Particle Size Matters: Masterclass in Using Silver for Biohacking

[00:00:00] Dave: You are listening to The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today we’re going to talk about something that frankly is a little bit confusing to me since, geez, going back in time, 25, 30 years ago, I first started hearing about all the weird stuff that wasn’t supposed to work because antibiotics for 15 years didn’t really work for the chronic sinus infections I had because I had all these health problems before I was 30, including weighing 300 pounds.

So I tried all the normal stuff, and when I just ran out, and I was like, this isn’t working, no matter how much I try. Maybe there’s something different. And I learned that many years ago, back when we all had raw milk and it was something that was actually good for us because of the type of cows, we hadn’t industrialized the process, the problem was milk spoilage was a big issue. 

So one of the things people would do is they would drop a silver coin, back when money meant something because it was backed by gold or silver. So you could get a silver coin and you could drop it into your milk, and it would last longer. I was like, well, why would they do that? Well, because silver does have antimicrobial effects. So does copper actually, and so do different metals at different amounts and different particle sizes. And I got into this idea that maybe I could make my own silver. And there’s all sorts of different silver things that actually do work.

I’ve even tried with one very alternative practitioner, some intravenous silver particles. But what I learned over the time is that there are different particle sizes, different delivery things. Just like if you’re taking something like glutathione, a compound I have talked about for years, for detoxing. If you just eat it, you digest it, you don’t get any benefits.

So it’s like, how does it get into the body? Because how something gets in, the delivery system, is part of what makes it work. So I want to revisit silver today because I’ve talked about it a few times over the years. And I’ve got Steve Revelli on to talk about what he’s doing specifically with silver.

And because this is the land of the free, I’m carefully choosing which words I use and don’t use to make sure that I’m in compliance with all of the necessary regulations about which types of free speech we can make or not make. Steve’s background is in science and education. And believe it or not, he’s a master’s level official in international bobsled.

So this is a guy who’s been around the block. So today, I want you to learn what is silver when it comes to biohacking, how do they use silver in the world of medicine because they actually do and have for more than a hundred years, and how would you use silver topically or supplementally. So this is the masterclass in using silver for biohacking.

Steve, are you ready to go?

[00:02:50] Steve: Yes. Certainly.

[00:02:52] Dave: All right, let’s do this. You work for American Biotech Labs, which is a product that I have here in the house, and you make something called Ag404.

[00:03:04] Steve: Correct. Yeah, that’s correct.

[00:03:05] Dave: What’s special about this versus rubbing silver dollars on my eyeballs or something?

[00:03:12] Steve: Silver actually has a great history. It goes way back to even medieval times. A lot of the people back then would say, well, he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. That’s an old adage, and sometimes it’s used today. Well, it turns out back in the day, the royals, the lords, and the people who were in charge had silver silverware.

We call it silverware now, but it’s made out a stainless steel. But back then, it was silver. And so they got a daily dose of silver every day, and it turns out that they were much more healthy than the peasants who were eating with wood. And because silver does have the ability to inhibit growth of pathogens, for sure.

 So that’s the history of silver. It’s been long known. But yes, I work for American Biotech Labs. Um, my division is ABL manufacturing, so we actually manufacture silver particles. And it is a miracle particle. It really is. It is just not Ag404 or tetrasilver tetroxide. That is a highly antimicrobial part of the product. That’s true. But the miracle particle itself is actually a pure silver core particle, and around it is this Ag404 coating that is attached to it, very strongly attached to it. It doesn’t leave it in fact.

[00:04:34] Dave: So you’re manufacturing a particle out of silver. So there’s silver. What is the Ag404 part around it, and why does it matter?

[00:04:41] Steve: Well, the Ag404 part is the part that’s antimicrobial. And the reason why Ag404, or silver, actually itself is antimicrobial is because it actually has a silver oxide, and that’s why Ag404 is a silver oxide coating. And what that silver oxide coating does is it steals electrons. I’m a chemist, so going to a little bit of the chemistry here, the Ags or the silver part of that, that complex, is missing electrons, and it turns out that one of the silvers is actually sitting at a plus one stage.

Now, that plus one stage means that that silver atom has lost one electron. The other silver in that complex is at a plus three. It’s lost three electrons. Well, every atom in the world wants its electrons back. You steal an electron, it’s going to want it back. And so it will get it back any way it possibly can.

And so the antimicrobial part of that is that if a microbe or a pathogen happens to bump into one of these silver particles, this silver will steal the electrons away from that microbe. And it turns out that we’re all held together by electrons anyway, by covalent bonds. And so it will basically disassemble that microbe and inhibit the growth of it.

