In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, we talk about how to deal with the effects of alcohol and other drugs on the brain, including ADHD and ADD, and how they can affect your brain function. We also talk about the benefits of ice baths, ice showers, and ice baths for ADHD. Joe also talks about how ADHD can be treated with drugs like Ritalin, Adderall, Modafinil, and Vyvanse, and why they should be prescribed to kids with ADHD. Joe also explains why ADHD should be prioritized over other forms of mental health problems like anxiety, depression, and PTSD. We also discuss the benefits and drawbacks of ADHD meds and ADHD therapy. We talk about ADHD medication, ADHD treatment, ADHD therapy, and ADHD in general. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review on iTunes. Thanks to our sponsor, Train By Day, by Night, All Day. See you in the next episode of Train by Day, all day! Joe Rogans Podcast by Night by Night All Day by Day by Night! Check it out! - The J.R. Experience by Night podcast by Night Podcast by Day All Day, By Night by Day - All Day Podcast by Night - By Night, all Day Podcasts by Night? - Check it Out! - Check It Out! , by Night all Day podcast, by Day all Day, All Night Podcast? - by Night By Night Podcasts Podcast, by By Night podcast? , All Day podcast by Day? by Day Podcast, By Day Podcast by Evening Podcast? by Night and Evening Podcast, All day, by Evening podcast? by Day and Evening? -- by Night , all day, all by Day & Evening Podcasts By Night all day? . by Morning Podcasts, by Morning, by Afternoon Podcast by Afterday Podcast? , Evening Podcast All Day Morning Podcast, Evening Podcast by Morning Morning Podcast? - Evening Podcast , by Day/Night Podcast, and Evening Morning Podcast - By Evening Podcast - By Day/Nite Podcast? ? , Evening Podcast/Late Night Podcast ? -- Evening Podcast ? , Evening podcast ? by Evening Poll by Day & Evening Poll? ... | Evening Podcast?? , Evening Poll, by Late Night Podcast
00:00:29.000Yeah, I mean, obviously there's a tolerance that's built up with drinking a lot, but I believe the number is approximately 8% of people have a mutation in a gene such that when they drink alcohol, it increases their dopamine levels very quickly and they get euphoric.
00:00:48.000These are the people like that character in Mad Men, the Don Draper character, like he would go out and just get plastered and the next day, you know, he's all fresh and And ready, and part of that is tolerance.
00:00:59.000But in certain Scandinavian countries, Northern European countries, this gene tends to be more prevalent.
00:01:04.000And these people are the people that can just keep drinking and drinking.
00:01:06.000They feel great when they drink, whereas most people, they feel disinhibited at the beginning.
00:01:11.000You know, you have a couple of drinks, the forebrain shuts down a little bit, because that's what it does.
00:01:14.000They start talking more, talking more, but if they keep drinking, they're blacking out, you know, they're stumbling, they're slurring their words.
00:01:21.000This 8% of people, by way of this genetic mutation, alcohol affects them very differently.
00:01:26.000It offsets all that sedative property and they could just go and go and go.
00:01:29.000This is the person who's doing a quesaday or at the party and just shot for shot and just looking like they're improving in function.
00:01:53.000Is universal, but in terms of how it impacts brain function, and you see this across all these different categories of drugs too, right?
00:02:01.000You know, somebody takes Ritalin, Adderall, Modafinil, or R-Modafinil.
00:02:06.000These are the common prescribed drugs now, and people use them recreationally for ADHD. In fact, in researching an episode for our podcast on ADHD, it turns out that more than 80% of college students will rely on ADHD meds Quote,
00:02:21.000unquote, recreationally not prescribed.
00:02:23.000They buy it from each other in order to study.
00:03:08.000Perhaps as detrimental as recreational drugs to increase focus.
00:03:13.000But most of the students out there and the tech workers, and this is big in the finance world too, are relying on Ritalin, Adderall, and things like Vyvanse.
00:03:22.000And to be clear, they have legitimate clinical uses.
00:03:25.000It's another one of these drugs for ADHD. Here's the story around why these drugs initially came to be.
00:03:31.000If you look at kids or adults with ADHD, like true attention deficit disorder or hyperactivity disorder, you don't always have the hyperactivity.
00:03:39.000What you find is they can focus really well if it's on something they like.
00:03:44.000So a kid with ADD or ADHD that loves video games, that kid will play video games with laser focus for three hours.
00:04:06.000Well, and if you can arrange your life such that most of your stuff is around that, great.
00:04:11.000But these kids prove that if you like something, you can focus.
00:04:17.000And it comes as no surprise then that the drugs for ADHD... Universally increase dopamine, because dopamine is this incredible molecule that enhances focus, motivation, and drive, and literally narrows the aperture of your visual attention.
00:04:48.000But nowadays there is rampant adult ADHD and ADD. Part of that is probably due to the phone.
00:04:54.000Part of that is probably just due to All sorts of things.
00:04:57.000But there is also a lot of recreational use of these prescription drugs, not illicit drugs like cocaine amphetamine, but prescription drugs that increase dopamine and supplementation for increasing dopamine as well.
00:05:09.000I had read something about Modafinil, NuVigil, ProVigil, whichever one it was, that initially it was created as a performance enhancing drug, but they needed some sort of an ailment.
00:05:28.000I thought it was in the reverse, but I'm open to hear it.
00:05:32.000And listen, the course of a lot of these drugs and how they hit market is super interesting.
00:05:36.000Learning more and more about this because one of my colleagues who works on aggression and mating behavior, which fascinates me, has identified some peptides that can really reduce anxiety.
00:05:46.000They put these to the pharmaceutical industry.
00:05:49.000Pharmaceutical industry wasn't interested in them at all, even though the safety margins are huge.
00:05:53.000So you say, why wouldn't they want this?
00:05:55.000Well, it turns out these same drugs failed in a schizophrenia trial a long time ago, so no one will go near it with a 10-foot pole.
00:06:00.000So the way the pharmaceutical industry generally approaches drugs is they love to re-market drugs for which there's already FDA approval because then they don't have to go through all the safety stuff.
00:06:12.000And when they do that, they can renew the patent.
00:07:17.000We can talk about which brain area, but what he discovered is- Conserve?
00:07:20.000Meaning, sorry, that in mice and in humans, these brain structures look identical.
00:07:24.000And that the same classes of neurons exist, that if you were to stimulate them, because neurosurgeons have done this, people go into a rage.
00:07:30.000Or in animals, if you stimulate them, the animals go into a rage.
00:07:34.000In fact, there are these videos online, they're incredible, where this is Dayu Lin's work when she was in David Anders' lab.
00:07:40.000So you take two mice, a male mouse and a female mouse, and they're mating, right, as it were.
00:07:45.000And then they stimulate these neurons, because they can do that now using light, believe it or not.
00:07:51.000And the male immediately tries to kill the female.
00:07:56.000You can even just put him in a cage alone with a glove filled with air.
00:08:00.000He's walking around, you stimulate these neurons and he just goes into a rage, right?
00:08:16.000And you know, and every time there's this, you know, horrible news event, like the school shooting thing or something like that, I always think, you know, like what's going on in the, there's a certain brain area, it's called the ventromedial hypothalamus.
00:08:26.000And this is a brain area that's really interesting because it has a population of neurons that control mating.
00:08:31.000You stimulate them and animals will just start trying to copulate with basically whatever's around.
00:08:36.000If you give them a choice of their usual preference of, you know, females, if they're male, Males, if they're female, because that's the way mice go, one or the other, they will just try and start mating.
00:08:47.000You stimulate the other group of neurons, and they will try and kill the other males.
00:08:50.000So these are like switches in the hypothalamus.
00:09:03.000So for many decades, it was known that if you stimulate this brain area, you could get a This is actually Nobel Prize winning work of a guy whose last name is Hess.
00:09:11.000And what they found was if you stimulate this brain area, cats would go into either two kinds of aggression.
00:09:18.000It was either defensive aggression, kind of with, you know, hair up, or you would stimulate a little bit more and they would do the, you know, predatory aggression, right?
00:09:27.000I'm probably doing this wrong, but, you know, like ears forward and, you know, you're the hunter last time.
00:09:31.000I'm still learning about, you know, animal behavior in this way.
00:09:34.000But what's really interesting is that for years, no one could understand why if you also stimulate this brain area and you used a different pattern of stimulation, you get mating behavior.
00:09:44.000And it turns out that the neurons are mixed in there like salt and pepper.
00:09:48.000David Anderson's lab figured out that these are molecularly distinct neurons.
00:09:53.000And what makes them distinct is really interesting.
00:09:55.000If they stimulate only the neurons that have the estrogen receptor, They become aggressive.
00:10:01.000And this again goes back to this thing that we talked about a while ago, which is that testosterone, aromatized, converted into estrogen, has these incredible effects on aggression and masculinization of the brain.
00:10:13.000And a lot of people think, in fact, people heard me say that last time and said, oh, you're trying to say that estrogen is doing everything testosterone is doing.
00:10:20.000It's that things like testosterone and estrogen control gene expression.
00:10:23.000And so the fact that it's estrogen or testosterone, it doesn't really matter.
00:10:27.000It's the fact that these are molecularly distinct neurons, they can trigger these neurons and they can get very distinct outputs of behavior.
00:10:34.000But what's crazy is you stop stimulating the animal, just goes back to doing whatever, and then it goes, oh yeah, I think I'll try and mate again.
00:10:38.000Now, eventually, the female's like, hey, this is getting confusing.
00:10:41.000But this, it's clear that these sorts of things are also happening in humans.
00:10:46.000But normally, we have kind of a weighting of aggression versus mating behavior, right?
00:10:50.000Some people choose to combine those, right?
00:10:54.000Rape, there's rough sex, there's all sorts of, you know, it's uncomfortable for people to think about, but there's a continuum between aggression.
00:11:20.000You look at animals mating and there's a kind of a balancing act between, you know, what looks...
00:11:26.000You wouldn't call it lovemaking, let's put it that.
00:11:29.000You'd call it mating that's pretty aggressive.
00:11:31.000And that's very common in the animal kingdom.
00:11:34.000Is it common in the animal kingdom because in order to have strong genes that pass on, you need a strong animal and so they express themselves in this aggressive way.
00:11:46.000To prove to the female that they're strong enough to mate and procreate?
00:11:50.000Like what is the reason for that sort of aggressive?
00:12:10.000I mean, it's the size of like a little gobstopper candy, like a little gumball.
00:12:14.000And you've got neurons for aggression, neurons for mating, neurons that turn on to make sure that animals don't try and mate with the wrong species, right?
00:12:23.000Like, how come a cat doesn't try and mate with the dog?
00:12:25.000Now, the dog might hump, but that's a different thing altogether.
00:12:29.000So it's all harbored in there and this hydraulic theory is that all of these things are kind of weighted probabilities.
00:12:36.000So there's never zero probability that any of this will happen unless they're in sleep.
00:12:40.000But maybe it's 10% aggression, 80% mating while they're mating.
00:12:45.000Maybe another male enters the arena and now there's sort of like a confusion like am I going to have to fight or can I keep mating?
00:12:50.000These kinds of things because oftentimes these animals are communal.
00:12:54.000And so the way that Anderson explained this to me, and we had a conversation about this recently, is that the brain might actually get confused in certain moments.
00:13:03.000And there's also a kind of opioid pain relief thing that gets released during sexual activity.
00:13:12.000And we were talking about this in the context of fetishes because if you look at fetishes, they're not random.
00:13:18.000True fetishes can be pathologies where people actually require the presence of something in order to become aroused.
00:13:26.000And those things almost always, if you look at true fetishes, are things like feet, dead bodies, feces, animals, things that are all very infectious, exactly.
00:13:37.000Your facial expression illustrates it perfectly.
00:13:39.000My facial expression for those listening is yuck.
00:13:42.000So, you know, that's disgust and you have circuits in your brain that are for disgust that are about getting you away from that thing because it's infectious, putrid, disgusting and out of context.
00:13:52.000And then you think about sex and food appetite and all that and it's all appetitive as they call it.
00:14:00.000It's bringing in more of those molecules as opposed to trying to get away from like vomit or something.
00:14:03.000Right, but the feet thing, isn't it like guys like pretty feet?
00:14:07.000You know, we're very visual animals, and so it may cross over into visual perception.
00:14:10.000And what arouses people differs, obviously.
00:14:13.000People have their different proclivities.
00:14:14.000But true fetishes are kind of a confusion of this circuitry, right, where people confuse or learn arousal associated with something that's actually quite dangerous.
