Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast, live stream number 252, if I am not mistaken. Not prime, but highly palindromic. Wow. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not that impressive at three numbers, but you know, still worth noting. Perfectly so though. Yes. Yeah. Rather exact. I mean, palindrome kind of has to be perfect. It does. Yeah.
Except for the spaces, which somehow don't count. True. A man, a planet canal, Panama. Yeah. Yeah. Spaces are all wrong. Yeah. Spaces are all wrong. You are. Oh, I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein. You are Dr. Heather Hein. We have. not really confessions, I guess to both of us. So we have confessions to offer today about the, um, the, uh,
slight outbreak of unprofessionalness at the beginning of the last podcast. Yes. And in fact, that's likely to be either all or most of what we're going to be talking about today is what we were involved in. And the implications, even though there's obviously so much happening in the world that we could be focusing on, but because this is...
This is something very, very real at the moment. This is where we're going to be spending our time. We're going to do a Q&A immediately after our live stream, about 15 minutes after on Locals. Please join us there. There's a watch party going on there now as well. We did a Q&A this last Sunday.
that's still up we talked about things like uh the election the last election 2020 election lots lots of interesting stuff in that q a so please consider joining us on locals as usual we have three sponsors right up top at the top Well, no, it's not going to go that way today. You'll see. I will. You'll see. I'll see. Right at the top of the podcast. And that's it. We choose our sponsors carefully. All of them have products or services that we truly vouch for. So without further ado.
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Learn more at join crowd health dot com. That's join crowd health dot com and use code dark horse at checkout. All right. You've coined two things in there. Grout health, which I'm not sure is an important concept. but it's a missing concept. We need that. And then you also... The health between the spaces. Yes, or even just something to keep your grout clean, which, you know, we could all use that, right? But the other thing is you coined the idea of...
Ground up health insurance, which anybody who's dealt with health insurance, I think would like to see it ground up. Am I right? Maybe add it into an aioli. Even just a little cheese. Cheese is good. Yeah, definitely. And if you won't eat it, it's probably good for pets.
well i'm sure they could put into something people lead anything apparently oh god yeah we will get there maybe not this episode but we will get there we talked about seed oils an episode or two ago and it's you know this is one of the big conversations that's happening online and um And boy, if CRLs aren't proof that people
Americans in particular will eat just about anything. I don't know what is. Yeah. Industrial lubricants for the win. Okay. Our second sponsor this week is Brain FM. Attention is one of our most precious attributes. even the language that we use around it reveals some of the depth of relationship that we have with it we can get someone's attention give someone our attention standard attention pay attention there's so many ways to be engaged
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Unlock your brain's full potential free for 30 days by going to brain FM slash dark horse. That's brain dot FM slash dark horse for 30 days free. Friend and listener of the podcast. I think that should be reversed. listener and friend of the podcast it's uh you know seems like the way to go she's our friend though that's what i'm saying i don't know if she's a friend of the podcast okay but still still first and foremost friend then listener
Nevermind. Let the record reflect that I am shooting for at least a B minus level ad read here. I will consider anything B minus or above a stunning success. Yes. Our final sponsor this week is Timeline. Timeline makes MitoPure, which contains a powerful postbiotic that is hard to get from your diet. No, hard to get from your diet alone.
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can help you stay strong and healthy into old age. Timeline is offering 10% off your first order of Mitapur. Go to timeline.com slash darkhorse and use code darkhorse to get 10% off your order. That's timeline, T-I-M-E-L-I-N-E dot com slash. Dark Horse. You totally did it. I would say that was a B minus add read, but if grading on a curve... I was going to give you B, B plus.
Right at the cusp. That's it. You want to go for extra credit, get solid into B plus territory? If we grade on a curve. No curves, no. No, this is a curve where I'm up against me. Like if you take the spectrum of my ad reads, that was a B plus ad read. So. I'm good with that. Curbs are for losers. Don't let the feminists hear you say that.
It's a different kind of curve. Yeah. I'm well aware being a heterosexual male. Boy, do I know it. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of which, I don't, I doubt we're going to get to end up talking about the Olympus spa. today but um all nude women spas of interest to uh heterosexual males no doubt right yes because hey naked women uh but
All you have to do is let the door open to people, men who are claiming to be women, and the entire thing falls apart. Well, I see it as kind of a triumph for gender-affirming tyranny. Yes. And depravity. And oh, also depravity. Good. Yes, of course. Yeah. Okay. So before we get to the main thing in the show today, we have two corrections right up top from last week. First, we were talking. We were talking about the campaign finance stuff going on in the Harris campaign. And I said that...
I thought that the Call Her Daddy podcast set building, because Kamala did not want to fly across the country, she insisted on having a set built near to her, cost a million dollars. And we've heard that I think that may be off by an order of... attitude. I actually have not been able to chase down the for sure number regardless, but $100,000 still sounds excessive, but far more in keeping with what it should have cost to build a relatively simple set to exactly.
match an existing set across the country. Yep. And I think that impacts my extrapolation from it, which was that that vast sum, which we had thought it was, would imply a a high degree of importance to keeping this all secret by navigating the very fine details of that set so it was undetectable, which, you know, at $100,000...
Who knows why they did it? I still think there was a home court advantage that they needed. For some reason, we will probably never know. But, you know, $100,000 is closer to what a set costs to build. Yep. And then the second thing is we spent some time talking about seed oils last week, and we will do so again for sure. But we're specifically talking, one of the things we were talking about was olive oil.
i said you know it's a fruit oil like avocado oil is i said something that is true whether i said that exactly um and have since learned uh that the traditional processing of olive oil actually does tend to contain the pits which are the seeds
because separating out the seeds from the fruits, which are the olives which people eat, would be a very time consuming process. And so while, yes, olive oil is... primarily effectively a fruit oil from olives traditionally there were seeds in the processing part of in the processing part of the process and so there would have been some extract from olive seed
as well in traditionally made olives olive oil and I don't know if the more you know industrial making of olive oil now perhaps extracts the seeds first it may well I don't know Yeah, I think, you know, I think we did a good job talking about seed oils. And this brings into focus the question that I think you and I have now both addressed on Twitter and we addressed a bunch in the podcast.
last week about the various reasons you know seed oil is a bad category the fact that an oil comes from a seed isn't inherently an indictment of it Coconut being a good example of a seed oil that's very good for you. But we talked about the fact that there was a second reason that some seeds... might be just fine, and that would be a long history of cultivation. And certainly there's a very long history of cultivation of olives in the Mediterranean.
and so the idea that humans and their uh fellow travelers in this case olive trees might have reduced the toxicity precisely because it was a benefit to both of them. That logic applies here very well. It does.
We mentioned, I think last week, and I mentioned on Twitter today, that I don't yet know what it is about sesame seeds, for instance, that renders... sesame seed oil um not in this category inherently like what is it about sesame seeds uh such that they are basically more willing to give up their oils through non-high-tech processing methods and it's the high-tech processing methods of many of the seed oils which require detergents and
and cleansers and solvents and then um you know dyes and such to render it something that seems barely you know palatable to humans but of course you know what we can fool with our senses which is what the
food makers, food in quotes, want to do doesn't mean that our digestive system and the rest of our physiology is fooled. But then there is one other category of seeds, and we talked about this last week. Another way... that seeds end up amenable to human eating without you having to worry really at all about the secondary compounds that the plants are putting into them, is if...
if the plants have protected their seeds by physical means rather than chemical means. So in general, because plants are sessile. So why isn't it toxic to eat meat? Because it's not. It isn't toxic to eat meat because yes, it's true that no one wants to have their muscles eaten.
But animals being mobile tend to defend themselves against attacks on themselves by fighting back or fleeing, right? So... plants being sessile cannot tend to defend themselves by fleeing or by fighting back in a behavioral way so they are left with typically either chemical or physical means with which to defend themselves and usually it's chemical in the form
of toxins or hallucinogens or you know something else that is going to render the would-be herbivore resistant to um you know hesitant to eating the thing but there are a few seeds like coconuts, which are giant ocean-going seeds, that don't appear to put anything, don't bother with anything chemical in their seed, because if you've ever tried to get into a coconut, you know it's really, really hard. There are a few creatures that can do it.
The coconut crab, for example, is an amazing critter. Absolutely amazing. And a well-trained human with a very sharp machete can do it. And I have been successful maybe once. It is tough, right?
But basically, you can defend yourself physically as a plant with a seed. And then if something like a coconut crab or a human with a machete is able to get in, then what is open to you is all of... deliciousness and nutritiousness uh without any of the of the chemical uh defenses that a plant without the physical defenses might have to put into it all right i want to go back to the sesame thing because as luck would have it and i was not prepared to
discuss this today, I would have done a deeper dive on it. But our good friend, Alexandros Marinos, actually decided to... test my hypothesis on sesame seeds now it's not really a test in the empirical sense the hypothesis the hypothesis is that the history long history of cultivation of sesame seeds resulted in what may have been was probably an inadvertent kind of selection artificial selection by
the cultures in question, where they would have chosen sesame seeds that were less bitter and that that would have reduced the toxicity over time and created a varietal that needs human... cultivation but bitter being a uh a standard sort of iconic indicator of this probably isn't good for you yeah it's frankly yeah it's a pretty darn reliable indicator that there's a secondary compound now some things like hops are bitter but not
toxic um but you know in small quantities so it can it's it is something you can develop a taste for and in fact anyway story for another day but what he did was he used uh ai to explore The model that I laid out was, or the test that I laid out was, if you were to compare sesame to its closest living wild relatives, would you find a similar seed with similar contents that was... uh by comparison much better and that is exactly what he found um so i um i have basically no experience with ai
my um the immediate place where i'm skeptical of this approach uh with regard to ai is that you and i know as people who have spent time over in phylogenetic systematic space um that um what What the AI will go to to establish who the closest extant relative is may well be from some random maximum likelihood model-based paper that doesn't actually establish the right sister taxa.