[00:06:02] Dave: How does it do that to microbes without doing it to our red blood cells, important parts of our bodies?

[00:06:08] Steve: That’s a very good question.

[00:06:10] Dave: Otherwise, we’d be drinking Clorox because Clorox kill bacteria. That would obviously be bad. 

[00:06:14] Steve: Some people do.

[00:06:15] Dave: Yeah. You have to run for office for that.

[00:06:17] Steve: Yeah, for sure. Uh, but anyway, it turns out that there’s two types of basic cells in the world. There’s eukaryotes, and we are a eukaryotic cell, which have a very complicated cell structure. And then there’s the other types, which are the lower form, we’ll call it the lower form, or these microbes. They have a different cell structure. And it turns out that their cells are actually quite fragile in comparison to our cells.

Now, it does turn out that if you have a high enough concentration of anything, it’s going to become cytotoxic to cells. And that’s a very important note that I want to make here, is that our silver particles are at a low concentration not to be cytotoxic to our cells as well as probiotics, because probiotic cells, they’re the same type of cells as those other pathogens, but they’re–

[00:07:13] Dave: They’re just different. I was going to ask you about that because I’ve definitely had some functional medicine practitioners say, use silver. And I’ve actually had the American Biotech silver recommended by at least seven different functional medicine practitioners. It seems like it’s, I’m going to call it the gold standard, but it should be the silver standard.

 And I’ve tried all kinds of stuff including making my many years ago, which is probably not idea. You can turn yourself blue like a smurf if you do that. What’s happening with this, though, is, for some reason, our healthy probiotics, which are single-celled organisms, they’re silver-resistant, but the bad guys are not silver-resistant?

[00:07:56] Steve: Well, that’s interesting because the other type of cell is called a prokaryotic cell. So these prokaryotic cells, and people don’t understand this. I’m a science nerd. I’m a student of all sciences. I was actually an educator, retired now, but I was certified to teach every science there was to teach because I love science. And what people don’t understand about prokaryotic cells, about bacteria, and fungus, and molds, and everything else, is they are vastly different from each other.

For example, uh, if you take a really bad bacteria called Clostridium botulinum, guess what it makes. Botulism. Very bad. But if you take a cell like Staph epidermidis, which is not a pathogen, it’s on our skin. It’s part of our biome that’s on our skin. Those bacteria are as different from each other as, say, we would be from a giraffe. They’re that different.

[00:08:51] Dave: Wow. From a giraffe? 

[00:08:53] Steve: Yeah.

[00:08:53] Dave: So very different, but we’re 95% the same giraffes anyway, from a cell perspective.

[00:08:58] Steve: Exactly. We’re all mammals, but we are that different where you wouldn’t probably treat a giraffe the same way in medicine that you would treat a human. And it’s the same way with these bacteria. So pathogenic bacteria are actually very, very fragile prokaryotic cells, whereas your probiotics, they’re not as fragile.

They’re pretty hardy, and so they can withstand. That’s the point I want to make about, especially silver in this case here, is we’ve done this study, and the studies say that if you take a cell, a probiotic cell, and you expose it to more than 40 parts per million, it will cause problems with that probiotic cell. And so that’s why our product does what it does within that range below the 40 parts per million.

[00:09:48] Dave: Okay. So your research shows you take the American biotech, the Ag404, um, which is an oxidized silver particle, specifically designed with the size of particle as well under 40 parts per million, you put that even in your stomach, in your GI tract, it’s going to take out a lot of the pathogenic guys, and it’s going to leave the other guys intact. But if you– okay.

[00:10:12] Steve: Yeah, that’s correct.

[00:10:14] Dave: But here’s the question, 40 parts per million, but if I drink a liter of water with it, then it’s no longer 40 parts per million. It’s actually a tiny fraction. So how does that work?

[00:10:22] Steve: Well, and again, it is a tiny fraction. I’ve seen products on the internet that scared me. I saw one the other day that was 20,000 parts per million, and I’m going, oh, I would never put that much silver into my body whatsoever anyway. And it turns out, we’ve done the testing on it, that we’ve had very good success with even five, with even actually one part per million of our silver particles. And so it doesn’t need to be ramped up. The American way is more is better, but it’s not true in a lot of ways, especially when it comes to treatments.

[00:10:55] Dave: When it comes to censorship, clearly, more is better. I, for one, support our new AI robotic overlords. Just wanted to make that really clear.

[00:11:02] Steve: Yeah, there you go.

