How to “Grow a New Brain” for Lifelong Health with Alberto Villoldo

Mark Hyman, MD

Full Transcript

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Dr. Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of The Doctor Hyman Show.

Alberto Villoldo
In the Amazon, the rate of dementia is one out of a hundred people. In America, it's one out of five people.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow.

Alberto Villoldo
And primarily women. You know, women have a stronger incidence of Alzheimer's. So what did they know about the brain that we didn't in the laboratory? How did they protect it? And I we found it.

We found the secret.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Now before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out function health for real time lab insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, well, check out my membership community, doctor Hyman Plus. And if you're looking for curated, trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website, doctorhyman.com, for my website store and a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products.

So, Alberto, it's so great to have you back on The Doctor's Pharmacy.

Alberto Villoldo
Good to be with you, Mark.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And, so for those people listening, we've been friends for twenty five years. We've been to the Amazon together. We've taught workshops around the world together. We're now together at your house in Santa Fe here in Mexico. And, you know, I'm recovering from back surgery, but we're not gonna talk about my bad back today.

We're gonna talk about the brain.

Alberto Villoldo
Let's talk about the brain. That's kinda close to your back. It's a little bit higher, but you know It's

Dr. Mark Hyman
at the bottom end of my brain.

Alberto Villoldo
That's And

Dr. Mark Hyman
and you've written this new book, which has a very provocative title, which is called Growing a New Brain.

Alberto Villoldo
That's right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So why do we need a new brain? What's wrong with our brain?

Alberto Villoldo
Well, I'll tell you. What's important here is to understand that we grow a new brain already anyway every every 20, an entirely new brain. You know, at different rates of speed, we grow a new body every seven years, you know, skin cells every seven days. The lining of your gut is every three days. But we thought the brain didn't repair itself.

Remember in college, we learned that you only had so many neurons and every shot Mess

Dr. Mark Hyman
them up with drugs. That's it.

Alberto Villoldo
Every shot of tequila was 20,000 brain cells.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Alberto Villoldo
Today, we know not only that we have stem cells, but that every neuron through a process known as protein synthesis regenerates itself.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's really remarkable. So what you're basically saying is that that the science of the brain is sort of in a new era. Yeah. What we used to think about the brain, we now are completely reevaluating and and realizing that we have the capacity to impact our brain in ways that we never thought possible.

Alberto Villoldo
Precisely.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And I I wrote a book about this fifteen year plus years ago called The Ultra Mind Solution, fixing your brain by fixing your body first. Precisely. And you previously wrote a book called Growing a New Body, which is based on a lot of the work we did together in two years.

Alberto Villoldo
We did. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But this Grow Your New Brain book is very intriguing to me because it kind of challenges our notions about about a lot of the work that I think you do, which is shamanic healing, energy medicine It's shamanic energy medicine. And dealing with a lot of the things that are we think of as psychological.

Alberto Villoldo
In fact, I'm gonna put on my my shamans

Dr. Mark Hyman
Alright.

Alberto Villoldo
Show.

Dr. Mark Hyman
There you go. Shamans show.

Alberto Villoldo
You know, I started out in a brain laboratory at San Francisco State, and then I went to the Amazon. But I noticed that Gabor is using his

Dr. Mark Hyman
I like that. I like that. I like that.

Alberto Villoldo
And today, I think we have to become neuro shamans. You know, rely not on because we study the brain and we're looking at the hardware. But what about the mind? None of this brain scientist have anything to say about the mind.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, that's it. I mean, the joke was that the neurologist pay no attention to the mind and psychiatrists pay no attention to the brain. But the truth is we have to do both. And and so when you you started in this work, you were really coming at it from the the perspective of psychological healing.

Alberto Villoldo
I was coming

Dr. Mark Hyman
spiritual healing.

Alberto Villoldo
Free science.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Energetic healing. Yep. And you realize you you maybe came up against a wall and couldn't fully help people resolve a lot of their psychological, emotional, spiritual issues unless you also help them heal their brain, hence, growing a new brain.

Alberto Villoldo
Repair the brain. You got it. Our brains are broken today, and we know the list of the things that are breaking the brain. But we really don't know yet how to repair it, how to upgrade it. How do you upgrade the brain to create psychosomatic health?

That's what we were investigating at San Francisco State. And when I got to the Amazon, I shut my laptop.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wait. Wait. I just wanna stop there. You said psychosomatic health. Now we've all heard of psychosomatic disease.

It's all in your head. Yeah. You're talking about the opposite.

Alberto Villoldo
Right. How do you do that? We know how to create psychosomatic disease. Basically, it's the stress hormones. You know, adrenaline, cortisol, the the amygdala running the show, you being angry all the time.

You're gonna get sick. We know that. But how do you create psychosomatic health and come to the optimized brain function? Come to the state that the ancients used to call gnosis Yeah. Which is direct knowing, which is we think it's knowing all that happens when you operate from the lower brain where you think you're a know all.

Take a 15 year old kid, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Why don't you leave now, home now, honey, while you know everything? But we're talking about upgrading the brain so you know the all, and you come into the state of gnosis where you understand how nature works, where you understand how you can create health.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And it was so much easier back then, right, with the indigenous people and the Incas five hundred years ago, and the descendants of those Incas are the people you studied with. And they didn't have environmental toxins. They didn't have social media. They didn't have, you

Alberto Villoldo
know, all

Dr. Mark Hyman
shitty ultra processed food. So what are the kind of insults that we've now had to deal with that have caused our brain to become so dysregulated that we're seeing this, you know, rampant crisis of mental illness, that we're seeing increasing violence. We just, you know, recently saw a shooter try to take out president Trump. I mean, that's just terrifying to me. Right?

Alberto Villoldo
Yeah. Anxiety, the violence, the projection of the shadow. The enemy is the other, and we don't see it in ourselves. So we know these psychological mechanisms. But at a cert when I shut my laboratory down, I was in the biology department, not in psychology, but in the biology department.

And we had a small brain lab, and we were in the section where you keep the brains, the formaldehyde. I was surrounded by 200 brains. Yeah. Pickled brains.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Smells so bad. I actually Man. Recently tested my biological toxins and embedded in my cells is still the formaldehyde from when I was in med school, the same thing cadavers.

Alberto Villoldo
Two years two years in that lab surrounded by my brains, and I couldn't get a second opinion from any one of them. It's That's it was a terrible thing. Then I shut it down, and I went to the Amazon to see how people protected the brain. Remember, Native American peoples had no writing. They had no record keeping.

So how do you protect the wisdom, the knowledge of a tribe, of a society, of pyramid builders, of architecture? Mhmm. Because it's all stored in the brain, the mind of the elders. How do you protect the brain of the elders when you don't have writing? What happens if you forget how to make fire?