So, you know, in order to do that test, you need to have the actual closest. Well, you don't necessarily have to have the closest living relative, but you have to have a close living relative. Let's put it this way. The closer in both. evolutionary distance and actual proximity on the tree that you are the better a test it is but actually the test just kind of degrades the farther away it is so anyway well and the prediction the prediction
It is a very good prediction of why sesame seeds should be more amenable to this. But also, it is a prediction that in other domains is... is well known to be true right like we we know that um we have um you know increasing nutrient until the last hundred years or so in in certain agricultural plants that have endured selective pressure from humans yep now i would also point out that you might imagine
if you were early in this kind of thinking you might imagine well modern humans will surely do the same thing for the plants that we are selecting and that's not true and the reason that it's not true is because there's no process of selection
You can imagine an ancestor. I mean, when I used to collect... abandoned mangoes from abandoned trees in the canal zone which were plentiful in panama when i was doing my graduate work there there were all these trees that had been at one time cultivated and people were no longer uh in the canal zone they'd been excluded and so there were all these free mangoes um and the trees varied
you know within a tree that tree puts out watery mangoes not worth your time that other one puts out really delicious ones that kind of thing so that selection is something that people become very attuned to if you've got a plant that's putting out bitter sesame seeds and some other plants that isn't, you will tend without thinking about selection just to say, actually, I prefer that one and I'm going to plant its seeds. But that doesn't happen with the modern cultivars for one thing.
You're taking huge amounts of this stuff and grinding it all up and then doing this extraction process. You have no idea where the ones that are less bitter are. So then you're using this industrial process to remove the off. flavors and that's no good um so there's no there's no feedback for that kind of improvement i would also point out that the need for um That you're effectively entering into a system in which the plant is freed of its internal...
feedbacks, its internal trade-offs, too, because you're putting all of these... This is exactly the point I was going to make, right? That a cultivar so freed from its secondary compounds, which were there to prevent... herbivory or predation, depending on which word you want to use, is predicted not to do very well in the wild, right? Oh, yeah. Right. So, you know, if you were...
you know, wandering around the canal zone in places that had once cultivated but now abandoned mango trees. The mango trees that were the most delicious to you as a human, presumably. And actually this... very first hypothesis i had that i tried to test in graduate school was that in places where there are cultivars that humans have chosen the fruit trees and wild trees the wild primates will prefer the human cultivars right a hypothesis generated
by watching crowned lemurs eat tamarind in Madagascar, which tamarind, which is introduced from India. And although I was never able to test that because I couldn't find the monkeys in the particular place where I was working, in Central America, you would exactly expect those mangoes, maybe not the ones that are watery, but the ones that have a bitter note or something or, you know, or cause your lips to go numb, have more of whatever that compound is.
forgotten yeah um to uh to do better in the wild uh when competing against um well when protecting themselves against predation and in tropical habitats of course at least with respect to trees there's not a single example of a main mature mainland forests being invaded by any novel.
novel tree at least that was true when i was doing my my research a couple decades decades ago yeah so that includes human cultivars which are because absolutely inferior competitors without their human companions and indeed all of the mango trees were fringe trees. These were all trees at the edge of a forest where something had been cleared. And yes, the forest was overtaking them. And my guess is those trees are even, are less plentiful now than they were because the forest does.
recapture all that that resource so further potential prediction of the hypothesis about sesame is that presumably sesame oil sesame seed oil is being produced on mass at this point and in monocropped farms which as you say, you know, reduce the selective pressure to almost zero.
But the prediction would be that it has gone through a bottleneck of human selection before that, that the sesame seeds in the farms themselves have as an ancestor something that had been selected fairly precisely by humans. Yep, absolutely. All right. What happened last live stream? Do we want Jen to show just a clip of it or not? I mean, I think it's worth it for anybody who did not.
see me coming apart at the seams yes it was our first uh it was the first ad raid and uh and this is some of what some of what happened Before we get into the meat and potatoes of the show. We have three sponsors right up at the top. Those traditions would be different if you were gone.
So on a later episode we may explain what explains what I see we can't even speak We may explain what is going on here today But we're not gonna say anything now about what exactly explains this ridiculous level of unprofessionalism now We are not. We should explore people. It has nothing to do with drugs. It really doesn't. Actually, practically the opposite. Is there a life endurance? Yeah. That's Heather. Hi, that's Heather was now caught. No, I mean.
I just feel the need that we're truthful people. That's why people listen to us, and so I'm trying to maintain that through this ad read. We have a lot of fun together. Yes, we do have a lot of fun together. And that was, it was kind of a brutal week, but we had a lot of fun together, even though it was kind of a brutal week.
Oh, yeah, we will come back to that. I think that's in some ways the most important punchline of the whole episode. I will say that there was one clue that people might have detected on our set that might have for somebody who was... Thinking broadly enough might have indicated what the hell happened to us. Yeah. I saw you invited guesses on Twitter. Yes. Did you get me? It wasn't much time, but we will go back and look and see if anybody guessed it ahead of our.
Telling you. So let me start just by putting this in. You're looking at me askance. Go for it, man. So first of all, we had fun, but we're not having fun anymore. Fun is over. Reading, because I am a dyslexic or whatever the actual case may be for those of us who are diagnosed as dyslexics. Reading is not as native to me as it is to most similarly educated.
folk in fact i suspect that if my brain ever goes if i live long enough for my brain to go speaking will remain more or less native and reading will be among the first things that become too difficult to be worth it it's true there are some ways in which we could just be not be more opposite yeah yeah yeah so anyway so reading stuff at best it always kind of feels like a high wire act um
Out loud, at least. I don't have any problem reading to myself, but reading out loud. No one's checking. No, I'm checking. In fact... Well, here's the weird part for those of you who want to understand what it's like to be of the other species. And some of you will be of the species. Reading for me is something where as I read. I have to, in my head, hear what it is that's on the page or it's nothing. It's just scratchings. So...
Anyway, like so many chickens. Yeah. Like so many chickens have walked across the page after dipping their talons in the ink. But anyway, so somehow not in full possession of my faculties. as i was reading it kind of got away from me and the problem is the thing that you might have detected on the set was
The thing that cures the giggles when that happens, which is not always about. Well, actually, I think there may be something to the idea that in general, it's not a perfect cure, but what works better than almost anything else is drinking. especially water. And I suspect that what that is, is that the giggles, let's imagine you were swimming and you couldn't touch the bottom and you got the giggles. That's dangerous.
right you wouldn't want to drown of the giggles right so so the sudden introduction of water into the environment causes the body to kind of sober up and
I didn't have water on the table. You didn't have water on the table. And if there had been water on the table, I couldn't have reached for it. Yeah. So maybe before, and I will, I'll just keep on leaving people hanging here. You know how... um if you don't drink for three days you die yes like everyone's heard this yeah this is one of the things like everyone's hurt right you don't drink any water for three days that's one of the thing the experts are right about yeah totally is
Well, at the point that we did our podcast last week, we were a little more than halfway through a seven-day dry fast. A dry fast being a fast where you ingest nothing. No food, no water, no nothing. And this was an extended fast. This was seven days, which means we were a little over three and a half days into dry fast, not eating or drinking anything since Saturday evening. And you may have noticed we weren't...
nor are we yet dead. You also notice that the place that I first tripped up in that ad read had to do with the concept of whether or not things would be different. If you were dead. I failed to notice that. Well, there you go. See, another clue. Maybe you thought, maybe I'm dreaming. Maybe I'm ascending to heaven I don't believe in. Exactly. A good place. Or not. Yeah. Oh, God.
yeah so um yeah so one we're going to spend a lot of time talking about this and we'll come back to this um also later um but One of the punchlines here is, guess what? The experts were wrong about that too. So many of the things that you thought you knew and that you just accepted, and this one just... Just accept it. Like, yeah, three days, we're probably dying, right? We're told this, what, in elementary school? I was like, it's just...
And every single person, it hasn't been a lot, but every single person that we've said anything about this to, the idea of dry fasting for an extended period of time, their first reaction almost to a person has been, what? what are you talking about right and um indeed maybe you want to share how so i back in september i came back from a trip and you started talking about dry fasting
Yes. Well, so let me just say, first of all, I think because there is some, you know, first of all, we are not experts in this. We're new to this and we want people to be very careful to take what we say with a grain of salt. We're going to be straightforward. You know, we're biologists, you know, I think you will know that we did what we said we did and we're going to be completely clear about what we did and didn't do.
