Full Transcript

Tim Boettner:

 So if you’re so much passion, and what’s the fuel for your passion? What brings your eyes light up? And how does that translate into longevity and the documentary and beyond longevity?

Jason:

Yeah. So my, my story in a nutshell is that, um, I, I was sick from an early age, I was dealing with chronic symptoms. Um, when I was 13, it was, it was chronic knee pain that started and, uh, wouldn’t, it wouldn’t, would it would persist for the next, you know, couple of decades. And I couldn’t find any answers, right? The medical establishment was offering literally no guidance into, into how to resolve it. They basically were at best helping me try to treat it. Right. But even that was a very poor effort. Um, and so it really wasn’t, um, it didn’t take me long to recognize that the medical establishment wasn’t there to keep me healthy or to even teach me how to be healthy. And so, um, in my twenties, I, I suffered from another chronic skin condition called seborrheic dermatitis, which, um, was pretty debilitating from a social standpoint because it was essentially on my face. Um, you can imagine it as dandruff that was, that’s on your face. And again, I was offered no real solutions. And so that was, uh, it was difficult to, to try to process that, um, and to deal with it in a way that, um, that allowed me to resolve the issue and understand what was really causing it. And so, uh, I was essentially left to my own accord to figure out what was going on and through that process of trying to understand, um, why the doctors were giving me. dandruff shampoo to put on my face and telling me to avoid heat exposure because it would be bad for my skin and all these things. I uncovered that there was no real basis for those, that the basis for that level of thinking was more or less fraudulent. It was coming from a place that was so distorted that you couldn’t make sense of it. There actually was no making sense of it. That fit my experience because none of it worked. This was in the early 2000s, right? The internet was barely a thing. You know, I remember searching on web crawler and Yahoo and, you know, these sort of a Netscape very early forms of Google, right? And, um, and it was difficult to find this information and I didn’t have the resources that I do now in terms of a network of integrative health practitioners that I could turn to, I didn’t know which books to buy. I didn’t, I didn’t know any of that stuff. And so this was a, the beginning of my own education into this, the world of health. And it seems weird, but most of what’s being taught out there is not about what health is and where health comes from. Right. It’s, it’s at best these mechanism, mechanistic understandings of biology that if I push this lever here, then this stuff starts to happen. As you kind of mentioned, it’s like, we’re getting into like the biochemistry and in the weeds and as an engineer, I, I kind of fell into that path too. I enjoy that. I love learning about, you know, the metabolic pathways and how to, and what’s really going on. And as you go down that path, what you realize is that it’s never ending. In other words, you can keep going and keep understanding and keep learning more. And eventually you get so deep down that hole that you actually lose perspective or you can lose perspective about what it is you’re actually doing, what health is. Right. You get so control focused, this sort of dominating aspect of biology. You’re trying to control your biology. that you’re losing the perspective of where health comes from, which is not from you pushing all these levers, right? When we cut our finger, we don’t have to do anything. I don’t take any supplements. I don’t have to understand any metabolic pathways. I just have to rest, give it the proper conditions and the body will magically heal, right? So it was in this process that I began to understand some of these things that maybe, you know, many of your listeners… probably understand, but back then in the early 2000s, coming from where I came from, I had no basis for this stuff. It was a long path. But ultimately, my sort of internal, let’s say gifts, my natural born gifts, which is sort of reasoning and logic and the ability to sort of think like an engineer in systems thinking, right, and systems processing, I was able to put pieces together. In other words, I’m pretty good at puzzles, right, and math. piece together things and use logic to deduce where to go next. And it wasn’t a perfect process by any means. I made a ton of mistakes and I still make a lot of mistakes, but it allowed me to navigate that world without any sort of formal guidance. Um, and eventually I found great teachers that I was, that I was, um, that I learned to trust. In other words, I was able to spot the really good teachers, you know, and the, the deeper I went, I said, okay, that’s a good teacher, right? Paul check, you know who I was on his podcast. He’s a great example of this. It’s like when you find these good teachers around you, you sort of instantly know. And so I was able to sort of sift through the weeds because there’s a lot of crap out there. And what I mean by that is there’s a lot of people giving partial truths. And I know they mean well, and they’re not wrong in one context. And we also have to remember that so much of health is contextual, right? To eat a certain way, to move a certain way. to exercise to a certain degree, to take this supplement or that supplement, to do ice baths and all these things that a lot of people are finding to be helpful, this is all very contextual. And so that’s really where I kind of found my footing is in this contextual ground and then leaning into some of these ancient traditions like Ayurveda and Chinese medicine and indigenous healing methods and then philosophies, right? And if we look to those, right? then we can start to understand why these things that are here for thousands of years, why they remain, why they still get taught. If something is getting taught for thousands of years, then you can bet that there’s a pretty good level of truth to it. So it’s incumbent upon us to recognize what that truth is, right, and why that sort of method or thinking is in place. And that was sort of the. one of the impetus for doing the human longevity project, which is a nine part film series where we went to the blue zones, that people, the places around the world that have been identified where people are living to a hundred and beyond at a relatively high rate, right? Sort of an anomalous rate. These are Ikaria, Greece, Okinawa, next to Japan, Sardinia, which is an island off Italy. and then the Guanacaste region of Costa Rica. And we went there to find these hundred drills. In other words, I wanted to talk to these people in their 90s and beyond 100, and I actually didn’t really care where I went. I just figured, okay, well, the research has been done and there’s a lot of people in those areas. That’s a good place to start, right? So that’s kind of really the sort of the backbone of my health philosophy is looking to the past and really using that to establish a solid foothold. for the future. In other words, I’m in love with stem cells, and I’m in love with peptides, and I’m in love with all this cool gadgets and technology, but without that footing of sort of ancient philosophy and wisdom, then we’re opening ourselves up to danger and more struggle and suffering, right? And that’s what I’m trying to avoid myself and help people avoid is this suffering. And it’s not like we are immune to that with all these new technologies. In fact, we’re probably more susceptible to it because they are so powerful, because they have such promise. that if we use them incorrectly, if we come in with the wrong mindset, then they can certainly create more suffering.

Tim Boettner:

Yes, and it’s fascinating. So for me, it’s like diving deeper and deeper. So then I talked about all the pathways and pathways and maybe hallmarks of aging. But in a sense, I can see that that’s just an observation what’s happening, but that’s not the place where it’s useful to do something. So the question is, the question for you is what really is beneath there. So what is aging? What drives aging? So it’s interesting that we can measure the telomere stuff and all that and NAD is declining, blah blah. But yeah, it’s just observation, nothing more.

Jason:

That’s right. We’re studying the effects, right? And this is what science, modern science does, right? It essentially looks at what’s happening, but without the basis of, let’s say, intelligence. Some people might call it God. Like whatever you wanna sort of call it, but there’s a framework. In other words, there’s something driving a process, right? In physics, we might think, you know, a fundamental sort of understanding is that things naturally decay into this sort of amorphous materium. In other words, there’s something resisting that when it comes to life. This idea of entropy, of losing order, life itself is resisting that somehow. In other words, we can call it neg entropy, but this idea that we can, let’s just use a human life. We start with… a zygote, right? And an egg and a sperm come together, and then it starts producing two cells and then four cells, and it keeps multiplying. And somehow these cells turn into different tissues. They differentiate, and then somehow they turn into organs that have different functions. And within the organs, there’s specialized tissues and specialized cells. And it’s a process that isn’t happening randomly. It’s happening in an organized… systematic, predictable fashion in a way that is creating a new organism, right? You can look at an oak tree the same way. How is it that life something is guiding the process of turning an acorn into a massive oak tree? How is that possible? Right? We take all this so much for granted, because we when we’re not we’re not studying nature as much we’re not observing we’re not truly appreciating You know, what’s happening, you mentioned you have, I think, a five month old. When you watch that process unfold and you start to see this being come into existence, at first it’s just this blob. It has no awareness, hardly, you can’t, there’s no consciousness there. And then you start to see through their eyes, hmm, so there’s a being here. Then you start to see that they’re growing. And it’s amazing. So there’s something behind the biology. What is it? This is the intelligence. And again, When you start to, if we’re really concerned about aging, or if we’re really serious about studying aging and extending life, first we have to ask the question of what life is, right? Erwin Schrodinger asked this question in a book called What is Life? And that was a physicist’s attempt to understand life, right? He did a really cool job, and in that book, he actually uses the word neg entropy, this ability to resist entropy. And so, what is aging? What? I can only define it as a process, a real time process. It is one directional. In other words, we cannot reverse aging. Aging is a process. In that process of aging, we have damage and we have decay and we have these things happen. That’s really what we’re measuring in the scientific world. So when we’re measuring telomeres or we’re measuring you know, the membranes and the damage to the membranes, we’re measuring mitochondrial damage, we’re measuring reactive oxygen species, we’re measuring eight, there’s all these markers that we can look at as hallmarks of aging. We can look at methylation function, right? We can look at all these things, and that’s great. But all we’re doing is we’re measuring the effects of aging itself. Aging is a one-directional process, and I know this because I have a child and I watch it happen every day, right? It is undeniable. So if we can accept that it is a process that is embedded within the structure of life, then we don’t have to question of can we stop it? Is it a disease? Can we reverse it? The answer is no. No, it’s not a disease. No, we cannot stop it. No, we can’t reverse it. All we can do is work with it, right? And perhaps even, I would go even a bit further, that it’s not a negative process. Perhaps it is a positive process. Perhaps it is… so important to age, to have a beginning and an end in this or a corporeal form in this body. Perhaps that is a good thing because there’s lessons along the way. There’s an aspect of humanity turning itself over. There’s this idea of antagonistic pleiotropy. This is what I It’s important for us to die out and new life to come on board. In other words, that’s the preservation of the species. So in evolutionary biology, that seems to be the more correct way to think about things, is that it’s this antagonistic pleiotropy. In other words, the sexual development is intricately tied to the process of aging. So if you wanna shut down aging, you have to shut down sexual development. They’re tied, you cannot separate them. And so as we have this sexual development, those same hormones, those same genes, those same processes that are guiding that are sort of the main drivers that are leading to our own destruction. And that’s a beautiful marriage. And you can actually see this in the development of children. You see the same hormones start to spike at puberty that spike in old age. And so this seems to be a more correct way. way to view this stuff. And I think for me, as I look at that, and the evidence suggests that too, if you look at animals, various animals, they all have a set lifespan. Why is that? And of course, that can be modified, that can be played with to some degree. Some animals in the wild will live shorter lives than if you bring them into captivity and you care for them that way, they might live longer. So there’s definitely a variation. But the idea is that each species benefits is able to maintain by turning itself over. Because environmental energy shift, because niches shift, because the environment is always changing, it’s actually helpful to turn over populations.

Tim Boettner:

Yes, that’s beautiful. Yeah, I can I can really feel how we are this process that’s unfolding. And then it’s called defaulting.

Jason:

Yes, and it happens internally too, right? It happens internally. This is what’s so cool. This idea of death and life, they are so intimately connected. Cells need to die within us in order for us to be reborn at the cellular level, right? So this is a, it’s a pattern you might say. It’s an archetypal pattern that we see throughout the universe, throughout life, throughout existence is this idea of dying in rebirth, dying in rebirth, dying in rebirth. It happens in the cell, it happens in tissues, it happens in, you know. the psyche, it happens in the human population. It’s just this over and over again. It’s important that things die and then they’re reborn. And I think it was, oh, I forgot his name. He wrote a book called Atomic Suicide. Brilliant, brilliant man who actually discovered the periodic table. He doesn’t get credit for it. Walter Russell, he has this idea that death feeds life. And it’s this sort of life giving back to, life leading to death giving back to life. So it’s literally death feeds life. And so it’s a really important concept to recognize.

Tim Boettner:

Yeah, yeah, I can for my engineering mind, so I can really feel how we are this system, integrated system, and we have a lot of systems internally, and we are embedded in other systems. And for me, so, for me is so health is for me, like, the if all of the systems are beautifully integrated, so that’s the flow of energy and then health is great for so for me, the question is how we create and best as possible integrate a system that health can unfold. So for me that’s the question how we can do that.

Jason:

Beautiful, yeah, there’s something important within your question that I wanna sort of elaborate on, which is that you said health will unfold, and that’s it. Like health is our birthright. When you look at, and again, not all children are born healthy, and there’s just complications there, no question, but that generally has to do with some other things. But let’s just assume that we have a relatively healthy child. They don’t need supplements, they don’t need to be coached, they don’t need any kind of anything, they just need to be a child. And of course they need nourishment and food and sustenance and there’s obviously things there. But I look at my little one’s skin, I have a three-year-old and I look at his skin and it’s like unbelievable, right? It’s like tiny pores, beautiful like fat layer, perfect like amount of fat, just squishy, soft, brilliant, lustrous, right? It’s the skin we all want. So you recognize that in a young being, and I look at the whites of his eyes, like this bright, bright white, right? And so you realize that health is embedded within us. It’s within our DNA, it is there, right? And so over time, what happens is, is that the health is lost, the vitality is lost, right? But the intelligence is always still there. And so the key to maintaining that health as long as we can, and look, we can reverse the effects of aging, right? So any damage that’s caused, there’s a certain amount that we can reverse, right? naturally and also with some of our technologies, especially that we’re bringing online. And there’s energy technologies and there’s biologics like peptides and like stem cells and these type of things. And we can help reverse the effects of aging. But health itself is within us. And so the way we maintain that is by alignment, alignment with universal principles of health, right? Which is we need to breathe properly. Right? So we’re all breathing. If you stop breathing, your health is gone, right? In a relatively short order. So even just improper breathing is an important thing, but learning how to breathe properly through the nose is probably the most important thing that we can do on a regular basis because we take so many breaths, because it is so fundamental. So we can learn to breathe properly. Now, unfortunately for many of us, we don’t have the facial structure to breathe properly. And this is actually something that I’m going through right now. Um, I learned about this a long time ago when I was studying Western prices work, but essentially most of us, especially in the West, and I would say, especially in the U S, um, have such horrible teeth. You know, the UK is really bad too. Um, that w in fact, the dental practices are to remove our, our back molars, right? Our wisdom teeth, um, because we don’t have space. And that was like the, the line of thinking, oh, let’s just remove those. You don’t need those. it’s causing crowding, you don’t have enough space. Well, if you go to indigenous cultures, say you go to Africa, say you go to Nepal, all over the world in some of these more indigenous places, they’re living more of an ancestral way, they’re living in alignment. What you see is you see big mandibles and maxillas, their facial structures, they have lots of room, nice wide palate, so you have a nice wide space for your teeth instead of like this, which is what most of us have. It’s like this, that’s kind of what I have. And so we need to actually get some space and then all of a sudden we have space for our teeth and our teeth fit. The reason I’m mentioning this as it relates to breathing is because in the natural development of a child, the roof of their mouth is kind of like this, right? And then through breastfeeding and proper nutrition, it starts to flatten out. Well, the nose sits up here, right? So this nose, instead of being squished in, it starts to widen, it starts to have space. So now when your top palate has, it flattens out, you have wide space for your teeth, now your nasal passage has air. So now you have good nasal flow through the air, you have good airway in the back, and that is critical. So most of us, because we didn’t breastfeed long enough, because our parents didn’t know any better when it comes to what the proper way to get nutrition is, or perhaps they couldn’t because they didn’t have the means. All kinds of reasons. But because that is the case, we have a facial structure that is not supportive of good breathing. And so now, thank God we have people like Dr. Felix Liao and others who are training some of these dentists and doctors to look at the airway. In fact, they’re called airway mouth doctors. And so if anybody has not seen an airway mouth doctor or heard of one, I would say, try to find one because you can actually get these appliances that will sit on the… the front and first they have to take evaluation. They have to see your airways, see what’s going on with your teeth and they do so much measurement, right? And dentists don’t do this, doctors don’t do this, integrative people don’t do this, chiropractors don’t do this, nobody looks at the airways. So that’s why Felix had to create this sort of AMD training to look at the airway specifically. And so what they can do is actually change the facial structure. Now this has massive ramifications on breath, on the nervous system, every tooth is connected to a meridian, a nervous system, nerves that run throughout the body. It’s connected to the spine. So all your structural misalignments, many of our misalignments are because our face has not developed properly. That’s wild, not to mention TMJ, not to mention sleep apneas, and poor sleep if you’re not getting good sleep. It could be because your face didn’t develop to its full potential. This is mind blowing stuff. So you can chase all the biohacking. All the… new technologies in the world, but if your face is not sitting, is not developed properly, which causes your C1, C2 not to sit properly, now your whole structure is compensating. Let’s say you’re an athlete, let’s say you’d love CrossFit or you’ve been a baseball or tennis player, then all of your whole chain is now going to compensate because your face didn’t develop properly and it’s causing things all the way down. It can lead to neurological disorders. It can lead to early dementia later in life. autoimmune conditions, cancers, it is so massive. It can cause cavities, right? Like if you have continual gum disease or cavities and you’re like, I brush, I do all the things, I eat a good diet, could be because your face didn’t fully develop to its full potential, your teeth are not in the right place. So this is a massive thing, right? So we got learning how to breathe through the nose. I would point to people like Patrick McKeown, oxygen advantage, that type of thing that you can look at on how to breathe. conditioning your body to carbon dioxide, to accept carbon dioxide, to be flexible with carbon dioxide, to learn how to breathe through the nose, learn how to keep the tongue on the palate. Again, if your face hasn’t formed properly and you have maybe that slight tongue tie, you may not be able to hold your tongue on the top of your palate, causing mouth breathing when you sleep, which disrupts your sleep patterns, which disrupts your whole immune system, your nervous system function, your mood, everything, right? So you can see that the chain here is really, really big, so we need to get the mouth online. We need to get the facial structure. We need to get the alignment in our spine. So it’s really about creating structural alignment, right? Throughout the whole body, breathing properly, aligning with the way nature intends us to live, which is on its rhythms, right? If you go and live or work with or study any population that’s sort of living in their natural ways, then they typically get up with the sun. They go work in the fields. They go work with the animals. They do some kind of work, manual labor outside. That’s not our reality in the West anymore, right? As much as, I actually love that by the way, because it totally just calms my mental, it feeds me in so many ways. But we live in a different reality, many of us. And so how do we kind of find ways to incorporate that into our everyday life, right? Can we get up in the morning? Can we get light in our eyes to turn on our circadian rhythm and set our circadian rhythm so it’s entrained with the natural solar cycle, right? When light enters the eyes, hits the suprachiasmatic nucleus, talks to the hypothalamus and the pituitary. The pituitary is guiding so many hormonal functions throughout the body, right? So this is, if you’re a guy with low testosterone, get outside and get morning light, that’ll jack up your testosterone, right? There’s a lot of these type of things, but when we’re living out of alignment with how humans live and how life is sort of meant to be lived, then we’re gonna suffer. And we can do all the biohacks, we can do all the… the studying of biochemistry and following all the pathways and taking all the NAD and all this anti-aging nonsense, but we’re not doing something basic, right? I don’t know if you’ve seen this guy, Brian Johnson, who’s now doing all these things, right? And so I haven’t followed him too much, right? He’s the guy that I think started Venmo, billionaire, and now he’s kind of on his new project, which is I’m gonna solve the problem of aging, right? and he’s doing all these biomarkers and I’m not knocking him. I think that he’s doing a lot of great research. He’s spending tons of money. I think he calls himself the most tested man in the world or something. He’s got a whole team, right? And they’re trying to dial in every aspect of life. And I want to point to you that that’s okay. That’s one way to do it, let’s say, if you have, let’s say, millions of dollars and time and the inclination to just dedicate everything to trying to optimize every last little. pathway, which is kind of what they’re doing. But then you also look at the people that I studied in Icaria, Greece, in Sardinia, Italy. There were 104 who never measured a damn thing, who got up every day and worked in the fields and trekked 34 miles to go get some cheese from the local cellar down by the water, these type of things. It’s not a requirement. Those guys that I visited in the Blue Zones lived in harmony. Right? They fasted, they exercised regularly, which means they didn’t do crossfit. They didn’t do biking. They didn’t do any Pilates. They didn’t, they didn’t do yoga or breath work. They just moved every day in the way that, that met the demands of what they needed to do. Right. They weren’t, um, doing any kind of mobility training. Right. And again, I’m not knocking any stuff. Some of this stuff we actually need to bring into our West because we’re not living like them. But there is no quote unquote natural movement. Every movement is natural. There’s just imbalances that start to develop for a variety of reasons. So it’s good for us in the West to bring in the breathworks and the yogas and the qigong and the meditations and all these things and the mobility training. So those are fantastic. But that’s to compensate for our misaligned lifestyle. So. So that’s the main thing and I know I’m covering a lot here, but this idea of living in alignment is critical because if we don’t have this as a core philosophy, then we’re going to go and do in the Brian Johnson thing, which is we’re going to try to chase all these markers and we’re going to forget if you look at Brian Johnson, he’s pretty pale. I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like he’s getting up and getting enough sunlight in my opinion. Now he’s light skinned, so he doesn’t need a lot, right? But he looks pretty pale. So If you just look at some of the solar biochemistry, let’s say, when you get light on the skin, we have chromophores in our skin. We have all kinds of proteins in our skin that accept sunlight. Sunlight is an environmental signal for our biology. It turns on ACTH, which signals cortisol. It converts all kinds of hormones, including vitamin D and testosterone and all the sex hormones. Right? So it’s a precursor and a necessary component of healthy biology. Right. And so it doesn’t mean go get burnt. It doesn’t, it, that certainly can, you can get too much, but if you’re not getting enough, that causes real problems. Right. So he’s, I think he’s also taking like HGH and some, some of these things. And, and again, that’s fine too, to supplement. Um, and again, I would point to that if you’re trying to do that, he’s going to chase biomarkers all day long. for the rest of his life. Like that to me is not really any viable way to live. Right, so when we start to live in alignment with nature, you know, just getting out in nature, right, calms the nervous system, turns on the parasympathetic, you get good vagal tone, right, which improves digestion, detoxification. Just looking at a photo or a painting of nature will improve your detoxification function. Right, so. This is kind of what I mean. Like it’s one way to take, you know, a variety of detoxification herbs that turn on phase one and phase two detoxification in the liver and then binds all the toxins and blah, blah. You can do that. And you can also just go outside and go for a walk in nature, right? And to some degree, regular aspect of that will improve detox perhaps even more, right? This idea of fasting, not eating too much, eating at the right time of day, exercising at the right time of day. going to bed at the right hours, right? When the sun’s going down just after sunset, right? Allowing your body to follow the rhythms, right? If you go camping, right? For let’s say three or four days, you start to recognize your rhythms start to shift because you’re not looking at screens, you’re not inside, there’s no TV, there’s not all the stimulus, right? So when we align with nature, that’s the first step. But I’ll go into kind of the next big thing, but I’ll let you kind of respond because I’ve been talking for a while.