That could be a big problem. Yeah. Definitely. So that's what I began to study, how and I was funded at that time by big pharma. I was a medical anthropologist, and they wanted to know the big the next big cure.

Or all

Dr. Mark Hyman
the drugs in the Amazon that they can reap and harvest.

Alberto Villoldo
Precisely. And because in the Amazon, the rate of dementia is one out of a hundred people. In America, it's one out of five people.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow.

Alberto Villoldo
And primarily women. You know, women have a stronger incidence of Alzheimer's. So what did they know about the brain that we didn't in the laboratory? How did they protect it? And I we found it.

We found the secret.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Really? Yeah. Okay. Lay it on us. Totally.

Doctor Waldo, what is doctor Waldo?

Alberto Villoldo
I'll tell you what it is. I'll tell you it's about restarting systems that shut down at about the age of 35, which are the detoxification systems, which are the n r f two activators. That's what we know

Dr. Mark Hyman
them to be. What's that? It's a big word. N r f two. I bet

Alberto Villoldo
I

Dr. Mark Hyman
bet most people listening know an n r f two activator

Alberto Villoldo
is. I can't I can't pronounce it. But n r f two

Dr. Mark Hyman
c factor

Alberto Villoldo
kappa kappa beta. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Alberto Villoldo
It's a it's a protein that sits on the cell membrane. They're like the Navy Seals. And when they're needed because some outside insult, they go in from the cell membrane into the nucleus, and they begin to switch on the genes to create health and silence the genes to create disease. Now, this was only discovered about twenty years ago. And the, Johns Hopkins, Johns Hopkins researcher, they found in the laboratory is that these systems, which are the master detoxifying systems, begin to shut down at the age of 35.

But today, we know how to turn them on again. We know that we have to get to password protected regions in our DNA to switch on these systems because biology invest heavily on the young.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So what's the password?

Alberto Villoldo
The password are certain plants that are d n r f two activators. And we know what's many of them are, and the Amazon is full of them. What we found in the Amazon was that actually, we found this with our friend David Perlmutter, that the sacred plants, not the teacher plants, those were the psychedelics, which we can get to a little bit later, but the sacred plants were the ones that switched on your detoxification and regeneration systems. And today, we know what they are. You know, five day old broccoli sprouts.

Broccoli is a huge n r f two activator. Coffee is an amazing n r f two activator. But there's the hormetic curve, the hormetic effect. If you do it for more than five days in a row, you begin to shut down the very systems you're beginning to turn on again. So you gotta cycle them.

So this

Dr. Mark Hyman
is a really important point you're making because, you know, all these plant compounds that we think of as medicine can be medicine for us, but they're actually the the defenses for the plants. So they're they're poisons. And Precisely. Makes the poison. And what you're saying is these are I I think this is phytohormesis is the actual term.

I've I've written about it in my book on longevity because it's in such an interesting concept that these stress molecules in plants and the more stressed a plant is, the more it makes up these defense molecules

Alberto Villoldo
Precisely.

Dr. Mark Hyman
The more it activates our body's own embedded longevity repair pathways.

Alberto Villoldo
And you gotta have the the ones that are bioavailable. Like, the most bioavailable one that we know is sulforaphane, which comes from broccoli sprouts, five day old broccoli sprouts. You gotta chew them well. Imagine you're a rabbit trying to eat a broccoli, and then there are these toxins being produced and which is the defense mechanism, that all plants have. That for us becomes medicine at the right dose.

Mhmm. And that will switch on these very same systems because the body thinks that suddenly you're consuming a poison, and it'll mount a huge antioxidant defense. It'll start producing glutathione, which shuts down normally at about the age of 35. It'll begin producing superoxide dismutase, a massive production of these. But if you keep eating those broccoli sprouts every day, it'll shut them down.

Say, hey. This is not poisonous.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. Because your cells up regulate and down regulate in response to the environmental use. That's why you get alcohol tolerance or opioid tolerance. You need more and more to have the same benefit. Right?

Alberto Villoldo
Precisely. And this is what the Amazon indigenous people discovered without knowing what an RF two stands for. They just know that these were the sacred plants that promoted longevity.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But they weren't any broccoli sprouts in in in the Amazon.

Alberto Villoldo
No. They have a bunch of other. Una de Gato, cat's claw. There's 50 others that are extraordinary, but we can't get them in the West because we don't know the quality that we're getting, and we don't know how accurate the dosing really is. It's all in the dosing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
There's other ones like curcumin,

Alberto Villoldo
green tea. Amazing one. But curcumin is 5% bioavailable, whereas sulforaphane from five day old broccoli sprouts, you grow at home. You gotta turn your kitchen into your laboratory.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's all gonna be hippies and brush sprouts in our kitchen now?

Alberto Villoldo
Totally. Please

Dr. Mark Hyman
do that in college.

Alberto Villoldo
Five day old broccoli homegrown broccoli sprouts are 85% bioavailable. So do your curcumin, do your golden milk, but be sure that you pay attention to it. And it's in my book, my most recent book, which is the Grow New Body Cookbook. Yeah. All of the science is there.

But now if we're growing a new brain, we need the n r f two activators and the things that will promote neuroplasticity and neurogenesis.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And there's other things you talk about besides these plant compounds. And you talk about the other major factor that needs to get turned on to repair the brain called BDNF in the brain. Precisely. BDNF.

What is BDNF?

Alberto Villoldo
BDNF stands for brain.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Not BDSM. It's BDNF.

Alberto Villoldo
BDNF. BD. Brain derived coming from the brain neurotrophic factors. Factors that regenerate the brain. Now this switches on the production of stem cells.

So that one of the best BDNF, inducers is mother's milk. Wow. But it's hard to get at the health food stores, you know, you can't get it. But because mother's milk is 50% DHA, omega three fatty acid. DHA omega threes are promoters turn on the production of BDNF.

So does exercise, meditation, but the classic, the best one is is DHA, is omega three. And in fact, to you know, I'm an anthropologist, but it the Native American peoples in North America used DHA as their money, as their currency.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Well, it was. Right?

Alberto Villoldo
It was a fish called what was that fish called? The candle fish. It was so rich in oil that you could put a wick in a dried fish and light the wick, light your fish, and it'll be your candle.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Candlesticks. Pacific Northwest. Yeah. The fish

Alberto Villoldo
Pacific Northwest. And they would extract the oil. Even today, they still do it. % rich in DHA, and that's what they used to trade with. And also it turned on the higher brain production of stem cells, and it repaired the hippocampus, which is why there's so much trauma today.

Today, trauma has become as common as air.

Dr. Mark Hyman
What's the what's the hippocampus, and how does trauma impact that?