[00:11:03] Dave: All right. So you do something else. You make nanoparticles. And guys, earlier I talked about delivery systems. And one of the analogies that I like to make when I’m talking about, say, the things I used to believe when I was a raw vegan, and it made me really sick, is, well, I’m getting minerals because minerals are in the plants. And it’s like the people would smuggle heroin. They’d put heroin inside condoms, and they’d swallow it. I have a pound of heroin. I’m not even high. Well, it’s because it wasn’t bioavailable, because there was a barrier in there.

So when you take any supplement or even any food, if you were to take a piece of fruit and swallow it like a pill without chewing it, it’s going to be less bioavailable than if you chewed it. So cooking makes things more or less bioavailable. So it’s the same with supplements. And in the case of what you’re doing with American Biotech, you’re making extremely small particles. And the cool thing about small particles, that I know, is they can penetrate cell membranes easily, but larger particles will get kept out of, say, the blood-brain barrier and things like that. So what size nanoparticle are you using? How do you do it, and why is it special?

[00:12:15] Steve: The size of a nanoparticle is very, very important. I’m, again, a cell biologist as well, and so I know what can get in and what can get through the cell membrane. And so our particle is between five and 15 nanometers, which is in the low end of what we call a colloid. Remember, a colloid is something that is truly suspended, but it’s not dissolved into a solvent, which the solvent is usually purified water. And so our particles are on the low end of that. By definition, a colloid is between five and a 100 nanometers in diameter of a particle. Other than that, it tends to gravitate. Gravity grabs a hold of it, pulls it out of suspension.

So our particles are on the low end of that, between five and 15 nanometers, and it turns out that that is an ideal size for that particle to be absorbed through the mucosa, especially in the oral cavity and in the esophagus. That’s where most of our nanoparticles are absorbed. And so what we tell our clients and customers is to put that dosage, one teaspoon, uh, three times a day, into your mouth and hold it there as long as you possibly can, gargle with it if you want to, and then swallow it because most of the particles have been absorbed by them.

[00:13:28] Dave: Okay. So what about nasal use? This is something that I do when I fly sometimes. I’ll put it in my nasal spray. So how would you use the American biologic stuff nasally?

[00:13:40] Steve: Well, according to our regulatory body, which you have discussed, we are not allowed to put it into any mucosal space in the body as well.

[00:13:50] Dave: Oh yeah, I understand. Um, the good thing is that regulations don’t actually apply to free humans. So I can take a nanoparticle silver of my choice, and I can add it to my xylitol-based nasal spray, maybe with or without lugol’s iodine. And then I can look at all the research that shows that the iodine alone would kill a large percentage of things via a different pathway than the silver. But I’ve never been able to ask someone. If someone were to add iodine and silver together, is it going to work or is it not going to work?

[00:14:22] Steve: Well, I can tell you this, that the only thing that silver particle has issues with is, and I want to make sure you understand that, high concentration of salt. 

[00:14:34] Dave: Of salt. Okay.

[00:14:35] Steve: Yeah.

[00:14:35] Dave: Above isotonic.

[00:14:36] Steve: Above isotonic. Way above.

[00:14:38] Dave: Okay. So what you could do if you just wanted to take care of your own health is you could get– an isotonic basically means the same amount of salt that’s in your blood.

[00:14:49] Steve: Right. Normal–

[00:14:50] Dave: So it’s not higher or lower. And you could buy any of the saline nasal sprays available. You could make your own. In that case, you have to use purified, sterilized water because tap water actually has stuff in it that’s not good, and then you would add the Silver Biotics do it. And when you did that, you would have topical silver, but of course you’re not recommending that because that would be wrong.

[00:15:15] Steve: Well, I can tell you this. I know that from phone calls into our office and things like that, that people have used our product off label in a variety of ways, and we have had no complaints, and we’ve had no adverse reactions reported to us, no matter how they’ve used it off label.

[00:15:35] Dave: It’s always frustrating to me when people use knowledge to improve their health without permission. I share your distress over this.

[00:15:43] Steve: Yes, it is quite distressful. But the product, it does work. Like I said, we’ve had no complaints and no adverse reactions, and we know from people calling in, that they’ve used it in a variety of different ways.

[00:15:56] Dave: Got it. So this is a way that I use it, and I learned that actually from a couple of different functional medicine doctors over the years who said, Dave, if you’re getting these chronic sinus things when you fly– I very, very rarely get sick. And when I do, it’s almost always a really bad mold exposure or when I didn’t bring the stuff that I use, which makes a difference for me.

