to feel like crap and be cranky pants after three days is all psychological.

00:56:18.020 So I've quit this stuff for six months at a time.

00:56:20.900 But I actually like my brain and my life better with low-dose nicotine.

00:56:25.380 It's a meaningful improvement.

00:56:26.980 So I have no issues with it.

00:56:28.900 I'm also not going to get Alzheimer's.

00:56:30.960 Yeah, I mean, that's always a plus.

00:56:33.000 Because guess what increases your risk for Alzheimer's?

00:56:38.680 Lipopolysaccharides.

00:56:39.180 That's horrifying.

00:56:39.900 I don't want to hear that.

00:56:40.560 I mean, you can tell from brain fog.

00:56:43.100 Okay, that's all extremely useful information.

00:56:45.620 All right.

00:56:46.380 have you tried any of the other hardcore smart drugs like paracetam yeah do they work um yeah

00:56:53.860 i found with i found with most of them i tried almost all the stimulants um from chemical

00:57:01.720 research companies like all of them it was this one too i was like ah too much but i found most

00:57:07.580 of them made me i don't really like how i feel on them like anything that gives me more energy i

00:57:13.040 don't really like how i feel on them like with nicotine i feel like it almost

00:57:16.640 calms me down a little bit yeah and with everything so the all the racetams

00:57:21.740 didn't really like them there was one that was really intense i'll remember what it was called

00:57:28.760 i kind of like that but then not to come down was it phenol paracetam no but i've tried that too

00:57:35.120 and that doesn't work for you i mean they work but maybe it's a dosing problem i don't really

00:57:39.440 like how it makes me feel anything that stimulates me I don't really like it all right so what I

00:57:44.380 think is going on with you is GABA receptors so you should look at things that stick to GABA

00:57:51.020 because you feel ungrounded and I mean that could be it I was on antidepressants for almost like

00:57:58.000 high dose antidepressants for grade five till I was 23 you ever try saffron no saffron like

00:58:06.340 saffron the spice yeah no you can take a saffron extract that is not addictive and performs better

00:58:14.680 than ssris well i believe that i was the first guy to put that in a commercial supplement about

00:58:21.700 10 years ago and you can buy a saffron extract all over the place now and i i use saffron regularly

00:58:28.420 and it helps i don't get depressed i've been depressed before but i don't typically go there

00:58:34.340 Is that for GABA or does it work on serotonin that one works on serotonin interesting 5htp?

00:58:39.740 When I was going through antidepressant withdrawal help it helped a lot it helped. Yeah

00:58:43.720 I think saffron might be worth considering a kava. I use something called true kava

00:58:48.220 I've been helping that company get going kava hits the same GABA receptors that alcohol does

00:58:54.140 But it doesn't have any of the downsides of alcohol. So this is in Indonesia

00:58:59.300 This is a traditional beverage that they would drink. Is that a route? It's a route. Yeah, but the

00:59:04.180 extracts or lab tested with extracts. Okay. That sounds like an oil before bed. Kava could be good

00:59:11.080 for you. I serve that at my parties. It's just true kava.com. And then, um, there's also a couple

00:59:19.460 smart drugs that affect GABA and I'd have to dig through, uh, to figure out, let's see, there's

00:59:24.840 phenol GABA, which might be amazing for you. I haven't taken phenol GABA. I've tried GABA.

00:59:30.060 yeah phenogaba it you it has a 72 hour washout you can't take it every day otherwise it builds

00:59:35.920 up in your system and it can be addictive you don't want that but if you do it like once every

00:59:40.000 three days at a normal dose and that can be really really good and then we can teach you

00:59:47.040 how to ground yourself like when you're feeling too much energy like that there's things you can

00:59:51.400 do with your energy like this is old chinese medicine stuff or yogic stuff and so you can

00:59:58.560 learn to have control over what's going on and all that stuff so like if I'm

01:00:04.080 feeling ungrounded I'm pretty likely to say you know I think I'll have some of

01:00:08.580 this is it flavored yeah it has some minty stuff

01:00:13.380 I'm actually allergic to peppermint I had an anaphylactic reaction this

01:00:18.240 year I I used to get really reactive peppermint but that's gone my dad's

01:00:24.320 really allergic to peppermint too I was like who on earth is allergic to

01:00:27.240 peppermint so you you guys just have mast cells in the family you okay two one more thing we're

01:00:33.000 gonna do for you like this is super technical i hope it's helping a lot of people um it's helping

01:00:37.480 me who cares just kidding so we've got to get you the right stack of drugs to suppress your

01:00:45.240 mast cell activation and everything will change right and when you've you're on them for six

01:00:50.200 months, you will suddenly find, oh my gosh, I feel much, much better. Um, there's one off-label

01:00:59.620 Japanese drug I'll tell you about after the show that might be interesting. Um, if you can help me

01:01:03.780 remember to do that and let's see, let's talk about cortisol. So cortisol is bad, right?

