Transform Your Life with AI Health Breakthroughs | EP #149

So many people are suffering from brain fog, weight gain, water retention, poor response to exercise, poor sleep, and poor deep sleep, and they think these are just consequences of aging. They're not. Gary Brecka is a human biologist. To say that this guy has changed my life is the understatement of the century. I will add 7 years to the lifespan and healthspan of every person in this room. Of all the biohacks, I'm probably most excited about hydrogen gas and hydrogen water. Do you feel different? No question. I think it's the most overlooked in all of biohacking today. We know that we can't change the pH of the body by drinking alkaline water. We can change the pH of the body by adding hydrogen gas. This is what I call the Golden Age of Healthspan. Why some people live to 120 and others are dead at 50—there's a reason, and we're going to be able to understand that and begin to impact it. Now that's a moonshot.

Ladies and gentlemen, everybody, welcome to Moonshots. My guest today is Gary Brecka, renowned human biologist, biohacker, and longevity expert with over 20 years of experience optimizing human performance and functional medicine. Gary and I are going to be talking about the technology that's available to you today in your home and in your life to help you extend your healthspan and your lifespan. He's the co-founder of 10X Health Systems, past CEO of Streamline Medical Group, and host of The Ultimate Human podcast.

Gary, welcome to Moonshots, buddy. I'm so excited to be here. I recently visited you at your home in Miami, and it was a technology showcase. We're going to talk about a range of technologies that are becoming available today to help people understand what's going on inside their bodies and then improve it.

These aren't necessarily technologies that are expensive or that take a huge amount of time, but they are hacks and tricks. I think we're going to see even more of this, especially as AI starts to play a role. I'm imagining that when I come back to your home in the next few years, you'll be sitting there talking to Jarvis, and Jarvis will be picking up all of your sensors and saying, “Gary, hop in the hydrogen bath. I need some cryotherapy. I need this.” You'll be able to turn on your AI biohacker support system.

I believe in that, too. Everybody's excited about my biohacking habit except my wife, because every single room in the house has something in it. I guess there are worse things I could be addicted to. I don't collect cars or anything like that.

She was in the cold plunge at the time. When I finally put the H cat machine—the transdermal ozone machine—in our master bedroom, she said, “Okay, I've had enough of your biohacking.”

It's amazing. I have a childlike fascination with human performance, cellular biology, and all of the technology bridging artificial intelligence and human optimization. There are some fascinating technologies out there, and not all of them are very expensive. They can have significant impacts on our cellular biology.

I think this is the Golden Age of Healthspan. This is the age of the healthspan revolution. I want people to understand what's possible today. It's funny, because I've been in both your home and Tony Robbins's home. Tony is a dear friend and partner, and you've been to my home as well. We've got some of the best toys on the planet.

We collect the right toys. Some people collect cars; we collect biohacking devices.

What do we have here? Mine is red and yours is blue.

Yours just needs to be charged.

This is a reflection of my inner self.

This is hydrogen gas. Of all the biohacks under $30 a month, I'm probably most excited about hydrogen gas and hydrogen water. This bottle will run you about $250, but you can get elemental magnesium tablets and drop them into a bottle of water to create high-parts-per-million hydrogen gas.

I think it's the most overlooked modality in all of biohacking today.

Let's dive into that. I'm a scientist, a physician, and a biohacker, so I'd love to understand what's fundamentally driving hydrogen's benefits.

There are lots of studies on hydrogen gas and its capacity to lower inflammation, improve circulation, and improve markers of methylation. There's an interesting study in Experimental Gerontology, published in November 2021. We could talk about a lot of the other clinical evidence for hydrogen gas, which is a very prevalent gas in the human body. It's harmless to human beings.

Hydrogen is an antioxidant. It donates electrons. Historically and evolutionarily, we've reduced the amount of hydrogen gas in our diets, our gut microbiome, and our water. Most of our water is very still. If you scooped water out of a running stream, you'd find a high number of parts per million of hydrogen, versus bottled water, which is more stagnant. Most bottled water has been sitting for about 2 years.

There's an interesting experiment you can do at home. You can order an ORP meter—oxidation-reduction potential—from Amazon for about $12 to $15. It's a millivolt meter that measures the capacity of a fluid like water either to cause oxidation or to reduce oxidation. You want the number to be negative. The more negative the number, the more capacity it has to reduce inflammation.

If you poured standard bottled water into this, it would have a positive ORP, meaning it isn't reducing inflammation and is causing some oxidation. It would be around 150 to 200. The second you press that button and add hydrogen gas, or drop an elemental magnesium tablet into the water and it effervesces into hydrogen gas, you'll see the ORP drop to negative 400 or 500.

The study in Experimental Gerontology looked at a 6-month, placebo-controlled, randomized group of 70-year-old men and women. Some were drinking regular water, and the others were drinking high-parts-per-million hydrogen water. They used well-known markers of methylation, including TET—ten-eleven translocation methylcytosine dioxygenase—to measure the impact on cellular methylation, which is a marker of cellular metabolism and how well your cells are taking nutrients and converting them into usable forms.

They measured choline levels in the left frontal lobe of the brain and creatine levels in the right parietal area. They measured sit-stand ratios and several markers of inflammation, including C-reactive protein and creatine phosphokinase. Across the board, simply adding hydrogen gas to the water improved all of these markers, including telomere length.

Let me put some numbers against this. How much hydrogen-enriched water do you consume per day?

In the morning, I'll use it instead of caffeine. A single tablet will get you between 9 and 12 parts per million of hydrogen. Some people can tolerate more than others. I drink 4 or 5 of those throughout the day.

It will mitigate the effects of travel. If you want to do an interesting experiment, when you wake up in the morning, take 4 or 5 elemental magnesium tablets and drop them into about 750 mL of room-temperature water. In about 50 seconds, they'll effervesce, and those microbubbles will be in the water. Drink the entire 750 mL and see how switched-on you feel.

Do you instantly feel switched on?

You feel instantly switched on. You can feel the inflammatory cascade dropping. You feel more mentally alert, clearer, and more cognizant. It sounds like I'm trying to sell hydrogen water, but technically I am. Of all the biohacks out there, you have a red-light bed that costs $119,000, while elemental magnesium H₂ tablets cost less than a dollar a day and can completely change the trajectory of your health.

Do you feel a visceral impact? Do you feel different?

No question. You will feel different. The markers for sleep improved in the majority of these people. They had better deep and REM sleep. Deep sleep is where we're detoxifying our lymphatic systems, and active REM sleep is where we're assembling memories and putting the cognitive actions of the day together with our subconscious and our learning.

What about carbonated water? How do you feel about that?

I think carbon dioxide has the opposite effect. I haven't seen any studies on carbonated beverages having an impact on inflammation, cognitive function, or joint health.

Are you warning people against using carbonated water?

I think if you're going to drink water, you should drink still water with hydrogen. The two shouldn't even be in the same category.

