[00:00:00] Dave: You’re listening to The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. This is a live in-person show, which I absolutely prefer over Zoom or remote, but you know how podcasts are. The people that you want to hear from oftentimes aren’t where I am, and vice versa, with good microphones and all. So thanks for showing up in the same city, same time as me, Shaahin.

[00:00:23] Shaahin: Yeah, great to see. I always find face-to-face is better.

[00:00:25] Dave: Yeah, it’s just way more fun. So what are we going to talk about? What are you going to learn today? How about we talk with the Willy Wonka of Generation X? That’s a name I think you’ve earned, building a billion-dollar ecstasy business and not going to jail for it. Creating herbal ecstasy, being investigated by seven attorney generals, and not going to jail for it because there’s nothing wrong with selling herbal ecstasy. And this is back in the ’90s. This is a while ago, and you weren’t even 18 when you did that.

[00:00:59] Shaahin: No.

[00:01:00] Dave: Okay. So you guys interested yet? What does this drug kingpin from the ’90s got for us, except he’s also an Amazon expert. Since then, he’s been selling nootropics and a bunch of other stuff on Amazon as a very, very successful entrepreneur. So he’s also an author, a filmmaker, got a couple of his books here, like Billion: How I Became King of The Thrill Pill Cult. So basically, all around interesting guy, Shaahin Cheyenne.

[00:01:30] Shaahin: Perfect.

Timestamp 1

[00:01:31] Dave: When people are taking a lot of herbal ecstasy and they try to say your name three times fast, what happens?

[00:01:35] Shaahin: Unfortunately, you can’t get herbal XC anymore because they banned the key ingredient in it. We’re going to be doing a relaunch at some point.

[00:01:45] Dave: Are you serious? Are you just going to call it, like, fuck you, FDA?

[00:01:47] Shaahin: Fuck you, FDA.

[00:01:49] Dave: Dude, I’m serious. They’re going to come after you so bad. You should be respectful of those guys.

[00:01:53] Shaahin: In the United States, the key ingredient, which was ephedra at that time, is now no longer easily, readily, legal, and available, so–

[00:02:02] Dave: Ephedra.

[00:02:03] Shaahin: Ephedra, yeah. And for people who don’t know– I don’t blame anybody for not knowing because you haven’t been able to get that for close to 20 years here in the United States– ephedra is one of the oldest plants known to man.

[00:02:16] When they find these cavemen mummy-type things and these little pouches on them, they almost always have a little bit of ephedra in there. And ephedra is a stimulant, a central nervous system stimulant, and one of the most powerful, I think, plants known to men. So it was very effective.

[00:02:36] Dave: More than coca?

[00:02:38] Shaahin: So coca, if you process it, will have the effect of cocaine. Ephedra, you can have it just the way it is, and it will have that stimulating effect. Coca, if you know, if you ever travel to South or Central America, actually has the opposite effect when you have it in tea, when you see people having tea.

[00:02:57] Dave: Yeah. I would chew mouthfuls of it at altitude to feel better the first time I went to, I guess, go mountaineering in Ecuador and in Peru, for sure, all the times I’ve been there.

[00:03:07] Shaahin: It’s such a bummer you can’t get it. It’s such a bummer it’s illegal in the USA. It’s actually a really nice tea.

[00:03:12] Dave: And it’s not strong. It takes, I don’t know, 50 pounds to make a useful amount of cocaine or something. And guys, cocaine’s a terrible drug. You shouldn’t do it. It’s dumb, just to be really clear. And if you really like to wake up, there’s just better drugs for that, and there’s probably natural ways. Porn and cocaine, do similar things to your dopamine receptors. So why would you do that?

[00:03:35] Shaahin: Yeah, especially don’t do them at the same time.

[00:03:38] Dave: Never thought of that. Yeah, I see why they call you the Willy Wonka. So you’re already doing all these things. You’re just an interesting guy. You’ve been homeless. You lived out of your car. You fled Iran when you were five years old carrying your family on your back. Do I have the story right?

[00:03:53] Shaahin: More or less. Yeah. So we left Iran 1979, the Iranian Revolution.

[00:03:59] Dave: So really serious time. With literally nothing.

[00:04:03] Shaahin: And we came here. My parents were basically working their fingers to the bone trying to make a living. And I was like, dude, there’s a guy driving down the street in a Ferrari with a beautiful blonde in the seat next to her. How do I get that? And I quickly realized that there was no laid out path. They don’t teach you that in school. They don’t teach you entrepreneurship in school.

[00:04:22] Dave: Of course not.

[00:04:23] Shaahin: So I bailed.

[00:04:25] Dave: Bailed on high school.

[00:04:26] Shaahin: Yeah, before 9th grade.

[00:04:29] Dave: So you dropped out in 8th grade.

[00:04:31] Shaahin: Dropped out. Yeah.

[00:04:33] Dave: What did your parents have to say then?

[00:04:34] Shaahin: I cut all ties. Good or bad, I read that book, Think and Grow Rich. I don’t know if you–

[00:04:41] Dave: I never heard of it. I read it when I was 16 and did all the stuff in it. This stuff doesn’t work. I literally was like on my mirror, I’ll have a million dollars by the time I’m 23, and I only had $6 million by the time I was 26. The thing doesn’t work out. No, it totally works. So we were both influenced at a young age by Napoleon.

[00:04:57] Shaahin: Yeah, yeah. And his stuff is now pretty controversial. We won’t go into that. So I thought to myself–

[00:05:03] Dave: You can’t cancel Napoleon Hill. That’s stupid. If you’re trying to cancel Napoleon Hill, pick a guy who’s alive to cancel, for God’s sake. It’s stupid.

[00:05:11] Shaahin: It inspired a lot of us. So I take it for what it’s worth. It worked for me, is what I can say. And I was 15. I decided, hey man, you know what? I’m like sink or swim. Let’s go. I don’t know what I’m going to do, Dave. I’m going to go find my fame and fortune. I found a mentor.

[00:05:27] Dave: So how were you living? You’re in 9th grade, you’ve cut ties with your parents. Did you have a car? How did you do this?

[00:05:32] Shaahin: I had a period of time, and then I lost it to a mob boss. Long story. And I got into the electronic music scene at the time.

[00:05:41] Dave: So you were a raver back when Crystal Method was coming out.

[00:05:45] Shaahin: That’s right. And what I would do is I managed to make friends with everybody in the clubs because they knew me. I didn’t do drugs. I would just go into the clubs late at night and observe what was going on? I would observe the commerce happening in the clubs because I was interested in making money. I wasn’t interested in partying. I wanted to know, how do you make money? And I quickly realized that the DJs, broke ass– can we curse on this? I don’t know if we can curse. Broke ass motherfuckers. Always broke. The club promoters–

[00:06:16] Dave: Don’t tell Steve Aoki. He’s doing all right.

[00:06:18] Shaahin: That’s changed a lot. That’s changed a lot. This was early ’90s. And the club promoters, also broke. But these clubs would happen all the time. I thought to myself, man, they must be subsidized. And by the way, you asked me how I lived. I would sleep behind the speakers, glorious place to sleep. You’ve got that droning beat, and you could get a solid three, four hours with that metronome behind you. Nice Delta waves. It’s fantastic.

[00:06:43] So I started looking around, and I saw these guys. They were like subsidizing. They give some money to the club promoters. They give some money to the DJ. It’s just keeping the electronic music scene going. And I was like, what are these guys doing? And of course, they were dealing the drugs.

[00:07:00] Now, I looked back to my teenage years, and I thought to myself, this is going to be amazing. And then I look back to my original life of crime where we were selling contraband in school, gum, nudie magazines, whatever.

[00:07:13] Dave: This is in 8th grade before you dropped out.

[00:07:14] Shaahin: Yeah. Before I dropped out.

[00:07:16] Dave: You’re the ultimate bad influence so far.

Timestamp 2

[00:07:19] Shaahin: Yeah. And I just realized that I was really fucking bad at crime because we’d be really good at making money and always getting caught, a 100% getting caught. So I was like, dude, I can’t fucking do crime. It’s just a bad idea. And then it occurred to me, what’s the main drug that’s happening?

[00:07:39] And it was this drug, MDMA, methyl​enedioxy​methamphetamin, ecstasy. Here’s the problem. It was now illegal, and the supply of ecstasy had dried up. So people were taking all kinds of shit, trying to get the effects of ecstasy. They weren’t really taking ecstasy. So I thought to myself, man, if I could come up with a natural alternative that wasn’t illegal, I could maybe do something. Now, I didn’t realize that I was broke. I didn’t have any money. I didn’t have anywhere to live, but went about the journey of creating.

[00:08:16] Dave: Wow. Okay. So you put together herbal ecstasy, and what was in it?

[00:08:23] Shaahin: So initially, what I did was I went down to Chinatown, and I was like, give me all the herbs that do something. They’re like, what do you mean? This is for heat. This is for cold. This is for cough. And I was like, fuck. All right. I got to go back to the drawing board. So I did what anybody in the early ’90s would do. I pulled out this big book called the yellow pages, and I went to the library and got all these books, and I found this guy. His name is Andrew Weil.

[00:08:49] Dave: I’ve interviewed him on the show at his restaurant. Yeah. He is old-school. I love Andy. Okay.

[00:08:53] Shaahin: Old-school guy. He had written the textbook for drugs in the early ’80s for schools that taught people, this is what LSD is. This is what mushrooms are. I’m like, this guy’s going to be the perfect guy. And of course, I dialed, and the first ring on the phone was him. And I said, hey, man, this is what I’m trying to do. Can you help me? He’s like, who the fuck is this? How old are you? And I’m like, 16. I think I was just a little bit older than 15. I said, 16. He goes, okay.

[00:09:23] And he gave me some suggestions, and I went and got some books, and I started getting ingredients. I somehow managed to get myself a girlfriend at that time. I don’t know how, being dead broke. And her dad was some school administrator, so he would leave early in the morning. I would sneak in through the back as soon as the dad was gone, and we’d be mixing stuff up in the kitchen.

[00:09:48] Dave: This is like some Ferris Bueller’s Day Off kind of story is what it sounds like.

[00:09:54] Shaahin: Yeah. And so eventually we came up with a formula that really worked, and we would just test it on the teenagers in the neighborhood. I’d be like, hey, you guys like going to raves? They’d be like, yeah. You guys want to try a new drug? And at first, I didn’t have the money to buy the capsule machine. So we would roll them up into balls and put them in the oven. I tried to get as close to the capsule size as possible, but you have to take 20 goo-filled tablets. But when we got the formula working, it felt in-fucking-credible.

[00:10:25] Dave: Ephedra can get you loopy. Yeah.

[00:10:28] Shaahin: Oh yeah. But it wasn’t just Ephedra. It was like about 10 or 12 different ingredients that made it, because if you take just Ephedra, it’ll make your heart beat really fast. Yeah. It’s not a well-balanced formula. So the Chinese rarely use it by itself in traditional medicine. Yeah. So we got a formula that worked, and in all my youthful exuberance and wisdom, I decided to take it to a club, and now I was like, all right, how am I going to sell this fucking stuff? I got to find distribution for it. And I was like, you know what? The drug dealers. They don’t have any money.

[00:11:04] Dave: The organized-crimes must have loved you. Okay tell me what happened here.

[00:11:08] Shaahin: Walked into the club. From my club days, I knew who the biggest drug dealer was. Man, I was sweating. 16 years old. Walked into the club.

[00:11:16] Dave: Did you wear a suit?

[00:11:17] Shaahin: I should have. I had no money for a suit.

[00:11:20] Dave: Just like Miami Vice or anything.

[00:11:22] Shaahin: No, but what I did do is I had little baggies that looked like they would be a drug, with this butterfly on the front and just the letter E. And I walked up, and it was like– the older I get, the more and more I believe in just a little bit more woo woo, and I don’t know how it was possible, but synchronistic events. There’s a guy, his name is Kirby. He wrote a book about that called Synchronicity. I don’t know if you read it.

[00:11:49] Dave: I haven’t read that book, but you can manufacture synchronicity. I know people who teach that stuff. Yeah.

[00:11:54] Shaahin: Okay. Yeah. So it’s an amazing thing, but the older–

[00:11:57] Dave: By the way, I meditated you appearing here.

[00:11:59] Shaahin: You manifested me. So I walked up to this guy, and he was a rough-looking dude. Now everybody’s got a tattoo on their face, or maybe two. Back then, if you had a tattoo on your face, it was serious.

[00:12:10] Dave: You you were a murderer pretty much.

[00:12:11] Shaahin: You were a murderer pretty much. Yeah. It was not normal. And this guy had tattoos on his face. He had the gold teeth. He had body guards. I walked up to him. He was like, what do you want kid? And I was trying to get the courage to do it, and I was like, fuck it. I’m going to do this now. I pulled out the backpack, and I was like, you got to sell this. He’s like, get the fuck out of here.

[00:12:29] And just in that moment, two people walked up to him. They wanted ecstasy. Guess what? He didn’t have any. And so it was a choice for him in that moment between selling what I was selling, and selling nothing. And I just held my ground. He said, don’t fucking leave.

[00:12:46] And so I’m staying in that club. I am sweating. He took the whole backpack, which was like, 500, a 1,000 doses. And I came back. They motioned me forward. The bodyguards moved aside. I thought the dude was going to kill me. I was thinking, I’m going to wash his car. I’ll walk his dog. I’ll do anything. This dude doesn’t kill me.

[00:13:04] Turns out he sold out and everybody in the club was pointing and hands up in the air. We love this stuff. We love it. And the guy’s like, how soon can you get me more.

[00:13:21] Dave: Wow. And how much did you pay for it?

[00:13:23] Shaahin: So it cost me in those days, and the price didn’t change for the majority of time, just like Coca Cola. It was 25 cents a dose. And we were selling it between 20 and $25.

[00:13:29] Dave: That was your retail price. But what was your wholesale price?

[00:13:30] Shaahin: It was half.

[00:13:30] Dave: So you’re getting 12.50 for 25 cents. Oh my God.

[00:13:33] Shaahin: 25cents. And it was cash. It was all cash business. So after that, we did Lollapalooza. We did the entire tour with Beastie Boys and all those guys. We were doing easily 2 to 5 million a show. Cash. I had to buy vans to move cash.

[00:13:54] Dave: How did you handle security for that?

[00:13:55] Shaahin: It’s a really good question. Again, in my youthful exuberance and intelligence of a 16-year-old, I had none.

[00:14:03] Dave: You probably got a lot of it stolen off the–

[00:14:05] Shaahin: So much of it stolen.

[00:14:06] Dave: It happened with my t-shirt business when I was 16, yeah. I was selling t-shirts at Santa Barbara for Halloween. Halloween t-shirts. Yeah, one time, I’m like, how come I have no more money than– one guy with the bulky jacket. I should have jumped on him and pounded him, but I was a kid too.

[00:14:21] Shaahin: I write about that in book, actually. It’s really interesting. And I had a total solution for it, and it’s a great business act. I know it’s Bulletproof, biohacking. So my business hack for that was what I called suicide margins. If you make enough money, you can solve any problems. So that was my solution. It was just, hey, throw money at it. So I can just make more money. Solves all he problems.

[00:14:43] Dave: It’s true, I know some wealthy people who spend all of their time trying to avoid taxes. And the easiest thing to do is make more money. And then if you pay the taxes, you still keep more, versus taking all these legal risks and going to jail for 18 months for fucking around and finding out and all that.

[00:15:00] I’m not a friend of taxes, but you don’t need to be hyper aggressive on that stuff because, like you said, improve your business a little bit. So you figured this out at a young age, and you lost some money, but there was so much left over. Did you buy convertibles, and strippers, and all that stuff?

[00:15:17] Shaahin: We had all that stuff. Any vehicular thing we had–

[00:15:22] Dave: You were 17 at the time?

[00:15:24] Shaahin: Yeah. I was under 21 for all of the herbal ecstasy days.

[00:15:27] Dave: With unlimited money, under 18, and no parenting.

[00:15:31] Shaahin: Yeah, we were printing money.

[00:15:32] Dave: Did you ever call your parents up and just be like, I left a million dollars in the garden or something?

[00:15:38] Shaahin: Look, I took care of my parents. Afterwards, I came back. I don’t if you know much about Persian culture, but as long as you made money, all sins are forgiven.

[00:15:50] Dave: That’s the difference between India and Persia. India’s like, you’re not a doctor, not a lawyer, not an engineer, you don’t exist. And they’re like, show me the money. Yeah, I got you. A key member of my team is Persian, and I hear the stories. Yeah. So this is amazing. So you came back. You made good of yourself despite yourself, but then you got seven different state governments coming after you. What was their charge? What did the say?

Timestamp 3

[00:16:18] Shaahin: So nobody had ever done what we had done, and this is the really interesting part. Back in those days, I’m sure you remember because you’re a incredible pioneer in this industry, was that vitamins and supplements were not sexy like they are now. You didn’t have–

[00:16:34] Dave: It weren’t them sexy, dude. The whole biohacking thing was not about making them sexy. Okay.

[00:16:38] Shaahin: Back then you went to the natural products expose, all the big trade shows, and it was fucking boring, man. It was like round label– it was all like [Inaudible]. There was nothing sexy about it. So here we are. And they were like, well, if it’s a drug, we can regulate it and get these guys out of here.

[00:16:57] And mind you, right at that time, there was a company which will remain nameless, but they had spent billions, with a B, creating a little blue pill. And this blue pill was the answer to what? To Prozac, which was in the ’80s. And what did Prozac do? What was the main side effect of Prozac for males and females?

[00:17:17] Dave: Gee, I wonder if it’s similar to what high dose methylene blue does, because it’s also an SSRI. And it rhymes with ED?

[00:17:24] Shaahin: There you go. There you go.

[00:17:25] Dave: There you go, guys. Wake up without a kickstand if you’re on SSRIs.

[00:17:30] Shaahin: Yeah, definitely a lot of guys waking up without a kickstand. But then their plan was foiled. They were going to be making billions and billions, stock price going up, everything crazy. But here’s this little Persian kid. He’s not even 21, and he’s creating a billion dollars in revenue with a product that’s unregulated.

[00:17:53] Dave: And this was actually going to you in a corporate forum at this point?

[00:17:57] Shaahin: Yeah, so they came after me directly. I met every three-letter agency known to man. It was like someone’s got one of those strings, and they pull it open, and the trap door opens, and the pinata breaks, and all the stuff comes out. I was like, where are these guys coming– the IR this, the CI this, the ND this, the FD this. And all of a sudden, I’m on TV. And I’m on TV in a big way. I did every major station, every major talk show.

[00:18:22] Dave: So you even had the FTC and people come after

[00:18:25] Shaahin: Oh yeah.

[00:18:26] Dave: Of all the regulatory agencies, they have some of the most power. But they also are the ones that enforce truthfulness to the best of their ability, which I like. You are not allowed to lie. That’s a really good business rule. Don’t lie to your customers. So I’m like, if all the three-letter agencies that, I would say, are doing the right thing, the FTC is probably at the top of my list.

[00:18:51] Shaahin: Yeah. Look, I think it’s all good on paper until you realize the bureaucracy of big government. And then it stops working because you’ve got a lot of lawyers that are given a directive. And now, as opposed to doing what’s better for humanity and for the public, they’re just trying to meet their directive. And that was a problem because we weren’t hurting anybody.

[00:19:17] Still to this day, Dave, billion dollars sold, not a single report of an adverse reaction with herbal XC ever. Challenging. We had lawsuits. None of them stuck. Nobody proved anything because the product was safe. In general, supplements, if they’re put together correctly–

[00:19:38] Dave: Okay. And they don’t have lead, and metals, and they don’t inhibit liver function because you’re taking too much of them. Some of the Chinese herbs are a little aggressive that way, but okay. Well-formulated are very safe. I got you. I got you. I just don’t want listeners to believe all herbs are safe. There’s a lot of shit on Amazon right now that is really concerning. Some of the he shou wu for gray hair. Yeah, go 20% above the recommended dose, and your liver shuts down. Oops.

[00:20:04] Shaahin: Oh, yeah, you can die from herbs, for sure. No question. If it’s incorrectly formulated. But look at the Chinese, man. They’ve been taking all that stuff since the dawn of time in hospitals. They give it to you in China, and they’re doing just fine.

[00:20:17] Dave: They know a few things.

[00:20:18] Shaahin: They know a few things. So what happened is all these agencies came after us with the directive of getting rid of this key ingredient, and really with the directive of getting rid of us because nobody had ever used plan recreationally in a product. So they’re all going like, dude, we’ve got supplements here. We’ve got drugs here. How do we get this guy? This is not even on our radar. And he’s making hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

[00:20:48] Dave: Yeah. They didn’t get their cut.

[00:20:50] Shaahin: They didn’t get– okay.

[00:20:51] Dave: Did you think of just paying them their cut in food coupons? I don’t know how you–

[00:20:56] Shaahin: When you’re a rebellious teenager, you don’t think that. Okay. I’ll tell you this. And by the way, there’s a film coming out about this. It’ll be on the next two years. It’s a big studio that’s making my life story based on the book.

[00:21:09] Dave: Guy’s, the book is Billion, by the way.

[00:21:12] Shaahin: Yeah. Billion.

[00:21:12] Dave: When did you write this? Is this new? During COVID?

[00:21:16] Shaahin: Yeah. Billion: How I Became King of The Throw Pill Cult. But because of the strike and everything, the film’s on hold, but it’ll come back. So the thing of it is this. When these agencies come after you, they usually just ask for money. And you can pay them, and then it goes away, which, what the fuck? And my lawyers came to me, and they’re like, dude, just pay them. You’re not going to beat the government.

[00:21:42] AD BREAK

[00:21:43] This is how aggressive things were. I had on staff close to a dozen attorneys, on staff. I’m not talking of outside firms. I’m talking just my staff of attorneys.

[00:21:52] Dave: Yeah, you were definitely the young testosterone-fueled kid. And this is a lesson learned for you. If you’re an entrepreneur– there’s a lot of entrepreneurs listening to the show– it’s a bad idea to get in a fight with your government because they have a monopoly on guns.

[00:22:08] Unless you live in Texas, but even then they have more than you. Seriously, governments have a monopoly on violence. They can take anything they want from you at the end of the day. If you think it’s not legal, if a judge says that they can do it, they will. So you should be respectful of them and recognize the actual game you’re playing, which is that some agencies, they’re sponsored by a business.

[00:22:30] So you should be a good corporate sponsor in whatever the way your industry is. And oil and gas does it one way. Big pharma does it another way. But at the end of the day, the government wants business to happen. So there will be jobs. Because if you have a lot of peasants without jobs, they get pitchforks, and then you get a new government.

[00:22:44] And this is just how the world works. So be a good entrepreneurial citizen, and you can be disruptive, but it doesn’t mean that you get to break all the rules or even follow the rules the way you want. Because you’ll experience what you experienced, right?

[00:23:00] Shaahin: Yeah, yeah. So they came after me. I should have. You were absolutely right. And no one’s ever said that to me. So I appreciate you for saying that because I really think that way. I’m like, dude, if I was smarter, I would have kept a lot more of my money, and I would have just paid them off. You just pay them. But I was so rebellious, Dave.

[00:23:16] Dave: I was the same in my 30s. I had ODD, oppositional defiant disorder, and OCD. It’s like never. Over my dead body, which is just a lack of wisdom. And also, some people say without selling out, you’re in a system, and there are some things where if it’s unethical, you just don’t do it. I don’t lie, for instance.

[00:23:41] And if there’s two paths forward, one of them is a better path that allows your work in the world to reach what it’s doing, and it’s not harming others. That’s how the game is played. 48 Laws of Power actually got me to think differently. That changed my whole life, but I read that when I was 26. That explained how tech VCs work.

[00:24:04]  So just in the interest of coaching our listeners and sharing some knowledge, it doesn’t feel good to realize, oh my God, I’m up against a power that’s greater than me.  And it’s not fair. And you can heal your sense of injustice and just recognize the world is quite often unjust.

[00:24:25] And once you do that and you don’t have roll on the ground screaming, and whining, and asking someone to change your diaper or whatever, you’ll probably be a happier person, and the amount of injustice in the world won’t change at all.

[00:24:37] Shaahin: Now you’re talking like a hacker, and I love that about you. I’ll tell you why. What I’m hearing you say is you don’t always have to go through a brick wall. Sometimes you can just stop and go around.

[00:24:50] Dave: All right. This is a story from Iran. Actually, was this Iran? No. It was probably in Kuwait, if I’m remembering right. When the invasion happened, some generals were like, let’s get into this vault full of gold. This actually really did happen. And I’m probably telling the story poorly.

[00:25:09] So they threw tanks and explosives at the doors of this big heavy vault. And when the place was retaken, the doors were destroyed. And they’re 10 feet thick or whatever. They could have, with two of the many things they tried, just gone through the wall. Just go to the side and blow your way in. But they didn’t.

[00:25:30] They threw everything at the doors because that’s how you’re supposed to do it. And there’s a certain mindset as hackers and entrepreneurs, like, well, that seems like a lot of work. So we’re fundamentally lazier than other people, which means we do it in the way that was the least amount of work, which means we got more done, which is the beneficial side of laziness, even though people don’t like to think of it that way, but it is.

[00:25:51] Shaahin: It’s true. It’s true. And I think probably one of the things one of my mentors has taught me in the last few years, which I think has been most impactful for me, is really the concept of you don’t know what you don’t know. And when I was in my 20s, I felt like I fucking know everything. And it’s probably the reason why herbal XC isn’t around today and not a multi-billion-dollar company, was because I thought I knew everything. If I knew then that I didn’t know, things would be different.

[00:26:21] Dave: So part of this is you probably have a traumatic childhood. People who have traumatic childhoods are more likely to be rebellious, especially in the early 20s. I have the same thing. So I was unwilling to ask for help. It’s like I’ll do this. I already know everything. I’ll do it myself. So back in 199– let’s see. Good God. This would have been in 1994. I’ve already been in Entrepreneur Magazine. I’m the first guy to sell anything over the internet. Did you know that?

[00:26:49] Shaahin: Wow. I didn’t know that.

[00:26:50] Dave: Yeah, the t-shirt said, “Caffeine, my drug of choice.”

[00:26:54] Shaahin: Oh, I love it.

[00:26:54] Dave: And e-commerce didn’t have a name. And we didn’t have web browsers or online payments. So people would mail me a check, and I would mail them the shirt out of my dorm room. I was just trying to pay for my college. But I got in my fat picture. I was like, you weren’t 300 pounds. I’m like, here’s my Entrepreneur Magazine picture when I look like a 300-pound lesbian. And I say lesbian because my testosterone is 200, and I look very androgynous in that photo. It’s on my website

[00:27:16] Shaahin: Don’t cancel Dave.

[00:27:17] Dave: You can cancel me if you want to. You should at least ask my preferred whatevers. So you can skirted the line. 

[00:27:24] Shaahin: I skirted that line pretty well. 

[00:27:27] Dave: I don’ think I crossed any– do you?

[00:27:33] Shaahin: You are safe, my friend.

[00:27:34] Dave: Are you feeling triggered?

[00:27:35] Shaahin: Just slightly, but the coffee made it better.

[00:27:38] Dave: You should unload that gun. Do you need to get a therapist? There. Now we’re all offended equally. This is great.

Timestamp 4

[00:27:48] Dave: But what I was trying to say when I distracted myself with my bad sense of humor is that that unwillingness to ask for help– that story, I’m there. I was also working in an auto parts warehouse, putting car parts in boxes.

[00:28:03] It was the most mind-numbing work, but it paid three times as much as working at Dairy Queen, which was the other option in the small town, where I was. So I did also weld Toyota truck frames. If you ever drove a Toyota, I worked on, I’m sorry. I wasn’t good. So I didn’t it for very long because I sucked.

[00:28:19] Regardless of all that, I had this idea, and I remember it so well. I’m like, the best product on the internet is books. It was 1994. And the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. And as an entrepreneur, when you get a really good idea and you can see the path, like this is– because you can organize them.

[00:28:39] So what did I do? I thought [Inaudible], and I didn’t do anything with it. I kept selling my t-shirts and shut the business down because it was too much work to put them in envelopes. And I did not ask for help. I don’t need to hire people. Much less, I was 60 miles from Silicon Valley.

[00:28:55] I could have driven there in 300-pound computer hacker and probably done some Amazon level stuff. But the point here is unwilling to ask for help. Meanwhile, Mark Andreessen, same thing. He does the first web browser, and I’ve got this first ecommerce. He goes to Silicon Valley, finds a guy who’s 50, Jim Clark, and says, hey, will you teach me?

[00:29:14] And Jim’s like, sure. And I’m like, I’ll do it all by myself. So who’s the idiot here. It was clearly me because I didn’t ask someone at least twice my age for help. I didn’t do that till much later in the aging space. It took me until I was about 27 to realize I don’t have to do it by myself. What age were you when you realized maybe you should get some good advice?

[00:29:33] Shaahin: I think it was long after because my ride was so wild, and crazy, and fast that I was just like, fuck it. Make more money. You got a problem? Make more money. Mob coming after you? Make more money. A government come after you? Make more money. It was my answer to everything.  

[00:29:48] Dave: Yeah. Kind of the war ship of [Inaudible].

[00:29:49] Shaahin: And I learned later that, look, money has two parts. And this was mind blowing revolution to me. Part one is making it. Part two, like we were discussing earlier, is fucking keeping it. That’s a whole other science.

[00:30:05] Dave: I made $6 million before I was 28. I’m with you, man. And people lose money easily. How did you lose it all?

[00:30:12] Shaahin: I didn’t lose it all. I had the wherewithal to keep a good amount of it. And I did the right things with that. I went on from there to inventing digital vaporization, which really, we were the first vaporizer company. I exited it, and the company went public. It was the first vape company to go public. I don’t endorse vaping at all. I think it’s not a good thing.

[00:30:34] Dave: Was this heated tobacco product or natural vape?

[00:30:37] Shaahin: So I had the patents and wrote the first book on the technology of actual vape.

[00:30:43] Dave: You didn’t do anyone a solid on that one. You’re going to do four lifetimes of karmic debt for that or what?

[00:30:48] Shaahin: No. Actually, the way we had built the devices has nothing to do with the vapes that you see now that cause injury, which, primarily is based on the fact that they had to get them small and convenient. The first vape that came out was ours. It was called the Vapir, and it was about the size of a ketchup bottle. And I had done deep dive. We use plastics that would not erode when exposed to amounts of heat.

[00:31:11] The heating element, and this was key, was made from ceramics. because when the heating element is metal, you get little metal parts, especially degrading as they go up and coming into the lungs. You don’t want metal in your lungs. So our device was revolutionary.

[00:31:24] Plus we had patents on digital regulation of temperature. So turns out that you heat tobacco up to a certain level, you get smoke, tar, carbon monoxide, but if you can heat it digitally accurately to just below the point of that, you get all the active elements without any of the smoke, tar, carbon monoxide.

[00:31:43] Dave:  Yeah. So you did that. I was in Dubai and Turkey last week or a week before, and you see it all over the place, the heated tobacco products. They’re doing exactly that. I’ve even met with Philip Morris because they’re like, what else could we do besides tobacco that wouldn’t be harmful?

Timestamp 5

[00:31:54] Shaahin: Yeah. You will appreciate this because I know everybody rips off your stuff that you did earlier on, is that I’m watching this fricking documentary called Big Vape that’s on Netflix, fascinating, about the– what are they called? The Juul company. It’s sold billions of dollars to whatever to, I think– she ended up buying them, and I was like, fuck. That was all my shit. I’m looking at him. The pitch that they’re giving was my pitch a few years before they even came around. And I had all my stuff patented. I had it all set, but they were smarter. They were smarter, again.

[00:32:30] Dave: European patents or something?

[00:32:31] Shaahin: No, you don’t know what you don’t know. I sold the company. I exited in 2006 for reasons that were not reasonable, again.  Like you’re saying, it’s so important to ask for help. But I was going through the brick wall rather than going around it. And I think they were willing to make the compromises necessary to make it convenient.

[00:32:56] The smallest we got it down to was a cigar because I didn’t want to make that metal heating element. I wanted it to be ceramic. I wanted it to have all these things, but they were willing to make those compromises, and they got it very, very small by using certain chemicals evaporated with lower temperatures, which meant lower energy usage on it.

[00:33:14] AD BREAK

[00:33:14] Dave: Wow. What a crazy story so far. Now, I want to ask you something that’s maybe a little bit more psychological, emotional, metaphysical. So you’ve pretty much made and crashed the herbal ecstasy thing. You’ve been fighting really hard. Sounds like you exited your vape thing not on the best of terms. Did you feel discouraged, defeated, like no matter what I do, it’s not working right? Or were you still like, I have so much money? It doesn’t matter.

[00:33:47] Shaahin: Money helps a lot.

[00:33:48] Dave: It does. Absolutely.

[00:33:49] Shaahin: Yeah. I think a good friend of mine and a teacher of mine would always say, the guy that said money is the root of all evil didn’t have any. So I definitely think money makes life easier. It makes it more convenient. I was very happy with the money that I had. I don’t have to work anymore. I didn’t have to work back then.

[00:34:06] Dave: So you’re comfortable at least.

[00:34:08] Shaahin: Yeah, it’s not like I was so crushed, but when you’re a high achiever and anytime you have an exit– this is a very common thing for guys and girls who have exits in their companies. They exit. They open up their phone. The bank account pops up. There’s a few extra zeros at the end. And they’re like, dude, where’s my ticker tape parade? What the fuck? Nothing.

[00:34:29] Dave: It’s actually very lonely when that happens because you can’t tell anyone or they just become jealous.

[00:34:33] Shaahin: That’s where you find out where your real friends are. For me, those exits were okay. I made the money. The money was there. It was great. but you probably understand this as well. You also end up selling your baby. For me, I’ve never chased money. Money’s been easy for me.

[00:34:49] Dave: Hold on a second. When you were young, you were chasing money.

[00:34:51] Shaahin: I wasn’t chasing money.

[00:34:53] Dave: It was just coming to you because you cared about it, but you weren’t chasing it. Okay. I see what you’re saying.

[00:34:56] Shaahin: Yeah, I genuinely was in the buzz of what I was doing. And I think back to this. I was like, was I chasing money? No. Every time I’ve tried to chase money in my life, it’s been the biggest waste of time. So I learned early on in my 20s that that doesn’t work for me. I got to work with people who I enjoy working, with first and foremost.

[00:35:15] If you’re an asshole, I don’t want to work with you. There’s no price for that in my life. And I want to work with people that are doing cool shit where our missions can meet and where we can create a bigger impact. Steve Jobs would say a dent in the universe together. That’s what’s important to me.

[00:35:33] A lot of people will say bullshit or whatever, And at the end of the day, they end up just chasing money. I really don’t give a fuck. I’ve had enormous amounts of wealth, and I’ve been as broke as you can get, reverse debt. And honestly, it’s better to have money, but at a certain point, there is something as enough, and then you can do cool shit that really matters to you and that you enjoy doing, like stuff that like you and I are doing.

[00:35:57] Dave: It’s important. And for the average person listening to this, if you’re not an entrepreneur, even if you are, it’s not like the opportunity to make 10 plus million dollars comes along even for entrepreneurs. It’s exceptionally rare. Bulletproof, when it had a $100 million dollars, there’s only 17,000 companies in the US of any size above a 100 million a year in revenues. It’s a very small number.

[00:36:21] And each time you add a zero, you’re taking out 99% of the likely things. So it’s exceptionally rare. And so you can have that sense of gratitude. But once you have an exit like that– that’s why you see so much enormous wealth concentrates these days. Because you have many millions of dollars, a million or two here, a million or two there, and some of those are going to pay off.

[00:36:42] But if it’s your first million, taking half of whatever you make and locking it in a bank where you can’t spend it on stupid shit, I wish I’d have known that the first time I made $6 million. I’ve made that mistake more than once, I’ll just say. It’s easy to lose what you make.

[00:36:56] Shaahin: Yeah, boring, non-sexy investments, real estate, blue trip stuff, treasury bills.

[00:37:02] Dave: Right, right. Although in the US, treasury bills– I’m not sure how the US currency is doing over time, and debt, and all that, but that’s a whole different discussion.

Timestamp 6

[00:37:12] Dave: So you didn’t get discouraged, but you also didn’t stop. A lot of people I’ve known, they make their money, and they put on some weight, and they stop doing stuff that matters. And John Gray just talked about this. Your testosterone drops when that happens, when there isn’t a challenge, there isn’t a mission, there isn’t a little bit of adversity that you’re overcoming. I don’t know. I’m going to buy some art. So how did you avoid becoming that guy?

[00:37:40] Shaahin: I started a family, so family first. My family is the most important thing. We’ve got a beautiful boy who I absolutely love, and it’s been one of the greatest challenges and adventures in my life, having–

[00:37:55] Dave: Still pretty young?

[00:37:57] Shaahin: Yeah, he’s 10 now, which is incredible. So I think that’s been really inspiring. And also,  one of the things I learned along the way is that, especially guys like us, we have a diverse range of interests, and we have a tendency to be like, man, I’m interested in this. Let me make it into a business and make fucking money from it. It’s just naturally what comes.

[00:38:20] But what I’ve learned is to have a whole series of things that I’m interested in that have nothing to do with making money. And that I will never make money from them. I’m not anxious, but I will spend time doing it. So I think Kotler talks about it in his book. He calls it following your fascination. And so I think having things that you’re genuinely interested and fascinated in is a big deal for me, friends and social connection.

[00:38:41] I mean real friends, not just bullshit people, but people who you really connect with, super important. And we were just talking about doing shit that makes an impact, that makes a difference. That’s everything.

[00:38:58] Dave: Yeah, and funny enough, that raises dopamine and testosterone. Service to others also puts you in a flow state.

Timestamp 7

[00:39:04] Dave: So you figured that out somehow early, which is really cool. So you turned to Amazon after being a drug kingpin.

[00:39:14] Shaahin: Yeah. Look, I found out about this little guy named Bezos who had launched the platform. And I was like, this is cool. They’re selling books on there. Like you. We probably had a similar thought at a similar time. It was going in air. And I was like, man, similar to you, I don’t want to deal with the platform. I don’t want to deal with the whole thing.

