​

Episode #28 - Rewire Your Brain to Heal: Biohacking the Mental

Patterns That Keep Us Sick​

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Hello, welcome to the Thyroid Pharmacist Healing Conversations podcast. I'm your host, Dr.
Izabella Wentz, the Thyroid Pharmacist, and today I have a very special guest with me, and I
know all guests are special, but this one is a long-term friend of mine and a brilliant, brilliant
biohacker. He's known as the father of biohacking, Dave Asprey.

You might know him as the founder of Bulletproof Coffee, the Bulletproof Diet, and the
Biohacking Movement. He's a four times New York Times bestselling author and host of the
Human Upgrade Podcast. His latest book Heavily Meditated the Fast Path to remove your
Triggers, Dissolve Stress, and Activate Inner Peace launches in May of this year. And it offers a
fast path for you to dissolve stress and achieve inner peace. He's also the founder of Upgrade
Labs, creator of the Biohacking Conference, and CEO of Danger Coffee. He's helped millions
upgrade their bodies and minds for peak performance and longevity. Dave, welcome. It's so
wonderful to have you here with me.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Izabella. It's so good to see you. We're both in Austin, but just far enough apart that we don't
get to hang out too much.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Well, yeah, we're going to need to change that for sure. I don't know if you know this, but you
really, really changed my mind by introducing me to neurofeedback and biofeedback.

It has been incredibly life-changing for me. I used to be very reactive and in my head a lot
and anxious, and just having the opportunity to go through neurofeedback at one of your
conferences, one of your biohacking conferences, I was like, I really need this in my life. And
it's seriously been a life changer for me. So many of my friends, family members, my husband,
everybody's like, wow, where did this calm collected person come from?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Yeah, you have really different energy than when I first met you. You can almost say flighty,
but not in a negative way, but just very fast to react. And yet you have this chill demeanor,
but not like I've had too much THC chill, but just like I'm calm and peaceful. So congrats on
doing the work.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Thank you so much. Thank you so much for introducing it to me and millions of people around
the world. Tell me more about your latest book, Heavily Meditated. What caused you to write
that book? You've written so many incredible books about biohacking.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

I only want to write books about things that haven't been written otherwise. I'll just interview
the author on my show and tell people to read the book. And what's been missing from the
conversation about meditation is that meditation is relatively slow. It doesn't work that well,
and not every meditation works for every kind of brain. For instance, did you try to meditate
before you did neurofeedback?

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Yes. I tried meditating for the first time when I was 18 or 19, and then I remember people
laughing at me. My friends at the time were like, your mind is way too fast. You have no chill.
There's no way that you could meditate. And I find that I found it really, really hard. And then
I tried different types of meditations. I know I tried the Muse headband and I was trying to get
as many birds as possible.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Didn't work for you.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

It did not work so well for me. Yeah.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

It didn't work for me either. And it's because 98% of humans have been involved in agriculture
for most of history. So most meditations are made for farmer brains, which is just fine.

But if you don't have a farmer brain and you're a hunter, it's just going to feel like someone
gave you Valium. When you try to do a meditation like that and then you realize, wait,
meditation classically, oh, just go sit in a cave or a monastery for 20 years and just spend half
your life doing it and you'll get it. That has merit. No one has time for that. You have kids, I
have kids. I have nine companies.

I'd write books. You write books. You know the game. You're not going to spend four hours a
day meditating, but you would if your life depended on it and there was no other way. Same
thing with the gym. Nobody's going to do zone two for eight hours a week, and it's not even
necessary. There's better ways. So when I started the biohacking movement, I talked about
edgy stuff, I talked about Earthing, which now was more accepted, but at the time, people
were like, Dave's a crazy man.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

There's no science from, yes, there's science. And then I talked about red light therapy. Now
it's everywhere. I talked about my True Dark glasses, which were the first modern circadian,
put yourself to sleep glasses. And I actually published in a medical journal about those. We'll
talk about that later.

So there's all these things. Oh, and for the last 10 years I've looked at the brains of more than
a thousand high-performing people like CEOs who've come to 40 Years of Zen. This is my
executive brain upgrade facility in Seattle.

So I've been able to measure what works to change your state. And there's different states,
different altered states are your targets, and I'm giving away the core process that costs –
$20,000 a week, is what people spend to come work with my team on just unloading all their
triggers. But it's in the book and it's called the Reset Process, and it is a way of going in and
finding anything that triggers you and permanently turning off the trigger. And it is very
different. I mean, we're both parents. How many times does your kid come up and say
something that you've already said no to like a hundred times and then they say it again.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

YouTube these days, YouTube, YouTube.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

And so you're like, okay. Inside you're like, oh my God. And outside smiling. Kids feel that. So
do adults. And so most of us have this lack of congruence where if we're successful
moderately, we learn to behave. Even if we're pissed off, great stops violence.

Problem is everyone knows you're pissed off and that you're behaving. So they still got to
control you. If you can find a way to turn off the trigger. So the next time that thing happens,
you are actually not pissed off and you don't act pissed off. You remain in charge of you, and
that means your kid's not in charge of you, and it means that the mean coworker is in charge
of you. In fact, you are impossible to program. So I wrote Heavily Meditated to provide a list
of altered states of high performance, including a state of healing, a state of flow, a state of
focus, a state of connection to everything, and what are all the available technologies and
techniques in order to get you there.
Dave Asprey ([Link]):

So there's three different types of breath work, and each of the three buckets has multiple
ways of doing it. There's a chapter on psychedelics. There's a chapter on tantric sex because
of a weird 20% of people report meeting God during orgasm at least once in their life. So why
do people talk about ayahuasca but they don't talk about orgasm as a way to access a very
similar state if you know what you're doing. So everything that you can do to change your
state is in this book. I couldn't introduce this at the beginning of the biohacking movement
because butter in coffee was triggering enough for people.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Very controversial.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

And so for the past 25 years though, I've been doing shamanic training. I've traveled to remote
parts of Nepal and Tibet, the Andes, and I've been working in altered states – neurofeedback –
at the very highest levels on the planet, and now I'm sharing all of that information. I just felt
like if I shared this in the first beginning stages of bringing biohacking into the world, I didn't
know as much as I know now, but I knew plenty. I just wouldn't have been credible had I done
that. So I'm kind of exposing this side of how I've been successful and I teach people in
radically little amounts of time to change their state.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Yeah, it's really, really incredible what meditation can do for us from a health standpoint…

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

If we actually do it.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

If we actually do it. And I feel like I think about all the keyboard warriors these days, and if
you're online at all, you see people getting very triggered with something this politician said
and something this expert said and something this said, but they're actually really, really
upset.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Do you mean vegans?

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

I think vegans might be some of the people or some of the people with the MAHA movement,
they're like, I can't believe you said this or you made this comment about this person. And I'm
very, very deeply offended and the way that I could come to it, and I used to be one of those
people too. The way that I could come to it. I could look at the people and say, wow, I
understand this person's perspective and I understand this person's perspective and I respect
both of them, and I can be in my own space and be my own person without feeling really
triggered by…

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

I think you're doing it wrong.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

I'm doing it wrong. Should I be triggered more?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Yeah. You really want to be angrier and you want to attack the character of people you
disagree with. I mean, you learned how to use social media yet

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

I feel like I'm really lagging on social media and maybe I just need to take new tactics.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

So a minute ago I said something about vegans on purpose, guys. I was a vegan, a devout
vegan, and it really screwed me up. And if I pissed you off when I said that, ha ha, I'm the
puppet master and you are my puppet unless you learn how to turn off that trigger. So I kind
of mentioned vegans too, because they're the easiest to trigger population followed by
extreme low carb people, whether they're vegetarian or vegan or not. And anytime you're
dealing with malnutrition, you have less activity in the prefrontal cortex. But this is adult
level. I felt the trigger. I caught it with my logical thinking. What I'm teaching in Heavily
Meditated is how about you don't feel the trigger in the first place? It didn't happen anymore.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

It is like the difference between picking up your phone, I'm grabbing my phone here and
you're trying to use it. And every app is alerting all the time. Like, ah, you could learn to
ignore those, which is what most of us do when our nervous system is sending off these alerts
all the time. So ignore, ignore, and you can still work, but it's really cognitively demanding or
go into system settings and turn off all the alerts and you're like, wow, it's so useful.

Your nervous system has alerts that you don't know are going off and you can turn them off.
And it is so life changing. That's the kind of stuff that you did where I'm not tweaking
anymore. And it wasn't even you. It was your meat, it was your hardware doing that. And
there's a new model for biohacking and just consciousness that's in Heavily Meditated that I
thought was worth writing a book about.
Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

It's really quite fascinating, and I know you have worked with this in yourself with lots of your
clients. You've advised people on it, you've even worked with it with your children. These
days, with my 7-year-old, I'm trying to explain the concept of an amygdala to him and what
happens. And we have sometimes oftentimes as children, but even as adults, we have this
thing that just turns on and we get really triggered and we can really go down a cascade. And
I find that a lot of people with hypothyroidism, Hashimoto's autoimmune disorders, irritable
bowel syndrome, chronic illness, their system is really, really overactive. And for them to
come into that healing state, they really, really need to rework that.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

It's really sneaky. And I have been diagnosed with, that's probably the wrong word, but I was
diagnosed with Hashimoto's when I was 26, and I've been on thyroid medication most of the
time since then. And at the time, my testosterone was lower than my mom's. I was on
antibiotics for 15 years, just about every month for chronic sinus infections. I had toxic mold
which caused Lyme disease and just a whole host of autoimmune things, arthritis since I was
14, chronic fatigue syndrome.