I haven't run that experiment for myself, but I will. I'll link the studies. I also have a hydrogen bath at home.

I saw that when we were taking the tour.

The way you described it made me think, “If I have 20 minutes, I'm jumping in the bathroom.”

No question.

What's the hydrogen bath? It's a normal bathtub with an external hydrogen generator bubbling hydrogen into the water. You're not consuming it; you're bathing in it.

It's going transdermal. You fill the hydrogen gas generator with distilled water. It breaks the water apart, releases the oxygen into the air, and puts the hydrogen gas into the bath.

We have an image of the generator on the screen. That is a game changer.

If I only had a single biohacking device, it would be a toss-up between that and a red-light therapy bed. A good red-light bed will cost you over $100,000. The hydrogen bath will cost you about $7,000. There are also places where you can go and do this.

I'm still trying to understand, as a physician and scientist, how this is impacting me. When you say something is an antioxidant, what does that mean? What does it mean when blueberries are antioxidants?

It means they're donating electrons and reducing inflammation. If you can get hydrogen gas to go transdermal, you're affecting microvascular circulation.

A lot of people don't realize that 70% of our circulation isn't actually done by our heart. Nobody has a heart strong enough to pump blood from the center of the chest to the tips of the toes through all the capillaries in the brain, liver, lungs, pancreas, kidneys, and everywhere else. The heart circulates about 30% to 32% of the blood in our circulatory system. The rest is done by an activity called vasomotion or vasomotor activity.

Think of a snake swallowing a mouse. It pumps the blood to the entrance of these very small capillaries, and then there's a wave-like peristalsis. You've got valves in your venous system that allow blood to flow in only one direction. The mouse never goes back the other way. It's similar to how our intestinal tract works. There's no pressure behind the intestinal tract; there is a peristaltic motion.

This is the first part of our circulatory system to be compromised. If 70% of our circulation is microvascular and needs vasomotor activity in order to function, you could improve 70% of your circulation by affecting vasomotor activity. Transdermal hydrogen will do that, and oral hydrogen will do the same thing.

I want to put some numbers on this again. You said to run the experiment: have 750 mL of water, put 4 or 5 tablets in it, and see how you feel instead of using caffeine.

The next time you have a hangover, take 4 or 5 H₂ tablets, drop them into water, and drink it. You can get them at DrinkH2Tabs.com. The worst headache or hangover will be gone in 10 or 12 minutes.

Having done that, what do you do during the day? Do you continue at that level of consumption?

Yes. Just put a single tablet in 12 to 16 ounces of water. I drink Mountain Valley Spring Water, which comes in 750 mL bottles. I put a single hydrogen tablet in there and sip on it throughout the day. I'll take 4 or 5 of those throughout the day. It's a game changer.

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All right, back to our episode. Let's go back to the bath for a second. The technology is direct and simple. You described a few of the athletes you've treated, and it's been a game changer for them. Who comes in, why are you telling them to jump in the bath, how long are they in it, and what's the impact?

One example that's in the public domain is Jon Jones. When he was preparing for his fight on November 16 of last year, he was intending to retire after that fight. I sat next to him at a UFC fight in the Sphere, and he leaned over, grabbed my leg, and said, “You're a man of God, aren't you?”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “I feel like God put you in my life at this moment. I really need to talk to you.”

When I spoke to him, he said, “For the last 12 or 15 years, I wake up every morning in excruciating pain.” He's a Division I wrestler who had beaten up his body a lot. He's one of the greatest fighters, according to Dana White, to ever live, and he's an absolute gem of a human being.

A few weeks later, I flew out to his fight camp. He told me that all of his joints were sore and achy, that he was recovering slowly, and that it took him a long time after waking up before he could start training. He was training only 5 days a week instead of 6, taking 2 days off on the weekends.

I introduced hydrogen water to him.

You're talking about whole-body inflammation.

Whole-body inflammation. The majority of inflammation focuses on areas with the most compromised blood flow: ligaments, tendons, bones, cartilaginous surfaces, joints, and muscle-tendon insertion points. You don't get as sore in your muscles if you're used to training, but you get a lot of joint, tendon, and ligament soreness and chronic inflammation in those areas.

If you can get hydrogen gas to go transdermal—and you can—you reduce that inflammatory process and improve circulation. I'll also give you links to studies on grade 1 and grade 2 sprain and strain injuries that treated people with hydrogen water versus the RICE protocol: rest, ice, compression, and elevation. Transdermal hydrogen was more effective than ice, compression, and elevation.

A few weeks later, Jon texted me, “I can't believe I'm waking up without pain. I'm adding a sixth day to my training schedule.” He dominated his fight, which I take no credit for, and he's announced that he's going to continue fighting. I gave a hydrogen bath to Michael Chandler for his last fight, and I've given these baths to a lot of people. My parents get in one every day. My mother has bilateral knee replacements.

This is essentially the equivalent of a cure—bathing in hydrogen?

I'm very high on hydrogen.

For someone with a high inflammatory load, which you can measure, how often and how long should they bathe?

Twenty-five minutes once a day. My wife, Sage, has an L5-S1 fusion. Shortly before we met, a little over 10 years ago, she was in a serious car accident. It dislodged her L5-S1 disc, which degenerated, and she had to have a fusion. They went in through an anterior approach, took the disc out, put in a spacer, and covered it with bone.

Ever since then, she's had lower back pain, radiculopathy, and all the usual byproducts of an L5-S1 fusion. If she gets in the hydrogen bath for 25 minutes before bed, she sleeps through the night pain-free. If she doesn't, she often wakes up in the middle of the night and has to stretch, walk around, or move before getting back into bed.

I think these modalities can replace things like methotrexate, methylprednisolone, prednisone, anti-inflammatories, and corticosteroids. Cortisone is poison. It initially suppresses the inflammatory response, but it will eat the joint like a termite.

It solves the problem in the near term and causes many more problems in the long term. I think cortisone injections have ended more professional sports careers earlier than they should have, perhaps more than any other intervention.

I want to jump into something you're passionate about and that is fundamental: methylation. What is methylation?

Methylation, also called 1-carbon metabolism, is the process the human body uses to take all the nutrients that enter our bodies and convert them into a usable form.

There's not a single compound known to mankind—no vitamin, mineral, amino acid, fluid, protein, carbohydrate, fat, or anything else—that we use in exactly the format in which we consume it. Most of us understand that we don't eat to fuel our cells; we eat to feed our bacteria, and our bacteria eat to feed us. There's an intermediary between our food and our cells.

The bacteria in your microbiome determine how foods and medicines are digested. If you've got the wrong bacteria, they can determine how much of a medicine works for you. Companies like Viome help you understand how these bacteria are metabolizing what you eat and the drugs you take.

I'm a huge fan of Viome. Ultimately, it's having a positive impact on methylation. That's one of the mechanisms affected by the results of that test.

