Sexual Mastery with the World’s Top Experts: Unlocking Pleasure, Performance & Intimacy | 1204

That's really what my work is trying to gear people toward is having these life changing, cataclysmic, therapeutic, deep, powerful, even psychedelic type experiences that really change your life. If it's not changing your life, you're doing it wrong. It's because this has the power to really rebirth. This is the procreative energy of the universe that we literally have at our fingertips, every single one of us.

You're listening to the human upgrade with Dave Asprey. If a woman was having orgasm six months ago and she's not having them now, is the first step to just try five different partners to see if one of them is better than the other?

No, I actually.

I knew you were going to say no. So what else do you change besides your partner?

Would that be if that was the case? Like, this is like a babe, Sorry, I got to go sleep with five other people right now and get back to you. But sometimes for one person, it could be. So let's break it down for one woman. Perhaps she just hasn't, you know, she's kind of developed this point with her partner where they're not communicating anymore, which is one of the pillars. She actually has resentments that have built. Maybe she's even gotten to the point of contempt. They don't get along, resent, she's resentful. They haven't been able to communicate about their sex life. And so she just feels unseen and maybe even a little unsafe with a partner who hasn't been taking care of her emotional needs. And so she felt like once she started to have these conversations with her partner, maybe they went into therapy again, she started to feel safe, and then her orgasms were coming back. That could be one. For another woman, it could be because she went on an antidepressant or she's been on the birth control pill. She was on an SSRI or a birth control pill, and she realized that the confluence of those or the combination of those, she. She was no longer able to have an orgasm. Right. That's why. And she. And then this might seem to some people, they'd be like, well, of course, I can't tell you how many women are shocked that it's because of the birth control or because of a medication. Now, maybe when they first started taking the medication, their orgasms were fine, but six months to a year later, it's not. So again, we're all really, really different about how medications impact us. Yeah. So. And another thing could be because we're not moving our bodies. Right. For another woman, it's like she stopped working out because it's blood flow. So arousal in our genitals comes from blood flow. It comes from moving our bodies, from exercising. And so same with erections. If I am not moving my body, I'm not eating healthy, I'm feeling just not, you know, and also to go to the other pillar of self, acceptance, I'm not accepting my body. I've gained weight. I feel really insecure about it. On top of me, not moving and exercising and having any cardiovascular health that could also build my ability for my clitoris and my vulva, my pelvic floor to get aroused, turned on and engorged with blood enough to have an orgasm, I could keep going. That's some of them.

I've been compiling a list of all the evils of chemical hormonal birth control for women and inability to orgasm wasn't on my list. We have increases in cancer, heart disease, inability to select a mate who's compatible with you, depression, other things like that. So what are the other reasons that women might want to choose a different form of birth control than the pill?

Oh, my God, that's so many. Those are some of the great reasons too. Yeah. You're referring to the study that I talk about in my book about women who pick a different mates when they're on the birth control pill than when they're off the mate. I think that a lot of women who go on antidepressants also find that they are more prone to developing depression and anxiety soon after they go on it. After you're on a birth control for a while, it is going to impact your hormones. And for many, many women, when they go off of it, it takes a lot of work, time and efforts ever to learn to balance your hormones again in a way that works for you through nutrition, exercise, seeing experts, a lot of things that our health insurance does not cover. And I don't think there's enough experts out there yet or who you can find or that the experts that are accessible to people in different parts of the country or different parts of the world that could find that they could find a hormone specialist that could help them with their specific case because we're all different, unfortunately. The birth control pill for many are going to wreak havoc on their hormones for the rest of their lives. But it's going to look different on everybody. So you really have to do some work. So I think that's part of it. And that would be their ability to get. Yeah. Turned on, aroused, to change their diet, their hair can fall out their nails, their hair, their skin. I mean, there's just. Because the other thing I find is that so many young women don't even question it. I know that I did it. When I went on the pill, I was like, this is what you do. It didn't even feel like it was a drug. It didn't feel like it was anything that mattered. It feel like it was sort of a. A. A inconsequential pill that I took every day that just, you know, even when someone say, are you on a medication? I would forget to say, oh, the pill. Right. We didn't realize there were so many consequences, but now we do. So absolutely, for women. And if they're telling themselves, oh, I won't remember, or no one wants to wear condoms, you know, I would look at that again. I think that a lot of men have gotten off saying that condoms are uncomfortable, or it feels like I'm wearing a raincoat, you know? Well, we're taking birth control pills and we, like, wanna, like. We feel anxious, depressed, and we can't choose an acceptable mate. If you are still gonna have an orgasm, but feels like you're wearing a raincoat for five minutes on your penis, like, that's really small price to pay. For women who are experiencing years of trauma after being on the pill, there's.