And I am still subject to, we’ll say, chronic sinusitis if I don’t take care of myself. So I eat something I’m sensitive to, I’m in a moldy environment, I don’t get enough sleep, then I’m going to start feeling something, and then I know what to do. I would start to suffer bad [Inaudible] and all that. But I do recommend that you consider using silver nanoparticles in ways that improve your health. 

And you guys can probably hear what I’m saying, and it’s very interesting, and you should take note that even in podcasts, we’re now starting to speak like we’re in some bizarre alternate reality. Uh, don’t worry. Stick with the show. I am not actually in that reality. I’m just visiting for a little while for the purposes of this interview. All right. So if people are having dysbiosis, in other words, you’re having room clearing gas, you know you have digestive problems, what’s a typical regimen? Because you’re allowed to use it for that.

[00:17:16] Steve: Absolutely. Our recommendation for the immune support is, uh, one teaspoon three times a day. And by EPA standards, we know that that’s far, far below the toxicity limit of intake of silver as well. But that’s our recommended dosage. And as an immune support– and that’s a topic that we can get into as well, is what does immune support mean?

 What our product does and what silver particles do is they actually take care of that bioload. We all have pathogens in our bodies right now, and they’re just waiting. They’re opportunistic pathogens waiting to cause a disease. And so what our product does is it takes care of that bioload so the immune system can do what it’s supposed to do and not be hindered by taking care of the bioload by itself. That’s what the immune support of our product does.

[00:18:12] Dave: There’s also a lot of topical use, and some human skin types carry a lot more bacteria than others. So if you’re listening to this and you’re the person who gets a mosquito bite, it gets infected. You scratch your skin, it gets infected. You know where the Neosporin is, most likely. And there’s other people, they get the same scratch, and it just goes away.

How did you do that? And my former wife, uh, Dr. Lana, explained that to me As an ER doctor, they know there’s some people you’re just going to have to treat that. And what I found is I don’t really need to use the Neosporin if I have access to Silver Biotics, which is the topical stuff that you guys make.

So if I get a scratch, I actually just smear some on there because nine times out of 10, I’ll get a mild skin infection. It’s annoying, but it’s just the way my body’s built. What is the best Silver Biotics formulation for people who have that problem of mild skin infections or irritation? You get a scrape, and you know it’s going to turn red and get all gross.

[00:19:10] Steve: Yeah. We have a Silver Biotics silver gel that’s made for topical, and it’s cosmetic, but I want to let everybody know that we take that same silver particle under a different formulation, and it’s called ASAP OTC, and it actually has a 510(k) FDA-cleared set of claims that we can make. We can make it for cuts, lacerations, abrasions, burns, surgical sites, and it will be antimicrobial. It’s an antibacterial at that point with that product. So it’s a little different formulation, but it’s the same silver nanoparticles we can make FDA claims on.

[00:19:53] Dave: It’s interesting that people listening still value FDA claims because the FDA, most of what they claim is actually not reality based from what I’ve seen so far. The tens of billions of dollars of FDA-approved drugs, the fines for companies selling these drugs, and things like that. I wonder what you guys are doing over there. But in the meantime, for us to be able to freely discuss it, it’s very helpful to have that. And one thing that I think a lot of listeners don’t know about is, how long has silver been used in the most severe burn ward cases?

[00:20:27] Steve: Well, there’s a product called Silver Sulfadiazine.

[00:20:30] Dave: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:30] Steve: That product has been in hospital pharmacies for decades.

[00:20:36] Dave: Probably 70 plus years, I would guess. We’ve known if you use silver– because when you burn you half the skin off your body, you’re probably going to die because of infection. And they’re like, oh, that’s weird. We use silver, and then people live. Huh. Who would’ve thought? And these days they actually have this new technology where they can take stem cells in the equivalent of an airbrush, and it can spray stem cells, and you grow skin back, but not if you have an infection.

So there’s this long history of silver, like you said, going back to medieval times. And it’s ridiculous that anyone on Earth thinks that they have a right to tell you when you can and can’t use something that we’ve used for thousands of years as a species. That’s not my world.

[00:21:21] Steve: Even with infants and neonates. They used to put silver in newborn’s eyes after birth. And that was actually mandatory for years and years and years.

[00:21:33] Dave: It’s interesting. This is something that drives me nuts. My first book was on fertility and childbirth. It’s called The Better Baby Book. And there’s hundreds and hundreds of babies who probably wouldn’t have been born without that book. But one of the things that I learned in the course of being a dad, I delivered both my own kids at home, uh, with appropriate care in place.