Alberto Villoldo
The hippocampus is the learning center in the brain, and it's rich in cortisol receptors. I mean, it's full of cortisol receptors. And when you have trauma, when you switch on the fight or flight system, and it's not fight or flight that does it. Fight or flight, you get to fight, you get to run. It's when you can't fight and you can't run.

If you're six years old and an uncle is fondly you, you can't fight. You can't ride. You freeze. And you get into freeze. And when you get into freeze, your brain is to wash in cortisol and adrenaline.

Now if your mother wasn't sure that she could rely on her partner to take care of her and her baby, you were born with your fight or flight turn on, the HPA axis, high hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. Your brain was because cortisol and adrenaline go right through the placental barrier.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Alberto Villoldo
So the Hopi have a saying that before you're born, that you have a twin, an invisible twin. All of us do. And before we're born, the twin looks out of the uterus to see if the world is safe. And if the world is safe safe, it says, come. Come on.

Come on. Let's go out into this world. It's loving. It's safe. It's not safe.

Part of you is not born. And you're born with soul loss, what they call in the in native societies, they call soul loss. So you have to do a soul recovery. But when you're born incomplete like that, we know the brain chemistry now. Yeah.

So this is the you're born with your fight or flight switched on that damages your hippocampus. You cannot have a new experience. You cannot learn. You can't store memories. That's what the hippocampus says.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Seeing you in your book, you talk about sort of how we we need to heal our body to heal our spirit and our mind. And can you talk more about that? Because it's really kinda goes to what you're talking about. You know, give you you know, the Carolyn Maich used to say your biography becomes your biology.

Alberto Villoldo
Yep.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and and what you're essentially saying is that your your biography, your story Mhmm. Gets transmuted into biological signals along with all the various other things that we're exposed to in our modern world, our processed food, the environmental toxins, chronic stress, digital overload, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But but but in order to actually really heal and to become whole human beings, we we both have to heal the brain and the mind and the soul.

Alberto Villoldo
And the body. You know, and you know, in the West, we practice medicine by specialty, you know, geography. The neurologist don't talk to the GI docs, and most of what's happening in your brain is coming from your gut. Yeah. So there's no people that do the entire system.

And this is what Well, I

Dr. Mark Hyman
do.

Alberto Villoldo
Yeah. Yeah. You you and two or three others that I know. But this is what the shamans, the indigenous people do. They look at the entire system and not only the entire body and mind, but how you're relating to the ecosystem, to nature, and to the family system, and to your destiny.

Like, an important part of the healing is finding out what is it that you came to do here in this world. And when you go on that quest, even if you don't find out what it is you came to do, but you're looking, searching for it, suddenly, the universe pass you back. Mother nature begins to support you in your healing. And this is what I learned in the Amazon because, you know, I was in the biology department and in biology you believe that mother nature, that Gaia, the planet loves her species, but she doesn't care about the individual members of the species. You know?

She cares about the species. You and I are expendable. But the shamans believe that the minute you come into service of the mother, that you become an earth keeper, that you become conscious of the impact of your actions in the earth, that she takes a personal interest in you. Mhmm. And then magic begins to happen.

We they call it magic. We call it health. So that so that one of the things that I stopped doing, I always used to bless my food. You know? Yeah.

I stopped blessing my food. Now I asked my food to bless me. Mhmm. This is coming from the mother. So your return to the mother is so important because what happens at that point is that you heal shame.

Mhmm. And shame is the most bedeviling, befuddling, toxic emotion that we can have. Shame means I am not worthy. I'm not a good person. Yeah.

And that's the very first experience that we have, emotion in the West, because our mythology see, when I was in the Amazon, I would ask people, what's your mythology of origin, your first story ever told? And our first story ever told is we got banished from the garden.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You have to fight that apple and we're screwed for life.

Alberto Villoldo
Because we were ashamed. God comes and says, where are you guys? And why are you hiding? And the, and Anna says, because we are ashamed. So we heal the shame.

The shame is the deadliest, toxic emotion that we can have. And the way we heal it is by returning to the mother and finding out that she loves us.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and part of that you're you're talking about in in the book, Growing a New Brain, is really about how to use food and lifestyle strategies and supplements and

Alberto Villoldo
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Other tools to help actually sort of repair a lot of that damage that Look.

Alberto Villoldo
You can't grow a new brain on French fries. No. You can't. You gotta have the right French fries

Dr. Mark Hyman
for dinner, Alberta.

Alberto Villoldo
The right the right neuro nutrients to be able to do that. And an essential one of these is is tryptophan. So, you know, tryptophan is a precursor for serotonin.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Alberto Villoldo
And serotonin is ubiquitous. It's everywhere in nature. So trees have it, butterflies, plants have serotonin. And for us, it's a neurotransmitter. For a plant, it tells it when to go flower.

But I suspect it does that for us too. When do we blossom? I mean,

Dr. Mark Hyman
you've seen a plant that looks kinda depressed, you know, and it's kinda saggy and

Alberto Villoldo
Yeah. Give it

Dr. Mark Hyman
a little looking.

Alberto Villoldo
Put a little bit of tryptophan. And today, we can order it from Amazon. You know? Yeah. Because that was

Dr. Mark Hyman
in that plant food that you put in your for your cat's

Alberto Villoldo
You don't have to go to the Amazon. You can order it from Amazon. And it's, and tryptophan or five HTP is a precursor for serotonin, and serotonin is what repairs the hippocampus.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Alberto Villoldo
This is absolutely the key, and we're serotonin deprived right now. Our foods are are devoid of serotonin.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Alberto Villoldo
And a hundred years ago, a pea, a sweet pea, had twice the amount of tryptophan that it does today because we're breeding food for sweetness.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And starch, not protein.

Alberto Villoldo
Precisely.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Tryptophan's an amino acid.

Alberto Villoldo
It's an amino acid. We have a hunter gatherer genome evolved two million years ago. Our DNA hasn't changed that much. In two million years, when we were hunter gatherers, primarily, we were gatherers, scavenger gatherers. We would find roadkill and bring some meat home, but most of the time, we were we were gatherers.

And and the animal protein was very scarce.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Alberto Villoldo
So the transport system to get tryptophan into the brain gives priority to the three amino acids that are the branch chain amino acids, valine, isovaline, and leucine. Prioritizes them because we had such little for million thousands of years, so little animal product. Yeah. And then tryptophan has to take a second place because you need these for protein synthesis. But today, we're serotonin deprived.

