← Detox Nation with Sinclair Kennally
Detox Nation with Sinclair Kennally
Why Detox Doesn't Work Until You Fix Your Environment | Dave Asprey
00:27:40
Loading summary
Transcript59 lines
- [00:00]
Dave Asprey
So I rebranded Longevity into biohacking. I spent $2.5 million doing this. It's been 58% women since the start. It's not that I'm weak. It's not that I'm not trying hard enough. It's not that I'm dumb. It's not that I'm lazy. The environment around you controls how you perform, much more so than the environment inside you.
- [00:18]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
Dave, from £300 to the founding father of the biohacking movement, you've had an incredible journey, and I think.
- [00:25]
Dave Asprey
And abs. And abs. Congratulations.
- [00:28]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
I will not be showing my abs, but I'm also proud of them.
- [00:31]
Dave Asprey
You know, we're all working on it.
- [00:32]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
You and I have both been through chronic illness hell. And one of the things I find when people talk about biohacking is that it actually has been kind of boxed in as this high performance, almost vanity project. And I know that's not what you intended it for, and I know that's not what the impact is. Can you speak to that?
- [00:48]
Dave Asprey
Sure. Biohacking is a global movement now. It's a $36 billion market size, according to industry analysts. And it started with 100 people in a bar in San Francisco with the first biohacking conference today. It's called Beyond Biohacking. And I created it after spending almost a decade running a longevity nonprofit in Palo Alto, California. And the real challenge is that the things that make old people young make young people powerful. But young people aren't going to listen. So I rebranded longevity into biohacking. And the benefits are high performance. But having had chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia and a long list of other things going on, including autoimmunity. I mean, we could talk for a half hour about all this stuff that's gone wrong in my biology. Having had all that, you know what I really wanted? I didn't want to be healthy. I wanted to kick ass. Everyone wants to perform better, and the sicker you are, the more important it becomes in your life. But unless you're really deathbed, deathbed ill, you're never going to say, the most important thing today is health. Because the most important thing today is actually feeling full of energy and doing what you're here to do. And so that's why biohacking is different. I'm not going to take you and say, oh, you're sick. Did you want to be well? Did you want to be average? No. We want to take you from wherever you are, even if you're as far off as I was. And we want to make you fully able to access everything that's possible for you, and that includes living way longer, because once you get your energy back, you want to do that. And it includes learning how to be conscious, because who wants to live a long time and be a jerk? So you will enter the path of consciousness and longevity if you become a biohacker. And the sicker you are when you start, the more important it'll be. And that's why when you come to the biohacking conference, yeah, you see pro athletes and celebrities and people who have achieved a ton. And you'll see a ton of people who used to be really sick, and you'll see a ton of people who are still working on it, but now they have power. That's why it's so important. And it's a new word. Biohacking entered the English language through Merriam Webster's in 2016. My name's in the dictionary because I didn't trademark the term. I wanted it to be a new movement in society that it's about enhancing how we show up in the world. And of course, if you're sick, you want to do that. But being well is table stakes. We want to go beyond table stakes. We want to win, and that's why it's so important. Another common myth about biohacking is like, oh, it's for men. No, no, no. It's been 58% women since the start. In fact, women make better biohackers than men at the beginning of the movement, because men, unless there's a bone sticking out, we're like, I'm pretty good. And women are like, you know, my body changes on a regular basis. And I might be aware of that more than guys are. So that's kind of how it happened, is because I wanted to share the things that changed my life in my mid-20s, when people in their 80s reversing their age were teaching me how they did it, I thought, this is amazing. Now I'm healthy. But now I'm better than healthy. I know how to make my brain work better than it's ever worked before, and why would I stop? And the message for anyone who's dealing with chronic fatigue or the chemical sensitivities. Got it. I used to have them so bad, they can go away, and they can go away permanently, or they can go away and they might come back a little bit, but you don't care because you have the tools of. Well, screw that noise. Turn it off.
- [04:10]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
Yeah, I think that's really well said for Me, my entire personality became about managing my symptoms and my reactions. I lost total access to my generosity of spirit, my kindness, my emotional resilience, my natural centeredness, even my connection to God, especially my connection to a higher source. So I think what you said is really empowering, and I want to unpack it a little more. Everybody's getting sicker. We all know the reasons why.