For example, we take in folate or folic acid. It goes through a series of enzymatic reductions and eventually becomes something called methylfolate, or 5-methylfolate, which is the active form.

I'm going to steal one of your hydrogen tablets while we're here because my battery is dead.

Is it?

Yes.

A methyl group is a carbon with 3 hydrogen atoms. To connect this to our space cadets, when people talk about Starship landing on Mars, it's being fueled by liquid oxygen and methane, which is 1 carbon and 4 hydrogens.

What's incredible is that in microbiology and chemistry, the difference in the molecular impact of a compound by simply attaching or detaching a methyl group is night and day. It's everything. Neurotransmitters are activated and deactivated through methylation. We downregulate neurotransmitters—for example, catecholamines, which are fight-or-flight neurotransmitters.

There are genetic mutations that don't allow people to metabolize or break down those neurotransmitters properly.

This process of methylation, or 1-carbon metabolism, is how the body takes something in a nonusable form and converts it into a usable form. If you ingest folic acid, folic acid is useless. It doesn't prevent neural tube defects and doesn't have other positive effects in the body. Folic acid is a man-made compound. You can't find it anywhere on the surface of the Earth; it doesn't exist naturally in nature. Folate does, but folic acid doesn't.

Folic acid and folate follow the same enzymatic pathway until they reach one of the primary genes of methylation, called the MTHFR gene.

The infamous gene.

Yes, and understanding your genome is important. Forty-four percent of your listeners have that mutation.

It's a problem.

It is a huge problem. The consequence is that you're not properly methylating in your body.

Think of it this way: We pull crude oil out of the ground, but you can't put crude oil into your gas tank because the car doesn't recognize it as a fuel source. If you refine crude oil into gasoline, the car can accept it as fuel. The human body is no different. Our cellular biology doesn't use folic acid or folate; it uses the form of folic acid or folate that it is methylated into through the process of methylation.

The MTHFR gene mutation is probably the most common gene mutation in the world. It's estimated that between 44% and 62% of the population has it. It doesn't sound like a big deal to be unable to convert folic acid into methylfolate until you realize that folic acid is one of the most prevalent nutrients in the human diet.

In the United States, all of our grains—all white flour, bread, pasta, cereals, and grains of any kind—are sprayed with folic acid. We call it fortified or enriched. What happens if you put fortified or enriched foods into the body of somebody who can't process them? They go haywire.

If you look at the history of postpartum depression, which can begin during pregnancy, most women who develop postpartum depression have the MTHFR gene mutation. They're told by their doctors to take high doses of folic acid—1,500% to 1,800% of the daily allowance—to overcome the fact that they're not methylating. That makes it worse.

If those women took methylfolate in a methylated prenatal vitamin, the incidence of postpartum depression would collapse. It's not the rise in estrogen—from the 400s during the normal menstrual cycle to the 4,000s during pregnancy—that causes the problem. That's perfectly normal. Estrogen needs to rise tenfold during pregnancy to bind water in the interstitial space, increase the laxity of the pelvic girdle, and allow other things to happen.

But then you take 1,500% to 1,800% of the daily allowance of folic acid because your OB-GYN tells you to, and the next thing you know, you're experiencing anxiety, depression, and racing thoughts.

Many people listening to this podcast have that mutation. They may also have a genetic mutation called COMT, which is another significant one for women. Women who have had hormone testing done—particularly the gold standard of women's hormone testing, the DUTCH test, which is a multihour urine test—will see this genetic mutation: catechol-O-methyltransferase.

This gene determines how rapidly or slowly you break down catecholamines. That's important because a rise in catecholamines creates anxiety.

There are so many people suffering from anxiety who hold on to it without understanding what it is. If you ask 15 practitioners what anxiety is, they'll describe the characteristics of the condition: fear of the future, a sense of impending doom, or fear without the presence of danger.

But what's causing it? Most people with anxiety can't tell you. It's not that every time they step onto a crowded elevator they have a panic attack because they're claustrophobic, or that every time they walk to the edge of a 30th-floor balcony they panic because they're afraid of heights. Their anxiety comes and goes without an obvious trigger.

You should investigate the COMT gene, because you may be slow to break down and downregulate these catecholamines, the fight-or-flight neurotransmitters. As they rise, they do 3 things. First, they create a wakeful state. Someone could be sitting in a safe room with friends outside the door and suddenly feel overwhelmed by anxiety.

They'll try to relate it to their outside environment and rationalize it. If they understood that it was a rise in catecholamines, they could begin taking methylated B vitamins—methylcobalamin, methylfolate, and sometimes S-adenosylmethionine. These over-the-counter vitamins and nutrients can allow them to methylate and downregulate the neurotransmitters, calming the system.

What excites me is that this knowledge is becoming available. William Gibson said, “The future is here; it's just not evenly distributed.” We're on the brink of a moment when all of this knowledge will be knowable by anybody—not because they happened to listen to this podcast, your work, your books, or mine, but because they turned on their AI health system.

When you're born, you have 3.2 billion letters that guide your life. That's your software for the rest of your life unless you undergo CRISPR or gene therapy. Combined with the hundreds of subdermal sensors and wearables being developed, we'll be able to know your physiological state at any moment and understand how to optimize it.

I've been having this argument with some old-school physicians and scientists who say that we won't make it to 120 and that we're not going to bend the health curve. They're as certain about it as people in the 1890s were that humans would never fly or go to the stars.

I agree with you. I think the greatest intersection for humanity is the intersection of artificial intelligence, big data, and early detection.

With respect to methylation, there are 300 billion independent metabolic transactions occurring at any given moment. AI can make sense of it all. You and I can't do that on our own.

I've also been having this debate with several people in the media who say we won't make it to 120. The equivalent for me is the people who said humans would never fly from New York to Paris.

It was the Wright brothers who said mankind would never fly from New York to Paris.

I recently did a podcast with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and we were talking about 30-year increments of human technological progress. We talked about the Kitty Hawk flight, and then Wilbur Wright said, “You'll never make it to Paris.”

The first real commercial aircraft was the Boeing 707, which was converted from the KC-135. The wingspan of the 707 was greater than the length of the first Kitty Hawk flight.

Exactly, which is crazy. We live in a world where our history doesn't necessarily project what our future will be.

We're running billions of chemical reactions per second in 40 trillion cells in the human body, and we've never been able to understand them. AI will enable us to do that. There is fundamentally a reason aging takes place. Why do some people live to 120 while others are dead at 50? There's a reason, and we're going to be able to understand it and begin to impact it.

Aging is multifactorial. Methylation is one part of it, but so are detoxification pathways, transsulfuration pathways, and the number of mycotoxins you're ingesting every day. We're doing a great job of that here in the United States.

We dropped to 66th in the world in life expectancy on December 6. We're below some sub-Saharan African nations that don't have clean water and sanitation, yet we're number 1 in health care spending.