And that's why so many people are in the SSRIs, which are flooding the brain with serotonin to help you stabilize your mood and your hippocampus repair. Yeah. And the hippocampus is what we're learning happens.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So I assume when you're talking about this because, you know, for years, I I I've been diagnostic testing, which allows me to look at the effects of inflammation on neurotransmitters. And so we measure something in the urine that is called quinolinic acid, which is a byproduct of of, tryptophan five HT metabolism when it's there's inflammation that diverts it away from producing serotonin to produce this very toxic compound called quinoline like acid, which is found very high in people who are depressed or have autism or dementia. And it's it's it's I can tell you if someone has brain inflammation. The question is why. And so a lot of the disruption in serotonin regulation, I think, is because of our inflammatory diet Precisely.

Gut microbiome. And you you do talk a lot about the gut brain.

Alberto Villoldo
We do talk. We Can

Dr. Mark Hyman
you tell us about the this framework of how the brain repair has to also start in the gut.

Alberto Villoldo
You know, the thing I really don't like about being interviewed by value, Mark, is you've written about

Dr. Mark Hyman
it half of this stuff

Alberto Villoldo
already, you know. But luckily, I don't read all your books, so I come up with my own. But then

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, we're coming at the same thing from two different lenses.

Alberto Villoldo
Totally. The

Dr. Mark Hyman
shamanic lens and the medical lens.

Alberto Villoldo
Precisely. But we

Dr. Mark Hyman
end up in exactly the same spot.

Alberto Villoldo
Precisely. And the thing is that today, we have to become our own chief scientist because we can't rely on the science. You know, the the editor in chief of the British Medical Journal wrote that 50 of the articles that they publish are bogus. They're bad science, but we just don't know which 50%. So we have to be very careful researchers Yeah.

Find out who we trust. And especially when it comes to probiotics and comes to the gut because the probiotics we buy at the store are only 1% of the whole gut probiotic system, which are the anaerobic ones, the oxygen breathers. 90% or 95% of our gut is the non oxygen breathers. The anaerobic ones that no. But you can't buy them.

You can only feed them and hope that they

Dr. Mark Hyman
Grow.

Alberto Villoldo
That they grow and they get strong because that's where you produce serotonin. Your gut transforms tryptophan into serotonin, and then it gets taken by the vagus nerve and by the bloodstream across the blood brain barrier and into the brain. There's this little teeny bit of serotonin produced in the brain by the raphe nucleus. Very one out of a million neurons are serotonin producers. Most of it comes from your gut.

If your gut's broken, you're not producing serotonin, which then the pineal gland, once it gets to your brain, if it gets to your brain, turns into melatonin so you can sleep. Yeah. And if your fight or flight system is attenuated, it's toned down, if you're not in constant alert waiting for danger or who's the shooter that's gonna come by, you know, what kids are most terrified of today is going to high school because there's such you read about such danger. If your fight or flight system is toned down, then the pineal gland can not only produce melatonin, but it'll begin to methylate serotonin, which is a tryptamine, and you end up with di two dimethyltryptamine, which is ayahuasca. Woah.

Which is the brain produces. And all of the psychedelics, by the way, work on serotonin receptors in the brain.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So LSD, psychedelic MDMA.

Alberto Villoldo
Psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, which is the most powerful psychedelic known to humans. It's produced by the brain. That's why we have receptor sites for it, but you have to get the serotonin in there. And then you wake up the higher brain, and this is what allows you to create psychosomatic health. Mhmm.

Because you have the experience of oneness, of communion, of belonging. You understand how life works and how you're part of it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow. And so so part of the healing of the brain, you're saying, is healing the gut. How do how do you how do you recommend people do that in your book?

Alberto Villoldo
Well, you know, there's a dozen books written about these cult including a couple by you.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah.

Alberto Villoldo
How do you repair the

Dr. Mark Hyman
curious of what you've learned, you know, a different set of lenses looking at Yep. How you start thinking about the gut. You know, for example, visiting you in in Chile, you have this big bunch of raspberries that's kind of a culture medium for probiotic called Saccharomyces boulardii that's really powerful in regulating

Alberto Villoldo
This is the key for us. The work that we do is a product called Saccharomyces boulardii, which is actually a yeast. So it's not really a probiotic, but it's a yeast that acts like the United Nations peacekeeper inside the gut. And it begins to regulate the colony, and it gets rid of candida Yeah. Which has taken over the gut of most people in America today.

Candida is a yeast that proliferates the minute you take antibiotics. And you can look at your tongue, and if it's got a white film on it, you've got candida. Now the purpose of candida, everybody should have a little bit of this yeast.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And there are many other yeast and fungus to grow in that too.

Alberto Villoldo
Yeah. But especially of candida Yeah. Is to ferment you after you die. This is like nature's garbage disposal.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like The Last of Us TV show where they get eaten by the mushrooms.

Alberto Villoldo
This is it. Yeah. So but you don't want that to happen a day too early, of course. So Saccharomyces boulardii, and this is in my website. I've got you got instructions.

It's in my books. It's actually a yeast that competes with candida, brings balance to the gut, especially to this kind of dark area, this this kind of black hole that we have in

Dr. Mark Hyman
our

Alberto Villoldo
guts of the of the anaerobes, the non oxygen breathers. And it brings balance to them and allows them to proliferate and it gets rid of the bad parasites. It gets rid of the h pylori, for example. There's a really good science behind the use of circumcise boulardii. And it's been used with babies and children for fifty years to stop diarrhea.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's quite incredible. In fact, they use it in in clinically in medicine for people who have C. Diff as a treatment for

Alberto Villoldo
Precisely. C.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Diff, which is because of clostridium bacteria that can kill you. I had it, and it almost killed me. And, yeah, it's a it's a paraprofocal complement. We call it yeast against yeast.

Alberto Villoldo
This is, and the beauty of boulardii, saccharomyces boulardii is that it doesn't stay in your gut, doesn't colonize. Mhmm. It leaves after about six, seven days.

Dr. Mark Hyman
The only things we see a lot on our stool test when we do stool analysis is a reduction in something called IgA. That's an antibody, the the first line of defense of your immune system.

Alberto Villoldo
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And when you say COVID antibodies, so those are the defense against COVID. Right? So you have an a system in your gut which interacts with the outside world. And typically, when our guts being such a mess, we see a lot of people with suppressed IgA levels, and the saccharomyces helps to bring it up. So you're talking about these sort of ancient organisms that we've symbiotically evolved with to help regulate our biology and restart and renew processes that that have been going on for hundreds of thousands of years.

Yep. But we kinda messed them up.

Alberto Villoldo
Yeah. You know, if you want to see animals in Africa, you you go to where the food is. That's where the animals go. And that's what these bacteria did in our gut also. They went to where the food Yeah.

So they get to eat first. And then They

Dr. Mark Hyman
eat first.