- [04:37]
Dave Asprey
Not everybody.
- [04:38]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
Biohackers aren't okay, well, people who are asleep, many, many people are. We know also that it's not too late to turn this around.
- [04:47]
Dave Asprey
Oh, it's never too late.
- [04:49]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
And you're a great, you know, walking example of that. So in this toxic era, when food has been empty for decades, when we're getting poisoned through our food, air and water against our consent, you know, what do people need to do that still actually works to enroll their body's own healing responses?
- [05:07]
Dave Asprey
The most important thing you can do is you can say, I have a choice and I am in control of this, and I've been stuck where I just can't. It's impossible. I don't know what to do. But wait, if I don't know what to do, that means there might be something to do. So you reframe it from I am sick to I am working on solving a problem and that there is a way to do this. In my case, I thought I might be dumb. I was failing out of Wharton Business School, literally failing out. So I went to a psychiatrist and I got a brain scan with Dr. Daniel Amen, who's become a dear friend. And this was 20 years ago. I got the results back, and they said, dave's an interesting referral. And I had brain damage from mold toxins in the environment. And I thought, oh, thank God, I have a hardware problem. It's not that I'm weak. It's not that I'm not trying hard enough. It's not that I'm dumb. It's not that I'm lazy. It's that there's something not working and we can fix things that aren't working. And so much of that, even the disconnection from spirit that you were talking about, it comes down to biology. Especially in my most recent book, which is called Heavily Meditated. I wrote it to tell people, here's how to get to these altered states of healing faster. But it became the best selling philosophy book because the idea there is that you have mitochondria in your body that are directing these little antennas that sense reality, and they're processing all of reality. And if you have this hyper reactivity. Your mitochondria are sick. So they're a layer of processing reality. And they're what connects you to spirit, they're what drives intuition. They're also drives willpower and effort and they're what make you fat. And they're actually what drives the inflammatory cells called mast cells that are behind a lot of this. So if those little guys, which are not really you, they're separate little bacteria consciousness, if they're not running very well, your whole life feels different because you process reality through them. So I just want to say you can fix it. That's the most important thing. Start there. Okay, I have a problem to solve. And here's what's not fair. I spent two and a half million dollars doing this. Now the first three or five hundred thousand was just to get. Well, it doesn't cost that much. But it's because we didn't know what to do.
- [07:23]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
We did not know what to financially devastated myself.
- [07:26]
Dave Asprey
Most people who get mold or CFS or EBV or all the things that can cause this end up spending more than they have on it. In fact, it was a big stressor. I was married briefly in my 20s. It was a stressor on the marriage. Like I cannot work because my brain is gone unless I spend a lot of money on all this stuff. But there are basic principles. And number one is the environment around you controls how you perform, much more so than the environment inside you. But you get to change both. Reduce the things that cause friction, and that is toxins. I don't care if the toxins come from air, whether they come from water, whether they come from food, whether they're made by a plant or made by a chemical factory, it doesn't matter. Get less of those. And the cool thing is you may be resilient to this toxin and for someone else it takes them out. Case in point, for me, I finally figured out that I am genetically sensitive to nightshade vegetables. Now, I grew up in New Mexico. Green chili is a religion. I love this stuff. Well, when I finally figured that out and realized that those specific lectins and oxalates, which are common toxins that drive all kinds of symptoms that people don't necessarily make, those are plant based toxins. I don't handle those well at all. But you might be able to eat a jalapeno and it'll be anti inflammatory for you. So it's personalized. And what I've done in my work is I've said, well, here's the foods that really work for almost everybody. Here's the foods that are suspects. You don't know if they're guilty or not. And here's foods that are just not food, really, but people still eat them, and they're probably gonna cause trouble. Even if you think you're doing well, you don't even know what doing well feels like if you eat that kind of stuff.
- [09:03]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
So true. When you're fat, sick, and tired, you don't remember what life feels like.
- [09:07]
Dave Asprey
This is true.