But we also need to be careful about terms. And I'm concerned that the term fast is a little misleading because frankly, the longer it went, the slower it seemed. I see. actually but um i i what i thought you were going was um we just want to say We're not doctors, as you know. We're not medical doctors. We're not providing medical advice. We're not advising anyone to try this. We do think it is fascinating and interesting and is one of...
many, as it turns out, probably forgotten things that humans have done for a very long time, about which we are now told you certainly couldn't do that because of course you will die. Not only done it for a long time, but... if you were to go back through your entire history of ancestors you would find that this had been imposed on them by nature without intention many many many times and therefore what you would expect is
an elegant pattern that the body faced with austerity on both the food and water front would have an elegant pattern for dealing with it that is to say it might be a bad thing but that the body would deal with it in the most eloquent way.
elegant way possible. And the reason being that ancestors who faced that kind of austerity and dealt with it elegantly would have outcompeted those who dealt with it less elegantly. So you would expect an evolved pattern in which the body addresses the of food and water very very well and it is interesting that we moderns know so little about it especially i know that you will get there but in light of all the traditions that include something of this in in uh in the course of
uh the various annual cycles yeah and so we we can um we now think um because this is not the first this is the first seven day that we've done but um We now think that this is potentially a tool with which the vast number of Americans, we'll keep it to for the moment, who have been harmed by big ag, big food, big pharma, can...
potentially triage their way back to health and uh by which people who are um who are not yet harmed or who have gotten themselves back to a healthy place, can use this as an occasional way to basically snap your body back into metabolic health the indicators and i'm jumping ahead here before we go into our particular story, but indicators of diabetes and pre-diabetes, cancer and pre-cancer, dementia and Alzheimer's and the...
uh the pre-existing the precursors of those metabolic syndrome metabolic diseases all of these things even with just intermittent dry fasting because there is basically no research on um no no published scientific research that i have found on the on how extended dry fasting can affect the body but with regard to intermittent dry fasting all of those indicators of disease and actual disease go down
So this is potentially a health intervention. And what we did wasn't intermittent dry fasting, it was an extended dry fast, but there are advantages. even at the intermittent dry fasting level. And of course, that is what you were doing when you were sleeping. So for, you know, all of the things that people have heard about the advantages of sleep, about the need for sleep in order to be healthy, probably.
Certainly, part of what the benefit is there is that you're giving everything in your digestive system a break. So yes, there are neurological changes that happen while you sleep and there are different stages of sleep and all of those things.
Many of those things that you've heard are probably true, but it is also true that anyone who actually sleeps through the night and isn't waking up all the time and getting little sips of water is effectively dry fasting, intermittently dry fasting every night, and that that is where some of the healing comes from, reductions in inflammation.
inflammation and, you know, indicators of metabolic syndrome and all the rest of these things. All right. So I think going back to narrative is a good idea. So you were away. I'm terrible at keeping track of when things were. When was that? Early September. Early September. You were away for a number of days and I was doing some fasting, which I've actually started doing a lot of experimenting. I do a lot of...
intermittent fasting, not eating till five o'clock, and a certain amount of extended fasting, like a few days. Actually, if we're going to, let's just go back. I actually started this year. with a resolution. I thought, you know, I'm not... I'm still suffering from all of these effects of this boat accident, which is now, you know, almost at that point, seven years ago. And I'm just going to do a 36-hour fast once a week for the first two months of the year, right? Nine weeks.
And it wasn't a dry fast. I never heard of a dry fast at that point. And I did it. And it was fine. And it felt like, eh, it didn't really make any difference. whatever like I don't need to keep doing that it wasn't that hard but I wanted food but I didn't feel like achingly hungry because the fact is we're all Most of us in the United States, in the weird world, are so overfed that it takes longer than that to actually feel real hunger. You start wanting food soon.
Like pretty, pretty quickly. But are you actually in need of nourishment within 36 hours? No, no, you're not. So. I will say I've had particularly good luck with intermittent fasting. You have a hypothesis, which I think is probably right, but certainly I would love to see tested that there may be a male-female difference based on the...
division of labor between male and female hunter gatherers and all of that. And within, um, female lifespans, a difference for, um, you know, fertile, uh, pregnant breastfeeding and postmenopausal women specifically. But all right, you were away. I was experimenting with some longer fasting and I can't remember exactly. I think I was probably looking up something about what's called acidosis crisis. And I was doing a kind of a search and it led me somewhere.
had this happen to me on a number of different topics over my lifetime. Some term shows up that suggests there's an iceberg i don't know about and i've just seen the tip of it and it's like well now i've got to know what that is so i saw the term dry fasting show up in my search and i was like what the hell is that right
So I started to do a deep dive. And at first, of course, I carried the same... suppositions that most people have about the fact that the maximum length of time you could survive without water, or maybe it's more sophisticated than that, maybe it's an LD50, 50% of people die at three days, you know, blah, blah, blah.
but the more i dug not only did i find out that couldn't possibly be the case based on the number of people who were apparently doing this and the total lack of any evidence that people were dying from this But I also got a story that fit. So remember, back in my training, I'm a mammologist. I spent time studying mammals. So I'm reading with a critical eye what is being described here. It doesn't all fit. I think some of what's being said isn't quite right.
But a lot of it fits extremely well with things I know. And there's one fact that lands like a ton of bricks. The fact is... the way that a camel's hump functions a camel's hump is indeed the mechanism one of the mechanisms by which this remarkable dry adapted animal deals with extended periods
where there's no water to be had. The air is not full of water. There's no water to be drunk. It's not getting it from the food because nothing grows in these places. So before you go on... i want to ask the audience to consider what you think is going on inside the camel's home like do you imagine it as like a barrel full of water they're just kind of sloshing around probably if you if you if you now are asked to consider that question
like no because i like that would make it unstable and like that's probably not what's going on so in which case how is the water being stored in the camel's hump and i will i will confess that uh I actually learned this fact in the graduate study of mammology. I hadn't thought terribly much about it, but if you had asked me as I entered graduate school how a camel's hump functioned, I probably would have told you there's liquid water in there.
And that is not the case. So what it turns out, the important fact is that a camel's hump is in fact full of fat and a sort of... Complicated systems understanding will tell you that a hump full of fat is actually the opposite of a hump full of water. And this is not true for the following reason. There are things in the universe which are conserved.
and there are things in the universe which are not. Water is decidedly in that second category. Water, if you said water is neither created nor destroyed, you'd be dead wrong. Water is both created and destroyed on the regular during biological processes. One of the processes that makes water is the breakdown of fat. So how does a camel's hump work? It works by storing fat, which is then broken down metabolically, releasing large amounts of water.
So you've totally jumped ahead in the story here. I happen to have exactly the relevant visual here, if you want to show my screen. This is from a 1981 paper by a guy named John Candlish. in the biochem department at the university of singapore called metabolic water in the camel's hump a textbook survey in which he is looking at four what he calls storage substrates glycogen which is of course the storage unit for glucose
or carbs, fat, protein, and ethanol, alcohol, right? So we've got the four basic macros. And across the top, we have water yields. And interestingly, ethanol yields a high amount, the highest amount of water because it... And that just makes sense, right? It is a liquid already. But compared to glycogen, carb, and protein, fat produces so much more water.
upon being broken down than either of those two other standard macromolecules, that if you stress your body for water, it's going to go after the fat. preferentially and this again this is one of this i was hoping to wait for this until until later on but whereas water fasting um whereas during water fasting people tend to lose lean body mass because muscle gets broken down because your body is starved for nutrition but not for water, it's going to go after protein.
Whereas during a dry fast, when your body is starved for both nutrient and water, but water is the more pressing issue, it's going to break down fat preferentially. And so you do not tend to lose lean muscle mass during a dry fast, whereas you do. a so-called water fast. All right, a couple points here. One, by the way, love that chart. But that chart is actually cognitively way too conservative because...
The reason that animals prefer to store energy, and I'm not talking about water yet, the reason that animals prefer to store energy as fat is that it is so energy dense per unit of water. So the point is the cost for carrying around fat is low because fat is light. That's why it floats on water, right? So the point is the fact that that number for the amount of fat released per gram is so high for fat is misleading because you've also got a per volume consideration, which would be even more.
impressive. So there's a huge amount of water to be released chemically from fat when fat is broken down. Second point I wanted to make is that there are actually multiple reasons for the body to prefer fat.
as a way of creating water by chemically releasing it one of them would be for example let's say in comparison to protein that the release of water from protein will create toxic ammonia compounds So there's a fact in nutrition, which I believe is a robust fact, which is that the body is somewhat reluctant to break down protein for calories or other reasons because of the toxicity that then has to be addressed by things like that.
like your liver. Okay, go ahead. Whereas what you release when you break down fat... is whatever toxins have been inadvertently stored in your fat which you would like to release and have them flush out of your system anyway yeah these are fat soluble compounds which are hard to get rid of because they're locked up because they're locked up in your fat cells and it seems to
And I want to say this with a caveat because I have not been able to vet this for sure, but I have seen the claim in a number of places without the research to back it up and everything we've said so far.
would seem to support this claim, which is that another thing that you've heard... and no doubt have believed as i did is once you have a fat cell you've got that cell for life and it can expand and it can shrink but you've got that cell for life and so if you've been fat it's going to be harder to stay thin once you get there because those fat cells
are just waiting to fill up. But if you need to lyse the fat cell to get to the water and you stress your body for water, then those fat cells actually get lyced and are gone. L-Y-S-E, lyced. Yep. All right. Last point I want to make at this stage is another reason that the body, given the predicament that you put it in with dry fasting, should prefer fat over protein to break down.