And it was a beautiful, sacred experience. But when you go to the hospital, especially in California, it is required by law that they put– now it’s not silver anymore. It’s an antibiotic ointment in the baby’s eyes in case mom has active gonorrhea. Now, if you don’t have that– or it might be syphilis, I could have the STD wrong. Whatever the thing is. If you don’t have that, and you do it to the baby, the baby can’t see mom’s eyes.

So what’s more important? Protecting the baby from something you don’t have, or allowing that first gaze to work right. I think the first gaze is more important, and that’s why I choose to do that. And if someone disagrees with my choice, well, they don’t actually have any say because that’s my decision.

I would say if it was a clear silver drop and mom had an infection, okay, fine, you can see through that. But if it’s a greasy chemical-based ointment that a regulator said you would have, sorry, that was not within the scope of the regulation. So you don’t have to choose that. You can actually say, no ointment in the baby’s eyes, please. And then you can opt out of that. So there’s a lot of stuff like that going on. I think we need to fix it, but would I be okay with silver drops? Sure. Especially if there was actual risk, which there probably isn’t.

[00:23:16] Steve: Yeah. And to circle back a little bit, Silver Biotics does have what we call a vertical sprayer.

[00:23:23] Dave: A vertical sprayer?

[00:23:24] Steve: Yes.

[00:23:25] Dave: What does that do?

[00:23:26] Steve: It is a sprayer that is very similar to a nasal sprayer, but it is a vertical sprayer that you can spray that dosage into your mouth and not have to take a teaspoon.

[00:23:38] Dave: Mm. That’s really useful. So you could put it in your mouth and spray it vertically, right?

[00:23:44] Steve: Yes.

[00:23:44] Dave: And if you slipped and it accidentally made it into your nasal cavities, that would be an off label use that’s not allowed, right?

[00:23:51] Steve: That is correct.

[00:23:51] Dave: Okay, guys, make sure that when using the vertical sprayer in your mouth, it doesn’t go into your nose. Oh, wait. Okay. I’m just not even going to finish that sentence. But anyway, you guys understand how that works. And when I travel, I am definitely a fan of doing this, uh, because I’m highly resilient. I travel a ridiculous amount of the time, and I’ve been on so many flights. Way more than a 1,000 at this point.

And if you don’t take steps to be resilient, the odds are you’re going to have a problem. When I started flying like this, I was in my mid-20s, and I was the only guy at the company where I worked. This is one of the tech companies that held Google’s first servers when Google was two guys and two computers.

We took them, and Hotmail, and Facebook, and all those guys got started in our data centers. I was a co-founder of the professional services group there, so I’d fly all over the country, and I’d get sick every single time I flew. And then when you get sick, you get critical brain fog. And I was the guy who would go give a keynote because no one wanted to do it.

And I did it over and over, and I finally just developed this whole protocol to make sure I didn’t get sick. And now, I just don’t have to do all of that. But one of the things that has survived is I do use a nasal spray. And I like to have saline in it because it keeps you from getting cracks in your sinuses.

And I do sometimes accidentally spill silver particles, silver nanoparticles into it, and I think that’s something that’s been of benefit to me over time. Um, there’s other times when I might have taken a topical silver nanoparticle gel and just smeared it right inside my sinuses at the instructions of a doctor actually. And I’ve also found benefits from that. So, um, if you’re going, Dave, why are you talking like that? Well, you’ll just have ask yourself. Maybe there’s a reason.

[00:25:46] Steve: Absolutely. And know we have just recently reformulated our, uh, silver wound gel, and so you might want to check that out as well.

[00:25:54] Dave: Oh, neat. All right, I’m going to order some. Uh, I haven’t seen the new stuff yet. I still have– it’s blue, the thing, right? The container.

[00:26:01] Steve: Yeah, it’s not blue anymore. I think we have new packaging and everything else for the new wound gel, but we’ve reformulated and have dressed it up a little bit, updated the formulation, and so it’s a great product.

[00:26:12] Dave: All right. I will order some, and I know you probably give us a code. I didn’t even check. There you go guys. Here is silverbiotics.com. Use code DAVE, 30% off. So I ask anyone who comes on the show to talk about their stuff like, look, give a discount for people listening to the show. So I know I’ve trained you guys to expect that, and I’ve also trained guests to say, you got to give something back because people are willing to spend an hour listening to our conversation.

We have to give them good information, and you got to give them discount. So that was actually a fat discount. Thank you. silverbiotics.com. Code DAVE. So I’m going to go there and order some myself because I know that my– well, my blue one is probably an older one, so I got to get the reformulated one. Okay. Let’s talk about cosmetic use.

