The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
21 Jan 2025
Chapter 1: What is the ancient battle happening inside our cells?
I got the scan, and when I walked back into his office, he was kind of white, and he looked at me and he said, Dave, I thought there was nothing wrong with you. When I see your brain scan, he said, inside your brain is total chaos. I don't know how you're standing here in front of me.
It was chemically induced toxic mold brain damage that different toxins or nutrient deficiencies cause problems in the brain. All driven by this mold toxicity. Well, by mold and MTHFR, which makes mold worse. It literally just blew my mind. Oh, there's more.
Before I was 30, I had most of the diseases of aging, arthritis, high blood sugar, prediabetes, high risk of stroke and heart attack, in part because I was constantly inflamed because I was sleeping in a moldy bedroom. So I went on this path of saying, how do I get rid of this stuff? And it turns out that it's all mold poisoning mitochondria. So what do you do? What did you do?
If you have mold, you got to bind the toxins. You got to get rid of the mold growing in your body. And you should do some ozone therapy. And you should take the supplements that allow you to methylate. If you do those things, you're probably going to get better. What are the people watching this do?
Where do they start? They get a mold test. Everything pops red. This is going to shock you, Gary. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist, Gary Brekka, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, longevity, biohacking, and everything in between.
And today I'm blessed enough to sit with the father of biohacking, someone who has, unbeknownst to him, been a mentor of mine for many years. I've read a lot of his books, followed a lot of his teaching. He really opened my eyes to the entire world of biohacking and longevity and anti-aging and life extension. He's a vast world of knowledge. We had just had an incredible podcast together.
So welcome to The Ultimate Human, Dave Asprey.
Gary, it was an honor to get to interview you on The Human Upgrade and an even bigger honor to be on your show. I've been watching all the things you're sharing. I just love it when you talk about MTHFR, which has been a big part of my biohacking journey as well. So kudos for just teaching millions of people the stuff that matters.
Thank you so much, man. You know, I... I've been just fascinated, like I have this childlike fascination with human biology and human physiology and just human optimization and performance. And you clearly do too. I think you were the one that really drew my attention to inside the cell, through the cytoplasm, down into the mitochondria. You've written books on bio-optimization. And I think...
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Chapter 2: How does toxic mold affect our health?
Chapter 3: What is the connection between mitochondria and happiness?
And for the first time ever, within the last five years, we figured out how to look at something called proton spin in living cells. And scientists found out that every time your heart beats, the proton spin of all of the molecules in the brain changes direction.
Instantly, with no lag time, which means there's a quantum coherence between your heart and your brain and between all the cells in your brain. This means that our brains are quantum. Our biology is quantum. The microtubules inside our mitochondria are quantum. So, of course, they're picking up quantum messages. Yeah, I would, of course, believe that. Right? Yeah.
And it doesn't mean that it's easy for us to sense that, but this is where intuition comes from. And people might be saying, well, Dave, you're a biohacker. I know you from ketosis and putting butter in coffee. I've also written a major New York Times bestselling longevity book and a neuroscience book.
And I've run a neuroscience clinic for now 12 years called 40 Years of Zen in Seattle, where the world's top performing executives and athletes and celebrities come and do decades of meditation in five days with computers attached to their heads. And I've studied intuition. And
What happens in reality is your body, your mitochondria, it's like a distributed network, a separate consciousness from your brain is constantly scanning reality. The mitochondria are the frontline sensors of reality and they sense reality a third of a second before your brain gets a signal. And you're saying a third of a second, really? Yeah, if I clap my hands,
you're a smart guy, you know it took the sound some amount of time to hit your ears and then you heard it, right? It's not real. What's not real? The third of a second lag time is invisible to you. So when the sound hit your body, your consciousness didn't get the first electrical signal of the sound until a third of a second went past. So there's a censorship window that all humans have.
Just like when they do live broadcasts, there's an eight-second window in case someone has a wardrobe malfunction, they can shut it off.
Right, right.
Drops the F-bomb. Right. Our body reserves a third of a second to decide whether it's going to let you hear that or see it or whether it was worth your attention or time. And it is the mitochondria that are the frontline sensors.
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Chapter 4: What biohacking practices can improve mental clarity?
Chapter 5: How do MCTs and fats in coffee influence performance?
Instantly, with no lag time, which means there's a quantum coherence between your heart and your brain and between all the cells in your brain. This means that our brains are quantum. Our biology is quantum. The microtubules inside our mitochondria are quantum. So, of course, they're picking up quantum messages. Yeah, I would, of course, believe that. Right? Yeah.
And it doesn't mean that it's easy for us to sense that, but this is where intuition comes from. And people might be saying, well, Dave, you're a biohacker. I know you from ketosis and putting butter in coffee. I've also written a major New York Times bestselling longevity book and a neuroscience book.
And I've run a neuroscience clinic for now 12 years called 40 Years of Zen in Seattle, where the world's top performing executives and athletes and celebrities come and do decades of meditation in five days with computers attached to their heads. And I've studied intuition. And
What happens in reality is your body, your mitochondria, it's like a distributed network, a separate consciousness from your brain is constantly scanning reality. The mitochondria are the frontline sensors of reality and they sense reality a third of a second before your brain gets a signal. And you're saying a third of a second, really? Yeah, if I clap my hands,
you're a smart guy, you know it took the sound some amount of time to hit your ears and then you heard it, right? It's not real. What's not real? The third of a second lag time is invisible to you. So when the sound hit your body, your consciousness didn't get the first electrical signal of the sound until a third of a second went past. So there's a censorship window that all humans have.