is very intuitive actually let's imagine for a second that we're talking about a very closely related creature to us like a cheetah okay and you realize that doesn't sound very closely related but it's a mammal right and it's You said cheetah, not cheeto. No, not a cheeto. No, no, no, no, no, no. Not very closely related. No. A cheetah, which has to successfully hunt. very regularly because it's an endotherm a warm-blooded creature it burns a huge amount of calories just to stay at
the right temperature. And it has to stay at the right temperature because if the temperature falls, all of its enzymes fail to work very well. Us endotherms require tight temperature regulation. Now imagine the cheetah is somehow living through a drought and faced with a lack of animals because in a drought there may not be enough animals uh prey items to eat and it doesn't have access to water because the water hole is dried up or something like that what
should happen inside that cheetah. Well, You've got some fat to break down, which has a very high energy density, and you've got some protein to break down, which also has a high energy density, and a certain amount of water in it.
if the animal has to successfully hunt and it's having trouble doing it by breaking down protein it gets less and less likely to succeed because it gets weaker and therefore slower Whereas on the other hand, if you break down fat, the animal gets lighter, releases more water, And therefore, a lighter cheetah is able to make a successful hunt more easily because it has less mass that it has to accelerate.
Either whether it's linear acceleration or it's cornering, trying to catch the wildebeest, you know, it will accelerate more efficiently the less it weighs across the board. the body has reasons to prefer burning fat and the fact that there's a tremendous amount of water There means that one can trigger whatever pathways it is that we have all inherited from our ancestors, be they human or pre-human. We can trigger those pathways by denying it water, whether that's safe to do.
Well, you and I have gone a certain amount down this road, and we can say a certain amount about it. Is there room for a whole lot more research? You better believe it, but you would want it done by people who didn't have a conflict of interest. I'm sure you're headed there. But I will say that as much as there's a lack of research in the places that you would want it if you believed in our Western scientific system, there has been a lot of exploration.
uh especially russians for example who have looked into the question of well what happens when you deny the body both food and water for extended periods of time yeah um so let's just go back first to um I came back, you had looked into this, and you had done some weird thing, which I don't know if you want me to describe, but it included a day, 24 hours of dry fast. Yep.
i had this reaction that i think everyone does what like okay a day i guess you can survive but you know you're begging for trouble there um you shortly thereafter um left on your own adventure and i did a three-day fast all alone on my own a three-day dry fast which i preceded with 24 hours of liquids only and followed with 24 hours of liquids only and We're not going to end up getting into all of the details here today, but...
The reason that I decided to pre-seed with 24 hours of liquids only is because you want as much as possible to have your bowels empty when you begin such a thing. And the refeeding process after a dry fast is extraordinarily important so that you don't basically undo. the health benefits that you have accrued through the dry fast. So that is a giant topic on its own, which we probably won't get into much today, but you can't just decide.
oh okay i'll just stop eating and drinking now you want to have been eating very clean for a while you know in in my case i had already for a couple of weeks said you know what i'm off alcohol sugar and gluten just like let's see what happens And if you're on any meds that you really feel like you need to be taking every day, you're not ready for a dry fast because you can't take stuff in.
during a dry fast that's part of the point there are also distinctions to be made between what are called hard dry fasts and soft dry fasts hard dry fast you have no exposure to water whatsoever a soft dry fast you're allowed to shower and and brush your teeth so as you don't swallow any water i think there's actually an intermediate thing for which there isn't a name which is something we'll talk about here but uh in which um
in which not only are you allowed exposure to water, but you should be encouraged to do things like go outside in the cold and just embrace the cold wet. And it sounds like the last thing in the world you would want, but we both found that.
It was something that we actually totally craved. Like by day seven, we were looking forward to the cold plunge. On day six, we went out on the water and we dove into the Sailor Sea. And that sounds... crazy but it was exactly the right thing yep all right so i want to just go back and and pick up how we got here yeah so
You were away. I was experimenting with fasting. I run into this thing and it starts making a lot of sense because of course it fits with what I understand about camels and the way rats. Okay. I didn't. know about that but now that you don't have humps but no but it makes perfect sense but they do dry fast effectively and and Hold on before you go on. So the word for water that the body generates internally is metabolic water. And so...
Camels generate metabolic water through basically liquidating their humps by taking the fat out of them. And kangaroo rats do a certain amount of recirculating, of conserving of water. I think they...
Gosh, do they run their urine through the loop of Henle twice or something? I don't remember. Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. Something like that, right? So the urine that they actually excrete is super, super concentrated. Or they have very long loops of Henle, something like that. Maybe that's it, yeah. Loop of Henle being another. another mammal synapomorphia a shared derived characteristic that is unique to mammals which suggests that our mammal and our first mammal ancestors were
indeed already exploring habitats that were risky for us, right? Because what that loop of Henle in the kidney does is concentrates urine and helps us preserve water. So kangaroo rats do it in a different way than camels. So the thing that really struck me was I've been, of course, there every step of the way as you've been struggling to recover from the boat accident.
What I was reading in doing my first initial deep dive on the drive fast was the number of cases of chronic injury and damage that people had successfully addressed with this technique. superficially speaking, I thought the explanation made a kind of sense. There's still some things about it I don't know. It may be more metaphorical than we understand. But the idea that a body that has damaged tissue...
and is forced to cannibalize itself will preferentially go after tissues that are paying back least, which would tend to be damaged tissues. So the autophagy process is... you know, should be, if it's an elegant process that you face because selection has given you an elegant process, it should go after the things that work least well first, including mitochondria.
broken cells, scar tissue, that sort of thing. So the analysis again, unverified by research that I have yet found is that the three the three sources of metabolic water that the body will go to first when water stressed as through an extended dry fast will be autophagy of things like diseased and old cells, such as mitochondria that are worn out, etc. Pathogens, and basically that as you... What's the liquid version of starve as you desiccate pathogens that you have?
uh and i'm sure you have some right like and some of us probably have a higher parasite or pathogen load than we know as those things get desiccated they become weak and the body will go after those and tear them apart use the parts that it can and flush the rest and then fat being the third one. So the autophagy increases during extended tri-fast, and then also at, I think it's day three, under
We know under some circumstances, because the research has actually been done, but don't know across all circumstances, although why not, you actually get proliferation of stem cells. So new generation of stem cells during extended dry fast. that aren't otherwise necessarily inclined to be prompted to generate. Okay, so in reading about this stuff, I thought I would love to do that, but I also more importantly thought...
Heather has been struggling with all of this damage that's very hard to address. It requires, you know... the equivalent of physical therapy regularly in order to deal with these things and this is certainly worth a shot to see whether it has any impact whatsoever on these now effectively permanent chronic conditions um and so anyway you came home and i said uh you know i read about this thing i know it sounds crazy but i think you need to read about it too and you'll see why
why i'm focused on it and that led you to your you know i had only done one day at that point which is just dipping your toe in the water and um at that point i thought um i actually want to do this alone i want you know i'll keep in touch with you but i want to do this um
entirely alone you know free my clear my schedule so that if i'm like just laid out flat on the floor during this thing um unable to function particularly um it's okay i'm not getting in anyone's way and no one is depending on me uh and and did a three-day fest near the end of September, three-day dry fest, and then flew out to D.C. for the Rescue the Republic rally.
At that point, it was too early to know if the results were going to be permanent, and perhaps it still is. But for the first time since 2016. When I almost died in that boat accident in Galapagos, I didn't have chronic pain. And it hasn't come back. And I will just say, in passing, you looked dynamite. You showed up in D.C. So it was, you know.
not just a question of internal stuff. There was one other thing I wanted to add here just for the full context. My one-day drive fast was really mostly a test of the following question. I have several times in my life, I could count them on one hand, screwed up and not had enough water with me in some circumstance where I'm breathing out a ton of water.
right? Some place where I'm hiking, it's hot, I don't have enough water. And my experience in those cases was that profound thirst is one of the worst things I've ever experienced. It is...
