Think Fast: The 252nd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 252nd in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this week’s episode, we start with corrections from last livestream, and a bit more about seed oils. Then: dry fasting. What are the cultural and biological precedents for abstaining from all food and drink for hours or days at a time? What religious traditions include dry fasting? Are their health benefits? What are ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, live stream number 252, if I'm not mistaken.
Not prime, but highly palindromic.
Wow.
Yeah, alright.
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.
Amani, 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 Hying.
We have not really confessions, I guess, to both of us.
So we have confessions to offer today about the 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 there that's still up.
We talked about things like the election, the last election, 2020 election, 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 Well, no, it's not going to go that way today.
You'll see.
You'll see.
I'll see.
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All right, you've coined two things in there.
Did I? Grout health, which I'm not sure is an important concept, but it's a missing concept.
We need that.
And then you also...
Yeah, it's 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, you know.
Cheese is good.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
And if you won't eat it, it's probably good for pets.
Well, I'm sure they could put it into something.
People will eat anything, apparently.
Oh, God.
We will get there.
Maybe not this episode, but we will get there.
We talked about seed oils an episode or two ago, and this is one of the big conversations that's happening online.
And boy, if seed oils 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.
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I think that should be reversed.
Listener and friend of the podcast.
It's, 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.
Never mind.
Let the record reflect that I am shooting for at least a B minus level ad read here.
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I would say that was a B minus ad read, but if grading on a curve...
I was going to give you B, B plus.
Under 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.
Curves are for losers.
Don't let the feminists hear you say that.
It's a different kind of curve.
Yeah, I know.
I'm well aware, being a heterosexual male.
Boy, do I know it.
Yeah.
Speaking of which, I doubt we're going to get to end up talking about the Olympus Spa today, but...
All nude women spas.
Of interest to heterosexual males, no doubt, right?
Yes.
Because, hey, naked women.
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 about the campaign finance stuff going on in the Harris campaign.
Yeah.
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 magnitude.
I actually have not I 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 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.
And I said, you know, it's a fruit oil, like avocado oil is.
I said something.
That is true, whether or not I said that exactly.
And have since learned 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.
Yes, olive oil is primarily effectively a fruit oil from olives.
Traditionally, there were seeds in the processing part of the process, and so there would have been some extract from olive seeds as well in traditionally made olive oil.
And I don't know if the more 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 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.
You know, and we mentioned I think last week and I mentioned on Twitter today that, you know, I don't yet know what it is about sesame seeds, for instance, that renders sesame seed oil not in this category inherently.
Like, what is it about sesame seeds 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 cleansers and solvents and then, 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 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.
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 forms of toxins or hallucinogens or something else that is going to render the would-be herbivore 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, right?
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 that deliciousness and nutritiousness.
Without any of the chemical 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.
What's 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 standard sort of iconic indicator of this probably isn't good for you.
Yeah, it's frankly, it's a pretty darn reliable indicator that there's a secondary compound.
Now, some things like hops are bitter, but not toxic, but, you know, in small quantities.
So it is something you can develop a taste for.
And in fact, anyway, story for another day.
But what he did was he used 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, by comparison, much bitterer?
And that is exactly what he found.
So I... I have basically no experience with AI. The immediate place where I'm skeptical of this approach with regard to AI is that you and I know, as people who have spent time over in phylogenetic systematic space,
that 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 taxon.
So 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...
Close living relatives.
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 is both...
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 well known to be true.
We know that we have increasing nutrient length until the last 100 years or so.
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 in the canal zone.
They'd been excluded.
And so there were all these free mangoes.
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 plant 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.
So there's no feedback for that kind of improvement.
I would also point out that the need for...
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.
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.
A hypothesis generated by watching crowned lemurs eat tamarind in Madagascar.
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 cause your lips to go numb, have more of whatever that compound is.
I've forgotten.
Yeah, to do better in the wild when competing against, 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 mature mainland forest being invaded by any novel tree.
At least that was true when I was doing my research.
A couple of decades ago.
So that includes human cultivars, which are 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 less plentiful now than they were because the forest does recapture all that resource.
So further potential prediction of the hypothesis about sesame is that presumably sesame oil, sesame seed oil, is being produced en masse at this point and in monocropped farms, which, as you say, 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 a Um, ancestor, something that had been selected fairly precisely by humans.
Yep.
Absolutely.
All right.
Um, what happened last, last year?
Do we, do we want Jen to show just a clip of, of, of, of, 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 read 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 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 going to say anything now about what exactly explains this ridiculous level of unprofessionalism.
No, we are not.
