The Neuroscience of Sex – Jamie Wheal, Part 1 with Dave Asprey : 845

When Jamie Wheal comes on Bulletproof Radio, we always get into some mind bending topics. He's a friend who specializes in neuroanthropology. What the heck is that? Means it brings together culture, biology and psychology into a single field. Jamie is a co founder of the international Flow Genome Project of which I was the first investor. And they work on training people for the ultimate human performance. He looks at the nitty gritty between science and human potential with a lot of precision. And that's why our interview about hedonic engineering ended up being a multi episode miniseries for you. Because it was more than would fit in one episode or fit in your head all at one time. We pull apart his book Recapture the Rapture, Rethinking God's sex and death in a world that's lost its mind. Jamie goes to a lot of places you probably wouldn't think about, all in search of the flow state. Things like the fascinating sex survey he conducted with couples or views on sexy biohacking and nerdy kink. We've got some deep survival circuits and powerful evolutionary drivers when it comes to sex and death and everything in between. So if you care about neuroscience and psychology, listen to these episodes. You're going to like what you hear.

Bulletproof Radio. A state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today is going to be a lot of fun because, well, we have our live audience from the Upgrade collective who are here to answer or to ask some questions for you. But we're going to be talking about a book called Recapture the Rapture by my friend Jamie Wheal. Rethinking God's Sex and Death In a World that's Lost Its mind. This is perhaps the hardest title you could ever put on a book that you want people to read. As an author who's got only four New York Times bestsellers, I'm like, okay, rapture, you just like triggered half the religious people and dude, let's put death on a cover. Like, death is the hardest thing to sell. It's harder to sell than fasting. What were you thinking, Jamie, naming your book Recapture the Rapture?

Yeah, well, I mean, funnily enough, it came to me even before writing Stealing Fire and I was just like, oh shit, that's a rad podcast title. Like someday maybe I'll do a podcast and I'll call it that. Like Recapture the Rapture. End of times for stellar minds. As I was just thinking, like just interviewing fascinating, interesting people, you know, and then, um, after, after that. And as the world become increasingly strange and wobbly, it increasingly seemed like the idea that rapture ideologies of all stripes, not just fundamentalist religious ones, but also techno utopian ones, basically any ones that are 1% solutions that kind of share a sort of underlying structure. Together, those rapture ideologies have been hijacking our collective conversation. So it felt really, really critical, like, hey, we need to reclaim the story of what's happening and where do we all go now together. Because 1% solutions, no matter how you slice that 1%, are fundamentally sociopathic. Right. He's like, it's the elect. And it could be the elect that's moral and ethical or spiritual, the true believers. It could be the meritocratic, the best and the brightest. It could be the ones with financial resources. But however you cut it, the rest of us, you know, need a story for us to live into. And that seemed really important.

It is important, and I should share some of your background with people. You're one of the founders of the Flow Genome Project. I brought you guys in for the second annual biohacking conference years ago to help create some of the experiential things which may or may not have involved one person doing two somersaults unintentionally through the air and landing on a vendor's table. But everyone was okay at the end of the day.

Amazingly talented football player.

Yeah, it was an unintended thing. We were creating a flow state by creating unusual swings. And you guys have been studying flow state for a long time. And I was, as far as I know, the first backer of the Flow Genome Project way back in the day.

Yeah.

And you've been studying hedonic engineering since I've known you, which is probably, what, eight years now? Yeah, but no one knows what hedonic engineering is, but it's basically neuroscience plus optimal psychology.

And.

And you've clearly got a big brain, and you've put together some really new thinking for this book, which I think makes it. It'll actually be a really intriguing but relatively intense conversation we'll have because you talk about God, sex and death, and we're going to try and fit that into an hour, hour and change here and get into your thoughts on it. How do you manage to fit all that into a book? You do weave it together kind of artfully, but, I mean, you're kind of going across all these places. What's the connection between God's sex and death?