Health care spending.

Health care spending. We lead the world in only a few things: morbid obesity, type 2 diabetes, multiple chronic diseases, American infant mortality, and maternal mortality. It's astounding how much we spend and how poor our outcomes are.

I agree that aging is multifactorial, but methylation is an essential process. When I speak to crowds, I put up a horrifically confusing chart of methylation. It looks like somebody took colored spaghetti and threw it against a wall.

I tell people to look at the chart for a minute. I say, “This is what's happening inside your cellular biology 300 billion times every day.” We turn over roughly 300 billion cells a day, and these processes are happening 300 billion times a day.

Now look at the chart and try to find a chemical, a synthetic compound, or a pharmaceutical. You won't find any of those things. What you find are vitamins, minerals, amino acids, nutrients, and building blocks.

When you start depleting certain vitamins, minerals, and amino acids—when you start removing them from that chart—the system goes haywire.

So many people suffer from what they think are the consequences of aging: brain fog, weight gain, water retention, poor response to exercise, poor sleep, poor deep sleep, and hormonal imbalances. They think these are just consequences of aging. They're not. They're consequences of missing raw material.

It's astounding what happens when you give the body the raw material it needs to do its job. In plant physiology, we understand this. If a leaf is rotting on a palm tree or another tree in your yard, a true arborist won't touch the leaf. They'll test the soil and say, “There's no nitrogen in the soil.” Then they'll add that nutrient, and the leaf will heal.

Human beings are no different. When we deprive the body of certain raw materials, people get diagnosed with mental illnesses or mood disorders because they're low in serotonin. But serotonin is methylated from tryptophan, a simple amino acid.

To methylate tryptophan into serotonin, which happens in the gut, you need the B-vitamin complex. About 90% of the serotonin in our bodies is in the gut. If you don't have it there, you can't have it here; it travels up the vagus nerve.

Deficiencies in amino acids and B vitamins prevent the methylation process from converting tryptophan into serotonin or phenylalanine and tyrosine into dopamine. Once you're deficient in these neurotransmitters, you can't assemble the moods and emotional states that require them.

You get told that you have a mood disorder or a mental illness, and now you're on a bandwagon of chemicals and synthetics designed to reduce the synaptic uptake of neurotransmitters. In reality, you have deficiencies born out of a lack of nutrients. That's why I'm so fascinated by methylation.

Methylation of our DNA is also how we control which genes are on and which genes are off. It's how we know that genes aren't necessarily our destiny; they may be our predisposition.

I love this. Let's turn to some of the fun toys in your bedroom and your incredible penthouse apartment. This is a red-light bed. There are a multitude of them, and, as you said, this typically runs around $100,000. Talk about it.

I'm a huge fan of red-light therapy. Let me also tell your listeners that they don't need to spend $100,000 on a red-light bed. You can find red-light panels, smaller red-light beds, and other ways to get red light. You can usually find a clinic in your area that lets you use these devices through a membership or individual sessions.

At the very least, you can expose your skin to sunlight. We are very photovoltaic beings. We were just sitting outside in Southern California soaking up the sun.

How often do you use the red-light bed, for how long, and what does it do for you?

Ten minutes a day, every day—7 days a week if I can. I have it in a separate room in the house. I wake up in the morning, brush my teeth, splash water on my face, and try to get outside with the first light.

We were in Los Angeles recently, and I found a ladder behind the Airbnb. I put it against the house, climbed up to the third floor, and did breathwork up there in the morning. It was cool—around the high 40s—so I took my shirt off and did breathwork on the rooftop.

Exposing your skin to sunlight is the best way to get light therapy. Red light does several things. There are a number of therapeutic wavelengths. Light can be very damaging or very therapeutic in the body.

If you look at the light spectrum, starting with X-rays, those wavelengths are very damaging. Then you have UVA and UVB, the damaging rays from the sun that cause skin cancer. After that is a very narrow spectrum: the visible light spectrum—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Then you get into infrared and near-infrared.

When red and near-infrared wavelengths pass through the body, one of the most powerful things red light does is enter your mitochondria and release a gas called nitric oxide. It forces oxygen to dock.

There is a part of the Krebs cycle inside the mitochondria where oxygen docks called cytochrome c oxidase. Think of cytochrome c oxidase as a one-armed man: it can shake hands with nitric oxide or oxygen, but it can't do both.

If you get cytochrome c oxidase to bind oxygen, you can upregulate the mitochondria and improve its production of adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. Aerobic respiration yields 36 ATP, while anaerobic respiration yields 2 ATP. ATP is what powers human beings.

You're taking me back to seventh grade and medical school. It's all about the mitochondria.

Red light releases nitric oxide and forces oxygen to dock, which acts like a battery charger for your cellular biology. It literally charges you up like a battery.

We also know that certain red-light wavelengths—mostly in the visible spectrum because they're very superficial—are excellent for collagen, elastin, and fibrin. Red light also has a positive impact on vasomotor activity and vasomotion.

There are numerous clinical studies in the public literature and on PubMed showing improvements in eyesight because red light improves microvascular circulation to the back of the eye.

When you're in a red-light bed, do you need to shield your eyes?

I leave my eyes open. These red-light beds have 4 or sometimes 5 wavelengths. I use one with 45,000 light diodes and 5 wavelengths. A typical session is 10 minutes, although you could do 20.

You're improving collagen, elastin, and fibrin in the skin; improving microvascular circulation; reducing inflammation; and charging up the mitochondria. The red-light bed and the hydrogen bath would be my 2 go-to modalities.

I use a red-light panel, a red-light cap on my head to stimulate circulation and hair growth, and a red-light oral device.

I've seen those. They look like a tongue device.

It basically is. It's both red and blue light, and it affects the pathogens in my mouth. I've become very focused on oral health because the bacteria and other pathogens in your mouth are a capillary away from your brain and not too many capillaries away from your heart.

Some of the bacteria that create calcification, or hydroxyapatite, are found in cavitations in the mouth. We also find them in calcium deposits in the heart. Most people think these hard plaques are calcium, like our bones, but they're actually calcium combined with phosphorus, forming hydroxyapatite. To create that, you need an osteoblast or a bacterium that can combine calcium and phosphorus.

I'm a huge fan of seeing a quality biological dentist, especially if you've had a root canal, getting the area cleaned out, and testing your oral microbiome to understand whether you have pathogens that are dangerous.

I'm actually waiting for a tooth right now.

You're waiting for it to be removed?

No, I'm waiting for the replacement. I had a root canal, and I went to a biological dentist named Dr. Jigar Gandhi, who's phenomenal. I cracked another tooth in the back of my mouth and called him. He told me to take a picture of it.

He looked at the picture and said, “That's your 19th tooth meridian. Do you ever get left anterior shoulder pain?”