And there is a genetic component to that. It's not caused by genes, but genes create
susceptibility. It's caused by the environment. So if you have Hashimoto's or other
autoimmunity, there is a great chance that your nervous system doesn't make catecholamines
or stress hormones like dopamine and adrenaline and noradrenaline properly.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

So you have a better chance of getting PTSD if you have autoimmunity. And PTSD isn't like,
oh, I was in war. You can get PTSD from the way you're born. I had that. I was born with a cord
wrapped around my neck. I had no idea until I was 30. And a woman who studied it for 30
years just picked me out of a group and was like, you have this and look what? So what are
you going to do about it? If you have a system that doesn't make the right stress hormones,
then you're likely to have problems with stress. And then your ability to change your
interstate becomes more important, not less. Right.

You can build an incredible amount of resilience. I never had this as a kid. I'd get sick. My
behavior was all over the place. I had oppositional defiant disorder, which is good for
entrepreneurship.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

I was going to say, it's like chances you'll be an entrepreneur in the future, right?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Exactly. Right. All this stuff, I did not have resilience, and I was angry and anxious all the
time. I didn't know I was anxious because I was always that way and I knew I was angry. And I
remember when I first started tapping into this as someone who had Asperger's syndrome, I'll
just say when I was younger and it is reversible. It's just a lot of work.

I remember working with the first therapist type of people at a 10 day retreat doing
transpersonal psychology first that I'd experienced. And they said, you have to be feeling
something right now. And I'm like, yeah, I'm pissed off. This is dumb because people are doing
emotional work and emotions are all dumb. This was my perspective. And finally after two
hours of debating with me, they said, do you feel anything in your body? I said, yeah, there's a
weird feeling in my stomach.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

And they said, great. That's fear. I go, what do you mean that's fear? There's nothing in here
to be afraid of, therefore it's not fear.

And she looked at me and said, words that really change my perspective. She said, fear's an
emotion. It doesn't have to be logical. And I'm like, no. This whole time I thought my brain
was in charge. And what you learn in Heavily Meditated is a new framework for understanding
why you do what you do. And it completely erases a lot of shame and guilt that people have.
Can we walk through sort of how your body processes reality before you do?

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

I would love that.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Okay. This has taken a lot of time to emerge. This is kind of the culmination of all my books,
and I think Heavily Meditated is my most important book. So there's a third of a second
censorship window on reality. If you're human and an adult, kind of like in the old days when
people would watch live tv, I guess some people still do, there's an eight second delay. It's
live, but it's not because someone might drop an F-bomb. There might be a wardrobe
malfunction. So there's a censorship window. Your body senses reality, and one third of a
second later, it allows the brain to sense reality. Just the brain gets the first electrical signal
that something happened. So when I caught my hands, you think, oh, it took an amount of
time for the sound to reach me, and then I heard it. That's a lie.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

It took some amount of time for the sound to reach you. Then your body held onto the sound,
spent a third of a second pondering it and deciding whether you should feel afraid or happy or
some other emotion to manipulate you. Then the sound hits your auditory cortex and 700
milliseconds, another three quarters of a second, basically later your prefrontal cortex thinks
about it and knows what it is. So what's happening, and who's in charge for that third of a
second, there's some clues. You ever lean on a hot stove and then look down and go, yeah, I
think I should move my hand. That's pretty hot.
Dave Asprey ([Link]):

No one has ever done that because you lean on a hot stove accidentally and magically your
hand pulls itself away. And then in the biggest lie of all, you say, good thing I moved my hand
away. You did not move your hand. Someone else riding around inside your meat suit did that.
It's another consciousness. It is not you. It is a distributed consciousness of your mitochondria,
and they're running the operating system of life. And this explains everything that's
happening, even with autoimmunity, with all the behavioral stuff, with anxiety, with PTSD,
with reactivity, all of it. So… sound interesting?

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Wow. Yeah, that is fascinating. One thing that you brought up is you had a diagnosis of
Asperger's, and I know these days a lot of people are getting diagnosed with autism and you
say it's reversible.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Absolutely.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

What would you say to the people that are really struggling with that message?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

It is an enormous amount of work, but it's possible. And if someone says it's incurable, yeah,
right. I have on the record Einstein saying we will never harness the power of the atom for
electricity. We have the chairman of the FCC saying, we will never use satellites for
communication. We have JP Morgan's head banker saying the automobile is a flash in the pan
and will never, dude, anytime someone says something's impossible, all they're saying is that
they're ignorant and they don't know how to do it and they're afraid to try. I know hundreds of
parents who've reversed autism in their kids. I've spoken at major autism conferences and
here's the model for autism, and then we're going to get back into what's happening during
your censorship window.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

This is such a worthy conversation because the more gut issues, the more out immunity, the
more chances of autism either in you or in your kids. And my very first book, you probably
remember this, the Better Baby Book was like the subtitle was going to be, how do I not have
autism in your kids? I didn't want to give it to my kids. And they don't have it. So if you're
interested in fertility and pre fertility or preconception, that's the book called Better Baby
Book.

So autism is basically mitochondrial network collapse. Mitochondria are the basis of

consciousness and awareness in the world, so they make much less energy than they're
supposed to. When you have autism, something causes that, and this is why big pharma has
gotten away with it. There is no one cause for that.

It's like if you were to bake bread, you go to big pharma, they're like, no, we baked the water,
we baked the yeast, we bake the flour. There is no bread. And guys, it takes a recipe.

And then your bread's all screwed up. Well, what went wrong? Well, did you use too much
salt? Did you cook it for too long? Was it enough? There's a lot of variables, but you had either
a good loaf or a bad loaf, right? So what is the recipe that makes autism? It is mitochondrial
network collapse. Various toxins can do that, and probably some stress.

Dr. Izabella Wentz

Mold mold's a big one.

Dave Asprey

I had major toxic mold as a kid was certainly a factor. And MTHFR genetics and all this stuff
that make it so you're more likely to be unable to recover from it easily, but if the
mitochondria are weak, that's not enough. That could give you autoimmunity, but it's not
going to give you autism. Autism also has chronic neuroinflammation that's almost always
autoimmune, and mold is the biggest trigger of that that I'm aware of. It can also be gluten, it
can also be casein, it can be a bunch of other stuff, but those are the most common ones.
And if you have nervous system inflammation, that means that your eyes, your ears, your
tone, your taste, your touch, all of them, it's like there's static on the line. So you have this
brain that's already underpowered because mitochondria networks aren't making enough
power and all the signals are dirty.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Imagine if when I'm talking right now, it's like [makes noise]. And you just had to listen to that
all the time and just try and get some kind of meaning out of that, but you're super tired all
the time. That's an autistic brain. So no wonder I can't handle the way a tag in my shirt or
something when I was a kid. It would drive me crazy, cut the feet out of my pajamas, all this
stuff that every parent of autistic kids knows, and all of that is just, I couldn't handle signals
in my nervous system. So what you do is you shut down in a very elegant way. That's not
intentional. It's the body doing the most amazing job ever of keeping you alive.

It's like what is the most critical thing to sense in the world around you to stay alive? And
we're only going to train on that, or we're just going to ignore all the other stuff. There's not
enough energy and the signal's too dirty. So how do you fix it? Earlier is better. Number one,
get rid of the toxins that are inhibiting mitochondrial function and reboot, restart and
enhance mitochondrial power.

And I've written several books about that, and it's incredible what a little bit of ketone will
do, but there's all of your work, it contains things like that as well. How do you get
mitochondria working? It's incredibly important. And gee, would having a low thyroid give you
poor mitochondrial function? What do you think?

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Definitely. Yeah. Low thyroid can definitely be a contributor. And we know various toxins out
there, and I feel like a big part of getting a person from that overwhelm is also working on
their brain function.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

I think it's hard to work on brain function if mitochondria are disrupted, there is a chicken and
egg, a sense of chronic stress will inhibit mitochondrial function and make you more inflamed
and less healing.

It takes a certain amount of energy to change the brain and the challenge and the whole
framework in Heavily Meditated the new book, it's – have more energy into the system and
then understand how the system allocates energy before you think so you can allocate the
energy properly. So doing the brain work is going to be really effective in reducing wasted
energy. And I'll walk through that framework in a minute.

I want to point out for people who are listening, going, oh my gosh, I have an autistic kid, or I
have autism or Asperger's or whatever, step one, turn up power in the brain. Step two, reduce
inflammation in the nervous system so that you get a clean signal on the nerves.

If only that would fix things. It will fix things if you catch 'em before probably four or five. But
after that, now that you have a high powered brain, oh my gosh, it's a brain that evolved to
do pattern matching under low power conditions now that it's got high power. You have a
hyper-efficient brain. Hyper-efficient brains have superpowers. Einstein's brain wasn't bigger,
it was more efficient. The more efficient your brain, the better you are at problem solving.