01:01:11.860 No. Where are you going with this? I was hoping you'd say yes. Most people, cortisol, stress,

01:01:17.860 death yeah when you're burned out you don't make enough cortisol low cortisol is four times more

01:01:25.000 deadly than high cortisol because you don't have the ability to heal and recover i found out that

01:01:31.640 my body doesn't make enough cortisol and it hasn't since i was born oh yeah and if you don't have

01:01:37.580 enough cortisol you don't have enough blood pressure so a huge number of people are dealing

01:01:41.120 with mast cells and low blood pressure and long covid and chronic fatigue syndrome and you know

01:01:46.340 mold poisoning and the people who think they have Lyme disease, which is just a symptom of toxic

01:01:50.680 mold poisoning. I went down that path for a long time thinking I had Lyme. I did have Lyme. It goes

01:01:55.600 away when you treat the mold. Um, one thing that's important is that's good to know. I, I score, I

01:02:01.740 had a positive Lyme test that I've ignored. Cause I was like, Ooh, I don't know if that's a rabbit

01:02:06.300 hole. I want to dig down. Yeah. The Lyme co-infections are pretty bad, but Lyme itself,

01:02:11.140 look, everyone has Lyme. It's like, I'll look at them, but tell me where the water leak in your

01:02:14.940 house is and like how did you know because i treated my lime for two years and that wasn't

01:02:21.000 the root cause it was a symptom so there's a stuff you do if you've been mold exposed and the

01:02:28.400 the biggest thing there is you go on a mold pharmaceutical called sporinox and you go on

01:02:33.940 it for like six months so does that i looked into that and then i was like no i just have to detox

01:02:39.400 you don't need to kill the fungus that's growing in you you need to kill the fungus that's growing

01:02:44.020 in you. I thought I was skeptical. I've done ozone therapy. I've done all the things. And I talked to

01:02:49.300 the guy who originated that protocol. He runs a company called my Michael lab. His name's also

01:02:53.920 Andrew. And he is like, I've been doing this clinically for 40 years. And if you'll just

01:03:00.200 trust me, he's like, here's your labs and you're highly resilient. Um, but you still have mold

01:03:06.140 growing in your body and I have the evidence for it. So try this. And so I took Sporinox for six 0.78

01:03:12.180 months and one day just like you said i just woke up like i'm kind of done and i am so resilient

01:03:18.920 to mold it's insane did that does that kill candida as well or is it you can take a different

01:03:24.800 drug for that it'll affect candida but not nearly as much as fluconazole yeah okay so what a lot of

01:03:29.860 people with lime or mold do is they would take fluconazole to kill yeast for 60 days and that

01:03:37.000 has a huge effect that also helps Lyme. But if you take Sporinox, you may also need to,

01:03:42.740 you may not need to take Fluconazole. They can both be hard on the liver and you can buy the

01:03:47.320 drugs online or you can get them from a doctor. You should get a liver test after taking them

01:03:52.740 for a couple of weeks just to make sure you're not susceptible. But most people don't. I would

01:03:57.440 recommend extra glutathione when you do that as well. Do you handle glutathione? Have you looked

01:04:02.560 at your copper genetics around comt yes i have i can't remember right now i don't think i have

01:04:10.840 a problem with it okay uh but maybe i wasn't like i did my genetics through 23andme okay years ago

01:04:17.260 and then ran it through a bunch of third-party things and didn't find anything okay so that's

01:04:21.200 as far as testing so you're not dealing with mthfr or or inability to process sulfur most likely

01:04:26.820 that no okay then here's the other thing though around blood pressure brain fog is so often

01:04:34.900 caused by either histamine or by blood pressure drops in blood pressure not high blood pressure

01:04:41.100 but low blood pressure so for that step one electrolytes like we talked about step two you

01:04:46.880 can have a little bit of coffee because that helps but there's drugs for that and this is

01:04:54.360 another book. No way. There's another book that no one has read. Um, the book is called safe uses

01:05:00.240 of cortisol and the best people to talk to are people who've been practicing medicine for 40

01:05:06.780 years. And the guy who wrote this book is in his eighties. And he said, look, I've had thousands

01:05:13.520 of patients with crippling autoimmunity and no one could help them. And I put them on bioidentical

01:05:20.720 cortisol replacement at just the normal level the body would make wow and the it's called

01:05:27.560 hydrocortisone but it's an oral form of it and you take five milligrams four times a day

01:05:32.260 and all kinds of things resolve within 30 to 60 days and if you stop taking it they slowly come

01:05:38.880 back even things like endometriosis and pcos and all kinds of things so about 10 years ago i

01:05:46.260 discovered this and I found my cortisol levels were always too low. So I got them up to normal.