I said no, but I actually did get left anterior shoulder pain. I thought it was biceps tendinitis. Then he asked, “Do you ever get left lower-lobe lung pain?”

I had a catch right there in my rib whenever I did high-intensity interval training. I thought it was a runner's stitch.

Then he asked, “Does your left big toe ever go numb?”

It didn't go numb, but it would tingle and itch. My wife used to tease me because I'd take my shoe off, itch my big toe, put the shoe back on, or tap it while talking to someone because it felt like it was going numb.

He sent me a chart mapping the tooth meridian. I had a root canal in that tooth. He did a cone-beam X-ray and found several cavitations, including 2 in root canals.

When he removed the tooth, there was a little balloon on the bottom of it. I asked, “What is that?”

He said, “That's a cavitation—a pus-filled sac with bacteria and parasites.”

I had no pain, symptoms, inflammation, or gum bleeding. He put it on a slide and dark-fielded it in his office. You could see my macrophages attacking the parasites and bacteria. I was horrified.

He cleaned it out, ran red light through the area, and put in platelet-rich fibrin.

Let's stop here and tell people that the health of your mouth is critically important. You're 54, and I'm 63. I wish I'd started paying attention even earlier in my life. People ignore oral health. They go to the dentist when they have to, but there's so much more you can do.

Use an electric toothbrush and floss. I have a device called Proclaim. You go in, your mouth gets scanned, and they make a mouthpiece with a jet between every tooth. It's high-energy, high-speed water-pick flossing in 30 seconds. You bite down on it like a mouthguard, and a container of water gets pumped through all of the jets, cleaning your mouth.

There's another product with a similar structure: a toothbrush with bristles all around it that you bite down on, and it brushes everything.

I remember I knew Jeff Bezos 45 years ago, before Amazon, when he was purely a space cadet. I asked if he could speak at an event—this was about 20 years ago—and he said, “Peter, I'm so short on time. I'm trying to optimize my toothbrushing time.” I understood. Technology is making these routines more efficient.

More importantly, go to a biological dentist and check out the floor and front of your mouth.

For the tooth I'm waiting on, he removed it, cleaned it out, ran red light and ozone gas through the area, and increased the perimeter of the hole until fresh red blood appeared. When they take the tooth out, it doesn't even bleed initially, which is a bad sign.

He then packed it with your own platelet-rich fibrin, stitched it shut, let the bone grow back, and put in a porcelain implant. He doesn't use metal. I just need to go back and have the tooth placed on top. It's one of the best things I've ever done, and I can't believe it had gone unnoticed.

He also uses red light—not a full red-light bed, but the smaller devices.

Let's jump into saunas. I just bought a portable infrared sauna, about the size of a chair, that I can zip up. This is a full-on sauna. Talk to me about your sauna practices.

Sauna is one of the best ways to activate your detoxification pathways. If you talk to any functional medicine practitioner who's trying to detox someone from mold, mycotoxins, pathogens, bacteria, or metals, they'll tell you that sauna and sweating—both infrared and dry sauna—need to be part of your regular routine.

I usually put a liter of fluid through myself after I get out of the sauna. I have a dry sauna.

My parents have been staying with me for several weeks. My mother has bilateral knee replacements, and my father had a serious boating accident years ago that left him with hemiparalysis on one side of his body. Both are physically deconditioned.

I was following Dr. Otto Warburg's work on multistep oxygen therapy, or EWOT—exercise with oxygen therapy. Since it's difficult for them to raise their heart rates, I put both of them in the sauna, run a nasal cannula under the door, and have them breathe high-parts-per-million oxygen for about 20 minutes.

The difference in their cognitive function immediately after getting out of the sauna is night and day. They would both tell you that they feel clear, clean, cognizant, and awake.

How many days a week do you use the sauna?

Twenty minutes minimum, 3 times a week. It's something my wife and I really like to do. It's right next to our bathroom, so we'll often end the day in there together.

Then I'll get out of the sauna and do a 20- or 30-second cold plunge—not a long cold plunge. I'll dry off, and that's become a sleep hack for me.

People could also do that with a contrast shower: a hot shower followed by a cold shower. It's especially useful if you're someone who ruminates—if your environment quiets down and your mind wakes up, replaying the day or going through your grocery list.

Sauna is excellent for detoxification, as is a steam room.

If you had to choose between a sauna and a steam room, which would you choose?

I would probably choose a sauna. Most commercial steam rooms don't filter the municipal water before bringing it into the steam room. You're vaporizing fluoride, chlorine, microplastics, pharmaceuticals, and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, which are very high in the municipal water supply in Miami.

Unless you're certain they're running the water through a 4-stage reverse-osmosis filter or some other type of micron filtration, I don't trust a lot of steam rooms. My preference is not to breathe vaporized fluoride and chlorine.

Steam can be even more effective at heating the body than a sauna. Water is 29 times more thermogenic than air.

What do you mean by that?

Its ability to take away or provide heat. You can die from hypothermia in 72-degree water, but you can't get hypothermia in 72-degree air because your body can maintain the temperature gradient.

I have both steam and sauna at home. I use reverse osmosis and a charcoal filter, and then I have another filtration step. I'm a little obsessive.

Let's talk about the cold plunge. That's one of my favorites.

There's no evidence I've seen that colder is better or longer is better. Three minutes minimum and 6 minutes maximum at 50 degrees Fahrenheit is plenty.

You get peripheral vasoconstriction, which drives blood into the core—the liver, lungs, pancreas, kidneys, and brain. You also get an interesting activation of brown fat, which is different from white fat. Brown fat is essentially our thermostat. It exchanges a calorie for a measure of heat.

When I get cold, my body uses calories and turns them into heat?

Yes. There's a cost to having your body temperature return to normal. If you're in 50-degree water and get out into 70-degree air, your body is still returning to 98.6 degrees. There's a cost to that, and the cost is increased caloric expenditure.

Brown fat turns calories into heat. One important thing is to look for small hacks that increase your caloric expenditure.

For those joining us on YouTube, Gary is wearing a vest that looks like a normal vest, but it's a 10-pound vest. I tried it on, and it felt slightly heavier and snug.

You said that, based on your muscle mass and caloric expenditure, wearing it during the day could burn close to 600 additional calories.

If I wear it for 10 to 12 hours, it's close to 600 calories. That's a Big Mac. It's significant.

I don't mean to say that you should wear a weighted vest and eat a Big Mac. I'm also a big fan of rucking. I have a vest with plates in the front and back that hangs over the shoulders, but that's a bigger commitment.

This vest zips snugly to your body. You can use it during workouts, or they make more decorative ones you can wear while walking through the airport. I'm traveling anyway, so I'm trying to stack these practices. If I'm going to walk, I might as well add weight.

The mental hack is to increase your caloric expenditure through small choices. Take the stairs instead of the escalator. If you can't find a parking spot, park 2 or 3 blocks away and think of it as free exercise.