[00:26:57] Steve: Yeah, cosmetic use, Silver Biotics. I’m a retired educator. I retired about seven years from teaching and came to work full-time for the company. I’ve actually been neighbors with the founders of the company for about 20 years, and that’s how it got invested with the silver products anyway.

 But before that, I had no idea that silver products even existed. Anyway, so since then, I’ve been formulating new products, new cosmetics. So we have a full range of, uh, healthcare creams, which have the same silver nanoparticles in it, has the same properties as the silver gel, but it’s in a cream with– we have different, uh, scents.

We have a lavender scent, and a grapefruit scent, and more scents are coming. But we also have a facial serum, uh, which contains basically three ingredients. It has silver nanoparticles in it. It has high hyaluronic acid, and a little bit of glycerin for moisturizing purposes. And so we have those cosmetics available, which are great products.

[00:27:59] Dave: Got it. And just to be clear, it’s silver biotic or biotics.com?

[00:28:04] Steve: Silver Biotics.

[00:28:06] Dave: With an s. Okay.

[00:28:07] Steve: With an s.

[00:28:07] Dave: Yeah. silverbiotics.com. Code DAVE. There we go. I found it. And here’s the blue bottle I was looking for. That’s the bottle though, not the tube. All right. I am actually going to get some of the topical stuff to play around with because it’s your new one. Um, yeah, it’s new packaging. Cool. I love it. What about wrinkles? What about acne? Uh, what about just making your face look good? What do we know about silver in that, or is there nothing going on?

[00:28:37] Steve: Well, there is. It’s the same properties as immune support. Again, bacteria, microbes, molds, yeast are on the skin as well. They’re just opportunistic, waiting to cause a problem. And so we do take care of that bioload of the pathogens on the surface of the skin as well as inside the body.

And so we support the immune system that way. For an example, if you get a cut, if you get a scrape, what’s happening here? The epidermis has been scraped off. Well, the epidermis is a layering of cells that are dead on top and alive on the bottom. But if you scrape all those dead cells away, you provide a food source for those microbes, and that’s called an infection. And so what the silver nanoparticles do is, basically, take care of those pathogens so the skin can heal like it’s supposed to heal.

[00:29:32] Dave: Got it. You have the new anti-aging facial serum, and you have skin cream unscented. I’m a guy, which means I’m lazy. And if I wanted to smear this stuff on my face to make my face healthier, which one would be the one to use?

[00:29:48] Steve: The one, if you’re a guy, probably the unscented, unless you like lavender or grapefruit.

[00:29:53] Dave: It would be the skin cream though, not the anti-aging serum? What is the difference between the two?

[00:29:56] Steve: Oh, well, the serum has hyaluronic acid in it. So what it does is it plumps the skin like hyaluronic acid serums do, and, uh, it takes care of fine lines and wrinkles.

[00:30:09] Dave: Okay, cool. So hyaluronic acid is also a component of collagen. Guys, you know I turned collagen into a billion-dollar industry over the last dozen years of talking about it, and, uh, one of the things that helps with joints, helps with wrinkles is– you actually have more hyaluronic acid in the body. When you get a filler in your face, if you do that, it’s made out of hyaluronic acid.

[00:30:33] Steve: Yeah, and our skin creams do have a small percentage of hyaluronic acid as well, but if you want that really high percentage of hyaluronic acid, facial serum is the product that you want.

[00:30:43] Dave: Okay. Good deal. So that’s how you would pick those things. So I am definitely getting a refresh because I know I have a bottle of the silver on my bathroom counter. I hadn’t looked at the newest formulation for the gel, so I will pick that up. And what else should we know about silver?

What are the things that you want to say that maybe you haven’t really talked about before? It’s okay to hypothesize here if there’s some things we’re saying. Well, we see this clinically, but we don’t have a double-blind trial. It’s weird how clinical evidence, what doctors see in patients is a form of evidence that’s oftentimes more useful than clinical trials that are funded by people with a prepaid outcome.

[00:31:26] Steve: For example, uh, we can talk about antibiotic resistance.

[00:31:30] Dave: Oh, let’s.

[00:31:32] Steve: That’s a big topic out there because there’s some nasty bugs out there. MRSA and VRE, those are the fancy letters for very, very bad bacteria that have become antibiotic resistant. It turns out that those antibiotics in there, the kinds of penicillins, the sulfas, whatever, they become part of the bacteria’s metabolism. And so when those bacteria try and metabolize those, it basically destroys them. But guess what? Life is smart. And so the bacteria basically evolve a way to metabolize around those antibiotics, and so the antibiotics do not inhibit the growth of them anymore. 