Well, I mean, I think I have to give a hat tip to Old David Data, who back in the day once said, you know, those are the only three conversations worth having. God, sex and death. So I actually, I wrote the title and pitched and sold the book to our shared publisher at Hopper Wave. Right? Yeah, with, with some general ideas that I was going to be in that neck of the woods, but by the end of the book I'm like, holy shit. I actually kind of did that, you know, like actually devoted relatively even treatment to each of those categories because it seemed to me that both belief and some sense of awe and inspiration were essential. Some sense of ability to heal and mend were non negotiable, like just toolkit for antifragile humans. Otherwise you just take your hits and you get left by the side of the road. And a sense of both, you know, the sort of, you know, man's search for meaning kind of thing. We're clever monkeys who figured out that like, here we are, holy shit, we're alive and we have conscious thought and one day we die. And what do we do with that? So what do we do with our kind of existential dread? What do we do with our collective existential crises? But even more sort of powerfully and beautifully, if you can get the, the God in the sex pot going in particular and a few other, a few other key ingredients, can we, can we die and be reborn a second time? Right. So can we actually, you know, in a 21st century contemporary way, not bundled in tons of mythologies, can we actually unpack and revive the death rebirth rituals that were true in indigenous shamanic traditions? They were true in the ancient Greek Lucinian mysteries pretty much. You look all the way all around the world, death rebirth, you know, die, die before you die was one of.

The kind of like deleting Facebook.

Yeah, exactly. That's a start. That's a start. And, and that idea, that, and I didn't kind of realize it until I'd written the book, but I was like, holy. Actually, what I was able to assemble from all these fascinating researchers and scientists around the world is actually the neurophysiological protocol, you know, plus or minus. Not everybody turned on all the levers all in the same way, but pretty much the neuroscience behind the most ancient initiatory mystery practices that humans have ever invented, which is that death rebirth practice.

This is important stuff. Rites of passage have been taken away from our youth. We used to go through this on a regular basis. It was part of becoming an adult. This is the vision quest thing. In fact, I wrote about that in fastest way I Went on a vision quest. I don't know. I felt like it was the right thing to do. Robert Cialdini was just on who wrote that amazing book Influence, and he talks about, why do we have hazing rituals? Why are they built into our existence and we can't get rid of them because they're wired in, just like sex is wired in. And it's not, say hazing is good. It's not. Except that it seems to work. And it does some things for us societally that you wouldn't expect. So you dug in on this and you broke your book into sort of three things. You've got choose your own apocalypse, and you've got the alchemist cookbook and ethical cult building. So I thought about it and I said we could touch on each of those or we could go deep on one area. This one of the F words I like. Now, in my work, there's four F words that drive all biology. There's in order. This. This works for bacteria, it works for whales. It doesn't matter what you are. It doesn't matter if you're a tree. Number one, fear, Run away from, kill, or hide from scary things. If you're not doing that, Number two, eat everything. That would be feed.

Oh, feed. There we go. It's like, where's the F word? Yeah, okay.

Okay. Number three is something else all life has to do to stay around for billions of years. That's also an F word. You getting that one?

Oh, are we onto the part yet?

I know that was fertility. God, you're just dropping F bombs. Yes. So. And then the other one is friends.

Right?

The community building and all that. So if that's what all life eventually ends up doing. I've written a lot about how to disrupt big Food, started a company that did that, and I've touched on fear and a lot of the works on my neuroscience stuff. And I've had a few podcasts about sex. Right. Had a professional dominatrix on and the sex done, guys. And I think it's time to go in, to go deeper in what you've written about the sex part of that. Because some people, when they have sex, they meet God. Some people, they call it the little death. In fact, that's one of the nine kinds of orgasms women can have. So what made you put that in this book, though? So we're going to. I'm going to interview more about sex than anything else because, hey, it's an intriguing concept, and I don't think I've balanced the show Out. Enough with that. But why, why did you go there?

Well, I mean, I can give you my PR coached answer or I can, or I can give you what actually happened.

Okay, I want both so we can compare truth versus reality.

