Dr. Andrew Hill is a cognitive neuroscientist and co-founder of Moderation Focus, an alternative to the traditional 12-step program for substance abuse. Dr. Hill and I talk about the benefits of a moderation approach to recovery from substance abuse, and what it means to be a responsible user of alcohol. He also talks about the role mindfulness can play in the recovery process and how it can help people who are already struggling with substance abuse and addictions. It's a fascinating conversation, and one that I think many of you should listen to. Joe Rogan is a comedian, podcaster, writer, and podcaster based in Los Angeles, California. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, NPR, and the Los Angeles Daily News, and is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post. He's also the host of the podcast The Joe Rogans Experience, which is a podcast that explores the intersection of science, technology, medicine, and philosophy in order to help people overcome their addictions and improve their lives. If you're interested in learning more about his work, check it out on his website here. If you like what he's up to, check out his podcast here. Thanks for listening to this episode, and share it on your socials! Cheers, Joe and Joe! -Jon and Jon Subscribe to the podcast! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review, review and subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts! Rate/subscribe to our Podcasts. The opinions stated in this episode are our new episodes are those of our podcast? We post them on Anchor. com/Joe Rogan.fm/TheJoeRogan Experience? We are listening to us on Podchronicity? Thank you for supporting us on Instapod? and we'll be giving away $5/month and $10/month for a chance to win a VIP membership to our new ad-free version of the next episode on PodChronicity VIP? Subscribe and Reviewed on Audible. com? Learn more on this episode on the pod is available on Tuesday, September 18th, September 21st, 2019, 2019. Subscribe at PodCharity is a special offer starts at $50/month, only $20/day, Subscribe & Reviewed at $35/day and $55/month is available at $99/month?
00:00:46.000I wanted to get you in here and sit you down.
00:00:48.000Because you said something really fascinating.
00:00:51.000That you take people who may have problems with substances, and instead of getting them to abstain, you get them to use them responsibly, which is an alien concept in this day and age.
00:01:05.000Yeah, I mean, this is not terribly common in substance abuse, you know, sort of treatment world.
00:01:09.000There's a few companies that do it, and one of them is here in Los Angeles, Alternatives.
00:01:14.000We'll take people that, you know, might have an issue with alcohol, let's say, and the only option is not abstinence for our program.
00:01:23.000We have moderation options, controlled use options, harm reduction.
00:01:26.000So someone might come in and say, you know, look, I consider myself an alcoholic, but I want to start drinking again.
00:01:33.000Or, you know, I'm someone who has been abstinent for a long time and struggles with craving, struggles with, you know, choice, and whenever I slip, I slip big.
00:02:03.000One of our principals, Dr. Mark Kern, has been doing addiction work with Moderation Focus for about 30 years in LA, and so it's not the newest thing ever, but it's newer than AA, of course, which has been around for pushing 100 years now.
00:02:15.000Yeah, AA people seem to think that that's the only way to go.
00:02:19.000You have to do the 12-step program, you have to call everybody you ever wronged, you have to pray to Jesus, you have to...
00:02:27.000Drink a lot of coffee and smoke cigarettes.
00:02:31.000I mean, you know, the biggest difference for an alternatives approach or a harm reduction or moderation approach compared to AA, in my perspective, is that a lot of the AA approach is disempowering.
00:02:42.000You must give up control, you know, surrender.
00:02:46.000And I think that there's another option out there, and that's We're architecting more control, more power.
00:02:51.000Let's figure out your cues for over-drinking.
00:02:53.000Let's figure out what happens, you know, why do you get to five or six or seven drinks?
00:02:59.000You know, what are the triggers for, like going home and, you know, automatically driving into that liquor store parking lot you always pass by?
00:03:06.000So we help people figure out all the different triggers and cues that are driving their out-of-control use and what control use might look like for them, you know, what sort of appropriate mindful drinking might look like for them.
00:03:18.000And if it's alcohol, people spend the first month with us abstaining anyways, just to reset tolerance.
00:03:24.000Because to be good at moderation, you have to be good at abstinence.
00:03:28.000So the goals may not be abstinence always in our alcohol program, but everyone takes a month off, resets their tolerance, gets some sort of clear head, gets their sleep fixed.
00:03:39.000And we're doing other things besides the alcohol interventions and therapy and biofeedback and mindfulness and another sort of whole team approach.
00:03:47.000But then at the end of that month, if folks decide they want to, we go to a bar with them.
00:03:52.000Sit down, they order a drink, we give them a breathalyzer, and they have their first drink, and we, you know, they get breathalyzed every...
00:04:20.000A lot of the clients that we work with carry around little breathalyzers in their pocket that, several times a day, ping them and ask them to blow and get a little camera snapshot.
00:05:45.000So it's hard to talk about, you know, problematic alcohol use if any alcohol use is considered problematic.
00:05:51.000Yeah, it becomes one of those things where everyone has this very rigid idea of what an alcoholic is supposed to do.
00:06:01.000And if you bring up something like what you're proposing or what you actually, not just propose, but you enact in treatment, That's got to receive a lot of criticism.
00:06:12.000And, you know, we get long-term sort of 12-step type saying, you're going to kill people, people are going to, you know, have problems.
00:06:18.000The thing is, you know, we've done some research in our center and folks self-select abstinent track or moderation track.
00:06:23.000And the self-selection appears to be what drives success, not which track you're on.
00:06:30.000So if people identify their goals, we help them reach those goals.
00:06:33.000But if your only goals are, or if your only allowable path is you must be abstinent, then you aren't taught any skills about how to drink a little bit.
00:06:42.000You know, so when people who are on an abstinent-only sort of treatment programs have slips, they have big slips.
00:06:48.000They just say, okay, I'm off the track.
00:07:14.000Yeah, there's an opioid receptor in the brain.
00:07:17.000I forget if it's the mu or the kappa, but one of the opioid receptors in the brain, there's one genetic sort of flavor you can have where alcohol is extra rewarding.
00:07:27.000Where it just, you know, you love that sensation, you love the feeling a little more than the average person might.
00:09:15.000Is that just the common way of discussing it because of the 12-step treatment program ideal?
00:09:23.000Yeah, I think partially there's this idea of, well, you're powerless over alcohol, therefore accept that you're powerless.
00:09:28.000But a lot of that powerlessness, or I can't control my behavior, is because of the sort of over-learning that comes where behavior is no longer choice.
00:09:36.000It's almost automatic because you've gotten so rewarded so many times from that behavior that then the behavior becomes reinforced.
00:09:43.000I mean, you know, all addiction is this way, but all addiction is just learning.
00:09:47.000It's not some special form of learning.
00:09:50.000So what you're talking about is people that have learned to lose control.
00:09:54.000So, does that, like, there's the common thought about Native Americans, the common discussion when people talk about Native Americans and alcohol is that they didn't have alcohol in their diet, We introduced it to them with the Europeans,
00:10:10.000rather than introduced it to them, and then they became almost instantly addicted because they did not have the genetic predisposition to process it.
00:10:16.000Is that BS? I think it's partially BS. I think it's more about, you know, if you lock a bunch of people on a small plot of non-farmable land and don't give them any mechanisms for advancement and take away all their power and then give them a drug to abuse.
00:10:32.000You know, there's always these studies showing that if you give a rat unfettered access to drugs and alcohol, it sits there and, you know, hits the lever until it dies, right?
00:10:42.000If you give a rat access to cocaine or alcohol, well, probably not alcohol, but something really rewarding, it will only self-administer the drug and, you know, and sort of starve to death for the reward when the environment isn't interesting.
00:10:56.000When the environment's impoverished, if there's lots of, you know, rat toys and lots of other cute rats hanging out, they're much less interested in becoming cocaine addicts or whatever it is.
00:11:05.000It's only in the absence of stimulating enriched environments do these sort of automatic behaviors take over.
00:11:11.000So I would argue, at least partially, the Native American alcohol connection is because these are people who are disenfranchised systematically and then given an escape.
00:11:21.000I had that discussion recently with Dr. Chris Ryan, and he's the author of Sex at Dawn, a very interesting book.
00:11:28.000But one of the things that he brought up is the environment itself, that they do these studies on rats, they're in a cage.
00:11:34.000They're in a cage with fluorescent lights, and there's people in lab coats that are hovering over them.
00:11:39.000It's about as unnatural as you can get.
00:11:41.000And any escape that they could probably seek to try to mitigate the stress that they're under, I mean, it's a completely unnatural environment.
00:11:50.000It's not like you're giving them cocaine.
00:12:23.000I mean, humans are given this, well, if you're an alcoholic, if you're a drinker, a problem drinker, you're always going to be a problem drinker is the prevailing wisdom, which also isn't true.
00:12:31.000Something like 90, 95% of people that are problem drinkers Learn to not be problem drinkers with no programs, with no intervention, no therapy.
00:12:40.000They just learn to get control over their drinking.
00:13:08.000And boredom and lack of ability to tolerate boredom or tolerate uncomfortable emotions, of which boredom can be one, is often the biggest driver for problematic substance use.
00:15:16.000Like cannabis, for instance, is sort of right on that edge of being legal or not.
00:15:20.000And we would offer cannabis moderation if someone was legally using cannabis.
00:15:27.000And if we were in Colorado or Washington State, we'd be offering cannabis as an equal moderate player, so to speak, with our alcohol program.
00:15:34.000Well, does that concern you, that the only reason why you don't use cocaine in that way is that it's illegal?
00:15:41.000Well, I mean, I think a lot of people can get in trouble with cocaine.
00:15:47.000In a way they aren't going to get in trouble with weed.
00:15:50.000So I think the bar for risk versus harm versus potentially the cost of failure is much higher for some of these heavier drugs.
00:16:00.000So we're never going to offer a heroin moderation program.
00:16:03.000But isn't alcohol equally bad for you?
00:16:07.000I mean, when you look at statistics of abuse and the health consequences, alcohol seems to rank right up there with heroin.