I think the surest route to madness, and rapidly so. Much, much worse than starvation. I'd much rather feel physical pain. Presumably there are levels at which it would overtake thirst. But profound thirst is... absolutely awful and so my assumption going into this based on what we all think we know is that you would become profoundly thirsty in 24 hours and it would get worse and worse and worse and the one day dry fast that I did.
should have told me whether or not this was something that was even possible for me maybe i'm more sensitive to thirst than most people but after 24 hours i should have a pretty good idea whether or not this is just going to be unbearable and after 24 hours you know
Yeah, ordinarily I would have taken a drink, but I didn't feel profoundly thirsty. So my sense is there's some combination about, you know, one of my... awful experiences with thirst was in jamaica where i had hiked down with some kids who were in the neighborhood who wanted to go down this cliff and go look at the tide pools and it was thousands of feet down and anyway on the way back i was just
mad with uh with thirst enough that we encountered this disgusting little puddle of water in a rock full of gross algae and i like actually considered whether or not to drink it i didn't but um but anyway so i was testing that hypothesis and my sense is those circumstances are one where you're putting out so much water that the the process that is involved in dry fasting doesn't kick in and so that is actually
a you know that discomfort is about a kind of danger you're putting yourself in that is not just a simple matter of not taking in water it's a combination of not taking in water and having a sort of uncontrolled loss of water to the environment at the same time and your body is putting
you on high alert this is really bad yeah this is dangerous yeah yeah but no that didn't that didn't accompany this and so it was like huh there's probably something down this road that i just don't know and i got interested in it and then you explored it and obviously three days isn't
excruciating either so it was hard difficult but um but and and maybe one of the um you know one of the benefits that we haven't talked about yet at all is the psychological benefit of putting yourself to a test and succeeding and saying, okay, can I face temptation? Do I have the willpower to do this? And I think you need to be in a state of health.
um such that you are confident you know and or be monitored by someone whom you trust a medical professional whom you is actually competent you trust such that you don't worry that every little twinge or something is an indication that this you know the end is nigh but I, on my, on my first three day fast, three day die fast on the final day. So in all three of the cases that we've done.
um well in all three of the extended dry fast that i've done and you did the second two as well um we started them around six or seven pm uh so that um such that um on any given day you are coming up to a next day marker. And so on the final day of my first dry fast, I went into town and went into the place that makes the best chocolate chip cookies that you may ever have had in the universe.
Where else would you have chocolate chip cookies if not in the universe? But they're right here, and it has big chunks of sea salt on top, and they are warm and gooey, and my God, are they good. And I walked in and the smell is they only make them two days a week or something. And they're fantastic. And I felt really good.
about wandering through the store. It was still then, it was still high enough tourist season. There were a lot of people around and everyone very excitedly talking about the cookies and all the other things at the store. I'm cryptic. Like I'm not talking to anyone about what it is that I'm doing. You know, you get a little self-conscious because you have ketosis. I started referring to it as ketosis mouth. Like, okay, I don't really want to breathe on anyone. But.
Being able to resist the temptation of something that is right before you and that you know is extraordinary. And in that case, like, well, in six hours, I get to go have the first nutrients I've had. in three days and still only liquid for a while and then it's slow to refeed but the cookies would come and the longer you wait the better you're the more lasting the benefits are so anyway to jump jump forward a little bit
we came back from Rescue the Republic and did a three-day fast together. And a three-day dry fast together again. bracket on either side with liquids only for 24 hours.
And then we did this long, not that long, but rather remarkable trip through Florida and Pittsburgh and Montana. And sometime during that trip, I had said to you, okay, I think I want to do a three-day... drive fast once each in september october november and see if i can you know really kick some stuff loose and in reading a bit more i said yeah i'm gonna do a seven day let's do it so uh we came back from this most recent trip
and within a couple days did this seven day. So that's some of the background, and we are going to show you actually some of the... images that we sent to each other during during the seven-day dry fast but first let's talk a little bit about some of the religious traditions that do intermittent dry fasting okay um so we have and these will be familiar to probably um
Most of you, at least the first one, Ramadan, which is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, is one month of consecutive days every year. It's a lunar calendar, so it moves around. It moves like... 13 days earlier in our calendar every year. So it's at wildly different times a year, depending on where in the Islamic larger calendar you are, of intermittent dry fasting between dawn and dusk.
So people who are practicing Ramadan are encouraged to get up before dawn and eat. And then it's a dry fast through sunset and then encouraged to eat after sunset. And of course, depending on when in the year and where you are on the planet, that is, that could be not really that hard at all, you know, if Ramadan is happening in, say, let me see. uh let me go you know june in alaska
If you are practicing honoring. That's a good point. Right. But if it's December in Alaska and you're Muslim and that's where you happen to be and that's when Ramadan happens to be this year. it's going to be a long slog between meals. And so that's actually very interesting. um that um that the dawn dusk thing in all of these faiths it's it's um and probably there are more but islam judaism and baha'i faith all have some uh some traditions of intermittent dry fasting uh which is
Pretty fascinating. So Ramadan is a month of consecutive days. Baha'i faith is 19 consecutive days in March of every year. And then Judaism has six single days, including Yom Kippur, which is, again, intermittent dry fast between sunrise and sunset. And then Islam, interestingly, also has some other prohibitions during the Ramadan fast, which is smoking and engaging in sexual and sinful activities.
I will say there's part of me that wonders whether or not the variation that comes from your latitude and the dawn-dusk thing is a feature or a buck. Well, and, you know, Baha'i specifies March and March everywhere is Equinox. So that's going to be relatively even.
relatively equivalent no matter where on the planet you are and then Judaism um those you know yom kippur moves around a little bit but it doesn't advance across the entire year and so the very unusual one there is the islamic yeah yeah interesting um but you're right it does radically change things yeah it really really does um okay so boy there's a lot i mean You have someplace next to go. Were you trying to interrupt? Go on? I wasn't. I wasn't. Okay. There's a lot to say here.
One is that, and I think we've said part of this already, which is that... Most of the research, at least that I have found, has been done on people who have engaged in Ramadan fast. I don't find any... Any research except that done by individual Russian research teams on extended dry fasting and what... the effects of Ramadan fasting seem to be, again, are to reduce indicators of things like metabolic disease and cancer and diabetes and Alzheimer's and just all of these things.
one let's see there are a number of oh so this is this is a this is a book that is flawed but useful um that uh we have both we've we've gone to and i'll put this into the show notes of course it's called the phoenix protocol protocol dry fasting for rapid healing and radical life extension i'm not buying the radical life extension part by a guy named august dunning who's a former nasa space station op system engineer chemist and physicist and it's fascinating and one of the things
one of the charts that he has in this book is, you know, maybe not entirely true, but it's a fascinating list. So let me just show you, this is page 58 from... from this book conditions resolved with dry fasting general recovery and rejuvenation of the body improves metabolism strengthens a person's faith in their abilities improves thought processes
promotes spiritual development, cleanses the skin, the digestive tract, the kidneys, promotes the utilization of diseased cells, dissolves stones in the kidneys and gallbladder. cleans vessels of cholesterol plaques, reduces high blood pressure, stage 3 and 4 cancers, metastases, improves the function of the lymphatic system, stimulates the immune system, activates the processes of toxin removal.
acute renal failure thrombosis major focal myocardial infarction pronounced body mass deficit manic depression obsessive states hereditary mental disorders severe head trauma severe concussion only short courses one three and five days encephalitis toxoplasmosis inflammatory diseases of central nervous system cerebral palsy cerebral tumors hypothyroidism and thyrotoxicosis, chronic diseases of the cardiovascular system.
hepatitis, bronchial asthma, angina pectoris, diseases of the nervous system, epilepsy, schizophrenia, condition after chemotherapy and radiotherapy, acute infections of kidney, hemophilia, thrombophlebitis, grade 3 heart failure. diseases of the inner ear. Now that sounds like an absurd list, and maybe some of the things on there don't belong on there at all, but I'm certain that some of them do.
Quite. I do want to address the question, you know, obviously the book claims benefits in radical life extension. i think actually the likelihood of that claim depends entirely on the definition of what that means because what i learned the lesson that came through again and again in my study of telomeres and their evolutionary nature their relevance to cancer and senescence meaning aging is that radical life extension is as far as we know not possible
if you are talking about beyond the maximum human lifespan. I'm not saying we will never reach 123 or 4. But I'm saying it's a fool's errand at this point to be pursuing that as an individual. However, radical life extension has already happened with respect to average lifespan. personal lifespan. These are things that you do have a lot of control over. So if radical means take control of your health and instead of living to 75 or 80, living to 95.
then I don't find that implausible at all. So anyway, I don't know yet what he means by it, but I wouldn't rule it out. Just because that term has become popular amongst people who think we're going to live to a thousand years, you know.
because you know as you say that book is a mixed bag there's some stuff in it that's clearly not quite right but well as as we have um you know we don't know him um maybe we will come to um seems you know very smart um and you know an autodidact and a generalist as we hope for from our scientists and engineers but as someone who is primarily an engineer or who approaches things from an engineering perspective um and According to the back of this book, here's a system.
uh nasa space station ops system engineer chemist and physicist what's missing there is is biologist and what i think you know i think the error is once again the conflation of complex with complicated systems yep I think that's right. That said, I've read a lot in there that's quite sensible. So you have to sort of refactor some things. But anyway, it's a good resource in general, especially for describing things like the experience.
there's some things in there, uh, that I want to chase down further, but anyway. Yeah. So, um, when We came back from D.C. and did my second and your first, our first together three-day dry fast. You started sending me pictures of food. And I had said to you at first, you know, this isn't...