00:14:24.000I mean, you take the extreme one, like dead body.
00:14:26.000It's like incredibly— Is that normal?
00:14:34.000Common enough that you brought it up, though.
00:14:36.000Well, I've been reading up on this because I'm fascinated by the primitive as in addition to the more evolved parts of the brain.
00:14:43.000So the way Anderson describes is, you know, you'll see animals mating and then all of a sudden, you know, he'll bite the back of her neck or sometimes she'll bite him.
00:14:49.000And the theory is that some of the neurons and they've seen this in brain imaging in real time.
00:14:55.000Some of the neurons that are responsible for aggression will just suddenly, you know, spike up there, right?
00:15:00.000And will kind of overtake the other behavior and then they'll go back to mating.
00:15:04.000Now, when you're talking about studies on animals and they're doing this, there's these ethical questions if you're going to do a study on humans, if you wanted to stimulate those same neurons and try to incite aggression or hostility or even arousal.
00:15:23.000So a good friend of mine, Eddie Chang, he's the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF. He spends his life and he makes his living probing around in the brain of people who have epilepsy, looking for the site where if they stimulate, the person will have a seizure so that they can burn that area out or make some other manipulation.
00:15:41.000And he's told me that you can't poke around at random, right?
00:15:45.000Every scientist would love to just do that experiment, just go in and kind of search.
00:15:49.000But there are sites where they'll stimulate, thinking they might evoke a feeling of pleasantness or no feeling at all, and the person will go into a rage in the OR, in the operating room, because they're wide awake.
00:16:01.000You've probably seen these things of people with neurosurgery and they're playing the violin or things of that sort.
00:16:06.000Occasionally they'll hit an area where the person will say, I'm feeling super angry right now.
00:16:10.000And they'll say, let's back off a little bit from there.
00:16:12.000And they'll chart where they were in the brain.
00:16:38.000And do you feel like that variation is neurochemical?
00:16:42.000I think it is neurochemical and I think it is learned as well.
00:16:45.000This peptide that we were talking about earlier becomes relevant in this context.
00:16:50.000So David's lab discovered there's a peptide called tachykinin.
00:16:53.000It's related to another molecule that's involved in pain relief called substance P that we all make.
00:16:59.000Tachykinin has a bunch of different forms, but in humans there's tachykinin 1 and tachykinin 2. In mice or humans that are socially isolated for a period of time, tachykinin levels go through the roof.
00:17:11.000This is very relevant to the recent past around the pandemic, in my opinion.
00:17:16.000It goes through the roof, and what happens?
00:17:18.000It creates anxiety, anger, and in particular, aggression.
00:17:23.000And so there are drugs that are tachykinin inhibitors.
00:17:27.000And I asked David, I said, well, why aren't we giving tachykinin inhibitors to people that are feeling anxious and aggressive and, you know, kind of tamp that down?
00:17:36.000And we just had yet another school shooting and we can talk about what that's about or not.
00:17:41.000But, and he said, this drug is actually approved.
00:18:55.000Something came over the news that, you know, there's literally killer loose and it was like I in Brooklyn went into a subway, released some smoke bombs and shot people, right?
00:19:03.000They found him in the Lower East Side walking around.
00:19:21.000Then you find the angry posts, you find the things online, but it's never like, oh, this, okay, you've got crazies like the BTK killer and people who were like in their church and stuff, but were sociopathic killers on the sly.
00:19:32.000But these kind of random act, what seemed like random acts of aggression, almost always these people were highly socially isolated.
00:19:50.000I was like, why aren't these drugs being used or prescribed?
00:19:52.000And he said, because years ago, there was a trial at a pharmaceutical company exploring the role of this drug in schizophrenia for reasons that aren't clear.
00:20:01.000And it cost the company a ton of money.
00:20:02.000So now no companies want to go near it.
00:20:04.000There's this kind of, you know, blacklisting of drugs that failed in trials.
00:20:08.000And as a consequence, there's probably dozens if not hundreds of very useful medications out there that are just not being explored.
00:20:16.000So when they do studies on people to try to find out what areas of the brain that you can ignite to get people hostile, how would they perform those studies?
00:20:27.000So unfortunately, I guess fortunately for guys like Elon, because they have companies based on this, but unfortunately for kind of exploratory purposes, making this easier, They shave the head in a little spot, they drill, they make a tiny little hole in the skull and they're lowering electrodes down there.
00:20:44.000And the way these electrodes are built, they're not just a single wire, it's actually pretty cool.
00:20:48.000It's like a barrel of wires and they're able to like put them to different depths.
00:20:52.000So, you know, you imagine a hundred or a thousand wires all at different depths and, you know, probing around and stimulating at different levels.
00:20:59.000And then they'll hit a spot where the person will say, I feel like I'm about to have a seizure, or sometimes we'll have a full-blown seizure, and they go, okay, that's the spot.
00:21:08.000So we're kind of poking around the dark?
00:21:10.000I mean, the brain, I'd love to tell you that we understand so much about how the brain works.
00:21:15.000I think we understand a lot, but most of what we know about how human brain structures work are from experiments like the one I just mentioned, which is clinically oriented, but then you're doing some experimentation along the way.
00:21:26.000Or case studies like the famous HM. They always give their initials, not their names because to maintain anonymity.
00:21:33.000But we know more about human memory from one guy who had both his hippocampi lesioned because he had epilepsy in his hippocampi.
00:23:50.000Because the worst thing is when you know where someone's going, and you see the setup, and you anticipate the punchline, then the punchline comes, and you don't think it's funny.
00:24:00.000Because you're like, ah, I thought that myself.
00:24:38.000I mean, I think that for us, we were just thinking like, wow, for two scientists, like two super nerds, to put yourself into a situation deliberately where you don't know what's going to happen, it's like the worst.
00:24:49.000Everything about science is trying to control variables.
00:26:11.000If I write until like 3 or 4 in the morning, I try not to get up before 10. But on normal days, I'm getting up at 7 or maybe even a little earlier.
00:26:19.000But when I come home from shows, oftentimes my mind is very excited, and that's when I like to write.
00:26:28.000Yeah, you know, there's a really cool phenomenon where in early in the day or after, we should say, after someone's been asleep for a while, for that first zero to nine hours of the day, I call this phase one, just cause gotta label everything with a name to make it clear.
00:26:43.000During that time, we know that dopamine, adrenaline and cortisol, healthy levels of cortisol are highest in your system.
00:27:10.000Bias the probability that certain brain circuits in areas will be active and certain ones won't.
00:27:15.000So when dopamine and epinephrine are really churning around in your brain, you're really good at linear types of things, like math, organization, working out, sets and reps, this does this, does this, we're going here, itineraries, where there's a right answer and you're just trying to plug and chug.
00:27:28.000As serotonin and other molecules kick in, which is later in the day and at night, The brain becomes much better at these, I call this phase two of the day.
00:27:36.000They become, so it's like seven to 16 hours, sorry, 10 to 17 hours after waking.
00:27:42.000So zero to nine for phase one and 10 to 17 for phase two.
00:27:46.000Your brain is much better at nonlinear thinking, creative thinking, brainstorming.
00:27:52.000I don't know what the writing process, comedy process is for you, but You know, you're doing anything creative, you're organizing existing things into new ways, you're kind of playing with ideas, and it actually can be beneficial to be slightly sedated.
00:28:05.000This is actually why so many great writers and musicians and maybe comics have used A little bit of alcohol, a little bit of cannabis to put their brain into that kind of liminal state where you're not super lasered in.
00:28:16.000You're not looking for the right answer.
00:28:18.000The right answer just kind of comes to you.
00:28:19.000And for some people, they have a hard time accessing that when they're in this hyperdrive mode.
00:28:58.000That's sort of his drug, you know, like he's sleepy, and he's kind of just like half out of it.
00:29:04.000And, you know, when he puts the sunglasses on, he just, it's almost like he's in an altered state of consciousness, but without having to snort ketamine or whatever the fuck he was doing.
00:29:13.000You know, he's definitely a healthier approach.
00:29:45.000Karl Hart was telling me that it's almost the same thing as PCP. Absolutely.
00:29:49.000This receptor is a receptor that becomes active only when you're hyper-focused on something and it has the capacity to create brain change in a very dramatic way.
00:29:59.000They say, oh, your brain is different five minutes after this conversation than it was before.
00:30:43.000You give them ketamine, you try and dampen the plasticity, the brain change that would occur to remember that incredibly traumatic event.
00:30:51.000Now it's being used as a way to bring people into The clinic or it seems like it is pretty rampant use now and put people into this dissociative state so that they see themselves having an experience.
00:31:02.000In fact, I've talked to people who've gone through cut to mean trials and they describe it as watching themselves get out of their own car.
00:31:09.000They're like third person in themselves.
00:31:10.000This to me sounds like a horrible state to be in, but a lot of why is that?
00:31:14.000I mean, I've been working my whole life to just be comfortable with the body I'm in and I'd like to stay in it, not because it's always comfortable to be there, but because, you know, getting good at that seems to be the key to having a good life, being able to tolerate discomfort.
00:31:27.000This is about getting out of yourself.
00:31:30.000Yeah, but isn't the point for these people to try to figure out what they're doing wrong with their life so they can look at it objectively as a third party?
00:31:35.000Yeah, that makes sense to me that they would look at, like, for instance, their suicidal depression and say, you know, like the new agey kind of thing is like, you are not your feelings.
00:31:44.000That's a tough one for people to incorporate because when I have really strong feelings, it certainly feels like it's happening inside me.
00:31:51.000So this is allowing them to get next to their feelings and see their feelings as an experience, not them.
00:31:57.000Yeah, I mean, but even when you know that it's definitely happening to you, you know that you are also sometimes not burdened by those feelings.
00:32:22.000Yeah, and it seems to work quite well for intractable depression, as it's called.
00:32:26.000What's really odd about the fact that it works, at least to me, is that if you look at the other new emerging, very effective treatment for severe depression, it's the exact opposite.
00:32:36.000It's this incredible work that Matthew Johnson and colleagues are doing out at Johns Hopkins, giving people macrodoses of psilocybin.
00:32:43.000I talked to him, we had him on the podcast, and I asked him, I'm like, what are your thoughts on microdosing?
00:33:37.000And he said, there does seem to be something crucial about the people in these trials experiencing what would normally give them a complete panic attack and being able to just let go and go into the experience without trying to control it,
00:33:53.000without trying to tamp it down or ramp it up.
00:33:57.000What kind of experience that would give them a panic attack?
00:33:59.000For some people, he said there was one woman who came in, I believe it was a woman, there was a painting on the wall and she thought she could jump through it.
00:34:29.000The key thing is that they kind of feel overwhelmed, but then they feel supported enough by the therapist to lean into whatever's happening, and they stop trying to regulate it.
00:34:39.000And that's where apparently he thinks the breakthrough is.
00:34:42.000And so that reveals something very fundamental.
00:34:45.000It says that there's something powerful in terms of long-term depression relief that can be learned in those states that has to do with not...
00:34:55.000Regulating oneself or one's need to run for safety.
00:34:58.000And I find that fascinating because, you know, it raises all these questions.
00:35:03.000For instance, do you need to hallucinate?
00:35:06.000Maybe it has nothing to do with hallucinations.
00:35:07.000Maybe it just has to do with getting the person into a state of like real fear and then allowing them to lean into it.
00:35:13.000I don't know, that's a speculation, but I think that what's interesting about all this work on psychedelics is it's clearly working in these clinical trials.
00:35:20.000I mean, overwhelmingly the data are more positive than negative, and yet no one knows exactly why it's working.
00:35:26.000No one knows what's being rewired in the brain.
00:35:28.000There's all this speculation like, oh, dendrites grow and there's plasticity.
00:35:35.000So something powerful is happening under these Under the control of these psychedelic drugs in these clinical settings that are teaching people something valuable they can export.
00:35:48.000And everyone has a different narrative, like, oh, I saw this face or the green gremlins or whatever, you know, melting reality.
00:35:54.000But it seems to be the ability to let go of the attempt to control one's internal state.
00:36:02.000One of the weird things they found out when they started studying people while they were under the influence of psilocybin was the lack of brain activity.
00:36:12.000So the receptors for psilocybin are many, but one of the main ones is the serotonin 2C and 2A receptor.
00:36:20.000And those are in this layer of the cortex, the outer lining of the brain, called layer 5, which is extensively involved in lateral connections.
00:36:28.000And so it's absolutely true that you see More broad activation of the brain by any one stimulus.