00:17:14.000And then you would go, literally, you would exit his door and go to the next door, and that was run by the same company, and it was a pain management facility pharmacy.
00:17:23.000And you'd go in there, and all they had was pills.
00:17:25.000And you would just go and buy OxyContin.
00:17:28.000And there was all these people waiting outside.
00:17:33.000It was amazing because they they followed people who were hooked on it They followed people that were going hopping from clinic to clinic and it was just rampant Florida had some ungodly percentage of people that were prescribed Now,
00:17:49.000of course, elders are also, I mean, Florida, half the state is elders.
00:17:53.000And pain management is much, you know, more common.
00:17:57.000Pain management in the medical sort of space is much more common when you're, you know, 70, 80 years old than it is when you're 30 or 40. It's very important when you say elders that you say age and not Mormons.
00:18:26.000Yeah, I have a buddy who's a Jack Mormon, you know, a lapsed Mormon, and he's this, you know, 55-year-old guy with dreadlocks down to his ankles and, you know, musician, and he left the Mormon church, but he was an elder in his, like, early 20s before he sort of decided it wasn't for him.
00:19:29.000It's like something steals who they are.
00:19:32.000Yeah, once you're addicted to, you know, pain medication, you know, the doctors won't give it to you forever, so at some point you're getting off the pain medication prescriptions, but you might still be addicted, so you seek, you know, street opiates, and that's sort of the standard story there.
00:19:44.000So there's an itch that they can't scratch anymore, and it just becomes overwhelming after a while.
00:19:50.000And is a lot of that the same thing, sort of the psychological pull of something that's forbidden or something that you're not supposed to do?
00:19:57.000Or is there a physical component to the heroin addiction?
00:20:00.000There's definitely a physical component to addictions.
00:20:03.000But, you know, the withdrawal symptoms and the, I mean, addiction is really two things.
00:21:20.000It helps reduce pain and inflammation.
00:21:22.000So if you've been abusing with supra-physiological levels massive opiates, and then you withdraw them, your pain-reduction system is overly...
00:21:32.000Sort of, you know, sensitized, and then you feel things as painful that were not considered painful before.
00:21:38.000So I think that a lot of the withdrawal is sort of resetting the endogenous pain management system.
00:22:23.000Like, how does one keep ramping it up?
00:22:25.000Well, I mean, I think you have to be resourceful.
00:22:27.000And I think you mentioned earlier people, you know, clinic hopping or doctor hopping.
00:22:30.000I mean, that's a really common sort of way people abuse pain meds is they get multiple people to prescribe.
00:22:37.000It sounds like, you know, Rush may have had his friends and family, you know, helping to develop his habit.
00:22:44.000When you're taking lots of different things, though, there's an added risk, and that's what's called polypharmacy, or interactions between your drugs.
00:22:52.000And a lot of painkillers, a lot of major tranquilizers are very significant drugs that suppress The cardiovascular system, the respiratory system.
00:23:00.000And so if you combine different types of drugs being given from different doctors who aren't aware of the different drugs that you're being given, then you can get into life-threatening side effects very quickly for some people.
00:23:11.000That was the big issue in Florida was that they didn't have a database up until recently.
00:23:16.000So you could go to one doctor, get your prescription, then go right down the street to another doctor and they couldn't share information.
00:23:28.000And, you know, to some extent, those little pharmacy slash prescription shops, they remind me of, you know, the cannabis culture we have in most states now where, you know, you can walk into a little mom and pop sort of prescription center where maybe you see a doctor, maybe you see their nurse practitioner.
00:23:44.000You pay your 40 bucks, you walk out with a card, you go next door and you put your card down and walk out with your weed.
00:23:50.000You know, nowadays you go online and you say, I'd like this strain delivered at my door at this time, and it shows up at your door with a smile and, you know, a little mint.
00:23:58.000It's a very different sort of way to deal with drugs than the gatekeeper of the physician who's carefully paying attention to your full use spectrum and managing your life, managing your health with some, you know, good perspective on you.
00:24:14.000When we have these, you know, as you mentioned, the short time, we have 10 minutes with a doctor or something, and it's a prescription out the door.
00:24:20.000Yeah, well, the cannabis one is kind of a joke, because although there are people, I mean, I know people that use it for health reasons, the vast majority are juke in the system.
00:24:29.000They're just like, hey, I've got a headache, you know?
00:24:33.000Sure, well, you know, stress is one of the biggest detriments to health.
00:24:38.000You know, cortisol rises, your hippocampus dies, and cells fall apart, and your body heals less fast, and you learn less well, your frontal lobe shuts down.
00:24:48.000So, you know, I would argue that even the recreational cannabis users who sort of gamed the system are getting the stress reduction benefits from it, typically.
00:24:56.000Oh no, I would agree with you, most certainly.
00:24:58.000I also think that life itself is a disease, and that you need a drug to treat life itself.
00:25:07.000Well, the pressures of the average 9 to 5 existence, plus traffic, commute, bills, family, is overwhelming.
00:25:15.000I don't believe that our bodies are designed for this.
00:25:18.000And I think that any means that you can without completely destroying your body and mitigating whatever pressures and stresses you're under, I'm all for it.
00:25:27.000I mean, I think aspirin should be legal.
00:25:29.000I'm a big fan of almost everything being legal.
00:25:33.000I think that some folks are going to have a much harder time with certain substances than others.
00:25:39.000Yeah, and that's individual variability as part of it, you know, the genetics you show up with.
00:25:43.000It's also things like your environment, you know, what you see used, how you use, why you use.
00:25:49.000You know, are you using because you want to feel comfortable or euphoric or have some good time or watch a movie and find it extra interesting?
00:25:54.000Or are you using to shut down the pain and boredom of your life?
00:25:57.000Those are very dramatically different ways of using substances.
00:26:00.000And are you using it to mitigate the effects of trauma, especially trauma from your childhood, which is one of the things that people don't consider when they talk in disparaging ways about people being addicts.
00:26:15.000They don't consider the fact that this person might have been wired in a certain way because of traumatic experiences that they had while they're developing, where their mind was developing.
00:26:25.000Yeah, I mean, I do brain mapping, QEEG, and we look at sort of functional patterns in brains and try to tie it together to people's, you know, behavior and the things they're struggling with.
00:26:33.000And I often see in people that are struggling with alcohol, sort of a sensitization, a hot spot on the back of the brain in an area called the posterior cingulate cortex, Which is to some extent involved with sensitization to threat, noticing danger.
00:26:46.000And that spot shows up, that overactivity shows up when people have experienced fairly significant trauma.
00:26:54.000So it's a pretty common reason people are using drugs and alcohol.
00:28:07.000Remember this pattern of muscle activity because this one gets me to see more stuff and explore the environment.
00:28:13.000And it wasn't like some magical, your brain went, okay, contract the left bicep and then the left forearm.
00:28:19.000It just kind of happens randomly until it produces the desired effect, which is, oh, I'm sort of crawling now.
00:28:25.000And then the brain does more of the thing.
00:28:27.000That let it get more input, avoid danger, get pleasure, whatever the learning reinforcers are.
00:28:33.000The same thing happens when you're sitting in front of a biofeedback machine trying to make a spaceship fly or a car race around a track with your brain.
00:28:42.000And so whenever the car slows down and peters out next to the race course because your brain got distracted or tense, the brain doesn't like the lack of input.
00:28:50.000And it starts to go, hey, wait, where's my input?
00:28:53.000And it tries to figure out, oh, I'm controlling this environment out in the world, therefore I should do more of X, less of Y. It's actually a non-cognitive process, believe it or not.
00:29:03.000You aren't trying, you're more sort of letting it happen.
00:29:06.000We're instrumentally are shaping, conditioning the brain in certain directions.
00:29:10.000And are there certain triggers that could potentially bring you back to the negative state that you were in because of the trauma?
00:29:16.000Like, are there things that people have to avoid once they go through this process to keep from...
00:29:27.000It's kind of like if you were limping because your left knee was off and you went to do six months of physical therapy, from then on you're walking with appropriate gait and you're always practicing the new muscles and coordination and things.
00:29:41.000Neurofeedback isn't permanent for everything.
00:29:43.000If there's an active disease process going on, like schizophrenia or HIV or something, then the problems you're able to reduce can reemerge.
00:29:51.000But if you've got ADHD or migraines or sleep issues or anxiety or trauma or OCD or PTSD, these things all do appear to change and change in a largely permanent way for most people.
00:30:08.000Like, say, if you take someone who's had a traumatic childhood and issues with abuse and substance abuse because of that, and then they enter into some sort of a treatment like this, how long of a process?
00:30:18.000Yeah, most of my clients start off with sort of a training program.
00:31:13.000And there's some truth to the people saying it doesn't exist.
00:31:17.000I think that as a pathology, as a strictly a mental illness, it doesn't really exist.
00:31:22.000I think what we have is a natural spectrum, continuum of attention management resources.
00:31:30.000And some of us can notice everything in the environment and turn our attention and just be wide focused and be pulled off by all novelty.
00:31:36.000And other folks are good at being heads down and sustained attention.
00:31:40.000You know, 10,000 years ago, we needed hunters who could, like, you know, see the little tiger hiding in the corner or the hard, you know, red berry, hard-to-spot piece of fruit hiding under the leaf, who could notice all the little environmental cues.
00:31:53.000And we also needed folks who could sit behind the village and, like, weed the plants all day long.
00:31:57.000So I think that there's a natural sort of reinforcer of human, you know, a range of human attention regulation where some folks have more novelty-seeking, more wide focus, and other folks have more narrow or sustained attention.
00:32:09.000So when we say ADHD, you know, the diagnostic criteria in general in mental health isn't really about what's going on.
00:32:20.000It's about what's going on and does it interfere with your life?
00:32:23.000So you can be really hyperactive, really spacey, really checked out, really, you know, hard to talk to, but if you're successful, I wouldn't call it a pathology.
