The Man Who Injected Himself With Snake Venom 800+ Times — Tim Friede on Building a Universal Antivenom

⚠️ Please do not attempt anything discussed in this episode.

My guest today is Tim Friede — a name some listeners may recognize from Stan Lee's Superhumans, where he appeared as "Antivenom," or from National Geographic's Snake Underworld, or from the paper published last year in Cell that made his decades of self-experimentation suddenly, scientifically undeniable.

For over two decades, Tim did something no research institution would sanction: he injected himself with snake venom — hundreds of times, from some of the deadliest species on Earth — in an effort to build immunity no antivenom could offer. He was bitten by cobras. He flatlined. He kept going.

I asked him where it started. Not with grand ambition, he told me, but with a hobby — milking spiders and scorpions in the late '90s — and a sobering statistic: five million snakebites a year, worse than a hundred thousand deaths, hundreds of thousands more left maimed. He decided, without a medical degree or a lab, that he would become his own subject.

I wanted to understand the cost. He described the isolation — a divorce, a small house in the woods, doctors who refused to touch research built on self-harm, no matter how methodical. And the moment that changed everything: a phone call from immunologist Jacob Glanville, asking for a vial of his blood. That sample led to an antibody, D9, capable of neutralizing venom across an entire family of snakes — the foundation, now, for what may become a universal antivenom, with a manufacturing partnership underway in New Delhi.

I closed by asking what he hopes people remember. Not the bites, he said. The persistence.

We ended, as we always do here, with ichigo ichie — this moment, once in a lifetime, never repeated quite this way ,again.