[00:39:33] And then it turns out that he opened up the platform to third party sellers. We were one of the first on there. I knew somebody who worked there, and was like, hey, you can just reach out. Back then, you could email Jeff, jeff@amazon.com, and he’d write back. You can even get on the phone with the guy. So we did that, and I was like, this is really easy.

[00:39:53] We launched the first product on Amazon. The first product was a brand of matcha tea called MatchaDNA, which I no longer am a part of, but it’s an amazing product. And overnight, we had done hundreds of thousands in sales. And back then, there was no regulation. It was all new. We got 5,000 reviews. The product was selling like crazy.

[00:40:14] Dave: How many of those reviews were your own people?

[00:40:17] Shaahin: Not a lot. Not a lot. Yeah.

[00:40:21] Dave: Not a lot. That’s the most honest answer ever.

[00:40:23] Shaahin: You get what would they call friends and family to start you off.

[00:40:27] Dave: Those are legal.

[00:40:28] Shaahin: Yeah, I think those would be illegal.

[00:40:30] Dave: No, those are legal. Friends and family are allowed to do it.

[00:40:32] Shaahin: Are they?

[00:40:32] Dave: Yeah, as long as you’re not paying them to do it. It’s when people use bots and all that stuff.

[00:40:36] Shaahin: Every thing’is great.

[00:40:37] Dave: I think my mom reviews my book. I’m okay with that. There’s nothing wrong with that. Thanks, mom.

[00:40:42] Shaahin: And so very quickly, I learned, hey– and this is probably a lesson I’ve learned from you, is if you play by the rules, you won’t always get what you want. You’ll get what they want you to have. And I thought to myself, man, let’s figure out how to hack this Amazon thing.

[00:41:00] So we became Amazon hackers. And at the same time, a lot of guys were becoming Amazon hackers, and we created a seven-figure, eight-figure company that’s close to becoming a nine-figure company selling on Amazon. And we owned that real estate, and we learned how to blow things up on Amazon and make money. And I started a course, teaching people how to do that. Yeah. So it was very exciting.  

[00:41:23] Dave: As I’m recalling, you had a cognitive enhancement product on Amazon.

[00:41:28] Shaahin: Yeah. Again, from the XC days, I was really interested in that field. We partnered, believe it or not, with one of the same pharma companies that had railed against me with the government back in the days. And we created a really bad ass brain supplement. It was in liquid form. It was in capsule form. It was called Accelerol. And it was the first brain supplement to be sold on Amazon.

[00:41:54] Dave: Wow. So you, me, and Tim Ferriss have that in common. So back in, I think 2004 when I was finishing up business school, my final project was I’m going to make a nootropic, a brain supplement, but it was going to be called unfair advantage. It was going to be marketed to parents of college students.

[00:42:16] You’re spending 80 grand a year to put your kids through college. You might as well give them this 50-dollar supplement so their brain will work after they’re done partying. And so I had it all lined up. And it’s funny. At Bulletproof, we did use that name, Unfair Advantage for a cognitive enhancement thing years later, but there’s that.

[00:42:31] Actually, Tim Ferriss, he started a nootropics thing around the same year, as I remember, and that was part of the story in 4-Hour Workweek. So there’s something about entrepreneurs and cognitive enhancement. And now half the entrepreneurs on the planet are doing nootropics. I like to think I helped on that. So did Tim. So did you. There’s a lot of us working on that, but it’s pretty cool.

[00:42:50] Shaahin: Yeah, yeah. You were a huge mouthpiece for that. And that was super important. I actually remember finding you– back to talking about synchronicities, Bradley Cooper was in my house in Venice. And we were hanging out. This was before he became famous, and then he came out with that film, Limitless. And I was like, that’s the pill that everybody wants. What a badass film, except for the fact that you ended up becoming a psychotic murderer.

[00:43:13] Dave: Yeah, yeah.

[00:43:13] Shaahin: Get rid of that part.

[00:43:14] Dave: And it was based on modafinil because when you take modafinil, color saturation changes a little bit if you’re watching for it. And I know, or at least the director or camera crew did, because every time he would take the drug, it was shipped into a green spectrum, like, I know that shift. So I was on ABC Nightline. I was like the only guy without a bag on my head. I took modafinil in business school so I could graduate. That was the limitless pill, was the prescription cognitive enhancer.

[00:43:39] Shaahin: You caught that. There’s something about filmmakers who know how to show those experiences. There’s a series on TV now called Britannia. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it. It’s fascinating. It’s about pre-Roman and just Roman times, and the foundation of modern-day London, and the drug scenes, the psychedelic scenes are so spot on. You just know those guys have had some experiences.

[00:44:08] Dave: Yeah, you can tell if it’s real versus not real. One of the guy who wrote for years for NCSI, NCIS, whatever, LA, he had some really realistic scenes, and he did my 40 Years of Zen neurofeedback training. I got to know him. And it turns out he’s a very well-respected trainer in an esoteric knife fighting form, world class sort of things. He knew combat scenarios, and that’s why they could design these scenes the way they could do it, because not fake.

Timestamp 8

[00:44:47] Dave: And so knowing that those people are out there is interesting, but you’re also into jiu jitsu. How does that play a role in your mindset?

[00:44:57] Shaahin: I think jiu jitsu is really interesting. I’ve been training martial arts since I was 13, and I trained at a studio where the guy was one of Bruce Lee’s prodigies, a big legacy place. And I think one of the things that martial arts has taught me is discipline. Brazilian jiu jitsu is unique, is a high, like you say, releasing dopamine because in that moment, when you’re grappling– Brazilian jiu jitsu is all about grappling.

[00:45:27] Every class has constant hand to hand combat. And even though, you can just tap, and all the pain goes away and it stops, your brain doesn’t recognize that. So when you’re training, you instantly put yourself in that state where it’s like tunnel vision. You are there to survive. So there are no other thoughts when you’re grappling.

[00:45:52] You’re not thinking about the rest of your day. You’re not thinking about your taxes. You’re not thinking about your fight with the wife or girlfriend. And all it is in that moment is survival. And so people know people who train jiu jitsu, when you’re done with a really hard, we call it rolling, when you’re done with a hard roll, at the end of it, everybody is like, ah, there’s just this release of dopamine where you just feel incredible.

[00:46:16] Dave: Like a cold plunge

[00:46:18] Shaahin: Like a cold plunge. Yeah, that’s right.

[00:46:20] Dave: A very similar neurochemistry. Anything that hurts briefly and then resolves will create the same dopamine.

[00:46:25] Shaahin: Have you ever tried Brazilian jiu jitsu?

[00:46:28] Dave: I did a bit of Judo when I was younger, but not formally. I have a little question for you about that.

[00:46:36] Shaahin: Yeah. Tell me.

[00:46:36] Dave: Have you heard the latest Joe Rogan, Elon Musk interview?

[00:46:40] Shaahin: I have it on my phone. I haven’t listened to yet. Tell me.

[00:46:42] Dave: Okay. So they talk about the Zuckerberg-Elon fight. Elon’s like, anywhere, any rules, anything. And he’s been in real fights. I’ve been in a lot of real fights, too when I was younger. When you’re the biggest kid in school, the little guys always go after you. At least a 100 real fights. And never threw a first punch, by the way, and always threw the last one, because physics.

[00:47:05]  So when Elon told Joe Rogan– which is funny, because Joe’s a bit of an expert in fighting. And he’s like, I’ll use my patented walrus technique. And he’s like, what? And then Elon’s like, look, physics. He’s like, I’m a rocket scientist here. So it doesn’t really matter if Zuckerberg has some skills. I’m literally going to lay on him.

[00:47:30] And I have so much extra mass that, yes, it’s possible he could win, but it’s like I’m also trained, and I don’t even need to be in good shape. I just need to get on top of it. And so I’ve also seen, was it Zuckerberg and Lex Fridman Spard? So if I try Elon’s walrus move on you, what’s going to happen? Because I outweigh you by– how much do you weigh?

[00:47:53] Shaahin: I’m 180.

[00:47:54] Dave: All right, so I’m 20 extra pounds. I’m 200

[00:47:57] Shaahin: So in the words of Mike Tyson, everyone’s got a plan until I punch them. This is one thing I love in all areas of life. We’re in the world of business, in the world of health and wellness. There’s a lot of bullshit out there. There’s a lot of bullshit people who can just talk shit and get away with it. We were talking about that earlier. There’s so many people who do that.

[00:48:23] One of the beautiful things about jiu jitsu– today I guess I’m being an evangelist for martial arts in general, but maybe Brazilian jiu jitsu in particular, is that there are no liars on the mat. Once you get on the mat, all that bullshit goes away. Because it’s you and somebody else.

[00:48:41] And some of the guys I know, like my old teacher, who was an amazing guy, he was 125 pounds, and he could take out guys many times. He would just put you to sleep man. And I don’t care how cerebral you are. There are things like muscle memory, muscle– there’s unknown things that just can’t be learned any other way than through experience on the mat. So while I think Elon cerebrally might be correct, I think he might be in for a rude awakening should it actually come to the combat?

[00:49:15] Dave: He might. He also has a point. He’s done training for 10 plus years, and he’s been in a lot of real fights. I somehow don’t think Mark Zuckerberg has ever actually faced down three bullies who are intent on causing him real harm. And Elon’s done it way more than one time. And so there’s a little bit of like street fighter in there that doesn’t match Harvard. I know a lot of guys who’ve never been in a fight in their life.

[00:49:39] And it’s a very different vibe because if I walk into a place and it’s risky, I know in my bones I’m okay. One of us is going to die. And if I go in, I am literally going in, and that’s how it is. And that’s okay. But the thing is, thugs, they know that because they can feel it. And they’re like, you’re not a good target. I’m going to pick someone who’s smaller and someone who’s never been in a fight before.

[00:50:03] So I’m like, you might hurt me, but I’m going to hurt you more. And I’m okay with it. And so there’s a bit of a vibe there that everyone’s okay until they’re hit in the face. And I think I wouldn’t want to wrestle Mark either. He’d probably kick my ass too. The reason I know that is because I sometimes date a woman who is very strong in jiu jitsu, and she’s 5’6 or something, and she can pin me. There are times where I’m like, okay, I actually can’t get out of this.

[00:50:29] It’s embarrassing because I’m substantially larger. So the walrus move does not work on her. So I wouldn’t think it would work on you. And so Elon, if you’re listening to this, I wish you luck. I want to see it. Do some pushups for the walrus or something. I don’t know.

[00:50:45] Shaahin: I should preface it by this. While I don’t think his walrus move would work, I think that he would be one of the people that if he were to invest the time–

[00:50:55] Dave: He has, it sounds like.

[00:50:56] Shaahin: In Brazilian jiu jitsu?

[00:50:58] Dave: In a bunch of different styles. He talked about them with Joe.

[00:51:00] Shaahin: Then I think that 10,000-hour rule might be a 1,000-hour rule.

[00:51:05] Dave: Yeah, 10,000 hours plus the– I’ve been knocked unconscious as a kid multiple times and almost died. He talked about that on the show too. And I’ve had knives pulled on me, but I haven’t been knocked unconscious. I’ve been kicked in the head a few. Maybe that explains it.

[00:51:18] He was in South Africa with real crime, and I think that’s one of those things where you can go into a deeper level of survival mode, but dude, what do I know? I’m not an MMA announcer, or a professional comedian, or any of that stuff. But I would like to see the results, and I don’t think I’d want to wrestle you. And if I did, I would probably have pepper spray in my back pocket because–

[00:51:43] Shaahin: Yeah, look, it’s interesting too, what you’re saying, Dave. Because back in our days, as kids, you got knocked out. That happened to me too. And now there’s so many boys I see growing up. They’ve never gotten into a fight. They’ve never had that kind of confrontation. They might talk a lot. I’ll knock you out. Whatever. How? That’s a great question to ask somebody if it’s not a life-threatening situation. When they say, I’m going to do this to you, you go, how? And when you see that blank look come across their face, you know that they’re just full of shit. It only takes a second, right?

[00:52:12] Dave: It only does. God, it’s making me think about this. There was a time, I don’t know what grade. It was probably 9th. The Golden Globes champion of my city comes into my room and starts picking on me. This guy’s a trained boxer, and I’m like, I know a little yellow belt. I know judo.

[00:52:30] So I thought about it. I’m like, if he gets one punch on him– so I looked at him. I kicked him in the shin as a soccer player as hard as I could. He started jumping, and I tackled him and put him in a judo headlock. And he came to school the next day with a neck brace on. I totally cheated.

[00:52:45] I’m like, oh, he’s a boxer. I’m not doing that. Which is why I would pepper spray you and then rustle you when I have a gas mask on. But otherwise, you just don’t do it. You should run. I just thought of that, but it’s one of those things where if you’re listening to this and you’ve never been in a fight, you probably should do some jiu jitsu or some other kind of thing. Especially if you’re a guy, I think it’d be really important. And if you’re a woman and you love it, it might be important, but there are self-defense methods that are more important for you than jiu jitsu.

[00:53:16] Shaahin: Yeah. And what I heard you say that I think is probably the single most important thing is– I tell my son that. Why do we train? Because my son’s training now too. He’s been training since he was three, and I tell him we train so we don’t have to fight. And the fact is, if you learn this stuff, it’s not that you can just defend yourself if a situation comes to it. It’s that those situations won’t come. The predator walking across the street catches that vibe, and he’ll go pick on somebody else because they don’t want somebody who’s going to fight back. They want the person who’s scared.

[00:53:48] AD BREAK

[00:53:49] Dave: But years ago, I was with a partner, and she came across the story of a black belt woman who was assaulted, and froze up, and didn’t use any of her skills. And was like, what is wrong with me? And it’s because it’s normal to freeze up if you’ve never been in a real fighting situation.

[00:54:07] And so they designed a thing– in fact, that partner went through the training of like, that’s better self-defense, and then do jiu jitsu or any martial art you like. But you need to do the thing so you will default to taking a specific set of actions to protect yourself that probably isn’t grappling. And then learn grappling or whatever you like, but learn self-defense first, if you’re into that.

Timestamp 9

[00:54:29] Dave: My advice just from watching this over the years. And then don’t be in unsafe areas. And if you are, have a big, strong guy who knows jiu jitsu with you, and then you’re fine. All right. What other advice would you have for entrepreneurs or just people? Because you’ve lived a very interesting life so far.

[00:54:44] Shaahin: Yeah. We talked about this, I think, briefly before, but I think your power as an entrepreneur now, a lot of the times comes from your reach. And you gain that reach by being able to get your message out. I think that’s one of the reasons why you’re such an incredibly positive influence on people, is because you not only have that mouthpiece, but you know how to create it. You are a master curator. All the stuff that we talked about, the butter coffee, maybe you weren’t the first person to drink butter with coffee.

[00:55:18] Dave: Turns out it was Ethiopian warriors thousands of years ago, but I didn’t know about them.

[00:55:23] Shaahin: But it doesn’t fucking matter. You might as well been the first person to come up with it because you’re the first person that brought it to all of our attention because you know how to craft that story. And through doing podcasting, which now all my efforts are around my podcasting company, PodcastCola. Give it a quick plug. Which gets people booked on podcasts.

[00:55:43] But through this medium of podcasting, you have the ability to get your message out. And especially what we’re doing now, long form, you get to really get to know the person on the other side. And even though we’re not really selling anything, we get to have a conversation that is impactful and important. And I think that’s something that’s so powerful.

[00:56:06] But I think as an entrepreneur, you want to do what you’ve done, which you’re one of the best in the world at, which is curation. You want to become a curator of these ideas. And I tell people this all the time. There’s no fucking money in innovation. I fucking created–

[00:56:22] Dave: They steal it. As soon as you do, it’s terrible.

[00:56:25] Shaahin: Yeah. I created the modern digital vaporizer, digital vape. You guys can look it up. I wrote the book on it. I’ve got the fricking patents. Nobody came before me. All that technology, I put out. Did I make the billion dollars from it? No, it was somebody else who came after. Innovation is a quick path to losing money unless you’re a big company, in my opinion.

[00:56:45] Dave: The big companies can’t innovate, which is funny.

[00:56:48] Shaahin: That is funny. But being able to become a curator of ideas and being able to get your message out there, particularly on podcasts, which, by the way, now is one of the highest ROI methods of marketing out there. It’s the ultimate hack, which is why you’ve been doing it for how many years now?

[00:57:05] Dave: Ten years. We’re almost at 400 million downloads. Won a Webby award, and it’s got to be, what, 1,150 episodes or somewhere around there? But the real thing is, I got to talk to really interesting people who were teaching me stuff for 1,100 hours. With all the extra edits, it’s probably closer to 1,800 hours. You think about that, a full-time job, eight hours a day, is 2,000 hours a year. So I’ve almost had a full-time year of just eight hours a day talking to smart people, learning from them. So I might have learned a few things.

[00:57:38] Shaahin: Of course, you know how to do it, which is my next comment, which most people don’t understand, is most people think you go on a podcast and use that person’s audience to sell some stuff. It’s wrong. The way you’ve been doing it is the right way. You use podcasts tactically. You use podcasts to get your foot in the door.

[00:57:54] If you want to meet somebody, maybe you wouldn’t normally be able to get in to meet that person, a billionaire or somebody who’s famous, whatever, but are they interested in becoming famous? Are they interested in using your mouthpiece or having you interview them? Probably more so than they’d be interested in having a cold call about you about some great business opportunity. Not that you would ever need that, but for the general people out there–

[00:58:17] Dave: Yeah. When I started this, I was well known in computer security and cloud computing circles, which are these big circles that no one cares about unless you’re a nerd. Yeah. This is an excuse to talk to authors. I get to call Robert Green and talk to all these interesting people.

[00:58:35] And I’m really good at predicting the future. And there were very, very few podcasts when I started, which is why I could win a Webby and grow the way I have and gain the audience. And also, I’d spent 15 years either running an anti-aging nonprofit and being media trained and giving keynotes.

[00:58:55] So I knew how to interview people, which is a skill most people on podcasts, they just sit there and goof off. There’s no structure. So I’m incredibly fortunate. Right time, right place, right skills. But man, it pays off. So my advice for anyone who– you run a podcast booking agency, you should learn how to interview people. It’s probably a good idea.

[00:59:14] Shaahin: Yeah. And it’s a learned skill. With our clients, the first thing we do is we teach them how to do that so they can not only be guests on other people’s podcasts, but also, like you said, do it on their own. And when you can do that, now you’ve got the use of other people’s audience that you can borrow and bring over to your own show.

[00:59:33] But also you have the power to use podcasts tactically. So you’re 10Xing the power in that pocket. It doesn’t matter if one person is watching or 10. A lot of the deal flow that I have in my different businesses come from me being on shows, not necessarily from other people listening to the show contacting me, but just connecting with the show hosts.

[00:59:55] Because who has a podcast? Entrepreneurs, people who are in your industry, people that are in your niche, and people that are so active that they decided to create a fricking show and put the time and energy into creating that. And there are now over 8 million podcasts out there.

[01:00:11] Dave: So essentially you guys do media training, but does your mother know that PodcastCola is totally a scam?

[01:00:19] Shaahin: Yeah, right? In what way?

[01:00:23] Dave: I’m just testing your ability to handle hostile questions to see good your media training is.

[01:00:27] Shaahin: Yeah. Dude, you’re dealing with a guy– they would put me in a room, back in the herbal XC days, and they’d be like, great, we want to have you on our– a perfect example of this is Montel Williams. You remember Montel Williams talk show? Montel would be like, we want you in.

[01:00:40] And they would put me on a nice plane. They’d put me in a nice car. Drive me to the studio. And so often– not just Montel, but other people– I know there’s a studio audience there, but I’m like, why am I in a room with a camera facing me here? Why am I not on with the rest? And then all of a sudden ushered into the room.

[01:00:59] And you guys can watch this stuff on YouTube because it’s all online now. Would be like FDA, FTC, all the three-letter agencies. And I’m talking to a screen, and they’re talking to a studio audience. I was young, and again–

[01:01:14] Dave: Not trained.

[01:01:15] Shaahin: Not trained, but it worked out perfect because people saw right through it. And every time the government came out with a new law, they will come out and be like, oh, this product is really dangerous. And I’d be like, fuck, we’re going to lose everything. You know what people were hearing? People were hearing, this shit works. That’s what people were hearing.

[01:01:35] Dave: The government wants to ban something? It’s twice as good.

[01:01:37] Shaahin: Oh yeah. And I tell the story. I tell it in my book, Billion, if anybody reads that, is that I went on Montel Williams show, and when I went on his show, I knew that one time that it was going to be a sabotage. So I got there a day early. We gave free pills and t-shirts– before the internet, we have this thing called 800-numbers. 800-numbers on the shirts.

[01:01:58] And we gave people sweaters, and the deal was you got unlimited free pills for the next year, and I’ll give you a bunch of free ecstasy. Take it now. Take it later. Whatever you want. Herbal ecstasy, by the way. I didn’t give them real drugs. And I said, when the show comes on, you take your shirt off.

[01:02:12] Dave: You did not. That is so brilliant. That makes me happy.

[01:02:16] Shaahin: You got to hack everything. And the show came on. And of course, there’s Montel, and he’s got this guy that he dragged out from the FDA, brown suit dude. And he’s out there talking about it. And then he had some mom that died from somebody else’s product on a show me.

[01:02:33] Talk about forging connections. And so I was like, oh, okay, she’s looking at me angry, and I looked at her, and I’m like, lady, that’s terrible, but it wasn’t from my product. So I’m really sorry about your kid. I think he took real drugs. That was the problem. Which he did. And then Montel’s like, oh, this stuff’s terrible, whatever.

[01:02:52] I took my shirt off, and I’ve got this video on, and I write about in my book, with the 800-number. We made a million dollars in airing. And it took them about five airings on national TV to catch on and blur it because they didn’t realize. And those are the kinds of things that we did. Going around the wall, not through it.

Timestamp 10

[01:03:13] Dave: That was so good. You’re natural at that. You can actually be trained in how to handle hostile questions from media. And I disrupted a lot of things. I made grass-fed a big thing. And I’m not the only person. I’m not taking all the credit for that. But I was a major voice in making grass-fed beef. First restaurant that I know that only served grass-fed beef in LA was my restaurant. I’ve been pushing on this, and I piss a lot of people off. Eat butter.

[01:03:37] So I’m used to that. And I’m also really well-trained from corporate America, same thing. If people say, how do you deal with trolls online? You can play with these guys. They’d have no chance with someone who knows, essentially jiu jitsu with hostile questions.

[01:03:52] So it’s cool that you teach people that, which means you go into a situation where there’s a takedown. They’re trying to ask you the questions. Like the one, does your mom know? And you’re like, what kind of question is this? And it’s designed to really bypass your prefrontal cortex, get to your amygdala, so you’ll be reactive. Yeah. I could tell it. Even though you’re trained, it got you off for a second, but probably because of your jiu jitsu, you got right back on. Right?

[01:04:19] Shaahin: Yeah.

[01:04:20] Dave: It came out of left field too.

[01:04:22] Shaahin: Yeah, it came out of left field, so I’m trying to figure out what the angle is. But interestingly enough, you can always ride that. You can be like, it’s a scam because it’s probably too good to be true. And we just keep producing results for our clients at PodcastCola, but the fact is, for a lot of people, if you don’t work it, it’s a scam. You can work it a lot of different ways.

[01:04:43] Dave: Yeah. And there must be a reason you’re saying that. And that buys you time to think, and they’re like, all right. By the way, that’s from Chris Voss, who’s been on the show as well, FBI negotiator. He’s a great guy. So there’s all these things, but  just for sharing knowledge for people who want to be hosts and all that, you definitely want to do some training on media, learn how to interview, learn how to be interviewed.

[01:05:08] There’s a reason that when Bulletproof started and the biohacking movement started I’ve been in every major men’s magazine. I’ve been in Vogue. I’ve been in Mademoiselle. And I was the fat computer hacker from Jurassic Park I. But I was a good guy. There’s no way I should ever have my shirt off in a magazine, except I can now. But it’s so unlikely.

[01:05:27] But all that media stuff happened because there’s a skill to working the media, and now there’s a skill to working podcasts. So it sounds like you’re teaching a generation of entrepreneurs to do that. So it’s a worthy skill, and it’s not easy.

[01:05:39] Shaahin: Thank you. And thanks for mentioning Chris Voss because he wrote the foreword to my book.

[01:05:43] Dave: Absolutely. Chris is a gentleman, a scholar. I’ve called him a few times when I needed ninja-negotiating moves.

[01:05:48] Shaahin: He’s the ninja and a master at doing podcasts. He was just on Andrew Huberman’s podcast.

[01:05:55] Dave: That’s right.

[01:05:56] Shaahin: And there’s a big one that I think he’s getting very close to being on, but I’m not going to mention it because I don’t want to jinx it.

[01:06:00] Dave: Yeah. You don’t want to jinx it. And it’s funny. Andrew Huberman was on this show around episode 400 before he had a podcast. Yeah. My job is to curate. I’m going to find the good ones. I’m like, good for you with Huberman’s Performance Lab at Stanford. So I’m happy he’s structuring the content the way he’s doing because a lot of people are listening, and it’s epic. So lots of friends have been on the show. Shaheen, how do you handle this? I can send people to your website, but they’d have to spell your first and your last name. It seems like that’s hard.

[01:06:31] Shaahin: Yeah.

[01:06:32] Dave: Is there a hack for this? Do you have–

[01:06:33] Shaahin: Yeah. If you guys want to get ahold of me, you can just go to podcastcola.com and email me there. I’m on there. Or you can get me at shaahincheyene.com spelled S-H-A-A-H-I-N C-H-E-Y-E-N-E.com. Either of those links will get to me. I’ve got a link tree on both of those websites, and it’ll tell you about all the stuff I’m doing.

[01:06:54] And the book obviously is on Amazon. You can get the audio book on Audible. Yeah. And then I’ve got a podcast called Business Story of The Week, where we interview entrepreneurs and what they’re doing. And Business Story of The Week’s doing really well now. So if you guys want to check that out, that’s amazing too.

[01:07:12] Thanks for stopping by.

[01:07:13] Thank you, Dave. Appreciate you having me on.

[01:07:16] Dave: If you like this episode, pick up the book. It’s an interesting read, and you’re going to need to drink something while you read the book. dangercoffee.com. Support the show. Support my work. This is my new coffee, ultra clean, best I’ve ever made. Plus trace minerals. Plus electrolytes. You feel the difference, and it tastes like really good coffee.

[01:07:38] Shaahin: Legit good. Actually, I just had a cup, and I was like, fuck this stuff’s actually good. It’s really good.

[01:07:45] Dave: Thanks, I think. I’ll see you guys later.

[00:00:05] Dave: You’re listening to The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today’s episode is one that I just have been looking forward to for a long time. It is with a dear friend, a guy who’s taught me so much, and a guy you’ve probably heard of, John Gray. He’s author of a very famous book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, and probably, what, 40 other books? How many books have you written now?

[00:00:30] John: Just 25. Just 25

[00:00:32] Dave: Oh my gosh, I’m such a slacker. I’m at eight, by the way, just to be clear.

[00:00:37] John: Congrats. Yeah. They’re amazing books.

[00:00:40] Dave: Oh, thank you. Truly, coming from you, that means a lot. The thing I wanted to chat about here is things have changed since the ’90s. And so you wrote a then and now version of this with the idea being, even over that 20- or 30-year range, that the most common relationship problems, at least between men and women, are because of fundamental psychological differences between the sexes. Has anything changed in that view over the course of last 30 years? This is a fundamental problem.

[00:01:19] John: I think men are still men. Women are still women. But the challenges we face are completely different. As soon as women started being independent from men, making more money, being independent, being highly educated, what do they need a man for? So that changed everything. So many single women will say, why do I need a man in my life?

[00:01:42] If you don’t know what you need a man for, why do I want to be with you? Because ultimately, men are looking for a job. They want to be successful. Everything we do is to be successful. And many women listening are going to go, yeah, I want that too. That’s her masculine side. But if you’re a man and you have a biology of a man, feeling successful and providing for others, solving problems, getting things done, setting goals and achieving those goals produces male-friendly hormones, testosterone.

[00:02:14] And women, with the same intention of solving problems, fixing things, achieving your goals, making money, they make testosterone as well. And it’s not that testosterone is not female-friendly. It’s just testosterone doesn’t lower a woman’s stress levels. Testosterone will lower a man’s stress levels. 

[00:02:32] And how I say that is when a man is experiencing high cortisol levels, chronic stress, his testosterone levels are low. When a man is feeling no stress but motivated, challenged, his testosterone is at its maximum place. Then if he’s in a physically intimate relationship, his testosterone can go even higher. 

[00:02:53] So you can make all the money in the world, but if the woman’s not adoring you in bed, you’re not going to reach the highest level you can get to. So you’ll see many successful men do have intimate experiences at a very high level. This is how we’re set as men.

[00:03:11] If you’re out there making love, your testosterone levels will be higher because– think about my work and your work. When we’re standing in front of the audiences at your big conferences, which are such a delight, and you get a standing ovation from those people, you just feel fantastic.

[00:03:28] Your testosterone has shot up. That is because I have served them, and they’re acknowledging and appreciating me. So testosterone goes up. That’s what men thrive on. And on another world– it was playful. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. There’s the female friendly hormone, estrogen. And when a woman is depressed, stressed, unhappy, her estrogen levels will typically be too low.

[00:03:55] And if her estrogen levels are normal and healthy, she is happy. And then for her to be happier, we’ll call that orgasm, her estrogen levels have to double. If her estrogen levels don’t double or can’t double, she’s not going to experience that highest peak of connection and bonding that’s possible for couples today. But you have to learn some good skills to keep that going.

[00:04:20] Dave: Hmm. I dated this absolutely just wonderful woman for a while, and she came over to my house one day, and she said, Dave, I’ve decided that men are here to make women happy. And this is a woman who studies relationships for a living, and I just laughed, but it made me think of your work. Guys just want to be useful. We want to be successful. What would you say to her?

[00:04:46] John: From one point of view, absolutely. A man just wants to make a woman happy. And let me give you some foundation for this. I’m not a people pleaser. Sometimes when men hear me saying, look, men just want to make women happy, they think, oh, you’re just some wimp, people pleaser. I go, hold on, hold on.

[00:05:06] Dave: No.

[00:05:06] John: You’re only a wimp if you’re not being adored, and appreciated, and acknowledged, and trusted, and accepted just the way you are. If you’re giving up who you are, then you’re a wimp. So when I say men just want to make women happy, let me just tell you, men who are married, who decide to get a divorce, women who are married and they decide to get a divorce, what women will almost always say, I give, and I give, and I give, and I don’t get back. So I have nothing left to give. 

[00:05:40] That’s what women will say. What do men say? They typically will say, no matter what I do, it’s never enough to make her happy. That’s our bottom line. We really just want our wives to be happy. And if she’s happy, what’s the message I get? I’m getting a standing ovation. When I come home, I’m getting a standing ovation. It doesn’t look like a standing ovation, but it’s a woman who’s happy.

[00:06:04] Dave: Who’s laying on your back ovation. Is that what you’re saying, John?

[00:06:07] John: A layon my back.

[00:06:08] Dave: A laying on your back ovation.

[00:06:10] John: It’s usually for me in the morning, but yes.

[00:06:15] Dave:  So there’s some loop around being a source of safety, groundedness, being a provider, all the other, I don’t know, guy things. And that’s creating a rise in estrogen, which creates appreciation, which then fuels additional intimacy. Am I reading that right?

[00:06:33] John: Through appreciation–

[00:06:35] Dave: Yeah.

[00:06:35] John: If I do the things you just mentioned, providing, being supportive in a way which makes her feel supported, not what I think is supportive– let me qualify that. Let’s say I make a lot of money. At a certain point, so what? She can always get a lawyer and keep that money. That’s the dark side of divorce. So women have figured this out. And let’s add to it. Let’s say I make a lot of money, but she also makes a lot of money.

[00:07:04] Dave: Hmm.

[00:07:04] John: They’re similar. Why does she need me? So why is she going to appreciate? It’s like, look at all this do things I do for you. She says, I do that too. What else are you doing for me? So that’s the picture today. When women could not make money and they lived in a dangerous world, to have a man who’s amazing, and you had a huge appreciation because you felt this is something of meaning and value to me that I need. 

[00:07:31] Need is a word that’s become a bad word because you can be needy, and that’s awful. Needy is, I need you, and you’re not providing. That’s needy. I need you, and you’re not giving me enough. I need you, and when you don’t give me what I need, it hurts inside. And that’s really immature. It’s too demanding. It’s not a good relationship skill. And this is this phrase that women are all being taught to say now, which is, that hurts.

[00:08:04] Okay, everything hurts. We’ve become this hypersensitive society of, my feelings are hurt. Now, when your feelings are hurt, the part of you that’s feeling hurt is probably about seven years old inside of you. This is the most immature part of us. So let me give you an example of how this would look. I have a friend, and he’s a successful businessman.

[00:08:25] He does well in his life. He’s a biohacker. He’s very cool guy. And he’s got a beautiful girlfriend. And he loves her, and she’s amazing. And they have amazing physical intimacy. There’s nothing to complain about. And then he says, okay, this weekend, I want to go fishing with my buddies. And she says, but if you go fishing with your buddies, it hurts.

[00:08:49] Do you want to hurt me? Do you still want to go fishing with your buddies if that hurts me? And he goes, listen, I don’t want to hurt you, but I also need time for my life. I can’t always be with you fulfilling your needs here, which I enjoy doing when I have time for that and I’m with you.

[00:09:05] And so this idea of, I feel hurt becomes the ultimate manipulator to control a man. And then what men will often say is, besides my wife is not happy, I feel controlled. And women go, I’m not trying to control you. They’re not aware that negative emotions to a man can seem controlling and why because we so much want them to be happy because when she’s happy, I take credit for it. So I feel great.

[00:09:33] I take her to a movie, and she goes, that was a great movie. On a personal level, I feel like I wrote that movie. It’s like you’ve developed all these great products. If your wife’s taking your products and drinking your products, and she’s saying, I feel fantastic, you feel yeah, I did that.

[00:09:50] So men will tend to take credit for how women feel. But that’s a bit of [Inaudible] as well because if she doesn’t feel good, then we feel bummed out. And bottom line, if I’m speaking to an audience and half the audience leaves, I’m going to be pretty bummed out.

[00:10:07] Because as perfect as we want to be, I’m still attached to, hey, I want everybody to be happy with my talks. And if a few go, that’s all right. But half leave, what a bummer. It triggers unhappy feelings in me. So success is , again, coming back to– and I like to bring it back to hormones because this is your facts.

[00:10:28] Men need to make, just for feeling good, 10 times more testosterone than an average woman who’s feeling good. And to be a biohacker, a superman, live long life, you have to hire testosterone. At 72 years old, my average testosterone is 50 percent higher than when I was a young man doing all right.

[00:10:51] Dave: Without supplementing.

[00:10:53] John: I don’t do any supplements. No, I do supplements, but not for testosterone. One of my favorite supplements, oh, it’s Tongkat Ali. I love Tongkat Ali, but I can’t even take it. I would just have erections all the time.

[00:11:07] Dave: You stopped taking it. No kidding.

[00:11:09] John: Oh, at 50 years.

[00:11:10] Dave: So you guys, Tongkat Ali, common testosterone-raising herb. I don’t take that.

[00:11:13] John: Yeah, it’s a really good one if your testosterone’s low, because also, one of its functions is it inhibits the transfer of testosterone into estrogen. What’s that hormone that does that?

[00:11:26] Dave: It’s aromatase.

[00:11:28] John: Aromatase. So Tongkat Ali is a aromatase inhibitor because that’s one of the problems for men, is we can have this testosterone, and as soon as a woman’s not happy with us, we get upset. And what’s just occurring is now your estrogen levels are going higher. It’s like if you take too much testosterone, too much, then it will convert into estrogen. Because your body’s always trying to find the right balance, and you get man boobs. Or if you’re too far on your female side, you get man boobs.

[00:11:58] Dave: I’ve struggled with man boobs for my whole life. When I was younger, I was obese, and I always had them. All the guys in my family have them. It’s a testosterone pathway thing. And I don’t have them at all because I finally managed the conversion of testosterone and estrogen the right way.

[00:12:15] I use Crizin, which is similar to Tongkat Ali, but it doesn’t raise testosterone. It just stops it from going down that pathway. And if I forget to take it, give me about three days. I’m like, oh, tender nipples. And it’s irritating. But even though I’m very lean and extra body fat makes extra estrogen, it happens.

[00:12:36] And managing it with herbs, whether it’s Tongkat or Crizin, it seems like a really good idea, but you’re not doing either one of those because you make a lot of testosterone because of your, we’ll call it energetic and sexual practices, and your relational practices, and probably your diet. But then do you take something to manage conversion to estrogen or you don’t need to do that either?

[00:12:58] John: No, I don’t.

[00:12:59] Dave: So really the man’s man hormonally and naturally. 

[00:13:03] John: Nothing was natural. When I recognize how clearly gender differences trigger different hormones– so if I let myself talk about anything, I’m feeling sorry for myself, or argue, or raise my voice, any of those symptoms of using negative emotions to create a response in somebody, my estrogen levels will flare very, very high.

[00:13:31] Dave: So whining is bad.

[00:13:33] John: Whining is really bad for men. Complaining is really bad for men, particularly to a woman that you’re arguing with because then you’re using negative emotions to create a result. Negative emotions is the lowest animal level inside of us.

[00:13:50] Dave: Isn’t that what like social justice warriors, every protester out there is complaining?

[00:13:56] John: Yeah. Their testosterone levels are just so down if they’re men. Their estrogen levels are so high. They’re petty. They’re picky. They’re hypersensitive. Their feelings are hurt all the time. 

[00:14:07] Dave: Like Greta.

[00:14:09] John: This is the dynamic. What happens to women is if they’re out there complaining, it’s like porn for men. See, porn is not productive for men. We might talk about that later, but just right now– 

[00:14:21] Dave: It feels good, but it’s bad for us, right?