00:32:32.000I wouldn't even call it ADHD. And to call it ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the deficit implies you have less attention than average.
00:32:43.000But, you know, we all know ADHD people that can sit and play video games without stopping for 20 hours straight.
00:33:10.000Who has this issue with attention when it comes to things that they're not into, but yet they can focus extremely well on something that they're fascinated by, and then that benefits them and they become successful at that.
00:33:22.000If you are in a negative environment as far as teaching or school, and they try to get you to become this person who's just like everybody else, then it becomes something they want to medicate you with.
00:33:41.000And there are benefits for having, you know, more abstract thought and more novelty seeking and be able to integrate, you know, abstract concepts.
00:33:56.000But I'm verbally about as, you know, good as it gets.
00:33:59.000And so, you know, I was always sort of not rewarded by being in math classes and really rewarded being in, you know, language or, you know, whatever, English class.
00:34:08.000The artist ADHD kid thrives in, you know, one-tenth of their high school classes.
00:34:15.000Potentially, if it's dramatic ADHD. But I would say that most people don't have dramatic attention regulation issues.
00:34:23.000They have minor attention regulation issues that can be changed.
00:34:27.000You mentioned that ADHD people can be...
00:34:32.000I'm fascinated by things and really, you know, pay attention.
00:34:36.000The prefrontal cortex, the most frontal, most anterior part of the brain, the most human part, the part that developed the latest, is really the executive of the brain, the CEO. And a lot of how it does its job is by telling the rest of the brain, no.
00:34:50.000You know, don't turn your head and look at this other thing.
00:35:52.000They train people around them to create conflict with them because being yelled at, being punished, being engaged aggressively lights up the prefrontal cortex.
00:36:02.000So they do behavior or they engage in behavior that will cause people to yell at them subconsciously.
00:36:08.000To get the reward of having a feeling alive, a feeling on.
00:36:15.000Now, when you're dealing with people that have such an incredible amount of variation, the variation between human beings and personalities, you're sticking them in a classroom, and you're forcing them to adhere to...
00:36:32.000Some sort of program that was designed by someone who's never going to meet them.
00:36:37.000And it's the same for everyone across the state.
00:36:56.000And the more unusual you are, the harder it will be to conform.
00:36:59.000But I would say for most people, you're still getting basic skills, even in these sort of homogenized programs.
00:37:05.000And is there some benefit from just dealing with this homogenization, dealing with the boarding, The curriculum, you know, they're forcing upon you, just some sort of stress management benefits?
00:37:22.000I mean, you know, it's certainly people management.
00:37:24.000You can't teach every individual kid one-on-one.
00:37:28.000And so there has to be an accommodation or a compromise somewhere for doing classroom, public school, broad teaching.
00:37:37.000I think the massively online, you know, courses that are mostly free these days, that's mostly adults taking those, you know, taking advantage of those, but I think that will change how we teach children long term.
00:37:50.000You know, if you take the traditional public school common core system on one end of the spectrum, and you look at something completely opposite like Montessori schools, Montessori is all about finding the thing the kid is interested in.
00:38:03.000And then funneling all their learning down that one avenue of interest.
00:38:07.000I love the idea behind that, but Montessori also lumps all these ages together.
00:38:31.000A couple hundred years ago, we had a six-year-old and a 12-year-old and a 16-year-old in the same classroom, and they probably all learned from each other, even if they didn't know it.
00:38:40.000Right, but aren't they all on different levels?
00:38:42.000A six-year-old and a 12-year-old are going to be learning completely different things.
00:38:45.000Maybe, but at six years old, I was learning like most 16-year-olds.
00:38:51.000But the point is that even within all a bunch of six-year-olds, you know, class of, what is that, like three?
00:38:56.000You know, you've got some that are functioning several years below their level, and some that are functioning many years above their level.
00:39:04.000The first intelligence tests were really age norm tests.
00:39:08.000They said, you know, here you're functioning compared to your chronological age, where's your mental age?
00:39:14.000That was the first sort of round of intelligence tests that were created.
00:39:16.000It was all about age, you know, developmental age versus chronological age.
00:39:21.000But it would seem to me that it would be incredibly different.
00:39:23.000I'm not that aware of the monetary system other than friends that have kids in it that have complaints.
00:39:27.000But I would think that The variability would be so large that if you have a classroom of 20, 30 kids, how are you going to pay attention to each kid's needs?
00:39:37.000You're going to have to have multiple teachers.
00:39:52.000And in a Montessori program with 25 or 30 kids, you probably have four or five adults in the room.
00:39:57.000Knowing what you know about the mind and the development of the mind, is the current state of education, public education in this country, is that one of the more frustrating things that you have to consider?
00:40:09.000I mean, people learn so many different ways, and I also don't think that learning stops when you're out of school.
00:40:15.000I think that the role of public education should be to do as much as possible for as many people as possible.
00:40:22.000But, you know, the people at either of the extremes are never going to be well served.
00:40:26.000People that are struggling or people that are advanced are never going to be well served by You know, general public education, while it's this sort of 1 to 35, 1 to 40 ratio.
00:41:33.000But nowadays, people go from, you know, being children to adults without any clear stages, without the sort of social reinforcers of where you are and what your life means in terms of the community, in terms of your family.
00:41:46.000So I think that's unfortunately, you know, it's a function of living on a planet with seven billion people.
00:41:50.000That's a topic that's been brought up on this show many, many times because I'm a big fan of and a big proponent of engaging in difficult activities to understand yourself.
00:42:02.000And I think that coming-of-age rituals They, at the very least, signify to a child, like, now I am this.
00:42:14.000And when you achieve your blue belt, there's this moment where you get that belt, you go, wow, I am a blue belt now.
00:42:21.000And it doesn't seem like it should be much, but I remember when I was doing jujitsu and I went from a white belt to a blue belt, I was like, wow.
00:42:34.000And in historical, cultural, sort of coming-of-age rituals, the young person is given advice by all the men in the village, all the women in the village.
00:42:47.000I mean, the ordeal, I think, is what you're talking about, too.
00:42:50.000The ordeal should not be underestimated.
00:42:52.000I don't know if we haven't met before, so I have a history as an ecstatic shaman.
00:42:56.000I've done a lot of ecstatic work around...
00:42:58.000What does that mean, an ecstatic shaman?
00:43:00.000...pushing yourself hard until your reality changes.
00:43:07.000Define shamanism, define it as, you know, ordinary reality is what we all have.
00:43:12.000And if you push yourself hard enough through any mechanism you can think of, eventually your reality breaks and you have other insight, other knowledge, other ways of, you know, understanding the world.
00:43:23.000And so for me, it's been things like, you know, dance all night long or drumming or, you know, other things as well.
00:43:29.000But the idea is to push yourself until you get out of your own way.
00:43:34.000Until your monkey mind breaks down, until you leave that behind.
00:43:39.000So as a shaman, you would lead people in these dance marathons?
00:44:58.000I'm intrigued by it, and I think for folks that are struggling with certain types of drug addiction, I have some clients who've gone through that particular thing and say that they were impressed by it or they got something out of it.
00:45:10.000I just don't have enough You know, a real clear first-hand experience to talk about.
00:45:14.000The amount of people that have done it, I've never done it either, but the amount of people that have done it that have had addiction issues and gone through it and it's wiped out their addiction issues, it's pretty staggering.
00:45:24.000But you know, that isn't only true of ibogaine.
00:45:27.000That's true of things like ayahuasca, mushrooms, ketamine, electro-convulsive shock therapy.
00:45:34.000These things, and this is a hypothesis, this is a theory I have, that all of these things act in a similar way on the brain to reset, to cause a systemic, wide, sort of flip the switch.
00:45:46.000You know, ECT is still used for medication-resistant depression.
00:45:50.000It's one of the few things that works.
00:45:52.000If drugs don't work for your depression, ECT will lift your depression.
00:45:59.000You know, one is zapping you, one is sedating you, but I think they're really going after sort of a reset deep in the brain in some way.
00:46:05.000So this transformative experience being so completely alien to normal states of consciousness is enough to give you this new blank slate, or at least a new starting point.
00:46:18.000Yeah, or at least, you know, maybe it could be sort of hormetic.
00:46:20.000It could be a stressor your body reacts to with healing.
00:46:25.000Almost anything that affects depression, that lifts depression, does so by raising a neurotrophic factor in the hippocampus.
00:46:34.000The hippocampus is involved with memory formation, also exploring the environments.
00:46:38.000And there's a compound called BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor.
00:46:42.000It's a growth hormone or growth factor in the brain.
00:46:45.000Anything that lifts depression raises BDNF. BDNF is the final common pathway, if you will, of antidepressants.
00:46:53.000It's not serotonin, not dopamine, norepinephrine, it's not exercise.
00:46:58.000It doesn't matter what you say your antidepressant drug or mechanism is, how it actually works downstream is BDNF. Wow, that's fascinating.
00:47:06.000I'm really glad you brought up the expression depression.
00:47:40.000Their career turned around, their romantic life turned around, and they were no longer depressed.
00:47:44.000And so I've always wondered how much of this idea that we have of someone being sick is just based on the input that you're getting from your environment, whether or not you're getting positive feedback.
00:48:02.000You don't have to worry about your bills.
00:48:04.000You're in a rewarding relationship where you feel supported and loved.
00:48:08.000You don't have this feeling all the time of being lonely or being left out.
00:48:14.000How much of that is an environmental issue?
00:48:17.000How much of that is just your brain is lacking a certain amount of pills?
00:48:21.000And how many people are medicated because their environment is shitty?
00:48:26.000And so instead of giving you the impetus to change and alter your environment to benefit you, You're instead given a pill that makes your environment tolerable.
00:49:11.000When someone's life becomes less stressful, you're right, some people become not depressed anymore.
00:49:16.000And I would consider that a low-key form of depression, if they just get a little bit depressed or depressed because of exogenous life things.
00:49:26.000All the diagnostic criteria for depression suggest that you need to have all these symptoms for many weeks.