So the gift of autism or Asperger's, and yes, there's a lot of suffering that comes with that
gift, but the gift is when you restore mitochondrial function and nervous system function,
you're better able to see patterns in the world because your brain was forced to do that, to
the exclusion of things like smiling and all that weird social stuff that people do, which isn't
that weird to me anymore. But once you fix your optic nerve and the pathway so it's less
staticy, you got to train your eyes to move again. And once you fix your auditory system, oh,
now you have to retrain yourself to hear. You probably have to learn how to move your
tongue. Again, I did that. I had a tongue tie as well.

And then you have to go through all the infant movement stuff that you should have done
when you were a kid that you didn't. So I've spent time when I was first recovering from
Asperger's doing weird exercises, crawling with a bear crawl and cross crawling and all kinds
of stuff.
Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Reflex integration work, right? Yeah.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Yeah. And I'd say I'm like 80% on functional movement. There's still a few things in my lower
legs I never learned to use, right? I've also had three knee surgeries as a result of really not
having a sense of proprioception in the world. So where I am today though, I know all the
emotions. I know their feelings and my body, I can locate them. I can direct my energy field. I
have a fully functioning neurotypical way of interacting. In fact, it's according to the spiritual
guru types I work with. They're like, wow, that's unusual. It's really good because I had to be
intentional. All I understood was basically anger, anxiety, and I wouldn't have called it that,
but that's always behind all that is fear. The other emotions, I was pretty, I just didn't
understand them. I didn't know where they were in my body.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

So a lot of the work in Heavily Meditated is about somatic awareness and standing the
unusual nature between your body and consciousness and your behavior. And here's what
happens, Izabella, in that censorship window, the mitochondria, trillions of them that are
definitely provably quantum entangled with each other. So they're acting as a distributed
consciousness that runs your body. It's like the operating system for your meat. They run the
operating system that all life on earth follows. It doesn't matter if you're a deer or you're a
blade of grass or like a slime mold or a politician, anything like that. There might be a
relationship there, but whatever those, and if that triggered you, I got you. Now I'm in
charge. See? So what's the body doing? What does all life do? It's all F words.

Number one, fear. If something is scary, run away from kill or hide. This is really good. It's
worked for 2 billion years for all life. And you're saying, how does a blade of grass run away?
When grass is threatened, it grows sharp edges and it makes more toxins.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Interesting.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

And so trees grow more thorns when they're threatened. When they feel safe in their
environment, they make less thorns and their fruit is less bitter. So we all have our ways.
Everything on earth, whether it's a single cell like a mitochondria, which is just an old
bacteria embedded in our system, or whether it's a forest, it's always there. So fear is first,
humans will put nine times more energy into fear than anything else. And if you learn how to
meditate or do the stuff in Heavily Meditated, you can drop it down to six times more energy
than anything else. Okay?
So if something's not scary, the next thing the body does before you even get to be aware that
something's happening is food. Because famines have killed everything. And today, a third of
the thoughts in the average person's head are about tacos. Okay?

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Yeah, I think that sounds about right. Yeah,

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

It could be some other food, but literally what's for lunch? I'm starving and all that. And this is
just an ancient part of your hardware, your body, not your active mind. That's telling you you
have to eat, have to eat, have to eat. Now, the thing about mitochondria, they don't
understand time or refrigerators.

They're dumb, but they're very fast and they get to tell you how to feel. So you feel like
you're going to die if you don't have lunch. And you say things like, I'm starving. It's not real,
but you believe it. So fear and food, the next F word, all life has to do it to stay around for
multiple generations. Do you know that one?

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Fornicate?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Wow, you went right. I was thinking fertility, but okay,

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Okay. Yeah,

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

You can a little bit dirty minded.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Let's change it to fertility. I could have said something else.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Most people say the other four letter version of it. The reality is your body will look at
everything through that lens as well, at least once you're of age. So Izabella, fear of food,
fertility all the time before you can think, is there anything you've ever done that you're
ashamed of that wasn't from those three things?

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

That's a tough question.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

I've never met anyone who could think of something that wasn't one of those.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

I can't think of anything.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Well, there you go. You can drop the guilt anytime you ate all the Ben and Jerry's while on a
date with those three people you shouldn't have been on a date with at the same time while
feeling afraid or whatever. All of that stuff is just the operating system of your body doing its
best to keep you alive and make sure the species is around forever, every time you
procrastinated, every time you were fearful, every time you didn't do something that you
wanted to do every time, all of it. It's just ancient survival stuff.

And the thing to understand that's in Heavily Meditated that isn't anywhere else is that this
happens because the system has those priorities and it makes you feel and makes you
perceive things. And the part of you that you think is you, that's your brain and all those
urges, all the mean voices in your head, those are another consciousness in your body working
to control your meat body because your body is like, I know how to live.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

How dare you have a brain in there? How dare you think about stuff? So your body thinks
you're an idiot and you're ashamed of all the dumb stuff your body makes you do. So all life all
the time, do I need to run away? Can I eat it and can I hump it? Bad news? Except there's more
F words that all life does.

The next F word is friend. All life will work with its own species and those around it to make
ecosystems. We actually are wired inside ourselves to cooperate and be kind to each other.
It's just hard. If there's too much fear, too much hunger and too much, we'll call it loneliness.
And after that F word is the final F word, it's forgiveness. And forgiveness is how humans
evolve. All life will evolve. And forgiveness is not telling someone you forgive them. And it's
not saying that what someone did was okay. It's a felt sense inside the body that you can turn
on. And when you do it, it turns off triggers permanently and forever. And that's why I wrote
Heavily Meditated, because if we can make more energy by fixing our mitochondria, 48% of
people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial dysfunction. Everyone with autoimmunity
has mitochondrial dysfunction, and everyone over age 40 has mitochondrial dysfunction, we
just call it aging – unless maybe you're a biohacker into longevity.

So increase the amount of energy, decrease fear. Wow, there's a lot. Okay, what's next? What
if you turned hunger into nourishment? You learned how to eat so you weren't inflamed in
having cravings all the time. Oh wow, I still have a lot of energy. Let's put that into turning
lust into intimacy. That actually is a major source of nourishment and a source of altered
states, beneficial ones.
Oh, what's left after that? I didn't waste the energy. I got energy from all that. Oh, my
community. Now I have enough energy to do something that matters in the world and to be
there for my family and my friends. And the broader everything, you're the kind of person
that has enough energy to pull over and help the little lady across the street. We're wired to
do that. You don't have to think. You just have to allow. And there's so much energy left after
that. I think I'll do my meditation. I'll work to improve myself. And some people have
compared this to the hierarchy of needs from Maslow.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

And it's not the same. Maslow did say, however, that for people to be self-actualized, he has
this hierarchy of needs. You need a sense of safety, a sense of connection. So it's kind of the
same neighborhood. But he died early and unexpectedly before he could publish the final step
of his hierarchy of needs.

And the final step was transcendence. So humans require altered states in order to reach
their full potential. So there's an altered state of just being able to heal another person and
to be able to hold space for them being grounded and calm and peaceful. And I know that
you've learned that state. There's also the ability to go in and kind of perceive what's
happening inside the body to go inward. There's a state of connectivity, a state of flow, a
state of creativity, a state of intuition. So when people say you should meditate, it means
about the same thing as saying you should eat.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Should you eat Twinkies or should you eat a certain thing to have a certain result? And Heavily
Meditated says, actually, meditation is not a very efficient thing for most of us. You could
stack it with breath work and breath work, choose the right breath work and the right
meditation, something's going to happen.

Or you could use neurofeedback or you could use other technologies that put the brain into a
state. There's magnets, there's lights, there's sound, there's drumming. And so I go through all
the available technologies, all of which I've tried. They're from different lineages, different
ancient practices around the world, and some very modern ones. When people read the book,
they'll go, oh, now I understand why my body does what it does and why I take credit for it
and feel guilty about it.

And you'll start to see your body basically as a big Labrador retriever, you can have a dog that
comes in, it chews up your shoes, it pees on the couch, it eats the food off the table, it starts
barking all the time, and then slobbers on you, or that same dog with a little bit of training
comes in as a service dog sits down, you put a piece of popcorn on its nose and it just sits
there until you tell it to eat.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

You can do that with your nervous system. You get to have something that's flopping
everywhere or not. It's just easier to train when you've learned how to turn fear into peace,
hunger into nourishment, loneliness, into really an altered state form of intimacy. And then
you turn your community into a sense of nourishing power for you. And then you have so much
left at the end of the day. And that's really what biohacking does.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link])

It's really interesting that you brought up how you can heal your physical body and you get
this surplus of energy, but some of the wiring might still be there, and so you don't utilize that
energy efficiently. This is exactly what happened to me when I got myself into remission from
Hashimoto's.

I ended up still kind of having the same patterns that I did when I was sick. And so I was
pushing myself too hard, beating myself up, overworking, and I remember connecting with a
spiritual healer, and she told me that people with autoimmunity, the things they say to
themselves are not very kind. And she had mentioned to me meditation, and I was like, I'm
going to do it. I'm going to watch this CD and I'm going to do it. But it was just so challenging
to do, and it was a really, really big process to rewire my brain and get into this safety state
where I could feel my best self and I could utilize all of that energy for doing good in the
world, not living in that fear. Panic state. And so many people, unfortunately, even they can
heal their physical bodies, their mental childhood trauma remains. The trauma of being sick
remains trauma of mold exposure.