[00:14:23] John: That’s right. It feels good. The reason it feels good is because it super raises testosterone. When a man looks at porn, if you go online, go to free porn, 64,000 women are waiting to have sex with you in your subconscious mind. So you’re alpha man. You’re the king of the tribe. And so your testosterone shoots up really, really high, and it will go way down afterwards. And way down is called baseline.

[00:14:52] Dave: Even if you don’t ejaculate? What if you just look at it for a while and get turned on and then don’t ejaculate.

[00:14:57] John: I’ll tell you, being a master of not ejaculating, which is part of my high testosterone, I never ejaculate. I could in a second. See, that’s the thing. I’m very in touch with my female feeling, my feelings. My estrogen levels are also very high. It’s just my testosterone so much higher.

[00:15:19] And being in touch with feelings when you’re over there, that’s the reason we ejaculate other than the fact we get addicted to it. When something feels so good, this feels so good, I want more and more of this. When anything feels good, you’re producing female hormones. That’s why you look at manly men– I won’t call myself a manly male, but if you watch Joe Rogan’s–

[00:15:41] Dave: You’re a well-balanced guy. 

[00:15:43] John: I’m a well-balanced guy. But you get this big guys, and Joe Rogan was interviewing one of them, and he said, tell me your routine. He says, I get up every morning at 4 o’clock. I run huge amount of distance. I forget what it is. Miles and miles.

[00:15:57] Dave: It’s probably my friend [Inaudible], maybe. 

[00:16:00] John: He runs miles and miles, and he comes back.

[00:16:03] Dave: Yeah.

[00:16:03] John: And then he gets into a freezing cold bath. He gets into the ice thing. 

[00:16:07] Dave: I do that, yeah. 

[00:16:08] John: And then you finish with that. He says, and I feel like a million bucks. I’m King Kong. I’m the king of the world. And I know that feeling. I feel that way. And then Joe says, do you like getting up like that? I hate it. I hate every minute of it. I hate it. I hate it.

[00:16:25] Dave: It has to be David Goggins. Okay, got you. 

[00:16:28] John: I use that example for people to understand that high testosterone guys have to do stuff that is not easy. You’ve got to do difficult, challenging stuff, and you don’t like it. See, whenever you’re liking something, you’re making estrogen. Whenever you’re enjoying something, you’re making estrogen.

[00:16:46] When you’re depending on something to make you happy, that’s an estrogen stimulator. Actually, when you’re depending on yourself to be productive, to do something that you believe is productive and good for you, and good for others, and so forth, you set a goal, and I’m going to achieve that goal.

[00:17:06] So I tell men, particularly for men, set goals. And for some men, just write them out. Put it out there, and then when you take action to achieve those goals, your testosterone levels go up. Again, I talk to young men about, you want your testosterone to go up? Make promises.

[00:17:24] When you make a promise, you’re setting a goal, and then you follow through. So my joke is I don’t make that many promises now. It’s too hard. If I say I’m going to do something, I have to do it. So if I’m not really sure I’m going to do it, I don’t make the promise. But being a person of integrity, it’s such a good quality.

[00:17:44] It would be our male side has that integrity strengthens us that if I don’t like it, if it’s hard or whatever, but I said, I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it. And that process, that mental process of taking action to achieve your goals is a huge testosterone booster.

[00:18:01] Dave: I love hearing this. One of the reasons I do this show, the reason I started my blog on biohacking is I just wish someone had told me this when I was 19, and I was obese, and my brain didn’t work, and I didn’t know all the stuff that I know now. And it was only in a way I could understand it.

[00:18:19] What you’re saying is for guys, it’s supposed to suck at least for a little while each day. And that’s one of the reasons I do cold plunges or cryotherapy when I have an Upgrade Labs near me, because that little bit, not only is there an effect on testosterone. Testosterone and dopamine go together, and dopamine is the motivation, happiness chemical.

[00:18:39] So that’s a way to do it. Okay, so that’s important. It’s supposed to suck. And if you set a goal and then do the goal, your testosterone goes up. If your testosterone goes up, you’ll be happier because of dopamine, but you’ll probably be more attractive to women too, right?

[00:18:56] John: Absolutely. Absolutely. Women are saying today, they just feel there’s this wishy washy quality of men, and they’re just turned off by it. And here’s a paradox. Women will say, I need to know what you’re feeling. Dave, what are you feeling? What’s going on inside? Talk to me. Talk to me. And then they have this encouragement of psychology saying, we’re all supposed to talk about our feelings.

[00:19:20] They don’t take in concern, are you a man? Are you a woman? Are you a man with high testosterone and you can tolerate talking about some feelings? Your testosterone levels normal, and you talk about your emotions and feelings. Estrogen’s going up. Your testosterone will go down.

[00:19:37] So you have to be careful about this talking about feelings things. On one hand, culture is telling women, we all need to talk about our feelings because women do. But they need to learn how to talk about their feelings in a way that doesn’t blame men. Okay, that’s part of it. 

[00:19:55] Why this happens, one is psychology is telling us we should all talk about feelings. But what will happen is when a man is slightly challenged– okay, woman’s saying something. Am I being blamed? Am I supposed to do this better? Did I not do it good enough? Should I actually change?

[00:20:11] Is she being reasonable? Is she not being reasonable? Or simply, he’s thinking, what’s the point? Where’s she going with this? What am I supposed to do about this? See, men always go to action. So what am I supposed to do about this? So I’m listening to her. What’s going to happen in most men is we’re going to detach.

[00:20:29] Testosterone creates detachment. That’s also why my testosterone levels are much higher than I was a young man. I’m very detached. I’ve meditated for 50 years. I’m like a little Buddha. Nothing bothers me. And if it does, I process it quietly inside. I analyze it. Let it go with forgiveness, with responsibility. Pardon

[00:20:51] Dave: You’re a master of that. We’ve known each other for 10 plus years. And every time I see you, you’re just dialed in. You don’t get rattled. 

[00:20:58] John: No.

[00:20:58] Dave: And you’ve been through some stuff. Yeah.

[00:21:01] John: But every guy, when you’re challenged by something, what that means is you’re starting to have some frustration, some disappointments, some concerns, some worries. That’s estrogen. So if estrogen is going up, I need to balance. And so I need to make more testosterone.

[00:21:20] The body naturally does this in men. So what we do is we disconnect from our emotions. We disconnect in order to think about it. So if you could just look at, I need to think about it, not feel about it, I’m starting to feel about it, not pleasant feelings, so I want to find my balance. I’m going to disconnect. 

[00:21:38] So quite often men will be listening, and they suddenly disconnect. We become quiet. We mull it over. And women panic. They freak out. They go, what are you feeling? What’s going on? And what they really want to know is that you’re not mad at them. That you’re not going to punish them.

[00:21:56] Dave: I think I figured out the cheat code. In a situation like that, if a woman I’m dating says, what are you feeling? The answer is, I’m feeling horny. And it bypasses everything. What’s wrong with that approach?

[00:22:09] John:  I think it’s great. I never thought of that one. But here’s my response. I have to adapt to see how that might work for me. Well, I’m pretty horny all the time. So even if I’m mad– actually, I don’t get that angry. Let me come back to my point, but that was a good answer. 

[00:22:29] If a woman says, what are you feeling? I say, I’m thinking about what you just said, and that’ll be enough. Basically, they just want to hear a friendly tone of voice. It’s all in the tone of voice. I’m just thinking about what you just said. Tell me more. And you take them off of you. 

[00:22:48] And this is a danger place because when you start to disconnect, which is very natural, whenever you detach, testosterone goes up. So when you ask me about how I regulate my testosterone levels, I meditate at least one to two hours a day. Unless I don’t have time to do it. But generally speaking, I’ll meditate one to two hours. In meditation, you learn to detach from the outer world.

[00:23:12] You’re letting go. In a sense, you’re forgetting all of your problems in a non-stressed state. Again, forgetting your problems is a very useful testosterone booster because if I can’t solve a problem– like right now, we’re solving problems. We’re doing our thing.

[00:23:33] Testosterone goes up. But at the end of the day, when you can’t be solving problems as you’re a man, then the next best thing is, let me take time to forget my problems that I can’t do anything about and solve a problem I can do something about, which is my meditation practice. It’s a challenge.

[00:23:51] When I’m meditating, it takes a lot of willpower. It takes intention. It takes clarity. It takes focus. So I’m applying myself to solve the big problem, which is not the problems of the day. So that was the ultimate technique taught for men, was meditation. Buddha is basically teaching you to forget all your problems.

[00:24:11] Go in a state of samadhi. And you can do that. But what you’re doing at that time is building huge testosterone. Now, not all men are going to become meditators. They’re not all going to become masters of it, so to speak. But what they have is you can just simply go to your cave. 

[00:24:27] From my yogic background– actually, you’ve been in caves. I’ve been in caves, meditating in caves. I’m in my cave right now. I’m underground in my office. And then I decided to actually dig even deeper. I’ve just built another cave just for–

[00:24:43] Dave: Oh, really?

[00:24:44] John: Yes. It’s even deeper. And it turns out soil that my house is on has got crystals all in it. So it’s real good energy, and I go down there into that cave. And sometimes I’ll meditate there. I actually can meditate anywhere, but the point of it is it’s a very systematic way to detach from having to solve problems that we can’t do anything about and create a problem that we can do something about.

[00:25:10] And that’s what hobbies are for men. So any kind of hobby a man has is actually a way he recovers from the day’s stress by forgetting that. So now I’m married to my wife, and she’s upset about her day’s stress. And what do men typically say? Honey, just forget it. Don’t worry about it.

[00:25:31] It’s no big deal. It’s not a problem. You can’t do anything about it now, so why don’t we go have sex? These things just don’t work with women because they’re designed differently. Now, there’s a whole spectrum of all different kinds of women, but hormonally, women are women, and if they talk about what’s going on inside of them– we’re solving problems. We’re going out into the world and producing an effect. That’s a testosterone producer.

[00:26:00] An estrogen producer is I’m going to let you come in to me and have an effect. It’s just the opposite. We’re complementary. So women will talk about their day, and by revealing what’s inside, they feel seen. They feel heard. They feel you care. They feel understood. They feel validated.

[00:26:21] But if you’re hearing them and then you’re making jokes about what they said, they don’t feel validated, and then they stopped talking to you. Or if you get angry at them, and most men will get angry if women just talk about all their feelings, women have to understand, just as men have to learn how to listen without interrupting, how to ask questions, give her what she needs, which is to feel heard. How can I hear her if what she’s saying is I’m a terrible guy? This is what women are missing, the whole idea of complaining just pushes a man away from you. 

[00:26:55] Dave: You don’t have to take that as a guide, and it’s not appropriate. And if you have good boundaries, you need to stop that because it’s toxic. And if there’s a thing you want to change, we can talk about it, but we’re going to talk about it once. You’re not going to harp on it. I’m curious. So there’s a reason that’s the name for it. You keep playing the harp. And I think this is something that maybe you guys need to do in relationships. The other thing that I’ve noticed, and I wanted to check in with you– 

[00:27:23] John: You just made a huge point, Dave. How do you not take it? How do you not take it?

[00:27:29] Dave: Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask you because I’ve been dating for a couple years now post-divorce, and I’ve just been fortunate to date some magical people. But when it’s one of those they’re going to share feelings times, there’s a grounded thing I do with meditation where I’m like, these are not mine, and the emotions don’t affect me.

[00:27:53] I’m listening, but I don’t lose my state. And the feedback I get from that is, wow, you’re not afraid of my emotions. And then they feel heard because I’m not emotionally reactive to their emotions. And then they stop talking about them just because I didn’t get tweaked.

[00:28:08] John: That’s it.

[00:28:11] Dave: Just be grounded. Let them say it once. Don’t lose your shit, and then they’re done.

[00:28:16] John: That’s exactly it. See, what happens is women will talk, and if you get triggered and you talk back, that it just goes down. What you have to do is what you’ve learned to do is not get triggered by it. Here’s how I don’t get triggered by it. I’m going to tell you how I do it, but also women have some responsibility here too.

[00:28:38] Dave: Absolutely.

[00:28:40] John: But from my side, if a woman is upset, I have such background of experience with this and knowing that if I don’t react, her upset will transform before my eyes. So men think if a woman’s upset about something, you have to change or do something different for her upset to go away. We think that, but that’s not–

[00:29:06] Dave: It’s true. If you feed them steak, they usually behave themselves better. Is that true?

[00:29:11] John: Well, I wouldn’t put it that way, but I like steak.

[00:29:15] Dave: I’m just going to get canceled right now. My point was that if anyone, male or female, is feeling emotional, eat some animal protein. You’ll be more grounded, and you’ll probably be less emotional. So there you go.

[00:29:27] John: That’s a good approach. I like that. My wife loves steak. That’s what makes it work. I also felt having a really good sharp knife when you cut the steak makes a difference as well. Just want to throw that in. But if you have to struggle with your stake, get a new knife.

[00:29:46] Dave: You know what, thank you for saying that. Yes, I spend huge amounts of money on steak knives because if our steak falls apart, your testosterone goes up. And if you have to rip at it with a little serrated piece of shit knife, your testosterone drops, you grow man boobs, and you pretty much should be eating a soy burger. All right, can we just put that out there?

[00:30:03] John: Let’s put this as a metaphor, that if your knife is not working, then it makes a mess. So the knife for a man is don’t get upset when she’s talking. Don’t get upset when she’s talking. Now, what’s biologically happening when you get upset, when you’re upset, we’ll call that a little stress reaction.

[00:30:23] And when a man has a stress reaction, if it’s a little stress like a little adrenaline, he will detach. So that’s easy. It’s like when a woman’s a bit bothered, first of all, men will detach. Okay, I can handle this. But at a certain point, he’ll talk, and he’ll try to solve what she’s talking about. And then she’s going to go, yes, but. At that point, little stress becomes big stress.

[00:30:47] You’ve just given your great advice, and it hasn’t had enough effect on her. So now it’s going to be more upsetting to you, and you’re going to have that estrogen surge. And your estrogen surge just keeps rising higher and higher, if you’re a man, if you’re not feeling successful.

[00:31:04] If you don’t feel successful, estrogen goes up, and the symptom of your estrogen going up is you get angry, and you get intense. And whenever men get angry, or intense, or argumentative, it will shut a woman down. And whatever she has to talk about will now multiply, and triple, and quadruple. 

[00:31:23] Dave: Mm.

[00:31:25] John: It’s learning to be detached. And detachment doesn’t mean disinterested. Detachment doesn’t mean that I don’t care what you’re saying. I’m detached, but I realize I have this person I love, and they’re confused. They’re emotional. They’re not making sense. I don’t say that to them, but when somebody is– here’s a general philosophy I have. When somebody’s having negative emotions, they’re not seeing reality. They’re just not being logical.

[00:31:55] When you’re logical, your male side, and you’re emotional, your female side, you will always have positive emotions, positive feelings. Whenever you’re having negative emotions, there’s an imbalance. And that’s what a negative emotion is. It’s a symptom that says, hey, you need to make an adjustment here and let go of that negative emotion. But the primitive brain goes, if I have a negative emotion, let me use it to create a result.

[00:32:20] Let me get angry to intimidate somebody. Let me feel sad to get someone to feel sorry for me and help me. Let me feel fear so I’d have a justification for not taking action, and I can run away. I feel guilty in order to have someone trust me again. Really, emotions are all manipulations, but I’m not saying that we should suppress our emotions because that would be suppressing a part of who we are.

[00:32:48] We want to upgrade who we are by feeling the emotion and then transforming it into a positive emotion. And what I’ve seen to be the case, if I create safety for a woman to express what she’s going through, revealing what’s inside, if it’s negative, it will very quickly turn into positive. Why? Because talking about your feelings, whether they’re negative or positive will produce estrogen. 

[00:33:16] See me. Hear me. See my sign. I’m activist. I’m opposing. It’s like porn because it will produce estrogen, but it does nothing to change your life. You’re a woman who comes to me for therapy. She’s going to first talk about how bad her husband is or her ex-husband is. And she’ll talk about that. 

[00:33:34] I will listen to that for a while before I help point out to her how she’s also part of the problem. I would never start with that. That would be trying to solve her problem. I’ll first help raise her estrogen by being empathetic to whatever her experiences, even though, from my male side, I know that she’s a part of the problem, just like the other guy’s a part of the problem.

[00:33:56] When it comes to a woman you want to first raise her estrogen. If estrogen levels go up, her stress level will go down. When her stress level goes down, she can think more reasonably and also more positively on an emotional level. So I know you get this but let me give another little story here for everybody listening. 

[00:34:19] This is imagination here for a moment.  We have this hippocampus in our brain, and it’s the memory, this memory center. And for women, it’s generally almost twice as big for them than a man, which, by the way, answers your question, women. You always have the question, which is, how could you forget? How could you forget? 

[00:34:43] Dave: Because you have a man’s brain, a smaller hippocampus.

[00:34:47] John: I have a smaller hippocampus, honey. Don’t take it personally, please. And men are saying, why do you keep remembering everything in the past? By every mistake, you remember it all. And that’s because she’s got a bigger hippocampus. But the hippocampus is like a library, and it has two stories. And the ground story is all the positive memories. 

[00:35:09] You’re an amazing guy. You do this. You did that for me. You do this for me. You love my kids. Just all your best qualities, she remembers on the ground floor. And then all of her disappointments throughout the whole relationship, and her father, and her other relationships, it’s all stored on the second floor. When she’s in stress mode, it’s like she gets in an elevator and goes to the second floor of the memory.

[00:35:33] Dave: Mm. 

[00:35:33] John: And so all she can think about is, you’re the guy who didn’t do this, and you’re the guy who didn’t do this. And as she’s thinking that, she’s just becoming more upset. So if she can express that, expressing what you feel, regardless of whether it’s positive or negative will produce estrogen.

[00:35:50] When estrogen goes up, if she’s deficient in estrogen, now it’s going up, her stress level will go down. When her stress level goes down, she’s not in fight or flight. She’s now on the ground floor. And now suddenly she’s remembering all the good things about you. So this is like an amazing thing for men to know, is if I just don’t take it personally, I don’t get upset about it.

[00:36:12] Men have to take action, though. See, it’s a key thing with testosterone. Keep your testosterone up is action. You’re anticipating success. That’s a big testosterone producer. I know that if a woman is upset with me, if I don’t get upset back, I win. I will always win, and she will win too eventually.

[00:36:30] So I know there’s a big reward coming for being a good “listener”. Now, when in history were men rewarded for being listeners? No way. This is all a whole new thing because when in the past did a woman say, oh, my husband’s not romantic. My husband’s not a good listener. My husband is not tender and affectionate, whatever.

[00:36:51] Women didn’t say that in the past. They say, my husband’s a good provider, or he doesn’t have a job, and he’s not a good provider. That was their major need. But as soon as women evolve beyond their survival needs, and they pretty much can take care of that themselves, then what do I need a man for? And a new need emerges, and it’s an insecurity.

[00:37:12] A deep, deep insecurity emerges, which says, I need a man to reassure me. I need a man to validate me. I need someone to say that I’m okay. And of course, when you’re having negative emotions, how can you say someone’s okay unless you understand, oh, it’s okay. Your estrogen levels are just too low.

[00:37:31] And if you talk for a while, they’ll come back to balance, and then you’ll remember what a great guy I am. And this whole model comes from one day, in my marriage, I was giving my wife a hug, and she was tense. She was tense. We started practicing six-second hugs. It turns out that six or seven seconds into a hug, if it’s non sexual, will produce a wave of oxytocin.

[00:37:55] Oxytocin, you feel safe. And then when you feel safe, you can begin to feel, I can depend on someone, and that raises her estrogen. So now she’s feeling safe. Estrogen levels are going up. Remember, anytime you feel, I can depend on someone for something of value, estrogen goes up. So when her estrogen starts to go up, she starts to feel better.

[00:38:20] After the hug, she said to me, John, for the first part of that hug, I was just frustrated with you. And then I started to remember all the good things you do, and I completely relaxed. So women get upset because they just forget the good things that we do. They’re temporarily no memory. Temporarily, they only remember the bad stuff as opposed to remembering the good stuff.

[00:38:43] So that’s the way I win, is helping her come back to realizing that she’s overreacting. Now, I never say you’re overreacting, but if you give women a chance to hear themselves, they’ll realize, if their estrogen does go up, that they’re overreacting. Anytime I’m upset, I’m overreacting. That’s my whole definition of upset, is you’re not centered and balanced right now.

[00:39:07] Dave: So there a couple of scenarios that come up here. So let’s say that a guy becomes a master of what you’re talking about. So you learn how to stay grounded and to not show that you’re losing your mind but also not lose your mind. Actually, in your heart, in your somatic-felt sense, you’re grounded.

[00:39:25] And a woman who’s important to you in your life is emoting and sharing all the feelings and stuff like that. And you’re like, okay, that’s fine. And you’re practicing what you said. So by showing them that you’re resolute and you’re there for them and wrapping them in safety and all the stuff you do, okay, it passes, and it’s good. But if you’re in a relationship with someone who it never passes, even when you do all that stuff and it just gets worse and worse and worse, what’s the strategy there?

[00:39:57] John: Well, let’s take it back a few steps before she got to that place. So many times, if my partner was to be bothered by something I said or did, it really annoys me a lot. I get angry inside, and then she says, oh, what are you feeling? I said I’m thinking about what you did. Tell me more. I never ever reveal what I feel. 

[00:40:21] Dave: But they can feel you. They have hearts. They know.

[00:40:25] John: Dave, Dave, if you just simply say, I’m just thinking about what you said, help me understand it better, you’re now in control. See, as soon as you express, I’m angry about what you said, or I don’t like what you just said, or I don’t enjoy being with you when you’re like this, you’ve just gone to your female side, and you’re asking her to change, and that will blow her out of the water.

[00:40:47] Dave: No, I’m not going there. So you do the tell me more, tell me more. And I’ve been with people where they–

[00:40:55] John: Let me finish. I hear where you’re going. I don’t say, tell me more, tell me more, tell me more forever. I do it to my point of tolerance and say, now I’m going to think about it. And walk out of the room. I don’t allow myself to go to that place where I’m getting too upset, where my frustration, my annoyance, my being turned off turns into anger. 

[00:41:17] If it starts to turn into that direction of anger, I stop. Okay. Let me think about this. We’ll talk about it tomorrow at 12:00. You just shut them up that way because you can’t hear– right now I can’t hear you. That’s also confrontive. 

[00:41:33] Dave: Oh yeah.

[00:41:34] John: So you want to just say, look, I’m thinking about what you said. We can talk more about this another time, or tomorrow at 12:00, or we’ll do it at dinner tomorrow. Give them a go-to place. In the same way– now let me balance this– basically, you want to have sex with your wife, and she says, I’m not really in the mood, but I’ll let you know when I am.

[00:41:53] That’s such a nicer thing than if I just said, let’s have sex. She says, I really not in the mood now. Then you’re left with feeling, when are you in the mood? And then she’ll say, I don’t know. That’s not an appropriate answer. You basically said, let’s make love tonight. I don’t know if I’m in the mood. We’ll see. Better to say, I’ll let you know. Then you can relax as opposed to feeling like I’m this dog trying to get pet. 

[00:42:21] We need to have consideration for the other person, but I’m telling you, so many arguments start when you’re listening and then you’re getting upset and then a woman will say, what are you feeling? And as soon as you start to express what you’re feeling, it all escalates, and she has way more to share. 

[00:42:39] I’m just saying it up lightly. When your wife says, what are your feeling? I’m just thinking. I’m not feeling. That’s fine. There’s no feeling. I’m just thinking. Even if there is feeling, don’t go there because as soon as– yeah, you’re right. I get a little too excited here– you talk about what you’re feeling, estrogen levels are going higher. So don’t talk.

[00:42:59] Dave: Mm-hmm.

[00:43:00] John: Now, if you’re talking with a buddy, fine. Typically, if you’re upset with your guy friends, you make fun of things. You laugh at things. You lighten it up. That’s a way of processing feelings. And there’s a place, if people hear me, I have to realize there’s so many different parameters. When my wife died, I was only feelings. Five years ago, Bonnie passed, and I grieved and grieved and cried and was upset and nothing feeling. That’s a big problem.

[00:43:30] Yes. You process it. Man, don’t let little stuff bother you. It’s like that book. It’s All Small Stuff. But you can’t tell a woman when she’s having issues about small stuff, this is ridiculous. You’re making a big deal out of nothing. Instead, I interpret it, okay. She just needs to talk for a while about what’s bothering her. And then I’m going to give her a hug, and I don’t have to fix anything. I don’t have to solve anything. This is a difficult thing to master. I have no question about it.

[00:44:01] Dave: It’s definitely something you can master. And it feels like too, especially if it’s earlier on in the relationship, at a certain point, you’re going, you know what? The person that I’m evaluating as a potential partner has an awful lot of this, and it’s more than I want to deal with. 

[00:44:17] Because there are some people who get really stuck in it and some people who the process works. And it feels to me, from talking with friends and people who are working with me on various programs, there’s a level of attainment that men have, like, okay, this is the amount of input that I can take before I get ungrounded. Right?

[00:44:39] John: Good. That’s good. That’s awareness. That’s a very–

[00:44:41] Dave: Yeah, that’s awareness. But if you found a potential partner and their default level is above your level, okay, you can work on your awareness, but it might be the wrong person, and it’s okay. Find someone who’s better matched, right?

[00:44:54] John: Absolutely. There’s a match that we need to recognize. I’ll tell you a story now which is very interesting about the match. Every relationship does have challenges, and my wonderful relationship with Bonnie over 32 years– I just love her so much, always loved her, but there were lots of challenges as well. And that’s part of how I wrote all my books, is how I overcame the challenges in the relationship. And one of the challenges was that Bonnie would never say she’s sorry.

[00:45:26] Dave: Mm.

[00:45:27] John: I felt like I’m the one who’s saying, I’m sorry, all the time. And one day, I said to her, honey, it just seems like I’m always apologizing and saying, I’m sorry, and you don’t. And yet you do for everybody else. And she said, John, when I was growing up, my mother was so hard on me. 

[00:45:43] Everything that went wrong with my brothers or me or her was always my fault, was my fault. It was so painful. And I love you so much. I can say it to other people, but if I said, I’m sorry to you, it would crush me if you looked at me, you should be sorry, and you didn’t forgive me. 

[00:46:05] So I said, in that moment, okay, honey, if you want to say you’re sorry about things, that’s okay. But from now on, you don’t have to. Now, what that did for me, I have to say, was it helped me actually increase my testosterone, my manliness, so to speak, because the part of you that takes responsibility is your masculine side. The part of you that is affected by others is your female side, whether it be positive or negative. 

[00:46:30] So what’s made us successful in life is that when things go wrong, we adjust. We look at, how can I make this better? What do I have to do? What’s right for me to do? There’s a problem. Yes, other people are involved in the problem, but what’s my share of it? What can I do? 

[00:46:43] And we’re looking at our body, and we’re looking at the environment. Biohacking is taking responsibility. It’s a very masculine thing, the biohack, which is, all right, this is affecting me this way. I’ve got toxins here where I’m going to fast. And again, fasting is another reason my testosterone levels stay very healthy.

[00:47:01] I have to do it at least once a month. I love fasting, meaning I have a two or three day fast once a month. Particularly, the way it shows up for me in my 70s is I’ll start getting belly fat. Now, once belly fat starts to happen, we know, for men and for women, belly fat generates estrogen. So I don’t need it. Wisdom and love generate estrogen.

[00:47:27] I don’t need any more estrogen. I have wisdom. I’ve got love. And if I’ve got belly fat, it’s just cooking estrogen all the time, making more. And so that’s something I want to avoid. And so by fasting, it keeps my belly fat down. I do intermittent fasting all the time, but then I occasionally will do two days or three days. So powerful. And of course, a plug for your book, I learned how to fast better your way. So people should know that. This is the ultimate.

[00:47:53] Dave: Thank you.

[00:47:54] John: Yeah, it’s the ultimate. We need to have a way that can work for us. And what you’ve done is explore those different ways for different people. Easy fasting. Then you build up easy to go two or three days. Once a year, I’ll do seven days. I think that’s very powerful for my longevity. And I’m in a competition with you as well. I’m planning 132. We’ll see.

[00:48:16] Dave: Right. I really hope that you beat me, and I also hope that I beat you. Either way, it’ll be a good opportunity to compete, so we all win.

[00:48:26] John: I’m just bringing in the testosterone factor in this. It’s a matter of not whining, not complaining, not being upset, but also there’s a place inside when you’re listening to a woman where it starts to challenge your ability to stay cool, calm, and collected. Stop the conversation. And that really important. 

[00:48:48] And my way of stopping the conversation– I’ve tried different ways. A simple way is, okay, hold on here. I need to go to the bathroom. That’s one way. You’re boxing in the ring, and then you go to your corners.

[00:49:04] Dave: You let the cat out of the bag. I admit that I may have used that a few times in my marriage, but eventually I think she heard one of our episodes where you talked about that, and then she’s like, I know why you’re doing that. And I’m like, I have to poop. Yeah, it only works if you don’t overuse it, I heard.

[00:49:25] John:  For sure. But again, it’s simply, look, I want to understand what you’re saying. I need to think about it, and I’m out of here. You just got to go walk away. You can’t try to be the good guy who’s read my book and you’re supposed to just listen and listen and listen. It’s not, tell me more forever. It’s, tell me more if you can actually persist.

[00:49:44] Now, here’s for the women listening. This is an unrealistic expectation, to expect your husband to listen to your complaints. Analyze your complaints and realize one complaint a week, and turn it into a request. That’s it. Talk about your feelings. Yes, you need to talk about your feelings.

[00:50:03] Talk about your feelings about other things. You’ve got a life out there. You’ve got a job you do. Every day has got frustrations. Every day has disappointments. You’re raising your kids. Any situation, there’s frustrations, there’s disappointments, there’s concerns, there’s embarrassment, there’s feelings of guilt.

[00:50:20] These are emotions that you can share with him about your life rather than your frustration with him, your disappointment with him. And if you don’t have enough emotional intelligence to articulate the various emotions that you have about your life that has nothing to do with him, then all of your emotions, because you’re suppressing them, will get projected onto him.

[00:50:43] So rather than being a little frustrated with him, you had five frustrating things happening today. Now you’re five times more frustrated with Dave. As opposed to at work, this happened. And this is something nobody talks about. Don’t talk to your husband about what’s wrong with him. Talk about what’s wrong with your life.

[00:51:01] And then when you do that, then say to him, always, I just need to share these feelings, and then afterwards I’m going to feel really good. So you share some feelings, and then you let him know that you feel very good by always finishing up by talking about some problems you had with this person, or that happened, or this fed on didn’t start up.

[00:51:18] But I’m really grateful because, I’m happy because. I love you, and I’m so happy that you listen to me, and I’m proud of myself for handling all these problems, and then go for a hug. She has to learn how to process her feelings and use you as a mirror, somebody who’s aware of what she’s going through, but you don’t have to fix anything.

[00:51:40] If women can learn this, you’ll only have a happy, fulfilled man who’s trying to please you all the time. And doesn’t resent the fact that he’s giving so much to you because he’s getting so much back, because what he wants and what he needs is to feel that you can trust him. You depend on him that you accept him just as he is, no complaints, and that you appreciate him for the things he does provide. 

[00:52:03] These are possible. But so many women, when I talk about trusting a man, they put their finger in their mouth and go, ugh. Yeah, I’m supposed to trust him? This is like heresy. This is like today, black people standing up and just saying white people are terrible. It was the thing I heard was. Pale, male, and white. Pale male, and some other bad word. 

[00:52:25] How can people stand up and say these things? It’s so racist. It’s so crazy. The whole society has tipped over where women feel it’s fine to say bad things about men. At least men used to never say bad things about women. Now we’re bouncing back. A lot of men push women down. We have to start loving. What happened to love?

[00:52:48] Dave: I was raised to not say bad things about any group of people because it’s actually the individuals in the group. That person did something, but whether someone else is a member of the group– and if you’re going to be complaining about men or women, it doesn’t work. If you’re looking for patterns in men and women so that you can improve understanding, I’m all over that

[00:53:17] And it feels like there really are some of these patterns in our hormone levels, but you seem like you’re relatively extreme on the effects of estrogen. Are there papers on this? How do you know about this stuff? Because this is really cool. By the way, I find what you’re saying to be accurate and true in my own experience, but how do we know that this raises and lowers estrogen or testosterone?

[00:53:42] John: Okay, so let’s start with testosterone. There’s more research on that. You’re a man and you have a football team or baseball team, soccer team, and they win, you can measure your testosterone goes up. Why did it go up? Because your team won. You were successful. And if they lose, your testosterone goes down and you feel bad.

[00:54:05] Every man knows when you’re not feeling successful, you feel bad. This is such simple knowledge. But there’s a study showing your testosterone shoots way high when your team wins. There’s another one. They’ve got medical records of millions of men in this country.

[00:54:23] They go for checkups. And for every age group, there’s average testosterone for that age group. So you average it out. So 25-year-olds, there’s a high and a low. You’ve got your averages. Now, within that section, let’s say you’re 35 years old. Some men will have the highest testosterone on average. They’re single. 

[00:54:46] The next level down, you’re in a committed relationship with a woman. Now, there’s no research saying if you’re gay or whatever, so I don’t have ex knowledge on all that. I’m just talking about heterosexual. So you’re in a committed relationship with a woman. For that age group, the next lowest level is you’re married.

[00:55:05] So when you’re getting married, you’re suddenly in a lower testosterone level on average, than all the single men. And then you have children, you go down again. These are averages. And you have grandchildren. It goes down again. I don’t have to be average. You don’t have to be average. We’re consciously doing things to biohack our bodies, and our minds, and our heart to be optimal. But the average, it just goes down. 

[00:55:34] Let me give you my experience now as a grandfather. I’ve got five grandchildren. The fifth is now only eight months old. And I go twice a week and play with the granddaughter for two hours. I bring them food, I socialize, but I’m caring for the baby. I’m never run out of energy.

[00:55:54] I have so much energy. But when I spent two hours with a baby, I am exhausted afterwards. I’m just going to take a nap. I am down for it. Because what happened is that loving relationship raises estrogen levels up. So your estrogen goes higher and higher. And there’s a tendency, if you’re not also feeling like you’re solving problems, fixing things on your male side, your testosterone will tend to go down. So I’m just playing with this little baby and being happy. 

[00:56:27] So my point is there’s another research study showing that the more intimate men are with people, personal relationships, it lowers their testosterone on average. So that’s very profound. The next one is if you look at simply the hormone charts, when a woman is healthy, her estrogen levels will be 10 times more than the average man. When a woman is also healthy, her testosterone levels will be quite high.

[00:56:58] But a man’s testosterone levels to be healthy is 10 times higher. And for some men, it’s 20 times higher. So there’s no absolute for every man, no absolute for every woman, but there are these huge diversities between what women need to be happy and what men need to be happy. For example, we talked about the guy who works out at 4 o’clock in the morning. What’s his name?

[00:57:21] Dave: David Goggins, I think.

[00:57:23] John: When you see a man who’s got big shoulders, he’s going to have a littler waist typically. That’s a mesomorph body type. If you’re born with a mesomorph body type, then you have to make more testosterone to feel good. If you’re born with– 

[00:57:38] Dave: Oh, no kidding. So if you’re like a V shape, you need more testosterone, or you’re going to be unhappy.

[00:57:45] John: That’s right. You need to make more testosterone. So if you go– yeah. 

[00:57:50] Dave: That’s why I like to shoot up testosterone all the time. Totally solves my problems.

[00:57:56] John: Again, making testosterone is better than shooting up testosterone, just to–

[00:58:02] Dave: I’ve heard it. I’ve heard that. No, I do both as well as I can, but it’s been low my whole life. Okay. 

[00:58:08] John: Yeah. So basically, if you shoot up testosterone, okay, it’s going to have some biological effects in your body. And it might also give you a greater level of confidence to take action. And it’s the confidence to take action and actually put it into action that’s going to be healthy for you and raise your testosterone your own. 

[00:58:27] It’s like antidepressants do very little except it’s a placebo. And due to the placebo effect, it might cause people to have more confidence in interacting with other people, and that would be the benefit of it. 

[00:58:40] So do it for a short period of time, set up some good habit patterns, and then let your relationship stimulate the brain chemicals of happiness and the hormones of motivation and happiness. When I talked about motivation, I think for the women listening, it’s very important to understand men. You asked for research. Let me do a little bit more on– 

[00:59:01] Dave: Yeah.

[00:59:01] John: Women and estrogen. This dawned on me, is it turns out that back when I wrote Men Are From Mars, all of the medical community was asking me, how do we get men to all go to the doctors? Women all go to the doctors way more than men do. And it turns out that when you depend on someone for something, a hormone that feels really good gets produced. 

[00:59:30] Now, I don’t have any research on that one other than just that one. I got lots of examples. Then I looked in the newspaper, and I saw that 90% of the people who go to talk therapy, go to counseling, where you’re just going to talk, are women. Why do men not do that?

[00:59:48] Now, men might go for strategies. We have this whole new field called coaching, where you’re going to learn strategies as opposed to just sitting there and talking. I’m telling you, many of these counselors will just sit and ask questions of women, and they leave, and they feel better.

[01:00:03] Why do they feel better? And why is it 90% of the people who go to talk therapy just to feel better are women? Because you do feel better. It raises your estrogen levels. Then you look at oxytocin. Now, oxytocin was considered to be the magic hormone. And in the ’90s, I would talk about that, is I went into the malls, and I saw that– you won’t see this today, but women were different back then.

[01:00:30] You see a mother with a baby in a baby carriage, and other women would flock. They glow. They see that little baby. And I go, okay, what is that hormone? And you find that’s the hormone oxytocin. And the 10 years later, they did research showing oxytocin is associated with low stress in women.

[01:00:50] Remember, women need to make 10 times more estrogen for their feelings of well-being. If a woman wants the orgasm, her estrogen levels have to become double, 10 times more than a man. These are all biological studies we can measure. Towards ovulation, for a woman to ovulate, her estrogen levels have to double. 