Tim Boettner:

It was great, there’s so much in just a couple of comments. I loved that you started with breath because for me the breath is something like an organizer. So we just breathe how we are designed and we can just watch our body, how our body is aligned, organized, even posture. We can say okay let the tongue rest on top of your mouth, breathe through your nose and you can see how the posture becomes back in alignment. never would never lose that. Yeah, health could unfold. So that’s beautiful. Then you mentioned just they live in harmony. You said they live in harmony, the indigenous tribes and that’s beautiful too because harmony, I think that’s an expression of health. Wow, yeah. And yeah, Brian Johnson. So. like what he’s doing because it’s interesting because we can learn something about him. That’s so that’s pretty interesting. I love it. But for me, philosophically, it’s there are fundamental flaws, fundamental flaws in his philosophy, because he states that he don’t want to think and just he wants to he’s not aware of his consciousness. He wants that someone else makes decisions and optimizes. himself and that’s for me it’s a fundamental misunderstanding and for me and then maybe we will go deeper in the soul stuff and all that stuff so I think that health is if our soul is in alignment with our thinking and doing so then health will unfold and Brian Johnson for example um don’t get it and I think that he in this way misses a fundamental part of longevity game and for sure there is the game there are the rejuvenation olympics right now so it’s crazy how people measure their chronological and biological age and then they do the rejuvenation olympics yeah that’s in a way that’s nonsense because all those people don’t participate in that so but

Jason:

Wait, so how are they doing this? So they’re measuring their quote unquote biological age by measuring like, because here’s the thing, are they measuring telomeres?

Tim Boettner:

No, I forgot the name. I will link the name of the test. There’s a special name. There’s one test they are doing and they have to do it three times for the Rejubilation Olympics with six months in between. Yes, and then there’s something like a score, a score like 0.7 and that means that they just age 0.7 times. years in one year something like that so that’s what they what they are measuring i think simland and bang weenfield are ahead too that’s fun so i can really see that they um have a lot of fun doing that and that’s beautiful but it’s

Jason:

Well, that’s the way to do it, right? Like, I mean, you’re hitting on something I think is so important, which is that, yes, these things are fun and they’re kind of cool and interesting, right? But these are all proxies for aging, right? How much someone has quote unquote aged. There is no actual yet defined way to measure biological age, right? One of the best tests to measure damage is 8-OH-DG, right, which is 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine, I believe.

Tim Boettner:

Just one second, I looked it up. It’s a Dunedin test.

Jason:

Yeah, I actually not familiar with that one. So I’d be curious, but I guarantee you it’s a proxy, right? Because again, aging is a process. So you can’t measure the process. Like the process is happening. In other words, it’s like time. Time is just unfolding. There’s no way to actually measure time. Like we’re kind of doing it, right? But it’s all proxies for the reality that’s unfolding, right? it’s, it’s an, there’s no way to measure it. We can, we can, again, we can measure the effects and, but again, all we’re doing is we’re measuring it in relative fashion to what we might consider average or normal, right? So, and again, all the markers that we’re looking at. So if I’m 42, then what, let’s say we had a test to measure that accurately measure, sort of accurately measure biological age. then all I’m doing is that I’m taking that test, let’s say it says that I’m 48. Then all it’s doing is saying I’m biologically I’m the age of another of the average population that is chronologically 48. There’s no, it’s all relative, right? So again, I just wanna name that. These are all okay tests, they’re fine, right? And we can look at Yamanaka factors. This is probably the most… deeply scientific way to determine where somebody at is on that sort of scale of quote unquote aging. But let’s say just for sort of conversation sake that we’re entering this new regenerative medicine phase of kind of science. Well, let’s say we all, and it becomes, let’s say widely available. So now we’re taking on these biologics, we’re doing all this stuff and where people are starting to live to 120, 140, 180. Let’s say the average starts to move. Well, now everybody’s moved the average. And so it’s all, again, the relative function, right? So we’re all measuring against relative to other humans. And so it all just becomes a proxy. But again, there’s no way to actually measure because whatever marker you’re testing can be reversed and moved forward and then moved back and moved forward again. So it’s all dependent on what you’re doing. And… The thing about aging is that from my perspective, aging, there’s no global marker of aging. Again, the Yamanaka factors are as close as we get, but nobody dies of entire body-wide system shutdown. It’s kidney failure, it’s heart failure, it’s pneumonia. In other words, it’s the immune system that gets weak first or it’s the brain or it’s the heart or it’s some vital organ. basically ages faster than all the rest of the body. So within you right now, how old are you, Tim?

Tim Boettner:

I’m 31.

Jason:

31, okay. So let’s say your liver is 34. Let’s say your kidney is 38. Your heart is 27. Your brain is 25. This is a better reality that we’re pointing to. And so we need to look at some kind of global average or we need to measure. organ specific. And again, even that is still a relative measurement. But this is how to think about aging. And this is what people do now with telomeres. For a long time when they’re measuring telomeres, which for those who aren’t familiar with the end caps of the chromosome, first of all, it’s not a good way to measure DNA damage because you can have other parts of the DNA get damaged other than the telomeres, than the end caps. But it’s a good measure for genomic stability. So anyway, let’s just say that. They were measuring white blood cell telomere length. Well, now they’re actually measuring telomere length in a variety of different organs and tissues. And what you find is that some telomeres are long and some telomeres are short. And then when you do, let’s say, positive anti-aging strategies, what happens is that not that all of them start to lengthen, no, the ones that are shortest start to lengthen. and the ones that were already longer don’t move much. So the body’s brilliant in what it’s doing, it’s sort of shoring up the weak spots if you do the right things. And again, we’re all born with sort of genetic susceptibilities, let’s say. And when I say susceptibility, that’s not even the right way to frame it. We’re born with genetic dispositions that guide us toward, let’s say, an environment that is optimal for us. So… So we’re always doing something that is not optimal for certain parts of our gene structure and that are more optimal for other parts. Right. So, um, that kind of leads into the other part that, that is really critical for longevity or for, for aging well, which is alignment with our unique constitution. Right. So we have alignment with sort of global health principles and that takes some awareness, right? Like that’s where Brian Johnson’s maybe not totally in alignment. I mean, he, he’s not, he’s a bright guy. So I don’t want to. totally, you know, I’m not here to bash him, but, um, and he’s got some good philosophies, you know, that I, that I do appreciate. Um, but there are fundamental things like connection, love, happiness, laughter, um, uh, ah, you know, inspiration, um, meaning and purpose. Um, you know, these are things that seem to have the most impact on how well we age and how long we live. Right, so if we have those things in place, then we tend to live a long time. And that’s because our emotions, our mental frameworks, and our habits are better in line with health. Like if I don’t have connection, if I don’t feel connected to other beings, to God, to nature, to, I just, I feel a lot of disconnection in my life, then that’s going to manifest in a lot of negative thinking, negative emotions. And when I say negative, I’m saying emotions and thinking that are harmful to my own genetic expression, to my own health. And those thoughts and emotions also guide behavior. So now I’m going to be doing things that are not necessarily good for my health. So we can look at the things, the habits, the behaviors that are leading to bad outcomes in health, yes. But what’s guiding the behaviors? What’s guiding the habits? Well, it’s the thoughts, the beliefs and the emotions. Okay, well, what’s guiding the thoughts, beliefs and emotions? Well, it’s all the things that I’m doing, so there’s a sort of feedback loop. It’s the perceptions that have been created in my mind. It’s the internal working model that I’ve been created. Much of this is guided from childhood, and perhaps we can even say karmic and social global ongoings, right? So much of what… is what I’m doing today at 42 has been dictated by what happened when I was six months and two years and five years and ten years, etc. As my mind, as my consciousness, as my internal working model was developing. I mean, literally my biology is developing. I have a three-year-old, he doesn’t have a nervous system, he doesn’t have a brain that is capable of a level of thinking and the level of awareness and complexity that I have. Right? That’s all, it’s so adaptable. This is the thing about humans, we are so adaptable. We are constantly influenced by our environment and something that’s gonna happen regularly will start to condition us in certain ways of thinking, certain ways of believing, certain ways of emoting, certain ways of behaving. So that conditioning, it’s not always the sort of trauma piece, although that’s a big one for many of us, whether it’s divorced parents or abuse or neglect or even kind of repetitive. verbal and mental abuse in that way, impacts us, no question. And it’s the conditioning too. So it’s the conditioning, right? I grew up in a household that didn’t have a lot of money. Right? And so the conditioning that was implanted in me subconsciously at a very subtle level, you know, had gave me certain beliefs about money, gave me certain beliefs about wealth, gave me certain beliefs about what’s possible. Right? So I had a lot of limiting beliefs around money, about wealth, about abundance, right? And I don’t just mean money. Those are abundance itself, right? This is sort of the essence of life. If you look at an orange tree, it’s not thinking there’s not enough. It’s thinking we can create anything, right? We have the abundance of nature, right? So these are archetypal patterns that were laid down within me that I had to sort of deconstruct constantly look at, right? So those thoughts, beliefs, and emotions lead to perceptions and experiences that kind of keep cycling. until I have the awareness to be able to see those, to be able to repattern those, right? So again, we’ve moved a little bit away from the Brian Johnson model of health, and we’re getting back to a more fundamental level of health that has to do with psychology, that has to do with environment, right? So it really is all about environment. It’s about the mind. It’s about those early things that happen to us that create the conditions for how I carry out the rest of my life.