Alberto Villoldo
They eat first, and then there's actually about 10 levels, 10 layers of probiotics in your gut. And then we get to eat less because one layer, they begin to break down our foods. So boulardii is an excellent remedy, and then you've gotta feed the others. And what do they feed on? They feed on the stuff that you don't digest.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. One of the one of the most interesting things I discovered in the last year is especially when I got sick with with ulcerative colitis after CDF was this whole body of research, not just about fiber, not just about prebiotics and probiotics, but about polyphenols, which are the phytochemicals that you're talking about from these sacred plants that actually feed the good bacteria too. So they actually love that stuff.

Alberto Villoldo
They this is you gotta feed them. This is the best way because the probiotic market is an $80,000,000,000 market annually. And most of the stuff doesn't work, unfortunately. The there's some good ones, but none of them work with the anaerobes. The only way to work with them is with Ubiquinol, with not with quercetin with quercetin, the polyphenol rich compounds that will feed them and and the fiber also is is really important.

So beginning with the gut, and then you find the keystone species. So in the in Yellowstone National Park, they shot many of the wolves, drove the wolves away, and they found that the whole ecosystem went out of balance. Yeah. And they reintroduced the wolves, and the ecosystem went right back into balance. And one of the keystone species is the, archimancia municipalia.

So if you work with these keystone species, they bring order to the ecosystem.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Archimancia is really important. We've done a lot of work on the podcast talking about it because it's such an important thing. But I had very low levels when I had colitis, and I I took pomegranate green tea, and I took cranberry in high doses

Alberto Villoldo
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Every day in concentrates, and it regrew my Akkermansia.

Alberto Villoldo
Yep. It's incredible. How quickly they respond. But you gotta get rid of the bad guys first. Sometimes you have to take gluconazole or you've gotta take something to get rid of the of the, of the yeast, which colonize very rapidly.

And then you've gotta reset your vagus nerve because the vagus nerve is a transport. It's a highway taking serotonin to the brain.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, so we've covered a lot here. I I I we've covered, you know, the ancient ways that our brain is designed that we can actually activate to grow a new brain and to deal with both the mind and the soul and the biological things that go wrong with our brain as a way of actually accelerating our growth as human beings. Because at the end of the day, this is what it's about. Health is not just about, you know, being healthy, not sick. It's about actually being able to express your life in a way that's fulfilled and whole and alive.

And if you don't have mental, physical, social, spiritual, emotional Mhmm. Brain health, body health, you're not gonna get there.

Alberto Villoldo
You're not gonna get it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So there's a bunch of other stuff you talk about in the book that I think is quite interesting. One is one is this whole idea of mitochondria. Yeah. And we've written a book on power up, I think it was called Power Up the Brain or

Alberto Villoldo
Power Up Your Brain with David Perlmutter.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Who's a really good close friend. He's been on the podcast. He's He's an incredible neurologist. And I was like, that was your kind of first foray into out of the shamanic work into, like, the

Alberto Villoldo
Well, see, the mitochondria see, the thing is that there's nothing more spiritual than biology Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
A %.

Alberto Villoldo
To begin with. I mean, it's a miracle.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like the Tao I call it call it the Tao of biology. Like the Tao of physics. Yeah.

Alberto Villoldo
And the, and the people that that say the psychologists are great. You it's good to be able to tell your life story to someone, but you can't you can tell your life story, but how do you change your story when your story is deeply biological and is not just what happened to you when you were little? So the the perspective that I learned from the shamans in the Amazon is that trauma is not what happened to you. It's a story you wrap around it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm. There are

Alberto Villoldo
no traumatic events. There are only traumatic experiences. And to heal that experience that's been damaging your hippocampus, you gotta support your hippocampus. You can't write a new story about your life journey until you begin to repair the hippocampus.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So how do we do that, doctor?

Alberto Villoldo
You cannot you gotta change your brain to change your mind. Yeah. You can't change your mind without changing your brain. That means intervening with the hippocampus first and foremost, repairing the gut. But the quick fixes are things like l tryptophan, five HTP, the precursors for serotonin.

And in six weeks, it begins to work and you begin to feel happier. Serotonin, you know, is the happy molecule. Yeah. So then the then you have to go on the quest. And the quest is the quest for what am I doing here?

What did I come to do in this life? Did I come to spend another year in therapy? Do what is your personal quest? And how can you make a difference in the world? Leave this place a better world than the way you found it.

And that's what's gonna bring you then you're not going to be fighting with your body. You're not gonna you're gonna begin to shift your priorities to eating natural, seasonal, local, organic, to becoming kinder, gentler person Yeah. To forgive more easily and to, and to love yourself and to make your way back to the garden, back to Eden. You gotta drop the whole shame story, which is I am not worthy. Yeah.

You only do that you cannot do it through psychology. You gotta do it by returning to the mother, by becoming an earth keeper, a steward of our planet, in your own little way.

Dr. Mark Hyman
When you're talking when I when I hear you saying in the subtext there is that, you know, reestablishing a relationship with nature is really critical here. Yeah. And nature is our biology. And unless we understand our biology, everything from our gut microbiome to our mitochondria to all the different things that affect us, we're not gonna be able to get there.

Alberto Villoldo
Yeah. You can never be disconnected from nature because you are nature. Yeah. You can be be disconnected in your own end, but you are nature. You embrace your nature, and you recognize that, that you're on a spiritual quest.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Alberto Villoldo
To find out who do you know the three ancient questions that every spiritual traditions has? Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? And, you know, the church answered that for us for a long time.

And then science came around, you know, said you didn't you know, you came from this primordial soup. Who am I? You're a bunch of molecules and and where am I going nowhere? Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.

Alberto Villoldo
And Disorienting. But the spiritual traditions are about you finding going on the quest. You begin by asking the questions, but you gotta get to the higher brain. The problem is that our lower brain, our limbic brain, the Neanderthal brain, needs ceremony in order to change. And that's why you have ceremonies in every culture, every society in the world.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, what's interesting is that most doctors around the world do ceremony.

Alberto Villoldo
Do ceremony. Right?

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's how they heal with ceremony.

Alberto Villoldo
I mean,

Dr. Mark Hyman
I should tell you a quick story. I was I was in Mongolia on this horseback trip where Genghis Khan, you know, rode his horses, and it was an incredible trip. And I got the worst freaking hiccups that wouldn't go away for three days. They literally were thinking of evacuating me for a case of terminal illness.

Alberto Villoldo
Medevacuum. We got

Dr. Mark Hyman
we got to this little village, and it was in remote Mongolia. I don't even know where it was. And there was a a yurt, one year, and there was a family that lived there. And apparently, the the elder women woman there was a shaman. Among her other duties are herding goats Sure.