Yeah, well, I mean technically this is late in the book tour game and so I suppose I always get a little looser at this space than in the beginning. Well, this book is, it's almost as if sort of in fact a good friend said, hey, this reads like Aleister Crowley hired Malcolm Gladwell as his ghostwriter.

What a great description, right?

Like it comes across as, yeah, like, like sort of really thoughtful, heady, like, like, like non narrative, non fiction. I'm going to meet all these people and this is going to happen and we're going to learn these things along the way. But that's not actually kind of not really how it happened at all. It happened because my wife Julie and I came back from Burning man one year for the first time we'd ever gone together and came back and we had a full day and a half before the kids were home from the grandparents. So we had our own little decompression party at our house and we found ourselves getting sucked down this rabbit hole of experience. And it created a series of profoundly non ordinary states and, and, and information. And, and it began disclosing itself to us as like this is what, this is, this is how it works. This is how not to do it, this is how you can do it. And, and effectively it became this autodidactic self disclosing protocol basically what, what we, you know, could loosely call the sexual yoga of becoming. And every time we would get into those spaces, I'm like, holy. You know, because like my, I don't know how you go, I don't know whether you do research first and then you experiment. I usually just like fling myself into life until I get a hit. And then I'm like, okay, what the hell was that about? Right? So that's that kind of notion of like neuro anthropology. Like look like, find something interesting. Now look back for historical precedents so you can see it across, you know, across time and cultures and then add the neuro level. What is the psychology and the biology underneath the hood of these things that would explain their persistence across time and space? And so that's kind of what we did and the numbers of time and you. So like the research on delta wave states, the research on gas blended static apnea and breathing protocols, all these things came from finding ourselves into an experience that was actually Teaching us. And so it was a little bit like Kirk to Enterprise. And we'd come. We'd come out of these state experiences and I'd record them on my phone and I'd be like, holy shit, eureka. Like, here's another piece. And this went on for about five years. And it was just. We didn't discuss it, we didn't decide to do it. It literally just is something that happened in our life. And after, you know, I don't know what, 30, 40 collected hours of these snippets from that domain or realm, that information layer, I was like, I was like, actually, I think, I think I have to write this down. She's like, you're crazy. Don't tell anyone. You know, and then it would show up again. And it would show up again. And I'm like, no, I think this is the thing. I think I actually need to share this. And so it actually. Autodidactic is the best word I can come. It was self teaching and disclosing and I just did my best to get out of the way. And so you asked about the three parts of the book which was, you know, choose your own apocalypse was kind of like situational assessment. Where are we? Why are things so wonky? And why aren't we rising to the occasion right now? And what, you know, what ought we or must we do? So that just felt necessary to provide any kind of shared reality. And on ramp to get to the Alchemist Cookbook, which was the core of what had kind of just shown up in our life. And then the ethical cult building piece was just. Even from writing Stealing Fire four years ago to now, it really seemed like we were increasingly in a sort of space of like a children's crusade. It seemed like everybody started to, you know, break sticks off bottle rockets and just lighting them on fire and hoping they all go where they're supposed to. And sure enough, even in the writing of the book, you know, the super spikes in pandemic, QAnon, all sorts of things. There's been, you know, Wild country with the Story of Osho on Netflix. There's been the NXIVM story. So like, cultic tendencies and our yearning for these things all seem to be off the Richter scale.

So even have movies like Game Changers, which is like a super cult, right?

Which is that one.

That's that weird vegan cult movie.

Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. In fact, I think I remember you posting about it, didn't you?

I just offended a bunch of vegans who. Listen, I'm Sorry, guys, I'm just teasing you. But no, there is a keto cult and there is a vegan cult and they're both actual cults in my book.

Yeah.

At least in my belief. Yeah.

So, so, so bottom line is I felt like, oh, well, normally this would be three really good ideas and I'll write three books and I'll milk it over 10 years. Yeah. And it just felt like I was like, I'm not sure we have 10 years to just kind of dawdle and dribble things out. And so it felt like I think I need to bundle this and put it all together in a story that.