My wife and I play that game at the airport. We try to find the stairs rather than the escalator.

What's amazing is that airports have moving walkways, but people turn them into moving standways. They get on, stand there, and ride to the end, then walk 4 feet to the next one. I love a good walk in the airport before getting on the plane.

The other benefit is the release of cold-shock proteins, which are specialized proteins released from the liver. There's a lot of research looking at cold-shock proteins and their benefits, particularly LIN28A and LIN28B.

They're implicated in improving insulin resistance and making you more sensitive to insulin. They also scour the body of free-radical oxidation, and there's evidence that they improve protein synthesis—the rate of muscle repair.

In 3 minutes, you get a dopamine spike, peripheral vasoconstriction, activation of brown fat, and a release of cold-shock proteins. Three minutes, then get out. You don't have to get into 35-degree water or stay in for 12 minutes.

I see people online going underwater with a snorkel in 37-degree water. That's a macho move, but it's not a good idea. Your brain is only this far inside the surface of your skull.

I want to talk about hyperbaric oxygen. I've seen and heard about miraculous results as well as mixed results. There seems to be a therapeutic level and a hobbyist level. Let's talk about this.

This is a hobbyist version. I have one of these soft-shell chambers. It reaches about 1.3 or 1.4 atmospheres. The hobbyist chambers generally reach about 1.3 atmospheres, which is good.

As I've gone deeper down the rabbit hole of hyperbaric oxygen therapy, I've become convinced of it. I'm actually building my podcast studio inside a hyperbaric chamber. In February, I'll have the first podcast studio inside a hyperbaric chamber.

The majority of the research on hyperbaric oxygen therapy is done at 2 atmospheres or greater. Sadly, most soft-shell chambers borrow that research and present it as evidence for soft-shell chambers. I have a soft-shell chamber, so I'm not criticizing those companies, but the research needs to be interpreted carefully.

My wife doesn't always get a good night's sleep. She'll wake up and spend an hour in the hyperbaric chamber, breathing 92% to 95% oxygen through a nasal cannula. When she gets out, she's switched on.

If you've ever done hyperbaric therapy, even at 1.3 atmospheres, you feel amazing afterward. The compressed gas at 2 atmospheres is especially significant.

I use hydrogen tablets to offset the oxidative free radicals from hyperbaric oxygen. I'll drink 750 mL of water with 4 or 5 H₂ tablets, then get into the chamber.

You feel like you've taken a limitless pill. You're so cognizant, clear, awake, and alert. It comes close to mimicking deep sleep. If you're sleep-deprived, hyperbaric oxygen is excellent for wound healing, circulation, and cognitive function.

I put both of my parents in the chamber. I'm excited about the podcast studio, although not everyone can do that. I'm not sure I have an extra hour to spend in there, and if I did, I'm not sure I'd spend it that way.

Hyperbaric oxygen would be a priority if I'd had a stroke or needed post-surgical recovery. It's also one of my favorite modalities. In Israel, I met the team that did some of the best cognitive-function work. They've studied a range of repairs, including stroke, neurodegenerative disease, and neuronal growth.

My concern is that their work is based on spending a significant amount of time in hyperbaric chambers. I keep thinking about Jeff Bezos saying he was trying to optimize his toothbrushing time. That's why I built the studio in the hyperbaric chamber.

I wouldn't say hyperbaric oxygen would make my life better unless, God forbid, I'd had a stroke or needed post-surgical recovery.

What's H cat stand for?

It's hypothermic oxygen carbonic acid transdermal therapy. It's a mouthful, but basically it's transdermal ozone.

Ozone can be infused into the bloodstream transdermally. I'm a huge fan of ozone for mold, mycotoxins, metals, and glyphosate.

During COVID, I had one of the physicians take my blood out, circulate it with ozone, and put it back in.

You take the blood out, ozonate it, and put it back in?

There are multiple ways to use ozone. You can take an ozonator, put ozone gas into a syringe, hang an IV bag below the level of the heart, let the blood drain into a sterile IV bag, add ozone gas to the blood, and infuse it back in.

You'll see the blood change from a Cabernet color to bright red as the red blood cells take up oxygen. You can also do what's called 10-pass ozone, where the blood is pulled into a glass vial, agitated with ozone, put back in, pulled out again, and put back in.

A very advanced form of ozone is called EBO2. The blood comes out of one arm and returns through the other. It passes through a filter designed to remove BPA, mold spores, mycotoxins, metals, microplastics, and glyphosate. As it passes through the filter, it's also ozonated.

EBO₂ is probably the most advanced option if you have mold, mycotoxins, or metal exposure and can't travel to Panama for an extracorporeal blood filter.

That previous machine closes around your neck and steams you like a steam room?

Yes. It first releases carbon dioxide gas, the main vasodilator in the human body. People think it's nitric oxide, but nitric oxide is actually a cytotoxic gas because it competes for oxygen.

I wouldn't take a nitric oxide supplement intentionally. There's a great book called The Ultimate Guide to Methylene Blue that goes deep into nitric oxide as an oxidative free radical and its implications in neuropathic disorders, including Alzheimer's, early-onset dementia, cognitive decline, autism, and learning disabilities.

Nitric oxide competes with cytochrome c oxidase for oxygen. Anytime we deprive the mitochondria of oxygen, that's bad. When you use red light, it releases nitric oxide, which enters the vascular wall and causes vasorelaxation in the arterial wall. You get increased circulation, but you also get the benefit of oxygen.

This also has Rife frequency in it. You put your feet on frequency plates and select different modalities—thyroid, immune system, adenoids, or whatever you want. It runs carbon dioxide to dilate the blood vessels and pores, then runs transdermal ozone directly into the bloodstream.

It shifts you from a sympathetic to a parasympathetic state like nothing else. You get out of that thing incredibly relaxed and calm.

We've got the Ballancer Pro here. Those are expensive compression garments, but they work.

This is vascular-muscular compression, mainly for lymphatic compression. Many people think that more pressure is better, but that's not the case with lymphatic circulation.

There's no pressure behind the lymphatic system. It's a static system, so it needs muscular contraction to flow. It needs motion and activity.

The Ballancer Pro starts at your feet. The pressure increases rhythmically and gently, pushing the lymphatic fluid upward in 2 phases through a tube.

Let's talk about PEMF—pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. People swear by it, and I swear by it. I have one in my bedroom.

PEMF stands for pulsed electromagnetic field. High-frequency PEMF can cause muscle contraction and is useful for muscle spasms, muscle soreness, and recovering from joint injuries.

As a daily modality, you want a low-gauss PEMF. Gauss is a measurement of magnetic-field strength, similar to the Earth's magnetic field, which has a low gauss.

You can put this directly under the sheets of your bed. It will work through an Eight Sleep mattress because the thing I like about Eight Sleep is that there's no EMF in it—just coils in the bed. I sleep markedly better when I use it.