And they go through all of these different things. And I love how you share different practices
because I feel like the, I don't know, we hear so much about meditation and it truly can be
wonderful, but for me, that just wasn't it. For me. Neurofeedback was like, this is it. And I
could hook myself up and I listen to this music and it's very, very life-changing. Done over 500
sessions maybe. And then I've also done a lot of EMDR. Those were these two things that
really rewired my brain. I'm curious, this might be kind of asking about your favorite children,
who's your favorite child? Do you have one that you wrote about in your book that's been just
your favorite or a really big game changer for you?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Neurofeedback is by far the most important. And this is why I started 40 Years of Zen 10 years
ago, and I've had billionaires and celebrities and CEOs come through. And in five days you go
through this reset process. And it's funny you mentioned EMDR. I've recommended that for
years for people who don't have access to neurofeedback.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

I did both.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Yeah, it's great to be able to do both. And the reset process that's in Heavily Meditated in my
experience works better than EMDR.
Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Wow.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

And that's a big claim because EMD is very valuable and especially in conjunction with
neurofeedback. So for me, 25 years ago, I knew there was something wrong with my brain
because I was having massive brain fog, chronic fatigue, toxic mold stuff. And I was in Silicon
Valley and I didn't know what to do, and I said, I'm going to have to fix my brain. So I tried
smart drugs and I looked up, and there was one guy who did neurofeedback in the Bay Area.
He was a chiropractor, so it was 25 minutes away. So I drive to his office in Los Gatos, and I
went in the first time, and there's a fish tank and beads. It's a very chiropractor from the
nineties. And this little kid just walks up to me and looks at me and goes, ha. And just started
running in circles around me. And my nervous system was like, totally triggered.

And I thought, this is hellish. But when I did my sessions, I did 10 of them. It was very a Pac
Man, very rudimentary thing. But I came back six weeks into my sessions and the same kid
was in the lobby and I was looking to hide, and he just walks up, goes, hi, my name is Bobby.
And I'm like, oh my God. And his mom's like, yeah, he has autism, but he's so much better.
And I thought, okay, this stuff is working. And I did feel like I gained more awareness of
myself. So I bought a system and I started doing it at home. So that was 25 years ago. I've
been doing neurofeedback ever since. And sometime into that, I realized doing clinical grade
neurofeedback on yourself is doing brain surgery on yourself. You're screwed. You can't fix
yourself if you break yourself because you needed the brain to fix itself.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

So I started working with different experts around the world, and I opened 40 Years of Zen in
order to have the equivalent of a formula one mechanic from my brain, and to bring in people
who are making big differences in the world. And over that 10 years, I was able to create and
hone and polish the reset process. And I'm giving it away and Heavily Meditated because yes, I
prefer it with neurofeedback. I would love everyone to come to 40 Years of Zen, and I'm
working on ways to make that more accessible. But in the meantime, read the book. Go to
the chapter on the reset process, find something that pisses you off something that's a trigger.
Start with a little one and do the eight steps and watch what happens.

I do this with audiences. I will, the biohacking conference, May 28th through 30th here in
Austin, [Link]. I will be doing this for the entire audience. And people
they'll cry. And what it took four minutes and I let that go. It actually works. And we'll have
some other people in this kind of world there. Joe Dispenza will be on stage talking about the
science behind meditation and breath work the way he does it, which is very, very profound.

So what I want is for everyone listening to this show to just understand there's something that
keeps you up at night. There's something that gets under your skin, something that makes you
angry and just makes your body kind of curl up. You can go in and turn that off like a light
switch and it will permanently be off. It's not that you'll be able to handle it better. And you
can even do this for things like fear of toxic mold. And this is something I had to deal with
because toxic mold was so disabling for me, when I had that brain fog, I would walk into a
room and it smelled like a mop and it's got mold in it, and my blood pressure would drop.

I would have a physiological fear response, that first F word. My system is not dumb. And I'm
sitting there going, why is my body doing this? I just got dizzy and my heart's beating and I
feel like I'm going to die. Well, when I moved to Austin after having done all the reset
process, all this work, I moved into a house that had 42 water leaks in it and was super moldy.
And I lived there for four months with no health challenges whatsoever. It was not good for
me, but it didn't create a PTSD response. It didn't give me brain fog because I retrained the
system. So I'm not afraid of mold. I'm just aware of it. And the goal here is to be non-reactive
to anything that's challenging. And when you do that, you have so much power.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

It really is. It's quite incredible in my experience. So I grew up like the runt of the litter. All of
my cousins are five eight. I have a brother that's about your size, and he was into jiujitsu. And
I'm very small. And so there was always this messaging like, oh, Izabella is really small and
weak. And I remember going through, and I would just be very offended about that.
Whenever somebody would mention something about me being weak or small, I just would
feel very triggered.

And going through EMDR and neurofeedback, I remember I asked somebody to help me lift
some chairs up. And she said something and I'm like, Hey, can I help you? I said something
like, can you help me with some heavy lifting? And she said something like, oh, these aren't
heavy at all. I don't know why you would think they were heavy. And the old Izabella would've
been so offended. She just called me weak. I can't believe that. And with the neurofeedback
and the brain rewiring process, I was able to be like, oh yeah, thank you for helping with
those. Look at you. Good for you.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

And the difference here is that instead of feeling angry and then choosing to say that to be
manipulative, you didn't feel angry, right?

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

No, and I didn't feel ashamed. A big part of what I felt is ashamed that I was the runt of the
litter, and I was so small and the wind would blow me away because I was so tiny and weak.
And that was a really transforming and empowering thing that I went through. It was one of
the first things that I noticed. And I was like, wow, I would've been crying in my room that
somebody thinks I'm weak and had all these thoughts about myself. And so it, it's just life
changing when you can eliminate your triggers one by one. And the process took me a few
years, a lot of sessions with an EMDR therapist, a lot of neurofeedback sessions. And so the
fact that you're saying this can be done in four minutes.
Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Wow, four minutes per trigger and you need to write down and structure it correctly. It's not
like you can say, my dad was mean to me. I'm going to in four minutes, let go of that. You go
through each of the different aspects.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Individuals.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Yeah. But I will say that when people come in and spend five days with facilitators and the
technology at 40 Years of Zen, you can do the equivalent of those 500 sessions, those years of
work, you can pack it all in. The average person can do probably 80% of the letting go of the
resetting the forgiveness in that amount of time. But those are intense days. And one of the
things that accelerates it we're the world's first psychedelic assisted neurofeedback place. So
ketamine is an option because ketamine increases neuroplasticity. So your brain can rewire
itself more quickly.

And it's not ketamine journey time, it's ketamine low dose just to help the brain be
lubricated. And what I believe is kind of a little bit Buddhist from that part of things, but
we're wired for kindness to each other. But there's sort of three steps to getting there. And
the first step is to develop empathy for other people. And a lot of people on the spectrum
don't have that. If you have autoimmunity, you're tired all the time. How can you have
empathy? You don't have,

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

You don't have space.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

You have your emotions. I'm not going to do that. Problem is empathy is not a very high
vibration state.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Interesting. I didn't realize that.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Walk into a McDonald's and empathize with everyone in there.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

You really want that in your system.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

As an empath, I've had to learn how to really protect my energy.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Exactly.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

How to really guard my energy and be able to show up for somebody with sympathy and
empathy when I need to. But then also close myself off in my own little world, in my own
little circle. So it doesn't, I'm not crying because of all of the people that are going through
challenges. Right?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Exactly. So it turns out that strategy of guarding yourself, close yourself off, that does take
energy too.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

It does.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

There is a state above it that they teach in different lineages of Buddhism. It's compassion.
And what compassion is, is you teach your system to automatically wish other people well
before you have a chance to think or judge. And when you do that, you no longer have to be
empathetic because that supersedes empathy. You're like, oh, I want everyone to be happy.
And then you can turn on empathy. If you're going to heal someone, you can choose to feel it,
but you don't have to feel it uncontrollably. So you don't need all the guarding because the
guarding happens from compassion.

And these are all training the mitochondrial system to do this. It's not about choosing to do it.
If you have to think about it, it was too late. And the reset process really helps with
developing compassion versus empathy. Empathy is better than apathy. But compassion is
better than empathy. And the final most enlightened state is actually in the ease. They would
call it enlightenment. In the west, we call it resilience. And this is a picture of a monk
meditating in the middle of a storm. And the goal, I believe for all of us when I really think
about it, is to be able to choose your state and to hold your state no matter what happens in
the world around you.