[01:01:11] And they also have research studies showing that when women’s estrogen levels are close to ovulation, they find men very attractive, and they want to be penetrated. They have that desire for sex. So you put all this stuff together, and you realize she feels, I need a man. She’s in touch with, I need a man. I want to hold him. I want to take him inside of me. That happens when her estrogen levels go to a higher level than normal. And then you have women who are unhappy.

[01:01:42] Depressed women have low estrogen levels. And now, to get a little bit more sophisticated, after ovulation depressed women have not enough progesterone. Now progesterone is produced. Again, it takes a long time to figure this psychological aspect of it out, but there’s research studies that show that progesterone gets produced in social bonding.

[01:02:06] Dave: Mm.

[01:02:06] John: Okay, that’s well known social– oxytocin has been associated with well-being. We know that well-being in women is also their estrogen levels have to be 10 times higher than a man’s. So oxytocin allows estrogen to go up because when you feel safe– think about when you feel safe. You can depend on someone. 

[01:02:26] For me as a man, I have a female side, and sometimes, like when I was in Russia, I had this bodyguard who was 6’8, big, giant guy, and– I never feel afraid. I don’t walk around having the awareness of being afraid unless I’m driving a car at 130 miles an hour or something. So it’s just not in my nature. But when I was with that man, I noticed how good I felt. It was like, it feels really comfortable to have someone to protect you. 

[01:02:56] I realized this is what women get out of men, is basically when you feel that I’ve got protection, your estrogen levels go up. And what do you feel inside? You feel, I can depend on this person to protect me. It’s that feeling of, I can depend on someone. What do women always say? When women are stressed, what do they always say? They say, I can’t trust you. This is like the killer of relationships because the number one testosterone producer in men is you trust me.

[01:03:26] If you trust me, my testosterone goes up. When I come and speak at your conferences, oh, John Gray’s here. I already know they’re going to love my talk. They’re here because they want to hear my talk because they expect something good. When you feel trusted as a man, that you can deliver the goods, your testosterone levels shoot up.

[01:03:46] It’s the language. What raises estrogen? What raises estrogen is when a woman feels I can trust you. Why can I trust you? Because I know you care about me. I know you think I’m important. I know that you’ll be there for me. So the languages of love and men from Mars are still the languages of love because of the languages of hormones. 

[01:04:11] When you give me a message that you trust me for something of value, my testosterone goes up. If I’m not perfect and you accept me, you’re not trying to change me, my testosterone goes up. And I’ll give you an example of that. One time I was doing some photo shoots in China, and people wanted their photos with me. And I’m like, let me comb my hair. And the woman said, oh, nobody cares what you look like. You’re a genius.

[01:04:41] Dave: That raised your testosterone, right?

[01:04:43] John: Of course. Of course. That means I don’t have to be perfect to be lovable, and I’m trusted. And so the other message’s that’s acceptance. When you get acceptance, your testosterone goes up. And that’s also forgiveness as well. You don’t have to be perfect. When women say they want a funny man, actually what they want is a man who’s light about himself.

[01:05:07] He has a lightness. He’s not always defending himself. Like, no, I’m right. I have to be right all the time. Oh, I made a mistake. Oh, I’m a little embarrassed, whatever. Playfulness. That’s acceptance. So you accept him. You trust him, and the big one, another testosterone producer, is you appreciate him. That’s the language of love that raises testosterone, and it will raise a woman’s testosterone as well.

[01:05:30] If I give her that trust and acceptance, and I appreciate her, but I’m like a child, if I’m in the place of depending on her, accepting her no matter what, and appreciating everything she does for me, she’s going to feel like she’s my mother, and she’s going to get turned off to me. What she needs to feel is she has that sense of she can depend on me for things, appreciates what I provide, etc.

[01:05:56] What she needs to open her heart is messages that say– as you relate to those things I just said that boost testosterone, what boosts estrogen is when somebody feels they can depend on you for their safety and their security, which that means, I care about you. If there’s a fire, I’m going to run and get you.

[01:06:17] I’m not going to get somebody else. I’m going to find you. You’re number one. Caring is like, if you get a new car and you’re a man, you like your car, and somebody dents it or scratches across the car, it’s like they scratched you. That’s what women want to feel to bump up their estrogen, is I care about you. You’re important to me. You’re significant to me. 

[01:06:40] Second one, I understand where you’re coming from. Women’s so much need understanding because they won’t admit it, but they feel like they’re crazy, or they feel unlovable, or they feel like they’re being too needy or too demanding, whatever. And what they need is some messages saying, I still love you. I still love you.

[01:06:59] My wife says to me, you do so much for me. I feel like I don’t deserve it. I say, yes you do Yes, you do. I love you. This is the dynamic where they need to feel that they’re not being seen as crazy, or demanding, or negative. So they need caring, they need understanding, and they also need respect.

[01:07:21] And this is where my teaching varies from everything in the books. Nobody has ever pointed this out, but what’s the word respect means I have my interpretation. Again, you have translation of language, but this word respect, I hear it over and over where men think, I want respect. You’re not respecting me. 

[01:07:42] Actually, what men really need is appreciation. When somebody respects you, that means they do things for you. I’m going to do things for you. I have a baby who’s crying in the night. I’m going to get up, and I’m going to take care of that baby because I respect the needs of that baby.

[01:07:59] If I’m driving in a way that makes my wife feel unsafe, I’m going to respect her comfort needs and adjust how I drive to make her happy. But at the same time, I don’t want to feel like I’m a slave, or a wimp, or just pleasing her. I have to realize she’s sitting to the right of me in the car. If she doesn’t feel comfortable, even though I’m comfortable, I need to respect her. 

[01:08:23] So here’s a little practical example of respecting a woman as the best foreplay in the world. I drive fast sometimes. If we’re in a hurry, she’s happy for me to drive fast. But if we’re not in a hurry, she feels a little stressed. So she could say, you’re driving too fast. That’s not nice to say. 

[01:08:42] You should slow down. That’s not nice to say. It’s like you’re the boss of me. Don’t be the boss of me. So how to communicate, slow down. We worked it out. Just grab the handle of the car. She grabbed the handle. I said, oh, I’d be happy to slow down. Then I put my hand on her thigh, and I say, and I did that for you. 

[01:09:03] And she says, I know, and I greatly appreciate it. See, that’s where you’re no longer a wimp. You’re trying to please a woman, but only because you’re getting rewarded so much. It’s a good deal. I’m going to make an adjustment, but I’m getting something back. And a lot of times men hear me speaking and think, oh, you’re just supposed to be a wimp and do everything for women. I said, no, you do what you want to do for her, but you want to do more when what you’re getting back is great. 

[01:09:28]  

[01:09:28] Dave: So if you’re paid back in distrust or disrespect, you’re not motivated, and then you’re that wimp you’re talking about. But if you do it and it’s reciprocated, then it actually is good for the woman, and it’s good for the man. And that makes–

[01:09:45] John: It’s what a relationship’s all about. It’s finding out what your partner needs, do your best to provide that. And when you’re not getting what you need, don’t be a baby. You’re a grownup. Have a life. My whole message here is, don’t look to your partner to be happy. Look to your partner to be happier.

[01:10:05] It’s not my job to make her happy. That’s her job. It’s my job to take her from happy to happier. Likewise, it’s not her job to make me happy, but how she responds to me will make me happier. It’s not her cooking a meal for me. It’s not her cleaning the house for me. That’s old-fashioned stuff. That’s when men were out in the world and women were at home all day.

[01:10:27] So they did those things as reciprocity. They were giving back to him because he gave so much for her. But when women are out there being independent, men are being independent, what do women need? What they need is a man’s assistance and helping her come back to the female side of her, which is her female hormones.

[01:10:47] And by the way, you wanted more research on this, which is when you look at women, when they’re very depressed, and very suicidal, and very bitchy, and awful, usually, if it happens, it’s the five days before her period. And that’s when she needs the most progesterone.

[01:11:08] But all women who have that problem– they’ve measured this– it’s a condition called PCOS. It’s a condition which is moody, and irritable, and unhappy, and dissatisfied. They look at, what are your hormone imbalances? And at that time, she’s making too much testosterone.

[01:11:28] Dave: Mm-hmm.

[01:11:28] John: The testosterone levels are really high. And testosterone inhibits the production of progesterone. And biologically, if you look at the actual biochemistry of this, in a woman’s body, when she makes testosterone, she uses up her progesterone. So progesterone is a precursor for making testosterone. What produces testosterone goes way up when you’re being challenged by life and you have to protect yourself and you don’t have a man to protect you.

[01:11:58] Your testosterone shoots up. So you can just see how this happens, is when a woman doesn’t feel safe that I can depend on someone, then I have to depend on myself. It’s real simple. I’m on my female side. My husband’s protecting me. My husband’s doing things for me, are giving me something of meaning, which is he’s loving me in a way that says he cares about me.

[01:12:19] He understands me. He doesn’t judge me. He doesn’t make fun of me. He honors my needs, my sensitivities. That honoring needs and sensitivities is respect. Now I need respect, of course, but respect is not my major need. My major need is testosterone. Once my testosterone is fine, yeah, respect me all you want. That’s great. That’s just extra on top. So humans need all those forms of love, but for hormonal balance, we need to lean in one direction or the other.

[01:12:49] Dave: I have a couple of questions about estrogen for you. One’s an observation. One’s a question. Your talk about how not being trusted or appreciated suppresses testosterone in men, which suppresses dopamine, and happiness, and all. This is why coming after a guy’s reputation is such a sneak attack, and it does lead to disruption.

[01:13:12] I’m actually realizing Joe Rogan dropped my testosterone because there was a time, which is like 10 years ago or something, where he had a financial interest in a competitor to Bulletproof, and all of a sudden it went from Dave Asprey changed everything for me to he’s a liar and a con artist.

[01:13:28] So all of a sudden, I felt untrusted by my community because a bunch of trolls came to my website. That’s why trolling is so bad for people in general. And so it was really dysregulating, and I didn’t understand it was about the testosterone dopamine axis. Because the reality was every time Joe said Dave’s a bad man, or whatever the insult of the day was, it actually meant I was selling more coffee.

[01:13:48] It didn’t matter what he said. It was actually good for business. But I couldn’t see that because I was so rocked by it. And that’s water under the bridge. I’m grateful for the experience because it did grow resilience for me. But when a person comes after someone’s reputation the way they do when someone says something that’s not in the current narrative, they come after your reputation. It’s a big, structured thing they do in big media.

[01:14:12] And you’ll see there’s a very standard way of taking down someone to make everyone think they’re not trustworthy, which then dysregulates their stuff. What’s the defense against that? Is that the time to start injecting testosterone? Is that the time to meditate? What do you do if there’s an unwarranted attack on your reputation that makes you feel like you’re not trusted, which has a hormonal effect?

[01:14:32] John: Huge, huge. See, we’re relational beings. How we interpret reality around us dramatically affects our hormone system and dysregulates us. So I’m no stranger to what you just talked about. I was canceled in the year 2000. At the end of 2000, all the papers were saying Men Are From Mars was the biggest selling book of all books– all books, self-help, everything. It was considered one of the top 10 most influential books for the whole quarter century.

[01:15:07] So I was getting huge publicity. I never received a positive print interview. On video, I show myself. How can you be critical of me? And usually, the medium of TV interviews, they want you to look good. We’re having a fun, friendly thing. This is such family-friendly ideas. It’s all positive.

[01:15:28] But the writers, they’re all jealous of me because I’m this big seller, and they’re writers, and they’re getting nothing. So they’re just looking at me, and they’re just furious, jealous. Why is he getting all these books sold? So they always have that edge because I’m a writer. They’re writers. And so they took it out on me. So that was devastating to me. 

[01:15:50] And so that was one of the hardest things. And particularly, I did the biggest theater on Broadway, the most successful show in history monetarily and got terrible reviews, but it’s sold out every night. And they were upset because I didn’t even have a stage set. I’m enough. I come out. I’m enough. I’m doing my thing. I was critical of that. 

[01:16:12] A little play on this one, but at one point, I would bring people up and work with them on the stage for fun. And one guy was a vaudeville comedian, and he was so funny. I just let him talk for a while. He was funnier than me. Because part of my thing is humor as well. And his wife said, Samuel, get off the stage. And the whole audience booed her because– I liked him. Everybody’s liked him. It’s fun. 

[01:16:39] And so the New York Times, USA Today, they said, oh, Gray gave his talk, and the people booed. Now see, you have to realize, I have already toughened up. This is eight years of massive success and lots of criticism, but still, I’m the biggest author. But this one got to me because I found out the next day that some parent had given their child that article, and the child brought it to school for my daughter and all the kids made fun of her. Oh, your dad. You think he’s so great. He was booed off the stage that got to me. 

[01:17:13] So I’m just giving an example of things really hit you deep. So that triggered a huge drop in testosterone, if you look at it biologically. Estrogen levels off the chart. So how do you get out of that? I can meditate or whatever, but I was just like, couldn’t get beyond it.

[01:17:32] John: And it was a technique that I used all the way through that whole period of my life. When people were critical of me, knock me down, I had to pick myself back up. And two ways to do it– this is my technique– when something really gets you, you’ve got to process your feelings. You’ve got to process your emotions.

[01:17:48] There’s an old saying in China, men don’t cry unless their heart is broken, which symbolizes if it’s a big thing, you need to process your emotions. If it’s a little thing, the normal stuff of life, you just ignore it and go do something to bump up your testosterone. Have your testosterone-building hobbies that you can do, that don’t have to do with talking about feelings.

[01:18:13] And this is more common for men today, who are actually have way too much estrogen. Things will trigger them. They’ll get all upset. If you are all upset, two steps. One, first go out and do something to bump your testosterone up as much as possible. If you exercise, use your muscles.

[01:18:31] That’s a really key factor, is using your muscles, solving problems. Whatever your skill is, go and do it. Put your feelings to the side. But then come back to those feelings because they didn’t go away. That means you have to process them. And this is what I believe about men versus women.

[01:18:51] Whenever men are hugely triggered, it’s activating your childhood. Now, in psychology, we think everything is activating your childhood, and it is to some extent. Women can be activated from yesterday. They’re estrogen beings. They have emotion all the time. They’re pushing it down, pushing it down. So they can be upset about stuff, and it’s just today.

[01:19:13] But for us, if something hits you big, it’s because it triggered something deep from your childhood. So whether it be something about today or something from your childhood, the process is the same. This is what I did. I’ve done a thousand of these during the ’90s when I was being attacked all the time.

[01:19:29] Rarely do I need to do it now, but I sit down at the piece of paper and I write out what I’m feeling. I write out, I’m angry. What I want. I’m right out what I’m disappointed or sad about or hurt by. What I want. I go into what I’m afraid of. And they’re all irrational. So I’m afraid no one will like me again.

[01:19:48] I’m afraid I’m over the hill. I’m afraid I’m a liar. I’m afraid I’m a fraud. I’m afraid they’re right about me. Whatever. See, I don’t believe any of those things, but if you’ve got negative emotions, it’s because they’re irrational. So a rational guy like you has to say, temporarily, I’m going to exaggerate the irrational aspect of these strong feelings I’m having.

[01:20:06] And you write out anger, sadness, fear, and then regret. Each time, what I want, what I want, what I want.  The most powerful thing to feel good is to be in touch with what I want. Anybody who’s depressed has stopped wanting. Anybody who’s afraid is, I don’t want, I don’t want. 

[01:20:26] But every negative emotion is an I don’t want. So you write out the negative emotion, and then what I want. Write out the sadness and what I want, write out the fear and what I want, right out the guilt, shame, regret, whatever, and what I want. And go into what I want.

[01:20:39] That’s the first step. Then change the subject and imagine having what you want. You go into, okay, I’m just going to focus on what I want to happen and imagine it happening. And when I imagine what is happening, I’ll feel better. All negativity is just imagining the worst that hasn’t happened.

[01:21:01] And I’m going to imagine the best. What I want is people to think I’m wonderful. And I just go back and remember times when people said, you’re wonderful. Now what I do is– I’ve got millions of videos online, of views, millions, billions, whatever. I just go and watch some of my videos. 

[01:21:20] My favorite one is my Ted Talk with just 20 minutes, and I just look at everybody’s responses. You just go talk to some people. Love you, Dave. Call me up. And I was just saying, look, you changed my whole life. Biohacking is everything. It’s amazing. And talk to somebody else.

[01:21:33] So you’ve already had that experience. So after I’ve gone through the negative, focus on what I want, then I imagine having what I want, which is people thinking I’m great, people thinking I’m wonderful, people thinking that I made a difference in their life. That’s what I want, is I’m successful. Once I’ve imagined that, then I come back to, how does that make me feel?

[01:21:52] Well, I’m grateful. I’m happy. I feel love. I love my wife. I love my children. I love my life, and whatever. And I’m proud of myself. So four positive emotions to go against those four negative emotions. Now, Dave, you’re super famous, so when something cracks your emotions, because you’re a very grounded man, it’s really about the childhood.

[01:22:12] So what you do is you go through the feelings of, it’s all over. I’m not good enough. I should be better. I won’t be successful. I’m being mistreated. I’m not being seen. How cruel. Okay. Then you listen to that, and you go, gee, how did I feel like that as a little child but I didn’t realize it, and I didn’t realize it?

[01:22:31] So now you just go back and remember one incident. And just give yourself the realization that what I’m feeling now is what I was feeling then and didn’t know it. So then you write out your anger, sad, afraid, and guilty as a kid, as if you’re writing to one of your parents, and saying what you want, what you want, what do you want.

[01:22:49] Then write out the response you want to hear from the parent. And that’s called reparenting. And then you give yourself that response. And then you say, how does that make me feel? I feel great. I feel wonderful. I feel safe. I feel good enough. I feel like I can make my dreams come true. So what I’ve done is changed how I feel by adjusting my hormones.

[01:23:09] When the parent is reparenting you, they’re giving you messages. I appreciate you. I accept you. I believe in you. I’m there for you. You’re a great kid. But the key, again, every one of these stages, people have to listen to this again and again, these are significant stages. 

[01:23:25] What I’m feeling now, how it relates to my past, imagine being then. Write out the four negative emotions, imagine the parent saying, I understand why you’re angry. I understand why you’re sad or disappointed. I understand you’re afraid about this. I understand. You have to be understood.

[01:23:39] The female side of us needs to feel somebody cares, somebody understands what we’re going through. We’re not saying you shouldn’t feel that way, but understands how we feel and then respects us by saying, it’s my fault. I’m so sorry. I made a mistake. I’m going to change. I’m going to give you what you want.

[01:23:56] Imagine a perfect parent, which no parent is, of course, giving you what you need. And then asking yourself, if I got what I need, which I’ve just imagined, how would that make me feel? And then you would feel who you truly are. You would feel secure. You’d feel safe. You’d feel forgiving. You’d feel accepting of yourself. A whole bunch of feelings come up that you would have felt as a child if your parent had been able to be there for you at that time.

[01:24:22] Dave: Right. It’s funny. That idea of reexperiencing a pain and then experiencing the positive thing, that’s at the core of the reset process we do at 40 Years of Zen at my neuroscience clinic, but with amplifications from tech. And Gabby Bernstein’s been on the show. She’s a friend. I think also a friend of yours, most likely. You know Gabby, right?

[01:24:41] She did a lot of IFS and reparenting stuff, and it’s a potent thing. I thought you were going to say, the testosterone way, you imagine all the things that are wrong, and then what would raise your testosterone? And I like to have a wood chipper, and I just imagine feeding the bad people into the wood chipper, and my testosterone goes up. 

[01:25:01] John: Ah, great. Get a gun, and just shoot it at a target. Your testosterone will go up. But see, that was my first step.

[01:25:07] Dave: I don’t really–

[01:25:07] John: Do the testosterone things, and if that negative stuff is still there, then you know it’s your past. It’s not right now. Because all we have to do as men is go solve a problem and feel confident. The estrogen comes back down, the testosterone goes up, and you’re in balance.

[01:25:26] Dave: Here’s another question, and this is an advanced biohacking question, and you might be one of the few people who’d know an answer to this or a potential answer. We have a problem where testosterone’s lower everywhere in men and women because of pollution, and we have more estrogen in men because of societal changes and all that.

[01:25:43] There are drugs called selective estrogen receptor degraders or SERDs like Faslodex, and you take it. It blocks the effect of estrogen on receptors, and it degrades the receptors so that they don’t like estrogen as much. Thoughts on maybe taking that stuff so that you’re just a little bit more able to handle the world we live in today?

[01:26:02] I’m not familiar with that, but does it actually destroy the receptor site, or does it–

[01:26:08] Dave: It degrades the receptors. It doesn’t destroy them fully, but they just don’t work as well. 

[01:26:12] John: Okay. My first reaction is there are men who make no estrogen, and they’re sociopaths and psychopaths.

[01:26:20] Dave: Yeah. They run for office, right? I got you on that.

[01:26:22] John: That’s right. They’re all politicians. Anybody who cannot care what–

[01:26:25] Dave: A few are bankers or World Economic Forum, but we know all that.

[01:26:29] John: We know all that. So these are psychopaths, sociopaths. So they don’t care what other people think. They just care about what they think. And what’s interesting, and I’ll give an example of this, when I first became aware of this, when I saw the movie Terminator, and I got in my car afterwards, it was like suddenly I was revving my engine to race out of this place, and I noticed the whole parking lot garage, all the guys were revving their engines.

[01:26:56] I don’t see that. So why did I suddenly feel this strong power? And I noticed I feel so powerful. What I felt powerful is the whole movie I was identifying with a robot because the action figure men will typically identify with the action figure. The action figure has no emotions.

[01:27:14] Dave: You will be terminated. Okay.

[01:27:16] John: Exactly. So if I have no emotions, I will be the most powerful person in the world because my emotions say, I care about you. I don’t want to hurt your feelings. I don’t want to mislead people. I want to be kind. I want to be fair. This is our feeling self. This is our conscience. This is our connection to the divine.

[01:27:36] This is our female side. We came out of our mothers, through the heavens. It’s our female side that we connect with the divine. It’s just that if we have too much female side, our testosterone is weak. And we don’t do anything with that. And think about a guy who’s testosterone is weak. He feels, I’m not confident to achieve my goals. I’m not going to do it. 

[01:27:56] And so what does he then do? He goes over and eats a lot, or he wants to have fun. And in the old days, it was called a playboy. If you never earned your way into the world and you’ve got a lot of money from your parents, so you don’t have confidence that I can do it myself, the testosterone is low. And typically, they would become playboys. 

[01:28:14] Not every man who has wealthy parents is a playboy, but that’s typically it. You’re a drug addict. You’re a playboy. You want to do fun things. You just want to do enjoyment. You just want pleasure as opposed to getting pleasure from doing things that are of service to others.

[01:28:29] So the male way to happiness is you do things not to be happy. You do things to be of service, to be productive, to solve problems. And happiness comes from behind. It’s literally an experience of the soul that is always behind us watching. And that joy comes because you’re in your role as a man, solving problems.

[01:28:49] It just comes upon you. Just like when I’m doing my exercises this morning, when I always go the extra bit where it’s a little harder, you feel so good. It comes in because you applied yourself to do what you can do. When men don’t do that, then I don’t feel confident, so I’m not going to do that. Then we go over to our female side and do what we like to do, do what we enjoy doing, do what’s pleasurable, do what stimulates us, do what gives us a big dopamine rush.

[01:29:17] So anyway, my warning there is can make you a psychopath if you have no estrogen as a man. And I think that when men have too much estrogen, at least my experience, they talk too much about their feelings. They give too much validity to their emotions, and their feelings, and they share too much.

[01:29:35] They talk too much. See, I talk a lot, but everything I’m talking about is solving problems, is I know what the problems are out there. Every word is, is this how it’s going to be heard? I want to make sure it’s going to help people, not hurt people. This is very testosterone of a male needs to work.

[01:29:55] Again, here’s more research. When you look at the insurance actuaries, they know that when a man retires, he has two to three years before he has a heart attack. Now, why does he have a heart attack? What happens? They also know when a man retires, his testosterone levels go down. And this is something you don’t see anywhere.

[01:30:16] But the bottom line is that when men retire, they’re way more vulnerable to having a heart attack. And the heart attack, you can associate it with oxidized cholesterol. It’s not cholesterol, but it’s oxidized cholesterol. Could be one of the conditions, but why is it oxidized? Because you’re in a state of stress. 

[01:30:34] When men are not producing, when their testosterone goes down, they’re in a state of stress. Even if they’re sitting there watching TV and doing nothing, their body is in a state of stress. It seems somewhat relaxing. And again, it is relaxing. Again, paradox is all over the place. 

[01:30:50] I’ll be doing three clients a day in this show. I work hard. I put a lot of energy out. Now I can go and watch TV, and I’m relaxing. That could be cave time. I’m relaxing. And by relaxing, I’m rebuilding my testosterone to go out and fight another battle. But if that day I didn’t fight another battle, if I didn’t do anything and I just sit in front of the TV set, it’s going to cause stress inside of me because I’m not doing what I’m here to do.

[01:31:16] I’m procrastinating being a man. I’m putting it off. And everybody knows when you really want to do something, you procrastinate. It’s a major source of stress because you’re not following through on what you said you’re going to do.

[01:31:29] Dave: I love that. It makes so much sense. So masturbation in men versus masturbation in women. What does it do to men?

[01:31:38] John: Okay, so you get a huge dose of dopamine, estrogen surge, and a bigger surge of testosterone. Ironically, research shows that a man to have an erection has to have a surge of estrogen, but he also has to have a lot of testosterone. If you have no testosterone and you’re with a woman, you get a surge of estrogen, but you don’t get turned on.

[01:32:00] That’s why married men over time don’t get turned on to their wives. And this is very common, is he has so much estrogen because he loves her. He depends on her for the extra support she gives him. And that’s important. You should depend on that. But you should be getting enough messages that say, you’re the guy. You’re providing, and protecting, and providing a support that she needs. You’re feeling appreciated. You do something. And you get appreciated. 

[01:32:25] So if your testosterone is low and you love someone, your estrogen will go up, and you won’t be able to get an erection. If you have testosterone go really high and you have no estrogen, you won’t get erections either.

[01:32:39] This is your sociopaths and psychopaths. They can’t get erections through love. I don’t want to analyze that right now, but the bottom line here is that we do need female energy to raise our testosterone even higher. And so we have to have some of the estrogen to get turned on.

[01:32:58] So the thing that happens when you go online and do pornography and do masturbation, if you’re masturbating to 64,000 people that want you, women that want you, undressing in front of you, your subconscious mind thinks you’re the alpha male of the universe.

[01:33:15] If you are a monkey tribe– this is interesting– if you’re a beta monkey, but the alpha dies, he’s the one that all the females want to have sex with the most. He’s alpha because his testosterone levels, if measured, will be double all of the betas. He has double the testosterone.

[01:33:31] And then when he dies, the monkeys will fight amongst themselves, and one will become the top. In one day, his testosterone doubles just because of his status in the hierarchy And once his testosterone doubles, what goes along with that is all the females want to have sex with him.

[01:33:49] So when you get this illusion that females want to have sex with you, you feel you’ve earned it, that you’re the alpha. And so automatically, your testosterone levels double. And they go up, and then they crash back down as with everything. When you overstimulate, receptor sites close down. And biologically, the porn sites will all say, oh, masturbation doesn’t lower your testosterone.

[01:34:12] Oh, let’s look at one long-term study, which is the fact that every year men’s testosterone levels go down 1%. And you can’t even find men that don’t do porn and masturbate. They can’t even do studies on students, young men who aren’t doing porn. It’s just very rare. So what we know is, after sex, your testosterone does go down to baseline.

[01:34:35] But over time, masturbating or having sex all the time, your testosterone levels will start going down, down, down. Because after sex, what you have is a drop in testosterone as well. You have sex. That’s when you want to pull away. You want to go to your cave, so to speak. You withdraw a bit. This disconnection is going to help restore balance and raise your testosterone.

[01:34:59] And that’s called the recovery period. When you masturbate, what happens is there’s a natural urge in young men. Your testosterone is up. You’re getting erections. I’m talking to the young guys. When you do this, you’re training your body to ejaculate. If you do this, this is just an upward stroke on the top of your penis. You’re training your penis. You’ll feel pleasure, but you don’t need to ejaculate.

[01:35:24] Dave: On the top. 

[01:35:25] John: Yeah, on the top. It’s the top of the penis going up. There’s less sensation there. So you’re training yourself to be aroused without needing to be too aroused. Too aroused basically means your estrogen levels have shot up too high. Remember, pleasure is estrogen.

[01:35:45] When you’re doing anything that’s pleasurable, you’re making estrogen. Anything you love to do is making estrogen. So estrogen levels are rising, and when they go so high and your testosterone isn’t matching it, now you’re mainly estrogen dominant. Your body basically ejaculates.

[01:36:01] You’re out of balance. Tension builds up, and the intensity builds up, and you release. The whole idea of learning to make love without ejaculating is making sure that the intensity doesn’t go too high. It just gets higher and higher and higher, and your body adjusts to it over time. It adjusts, and it adjusts.

[01:36:22] The research on 25-year-old men, when they had sex with their wives and stained from sex for six days, on the seventh day, when they wake up, their testosterone levels increased by 50% or more. So this increase from not yet having sex. 

[01:36:40] Dave: Abstain from sex or from ejaculation.

[01:36:44] John: Well, their study was abstaining from sex, but basically for most people, that meant not ejaculation. So they didn’t ejaculate. If on Tuesday they had sex and they ejaculated, and on Saturday they had sex and they ejaculated, when Saturday comes around next week, they don’t have 50% more testosterone.

[01:37:02] And if every week you have sex twice a week, and so you’re never starting out with that 50% higher, women are going to not be as thrilled by you because when your testosterone goes higher, it raises their estrogen. And there’s research to show that as well. We put out pheromones that raise women’s estrogen, and when women’s estrogen goes higher, it puts out pheromones that raise a man’s testosterone.

[01:37:26] We’re very reciprocal in that case. I want to suggest to couples who are not having sex, the reason you’re not having sex, you’re not feeling the desire. Now, first of all– well, there’s so many reasons for these things. But what happens in sex is the newness of a relationship. You don’t have to have good relationship skills to feel sexual attraction.

[01:37:46] You just need high dopamine. High dopamine, the newness, the danger, the challenge, all that, or if you do sex, which is you wouldn’t want your mother to find out about it’s dangerous to reveal it, any of those things produce high dopamine. High dopamine in a male raises testosterone. High dopamine in a woman raises her estrogen, so it amplifies our sexual attraction. 

[01:38:08] But when newness goes out of the relationship, you don’t get free testosterone if you’re a man. You don’t get free estrogen if you’re a woman. And it’s the testosterone and estrogen that actually is what’s creating the attraction. Because think of a male as the positive pole of a magnet and the female as the negative pole of a magnet. She’s receptive. Now she’s not a negative person, but she’s got the vagina. He’s got the penis. Positive, negative. 

[01:38:32] Now, if you have a positive pole and a negative pole, you don’t notice much when the magnets are not so close, but when you get naked and get close, suddenly, if you have those magnets, they’ll click. The fire gets turned on. That’s what you can have for a lifetime. 

[01:38:47] Because you can’t have dopamine for a lifetime with your partner, familiarity sets in, serotonin in, comfort and ease set in. You want that comfort and ease, but when you get naked in bed, now you’re going with that to happen. It will always happen if you have polarity of masculine and feminine. I have to be more masculine than her. She has to be more feminine than me. 

[01:39:11] And that’s the polarity of estrogen goes higher, my testosterone goes higher. We will always have that click. It won’t be like it was in the beginning, which is like a drug trip, just the newness where you touch one finger and you’ll click.  But as a couple, and this is my favorite technique, in bed, be more feminine than the man.

[01:39:33] What is more feminine? It’s more emotional. Where do emotions come from? Insecurity. You can’t be angry if you’re not insecure, you can’t be sad if you’re not– it’s all insecurity inside. It’s needing something. So what do all women need? They need reassurance. The relationships are about needing reassurance for the woman. That I care. That I hear you. I still love you. I respect you. You’re the one for me. 

[01:39:56] That’s why monogamy can be so good for women. It’s just helping to open them up. And good for a man because you’re keeping your promise. But on the female side, here’s the technique, Dave, for the woman to say when you’re in the bedroom and you’re getting naked, to just feel her vulnerability, and at some point, say, do you love me? And the man says, yes, I love you. Now, this is a process as opposed to, of course, I love you.

[01:40:18] No, you’re doing a process to say the words that all women want to hear. Do you love me? I love you. How much do you love me? I love you with all my heart. Am I the one for you? Yes, you’re the only one for me. Are you sure you want to be with me? Yes, I always want to be with you. 

[01:40:34] The more things she can bring out and you’re the answer to it, now you’re penetrating her on emotional level at a deep level. This is called the reassurance exercise. It will amp up her estrogen because women all want to get reassured. You’re still attracted to me. I’m still beautiful. I’m still the one for me. I’m the only one for me. You’re not mad at me? You still love me? You forgive me from yesterday? See, they’re looking for that reassurance.

[01:40:57] Dave: Hmm. And the woman has to ask first? Even if she doesn’t feel like she needs reassurance, she just asks anyway, which sets up this cycle.

[01:41:05] John: I convince women that they need it. In five minutes, it’s hard to convince them. How many women want to look in the mirror and say, you’re beautiful? They all want to hear you’re beautiful. In my classes, I say, how many women want to hear every day messages that you’re beautiful? That you’re likable. I enjoy being with you. I’m happy to be married to you. I like to be married to you. 

[01:41:26] Everybody loves those kinds of things, but it’s our female side that wants to hear that. I want to hear that I’m great, wonderful, but that’s my female side. So in sex, you want to amplify the feminine and amplify the masculine, which is I’m here to provide the words that you need to hear.

[01:41:41] And to a certain extent, I’ll say this, even if she has to fake it a little bit to get it going, and he has to fake it a little bit to say, I love you, once a man expresses something into words, you create from expression. It’s like planting your flag. Yes, I love you. Yes, I’m not mad at you. Yes, I’m happy to be married to you.

[01:41:59] Every time you have sex, you’re saying, I’m so happy to be married to you. So what’s happening is your brain is going to say, this is what I said, and I’m going to gather evidence to prove that I’m right because, once we get it out of our mouth, we want to be right about it.

[01:42:12] So the whole tendency is to build testosterone by putting it out there and her going, yes, I need to hear it. Say it again. Are you happy to be with me? Are you glad we fell in love? Are you glad we got married? Every woman wants that reassurance deep inside. And so by speaking it out, the question, it will help her find the truth, just as for men to give the answer, it will help him find that part of him that owns that answer.

[01:42:36] Dave: And to be clear– we’ve talked about this on and off line before– it’s not that the guy just says it. It’s that he only says it if she asks for it first.

[01:42:44] John: Yes, yes. This is women having to be on their male and female side, not just waiting. All women are waiting for you to say all the right words. No, show that you need it. He doesn’t know you need to hear all that stuff. So you reveal it. You’re looking for reassurance. It is such a powerful concept. 

[01:43:02] Dave: Beautiful. John, thanks for your work. Thanks for being on the show. And guys, if you haven’t read any of John’s books, you’re missing out. This is some of the most distilled knowledge, and I’ve said it before, the reason I invite John to speak at my events.

[01:43:21] John: What was that? Got some great classes free. Some of them you pay for.

[01:43:26] Dave: Oh, where are they?

[01:43:27] John: At marsvenus.com, marsvenus.com. People can check that out.

[01:43:31] Dave: All right, guys. Check it out. Thanks, John.

[01:43:35] John: You’re welcome.

[00:00:00] Dave: You’re listening to The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today we have an incredible guest and a friend who is going to talk with you about quantum physics, consciousness, and the power of intention. These are things that are really annoying as a biohacker because it would be so much easier if we were just little meat robots, little meat puppets maybe.

[00:00:28] And we all did things the same way, and things were just mechanistic in the world. Except that’s not how it works. It’s not even a very functional model of reality. And Lynn McTaggart is an award-winning journalist, best-selling author, and someone I’ve known for more than a decade, who’s been studying, what are the things that don’t meet the model that we can measure, things that are provable, that are scientific.

[00:01:00] And what you find is, wow, there really is stuff like that going on. And her groundbreaking book is called The Field, which came out a little bit more than 20 years ago and still stands the test of time. And she basically said, look, there’s a quantum energy field that connects all living things. And if that makes you react right now, and you’re reacting with something besides curiosity, I hate to tell you. You’ve probably been programmed. 

[00:01:31] So it’s okay for someone to say, here’s a theory, and for it to be right or wrong. But if someone says, here’s a theory, and you immediately have a visceral response that it can’t be that way, seriously, you need to get a therapist, because it’s okay to disagree with someone.

[00:01:46] But if you ever take the time to read one of Lynn’s books, or to talk with her in person, or hear what we’re going to go through today, you might learn some other things, like her book, The Power of Eight, talking about why eight people coming together makes a field, or The Intention Experiment, or her other book called The Bond.

[00:02:05] These are tests of reality, test of spirituality, test of intention, and how it all comes together. And that’s why I wanted to talk with her on the show today and share some more of her work with you. We are both part of Jack Canfield’s Transformational Leadership Council, which is a group of leaders, and authors, and creators, and teachers in the personal development movement, and so we have a chance, maybe every year or so, to spend some time in person, which is always fun. Lynn, welcome to The Human Upgrade.

[00:02:41] Lynne: I’m thrilled to be here, Dave. Thanks for inviting me. 

[00:02:44] Dave: Can you tell me about quantum field therapy? Just summarize it for me.

[00:02:50] Lynne: We are told, through conventional science, that we are separate and well-behaved entities operating according to fixed laws in time and space. That is the paradigm we’ve been sold. That’s the scientific story we’re told. And it’s really something that’s more than 300 years old, thanks to Isaac Newton, that describes such a world of separate objects.

[00:03:17] We’re also told that those objects compete for survival, thanks to Charles Darwin. So we got our paradigm of competitive individualism essentially from these two people, which has really formed our understanding of our world, of ourselves, of science. 