Another dark side to the pill that we don't talk about very much, and it has to do with evolutionary biology. When men are in a world where there are no ovulating women, our operating system picks up on that, and then there's no reason for living. So our motivation to go out and do stuff that matters goes down when all the women around us are on chemicals that interfere with their natural cycles. So there's a signal to make the world a better place that comes from women that men are very responsive to. And it's largely invisible to us, but it affects us. So if there's problems in a relationship and a woman's on a birth control pill, as opposed to another way of protecting herself from unwanted pregnancy, it can have effects on the guy too. They're just subtle effects. Right? And his arousal will be less than it would normally be because we're. Well, you don't smell like a fertile woman. That's just how we're wired.

It's so true. I love that we're talking about this because I'd love for men to get on board with this too and say, babe, maybe it's not the best choice for you to go at the pill right now. I'd be willing to figure out other ways that we could work together on it because it should be a collaborative effort. Oh yeah, women are just taking the brunt of it. Like to have a partner who's educated around this and saying maybe not the best choice. Let's find some other ways is such a better way to go.

It's one of the most loving things you can do as a man is like, hey, let's take care of your health and let's make sure that you don't get pregnant unless we both decide that's the right thing for us because it's not worth sacrificing your long term health for that. It just isn't. Okay, the other thing, and since you were last on the show, for the last almost couple of years now, I've been single, I'm actively dating. And so I've noticed that many people are just programmed to not either not know what they want in bed or to secretly want it, but just not ask for it. Why is it that men and women, the answer may be different for each one. Why don't they feel comfortable asking for what they want?

Such a good question. Dave. I gotta tell you that I, when you started out this conversation about telling me what by asking me what's changed? And I, my list was pretty short. What stayed the same is women and men often do not know. They don't feel safe. They, it feels like it's. I can give you the overview and then break it down. There's still taboo around it. They don't feel safe. They haven't explored. They'd never actually been with a partner who really was invested in their pleasure and their own and didn't know the right questions to ask. We don't have a lot of experience being in healthy sexual relationships. Having conscious sexuality is a practice that I'm. Is what I'm kind of encouraging. What I encourage people to do in smart sex is to actually take a look at your own sexual history and understand who you are as a sexual being so you can communicate it. So to break that down, I think for women, I think there's different reasons, but we all don't share it. And I can tell you from my experience, when I started out, I remember that partners would say to me, like in my 20s, they'd say, hey, does that feel good? Do you like what I'm doing right now? And I would just say, yeah, whatever you're doing feels great. Yes, it's great. Because I knew that number one, I'm not going to say it doesn't feel good. I guess it feels good. And number two, if they said, what else do you want? Like, if this doesn't feel good, I had no idea. Because we're not giving a menu. We're not given a menu of what? What's on the. Like, what we could even ask for.

It'd be a very long menu.

Exactly.

A lot of things people want.

It's a lot of things that people want, but we don't know sometime know that either we don't know it because we haven't had experience, or we know it and we don't know how to ask for it. So a lot of my book is giving scripts. Like the whole communication chapter is like, literally I break down how to ask for something you want, how to give difficult feedback, how you know, because people just. Again, it's so terrifying to bring up sex for a lot of reasons. Shame. Taboo. We don't have experience doing it. It's not normalized. We're afraid that someone's going to judge us or we're going to hurt our partner's feelings. So we just stay mute and silently suffer through bad sex. Or we learn and we say, okay, you know what, my pleasure is important and I'm going to figure out what feels good to me and I'm going to do it through masturbation. I'm going to do some research. I'm going to find partners who have a growth mindset around sex, who are actually really engaged and excited so we can figure it out together and then we can learn and explore and play. But to. To your point, we're not there yet. I mean, hopefully my listeners of all these years have gotten there and some people I've dated, but I found the same thing too. I was single for a long time and most people don't really know or they don't know how to ask for it again because it's not normalized. And a lot of women, and I was doing this myself too, just they fake their pleasure and they're more performative.