So your mother-in-law can be yelling at you, there can be a puff of toxic mold. There can be a
politician on TV and an ad from pharmaceutical companies. And it doesn't matter because you
are going to be peaceful, grounded, focused, and you're going to do something about it if you
choose to, but you don't feel like you have to. So this is where freedom comes from.
Dave Asprey ([Link]):

It comes from removing all of the triggers. And when you do that, your ability to perceive
reality goes through the roof because every trigger you have changes your lens on reality. Your
mitochondria shape, everything you experience. They decide, is it worth showing that little
thing over there to the conscious brain? Nah, it's not worth it. I don't have enough energy. It
might be scary. And there's a whole set of stuff. It's all just fear, food, fertility in order. And
after that it's friend and then forgiveness. And it always runs like that. And it does that for all
life, all the time constantly. And knowing that's teachable and programmable and that you
can turn the fear down so that you only have fear of things that are going to actually burn you
or a tiger that's actually going to get you. But your system no longer thinks that an alert on
your phone is a tiger.

And I say that because the first time I ever did neurofeedback on that really primitive system,
I was sitting there, had an electrode glued to my head, and the phone rang and I noticed I was
trying to focus. Everything in me kind of shifted. And the chiropractor Thomas, he's like,
Dave, look at your brainwaves. When the phone rang and my brain just went completely
chaotic and my whole body, I was like, wow, I feel jangled here.

When I was a kid, if the phone would ring, everyone else would run to the phone. I'm coming.
And it was like this made up emergency that we had to answer the phone, which is complete
nonsense, but it was a learned behavior. So I'm like, oh, maybe I can do that. And today, I'm
just going to check real quick. I have 1,684 unread text messages.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Wow, that's a lot of texts. No wonder you never text me back.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

I do my best, but do you think I'm stressed about it?

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

No.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

No.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

I'm joking. You do text me back.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

I do my best. But I have not texted back really close friends. And a few times billionaires are
like, Hey, I want something like, dude, sorry, I was on camera all day. And I'm not going to live
my life according to interrupts from other people, even if they might be really good ones. And
so I do my best to have help with that, but it doesn't dwell in my head the way it would have
before.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

I'm right there with you. I am like, everybody's on read and it's okay. I still love you. I'll get
back to you when I have a little bit more space.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Or maybe you won't get back. And I just tell 'em, text me again if it's really important. Or he'll
call my assistant. I don't know. She'll call me or something or call me. But I do my best. And I
don't stress about it. I don't lose sleep over it. It's not something that I consider anymore. And
I didn't use to be like this at all. It's because I learned how to turn fear into peace, to turn
hunger into nourishment. So I'm just not hungry. In fact, I haven't eaten anything today except
for a little bit of butter in my Danger Coffee this morning, who would've thought, and I can
eat or not eat, I'll be fine. Right? There's no voice in my head.

There's no nothing about it. And then I long ago actually wrote about this, and there's a
chapter in Heavily Meditated like tantric and other similar practices can have profound deep
neurological healing.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

So learned how to do that too. So I'm not feeling lonely or any of that stuff. So there is no
angst in my system that I'm aware of right now. And if something did trigger me, I'm like,
wow, I missed one. I got to write this one down so I can go run the reset on it. So I would
invite you anytime that you're feeling triggered by anything, it's not the other person's fault.
It is yours, but it's not you, it's your body.

It's like a dog that barks when you don't want it to bark, teach it not to bark. And that's what
the reset process is for. And the reason you do it is that you get the energy that was wasted
on that trigger before. And the other reason you do it is it doesn't feel good to know other
people are in charge of you. And if you can be triggered, you're carrying a loaded gun, that's
what it means. And other people can pull the trigger. Yikes. I wouldn't want to live like that.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Yeah. I feel like I finally understand your secret. What – I think a lot of people know that
you're extremely successful and you run nine different companies. You're always funny and
brilliant. But what I don't think most people know about you is you're always the kindest and
most compassionate person in a room. When – I've spent a lot of time with a lot of
entrepreneurs, and there are many of them who do a quarter of the things that you do, and
they're so stressed out, they're so burned out, they're rude to everybody around them.

And I really think it's an energy thing. And you've created, you just show up and you're like the
social butterfly and you're such a bright light in the world.
Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Thank you. I want people to know I wasn't always like that. That is a built state, and it's
something that anyone who chooses to can do. It's funny. My girlfriend Christina Weber runs a
relationship mastermind for entrepreneurs where we bring people in about 30 either couples
or singles, and then do relationship coaching with top relationship coaches in the world with
the idea that if you can have a healthy relationship, it'll return so much to your life that you
should focus on that as much as your business.

So she's an entrepreneur, not at the same scale that I am, and she's always saying, why do you
have free time? How are you not looking at your phone? And she was kind of a workaholic
before we started dating. It's because I don't waste time on triggers. I don't do stuff out of
fear and all the stuff I write in Heavily Meditated, I have gone through some seriously major
stressful stuff in the past couple of years, and I'm still here. It didn't break me because of the
stuff that's in this book. So I talk about family members trying to steal companies. I was fired
from Bulletproof and the company was sold for less than 10% of what it was worth when I was
fired and stuff like that.

And the fact that I can just talk about it without re-experiencing pain, I got consciously
uncoupled. Getting separated can be kind of a stressor.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Huge.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

And to be able to go through all that stuff pretty much simultaneously. I'm not saying it wasn't
painful, I didn't experience stress, I did, but I was able to use the tools and Heavily Meditated
to have the resilience that I wanted. And so I do my best and I'm not perfect at all, but I just
do my best at being present most of the time. And I did not have any of this ability when I
was 30 years old. This is all built and the tools to do it, they're in Heavily Meditated and it
really matters.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Yeah, you've gone through some challenges the last few years and then you still show up.
Some people could get very jaded from some of the things that you've gone through, but you
still show up with an open heart with so much kindness, and I really, really appreciate that
about you. And I don't think, I don't know, I think it comes across in social media, but not
many people might know that about you.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Thank you. It's funny, I don't know. Social media is so constructed. People oftentimes tell
themselves stories about me, and I've gotten to the point now where I think it's hilarious and I
understand.
So when someone comes in, some troll tries to say something negative, they're stuck
sometime before 12 years old. They were bullied or they're mistreated and they're just
echoing that as adults. But I am so childish. In fact, that's part of my longevity strategy is to
have a seventh grade sense of humor forever. So what I do almost every single time when
someone just comes at me on social media, if I see it, which I don't very often I just respond,
that's not what your mom said. We are literally in middle school when they're acting that way,

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

And universally they don't like it. And then they go, well, that wasn't very nice. And my
response then is, oh, but we were already doing seventh grade stuff, so now it's your turn.
Like I'm rubber, you're glue. What are you going to do next? And it takes it out of all the anger
and all the judgment and all the stories they tell themselves. And it's just saying, you're
acting like a child, but I'm okay to act like a child too, but not a mean child. I'm going to play.
And turning trolling into play has been the most fun, and it works every time.

One of my favorite times, I had a picture, a little video of myself talking about the value of
sunsets for circadian biology. And in the photo, my girlfriend wearing a little bikini was
looking at the sunset.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

I remember that.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

You remember that? And I'm like, oh, I like beautiful sunsets and whatever.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

It was funny.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

It was super funny. And clearly she consented to be in the picture. And so many people,
usually angry women without boyfriends would say cringe is what they do to try to shame men
who like women. So my response was, please don't say that about her body. I think she's
beautiful. And she's sitting there writing it with me, and we laugh for hours playing with the
trolls. If trolls can't trigger you, they're toys. And that's fun.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Yeah. Yeah. People were very triggered. The comments section was very, very entertaining
with a lot of people clutching their pearls and just being very, very offended. And I thought it
was really fun. I was good for Dave. It was kind of like a soft launch of announcing your
relationship.
Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Sure. Yeah. And the cool thing is I lost 2000 followers.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Did you really?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Oh yeah. They were the best 2000 followers I could ever get out of there. Judgy, angry people
bringing the energy down. You should unfollow me if that's you. I do not want you in my living
room and it's my house. And one of the things that happens when you have less energy, when
you have autoimmunity, when you have thyroid issues, your ability to set boundaries goes
down. You just don't have energy to do it.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Right.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

So that makes you more vulnerable to narcissists and to other people who are looking to take
advantage of you, whether they're conscious of it or not. So learning how to set boundaries is
part of learning how to be untriggered. And in the book I talk about here are the four types of
people, and that was a lesson that I wish I would've had earlier. And this is something that
comes from Lao Tzu’s heritage. This is the Buddha of China, basically. So 10,000 years of oral
heritage in one monastery, and there's nine living grandmasters of that lineage. And one of
them taught me that, which is why it's in the book.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

So is it like energy vampires that you're, is it energy vampires that you're talking about people
that the four types of people, are they people that steal your energy or…

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

No.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Tell me more about this.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Number one, there are energy vampires. That's a different, actually, it's a whole different
realm. The four types of people, category one, these are win-win people.
Dave Asprey ([Link]):

If they do something with you, you both have fun. You both make money. One of you may
have more fun, make more money, but everybody wins. They're very rare.