Works for folks that explains it a lot because it's tough. And I attempted to do something similar with, with my book unrelated to the documentary, also called Game Changers, where I'm like, I'm going to interview a lot of smart people and find what they agree with. There's 40 something topics in there. But it was like, if you're, if you didn't want to spend 40 years looking at each topic, you know, if I'd have had this book when I was 20, what would I do? So I think there's value to readers in having enough things if you can weave them together and you do it really nicely. And one of the things that I, I've never seen before that I thought was of value is we've all heard probably the stoned ape hypothesis that, oh, we ate mushrooms or some other plant psychedelic and it made us smart a long time ago. And I've actually had Terrence McKenna's brother, Dennis McKenna on the show. That's Terrence McKenna's theory. And you're saying, no, no, no, it wasn't mushrooms that made us smart, it was sex. How does that work?

Yeah, well, I mean, funnily enough, I mean, for starters, right. I mean, that was food of the gods. That was. Terrence put that out in the kind of mid-90s. And it was always like a definitely tenuous kind of stony late night theory. Right. And it sort of.

I read it underneath, like those velvet paintings with black ones.

Yeah. And so, you know, intriguing, super cool and possible. But yeah, maybe, Right. Just never could be more than a maybe. And then I started really thinking it through and then just did some research. And funnily enough, like Jared diamond, like the Guns, Germs and Steel, Pulitzer winner, actually wrote a book called why Sex is Fun. And he was one of the threads into this story. Like, what is the evolutionary impact of sexuality on human consciousness? And because one of the things, I mean, I always thought back to like the Blue Lagoon, like that Brook Shields movie from back in the day. And it was just like, you know, that story was the two shipwrecked kids and then they grow up and then they, you know, fall in love and they get busy and then they have a baby and then they kind of get kicked out of the garden and, you know, you know, the normal puritanical subplot, but that idea of like, hey, hominids, primates, all animals, you know, for millions of years with no instruction manual figured out how to get it on, and it's not the most obvious thing. And so you realize, you realize, holy smokes, that, you know, ergo, that must mean a metric shit ton of neurochemical and hormonal and behavioral incentives to figure this out. And so that was the original inquiry. And Jared diamond makes a fascinating case. He's like, look, when we think of the evolution of human consciousness, most of the time people think about walking upright, they think about tool, tool making fire and language. And his idea was like. He's like, actually, you have to consider sexuality because we have an incredibly anthropocentric view of human sex. We just take what we do as normative. And what the rest of the animal kingdom does is weird and strange. And we watch that on the Discovery Channel or with a David Attenborough voiceover. And he's like, right? He's like, actually, it's the other way around. We are freaks. Not just compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, but even compared to our primate cousins. We are so unusual in women. Women having full breasts even when they're not lactating, like, that's weird. That's extra muscle mass. It impedes movement, fleeing, hunting, all sorts of things, but we have it. Women have shapely hips and additional fat storage. Men have, you know, something like four to six times the additional penis length of any other primates and apes, you know, gorillas who are 500 pounds that could bench press a house, have a one and a half inch willy, you know, and. And his idea was, it's a signaling display, it's a mating display to say, I am so healthy and, and, and happy that I can pack ounces of protoplasm uselessly onto my penis. Frequent female orgasm, all of these things, you know, copulation outside of estrus or fertility, like for animals. It's not like when Hobbes said that, you know, life is nasty, brutish and short. It's an equally good descriptor of sex in the animal kingdom, you know, it's. Generally speaking, they ignore it until they're briefly consumed by it. Right. And you know, even something. And it goes away, and then it goes away. But we are sexually and erotically oriented almost all the time. And so the thesis there is like. Well, and you know, and this loops all the way to Rick Doblin and the maps. MDMA studies. Right.

Which he's been on the show too.

Right, right. Which, which is holy moly. Like, if you were to introduce a practice, substance or behavior to radically shift hominid consciousness, it would need to be widely available and distributed. It would need to be positively reinforcing.

Right.