00:49:34.000I think it's two or three weeks minimum across more than one domain of your life.
00:49:39.000So it's not simply being sad for a few weeks because of a bad thing that happened to you.
00:49:47.000It's what happens with how your emotional regulation gets changed by that or turns into a problem.
00:49:53.000So there are many people, their lives get better, they get a new job, they have things perk up.
00:50:29.000I would say that major depression, I mean, I'm not actually sure when it crept into the DSM. The whole issue of diagnosis is a very thorny issue anyways.
00:50:37.000The DSM... Was not really developed, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is what psychologists and psychiatrists use for diagnoses, was not really developed to help with diagnoses.
00:50:48.000It was developed to help with insurance companies.
00:50:51.000It's kind of like the BMI. You know, the BMI, for you and me, would say we're overweight, if not obese.
00:51:04.000But if I was, if my body fat was higher and muscle mass was lower, I would be.
00:51:08.000And the same thing's true with diagnoses.
00:51:10.000It was really a tool used to figure out what to pay on insurance to some extent.
00:51:14.000And so at a population level, if I took a thousand people, the BMI would work pretty well for most of them.
00:51:21.000And the same is true of the DSM. It works pretty well at a population level.
00:51:26.000But when you drill down to the individual, sometimes their symptoms don't fit the DSM, or how long they've had symptoms for, or the course of their disease doesn't really totally fit.
00:51:35.000And does a psychologist say, oh, you don't fit all the criteria, therefore I can't give you a diagnosis?
00:52:03.000Yeah, depression is a disease, and you hear it all the time, and you hear it oftentimes in commercials that are selling drugs, and that really concerns me, because I'm like, well, you might be giving someone the green light to take a pill, and it takes away the power,
00:52:19.000From them takes away the power to change your life to alter your life for the better because you've got this horrible scenario in your life horrible situation Circumstances whatever they're leading you to feel like shit all the time and someone's coming along and saying hey, man You don't need to get a better job.
00:52:52.000You know, from the point of view of brain activity, if you look at depressed brains, if I brought in 100 depressed brains into my clinic and did brain mapping or QEEG on them, what I would find in most of them is is an asymmetry in the frontal lobes.
00:53:07.000Many people who are depressed have an overactive right frontal lobe and an underactive left.
00:53:13.000This bias of left side being more active than right is typical.
00:53:16.000Glass half empty, approach the world, explore environments.
00:53:19.000When the right is more active than the left, You withdraw, you shut down, you don't want to do anything.
00:53:25.000And so there is a brain signature often present in major depression of a left-right bias that goes in the opposite direction.
00:53:32.000You know, if you measure the Dalai Lama, he'd be really strong left biased.
00:53:54.000I mean, I've never, you know, tracked someone through being non-depressed into depressed because they all come and see me once they're depressed.
00:54:02.000Your brain is a little bit like this, and you're a little bit, you know, oriented towards becoming a little bit depressed, and then stressors mount.
00:54:11.000Genes only account for about 30% of our experience.
00:54:14.000And 70% of our experience is how the environment interacts with us.
00:54:18.000And the same is true of anything else that's cognitive or psychological.
00:54:21.000You may have a slight tendency towards a depressed brain, you know, right-front dominance.
00:54:26.000But unless your life becomes sucky, or things really build up, or you feel unsafe, or unmet, or unfed, or something else, you might not ever develop the depression patterns that really you get stuck in.
00:54:38.000Have you ever monitored people pre- and post-depression, like someone who has recovered from it?
00:54:43.000What are the changes that you observe?
00:54:45.000I mean, all the time you see the asymmetry reverse, go back to the sort of normal or typical brain patterns.
00:54:52.000I mean, not every person with depression has frontal asymmetries, but it happens often enough that I believe it when I see it in the brain maps as a sign.
00:55:01.000I mean, I often do brain maps without doing clinical histories first, because I don't want to be biased.
00:55:05.000So I'll sit you down and, you know, record some baselines, and then after I have the data, I'll say, okay, I'm seeing this pattern.
00:55:13.000You know, this thing here, the literature suggests, and many people that come into my clinic have some depression when they see this pattern.
00:55:25.000There's patterns for ADHD or trauma, you know, OCD or PTSD. And so I tend to unpack what I'm looking at based on their symptoms and then confirm, get them to confirm what I'm guessing.
00:56:31.000Meaning a training up or down specifically, like making your brain make more beta and less theta, which is an attentive, focused, calm state.
00:56:50.000And it's going to fluctuate moment to moment because you aren't making a static amount of this brainwave.
00:56:54.000You're making, you know, the amount your environment and your internal environment demands.
00:56:58.000And so whenever it tends to trend down, Maybe I'll have you play one of your podcasts, and the volume of your podcasts will go up whenever your theta goes down.
00:57:08.000Whenever your theta goes back up, the volume drops.
00:57:10.000And so your brain goes, hey, wait, I was listening to that interesting guy.
00:57:14.000And over half an hour, you might have several hundred of these resuming of feedback, of rewards.
00:57:22.000And that can be something like an audio or a video.
00:58:35.000And then six months of this one experiment that Dr. Barry Sturman did in the late 60s, six months later he pulled a bunch of cats out of his subject pool to do a rocket fuel exposure experiment.
00:58:46.000NASA had said, hey, look, our astronauts are getting really sick.
00:59:01.000And so Dr. Sturman at UCLA in the late 60s was exposing cats to increasing levels of rocket fuel vapors and found that a little bit, you know, they panted, a little more they stumbled, a little more they cried, and then, like, seizure, coma, death.
00:59:16.000This nice linear, you know, with increasing dose.
00:59:19.000Except of the cats he was using, a certain subset, like 6 of 30 or something, Refused to have seizures, and the whole curve of unstable brain was pushed to the right.
00:59:29.000Couldn't figure out why until he realized, oh wait a minute, I used these same six cats in a previous experiment to increase their brain waves.
00:59:36.000In this one brainwave that I thought was a nice target to go after, it turns out that brainwave is the anti-seizure brainwave.
00:59:43.000When you train it up, you have decreased, dramatically decreased seizure activity in the brain.
00:59:48.000And so he found this, you know, this brainwave was sort of metastable in encouraging brain activity.
00:59:54.000And his lab manager at the time was a medication uncontrolled epileptic.
00:59:59.000Having, like, tens of seizures a month, which is basically a death sentence.
01:00:04.000Your brain will, you know, Swiss cheese over time, and you'll have major, major long-term problems.
01:00:09.000And she demanded he build her a biofeedback machine to train up this brainwave.
01:00:13.000And over the next year or two, they did some training, and after a couple of years, she went off all meds and was seizure-free.
01:00:25.000He submitted a paper to Epilepsia, the journal, and suddenly his government funding all vanished.
01:00:33.000So, the conspiracy theorist ideas start to mount when you think about the late 60s and big drug companies not wanting a non-drug intervention for epilepsy out there.
01:00:43.000Now, what is the current protocol on this stuff today?
01:00:46.000I mean, how many people are using this kind of treatment to deal with epilepsy?
01:00:52.000I've had a few folks come through my center who do have seizures, and I've reduced them.
01:00:56.000But I'm not sure of the numbers of epileptologists out there using it.
01:00:59.000The numbers of neurofeedback providers, just as a hand-waving guess, let's say there's 10,000 in the U.S., And there's many more, of course, throughout the world.
01:01:08.000When I go to big conferences, there's, you know, 1,000 to 1,500 people at the professional trade shows for this stuff.
01:01:15.000So you figure, extrapolating, there's at least 10,000 practitioners in the U.S. In fact, just down the street here in Woodland Hills, some of the giants in the field, the Othmers, they sort of founded the field.
01:01:26.000Soon after Sturman made these discoveries, the Othmers...
01:01:31.000At EEG Info launched sort of the field of neurofeedback for clinicians.
01:01:35.000They built software and hardware for many years for clinicians to use.
01:01:41.000The idea that they would pull funding just because he's come up with something that takes away from the money...
01:01:48.000And who knows if that's actually what happened, but it's a good story that there's this potential, you know, sort of big brother, big pharma...
01:02:01.000When neurofeedback started getting really big, a lot of what it was first used for is ADHD. It's sort of the magic bullet for ADHD. It's called the 20-hour solution for ADHD. This is starting to really be used maybe 15,
01:02:19.000A couple of the big drug companies were paying scientists to go to CHAD meetings, the ADHD support group meetings, and say, nope, neurofeedback doesn't work.
01:02:28.000They were being paid by the drug companies to go and anti-shill for anti-neurofeedback.
01:02:34.000Well, we find that today with marijuana.
01:02:37.000We find that today with pharmaceutical companies paying people to talk badly and not just that, but testify about the negative aspects of cannabis.
01:02:46.000And then you find out they're being paid by pharmaceutical companies hundreds of thousands of dollars.
01:02:49.000Yeah, I mean, when did money get in so deep into not only medicine, but politics?
01:02:54.000I mean, when you and I were kids, this wasn't like this, was it?
01:03:25.000I mean, today you still have, there was this horrible story, a horrible video of the head of the DEA having a conversation with someone in Congress where the guy is breaking it down to her, saying, what is worse?
01:04:06.000Yeah, and unfortunately there's not a lot of good research out there.
01:04:09.000I mean, I'm putting together a cannabis study with my lead tech at Alternatives, and we're going through a literature review trying to figure out what the state of the literature is.
01:04:17.000And I'm looking at brain activity, so my questions are things like, well, how long is it active in your brain, and what are the brain changes that cannabis produces?
01:04:25.000And we're looking at studies from the 70s and some of them in the 80s, and little footnotes and methodologies say, okay, the THC concentration in this study is 2%.
01:04:37.000And nowadays, you know, the stuff being delivered to your door from the collective is 20%, 23%, 25%.
01:04:44.000So cannabis has gotten 10 times as strong since our parents were, you know...
01:04:50.000Well, that's all just dirt weed, though.