You were faking your pleasure? Seriously?

Yeah, I.

You're a very bad girl.

I know pleasure. I faked orgasms. That's why I got into this business. I was like, I do not want to fake orgasms anymore.

Yeah, just PSA for women. If you fake your orgasm, we'll keep doing whatever we were doing. So that's a really bad way to give us feedback.

It's a really bad way to give us feedback. But to go to your question, why? You asked me why. Why aren't we talking about? Why aren't we telling you're out with Dave Aspie on a date. Like he wants to please you. Believe me, I know this gu tell them, but they're just in their head. They go, well, I actually don't know how to get the words out. What if he doesn't really want to please me? What if he judges me and thinks I'm a freak or what? Not you, any man. Right. But I think again, we have to have experience knowing that if someone's asking you, they give them the benefit of the doubt. They actually want to please you. But we don't see that in movies. We don't see that in porn. We don't. We really don't. So we don't have a lot of examples of it yet. Even in 2023.

So I want you to criticize what I do. If a date's going in that direction, I literally say I'm open to doing all kinds of stuff. Like, what is your hottest fantasy that you've never asked for? I want to try that.

Love it.

All right, so pros and cons.

Okay, well, first I think that's hot. But okay, how well do you know the person when you're asking them that?

Usually well enough. I'm probably not going to do that on a first date.

Okay. It's not like the first. You're not like in the car picking them up. Okay.

Yeah, I'm not the typical pick up a random person at a bar kind of guy. Like, I want someone to.

I think it's a great question to ask. However, I think that there's. You're going from like zero to hottest fantasy. And I would maybe do, I would maybe scale it back a little and just start to talk about sex in general. So what has been some hot turn ons for you? What's the most memorable sex you've ever had? Or like, you don't have to say the partner's name or what? What's a, what's a fantasy that you once had that actually came to reality? And if you've been with them for a while, you could say, what's the most memorable time we had sex? Can you remember the moment that you were the most turned on with me? And then from there they're comfortable sharing with you already. And then you share something with yourself perhaps about your sexual journey that you've been on and what you've been learning about yourself. But I think sometimes for the majority of women out there that I know that I've experienced And that I see and date even people that you think would be way more experience in this area that saying that to someone and have her being like, this is so personal. I've never told anyone. I know you say, dave, you're going to be down with it, but this makes me a freak or this makes me not normal. I think that they probably shut down and I mean, I don't know. What have you found?

I don't think anyone shut down. But there's something that guys can do to make a woman feel safe. And it's not an action, it's actually a, a physiological state. Like it's, it's a thing you do with your heart. I've actually been teaching this to a few people and I'm actually going to talk about this at the conference. But you can, you can create a feeling of safety that makes your partner feel like they can talk about it without being judged. And I don't think it's a verbal thing you do. I think it's like a way you hold yourself. It's, it's like a feeling in your chest.

Is it like a breath? Do you like eye contact, breath work?

I mean, there's, there's grounding and like co breathing practices and you know, making a sound on your exhale and things like that. Like, I've taken courses on that, but I think it's actually something that you do to turn off as a, as a man, to turn off your own fight or flight response so you're actually physically relaxed when you ask it. Instead of like, oh my God, what's he gonna say? You're like, she can say whatever she wants to say and it's okay. And you have this, just this deep calmness. And that's usually when they're like, wow, I've never talked about this before, but you know, that would be really spicy. Okay, maybe, maybe we can do that sometime. Yeah, but. And then to not be, not be judgmental with whatever they say and just say, well, that's either I've never done that or, you know, that is fun. Right. Whatever. Whatever it is. Right.