- [09:07]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
When you're actually yourself, it's like a.
- [09:09]
Dave Asprey
Black and white old movie. And you don't realize that you lost color at some point.
- [09:13]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
Yeah, that's a really good way to say it. What data markers do you think are most revealing? Because we can measure all kinds of data in this day and age, and yes, it's very quickly overwhelming and expensive. What are the markers you think really help paint a picture of the root cause issues and not just, oh, yeah, you're inflamed. Well, yeah, we know we're inflamed.
- [09:32]
Dave Asprey
It's really important to do the basic biohacking panels. And this means C reactive protein. This is a marker. Oh, you probably have an infection somewhere that you don't know about. Could be under a tooth, could be somewhere else. Or maybe you just worked out really hard before you took the test, in which case do it again. You want to look at homocysteine. In that case, you probably have a genetic problem. And there are much more advanced genetic tests that you might need to do that cost a couple grand. But we'll start with just what's your homocysteine? And if that is not too high and not too low. Okay, it's not those two things. I also include something called LP PLA 2. This is a marker of inflammation of vasculature. Because when people add saturated fat, which is necessary for healing, they go, oh, but my cholesterol. Well, if your LP PLA doesn't go up when you eat foods, then you don't have anything going on in your arteries. So that's just to make sure that when your doctor complains that you're not on statins anymore, which harm mitochondrial function and make you feel like crap and probably increase your.
- [10:32]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
Don't reduce the incidence of cardiac events.
- [10:34]
Dave Asprey
Actually, I think that might increase it. A new study just came out, so that's kind of weird. So anyway, you might be on that path, you might not, but I want you to get those. And then thyroid. Oh, my God. The number of people who have Thyroid issues and have all these energy problems and sensitivities. Fix thyroid and you get much better. And then you need a sex hormone panel and a sex hormone panel. The number one thing there is testosterone. And yes, all of the sex hormones are important, but testosterone is important for men and women specifically because it drives dopamine. And dopamine gives you willpower. It makes you motivated to do things that matter, like get healthy again. So if you're low on testosterone, low on thyroid, thyroid means you have no energy. And testosterone means I have no motivation and willpower. Well, no wonder you feel like crap. By the way, when I was 26, my testosterone levels were lower than my mom and my thyroid was almost undetectable, and I'd hit £300. You wonder why? Okay, so now those are not problems because we know how to do it. There's one more thing that I would call out, which is kind of step two, and that would be a urine organic acids test. And you do this because this is going to tell you where your mitochondrial blockades are. The other thing that's critically important is understand we're all limited by budget. But there's something else that's more important than budget. If I was to tell you you can double your lifespan with this one simple thing, you'd be really interested, right? And then, oh, every morning for the rest of your twice as long life, you have to wake up and punch yourself in the eye five times as hard as you can. Would you do it? No. No one's going to do it. So it turns out investing, suffering and effort, those matter more than dollars. Because even if you have the dollars, if you're too tired, you're not going to do it. You're going to take a nap. So we're actually investing our energy and our willingness to suffer or endure pain or do hard things. And then we're investing our dollars.
- [12:32]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
So let's talk about that, because everybody is trying to figure this out against a backdrop of actively being poisoned. And they're final figuring out, oh, maybe my government isn't covering the basis for me and I'm going to have to make my own decisions around this. You want to comment on that?