[00:03:38] But new science– and I say new– it’s actually science that begun to be discovered about a 100 years ago but also followed up about 40 or 50 years ago with investigators, scientists from prestigious universities around the world, who began discovering a little bit of a puzzle that, put together, is a completely new view of the world.

[00:04:07] And at the heart of this is something in quantum physics that physicists have known about for more than a 100 years, which is that when you get right down to our subatomic particles, the very nethermost level of our being, we’re not an anything yet. We are a vibrating energy trade, trading with each other, other subatomic particles, but also this quantum field out there, sitting out there like a supercharged backdrop in empty space.

[00:04:42] And what they recognized, and we are now having to recognize through so much evidence now, is that we are all part of this field. And that really changes the game completely, because it indicates that, at some level, we are all connected, and also, at some level, we can access all the information out there in the field.

[00:05:10] Dave: What if I don’t like it that I’m part of the field and want to opt out? What are my choices? 

[00:05:15] Lynne: That’s not a choice available to you, Dave. Most of us actually don’t operate as though we’re part of a field. We operate according to a sense of being separate and also there not being enough out there, so we better damn well get there first. That’s our model, and that’s how we live. But unfortunately, you are part of this.

[00:05:41] Your subatomic particles are doing an energy trade with other subatomic particles. Whether you like it or not, you don’t enter the field. A lot of people ask me, how do I get there? Enter the field. And I say, you’re not entering the field. You are the field. You’re part of this field, but we don’t experience life like that.

[00:06:02] The only time I see people experiencing a real sense of oneness, I have to say, is during group intention, like with the Power of 8, with my intention experiments. People experience a sense of oneness, and they actually get to feel like, oh, this is what it is. And we know this through a lot of brainwave studies, but generally, you are the field, whether you like it or not.

[00:06:29] Dave: And you say I am the field. But if I’m with seven other people doing focused intention work, am I still the field?

[00:06:40] Lynne: Oh, you’re all always part of the field because you’re all part of the field. We have to realize this is pretty democratic. Everybody listening to this, everybody in the universe is part of the field. All things are part of the field. All living things are part of the field. 

[00:06:56] Dave: What about the thing?

[00:06:57] Lynne: So it’s not only us and not them over there are part of the field. It’s everybody. It’s just that when people come together in a small or large group, which I discovered after writing the field, I was curious about some of the evidence that I’d found from some of these scientists demonstrating that thoughts, or things, and not only things, but things that affect other things.

[00:07:25] And so being the nosy, and curious, and skeptical journalist that I am at heart, I wanted to know, okay, how far can we take this? We talking about curing cancer with our thoughts. What can we do with this? And what happens if lots of people are thinking the same thought at the same time?

[00:07:46] So that’s how I got into looking at studying quantifying group intention. And when you say we put people in a group of eight, what I have found is when people come together in a group, two things happen. Lots of things happen, but one is their thoughts as a group magnify their effects of intention that we’ve demonstrated and that have been demonstrated in loads and loads of evidence, and study, and research.

[00:08:17] Their thoughts, which can affect things, actually affect things more. When I was looking at intention and the fact that thoughts are things, this was evident when I was studying the field. There were scientists who were experimenting with the power of intention. And they found that they could affect everything from single cell organisms to full-fledged human beings.

[00:08:46] So thoughts weren’t just things. Thoughts were things that affect other things. So the skeptical journalist in me wanted to know how far we can take this. Are we talking about a very subtle effect, like affecting a quantum particle? Or are we talking about curing cancer with your thoughts?

[00:09:06] And I also was curious, what happens when lots of people come together at the same time? And decided to test that with a thing called the intention experiment because I knew lots of scientists working in consciousness research, and I also had a good number of readers by that time because the field was in 30 languages.

[00:09:30] So I thought if I brought them together, I could have the biggest global laboratory in the world. And that’s what happened. I started testing the power of intention, inviting my readers every so often to send intention to some well-organized, well-controlled target set up by one of the scientists.

[00:09:53]  We’ve run 40 experiments to date, everything from trying to make seeds grow faster, to purifying water, to lowering violence in war-torn areas, to healing someone of post traumatic stress. Of those 40, 36 have shown measurable, positive, mostly significant effects as recorded,  and studied, and quantified by these scientists. 

[00:10:20] Now, getting back to the group of eight, that came about when I tried to shrink this down in a workshop back in 2008. I thought, if we have these effects on a giant scale, what happens with just a small group? So I decided to do it in a workshop, and I thought it was going to be a very mild little feel-good effect, like getting your back rubbed, or something like that.

[00:10:47] But that’s not what happened. With these first groups, we did it on a Saturday. I told them to come back the next day. And I didn’t discuss what I was going to ask them, but I asked them, okay, any change? And I was shocked to hear the result. We had somebody who was limping all weekend, who was walking normally that day. And she said, I have bad arthritis, but I’m walking normally today. 

[00:11:12] And somebody else with depression said, it really feels lifting today. And somebody else with Irritable bowel syndrome said, my gut’s normal today. And somebody else with cataracts said, I’m about 80% better.  So I was shocked by this, but I started testing it, experimenting with it, and I’ve worked with thousands of people over the years and seen thousands of healings. 

[00:11:44] Getting back to your original question, what happens in a group is that we do experience the field. I’ve done some brainwave studies with teams of neuroscientists, and we’ve found that when people come together to intend in a small group, doesn’t have to be exactly eight, by the way. Seven works. Nine works. 12 works, but a small group.

[00:12:12] What happens is, in the brain, the parts of the brain that make us feel separate, very quickly turn off. Those are the parietal lobes back here. They help us navigate through space. They tell us, this is me. This is not me. This is how to go. Those are dialed way down, and that is very much involved in making us feel separate. 

[00:12:37] And so do the parts of the brain, like the right frontal lobes, the executive function, and parts of those that are involved with worry, doubt, negativity, those are also dialed way down. So people are in a state of ecstatic oneness. Brainwave study is almost sidentical to those done by the University of Pennsylvania on Sufi masters doing chanting, or Buddhist monks in ecstatic prayer. So the long and short of it is power of 8 groups get people in an altered state of essentially a mystical state, like ecstatic oneness. And then we actually feel the field.

[00:13:20] Dave: Wow. So you move into a state, then you feel the field, but you don’t feel the field unless you’re in the state?

[00:13:30] Lynne: We don’t normally because we have been programmed to look at the world from a certain way. Also, we all have this healing capacity in us. Everybody is born with this amazing gift, but it’s denied. As children, we all know it, but our authority figures tell us, you’re just imagining things. You don’t really have that ability, all of those kinds of things.

[00:13:59] And so we stop believing it, and then we start thinking, okay, the world is as described, as I described before. We are all part of a lonely planet. And we’re lonely people on a lonely plane in a lonely universe. We are separate. But that isn’t reality. And I’ve seen it, as I say, thousands of times. I’ve seen two people get up out of their wheelchairs. Not only seen it. I’ve videoed it. 

[00:14:31] Dave: Yeah.

[00:14:32] Lynne: I’ve had dozens and dozens of people reverse end-stage cancer, and everything in between. So I know it exists. We just don’t experience life like that.

[00:14:44] Dave: And when you say that, there are definitely some people listening and going, that can’t happen, therefore it didn’t. One of the things that stands out about your work is you’re saying, let’s be curious about that. So let’s look at the percentage likelihood of this. Let’s document it well. And now we have Dr. Joe Dispenza, another mutual friend, who does– funny, there’s eight people doing healings, and he’s showing effects at least as strong as pharmaceutical drugs from eight people focusing on healing someone. 

[00:15:18] So what this means is, if you’re listening to this and you’re saying, I’ve never heard of any of this, look, your model of reality, well, functional isn’t accurate. Because everything we just talked about, which is not one example, it’s thousands of examples, that are well founded in science and statistics, if this is possible, which it’s more than possible– it is proven to exist to the highest standard– then your model might need an update. And I think you’re one of the very early voices talking about this in modernity. Of course, we’ve known about this for five or 10, 000 years in ancient traditions, right?

[00:15:57] Lynne: Absolutely. I’m just bringing science to it. And I know Joe was very influenced by the work I was doing. And we’ve talked about it many times. He’s a dear friend.

[00:16:08] Dave: Yeah, he definitely talks about you and is very open with sharing credit. And he has his own body of work that’s pretty enormous. You can tell. You can see your work when you go to a Joe workshop. There’s eight people for a reason.

[00:16:24] Lynne: As I say, it doesn’t have to be eight. Eight is, by the way, like a Goldilocks figure. It’s not too big. It’s not too little. And it’s got a lot of symbolic ideas associated with it. It’s good luck in Chinese. It’s a sideways infinity sign. So there’s a lot of great things about eight.

[00:16:46] What I tried to do is document why this works. As you say, for those people in the audience who say it can’t work, it can’t work for me. So I do it in two ways– many ways, actually. Studying things and looking at the science of it, et cetera. But I’ve done it with intention experiments, working with Princeton University, University of Arizona, Penn State University, University of California, and many European universities.

[00:17:18] And we’ve set up very controlled experiments. I’ll give you an example of a great peace intention experiment. We decided to choose the most violent place in America, which happens to be St. Louis, Missouri, believe it or not. And there’s an area of St. Louis that is particularly violent. It is the most violent place in America.

[00:17:41] It’s called Fairground. And if you saw the real estate there, it’s pretty shocking. So we did an experiment 10 minutes a day for six days, where me and my audience around the world focused on Fairground. And I worked with a statistician, a professor of statistics called Dr. Jessica Utts of the University of California.

[00:18:10] We got hold of police data of violence of St. Louis as a whole, different neighborhoods around Fairground, and Fairground. We looked at violence data, and property crime. All of them had been going absolutely inexorably up. So we looked at it for three years before and six months afterward, and we found that all of the areas, St. Louis as a whole, all the neighborhoods, violent crime continued to go up. So did property crime. 

[00:18:44] In Fairground, property crime continued to go up, but violent crime, the focus of our intention, went down by 43%. And it was the only area in that whole part of St. Louis, or St. Louis as a whole, where that happened. So we’ve done that, and we’ve also done very controlled experiments with water, and seeds, and all kinds of things. And it’s clear. There’s no pharmaceutical drug out there that can claim, out of 40 experiments, 36 have shown measurable, positive, mostly significant effects.

[00:19:22] Dave: Wow.

[00:19:23] Lynne: And what I’ve seen in the Power of 8 groups, in terms of documenting it, not only those brainwave studies, but what happens when I put people in a group for a year. That’s what I do when I work with them. When I first saw these effects, I thought, oh, what if I taught them for six weeks. I taught them live and interactive, and I mean live on Zoom, and then put them into groups and have them meet with each other every week. Let’s see what happens. Would everything in their lives begin to heal?

[00:19:59] And I can tell you heart on hand, or hand on heart, that those people who continue to meet regularly– that’s the big secret sauce– are the people who experience health healings, financial healings, relationship healings, new careers, a new life purpose. Those are the people. And it’s complex, but that’s the important thing.

[00:20:28] You don’t need to prime for this. You don’t need hours of priming or any kind of thing like that with a group. What you need is a consistent group, and they become essentially your attention family. And it is that alchemy that creates the healing.

[00:20:50] Dave: It feels like the repeated meetings. It feels like your energy fields get to know each other. And there’s knowingness where you see someone, you’ve talked to them, and then they feel comfortable with you. There’s a group called YPO, or Young Presidents Organization.

[00:21:11] And this is a group of entrepreneurs. There’s a chapter probably in your city, and I’ve been a member for a long time. And you have to have started or be running a 10-million-dollar plus company. I was in Dubai, and I was hanging out with the YPO people there, so a very global organization. But they put people in seven-person, not eight-person forums, and they’ll be together sometimes for years where they meet every month and go through stuff.

[00:21:39] And it feels like there’s an energetic that comes in that small number. And you also see in MBA research. The maximum effective size of a team is seven or eight people. That’s enough. You can know everyone. You know what’s going on, but there’s a team vibe that comes together that seems like it’s part of manifesting. Am I translating that right?

[00:21:59] Lynne: Yeah, absolutely. I think several things happen, Dave. First of all, when  you look at all of the evidence about human beings, you see that we need to belong. We need to belong more than we need to eat, essentially. The worst thing you can do to someone is to ostracize them. 

[00:22:18] And in fact, this evidence shows, from psychology, that people who commit suicide suffer from what psychologists call excessive individuation. Translation. They feel left out. And being left out is the thing that we can’t bear the most. So suddenly, you have a little tribe that meets every week, that has your back, that is intending for you.

[00:22:45] And remember, with intention groups, seven eighths of the time, you’re intending for someone else. And something about all of that is so healing and strengthening. One of the big pieces of my work is altruism. We all talk about self-help, but my work is other-help. And the reason this is so important is, in science, when you look at the evidence for altruism, it’s like a bulletproof vest.

[00:23:17] People who do stuff for other people live longer, healthier, happier lives. Anything. Volunteering. It’s something like they’re 40% more likely to live a longer life. If you join a group, according to Harvard University, just one group, bowling group, book club, whatever, you will have your chances of dying.

[00:23:41] So connection and altruism are really important. If you’re ill and you help somebody with the same illness, you’re more likely to heal. But I tell you what, there was one piece of evidence that absolutely clinched it for me. It was a study of two groups of people. They wanted to see how lifestyle affected the immune system. 

[00:24:06] First group, super successful, super wealthy, pleasure seekers, they called them. Went on every holiday, loads of money to spend, all of that, but no real noble pursuit, as Aristotle would call it. When they looked at their immune systems, they thought these are going to be really good. These people are living the good life. They’re living the dream. They were terrible, Dave. They were perfect candidates for heart attacks, stroke, Alzheimer’s. They didn’t have a noble pursuit.

[00:24:43] Whereas the other group of people, maybe not as successful, but they were living a life of service. These people had totally robust immune systems. They were going to live forever. That, to me, spoke volumes about why Power of 8 groups work. It gets them into a state of altruism. And that is one of the big secret sauces.

[00:25:10] But the other bit of this that’s really important, why groups are powerful, is that state of oneness. So I have this year-long intention masterclass that I run. And one of the people who came on, one of my students, was a guy called Jerry. And at the end of the year, Jerry said he loved it so much that he joined again. 

[00:25:38] Now, he learned all the same stuff, but he had another group. We assign the groups. Our team does. And he loved that group too. And by the end, he said, I’ve had all my miracles, but the most important thing for me was compassion, love. I ‘ve had more of that during the COVID season than I’ve had at any point in my life. He said, I now know what love is. 

[00:26:07] And that’s another aspect of healing. We forget that so much in our lives. We really do. And so it’s that healing connection of people who have your back, that state of oneness I told you about. It doesn’t need priming. Our study with neuroscientists, we worked with Life University, the largest and most prestigious chiropractic university in the world.

[00:26:33] They put their neuroscience team at our disposal. We measured what was going on. And as I said, these parts of the brain turned off. But this was in total novices who had never done anything like meditation before, certainly never Power of 8 groups. And it happened within a minute or so. So you don’t need exhaustive priming like you do with a Buddhist monk, or years of practice like a Sufi master.

[00:27:02] You can do this within a few minutes, and I’ve seen people, as I say, get up out of their wheelchairs or cure a genetic disease. We’ve had lots of those too. Two people cured going blind. They were going blind, and it the reversed to that, retinal detachment, and other things with one Power of 8 group.

[00:27:26] That’s how powerful it is. But as I say, I think a really important point, and you made it to with your Young Presidents Group, is the consistency of meeting over and over again. That is powerful. That creates your tribe. And that’s a root for your healing.

[00:27:45] Dave: There’s data that shows most people in the US– maybe not most– the average number of friends. I’m bastardizing the statistics, but basically the number of people who report having more than one good friend is at astoundingly low levels, much less having eight people where they get together once a week.

[00:28:08] In my own experience as a father, you might have this in your late 20s, early 30s, and then you all start having kids, and then it just falls apart because your kids are different ages, and they’re pooping on themselves and doing all the stuff that kids do. So how do people in practice really do this? Do you have to be in person? Can you do this remotely? Can you do it every other week? How do you make this fit into a normal life?

[00:28:33] Lynne: Okay. That’s such a great question. You can meet in person, and that is very powerful. And I do that, retreats, weekend workshops, and all of that kinds of thing. But most of the people I know who are meeting in Power of 8 groups do so virtually. In my masterclass, everybody is assigned people in their time zones.

[00:28:57] But they’re working virtually, so they’re meeting on Zoom. They’re meeting like we’re meeting right now. And what we suggest, really, really emphasize and encourage people to do is one hour, once a week. Most people can find an hour once a week to meet. And as I say, we even put people into their preferred time zone, their preferred meeting times, morning, afternoon, night. And the people who are successful at the end of the year, the people who have amazing stories to tell, are the people who showed up all the time. But isn’t that true in all of life?

[00:29:37] Dave: it’s true. The people who show up and do the work consistently, whether it’s meditation or breathwork, or neurofeedback, or a gratitude practice, or cold tubs, any of the biohacks, if you have knowledge of a biohack and you only do it once every six months, it probably isn’t going to work very well. So the showing up thing, it works. And you’re saying it works for something like this.

[00:29:56] What happens if it’s not eight people, but it’s 80 million people at the same time? What happens?

[00:30:03] Lynne: Okay. That’s a great question, Dave. First of all, I should say that size of group doesn’t seem to matter. And we know this because we’ve done several studies where we’ve repeated it with different-sized groups to see if it supersized even more with a bigger group.

[00:30:23] So, for instance, I did an experiment, this is back in 2007, the University of Arizona, and I worked with the team there headed by Dr. Gary Schwartz, a noted psychologist, who has an entire consciousness lab. They set up four sets of seeds, 30 seeds each, labeled them A, B, C, D. Sent me the photos of them, and I was about to speak in front of an audience of about 700 in Sydney, Australia. So I thought, oh, this is an interesting test of this. 

[00:30:56] So I showed the audience the four pictures. I allowed them to choose which one we were going to intend for. Let’s say it was Seeds A. We did intention for Seeds A. Didn’t tell the scientists when we were doing it, or which seeds we chose. But when we were done, we just told them, okay, now you can plant the seeds. So that was their cue. We still didn’t tell them which seeds. 

[00:31:23] They let them grow, measured them four or five days later, whichever we had specified, and then I unblinded the study once they were finished measuring them. Lo and behold, the seed sent intention grew significantly higher than the controls. Now, we ran that six times. We had a much smaller audience. We had a workshop of about a 100 in New York. We had a big audience of touch practitioners in South Carolina, about 800.

[00:31:58] We had a big audience in California. We had a smaller audience in Dallas, Texas. And then I ran it over the internet with thousands of people from around the world, doing intention, sending it to my website. And lo and behold, we got the same result, no matter what size group.

[00:32:18] So we realized, from that in some other studies like this, that it didn’t matter what size. There is the Maharishi Effect, where they say you need the square root of 1% of the world’s population meditating, and the crime rate will go down. And they have some very compelling studies of meditation, a certain quota of the population studying and performing meditation in different cities as the crime rate go down. 

[00:32:49] Our work’s different from that in that we have a specific intention that we’re doing, a very specific intention, not just an exercise like meditation, where, obviously, it’s changing individuals, and there’s no doubt a field effect caused by that. But this is a different procedure.

[00:33:09] So size doesn’t seem to matter. What seems to matter is being specific. Let’s unpack this for a minute. I told you about the seeds experiment, so just think about this for a second. I’m in Sydney, Australia. The seeds are in Tucson, Arizona. So my audience and I are intending for something that is 8,000 miles away.

[00:33:36] Plus the fact we’re sending an intention to the photo. We’re not even intending to the thing itself. We’re sending an intention to the photographic representation of those seeds, a symbol, essentially, of those seeds. And yet it’s still having an effect. That to me is the big mind blower because it’s suggesting that we have some sort of psychic internet when we do group intention that can reach across the miles, that can be stimulated by just a symbol and affect the target.

[00:34:13] Dave: There’s abundant evidence that quantum effects are real. So if two particles are entangled, a change to one creates change in the other instantaneously with no lag time. There’s no speed of light required. There’s also evidence, relatively recent evidence that shows every time your heart beats, the proton spin of everything in your brain changes with your heartbeat, which is very strong physics-based proof that we are quantum systems, even if we think of ourselves as chemical or electrical systems, where those are higher level writing on top of quantum.

[00:34:45] So there’s a mechanism for this to be real and for it to work. And then we have Stan Grof’s work. And for listeners– I know that you know of Stan’s work– Stan Grof wrote a book called The Holotropic Universe, Holographic Universe. Which one was it? Do you remember?

[00:35:04] Lynne: Holographic Universe with Michael Talbot. 

[00:35:07] Dave: He writes about holotropic breathing. I did a breathwork event with him. I hosted one for the Upgrade Collective years ago, and interviewed him a couple of times. And he says, the whole universe is a holograph. And in a holograph, when you break something apart, there’s basically a map of the whole in each picture, no matter how hard or how small you go.

[00:35:30] And his argument is that reality is actually a big holograph. And this is all weird, mind bending stuff. But if that’s real, then you should be able to look at a picture of something because the entire universe is in the picture. It just helps you to focus your intention, right?

[00:35:48] Lynne: Yeah, there’s are so many mechanisms at work here, and we’re just beginning to discover, as you say, quantum effects in our bodies, quantum effects in all kinds of things, the world at large, because the belief, even in current science and mainstream science is that there’s a science of the small, the quantum effects, and there’s a science of the large. 

[00:36:15] Now that never made sense to me because I thought, oh, right, subatomic particles do all these weird things like entanglement, non-locality, superposition, until they realize they’re part of something bigger. And then they start behaving themselves and acting according to mainstream physics, the more mainstream rules of the game. That never made sense to me. 

[00:36:39] And we’re now seeing that, for instance, photosynthesis, the very crucible of a plant that takes sunlight and turns it into oxygen, which makes us all be able to be here, is a quantum process. Electrons in there are operating in a state of superposition, essentially. 

[00:37:02] And other studies are showing that giant molecules, molecules you could even see under a microscope, are operating according to quantum principles. So the problem isn’t with the physics of the small and the physics of the large. The problem is our knowledge is just beginning to understand that this is the physics of the world at large.

[00:37:29] Dave: Yeah, there will have to be alignment of those models. And funny enough, all the big physics models don’t describe reality that well. Like, ah, that describes it within a couple of percentage points. And when you get the quantum people who come out like,[Inaudible] has been on the show a while ago, he says, I figured out how to use other math, and I can beat the standard model by 8%, which standard model is how they predict physics.

[00:37:54] And they chased him out of CERN and wouldn’t let him speak there because he’s a ski instructor, not a physics PhD. And we talked about it on the show. So it turns out there’s different ways of modeling reality, and if your model doesn’t account for quantum effects and be able to predict the very largest things we know, then your model isn’t an accurate representation of reality.

[00:38:16] And so then now we feel deeply unsafe because you mean the story I’ve told myself about the entire universe is probably false? Yeah. And if that makes you feel unsafe, you should get a therapist, or maybe do some breathwork or something, because you’re exactly as safe as you were before, whether or not you knew the nature of reality.

[00:38:34] The reality is you don’t know the nature of reality. I don’t know. Lynn doesn’t know. We’re just all figuring it out. And we’ll probably be figuring out for as long as there’s life in the universe. That’s just how it works.

[00:38:46] Lynne: And we should remember too, Dave, that science is just a story. We act as though science is this finite truth, and that everything that we are supposed to know has largely been written.

[00:39:01] Dave: But you have to trust the science. A very important person told me that recently.

[00:39:05] Lynne: That what?

[00:39:06] Dave: A very important person recently said, trust the science. And they were telling only the truth. There’s nothing made up. There’s no financial motive in there at all, right?

[00:39:15] Lynne: Oh, no. And we all know that pharmaceutical companies are doing this for philanthropy, of course.

[00:39:22] Dave: Yeah, and for science. It’s only science.

[00:39:26] Lynne: We all know that that’s not true, looking at the state of side effects from pharmaceutical drugs. We know that a lot of that data is very, very suspect. But even if we weren’t going to look at things like that, where there is a financial component to the outcome of the studies, and that determines the outcome.

[00:39:49] They used to say, there’s no such thing as rocks coming from the sky because rocks don’t come from the sky, until they realized, actually, there are asteroids that happen. And all of those kinds of things, from thinking the world was flat. Science is a story. And new chapters are constantly written that rewrite the chapters before. 

[00:40:13] And so it’s a constantly written story. We can’t ever say, yeah, we’ve got it all figured out. And as Nassim says, the standard model is about as close to reality as a cyborg is to a human. It’s a little model they’ve invented to try to say, yeah, we figured it all out.

[00:40:33] We found it. Here it is, the smallest piece of the universe. And I always say, it’s a bit like Russian dolls. You know those little dolls where you open one up and a little one is inside of it? That’s what happened with science. They keep thinking, yeah, I found the smallest piece of the universe. And because I know that, I can figure out all the other pieces and put it all together like one great big old radio. But the problem is, every time they look, there’s another littler doll inside. So we’re still discovering, just as you say, Dave. 

[00:41:13] Dave: Yeah, I’m just agreeing with you. We’re figuring it out. And thinking about it, I’m working with one guy who’s working with an unknown subatomic particle. And this has huge effects on biology, but no one has measured it before, and it isn’t acknowledged. So there’s all kinds of stuff. And that’s why in the world of biohacking, I just want to find the outliers. Like, oh, how does that person seem to be able to do this?

[00:41:38] Is it transmissible? What is the state of the person? Can we make it teachable? And that’s behind some of my 40 Years of Zen work and longevity. If one person can make it to 120, we can probably do better than that over the next 100 years. So it’s the things that don’t match that are the gold, but unfortunately, we’re programmed– I don’t want to say taught even– just to automatically reject those and to be unable to see them because they’re impossible because we believe so strongly in our story.

[00:42:08] And somehow, you broke out of that and started asking questions and gathering data. Once you start gathering data, it gets easier and easier to break out of it because you can see the data and like, oh, I’m onto something here. I want to ask you about new modalities that support your work.

[00:42:25] Wouldn’t it be fun if you could do neurofeedback, but with a SPECT scan or fMRI? And for listeners, SPECT is what Dr. Daniel Amen has used to scan hundreds of thousands of brains. Dear friend. I’m on his board of directors, and his SPECT can change my life. fMRI is similar.

[00:42:42] And then you have things like MEG. We’re using magnetic signals coming out of the brain and HEG, which is blood flow, in addition to EEG, which is electrical signals, which is the primary modality I work with. So all this new understanding of the brain, since you wrote your first book, has it supported your theories? Has it proven them? Is it going against them? What’s the latest state of understanding the fields and intention?

[00:43:09] Lynne: Let’s look at functional MRI. Walter Schimp revolutionized MRI scanning, which used to take hugely long time. And he did this 20 years ago, or whatever, making it functional so that we could watch a brain in real time, essentially, just see how it works. That operates through getting information that is holographic out of the body.

[00:43:39] He was a really early proponent of holography, and in fact, came up with a whole theory with numerous people, including the late astronaut Edgar Mitchell, called quantum holography. So they were actually using that to create this imagery that we now use widely. When you say other modalities, do they support the stuff that I do?

[00:44:08] Absolutely, because we see that we used QEEGs to study brainwave mechanisms during Power of 8 groups. And we found, as I say, as I talked about before, extraordinary outcomes because we thought what we were going to see was brainwave signatures that were identical to meditation. And I was, and so was the lead neuroscientist and the team, all shocked to see that the brainwave signatures look nothing like meditation.

[00:44:45] They were the opposite of meditation. Meditation causes an increase in slower brainwave activity, like alpha waves and even theta waves. Ours were turned off. Ours were brainwaves that were turning down. We were people in, as I say, an altered state, a state of ecstatic oneness. And so the equipment just proved what we were seeing empirically, what we were seeing from people, what was going on. 

[00:45:18] Dave: When you say they shut down, are you saying that there were just no brainwaves or that the amplitude of the brain was lower? There was a shift towards Delta? What does that mean?

[00:45:28] Lynne: No. There are different brain waves that the brain has, different speeds of brain waves. In certain parts of the brain, there was less activity. So the parietal lobes, the temporal lobes and parts of the right frontal lobes were turned way down. They was far less activity there.

[00:45:48] So these were people where it was dialed down. And as I say, the brainwave signatures look nothing like meditation, but they look virtually identical to the work done by Dr. Andrew Newberg, using some of this equipment you’re talking about as well to look at Buddhist monks during ecstatic prayer, nuns during ecstatic prayer, Sufi masters during chanting, and Sufi dance, all in a state of ecstatic oneness. Virtually identical brainwave signatures as what we’re seeing with a group of people doing an intention to one member of the group for 10 minutes. 

[00:46:29] Dave: This is really important. I talk about this a lot in when we’re talking about neurofeedback, because 40 Years of Zen is so focused on that. Number one, it is a group activity. You’re doing it in a small group, up to eight people, surprisingly. I wonder why that is. And what people like to say is, oh look, I raised alpha brainwaves, or I raised gamma brainwaves. Woo-hoo. 

[00:46:55] Actually, no. That’s like saying I made C note. I made [Inaudible]. Great. Were you laying a song? Was it an Eminem song, or was it Mozart? They have different vibes in them. And what you’re talking about isn’t that you had more of this or that. It was that it was the right frequency at the right part of the brain in the right order, which is more of a musical resonance kind of a thing. And then when you have eight people doing that, were their brains all incoherence with each other, or were they each playing a different instrument?

[00:47:30] Lynne: I don’t use the term coherence because, in physics, that means something very specific. I know it’s used a lot and by lots of my dear friends. In physics, it means not just your body is somehow operating in sync. What it means is a resonance effect, as you said. So waves. Let’s take sound waves because you talked about sound.

[00:47:57] So they do that. They do a sideways S, and most waves do that. When lots of waves are doing the same thing at the same time, they’re peaking and troughing at the same time. That makes the signal much louder. So that’s why a laser is so bright compared to an individual light bulb. It’s all of the waves are waving at the same time.

[00:48:22] When people are doing the same intention at the same time, and they’re literally holding the same words at the same time, in my way of doing it, as you say, we’re not measuring, hey, didn’t we get more of this or less of that? We’re seeing, essentially, people brains in sync. 

[00:48:43] We’re seeing people and brains– so what happens in guitar playing, or any musical instrument playing, I don’t measure what happens with brainwaves in guitar players, let’s say. But there have been studies showing that when two guitar players start playing together, their brainwaves operate in synchrony very quickly.

[00:49:06] So some of that is going on, but I want to make the point that I was curious what was going on in the brains of my participants. So we did this study with student volunteers, as I said, who had never done this before, never even meditated before. Got this amazing outcome to see what was going on inside.

[00:49:28] But I don’t measure that. I measure, what happened in their lives? Did they heal those cataracts? Did they reverse their blindness? Are they standing up out of their wheelchair? Have they made up with their estranged partner, or found new love in their lives, or found an amazing new job? And that’s my measurement. How did it work in the world?

[00:49:53] And here’s a key thing too, Dave, that we haven’t talked about, which is the effect of being a sender. I told you there’s an altruistic component to this, but I find that the results work for people– they heal an aspect of their lives, all of their life– as much when they’re senders as when they’re receivers.

[00:50:17] It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Example of this, a guy I met called Wes I had asked for a volunteer group of intenders at one of the new-age churches, the Mile Hi Church outside of Denver. So I assembled two groups. He was in one of them. He was going to put himself forward as a receiver.

[00:50:41] And these guys had never done this before. They were just volunteers. They were in the same room. He’s going to put himself forward because he had suffered from depression for his whole life after university because in the last year of university –he was studying to be a biochemist– he got called up for the very last year of the Vietnam War.

[00:51:04] The whole situation was so traumatic, and he couldn’t get out of it. There were no more student deferments last year of the war. Comes back, freaked out, quits university, and his life goes in a terrible downward spiral for years. Even meeting the love of his life, that didn’t last long. She had a fast-growing cancer. He dies. He has medical bills, so much so he has to give up his house, terrible story.

[00:51:32] Upshot is, when I meet him at 65, he can barely get out of bed. He is super depressed, sort of, what’s the use? So he was going to put himself forward, but somebody else had stage 4 cancer there. So he thought, she needs it more than me. So he does the intention, goes home.

[00:51:54] Next day, he wakes up, and it’s like all his senses are heightened. Everything’s in super technic color. That happens a lot with people in these Power of 8 groups. Then the next night, he has this dream, he calls it almost a vision, where he’s met his 19-year-old self. He’s back at campus where he never finished college.

[00:52:17] And his 19-year-old self somehow conveys to him, don’t worry. There’s still time. It’s like he undergoes a complete change. He then is suddenly like Scrooge on Christmas morning. He’s running around saying hi to everybody, and he had been avoiding people. He enrolls in a class. He starts doing exercise. He starts writing. He rejoins his church.

[00:52:43] It’s like his whole life restarted again. And I’ve seen that many times where people were stuck with something. Maybe they had a book they were trying to write and they couldn’t get anywhere. I will oftentimes say in my courses to people like that where they’re just keep getting intended for, and it’s not working.

[00:53:02] I will usually say, get off of yourself, start intending for somebody else, and see what happens. And invariably, something happens that next week. In this case, I’m thinking of Lisa. She was stuck. She couldn’t get her book written no matter what was going on. Her group kept intending for her. She was terrified about the process. And suddenly, she intends for someone else after I say, get off of yourself, Lisa.

[00:53:32] And the very next week, in a store she didn’t even need anything from, she feels compelled to go in there, she bumps into someone she barely knows. Turns out this woman’s a book coach. When she hears Lisa’s story, she offers to walk her through the whole process. Upshot is, Lisa writes a bestseller on Amazon. So I’ve seen that over and over and over again. The sending is just as powerful as the receiving.

[00:54:04] Dave: Yeah. This is that service to others thing. And having done the hands-on healing within, Joe Dispenza’s stuff, and I’m active in a local group here in Austin when I’m in town, and sometimes in Victoria when I’m home there. And what you find is that when you really get into the right state, maybe just because you’re synchronized there, all the other people doing healing, it does flow through to you.

[00:54:35] So you feel a very noticeable effect. It’s probably sometimes at least as strong as psychedelics just from entering the right state, and there’s no psychedelics at all, or breathwork, or anything. You just go into a certain state, and then all of a sudden, everyone else is in it, and then you go pretty deep.

[00:54:51] And yeah, I’ve felt very potent effects from it personally. And we’re taught to say, that’s probably because I’m crazy. Except everyone else is having the same effects, and we’re not all crazy. So I look at that as being scientific.

[00:55:07] Lynne: I survey people who take part in all of my intention experiments, and I started this in 2008, and I get back things like this. I felt like I was part of a higher network. I was crying uncontrollably. I had goosebumps up and down my arms. I felt enormous heat. I felt like there were hands holding my knee. And we’re talking about people who aren’t in contact with each other.

[00:55:39] They’re on Zoom together. That somebody was holding my knee to heal it. We have things like that. It is people evidencing being in an altered state, no question. And so there’s so many different mechanisms at work, but that’s what’s going on. And in my work, I don’t put people into groups for more than 10 minutes.

[00:56:03] This is all happening immediately. You don’t have to prime. You don’t have to spend hours priming, or minutes, even. It happens immediately, as it did with those volunteers in the Power of 8 study. We found it happened to people who had never done this within minutes.

[00:56:26] Dave: Wow. 10 minutes, eight people, once a week. How do you pick the eight people?

[00:56:33] Lynne: I don’t pick the eight people. For instance, my master class, I don’t pick. I don’t isolate, oh, these are the best ones. I just offer this to people who want to be part of a course. And so there’s two ways. There’s lots of ways people can join and do this. I have a community. It’s completely free.

[00:56:54] People can join and create a Power of 8 group, and I have free tools for people, etc. So people can just go on my website, lynnmctaggart.com, if they just want to be in a group and find that they can just advertise on my community site for, hey, I’m in this time zone. Anybody else want to join me?

[00:57:12] They can read my book, the Power of 8. People who take my courses, for instance, the master class, we put them into groups based on their location, their time zone, their preferred meeting times. We do all of that. And we even give their groups a name for them. I like to name people after Beatles songs.

[00:57:32] I’m a Beatle fan, and we needed lots of group names. So we’ve got Follow the Sun, and I Want to Hold Your Hand groups, and Yellow Submarine, and all of that. People just are randomly put in a group, and that’s the other secret sauce, Dave, because part of my course is saying here’s the way to use intention to get along with anybody, because a big bit of my work right now is using intention experiments to heal polarized communities.

[00:58:04] Dave: When you say anybody, does that include sociopaths, deep narcissists out to harm you? I’m not sure I want to get along with those people, but talk to me about that.

[00:58:18] Lynne: All right. It’s a self-selected group. We have very few cases of disturbed people who are in a class of mine for a year. It would have to be people who resonate with my stuff. And it’s like people who join your work. They probably are a bit self-selected anyway. So one or two people, and we keep tabs on them. And if there is somebody who is disturbing the group, we ask them to leave. 

[00:58:44] Dave: And they run for office. Got it. Yeah.

[00:58:49] Lynne: And they run for office. 

[00:58:52] Dave: A little but dark, but accurate.

[00:58:55] Lynne: Accurate. Yes. Hopefully not. They probably didn’t take a Power of 8 course. That was the problem.

[00:59:02] Dave: Yeah. Maybe for a sociopath, they can hang out in there. In fact, I know they can. The people who are intentionally doing evil, they’ll do it in the field as well. But the narcissists, they don’t know that they’re doing evil. They think they’re doing good, but they’re doing evil.

[00:59:19] And for them, I think they’d have a really hard time being resonant with the field, because they’re doing one thing and believing another, and there’s such a dissonance in there that they probably just wouldn’t line up. And if they did line up, they would have to face whatever trauma made them into a narcissist in order to be able to do this kind of work. So it’s an interesting thought experiment.

[00:59:41] Lynne: It is. And think about it this way. Do you think a narcissist would want to do other-help? Seven days to the time, they’re doing intention for someone else. They might not like that. So it may not appeal to them anyway.