01:05:52.940 And especially during recovery after an exposure recovery, after having COVID,

01:06:00.220 having enough cortisol present is critical for recovery. And one of the reasons I'm so resilient

01:06:05.620 when I travel is that if I'm crossing nine time zones, I handle my circadian biology like crazy.

01:06:10.320 The glasses I wear at night are called true dark. It's one of my companies started 10, 11 years ago.

01:06:15.020 your body pays attention to light that's what tells your body what time it is so airplane

01:06:21.000 lights and hotel lights it screws up your timing i don't get jet lag anywhere on the planet as long

01:06:25.420 as i wear the true dark glasses at the right time but your cortisol curve gets screwed up when you

01:06:31.320 travel as well so i take cortisol when i travel and it means i never get sick and i don't have

01:06:39.000 high cortisol and that doesn't have i mean it sounds good you know what i had to take so after

01:06:44.700 had my allergic reaction this year to peppermint they gave me prednisone because i was in a state

01:06:48.440 of anaphylaxis and it was extended very unpleasant and i was on prednisone for about a week and a half

01:06:54.920 to get the reaction down and it destroyed me but initially i was like this is amazing so whatever

01:07:03.320 it did initially i was like and i know how i've seen people on long-term prednisone it is not

01:07:07.960 pretty but i was like whatever it's doing is making i was in a state of anaphylaxis too but

01:07:11.840 it was making me feel good does hydrocortisone is it like a steroid like that or not exactly

01:07:17.980 they're in the same rough family in fact the guy who wrote that book i think it's still in print

01:07:23.480 he said my biggest challenge as a doctor is when i say cortisol doctors hear prednisone yeah

01:07:28.940 prednisone is a long-acting brutal steroid that'll dysregulate your blood sugar cause puffiness it

01:07:34.480 destroyed my stomach after a week you feel like crap for months after yeah it was it was terrible

01:07:40.260 It can save your life though.

01:07:41.720 I mean, there's, there's times when prednisone is called for cortisol, your body makes it

01:07:46.820 every day.

01:07:47.660 You're taking the same amount your body makes.

01:07:51.380 So it doesn't have those effects.

01:07:53.220 It lasts for about six hours.

01:07:55.100 So if you're on this full, you take it four times a day and it'll have no more effect

01:08:00.000 than having a stressful day because you're, it's the same amount your body wants to make.

01:08:04.300 Does it reduce inflammation too?

01:08:05.760 Heck yeah.

01:08:06.660 Why have I not heard of this?

01:08:08.260 That's weird. 0.93

01:08:09.120 I'm a biohacker I invented it like that's and I have I've had more medical shit wrong with me 0.53

01:08:15.900 being 300 pounds at 23 like all the stuff that you get when you're old I had to deal with before

01:08:20.400 I was 30 and I was running a longevity group where people in their 80s taught me all this

01:08:25.180 like it's not that I just know it all it's that I had the best mentors on the planet

01:08:28.680 and cool so I love getting to go deep on this I hopefully this is helpful for a lot of people but

01:08:36.240 if you go to your doctor and say, I'm low in cortisol, they'll say you're crazy. And you say,

01:08:39.880 no, no, if you're a good functional doc, could I do a 24 hour salivary cortisol test? So four times

01:08:46.640 a day you get your spit and you look, Oh, isn't that funny? Your cortisol is too low all the time,

01:08:50.560 or it's high at night and low in the morning. So then you take bioidentical cortisol, just like

01:08:55.180 you would take thyroid hormone. And for people with chronic autoimmunity and muscle activation,

01:08:59.100 it's life changing and you become tolerant of more foods and you can start introducing them.

01:09:04.480 but maybe you can take one of the mast cell stabilizers or mast cell suppressors.

01:09:09.580 Oh, so maybe that's the first step before trying to find a antihistamine.

01:09:14.520 Yep. And again, these are medical things, but cortisol is also me.

01:09:17.360 You can buy in Mexico and for a lot of people, I mean, I got there,

01:09:21.280 I'm financially successful now and I made $6 million and I was 26.

01:09:26.520 And that was pre Biden dollars. This was real money.