00:36:36.000Show someone a picture, it's very broad compared to when they're not on these drugs.
00:36:40.000And when you broaden the amount of activity, I can imagine you reduce the total amount of activity in any one area.
00:36:46.000But my understanding is that these brain states are just so atypical.
00:36:50.000They're not like anything you see in sleep or dreaming, although they're similar.
00:36:55.000There was a guy at Harvard for years, Alan Hobson, the genius, a neuroscientist, and he was saying, Dreams are reparative.
00:38:50.000And all of a sudden, I felt like Now I sound like a crazy person, but this is how it felt since from a sensation perspective, as if like my body had been in Saran wrap before and it just kind of unzipped.
00:39:01.000And from that point on, I've been able to feel things body wide.
00:39:04.000And then I started thinking about all sorts of things like, I have unusual number of deaths and losses in my life for somebody who wasn't in the military or didn't grow up in the inner city.
00:39:16.000It just had some bad luck, you know, like, you know, new people that had bad luck.
00:39:22.000And all of a sudden I was able to kind of digest that and think about it in a more reasonable way.
00:39:26.000I think before that I was just pack it away, just work, work, ignore it, or try and sublimate it or turn it into anger or fuel, which, you know, it can be its own use, as you know, but at some point I was like, you know, I think I need to actually spend some time on this.
00:39:41.000And yeah, I think it made me a nicer person to myself.
00:39:44.000Yeah, I think there's real benefit in those things, whether it's MDMA or psilocybin.
00:39:49.000I think there's real benefit in a lot of them.
00:39:51.000And I think there's definitely benefit in macro, but I think there's benefit in micro, too.
00:39:55.000I know a lot of people that microdose, and they just feel like an elevated mood all throughout the day.
00:40:01.000I don't think you're going to get these sort of transformative, life-changing experiences where you transcend whatever it means to be a person and get a chance to look at yourself and look at the way you interface with reality in a different way.
00:40:13.000But I think what it does do is it alleviates a certain amount of anxiety and tension for people and it allows them to have a more enjoyable experience just in like regular everyday life without being intoxicated.
00:40:59.000And his joke was, it seems like you can detect reality better when you're high than when you're not high.
00:41:06.000Because people that were on psilocybin were able to detect, so if you have two parallel lines and they move one slightly off parallel, the people on psilocybin were able to detect it quicker than the people that were sober.
00:41:18.000I believe that for a number of reasons.
00:41:20.000Well, first of all, psilocybin at a basic level, when we think of it as like a drug, but it's like In many ways, it's a lot like the so-called SSRIs like Prozac, Zoloft and those things that they work on serotonin.
00:41:31.000It mainly increases serotonin but different receptors than things like Prozac and Zoloft.
00:41:37.000The ability to – we call that a psychophysics experiment.
00:41:41.000They vary that ever so slightly as you described.
00:41:44.000The thresholds for that are going to be different for different people.
00:41:47.000But if anything that can more narrowly tune attention is really going to help.
00:42:02.000He's an MD. Mainly works on trauma, incredible trauma therapist and has written about trauma, wrote the book on trauma that I think is the one in my opinion.
00:42:11.000And then we got into a discussion about like different substances and do they have application?
00:42:15.000So we talked about ketamine, et cetera.
00:42:17.000Asked about alcohol, just by way of comparison.
00:42:20.000And he said, There are basically zero therapeutic uses for alcohol, right?
00:42:27.000Now, this isn't something he does in his own clinic.
00:42:29.000He does talk therapy, not drug therapy.
00:42:31.000Although he's a psychiatrist, he can prescribe things.
00:42:34.000And he said, you know, cannabis is interesting and it may actually have some therapeutic potential, but the The main effect of cannabis is to narrow attention and focus.
00:42:42.000It actually can increase attention and focus.
00:42:43.000Now, the problem is it's not a very good filter, so people can narrowly attend to just video games or just to their anxiety if they're already anxious.
00:42:54.000But when it comes to psilocybin, psilocybin seems to increase creative thinking, new kind of new rules and algorithms about what could be an answer.
00:43:04.000So I'm not aware of how it might directly impact visual perception unless it narrows focus, but most of the drugs that impact serotonin are going to increase focus to some degree or another.
00:43:15.000And that can be good if what you're focusing on is pleasant.
00:43:18.000It can be really bad if what you're focusing on is really unpleasant.
00:43:21.000I knew people, I'm sure you've known, who just smoke weed and they have a panic attack.
00:43:25.000Yeah, the smoke weed thing is a weird one because it's like many things.
00:43:31.000It's completely dependent upon the individual.
00:43:33.000Like their individual genetics, their biology, whatever it is that they've had in their past.
00:43:40.000I know people that smoke marijuana and they're high-functioning.
00:43:42.000And I know people who smoke marijuana and they don't get anything done.
00:43:46.000And I don't know if those two things are related.
00:43:48.000I think people who generally have drive and discipline, marijuana gives them a break.
00:43:57.000It gives them a nice little, just a little rest stop.
00:44:00.000And I think that's probably beneficial.
00:44:02.000And I also think it makes you a little kinder, a little more compassionate, a little more sensitive, which is probably very beneficial to someone who's hyper-focused.
00:44:12.000Like people that are like type A personalities and trying to get things done all the time.
00:44:16.000You smoke a little pot and you're like, what am I doing?
00:45:06.000It's almost like I'm more aware of, like, what's going on.
00:45:09.000Instead of, like, this blunt sort of, you know, almost, like, distance from each individual muscle fiber, which I am normally...
00:45:21.000Normally I'm just trying to warm up, and then I warm up, and then I start getting going, and then I lift light first, and then I work my way up to what I normally use.
00:45:29.000But when I'm high, it's like I could feel like where it connects to the bone.
00:46:17.000It's a skill you can build up over time.
00:46:19.000This is great for some people, but some people are highly anxious.
00:46:22.000It sucks to have a lot of interoception.
00:46:25.000But we know, of course, that the mind-muscle connection is really powerful.
00:46:29.000And it's not just, Mind muscle connection is a, whatever they call it, bro science thing.
00:46:33.000The reality is that from peer reviewed studies, that if people focus on the contraction of a muscle during resistance training, as opposed to moving the weight, something that's hard to measure if they're actually doing it, the strength and hypertrophy gains are much greater.
00:47:24.000I mean, you always see those people like their shoulders hunch and they're, you know, they're making a mess of themselves, overworking their strong parts.
00:47:30.000And, you know, I mean, some people walk in the gym and it's clear they've never actually looked at, like, you know, the lower half of the mirror.
00:47:39.000The skip leg day thing is a cruel joke, but it's a cruel joke in the right direction because there's nothing worse than an imbalanced I mean, where someone has done a lot of work to try and create something.
00:47:53.000It's like having small legs and a large upper body is so unhealthy.
00:47:57.000You're like, for sure, your lower back's gonna be fucked.
00:48:00.000Well, structurally and also just neurally, you know, again, as a neuroscientist, you think the nerve to muscle connection is what contracts fibers.
00:48:08.000And if you think about somebody who's, you know, big upper body, small legs, That person, the neurons in their brain that represent their body are also completely contorted.
00:48:18.000No, but what do you think about a person, like, I bring him up all the time because he's so odd, Jon Jones.
00:48:23.000Like, Jon Jones has the smallest calves of any man I've ever seen who's an elite athlete.
00:48:31.000He's one of the greatest fighters of all time.
00:48:33.000And even now, while he's worked his way up to heavyweight, he hasn't fought in two years because over that time he's been building himself up.
00:48:41.000And now he's like a legit 255 pounds, he's fucking huge, tiny calves.
00:49:27.000These are very small calves, which it's really unusual for someone who's built the way he is.
00:49:33.000But his explosiveness out of those calves is probably met by that short muscle belly.
00:49:40.000Well, he's not the fastest guy, you know, and his whole thing is he's the best at controlling distance because he's very tall, especially for light heavyweight.
00:49:50.000Not going to be as tall for heavyweight, but he's fantastic at controlling distance.
00:49:55.000If you're a person who wants to maximize your...
00:49:59.000Like, you have a certain amount of weight you can beat.
00:50:02.000You can beat 205 pounds and that's it.
00:50:04.000If you want to beat championship weight.
00:50:05.000At 205 pounds, he's got the perfect physique.
00:51:14.000One of the ways I know it's a real issue is we didn't get steroids that showed up on its supplements, but when we were initially starting out,
00:51:29.000we used this third-party company that would mix our ingredients.
00:51:35.000And they would mix ingredients for other supplement companies as well.
00:51:39.000It was a company that packaged stuff for you.
00:51:41.000And so we did third-party tests on some of our stuff, and we'd find vitamins in there that weren't supposed to be in there.
00:51:49.000So we realized, oh, they're getting it from the vats.
00:51:53.000These guys aren't cleaning the vats properly that they used for the previous supplement.
00:51:57.000Now, if you're getting a lot of cheap stuff, particularly if you're getting stuff that's made overseas, that's the same companies that are making steroids.
00:52:05.000So they're making, you know, wherever it is in China, what have you, they're allowed to do that or whatever, it's not regulated.
00:52:12.000So there's guys that are buying off-the-counter, real, normal supplements that are supposed to be steroid-free that have steroids in them.
00:52:20.000Now there's also unscrupulous companies that will add steroids to their products just to make them more beneficial, just to make them more functional.
00:52:40.000And he was just taking some normal stuff that he bought from some health food store, and it turned out he popped for a very small trace amount of this stuff.
00:52:50.000Previous tests is nothing, and then this tiny small amount, which would indicate that, and this is what they said about John as well, the problem with what John did was like John tested negative, and then he tested positive, but the positive amount was so small that it's almost like he's getting off of it.
00:53:10.000So he would have to be on it for a long period of time.
00:53:12.000He'd have to be on it for weeks in order to reap any benefit.
00:53:16.000But meanwhile, it was less than that time ago, he was negative, and now he's got this trace amount in his system.
00:53:23.000So there's a lot of things that seem to lean towards the idea that he was accidentally dosed, that he took a tainted supplement.
00:53:34.000However, do you know More Pleats, More Dates?
00:53:49.000But he calls bullshit on a lot of guys in the UFC. And he goes over their specific blood work.
00:53:56.000And what he was concerned with was more the testosterone to epitestosterone ratio.
00:54:03.000He said it was off, way off, and not normal.
00:54:06.000And also the amount of testosterone that John had, the free testosterone system, he also felt was so low that it seemed to indicate that he was coming off exogenous hormones and that there's maybe some masking going on or whatever.
00:54:22.000But it was enough to make John ban him.
00:54:48.000And he kind of calls bullshit on him too.
00:54:50.000He calls bullshit on a lot of these guys.
00:54:52.000Yeah, well, and the lines have become really blurry because there's, you know, it used to be if anyone was taking any exogenous androgens, they were, quote unquote, on steroids.
00:55:00.000But now, of course, there's TRT, which is up to 200 milligrams per week.
00:55:04.000You can't do that in MMA. It's not legal.
00:55:43.000And there are now additional papers showing that, yeah, it raises testosterone and estrogen a little bit in parallel with that.
00:55:49.000It, you know, it looks like it's not going to cause people to, you know, to flag red on in most leagues, but the increases are not what one sees with, you know.
00:56:14.000But there are things that are short-acting that, like for instance, women, in a lot of women's sports, they'll use low-dose oxandrolone, Anavar.
00:56:22.000Right, which is DHT, dihydrotestosterone.
00:56:32.000And people will take it before workouts because it immediately makes you feel, or pretty quickly makes you feel kind of aggressive and like you want to train.
00:56:39.000Not angry aggressive, but you want to move your body.
00:56:42.000But then it also blunts, and a lot of doctors prescribe it for this reason, it reduces sex hormone binding globulin, SHBG. There aren't a lot of things out there that can reduce SHBG. SHBG is what prevents testosterone from being free testosterone.
00:56:56.000And I asked a Tia, Peter Tia, like what's the healthy level of free testosterone that a normal person should have, normal male should have?
00:57:03.000And he said, it should be about 2% of your total testosterone.
00:57:06.000And there aren't a lot of tools to do that.
00:57:08.000So if someone has a testosterone of, you know, Of 1000 and their free testosterone is five, that's bad, right?
00:57:15.000You'd expect it to, you know, be up in the 20. So, you know, as the Oxandrolone, Anavar can adjust that, but it also can crank up liver enzymes, but it's very fast acting.
00:57:26.000So a lot of athletes, especially female athletes will take this In the short run and then, you know, train with it, cut with it.