[00:59:54] Dave: Yeah, it would appeal if they could take credit for it. So a true narcissist, literally, if they’re working on someone with cancer and the person died, they would believe that they extended the person’s life, and that they were successful in what they did, and they were a hero, even though there’s a body in front of you. But in their self-story, there’s not a body. It’s that denial of reality that causes so much harm because, for sane people, we’re like, what is going on here?

[01:00:23] Lynne: I know. I know, Dave. Luckily, we just haven’t had much of that. As I say, we’ve had one or two people who have had some issues. And we’ve removed them, but tried to help them in some way.

[01:00:38] Dave: Yeah, that’s not– 

[01:00:39] Lynne: We listen to the group too. If the group is getting disturbed by it, then we are — members of my team are in touch with people through the year. So, as I say, we handhold with them, and I have intention clinics, where I meet them again, every few months after doing the whole training in the beginning of the course. And I keep in touch. I send them all kinds of things, challenges, etc., so we’re in touch. We’re in touch. 

[01:01:10] Dave: So you’re in touch. And I’m asking not really because I think there’s an issue with what you’re doing, but for people who are thinking of joining some kind of a group, like, how do they know it’s not happening? It sounds like you just feel into it, and it’s probably not happening because of the nature of the work. I’m by that.

[01:01:27] Lynne: I guess it is self-selective because they’re people who are members of my community, and we do a lot of intention experiments like we’ve been doing several for healing Israel and Gaza at the moment. And that’s a lot of my work. As I said, I’ve been working on healing polarized communities. And one of the really interesting things about an intention experiment as well as intention in a group is what happens to people who are polarized.

[01:01:58] And I saw this back in 2011. So these are people who are joining, not the targets of the intention, but the people who are actually doing the intending. I think it was the 10th anniversary of 9/11. I was pretty sick of watching those buildings come down as we do every year on September 11th. So this was the 10th anniversary, and I thought, maybe we should do something different.

[01:02:25] So I decided to do an intention to try to lower violence in the two southern provinces of Afghanistan because the war was raging there and there was a lot of violence. So I thought, I’ll invite my Western audience, but I also reached out to a guy called Dr. Salah Al-Rashed, who is the Deepak of the Middle East.

[01:02:49] And he’s hosted me for talks numerous times, and workshops. So I said, Salah, can you bring your following as well to this intention? And we did it in Arabic and English, and we had both sides come together. And there was some great data outcome. We got data eventually from NATO, from a German general who was part of the combined forces there, and it was pretty significant, the drop in violence– that was very interesting– compared to the rest of the provinces.

[01:03:25] But the more interesting thing, as far as I was concerned, was what was happening between the Arabs and the Americans. They were messengering back and forth on my instant messenger, with the broadcasts, and also on my Facebook page. And they were sending love to each other, and forgiving each other. They were befriending each other. I went, wow. 

[01:03:48] So we had another opportunity, which is a bit germane to what’s going on in the world right now. So nearly 10 years later, I had an opportunity to do an intention using special equipment where we could put cameras into eight conference rooms in eight different Arab cities. And the ninth camera was put in an audience of Israeli Jews. So I had Arabs and Jews–

[01:04:17] Dave: Mm-hmm. 

[01:04:17] Lynne: On this intention. And we were going to do an intention to lower violence in Jerusalem, which was suffering from a lot of violence at the time. Now, I had to broker this whole arrangement because the Jews didn’t want to talk to the Arabs. Arabs didn’t want to talk to the Jews. They’ve both been brought up to hate each other. 

[01:04:35] So I did this, and it was special equipment so that I could broadcast all of them, but then afterward, call the different places where the cameras were, so I could call on the people who were in Jordan, and then the people in Saudi Arabia, and the people who were Jews in Israel, and have them all say, okay, what happened? How do you feel? What’s going on with you? So we did our intention, and then I started calling on people, and it was miraculous.

[01:05:06] Dave: You guys enjoying this? This so interesting. 

[01:05:07] Lynne: They started sending love to each other. They started saying, your God is my God, and so forth. It was just incredible. And this was so astonishing for me. And the whole experiment went very viral all through Jerusalem, Israel, and also in many places in the Middle East. Even MPs were talking about it, members of the government in Kuwait. 

[01:05:32] Here’s why. I started trying to figure out what goes on. Why do we have this situation? And it all has to do with the vagus nerve, I found, when doing some research and looking at the work of, Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley. 

[01:05:52] He found, in one study, that when people focus on an altruistic activity, such as looking at starving children, they are more likely to identify with people who are not like them. It makes the heart leap across the fence because the vagus nerve, as you I’m sure know, has lots of functions, like activating sympathetic nervous system, the fight-or-flight mechanism. But another activity of it is the connection, feeling safe aspect. 

[01:06:24] Dave: Yes. 

[01:06:25] Lynne: When we feel that, when we have a release of oxytocin, we are far more likely to trust people and trust the other. And that was part of what was going on with this altruistic activity for lowering violence. So I saw it again and again, and I even did an experiment right before the inauguration of Joe Biden to try to keep violence down in Washington. And I invited Republicans and Democrats. And again, it was a love fest.

[01:06:57] So for me, it’s almost like the target is immaterial now. What’s more important is what goes on in people when they come together as a group for an altruistic intention. And I’ve seen that with my participants. As I said, I surveyed them, and I’ve surveyed them for years now. And about 40% report that they are healed in some way or a condition improved, a health condition improved.

[01:07:29] They also report, about half, they are more in love with everyone they come in contact with. Something happens to people. They’re also making up with their relationships. They’re getting along better with their co-workers. Their father, who disowned them, suddenly calls. We have so many stories like that, where their lives become more peaceful too. So for me, it’s not the target. It’s the reaction in the part of the participants that’s the real experiment.

[01:08:05] Dave: There’s something about creating a feeling of safety that allows people to enter these altered states. And that’s something that I’ve become more proficient at over time, is intentionally creating a feeling of safety when I’m around someone who, particularly if it’s in a healing kind of environment, just to, what you would call holding space.

[01:08:26] But there are very specific steps you can take that may be specific to masculine versus feminine energy. I don’t know. But you can create a thing where people are like, wow, I just feel safe. And then like, oh, I guess I cannot have the cramp or whatever the heck their body was doing to make themselves think they were safe.

[01:08:43] And it’s pretty odd, but it’s repeatable. And so I think there’s a lot of things that we’re learning in the world of healing. And if you have eight people working, not just to create a feeling that someone’s caring for you, that you’re safe, but also that you’re changing, I think 

[01:08:59] it can be really powerful.

[01:09:00] So if you’re listening and you’re skeptical, we have a one of the masters of this kind of work on the podcast who’s telling you there’s some real data behind it. But I have two questions for you. One of them is, and I know that it’s actually repellent to say this for people from marketing my last book, but I’m going to say it anyway.

[01:09:21] I’m lazy. And what that means is that if I can get into a state in one minute instead of 20 minutes, I’m going to choose the one-minute path because it’s more efficient, and our bodies are biologically wired to save energy, which gives us more time to be with our kids or do stuff we want to do.

[01:09:38] So yes, I do want it all, which is a function of being lazy. I’m also an entrepreneur because I’m lazy. Oh, I work really hard just because I can have more leverage. So I want leverage on my quantum practices when I’m working with intention. So I have a variety, I just picked these out of my desk drawers while I was sitting here, of technologies that have quantum claims, and I want to know if you’ve experimented with any of these, or you think there’s any validity to the idea that maybe I could strengthen my quantum field. 

[01:10:05] I’ve got one of my favorite things, the Leela Quantum. This is their pendant, but I have their energy squares that I actually really like. I think they’re very noticeable. Got the Analemma thing that makes quantum and actually otherwise charge water. So this is a wand, if I can open it up. I don’t even have it. This is a wand you stir your water with. This is just the wrapper for it. 

[01:10:25] We’ve got the Resonance Academy, the ARK crystal, a very expensive quantum entangled crystal, entangled with someone who’s special to me and all that. And we have the Qi-Shield, which actually does generate Qi. It’s a copper coil, and there’s some liquid. They don’t tell you what it is, but I could guess. 

[01:10:43] So now that I have talked about all these, and I have resonated with them and become one with their quantum chi. Okay, only rolling my eyes a little bit. These are the ones that I’ve found have a noticeable difference. If I’m doing these things and then I go and I do a quantum healing or I was to enter a group of eight and we were to do this stuff, am I going to be better off? Will I get there faster? Will I go deeper? Or do they just all have a really good placebo effect? 

[01:11:10] Lynne: Some have a placebo effect. Some may have some sort of effect. Certainly, there is some data, and I’d be a very, very wealthy woman if I could verify everything that gets sent to me. And we get loads of those–

[01:11:32] Dave: Yeah. I have a drawer full of stuff that I don’t think works. 

[01:11:34] Lynne: And there’s a load of them that don’t work. There are some that seem to have some promise. There are certainly some pieces of equipment that are really interesting, and that may have an effect. Here’s what I know. As I said, Dave, from the very beginning, I’ve watched thousands of people heal their lives in 10 minutes.

[01:12:01] There’s a woman I know called Lisa, another Lisa, who had a genetic liver disease, enlarged liver and spleen, candidate for a liver replacement. Goes to a Power of 8 group. First time. And it’s not even one of mine. It’s one that this little healing sanctuary talked to us about, and they run this little Power of 8 group session every week.

[01:12:28] Goes into it, feels something amazing going on inside her body, has some sort of sense she’s healed, and puts off going to the doctor. Finally does. He goes through a scan with her and says, your liver’s normal. All that scarring’s gone. All of your spleen is normal. Now, I’ve seen stuff like that tons and tons of times, loads of things. 

[01:12:57] I can’t think of anything that works as fast as that. It was 10 minutes. That’s it. So when we talk about upgrades, I’ve mentioned there are group effects. There’s intention itself. We know it works. There’s altruism. There’s a sense of oneness. There’s a big secret sauce going on in groups, but I think it comes and boils down to a simple something, which is we were made to be connected. We don’t get connected. When we do, and we got that group, that tribe, miracles happen.

[01:13:35] Dave: I love what you’re saying there. And I’ve definitely experienced these types of things. It’s funny. Even talking about quantum things like this, people are saying, oh, Dave, you promote things. How dare you? So recent article, I forget. Some magazine was doing a hit piece on one of the companies that has pretty profound science I’ve worked with. The company is also backed by entrepreneur Dave Asprey who promotes quantum healing boxes. 

[01:14:08] Yeah, the guy who started the biohacking movement and built a 100-million-dollar a year company that put collagen and grass-fed butter. No. Whatever they can use to discredit you, they will use the fact you talk about this stuff to discredit you. And I’m like, yeah, I guess I’m that guy, so you put that on my–

[01:14:29] Lynne: Skeptics will discredit anything. I bet you have a Wikipedia page like I do. Mine, I don’t recognize it. I don’t recognize myself on there.

[01:14:40] Dave: It actually doesn’t even know what year I’m born or what month. Wikipedia is absolutely just a propaganda factor at this point. It’s sad. It had promise 10 years ago, but at this point, you have ChatGPT. Why would you ever look at Wikipedia again? It’s a cobweb. It’s the AOL of encyclopedias is what Wikipedia is. It’s just less accurate.

[01:15:02] Lynne: I love that. I love that. Absolutely.

[01:15:06] Dave: It’s funny. I’m just saying. Talking to all these devices, it actually reduces my credibility in the scientific community, but I don’t care. If you don’t like my science, then just don’t read my books. Don’t.

[01:15:16] Lynne: But also, as you said, it’s not every piece of equipment. Some of them do have a lot of promise. And the point is, if we’re not open-minded about any of this, we will never advance. This is the problem with science. You must be a scientific explorer, and that includes products like this. Because some of them do have great promise, and others are completely worthless. But unless they are tested, unless they do have science behind them, and unless we’re willing to be open-minded to say, hey, this is a new idea, let’s try it, then we will never advance.

[01:15:58] Dave: 100%. You have to be curious, willing to fail. And I’m only talking about stuff with clinical studies where I can also notice something, otherwise there’s all sorts of stuff. So the curiosity is important. And if you’re afraid to be curious about things, you’ve been programmed. You have trauma. You should go do some EMDR or something on your dogmatism.

[01:16:19] And here’s my final question. I talked about what would happen if there was 80 million people focusing on something. Have you heard about how the Simpsons magically predict the future? Have you seen this? Hundreds of cases of the most bizarre things that should never ever happen, and then you find out they happen five, or 10, or 15 years later. Why do you think that is? I have a theory, but I want to hear yours.

[01:16:44] Lynne: I have no idea, but didn’t they predict Donald Trump was going to be president?

[01:16:50] Dave: Oh yeah. 

[01:16:51] Lynne: That’s just one of many, but yeah.

[01:16:53] Dave: They predicted Twin Towers falling down. They predicted Donald Trump. They predicted Greta Thunberg, whatever her name is, the one who likes to say, how dare you? I don’t know what to do, but how dare you? That one instead of doing something like other kids her age are. And so all these things, I’m like, okay, how did they know? 

[01:17:13] My theory has to do with your work actually. It’s actually more than 80 million people. It’s probably more like 500 million people look at a cartoon where they have to fill in the gaps and imagine it as being real. How much intention is on those stories that The Simpsons tell? So are they predicting the future? Are they creating the future by putting a whole hell of a lot of intention into it?

[01:17:38] Lynne: Dave, that’s such a great question. Are they creating it, or are they predicting it? Now, get this too. As you know, because you’re a student of quantum stuff, there’s no such thing as time. All quantum physicists worth their degrees will say– Carlo Rovelli, the big Italian physicist– no such thing as time.

[01:18:06] And I’ve seen that too, because some of my work is about retro intention and intention in the future, in the big future. So we do a lot of time travel with intention too. And I’ve seen it really work. Also, we have some of our amazing extended human capacity, not just the capacity for intention, but also precognition. 

[01:18:33] A great example of that, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake , the British biologist, after 9/11, he put an ad in the Village Voice to say, did you have a dream about this? If so, write me. Had hundreds, if not thousands, of letters of people who had very, very specific dreams of planes going into those buildings, or some toll buildings. Them being in the cockpit. Them being as a passenger, or them just being a witness. 

[01:19:03] We have an amazing ability to forecast. So maybe people are collectively watching this and forecasting or creating it. Maybe by looking at this, we are creating it. And thinking about it, we are creating it. It’s a real fascinating thought experiment. I don’t have an answer to, but certainly– or maybe the creators of The Simpsons are brilliant predictors, or maybe they’re brilliant intenders.

[01:19:39] Dave: It’s a tough one. I’ve been thinking about this for years. I’m pretty sure that they’re doing a good job at least of planting a seed, and when enough people focus on it, it becomes both of those simultaneously, both predicting and creating. Because the quantum is non-dual as well, which is weird.

[01:20:01] And it seems like a lot of artists, though, do read something in the field too. Like Californication, the Red Hot Chili Peppers song, if you listen, read the lyrics, they’re all so predictive of the future. And they wrote it a long time ago, and they’re like, what is going on here? I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m just fascinated by the whole thing. And I figured you might have some thoughts on it because– 

[01:20:22] Lynne: let’s just think about the field. So the field is created. When we talk about the field, it’s created by, as I said, the subatomic dance of subatomic particles. They send energy back and forth, and in that moment of trade, they create what’s called a virtual particle. Therefore, far less than the blink of an eye. But because of all the little tennis games of all of the subatomic particles and everything in the world, this becomes this extraordinary field.

[01:20:56] So it’s out there. An important thing to understand about quantum waves is that they imprint information. When they bump into each other, they take on each other’s information So we talked about the field being a medium in which we’re all connected, but it’s also a medium of all information, essentially, a scientist.

[01:21:21] So perhaps these artists are tapping into the field. They’re tapping into information, even future information. So that could be it too. We’ve got one vast information store. If we were to put the Library of Congress on quantum waves, all of it, that’s every book in English, would fit on a sugar cube.

[01:21:48] Dave: Mm-hmm.

[01:21:48] Lynne: That’s how much information that field out there can hold. That’s just one wave. There’s gazillions of them. 

[01:21:56] Dave: And if we put Wikipedia on there, it would actually weigh less because there’s no actual information on Wikipedia.

[01:22:04] Lynne: It would probably be. Yeah, it would be one of those things that’s weightless. Absolutely.

[01:22:08] Dave: It would turn from sugar into genetically modified soybean oil with a sticker that said it was good for you.

[01:22:17] Lynne: I love it. I love it. I love it.

[01:22:22] Dave: Your work is fascinating, and you’ve consistently applied real science to one of the hardest things to study and the thing that always is triggering for certain people in certain places. So thank you for your amazing books, and your work in the world, and your curiosity. Truly appreciate you. And I can’t wait to see you again in person at the next TLC meeting.

[01:22:46] Lynne: I look forward to it, Dave. Thanks so much.

[01:22:50] Dave: People can go to lynnmctaggart.com to find out more about you. Is that the best place?

[01:22:55] Lynne: Yeah, that’s it.

[01:22:56] Dave: Okay. Good deal. All right. See you soon.

[01:22:58] Lynne: See you.

[00:00:00] Dave: You’re listening to The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. How about we have a conversation with one of the 100 most spiritually influential living people on earth? Today’s guest was named that by Watkins Mind Body Spirit, and AgeNation gave him a Life Achievement Award. He’s a cancer survivor. He’s written about and teaches the journey of inner transformation and the life of relationships.

[00:00:31] Author of dozens of books, including The Book of Awakening and Surviving Storms: Finding the Strength to Meet Adversity. Basically, a badass in resilience. And you might have noticed that I’m into resilience because even the naming of my last company, Bulletproof, before I left, was about that state of resilience.

[00:00:53] It wasn’t about being invincible. It’s about being able to handle anything that life brings your way because you have more energy. So we’re going to talk about the fusion of science, health, and spirituality with a master of all of these. His name is Mark Nepo. Mark, welcome to the show.

[00:01:10] Mark: Thank you. Thank you so much. It’s a joy to be with you.

[00:01:13] Dave: You just came out with a new book called Falling Down and Getting Up: Discovering Your Inner Resilience and Strength. And that’s what I’m having on the show. And just for listeners, I get pitched a 100 times a week from people wanting to be on the show to talk about their books. And I’ve asked my producers and my team to just say no to almost everyone.

[00:01:36] Because unless the book has new knowledge and new information, there’s a lot of recycled books. Oh, look, another book on intermittent fasting. You don’t say. Look, that’s been done. So I want new stuff you haven’t heard before, or I don’t want to take my time or yours on the show. So we’re really stepping it up.

[00:01:54] And even though Mark’s written more than a dozen books, this is one that’s worth your attention. So very high standard for authors to go on the show because there’s too many authors and too many of them with nothing to say. And I don’t think you’re one of those guys. To get our listeners tuned in on what you do, talk to me about getting cancer early in life, what happened, and what it did to your spiritual view on humans.

[00:02:19] Mark: Yeah. I’m 72, and when I met people my age when I was younger, I thought they were ancient. It doesn’t seem so old now. But in my early 30s, I had a rare form of lymphoma. Ad I hadn’t been through anything really challenging up to that point, and so I was just turned inside out and upside down. 

[00:02:43] And it was a rare formal lymphoma that manifest as a tumor in my skull pressing on my brain. And it grew to the size of a grapefruit, and it was pressing on a quarter of my brain inwardly. And I should have had all kinds of neurological problems, but I didn’t. And I went through an incredible gauntlet of tests and biopsies, open biopsies, because no one was sure what they would find. 

[00:03:18] So my karma was I was so afraid, and I had to go every through everything awake. And part of the journey resulted in a miracle that I was a few days from spinal chemotherapy and whole-head radiation. The only side effects would have been affecting my speech and memory, which for me would be knees to a quarterback, and it vanished.

[00:03:47] Dave: It just went away.

[00:03:48] Mark: It vanished. And I knew it the day that it happened. I had requested, because of an inner knowing, one more MRI before going in for these treatments. And that morning, I woke up early, and I knew it was gone because having the tumor energy wise felt like a constant vibration. And when I woke up that morning, the vibration was gone.

[00:04:19] Dave: Okay, inner vibration. Let’s go deep on that. There’s something called interoception. There’s actually two flavors of interoception. There’s enteroception, which is gut-based, and then there’s interoception, which is all the stuff in your body. And most of us don’t have much awareness of that other than I had a gut feeling, or I have a stomach ache, or my heart is pounding.

[00:04:42] But there’s many, many different layers of that. And as you gain attainment in meditation, or biofeedback practices, you start realizing, oh, there’s other signals and all that noise. But most people don’t feel a vibrating around their tumors. Even medical intuitives who can feel their own tumors, they’ve never described it that way. How did you learn how to feel your tumor?

[00:05:05] Mark: I don’t really know. One of the things that happened in that journey was, of course, being– I was a young poet. I was teaching at Albany University. And at that point, I was hoping, like any young poet, maybe if I worked hard enough, maybe I’d write one or two great poems in my life and contribute to something.

[00:05:29] Forget all that, when I was thrown into this cancer journey, I suddenly needed to discover true poems that would help me live. And so I thought I was open, but I was forced more open. And so through this journey– because the second part of the story is I was spit back into life, like spit out of the mouth of the whale of cancer, like Jonah.

[00:05:54] But 10 months later, this tumor was so dramatic that I had a sister tumor on a rib in my back that no one noticed. I didn’t even notice that I had access to all the films. And so 10 months later, I was back in needing to have a rib removed this time, surgically from my back.

[00:06:14] And then I had to go through very aggressive chemo, which almost killed me. And then I had to stop that. And so I discovered that miracle is a process and not an event. And the humbling thing is that I’m Jewish. I was raised Jewish. I have a deep tie to the Jewish heritage, but I’m a student of all paths because, this whole journey, I was blessed to have support, and help, and blessing from people of all walks of life, formal and informal, from scientists to Native Americans to Sufis to people I didn’t know. 

[00:06:51] So when I woke up on the other side, I was not and am still not wise enough to know what worked and what didn’t, and I was challenged to believe in everything. And all my work, my books, my teaching, I believe in the center of all traditions, the unique gifts of each. And it’s the cancer survivor in me that says, okay, how do we make use of it? If we can’t make use of it, what good is it?

[00:07:21] Dave: I’m still wondering if they made a woman out of your rib.

[00:07:25] Mark: Ah, I don’t know. Maybe I was turned into that feminine quality, that receptive quality, which has deepened my whole journey as a poet.

[00:07:38] Dave: Obviously, if you’re listening, where did that come from, the whole taking a rib from Adam to make Eve or whatever? One of the Bible things. And I say that jokingly, but that is a powerful metaphor. And when you’re dealing with metaphysical stuff, you always step back and say, huh, what’s going on there?

[00:07:57] I’ve had a few cancer survivors on the show. One of my dear friends, Mike Koenigs, wrote a book called Cancerpreneur about how he almost died from bowel cancer and how it really changes outlook on life. But he did this as a father a little bit later in life. You’re 72, but this happened to you 40 years ago. 

[00:08:15] Mark: Yeah.

[00:08:15] Dave: So it was a very early, call it, awakening. You’re already a poet. Were you one of those artistic kids who went for walks in the forest and journal? Were you always artsy healer?

[00:08:28] Mark: I was always very open-hearted and sensitive. I was born in Brooklyn, grew up on Long Island. I didn’t get access to nature till later on in life. And for me, the world spoke to me through metaphor as a kid, even though I didn’t know what that meant. And that had been my language, but it was, in high school, the first woman I fell in love with dumped me and broke my heart, which is archetypal.

[00:09:00] Dave: Yeah, they always do

[00:09:03] Mark: I wasn’t a loner, but I didn’t have any real close friends till I got to college. So I started writing to heal. And I realized pretty quickly, I wasn’t talking to myself. I had begun a conversation with life. And this brings, to me, the sense that poetry is not the arrangement of words on a page. It’s the unexpected utterance of the soul. 

[00:09:28] And you don’t even have to write it down. I just happened to write it down. Everyone has a poet in their heart, and it’s the conduit by which I think we come fully alive and enliven our connections to the web of connection that is the living universe.

[00:09:49] Dave: Do you think that you healed yourself? Do you think God healed you? How does that work?

[00:09:55] Mark: I think the closest thing that I could come to is I don’t think I healed myself. I think I contributed by being desperately open and wanting to live. There’s the early Chinese Taoist sense of things. And the great metaphor for that is even the Tao means the way. They don’t even try to name it. But a metaphor for that is that life in the Taoist sense is an invisible river, and each soul is a fish in that river. And so when the fish align, find the current, the current takes them. 

[00:10:34] And this has informed really all of my work, is that I’ve come to believe, and I’ve experienced, I think, that when I can be authentic and be fully here, that’s the best chance to align with the currents of life. And those currents are restorative and healing. So I think I contributed by being scared out of my wits and wanting to be here.

[00:11:07] Dave: Enlightened self-interest also motivated the creation of the biohacking movement. Like, this body is not going to make it if I don’t do something about it. So there’s that. And it can be motivating and expanding, for sure. One of the things that I stumbled into early in life, also out of desperation, is I learned longevity from people in their 80s when I was in my 20s.

[00:11:32] Because the stuff they were doing to stay young was the stuff that was helping me lose the 100 pounds, helping me reverse chronic fatigue, not have brain fog the way you’re supposed to in your 70s if you don’t manage your biology. And so I just stumbled into this. Oh my god– I’m going to be crass– these old people know a lot of stuff.

[00:11:50] And when you’re in your 20s, you think you know everything. So I’ve cultivated a practice of always spending time with people older than me and younger than me whenever I can. In fact, this weekend I was at my friend T. Lock’s 80th birthday in Las Vegas because you don’t know that many people who are 80 who can do cool meditative things.

[00:12:11] And as you’ve aged, though, most of my older friends have described to me at some time in their 50s or 60s where they feel like they became less visible. People in their 20s or 30s, say, ah, it’s an old person. What do they know? Did you experience that? At what time in life did you, oh, wait, I’m not as visible as I was before? And what did that do to you?

[00:12:36] Mark: Oh, I haven’t really experienced that personally. I feel like one of the things about being a poet or an artist of any kind or someone who’s– And I agree with you that I’ve had both models, if you will, of elders that I feel like that everything to this point in life, even though I’ve been blessed to retrieve– I like to say retrieve all these books– it’s just been an apprenticeship for I don’t know what yet.

[00:13:07] I feel like I’m just beginning in a lot of ways, and I’ve had the typical older person earlier in life. I had very kind people, but people who never asked a question. And then I had some mentors unexpected– most mentors are unexpected– elders who, my God, I just was so enlivened by their unending inquiry. 

[00:13:38] That was medicine. That brought them alive. And I think one of the reasons I’ve been able to retrieve so many books is that I learned how to get out of the way. And I’ve come to think of writing now as listening and taking notes.

[00:13:54] Dave: You used the word elder three times there, and it’s such a beautiful word. In fact, Chip Conley came on, putting together the Modern Elder Program to introduce elders. And I went to a dinner that he put together where we had people in their 20s, people in midlife, and people who are in their 70s and 80s to all sit down and have dinner.

[00:14:13] It was really cool. And you just realize the village elder component is missing, and one of my goals with this show and with the biohacking movement in general is like, if you want to save a lot of time, ask an old person, because they probably already did it. So let’s capture that wisdom and knowledge and make it accessible because there are many like you who are over 70.

[00:14:35] I’ve got plenty of mileage. You’re like, I’m ready to share. And now you know something, which is why your new book is noteworthy. But there’s a couple of questions. You also said you like to say your books are downloaded, did you say?

[00:14:49] Mark: Retrieve.

[00:14:50] Dave: Retrieved. Right. So are we talking Akashic records? Where are you retrieving them from?

[00:14:56] Mark: Again, let’s use that image of, and it’s from this principle that if I participate. But it’s a journey of relationship, not of me creating something out of nothing. I think that’s part of the modern narcissism, of the modern world. Oh, I’m an artist.

[00:15:14] I’ll be a miniature god. I say it comes into being. No, that’s not what my experience has been. But again, when I am authentic, in a small way, if I follow a feeling, a confusion, a pain, a fear, a question, if I’m open and honest enough, I am usually rewarded with an insight. I’m rewarded with a story, a truth, a poem, a metaphor, and then that becomes my teacher.

[00:15:48] So in a lot of ways, my heart is my Geiger counter. It’s like I know what’s true, and then my mind needs to be a student of what I discovered is true. And if I dismissed it because I didn’t yet understand it, I would have written nothing.

[00:16:05] Dave: I get you. So it’s a dance between you and whatever else is around you, but it’s not like you’re plugging in and retrieving from somewhere. 

[00:16:17] And I think this is the dance with the unknown. I think one of the things about our modern age right now and our contemporary scene is, as people get insulated with their fear, then we tend to only seek what will confirm what we already know, and that’s not learning. Whatever we know, however little or a lot, there’s always an edge. And in so many ways, that edge is just to keep deepening our relationship with the unknown.

[00:16:51] Do you believe in evil?

[00:16:52] Mark: I’ll describe evil this way. First off, let’s back up. I think the Buddhists talk about the friction of the wheel of life. There is the weight and gravity of living, which causes suffering, which no one can get out of, just like they can’t escape gravity. 

[00:17:14] And then there’s the way that we inadvertently hurt each other. I’m bringing you tea, and I trip, and I spill it on you, and I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. To me, evil is consciously, deliberately doing harm, knowing you’re doing harm. I think that’s evil.

[00:17:35] Dave: And do you think it exists?

[00:17:37] Mark: It exists, and I think this is one of the endless conversations that’s been since the beginning of time, is, are human beings innately good, or are they innately bad? And if they’re bad, then we need all these controls, and things, and restraints. I’m of the camp that we are innately, I won’t even say good, but whole. And then being human, things block us.

[00:18:04] Dave: Yeah.

[00:18:04] Mark: Things veil us. It’s interesting. In the Chinese language, when they go to translate the English word sin, they translate it as opaque.

[00:18:15] Dave: Hmm. 

[00:18:20] Mark: And also, in the Chinese tradition, there was a philosopher, Mencius. I would have loved to have interviewed this guy. He was 300 BC, and from all we can tell, he was just a sweetheart.

[00:18:31] Dave: Total mensch.

[00:18:33] Mark: Yeah, total mensch. And he said, water, allowed its own nature, will always flow downhill and join other water. It can be manipulated to go uphill even, but allowed its true nature, it will always flow and join other water. And so two people. Human beings, allowed their true nature, will flow to each other, and join, and be kind. 

[00:18:59] But we can be manipulated or manipulate ourselves to be hesitant or unkind, or to work out of fear needlessly. And so, yeah, my experience has been, the times that I trip into inadvertently hurting those I love is when I’m opaque, when I’m blocked, when I’m not clear, when I have forgotten what matters, or who I am, or who you are.

[00:19:31] Dave: It’s interesting. One of my favorite courses in my undergrad was called Religion and Violence, and it was taught by a rabbinical scholar, and we were studying Jim Jones, and all sorts of different violent religious movements around the world to figure out the relationship between them.

[00:19:50] And I’m a computer science guy. Just full transparency, I took the religious classes because you can get an A in a religious class a lot more easily than a computer programming class, let me just say. There is no right answer versus either your code works or doesn’t, so maybe that’s a comment on my technical skills.

[00:20:09] But it was really enlightening because I believe that all these people were basically irrational. And I told the teacher that, and he laughed and said, no, no, they’re totally rational. They just have very different beliefs than you. So if you believe you’re going to heaven with a 100 virgins or whatever the story is, okay, maybe it makes sense to put on some explosive clothing or whatever, but it’s not an irrational act. 

[00:20:34] It’s just maybe one that’s not connected to the reality that the rest of us are seeing. So it’s that lack of transparency, that opaqueness, and that you’ve been programmed with a reality that isn’t a very functional version of it. And that was really a life changing understanding for me where I didn’t think everyone was stupid and irrational. I just thought they were poorly informed.

[00:20:57] Mark:  Yeah, yeah. I think that so many times, we’ve heard this archetypal choice between love and fear, and it comes down in every direction and every way. I I’ve learned through, especially for my cancer journey, feeling so much fear, that fear is something to be moved through, not obey. If I’m afraid and I ask my fear, what should I do? My fear will go, oh, I thought you’d never ask. Be more afraid.

[00:21:30] Dave: Yeah. Maybe you should be more afraid. It’s hard to know. You also said something about, are people good or evil? And that’s a very dualistic approach. And the non-dual, they’re good and evil at the same time, depending on which life, or emanation, or situation you’re in. And to accept that, that’s okay. 

[00:21:52] It feels like most things can be put to misuse. You can use the shovel to dig a hole. You can use it to smack someone. Is the shovel good or evil? I don’t know. I feel like it’s variable, and it depends on the circumstances, but that also leads to a life with no meaning, and you’re studying a life of meaning. So do you have to have duality in order to have meaning in your life?

[00:22:15] Mark: No, no. And in fact, I’m glad you brought that up because in referring to that, I, in no way, was intending that people are all good or all evil. We have capacities to do harm and o do well, and we all have a mix, I think. Just like there are X and Y chromosomes, and there’s infinite combinations, we have an infinite capacity for how we behave and how we work in the world.

[00:22:41] And I think the deeper meanings of life, at least for me, the greatest teachers have always come through paradox, where more than one thing is true at the same time. And I think that tripping into duality only is a big cause of a lot of suffering in our world.

[00:22:59] Dave: Wow, so cool. A big cause of my suffering was the belief that I was a rational actor. And it was only when I realized I was simultaneously a rational and an irrational actor at the same time that I got a lot more peace. And I’m like, what? How can that be? It depends on your framing, and it depends on which part of you you’re talking about.

[00:23:23] Your body will do things that are irrational to your mind, but they’re rational from the body’s perspective of reality, which is relatively ignorant and fast. For instance, it’s irrational to startle at something that’s not dangerous, except it was rational if you didn’t know what it was and you were responsible for keeping the body alive. There’s all sorts of stuff, and you take credit for it. I just don’t have to worry about it. Is that similar to the way you’re looking at things? What do you know that I don’t about that?

[00:23:54] Mark: I think what I’ve come to know about fear and pain, fear always gets its power from not looking. As human beings, we tend to inflate or deflate what’s before us and our experience. And I learned this very deeply at a very transformative moment in my cancer journey.

[00:24:18] I had that rib removed from my back, and three weeks later, I was ushered into a really aggressive form of chemo. And the first treatment was in New York City, and it was horribly botched. So I was in a holiday inn with my former wife and a dear old friend, and the only medicine they gave me was oral, so I couldn’t keep it down. 

[00:24:42] And I started to get sick every 20 minutes, and this is with the stitches still in my back from a rib being removed. And so, eventually, we went to the emergency room, but just before dawn came, I was slumped in the corner of this room because I was exhausted, not to any wisdom on my part.

[00:25:06] It started to occur to me, somewhere nearby, a baby’s being born. Somewhere nearby, a couple’s making love for the first time. Somewhere nearby, an adult father and a son who haven’t spoken for years are sitting and having coffee. And then I realized, to be broken is no reason to see all things as broken. 

[00:25:29] And what I’ve learned from that moment, which I’ve had to reflect on for years, is that while I’m afraid, I need the company of those who know what it is to be afraid, but I need everything safe and whole to heal. And when I’m broken, I need the company of those who know what it’s like to be broken, but I need everything intact and different than me to heal.

[00:25:56] And I think we have a lot of rightful emphasis on diversity, which, in our modern society, of course, is referring to ethnic diversity. But I think the greatest diversity is in the mysterious universe and variations of life force. So thank God everything– and being human, when I’m broken, I want to extrapolate and make the world a broken place. And when I’m afraid, I want to extrapolate and make the world a fearful place. 

[00:26:27] Thank God it’s not. Normally, it’s natural enough as humans. So if I realize that diversity, then I’ll say, oh, well, what I’m going through is insignificant. No, it’s real. And if I extrapolate everything, this is happening to me, so this is the most important thing. No. And thank God, there is other life than what I’m going through.

[00:26:57] Dave: It sounds like spiritual diversity– not religious diversity, but spiritual diversity.

[00:27:02] Mark: Absolutely.

[00:27:03] Dave: I have found that for me to heal some physical stuff, but certainly the emotional traumas, PTSD, the deep stuff like that, you need to be around at least one and sometimes several, we’ll call master-level healers.

[00:27:15] They’re people who know how to sit there, what you would call holding space in some traditions. And just by being in their presence when they’re calm and you’re losing your shit, your body, without any conscious mind at all, just realizes it doesn’t have to be that way. And then a shift happens.

[00:27:32] And those are things that pharmaceutical companies hate because you can’t clinical trial that stuff, and the healer is an important part of an equation. There’s a patient with a symptom, there’s a technology or a drug, and then there’s a healer. And they don’t like it that the healer has an effect. But my experience has been that. Do you agree with that model, that we’re resonating with the teachers who are creating the temporary sense of calm so you can adjust yourself?

[00:27:58] Mark: Yes, yes. Two stories that come to mind. One, I had a dear friend who’s now gone, but another friend who helped me when I was going through cancer. And later on, about 20 years ago, he had cancer and died. And I went through this very open– and he was there for me with other loved ones.

[00:28:20] But when it was his turn, I discovered that wasn’t how he wanted to go through it. And I loved him even more because I thought that being open about it and keeping me company was natural for him. And it was even more loving because it wasn’t. He was very private. He didn’t want to talk about it. And so I spent a lot of time sitting next to him in the hospital. And Dave, I would purposely breathe slow next to him.

[00:28:50] Dave: Yeah.

[00:28:51] Mark: And eventually, his breath matched mine, and that was the only way I could give to him. That was the only way. Yeah, it was a beautiful thing. And the other story, which is not a story about my life, but I had been doing research for one of my books, and it led me back to about healers and shamans.

[00:29:12] And I found this common story, different variations, but it was in a lot of different indigenous traditions. And the story is this, that there’s a shaman in a village, and he notices that a young boy has the gift, has the healing touch. So he goes to his parents and says, would you let me train him?