We should be poor people.
It has nothing to do with drugs.
It really doesn't.
At least the op...
Actually...
Practically the opposite.
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.
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.
Did you get any?
It wasn't much time.
But we will go back and look and see if anybody guessed it ahead of our telling you.
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.
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 a bet.
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 with the giggles, right?
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'll just keep on leaving people hanging here.
You know how 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 heard, right?
You don't drink any water for three days, you die.
That's one of the things 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 a 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 a heaven I don't believe in.
Exactly.
A good place.
Or not.
Yeah.
Oh, God.
Terrifying.
Yeah, so we're going to spend a lot of time talking about this, and we'll come back to this also later.
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 accepted like you know three days from probably dying right we're told this what in elementary school I was like it's just like 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 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 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's 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.
But no, I... Actually, but what I thought you were going on was, 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 any.
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 elegant way possible, and the reason being that ancestors who faced that kind of austerity And dealt with it elegantly would have out-competed those who dealt with it less elegantly.
So you would expect an evolved pattern in which the body addresses the lack 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 the course of the various annual cycles.
Yeah, and so we can, we now think, because this is not the first, this is the first seven day that we've done, but 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 by which people 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 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 published scientific research that I have found 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, 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 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, let's just go back.
I actually started this year with a resolution.
I thought, you know, 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 quickly.
But are you actually in need of nourishment within 36 hours?
Nah.
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 female lifespans, a difference for, you know, fertile, pregnant breastfeeding and postmenopausal women as well, 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.
And I've 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.
And 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 or 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 hump.
Like, do you imagine it as like a barrel full of water, they're just kind of sloshing around?
Probably if you now are asked to consider that question, you're like, no, because that would make it unstable, and 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 confess that 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 system's 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.
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 and the Camel's Hump, a textbook survey, in which he is looking at Four storage substrates, glycogen, which is, of course, the storage unit for glucose or carbs.
Fat, protein, and ethanol, alcohol.
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, and that just makes sense, right?
It is a liquid already.
But compared to glycogen, carb, and protein, fat...
It 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, I was hoping to wait for this until later on, but 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 during a so-called water fast.
Alright, 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 mass.
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 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 in the SATA plus tissue.
Because they're locked up in your fat cells and it seems to be, and I have, 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 that, and you know, in everything we've said so far, it 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 lyse and are gone.
L-Y-S-E, lyse.
Yep.
Alright.
Last point I wanted 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.
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.
Those 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, 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 It 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.
Well, 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.
So, 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.
And, you know, 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, especially Russians, for example, who have looked into the question of, well, what happens when you deny the body of both food and water for extended periods of time?
Yeah.
So let's just go back first to, 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, a 24 hours of dry fast.
Yep.
And I had this reaction that I think everyone does, what?
Like, okay, a day, I guess you can survive, but aren't you begging for trouble there?
You, shortly thereafter, left on your own adventure, and I did a three-day fast 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 the whole...
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 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.
A hard dry fast, you have no exposure to water whatsoever.
A soft dry fast, you're allowed to shower and brush your teeth so long 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 in which...
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.
Yep.
All right.
So I want to just go back and pick up how we got here.
Yep.
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 kangaroo rats.
Okay.
I didn't know about that, but now that you mentioned it.
They don't have humps.
No, but it makes perfect sense.
But they do dry fast effectively.
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, do 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.
Yeah, Loop of Henle being another mammal synapomorphia, a shared derived characteristic that is unique to mammals, which suggests that 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.
And 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.
And 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 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.
um pathogens and basically that as you what's the 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 uh 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 being the third one So the autophagy increases
during extended tri-fast.
And then also, at I think it's day three, 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 And so anyway, you came home and I said, 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 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 at that point, I thought, I actually want to do this alone.
I'll keep in touch with you, but I want to do this entirely alone, clear my schedule so that if I'm just laid out flat on the floor during this thing, unable to function particularly, it's okay.
I'm not getting in anyone's way and no one is depending on me.
And did a three-day fast near the end of September, a three-day dry fast, and then flew out to D.C. for the Rescue the Republic rally.
And 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 look dynamite.
You showed up in DC, 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 have 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 I was mad with thirst enough that we encountered this disgusting little puddle of water in a rock full of gross algae and I actually considered whether or not to drink it.
I didn't.
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 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 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.
It was hard.
Difficult.
And maybe 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 such that you are confident and or be monitored by someone whom you trust, a medical professional whom you is actually competent, whom 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 on my first three-day fast, three-day dry fast, on the final day, so in all three of the cases that we've done, well, in all three of the extended dry fasts that I've done and you did the second two as well, we started them around 6 or 7 p.m.
such that 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 it smells like they only make them two days a week or something, and they're fantastic.
