Fantastic. Thanks so much. I know you have a very prompt bedtime in about 84 minutes.
And you have to be back in LA for this. And I don't want to spike your or anyone else's cortisol. So, we're going to close the night and keep it super light and just talk about sex and death and war and addiction and profit and everlasting life for the next 20. Sound good?
Okay. First, I want to talk about how we first met. It was last fall at the end of a long Thanksgiving weekend. A lot of family time for me and screaming children. So, on Sunday, as a reprieve, I tuned in to X.com to watch Brian Johnson trip balls on Magic Mushrooms on a live stream for five and a half hours. And while you were on another planet, you were joined by among many others, your son, your father, Marc Benioff, Grimes did a DJ set. What was the purpose of this experiment? What did you learn?
Yeah, first my partner Kate Tolo's here. Hi, Kate. Kate was there helping me do the whole thing. When we started the project, we were asking this question: If you look at all the scientific evidence, what actually works to make someone more healthy? And if you go down the list, it's actually a pretty small number of things. Like you can do sauna, you can do exercise, you can eat well, you can sleep well. Like those things are known. Nowhere on that list was psychedelics. Like you know, it's an ancient medicine or it's been in a trial to treat depression or anxiety and there's different versions. But there was a study that came out in animal models that said psilocybin extends lifespan. And we said, 'Huh, maybe.' And so we looked into it and we saw there were some mechanisms that were interesting. And we thought what if we do an experiment where we test this molecule for longevity. So we did the world's most quantified psychedelic experiment to see is this psychedelic a longevity therapy.
It is surprisingly so. It's actually like we've tested so many things. The performance of this molecule was incredibly impressive. Just what you want to find is a therapy that when you do it impacts the body like you don't want just a narrow, you want a broad band. And so it was really useful for the brain, the microbiome, there was a metabolic reset we found first in human observation of like blood glucose. So it really was like a systematic improvement.
Are we doing it wrong? Should there not have been a signature cocktail?
Well, so like I think because then people take that we did it like these were 25 milligram doses of psilocybin and then people then assume that microdosing must like if a lot is good, a little must be good as well. But we haven't tested out microdosing. I think there's some evidence saying that microdosing may actually not be good. So TBD on that one. But so yes, so the answer is we should have served 25 milligram doses and then we've been having a fun time.
Excellent. For October we'll get our mushrooms ready. Let's quickly move from one other worldly experience to another. I want to talk about what no one in San Francisco is having: sex. Kate, your business partner, who's also your romantic partner, is here tonight. And you two are having a lot of sex very publicly. Let's read from a sample tweet from yours recently: 'My lips press against hers and I softly bite her lower lip. Kate's blood vessels dilate from the acetylcholine and nitric oxide release, flushing her lips, skin, and body. The cascade is nearing a waterfall.' This is very Fifty Shades of Grey meets Journal of Cell. Read more. Why stop? I'm into it. First, why are you so public about your sex life? What's the message you want to convey with?
Yeah. Kate and I were talking to my son. He is 20 now and we were talking about sex and he had these questions and I was like I've never educated my son on sex. You know, like we of course like have the basics covered, but his only source of education has been porn. And so we have this entire generation of people who have not been educated how do you make love? And like what does that happen? So for example like this very simple thing like when you're with your partner and you put your hand on their skin if you move fast the body processes that touch as like just a normal touch. If you move at a certain speed below I think it's like something like 3 centimeters per second, something very slow. The nerve fibers say, 'I feel intimate.' And so it's like the speed of touch communicates through nerve fibers of are we connected.
Are you calculating that speed when you're touching Kate?
Yeah. I mean, absolutely. I mean, so Kate is very good. She is a scientific experiment. But like, you know, if you do it, then inevitably you get goosebumps because the body registers like I'm now in an aroused state. And so what I wrote was basically an instruction manual on how to have sex. And so people they read it and they're like this is like, you know, Fifty Shades like longevity version. But if you actually decoded it, you'd be like, it's actually like 10 lessons I was trying to explain. Like for example, women in their arousal period, it takes them like 15 minutes to tent. If a woman is not for like 15 minutes of foreplay, then sex is painful for them. And so men, you know, if they get aroused within a minute or two and so there's a disconnect and so like basic stuff like that. So it was like trying to educate people on how do you create good relationships and love matter.
Makes good sense. It's not every day that a founder is public about their sex life. Mark Zuckerberg has posted a lot about smoking meats. I've not seen about him getting his meat smoked. What do your employees make of this?
My son is so cool. He just like he belly laughs and he's Yes. And your son and also your employees. Yeah. So yeah, we're very clear when people come to the office, come to work with us, we're like look, we're pretty rowdy. They know what they're getting into. Yeah. So if you like this environment, cool. This is the kind of environment. If you think it's fun, if not, then like we're probably not the right fit for you. So we try to be extremely upfront with like who this is, who we are and what we do.
Yeah. Makes sense. We're in a city, as I said, known for its celibacy right now. That founders are going monk mode. No dating until series B is a mantra among engineers of so much time to build and so little time to bone. Are they missing out? Like what is your advice to those in tech who'd say like a sex life is a distraction?
Yeah, I mean like we all know this intuitively that you know a well-maintained car drives better than a poorly maintained car. That you know a well-rested child performs better than a poorly rested child. Like basically whether it's a mechanical object, a physical object, or a biological object, those things run better when they're healthy. Like no one wants to write a shitty codebase. You want healthy code. And so what founders don't realize is when you're not taking care of your health, you are shitty code. Like you are not beautiful code. And so sometimes it takes a bit for them to realize that, but you know, like a good partnership is really beneficial for mental health and physical health and really for like most founders have mental health issues. Most people in this room have mental health issues. Like can we be honest? And like you know it's true. And like we don't talk about it but like a substantial portion of American citizens have mental health issues. So like yeah I get that it's like a clean prescription of like you know but really I think we're missing, we have not created a culture of health and it's hurting everybody.
That's fair. All right one more quick question about sex. We're going there so we'll go there. You measure your nocturnal erections. You average about 3 hours a night.
Yeah. It's more okay. More than your sons. Well, actually he beat me by two minutes. Yeah. Yeah. Very very discouraging. Yeah.
Do postcoital, are those numbers lower?