[00:29:32] And they say, oh, we’d be honored. So he starts training. He’s eight, nine years old. First thing that the shaman says to him is, you’re going to want to heal someone. Don’t do it till I tell you you’re ready. So, of course, a little boy sees an old woman who’s suffering, and he lays hands on her, and sure enough, he pulls the illness out of her, and then he gets sick.

[00:29:59]  And so the shaman is called, and the shaman heals him. He had a fever. And then as soon as he comes to, the shaman’s over him saying, what did I tell you? And then he proceeds to tell him there are twin calls to healing. The first is being able to draw the illness, whether it’s physical, emotional, spiritual, mental out of the person.

[00:30:23] But the second is just as important. How do you discharge it so that you don’t get sick and you just don’t become an instrument of contagion? What good is it if I take it from you and give it to my wife after we’re off this interview? And it’s amazing, that ancient common story. 

[00:30:43] Whether you’re a professional healer or you’re just in a relationship with a loved one or a friend, that’s so important. We have a lot more medical tools, but it’s the same thing. How do we address those twin calls of healing?

[00:30:58] Dave: It’s really cool that you’re saying that. I’m talking with John Gray, the Mars and Venus friend, a little bit later today, and he told me a story, privately, how he used to do a lot of healing work and then quit doing it because it was so much work for him to, basically, clean off all the stuff he would pick up doing that. It was just taking too much time every day for it.

[00:31:20]  I was just in the Middle East, and I met a guy who was like, I just learned how to heal people, and I can just do it. And I looked at him and said, do you have any training in this? And he goes, no, I just know how to do it. And I said, all right, let’s talk a little bit.

[00:31:40] And he said, yeah, I haven’t slept in six days. And I said, yeah, I can tell. It’s written all over you. So we sat down at a bar, actually, and I showed him some grounding techniques, and I was like, you need to find a teacher if you’re going to do this because it’s not safe to just do this work on someone unless you know the basic techniques.

[00:32:03] And even then, you might think you’re a good healer, but you’re actually probably not. And then you’re going to come across someone who’s got something really sticky, and it’s going to be all over you. And if you don’t have the masters and the teachers who know how to get that off of you, this is work.

[00:32:20] This is the stuff that a lot of people don’t talk about, but it is out there. And I’ve worked with this stuff. I’ve seen it plenty of times, and I’m blessed to have been taught by some people where I don’t do a lot of healing work on people, but I can when I’m called to. And I know enough to be humble about the fact that I’m going to call someone to help me ditch it if I need to.

[00:32:41] And I know the practices. And I wish there was more conversation like the story you just shared. And thank you for sharing it because it’s really important, especially if you’re listening to this and you’re saying, I just realized I can do this. Cool. Find a teacher. How did you find a teacher?

[00:32:58] Mark: Oh, like I said, our mentors and teachers, despite who we look for, the teachers come by accident. One teacher was wonderful. He’s now gone. Joel Elkes was a holocaust survivor, a water colorist, and   a medical doctor, who was one of the founders of psychopharmacology.

[00:33:29] He was part of the team in the early ’50s in England that discovered forsythia. He lived to be 102. I met him when he was 80 and wondered how much time we’d have. We had 22 years, and he was an incredible mentor to me. And   he taught me how to be a teacher, and one of the moments was, when I met him when he was 80, talking about elders, and this is before we had our digital cell phones.

[00:34:00] I had a tape recorder. I went to where he was living, and I put the tape recorder. We were going to have tea. And he said, what’s that? I said, Joel, it’s a tape recorder. He said, why? I said, I want to record your stories. Why? Because you’re an elder. He said, elder, shmelder, turn that thing off. 

[00:34:22] I said, oh, okay, okay. And then we sat in silence for a while, and we had tea. And then he reached over and took my hand and said, now tell me about you. Tell me what you care about. And I knew in that moment how to be a teacher.

[00:34:40] Dave: Wow. That’s profound. And the way you connected with him at first, he reached out to you?

[00:34:49] Mark: I reached out to him. I heard him speak, and then I just– he was born in Lithuania, but he grew up in England because his father, sensing the Holocaust, sent him to London. And so he was Jewish and had an English accent. So for a young Jewish artist, this was like Laurence Olivier and Moses. How could I not fall in love with him? 

[00:35:16] Dave: Got it. He just stood out to you. And this is a shamanic teaching, but when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Or maybe that’s from some kind of Chinese proverb, but wherever it is, I’ve noticed that in my own life and in of many others, where they just show up. And I’m really grateful sometimes someone just pops into my life who really has exactly what I needed. They know somehow. And that’s helped me a lot. 

[00:35:45] And for listeners, if you’re trying– how do I know? I don’t know. How do you know when your foot hurts? You just know. And if someone tells you to read a book, three different people tell you to read the same book or that you need to meet the same person, you probably should listen.

[00:35:57] I’ve met some of the people who taught me things because different people just keep saying I should talk to this guy. They don’t know why they’re saying it. I don’t know why they’re saying it. The world works that way. So you should listen.

[00:36:08] Mark: I think that you had said earlier in our conversation that so much in our modern world, in our disposable society, we tend to dispose elders. We just see them as old and every culture, before the modern world, has valued elders. And I think that’s one of the great questions we can ask anyone who’s been around a while, is, what do you see?

[00:36:31] After all of your journey, what do you know? I think everyone, not just elders, but those who suffer have a wisdom the rest of us need. And since everyone suffers, we all take turns being teachers. One of my small poems that’s been a teacher for me, just three lines, is, those who wake are the students. Those who stay awake are the teachers. How we take turns.

[00:36:59] Dave: Beautiful. And it always is A circuit that’s set up, so it’s not like our elders don’t benefit from spending time with younger people as well. I do this when I’m putting together my camps at Burning Man. You always want to have a few elders, and you want to have a few people in their early 20s.

[00:37:18] And then a mix in between. And the reason you do that is you get the energy of youth from the young ones, and you get the wisdom of elders. And if you’re lucky, you have an elder with the energy of youth, which is what I’m working to build with the whole longevity work I’m doing. Then it just gets to be a lot more fun. Let’s talk about your new book. And I think by now, listeners have got a sense for you being an elder who’s got some wisdom accumulated. 

[00:37:45] Your book is called Falling Down and Getting Up, and it’s about resilience and strength. One of the things I’ve noticed is my teens or 20s, the thought of failure was abhorrent, and I spent a lot of my early career burning myself out and being stupidly successful but running away from failure, which is a super toxic way of living and leads you to have blind spots. And it’s actually narcissistic at its worst expression. 

[00:38:17] If that’s the way a lot of people are living today, it feels like it’s even worse because the idea that you could be triggered by being told that you failed so that no one can tell you you failed, and this whole fragile I have to have a gold star or I can’t survive mindset– how does Falling Down and Getting Up resonate with someone who never has had experience of falling down because they got a participation trophy?

[00:38:41] Mark: Yeah, so let’s back up a second, and I’ll move into that, by just noting, I think that in the modern world, it’s always been, but more acutely in the modern world, our definition of success and failure isn’t very helpful. In a narcissistic culture, we tend to define success as getting what we want and failure as not getting what we want.

[00:39:05] That’s actually a pretty infantile way of looking at success and failure because if I got most of the things I wanted, I might be dead by now. Not everything I want is what I need. I don’t always know best. That’s why experience is a great teacher. And so I think that often, my experience has been there’s nothing wrong with working for what we want. I don’t want my wife to die. I want her to live a long time. That’s different than I want a Mercedes.

[00:39:41] Often, working for what I want in my life has turned out to be an apprenticeship for working with what I’m given, which is where our gifts truly show up. So it’s fine to work for what we want, but often we don’t get what we want, or we have dreams, and the dreams don’t always come true. 

[00:40:02] And I wouldn’t say that’s a failure. I’ve come to think of dreams as kindling for the fire of aliveness. And therefore, I can give my all to working for my dreams, and even if they don’t come true, sometimes I come true, and that’s more important. So now, with that in mind, falling down and getting up, we create a lot of suffering by resisting legitimate suffering. Carl Jung said, neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering. 

[00:40:42] Dave: Really? I love that quote.

[00:40:43] Mark: Yeah, isn’t that something? And so we can spend so much energy trying to avoid falling, but falling down or going in a different direction than we intended, which is just a change of course, you can’t escape it, being human. It’s like we can’t escape gravity when we walk out of the house.

[00:41:07] No one signs up to fall down. Oh, give me two. No. But it’s inevitable. It’s part of life. And we grow and learn from it. So if we back up enough, falling down over a lifetime is actually a dance. And the question is, what’s your particular individual dance look like, and how can you do it better? How can you be skilled at it? And what can you keep learning from it? 

[00:41:34] So the title of the book came from medieval monks in Europe when asked how they practiced their faith, said, by falling down and getting up. And I get that. I resonate with that. And then what that made me think, as we start to look at other cultures– all cultures speak about this in some way.

[00:41:51] I then discovered that in Japan, there’s a proverb that says, fall down seven, get up eight. Fall down seven, get up eight. And then I discovered in the Hindu tradition, the Upanishads– folks who aren’t familiar, there are the holy anonymous texts in the Hindu tradition filled with amazing metaphors. 

[00:42:13] And one of them is of a caterpillar. And if you watch how a caterpillar moves, it stretches forward, and then it bunches up, actually goes back a little, and then goes forward. So it’s bunching up and going– this is another form of falling down and getting up, going backwards and going forward.

[00:42:36] Dave: Mm.

[00:42:37] Mark: And that reminded me finally of, during my cancer journey, when I had that rib removed, I woke up right after the surgery, in a room, of course, and there was this nurse hovering over me, and she says to me, get up. We’re going to walk. And I said, who’s going to walk? Now? And then she got softer, and she whispered to me, two steps forward, one step back. 

[00:43:05] All of these things, from all different approaches, the caterpillar, two steps– what I meant to say is that in the Upanishads, that caterpillar image, they say, this is the rhythm of spiritual growth, like a caterpillar. And so all of these rhythms come together. And so there is an art to falling and an art to getting up that is very personal to how we face what is ours to face and how we ask for help when we need help. And those become ingredients for resilience.

[00:43:48] Dave: There’s a profound book called The Heart of the World about exploring the deepest gorge on the planet in the Himalayas, where only a couple of explorers have ever gone. And it’s allegedly where Shangri-La lives. And I’ve done some exploring the Himalayas– nothing as extreme as that. But the book just resonated in a really deep way with me.

[00:44:12] And there’s a story in it where the explorer, a Westerner, they’re falling down, I think, in mangroves or whatever kind of plants are growing up there, the big ones that trip you. Fallen over them and gotten bit by leeches, but I forget their name. And he falls down, and he’s just swearing, and he’s pissed.

[00:44:32] And he’s walking with a local monk. And then the monk falls over and gets all muddy, and just stands up, starts laughing and laughing and laughing. They both fell for the same thing, but the results were so different about it. How would we learn how to laugh when we fall down and just be curious? I guess I’ll do that one again.

[00:44:50] Mark: I think being human, if it’s not too painful, we can laugh. And of course, this brings up what I call faith in life. Not faith in a tradition, or a person, or a doctrine, but faith in life that it might be hard to be grateful for something while I’m in it. But more often than not, I’m grateful because I know I will learn something from it once I’m out of that difficult passage.

[00:45:23] And I think this is at the heart of the Leonard Cohen’s great song, Hallelujah. And he talks in there about the broken Hallelujah. I didn’t talk to Leonard Cohen, but this is what it says to me. Here’s an image. If you’re on a raft at sea and a wave comes and crashes the raft, and you’re hanging to a piece of driftwood, that’s pretty difficult for you and me. That’s even tragic. 

[00:45:51] And it doesn’t diminish the majesty of the sea. And how do we honor both? Miracle and tragedy are in every moment. And the value of falling down is that we’re grounded. But the value of miracle is that we’re uplifted. So if we only are grounded, we can be ground down. And if we’re only uplifted, we’re going to transcend out of here.

[00:46:29] And so somehow, one of the challenges in being human is how to allow the lift of miracle and the grounding of falling to help us be fully here, neither leaving this earth and neither being ground to dust on it. And the wheel of life never stops turning. And if we stop it at any one point, we have a philosophy.

[00:46:58] If you stop it on the top, oh, we’re going to transcend out of here. Isn’t everything wonderful? And if you stop it at the bottom, now we have nihilism and existentialism and everything sucks. That whole thing of the glass– is it half full or half empty? It’s always both. It’s always both. 

[00:47:22] Dave: This back to the non-dualism thing, right?

[00:47:26] Mark: Yeah.

[00:47:28] Dave: You talk about deeper teachers in your book, fear, pain, grief. How do you recommend that people deal with those?

[00:47:41] Mark: And again, what I should have said at the beginning of our interview is that what I offer are examples, not instructions. We’re just comparing notes. I think fear and pain are one thing. As I mentioned earlier, at least my experience, fear really gets its power from not looking. So the courage to look at what we’re afraid of till it’s right size. 

[00:48:08] And if I can’t do that alone, that means I got to call you up and say, I need to look at this, but I’m really stuck. Can you come over and help? Hippocrates said pleasure is the absence of pain. And that’s very helpful, especially in periods of chronic pain, because even in chronic pain, there’s always a sesura, even if it’s brief, there’s a moment. And how do we somehow find resilience in those pauses, the absence of pain, even if it’s for a second? 

[00:48:46] And then we’ll get to grief, but there’s an ancient Hindu teaching story about pain. And there’s a master and apprentice always. And the truth is that this master, finds this apprentice really annoying because all he does is complain, complain, complain. So the master says to the apprentice, get a handful of salt, put it in a glass of water, and bring it to me quietly. So he does. And then the master says, drink. He drinks from the glass, and spits it out. 

[00:49:22] Master says, what’s the matter? He says, it’s bitter. Master says, get the same exact amount of salt and follow me quietly. So as it cupped in his hands, he follows him. The master leads him to a river. And he says, put the salt in the river. He says, now drink. He kneels down. He scoops it. It dribbles down his chin. And the master said, well? He says, oh, it’s fresh. The master looks at him. He says, stop being a glass. Become a lake.

[00:49:49] Dave: Mm.

[00:49:50] Mark: Stop being a glass. Become a lake. And I think that ancient Hindu teaching story, anonymous– I love these anonymous ancient stories because before schools, and certificates, and degrees, stories carried wisdom. But I think the power of that story is that everyone gets their handful of salt. 

[00:50:12] No one gets out of this life without a handful of salt. So when we do experience pain, the only thing we can do is to enlarge our sense of things, become a lake. Not to eliminate it, but to right size it. And if we don’t, not only will the pain be more acute, but will get bitter. 

[00:50:37] And so the question out of that, which is so powerful for me, and I share it in my teaching, is, what relationships, experiences, and practices are in your toolbox so that you can enlarge your sense of things the next time pain surprises you? Or fear. What do you do? What can you do so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you’re surprised by fear and pain? And then we have to personalize that toolbox.

[00:51:12] Dave: It’s funny. I’ve been working with my teenagers on this. If that happens, it’ll go on my permanent record. It’ll be there forever. I’m like, do you know how many of my employees I’ve checked their permanent record? There’s no such thing as a permanent record.

[00:51:28] And of course, when I was a teenager, I believe the same thing. And then when it comes to friends who are getting separated or divorced– I’ve been divorced– it feels like you’re going to die then. But if you look back, listeners, where were you two years ago? Completely different. And two years before that, completely different. And five years ago, you had no idea what you were going to be doing now.

[00:51:52] And so with the right time frame, the pain just feels, oh, this is a very temporary thing, even though it feels so big. And that reminder, to myself, I feel like that’s wisdom that comes with time. How do we transmit that wisdom to people who haven’t figured it out yet?

[00:52:11] Mark: This raises a paradox for me. And that is, I’m a lifelong, devoted teacher, and I’ve come to believe that you really can’t change anyone. So what am I doing?

[00:52:23] Dave: Oh, I don’t want to change them. I just want to show them the– 

[00:52:25] Mark: No, no, no. I know. But what it’s led me to is I think that what it changes, what it means to be a teacher for me, which is to be more like a greenhouse, is to provide light and warmth to anyone before us so that they will grow at their own pace in their own direction, not where I think they should grow, not how I think they should grow, but providing the warmth and light so that they can organically grow themselves.

[00:52:59] And I think that, strangely, things take exactly the time they take. I feel like every person has their own language of wisdom, and every experience decodes a word in that language. The question that I’ve started to ask– I don’t have kids, but young people around me, through my teaching– I’m in an uncle position, godfather position with a lot of younger people. I find myself sitting with them and saying, what’s it like to be you? Tell me. What’s it like to be you? And how do you relate to the things around you?

[00:53:39] Dave: So you’re creating the observer’s mind in them so that they’ll step out and examine instead of being in it all the time.

[00:53:47] Mark: So to invite folks, young or at any age, to the work of self-awareness, again, I think, is relational. I have a friend who’s worked for years in the CDC. David Addis. He’s an amazing doctor who has been very instrumental in curbing worm-based diseases, especially elephantiasis, but he was working in Brazil, and he stumbled on this indigenous practice. It’s in Portuguese. So the word in Portuguese, it’s called edai, E-D-A-I, and it means, and so.

[00:54:26] And the way it works, say that I have a problem and I come to you. And so the way it would work is I’d explain what’s going on, and you would listen, and you would say, edai, and so. And the first edai means and so. In the context of all life, what does this mean? Not minimizing, but truly, that’s enlargening our sense of things. 

[00:54:56] And then I would express to you whatever that means to me, and then you would listen and say, edai, and so. Given where you are, where’s the next piece of solid ground? And then I would try to explain that as best I understand it. And then the final edai would be, and so what is your next step? Isn’t that a remarkable indigenous practice?

[00:55:25] Dave: It’s like an acceptance practice. I like that. I’ve seen something similar in an ancient Chinese practice, which is, yeah, and so? And then what? I like that a lot. You talk about something else in the chapter. It’s funny. You just mentioned your friend at the CDC, and you have a chapter in the book that says, speak what we know to be true.

[00:55:52] Now, it feels like your friend was working on a real disease that we actually know how to cure and things like that, where the cure might not be worse than the disease. But a lot of people who spoke what they know to be true and what, especially now, we know to be true, over the past few years, experienced an outsized amount of pain, and grief, and suffering. Now, how would we apply your learnings to people who are facing censorship?

[00:56:21] Mark:  Every generation has had to face this. Even think of Galileo, who was forced to recant when all he realized was that the Earth wasn’t the center of the solar system. He was put under house arrest for the last eight years of his life. And interestingly, this is absolutely ridiculous, but true. In 2014, 359 years later, after a commission, Pope John Paul II said, oops, we’re sorry. Galileo was right.

[00:56:59] Dave: You don’t think. 

[00:57:01] Mark: I think that this raises a paradox or a way of being that all human beings face, and that is– I think about it this way, between the friction of being visible and the cost of being invisible. That if we are visible– and that’s different from, look at me. I’m not saying getting attention. I’m just saying, just not vanishing, being visible. 

[00:57:31]  Then, by definition, we cannot possibly meet the expectations of everyone we meet. So there will be misunderstanding, conflict, some friction of some kind, the friction of being who we are in the world. And I do think part of our journey is to be who we are everywhere. 

[00:57:53] So the other side is the cost of being invisible, of being hidden, or being a people pleaser, or just being a chameleon. To me, when I’ve stumbled into that in my life, it’s corrosive. That is, if I’m silent too long, I lose my voice. If I’m hidden too long, I start to vanish. If I play dumb, I become dumb. And so the challenge, I think always, is to try to be who we are everywhere.

[00:58:35] And of course, that doesn’t mean that every place I go, every person I meet in Starbucks, I have to proclaim what I know. It means that I have to be what I know. And D. H. Lawrence has a poem called Self-Protection in which he asks the question, is the best self-protection being who we are or hiding who we are?

[00:59:00] Dave: What do you think? What’s your answer?

[00:59:02] Mark: Oh, being who we are, absolutely.

[00:59:04] Dave: You think?

[00:59:04] Mark: Which doesn’t mean that there aren’t some times that I need to be still and quiet. It doesn’t mean I have to announce who I am. There’s a difference. Yeah.

[00:59:21] Dave: I did this course a while ago called Urban Escape and Evasion. And they teach you how to know if you’re being followed, how to escape from kidnappers, and pick locks, and how to move through a city with bounty hunters hunting you. That’s actually the final exam. It was really scary. It was also really fun, but they taught a state called the gray man.

[00:59:44] And it’s actually also taught in shamanic practice, where we have the ability to not shine. You’re not necessarily changing what you see, but it’s becoming invisible. And I swear, I’ve almost done– I’m in Santa Monica, and I’m dressed like a junkie. I’ve snuck past five bounty hunters, and they couldn’t see me because I was one of the invisible people. 

[01:00:11] I’m like, I’m not a gray man because I’m too tall and whatever. I stand out. But I did it. And then this guy just appears out of nowhere. I think he was invisible. And he’s like, got you. I’m like, ah. And the reason he got me is because the cameraman who was filming for A& E– cameramen have a different view. They see everything.

[01:00:31] So he could see right through my junkie outfit. But the fact that a bounty hunter who I was looking for could appear in front of me, and I couldn’t see him until he revealed himself, that was so profound of a learning for me. And that reminds me what you’re saying. You don’t have to shout it in the wrong spot.

[01:00:51] But you don’t have to change who you are. You’re just not expressing it. And that’s a way of maintaining honesty and integrity versus lying. And lying is very expensive. It’s why there’s actually now studies that show that even little white lies, your brain spends a lot of energy trying to keep track of them, and it spins up a lot of cycles. It’s just not worth it. It’s sometimes better to just not say the truth, which is different than lying.

[01:01:20] Mark: Yeah.

[01:01:21] Dave: That was a big learning for me. As we’re getting to the end of the show, you’ve been doing retreats for 50 years, retreats and things like that. So by this point, you’re probably more than a beginner. Tell me about a recent retreat you did. What would you do as someone who’s been leading retreats for decades?

[01:01:40] Mark: What I do, and I feel like my job in holding these circles, these spaces, whether it’s a small group or a large group, is to open a heart space. And we enter it for a weekend or a week to help introduce people to their own wisdom and their own gift. And the way that I do that is I often will open up themes through story, and metaphor, and poem, and then I will invite people into meditative journaling and conversation dialogue exercises to see where these things live in their own life.

[01:02:23] And then we come back and have a large integrative conversation, and we go through that cycle. In a weekend, we probably get through six or seven themes. And then I also offer where I live because I missed working with people over time. So I offer year-long journeys for a small group, like 16 or 18 people that come together four weekends over a year.

[01:02:48] We do that over a longer design and a journey. And I tell you, it’s a real privilege to be in these authentic circles. And I’m always amazed. I feel like it’s like spiritual jazz because you never know what’s coming up. And when the heart space opens up enough, then when who’s the teacher moves around the room, it doesn’t get any better than that.

[01:03:22] Dave: That’s such a beautiful way of expressing it. Naveen Jain, and Vishen Lakhyani from Mindvalley, and I are doing a similar program called the Apollo Group. And we’re doing two in persons and deep dives once a quarter with the same group because it’s the continuity over time. Like you said, we’re not sure everything that’s going to come out of it. But the idea of spiritual jazz is beautiful because it’s the mix of the people and the teachers, not just the teachers talking.

[01:03:54] Mark: Yes, absolutely.

[01:03:55] Dave: Thank you for explaining it that way. That was really helpful for me to talk about why it works because we all know that it works that way. But yeah, you gave me a little nugget there. So much appreciated. The idea that the teacher finds the student or the teacher will appear when the student is ready, when you’re talking about these small, intimate retreat things that you do, do you run big ad campaigns? How do the people know you’re doing that?

[01:04:25] Mark: Oh, I do big promo things, but on my website, marknepo.com, there’s just all the places I’m teaching and what I’m doing there, and my books can be found anywhere. And I have another page called livemarknepo.com, which is where my webinars are listed when I do–

[01:04:47] Dave: Got it. So you just do the basic thing, and then when people are called, they’re called. That works. And it’s funny. Some of my friends, Joe Dispenza announced something, and, it fills up in five minutes, which is remarkable. I run a big conference, and it’s a little bit of work to tell everyone because I feel like I have an obligation to let people who would benefit to know about it, and it’s always a fine line between pushing people to go versus just making them aware. 

[01:05:14] So I figured you must have some enlightened way to do that. Mark, as we come to a close, what is one lesson from your new book that I haven’t asked you about that you feel would be most useful right now?

[01:05:31] Mark: Oh, I think most useful right now, two things come to mind. And this is in a very small poem of mine that goes like this, mystery is that whoever shows up when we dare to give has exactly what we need in their trouble. And I think that right now in the world, I feel there’s so much suffering, and I feel for all people on all sides of things.

[01:06:01] And I feel like if humanity is a global body, every soul is a cell in that body. And therefore, anything that we do in terms of inner work or relational work to keep the global body more healthy than toxic is important. And so what does that mean on a daily level? 

[01:06:22] On a daily level, I would encourage everyone to trust their heart. I think it’s the most reliable, strongest muscle we have. And that means, for me, whenever I am confused, troubled, tangled, unsure, I stop and give my full attention to the nearest piece of life before me until it becomes my teacher.

[01:06:53] Dave: I love that. Thank you for a profound and insightful interview. There’s actually a very dense amount of wisdom in your new book. You tell it in a beautiful way with a lot of stories and a lot of parables, and just a way where I feel like when I read it, I’m probably not going to get all of them, but I’ll get the ones that appeal most to me. And I like to write in the same way. There’s more here than you need, but the right stuff should pop out. Is that your intent, just that the people are going to find the nuggets in there?

[01:07:32] Mark: Absolutely. I feel like my job, like you’re saying, is to cast as many seeds as possible because you don’t know which ones will come up where. And I so want my readers to read my book slowly, to read a chapter, live life, read another chapter, live life, so that it’s a conversation back and forth and integrative journey.

[01:07:59] Dave: So you’re recommending I put the audible version on 8x and just listen to it all in 20 minutes and be done. Maybe not. Mark, your book is Falling Down and Getting Up: Discovering Your Inner Resilience and Strength. And thanks again for being on the show.

[01:08:21] Mark: Oh, thank you so much for letting me be a part of your good work.

[00:00:16] Dave: You’re listening to The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today is an interview that I’ve wanted to do since before I had a show. And this is about the potential cyberpunk future. You guys know I’m a computer hacker. I’m wearing my street cred shirt here. This is a cyberpunk shirt that, Tom Bill, you gave me. 

[00:00:40] Kevin Warwick is a storied figure from my time in computer science and as a computer hacker. And he is probably the world’s first cyborg. They call him Captain Cyborg. Now, the reason they call him that is because he was the first guy to have a chip implanted in his arm the length of a coin so he could open doors and activate lights.

[00:01:04] And we’re going to go into the benefits of this and the risks. So this isn’t one of those, let’s all become cyborg episodes. But if you’re looking at what happens with AI, robotics, biomedical engineering, there’s so much opportunity and risk. And this is a guy who’s famous for it and has been living it for 25 years.

[00:01:30] Emeritus professor at Coventry and Reading Universities. It’s an honor to meet you. I think you were featured in Wired magazine years ago, right? There’s an article on you.

[00:01:41] Kevin: On the cover. Yeah. February 2000. If you look, I looked a bit younger then, which I was, but I have to say, in the academic world, it’s not normal to be on the cover of Wired Magazine. So it’s pretty cool when it happens. You get all academic plaudits, but the Wired Magazine cover tops those, I think.

[00:02:04] Dave: Did you get shamed by other professors for selling out to mass marketing instead of just keeping your academic papers where only seven other researchers read them?

[00:02:13] Kevin: I think you’re quite right as you’re pointing out. I don’t know shame, but it annoys a few academics. So there’s probably one or two academic plaudits that I didn’t get because of the Wired Magazine and things like that.

[00:02:30] Dave: If you’re listening and you’re not familiar with academia, it’s almost like talking to the public about your work makes your work less valuable, which is bizarre, because if you discover something new, that’s meaningful for humanity, I believe you have a moral obligation to stand at the top of the mountain and shout it out because it matters. 

[00:02:53] But in traditional, especially European academia, it’s like, no, you have to be very humble and only whisper it in Latin code. And somehow it’s going to get out there. I think it doesn’t help evolve humanity, but I’m also not an academic.

[00:03:07] Kevin: Yeah. But I really thought it was important to get out there and say what I was doing, and why, and try and give some explanation and open people’s minds because, I think, at the time, first of all, it was technically innovative. And secondly, it was scratching the edges of science fiction as well, which was good fun.

[00:03:29] But so when you’re doing it for real, I think that surprised quite a few people. But it was getting that interaction, I think, with the outside world that I felt was very important. You’re quite right. 

[00:03:42] Particularly in Europe, you’re not supposed to enjoy doing science. You’re not supposed to have some fun, which I always to have some fun doing it. You’re not supposed to get to the outside world and start telling people and appear on television and things like that. I think I did annoy a few academics in how I did things.

[00:04:02] Dave: It’s all right by me anyway. In fact, I think it’s great. And we’ve seen others who’ve been on the show, like David Sinclair in the longevity field, where I’m really active. He went out there and said, we can reverse aging in cells. And some people have gotten mad, and other people said, great. But look, if you can do something magical, then we need to talk about it. And in your case, you did implant something in your arm, and you’re the first person to do that, and that is meaningful.

[00:04:29] Kevin: Yeah, and I think it’s not a normal thing in the academic world. You’re supposed to take a 100 people and do the same experiment on a 100, or 1,000, or whatever it happens to be, and then report statistically on what results you get over the– this was quite a dangerous thing at the time.

[00:04:47] Now, some of it, you can look back and say, perhaps it wasn’t that dangerous, but, at the time, it was dangerous because of the technology we used. When you are the first person to do something, you really are taking a step off the mountaintop. You don’t really know what’s going to be there. You hope you know what’s going to happen. You think you know what’s going to happen. And some things go well. Some things, not so well, but you hope you’re going to be okay at the end of it.

[00:05:18] Dave: You’re a little bit older and wiser now than you were in 1998 when you first had that implant. I was working in the data center business at the time, teaching Internet architecture in Silicon Valley. And I saw that, and I was like, this is really incredible. I was a little bit naive.

[00:05:36] We built the Internet as we know it today. This was a company that had the data center that held Google when it was two guys and two computers, and the Facebook when it was eight computers. Very, very central to the growth of Web 1. 

[00:05:49] And information wants to be free, and Bruce Sterling, and cyberpunk, and the idea that we’re going to democratize information. Over the last 23 years or 25 years since then, I’ve watched corporate interests and governments use it to create a mass surveillance and censorship platform that’s mostly automated.

[00:06:10] This is not the system that I built, and I naively thought that other engineers like me, no one would ever do what the bureaucrats wanted us to do. And I failed to understand that there are some evil people out there. Oh, you want to write a system that automatically shocks people who think the wrong thing? Sure. I’ll write that code for $6. There are people like that out there. Do you still have that implant from 1998?  

[00:06:32] Kevin: No, that implant ended up in the Science Museum in London, to be exact. But I think that’s one thing as a scientist, particularly in the academic world, you live with. And some people say, oh, Albert Einstein, if he knew what his results were going to be used for, he said he wouldn’t have done the work that he did, which is a load of rubbish, really. Of course, he did what he wanted to do. And you know as a scientist, it could be used for good. It could be used for bad.

[00:07:05] And I think all of the implants that I’ve had and been involved with, there are two aspects, and that is good or bad. Maybe medically they can help people in certain instances. I’ve done work with Parkinson’s disease stimulators, which have an obvious way of helping people to overcome some of the problems with the disease.

[00:07:27] But at the same time, you can use exactly the same technology for very negative effects. So I think you just have to live with it and take part in any discussions that are on the ethical side of what you’re doing, whether it’s positive, whether it’s negative. I’m always open to take part in discussions like that.

[00:07:48] There’s not a lot more I can do, I think. I’m a research scientist, and research is taking those steps into, not the unknown, but the little known and trying to push forward the technology and the science that we understand, and hence could be good, could be bad.

[00:08:08] Dave: This’ll be particularly outrageous for people on both sides of the pond here, but I look at research the same way I look at guns. It depends on what you do with it.

[00:08:22] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:08:22] Dave: They’re both useful, and they both could be used for harm. And so this comes down to this weird thing called ethics, and healthy nervous systems, and control systems, particularly on government, that hold people accountable if they do evil things with or without the technology. 

[00:08:40] And I think we have a shortage of accountability in government around the world, where, hey, you’re organizing documents, so you can’t do that. And they’re like, yeah, but you can’t prove I did it, and you can’t catch me, and you can’t enforce it, so therefore it doesn’t count.

[00:08:52] I’m like, you’re a bad person. But we don’t have things to do with bad people. But if they all had implants, and I had control of the implants, I could fix it. So by virtue of that, I should have control of their implants. Does that make sense?

[00:09:05] Kevin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think the same issues are raised by just about any technological– you take something like the telephone. I’m sure there’s a lot of people still at the time, particularly, this is a very bad thing. All my privacy is going, etc. Other people would say, this is a really good thing.

[00:09:31] I can communicate in a much better way. Certainly, it had an enormous commercial potential, and the number of people that have had jobs– I’ve had jobs in the past in the telecoms industry. That’s how I started after leaving school. So there’s enormous commercial. It changes society completely. So is it good? Is it bad? It’s a bit of both, and it depends what you want to do with it, which you were saying.

[00:09:59] Dave: What happened when you connected your nervous system to the Internet? Explain how that worked.

[00:10:04] Kevin: Yeah. I’m not sure whether you can see that. There’s still some scars on there. That’s where it happened. We used what’s called the BrainGate or part of the BrainGate, which has been used in various paralyzed individuals since that time. It consisted of 100 pins with electrodes on the end of them.

[00:10:31] And what the surgeons did was open up my arm, found the bunch of nerve fibers going down my arm, cut away the myelin sheath that covers the nerve fibers, and then fired these 100 pins into my nerve fibers. And it was like that for just over three months for the experiment. I had wires running further up my arm.

[00:10:58] They came out of my body. There’s all reasons why we didn’t implant everything. So it was like bringing my nervous system out of my body effectively. And we connected myself up to the computer, so I had hard wire or wireless, whichever we preferred to do it, connection between my nervous system and the computer.

[00:11:21] And then so we could do a whole bunch of experiments, both monitoring what was going on on my nervous system with hand movements, and secondly, firing signals into the nervous system. And that latter thing was interesting because there wasn’t an awful lot of work. There’d been work really done on more chicken sciatic nerves, which are not that much like human nerve fibers. And so you’re instantly faced with, what signals should we put into the nervous system? What should the voltage be? What should the current be?

[00:12:00] Dave: Level 1 and level 2 OSI model issues. We don’t know the signaling mechanism or even voltage that indicates what’s going on. 

[00:12:07] Kevin: You’ve got it.

[00:12:08] Dave: From a network engineering perspective, it’s weird because it’s not digital. So you solve those problems, right?

[00:12:15] Kevin: As best we could. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Literally having to test things out and seeing, how much voltage and current is okay to push into my nervous system before we cause any trouble and things like that? I didn’t tell my wife what I was doing in the day, that we’d turn the voltage up a little bit. So it was more the power. So in the end, microamps were putting in current, but I think it was 50 volts in the end that was being applied to my nervous system.

[00:12:48] Dave: Since that time, things have progressed a little bit. Some of the things that we do at my neuroscience facility, you can get a signal into the brain just by putting electrodes on the skull, tDCS, or TDaCS through the ears. Even with one piece of equipment we don’t use that induces a current using magnetics, you can do very, very carefully targeted parts of the brain. They’re doing this for depression with high amounts of electricity. But small amounts, people have profound mystical experiences without any drugs.

[00:13:23] And we’re nowhere near figuring all of it out, but it’s better than 20, 25 years ago. And we were doing it at the target of those nerves. You were doing at the ends of the nerves, but doesn’t that hurt like hell, peeling your myelin sheath? Myelin sheath degradation is part of Parkinson’s and ALS. It’s nasty stuff. Were you in a lot of pain when you did this?

[00:13:49] Kevin: No. To be honest, no. I had local anaesthetic. It was a two-hour operation, partly because the surgeons didn’t really know what they were doing until they came to do it. It’s one of those things. And once the local anaesthetic had worn off, I never really felt pain.

[00:14:09] When the power was being injected into my nervous system– it depends what you call it– from a scientific point of view, I never regarded it as pain. It was providing my brain with signals, and really, I could recognize the number of pulses and the frequency. Essentially, the whole thing of signaling to me involved pulses, and it depended how many of them came in the space of time. 

[00:14:38] So one example, I was looking at extending the range of senses. And so I connected up ultrasonic sensors, like a bat sense. So I was receiving pulses of current that increased in frequency the closer the object came. So if something’s further away, bing, bing, bing. And if something comes closer, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.

[00:15:06] And that was pulses that my brain was able to pick up. I wouldn’t have described them as painful. I understood what was happening and could link very quickly. Your brain can link, oh, there’s something coming closer, or something’s further away. Or if you’re moving around, you’re getting close to an object. It was great fun. Great fun.

[00:15:27] Dave: What was that like? Did you get used to having bat powers?

[00:15:32] Kevin: Oh, so much so. We were trying to do it in a standard environment because we had to produce papers on what we were doing. So let’s try it here. Let’s try it there. But one of the researchers, Ian, suddenly brought a board towards me very quickly when I wasn’t expecting it or anything like that.

[00:15:55] It was scary. I thought something was coming for me, and I didn’t know what it was. And it was very much a reactive, moving it, which amazed me that your brain links these signals to what’s going on outside and then responds so quickly. So that was– 

[00:16:15] Dave: That bypassed your prefrontal cortex, which is where you thought you were processing, went straight to your amygdala because it was an emergency situation, which means it really did get built into your brain.

[00:16:26] Kevin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Part of the experiment, when I went home at night, I was unplugged as it were, so I just chilled out normally. But every day, we were doing laboratory experiments. So I got used to it very much.

[00:16:46] Dave: When you took it off or turned it off, did you miss it? Did you feel like you were less than?