I felt really good about wandering through the store.
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.
And I thought, I'm cryptic.
I'm not talking to anyone about what it is that I'm doing.
You get a little self-conscious because you have ketosis.
I started referring to it as ketosis mouth.
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 you know six hours I get to go have the first um 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, bracketed 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 dry fast once each in September, October, November, and see if I can really kick some stuff loose.
And in reading a bit more, I said, yeah, I want to do a seven-day.
Let's do it.
So 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 the seven-day dry fast.
But first, let's talk a little bit about some of the religious traditions that do intermittent dry fasting.
And these will be familiar to probably 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, 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 that the dawn-dusk thing in all of these faiths, and probably there are more, but Islam, Judaism, and Baha'i faith all have Some traditions of intermittent dry fasting, 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 just 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.
So, 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, 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 tradition.
Yeah, interesting.
But you're right.
It does radically change things.
Yeah, it really, really does.
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.
Okay.
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 Fest.
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.
So, one, let's see, there are a number of Oh.
So this is a book that is flawed but useful that we have both, we've gone to, and I'll put this into the show notes, of course.
It's called The Phoenix Protocol, Dry Fasting for Rapid Healing and Radical Life Extension.
I'm not buying the Radical Life Extension part.
It's by a guy named August Dunning, who's a former NASA Space Station Ops 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 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.
1, 3, and 5 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 education.
Average lifespan and 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.
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.
Because, as you say, that book is a mixed bag.
There's some stuff in it that's clearly not quite right.
Well, we don't know him.
Maybe we will come to.
He seems very smart and 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, and according to the back of this book, here's a system NASA Space Station Ops system engineer, chemist, and physicist.
What's missing there 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.
That I want to chase down further, but anyway.
So when we came back from DC and did my second and your first, our first together three-day drive fast, you started sending me pictures of food.
And I had said to you at first, you know, this isn't helpful, man.
It's not helpful.
But I, you know, I joined in because, you know, why wouldn't I? And I have not actually pulled up those, but I did collect all of the images that we sent to each other during this seven-day dry fast that we just did.
Which, again, this 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 and watermelon only for another 24 hours.
And gradually last night we had steak.
So good.
It was good.
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 little...
Spousal joke for two people who were facing food austerity at the same moment.
But it very quickly became clear that actually searching up these images 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, like, the one kind of shopping that I enjoy is food shopping for good food, and I actually enjoyed spending time at the grocery store in the middle of this, and, you know, looking at the thing, like, oh yeah, 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,
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 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 you have.
One bite seems decadent.
Yeah, it's amazing.
Okay, so you could show my screen here.
I think there's 21 of these.
These are pictures that we found and sent to each other in the middle of this somewhat brutal dry fast.
Yes.
I won't continue to identify who sent what to whom, but I believe that I started off this time.
I sent you this steak.
Yes, you did.
With garlic and butter, salt and 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.
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.
And 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 clearly 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 the point is your gut...
If you don't have any such, you know, 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 fasting.
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 It 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 this seven-day dry fast began with a steak, moved from there to a gourmet hamburger, to a flourless chocolate torte with a bit of perhaps whipped cream or creme fraiche, 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 and...
My god.
You know, steak and cherry tomatoes and raw red onion and avocado and corn and some kind of a green sauce and some 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 are 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 mouthfeel, 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 chocolate, 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.
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 then we talked a bit.
We talked a bit.
We were talking the whole time.
We started talking to each other.
No, we were spending a lot of time together and 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.
So 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'm just going to go off island and Occupier.
Because boredom is the enemy in all facets.
Which is, like, I was trying to avoid that word because I don't believe in it.
Yeah.
And I told our children, like, yeah, it's like, no, 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 hikes and such, but the mental work was becoming harder and harder.
I was gonna 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 the carb.
And then 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, 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.
Um, 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.
But still mostly water.
More water.
Water.
Passion fruit smoothie again.
It's back.
A lot of water.
A waterfall.
And this was maybe the day that we actually like dove into the sea.
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 and going into a state of like, yes, still being interested in some nutrients, but most they had to be liquid because by day four and a half, five, I wasn't going to eat a pastrami sandwich.
That's not where you're going to start.
And so let's talk a little bit actually about About whether or not we were thirsty.
Good question.
Because, you know, you think, you think if you hear, oh, fasting, you're going to be hungry, dry fasting, what?