Tim Boettner:

Yeah, yeah, I love it. Can see that. Absolutely. So for me right now with my child, it’s so interesting that I’m thinking about how can I create an environment where so you know, so it’s interesting because she’s in the state of the non dual awareness, all that stuff. And I will know that he will forget everything. And her life’s job is to remember. And I’m just thinking about okay, how can I create an environment that she don’t need like decades to remember that. So that’s really interesting journey right now.

Jason:

Like you look at, I look at my three-year-old, I’m like, we’ve done a lot of things. He’s been a lot of places around the world and he’s not going to remember anything. Like, what the hell? This is all just been, you know, in the background, but it’s laying the tracks. Right. That it’s, so it’s, this is a thing as a parent and, and when we’re all parenting ourselves too, right. And so there’s this constant re-parenting that I’m doing to my sort of underdeveloped, uh, aspects of myself, right. The ones that have not matured. And so it’s this constant reparenting, but it’s this idea that how can we repattern these things? How can we lay down these really good tracks, right? And so I catch myself all the time with, let’s say less than optimal language, right? And less than optimal, like these beliefs that creep in and these conditionings of reality that I gotta check myself with because I’m then passing this conditioning onto him. about how reality functions, right? One of the big ones that I would say for me was, you know, you have to work hard to be successful, right? And that’s not a truth. You do not have to work hard to be successful, right? To be happy. Now it doesn’t mean hard work is bad. In fact, hard work is really good. I’m a firm believer that hard work is great. And it’s not a requirement for success, for happiness, for acceptance, right? To be loved. So that was something I had to deconstruct and say, ah, okay, hard work is not a necessity and hard work is still good. It gives you good things and the good things can come from it. And hard work, if done from the wrong place, can lead to all kinds of suffering, right? Just working hard to work hard will create so much suffering. If you’re not coming from a place of alignment, if you’re not checking in with why am I working hard? What is this for? Is this in alignment with my purpose, with my passion, with my dream, right? If it’s not, then it’s just gonna create suffering. And sure, you may lead to success, but it won’t ultimately fulfill you in the ways that you’re looking.

Tim Boettner:

Yeah, I’m not sure if listeners realize that maybe people think we are jumping around, but in my mind, it’s one theme. There’s a principle we are talking about, you are talking about, is connection, abundance, and that’s flow. For me, connection is the connection of all the systems. And if the flow of energy and information between the systems is flowing, there’s abundance, there’s connection, and there’s health. So that’s fundamental principles. We can see this in cells, in liver, whatever. If the liver isn’t connected to all the other systems, our body has no meaning. And it’s the same with the people and all that stuff. So that’s a fundamental principle for me. And the alignment is so important. If we choose to work hard from ourselves, that’s okay. But if we have this… Yeah, it’s limiting belief that we have to do and it’s not alignment with what we want to do. I think then our body signals with pain, with sickness, illness, that we are the alignment.

Jason:

Yeah, and let me tie this up because, you know, these two concepts of living in alignment with sort of universal principles of life itself, of healthy living, that’s one factor. Living in alignment with our constitutional principles. In other words, I have very light skin, you know, kind of reddish hair. If I go live at an equatorial region of Africa or South America, Central America, and I’m outside all day, that’s an environmental mismatch to my biology. Not a good idea. Right, like it’s a really bad idea. So that’s a constitutional limit. That’s a biological limit that I have. So I must understand that about myself. Now, that is a very obvious thing I can point to, but we have the same things when it comes to movement, when it comes to how I’m eating, right? There’s all kinds of ways that we need to think about things, right? And this is where I love things like, there’s philosophies in the guidance of Ayurveda. For me, it’s Ayurveda, right? But Chinese medicine also has this. but there’s principles that help you understand your constitution, how you came into this world. And that will dictate what food you can eat, how often you should eat, how much you should eat. Do you have strong digestion? Do you have weak digestion? Do you eat these, this foods at this time of the day or that food? If you, you know, which season of the year is sort of a little more precarious for you, right? Like you gotta be careful in that season. It guides all of that. In other words, there’s a constitutional aspect to who I am. Now, If we accept those principles that I laid out, alignment with universal principles of life and alignment with your own constitution, then what is preventing that? Well, it’s all the conditioning. So in other words, most of what I’m doing still today, even with the level of awareness that I’ve eventually developed, I’m still running most of my life by habit. All the things that you’re thinking in the background that you’re not even paying attention to, you’re limiting beliefs around money, you’re… your lack of awareness about gratitude of just being alive today. When you buy groceries at the grocery store, when you do anything fun with your kids, do you have the level of awareness to go, wow, I’m really lucky, thank you, right? I still don’t every time, right? Why? Because it’s a condition, it’s a habit. It’s a mental conditional habit that… that most of us have come through. So the things that I’m eating, the late night snacks, that little thing I like to do, a little extra cannabis that I might smoke, the little bit of alcohol and wine, whatever the case, whatever the habit, whatever the thing, right? These, maybe even it’s something like, I’m kind of a little gossiping about my friends a little too much, right? Whatever the case is, all this stuff is conditions and habits. Those conditions and habits are preventing us from living in alignment with universal principles. and living in alignment with our constitutional principles. So that’s what I’m pointing to. These are the two things that we need to do, but we can’t do them if we’re living from conditioning, if we’re living from trauma, if we’re living from past programming. So that is what’s preventing. It’s not, do I take NAD at this dose and maybe I take some NMN too, and then maybe I take some NR because the research has showed, no, no. Like that’s all fine and we can play those games, right? And I’m a big fan of supplements, I got a ton of them. I got closets and closets full of stuff. You know, I got suppositories. I got, you stick in every orifice, right? Like that stuff’s cool, right? And I’m a believer in that stuff. And if you’re not getting this other stuff right first, then you’re constantly chasing your tail at best. You’re chasing your tail. And at worst, you’re causing more damage because you’re not doing the things that you actually need to do and you’re pushing on the wrong buttons, right? So that’s what I mean. That’s kind of the theme here. And that’s why maybe it’s, we’ve wandered a little bit here for sure. but it’s those two principles and it’s the thing that’s preventing us from living in alignment with those principles because once you start recognizing who you are really beyond this human form, what life really is, why you’re really here, then all this stuff starts to get so clear. It starts to make so much sense, right? And then what you’re eating and how much you’re eating and how often you’re eating, you don’t have to follow a guru. You don’t have to look at the latest research, right? To your point earlier, you mentioned this, like, when you start to get in tune with yourself, with your body, with what you really need, right this moment, which may change, may be different a decade from now, because your life is different, right? Right now, I’m getting older, 42, so I’m starting to recognize, boy, I actually need to do a little bit more mobility and a little less gym stuff, a little bit more, I need to stop abusing my body in sort of these more fun ways that I really have enjoyed over the past 20 years. And I need to do a lot more of this other stuff that’s gonna open up my fascia and give my joints more space and provide more mobility and breathe into them in a better way. You know what I mean? So I’m doing different things which requires a different diet than when I was doing, you know, HIIT training and working out at the gym really hard and all this stuff, right? So this is what’s changed, right? So it’s really starting to tune in with who you are right now. What do you really need? in this moment, in this month, in this year, whatever the case is. And that’s to me, that’s what I’m saying beyond longevity. That’s why I wrote the book. We’re now getting to the phase of when you get to some level of recognition of what health is, what life is all about, why you’re here, what the point of it all is, then longevity is important, but only because it allows you to carry your mission forward and live your dream longer. Not because I’m just gonna, you know, break all records and live to 160 or 240 or whatever Dave Asprey wants to do.