00:57:32.000That's how they get the, like, I have this theory.
00:57:34.000And again, this is just theory that a lot of these female CrossFit athletes, they get those turtle shell abs.
00:57:38.000Some of them might have low body fat to begin with, but sometimes you'll see a look and you just have to, you know, you're projecting, but it's like, okay, they're taking something.
00:57:48.000They don't look androgenized, but they look like they're definitely taking something.
00:57:52.000Well, I can speak for the jujitsu world, and especially in competitions where they're not testing, there's a lot of girls that are taking things.
00:58:00.000I have a friend who used to date a girl who's a competitor, and she started doing steroids, and he started getting weirded out.
00:58:40.000But these in-between competitions is where they're making all their gains, right?
00:58:45.000So in-between competitions, what USADA does is they do random drug tests throughout the year.
00:58:50.000And even Derek says even that like is you can get away with it.
00:58:54.000He explained what they're testing for and why you can get away with it in multiple videos and I don't want to fuck it up because the science of it I'm sure I'll butcher.
00:59:06.000I mean I think that testosterone replacement therapy part has also contaminated the public I really appreciate that years ago you just kind of outed with it.
00:59:15.000You're like, yeah, you know, TRT. Yeah, I've been telling people from the moment I started taking it, I'm not ashamed of it.
00:59:47.000But if I'm taking something and it works, I don't understand this fear of expressing what supplements you're on or what things you're taking.
00:59:58.000Yeah, I don't know what part of human psychology that reflects either.
01:00:02.000I mean, I think that, I mean, look, it's clear that testosterone, whether or not it's replacing or maxing out or whatever, not maxing out like super physiological doses, but to raise testosterone through injection or whatever, cipionate in reasonable dosage with the doctor, you feel better.
01:00:18.000Your effort feels good, you recover quicker, et cetera.
01:00:53.000But in general, as it relates to sports, it's tricky because like, for instance, last time I kind of walked around this issue, but this time I'll just say it.
01:01:01.000I mean, I don't like basketball anyway, enough that I would worry that it'd be.
01:01:04.000I know someone who's a professional basketball player and I asked him about Steroids.
01:01:09.000And he said, well, if you get injured, you can take up to 200 mg a week, which is considered a TRT dose.
01:01:15.000But that's actually a pretty big dose.
01:01:37.000Right, because most people are either, we talked about this, I think, before, but breaking that up into some smaller injections amounts is probably better to just keep androgen levels more reasonable.
01:01:46.000But what's a normal level that people take per week?
01:01:49.000100 to 200 milligrams per week is pretty typical.
01:02:13.000Most typical now, people will take somewhere, it pays to think about it in milligrams, people will take somewhere between You know, 10 and 40 milligrams every third day or so, right?
01:02:25.000Yeah, somewhere between 10. Yeah, because some people, you know, came into it with their testosterone at 650. And when you talk about replacement, you know, nowadays people will prescribe- 40 is so high.
01:02:35.00040 milligrams every three or four days, that's still 120 milligrams, you know, per week or so.
01:04:00.000You're taking, if it's 200 mg per ml, which almost certainly it is in this country, testosterone cypionate, it's going to be, you are taking 30 mg every four days.
01:04:09.000So someone, some people take up to four?
01:04:12.000Some people are taking essentially more than three times what you're taking.
01:04:19.000Is allowed, according to this player, right?
01:04:21.000I don't want the NBA to come after me.
01:05:17.000So Hoyer and his staff consider their efforts to counter sleep loss, like deep breathing exercise to optimize sleep, to be all but a Band-Aid for a broken bone.
01:05:25.000By the 2014-2015 season, Royer and his staff had fully committed to their investigation of sleep deprivation, tracking 18 players over multiple teams in each conference.
01:05:35.000When the season began, those players' testosterone levels ranked on average in the 88th percentile.
01:05:42.000Compared to males their own age after two months of NBA play and travel their levels had fallen to the 70th percentile by March the 32nd percentile a 64 percent drop in just five months So that's just being worn the fuck out.
01:05:56.000Yeah, I mean I get called a lot Do some work with military do some work with any kind of high-performance teams that are dealing with this kind of thing They want to know how can we maintain hormone levels and performance and you always start with Get regular sleep as much as you can.
01:06:13.000And how do you, you know, one night, no big deal, but two nights, three nights, you're impaired.
01:06:17.000And a lot of these guys also are really disciplined, but some go out and party afterwards and that whole thing.
01:06:22.000So it's always maximize exposure to sunlight in the first half of the day.
01:06:27.000Number one thing for just making sure that you sleep well that night and then limiting artificial light exposure by dimming lights from 10 p.m.
01:06:35.000Very few people do those two things, but they have an outsized effect on sleep.
01:06:40.000And there's a really nice study out of Israel this last year that showed that if you had people, this was men and women, go outside for 20 minutes, Three times a week and try and expose as much of their skin as they possibly could to sunlight while still being decent, right?
01:06:55.000That it raised testosterone and estrogen significantly.
01:07:10.000And there was this whole pathway that they delineated in this study, really interesting, based on keratinocytes, which are these particular skin cells, and P53, which is a cell cycle molecule, super interesting.
01:07:19.000It showed getting sunlight on your body, getting sunlight exposure to your eyes early in the day, increases testosterone and estrogen, increases feelings of wellbeing, improves sleep, et cetera.
01:07:29.000It's like all the things we know, but people are finally catching onto this.
01:07:33.000And even though I kind of blab about this ad nauseam on my podcast, people always say, well, Can't I just crank up my phone really bright in the morning and sit there?
01:07:41.000There's always this kind of negotiating.
01:07:44.000You're not going to out-negotiate the sun.
01:07:47.000And then people think, oh, the sun, that's really kind of woo technology.
01:07:51.000No, we evolved to get sunlight during the day and to avoid light at night.
01:07:57.000Have they done studies on people that live in, say, the Pacific Northwest where they don't get a lot of sunlight and whether or not that affects their testosterone and estrogen?
01:08:04.000Yeah, so they definitely, it depends on where they start out, because there's some genetic variation.
01:08:09.000I mean, the variation in testosterone levels is huge, hence the huge reference range of like 300 nanograms per tesli or all the way up to, you know, 1200, right?
01:08:18.000This is what makes TRT kind of a tricky topic, but more seasonal depression for sure.
01:08:24.000Greater requirement for sunlight viewing, but in order to keep mood high and hormone levels high.
01:08:30.000But the good news is people that are very susceptible mood wise and hormone wise to lack of sunlight respond best when they start getting light.
01:08:38.000So there's this really nice study that looks at like night owls and people that don't get much sunlight during the day.
01:08:43.000If they start doing, getting some caffeine exercise in sunlight in the early part of the day.
01:08:49.000Just to ramp up their energy levels early on, get them outside, but also eating in the earlier part of the day, you know, just trying to bring their active schedule into the earlier part of the day.
01:08:58.000But doesn't caffeine just make you feel like you're not tired?
01:09:03.000Ah, so this is a really cool mechanism.
01:09:05.000There's actually a trick to avoid the daytime, the afternoon crash.
01:09:23.000Caffeine essentially blocks the adenosine receptor, but then when caffeine wears off, the adenosine that's still around binds to that receptor and you crash, you feel really sleepy.
01:09:33.000So one thing that you can do is when you wake up in the morning, Don't ingest caffeine for the first 90 minutes or so.
01:09:41.000Like really push that off so that the adenosine and adenosine receptor interactions can all take place and dissipate.
01:09:46.000Then you drink caffeine and what you'll find is that if normally you would crash around two or three in the afternoon, you don't experience that crash anymore.
01:09:53.000Because the caffeine wears off but there isn't a lot of adenosine there to bind the receptor.
01:09:57.000The crash that I experienced from caffeine is lack of caffeine or caffeine and then getting off it is nothing compared to the carb crash.
01:11:21.000By the way, though, Some pasta makes me feel less like that and I don't know what that is.
01:11:29.000I don't know how much you've looked into glyphosate and how much of an impact glyphosate contamination has on people because we looked at it the other day.
01:11:40.000There was a study that showed They went over a bunch of different things, different plants and produce and things, and the amount of glyphosate they found was pretty stunning.
01:11:53.000Glyphosate, which is Roundup, which is a very common pesticide, or herbicide, I guess.
01:12:01.000But either way, it's fucking really bad for you.
01:12:04.000And there's many people that speculate that what a lot of people are calling gluten sensitivities is if really you're having a reaction to glyphosate.
01:12:12.000I mean, I should be clear, I try and eat plain rice or oatmeal when I do eat clean carbs, if there is such a thing.
01:12:20.000I mean, if I eat a lot of carbohydrates, I crash.
01:12:22.000Do you know anything about glyphosate, though?
01:12:24.000Well, I was gonna say, I was in Copenhagen recently to give a talk about totally unrelated things, but earlier in the week, Dr. Shana Swan was there.
01:12:55.000And you asked about kind of regional differences and relate to light in terms of testosterone.
01:12:59.000But what I took away from her talk was that people who live in rural areas because of the use of pesticides, that sperm counts and testosterone counts are way, way down.
01:13:08.000They're really suppressed in those areas.
01:13:20.000I mean, I believe it was 2015 when they figured out the phthalate connection with people's dip in testosterone, dip in sperm count, and then also an uptick in women having miscarriages.
01:13:31.000But I would think that would be from...
01:13:35.000I think the problem is there's no solution.
01:13:37.000And so when there's no solution to something like that, plus it could harm the economy, like I think people panic.
01:13:43.000They don't know what to do about something like that.
01:13:46.000If there's a thing and this thing has a solution like, you know, like, oh, don't drink this, eat that.
01:13:52.000Because if you drink this, this fucks you up.
01:13:54.000But if you eat that, you're going to be good.
01:13:56.000You know, that's something that they would talk about.
01:13:59.000But when something like this, when you find out that the average person eats a credit card-sized portion of plastic and microplastics every week, that's a little weird, too, right?
01:14:08.000We tried to figure that out the other day.
01:14:10.000The calculation of that might be a little fugazi.
01:15:12.000It's legal here, but that shit has been eliminated from a lot of countries.
01:15:17.000A lot of countries don't want people taking that in.
01:15:21.000But in this country, it's widely used.
01:15:23.000Google, how many countries allow glyphosate use?
01:15:30.000Just Google how many countries have outlawed glyphosate.
01:15:34.000I mean, I feel like you can do things to offset some of the damage, like getting sunlight, getting exercise, trying to eat well, but yeah, not direct compensation.
01:15:42.000Following the landmark case against Monsanto, which saw them being found liable for a former groundskeeper, 46-year-old Dwayne Johnson's cancer, 32 countries to date have banned the use of glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup weed killer.
01:16:10.000But I was reading this whole thing about someone equating gluten sensitivities with glyphosate because they were saying that how much of wheat is contaminated with glyphosate.
01:16:24.000And they were saying that may be what people are calling gluten sensitivities with some folks.
01:16:50.000I think about the school shooting thing.
01:16:52.000I worry about what that represents at a larger thing in terms of just people feeling that disenfranchised and then people feeling that scared and concerned all the time that things like that are going to happen.
01:17:03.000And if you can't trust the food you eat, what can you trust?
01:17:06.000And I'm not a paranoid person, but I like to think that we are emerging or have emerged from the last few years, the whole pandemic bit, with people more focused on what they can and need to do for their own health.
01:17:38.000That's learning information and then trying the things that are going to, you know, accessing the things that are going to work.
01:17:44.000I mean, that's a huge part of what my life's about these days.
01:17:46.000And this is why I find that whether or not it's a discussion about carnivore diets or vegan diets, I mean, I look at the debates around that and I just have to chuckle mostly about the way that debates are playing out.
01:17:58.000Because it's so theatrical, like Liver King on the one hand and then these like dweeby vegan scientists, many of whom I'm not talking about Stanford colleagues, of course, but others that are just like so combative in different spheres and there's no solution to come from that.
01:18:12.000Yeah, the Liver King thing drives me nuts because that guy's on steroids.
01:18:59.000One of his main assertions, and others have made this assertion, is that when you eat an organ, like a testicle or a liver, that the nutrients in that organ are specifically channeled to the organ that it would most benefit from.
01:19:26.000Oh, so there's no evidence that I am aware of that if you eat, say, liver, that the nutrients are specifically directed towards your liver.
01:19:37.000There's some old, old studies using radioactive labeling of Of organs, having animals ingest those organs and then slicing up the brain and body and looking.
01:19:46.000And there was some small but interesting specific diversion of brain to brain.