Well, great thing about silver is there is no known antibiotic resistance to the silver nanoparticles. It just inhibits the growth no matter what bug it is. No matter what microbial agent it is, it inhibits the growth either directly or indirectly. It’s called modes of action. Turns out that bacteria sometimes are not very smart, so they see something, they’ll bring it in. Well, it turns out, when they bring the silver nanoparticles inside them, the silver actually will tie up a lot of the proteins and even the DNA replication to inhibit the growth of that organism.

[00:33:00] Dave: Have you looked at using this in agriculture? It seems like these evil companies that are making industrial beef, meat products, or chickens where they’re adding huge amounts of antibiotics to the feed– what would happen if they just added some Silver Biotics instead?

[00:33:16] Steve: We have a whole pet line with the Silver Biotics. It’s called Pet Vet. And so we have an immune supplement for pets as well as wound care for animals. And it turns out that the studies that we’ve done on it, the scientific studies we’ve done on it, basically tell us that it works the same for those animals as it does for us.

[00:33:39] Dave: Okay. I like that. I mean, do you have an industrial agriculture operation? I mean, are there small farmers out there or larger farmers who could start using this with cattle and chickens? Because I’m just tired of people destroying the soil with glyphosate and antibiotic overuse. This is affecting all life on the planet. We have to biohack that now. 

[00:33:57] Steve: It is. It is. There’s no question because those chemicals are long-lived in the environment, it turns out. And what happens when it rains? Well, it washes all that down to the streams, wherever the streams are, drinking water. So, yeah, I think it’s a big issue. And we’ve had some people try it with different agriculture, and they’ve been successful with it as well.

[00:34:20] Dave: And are you guys providing that to them?

[00:34:22] Steve: Yeah.

[00:34:23] Dave: Okay, good deal. So small farmers or larger farmers could reach out and talk about this. Is it cost effective compared to large truckloads of antibiotics that they’re putting in our alleged food?

[00:34:35] Steve: Yes. Yeah, it’s very cost effective.

[00:34:37] Dave: So they could save money. They can still have similar or better results than using, basically big pharma antibiotics in our food. So this is one of those other things. That’s why you support small farmers as well, because they’re the ones who would be likely to do this. Small farmers are worried about, did the animal thrive? Is it healthy?

It’s funny. When their animals are healthy, you are healthy. And when their animals are not healthy, when you eat those animals, you’re not healthy, and the soil made by those animals isn’t healthy, which means the plants made by those animals aren’t healthy. So I’m a huge fan of replacing antibiotics wherever we can.

And silver is one of those wow, fundamental things that I’m a real believer in. And I do believe particle size matters. You may get results making your own silver particles electrically. I did that many years ago, but it comes with a silver toxicity risk. And that is a real thing. But if there was a zombie apocalypse, would I want a nine-volt battery and a piece of silver? Actually, yeah. But in the meantime, I’ll take my Silver Biotics because it works way better without all the risk. So there’s the biohacking short take on silver and how that works.

[00:35:48] Steve: Yeah, for sure. And that’s one thing I want to go over a little bit, is how safe our particle is. Our product actually goes in the body and it comes out of the body within usually 24 to 74 hours, depending on the body type. I give that range out there because we’ve had clinical trials with human ingestion studies that it’s cleared out of the body in 24 hours, and some patients, it clears out up to 72 hours, depending on the testing. So we can give that range. The problem is with what we call your ionic silver products, stuff that you make in the garage with a nine-volt battery. It’s ionic. It’s pure ionic. There’s no silver nanoparticles there. It is just single silver atoms that have lost an electron. They’re Ag plus.

[00:36:32] Dave: They’re not oxidized.

[00:36:34] Steve: Right. And the problem is that those tend to stick around in the body. And if there’s a large enough concentration, it turns out that they get deposited in the adipose tissue of the dermis.

[00:36:45] Dave: It’s actually toxic metal at those levels.

[00:36:49] Steve: It is. Yeah. The EPA supports those. They call those LD50s. But it turns out that it’s not necessarily super toxic because it does get trapped in the adipose tissue. But the problem then is you go out in the sunlight, and now you’re a photographic film, and the silver gets reduced to a gray black, and you turn a blue color. It’s called argyria.

[00:37:14] Dave: Yeah. There was a guy who ran for office a while back who was blue. When you watch the X-Men, what’s the guy’s name? Beast, the blue professor. He looked like that, but without all the muscles. And he’s like, yeah, I took too much silver a long time ago. This is why I actually don’t use silver that’s electrically generated like that.