01:04:52.000There was a study that they did recently.
01:04:53.000They said that they got a hold of some marijuana from the 1960s and 70s, and the variation was between 2% to 5% for shitty weed, but as high as 15% for what they called Acapulco Gold.
01:08:06.000When it's processed by the liver, it's producing this new substance that's five times more psychoactive than THC. I know it lasts a lot longer.
01:08:18.000Your liver produces this metabolite, 11-hydroxymetabolite, and it's so much more potent, which is why when people eat cookies, they always think they're dying.
01:08:27.000They always think, like, oh my god, somebody dosed it.
01:10:55.000Because that seems to me, I've never done Adderall, but from the people that I've talked to that have and understand it, it's a stimulant like very close to amphetamines.
01:11:06.000Yeah, much lower dose and slightly different molecule, but very, very close to a, you know, strict class stimulant.
01:11:12.000My good friend, the late, great Robert Schimmel, who's a hilarious stand-up comedian, a great guy, he had a bunch of health issues himself, and...
01:12:10.000And the euphoria, I mean, your friend had some euphoria probably from it too.
01:12:15.000That goes away as soon as you're used to the drug.
01:12:17.000Well, he wasn't interested in doing it again.
01:12:19.000He just accidentally did it, but he's like, God, I got so much work done.
01:12:23.000And I've heard that before, like my friend Eddie.
01:12:26.000My friend Eddie Bravo dated a few gals who had problems with stimulants and he said you would always tell because you go over their house it'd be fucking spotless.
01:12:34.000He was like those chicks would always be cleaning their apartments.
01:12:37.000They would just constantly be cleaning.
01:12:39.000What is it about stimulants that make you want to get things done?
01:12:44.000Well dopamine is the primary neurotransmitter boosted by stimulants and dopamine is the reward signal.
01:13:00.000So, you would want to do things like clean your house.
01:13:05.000Yeah, because you want to do something.
01:13:06.000Because you want to engage with your environment.
01:13:08.000You want to explore, reshuffle, play around with your environment.
01:13:12.000Now, for kids, this chasing the dragon thing with college has got to be a giant issue, though, right?
01:13:17.000You're popping these pills, and at first it's benefiting you, and then slowly that starts to wear out, so you're taking And a lot of kids aren't ADHD, not dramatically, and they're taking stimulants off-label, other people's, you know, black market prescriptions.
01:13:33.000And, you know, there are some consequences to psychostimulants.
01:13:36.000There are some negative consequences if you're not managing them in the absolute right way you should, including things like cardiovascular side effects and habit formation and appetite suppression.
01:13:46.000And, you know, all these things can cause major issues.
01:13:49.000I mean, college students are some of the least healthy people anyways.
01:14:35.000It's the dopamine hit makes you go, yes, that's the most interesting thing I've ever heard of.
01:14:40.000Yeah, I was watching her and this guy, this other guy who used to work there, and they had this conversation, and he's like, yeah, well, you know, I would just take Adderall.
01:14:59.000Dopaminergic drugs are, in my opinion, some of the most dangerous things we have because they hijack learning because they really get in the way.
01:15:06.000And so it's not just that it's pleasurable and that's reinforcing.
01:15:09.000It's the pleasurable and dopamine gets boosted to super physiological levels.
01:15:13.000Well, how ironic that it hijacks learning when you're using it to help learn.
01:15:57.000I had a massive systemic reaction to it.
01:15:59.000And people that have attention problems, and I grew up, you know, ADHD, people that have attention problems have dramatically increased side effects...
01:16:07.000From that class of drugs, Provigil, NuVigil, Adafinil, you know, arm Adafinil.
01:16:46.000What they said eventually was it was something called erythema multiform minor, and there's a major form that's called Stephen Johnson syndrome, and that's where your skin peels off.
01:17:35.000If you look at the old, like, some of the review papers on modafinil, you find that all of the studies on people with ADHD have incredibly dramatically increased side effects compared to non-ADHD people.
01:17:47.000So you shouldn't use, you know, modafinil's great if you're a sleep, you know, a narcoleptic person or somebody's doing, you know, sleep-wake-shift disorders or things, but unless you absolutely need it to modify your sleep, it's not great for attention.
01:18:00.000I mean, I got some mild attention benefits from it the first couple of weeks.
01:18:04.000It's just nothing compared to psychostimulants, it's nothing compared to neurofeedback, or even like meditation, mindfulness can change your brain and shore up attention resources.
01:18:13.000I want to get to mindfulness in a moment, but what is the difference between NuVigil and ProVigil?
01:18:18.000Yeah, so Modafinil, the first product, ProVigil is the brand name, is a mix of left and right hand molecules.
01:18:28.000When you're making organic chemistry, things are sort of naturally developed in sort of two mirror image molecules in most chemical synthesis.
01:18:37.000And so there's an L and an R form of the modafinil.
01:18:41.000And they're mixed in the modafinil product.
01:18:45.000In the R-modafinil, which is nuvigil, It's only one half.
01:18:49.000It's the right-hand molecule, the R. And so the R molecule, theoretically, you know, typically in brain chemistry, one of the molecules is psychoactive, and one of them is much, much less so and or causes side effects.
01:19:04.000So a lot of the modern drugs will use an L or an R form only and get rid of the other half of the molecule.
01:19:13.000But modafinil, both the L and the R, versions of the molecule, are psychoactive.
01:19:19.000The R form is a little more psychoactive and tends to have a more stimulant-type feeling.
01:22:54.000Yeah, not being forthcoming about taking it either.
01:22:56.000It's one of those weird things you wanted to kind of keep on the DL. Tim Ferriss, who wrote a book, The 4-Hour Body, he didn't want to talk about it in his book because he was worried that people would start taking it like candy.
01:23:09.000And they are, to some extent, especially in Silicon Valley.
01:23:12.000Silicon Valley, yeah, I was just going to bring that up.
01:23:14.000And Dave Asprey talks about, you know, metafinil.
01:23:25.000And unless you're an arcoleptic, it's just not for you.
01:23:27.000Well, coincidentally, you're the only one qualified to actually discuss the real mechanisms of the compounds and the way they affect your brain.
01:23:35.000Yeah, I mean, and we don't know what modafinil really does to the brain.
01:24:54.000But you see the carcinogenic effects, or the people that have an issue with cigarette smoking, it's far more likely to cause cancer than it is people that are using, say, cigars.
01:25:08.000Mostly because they aren't getting the dosages.
01:28:16.000And, you know, so, I mean, I don't think we yet know.
01:28:19.000And I'm kind of excited by what's happening with the medical and recreational cannabis in this country because we're finally doing some of the research.
01:28:26.000We're finally looking into constituent components, all the other cannabinoids beyond THC. We're starting to examine the endocannabinoid.
01:28:34.000We have a cannabinoid system built in.
01:28:37.000There's a neurotransmitter called ananda, you know, the Sanskrit word for bliss, that hits our endocannabinoid systems.
01:30:40.000Some of the first papers over the past couple of decades were all CBD, CBD, CBD, reducing inflammation, reducing cancer, killing cancer cells.
01:30:46.000I've seen a few papers recently that say the non-CBD compounds also do that and do it better.
01:31:42.000It's a little frustrating, but I look at, you know, If you go back, you know, 100 years ago, technology was nowhere compared to where it is right now.
01:31:51.000I sort of see us on the exponential curve, the hockey stick of acceleration now.
01:31:56.000So would it have been nice if 50 years ago we were getting into this stuff?
01:32:00.000But on a global timescale, it doesn't really bother me that it's happening now versus last decade, no.
01:32:06.000Well, it doesn't bother me that it's happening now.
01:32:08.000What bothers me is the suppression that exists, that used to exist, like the same suppression that caused this, This reluctance of pharmaceutical companies to accept this treatment of epilepsy that didn't involve drugs that they sell.
01:32:22.000Well, the initial anti-cannabis movement was textiles in this country, right?
01:32:42.000Yeah, the decorticator was the first time that they developed a system of processing hemp fire that didn't involve slavery or hard manual labor.
01:32:50.000The reason why cotton took such a foothold is because they came up with the cotton gin.
01:32:55.000When Eli Whitney came up with the cotton gin, Cotton became much more viable than cannabis, than hemp.
01:33:02.000The fibers of hemp are far stronger, far superior from making paper and cloth.
01:33:53.000And this guy came out with the idea of, first of all, they got in cahoots with Harry Anslinger, and they decided to call it marijuana, which wasn't the name for it before.
01:34:05.000Marijuana was the name for a wild Mexican tobacco plant.
01:34:12.000So when Congress was outlawing marijuana, they didn't exactly understand that they were outlawing hemp as a textile and as a commodity.
01:34:20.000So then you had to get like a tax stamp in order to grow hemp and then They needed it for World War II, so they started this campaign, Hemp for Victory.
01:34:31.000And Hemp for Victory was this famous video that Jack Herrer, who was a famous marijuana activist, found this video to sort of Establish what he had been saying all along.
01:34:47.000Like, look, this is something that we had grown and used as a culture for thousands of years, human beings.
01:34:55.000It was a huge part of, I mean, it was what George W., or George Herbert Walker Bush, it was what his parachute was made of when he parachuted to safety in World War II. It was what the sails that Columbus sailed on was made out of.
01:35:24.000Yeah, well, you know, fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and marketing was even sort of, you know, a big player back then.
01:35:29.000And nowadays, it's hard to get good information about anything without, you know, a decent degree to understand where the noise is coming from.
01:35:36.000But in a lot of ways, it's very similar to what you're saying about taking away this non-drug option of treating epilepsy.
01:35:46.000It's like they realize, okay, there's money to be made with this one solution, this new solution.
01:36:56.000But there's all sorts of other connections to gut bacteria, and there's a bunch of inflammation issues, diet, and things that change that for kids who suffer from these things that they don't totally, truly understand.
01:37:17.000The only thing consistent across them is the social deficit.