01:09:28.700 and and I uh I lost her when I was 28 and there's been times when I can't afford all the things

01:09:37.160 that I think are going to make me well and I was really sick and I had a great job but man I I

01:09:43.160 didn't show up very well for my great job so I'm like if I had had a normal job I would have like

01:09:51.080 I probably would have lupus or something I would it would not be here like I am today

01:09:54.620 so you should get your lab tests you should go to a functional medicine doctor they usually are

01:10:00.020 four to six hundred dollars an hour they don't take insurance because they hate insurance companies

01:10:03.220 as much as the rest of us so part of what i've been doing is like how do we get access to lab

01:10:09.400 tests without needing a permission slip that's expensive and not helpful it's crazy so there's

01:10:16.620 uh at upgrade labs one of my companies the franchise we just launched that if you go to

01:10:21.960 upgradehealth.com you can order lab tests that tell your inflammation levels and hormones all

01:10:26.600 the basic stuff you need and it's like the highest level panel is eight hundred dollars and it starts

01:10:31.180 at 179 dollars what do you have to see a doctor first no how did you manage to do that a lot of

01:10:36.840 work what so wow and someone will come to your house and draw the blood what kind of tests do

01:10:43.220 you guys run that that's huge we run a longevity panel we run hormones thyroid inflammation

01:10:49.220 a homocysteine the the basic the basic stuff all the way up to advanced so there's kind of three

01:10:54.220 levels and I'm working on adding a lot more tests into that because you have a right to know what's

01:10:59.420 going on in your body and no one has the right to gate you from doing it yeah and I love doctors

01:11:04.940 uh the mother of my children is a doctor and some of my closest friends in the world are mds and

01:11:12.100 it's a it's an amazing profession they hate when people come in and don't know what's going on so

01:11:17.400 if you show up at your doctor and say, look, I got some lab tests. Here's what's going on.

01:11:21.660 Cause I think is going on. Can we partner on this? They're like, thank you. Right. Because

01:11:25.920 it saves them time. And that means you go to the doctor when you need to. Right. And

01:11:31.300 he sort of come in educated, but this is important because when I started on this path,

01:11:37.920 it was hard. I had to go beg for a test and no one should have to do that. And you want your

01:11:44.260 insurance company to pay for you to be well as it ever worked in your entire life you don't rely

01:11:49.160 on them for that so it has to be cost effective and you have to be able to get good advice on

01:11:53.520 what to do and that's what ai is for so we can tell you i'm not going to diagnose or treat anything

01:11:58.400 we'll tell your numbers if you want to feel this way and this is your goal you want your numbers

01:12:02.000 moving this way here's the supplements here's the lifestyle things and hey maybe here's the

01:12:05.700 pharmaceuticals that's awesome you got to get the pharmaceuticals from a doctor or go to mexico

01:12:10.100 and if you're

01:12:12.320 seriously if you're tight on money

01:12:13.880 that's what you do there's nothing wrong with that

01:12:16.020 right you can't afford testosterone

01:12:18.140 therapy yes go to Mexico 0.59

01:12:19.400 negotiate hard at a pharmacy they'll give you testosterone

01:12:21.980 right so get it done

01:12:24.260 and I

01:12:26.040 I know so many people tell themselves sorry I can't

01:12:28.100 afford this lab tests are cheaper

01:12:30.180 than they were and pharmaceuticals

01:12:32.140 you can order them online from all over the world

01:12:34.060 and they work so

01:12:35.980 it's best to see a doctor

01:12:37.960 I highly recommend that and I

01:12:40.060 recognize half the country doesn't have $500 in savings. So you're probably not going to spend

01:12:45.740 your entire savings on one doctor appointment to get a permission slip to get a lab test that

01:12:50.160 costs $500. It's dumb. So we need to unlock that. And if you just say, I can't afford lab tests, 1.00

01:12:55.080 then you buy $30 worth of pharmaceuticals that match your symptoms as best you can,

01:12:59.660 that don't have a problem. And you take matters into your own hands. I did that in order to get

01:13:03.860 well. You took matters into your own hands. That's basically what I did too. And before I

01:13:07.320 got to diet because i didn't even know that i didn't even know diet was impacting my health

01:13:11.320 at all but i went through all the pharmaceuticals i could yeah and i got myself onto a nice cocktail

01:13:17.420 where i could stay awake and focus it was not good but like i was alive you're you said something

01:13:25.580 really important there when you're really sick your energy is so low and you can't focus you're 0.60

01:13:32.520 like crap it's okay to use pharmaceuticals or natural methods to make yourself feel good while

01:13:39.780 you recover you don't have to suffer if i hadn't taken adderall which i hate as soon as i got 0.98

01:13:45.480 healthy i got off of that and was like my life is so much better if i wasn't on adderall i wouldn't

01:13:49.700 have been able to figure out diet was killing me smart drugs gave my gave me my brain back