But I would if I was really sick and there was no other choice, because it would work, but there’s that risk, and being blue is not my look. I want you guys to understand that different types of silver do different things, and nanoparticles here with clinical studies backing them up, at the right concentrations, it really does appear to be a real biohack. 

And the fact that regulators are uncomfortable with it usually means that it’s competing with a more profitable line of business. And since silver’s been around for thousands of years, it’s hard to patent it. But I think you guys do have some protections because of your nanoparticle size and the way you’re oxidizing it. Is this patent-protected?

[00:38:14] Steve: It is patent-protected. Yeah. I think we have about 30 patents on our products right now.

[00:38:18] Dave: Okay. There you go. So guys, it turns out there’s all these little interesting pathways you can go down in biohack and go, well, what’s going on? But the deal is, if your gut’s working perfectly, you have no skin issues, and you never get sick, is this where you want to invest your first biohacking dollar? I don’t know. Maybe you want to take a nootropic, and that’s okay.

I do find though, that a huge number of people don’t understand that inside your sinuses is right next to your brain. And when you have a bacterial growth there, those bacteria make something called endotoxins. And endotoxins are internally generated toxins. They’re called lipopolysaccharides for the most part. 

These are also made by bad bacteria in your gut. But when you make lipopolysaccharides in the sinuses right next to the brain, they’re a source of brain fog. If you’re exposed to toxic mold, you tend to make more aggressive types of lipopolysaccharides. But having sinuses that are clean is something that makes your brain work better.

So even if you think, I don’t really have much of a problem, I just cough up some gunk every now and then, strangely enough, having sinuses that don’t have a bacterial burden is a really good thing, and this is one of the ways to do it. And the code again, for you, it’s 30% off, so you save money. If this is the right biohack for you, it’s code DAVE, and it’s silverbiotics.com.

And again, if it sounds cool, yes. If it doesn’t sound like it’s your thing, then don’t. There’s no pressure. You don’t have to do every biohack on the planet. This is just a broad spectrum way to solve a bunch of different things. And it is something that I’ve had for, geez, seven or eight years in my medicine cabinet.

And I think there’s good evidence for it. We’ll just put it that way. Thank you so much for sharing all of this information. It’s great to be able to talk about it to the extent we get to talk about it, and, uh, I love the creativity here, but I got to ask you, I just tried placing my order and code DAVE didn’t work. What’s going on here?

[00:40:19] Steve: Oh. I’ll tell you what, we’ll get into that as soon as we finish here, and we’ll find out what’s going on and make sure your code works.

[00:40:24] Dave: Let me ask you to do something for listeners. dave, DAVE, and just Dave, all of them should do the same thing in your system because people get frustrated trying to type whichever one it is. And I know that’ll only be active for some amount of time after the show, so guys, when you hear this, if you want to do it, give it a try.

[00:40:44] Steve: We’ll get that fixed.

[00:40:45] Dave: All right. I’m looking forward to trying the new topical gel formula. I’m actually excited because I’m just about out of the one that I have. I don’t use it every day. I just use it when I have a need for it. Yay. You get to try something new. And I’m excited that we’re talking about something that’s been happening for thousands of years and that you’ve got clinical trials that show that it works. So, yet again, another ancient practice that now is scientifically backed. And it worked before it was scientifically backed. It’s so weird how that works.

[00:41:15] Steve: It’s just amazing to me, and I’m a student of history as well. And humans, we survived all kinds of things without technology. Well, how did we survive? Because we were able to, well, they, I should say, they were able to biohack their environment and get all the things they needed to survive. I mean, they lived a 100 years. That ability to biohack the environment to find out what they used and how they used it is invaluable.

[00:41:46] Dave: It is invaluable. And our ancestors were the most successful biohackers, that’s why they got to have children. That’s what it comes down to. They’re the ones who won. They’re the ones who didn’t die for whatever reason. And a large part of that was resilience. They built resilience. And strangely enough, those ancestors didn’t need permission to do that. They just did it all on their own. Who would’ve thought? All right, guys, I’ll see you on the next episode, and I will see you at the Biohacking Conference. I hope you can make it June 22nd through 24th in Orlando, Florida. biohackingconference.com.

[00:42:21] Steve: We’ll see you there.

[00:42:22] Dave: And of course, if you wanted to actually try out Silver Biotics, they’ll be there representing at the conference along with more than a 100 other companies making all the coolest biohacks.

[00:42:34] Steve: Well, thank you for having me. I sure appreciate it.