01:37:21.000But you can have a high-functioning Asperger's individual with, you know, superior cognitive skills, incredible abilities, but still some deficits in other areas.
01:37:33.000They're so concerned with opening up the doorway to this stuff that even non-psychoactive versions of these plants are illegal.
01:37:41.000We have a huge issue with that at Onnit, my supplement company, because we sell protein.
01:37:47.000Hemp protein is very bioavailable, but we have to get it from Canada.
01:37:51.000You sort of can grow it with the states.
01:37:56.000Didn't that law just change last week that we can now start growing commercial hemp?
01:38:06.000It's got a lot of resistance in terms of how it's going to react or how the federal government is going to react to it if a Republican gets in office in 2016. That's also one of the things about medical marijuana, like they've recently softened their stance considerably on medical marijuana,
01:38:24.000but all it takes is like one thing, one Jeb Bush motherfucker to get into office and things can get really weird.
01:38:30.000But as of right now, we have to get our stuff from Canada.
01:38:33.000We would love to buy it from America, from American farmers.
01:38:36.000But also, it just should be something that people could...
01:38:57.000Yeah, and not only that, there's a lot of medications that they prescribe, especially for people that have heart disease, where aspirin can just nip that shit right in the bud.
01:39:06.000Aspirin is an amazing, amazing anti-inflammatory.
01:39:26.000And how will you know how much bark to chew?
01:39:28.000I don't think the dosages are an issue.
01:39:30.000I think you'll absorb it and get pain relief or whatever.
01:39:32.000So it's only when you swallow it that it becomes an issue?
01:39:35.000No, I think it's being absorbed through the mucosa, but I don't think you're going to get concentrated doses the way you do in tablets of aspirin.
01:39:57.000Probably some, you know, druid brewing tea or something, you know, a couple of years ago.
01:40:01.000Yeah, it's an interesting thing that that's been around for so long, and it's sort of like very subtly swept under the rug, the health benefits of aspirin.
01:40:13.000Well, you know, at least in the cardiac medicine, there's still this focus of giving people the heart risks, or cardiac risk of heart attack, you know, prophylactic doses of aspirin every day to reduce the strain on the blood system.
01:40:27.000Well, I've also heard people say that after you get to a certain age, you should just take aspirin every day anyway, just to mitigate the natural reaction that your body has to inflammation.
01:43:26.000What people don't understand is that every fucking tomato you buy at a grocery store is a genetic demon.
01:43:30.000There's no such thing as a non-GMO cow.
01:43:32.000There's no such thing as a non-GMO ear of corn.
01:43:35.000If you're eating ears of corn, that shit has been modified.
01:43:38.000Well, corn's been heavily modified recently, in the past 10-20 years, but we've been GMO-ing cattle with selective breeding for thousands of years.
01:43:46.000Right, but isn't there a difference between selective breeding and splicing in non-native genetics, which they have done to increase the...
01:44:02.000Isn't it one of those things where there's not an either or?
01:44:05.000There's benefits to genetically modifying things to our advantage, but there's also greed.
01:44:10.000And also when people don't want to address the actual real health concerns of their creations.
01:44:17.000And that's what people were worried about.
01:44:19.000That's why when Brazil as a country filed suit against Monsanto and won.
01:44:25.000Brazilian farmers joined together and filed this gigantic suit.
01:44:31.000But then there's the Indian farmers that they have this huge issue where they get leased out these seeds and then they're in debt and they wind up committing suicide.
01:44:46.000It's sort of like the old sharecropping model where you rent the land, sell the seeds, sell the tools, and now you must work for me for the next 60 years to make back your money.
01:44:57.000Yeah, and Monsanto is the one who's profiting off of it.
01:46:23.000One of them was about peanut butter and jelly being racist.
01:46:27.000And I was like, what the fuck is this?
01:46:29.000And so, of course, everybody's tweeting it and retweeting it.
01:46:32.000And if you actually read into it, it's like, I think some editor just jazzed up this idea of three meals a day and peanut butter and jelly and, you know, where does three meals a day come from?
01:46:58.000They just, and this, it's just this mad rush to get people to read your shit.
01:47:03.000And in doing so, you've sacrificed all credibility.
01:47:06.000Yeah, and you can be inflammatory about peanuts without being stupid.
01:47:09.000I mean, peanuts are somewhat dangerous, you know, people's health, potentially.
01:47:14.000No, Why did I read about peanuts that said that it wasn't always the case and that one of the real concerns about peanut allergies is that keeping kids from peanuts when they're very young because you're worried about peanut allergies could in fact be causing peanut allergies.
01:47:27.000Yeah, there was recently a study that found that by doing a manipulation of gut bacteria they could eliminate peanut allergies in mice.
01:48:35.000And they eat coffee beans and then shit them out.
01:48:38.000And the farmers didn't want to waste these coffee beans, so they would literally pick them out of the dung of the Civic and put it into, you know, they'd roast it.
01:48:47.000And somehow or another, stomach acids do something to the bean.
01:48:58.000My guess is the roasting is really where that matters the most, because you have to bring the oils out of the bean to the surface and caramelize them or oxidize them to produce the flavor you're looking for.
01:49:08.000So my guess, and the longer you roast, the more the caffeine goes down.
01:49:11.000And non-roasted coffee beans have some sort of antioxidant effect as well, right?
01:49:17.000Yeah, the green coffee bean thing, the chloro...
01:54:13.000Yeah, that's one thing that people aren't taking into consideration when they think about the fact that they're driving some eco-friendly vehicle.
01:54:20.000Well, it's eco-friendly for right here, not necessarily eco-friendly for where it's being pulled out of the ground.
01:54:26.000Yeah, I saw an article, I think it was inflammatory more than real, but it pointed out that the ownership cost and the environmental impact of a Prius versus a Hummer We're equivalent.
01:54:37.000Because the Prius has a 100,000 mile lifespan and there's all these really expensive mine battery components that go into it.
01:54:44.000Where a Hummer has like a 300,000 mile lifespan and it's just an old-fashioned, you know, traditionally engineered car.
01:55:38.000I mean, the air quality has improved pretty much every year since Reagan in L.A., right?
01:55:43.000Like, Reagan was the peak of the horrible smog.
01:55:45.000I have to tell folks that, you know, when I go back to visit the Northeast where I'm from, that, oh, yeah, we don't actually make jokes about L.A. smog.
01:55:51.000It's like, well, it's actually not that bad.
01:55:53.000The air quality is pretty darn good, especially where I live in, you know, West L.A. It's...
01:55:56.000Were you getting the wave from the ocean air?
01:56:01.000The smog, you know, when I first moved to LA in 2005, I rode cross-country to motorcycle, and I was coming down to the San Fernando Valley, and there's this layer of black and orange sludge that I drove down into, you know?
01:56:12.000Even that's happening less and less, I think.
01:56:15.000So I think the sort of Southern California smog trope is really overblown these days.
01:56:21.000Well, the smog laws that they put in place and the smog screens that you have to put your car through, they're pretty substantial.
01:56:28.000They're doing a good job as far as that.
01:56:30.000It makes it very difficult for you to take cars post-1975.
01:56:34.000Pre-1975 they're exempt, but post-1975 cars, there's a lot of them that have a huge issue getting smogged, getting smog cleared.
01:56:42.000Yeah, I have one that's post that, but it's a diesel, so it's exempt.
01:59:09.000If you're lucky, you get one of those down to 2,200 pounds.
01:59:12.000If you're really a fucking psycho, you can get it down to like maybe 1,800, but you have to use carbon fiber fenders, fiberglass fenders, things along those lines.
01:59:22.000You really compromise a lot of no comfort at all.
01:59:27.000My Mercedes, I'm not sure what it weighs, but it's a heavy car.
01:59:32.000It's not a light, low Well, it could be 3,500 pounds, but I mean like a BMW M3, for instance, which is a sporty car.
01:59:40.000Yeah, I have a Mini Cooper, a modern one that's, you know, that's a small car.
02:00:38.000Yeah, but it's amazing because the new aluminums that they're using are just as strong, if not stronger in some ways than steel, you know, and they're substantially lighter.
02:00:48.000It's really incredible benefits as far as like gas mileage, all those things, yeah.
02:00:53.000The way they construct them is a little bit different, but so far no detriment.
02:00:57.000The new Range Rover is doing the same thing.
02:00:59.000The new Range Rover is cut somewhere between six and seven hundred pounds from their cars as well.
02:01:40.000He had some weird project he was doing, though, that everybody was like, alright, good luck with that.
02:01:44.000He was trying to make some super expensive MP3 player that recreated the sound of vinyl, or as close to it as possible, and he had a GoFundMe or a Kickstarter or some shit like that, and people were like, what?
02:01:58.000First of all, No one's giving Neil Young money.
02:02:08.000So, like, that was problematic, but it was also, like, the shape of this thing, it was like a, you know those Tobolaroni, whatever it was, chocolate bars?
02:04:41.000Well, there's many different types of meditation, right?
02:04:42.000The classic meditations, Vipassana, Samatha, Metta, these are all fairly similar in that you pick something, some anchor to hold your attention on.
02:04:52.000And then simply you notice when you've drifted.
02:05:00.000And when you notice you're not holding that attention focus, that anchor, you release whatever it is you've gotten distracted by and bring your attention back to the anchor.
02:05:25.000And that's the entirety of most classic meditation is noticing when you've gotten distracted, you've left your anchor of your attention, put down the distraction, go back to the anchor.
02:05:35.000So it's not a loss when you get distracted.
02:05:38.000Not only is it not a loss, If you aren't getting distracted, you probably aren't alive.
02:05:43.000You know, if you have a mind, it will get distracted.
02:06:48.000I just want you to breathe in three hours.
02:06:50.000The three hours thing is scary, too, right?
02:06:52.000You tell people, here's how you should meditate, and they go to a meditation class, like a Buddhist center, and they have to sit there for an hour and a half.
02:08:19.000These are all things that happen as a consequence of developing more resources.