And it would need to potently create the conditions you're searching for. And, you know, mushrooms grow lots of places, but not all places. You know, in this. Yes, there's migration, there's all these things, but, you know, it's kind of, kind of dodgy to hang your entire hat on that one alone. And you realize that prolonged partnership, coupling, extended sexuality, that results in brain change, that results in the cascade of neurochemistry, including prolactin, vasopressin, serotonin, oxytocin, dopamine, anandamide, kind of the, like, all the, the big swingers for peak state experiences all arise during. During sex, coitus and orgasm. So you're like, holy moly. Like, that is. Seems like a very strong candidate for. For persistent and shifted brain state and, and cognitive change over time.

So, so you're with Jared diamond and you think that it was really our. The experiences we have during sex drove larger brains and that that was maybe a more likely candidate than mushrooms.

Yeah.

So where does that lead us then? I mean, I know you look at traditional Chinese medicine, all the old, all the ancient practices around the world have a strong sex component that the Catholic Church has done its best to remove, but they're, they're still there. If you look at any of the literature, any of the old writings.

Yeah. As did like Napoleon Hill. Like, there's, there's, there's secret stuff behind everybody's. Yeah.

I, There were three laws in, in my Game Changer book around sexual. And it's different for men and women, but that, that if you ignore that, you, you don't show up as a human being all the way. So I, I was intrigued that you, you tied this stuff in. Especially later in a different part of the book, you talk about cults. You earlier mentioned Nexium and all, and it seems like there's this. I'm going to call It a. A secret or a hidden world of sex where most people don't talk about it, you know, at dinner parties, unless it's that kind of a dinner party. So there's all sorts of hidden things. How did you get to that for, for writing a book? I mean, you talked about your post Burning man experience. People have all kinds of weird sex of Burning man. And I don't mean that in a bad way, just that it's, you know, it's a different, different world there. So, you know, how did you get enough data in order to put this out in a book?

Well, I mean there was, there was a, you know, as I said, I mean it was all told probably eight years of personal, deliberate and intentional experimentation and mapping and modeling this and doing the research. Somewhere around the five year mark was like, okay, I think this is a functional protocol. Began sharing it with other couples and saying, you know, like stable, grounded, you know, resilient couples who were kind of ready for a next step in their life. And then we sort of did a very informal, I mean you could, you know, mastermind is a corny word, but like some sort of, you know, here we are, we're all conducting these experiments in our own lives, coming back and sharing and swapping notes. Like, did you see what I see? You know, did you guys, what, what results are you guys getting? And then after talking with Nicole Prowse, the and I don't have you had her on your show, the Kinsey Institute. She's rad and is one of the more cutting edge sexuality researchers that I'm aware of. She, she was at Kinsey Harvard, then UCLA and then started her own private think tank because of all the controversies. But she helped us think through what would the articulation of a dedicated formal study because it was like, okay, this stuff seems interesting anecdotally, subjectively enough people are having congruent experiences that yes, there's a there there, but now let's try and measure it. And so that's where we recruited a dozen couples for a 12 week study on effectively what was a sort of choose your own adventure. Hedonic engineering is kind of the big category. Sexual yoga. Becoming was kind of our placeholder for like the all the bells and whistles and said, okay, engage in a consistent, pretty minimal daily practice together. And then there's kind of a mix and match toy box of what else you might want to explore, experiment and work with. And then tried to really check like, hey, can we, how would we measure this? Right? How would we track it beyond just personal subjective reports. And so that's when, and this is kind of thing like I haven't got to talk about this on a podcast with anybody because nobody likes to go as deep as you do on this stuff. But this is the thing I'm most geeked about, right? Because the things we were tracking on the how do we recreate, how do we help amend the meaning crisis, right, Was that we all need healing, inspiration and connection, right? The fancy Greek terms is, you know, is catharsis for healing, ecstasis for peak states, and communitas for, you know, deep connection. And I was like, okay, either this helps those things or it's probably not worth bothering with because it's also volatile and problematic. Just let people stick to their knitting. And so we picked, for the ecstasis measures, we picked Susan Jackson's flow Scale inventory, which basically just measures from day to day, how often are you in a peak state or the zone or whatever you would call it, or a flow state. So that was just easy for people to kind of check along the way for like micro level state change. And then we also used The Johns Hopkins MEQ 30, the mystical experience Questionnaire, which is what Roland Griffith first developed to retest the Good Friday experiment. And they've been using as one of their benchmarks for all of their psilocybin research. So that was pretty good. We got kind of got a high and a low measure of how interesting of realm and zones are you getting into or not? And then we also wanted to check healing. And so that was the PCL5, which is a self administered trauma score. The gold standard is the CAPS scale, which is administered by a psychiatrist. So that was kind of a little too clunky for our uses. And then also overnight HRV via oura ring. So just having people track that and just saying, okay. Yeah, yeah. And so basically saying, okay, what is your accumulated lifelong trauma as indicated by the PCL5? And then also what's your physiology doing day to day, week to week over this time period? So again, a kind of a high and a low measure.