01:19:53.000But in my opinion, if you're eating brain and it's diverted to your brain, that's actually a concern, not a benefit because of prions.
01:20:02.000I'll go on record saying, to my knowledge, there's no evidence that eating testicles, for instance, supports your testicles because it's directed to the testicles.
01:20:12.000Now, there may be some bioactive, may be some bioactive hormones in there that go and support testicular function in some other way.
01:20:20.000But when things are brought into the gut, they're broken down into their component parts and they go out into the bloodstream.
01:20:25.000And then which organ gets that stuff depends on whether or not there's, say, a blood brain barrier, which keeps a lot of stuff out of the brain.
01:20:49.000Well, I think it's because I think it's because that there are nutrients, for instance, in liver, like very high concentrations of choline, precursor to acetylcholine.
01:21:02.000It is true that liver is one of the most choline-dense foods in the world, far more than an egg, far more than any vegetable or nut is gonna give you, and now I'm sure some celery, Warrior will come after me.
01:21:14.000You know, at the moment, as you know better than I, the moment you say one thing categorically, you know, you're kind of inviting it, but I've kind of learned to enjoy that response.
01:21:23.000I learned from it and correct me if I'm wrong, but liver incredibly high in choline.
01:21:27.000So you could see how the, the, the lore would emerge that eating liver is really good for you because it is, if you're interested in getting a lot of choline and vitamin D or vitamin A and other things of that sort.
01:21:39.000But the idea that it would be diverted specifically to your liver, that seems kind of crazy.
01:21:43.000Now, there's also this idea, I won't name names here, but there were people on social media for a while saying, well, walnuts are really good for your brain because walnuts actually look like a brain.
01:21:53.000And testicles look a lot like testicles too.
01:21:56.000But the point is that walnuts have certain things in them that are good for lots of cells, not just for brain tissue.
01:22:41.000I mean, you know, they're calorie dense, but they're great for you.
01:22:44.000So one of the things that Paul Saladino always wants to talk about is plant defense chemicals and about eating plants that plants don't want you to eat them.
01:22:52.000And so when you eat them, they're excreting these plant defense chemicals.
01:22:56.000Now, my thing on that is, and this is one of the things that Rhonda Patrick likes to talk about, is that that may have a hormetic effect.
01:23:04.000So there might be benefit to that, just like there's benefit to cold therapy and hot therapy, and that there's some foods that eating them, even though they do have these defense chemicals, those defense chemicals, at least in certain doses, might have a beneficial effect on your body.
01:23:21.000I'm going to try carnivore because I told Paul I would.
01:23:23.000I'm going to do blood work first and then after, but I'm not giving up my athletic greens and I'm still going to eat cucumbers, which he says are a fruit.
01:23:29.000He told me I have to cut the skin off them too.
01:23:31.000So I'm going to try it and see what happens.
01:23:33.000But I've also talked to Rhonda and she's really big on this broccoli sprout thing.
01:23:36.000And a lot of things that are incompatible in the Instagram space make a lot of sense to me scientifically, like eating some greens, but also eating some meat, et cetera.
01:23:46.000In terms of plants being bad for us, I mean, there are a lot of toxic components of plants.
01:23:51.000Typically, the further out on the branch you go towards fruit, the less toxic they become, right?
01:23:56.000Eating the bark is generally more dangerous, although berberine, a commonly used substance for lowering blood glucose, right?
01:24:07.000Aspirin derivatives, things of that sort, alkaloids.
01:24:10.000There is something interesting about plants, and I've talked to Paul and other You know, serious colleagues in the, you know, amino acid science space.
01:24:18.000So there is something called non-protein amino acids.
01:24:21.000There used to be a guy at Stanford who studied these.
01:24:23.000And he's a world expert in non-protein amino acids.
01:24:26.000Many seeds and plants contain amino acids that can't be incorporated into proteins and may have some toxicity to them if they are ingested.
01:24:35.000Now, there's never been a widespread systematic exploration of all the seeds and all the plants that people eat to see whether or not there are a lot of non-protein amino acids, but these things act in a sort of prion-like way when they get into the brain.
01:24:50.000And so, you know, I don't want to spark fear that every, you know, sunflower seeds are going to give you prion-like syndromes, but it's conceivable that by eating certain plant compounds, one could ingest these non-protein amino acids that they would get incorporated in To existing proteins or that they would look enough like protein amino acids that they could sneak their way in across the blood-brain barrier or into cells and cause certain kinds of dysfunction.
01:25:17.000And this particular lab's focus was on figuring out whether or not neurodegeneration was a downstream effect of some non-protein amino acids.
01:25:28.000Their conclusion was that a lot of plants, and in particular a lot of types of seeds, contain non-protein amino acids that if they were to be incorporated into mammalian tissues and cells, that that would be very bad.
01:25:39.000There's also like low levels of certain chemicals that are in seeds that are really bad for you, like apple seeds.
01:25:48.000And there was this idea years ago that the marijuana plant could inhibit The reproduction of animals that want to eat it by way of increasing aromatization, the conversion of testosterone to estrogen.
01:26:00.000And then when I was in college, there was this thing, everyone would say, don't smoke the seeds, it'll make you sterile.
01:26:23.000Yeah, I guess we should say as a universal rule, never use the argument that something lowers sperm count or testosterone as contraception.
01:26:31.000Because I know a former pro bodybuilder who was juiced to the gills and told me that he conceived both of his children on his heaviest cycles ever.
01:26:46.000Either she was hyperfertile or he was hyperfertile or both, but there are two kids that he claimed were conceived on everything from Debaldox androlone to...
01:26:59.000He's now walking around like a normal human being.
01:27:01.000Did you hear about that child who is abnormally large at two years old because the father was taking testosterone cream and the kid started showing pubic hair and an enormous penis at two years of age?
01:27:17.000The conversion of testosterone to DHT, which causes penis growth, will...
01:27:21.000Well, the question is, will that kid thank or punish his father later?
01:27:52.000They talked about his, something about his, he's 26 pounds at the age of one, put on over two pounds a month between the ages of 12 and 18 months.
01:28:45.000I mean, you know, I've gone on and on social media and elsewhere about the fact that I am not a fan of melatonin.
01:28:51.000You know, low doses every once in a while for treatment of jet lag or something.
01:28:55.000But melatonin has a specific role, which is to suppress puberty during development, in addition to all its effects on sleep, et cetera.
01:29:02.000And the idea that people are prescribing that to their kids, I don't know that it's screwed up their kids' puberty trajectory, but just the idea that you would take high doses of hormone.
01:29:10.000Look, we're talking about low, well-controlled doses of TRT, people freak out.
01:29:15.000But then people pop melatonin like it was M&Ms and they give it to their kids when they're clearly better alternatives.
01:29:21.000I don't think they think of melatonin in that way.
01:29:24.000I don't take melatonin, but I don't think most people think of it as a hormone.
01:29:28.000Well, now there's some evidence coming out that it may have other negative effects.
01:29:32.000I mean, I don't like to be the scare tactic guy, but it just seems to me there are a lot of reasons to just avoid it unless you really need it and occasional use.
01:29:39.000But the stuff in kids is really serious.
01:29:42.000Dr. Shana Swan stuff about phthalates, and then you're talking about evening primrose oil, or you're talking about, I mean, this kid, I have a confession, that didn't happen to me, but when I was a kid, I had, When I was five or six, I had hair growing on my Adam's apple and my voice was the same as it is now.
01:29:59.000They called me froggy when I was a little kid.
01:30:10.000I wasn't a super impressive athlete or anything like that.
01:30:14.000This particular mutation probably is what allowed me to work really long hours.
01:30:18.000It relates to kind of cortisol production and things like that.
01:30:21.000And when you start exploring, you find that, yeah, about 12% of young males have mutations in one or the other of these hormone pathways that sort of shift you towards being able to, for instance, like I can work very, very long hours and it's not because I'm I'm no David Goggins,
01:31:03.000And then, of course, if they supplement androgen through TRT or something, they can get away with lower dose because it just hits their system more efficiently.
01:31:10.000I think, for me, with podcasts and MMA and comedies, it's all things I really enjoy, though.
01:32:38.000Well, I loved Aquarian goldfish, but I knew that most of those fish were going to die because people weren't dechlorinating the water.
01:32:44.000So I used to go buy dechlor and go to these carnivals.
01:32:47.000My mom used to take me when I was little, and I would give you free dechlor for the fish if you wanted, but you had to listen to me lecture about the dechlorination process.
01:33:14.000I can't imagine being a fucking carny with three teeth on meth and some fucking kid comes up and wants to talk to you about chlorine, the goldfish.
01:33:21.000I got shit for this the other day, because I won't say where we're living at all, but...
01:33:26.000A certain neighbor has some very high-level security next to them, right?
01:33:50.000Careful you decide who elected who, but I'm independent.
01:33:53.000But the fact of the matter is that they're really nice, but we've gotten into discussions around sleep because they're on these crazy sleep cycles and how to regulate sleep and fitness stuff.
01:34:01.000And this one real nice Secret Service agent, she said to me, are you always like this?
01:35:39.000I do worry about them, though, because some of these people presumably have other things they're trying to pursue, and they don't realize that they're kind of circling the drain slowly by focusing so much on other people.
01:36:36.000Yeah, I mean, we've done episodes on grief and on eating disorders.
01:36:40.000I thought when I did one on eating disorders, especially anorexia, they were going to be like, oh, you know, this white guy with a shaved head who lifts weights, what does he know about eating disorders?
01:38:01.000So there's a scientist out of Scandinavia, her name is Dr. Susanna Soberg, S-O-E-B-E-R-G. And she showed up on social media a few, you know, six months ago and then published this really amazing paper in humans.
01:38:14.000What they showed was that they figured out the thresholds for how much deliberate cold exposure you need and how much sauna for it to really start having beneficial effects.
01:38:22.000Now, all the nutrition PT people, which seem to me some of the more frustrated human beings on the planet, I don't know why, but online, sort of like nutrition and physical therapy are where there's a lot of contention.
01:38:37.000They love to nitpick, and I respect that they know a lot about what they do, but there seems to be a lot of infighting around nutrition and around physical therapy.
01:38:51.000But what's very clear is that, from Susannah's work, is that if you put people into deliberate cold up to the neck, like uncomfortable cold.
01:39:00.000It should be, I want to get the hell out, but you can stay in safely.
01:39:04.000And that's going to vary person to person, even day to day.
01:39:07.000But if you get people into that for 11 minutes total per week, so not one session, But they're doing three minutes, three minutes, three minutes, whatever.
01:39:15.000At that 11 minutes per week threshold, they observe legitimate increases in brown fat, the good kind of fat thermogenesis, like the oil in the candle goes up.
01:39:24.000People become more comfortable at cold temperatures and metabolism increases.
01:39:29.000The increases in metabolism aren't huge.
01:39:31.000And the PTs and nutrition folks have really been like, those increases in metabolism are like a cracker or something.
01:39:56.000So norepinephrine, epinephrine, and dopamine are called the catecholamines.
01:40:01.000Those three catecholamines all increase substantially.
01:40:04.000And that can be from a very brief exposure to very cold.
01:40:07.000So like one minute or three minutes really cold.
01:40:09.000Or in the study that was published in the European Journal of Physiology, where this initially was first shown, they put people into 60 degree Fahrenheit water up to their neck.
01:40:16.000For like 45 minutes or an hour, which isn't super annoying.
01:40:20.000They had them on lawn chairs with weights, so they're just sitting there.
01:40:24.000But you can do a much shorter exposure.
01:40:26.000Rhonda was telling me you can even do like 45 seconds really, really cold and still get that blast effect, which makes sense.
01:41:09.000So if you get into cold water and you're completely still, like you're super stoic, you're building a thermal layer that's keeping you a little bit warmer.
01:41:16.000So if you really want to make it tougher, you can sift your body a bit because you break up that thermal layer.
01:43:00.000There's a, she hashtag sober principle.
01:43:02.000So there's this thing in science where if you name something after yourself, then you're a narcissist, but you can name things after other people.
01:43:08.000So I named this sober principle is if you really want to get the maximum metabolic effect, And you're doing heat and cold, end with cold.
01:46:21.000But the upper threshold for, as you mentioned, like your throat starts hurting, you're actually burning tissue is bad.
01:46:27.000There's an amazing finding on burn that I can't help myself but share.
01:46:30.000There's a paper that came out that showed Well, based on observation, burn victims show dramatic fat loss, not burned by the fire or the burn.
01:46:40.000So for many years, they become leaner and leaner and leaner.