02:08:23.000So what you do on the cushion or wherever you happen to meditate translates to less reactivity, more sustained focus, better attention, better sleep, less anxiety, less anger.
02:08:35.000But you aren't practicing all those things.
02:08:38.000Those things come from having more stable attention.
02:08:43.000I sort of feel like a lot of people operate on momentum and that they kind of, that momentum oftentimes is like nipping at their heels and they can never rest.
02:08:54.000It's like the momentum of all their past actions and thoughts and the things they have to deal with in their life, their bills, their responsibilities, all that stuff is sort of pushing you.
02:09:19.000It will help you choose how you react.
02:09:22.000I mean, the phrase I use is intention versus momentum.
02:09:25.000You learn to choose and to act versus react and to act from a place of choice and control instead of always reeling based on your environment.
02:10:10.000Well, I started doing it in the early 2000s.
02:10:15.000I went to a place and tried it out for the first time and I was hooked.
02:10:18.000I, you know, read about it, seen the Altered States movie, got excited about it, read John Lilly's book, The Deep Self, and if you've never done it, it's meditation times a hundred.
02:11:34.000There's lots of ways you can sort of trick the brain into producing input.
02:11:38.000Like that, even without climbing into a float tank, the simplest hack for that is probably something called Gansfeld classes.
02:11:46.000Take a ping pong, cut it in half, trim the edges so they aren't sharp, and essentially make a pair of goggles where you're covering each eye with the ping pong half, ping pong ball, and then sit and look through the white balls at a white wall that you're projecting light onto,
02:12:35.000The difference being that in the flow tank, one of the benefits of it is the fact that in the absence of sensory input, it seems like your brain has way more resources.
02:12:45.000So it seems like problems seem to be easier to fix.
02:12:50.000You just have a better understanding of things.
02:12:53.000Yeah, you know, I think why I haven't gotten into float tanks is because I have other, you know, ecstatic, ecstatic meaning taking you out of ordinary reality.
02:13:01.000I have other techniques that work really well for me and that I tend to use, you know, like rhythmic movement until your mind, you know, shifts.
02:13:09.000And then for technology-assisted stuff, I mean, I run a neurofeedback center.
02:13:12.000I can put you in a state in half an hour, you know, with wires on your head.
02:13:18.000And so if I want to dial in a specific state, I will dial in a specific state for myself.
02:13:23.000This is a massive benefit to that tank.
02:13:25.000I would really love you to experience it and then hear what your thoughts on it are.
02:14:32.000Could you keep it to the frontal area?
02:14:37.000The thing with the EEG is, to compare your results to any existing literature, you have to record the same spots or the same distribution of spots.
02:14:45.000Would there be a way to do it inside some sort of a diver's cap?
02:14:49.000There are a few ways that this might be accomplished, because I've seen EEGs done on actual divers, like on scuba divers.
02:14:56.000So there probably are ways of, like, electrodes that can get wet, that you can sort of seal against the scalp with colloidal, you know, gels and things.
02:15:03.000But I would love to see what happens to brains under that, you know, altered state.
02:15:09.000I'd love to see you do some tests on it.
02:15:11.000Crash is also developing some sort of a weird video component to his tanks where he has engineered these screens to have the lowest amount of light emission that you can possibly Have while still seeing the image so that these images because you're in complete silence complete darkness I mean you you don't there's no light in there at all so having this incredibly minimal amount of light on these screens you can see the the images but you don't see the television I don't see the screen itself and
02:15:41.000he believes in the absence of sensory input your your brain having more resources you can take in information better so you can learn quicker I mean, I think it's probably very likely.
02:16:06.000It must happen to mirror neurons in some way, then.
02:16:08.000Well, it's just theoretical at this point.
02:16:09.000I don't think he's actually achieved it.
02:16:11.000I mean, I know he's got the tank set up right now with this video.
02:16:16.000Maybe you could take a look at it and see what you think.
02:16:18.000Yeah, it sounds like we need to do it as a biofeedback component to it where what you're seeing is contingent on your brain moving in specific directions.
02:16:25.000And then you actually could, I mean, if the float tank's putting you into this receptive state and deep state quickly, and it sounds like it is, with biofeedback, you could probably, you know, like, incredibly powerfully just move people across state shifts.
02:16:38.000Well, it's the only atmosphere that I know of, the only environment, where your body is literally untethered from your mind.
02:17:08.000Because of the fact that there's a thousand pounds of salt in this water, and the water being 93.5 degrees when you float, or 94. Some people, you're floating in this, you're not feeling anything.
02:18:31.000Right, like oftentimes people discuss that when they talk about police violence, that much of the violence that they get involved in could be mitigated if they had a better way of communicating with people.
02:20:35.000He got worn out at noon every day, and he was really impulsive, and all the standard TBI stuff.
02:20:42.000So I think I've worked in the past decade with about seven or eight TBI people, and three of them were dramatic responders, and a couple were tough movers.
02:20:53.000So this guy, that you couldn't get him to move, what did you want to...
02:20:57.000You know, he ended up going overseas to teach English.
02:21:00.000He had an end to the time that I had him because he was going to the next job, which was overseas.
02:21:06.000So I only had him for like six or eight weeks or something.
02:21:08.000So had I had him, I would have said, look, let me stop billing you, which is what I do when I don't make results.
02:21:15.000But I said, let me stop billing you and then just keep training and just keep trying different things until I find something that works for your specific brain.
02:21:21.000So you take some of the pressure off them by not making up financial?
02:21:25.000So I sign people up for like a 30-session package, which costs some money, you know, costs a little over $4K. And 90% or more of people, their brains do exactly what I ask, and they're really happy with the results.
02:22:11.000Yeah, and he went coma for many weeks, lost a big chunk of his brain in the front, and so he had massive impulsivity because the frontal lobe, again, is your inhibitor.
02:22:20.000So, like, as far as drinking, sexual things, speeding?
02:22:24.000It was sort of like acquired ADHD. He sort of acquired it in his mid-40s because of his head injury, where he had no self-control, said whatever, you know, inappropriate, you know, and then he would get worn out by 1 o'clock every day, noon, 1 o'clock, he was just done, which is really common in TBI. Just not having any mental stamina.
02:22:43.000And so for him, it was, let's get your sleep better, because he wasn't sleeping well.
02:22:46.000Let's make your daytime energy better, and let's get you less impulsive with the goals.
02:22:50.000And those things all moved, but they moved, you know, a fraction of what I really wanted them to move.
02:22:57.000And most people, the reason why it was so frustrating, because for most people, neurofeedback is sort of, you know, it's my silver bullet.
02:23:05.000I expect that nine or more than nine out of ten people will just, you know, their brains will do what I ask.
02:23:12.000Even if they're dramatically impaired, you know, profoundly self-stimming autistics, people with major PTSD or major alcoholism.
02:23:19.000A really common presentation these days is people that have been on sleeping meds for decades and they aren't working and they can't sleep.
02:23:27.000But they're still on massive amounts of sleeping meds.
02:25:20.000And then I'll just start training, you know, decreased amounts of beta, increased amounts of alpha or theta, bringing those slower brain waves up.
02:25:27.000Maybe train up the sleep spindles, which is what keeps you deeply asleep.
02:25:30.000Once you fall asleep, it prevents you from kind of being woken by all the outside stimuli.
02:26:53.000I mean, very, very different, typically.
02:26:54.000And so I'll take that baseline data and compare it to a normative database with thousands of brains in it and get heat maps, picture maps, out of that that tell me how different you are than the population, statistically.
02:27:07.000How much of that varies based on intention, based on...
02:27:20.000If somebody's really sleep-deprived, there are some differences in the QEEG. But if there are a little bit vagaries in sleep here and there don't actually affect the sleep, it's much more important, like caffeine status and psychostimulant status.
02:27:34.000Those things are a much bigger deal when I'm doing brain recordings than how rested you are.
02:27:38.000I mean, folks come in having not slept, it's not a very valid reading.
02:27:40.000Or having been, you know, drunk the night before, it's not a valid reading.
02:27:43.000But if someone's just like, ah, I've got seven hours, not nine hours, ah, no problem.
02:27:48.000You know, and then statistically we say, okay, you know, let's say your brain has X amount of alpha with your eyes open.
02:27:55.000If it's too much, that means you're spacey.
02:27:57.000Too much theta means you're impulsive.
02:27:58.000Too much beta in the back might mean you're anxious.
02:28:03.000You know, different asymmetries in the front may be depressed.
02:28:06.000And so I'll see five to ten of these big patterns.
02:28:10.000I draw some arbitrary line in the sand, you know, more than one and a half standard deviations I consider clinically relevant or problematic, maybe.
02:28:17.000And then we sit and talk about all these patterns that rise to that, you know, outlier level and try to figure out, well, you know, this one can mean this.
02:28:35.000They're more sort of prognostic, where I'm guessing about what might be true.
02:28:38.000But the pattern, the brain mapping patterns, don't fit into nice diagnostic boundaries.
02:28:43.000So I might see a really dramatic ADHD pattern, and the person reports somewhat mild attention problems.
02:28:50.000But, you know, if there's a dramatic outlier, three, four standard deviations out of range, chances are very good that thing is causing you some trouble in some way.
02:29:01.000I would like to do this, but I'm worried that I might find out I'm way more fucked up than I think I am.
02:29:05.000Well, everyone's a little bit fucked up, you know?
02:30:52.000Although, you know, you can, you know, the angle of the hips and the eyes, I mean, you can sort of...
02:30:56.000A lot of Aikido, like a lot of martial arts, is very heavy in the footwork.
02:31:01.000So you step to one side and pivot around, and by the time they've swung their fist, they're overbalanced now, and you can just knock them over.
02:31:07.000Yeah, but you take an NCAA D1 wrestler.
02:31:25.000There actually were, in the 70s, several videotaped multi-martial art competitions, expositions, between Osensei, the founder, and several other principles of other martial arts.