Well, I love that you're setting the right tone and setting and place to have these conversations. The right, the right feeling that you're able to elicit that feeling. I think it's so important for us to feel safe and then also how we communicate it without judgment and with curiosity and compassion rather than, wow, you feel that thing or a look of horror on your face, whatever, which obviously I hope you're asking that question. You're probably not leading with a look of horror on your face, but you'd be surprised. A lot of us are wired. Not you, Dave. You're doing a lot of work. I love that you're teaching how to be in a how to be in a grounded accepted space and how to calm your nervous system I think is everything you know, especially like not specially I think all the time, but definitely sexually. I think I talk a lot about that in the book too, about just whether it's a few minutes of eye gazing and 10 deep breaths together is a game changer for people who especially disassociate during sex can have orgasms going off into their mind. But to have more connective conscious sex I think is is what we're both talking about.

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I don't want to be too graphic or anything, but I was with a person I dated for a little while and she would dissociate and every time I'd see her dissociate I'd like pause and be like hey, can you come back? And it was remarkable because it felt like it was actually really healing to be able to like no, no, it's safe to be in your body right now. Like we'll slow down, we'll do whatever, but I think you have to be really attenuated to your partner's state to do that. What is the best way for men or women to be attenuated to their partner's state so they can stay present during sex?

There's nothing like that though. To be with a partner where you actually feel seen and they see you leave the, the conversation or the room or whatever in any, in any case. But I think the best way to do it just like basic principles of like even Tantra I think which can be very overwhelming to people because they think they have to have like an 18 hour orgasm or it takes a whole process. But the main principle is just really just being grounded with somebody. Starting with a few minutes of eye contact, maybe sitting facing each other and like that satsum position. Even if it's a, you know, they're, they're your partner's in the ground, the masculine sort of in the ground. It's space and wrapping your legs around them. And this could just be like a five, ten minute thing where you're looking to each other's eyes and then sometimes you'll find that when you're doing that your breath can sort of sync up but if not, just start to bring your breath into it. Just some deep breathing where you're actually feeling each other's chests rise and fall. And you know, you're looking, you're breathing without the expectation of anything, just connection. And for many you'll find that as is a practice and as you do that, that the disassociate or the worries that you're having or the concerns do fall away and you feel much more not only connected to your partner, but then you'll start to feel the sexual energy and the connection circulating in your bodies. If you really spend some time cultivating this again, I don't know that it happens right away. I've been, I've studied this and been on a lot of different retreats with people I had never known. And then I get into this exercise with them and I'm like, oh, I'm feeling your energy, right. So I think it's available to all of us, which is so great that sexual energy is the creative life force. And learning to tap into that I really do think is the, is the, is one of the keys to a lot of the sex that we're all craving but we just don't know how. So that's what I recommend.

I love it that you talked about sinking breaths and that's something that either partner can do. Just be aware of your other of your partner's breath and just kind of match your exhale and inhale with theirs. That really does line things up in a way. And where do they teach that? I've seen that in various courses I've taken and whatnot. But outside of some relatively esoteric stuff, you don't learn that in high school. Sex ed, they never tell you that, but it seems like that's table stakes if you want to connect with someone, especially if it's someone relatively new to you. But even if you've been with someone for a long time, syncing up like that seems to just magically open the gates, so to speak, and then things just progress a lot more easily.

Yeah, it's true. And it is kind of magic. And I want to just give everyone this little tip that. And this is something that I had to learn as well, that there's a lot of times that sex starts happening, right? And we're kind of like, it sounds like maybe someone you dated where they disassociate, not because of you. It's a habit to disassociate. But it's okay to stop sex. Like, I think that we get especially. I'm gonna speak for women sometimes, too, that we get in this point where if we're with a man, that if sex gets started, we can't stop it. They've got the erection, we gotta keep going. We gotta please him. It's more performative. But I love to encourage people to think of sex as not a linear activity where, like, we kiss, we make out the thing, penis goes in vagina, we explode. Like, it's so not what sex could be. So I want to give people permission to say, if sex gets going sometimes I'll do this. I'll say to my partner, I'll say, like, you know, I. It's moving too fast or it's not where I went. Let's reset for a minute, and then we'll stop, and then we'll breathe in the middle of it, and then we'll just stop and breathe for 5 seconds or 10 seconds or a minute. And like you said, it immediately grounds us, resets us, and then we start again. Our sexuality didn't go anywhere. We're not leaving to go out to dinner. Like, it's still there. It's contained, but now it's controlled. And we're much more connected. So I do want to know that this is available to you now, the ability to somebody and to reset and get out of a. A place in sex that doesn't feel as settling to you in a moment.