5% of people are in category two usually, but they make mistakes. They have blind spots. But
when you say, Hey, man, that wasn't okay, they say, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. How do I make it
right? Okay, these are the only people you want to have in your life is ones and twos. Category
threes, they're win lose, but they don't know it. So this is the kind of person, you have video
of them stabbing someone. They're in a locked room, they're holding a knife covered in blood,
and the police open the door and they say, I'm a good person. It couldn't have been me. And
they believe it. They blame everyone else. And everyone has someone like this in your family
or in your company. It's always everyone else's fault. They never take responsibility. They
gaslight people all over the place. These are narcissists, but it's really valuable to understand.
They don't know they're narcissists.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

So they're just unaware.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

They believe their own story and their own story because of these mitochondrial networks. It
makes them unable to perceive reality. And they'll pass a lie detector test that says it wasn't
them, even though it was. And I had one of these lose tens of millions of dollars while running
one of my companies. I write about that in the book, well, telling herself that she wasn't
doing it because she never failed. And so she misrepresented the facts to the board of
directors and to me, every single week for a year, while hiding it from herself and then being
surprised at the end of the year.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Yeah, I've worked with people like that too. It's interesting because they really do believe it.
Because if I were to make a mistake and I make mistakes all the time, I'm like, oh, man, my
bad. I'm so sorry about that. Let me figure out why this happened and how to make it right.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

And so you're not going to be triggered by failure, but a narcissist or a category three, the
idea that their story isn't real is so triggering to them that their nervous system makes sure
that they believe the story is true and make sure that they try to destroy anyone who doesn't
agree with their story.

That explains so many things wrong with society. And then there's category four people. These
are about 5% of people, sociopaths and psychopaths, and they know it, and they're master
manipulators. So if you're sitting here, I have half the brain energy, I should have chronic
fatigue and autoimmune, and my thyroid's not working and I'm so tired. And one of those
people comes in, you're easy picking.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Absolutely.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Yeah. So this is something that they don't talk about a lot in the mold community. And you
also get people who say, I suffer from, I'm a victim of, victim narcissism is a huge thing.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

I haven't heard about that. Can you tell us more about that? I know some people identify with
their illness too much, and then that becomes a part of their identity, and then everything
like, oh, well, this can be healed. They get offended by that, right?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Yeah. So Scott Berry Kaufman is a friend who's been on the show a couple times, who's a
well-known author and psychologist, and he identified victim narcissism.

The normal narcissism we know about is grandiose narcissism. I'm so good, therefore I deserve
victim narcissism is – I have suffered or I am a victim of something, therefore I deserve
because I have autoimmunity. You have to do this. No, that's not how the world works. Other
people don't have to do things because of your state. You can politely request that like, Hey,
please don't wear perfume. It wrecks me.

But if they do, your offense is your problem. Say, you know what? I'm really sorry. I'm not
going to go to this thing because this stuff is bothering me. And if you're triggered by that,
then that's your fault. If you're going to be angry all the time at people, that's what victims
do.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

They're angry all the time. So if you say, I am a victim of autoimmunity or a victim of Lyme or
a victim of mold, or even I suffer from that, no, you were exposed to mold, you have
autoimmunity, you are curing autoimmunity. But if you say you're suffering from it, feeling
pain is one thing, suffering is another. There are different states, and when you start doing
the techniques and Heavily Meditated, you realize they're not the same thing. So you can
experience negativity, you can experience pain, and it can reverberate forever through
suffering, or you can experience it and let it go. And learning how to let it go is doubly
important for people with autoimmunity or anyone who's just had big stuff happen to them.
As someone who's had PTSD and doesn't anymore and had all this stuff I've gone through,
resilience comes from learning that.
Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Yeah, such an important part of healing is just that mindset and being able to shift the
messages that you send to your body. When you tell your body that you're suffering or you're
sick, the body's going to pick that up. And if you just change your mindset into, I'm healing,
right? I love mantras every day in every way, I'm getting better and better. That can be – little
things like that can be very life-changing, and I love that you put little things people can do
and really big things that people can do in your book so that they can really help themselves
and heal themselves. I feel like these days, a lot of people, they are in that victim mindset
and they're looking for a savior, and we have to save ourselves. Right?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

There you go. Speaking of little things, I think I have one you'll like. There's something in
Heavily Meditated that would be really useful for our listeners. It's just a little thing, but it's
so powerful when your system is used to just being triggered and it's called bicep. It's a new
idea in biohacking, and it's not this bicep.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Yeah, it's not that.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

No. The one on your arm, it's brief, intentional, conscious exposure to pain. And what, well, I
remember in ninth grade or something, I heard, well, monks used to whip themselves. They
would flagellate themselves.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Is that what you recommend?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Well, maybe the title of that chapter is “Go span yourself.” So there's that. But they would do
that, and I thought, oh my gosh, they think they're such sinners. They hate themselves that
much. How sad. That's not why they did it. And then yogis laying on beds of nails, proving
they're better yogis. No, they're not. Yogis don't compete with each other. So what's going on
there? Or addicts covered in tattoos that hurt to get biohackers, getting in cold water for a
minute or two, Texans eating really hot peppers. All of these things are brief, intentional,
conscious, exposure to pain. And there's a very specific reason we've been doing this for
thousands of years. It's because doing that resets dopamine sensitivity by up to 250%.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Interesting.
Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Dopamine is so important, especially to have autoimmunity, because dopamine rewards you

for working towards a goal, including healing. And if you can make it so it takes less dopamine
to motivate you, it means you have more energy for healing and for willpower every day. So
the monks were whipping themselves or self-flagellating because it took less effort to be a
good monk. The yogis laid on a bed of nails, so it would take less effort to maintain the state
of being a yogi and so on and so forth. And the reason addicts are usually covered in tattoos
and piercing, they are unconsciously regulating their cravings by making themselves more
dopamine sensitive by doing things that hurt a little bit because it takes them out of an
addiction cycle because it allows their brains to absorb dopamine better.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

So how do you want me to implement that into my life again? Can you clarify? Am I whipping
myself? Am I getting tattoos?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

That kind of blends into the other part of the book about the tantric practice, because I do
talk about conscious kink and somatic experiencing. We can go there, but cold plunges are
usually the most PG friendly version of that. And it doesn't have to be long intense, super
cold, especially for women, especially if the immune system is blown out and your adrenals
don't work. It can be 30 seconds of a cold shower, which is not that big of a stimulation. It's
just enough to be like, whoa, that was enough. And then to hold yourself under the water a
little bit longer than you want to. Right.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

What about a salad bowl? I think, weren't you talking about a salad bowl cold plunge before?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Yeah. In fact, I think that was in my last book. And yeah, that's a real easy one, and it doesn't
cost as much as cryotherapy or whatever. A cold shower is better, but you just get a salad
bowl, put some ice and some water in it, and then lean forward and stick your face in it for as
long as it can, just your face up to your ears and your forehead, and that will trigger the
mammalian dive reflex. And as long as it's uncomfortable, you'll get the bicep part of it as
well where you get the dopamine sensitivity.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

And can make your skin real nice too.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Oh, it totally can.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Yeah.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Yeah.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Okay.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

And we also have to talk about that other thing you brought up around whether you should
outsource the spanking to someone else.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Okay, tell us more.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

There are enormous numbers of states that our bodies are seeking sometimes to resolve old
traumas, sometimes to enter altered states. That can be really profound. So one of the
people I feature in Heavily Meditated is a local friend whose name is Kimmy Itch. Kimmy is a
somatic therapist, and she's also a professional dominatrix. And she got into that because she
realized that some of her somatic therapy clients and somatic therapies feeling things in your
body, they couldn't relax unless they were restrained.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Interesting.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

And this is a valid observation in science, and if the body is free to twitch around and it has
an operating system that does that, sometimes it won't relax, but as soon as the body knows
it's not up to the body, then she says her clients, they just drop into a fully parasympathetic
state, which they are not capable of if they're in charge of their limbs. So she's like, fine, let's
just hold those down.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Like swaddling a baby.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

It's exactly the same, and it's kind of similar to having a weighted blanket. So where I am in
my life, I don't judge anyone for wanting anything. So you want to go to Burning Man and do
psychedelics. There's a chapter on psychedelics, including which order to do them in. If you're
new to that you don't have to do psychedelics in altered states, there's plenty of ways to meet
God through breathwork. Okay? You can also meet God in the bedroom or heck in the dungeon
if that's your thing. I don't care. I just want you to pick the one that works for you. And
whether it's pharmaceutical, whether it's holding your breath for a long time, it just doesn't
matter.

Different people are going to be attracted to different things. And my experience has been
that the more PTSD or the more anxiety someone has, the more being swaddled we'll say is
going to be beneficial just to be able to safely enter a state of feeling, of feeling they haven't
felt before.

And if you combine that with some bicep, there you go. You can outsource that or not,
whatever appeals to you. So this isn't about at all that third F word fear, food, fertility. It can
be a source of lust and energy drain and OnlyFans and porn and just depletion. Or it can be a
source of profound power.