And yaks. So she brought me in her yurt, and she, took these stones and bones and this kind of sacred objects and kind of threw them and kind of read what was going on with me. And and then she took my shirt off, and, she put rancid yak butter all over my belly and started rubbing and chanting and rubbing. And and after three days of of sheer misery and actually fear, because there's a lot of serious things that chronic hiccups can mean like cancer.

Alberto Villoldo
Yum.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I was like, oh my god. If I got cancer, they went away. Now I don't know what happened. To the ceremony or they just would've gone away anyway. But the point was that that there these ancient cultures, their healers are also very embedded in both nature and in ritual.

Alberto Villoldo
Yeah. And the ritual is so important because you're giving the the person permission to get well. You're giving them permission to explore something new in their life. That's why we have graduation ceremonies. That's why you go into the military.

It's full of ritual and ceremony. You need permission from the healer and from yourself, and you need to go through a little rite of passage. It doesn't need to be yak butter on your chest and your genitals, you know. So the, it needs to be a small rite of passage that you create with your provider. Sometimes it's prescribing a medication.

That'll do it. Yeah. But if you can also reent the person towards their quest, put them on a quest, then Helium has accelerated tremendously. But to be on a quest, you need the brain nutrients. And the neuro nutrients are the stuff we're deficient in.

Yeah. And you need to detox the brain because we're exposed to so many, so many toxins. Remember, the body in its wisdom stores toxins in fat. Yeah. And the brain is 70% fat.

Yeah. And this is the kind of fat you don't wanna lose, you know, when you go on a diet.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's so interesting, Alberto. You're talking about the brain and fat and the decline of our brain function. And, you know, one of the things that as a functional medicine doctor is I'm always looking for, you know, what are the emerging scientific discoveries that can help us to kinda help our patients. And and there's been a new set of diagnostics which allows us to see things that we could never see before.

Like, imagine the discovery of the microscope or the telescope. And now, before we had to sort of we kinda knew everybody's poison. Like, if we did autopsy studies, we could do biopsies Sure. Of fat tissue. We can measure everybody's just a load got a load of pesticides and dioxin and DDT PcPs and the plastics and phthalates and you know, pesticides and BPA, you name it.

But we never can measure that in real life humans very easily. Because in the blood, it it kind of goes into your fat, most of it. And there's a new test that I've been doing out of Germany that measures intracellular toxins. And I have one patient with dementia and another one with Parkinson's, which are both neurodegenerative diseases. And we're seeing more and more of these problems.

Alberto Villoldo
Yep. And They're rampant. I mean

Dr. Mark Hyman
They're rampant. And and what was amazing was we can now measure these levels of cellular toxins and using a process of replacing the fat in the cell membrane Yep. We can get rid of them using phospholipids, which is what their cell membranes are made of. It's really quite amazing.

Alberto Villoldo
You know the especially when you look at the statistics, if you get to be 75, one out of two people will have diagnosable Alzheimer's. If you get to be eight I'm sorry. One out of three. If you get to be eighty, one out of two people. Yeah.

This is this didn't exist a hundred years ago before doctor Alzheimer's got to put his name on this illness he identified. In the Amazon, the thing that amazed me is that the incidence of dementia is one out of a hundred people. There's very little heart disease.

Dr. Mark Hyman
There's one percent there and twenty percent here.

Alberto Villoldo
Twenty percent here. It's crazy. And it's, of course, related to our lifestyle.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So learning how to grow new brain, pretty pretty important topic to this.

Alberto Villoldo
It's really important. And remember, the brain is fat. So you gotta give it the good fats. You cannot turn on the higher brain until you go first in a ketogenic diet. It doesn't need to be, you know, eating meat three times a day, but you gotta go into autophagy.

You gotta go into, start recycling cellular waste and eliminating. And we know how to do that now. The beauty of it is not only do we have the diagnostics, we know how to reverse the stuff. We know how to create a new brain. We know how to help people grow a healthy brain that's not only gonna prevent the dementia, it's gonna let them step into this place of gnosis, of wisdom.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Essentially, you know, we've had Chris Palmer on the podcast. I'll probably have him back again, who's a Harvard psychiatrist talking about mitochondria as the core dysfunctional unit that is causing most mental illness, everything from autism to schizophrenia to depression to the pole disease. And then we have to treat the mitochondria. But you're also saying that in terms of the aging brain, and not just not just that, but also just having a healthy brain, we really have to focus on You

Alberto Villoldo
got it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
The So how how does that come up in your book, Marlene?

Alberto Villoldo
Mitochondria, it's a big section on mitochondria and how do we restore mitochondria. There are fuel factories inside every cell, and your brain and your heart have the highest concentration of these fuel fact energy factories in mitochondria, but they're not only producing energy, they are actually in charge of the death clock. And whoever runs the death clock runs the show. They tell cells when they need to die so new ones can be born, so regeneration can take place. But mitochondria have they're actually they don't belong to us.

They're actually bacteria that join our cells. They formed a eukaryotic cell millions of years ago so that it it cut a deal with these multicellular organisms saying, hey. I'm gonna give you energy. You keep me protected. Keep me warm.

Keep me safe. And that's what that's what they do. But what they do is they turn basically, they store energy in the form of sunlight. Yeah. Of ATP of a molecule called ATP, adenosine triphosphate.

This is like the the sparklers that kids use. And when that they're depleted, that energy becomes goes from being ATP to ADP, adenosine mono AMP, adenosine monophosphate. Your fuel tank is empty. Yeah. And the, so this process of storing energy, of processing energy, of protecting the mitochondria who have 38 genes in a ring that are unprotected.

Right. Because our DNA is 24,000 genes in it. And your brain

Dr. Mark Hyman
cells have more mitochondria than any other cell in your body per cell.

Alberto Villoldo
And they are the feminine life force.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like, 20,000, 50 thousand

Alberto Villoldo
Per neuron.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Per Yeah. Per cell.

Alberto Villoldo
Yeah. And we only get the mitochondria from our mothers. So they're they're what the I heard the Amazon shaman saying, you know, your people, their feminine life force is very weak. And then David Perlmutter said to me, of course, it's mitochondria. That's right.

That's right. Because we get it from the mother. So how do we protect, repair? And here's where we get into zombie cells.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Thoughts about zombie cells. These are the zombies, like

Alberto Villoldo
They're like the ones in Haiti. Haiti,

Dr. Mark Hyman
the spirituals. No. You're not talking about that.

Alberto Villoldo
We kind of because zombie cells, These cells are neither living nor dead, and they're actually a a cancer protection mechanism that every cell has. So if a cell is not able to copy its DNA's information accurately to a daughter cell, mother cell their their mother cells and daughter cells. They're no they're no daddy cells. If it doesn't copy correctly, it'll neuter that cell so it cannot replicate. Yeah.