- [12:47]
Dave Asprey
It's a really interesting idea. In fact, it's alien to humans. So let's see. I'm no longer responsible for my health. I think my doctor is. I mean, oh, no, my insurance company is. They won't cover it. I can't do it. Oh, that means my employer is like, oh, but the government told them what to do. And those guys always get it right. Like, who's going to be your health daddy? Like you are your health daddy. No one else can do that. So stop giving away your power to these people. What does the government want? To accumulate power and maximize taxation at any cost. And I don't care what kind of government is. That's what they all do. And then what does an insurance company want to do? Take all of your money. Right. What does the doctor want to do? The doctor actually wants to heal you. And if you could just pay your doctor, they probably would do that. Except you have these insurance companies on one hand blocking what the doctor does, and on the other hand, if they do what works, then the licensing boards come after them because it's an organized mafia. So you can find real healers. I work sometimes with a guy in Austin. He charges 250 bucks a month and you can have his unlimited appointments with him. And so he has probably 1,000 people or something in his practice. 500, doesn't matter. But he makes plenty as a doctor. He's like, I don't talk to your insurance company. You want to do that and do whatever. So this is the future. We're going to have to pay our healers without any intermediation. And my healing team includes a functional movement trainer. It includes all the tech from my upgrade labs company. It includes the actual lab tests that I draw myself with no one's help. And it includes a team of doctors who are dear friends. So that's my healing team. What if it was a community of people who were all working on the same thing and talking about it online? That's the good side of social media. You want to know what's going on with your health? Go to Reddit and find a group of people like you, and they will save you tens of thousands of dollars of wasted effort. It's that hard. But it's impossible. If you think it's impossible, I totally agree.
- [14:39]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
So what role should politics play in.
- [14:41]
Dave Asprey
Health when you strip everything away? The role of government is to protect you from violence. That's it. You give them monopoly. You give them a monopoly on violence, which means they get to have the police and the guns in the military, and then they stop criminals from harming you. That's it. Everything else is optional in a functioning government where, oh, thank you, fda. These are your recommendations. They seem stupid because they are. I'm not going to do that. And they go, all right, that's cool, thanks. But when they start saying, we will force you to do it, it Looks like this. If anyone has been granted the right to force an injection or any other medication or food on you against your will, they are automatically granting you the right to give them a high speed lead injection. And let's do toxic metal. We don't want to go there. That's how it works. How can society function if we are allowed to do what is an act of violence on another person? If a person says no, I do not consent, and then you do it anyway, that's violence. We pay the government not to do that. I pay them 40% every year not to do that. And they are failing in their job. Now it gets a little bit weird because let's say that your neighbor sprays a bunch of toxins all over the place that pollute your home, that is also an act of violence. And if we had a functioning legal system, you'd be able to sue your neighbor for doing that and the people who made the toxins. And we have big problems right now because the pharmaceutical industry in the mid-1980s came up with this great idea of causing the government to remove liability for harming people. That's insane.
- [16:19]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
Absolutely insane.
- [16:20]
Dave Asprey
And so now the big chemical companies like China Chem makes paraquat, which causes Parkinson's and is illegal to spray in China, but they sell it to the US and then they, I'm guessing, paid a bunch of government people to grant a liability shield so they can manufacture a chemical in a country that maybe has some tension with the US and then ship it here, make everyone sick, and then take the money and, and not even be liable for their actions. This is a failure of government. And I will say this, if it continues this way. Very few democracies last 250 years and we've gone over 250 years. So I have no interest in being here if there's some sort of revolution. But if they continue, that is what will happen. It is inevitable. Because when someone poisons your children and you know what they're doing, and they do it against your will and this is happening, what are you gonna do? I'm not that kind of guy, but I know plenty of people from New Mexico, where I grow up, who are very well armed and they will protect.
- [17:22]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
Their families, especially once they fix their testosterone.
- [17:25]
Dave Asprey
Well, exactly. That's a whole nother issue. So I'm not at all calling for revolutionary violence. I'm just saying that people are willing to be bullied to a certain extent. And any guy who had a normal amount of testosterone in school, the bullies came after you. The bullies came after you in that one day. To quote Pearl Jam, Jeremy spoke in class today. And maybe because we're all low testosterone, because they intentionally put fluoride in the water which lowers our thyroid and they put all these estrogenic chemicals out there and they wonder why we are all like that. Well, you can undo all of that. And studies show that men who have adequate testosterone, specifically men, not high testosterone, just adequate the way our parents did that we make more moral decisions to protect others.
- [18:12]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
Do the hard thing.
- [18:12]
Dave Asprey
If you want to look at Mama Bear energy, that's a real thing. There are women who've picked cars up off their kids. You think low thyroid, low testosterone. Women do that? No. They dye their hair blue and then they complain about being a victim. It doesn't work. We need to remove the chemicals that are causing brain damage. That causes. By the way, the blue dye is part of the brain damage. By the way, have you ever noticed in a jungle the most poisonous animals are like bright blue and purple and green? Just saying.