01:13:55.080 so that i could then do all the work on nutrition and i could keep working without them i don't

01:14:00.100 think i would have kept my job yeah i don't think i would have gotten out of it i was sleeping 18

01:14:03.280 hours a day i couldn't wake up it's like how are you gonna think i couldn't think at all so yes

01:14:07.920 it's funny a lot of listeners are like seriously like you guys are being dramatic guys we're both

01:14:14.040 high performance people who are doing things in the world it's not that we didn't want to do it

01:14:19.460 it's that there was a hardware problem and you can fix hardware problems like i remember going

01:14:24.140 to the doctor in palo alto uh and i was like i feel like i've been poisoned like i have no energy

01:14:29.140 I'm so tired.

01:14:29.940 My brain doesn't work.

01:14:30.720 I can't remember how I got home at night driving.

01:14:33.520 There's just nothing there.

01:14:34.440 You don't know where you end up in the wrong spot.

01:14:35.840 And you're like, what?

01:14:36.640 Yeah.

01:14:36.960 All the brain fog and all that.

01:14:39.300 And I said, the only thing I've noticed kind of helps me is vitamin C.

01:14:42.920 He goes, stop, it could kill you.

01:14:44.760 But what they teach doctors in medical school is if they have more than three or four symptoms,

01:14:50.000 they're hypochondriac by definition.

01:14:51.660 Yeah, I got that.

01:14:52.640 Yeah.

01:14:53.340 Everyone's been gaslit by doctors because they're taught that.

01:14:56.400 It's like they're trying to do that to you.

01:14:57.640 so the trick is to understand if you have something foundational wrong it's going to

01:15:04.120 cause more than one symptom if your mitochondria aren't working if your vagal nerve isn't working

01:15:08.760 if your mast cells aren't working if your cortisol secretion is broken it's not like we're all going

01:15:13.280 to have just one symptom it's going to show up all over the place with different symptoms for

01:15:18.160 different people and we have so much ability to test for this stuff and we understand it now

01:15:22.940 and this is why i think biohacking is so important it's not your employer's job to pay for your

01:15:28.260 health care it's it's not your doctor's job to make you well it's only your job you hire your

01:15:35.140 doctor you hire your health coach you go online and go to reddit wherever only you own this and

01:15:41.860 they all work for you and it's okay to be efficient about it it's okay to say my priority

01:15:47.700 is feeling good enough to keep putting food on the table for my kids while i heal and to do that

01:15:52.060 first in fact i recommend doing that first and you did it uh for me it was modafinil which is a

01:15:57.360 drug for narcolepsy i wish i wish yeah i was diagnosed with idiopathic hypersomnia like almost

01:16:03.420 narcolepsy and and so that's how i got put on adderall but i tried modafinil and it was like

01:16:08.620 nothing i swallowed like five of those suckers the whole thing and went to sleep yeah and then i did

01:16:13.360 23 and me and it was like you don't metabolize this that sucks yeah for the vast majority of

01:16:18.820 people, um, modafinil, if you're dealing with chronic fatigue, it just gives your life back.

01:16:24.240 I, I was on nightline like 12 years ago and I was the only guy willing to not have a bag on my head.

01:16:32.220 And it was about the limitless pill and modafinil is that. So I've been on it for 20 years. I went

01:16:40.060 off it for a couple of years and I was testing the Bulletproof diet. My brain is much better

01:16:43.800 on a hundred milligrams of modafinil in the morning. Have you tried a draft? I have,

01:16:47.700 i don't like it as much okay yeah man so jealous i take a bunch of other smart drugs too

01:16:56.360 you might like one called depranil you know about that no this is a really cool one in fact i should

01:17:02.320 talk about this more in biohacking circles it's more of a longevity drug but it sensitizes your

01:17:08.720 dopamine receptors and when you like that when you're tired when you have chronic fatigue

01:17:13.640 You just you just don't have desire to do so because all feels so hard

01:17:18.080 And if you get your dopamine working better things don't feel so hard

01:17:21.080 Dopamine gives you pleasure and motivation from working towards something but not from getting it so

01:17:27.860 What you do is you take three drops of liquid deprinol which is a microdose and it protects your neurons or dopaminergic neurons

01:17:35.220 so you're much less likely to get Parkinson's as you age, but

01:17:38.480 It makes you feel more energy because your dopamine works better deprinol

01:17:43.560 Interesting.

01:17:44.180 I haven't heard of that.

01:17:44.980 Yeah, you want the liquid form of it.

01:17:46.420 Okay.

01:17:46.900 So the cool thing is we've gotten kind of deep on pharmaceuticals,

01:17:50.480 but the other thing that's missing in the world of chronic fatigue

01:17:55.580 or just being tired is circadian biology.