01:46:43.000And no one ever understood why this was.
01:46:45.000But it turns out that burn and local heat application can set in motion a whole bunch of biological cascades that burn up body fat.
01:46:56.000So that means those belly fat things are real?
01:46:59.000Well, they're now using local heating, and people really need to be careful with heat, because burning yourself to burn body fat is just dumb and dangerous.
01:47:10.000But They have this UCP device in the laboratory, but what they're doing is they're using a laser that heats up locally the tissue, and they're seeing a systemic increase in body fat utilization.
01:47:23.000Do you remember those cold sculpting things that they used to do to people, but apparently it fucked people up?
01:47:52.000And, of course, we should say this before...
01:47:56.000If you're eating more food than you're burning off total, you're not gonna lose fat, right?
01:48:01.000I mean, the rules of the laws of thermodynamics still apply, because sometimes people hear you can do anything and still lose fat, and that's not true.
01:48:07.000But those body waste belts that people put on, are those legit?
01:48:17.000Even though it's applied locally, it's not spot reduction.
01:48:20.000They're talking about heat causing a systemic increase In body fat utilization, again, on a backdrop of caloric deficit, more body fat burn.
01:48:37.000Yeah, well, I have a theory about the same reason women wear corsets, although there are other reasons for that, too, which is that they like the way that it makes them feel and look.
01:49:55.000And yet there are legitimate uses of infrared light.
01:49:58.000For instance, viewing infrared light, as long as it's not too intense in the early part of the day, if you're over 40, there's amazing data out of University College London, my friend Glenn Jeffrey's lab showing that can help Improved mitochondrial function in photoreceptors and offset age-related macular degeneration and visual loss can be offset.
01:51:00.000When it passes through the upper layers of the dermis, it appears that it can go in and trigger some activation of things in the so-called stem cell niche that creates new hair cells, new skin cells, so they're using it for hair growth.
01:51:12.000I doubt it has a massive effect on hair regrowth.
01:51:14.000Yeah, I saw a thing the other day where this guy had a helmet on, some sort of laser helmet, and the helmet was making him regrow hair.
01:51:23.000Probably would assist in maybe augment some existing therapies for hair, for increasing hair.
01:51:29.000And then, There's a growing population of people that are interested in using it to increase testosterone by putting the red light on their testicles.
01:51:39.000And of course, they're the anus sun-viewing people.
01:51:55.000Well, I think the result that's relevant there, which is a real result, is the one we talked about earlier, which is getting sunlight exposure on your skin, provided you don't burn.
01:52:03.000Obviously, people wear sunscreen if you need it, but sunscreen is an interesting conversation, too.
01:52:07.000But getting sunlight onto your skin can increase testosterone and estrogen, feelings of well-being, et cetera.
01:52:13.000It's not just about viewing it with your eyes.
01:52:14.000Right, but red light has different effects than just sunlight, right?
01:52:18.000Right, but you've got red wavelengths in sunlight.
01:55:04.000This is a place that I went to that has a more robust bed and they have like these goggles and they tell you with this red light therapy that you should put goggles on.
01:55:14.000Yeah, if you're going to hit your skin really hard with red light or what's called NIR, near infrared light, then you wear those little...
01:55:23.000They look like little suction cups that go over your eyes.
01:55:42.000And it also, you know, it depends on where you hang it.
01:55:44.000If it's on a wall and it's coming right into your eyes, like flashlight to your eyes, it's very different than if it's on your body and you're getting it indirectly to your eyes.
01:55:50.000But as a rule of thumb, you know, getting healthy amounts of sunlight, as long as you don't, your skin doesn't burn and getting that to your eyes and your skin is good.
01:55:58.000If you've ever had a cut, you'll notice it heals much quicker if it gets sunlight.
01:56:03.000And that's because of the way that these long wavelength lights trigger The stem cell niche that controls skin and the keratinocytes and repair.
01:56:36.000And so there's a group at Stanford, actually, and elsewhere also, of course, that are studying why is it that the environment of the mouth is so effective at healing itself?
01:57:28.000More so, there's kind of this idea that because we cover topics like trauma and some mental health issues, there's more the idea that we contain answers there and, you know, people aren't, their thinking isn't always so correct.
01:57:40.000No one has said, I'm this upset with you about something you said about butter or something that I want to kill you, although some people might feel that way.
01:57:49.000And for that reason, I now live in New Zealand and you're welcome to look for me there.
01:57:53.000So is it like the mitigation of mental health issues or something like that?
01:57:57.000Yeah, it's sort of fixation stuff or people thinking that there's some secret message in what's coming through.
01:58:24.000There are compounds that exist in commercial products, not just sunscreen, that can cross the blood brain barrier and that are bad for neurons, period.
01:59:02.000Well, these are typically associated with triclosans and some of the other things that are shown to be in certain detergents and soaps.
01:59:10.000Detergents and soaps that are now off market because they contain some of these very small molecules related to triclosans and related products.
01:59:18.000But there are healthy, there are safe sunscreens.
01:59:38.000I think we're probably going to arrive in a place not that different from the silicone breast implant kind of landscape where It turns out, depended on what implant and how long they were in and what they were packaged in.
01:59:51.000Like so many things, like tryptophan, the amino acid that people used to enhance sleep, now you get it readily, but it was banned for a long time because a few people actually took tryptophan that had contaminated binders.
02:00:04.000It was the stuff that was in there with it and they got very sick and there were some fatalities even.
02:00:08.000And so it was taken off market for years for all the wrong reasons.
02:00:11.000I mean, taken off for good reason, but it was the binders, not the tryptophan.
02:00:15.000With sunscreen, there are many things that are good about sunscreen, like avoiding skin cancer, but many sunscreens are bringing in these triclosans and other small, even if a molecule is small enough, it'll cross into the blood-brain barrier, and we don't know what the long-term effects of those are, but I think it's worth paying attention to.
02:00:31.000Similarly, I used to teach this in a big undergraduate course, If you look at the data on EMFs and you look at the data on cell phones, you will find animal studies that show that if you put a cell phone under a rat's cage or a litter of rat's cage,
02:00:47.000and two separate studies, you'll find dramatic decreases in testosterone in some studies, and you'll find subtle increases in testosterone in others.
02:00:56.000I don't know what the effect is or how it's working, but clearly, There needs to be an exploration of this.
02:01:03.000And clearly, it's going to be a really inconvenient thing to do that, right?
02:01:40.000You know, so they're not really incentivized to get it right, nor am I a conspiracy theorist.
02:01:44.000But here's my wish is that we look at everything and we look at it objectively.
02:01:49.000And that we take into account that there are some animal data that point to the fact that getting these EMFs in close proximity all the time might not be the best idea.
02:02:00.000There's certainly some kind of an effect.
02:02:02.000It depends on the individual and the dose and a lot of stuff.
02:02:06.000But what you're saying about scientists is an issue as well.
02:02:10.000There are certain people that they're talking about things that affect your health and they're clearly unhealthy.
02:02:16.000It's like, boy, that's a hard pill to swallow coming from you.
02:02:19.000Well, and I think, you know, we go back to Liver King and some of the other more colorful aspects of online nutrition and health information.
02:02:26.000People wonder, I actually saw some, I made the huge mistake of going onto Twitter in the last couple of years.
02:02:31.000I never really was on Twitter and it's such a weird landscape as you know.
02:02:34.000But one of the things I discovered was that a lot of the people in the science and medical community are there kind of poking fun at online health and nutrition and they wonder why.
02:02:45.000They're sort of like, how is it that this person has millions of followers and so on?
02:02:48.000And the reason is actually because they're doing such a poor job of communicating health information in a meaningful, clear, and actionable way.
02:02:57.000And so it provides this enormous opportunity for someone to just show up and kind of just say whatever and grab a huge audience.
02:03:03.000Let me push back against that because they're just – how would someone who's a legitimate professor make some kind of an impact online?
02:03:15.000You'd have to find an established portal or create your own, and that's a long, laborious task of building up an audience and providing them with good content and hopefully getting on a podcast where people have a large audience and an appetite for that kind of a thing.
02:03:30.000Or more realistically, go on your podcast.
02:03:34.000I think that what you do and to some extent what I do, what Lex does, and of course there are others, is try and provide a venue for people that would otherwise be locked away in their laboratories or locked away in their clinics to get information out there.
02:03:48.000And to have someone across the table for them like this, kind of pushing and saying, but tell me more.
02:03:59.000Because in the absence of that, I really think that people are just left to kind of, there's a kind of gravitational pull towards the thing that's most sensational.
02:04:08.000So they go, oh, like maybe just eating testicles is like the key to a good life, or maybe just eating plants is the only way to live and be healthy.
02:04:16.000And I think that there are, I mean, there's incredible science and incredible medicine.
02:04:20.000And I think most, at least my experience has been that most scientists Want to share what they know.
02:05:16.000I mean, those of us in the game of science, I still run a lab, so I'm familiar with this.
02:05:20.000It's the number of people that will actually read a paper start to finish who are qualified to parse what's in there is you can count on one hand maybe two.
02:05:29.000And for really, you know, blockbuster papers that have a huge impact, that number might get into the hundreds or thousands.
02:06:06.000Like, if someone's upset at you, and the thing about the social media, the bickering that I do see, the one thing that it does do is make me know that you're an extremely flawed person.
02:06:17.000This person who is, like, concentrating, whether it's nutrition or whatever it is, which I agree with you, there is this weird sort of...
02:06:26.000It's not feeling you're getting enough attention for your own research and then finding whatever one thing that you think someone's doing wrong and going after them and attacking them.
02:06:36.000And then there's also people that are legitimately upset that people are pushing out fake information and bullshit.
02:07:24.000I mean, and he does a really good job of finding those people and pointing those things out.
02:07:27.000But that's the thing is that there's this appetite for information.
02:07:30.000So when someone comes along and says something that's counter to what everyone's been told, It reinforces this desire to have like, ooh, there's some secret information out there that I didn't know about.
02:07:41.000All I have to do is eat testicles and I'll have more testicle power.
02:07:45.000Like that kind of shit is like, for whatever reason, very attractive to people.
02:07:49.000So it's very important that someone in his...
02:07:52.000I'm not talking about him when I'm talking about bickering, really.
02:07:55.000I'm talking about some very bizarre...
02:07:58.000Characters that haven't developed these online followings, but try really hard to get them.
02:08:04.000And I also think there's probably a bunch of social issues that these people have as well.
02:08:08.000But he does a great job of mocking these folks and a good counter to some of these more preposterous claims that you do see very, very prevalent, particularly in the alternative health space.
02:08:21.000You see it from a lot of these vegan people and all these alternative health people.
02:08:29.000There's so much weird nonsense that these people push, and that's how they make their, you know, that's how they get attention.
02:08:35.000Yeah, and Lane has done, for instance, a pretty good job of using kind of more sensational-like content to combat sensational content.
02:08:43.000So he does these like, ohs, and these, you know, that's not the style that I use.
02:08:47.000Although I will say he called me out on something that's worth mentioning because I think I was grateful that he did.
02:08:53.000I mentioned in a tweet that there is evidence that alcohol can increase the aromatization of testosterone and estrogen and he pointed out quite correctly that it depends on dose and there might be some individual variation.
02:09:06.000So that's where like someone saying, wait a second, hold on, that's not the whole story.
02:09:26.000Science is like you have a certain amount of data and you discuss that data and then someone else who has a deeper understanding of it can maybe point to some other study that maybe you weren't aware of and you add that to it.
02:09:40.000But when you get into the heavy-duty carnivore space, when you get into the heavy-duty vegan space, my problem with a lot of that is it's very dogmatic.
02:09:48.000And a lot of people claim that they have all the answers to all the things like, you know, Paul Saladino likes to do, is this bullshit?
02:11:16.000Nerdy speak for crossing over two separate things.
02:11:18.000I think that people that have a lot of different kinds of friends can look at any conversation about politics or about guns or about nutrition in a more nuanced way.
02:11:27.000I've always enjoyed, I believe this is you as well, I'm speculating here, but what I see is that, you know, I've got friends who are hippies, punk rockers, Republicans, Democrats, libertarians, gun owners, gun haters, all of it.
02:11:40.000By being friends with a lot of different kinds of people, you just kind of get, you just come to understand, as you put it once to me, and I really internalize this, like, it's about people, right?
02:11:49.000The dogmatic stuff is when you, you know, 99% of your friends are of one orientation or another, Your worldview just shrinks to the size of an atom.
02:11:58.000There's also a problem with people wanting to be right, you know, and they want to win.