- [18:41]
Podcast Outro Host
Hmm.
- [18:43]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
Okay, no comment. So here's the part that I want to remember about the people listening into this is that when you're sick and brain foggy, all this feels really insurmountable. And it's easy to be angry and go right back into powerlessness. But actually it's not that complicated to detox. These super harmful materials like glyphosate is so harmful to so many parts of your body. It's not just your gut lining destroys your mitochondrial mitochondria function. It gets right into the joints. You get all these non contact injuries. It's pernicious, it's absolutely disruptive to every major system in the body. But it's very straightforward to detox.
- [19:21]
Dave Asprey
How do we detox glyphosate?
- [19:22]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
That's really simple. You upregulate drainage. You use the right binders for you, which can include humics and fulvix. You add in a little bit of glycine so that you're pushing glycine back into the deeper joint tissue so you don't get keep regurgitating this glyphosate. And you also have to account for the heavy metals. Like aluminum is not a heavy metal. But aluminum glyphosate conjugates beautifully together for that neutral charge and goes haywire in the body. So you have to account for that piece.
- [19:50]
Dave Asprey
I love that. One of the things that's my strategy. Most people, unless we're really sick, we don't invest in our health. But we will Invest in our performance. Back when I started Bulletproof, I put an ingredient in bulletproof coffee that in clinical studies, I was not allowed to mention. Thank you, FDA that reverses Alzheimer's disease and dementia. It's called MCT Oil. And my new coffee company, now that I have nothing to do with, Bulletproof, called Danger Coffee, it has a therapeutic dose of humic and Fulvic minerals in it. So people.
- [20:21]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
I don't think I knew that.
- [20:22]
Dave Asprey
Oh, yeah. So it's there for a reason. So when people buy that, they're going to drink coffee, even if they're not sick, they're going to drink their coffee. And so I want them to not get sick, right? Yeah. There's specific reasons that it goes well with coffee, but I do that sort of thing because, look, until you hit rock bottom, you're not going to take it seriously. So let's create a world where there's products that mean you don't have to hit rock bottom.
- [20:43]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
Now you're just scaring me, Dave. That sounds insane.
- [20:45]
Dave Asprey
It sounds totally crazy, right?
- [20:46]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
Dangerous.
- [20:47]
Dave Asprey
One of the things that I experienced because I built a very large brand until they fired me. But I met with the CEOs of, I can't really say every major. But most of the major packaged foods companies, Coke and Pepsi and Kellogg's and all those guys, and they all asked me the same thing. They said, dave, we want to make healthier products, but if we do, it's going to cost just a little bit more. And I said, yeah, and people are willing to pay $0.04 more for the thing. And they all said, no, if we raise our prices by half a cent, then people will buy the cheap stuff from our competitors. So the only way these guys are going to change, and this goes back to game theory strategy, is if we simply say, I won't buy that, then they'll change. And my proof point here is Campbell's soup. Campbell's had so many toxins in their soup, and it became well known that a 20% drop in sales happened, so they reformulated. Oh, my gosh. And then we also have some influencers like Vani Hari, who's been a friend for more than a decade, who goes out there and just says, why is that in there? And the weird thing that I have a hard time explaining other than there may be bad people involved, is why is it here in the US but it's not there in the rest of the world? And I travel globally. I am a dual citizen of the US And Canada. If there was liability, all of the companies selling in the US should be taken apart by attorneys. And thank goodness Bobby Kennedy has spent 30 years doing that and he's setting it up. So all we have to do is say you are responsible as a manufacturer for putting out poison or non poison. And I'm not saying sugar is poison. It's probably not that good for you. It's not poison. But when you say I'm going to do sugar with a bunch of colored dyes that cause hyperactivity in children, there are some people in those companies who willingly believe, like, they'll pull the wool over their own eyes that it's harmless. And there are many more who have to know and they do it anyway. Absolutely.
- [22:55]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
No.
- [22:55]
Dave Asprey
I cannot figure out why unless we just have some kind of evil operating.