Because that we call them metastases. Yeah. So it'll neuter it, but it won't kill it. So these cells are not able to reproduce or neither living nor dead, but their mitochondria, they become fat and swollen and are starting to produce chemical signals, chemokines, cytokines that are pro inflammatory, and they're very toxic. But it's a cancer protection mechanism.

But when you have too many of these, remember, the problem here is the copying. If the copying is not accurate, they get neutered. And what interferes with the copying is a signal to noise ratio of all the toxins we're exposed to. These cells begin to build and we end up with cancers. These these senescent cells are called.

And they were discovered, by James Kirkland at Mayo Clinic who did a beautiful gerontologist who said, I'm tired of prescribing walkers and wheelchairs. How do we begin to deal with the causes of aging? And, he found that there were senolytic agents that actually switched on the kill switch, turned it back on in these cells. And you could get rid of them. You could do away with You

Dr. Mark Hyman
could kill the zombie cells, which are also called senescence cells. So senolytics is senescence is aging, and senolytic means to not kill aging. Yeah. Kill the aging cells.

Alberto Villoldo
Kill the aging cells.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So so how does that work? How do you do that?

Alberto Villoldo
Well, you we don't know exactly. At least, I don't know how they work, but they seem to switch back on the kill switch in mitochondria.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And what are the the therapies they're using?

Alberto Villoldo
And those therapies are combining things like quercetin and fisetin. Fisetin is made from strawberries. Yeah. And quercetin is is polyphenol. It's made from onion skins for a variety of products.

Natural products. And it's a hit and run intervention. Four or five days. And and I have a senolytic protocol that we use in in our retreat center in Chile that you've been to. And, in four or five days, you do away.

It's a one and done treatment that you need to repeat. We're finding out three or four times a year because we got forty years or fifty years of senescent cells in us. And that what that does is to basically reset the system. You don't have this burden of zombie cells that you need to that you're that you're functioning with. It cleans you out.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's true. Also, there's a great study out of Israel where they looked at I talked about it in my book Young Forever, where they use hyperbaric oxygen over 60 sessions. I actually am doing it right now. I just came from it because of my back surgery to heal the wound.

But the, the beauty of the the hyperbaric is that it it it actually creates a stress, but it kill also kills the zombie cells.

Alberto Villoldo
Yeah. Yeah. And this is, I think, essential. Absolutely essential. Our protocol is not only fisetin quercetin, which is commonly used for this, because this will kill the zombie cells.

But how do you get rid of them? So you gotta work on the transport system and support the liver in eliminating them. So we're combining it with, with alpha lipoic acid and with, liver support, including glutathione or glutathione to help to transport and eliminate them out of the body so they're not just sitting there.

Dr. Mark Hyman
This is amazing. We're talking about mitochondria, zombie cells, the microbiome, serotonin, you know

Alberto Villoldo
But see, this is Trauma. This is plant based. This is working with, and the reason you're you're gonna hear a lot more about senescent cell is because we're getting to molecular solutions to to pharmaceutical solutions. Yeah. But this is available today.

Fisetin is strawberries. You'd have to eat 30 pounds of strawberries to get the same effect.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But you can take it as a supplement.

Alberto Villoldo
But it's an amazing supplement four or five day intervention that lowers your burden

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Alberto Villoldo
Of these toxic cells that are pro inflammatory.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. One of the things that, you know, it it's so fascinating is that, you know, we can start to embed these practices into our daily life. And you and you you've written this book, Growing a New Brain, which is not just talking about the theory. You talk about case stories. You talk about

Alberto Villoldo
And how to do it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And how to do it. Yeah.

Alberto Villoldo
So can

Dr. Mark Hyman
you maybe share some stories about how this would be applied? What are the kinds of things people are doing? How does it work?

Alberto Villoldo
First, let me share a story about how I kind of got into on this track, because I was running a small lab at San Francisco State. We were looking at how can we create psychosomatic health? What are the mechanisms? And the, and it I got frustrated at one point, shut the lab down, and and went to the Amazon to see what they did. People that had no technology, but they had the plants, the natural world the plant world.

And, the mind, the power of the mind to create you know, we know the placebo effect is the most tested medication in the world. Yeah. Because every pharmaceutical is tested against placebo.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Alberto Villoldo
And we know it's extraordinarily effective. Yeah. That's I mean, it's 68% as effective as morphine in the case of, gunshot wounds. Amazing. So I began to looking at what's the placebo effect?

Do we we don't know what the mechanism is, but we know it works. We know it works even when the person you're giving the sugar pill to knows that it's a placebo.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's amazing.

Alberto Villoldo
It's extraordinary. A lot of the shamanic healing is based on mobilizing this resource that we have to create health that we call that we dismiss derogatively as a placebo. That's just a sugar pill. Most of what you're getting in your pills that you take

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, you're activating your psychopharmacology because I always say the the best pharmacy is the one between your ears.

Alberto Villoldo
The one between your ears. Yeah. So this is how what I became interested in. And so how do we do that for ourselves? Well, meditation seems to be one of those things.

Practicing inner peace, breathing practices that begin because that's the interface between your, that can allow you to self regulate your your physiology and your nervous system. So I think we have to discover what works for us. We have to provide the brain with the neuro nutrients, the support, get the serotonin. We're serotonin depleted right now. And and this is things that we can do immediately, and then turn your kitchen into your laboratory.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Alberto Villoldo
And then take part in what why this number of people are calling the experiment of n is equal to one. Yeah. Where you have, you know, in medicine, if you have a research project, you want n the number of participants to be as big as possible. But here, the experiment is n is equal one. It's my experiment is called Alberto.

Yeah. Yours call Mark.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I love experimenting on Mark.

Alberto Villoldo
Yeah. Me too. And the problem the thing is that if you don't do the experiment, you get to be in the control group. And the control group is deadly statistics. Yeah.

You wanna be an outlier in that bell curve. So we need to take control of our brain today, not outsource it to our digital devices like we've done. You know? The our memory functions are all outsourced to our digital devices. I was writing one of our blogs today, and it said, this thing popped up.

Do you want help with writing this blog? It was Chad GPT asking me if wanted me to do it. Soon, we're only gonna be here to clean the machines. So we need to really upgrade our brain, take the next step in human evolution because the one interest couple interesting details. There are 40,000,000 species in this planet, more or less, and only three of those don't have a death program in their DNA.

And they're humans, dolphins, and whales. Every other species in nature has a death program. There are no grandmothers in nature. There's there's, they're eliminated. Whereas, we have not only have grandmothers, but we can live thirty, forty years after menopause.

There's no menopause in nature. It doesn't exist.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Interesting.