So this is a pretty darn structured study of what do you want to call it? Ecstatic sex? Religious sex? Spiritual sex? No, I wouldn't call.

I mean, I cringe at all of those things.

Right, because that's. Yeah, exactly. I don't know the right, the right words. What's the name for it that you like?

Well, I mean, I think that like, like I said, the high level hedonic engineering and the subcategory of this particular practice would be, you know, you could call it just simply sexual fitness, or you could call it the sexual yoga of becoming, because that's ultimately what it sort of feels like. And that was a name that actually some of the participants coined. And it was like, okay, that seems pretty good. You like, that's a. That's a decent. Because it is deeply embodied, involves body work. It involves fascia integration, spinal mobility, and it's body work. Right. And so what we wanted to provide for people was a. An approach to harnessing their sexual and, you know, basically their integrated nervous system. It just also happens to be sexual. It's not that it is sexual. Right. And John Lilly back in the 50s, figured this out. He's like, look, the primate ecstatic circuitry maps one to one with the sexual reproductive network because nature's efficient and the blue lagoon, we have to do this, right? So nature poured the kitchen sink in, making sure we make more of us.

If there's no human in there, I promise you, we're going to run away from things that want to eat us. We're going to eat things that are tasty, and we're going to have sex like every. Everything alive does that. They have to. So, yeah, it's in there.

Exactly. And, and so, you know, and it's also critical to acknowledge the profound amount, like, evolution is amoral. It doesn't give a. Who we stood up, you know, beside and what we promised until death do us pod. And like, we are just we, you know, by our default setting is to be puppets on the string of an indifferent and utterly amoral evolution. And it creates most of our suffering, you know, from, from Helen of Troy and wars to sexual violence and trauma to divorces and, you know, and infidelity, you name it, right? We are just dashed on the rocks of evolutionary imperative.

Unless I try explaining this to my young teens, you know, 11 and 14 and, and, you know, not. Not yet into dating. And I'm just saying, like, seriously, people go to war over this stuff. And like, how could that be that interesting?

Yeah.

Like, imagine a piece of cake that's the most delicious ever that's sitting on the table in front of you, and you want to eat it all the time, but you're not allowed to eat the cake. Like, what will you do for the cake? And I'm trying to express the amount of pressure that's there, and Helen Troy is the prime example. And this is how humans are wired. The thing is, there's 7 billion of us on the planet and you're writing about God, sex and death. Is there room for all of this ecstatic sexual yoga, or are we just going to have 18 billion people if we all do this?

Well, I mean, I think that's the key to snipping the strings of evolution. So they were no longer puppets. Because, because to acknowledge that is like, I think it's really critical, right? Because none of us come to our sexual histories and our sexual experience without tons of baggage and wounds. A lot of scar tissue.