It also helps because if you do that, you'll probably have sex for a lot longer, which can be a really good thing.

That's true, too. So I think we rush through sex sometimes, oftentimes because the male orgasm, the female orgasm is on different time clocks. So I think if you are a Pleaser or a woman who's more performative when it comes to sex, which is more common than I like to, which is, again, one of my missions on the planet is to get to be less so. But it's going, it's going. His orgasm's escalating. He's about to go over. Like, I. There's no room for mine, for me to feel mine. So finding partners who understand this, learning to work together on both of your pleasure is key.

Well, I mean, I have a small sample size here, being a guy, but it feels like most of the time guys can get there. So, like, focusing on that is probably not where you want to focus first, because that's likely to happen.

Exactly. Dave. Men, there's something called the orgasm gap, and I work tirelessly to close it. But the orgasm gap is twofold. All men are gonna orgasm in most situations. Like 99.9% they're gonna orgasm. We don't need to worry about their orgasm. But for people with vulvas, it can take anywhere between 20 minutes to 40 minutes, and men can take between six and nine minutes. So there is the gap in time. So you have to bridge that gap so we can all get there. But then there's also the gap in that men have them and women don't. Like, we don't need to worry about that. Right. But again, this is education. This is why I'm glad we're talking about this. Because a lot of people don't really know that to us, we know this. But for other people, women just feel very inadequate and something's wrong with them because it's taking too long and are we going to get there? And since I didn't know how to ask my partner for what I wanted, he's not doing the thing that I need and, you know, becomes messy.

About eight years ago, I published the Taoist equations for male ejaculation. And I tried to disprove them because I thought it sounded stupid. And so the Daoists are looking at longevity. They wanted to live forever. They were immortality seeking. And they looked at sexual energy as something that you can waste or you can cultivate. And they look at that as part of longevity. It's different than tantra, even though there's an overlap between the two. And the equation was age in years -7 divided by 4. So they said, figure out that number. It might be seven days or five days or 12 days. And you only ejaculate that often or less, but not more. And I thought that's the biggest Bunch of crap I've ever heard. So I'm going to disprove it. So for a year I tracked my orgasm and ejaculation and sex and masturbation frequency. And I plotted it against my daily happiness, like, how much do I like my life? And I published that in, I think in Game Changers, the book. And it's kind of an embarrassing graph. It's like, well, here I was going to do the 30 day. They say if you want to live forever, just ejaculate once every 30 days. Keep your orgasm as a man to under an hour. Like impossible and stupid. But I'll give it a try. So going 30 days was a lot of work. And so there's on the graph, it's like, oh, you know, 22 days in, oops. Okay, let's start that experiment over again. But what I found was every time there's an ejaculation, the next day there's an ejaculation hangover because your testosterone drops precipitously. And this is why, you know, will you still respect me in the morning? And all of that. And a lot of guys know what I'm talking about. So I've, since that time, I don't ejaculate all the time when I have sex because it actually affects my physical performance and my wellbeing and just how, how much I like my life. So there are women, like I, I warn them, like, you know, the odds are I probably won't eject, but don't worry, I'm still having orgasms like this. This is good. But it, it really makes some people feel insecure. By the way, I sound like I'm sleeping around a lot. I'm not, I'm just dating.

But yeah, people. But most people don't really understand the Taoist principles of circulating the energy that you can have an orgasm without ejaculation, that you can orgasm in your body. I think that that's. And for women who are measuring their, their successual performance on their man's pleasure, I get why that could be a little bit confusing. Women might go to a place of I didn't turn you on enough. What did I do wrong? You know what I mean? It might not really. I mean, I'm sure you explain it in a way that they can't argue. They understand.