01:17:59.580 For me, my bedtime was 2.02 a.m.

01:18:02.760 I've been tracking my sleep for 17 years because I was such a crappy sleeper.

01:18:07.760 And I just couldn't fall asleep before then.

01:18:09.860 There's stuff to read, stuff to do.

01:18:11.380 and that's not very functional by controlling the color of light and the intensity of light in the

01:18:18.280 evening and having dinner a little bit earlier i moved my circadian window to be normal i go to

01:18:23.400 bed at 10 30 right sometimes go to bed at midnight because i'm staying up late before midnight was

01:18:27.940 unspeakably early this has been my entire life since i was 10 and so you see me at night i'm

01:18:33.520 going to be wearing red drew dark glasses for a reason and i have dimmer switches throughout my

01:18:37.180 house and I have red light bulbs and my Edison bulbs. Nice. Edison bulbs. Yep. I have straight

01:18:43.580 up red LEDs. Uh, and so I just switch on those lamps at night. And if the sun is down, you should

01:18:48.680 not be staring at bright white lights. Even for five seconds, you'll still sleep, but your sleep

01:18:53.940 score will be much lower. And I've seen people with weird autoimmune things, people with even

01:18:59.840 things like bipolar, they control their lighting and it goes away. So a lot of this is tied to

01:19:05.340 circadian disruption your gut bacteria have their own circadian pattern every day so one of the

01:19:11.720 reasons you feel crappy when you travel is that your gut bacteria didn't have their sleep-wake

01:19:16.840 cycle and they make more lipopolysaccharide these inflammatory toxins i i can i feel like i can feel

01:19:22.800 that i can't even go like a three-hour time zone shift i can't sleep my sleep's pretty good it used

01:19:28.480 to be 2 a.m all right i will give you a pair of true dark glasses and if you wear them on your

01:19:34.800 next flight like most people can't stay awake for 15 minutes wearing these and we've got now a new

01:19:40.620 neuroscience study published in a journal showing shifts in brain waves that's are similar to

01:19:46.240 meditation from wearing the glasses for 15 minutes so they literally chilled the body out and this

01:19:51.420 is nothing to do with your willpower let's do with just hardcore biology so understanding that good

01:19:57.840 sleep and good darkness in the morning and bright sunlight in the morning can reduce autoimmunity

01:20:03.080 is a big deal i i do believe that i believe like i was pretty skeptical about that for a while but

01:20:07.480 i know how fluorescent lights make me feel yeah and so there's something that's the opposite of

01:20:12.840 that and i know that those are horrible like horrible even the studio lighting when you're

01:20:18.420 wearing glasses it hurts studio lighting is horrible and i'm under it a lot these glasses

01:20:24.640 block the toxic part of blue but leave the good parts of blue intact my brain is fine at the end

01:20:30.580 of the day if i wear these and i've been on so many sets with actors and newscasters and they're

01:20:37.040 all just dealing with terrible brain fog that's caused by staring at these freaking lights all

01:20:41.100 the time then i'd have to wear yellow glasses all the time i mean there's no solution though right

01:20:47.240 are there any contact lenses you can stick in yellow eyes instead i haven't found any but

01:20:52.100 people just think you're a rock star so you'll be fine uh what you can yours look good well thank

01:20:57.180 you um here's what you can do get warm light bulbs so 2700k and just change the coloring yeah

01:21:07.140 that helps a lot i love that idea so even my studio lights in my home studio they have the

01:21:12.880 ability to change the color temperature these do and a lot of how a lot of houses are homes these

01:21:18.020 days they have super bright like bright blue horrible that stuff will make you old it's like

01:21:24.080 corn syrup but concentrated into lighting. It's just bad for you. So you want dimmer switches

01:21:29.360 and you want the warmest LEDs you can afford because they made incandescent bulbs illegal

01:21:36.060 in the U.S. Last year. Sorry, what? Oh yeah. So you used to be able to buy incandescent bulbs

01:21:41.840 because your body likes them. So last year they put a fine in place of about $440 per bulb if a

01:21:48.840 company sold a bulb. So I bought a few thousand incandescent bulbs right before they became

01:21:52.800 illegal so my house has amazing lighting and when i run out of those edison bulbs edison bulbs are

01:21:57.760 led they're just much better than the big bright ones so edison incandescent are illegal if they're

01:22:05.080 incandescent edison bulbs and you can still get them but the incandescent bulbs or the edison

01:22:09.760 bulbs that you buy now that i got the incandescent ones okay i was like there were spotlights out

01:22:15.300 there i was like i'm not having any of this those are precious most of the edison bulbs you buy