And I would encourage people who read Heavily Meditated, if that's attractive to you,
understand this is altered states and energy and power and healing, and that's what we're
talking about, not the more titillating sides of it.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

So we talked about some fun kinky stuff. Can we talk a little bit about coffee?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Oh, no, not that.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Danger Coffee. This has been my husband's favorite coffee, and he's like, this is such a game
changer for how I feel when I drink it for every kind of holiday. I make him a little gift basket,
and it usually contains Danger Coffee.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Oh my gosh, that's awesome.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Can you tell us the story a little bit? Inquiring minds want to know about what happened with
Bulletproof and now Danger.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

As someone who has been exposed to mold many times, I quit coffee for five years because
every time it would make me feel jittery and weird. I’d get brain fog after I drank it. I'd feel
good for a little while. So I came up with this idea of mold-free coffee, and it fixed the
problem for me, but I have nothing to do with Bulletproof anymore. Their label says it's clean.
I'm not sure what all is going on in there. Danger Coffee is a new idea in coffee, and it's called
danger because who knows what you might do. It's the good kind of danger. I am so powerful
that I will do the right thing because you can't trigger me full of energy. What makes it full of
energy is it's, there's about $22 worth of trace and ultra trace minerals, humic and fulvic in
every bag if you were to buy them as a separate thing.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

And as you well know, as a thyroid pharmacist, binding to lipopolysaccharides, mold, toxins
and metals in the gut is a good strategy. Well, humic and fulvic do that, and they're in Danger
Coffee for a good reason. So it's lab tested mold-free. It's super premium beans. They're
amazing. You can't taste the electrolytes and the minerals, but your body loves them.

And a physician I work with has noticed that people who get more humic and fulvic can
actually have higher electrical potential in your cells. So it's no wonder you drink a cup of
that in the morning, even if your adrenals are kind of tired, one cup in the morning increases
cortisol when it should be increased. Don't rely on five or 10 cups of coffee a day. That's not
good.

I healed from stage four adrenal exhaustion using one cup of mold-free coffee a day. It took
me six weeks. Wow. The first time it took me a year with no coffee. So using coffee
strategically can be good for you, but support your adrenals if you're doing that, which I
certainly did.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Yeah, I love that fulvic and humic acid can be such game changers for remineralizing, and I
love that you put that in the coffee. I love the taste of it too. You can't even taste it. And I
just feel like it's strange. Sometimes I find coffee depleting, but this is the only coffee I'll
drink because I feel like it's replenishing.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

I'm the same way. I literally carry beans and make them in hotel rooms. I don't want to drink
hotel coffee. Why don't we give a discount for your followers? Do you want to use code
Thyroid on [Link] or something?

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Oh my gosh. I would love that. So let's do code Thyroid.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Okay, there you go, guys. We'll give you a discount and our teams will figure out what it is,
but it'll be a good discount for you if you want to try Danger Coffee. It is meaningfully
different, and it's so cost effective compared to buying a bunch of minerals. Yeah.
Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Thank you so much for adding that. And then it's like you don't have to think of another
supplement to take, right?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Yeah. It saves you time.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

And everybody loves their coffee, so I'm so excited about that. Thank you so much for
creating it for us. Of course. I am so excited about the Biohacking Conference, so I'm going to
be hanging out. I'm going to be meeting people and trying out all of the cool biohacking tools
that you're going to bring. Can you tell us more about it?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Yes. This is the conference that launched the biohacking movement. We're expecting 4,000
people in Austin. Go to [Link]. Ryan Holiday will be talking about
stoicism. James Nestor will be talking about breathwork, who's the author of an incredible
book on that. Joe Dispenza I mentioned earlier. One of my shamanic teachers, Alberto Viotto,
and a long list of the top names in Longevity and Consciousness and biohacking, along with
120 companies making biohacking stuff, whether it's lasers for your brain or the latest
supplements. So huge numbers of biohackers had autoimmunity. They've recovered from
things that are not supposed to be recoverable. So you meet this community of people with
glowing bright eyes who are so happy to be helpful. So ultimately, the Biohacking Conference
is about community, and it's [Link], and it's so fun. It's my favorite thing.
I can’t - I'm so happy you're coming.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

I'm so excited. Yeah. I discovered neurofeedback and a whole bunch of other things when I
went to one of your initial biohacking conferences. And I'm going to check out the speakers
too. That'll be a lot of fun. Where else can people find you if they want to connect with you,
if they want to maybe troll in your comments?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Well go to [Link] because if you buy Heavily Meditated now, there's about $750
worth of bonuses for it. And one of them is a $200 course that you could literally buy for $200
right now on one commune, but they'll give you the course for free. So I'd love to teach you
what's in the book, [Link]. And of course, anywhere there's social media, I'm
probably there.
Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Okay, fantastic. So make sure you check out Heavily Meditated and connect with Dave online.
And yeah, this is a great way where you can actually teach yourself how to heal yourself and
become really, really empowered. Before we let you go, I was hoping to put you on the spot
and ask you some fun rapid fire questions. Okay. What is a wellness hack that you would never
try?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Green smoothies.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Really?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

They're horrifying.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

What do you have against green smoothies?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Well, oxalate is a massive plant toxin that is in almost all green smoothies that is highly
correlated with autism and autoimmunity and IBS and interstitial cystitis and white matter
lesions in the brain and mast cell activation syndrome, and a long list of other things. So
green smoothies are one of the fastest ways to poison your mitochondria with razor sharp
calcium crystals. Everything that I'm saying is in studies, many studies.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

So is it like kale green smoothies? What about if you put just regular greens and cucumbers?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

What’s a regular green?

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

What's a regular green? Not like arugula, but just like lettuce.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Arugula is actually safe.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Yeah.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Arugula and lettuce are good, spinach, kale, but unfortunately raspberries, most nuts. They're
really not keeping kiwi fruits very, very high in oxalate. So I didn't understand this, but I
always had joint pain throughout my body and this brain fog and all the GI issues. If you give
me the high oxalate foods, I get worse. And when I wrote the Bulletproof Diet, the first
chapter says lectins and oxalates on omega-6’s and histamines, all these things to look at.

I underestimated the importance of oxalate when I wrote the book. So I don't do sweet
potatoes very often. I don't do chocolate nearly as much, and raspberries are just abusively
high in oxalate. So I wouldn't do a green smoothie, but I would be okay with some cucumber
juice with lemon in it. That's pretty good.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Okay. Okay. Do you think it might be because of mold exposure? Because what I see a lot of
times on organic acids tests is people who have really high oxalate loads tend to be sensitive
to food-based oxalates, and it usually correlates with either Candida or Aspergillus
overgrowth.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Unquestionably, having toxic mold can raise your oxalate levels. However, 80% of people at
autopsy have calcium oxalate crystals in their thyroid.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Calcium oxalate inhibits thyroid function in studies. So the fact that you're not sensitive to it
and it's building up over time in your tissues because you're eating all these crazy super foods
that never existed, well, that's what's going on.

In the past, almonds were an incredible luxury. You wouldn't eat almond butter every day, and
you wouldn't eat raspberries for more than two weeks of the year when they were available,
and you wouldn't eat kale or spinach unless you were starving to death. And if you did, you
would soak them with dairy because the calcium and the dairy would help to detox it. So
we're just eating way more of these foods. Even things like whole wheat – whole wheat is high
in oxalate. And the reason white flour exists is because it removes all the toxins. So whole
wheat is not nutritionally superior at all. It is probably worse for you.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

I love how much you hate kale. It's so fun. Okay, so I thought you were going to say there's no
wellness hack that you wouldn't try, but that surprised me. The other question for you is if the
supplement police came to your house and were like, we're going to confiscate all of your
supplements, but you get to keep one, which one would you keep?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

I was thinking of which supplement I would offer the supplement police.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Yeah, that's actually a really good one. Let's start with that.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

I would offer them high, high-speed lead supplements. You can have my supplements when
you pry them for my cold dead fingers. And yes, I live in Texas now.

Which one would I keep if I had to give up all the rest of them? I think it might be Vitamin
DAKE, D-A-K-E. That's [Link] is my site with all that info on it. And this is a mix of
all the fat solubles and the right ratios that you need for it. I think that's fundamental, but
you also really need minerals, so maybe I would keep Danger Coffee. I think maybe that
would be the one.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Okay. You can keep two. I'll allow it.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

All right. Coffee and DAKE. There you go.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Okay. Can you tell us a little bit more about DAKE?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Sure. So vitamins, D, A, K, and E, specifically K2. And you're probably low in vitamin D if
you're alive, but if you just take vitamin D without A and K, then it causes calcification of
tissues, which you don't want. And if you're low on D, you'll be low on testosterone, you'll be
low on dopamine, and your chances of having autoimmunity go up dramatically.