02:12:04.000Like, if you believe that the Democratic Party is the only way forward for a rational, peaceful society, and you have this confirmation bias that only the Democrats have the answers to this, to that, the other things, or if you're a person that believes in God and the Republicans and we need the First and Second Amendment and this and that,
02:12:24.000And you're so committed, people get so committed to these ideas that they're not willing to entertain any other idea and then they fight rigorously.
02:12:36.000They fight as if you're defending your own life, your own soul.
02:12:42.000You don't fight, you don't discuss these things on the merits of their, you know, whether or not this is a good concept or that's a good concept.
02:12:50.000You're literally almost arguing for your very existence being valid.
02:12:56.000And it's very strange, because people equate themselves, they attach themselves to ideas.
02:13:01.000And when their idea gets challenged, they get emotional, they get excited, they get angry, they get aggressive.
02:13:09.000And it's so sad to watch, especially as people get older.
02:13:14.000When I see a 60-year-old man who gets hyper-aggressive and starts yelling at people about ideas, It's like, goddammit, calling people morons, calling people assholes.
02:13:56.000I immediately think of neuroplasticity as robust early in life and it tapers off.
02:14:01.000And brilliant people like Richard Feynman, the great theoretical physicist, I mean, he was known for doing crazy things, bongo drumming naked on the roof of Caltech, but also decided to become an artist, not a great one, but an artist late in life, or he also wrote a lot of theorems and did his work in strip bars in Pasadena.
02:14:18.000He loved being among different types of people, and he believed, he wrote a lot about this, that remaining curious, genuinely curious, and I define curiosity as being interested in something without being attached to the outcome, right?
02:14:30.000You legitimately want to find out what's on the other side.
02:14:33.000That that maintains this youthfulness and this plasticity.
02:14:37.000And I think when one approaches a conversation of any kind from the stance of, I don't want to find out, I want to be shown to be right, curiosity is dead, right?
02:14:46.000And that, I mean, I think that's tragic.
02:14:49.000It's just very difficult to get people to sit down and have civil conversations when they have hot-button topics that they're opposed to.
02:14:59.000Like if one person is hardcore right-wing and one person's hardcore left-wing, to have them sit down and have calm, rational conversations is incredibly difficult.
02:15:11.000Everybody wants to, because you're literally defending yourself.
02:15:13.000You're defending, it's not just an idea.
02:15:16.000Like say if you want to talk about the First Amendment and whether or not freedom of speech should be, like the First Amendment protection should be extended to social media.
02:15:26.000Or whether or not social media should be thought, like things like Twitter, which is it the town square or is it a private company?
02:15:31.000Like, these kind of discussions, like, people will get fucking emotional and furious and angry and ad hominems and they...
02:16:38.000Like, these thoughts are just so weak.
02:16:40.000And then I will see them, you know, talk about the experience on Twitter.
02:16:44.000And I'm like, oh my god, you're just so lucky I didn't go after you.
02:16:47.000Because it's like, there's so many people that have these sloppy, lazy ideas, and they exist in these echo chambers.
02:16:55.000Well, this is one place where I think a scientific training is useful, independent of whether or not one decides to become a career scientist.
02:17:00.000When you take your so-called oral defense examination, You get up there and there's five or six different faculty and your qualifying exam and they ask you questions until you say, I don't know.
02:17:13.000The idea is to find where your cliff is.
02:17:16.000The moment that you start wondering and stumbling, that's when you actually know you're doing a good job.
02:17:21.000I mean, you don't want to do that too early, but they'll ask crazy questions, hard questions that are unrelated to anything you think you should have have to prepare.
02:17:30.000Social media for me has actually become a good kind of repeat of my qualifying exam because occasionally something comes in that I go, wow, I never thought about it that way.
02:17:40.000But the moment you say, I don't know, that's when you are allowed to pass up to the next level in science.
02:17:46.000It's not when you know, it's when you are willing to admit that you don't know.
02:17:50.000That they say, now you can go pursue a dissertation.
02:17:52.000Then you do a dissertation, and then you have to defend it.
02:17:55.000And everyone thinks, so you have to defend it by showing it's watertight.
02:17:58.000You actually defend it, but a really good defense committee, we all meet beforehand, and we're like, how are we going to beat this guy or this gal up?
02:18:04.000And we decide, we're going to find where the leaks are and get them to admit that their study is wonderful.
02:18:24.000But it's a complicated dance that human beings do because your ego is involved and your reputation is involved.
02:18:31.000And for a lot of people, that's a lot of who they are.
02:18:35.000A lot of who they are is how other people see them.
02:18:38.000You know, there's a lot of folks out there that, you know, day to day, their life depends.
02:18:44.000I mean, I'm sure you've met people that got offended by something that doesn't seem logical to be offended by.
02:18:50.000I'm tempted to raise the story, but I'm not going to because I don't want to draw fire again.
02:18:54.000But no, I once credited a colleague who was an amazing colleague and someone picked up on something in the article about them that was totally unrelated and was And it was like suddenly the conversation shifted completely and then you realize it's all about them.
02:19:09.000It actually has nothing to do about the topic.
02:19:11.000And that's where I think things can get really diverted.
02:19:14.000I mean, I tend to not respond to comments too often.
02:19:16.000Occasionally, you know, thanks for your interest in science and like give people, cue people to an episode.
02:19:27.000It's a shitty way to communicate, too.
02:19:29.000You know, if you sit down across from someone, you look them eye to eye and have a conversation, people tend to be more civil, they tend to be more kind.
02:19:37.000It's so easy to be shitty with text over Twitter.
02:19:41.000It's just so easy and so many people engage in it.
02:19:43.000I was watching a friend of mine who's a comedian.
02:20:03.000And you're arguing with people about some shit that has very little to do with you.
02:20:09.000It's more to do with your ideological position, like you're standing in this whatever group you're in, right or left.
02:20:15.000Yeah, and as a creator the goal is always to create new and better what it works And so it really does seem like a a true time sink It is a time sink and it's also like your time is fucking valuable You're giving your time to something and that's robbing you of effort It's robbing you of whatever you could be doing to increase your proficiency in something increase your knowledge and your Enjoyment doing things you enjoy you don't fucking enjoy arguing with people People on Twitter that you don't even know.
02:20:59.000Occasionally, that can get murky because you'll say, You know, I learned this thing and it can seem like it's about you, but it's really about them getting something that I think will be useful to them.
02:21:08.000And the other one is, I don't generally get angry anyway.
02:21:12.000There are things in life that make me angry, but I never bring that to the table.
02:21:16.000Now, when you're talking about all these things for optimizing health and fitness and performance, Obviously, you're very fit and you work out a lot, but how much of your own body and your own experiences do you experiment on these things so that you could have more data or you could have at least anecdotal data?
02:22:34.000I know right now intermittent fasting became really controversial recently because there was a study showing that there's no additional benefit of fasting for weight loss as compared to caloric restriction.
02:22:47.000Clearly, and that set off a storm, and it was a storm I was happy to sidestep and enjoy, watch, go by.
02:22:52.000Because it was really interesting that the headline in the New York Times was, frankly, was terrible because it said, study shows no benefit to intermittent fasting.
02:23:02.000But what the actual finding was is that the study showed no additional benefit to fasting over caloric restriction for obesity.
02:23:11.000Fox News got it right in this case, and I have no bias.
02:23:14.000I don't subscribe to any of these things.
02:23:26.000They said no additional benefit, I believe, or something like that, to fasting over caloric restriction for weight loss, or something like that.
02:23:33.000Something very true to the concluding arguments of the paper.
02:23:37.000The other ones were really designed to say, fasting bad.
02:23:40.000Here you've got millions and millions of people who have now figured out a way to control their appetite, Because they're better at eating nothing for certain periods of day than eating like half the muffin.
02:23:49.000Because there's all these neural mechanisms.
02:23:50.000When you start ingesting food, there's this desire to eat more food.
02:23:54.000And for some people, not eating for a period is better than eating.
02:23:58.000And then some of the smaller news sites got it somewhere in the middle.
02:24:02.000So I'll eat my first meal somewhere around 11 a.m.
02:24:05.000But occasionally I'll have like a protein drink at nine if I'm really starving when I wake up.
02:24:22.000I definitely have a, what I call non-sleep deep rest protocol.
02:24:25.000So instead of naps and meditation, I'll listen to like a yoga nidra script or I'll do some sort of hypnosis script three or four times a week to just, Do what I call deliberate decompression, to just take my mind to a space, not unlike the one you were describing for cannabis for some people, where I'm just not thinking about anything.
02:24:43.000In order to reset, there's an amazing study out of Scandinavia, a hospital in Denmark did this study in humans showing that with positron emission tomography imaging, so brain imaging in humans showed that a 30 minute yoga nidra, so just lying down and listening to this deep relaxation script,
02:24:59.000Increased dopamine resting levels in an area of the brain called the striatum by 65%, basically putting people into a state where they're ready for action again when they come out of it.
02:25:11.000The CEO of Google has written about NSDR, non-sleep deep rest.
02:25:14.000That's an acronym I coined because I didn't like the words yoga nidra and meditation, all sounds kind of magic carpet-y and acts as a barrier for people.
02:25:52.000And I think probably the biggest surprise in researching the podcast over the last 18 months, because that's when we started, was we decided to do an episode on Gratitude.
02:26:03.000It's gonna be thanking people and things.
02:26:06.000It turns out that if you look at the research on gratitude, first of all, the increases in dopamine and serotonin and feelings of subjective wellbeing from people that have a regular effective gratitude practice, we'll talk about what that is, is immense.
02:26:43.000So this means give gratitude, give thanks, but also be in a position to receive thanks.
02:26:50.000These kind of nuanced things might seem small, but one thing I try and do is, since I can't walk around asking for gratitude, that's not my style.
02:26:59.000I like to think my ego's at least slightly more in check than that.
02:27:02.000I try and really let people that I care about and I'm grateful to know that, but I do that for them, not for me.
02:27:09.000And so that's something I pay a lot of attention to.
02:27:13.000It's kind of like people go, that's kind of like weenie stuff, like gratitude.
02:27:16.000The data show that gratitude and avoiding toxic people and focusing on good quality social interactions, physical contact with animals, kids, and loved ones like, you know, that huge increases in serotonin, oxytocin.
02:27:29.000These are no longer the kinds of things that are just talked about at the end of a yoga class, right?
02:27:34.000This is real science with brain imaging and measurements of chemicals from the brain and blood.
02:27:39.000And so I've tried to incorporate more of that stuff that isn't as kind of forward center of mass, you know, like get after it kind of stuff.
02:27:46.000I do that stuff, but I also try and, you know, have a good life and surround myself with good people.
02:27:51.000Well, just think about the way it makes you feel.
02:27:53.000When you're around good people and you enjoy your time, you feel better while you're doing it.
02:28:10.000And I think of it as not just good in the present, but it's also buffering me and everyone who does these sorts of things against the inevitable, right?
02:28:20.000I mean, shit happens and people die and terrible things happen.
02:28:24.000And so in order to be in the best position to really see that stuff and react to it in the best possible way and also continue to move forward and do what's important to me in life, I feel like all the stuff I'm doing is great in the day-to-day, but it's also about the long-term arc.
02:28:38.000I mean, my parents are getting to the age.
02:28:39.000Look, I hope they live to be another 20 years more, but chances are they're going to go in the next 20 years.
02:28:44.000I want to be in the best position to support them, and I want to be able to be the best position to support me, frankly, as well.
02:28:50.000So I think that doing all this stuff positions us to be You know, like leaders and supporters of ourselves and of other people.
02:28:57.000And I know that all sound kind of like, you know, word mumbo jumbo, but it's the day, you've talked about this before, it's the daily rituals.
02:29:04.000Like none of the things I described are something that you can just take and then it's all done.
02:29:22.000All of it, if your one is willing to look and be open-minded.
02:29:25.000But even if you don't have access to those things, there's so much that you can do with sunlight, exercise, gratitude, hydration, yoga nidra.
02:29:33.00090% of the really effective things don't cost anything except time.
02:29:39.000Well, when we're talking about, there's another, there's a benefit to what we're talking about with intermittent fasting is that you give yourself structure.
02:29:45.000And that's very important for people, even for people that are disciplined.
02:29:49.000Like, I find myself, when I have a full day off and I don't have to do anything, I find myself putting off my workout until later and later in the day, and then I kind of, like, lazily get through my workout, and I go, oh my god, like, I'm better off when I'm busy.
02:30:04.000Because when I'm busy, I have a structure.