You're going to be impossibly thirsty, and as you have already said, you're going to get more and more hungry, you're going to get more and more thirsty.
Well, you don't in either case, but...
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 that you know my body is going through ketosis and um and 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, you know, no swallowing, but, you know, it's...
Some would say that's cheating, but 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 maybe five minutes.
By day five, while it's there, it's fresh, and then as soon as you're done, you go back to this sponge that's been on a kitchen drain board without use for four days.
There's just nothing there.
It's different from thirst.
Neither you nor I had the sense of like deep body thirst the way that both of us have experienced, but you more often than I have, because you did more of it in your youth before we were together, of extended backpacks and such.
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.
I want to say something that we haven't said yet that I think is important.
One doesn't know exactly what to expect from a dry 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 stunt.
This is actually something where your body is creating metabolic water because where the hell else would it be coming from?
Yes.
And if it does, like, if you do stop peeing, you're in kidney meltdown and you need to stop.
Yeah, yeah.
So anyway, that is a very interesting experience.
I mean, just to be clear, we're not going to get into the weeds here, but, you know, three, four, five times a day.
Yeah.
Like, the peeing continues.
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.
Not at all.
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.
Yeah.
But not out of that profound sense of thirst.
Never did we get anywhere close to the discomfort that I've had in those, you know, four or five circumstances where I under-budgeted water in some case where I 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 is 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?
And again, most Americans are really unhealthy.
And so this might, in fact, be reckless or foolish or dangerous for Americans who have, you know, who are on drugs that they can't seem to get off of.
I think, you know, 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, taking any pills or ointments or elixirs or whatever at all.
And have been eating clean, by which I mean basically no alcohol, no sugar, maybe no grains depending on whatever your particular known allergens are and more general American-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, 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 were 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, 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.
Yep.
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 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 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.
I'm helpless.
Well, you are because you were using technology to create aid.
You made your own problem.
And so anyway, knowing what we are capable of, you know, parkour also reveals that the human body and human mind are capable of things that we don't know are there.
And I've heard the free-run guys talking about tapping into this kind of Inner monkey understanding of our center of mass.
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 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 this day.
Day five.
Yeah, day five.
Day five was tough.
It was pretty rough, but that that discovery that you have, you have this capability within you is 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 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.
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 the willpower to do this is somehow distinct from the willpower to manage everything you eat or to micromanage it on a regular 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.
A careful refeeding will cause a 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.
Where even did that come from?
Well, where did any of this come from?
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 process.
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.
For my personality, I really enjoyed doing it the first time alone.
The second one, the second three-day that we did together, it was fine.
It was really hard to sleep.
We haven't actually talked about the sleep distractions.
But whatever.
It could have been alone.
It could have been together.
I didn't really feel it.
But this one, not only was it important to have each other, I think, but it was...
You'd think we've been together a long time.
What could possibly be?
But it was bonding.
Oh.
Honestly.
Tremendously.
Tremendously.
It was...
Yeah, I wouldn't trade it for anything.
It was a very 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, 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, 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 strong arm it into some new state, and then they would get their comeuppance because everything would break, we would say, well, welcome to and then they would get their comeuppance because everything would break, we That's the mistake you made.
It's always the mistake.
But we rarely, if ever, have talked about the possibility Yes.
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.
That does a lot of things for you.
Not only does it give you a kind of control with no pharmaceuticals, etc., but it also gives you the capacity...
Oh, I just lost it.
What was it?
I don't know.
You're gaining control of your psychology and also your soma.
It's going to come back to me, but it's not going to come back right away.
But in any case, it's a very powerful process that...
Oh, I know.
It builds the right incentive structure.
Because no matter what else is true of the extended dry 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.
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.
Yes, 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 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.
Three days is not the limit.
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, Should 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?
Heather has one such community up on her screen.
Yeah, so Dry Fasting Club.
This guy who runs this has put himself through, I think, hundreds of days of dry fasting and has a number of excellent descriptions of protocols and resources 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, you know, if you, you know, people have burned to death in their Tesla.
Right?
It's a terrifying thought.
Yep.
That is not the measure of whether or not it was a legitimate thing to bring to the market.
Yes.
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.
So, 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, 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.
Alright.
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.
Oh, 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 hell, 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 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 I've 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 just extraordinary.
So I also wrote about that.
Yeah, beautiful.
I read it.
I loved it.
It 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 and it rises just as the sun sets for reasons that are obvious in retrospect once you think about it.
Yeah, that's right.
So 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.
Although we've got some stuff pulled down off TikTok.
Yeah, Jessica Rose.
Am I right about that?
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.