So you need all of these, but what no one talks about is that they also tell the minerals where
to go. So if you have vitamin D, it helps calcium and zinc go to where they're supposed to be.
So does vitamin K2. But vitamin A controls things like copper, so knowing that fat soluble
vitamins are the foundation and that they're the directors for the minerals. So for me, I take
Minerals 101 and vitamin DAKE every day, which are kind of the two most boring longevity
supplements that I've ever made. They're just the ones that affect the most pathways. So
those would be my most important ones.
Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

And that's really nice, because I know I've seen you take 30 to 40 supplements at once.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

I took 150 pills a day.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Wow. Yeah. But those would be your top two.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

They would.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Okay. Thanks for sharing that.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

I'd miss my cognitive enhancers, but

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Yeah. Do you have any favorite cognitive enhancers these days?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Rhodiola plus tyrosine, especially for people listening to your show, can be so powerful
because even though it's an adaptogen, it can act as a cognitive enhancer because it makes it
harder for your body to go into fight or flight. And if it's there, it makes it easier to come out.
So it gives you more stability of your stress hormones. And tyrosine is a building block for
dopamine and adrenaline, and even for cortisol. And people say, oh, no, cortisol is bad. Low
cortisol is four times more dangerous than high cortisol.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Oh, absolutely. It could be.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Yeah. And I've had low cortisol my whole life, and discovering that maybe a dozen years ago
was really important because I'm incredibly resilient now because I understand my
catecholamines and those types of things. So if someone's listening to this and wanted your
brain to work, you could try rhodiola and tyrosine. And I have a couple of supplements in my
line that contain those. But you have to have adaptogens that you already make, don't you?
Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

I have adrenal support.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Yeah it would. And so we do have those two ingredients in there. They're so helpful.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

So adrenal support is a cognitive enhancer, and I like to go to the very basic non-sexy ones
because those are the ones everyone needs. And after that, you can have ginkgo and you can
have all the cool stuff. Do you have a cognitive product as well for that?

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

I really love carnitine and I really love benfotiamine.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Ooh, nobody knows about benfotiamine.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

I love benfotiamine. It's one of my favorites. People with thyroid fatigue can resolve thyroid
fatigue in three days. In some cases. It's been incredible.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

That's a fat soluble form of B one. And it also helps to protect your blood vessels from
excessive amounts of sugar. So high blood sugar can cause advanced glycation in products and
methymine, so I love that. That's a very esoteric one. But of course you would know, you are
The Thyroid Pharmacist, right?

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Yeah. That's actually the one supplement that if the supplement police came to my house that
I would keep.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Wow.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

I've had low blood pressure for most of my life, and when I get on it, my blood pressure
normalizes, and then I get off of it, and then my low blood pressure comes back. So it's been
a really big game changer for my brain health and for my energy levels. And it supports our
mitochondria as well, right? It
Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Totally does.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Yeah. Wow.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

That's awesome. I wouldn't have picked that one, but I can see why.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

It's amazing. It's works so well for many people. There's not something that works for
everybody, right?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

It's true. I don't find a resolution in my low blood sugar, but it's a powerful, well-researched
supplement. I do take it. You're super smart. You always know all the cool stuff for real. That's
a genuine compliment. There are a lot of people in the field who don't have the breadth of
knowledge you have.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Thank you so much. That means a lot coming from you. And I'm always amazed at you, and I
learned so much from you. And just, yeah, always a pleasure to have you here.

One more question for you. Are there any things that are maybe, I don't know if a guilty
pleasure is the right word, but if somebody that would see you, something that isn't perhaps
biohacker approved, where they would be like, wait a minute, is that Dave Asprey?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Sometimes people think that I'm keto all the time.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Yeah.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Because the Bulletproof Diet was the first modern book with intermittent fasting and cyclical
keto. Which is being keto for a little while. So I don't have a hard time with carbs. In fact, on
the cover of Heavily Meditated, I'm about 5% body fat. I didn't diet, I didn't take anything. I
just got off an airplane and we did a photo shoot, and I am in better shape than I've ever been
in my life. And like, okay, I'm actually too low of body fat right now, so let's see what I can do
about it. So I've been eating like three or 400 grams of carbs a day.
Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Wow. And you're so lean.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

No weight gain, because mitochondria are really working right now. And I just finally figured
it all out. So there's that. And lately for the past couple months, this is going to really blow
your mind. I've been eating bread,

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Like real bread with real gluten. What?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

There's a way to do it. You want to know how?

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Yeah, tell us. Spill the beans. Tell us the secret.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

American wheat is a hard red wheat, which has tons of aggressive gluten and comes with a
side of glyphosate. If I eat a sprinkling of American wheat, my gut shreds itself. I get deep
pimples, my brain turns off and I fart death.

I do not eat American wheat in any amount ever. But whenever I would go to Europe, I'm fine.
So I'm like, wait a minute. So I bought some white flour, not whole wheat. Whole wheat flour
is always bad for you unless you're a peasant and you're supposed to die early just as you don't
want to eat whole wheat. So I get white flour from France. You cannot buy Italian flour
because there's a shortage. So American companies take American wheat, they ship it to Italy,
they grind it in Italy and sell it as Italian flour.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Flour. Whoa. I had no idea.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

So it has to be french flour organic, and then I make sourdough out of it. And when I do that, I
can have three pieces of bread every day for two weeks straight. I've tested this with zero
cognitive effects, zero negative skin effects, zero GI, no problems whatsoever.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Wow. That's incredible.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

It blows me away. And the reason it has to be sourdough and sourdough means 24 hours of
fermentation, because that breaks down remaining gluten, any other toxins. And white flour
is very low in toxins anyway, except for gluten. Right? You got rid of the brown stuff where all
the crap is. So yeah, I can do that. In fact, I have right now in my proofing drawer, a loaf of
sourdough bread rising, so I can handle that now.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

So you're like a closet sourdough maker. I'm really impressed with that.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Yeah, I'm getting pretty good at it.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

That's impressive. I know you've made some food for me before and you're actually a really,
really great cook. Thanks. You'll have to share this recipe with me. I'm going to have to try
this. Totally.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

I'll bring you some if you're up for it. Just take some gluten enzymes. You'll be fine. Yeah.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Do you take any enzymes with it?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Yeah, I take enzymes with it. Yeah, I'm not crazy.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Okay. Okay, good. Yeah. You're not that dangerous, right? Yeah, exactly. That's awesome.
Thank you so much for sharing that. I know that a lot of people with Hashimoto's, it's nice to
hear that there are ways to make gluten more digestible and that there are different varieties
of wheat that perhaps might be a little bit more compatible. I'm going to have to test this
theory out myself.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

And I have not gained any weight on it too, which is funny. So there is something deeply
wrong with American wheat and glyphosate's a major part of it, but we just have
mean-spirited angry wheat growing here because I guess it survives the cold winters or
something. But that European stuff is a different species and it is much more compatible.
Kind of like grass fed dairy is different protein than industrial dairy. Maybe European wheat is
like the equivalent of grass fed.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Oh my gosh. Oh my goodness. Dave Asprey eating gluten and bread.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

There you go.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

So that's awesome. But that just speaks to your resilience as well too.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

I'm healthier. Yeah.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

And the fact that you're not gaining any weight and that your mitochondria and your
metabolism is working so well.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

That could be nice to gain some weight. I'm a little bit too lean.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Yeah.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Can you imagine a 300 pound computer hacker ever saying that? I do not struggle at all with
weight anymore. It's so freeing. I love it.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

What do you think, if there were two things, three things people could do who might have
Hashimoto's hypothyroidism, which are notorious for weight gain and inability to lose weight.
Do you have any secrets for us? Biohacks?

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Take your thyroid hormones until your TSH is underneath one and your other markers are
where they should be. You really need to get enough. And for some people, it may even be
0.5, but you need to get to where your thyroid is properly supported. Make sure you don't
have mold and other things like that. And then get enough animal protein. And if we have 30
seconds, I want to explain this.
About four years ago I was looking at, am I really getting enough animal protein? It should be
one gram per pound of body weight if you want to heal. And I couldn't do it on two meals a
day unless I was going to do a hundred grams per meal. And all the studies said, you can only
have 30 or 50 grams of protein. And I thought, that sounds stupid. So I'm just going to have a
hundred grams of protein and I'll take enzymes.

And if you eat too much protein and you can't digest it, you get bodybuilder farts and they
will empty a neighborhood. They're horrible ammonia farts. So that's your metric. If you're
eating too much protein and not digesting it, you have a problem. So I just took enzymes and
betaine HCL and I have unlimited protein. And then last year, two studies came out showing
that there is no upper limit to the amount of protein in a meal you can absorb, and a hundred
grams is easily doable. So I kind of tested it on myself, and when I travel, I make sure I still
get 200 grams. That's why I'm so lean. I get 200 grams of animal protein no matter what every
day.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that. I feel like protein is finally having a moment
that it deserves to have because it can be so helpful for rebuilding and repairing our bodies,
helping with detoxification and helping us feel satisfied and getting us all those amino acids
for brain health.

Yeah, that's a great suggestion. And it's interesting. I feel like there was a bit of that thought
that we could only absorb so much at a time

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

That was just fake science, to be honest. There was no evidence for that. And it's
enlightening to think about that. How many other things that we believe are just not real. You
can't reverse autism. You can't heal from whatever that is. And if you look around, you're like,
there's someone who just did it. Isn't that weird?

So you've done a lot of work over the years helping people figure out how to reverse things
that are thought to be impossible or that there's just no hope. So your books, I've
recommended hundreds of times to people when they're saying, I have a thyroid problem.
Like, talk to Izabella. She's the one. So thank you for all the hard work on that front. There's
so much possibility for humans right now.

Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Oh, thank you so much for your kind words, and thank you for all the work that you're doing in
the world. You've changed so many lives, myself included.

Dave Asprey ([Link]):

Thanks, Izabella.
Dr. Izabella Wentz ([Link]):

Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the Healing Conversations podcast with
me. And I know this has been an incredibly insightful conversation for me and for everybody
listening at home, I hope this has been healing. Thank you for being here with us.