I do my best. I mean, so far I don't think I've, you know, created any trauma, lack of ejaculation. But hey, who knows, right?

Yeah, no, I think, but I, I, I, I love that Practice. That's definitely been around. We, I've. I think we've actually talked about this before too. We did, at dinner. Yeah. But I do think I have a little bit about it in the book because people are always curious about it. But I think that for men hearing this, they think I could never not ejaculate during sex. What would be the point? I don't really understand it. But what you're saying is you really did track your. What was it? Your happiness is.

You use the word happy, your contentment every day. I just had a score from like 1 to 10. Like, how much do I like my life? Like a combination of, you know, what I'm doing as an entrepreneur, as a father, as a husband, you know, basically, just how much do I like my life? And it was really weird that it would go from, you know, a seven or an eight or nine down to like a three or four for a day or two. And what I found was, that's so weird. But I have a lot more sex when I don't ejaculate. It's like, oh, can we go again later today? But if you ejaculate, you're just not interested for a day or two, right? So it turns out intimacy went up as ejaculations went down. And you're doubtlessly aware of all the research that orgasms for women do not follow these rules. It doesn't deplete women the way it depletes men, right?

It's not a deplete. It is true. Now for women it can be. It can be regenerative, you know, for sure, or it can be, you know, life enhancing, nourishing. And I think I always get this, what is it? Like, women can have like 326 orgasms a day, like according to Taoist principles, or we can have in a week. There's a lot more that we can have. But for men it is less so. So finding partners who can kind of work with you on this is, is going to be. Is an interesting place. Place to be in the world.

I want to know the differences for tapping into sexual energy for men and women. And I want to go with how do women do it? But then how do men do it? Or is it the same?

All right, well, there's a few things to address there. I mean, look, in my own personal experiences, before I read anything about sex or really, you know, studied anything, I had in my own experiences, these sense of sex being this portal for transformation, right? Like this idea, like there were other states of consciousness that would open to me. I would emerge out of my sexual encounters feeling really inspired and more of myself. I used to use the term self realization. That's how I felt. It's like these parts of me that have been superimposed culturally that weren't really me, that I'd adapted over the years, fell away, and I became more of my true self. And so I already had this instinctive sense that sex was much more powerful than we were being led to believe. And then when I read about Taoism and Tantra, those things just echoed the experiences that I'd already been having. And then years later, I was, yeah, definitely tickled to find that lone chapter 10 in Napoleon's what is it? Think and Grow rich book about sex and transmutation that's written in 1927, right? So he's interviewing all of these moguls about how they can become their. Their patterns of success to try to give a model to other people. And then he has this all important chapter about sex and using your sexual energy as a creative power source. And so all of these things have echoed the. As I said, what was opening up to me through my own personal experiences and then through my own studies, especially in Taoist philosophy, using more techniques like, say, harnessing breathwork. So look, the big barometric question that I ask people is, does sex leave you feeling energized, revitalized, transformed, and like it changed your life. And if the answer is no, then you're doing it wrong. And that's not a moral judgment as it is as much as it is to say that there's a way of having sex that gives you energy or takes away energy, right? That leaves you feeling like you want to go and run a marathon. And that's the big question I give to men, right? Is if you're practicing breathing techniques and recirculating your sexual energy after you have sex, whether you orgasm or not. Because I think there's still ways that men can have orgasms. But if they're recirculating that energy, they'll find a very minimal loss of energy that they want to go to the gym. They literally want to go for a run rather than passing out, which tends to be the default action that happens after a man has had an orgasm. And then so in that whole Tantra daoist philosophy, the concept is that men lose a lot of energy through ejaculation. And what I've seen and witnessed in my own relationships and with clients over the years is that if men are taught to breathe and recirculate that energy, then they can, even if they have an orgasm, they will lose a minimum of energy. Right. So there would be a question about whether if you're really deeply practicing this recirculation and breath work, whether you are truly losing energy. I suspect you still are, but much less than if you weren't practicing this conscious breathing. And then for women, there's a concept that women lose a lot of that energy, not so much through orgasms and unconscious sex, but through.