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But just that sense of, of, hey, can we reclaim our, our birthright to be sovereign over our own lived experience? And, and can we. Kind of almost like a judo move, can you, can. Can you take all of that imperative that has created tons of impulsive trauma and suffering? And can we jump the tracks and use those very same impulses for our own unfolding, for our access to, on inspiration, for our ability to defrag our nervous systems and metabolize our grief? And four ways to bond in profound and meaningful ways with each other. And so the final bit of this day, I laid out the first four metrics, right? And then the final, the final two were communitas. Like if you're, you know, if you're going to spend time with a special friend, right, do you like them more? Are you better connected? Because anybody who's Been in a long term relationship knows that, right? You know, the first two to, you know, one year to three years is hot and heavy, absolutely fantastic. And that, you know, and that once again, that's evolution is saying, it's saying just enough time to conceive, gestate and wean a small child. And then all the, all the lust and attraction hormones shut down. You're suddenly in the grind. You've got trash, you've got kids, you've got school buses, you've got bills. And you know, and we just get into the grind and the seven year itch and then everybody, you know, and then, then in comes the lure, fidelity, all these things. So how can we take this most primary and central driver of existence and use it to replenish the well of family units of long term and hopefully stable partnerships? Because the rest of life's kind of a bitch. And we have this capacity, you know, like, I mean, you know, our genitals. Let's just take this, right? I mean, in fact, you know, Wilder Penfield, right, The, the, the one of the OG neuroscientists who came up with the God, you know, the God helmet precursors and all that, right? He has this famous God helmet in the back, right? He has this famous little dude, he calls it the homunculus. And it's this weird little human shaped guy whose, whose limbs and appendages are sized based on the number of neurons they have. So he's got really big lips and he's got really big hands and feet, right? But he missed out because it's our junk, right? I mean, you know, the, the, the glands of a man's penis has 7,000 nerve endings. A woman's clitoris has 8,000 nerve endings. This is the most neurologically dense zones in our entire body. And wouldn't you know, if you put them together, lightning happens. So you're like, can we do a little bit more of that? A little bit more deliberately and intentionally never mind. Romance. Like everybody's in like have your romantic relationship. But the notion of sexual fitness as an integrated part of like the human user manual seems really helpful. So we also wanted to check. We basically did the intimacy of self and other test, which is basically a series of then overlapping circles. So like two circles are like this. We don't talk, we don't feel connected at all. Mild overlap, sometimes on a Friday night maybe, and then two complete overlaps. We are one and we're in full communion. So couples were able to score how close and how far apart they felt and then the PANAS scale, which is one that has been used by a lot of Harvard researchers, which is the positive and negative affect scale, we just indexed on the positive half of that and basically said, do you feel happier? Do you feel more content? So that was the six. And then basically just wanted to check that over, you know, long enough to get some meaningful momentum, but not so long that you get a drop off in participation and the kind of thing comes unraveled.

How much time each day did the participants have to do all the things you were telling them to do around sexual yoga?

Yeah, I mean, it was cyclic, so not the same every day. There was a baseline of 15 to 30 minutes a day. So that was your first commitment. And basically we said, hey, look, step number one is simply to commit to sexual yoga as a practice, not as romance. Because for most of us, sexuality is either an exclamation point on the end of an awesome day or it's a bargaining tool to dispense or withhold to get something else you want. Right. And that's how most of us. That's kind of our default relating to it. And instead go, oh, no. Treat this like push ups. Treat this like flossing your teeth. I don't wait to floss my teeth because I look like Potsy Weber on Happy Days and I've got shiny pearly whites. I'm like, yeehaw. I'm floss my teeth today. Right. I floss my teeth because I believe in the long term aggregate benefits of doing so. Right. The same with going to the gym or anything else. Right. So first of all, move it into that category. Not an out of the realm of psychosexual politics. All right? And then once people could do that, say, just, hey. And this was based on Nicole Prowse's research on female orgasm in particular is prescription pharmaceutical. So what happens if a woman has recurring and consistent neurophysiological erotic stimulation? And can that create some form of shift in her physiology and her neurochemistry? And does that improve mood, reduce pain, decrease anxiety, all. All the good and happy things? So that was the baseline, 15 to 30 minutes a day, and then two days a week.