Low-gauss PEMF mats are phenomenal for restoring cellular polarity. You can measure this. You can dark-field your blood, just as you can measure the outcome of a red-light bed.

Before getting into a red-light bed, put a nitric oxide test strip in your mouth. You can get them for about $6. It will be pale pink. After lying in the bed for 15 or 20 minutes, wait another 10 or 15 minutes and do it again. You'll see that your nitric oxide levels have increased.

PEMF restores the surface polarity of your cells. When cellular surfaces have similar charges, they repel; when they have opposite charges, they attract. Wherever cells stick together, you lose surface area for exchange with the outside environment. That impairs the cell's ability to eliminate waste, repair, detoxify, or regenerate.

A pulsed electromagnetic field restores that surface polarity. You can see the difference before and after PEMF. You can also see it before and after grounding or earthing.

People think grounding is voodoo science, but it isn't. If you can't afford a PEMF mat, take off your shoes and touch the surface of the Earth.

How much does one of these cost?

This one will run about $5,000. If you look at the coil, it goes from the top to the bottom.

I have an Eight Sleep mattress, so this would go underneath it?

It goes right under the Eight Sleep mattress. I can run pulsed electromagnetic fields while I'm lying down, and then stack that with the Eight Sleep. That's a great combination.

I'll add one of these to my list.

I'm usually wearing a continuous glucose monitor. It drove me crazy when I first wore one, but now I use it to gamify what I eat. That's basically it.

I'm not wearing it today because the battery ran out 2 days ago. I moved out of my house because of the fires, so a lot of my equipment is there. I'm wearing it simply to see how low I can keep my blood glucose from spiking throughout the day.

It's fun to see what happens when you eat high-glycemic carbohydrates. My game is to say, “If I eat that, I'm going to spike, and I'm not going to be happy about it.” It creates a useful hack.

You can see exactly what happens when you eat high-glycemic carbohydrates.

It's interesting. If I say, “I'm going to eat that, and it's going to spike my glucose,” it creates a hack.

Let's talk about the Oura Ring, which I'm wearing. An Oura Ring won't help you get to sleep better, but at night, when I'm going to bed, I know that if I drink alcohol, my Oura score will plummet. If I go to sleep late, it plummets.

I got this ring last night in preparation for you, and I had one of my highest scores: 95.

Nice.

What time did you go to bed?

I went to bed at 8:45 p.m.

And I tell you, that is everything. It is everything. Everything that we discussed matters little compared with sleep. When I go to sleep impacts everything. I used to be a night owl, where I’d be up until midnight, 1, or 2 o’clock, and my wife and my friends were like, “You don’t go out and party with us.” Well, it’s true, but I get up at 5 and I write. Last night, I got an hour and a half of REM and an hour and 15 minutes of deep sleep.

Do you get up and write or ride? You said—

I write.

Oh, you’re right.

Yeah. My first 2 hours are mine.

But the Oura doesn’t give you a good night’s sleep. It gamifies the fact that if I eat too late, drink too much water and have to get up to urinate, go to sleep too late, or drink at all, I’m going to have a terrible score in the morning. You know that if you eat too close to bedtime or drink at all, any of those things affect your score.

So I get an A sleep score on my Eight Sleep mattress as well. My Eight Sleep always gives me 100s.

My Oura ring is a harder grader.

Yeah, same with Whoop. They’re usually within a similar range. I wear a Whoop—I’m actually charging it right now. I think Oura and Whoop both do the same thing: You can disconnect the Bluetooth at night, and then it will upload in the morning, which I like. The Eight Sleep is always slightly better than my Whoop, but usually not demonstrably so. It’s like 96, 97, 96, 98. It feels like it grades on a higher curve.

Okay.

But I was one of the earliest investors in Oura when it first came out. The Oura ring used to be this giant, scarab-sized thing on your finger.

Beautiful.

That’s it right there. Yeah, I mean, this is the Gen 3 that’s out now. When you think about the amount of integrated electronics and circuitry in there, and the battery life—it’s got 4 or 5 days of battery life, a multitude of sensors and lasers, and Bluetooth—it is amazing. It’s the beginning of what we’re going to see in the wearables revolution.

When this integrates with labs, genetic testing, body scans, and all of these different modalities, and AI is able to pull all of that into one place, that’s going to be powerful. The thing I’m really a fan of wearables for is that Oura and Whoop can do studies that I think are more important than individual randomized clinical trials. When you take 6 or 8 people and send them to the University of Miami to do a sleep study, they walk into a sterile room that’s 2 clicks shy of a jail cell, you put monitors all over their bodies, and you tell them to go to sleep.

Versus getting 1,000, 5,000, or 10,000 people to opt into a study with Whoop or Oura, studying them in their own environment, sleeping in their own bed, with their own family, and in their own habitual pattern—I think you get better data.

You do. It’s amazing. Eventually, there’ll be implantables. If you feel this right over here, there’s a—

Wow, a little glass capsule in there. Oh, you’re next level. What is that, dude? What is going on there?

That’s my business card.

Is it really?

Yeah, I’ve been chipped.

First? Really?

I was onstage in Amsterdam at a Singularity University event. The guy was there showing the future of implantables. This was 12 years ago, really early on.

Really? That’s how long it’s been?

Yeah, it’s been in there that long. It’s a nonbioactive glass capsule, and inside is a near-field communication device, an NFC device. It’s like when you chip a dog, and you can read it. This had my business card on it, but eventually it will be measuring everything—not on the surface, but subdermally.

That’s so fascinating. Tonal—I love the device for its ease of use, and it’s all about consistency.

Oh, to measure your—

Yeah, and again, it’s gamified. I use an InBody. I love these devices. Last year, I focused on adding 10 pounds of muscle mass, and it was consistency in the gym—5 days, if I could, 6 days—creatine, and 150 grams of protein because I weigh 150 pounds. It was just measure, measure, measure, measure to play that game.

Yeah, but you have to want to play the game.

But you also have to enjoy it, and you have to have trackable things to track, like this.

And then I love my Manta sleep mask. There are 3 versions of it. This is the most advanced version, with speakers in it. I actually don’t use this one; it’s a little heavier, but I can’t sleep without it.

I also use a mandibular advancement device. It’s an upper and lower device that moves the jaw forward—the mandible—which opens up the airway and keeps me from grinding my teeth. The Oura ring, the Manta, and the Eight Sleep are my sleep kit. I’m just throwing as many hacks as possible at it.

I travel with this stuff. I’ve got my slippers—I’m at home—and that’s it. We talked about the Eight Sleep cooling mattress, and for me, it’s really about maintaining that body temperature. I’m fascinated by how much of an impact slight changes in temperature variation have on keeping you in deep sleep, because I notice I’ll sleep the same length of time, but my REM and deep-sleep scores won’t be as high.