Just like when they do live broadcasts, there's an eight-second window in case someone has a wardrobe malfunction, they can shut it off.
Right, right.
Drops the F-bomb. Right. Our body reserves a third of a second to decide whether it's going to let you hear that or see it or whether it was worth your attention or time. And it is the mitochondria that are the frontline sensors.
Wow.
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Chapter 6: What role do psychedelics play in health and wellness?
Chapter 7: How can we combat toxins in our environment?
It was chemically induced toxic mold brain damage that different toxins or nutrient deficiencies cause problems in the brain. All driven by this mold toxicity. Well, by mold and MTHFR, which makes mold worse. It literally just blew my mind. Oh, there's more.
Before I was 30, I had most of the diseases of aging, arthritis, high blood sugar, prediabetes, high risk of stroke and heart attack, in part because I was constantly inflamed because I was sleeping in a moldy bedroom. So I went on this path of saying, how do I get rid of this stuff? And it turns out that it's all mold poisoning mitochondria. So what do you do? What did you do?
If you have mold, you got to bind the toxins. You got to get rid of the mold growing in your body. And you should do some ozone therapy. And you should take the supplements that allow you to methylate. If you do those things, you're probably going to get better. What are the people watching this do?
Where do they start? They get a mold test. Everything pops red. This is going to shock you, Gary. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist, Gary Brekka, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, longevity, biohacking, and everything in between.
And today I'm blessed enough to sit with the father of biohacking, someone who has, unbeknownst to him, been a mentor of mine for many years. I've read a lot of his books, followed a lot of his teaching. He really opened my eyes to the entire world of biohacking and longevity and anti-aging and life extension. He's a vast world of knowledge. We had just had an incredible podcast together.
So welcome to The Ultimate Human, Dave Asprey.
Gary, it was an honor to get to interview you on The Human Upgrade and an even bigger honor to be on your show. I've been watching all the things you're sharing. I just love it when you talk about MTHFR, which has been a big part of my biohacking journey as well. So kudos for just teaching millions of people the stuff that matters.
Thank you so much, man. You know, I... I've been just fascinated, like I have this childlike fascination with human biology and human physiology and just human optimization and performance. And you clearly do too. I think you were the one that really drew my attention to inside the cell, through the cytoplasm, down into the mitochondria. You've written books on bio-optimization. And I think...
They're really excellent roadmaps. I'm going to put links to those in the show notes for the people that are not familiar with your work. They should be familiar with your work. We went down so many rabbit holes on your podcast. I want to isolate a couple of those. I loved what you said right before the camera started rolling because he said, well, what do you want to talk about?
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Chapter 8: What does it mean to be an 'Ultimate Human'?
That's how important this is. Wow.
That's incredible. So people can actually take charge. What was the practice that you went through? What were the stages that you went through to do that? Yeah.
In order to increase my mitochondria? Well, this is going to sound like I'm a broken record, but if you were to wake up in the morning and you were to have some sodium in water, you can have electrolytes too. I recommended this for years. It is life-changing to increase sodium. There's all kinds of reasons we can go into for that.
So you have some salt water in the morning instead of regular water. Now hydration goes up. Your brain works better in multiple studies. A gram of sodium is great. It better have some magnesium and potassium and things in it. So you do that. And then you take, it doesn't have to be a lot, a little bit of ghee or butter and some MCT oil. And for that, more is better unless you get disaster pants.
And you blend it. And you have to blend it for 20 seconds. You can do it with tea. You can do it with coffee. So take your hot coffee, put it in the blender, which I remember at your biohacking events, they blended the coffee. It drove me crazy for years. Like if I just eat a stick of butter and drink some coffee, it should work, but it doesn't.
And the reason is that when you blend it, you're making the water into exclusions on water. And with Danger Coffee, we've added a large dose of trace minerals and electrolytes that's in the coffee itself. So when you brew it, you're getting a therapeutic dose of 50 different trace minerals. So that improves when you blend it and you drink it and your body's like, oh, yes.
And it's saying yes via that intuitive sense that happens before you have an emotional reaction or a thought. And the intuition is the body says, this is the water I need. And these are the minerals I need. Thank God. And you just like want it at this deep level. And it tastes like always tell people to hydrate and mineralize first thing in the morning. Yes. So that's how I do it, is those things.
And then you don't need to eat for a long time after that. And some people, especially young exercise buffs, they get so triggered when I say, you're still fasting if you have some butter and MCT oil. They say, but there's calories. In the studies, the mice only had water. Mice don't have espresso machines or they would add espresso. Right. Yeah.
The reason that you can have some fat during a fast and it won't break the fast. And I wrote a whole book called Fast This Way to correct some misperceptions about fasting, particularly over fasting. So I've gone deep on the science on this. When you're fasting, your mTOR levels do not rise. And mTOR is a beneficial compound in the body that causes tissues to grow.
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