It's not helpful, man. It's not helpful. But I joined in because... you know why why wouldn't i yeah um and i have not actually pulled up those but i did um collect all of the images that we sent to each other during the seven day dry fast that we just did which again this the seven day dry fast which included you know a day before
of liquids only and then we did do just water only as we broke the fast for what 14 hours or something and then just liquids liquids and watermelon only for another 24 hours and um and gradually last night we had steak so good it was good um
So I think it will be telling to share the progression of images that we shared with each other. Yeah, and I will just say it will sound a little mean that I sent you an image of what I think was a... gourmet hamburger back in your three-day drive fest or our shared three-day drive fest previously, but that at some level, you know, okay, that was a, you know, a little...
spousal joke for two people who were facing food austerity at the same moment but it very quickly became clear that actually searching uh searching up these images um was both a little bit painful because you can't have those things anytime soon, but also... oddly pleasurable to think one appreciates the idea of these things at a level that you just don't even know is possible until you've
spent that long a period not eating and drinking yeah i actually enjoyed spending time um like the one kind of shopping that i enjoy is food shopping for for good food and i actually enjoyed spending time at the grocery store in the middle of this and uh and you know looking at the thing okay i can that's that's a jar of capers and so it's shelf stable and i'm going to bring that home and i think the first um
we had we had eggs the first morning that we had solid food and then we had cold smoked salmon with capers and red onions and a yogurt dill sauce that i made on cucumbers and avocado and just the the amount to which your other senses get heightened. And then when you are able to start eating again and drinking again, your taste is just through the roof. Everything tastes so good and you need less.
flavor than I have one bite seems decadent yeah it's amazing okay so um you could show my screen here I think there's 21 of these these are texts that pictures that we found and sent to each other in the middle of this somewhat brutal dry fast yes i won't i won't continue to identify who sent what to whom um but i believe that i started off this time i sent you this steak
Yes, you did. With garlic and butter, pepper, rosemary. You responded once again with a gourmet-looking hamburger. Yeah, that's a brioche bun, I believe. Oh, no, that's a pretzel bun. It was a brioche pretzel bun, I believe. Oh, okay. But one of the things... that we have understood from the research that we have found that extended dry fasting can do is possibly break dietary allergies.
Some of which are presumably, at this point, a result of vaccine injuries. And so if you can flush out some number of the things that are making you sick and that you can...
tamp down the error responses for your immune system, it is possible that you might be able to eat some of the things that have been plaguing you for a while that you wanted to eat but couldn't eat well. And so I bring that up because you sent me this picture of a clear gluten-full bun, which you have not been able to eat any gluten for, well...
probably for decades, but you have not been eating any gluten, having discovered this for well over a decade at this point. Yeah, I actually, I want to take this opportunity to say one other thing that I think we've neglected, which is if you think about the puzzle.
of what happens if your alimentary canal especially your gut is damaged what is the process of healing and how much is the process of healing actually impeded by the fact that your gut is functioning in other words if you had an airplane right you can do a lot of maintenance on an airplane when it's on the ground in the hangar that you can't do in flight there's some things you can do in flight but
But the point is, your gut, if you don't have any such, and this is even an argument for why you have these intermittent or... somewhat extended fasts in many of these traditions it may be that there's a kind of healing that is regularly necessary that you just simply can't access with nightly sleep you have to shut your gut down
for a longer period of time and one of these things that you i think can be certain is true a lot of this is speculative but one of the things you can be certain is true based on the way your gut comes back online when you do start the refeeding process is that you have effectively shut the whole thing down in a way that is not part of a modern life. And that shutdown process presumably allows a kind of repair.
that in many of us is probably highly necessary but never happens because of the number of toxins in our diet, just the simple fact of having to process food constantly. So anyway, I think that's a potentially very important source of some of the benefits that do seem to come from dry fasting. Okay, so the images that Brett and I sent to each other. during the seven-day dry fast. Began with a steak, moved from there to a gourmet hamburger, to a flourless chocolate torte with a bit of wraps.
whipped cream or creme fresh fresh raspberries a charcuterie board with grilled olives and meats and radishes and peppers and cheese cubes and some Oh my goodness, that looks so good. And maybe even almonds or chocolate-covered almonds. Deliciousness. Fresh strawberries. Fantastic. Peaches and cream. The peaches having been, looks like, glazed, perhaps lightly grilled or something.
A chicken breast. Chicken breast is not usually the most interesting kind of chicken, but this chicken breast looks particularly nicely done with some, again, you know, garlic and pepper and maybe parsley on it and a nice sauce. Apple cider donuts. My pictures got smaller. This is maybe my favorite of all. And just for me, I sent this to you, Googling steak salad.
My God. You know, steak and cherry tomatoes and raw red onion and avocado and corn and some kind of a green sauce and something like cotija or goat cheese all over the top.
amazing this is probably by you know day three or four maybe day three coffee ice cream with shavings of chocolate on top that or the right kind of chocolate not the chocolate that gets like solid in your mouth when you're eating ice cream and then you're wondering why you have the chocolate but it gives a little bit of a mouth feel like you get the tooth feel of the chocolate and then because it's the shavings it begins to melt and so you get kind of the
the pure hit of chocolate, but then also the coffee ice cream. You guys know what I'm talking about? Oh, I do. I certainly do. Yeah. Um, mandarins, tangerines. Yeah. Perfect. Pastrami sandwich. That's a pastrami Reuben is what that is. Pastrami Reuben. So it's got some Russian dressing, some kraut, some Swiss, and a really nice rye.
Even a little pickle spear in the corner. Berry smoothie. Berry smoothie. I believe we just hit day five. It was at this point, I think I sent you the berry smoothie. and uh and then we talked a bit like we we talked a bit we were talking the whole time we started talking to each other now we were we were spending a lot of time together and um said you know
Looking back through the previous pictures, about at the point that I sent you this, both of us are like, don't need the pastrami rubin. Don't need the charcuterie board. Don't need the steak salad. Nope. It's the berry smoothie. To make that clear, there is a famous point in all kinds of fasting, including water fasting, where hunger disappears. And I had never reached it before.
And I think it was day five here. Day five was the toughest. Day five. I think you were off island and we were communicating. I went off island because it's amazing how much of your day-to-day life is spent.
preparing and eating and cleaning up after food and you're not at your best when you're you know this many days into extended dry fasting and so i was trying to do work and i did do some work we both were doing a lot of work but it was hard and so i think i'm just gonna go off island and and occupy so because boredom is boredom is the enemy in all fast which is which is like i
i was trying to avoid that word because i don't believe in it yeah i'd like and i told my children our children like yeah it's like no there's always there's always so much to do but it was hard to stay on task it was hard to stay focused because the brain is not the brain is becoming focused on this one thing and so you know keeping yourself occupied like we both did a bunch of wood stacking like we were both moving wheelbarrows of wood around and doing you know doing
and such, but the mental work was becoming harder and harder. I was going to save this to the end, but it belongs right here. Okay, go for it. We did not say... what it was that actually happened that caused the giggles at the beginning of the last podcast. It was involved in this process. So one of the things we learn when we study nutrition
that the brain, unlike the rest of the body, doesn't run on fat. It runs on sugar. It runs on glucose. And so famously, runners hit the wall, right? If a runner burns all... the glycogen in their system, then suddenly it's like there's nothing in the tank, even though they may have fat on them that they could readily burn. The mind becomes cloudy and there's no readily accessible capacity. I've heard...
Bikers refer to this as bonking. And I've experienced this actually multiple times, always in the same circumstance. If I would go out... for an early mountain bike ride at the beginning of the season, I would forget that you need to eat abnormally beforehand in order to have carb load the carb and then yeah i under budgeted on clothing so it was very cold i'm burning a lot of energy just to stay warm and then you know 13 miles into an 18 mile ride so it's like oh
There's nothing in the tank. Right. So anyway, we have this idea that the brain requires glucose, that it burns glucose. And what one does discover in this dry fast process.
is that there is some sort of impact on your capacity to function. I think our last podcast, though... points out a very interesting dichotomy many people reacted really well to the content of that podcast and of course the ad read went hilariously off the rails so it's not like we couldn't think at all we were thinking very well and speaking very well but
it was not a normal brain state. Yep. So anyway, that I believe is the ultimate reason why the giggles happened and not having water was the reason that they could not be arrested. Right. So. Round about day five, I send you this picture of a berry smoothie. And then we want to show it again here.
And pretty quickly, we just get to water. Just pictures of water. Lemonade. I was like, I could go for some lemonade, but... passion fruit smoothie passion fruit is one of my favorite things in the entire world um but still mostly water more water water passion fruit smoothie again it's back it's back it's back a lot of water waterfall and this was maybe the day um that we actually like dove into the sea um and both i mean both of us were just like
Being inside felt stifling and the weather was crazy. The weather was stormy and windy and wet and just being outside, like just skin on the water on the skin. Something about the freshness of it.
yeah was and then finally this is the final one of these this is you sending it to me with a couple of emojis a water drop and an ice cube 99 99 of the way there yeah we're 99 of the way there So that relays the experience in part of having started, as you would expect, thinking about real, amazing, delicious food.
going into a state of like yes still being interested in um some nutrients but most they had to be liquid because by day four and a half five i wasn't gonna eat a pastrami sandwich that's not where you're gonna start like um and so i mean let's talk a little bit actually about um about whether or not we were thirsty good good question because um you know you think you think if you hear oh
fasting you're going to be hungry dry fasting but you're going to be impossibly thirsty and as you have already said you're going to get more and more hungry and get more and more thirsty well you don't in either case but um But one thing does get very bad and becomes increasingly impossible to ignore. And the only word that we have in English for it is not sufficient. It does not do justice to what it is, and it's dry mouth.