This is for both partners doing it together.

Yeah. And then two. Two days of 60 minutes of sexuality. And again, because, you know, it's very hard to get anybody to do anything, let alone, you know, like just track their meals, let alone something as squishy, personal and intimate as sexual practice. So we were just. Everything was liberating structures. We're like, here's the toolkit. Here's the baseline. Mix and match as you go. Report back for yourself. And so two days a week of 60 minutes of open sexuality. And there were several protocols, you know, none of them deliberate. Like, they were all deliberately simple so that people wouldn't, you know, like try to learn fancy tango or flamenco and then give up, right? So we wanted everybody to feel comfortable. And then a 90 to 120 minute session, effectively, we, we couch that as your sort of, as your Sabbath practice. Like reclaim a secular Sabbath. Give yourself, you know, if you think of the old church, you know, maximum of tithing, right? Which was give one, give, give a tenth of your resources to the church. So it's like, okay, well, if we reinstitute that concept of a tithe on a 40 day, 40 hour work week, that's four hours, that's half a day. How about Sunday morning, right? Like, like just block it. Or if it doesn't, if that doesn't work for you, find another time that does. But that, that was the notion. And then give yourself anywhere from, you know, 90 minutes to three hours to do a deeper, intensive dive. And that's when we would start layering in the additional elements, which could include breath work, which could include gas assisted breath work, which, which included, with functional medical oversight, different compounds. So everything from cannabinoids to oxygen to carbogen, which is a carbon dioxide oxygen blend, to oxytocin and even to intranasal oxytocin and ketamine. And so that was only a handful of folks that kind of put all the pieces together. But the folks that did had some profound and powerful experiences. They're like, oh my gosh, this is putting us outside of time and space into a realm of heightened information and inspiration. We're able to do intensive and highly effective body work. We're able to take turns loading up each other's nervous systems. It'll be kind of like a spotter climber situation, right? So lob each other. In fact, the, the, the best analogy that somebody wrote was it's like the vomit comet, you know, like that plane that does the parabolic arcs and then you're a zero G for 30 seconds. They were like, this is just like the vomit Comet, but, you know, but for the cosmos and the better we get at priming each other. So you cultivate both sexual energy, sensation, pleasure, pain, all of those things. You combine that with breath work and then static apnea with gas assists and all those kind of things, and then you spend whatever, you know, A minute to five to ten minutes in this utterly numinous space that typically is only accessed at the peak of heroic psychedelic trips. So you're like, wait a second, this is household materials. Why I call it the Alchemist Cookbook. Right? It was like how to Blow Yourself to God Consciousness using household materials. Because my sense of the Psychedelic renaissance, for instance, which, you know, obviously know and love Rick Doblin. No, and love and support maps. But my sense is, is that is, you know, it's. It's a big, slow moving, highly worthwhile project, but very expensive, very clunky, subject to capture by both regulatory capture and market capture, and probably not ever going to be distributed around the world to the bottom 4 billion. Yep. So how do we do that?

It is absolutely true that things like a breathing practice and things like advanced sexual practices can put you in altered states, at least as altered, at least in my experience, as any hallucinogenic drug that's out there. So these are free. They're hard to control unless you just use shame to control them. And that's why I like the amount of rigor behind the science you put out in Recapture of the Rapture, because you're saying, like, well, let's look at what all this stuff looks like. And you go into some of the history too, and you talk about a Dakini. Now, for people who don't know that that's not a kind of swimsuit. Tell me about Dakinis.

Yeah, I mean, they were fundamentally coming out of the Tibetan and Buddhist traditions and they were, you know, they were sort of, you know, sky dancing Tantrikas. So they, they were women, you know, women adepts who had attained and accessed God consciousness and, and quite often. And Miranda Shaw, who was trained at Harvard and has been an independent scholar, has written extensively about women in particularly Tibetan Buddhism, which has these strong shamanic and tantric elements. And she's like, actually, look, the. The secret stories, actually they were the ones who switched on first.

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