02:30:06.000And I think there's a thing about, like, I used to think that, or I do still think that, about, like, Sober October.
02:30:13.000Like, when we do Sober October, I'm not drinking or doing anything for one month.
02:30:17.000And that structure helps me, you know?
02:30:19.000And I think when you say, oh, I'm going to cut back on my drinking, what does that even mean?
02:30:26.000I never thought about that, because I'm not a drinker, although these days I'm hearing a lot about all these delicious whiskeys in Texas, and I don't have a problem with alcohol, so I'm always willing to try.
02:30:32.000Yeah, well, they're not really delicious.
02:30:34.000They're delicious in comparison to whiskey.
02:31:33.000But I've found that there's some really good vape pens that give you that head rush, and I don't feel like they're going to fuck your lungs up as bad.
02:31:39.000But kids are vaping like crazy now, and that's gotta be bad.
02:32:21.000I think I watched your election night episode and there was like all the comments coming through about there might have been a fast food hamburger on the table.
02:35:09.000So I haven't had any air in a little bit, but probably only 10, 15 seconds, but freaking out.
02:35:15.000So I get up on top of the cage, I've got a weight belt on, and I'm like, okay, I guess I shoot for the surface because I can see the boat up there.
02:35:23.000Because if I stay down here, I'm clearly going to die.
02:35:26.000And then I'm thinking, okay, well, shooting for the surface is exactly what they like.
02:36:15.000He's a longtime Hollywood guy who's a kind of a photographer who does these adventures.
02:36:21.000So then one of the divers saw me and I was like, you know, like I need air and he kind of looked at me, but, and so he kicked his way back over, but that was a long wait.
02:36:30.000And then we did the share air thing, but now two divers are out and we're there sharing air.
02:36:36.000And there's only so much air before you eventually run out and there's nothing in the reserves.
02:36:41.000Eventually they came back and then we pulled the rope and got out.
02:36:45.000And it was, yeah, it was enough of a scary experience for me that I was like, oh God.
02:36:50.000So we, and actually I got out and a guy from the SEAL teams came over to me, super calm, like typical of those guys.
02:36:54.000He was like, so what do you take away from that experience?
02:36:57.000And I was like, check the safety tanks.
02:37:17.000I knew I wasn't going to die of an air failure.
02:37:19.000And the other reason is everything we know about trauma and the treatment of trauma is that if you live with that bug in your brain about quote unquote almost dying, in fact, I don't even like to say that, that's stuck in you.
02:37:30.000So I went down there in the cage and then I cage exited.
02:38:12.000The next day, I woke up, and I was just so distraught about what happened the day before, I decided there's only one way to deal with this, and that's to cage exit, to go down there, but this time leave the cage, and this time leave it on scuba.
02:38:25.000And then it felt like a victory, right?
02:38:45.000Who can get the camera almost into the shark's mouth, et cetera?
02:38:48.000And for years, there was a lot of kind of one-upping and posting things online.
02:38:52.000And then a couple years ago, Out of what seemed like nowhere, Ocean Ramsey, this female freediver shark expert, shows on BBC video her swimming with no scuba, With the biggest great white shark anyone's ever seen.
02:40:51.000Some politician in Mexico, his wife had an affair with some guy and apparently they put the guy out there on the island, but the island is known, maybe that's just lore, but people were spearfishing out there and getting eaten.
02:41:05.000They were putting the bloody fish on their hip and getting munched.
02:41:08.000And so they realized this is filled with great whites.
02:41:11.000And when you drop anchor there, I remember every time going out there, and we've been there twice now, I was thinking, oh, we're not going to see any sharks.
02:42:44.000And, you know, we have a couple cocktails, and then the next thing you know, a couple is three or four, and then we do podcasts, and podcasts a lot of times will be drinking.
02:42:52.000If it's anything that I should do less of, it's definitely booze.
02:44:04.000They had to carry him to the stage, and then they had to put him in the chair, and then they had to crank up the sound like...
02:44:12.000Like, he was really loud because his voice was, you know, he had no energy.
02:44:18.000And I remember thinking, like, he's not old enough for this.
02:44:21.000Like, whatever this neurologically degenerative disease that he has, like, whether that happened because he was, you know, had a genetic propensity, predisposition for this, or whether it's because of a lot of cocaine.
02:44:41.000I don't know if they're related, but I know a lot of people that did a lot of cocaine in the 70s and the 80s, and they developed some serious neurological problems as they got older.
02:45:07.000I mean, the early studies of MDMA and whether or not it was neurotoxic actually...
02:45:10.000One of them had to be retracted because they accidentally used an amphetamine and cocaine-like substance instead, accidentally, in these monkeys, and they showed neurodegeneration.
02:45:19.000How did they accidentally confuse MDMA with that?
02:45:23.000Laboratories are, you know, human error is a big thing.
02:45:54.000And then later they discovered that what they had given them was not what they thought, and so they quite responsibly retracted that paper.
02:46:00.000There is evidence that high doses of any highly dopaminergic drugs, so cocaine, amphetamine, things of that sort, can be neurotoxic.
02:46:09.000If you make neurons really, really active, exceedingly active, they will die, right?
02:47:12.000Guys I grew up with, and these names won't mean anything to people, but guys that were kind of famous in the San Francisco skateboarding, punk rock scene, a lot of them have died young, died of heart attacks five or six years after they stopped doing a lot of cocaine.
02:47:24.000I think there is evidence that it can adjust the function of calcium channels on the heart, and then later, you know, it takes a smaller insult to put them under.
02:47:43.000And the long arc can be negative, like we're talking about, or the long arc can be positive.
02:47:48.000Yeah, well, I mean, I'm almost 55. I'll be 55 in August.
02:47:53.000And I'm very happy that I can still use my body the way I can.
02:47:58.000Because I always assumed that when someone got to be 55, they were done.
02:48:03.000Like, your body's going to fall apart.
02:48:04.000No, it turns out the measures, and I know Atiyah talks about this in a much more sophisticated way than I can, but one's ability to get up off the ground without assistance, one's ability to jump and land, one's ability to hang from a bar for a minute, these are measures not unlike blood pressure and Heart rate,
02:48:23.000resting heart rate and things of that sort about how well your nervous system can communicate to your musculature and whether or not your musculature and ligaments and bones can handle all that.
02:48:31.000And so I think being the one thing we know is that being physically active is superb at extending your life and improving your life.
02:48:38.000Yeah, improving your life is, I mean, I don't know how much you can really extend.
02:48:43.000It's like, we really don't have a lot of data on people that started working out when they were like in their early teens and kept going, supplementing their hormones, supplementing vitamins, supplementing, and then got into their 50s and 60s and 70s.
02:49:06.000If you're a professional athlete, you don't put in that effort because you're not going to be a professional athlete when you're 60 and 70 years old.
02:49:12.000So a lot of times when people that are professional athletes, they get to the point where they retire, one of the things they do is they get fat and they stop.
02:49:20.000Well, this is the old thing about that they used to say, you know, you stop lifting weights, you'll quote unquote turn to fat, which is Impossible.
02:49:26.000It was because people kept eating and they stopped training.
02:49:28.000My role model in all this is actually, you know, very perhaps surprising to some people.
02:49:34.000Recently, I had Ido Portal, you know, on the podcast.
02:49:39.000He has a video of his mother when she's in her 60s.
02:49:43.000She started training at 58, and this was like seven years ago, doing pull-ups for reps, doing backbends, doing all the kind of stuff that, you know, Ido-ish stuff, but in her 60s, which means that now she's in her early 70s, and he told me that she's still doing five sets of five pull-ups,
02:51:22.000If you stop, it's very difficult to sort of regain that kind of mobility and physical strength and coordination and your VO2 max and all that stuff.
02:51:31.000If you don't stop and you just continue, as long as you're smart about it and you don't push yourself too hard, you don't injure yourself.
02:52:14.000She's at NYU. Now she's the incoming dean of students at NYU. The reason I'm so happy about that is that she's talked about and published really good scientific studies on 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise early in the day, and now she's a 10-minute cold shower person because she lives in New York,
02:52:32.000harder to get access to ice tubs and things.
02:52:40.000I mean, finally there are data to point to the fact that doing cardiovascular or weight training exercise, if it's intense enough and it comes early in the day, especially, but also if you do it late in the day, they've also shown that people's cognitive function actually goes up.
02:52:56.000It was like, When you exercise, your heart, your cardiovascular system is better, therefore your brain is better, therefore there's this indirect effect on mood and performance.
02:53:03.000But now they know everything from grip strength to attention capacity to task switching.
02:53:09.000There are all these measures like the Stroop test of all these things of cognitive flexibility and all of that improved.
02:53:15.000By physical exercise, categorically, over and over.
02:53:18.000It doesn't matter if it's boys, girls, men, women, what age.
02:53:20.000And so now we no longer have to speculate as to whether or not exercise is good for the brain also.
02:53:27.000And her work is now being transferred into basically curriculum for students.
02:53:31.000Her goal is that students are gonna go through college, not just getting their grades, but coming out healthier than they came in.
02:53:38.000And hopefully that'll wick out to everybody, not just people in college, obviously, but will wick out to everybody.
02:53:42.000So they're going to be running studies, getting data from these kids.
02:53:46.000I think it's really important because I think that everything is kind of murky and kind of indirect up to a point, and now they're actually really solid data.
02:53:53.000Well, there's also this prejudice, unfortunately, that anything physical is not an intellectual pursuit, that it's almost the opposite.
02:54:04.000But that is a prejudice that many really intelligent people, otherwise intelligent people, have.
02:54:09.000Yeah, well, a colleague at Columbia who has a Nobel Prize, Richard Axel, plays squash like multiple times per week.
02:54:17.000He used to play basketball, though he says not very well.
02:54:20.000Eric Kandel, Nobel Prize in, for research and memory, swam a mile three times a week, now it's half a mile, because he's in his late 90s, he still does it.
02:54:29.000Tornos and Weasel, Nobel Prize revision, my scientific great-grandparents, 96 years old, still jogs every morning, 45 minutes, and still mentally sharp.
02:54:38.000So the smartest people, most accomplished scientists I know, all extremely physically active for decades.
02:54:45.000So whatever smart people think that physical activity is just for meatheads and jocks, they're obviously not smart enough to know how it really works.
02:55:13.000I think there's also a little bit of the tone that came back to me early on.
02:55:16.000Like, you know, some colleagues have been really interested in like, oh, I'm really excited about, you know, eating more omegas or eating more fish or, you know, whatever, taking athletic greens, etc.
02:55:25.000And then some of them like, oh, it's all pills and powder.
02:55:52.000And that wreck shows up somewhere in their 60s, and I see this all the time because I've attended no fewer than 10 funerals for brilliant people.
02:55:59.000And those funerals, with one or two exceptions, were all because they took terrible care of themselves.
02:56:04.000Well, in my world, in the comedy world, obviously I see that because most of my friends don't take care of themselves.
02:56:11.000There's a good percentage of people in that world, when they get to a certain age, like there's friends that are my age and they look like they're my dad.
02:56:19.000I almost wonder whether or not they somehow pair the idea that their talent and their ability is linked to their being unhealthy.
02:57:08.000But if you look at the top people, I say you, or you look at a Chappelle, or you look at the people that are, like I talked about three Nobel Prize winners, that their work will carry on for health and science for thousands of years, if we exist that long.
02:57:56.000He's not flippant in his perceptions and his thoughts.
02:58:00.000That's the most important thing that's the most important thing focus on your craft and You know, there's a great benefit to being healthy.
02:58:08.000Great benefit in many, many, many ways.
02:58:11.000Emotional stability and your ability to have energy to keep going.
02:58:16.000And that's one of the things that I try to relay to young people that aren't that healthy but are young comics.
02:58:21.000I say, don't think of it as like, I don't want to be an athlete.
02:58:54.000But I think of these things because I'm an athlete.
02:58:57.000Whereas other guys, they're fucking off, and they're just drinking, and the second show rolls around, and they're drunk, and they're tired.
02:59:03.000I've been there before, and I've had bad shows because of that.
03:00:24.000And I think people like you are a really valuable resource, and I'm really glad that you're not just contained to classrooms and that putting out that podcast and making it accessible to so many people, it's really, really valuable.
03:00:42.000You and Lex and a few others have really paved this road, and I'm very grateful.
03:00:46.000I do believe that people should have access to information and education, and so I'm just trying to do it.
03:00:51.000We're super fortunate that we have these kind of platforms, that this exists, because this has never been a thing in history before, and it's a thing now.