So I referred earlier to ketosis mouth. You just get this sense of like, I can tell that I've got, you know, my body is going through ketosis and I don't have any way to clear it. And we did shower and cold plunge and go into the ocean and we allowed ourselves to brush our teeth twice a day. And by day four, the refreshing, even though no swallowing, but yeah.
Some would say that's cheating, but, you know, no swallowing of the water. By day four or so... the freshness in your mouth that you would get from brushing your teeth was lasting you know maybe five minutes by day five it's like while it's there it's fresh and then as soon as you're done you go back to this just the scent like a sponge that's been on a on a
kitchen drain board without use for four days there's just nothing there and it's different from thirst neither you nor i had the sense of like deep body first the way that both of us have experienced but you more often than I have because you did more of it in your in your youth before we were together of you know extended backpacks and such and
This wasn't that, but it was a sense of like, I really am not sure if I can speak for a long time without interruption because my mouth is going to dry out and I won't be able to enunciate.
which is why i was unwilling to read all three ad reads that's right i want to um say something we haven't said yet yeah that i think is important one doesn't know exactly what to expect from a drive fast you can read about it but one of the things that's really truly fascinating is that you don't stop peeing which is one of the indications this is not in fact a death-defying
uh, stunt, this is actually something where your body is creating metabolic water because where the hell else would it be coming from? Yes. Um, so, and if it does, like if you do stop being. you're in kidney meltdown and you need to stop yeah yeah so anyway that is a very interesting experience um but i just i mean just to be clear we're not going to get into the the weeds here but you know three four five times a day yeah like
I would say the volume is not huge, but the number of times a day is actually not even abnormal as far as I'm concerned. But the question of whether or not... you know you are a little bit thirsty or we were a little bit thirsty but we were a lot uncomfortable toward the end at the point that those pictures go from dreaming of luscious foods like a pastrami sandwich to exclusively liquids and obsessed with water. That's a pretty good measure of our mental state.
But not out of that profound sense of thirst. Never did we get anywhere close to the discomfort that I've had in those four or five circumstances where I under-budgeted water in some case where I was... was hiking, which raises questions for me. I will say the place where our experience differs from that which we read about from the various places that we can read it is that in this book, you will hear, for example, that... Thirst is not an issue. Now, I suspect that this is a place where...
we being rookies at this probably did things that caused the elegant process to not unfold exactly as elegantly as it should have. And I would love to figure out whether that's true. or whether it's not true. But I will say we did go through a very uncomfortable last three days. And I'm not convinced that that is inherent to the process. I'm sure there's a certain amount of discomfort, but it may be that there is a more elegant way to do it. Yeah. So I guess maybe.
to wrap things up with the understanding that there's a lot more to say. And I think we're going to return to this as a topic again and again, and potentially in a more formal way. This is not medical advice. We're not advising this to our audience or anyone else, but I find it criminal, frankly, that this is another thing that's on the list of behaviors that humans can engage in.
and instead of it being discussed it is considered foolish and dangerous behavior reckless even reckless right uh and again most americans are really unhealthy And so this might, in fact, be reckless or foolish or dangerous for Americans who are on drugs that they can't seem to get off of. I think you would need to get to a state of stable enough health that you really could go for whatever amount of time you're trying to go without taking in anything.
pills or ointments or elixirs or whatever at all right and um and have been eaten eating clean um by which i mean basically um no alcohol no sugar you know maybe no grains depending on you know whatever your particular known allergens are and more general america typical allergens are be eating as clean as possible before you start but it feels like one of the things that just happened
With the election, there was a mandate, I think, to make America healthy again. That's part of what I feel like happened. And the public policy part of that is what we voted for. And we are seeing now, you know, a crazy attack on Kennedy from all places, including a lot of people who would claim to be, you know, courageous heterodox thinkers who can't.
actually think their way out of a paper bag I think because they're scared they're scared that he might take what all the insanity away I don't know but the public policy arm is one thing What we as Americans, as humans, need to do first and always, no matter who is in office and no matter what kind of change is on the horizon, is take individual responsibility for our own health and our own lives.
We have agency, and it is our bodies, our health, with which to move forward in the world. And people are resistant. people are totally resistant to the kind of radical change that actually needs to happen at both the population level the public policy level and the individual level so people have this fundamental belief in institutions that credentialed them or that you know the guys in lab coats show up and go like i know that that's going to kill you
And you dig deep and you find out who's paying their bills or how wrong they've been in the past or how they have no predictive power whatsoever. And any of those things should make you go like, yeah, fool me once. Shame on me. Shame on you. Fool me twice. Shame on me, right? So don't trust these people anymore. And we're not telling you trust us here. We're saying this is a thing.
intermittent dry fasting is definitely a thing that everyone is doing already if you are at all sleeping through the night that you could be doing more of and that will almost certainly bring to you some health benefits and resolve some things that you might think are actually not resolvable. All right, I want to add a few things. One, I think it's even dangerous that...
We harbor within us this belief that we all think came from somewhere that three days is the limit and you'll die if you don't have water for three days. Imagine for a second that we face a disaster in which... supply chains are broken, you're trapped somewhere you can't get out. Even just harboring that wrong idea in your head can cause you to make tragic errors in your planning. Knowing that you could go a week without food and water and not die,
is you are entitled to that piece of knowledge. And the fact that you don't have that piece of knowledge is criminal, I believe. To that point, exactly. Do this so that you are in more control and can tamp down your panic response when it shows up. And this is exactly analogous to one of the values that I don't hear talked about very much of cold plunge.
that I hated the idea of going into cold water, truly hated, and I think there actually may be a sex difference in this as well. Women, I think, are more likely to be like, ah, no way, no way, no how. And when I was doing a lot of it with you and the boys last winter.
I did it. I started doing it every day. I'm not sure I really saw any benefits, but I did it. And it is exhilarating afterwards. But it didn't feel like it was super necessary or brought me any particular health benefits. But what I know for sure it did. was, if I were to inadvertently end up in very cold water at this point, I would not immediately panic and that that would make the difference, probably, between dying and not.
And so similarly, if there is any chance, if you foresee any possibility that you might end up without water at some point, and frankly, if you're living such a sheltered life that that's not a possibility at all. Okay. But if there's any chance that you might end up living without water for any period of time, it might be valuable to know for sure that you can do it. I can do this. Yeah. You've got to know these things. And I would argue that there's a whole...
There's a whole book to be written on all of the things that we don't know about ourselves. When I used to lead trips out into the scab lands, I would encourage students to walk around at night without their headlamps on. You discover that your eyes are capable of something that you will never figure out.
if you are constantly putting on a light which then when you turn off the light causes you to think you're blind at night right and i'm helpless well you are because you were using technology to create yeah you made your own problem yeah and so anyway knowing what we are capable of you know parkour also uh reveals that the human body is human mind are capable of things that we don't know are there and i've heard uh the free run guys talking about tapping into this kind of
inner monkey understanding of our center of mass. Um, anyway, so knowing what you're actually capable of as a human being is key. And this is one thing knowing what you can endure, even just at a, um, a temperamental level which brings me to another point this was not easy you and i experienced
you know and in fact there was a point where each of us were about ready to bail out and each of us talked the other off the ledge and we're very glad that we went all the way through the seven days of day five yeah day five if i was tough was pretty rough um but that that uh discovery that you have you have this capability within you is uh liberating i will say the whole thing made me doubt
something about the concept of willpower. I came to understand that willpower is probably at least two things because this is, this requires an extreme kind of willpower to be sure. I find that I have that extreme kind of willpower. And then there's another kind of willpower that I don't seem to have, right? If I'm intermittent fasting, for example, and I get to five o'clock.
It's very hard for me to limit what I eat after that. I eat voraciously. This is like that a little bit. The refeeding process forces the discipline into the week following. And we're still in that refeeding process. But that the willpower to do this is somehow distinct from the willpower to manage everything you eat or to micromanage it on a regular basis.
basis we have not talked about the weight loss issue and i will just have to warn people the weight loss that comes along with this process is in one way staggering you can just watch your weight fall on a daily basis some of that weight is water and it comes back right away yep um so careful refeeding will cause fair amount of that weight to come back, but in a healthy way. Right. And if it is in fact correct, the mechanism here involves the destruction of fat cells, then you should get some...
substantial, durable benefit with respect to weight loss. So I very much agree with the idea that you've got Make America Healthy Again is partly about cleaning up the goddamn food supply and the environment and getting people knowledgeable about what it is they're putting into their body and what implication it happens and all of that there's public policy stuff to be done there's no end of it however there's a whole
personal level of it that is so profoundly important and to be denied, to not even know that this tool exists. on the map of possible things you know the number of people who are struggling with a weight issue who don't even realize that there is a natural non-toxic technique that has been explored by numerous people, some of them very scientific about their approach to it.
that has these profound predictable impacts does not appear to be highly dangerous. And I'm not saying it isn't highly dangerous for you if you are... distorted by modernity, dependent on pharmaceuticals, all of those things. But for a healthy enough person who's struggling with a weight issue or a chronic injury issue, this does not appear, as far as we can tell, to be highly dangerous.