When I look back at what the Eight Sleep is doing—changing its temperature to hold you in deep sleep and to hold you in REM sleep—I mean, honestly, how it even knows that is wild to me. My Whoop will validate that as well.

There are 2 important phases of sleep. Deep sleep typically occurs in the first half of your night’s sleep cycle, and that’s where your glymphatic system is clearing toxic proteins from your brain. If you have to choose, deep sleep is, I think, more critically important for our long-term health.

REM is where you’re consolidating memories, and it will typically occur in the later stage of the sleep cycle. If you’re getting good deep sleep but wake up 4 hours after you start, you might get an hour of deep sleep. I try to get at least an hour of deep sleep and at least an hour of REM sleep; that’s my goal. It’s hard to control, but the only way I control it is no alcohol, no food for a couple of hours before bed, and getting to sleep early. When I do that, I’m typically getting through that great cycle. If I wake up after a shortened night of sleep, the deep sleep is there, but the REM has been eliminated.

Yeah.

I’d like to wrap with a conversation about a technology that we’re both passionate about, which came out of DARPA, called ExThera.

Yes, and their filter.

I’m going to have ExThera onstage with me at the Abundance Summit this year for the first time. Every year at the Abundance Summit, which I hold in March, I have a day on AI, a day on exponential technologies, a day on moonshots, and a day on longevity. This is the first year that I’m really shifting from a focus on diagnostics to a focus on advanced therapeutics.

The technology to enable you to extend your life and to truly cure and prevent diseases is finally coming online right now.

I’m a huge believer in the ExThera filter. I did a podcast with Dr. Mink Chawla, the chief medical officer at ExThera. Dr. Chawla is a nephrologist and an ICU sepsis specialist. One of the challenges in the ICU is that people get sepsis. It’s pretty common: bacteria in your blood. It’s very dangerous. Sometimes it’s not painful because you’re not conscious, but it’s very dangerous nonetheless, and part of what happens is that it can shut your kidneys down.

As a nephrologist, he’s been studying how the blood is filtered throughout his entire career. He’s also published well in excess of 100 peer-reviewed studies. He’s a sweetheart of a guy—literally one of my favorite humans. I’ve been talking to him about spike-protein detox.

This filtration system that he’s co-developed has not just filters. Most filters filter based on size. A filter will be a step-down filter, with progressively decreasing pore sizes that things can get through.

Yeah, exactly.

You’re filtering things out by size. But when you’re filtering blood by size—if you want to get down to the micron size of a virus—you’re going to take platelets, all kinds of growth factors, and all kinds of useful things out of the bloodstream.

What you’d prefer to do is create a binding affinity. If you could selectively create an affinity that attracted things like viruses, mycotoxins, circulating tumor cells—which is fascinating to me—bisphenols, and microplastics, you could pull those things out.

What these heparin-binding sites do, aside from increasing the surface area inside the filter, is they mimic the wall of the artery—the glycocalyx.

Yes.

A lot of pathogens have a natural affinity for the glycocalyx because that’s how they leave the blood and enter the tissue. When Dr. Chawla was speaking at my Longevity Platinum trip, he said, “You typically have these things circulating through your blood, and if they’re trying to attack you, they need to attach to the surface of the blood vessel and then enter through it.”

Our blood vessels are coated with this glycocalyx, a large protein structure. He built this filter called the Seraph filter. The number I remember is that it has a tennis-court-sized surface area of this glycoprotein that your blood flows through.

If your blood has any kind of viruses—and we are constantly building up these viral loads—I’m a big fan of this emerging viewpoint that aging is a process of immune exhaustion. The immune system is just fighting on too many fronts. Eventually, we’re micro-poisoning ourselves to death. We’re bathing our cellular biology in this toxic soup, even those of us who are trying our best not to.

If you could filter these pathogenic compounds, including a lot of the inflammatory compounds, out of the bloodstream, all of a sudden you give your immune system a leg up. Mold, mycotoxins, and viruses—they have some really interesting data on long COVID. Twenty-seven million people report suffering from long COVID, and they can filter long COVID out of your blood in 2 or 3 filters. It’s incredible. That gives somebody their life back.

It does. The way I think about it is the following: We are living in a world embedded with viruses. We might get CMV, Epstein-Barr virus, shingles—all of these viruses. They don’t go away; they’re embedded in your cells and your DNA, and they flare up. They’re literally wound into your DNA.

It turns out that your innate immune system—your natural killer cells—has 2 primary functions. One is looking for cells infected by viruses and killing those cells. The other is looking for cancer cells.

If you’re bombarding your body with these embedded viruses, and you get a cold and then get COVID on top of that, you exhaust your immune system to the point where it can’t battle on all these fronts. When you put one of these filters in and literally take the blood out of your body, filter it over this tennis-court-sized area of glycocalyx, and return it to your blood, all of those pathogen and tumor cells get pulled out.

Then your immune system is like, “Ah, it’s a field we can go sweep up. We’re going to go get all the guys that are left.”

I think it would be a great treatment to do before biologics. If you were doing stem cells, exosomes, a natural killer cell treatment, or one of the other advanced biological treatments, it would be useful to actually have a clean slate.

One of the things that we do for athletes and other folks who are leaving the country to undergo stem-cell treatments is take 10 weeks to get their blood as clean as we can. You don’t want to hit your body with stem-cell treatments if you have any kind of cancer in your body or anything that the stem cells could activate.

You also don’t want to do it if you have hyperinsulinemia, a lot of pro-inflammatory cytokines, very high C-reactive protein, or high homocysteine. Stem cells have an affinity for inflammation, and you want the inflammation to be in the areas where you need the stem cells to go to work, not just dispersing once they get into the bloodstream.

Tell everybody where they can find you.

My first and last name, just at Gary Brecka on Instagram, or at The Ultimate Human. My podcast is The Ultimate Human. I have a community, I write a free newsletter every week, I write challenges and guides, and I host free challenges about every other month—cold plunge challenges, breathwork challenges, whole-food challenges, gut challenges, all kinds of things. People go through those challenges together as a community. I have a paid community that's $97 a month. I do 4 private podcasts a month with that community, a lot of one-on-one Q&As, and bring lots of special guests on there. I've had Dana White, Jelly Roll, and Stephen A. Smith on our challenges. I have a free challenge coming up in February, my morning-routine challenge, where we're going to go through the science of morning routines and circadian rhythm. It's a really cool, fun, active, engaged community. If you want to make a change in your life, doing this with a community is the number one way to do it.

That's what we're doing at The Ultimate Human—building a community. We call them the Ultimate Human VIPs. You can go to TheUltimateHuman.com and read what it would be like to become an Ultimate Human VIP. I'm back in Miami at the end of February. The FI Summit is happening down there, and I'm coming through to play with your toys.

Let's do it, man. We'll do a podcast in the hyperbaric chamber.

I love that. All right, awesome. Thank you, everybody. Live healthy.