Alberto Villoldo
Nature is doing a biology experiment with humans, dolphins, and whales in longevity. Mhmm. And to take part in that experiment, we need to be proactive in it. We need to attenuate, the systems that create psychosomatic disease, the, the amygdala, the, production of cortisol and adrenaline, and switch on the production of the psychedelics that the brain produces to awaken the higher brain. It requires the psychedelics.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, let's talk about that. I was I was gonna close with this because I think I think this is really an important, framework. Because historically, we thought of psychedelics as causing psychological effects. But but now we know they're causing biological effects and literally structural and functional changes to the brain. Incredible.

Yeah. For example, by increasing BDNF and other Yep. Brain trophic nutrients, things that are helping the brain grow, repair, heal, reduce inflammation. And and things like, you know, DMT from Ayahuasca, from, you know, the BUFO from the Sonoran Desert toad, the, you know, psilocybin medicines, MDMA, which is synthetic chemical, LSD, synthetic chemical, or but that comes from a plant, ergot. All of these are are things that have been around for hundreds of thousands of years.

Alberto Villoldo
And the old actin serotonin receptors.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And they actin and serotonin receptors. But what we're now learning about them is it that they can really create profound lasting changes in the brain, in a way, grow a new brain. What key kind of tell us how you think about that.

Alberto Villoldo
It's amazing, if you've seen the brain on on drugs, on psychedelics, you find that there are 20 to 30 times the amount of neural networks.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Not not the Richard Nixon brain on drugs with the fried eggs.

Alberto Villoldo
Not not the one with the fried egg. Yeah. And the the problem is that many so we're doing this experimenting without a traditional sacred structure. So every culture that works with psychedelics knows that you need a diet to prepare for it, a diet that's rich in serotonin, for example, and some of the MAO inhibitors. Yeah.

And you need to prepare a sacred space, a safe space, not just drop some acid or give somebody some ketamine and, but even then, tremendous healing happens. So that's the chemical effect is what we're looking at. Other societies looked at the sacred. What was the environment? How do you create a safe space?

How do you, are able to commune with the divine in whatever form you encounter it? Mhmm. Mhmm. And that's part of what we're looking for that we don't have the answer for.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That that's true. I think it's true. But I think what's what's sort of exciting to me is a sort of is a sort of revolution in brain science and the revolution in trauma healing, the revolution in psychedelic medicine, the revolution in nursing the body as a system and network, all these things are coming together. And I I think it's gonna change everything. We think about the brain, the mind, our lives.

Alberto Villoldo
Totally. It's gonna open up the door to explore the mind. So what

Dr. Mark Hyman
does the future look like? Tell us about how you see the future.

Alberto Villoldo
I am very optimistic. I see the future as tremendously exciting. I think that there have been five extinction events in the planet before we're living in this in the fifth one right now. Started about fifteen, twenty years ago. More species are dying than the previous one.

That's when a gigantic meteorite struck the earth and wiped out ninety percent of life forms.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow.

Alberto Villoldo
During extinction events, nature seems to take the foot off of the brake and step on the accelerator, evolutionary accelerator. So it's not only evolution in between generations, but now within generations. That we can become a new human that may

Dr. Mark Hyman
epigenetic reprogramming.

Alberto Villoldo
Epigenetic reprogramming to become a new human being that could have long life, long health, and can become a a keeper, a nurse keeper, a steward of the earth, and, can experience her and his divine nature.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So beautiful, Barto. I mean, I, you know, I I I think about it a little scientifically too, which is that the this concept that's emerging, from our scientific discovery, in a way, it you know, we talk about shamanic healing. We talk about energy medicine. We talk about kind of healing from trauma. The the this fundamental concept of epigenetics, which is relatively new, it's the idea that there's a control system regulating our genes, and our genes are fixed, but but which ones are turned on or off is regulated by this sort of master coder.

Alberto Villoldo
Mhmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And the coder is the epigenome. And that gets programmed generationally. So trauma can be transmitted generationally. Totally. The impact of toxins or crappy food is transmitted generationally, and those impacts are found downstream two or three generations down.

So if your grandmother was exposed to glyphosate, you're at risk for all sorts of cancers and informities. Right? If your great grandmother had a trauma, then that might be embedded in your DNA like the Holocaust survivors

Alberto Villoldo
Precisely.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That children and their children and their grandchildren are

Alberto Villoldo
have very low levels of cortisol that's been happening for generations.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So what's exciting is what you're talking about essentially is using this data science to reprogram the epigenome

Alberto Villoldo
I see. To start

Dr. Mark Hyman
breaking it so you can evolve within one generation. So there was this debate between Darwin and Lamarck. Darwin was like species evolved through natural sex selection over time. Lamarck was like, species come, fix as they are. They're both right in a way in a way.

Right? And so these traits and he he was like, traits can evolve in even in a generation. So I

Alberto Villoldo
think I Very rapidly. Yeah. Very rapidly. So Not only that, but we inherit not only the toxic legacy of our ancestors, both biological, chemical, emotional, but also the gifts, the extraordinary gifts of resilience, of courage, of endurance, of bright you know? And we have to begin to tap into that instead of our psychology today is That's beautiful.

I've never

Dr. Mark Hyman
heard that.

Alberto Villoldo
Is turning us into victims. You know?

Dr. Mark Hyman
I've never heard that. That's that's one of the most beautiful things. I love that. Tell us more about that because I I think that's a great thing to end on, which is this idea that we not only inherited bad stuff, but good stuff. And that makes us into human beings that we are that are all the good that we are.

Alberto Villoldo
It makes us into beings that are incredibly powerful, that have tremendous potential and possibilities, and can be part of a grand plan of dreaming our world into being. We are the sons and daughters of heroes, of people that have so much courage across the that cross the Bering Straits, that survived under conditions that were that were sitting around the fire looking at the stars and realizing we're not alone. Yeah. Ten thousand years ago, we have that in us as well, and we need to awaken. We we can all it's so easy to find what's wrong.

Now we gotta begin to awaken what's right within us.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's so beautiful. So Alberta, tell us how they can find more about your book, about your work, about your website.

Alberto Villoldo
The book is called Grow a New Brain. It's out now, and it's, it's in book stores and Amazon. And it's, and it has some risky practices in it too, so I've got to caution you on that because some of these are meditative kind of journey practices. And the, my website is called the4winds.com. The 4 winds Com.

And what I do today is to train modern shamans, neuro shamans. That's why I have my scarf on. Oh. The shaman's scarf. It's so

Dr. Mark Hyman
beautiful, Arturo. Well, thank you so much for being back in the doctor's pharmacy.

Alberto Villoldo
Great to be with you again, Mark.

Dr. Mark Hyman
All of our wisdom and knowledge. Yeah.

Alberto Villoldo
Thank you so much.

Dr. Mark Hyman
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