01:22:19.380 today have an led filament yeah as long as they're not illegal well they're not illegal to

01:22:25.800 possess they're just illegal to sell which is funny because that's rude american companies

01:22:31.180 made incandescent bulbs but only chinese companies make leds so lovely you have to wonder who had a

01:22:37.300 financial interest oh my gosh what a mess it's a mess it is a mess but here's the deal you can

01:22:45.940 build a level of resilience, Michaela, that you've never experienced in your life. I did

01:22:51.400 it. I had to do it. And things that you're like, Holy crap. You're like, okay, I don't

01:22:56.540 like that, but it doesn't matter. I've got enough energy to handle anything that life

01:23:01.720 brings my way. And you can build that. Like you can craft it and you find all the tools

01:23:06.540 and all the techniques.

01:23:08.060 Well, I'm definitely down to give the, uh, antihistamines for six months a shot. Cause

01:23:12.760 i think yeah i think that's necessary yeah i think for you is cortisol and mast cells so i had a

01:23:22.040 cortisol test it wasn't the one where you spit in a cup for four times a day but it might have been

01:23:26.620 through blood and it showed high levels in the morning at least like too high would you think

01:23:32.540 if i did the entire time blood tests are usually not useful okay so i need the saliva test yeah

01:23:37.760 you've got to have the slope of the curve okay right and also some people just get stressed when

01:23:42.380 they go to the doctor. So it doesn't work that well. Oh, I never go to the doctor. It was an

01:23:46.240 at-home blood test. Okay, good. They're coming to me. Nice. I like it. Um, and, and for people

01:23:53.480 are going, there was too much information. You can look at the transcript. You could feed the

01:23:58.300 transcript into whatever AI you like and say, Hey, summarize actionable items from this and,

01:24:03.620 or you'll summarize it for them in your notes. So it's not as hard as it sounds, but what I want

01:24:08.520 people to understand is there's always a reason and it's something that you can change and sometimes

01:24:13.260 we went deep on pharmaceuticals sometimes it's lymphatic drainage or it's red light therapy

01:24:20.520 or it's cryotherapy and i stacked all this together at upgrade labs and there's 30 locations opening

01:24:27.000 across the u.s and canada so you go in there and you do all this stuff that resuscitates your

01:24:30.700 mitochondria calms the nervous system enhances detox and all of a sudden you're like oh i feel

01:24:35.360 so different and you do it in a very small window of time so using that kind of gear was really

01:24:41.340 transformative for me so like we should make it available yeah that's amazing that's incredible

01:24:46.460 that's called upgrade labs and then the other thing is we talked about learning how to ground

01:24:52.880 yourself learning how to tell your cells that you're safe even if they're starting to to lose

01:24:58.760 their mind my neuroscience company that does that is called 40 years of zen and it's a it's a five

01:25:04.100 day thing in seattle and mostly celebrities and entrepreneurs and pro athletes and people come

01:25:09.660 come through there um there's an in-house neuroscientist it's in a mansion executive

01:25:14.820 chef but the idea is he's been five days with computers glued to your head for hours a day

01:25:20.400 showing you what's going on in there and teaching you tools to be able to consciously shift your

01:25:24.920 state there's just no instrumentation for these states so the old way was i'll just go sit in a

01:25:30.940 cave for 20 years and eventually I'll learn is it takes too much time and it's called 40 years of

01:25:36.440 Zen because it's designed to put your brain in the same state as someone who meditates daily for 40

01:25:41.960 years I just didn't have that much time so so so just to reiterate you basically track what's

01:25:47.320 happening in your brain and when it goes into a stressful mode to figure out what makes it calm

01:25:50.520 down and then just repeat that when you're there it goes a little bit deeper it's one thing to

01:25:56.500 notice when you're triggered and learn how to take yourself out of a trigger to say that's kind of

01:26:00.220 level one what we do at 40 years of zen is we teach you an unusual state it's called the reset

01:26:06.920 mode and it's when you go in and you turn off the source of the trigger so it stops triggering you

01:26:11.900 so in meditation i'll teach you notice the feelings the emotions they're flowing through you

01:26:17.040 set them aside and i'm like that's too much work i don't want to waste my precious electrons every

01:26:23.320 day on all these garbage emotions that aren't reality based that keep coming through so what

01:26:28.860 if I could go in and I could change my networks in my body so that they wouldn't identify danger 0.57

01:26:34.320 when there was no actual danger present? That would be great. Well, that's what I've done.