- [22:58]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
Yeah, it makes you wonder. Absolutely. Well, we're so much easier to control when we're sick.
- [23:04]
Dave Asprey
Actually, I think that they have created a beast. Anyone who's had toxic mold knows what mold rage is. And when you suppress mitochondrial function, when you're tired all the time, it's really hard to regulate your emotions. That means that you can be triggered easily, which is not good because they'll trigger you to manipulate you. And there are techniques. My most recent book is like how to not be Triggered. But it also means that you're likely to snap. Right. Why do the people who are planning this, if we assume there are people, why are they creating a bunch of people who are mentally and emotionally less stable? Because those are the people who do bad things in the world. And we want less of those to have a peaceful society. So that means if you're tired all the time and you're feeling shame that you yelled at your kids the way all of us have as parents, like, we gotta do something about that. So what do we do? We learn how to get our energy back so that we can regulate our emotions. That makes us less controllable, less programmable and healthier all at the same time. And that little bit of additional energy. Oh, now I can do the next thing that makes me well, and I can do the next thing.
- [24:15]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
Yeah. This is why I'm so passionate about detox. I really don't care what you store your food in, what you put on your plate, if you're doing it quote unquote, right, how thin you are at all, I do not care. What I care is if you feel like yourself and if your soul can be fully in your body. That's what I care about. And unfortunately, or, you know, whatever it is in this day and Age. That means detox. So you reduce the interference fields.
- [24:41]
Dave Asprey
Essentially, it's pretty straightforward. Like you're saying, allow less toxins in your body. So get an air filter, get a water filter. Learn how to buy food or learn how to grow it. Part of my path is I moved to Vancouver island and built a regenerative farm and raised all my own food and animals, except I was traveling 50, 60% of the time and hotels are always toxic. But I have up regulated every detox pathway in my body to the point that it's kind of absurd. So I am more resilient as a human being. Now the calendar thinks I'm 52. My lab tests don't agree, but I fly all the time. I expose myself to toxins. Heck, I moved into a home inadvertently that I found out had 42 water leaks and toxic mold. Everyone. I lived in it for four months with no symptoms whatsoever.
- [25:27]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
Wow.
- [25:27]
Dave Asprey
Because even though I hypersensitive before, where I would go in just two breaths and I would spin out and my brain would turn off and I would be sick for six weeks, that's the kind of resilience you can build. It's worth doing.
- [25:41]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
Well said. Absolutely. So, last question. What are people getting wrong about biohacking?
- [25:48]
Dave Asprey
Some people think biohacking is just for men, even though it's been for women more than men since the beginning. And some people think it takes a lot of money. But setting up the environment around you so that you succeed doesn't take a lot of money at all. Blackout curtains are cheap. Red light bulbs are cheap. Choosing two foods that are the same price and one of them has more toxins than another, choose the less toxic one. That's also cheap. Knowing maybe you should rinse your rice to get the toxins off of it. The arsenic, specifically. Well, okay, you got to pay for the water. So most of this is just about knowing the best practices. And if people just understand biohacking is about you being in charge of your state, that's all it is. And it's not expensive. It's not for billionaires. It's not for men or women. It's not for old people or young people. It is a basic human drive to say, I want control over this.
- [26:40]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
Let's do more of that.
- [26:41]
Dave Asprey
There's a side effect, too. If you have more control over this, that means everyone else has less control. It means you get to choose how you interact with others, including people who tell you to do dumb things that are against your health interests. Yeah.
- [26:55]
Host (possibly a health or detox expert)
Less abandoning of self.
- [26:57]
Dave Asprey
Exactly.
- [26:58]
Podcast Outro Host
Thanks for spending this time with us today. I know these conversations can bring up a lot and I want you to have room to sit with what you learned and let it land in your own body. If you want more support or you're curious about the next step on your healing path, you can always connect with me. Find me on Instagram hedetoxnation and explore resources mentioned in this episode@detoxnation.com this conversation is shared for education and personal reflection and isn't medical advice. Please always work with your trusted healthcare providers for your care. I'm really glad you're here and I'll see you in the next episode.