[00:16:52] Kevin: The answer is yes, but in two ways really. One, because I’m very much involved with the experiments and we’re trying to get as many experiments done as we could while I was all wired up. But I was very much a lab rat, as it were, a guinea pig, whatever way you want to describe it.

[00:17:11] And to be honest, I think for the whole team, because we’d been working flat out for three months, we were absolutely exhausted. So one of the first responses was just, oof, let’s chill a little bit. Let’s just relax, have a break. Rather than, oh, I can’t live without my ultrasonic sense. 

[00:17:32] It’s nice to know that we can have other senses. Didn’t try infrared, but I’m pretty sure infrared would have worked just as well. But it does open up, how far can we take it? What senses might people like? Would an x-ray sense actually do if we could get that to operate in a safe way? Would that work, etc.? So that’s where it becomes pseudo-science fiction, but you’re doing it. It’s science.

[00:18:04] Dave: Were you a fan of William Gibson’s work?

[00:18:08] Kevin: I think I read or watch the films if that’s easier. I still do. Still do. Even time traveling, although I don’t believe that so much. 

[00:18:24] Dave: Yeah.

[00:18:26] Kevin: Yeah, no, clearly, William Gibson was an inspiration. Yeah.

[00:18:31] Dave: Me too. And Bruce Sterling is, I think, my favorite. I’ve been trying to get him on the show since the start of the show, but he’s hard to pin down. If you’re listening to this, you’ve never heard of Bruce Sterling, I think he’s actually the best writer from the second half of the 19th century, just as a writer for any genre, including historical fiction, his writing about the Enlightenment, as well as the creation of the cyberpunk genre, which is strangely predictive of this conversation, even. 

[00:18:58] He has, in some of his series, humanity in the future splitting in two directions. And one group is called the shapers, and these are the people who are changing biology to allow humans to do things that we can’t do today. And then the other group, he calls them makers. And these are people who are adding cybernetic components. And there’s a core philosophical shift that becomes almost two versions of the species. And that’s affected my thinking on the world.

[00:19:29] We should fully max out our existing hardware and use it elegantly into its full capabilities before we start upgrading our hardware. Write better code so you don’t need a new laptop, but get a new laptop when the code is fully maximized. Do you think that there’s room for expanding our existing hardware before we add in, or should we just go straight to adding parts?

[00:19:55] Kevin: I think it’s both. Why not expand the hardware, software, etc.? And that makes it better when you are all linked up. Hopefully, it can work better, and the better the connection. I think, in a sense, it’s perhaps not the hardware that’s the issue. It’s more the connections and understanding the connections.

[00:20:17] You were describing more external signaling. And if we can do it without being invasive, great. But can we get the resolution that we can get with invasive? So for me, it’s not so much maxing out the hardware, but if we can do that, fine. That’s not going to be any problem. It can help whatever. The exciting thing is more the interface. That’s where the problem is, all the interesting bits are for me anyway.

[00:20:48] Dave: The interface is indeed the problem. And I did an experiment right when I was starting the show. I hand soldered this device that sat around my ankle, and it had little cell phone vibrators– there’s eight of them around it– and a digital compass. So it always vibrate North.

[00:21:08] I have zero sense of direction. Some people have one. I do not. And so I’m a visual reckoner. Some people can just unnaturally know which way North is. I do not know how they do it. So I’m going to teach my nervous system that. And yes, I suck at soldering. So after six weeks, it broke, and I never fixed it.

[00:21:24] But for that six-week period, I knew North. And after a while, I stopped feeling the vibration. I just knew North. My body was like, oh, that’s a reliable signal. And it just stopped. And I get in an elevator where the compass didn’t work, and it would go in a little circle. And I was like, whoa, I don’t know which way it is.

[00:21:38] I lost my geomagnetic sense. That was really based on a satellite. And I still think that if I’d have worn that for a year, I probably would have had a sense of direction because my brain would have automatically and unconsciously correlated the new signal with whatever signal we’re using biologically, probably something in our pineal glands, a little magnetic crystal thing.

[00:21:58] Kevin: Yeah. If you found it useful, probably. If it didn’t really make any use of it, it might still have learned it to some extent. But if it found it useful, then it could really have tuned into it. Yeah.

[00:22:11] Dave: So there’s all kinds of ways of getting a signal in, and having done six months of my life with electrodes on my head, doing neurofeedback to have better optimization and control of my own brain, I’ve been fantasizing for years about a tongue printer for feedback. Because the tongue is nerve rich.

[00:22:28] And for blind people, you can have a tongue printer. You can feel individual pricks on your tongue. So you can put something on your tongue and probably control your brain better than you do through your ears.

[00:22:36] Kevin: Yes, no, I had a research student who is actually an undergraduate student that did that experiment and connected up a little array. I can remember him. Ashley, his name was. 

[00:22:50] Dave: Really?

[00:22:51] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:22:52] Dave: That’s awesome. I would try that.

[00:22:56] Kevin: But he connected a little array, put it on the tongue. And it’s very fast. Very, very fast response through the tongue. And you can send little objects, and letters, and all sorts of things that the brain very quickly learns to understand. So quite amazing. But when he first did it, he wasn’t sure again what electric current to apply so that his tongue was okay. 

[00:23:21] And I think the original argument was whether it should be milliamps or microamps. And I suggested using microamps first of all, and seeing how it went. And he came back in next morning to tell me how it was doing. And his words essentially was something like, aah.

[00:23:39] Dave: The downside of the tongue. 

[00:23:43] Kevin: True story. Yes. Watch when you’re experimenting how far you go to start with. Switch on the lower current and work up.

[00:23:51] Dave: The same thing comes with optostimulation. I used the very first infrared brain stimulator, which was handmade by a guy who sold a 100 of them on Yahoo groups in the ’90s. I put it over the language processing part of the brain, and I left it there for a little too long.

[00:24:08] And for the next, about, four hours, I spoke in garbled tongues. At the time, I made my living giving keynote presentations about computer security. I’m like, I just seriously effed my brain beyond belief. And it came back probably stronger than it was before, but it’s not like problems don’t happen, right?

[00:24:27] Kevin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But you just have to live with them. Yeah.

[00:24:31] Dave: Let’s talk about some of the other problems Since I’ve written big books on mitochondrial function, New York Times science books and stuff like that, I recognize that life is simultaneously, at least within the body, we’re communicating with chemicals, which is the predominant view.

[00:24:50] We’re also communicating with electricity, which we’re figuring out, and with magnetics, which is provable, and now finally with biophotons, which is also measurable, quantifiable. Is not science fiction at all. There’s one photon every 40 seconds from your DNA. So there’s multiple signaling networks within the body.

[00:25:09] And with the longevity venture fund that I’m working with, we’re actually looking at investing in a company that’s using single photons to place signals. We’re hacking the communications network between cells, or cell components, and it’s cool. But what I’m interested in is something called voltage-gated calcium channels. Are you familiar with those?

[00:25:30] Kevin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:25:32] Dave: So I’ve noticed in my own experiments on myself and certainly from reading lots of literature, mostly out of Europe, it seems like certain EMF are not good for cell membranes, particularly because of that voltage. They induce voltage on the cells, more calcium comes into the cell, which causes cell swelling and mitochondrial dysfunction. And it might be the dark side of tech. I think this is like a Neuromancer, to go back to cyberpunk, where there’s the black shakes that everyone gets. Is that Johnny Mnemonic? That was Johnny Mnemonic. Anyway, they get the shakes–

[00:26:11] Kevin: They merge after a while.

[00:26:13] Dave: Right. Are you worried about EMFs with implants?

[00:26:18] Kevin: I always thought of the body more from the electrical point of view. That’s just my background. So it’s a bit of an issue with doctors and medicine, which as you’ve said, is chemical. You have a headache. You take chemicals anyway. Why can’t we do it in terms of the electrical side of things, just apply and do exactly the same thing, but from the electric– all right. 

[00:26:46] I will compromise and agree with maybe electrochemical and electromechanical chemical. We can stretch it because science really has been historically put into little pigeonholes.  I know when I first did at school with valences and things like that, how many electrons are on this? And realizing, doing it in chemistry, it was one thing. And then you do it in physics, and it’s the same thing, but it’s looked at in a completely different way.

[00:27:19] And how you’re looking at the same thing, particularly with the human body, it is a whole mixture, electrochemical, mechanical. It’s all the different things together. And learning what chemical effects an electrical signal has, it’s only through experimentation that you can do that.

[00:27:40] And you’ve got to be a bit wary of it if you’re applying it too much, or too little, or whatever, but if it’s not going to work, if you don’t apply enough, then you have to turn up the volume as it were.

[00:27:50] Dave: If you knew that you had an increased risk of Alzheimer’s or cancer from the work you were doing, would you have done it anyway?

[00:28:02] Kevin: Oh yeah, no question.

[00:28:03] Dave: I don’t expect that. 

[00:28:07] Kevin:  There was a team of four neurosurgeons involved with the experiment, and the main one, Peter Teddy, took me to one side about three days before we actually went ahead with the implant and said, look, this could go wrong. If it doesn’t work very well, you could lose the use of your hand, and you don’t have to go ahead with it.

[00:28:35] And he wanted to be sure that I understood what risks were involved. As it turned out, it probably could have been worse because we were sending signals into my nervous system. Maybe it did affect my brain in a way that makes some problems more likely, and so on. We don’t know that.

[00:28:52] But as a scientist, I wanted to find out. Yes, it could cause something, and I would accept it. I would man up and say, okay, yes, I brought that onto myself doing the experiment. And you can’t be sure. It’s like the Jekyll and Hyde, is a very good science fiction thing. 

[00:29:13] Would Dr. Jekyll have drunk the potion before he became Mr. Hyde if he’d have known what was going to happen? Of course he would. That was the whole point. He wasn’t too sure. He thought one thing might happen. That was part of the experiment. And it’s nice when you’re faced with a Jekyll and Hyde moment yourself. Yeah, of course, you’d go for it. That’s what you’re there for despite the dangers. Yeah.

[00:29:40] Dave: What do you say when someone looks at you and says, but it might not be safe? 

[00:29:47] Kevin: Really, boy, you do get it in the university when you’re about to do something like that, the insurance guys. What’s the university going to be liable for? You’ve got to sign these documents to say you’re not going to suddenly come at them. Almost surely, it’s not going to be safe. I think you take it that it’s not going to be safe anyway.

[00:30:06] You’ve got a decision. Am I going to stay within the bounds of what we already know with the safety involved, or am I going to push the boundaries a little bit? That’s the scientist I am and was. It’s somebody who tries to push the boundaries a little bit.

[00:30:26] Dave: I love that answer. Learning new things isn’t safe.

[00:30:31] Kevin: No, it’s not. It’s not. You try and make it as safe as you can. You try and learn exactly as best you can. But with the nervous system and the brain, there is so much that we do not know. We’ve got a basic understanding of some of it. 

[00:30:48] But even nerve fibers, there’s so much more we need to learn, exactly the things that you were talking about. How much voltage can we apply? How much current can we apply that is safe, and so on and so forth? And you take other parts of the body, and we’re still in a mist of lack of knowledge.

[00:31:15] Dave: I’ve gotten to the point where if someone says, what if it’s not safe? What if it’s stagnant? That’s the opposite. So my new brand of coffee is called Danger Coffee, because who knows what you might do? You have to take a risk. You just take a calculated risk that is safe enough because it’s worth it.

[00:31:36] Kevin: I think that’s it. It’s a calculated risk. Yeah, yeah. But you don’t know. It’s calculated. In a sense, it’s a bit like that. Because you don’t have actual numbers that you can say, this is 20% safe, or 40%, or it’s 50-50 chance of working. You don’t really have that. You think you should be all right from your knowledge, the scientific knowledge, and other people’s experiments, as much as possible. 

[00:32:02] And that’s one thing with the BrainGate experiment that I’m a little bit disappointed to. Although the same implant has been used to help people who are paralyzed and so on, there’s not been a more enhancement set of experiments with the same implant, which, from a scientific point of view, that’s where you get your citations from, and so on. So I’m still waiting. So maybe yourself, or maybe one of the listeners today, if they fancy going for it, get on with it.

[00:32:40] Dave: The idea of human enhancement is something I’ve always believed in. I’ve been taking cognitive enhancers for 25 years. I’ve formulated some. The other thing is I do run electricity over my nervous system, and I’ve done that since, geez, over my brain starting in 1998, actually. I’m using Russian tech that was developed for their space program so you needed less sleep.

[00:33:05] The results are interesting. My nervous system is better myelinated than most humans, which means I have thicker insulation on my nervous system, which means electricity conducts more quickly with less resistance over my nervous system. Are you familiar with P300D, the EEG measure?

[00:33:25] Kevin: Not initially, no.

[00:33:27] Dave: This is a lag time on reality. So for normal humans over 30 or so, there’s about 350 milliseconds of lag time. So if you clap your hands, you think you hear it, but you don’t. Your nervous system gets it. But the first EEG signaling that your brain hearing centers got a signal, that there’s a third of a second that your body decides whether it’s worth showing it to you or not. Decides whether you should be startled. And then it hands you the sound, and it gets slower as you age. I’m still at 240 milliseconds, which is what the average 18-to 20-year-old has. So my response time–

[00:34:05] Kevin: This is you bragging about it at the moment.

[00:34:08] Dave: I am a longevity guy. It’s one of the many measures where my biology is healthier than it was when I was a 300-pound computer hacker. But what I’m saying is that external electrical stimulation can be an enhancement. And what you’re proposing is that internal stimulation with BrainGate could also be an enhancement. So I’m just drawing parallels between those two. And it’s still bragging.

[00:34:31] Kevin: For me, the big one, looking at enhancement, is communication, which, when you consider how we as humans communicate at the moment, it’s really pathetic in terms of what could be possible. At the moment, I have lots of thoughts, and you have lots of thoughts.

[00:34:50] Images, ideas, colors, feelings, all that sort of thing, emotions. And when we’re communicating, we convert them to mechanical signals, pressure waves, or movement, or whatever it happens to be, which is very slow and error prone. And then it gets converted back again for communication over wireless networks, or wires, or whatever.

[00:35:16] So the possibility of connections linking your brain up to the network directly, or your nervous system, if that works, to communicate was always one of my desires to investigate, and beliefs that, yes, we’re going to be able to do that in the future. So future communications will be by thoughts, or brain-to-brain communication.

[00:35:44] It was one thing my wife had for the experiment– two electrodes pushed into her nervous system. And we did send signals, simple signals, like open, close hand, and a Morse code type thing between nervous systems. And that worked fine. And it was great. Interestingly, I felt t quite intimate.

[00:36:08] Probably more than I had imagined when we actually did the experiment. We could feel something between the two of us. Hey, it’s really quite special. But I do believe that in terms of enhancement, for me, the big one, the goal to aim for that would change how we are, to simply regard us as humans, if we could do that, would be very difficult. We’d have something a lot more. Would be communicating directly between brains.

[00:36:39] Dave: There are ways to do that that certain groups have done since the ’80s without having to tap directly in. I’m an external signals guy, but there are ways to get a signal off of a brain and then show it to another brain via existing senses, to the extent that I actually don’t do that with almost anyone at my neuroscience clinic because when you do that, it’s hard to have a firewall.

[00:37:09] Kevin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:37:10] Dave: You pick up the other person’s trauma. You pick up their preconceived notions. You pick up their judgments. So if you could do it with an enlightened guru, that would be good for you, but bad for the guru because he’d probably pick up your crap and then have to go meditate for a while or whatever the guru did to become a guru.

[00:37:30] So it’s like unprotected sex. You want a brain condom if you’re going to do brain computer interface with another human. And right now, we don’t have to do it. And if we did know how to do it, as a computer security professional, most of our security systems aren’t that good. I don’t know that I want to bring computer interface because, seriously, Mark Zuckerberg is going to be putting spam in there, or at least listening to what I do, if not the NSA, right?

[00:37:56] Kevin: Back to the negative side, or using the technology for something you didn’t want. I’m thinking in terms of what I was describing. From an academic point of view, let’s do the research. Let’s make this happen because I think it would be fantastic. But, yes, it opens up all of the negatives you could potentially imagine. Yeah.

[00:38:17] Dave: In fact, I think it’s a Bruce Sterling story, one of the characters– which one was this? One of his epic ones. Probably Neuromancer. One of the characters notes that people are going crazy because they got malware in their eye implants, and they’re just seeing ads 24/7, and they would commit suicide.

[00:38:37] Kevin: Oh, yeah. 

[00:38:37] Dave: Because they just couldn’t get away from spam. And I’m like, oh. Yeah, spammers would do that. The same guys have been clogging our inboxes for both your and my entire lives of having inboxes. So I’m hopeful that as we look at this, we look at the risks in a way that I didn’t when I was younger, even when we were creating cloud computing before it had the name. What are we going to do with this?

[00:39:02] And I think all of the tech has ultimately helped the world, but it’s also created a chance, in fact, a probability of a dystopian future, unless we address leadership and transparency issues in society. 

[00:39:15] Have you looked at longevity, using any of your tech to make yourself live longer, have a really sharp brain when you’re 120? Do you play around with those ideas?

[00:39:24] Kevin: In a sense, no. One of the bunch of experiments we did had that in mind, and that was taking brain cells, which we did from a rat, which was easier, and then putting them in a little dish and letting them grow, culturing them, feeding them, keeping them in an incubator.

[00:39:45] The reason I’m saying this– sorry, I jumped ahead a bit– for me, the key for longevity is the brain. I think we can look at all the other components and say, okay, we can come up with an artificial heart if there’s problems, and we can replace this. But the brain is the critical one.

[00:40:06] And if that changes, is it really you that is living longer, or do you become some other creature over time? Can you stay as you, as it were, keep your brain going? So it was looking at what happens when brain cells die off? Can we add brain cells? 

[00:40:27] Which we were doing in a little dish, just to see if this little robot, which had rat brain– and rat brain cells don’t live as long as human brain cells, so could we replace some? Let’s kill them off in this region here. Let’s apply some new ones, but then the rat has lost the knowledge of what it was doing, of avoiding this thing coming towards it, or whatever, which was interesting. So it was to do with what you’re describing, but I’m jumping ahead there and saying the key issue for longevity, for me, is how the brain survives and what mode it survives in. Is it still you?

[00:41:04] Dave: Certainly, if you lose your brain, you’ve lost the game. And the more I’ve studied, the more I realized that 80% of the nerves from the heart go into the brain, and the heart is a sensing organ, much like the eyes. And so you look at cases like Donald Rumsfeld, one of the most celebrated war criminals of the recent while.

[00:41:24] He doesn’t have a heartbeat. He has a mechanical heart that is a continuous flow heart. And I just wonder if that’s connected to some of the crazy ass stuff that he’s done. I don’t know, but what I do know is that the heart-body-mind-gut connection in the brain, there’s a lot going on. We know that proton spin in the brain changes direction every time the heart beats.

[00:41:52] So there’s a quantum entanglement that’s in another signaling mechanism that’s faster than light even, that’s also going on. So it feels like we haven’t cracked the code enough to know that it’s the brain, but it’s a good assumption. And we know that if the brain goes, the rest of it isn’t worth it. But we don’t know that if you only have the brain, it’s going to be enough. I would want to academically pursue that and figure it out. I just don’t want to keep my brain in a jar trying to talk because that might suck.

[00:42:18] Kevin: Yeah. I had, few years ago, a catheter ablation. I had atrial fibrillation going all over the place at different times. And the catheter ablation, which was part of pathway to what you’re talking about. The treatment was going into the heart and zapping electrical pathways in the heart.

[00:42:43] So to stop it fibrillating, I found it absolutely– didn’t really know about it until I had it, which for me, it worked just fine. But the way the heart is operating, electrically rather than mechanically, or chemically, or anything else, was absolutely fascinating for me to find out first hand. First heart, I guess.

[00:43:07] Dave: Yeah, the timing systems– there’s so much interesting cross systems talk in the body that I think with AI, it won’t be that hard to untangle a lot of. 

[00:43:16] Back in 2018, biohacking was added to the Merriam Webster’s dictionary as a new word in the English language. And people call me the father of biohacking because I started the movement and all years before that. And you, in the same year, in a TEDx talk, said that biohacking was an entry level point into cyborgs. Talk to me about what you meant, what you think about that.

[00:43:39] Kevin: I think it’s more of a philosophical thing than a technological. Maybe a bit of both. You can have different concepts of cyborgs. I’m not one who believes that you have somebody who has part technology and part human and it’s got to be a cyborg. Otherwise, just wearing glasses or riding a bike, you’re a cyborg. 

[00:44:02] So I’m looking at a cyborg as maybe a more science fiction type of cyborg that has abilities that humans don’t have that does involve a more semi-permanent or permanent connection between the technology which is integrated into the human, or the human which is integrated into technology.

[00:44:24] So it’s something like that. So that’s how I would see biohacking as being an entry level cyborg. You’re starting to get into it, and you can do some things, and if you have an implant or you have something connected into your body, as you were describing with learning where North is, and so on, and so forth, then that’s how you’re getting in that direction, but in a basic way. But ultimately, it is more the science fiction, the Arnold Schwarzenegger-type version, or whatever it happens to be, or the Neuromancer, and so on.

[00:44:59] Dave: Yeah, the six-million-dollar man. I think it was the first TV show I know that–

[00:45:02] Kevin: Yeah, yeah.

[00:45:03] Dave: Had that of stuff. There’s some interesting questions that come up around what happens with cyborgs because in the biohacking movement– so I started it in 2011, was the first blog post with the definition, and the first conference was in 2013, 2014 maybe. Yeah, 2013.

[00:45:24] So all of that, it’s progressing, and then a group called Grinders came out. And these are mostly people who do tattoos and body piercings, and they started making their own implants. And I thought about getting a magnet on one of my fingers because you can actually sense electrical fields. That’d be really cool.

[00:45:42]  I did start a medical testing company in 2008 that looked at immune rejection of implant materials. And I recognize my body is magnetic, and it just like, I don’t know the unforeseen consequences of having a magnetic finger. I think I’m going to wait on that one. What’s your take on the Grinder movement? Are you part of it, and is that where you see biohacking going?

[00:46:04] Kevin: I don’t really see myself as part of anything like that, but I’m interested in it. There’s a group in Pittsburgh– if any of are you listening in, hi, how are you doing? Some of the things I think they do are highly dangerous, and I think you must be crazy putting that into your body to find out. But that’s their forte.

[00:46:27] But other things, I think, is very interesting. And even getting things to light up into the skin and so on, it looks pretty cool to me perhaps more from an artistic point of view than a scientific point of view some of it. Good luck to them. Power to their elbow, or whatever they’re highlighting.

[00:46:50] Where we’re failing at the moment is for guys like that to pull that somehow into the academic world, because I’m sure they’re getting some really good results that have scientific interest, but we’re not pulling them in there, and that’s not them physically. It’s the results I’m talking about.

[00:47:12] There should be a journal of biohacking, or something like that, so that people can come at that journal, perhaps from an artistic, perhaps from a medical, perhaps from a scientific [Inaudible] background and get results from experiments like that. And it would have to be a more experimental journal and reporting on things like that, but we don’t have that.

[00:47:35] So, no, I’m interested in what they’re doing. Some of them, I think, I’m Facebook friends with, a number of guys down there in Pittsburgh, and other places. But I wouldn’t classify myself as being one of the Grinders or anything like that.

[00:47:52] Dave: You’re adjacent to them.

[00:47:53] Kevin: I just what I do. If they want to make me an honorary Grinder or whatever, then, fine, go for it. Yeah.

[00:48:00] Dave: It’s your new title. Honorary Grinder and Emeritus professor of–

[00:48:04] Kevin: Yes, Emeritus Grinder, I think.

[00:48:07] Dave: There you go. Same thing. Having had enough surgeries and enough medical issues in my life, I don’t really like the idea of having more implants. And as a computer hacker, if there’s a computer in there, it can and will be hacked. It’s inevitable. And you might not like what happens if you can’t get it out. 

[00:48:33] There are cases you’ve probably heard of, a few people who have electronic eyes that replace their eyes. These are people who were blind. And the company that made the eyes went out of business. And so now they have unsupported hardware in their eyes and no way of getting it out.

[00:48:49] And my call would be for lawmakers in whatever country they’re in, and I don’t believe there is a global law, or that there should be, and anyone who tries to do that is probably not your friend. But in each country, there needs to be something that says, if you have implants that you are selling your source code, all of it must be placed in escrow. And if the company goes out of business, it automatically becomes public source.

[00:49:18] This is why it’s called biohacking, not some other word. Because hackers are willing to create Linux, which is what’s driving our conversation today. So if we don’t like it, then Microsoft won’t tell us what’s under the covers. We’ll just make our own operating system. So if I’m going to have any implant ever, full source code access. Nothing hidden in the cloud, nothing that I can’t change, because then I will know if I’ve been hacked.

[00:49:40] And if it’s under those conditions, there’s no way in hell I’m going to do it. And because of the EMF problems, I think I’m going to wait a little while because the evidence is mounting more and more that having, especially Wi-Fi signals inside mitochondrially drenched tissues probably doesn’t lead to good outcomes.

[00:49:59] I think it’s a hackable problem. We can enhance our biology to be resilient to that. We can turn it off. We can actually change the signal so it’s a beneficial signal. A few companies I’m working with do that. But until those are solved, I don’t want stuff in my head or anywhere else in my body, but I want a laser eyeball because it’d be cool.

[00:50:19] Kevin: Yeah, no, I agree with you with the source code and the technology involved in it. Exactly with what you’re saying. There’s got to be some way of having backups, or replacements, or whatever it happens to be. I’ve been involved with surgeons with the deep brain stimulation, which is a commercial product.

[00:50:37] To an extent, they do have some of that, but the companies that are involved, perhaps financially, seem to be pretty sound at the present time. I say that, and that’ll probably put the death knell on them. But it would be an issue, I think. I think it could be a problem, even in that field, if the worst was to happen and there were company problems.

[00:51:00] So it would be good to have exactly what you’re saying. When you’ve got something implanted, when it’s life-dependent, or who you are dependent no, that you need to have some regulations in place to make sure that this can’t happen, or they can’t just close down whatever and the technology’s gone.

[00:51:22] Dave: This is a thing that’s a constitutional amendment-level protection in my home in Canada, charter of rights situations where, number one, the source code’s available, and number two, no one, under any circumstances, even for your own safety, has the right to force you to have any cybernetic enhancement against your will. 

[00:51:45] And given the last three years where people were forced and coerced into having medical treatments, despite what the Nuremberg Code said, and people have different opinions about that, I don’t care what your opinion is. The bottom line is, it is always wrong to force people to do something medical that they don’t want to do, even if there’s a good argument for it, including their own safety, as we talked about before.

[00:52:08] I can see a very dark future where if we could force people to get one injection, we can also force them to get brain implants. That’s not the world that I am creating. In fact, I won’t allow that world to get created. So I’m hopeful that as we move forward with improving ourselves, as we always have throughout all of history, that we’re mindful of this.

[00:52:28] And with that in mind, you have a great track record of being very early, being an innovator, as do I. Tell me your view 25 years from now of what it’s going to look like with cyborgs and humans. 

[00:52:43] Kevin: I think the big one is the issues with AI. How is AI going to be used per se? So this is not answering the question directly that you’ve said, but how far will AI go, and how will it be relied on and used per se, for itself and given control over this, that, and the other? And particularly with networking, it is being networked more and more with a network. Very often, we can’t really tell if this happens, what are the consequences going to be?

[00:53:15] It’s very difficult to work that out. And in a military scenario, if that is linked in with a financial setup, etc., there could be big dangers, as I think some people in the AI field are recognizing. So we’re getting away from the use of AI in a machine that you can switch off and switch on, and you can decide when it’s going to play and when it’s not going to play.

[00:53:39] This is something that is in control of a scenario, and it could be dangerous. I think then there is a need to move to the cyborg setup. The AI is not working alone, but it’s working as part of you, as a network. Then we’re going into a science fiction scenario. Is it iRobot even, or is it the global network– whatever. Is it the matrix that we’re talking about in the future? And would it occur in 25 years’ time?

[00:54:16] I think history is littered by scientists making miscalculations of how long something is going to take or whether it’s going to be, or whether it’s not going to be. Rather than being a cyborg problem, I’m changing the question to being, it depends how quickly and how far AI is going to be integrated in everyday life. At the moment, it’s going very quickly, but–

[00:54:44] Dave: The reason I started laughing like that is in another life, I was the first person to sell anything over the Internet, and it was a t-shirt that said, caffeine, my drug of choice. And it was over Usenet before the browser was created. And I was an entrepreneur magazine when I weighed 300 pounds, and I’m wearing this double extra large t-shirt. 

[00:55:05] I was just trying to pay my tuition. It was a small business. It wasn’t a big thing. E-commerce wasn’t a word. But they interviewed me, and I said, oh, in five years, there’ll be no more need for junk mail. Let’s be able to get all of our communications on email. And that was, I don’t know, 1993. Was that 30 years ago? And I still get crap in the mail, so clearly, I’m one of those people that history is littered with. That’s why you made me laugh.

[00:55:31] Kevin: I’ve got a better story. In ’97, I went to, the World Economic Forum in Switzerland with my wife. The very first day that we were there, we met up with some guy called Jeff Bezos, who had got this–

[00:55:51] Dave: Back in the day. Right.

[00:55:52] Kevin: Website called Amazon, which I’d never really heard of much before. And formerly, as we were part of the system, had to go to dinner with Jeff and his wife, and we were sitting there talking before we mingled with the other people from different companies and that. And so he asked me, what are you doing? Oh, I’m into robotics, and implants, and so on and so forth.

[00:56:21] He seemed to, I don’t want to say excited about it, but interested anyway. I asked him what he’s doing. We’ve got this website, which at the time, was selling books. That’s really all it did. And he asked me, what do you think? Should we expand it? And so my advice was, no, don’t bother doing that. Exactly what you’re saying. I thought, no, it’s not really going to just stick with the books and make things work for that. You’d be safe on that.

[00:56:50] Dave: Do you still go to the World Economic Forum? Was that like a one-time thing, or is that a regular thing?

[00:56:54] Kevin: For me, it was a one-off. It was interesting, but not a regular thing that I had to do.

[00:57:01] Dave: There’s some interesting schisms there because there were two founders of the World Economic Forum. There was Klaus Schwab, and the other guy a dropped out out of disgust because it was being used in a way that he didn’t like. And they’re big proponents of transhumanism, and I think, given their public statements, they’re the people who would happily put implants in you so that they could feed you bugs.

[00:57:27] I don’t think they’re working for the good guys right now, but maybe when they were founded, they did. You never know if someone goes or doesn’t go what their motivations are because if you’re working to fix a wrong, you might hang out with people doing bad stuff.

[00:57:47] So there are people who get really triggered by that idea, and I’m curious about everything including transhumanism. I do not believe that a dystopian future is what we want. And also believe that if I am in control of my own biology, it’s my right to put any hardware I want in my body. And that I’d be really stupid if I put hardware in my body that someone else controlled because that’s a bad idea. Just imagine if the guys who do TikTok’s algorithm were in charge of what’s in your brain. That’s not good.

[00:58:20] Kevin: Yeah, I agree with you 90%. I’m thinking, again, of medical devices whereif you did end up with Parkinson’s disease and you’re faced with a company saying, we can put something in your brain that allows you to live relatively normal life, and it’s going to apply signals when it thinks that signals should be applied, then how much would you trust them? 

[00:58:48] Would you say, no, I want to stay like I am, which could be pretty awful? Or do I want to go for this? Because you trust them that they know what they’re doing, and they’ve tried and tested, and there’s many people before you that seem to be all right with it, and so on and so forth. 

[00:59:05] Dave: All right. I would totally trust them as long as I can either remove the stuff or I had source code access if I couldn’t remove it. That would be the thing. 

[00:59:16] Kevin: Have it removed, or somebody can remove it– 

[00:59:18] Dave: Yeah, it knows that it could be removed safely, versus those eyes that once they’re in, they’re in. And when I look at AI, and cybernetics, and cyborgs in the future, what I see happening is that there will be large numbers of AI systems vying for your attention, and they will be the best at manipulating you better than the best sociopath.

[00:59:41] In fact, it’s called marketing. We’re pretty good at it already. What we don’t have yet is what I like to call cognitive firewalls. So when we do have augmented reality glasses that you’d want to wear, or even just running on your machine, there’s no reason that every web page you see shouldn’t be rewritten according to my rules for AI to only show me what I want. 

[01:00:02] There’s no reason that every YouTube video shouldn’t be automatically translated into two paragraphs of text instead of watching 10 minutes to see some guy with a weird face that’s probably auto-generated anyway. So it’s up to us to arm ourselves with AI that actually is used to filter reality so that we only get the information we want in a way that’s not manipulative.

[01:00:21] And so if you could have that built in, if you do, it’s called subconscious processing, and it’s very energy efficient because what we’re both seeing and sensing right now is probably 0.1% of all the signals coming into our body gets filtered by your body. I need augmented filtering that’s on board or off board to help me ignore stuff that doesn’t matter and allow me to choose where my attention goes.

[01:00:46] And that’s the attention economy that Wired has written about and everything else. I just want to be the one who trumps what all these bad systems are doing so that I don’t get distracted by nonsense and can stay focused on stuff I care about. Does that sound like it might fit in your future?

[01:01:01] Kevin: I’d go for it. Yeah. I’ll sign up for that. Where do I sign? Yeah.

[01:01:04] Dave: All right. Somebody come start a company with me on that. Not like I don’t have enough companies. But yeah, that’s a blending of computer security, cognitive science, and AI. And it’s the equivalent of my old company, Trend Micro.

[01:01:18] Kevin: Yeah.

[01:01:18] Dave: I need antivirus software for my mind right now, not just for my computer.

[01:01:24] Kevin: See, just as well, we didn’t meet up ourselves at the World Economic Forum. Otherwise, if you asked me what I thought for the future of the company, it would have gone nowhere. Got it completely wrong.

[01:01:36] Dave: I’m sure that’s why Jeff asked lots and lots of different people. And Amazon was a big customer of Exodus Communications where I was a co-founder of their consulting business. And it was an amazing time in the ’90s for the expansion. We’re doing that right now with AI, and we’re right at the beginning. It’s 1993 right now for longevity. 

[01:01:54] Kevin: Yes, yes.

[01:01:55] Dave: And the Internet really hit in ’97, is when it just went crazy. And so right now, the longevity business, the number of small companies I’ve talked with who are going to add five, 10, 15 years to human life, oh my God. The next five years is going to be the biggest ever, and it’s going to make the Internet look small. And once we have 200-year lifespans, I’m going to need that cognitive firewall. Otherwise, I’ll spend the whole time watching TikTok.

[01:02:23] Kevin: Yeah. And this is where it becomes very difficult predicting what’s going to be big, which direction is going to go in, and that’s where Jeff Bezos got it right, I guess, as far as Amazon is– and I got it hopelessly wrong. That’s why I’m not extremely loaded and very successful in business, but no problem. Good luck with it yourself. Hopefully, you get the longevity. You do the Bezos as far as longevity is concerned.

[01:02:51] Dave: I don’t need to be that absurdly wealthy, and if I am, I will be using it for the greater good. That’s for sure. Kevin, it’s been an honor to talk with you. I’ve literally known about your work for 23 years, and we finally got to connect. So thanks for being a pioneer. Thanks for being dangerous.

[01:03:08] Kevin: Fantastic. It’s gone so quickly. I didn’t believe it. 

[01:03:12] Dave: It has. And I truly see you as just a pioneer in being human because you’re saying, it was worth it. I’m going to take the risk, and I’m going to see what happens. And you were willing to accept the risk in order to receive the knowledge. And you did, and you shared it, and it’s academically amazing. 

[01:03:34] And for listeners, there is a dark transhumanist future that’s possible. There’s also the possibility of enhancing your ability to show up in the world in a magical way. And I am well aware of the risks. You be should be too.

[01:03:48] Kevin: Because there’s a link in your brain up to a computer, I think, opens up lots of positives, and some of them, the possibility of thinking in more dimensions. I know I talked about communication before, but the possibility of doing that, just that one thing, you can think in maybe just 10 dimensions, whatever, which a computer of course can do. It can process in all sorts of dimensions.

[01:04:15] This is, again, science fiction, I guess, but it can change how we look at the universe around us. Perhaps it will allow us to travel much better than we can think of traveling at the moment. Because we’ve gone almost nowhere in the universe. Just to the moon, which is like an outside toilet for the Earth. There’s hardly anything there.

[01:04:39] The possibility of doing the Star Trek and travelling out into distant galaxies and so on. It’s got to be easier than actually having to almost pedal into space. So I just hope that we can understand the universe around us in a much more complex way if we link our brains up with technology.

[01:04:59] Dave:  Now you got real metaphysical on us. And there are ways to do that with tech. I referenced one a little bit earlier. You can merge with another person with some of the stuff I’ve done, but those are the same things that mystics do in caves, and the old knowledge from Ayurveda, and Tantra, and yoga, and advanced Zen meditation, which I’ve done.

[01:05:23] Yeah, there’s levels that we don’t normally access. I think it was accessing your operating system and seeing all the stuff that the body throws out before it shows you. I do think brain computer interfaces are a way to do that, whether they’re external or internal. 

[01:05:38] And I’ve had profound dissolving into the universe experiences just using electrodes on my head, putting no signal in. Just turning off useless signals in my brain so I could access things. So there are levels where I think we can go. They tend to look a lot like yogic city powers and things like that, but some people are going there with or without tech. It just seems like the tech makes it easier, and it’s probably better than ayahuasca.

[01:06:02] Kevin: Oh, yeah.

[01:06:05] Dave: Wow. I’m so excited to hear your thoughts on all this. And I love it that you talked about perceiving reality in a different way, through enhancements and augmentation. I think it’s possible. In fact, it’s one of the reasons that I believe we need to know what’s going on on the backend, because imagine if that was possible and some developer turned it off because they didn’t think it was useful. I don’t want that too.

[01:06:29] Kevin: Yeah. Completely, which for sure they’re going to. Yeah.

[01:06:33] Dave: Thanks again, Kevin. It has been a profound pleasure and an honor.

[01:06:37] Kevin: Great to meet up with you.