01:26:37.900 That's what I do. That's why I do all the stuff I can do. I have nine companies and I'm writing

01:26:41.640 books and on stages and I'm a dad and like, I would be overwhelmed, but I don't waste electrons

01:26:48.080 on hunger. I don't waste electrons on getting triggered by stuff that doesn't matter. Someone

01:26:52.920 cuts me off in traffic. I'm like, it's all good. Like that wasn't me before. I was like, I will

01:26:58.020 run you off the road and kill your ancestors i used to be like that too and these are all there's 0.94

01:27:03.520 nothing wrong with anyone who has that going on it's all just hardware and it's bad programming 0.99

01:27:07.360 so i fixed my hardware and then i edited my programming and that's the path and for you

01:27:12.700 we're going to figure out what's going on in the hardware i'm going to guess mast cells i'm going

01:27:18.840 to guess your cortisol is not right and that's affecting mast cells and i think you have oxalate

01:27:23.520 from the mold and things like that that your body isn't detoxing because you're low on biotin

01:27:27.760 so we gotta get gotta get you i mean i'm very down i've like i'm operating at not full capacity

01:27:34.720 i can just tell but but mostly i've just figured out how to avoid anything so like i avoid everything

01:27:40.000 in my diet i'm fine right i avoid i like traveling doesn't feel great it doesn't feel

01:27:45.460 now it feels a lot better than it did a year ago but it doesn't feel good but i'm mostly

01:27:49.000 the only reason i can do everything is because i've just cut everything out that makes me feel

01:27:53.420 bad which isn't ideally i'd have some more tolerance i'm working on having more tolerance

01:27:59.320 too like one of my favorite foods on earth is green chili i grew up in new mexico

01:28:03.660 my whole family has arthritis so it turns out nightshade lectins from chili i have genetic

01:28:11.480 sensitivity to those if i eat them the knee pain that caused me to have all these surgeries on my

01:28:16.740 knees it comes back nightshades are really hot on me too so if i avoid my favorite food which is

01:28:21.720 chili, then everything works great. And if I eat it, it doesn't work great. So would I like to

01:28:27.160 magically like genetically engineer myself to be able to eat chili? Hell yeah. And maybe I'll do

01:28:32.080 that someday. I'm down. But in the meantime, it would be stupid for me to eat that. Yeah. So

01:28:37.940 there's nothing wrong. Everyone listening. There's a set of things that might work for some people

01:28:42.320 that are kryptonite for you. And if you know your list and you avoid them, you have a great life

01:28:47.380 And we're just not all the same.

01:28:50.660 I like that.

01:28:52.180 Okay.

01:28:52.620 Well, Dave, this has been very informative.

01:28:56.040 Um, where, where can people, if people want to learn more, where should they go online

01:28:59.700 to find you?

01:29:00.220 All right.

01:29:00.500 Go to Dave Asprey.com.

01:29:02.240 That's my main site.

01:29:03.260 3000 articles, 1200 episodes of the show.

01:29:05.420 You can just search for whatever you want to learn about.

01:29:07.980 And if you have an upgrade labs near you, do that.

01:29:11.120 Dangercoffee.com is where you get the coffee with the trace minerals that are good for

01:29:14.960 you and also bind to toxins in the gut.

01:29:17.060 and what else did we talk about upgrade labs 40 years in but you got the main ones yeah 40 years

01:29:22.160 of zen that sounds cool that sounds needed i might need that well thank you very much for coming on

01:29:28.540 that was great you're welcome and you're just you're just getting going like there's all the

01:29:34.260 stuff that feels like it's there 100 you know you have the ability to do this oh yeah you have the

01:29:38.980 resources the knowledge like you've you've got this i i like that part of what you said i i agree

01:29:43.500 And I figured out when I was 23 that if there's a way to fix this,

01:29:47.960 I'm going to figure it out or I'm going to die trying.

01:29:50.000 Like I remember having that thought.

01:29:51.240 And then I put myself into remission in like eight months after that.

01:29:54.360 It was pretty, it was like, what are you joking?

01:29:56.600 It didn't take very long.

01:29:57.400 So I completely believe any lingering issues are solvable.

01:30:01.920 It was just like a matter of, does this work?

01:30:04.260 No.

01:30:04.540 Does this work?

01:30:05.140 No.

01:30:05.360 Just keep going until you.

01:30:06.740 We're going to use AI and we're going to use lab testing and data to make it a lot

01:30:10.440 faster for you and everyone else.

01:30:11.700 That sounds way better.

01:30:12.340 That's the goal.

01:30:13.500 Oh, when AI, yeah, that's a great idea.

01:30:16.040 I love that.

The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - October 18, 2024

Nootropics, Gut Healing, Sneaky Tips for Optimization with Dave Asprey ｜ EP 209

Episode Stats

Transcript