Tim Boettner:

Yes. Yeah, that’s beautiful. So I don’t really want to mention Brian Johnson again, but one point is that I think with this philosophy is creating a fragile human that cannot respond. That’s a problem for me. My goal is that I can flow with life. And that can absolutely mean that I have to maybe a fast tomorrow, eat other stuff. I don’t know, but if I have one regime, I can’t adapt. I can’t to flow with life and that’s rigidity. So that’s I always said it okay. We have all we have to be our the expert of our own body so we have to be our own expert and That’s that’s our job. So and one other point so we have this consciousness trauma piece where we go deep and this That’s called NAD peptide stuff and this journey, do this, do this. And in my observation, for me, it’s really helpful to use all this mushroom extracts. And I realize when I’m healthier and I have more nutrients and some nootropics and okay, psychedelics is another part here, but this health stuff enables me to… really face the deepest fears, the consciousness stuff. So I can really see that people become healthier and healthier with the supplement stuff, nutrition stuff, then they are able to face the deep stuff. And that’s beautiful. Sometimes if I’m too tired, if I’m sick, I’m not able to do the trauma work and all this stuff. So it’s both necessary and fine.

Jason:

Well, and for me, this is this is where this is kind of where more of my work is led is yes, a little bit in the health realm for sure, but more in the waking up realm. In other words. Yeah, but even wake, it’s more like spiritual waking up, waking up to a deeper aspect of who we are, what our gifts are and what we’re here to do. And yes, they aren’t separate by any means. I’m just pointing to the fact that at first for me, it was all about like how to get out of suffering from pain and chronic disease. And that’s where I was focused with people. And that’s kind of the step one for most of us, right, that are dealing if you’re dealing with chronic issues. It’s really hard to do the deeper work because you don’t have the energy. You’re so much of your attention is, is focused on the physical body. And, and look, a lot of people in the spiritual communities, um, don’t have the health component dialed in. In other words, they’re overweight. They have chronic issues going on and they, they’re kind of using the sort of spiritual lane to kind of, let’s say override that, or they think they can until they can’t, and then it catches up with them, right. And then there’s a diagnosis that they have to deal with. Now they got to come back to. to body stuff, right? So this is a key factor, right? It’s body, mind, spirit, right? Like we have to work on those three things, right? And spirit really is the breath, right? That’s spirit, right? So when we breathe properly, when we know how to breathe, that is going to optimize that, right? That’s why the pranayamas in Ayurvedic work is so fundamental. It’s… brilliant because of all the various ways we can use breath to change the fit. And as you said in the beginning, it’s a master regulator of our physiology, and the physiology and the biology of our body is not disconnected from the mental, it’s not disconnected from the spiritual, right. So this awareness that I think we can develop, like to expand our conscious awareness is really the objective, as far as I can tell, it’s to wake up, right? And part of that is the body, but it’s not just restricted to the body. It is connected, it is integral, and it is important. Again, I point to Ayurveda because what I really, let’s say, ingrained in a new way in my system was that when I do the right things for my body, it shifts my mind. When I do the right things for my body, it allows me to shift my awareness. When I do the right things from a mental perspective, let’s say a thought-based perspective, it changes my physiology. Right? And we know this now with some of the work that we’re doing in the West, but like, if I think happy thoughts, if I watch videos of puppies, right? This actually shifts my nervous system function, improves digestion, improves detoxification, et cetera. Right? Like that. And so, so in other words, why don’t we continually practice being in that sort of happy zone? Right? And there’s people like, um, uh, Marcy Shime off who, who writes books on this, right? Of living in the sort of the miracle zone and being happy and actually training that. So that’s a conditionable operation that we can do. So why aren’t we practicing that as part of longevity? If I wanna live a long time, why don’t I practice being happy? That’s totally doable. That’s a conscious, conditionable.

Tim Boettner:

For example, where the study, we even know that the feeling of shame introduces cytokines and activates immune system. We even can measure that.

Jason:

And so, and there’s another thing too, it’s maybe important to recognize here that when we do some of the trauma work, the shadow work, the cleaning up work, I’d often recommend that it’s important to have another being there, a therapist or somebody who can help guide you, but also just be there as a nervous system. Because what happens is a lot of these ruptures happened when we were young, infants in our younger years, the caregiver was misattuned, whatever the case was, we don’t have a nervous system online when we’re young. We just don’t have it. capacity to process a lot of, let’s say stress. And so this is what’s needed in adulthood is generally to have somebody there to help us process something, but it’s good to go in there and process something. That’s when we want to feel the shame, the guilt, the self-hatred, the anger, whatever. It’s really good to go feel those things. So I’m not saying don’t avoid those things. It’s very important that I say this, that we don’t want to just go pretend and try to be happy all the time. No, it’s actually important that there’s things stuck in our system that are creating the conditions of our subconscious. When we go in there, typically again with another being to help us, we can process that stuff and feel that deep shame and that agony. We can cry and we can move it through literally through our tissues, process it with the help of another typically, and then it’s gone. That little piece, whatever that was is now moved through. Now that actually creates space. energetically for more happiness, for more joy, for more peace and ease and well being. So there’s two aspects, right? It’s to go in there and process the gunk and all the crap that’s still stuck, the ignorance that’s stuck within us. And also that will shift the subconscious stuff. And then also we can practice the conscious. We can practice these conditionable conscious behaviors and thoughts and beliefs. And that’s where this secret and the manifestation and all that type of work kind of lives is in that realm and that’s great. It’s just important to recognize that that’s not the only piece. We can’t just bypass all this crap that’s literally engorged in my tissues creating suffering in the body and the mind and go try to do all this manifestation stuff. Like do that stuff too, but we need to work on the trauma and the gunk that’s here, the shadow work. Now we start to change our operant behavior, our operant thoughts, our operant beliefs. And that to me, again, if I’m doing that correctly and I’m doing that continuously and I die at 55, I’m good. You know what I mean? Like the length of life stops, it doesn’t, it becomes less and less important when you get to this point of awakening. And I know this because I’ve talked to many beings that are much further along that path than I, and you hear the same thing over and over again. If I go, I go. It’s not up to me. It’s God’s plan, right? There’s a letting go of this need to control reality. And you recognize that this life that I’m living is not the end. It’s just a transition that happened. A transition to a beautiful place. So why wouldn’t I wanna go? It’s cool. Everything will continue on here. It’ll be just fine without me. You know what I mean? Like these are the things that you can start to work with and play with and you can let go of this idea of death. This is where some of the plant medicines, the psychedelic stuff. And I would say not only the medicines themselves, but good teachers. I prefer indigenous teachers and to really not only get their wisdom, but they’re transmitting stuff in the ceremony, let’s say. So if you’re drinking ayahuasca and you drink it enough with a teacher who’s been taught through a lineage that goes back hundreds or thousands of years, there’s things that are being taught within the ceremony that you’re not even aware of. And so there’s really important things. But in those processes, we can have a death. We can have a death experience. that allows us to recognize, in other words, it gets easier, it’s like practicing dying. And it’s awesome because it really sucks at first and it’s really scary and it sucks. And then it gets a little bit better, like, oh, I know this, I know what this death is like. And you can actually get better at death and that helps you get better at life. And as you get better at life, you get better at death, right, so because it’s all the same thing, right? So this is where, again, we can use all these tools, we can use all these philosophies. Me, I like to dabble, I like to go get… wisdom from all kinds of cultures. Some people like to choose a lane and work with, you know, a certain path and that’s awesome too, right? Whether it’s an Eastern tradition or whether it’s more shamanic indigenous tradition, they choose their lane and they go deep within that. And that’s an awesome way to live. I like dabbling and gaining the wisdom from all kinds of different cultures because I find that I can, if I can integrate it into this crazy modern world that we’ve created for ourselves, which is totally weird by the way. when you look at the rest of the world, like what we’re doing here in the United States and the West is just bizarre. And so it’s kind of cool and it’s also very strange. And so we’re gonna find ourselves, I think in a really interesting time over the next 20 and 30 years as this regenerative medicine movement comes online as this sort of let’s say, quantum free energy movement happens in a variety of different fields, right? AI is of course a part of that. It’s gonna get very crazy. And so this is a really, it’s a big part of my mission, which is to help lay a different philosophy down or help encode a philosophy that I think is so primal that we all have. People need to point to it more. Once we can point to it, it starts to land and all the sexy stuff that’s coming online kind of loses its luster. It’s just not as sexy as maybe you thought at first because the real sexiness is to be able to buy your groceries at the grocery store, use your credit card and go. Hmm, thank you. I’m really grateful that I have money to buy this food, right? Like you start to appreciate the more fundamental aspects of nature and your ability to play the part. You don’t have to rely on some technology. You don’t have to save up a ton of money and hope it works. Like, yes, I’m down with all that. And I can’t wait for it to get better because it can really reduce pains and these chronic diseases. And some of the bad decisions that I’ve made over the past 40 years, Hopefully that can help me unwind those, right? And all the while I’m gonna be working on myself to unwind them and to be in a level of acceptance of reality no matter what the outcome is.

Tim Boettner:

Yeah, you’re doing really a wonderful job. So that’s so beautiful. I think in our world right now of artificial intelligence, it’s so important that we go into our body intelligence, our own body intelligence. I think without our body intelligence, without artificial intelligence, really, really dangerous. I think if we have a synergy with our intelligence and artificial intelligence, it would be a synergy.

Jason:

Yeah, totally. And as we come into alignment with ourselves, and as we wake up, what you notice is that your gifts start to wake up. You know, we can call these intuitive abilities, psychic abilities, there’s all kinds of things that will start to come online. And I don’t just mean in a subtle way. Like some of the things that I’ve seen and some of the beings that I’ve worked with, they’re like straight out of Harry Potter, right? The capacity that we have as humans is remarkable. And what’s required to get to that level of development is to continually do this more basic work. Those people that I’m talking about, it’s not because they did what Brian Johnson’s doing. It’s just not. They’re doing a totally different thing, which is this sort of spiritual work. It’s all spiritual, but more of a awakening type of work, which is they’re focused on what’s really required to resolve these wounds and these misses and these little… pockets of ignorance within the mind and the body, that once those are illuminated, then there’s an embodied realization of what happens in this life and what’s possible. And that is so much cooler, it’s so much more intelligent than AI and all this nonsense, right? Like it’s like child’s play. I mean, look, for all this stuff, we can always go back to the matrix, right? The movie, The Matrix is like. That’s, it’s such a great pointer, right? Because that’s really what’s happening is that Neo just, he thinks he’s living in reality and then he wakes up and he’s like, what the hell is this? And it’s dark and it’s horrible and it’s gross and it’s ugly, right? And then he figures out the matrix is the game. And then he figures out how to really play the game. And once he understands how to really play that game, then all the other stuff is nonsense. It’s not even intelligent. He knows how to beat it so fast, right? Like it’s just, it’s a joke, right? He just puts his hand up, stops the game, all the bullets fall. goes inside the guy blows up, right? Like it’s just, it’s laughable, right? So that’s what I’m pointing to is that when we start to go inside and really figure out what this life really is and who you really are, then the stuff that you see in the indigenous cultures, the shamanic work, the spiritual masters that are living around this planet right now, then you start to appreciate that that’s a different game. And it’s worth playing. And it’s totally worth pursuing, even though it’s hard work. And it takes time and it’s a process. The reward is so much greater than chasing all this new stuff that’s coming online.

Tim Boettner:

Absolutely. So thank you so much. And yeah, what’s in my mind is really is all I really experienced what I mentioned before, if I took my nootropics and all that stuff, and then maybe microdose psychedelics, so I’m way better in processing that I can really feel how I can. That sounds absolutely stupid. But in a way I can biohack some of the indigenous ways. Sounds stupid, but it’s possible. That’s

Jason:

Yep. Now, and that’s, and that’s beautiful. And I, because I’ve, that’s a big part of my path, right? I’ve sat with Ayahuasca dozens of times and, and I’ve worked with Wachuba as well and, and you know, mushrooms and some other things too. Um, and those are great doorways to pop you open into a different reality, right? And what’s really cool is that we can get there without that stuff. So, so I’m not saying it’s one or the other. What I’m pointing to is, cause I still enjoy doing a lot of that stuff with great teachers, right? And that’s just, those are just unlocking a door. We can unlock that door. That’s what a lot of the Eastern traditions are really, really adept at, right? The Zhouquan, like there’s deep, deep traditions that help us do that. And so that’s the game. When we can start to do that on our own without needing anything, then it’s like, okay, now we’re on track, right? So. I’m still working at that myself, obviously. And again, I’m not demeaning any of the plant medicine work. I think it’s really a critical part of us as a human species waking up, right? It’s clearly led to a lot of great things. And like anything that’s external, it can lead to suffering if used incorrectly and if you come at it from a wrong perspective. I know people that have sat with ayahuasca hundreds of times. and all they’re doing is looping in an experience. They’re not going deeper and deeper and deeper. They just keep going in, coming out, going in, coming out, and they’re not going anywhere. They’re just looping and chasing an experience, right? So it’s not the ayahuasca that’s doing it. It’s their approach to what’s happening, and they’re gonna keep looping and suffering, right? And they’re gonna go in, and they’re gonna find all these realizations and amazing things and that blah, and they’re gonna come back out, and they’re gonna live their life, and it’s gonna get dull, and they’re like, well. This is, I need to go get more, right? So it’s literally like a drug addict, even though it’s not addictive, the substance itself, the sort of, the yearning for the spiritual awakening component is so strong and there’s a lack of awareness of doing the sort of work at home, integrating the peace and living in a more spiritual way. And so that’s where, again, anything external, NAD, plant medicines, any of the biologics. can be helpful and it can be harmful too. So it’s really the deeper, more aligned stuff is coming from inside. So it’s constantly bringing awareness to this stuff. And I catch myself all the time, looping in some process, right? Whether it’s using a supplement, or whether it’s using any of these plant medicines, or it’s anything. I will loop in a process and I go, ah, that’s what that is. You know, and I bring awareness to it, and then I figure out what’s the source of this. How do I resolve this in my system so that I don’t keep operating from a pattern? It’s operating from a piece that’s not aligned with myself. It’s not aligned with the greater whole of life. It’s operating from an aberrant pattern, a maladaptive pattern that I’m stuck in. These are hard to see when you’re in it. It’s very hard to see. So using the world as your mirror, using therapists and other people who are adept at actually spotting this and helping you. Both notice it. I mean, loved ones are good for this. Family’s really great for helping you notice your patterns. If you’re keen enough to, to listen to them. Oftentimes they don’t share them in the most, uh, let’s say, uh, a tuned way, right? So they’ll, they’ll share them in a way that, that kicks up another pattern. Right. This is why so many family dynamics are rough is because you just got pattern after pattern, just working back and forth at each other. So, um, so when we’re caught in these, you’ll see it in, in two adults that are fighting. You basically, what you’ll see is not a 42 year old, the 53 year old fighting, you’ll see a seven year old and an eight year old, and they’re battling it out, right? And because that’s where they’re operating from, from a conscious perspective is that these seven year old patterns and eight year old patterns are just fighting with one another. So, it’s looking at these patterns that are really critical within ourselves and when we can do that, then we can regain autonomy. Then we can actually start to operate from myself, from my true alignment. And again, that is one of the critical pieces to. to not only living long, but living well, no matter how long we live.

Tim Boettner:

Yeah, it’s beautiful. Yeah, I think the most important point is the waking up part and the dream part. For me, we all have to have a dream or a waking up experience and could be. Maybe people watch your documentary series and they see the beautiful people, they are laughing, they are laughing and they have a dream. For me, my first psychiatric experience a couple of years ago, it was like a state where I really felt so light and happy and healthy. And there was a lot of pain and tension afterwards. there was a big gap between this dream state how good I can feel how pure I am and the yeah, and then there was a positive tension and this tension is really what drives me in a way that I feel that again You said so beautiful to that the world is our mural life is our mural and I can see every day Okay, I don’t feel like my dream So there’s the tension and that tension pulls me in a positive way But the problem is if we don’t have this dream this waking up experience, we don’t know what we don’t know and then we don’t have this positive tension and then we have a problem.

Jason:

That’s right. And you have to sit with that, right? Like it’s really important to, to contemplate if you don’t know what your dream is, if you don’t know what your larger meaning, your purpose, your passion, right? Um, that’s something you want to get curious about, right? Because that is, um, it is going to be the thing that, like you said, it’s a positive tension. It pulls you in a direction. It’s like, once you figure out what that is, it’s like, it just naturally pulls you. There’s no other way to describe it. It just starts to happen, right? And everything in your life starts to organize to that, right? So it creates this orientation, right? And if you don’t have an orientation, then you’re kind of just fumble around in the dark, you know, sometimes you feel good. Sometimes you don’t, you, sometimes you try this and you try that. And you’re just not sure what’s really working and where you’re going and why you’re doing it, you’re just kind of, you’re just dabbling, right? And so creating this, uh, this dream, this vision of what you want your life to be like, and this can be, you know, a year out. five years out, 10 years out, 40 years out, it doesn’t really matter, but where in your life do you wanna go? And so if you can orient to that, then all your decisions start to move you in that direction. And as Paul Check points out too, it’s important to build that your dream team. Who in your life do you really need to help you get to this dream? Because you can’t get there alone. It’s really not a good strategy. You’re gonna suffer. tremendously in that ways, right? So, yeah, it’s important to have that dream. And so it’s sometimes for many people who are suffering in whatever way, and that’s where you wanna start. You wanna start to contemplate and get curious about what your dream is. And you may be frustrated, like you don’t know, you’re not sure, you know, and it’s, everybody seems to have, you know, a purpose in their life and you don’t, right? but it can really just take a little bit of silence, a little bit of contemplation, go for us a walk, right? Most of this is one of the big problems we have in our world, in our Western world is that we are overstimulated, like crazy. And so we can’t hear the whispers. We can’t hear these, even the loud knocks, oftentimes of our soul speaking to us saying, hey, do this, this looks cool, try that, right? Go talk to that person, right? This person’s important. These little whispers inside us, or they get drowned out by all the stimulus, right? And it’s a stimulus not only from our five senses, but it’s an internal stimulus as well. It’s spiking our nervous systems on a constant basis to where we become fairly numb to the other realities, the internal feelings, these little sensations that we have in our bodies, right? So part of this solution is to slowly or quickly, whatever you feel like you can do, but start to remove stimulus from your world. And that might mean going, a lot of people are going from smartphones to flip phones. I haven’t made that shift, but what I’ve done is I’ll turn off all notifications. I try to minimize any apps. I don’t use social media very much, like almost never. And so… these are the type of things that we can do. You know, my phone’s almost always on airplane mode or it’s, you know, in silence. Like I don’t respond to all the things coming at me. And so oftentimes it can be hard to get ahold of me. People maybe get frustrated with that. They say I don’t reach out and connect enough. And I understand that, but that’s, it’s important for me to live here in the present and reduce a lot of those stimuli, right? And get outside as much as I can, even though I’m still not as good as I would like to be. But… turning off all the stimulus and going on some vacations and perhaps even changing your environment completely, whatever you can do to remove stimulus, that can help allow you to start to get a better perspective of really what you want, right? And you’re allowing your soul to be able to speak to you more, right? And some people do this in meditation too, and that’s fine. And this can happen in the shower, this can happen when you’re on a walk, this can happen when you’re driving, when you’re driving. turn off the radio, turn off the podcast, right? Like there’s a lot of this stuff that we are constantly being bombarded with, that if we can just sit in silence a little bit, then all these new ideas and thoughts can enter and we can start to play with those.

Tim Boettner:

That’s interesting because then we are in a way more lazy. We do less and get so much more That’s the irony and the paradox of all of that.

Jason:

Yeah. And that’s what we’re seeing with the VR too, right? Like there’s all these things that were coming on with this, like the VR reality that I’m super curious to see how this plays out because there’s that sounds horrific to me. I mean, it sounds like a cool technology, but I can’t imagine, um, you know, two people, I think it was I was reading or watched some video about this new VR headset that you can walk around and it you can see the reality, but you’re in the VR world. So you’re walking around the room, but it projects the room into your actual goals. It’s very bizarre. So I just can’t imagine what this is gonna be like. And so again, this comes down to fundamental principles. So if we get back to the basics and all these new cool gadgets, we don’t get lost in them. We can use them for perhaps what they might be good at and leave it at that, but we don’t get sucked in and pulled out of what’s really, really important.

Tim Boettner:

Okay, so yeah, let’s wrap it up. If people wanna learn more, so for sure, I think all of what we talked about on show notes, I will link to your book, to your documentary series. Documentary series, what are other ways to connect with you, with your work to learn more.

Jason:

Yeah, you can go to awakenedhealthacademy.com. That’s where I have my docuseries, the Human Longevity Project. I have a lot of the other video summits and interviews and presentations that I’ve done with a lot of great thinkers in the integrative health space, in the, let’s say, trauma and waking up space as well. And then you can find my book anywhere. Books are sold. Amazon, it’s called Beyond Longevity. a proven plan to heal faster, feel better, and thrive at any age.