The fact that your doctor doesn't know that and your doctor is more likely to prescribe some radical experiment called Ozempic rather than to tell you to experiment with such a thing. And make sure you drink eight glasses of water a day. Right. You know, whatever the number is now. I like this.
where even did that come from where even well where did any of this come yeah right a lot of this stuff is like some person at some point thought this sounded like common sense and it became written in stone as if it was the result of some studious You don't think you're a camel, do you? Well, yeah, I think you're bound to have some of them processes. Yes, I do. And I guess the last thing. Oh, two more things. One, you hinted at it, but.
We don't know what would have happened if either one of us had tried this alone. I think it is highly likely that we each doing this alone would have ended up bailing out because it is very difficult. Day five was tough to get through. I did a three day, as I've mentioned, alone. And for my personality, I really enjoyed doing it the first time alone.
second one second three day um that we did together um it was fine it was really hard to sleep like we haven't actually talked about the sleep distractions um but whatever you know it could have been alone it could have been together i didn't really feel it but this one yeah it was not only was it important to have each other i think um but it was
you'd think we've been together a long time what could possibly but it was bonding oh honestly tremendously tremendously it was uh yeah i wouldn't i wouldn't trade it for anything it was it was a very uh profoundly galvanizing experience something about the shared struggle arguably you know if you starve yourself of food and water long enough you will die it's possible that the body also registers
you know from its perspective why did the food and water suddenly disappear and is it ever coming back you know this is presumably a trajectory that leads to death if long enough it doesn't know that you've got yeah you know a stopwatch running and that the seven days is the limit or something like that. So it's possible that that causes this, uh, you know, the bonding experience, but whatever it was, it was great. It's like a dandelion response. Yeah.
Well, anyway, it created a tremendous feeling of camaraderie and all sorts of good stuff. So that's a very positive benefit that I didn't necessarily expect, but it was very clear. And then the last thing I'll say is we haven't said it much in recent months or maybe even years, but we used to say a lot on this podcast.
Welcome to complex systems. And what welcome to complex systems means, we would say it when some fool with a complicated mindset would screw up some complex system by... attempting to you know strong arm it into some new state and then they would get their comeuppance because everything would break we would say well welcome to complex systems that's the mistake you made it's always the mistake but
We rarely, if ever, have talked about the positive version of Welcome to Complex Systems. And I think this is exactly that case where what you have is capacities. built into you that you could go an entire lifetime and very easily never discover which create an elegant process which gives you a ton of control over things like for example your weight right
We are, again, still novices at this. But the idea that if you can build out your capacity, and I wouldn't recommend that anybody start with a week. Start with a day.
Three days is an accomplishment. But if what you did was you figured out how to, within the next year, build yourself up to the capacity that you can... go back to whatever weight it is that you would like to stay at and then use some periodic version of this to maintain that weight so you know your weight goes above some number it's time to revisit right
That does a lot of things for you, right? Not only does it give you a kind of control with no pharmaceuticals, etc., but it also gives you the capacity. Whoa, I just lost it. What was it? I don't know. You're gaining control of your psychology and also your soma. And... It's going to come back to me, but it's not going to come back right away. But, but in any case, it's a very powerful process that, um, oh, I know it builds the right.
incentive structure because no matter what else is true of the extended drive fast, it's not easy. So to the extent that you can alter your eating, so you have to do it as infrequently as possible, you are better off, right?
if on the tail end of this thing your appreciation for food and your sense that whoa i don't exactly want to go back there right away if that causes you to look at every morsel of food a bit differently and think more carefully about what it is and how much you enjoy it and how much you want to eat of it and all of that stuff, then the point is that does give you a kind of control that is exactly what you want.
you want. You want to cultivate the internal structure that causes you to eat correctly. Again, we're novices. Who knows how well that pans out, but you should at least know that you have this tool at your disposal. And if you don't, because you're too dependent on pharmaceuticals and things, you might ask yourself the question, well, how much, you know, in a world that's as chaotic and unpredictable as ours?
How much do I want to be dependent on these external inputs? And how much better off would I be if I could use these other tools at my disposal that frankly... I want to see more of a demonstration of it, but the idea that this has benefits with respect to preventing and arresting cancers and things like that. Well, some of the research, the... peer-reviewed scientific research that has been done has specifically been looking at stem cell generation during chemo.
and finds that dry fasting promotes stem cell generation specifically during chemo that makes the ill effects of the chemo less and the positive effects maybe this was a little bit less certain better. Yep. Yep. Yes. All of all of the above. And I couldn't be happier. You know, I would love to get the discomfort day five through seven. under control. I would love to figure out.
what exactly that is and whether or not there really is a mechanism to deal with it. I wouldn't let it dissuade me from doing it, but it would certainly give me a pause if there was no mechanism to control that. But I am so grateful to have the knowledge that A, I'm not as fragile as I've been told I was. That's right. Three days is not the limit. Yeah. And I'm grateful for all of the other collateral benefits like bonding and all of that.
that came from this the very last thing i will say it is of course perilous for us to discuss something like this with the public We're trusting you. We're trusting you to understand what this is and what this isn't. This is effectively a report. In our book, we describe the laboratory of the self.
We have engaged the laboratory of the self here, and we are reporting to you on what we found. We're not telling you we're experts, but we are telling you what happened to us as completely as we can tell you. And what I would suggest is that... you think about, you know, did you read this book with a grain of salt?
You know, it's actually kind of too technical for most people. There's elements of it that are too chemical and they're a stretch. But should you do your own research and look into some of the communities of people who are utilizing this? has one such community up on her screen yeah so dry fasting club uh this guy who runs this um seems has put himself through I think hundreds of days of dry fasting and has a number of excellent descriptions of protocols and resources for
during the fast itself and refeeding and everything. So this is another great resource. Okay. And then one last thing I have to say that's just protective of us. I think it's completely legitimate, but nonetheless needs to be said out loud on the front end. Are there dangers here? There are. Life is dangerous. What I fear is going to happen is that somebody is going to hear about this and they are going to engage it recklessly.
Or maybe not even engage it recklessly. They're going to suffer from bad luck in conjunction with some responsible experiment. Maybe somebody will die. That is, of course, a terrible thing. And it is something we wish to avoid. But I would point out, if you invent a new technology and you put it onto the market, people have burned to death in their Tesla, right?
It's a terrifying thought. That is not the measure of whether or not it was a legitimate thing to bring to the market. Grow up. We do not restrict ourselves to discussing only things in which nobody might die. If I say, hey, skydiving is great and you go skydiving and you die, that's not on me, right? You have to take responsibility for your life and you have to recognize that, hey, you know what's really dangerous? Listening to the experts.
I didn't make it that way. Heather didn't make it that way. We've been trying to warn you that there's a problem with the experts. In lieu of the experts, what are you left with? You're left with a lot of people whose credibility you're going to have to evaluate for yourselves, including us. And what we're telling you is a report of something factual. If we were lying, that would be one thing, but we're not lying.
so yeah this happened you don't die at three days if you're us apparently you don't die at seven days if you're us apparently what does that mean for you we don't know but Be aware that for some people, you have access to a toolkit that nobody has told you about. Beautiful. All right. I think we did it then. I think so too. All right. Darkhorsepodcast.org has our upcoming schedule and such.
Locals is where we'll be doing a Q&A in 15 minutes, where we will be looking at the chat. So if people have more questions about this, we're happy to talk more just to our Locals community. Please do join us there if you have the interest and wherewithal. Check out our sponsors this week, which I've already forgotten who they were. It was CrowdHealth. and Brain.fm and Timeline, I believe. And I published a letter that I received on Natural Selections this week.
from a new friend and acquaintance we haven't met yet, but I hope that we do, writing about her experience. having been relieved, living in very blue Washington as we do as well, Washington State, having been relieved by the results of this latest election and having a friend who lives a little ways away from her but also in very blue Washington. assume that she had exactly the same response to the election, which was, oh my god.
This is how I have to leave the country. And this is a really extraordinary missive. I encourage people to go and check that out at Natural Selections. I also wrote as an addendum to that Natural Selections this week. When on day six of our, and I didn't say it in the piece, but it was day six of our drive fast that we went out on the water. And that morning I drove very, very early on in the day and the...
The sun was rising behind me, and up ahead, suddenly, the giant yellow full moon appeared, and it was extraordinary. It brought tears to my eyes, and there had only been one time before in my life that I had... been in a place where I could see both of those giant, you know, light giving entities in our sky be, you know, setting and rising at the same time, 180 degrees opposite. And then that same evening.
We were out on the water and we were watching the sunset and the moon came up to the east and it was... It's just extraordinary. So I also wrote about that. Yeah, beautiful. I read it. I loved it. It just tells you, you know, you're on this beautiful little blue marble rolling between these two objects. And it would be that when the... Moon is full. It's 180 degrees. It rises just as the sun sets for reasons that are obvious in retrospect once you think about it. That's right.
Check that out. Reminded that we're supported by you. We appreciate you subscribing. liking, sharing both our full episodes and our clips. Jenna's doing a great job with the Dark Horse channels, whatever, on Twitter and Instagram and TikTok now. And although we got some stuff pulled down off TikTok. Yeah. Jessica Rose. Am I right about that? Jessica Rose. The Jessica Rose episode was pulled down by TikTok. Well, a clip. Or a clip from it.
But we've got active social media channels in all those places now. So we'll be back with a Q&A on Locals Only in a few minutes. And until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love. Eat good food. unless you're dry fasting and get outside and appreciate water. Be well, everyone.