02:32:13.000Probably because he, you know, gave us a little cue that made them prepare to move in one way and then switched it and, you know, essentially using their mind against them, overbalancing them, you know?
02:32:46.000I have a vast, extensive experience in watching bullshit, especially martial arts bullshit, and a lot of it comes from these traditional martial artists that claim to be able to anticipate and use people's Well,
02:33:02.000there's very little claims being made by Osensei.
02:33:04.000In fact, and he doesn't claim that he has some ancient lineage that, you know, came down from the mountain.
02:33:08.000He created it from Tai Chi and horses and sword forms and everything else.
02:33:12.000It's a modern art, not an ancient art.
02:33:14.000Well, there's some martial arts that are very, the ancient martial arts that are very effective in actual hand-to-hand competition.
02:34:52.000And then I think if you put either judo or karate and you'll also find it, because it was a multi-martial art meeting in the 70s.
02:34:58.000There's a lot of fuckery when it comes to martial arts and a lot of people that get trapped into all this fuckery and I've met a lot of people that are very intelligent people that swear that their sensei is the guy that has the answers to all this jazz and I just have I've seen too much I know how much of it is based on predetermined ideas that you have about this person's abilities I make no claims about my senseis,
02:35:26.000the people I've learned from being from on high.
02:35:29.000The first day I rode a motorcycle, I crashed it when flying through the air and was standing on my feet watching the bike spin away.
02:35:50.000I landed on my shoulder on a street on tar and was standing up watching the bike spin away with one little tiny tear on my shoulder because I took the force of being thrown the way my body had been trained.
02:36:02.000Well, I'm definitely not saying that learning how to fall isn't a huge skill to have if you want to ride a motorcycle and fall down.
02:36:09.000Learning how to fall is a big part of both judo and jujitsu and aikido and a lot of different martial arts.
02:36:16.000But this motherfucker's not stopping anybody from taking him down.
02:36:19.000I'm telling you right now, that old dude with his clothesline technique.
02:36:23.000This is hard to see with that kind of shit.
02:36:25.000It's also hard to pick apart from here.
02:36:31.000If you were in the dojo watching the footwork, you might perceive it a little bit differently.
02:36:38.000Watching someone who's not a 90-year-old guy with a polite student.
02:39:48.000Well, there's just a long history of that stuff where it's like a part of people's map of the world.
02:39:54.000You have your model of the world of what's effective and what's not effective.
02:39:59.000There's a lot of people that don't like the idea of mixed martial arts because it's not In many ways, it's not traditional martial arts and some of the some of the positive benefits of traditional martial arts have sort of been cast aside in favor of Mohawk tattooed savages,
02:40:40.000You know, someone grabs me in a bar, and before they know it, I'm standing next to them, and they're not interested in attacking me anymore because their wrist is, you know, in pain or they're on the ground.
02:40:50.000I've used this stuff in real-world environments, not against some, like, you know, professional wrestler who's coming at me, but against some asshole in a bar.
02:42:34.000There's benefit in a lot of different things that I would...
02:42:37.000Look, one of the best platforms for going into jiu-jitsu, we're recently finding, is breakdancing.
02:42:46.000These breakdancing guys, there's a whole team of them from 10th Planet Jiu-Jitsu that started out as breakdancers, and these guys have this incredible athletic ability, because they learned how to support themselves on one hand, do handstands, and spin around, and they can manipulate their bodies in these incredibly unique ways.
02:43:03.000And these guys, you'd never think of breakdancing being a martial art, but once these guys learn basic positions, they're so good at them, because I I would say that the same is true of an Aikidoka.
02:43:15.000You can take someone who's learned that and put them in a more hard form.
02:43:18.000They're going to have skills that descend from balanced posture, moving around your center, moving from a strong place.
02:43:40.000I mean, we used to have guys when I was...
02:43:43.000My competition days that would come to the gym that had come from some crazy kung fu martial art where they had this distorted perception of reality and they would spar with people who actually knew how to fight and they would get knocked out.
02:43:56.000It was horrible to watch because they had this idea in their head of who they were and then in practice it just didn't work at all.
02:44:02.000Nobody in an Aikido center has an idea of themselves as a sparring person.
02:44:06.000No, but they have the idea of themselves as how well they would be able to keep someone away from them.
02:44:21.000What do you mean you wouldn't have been there?
02:44:22.000He would have come at me and I would have stepped to one side and just not been away.
02:44:25.000But don't you think that guy wanted to do that?
02:44:26.000No, because he was trying for a specific technique.
02:44:29.000He was like, grab my arm and I'll do the technique I'm thinking of.
02:44:32.000So do you think that if you were in a matted room with someone who's a trained grappler, you'd be able to keep them away from you?
02:44:55.000Crazy people flipping out, throwing chairs, you know, six-foot-five, 300-pound people, and I can restrain them alone often or with one other person.
02:45:03.000You know, one of the things that I think would be really interesting to talk to you about specifically is what is going on in the mindset of someone who is engaging in conflict.
02:45:13.000Because one of the most important aspects of any physical altercation is being able to keep your wits about you.
02:45:20.000You know, violence, conflict causes a huge surge in adrenaline, cortisol, which is a stress hormone, and it shuts down the connections between the executive, the CEO of the brain, and the other parts of the brain.
02:45:36.000We sort of have a dual-track brain or mind, almost.
02:45:40.000We have top-down resources and bottom-up resources.
02:45:44.000So there's automatic things that happen.
02:45:45.000Like, I can't look at the picture behind you without seeing it.
02:46:00.000A lot of the bottom-up stuff in crisis and in violence is what takes over.
02:46:04.000And the top-down ability for your intentions, your perceptions, your moment-to-moment perspective on your brain or on your reality, that goes away in a crisis.
02:46:15.000And the PFC, the prefrontal cortex, gets shut down, or at least its connections between the PFC and the rest of the brain gets shut down a little bit, and you go into automatic deal-with-the-crisis mode.
02:46:24.000I wish we could monitor that in competitive martial arts contests, because I've seen it time and time again where people are professionals, and they have a long experience of competition, but they get to the big event, whether it's fighting for the world championship, fighting a contender,
02:46:41.000the main event on a big show, and they freeze.
02:47:09.000It's state-dependent learning, where you learn skills in one set of Contexts, and if the context change too much, the skills may not be there.
02:47:18.000So these fighters who get to the big event haven't practiced in the big event room or with enough noise or enough flooding or enough, you know, caring about the fight.
02:47:47.000You see sometimes people can work well with small crowds with very little pressure, and then if you put them in front of a large crowd, you literally see them constrict.
02:47:56.000Yeah, and some of that's the sweet spot they're used to living in, right?
02:48:05.000It's sort of stress versus performance on two axes.
02:48:07.000A little bit of stress means better performance.
02:48:10.000A little more stress, better performance.
02:48:12.000A little more stress, performance plateaus.
02:48:14.000A little more stress, performance degrades.
02:48:17.000And this can be like stressors, like I'm stressed out, or just physiologic arousal, heart beating, you know, getting ready to do something.
02:48:44.000Well, they're used to performing somewhere in the top of the curve where they're stressed out enough or they're physiologically aroused enough to perform very, very well.
02:48:52.000But a little more stress, reaction time's down, judgment's down, awareness, memory, learning, all these things are impaired.
02:49:00.000In that sense, do you think there's anything that you could do that would help athletes compete under massive amounts of pressure?
02:49:07.000This sleep spindle that we tend to train up called SMR, sensory motor rhythm in the brain, seems to improve athletic performance.
02:49:14.000It's used a lot in golfers who are trying to get in the zone.
02:49:18.000Most neurofeedback is this non-voluntary operant shaping, but with golfers, you follow them on the golf course with a laptop, and when their brain goes in, they tee up and get ready to strike the ball.
02:49:31.000And then they wait until the computer makes a noise and tells them, okay, you're in the zone now.
02:49:36.000And then they release and you hit the ball.
02:49:38.000And so there they're trying to associate the feeling of being in the zone with performing, with delivering the golf balls, the club swing or something.
02:49:47.000Is it one of those things that's very difficult to replicate?
02:49:49.000Because a lot of times being in the zone means almost like you're in that zen state.
02:49:54.000Right, which is why you're training the brain to go there again and again and again, and you're giving an audio cue, so you start to recognize, oh, that tone means zone.
02:50:05.000And if you reinforce that association, if you're pointing at that state and saying, oh, there it is, there's your brain, it's in that state, you get sort of more able to access it.
02:50:14.000Is it difficult to replicate when you have a guy there with a laptop?
02:50:33.000If you monitored the brainwaves of fighters leading right up to the moment they got into the cage and then take the equipment off of them, let them compete, and then find out where the winners were when they stepped in and where the losers were.
02:51:23.000I mean, it depends on what you're measuring.
02:51:24.000When I do assessments, it's a full head of EEG and gelled caps and things, but you can stick a single wire or an ear clip on someone's head and measure EEG. How long would it take?
02:51:40.000I don't know enough about it, but I would think that there would be some interesting data that you would get based on...
02:51:44.000I mean, it would be really fascinating if we found out, but look at this.
02:51:47.000All of the winners were in this zone, and all of the losers were in this area.
02:51:52.000Yeah, you'd probably find increased fast alpha, sort of flow state, you know, a lot of beta, but not a lot of very fast beta, so focus but not anxiety.
02:52:01.000Probably very low amounts of slow brainwaves like delta and theta, which happen when you're dreaming or creative or checked out.
02:52:08.000So my guess is the performance would be correlated with better access to flow states and focus states and less presence of anxiety states and distractible states.
02:52:20.000There's so much to learn when it comes to the human mind.
02:52:23.000This is such a fascinating subject of conversation because most people have no idea of what's going on below the surface.
02:52:32.000It's like we have this unbelievably powerful supercomputer that's running our reality and we don't have a clue as to how to operate it.
02:52:39.000The most complicated machine we know about.
02:52:41.000You know, three pounds, but more connections in the brain than there are stars in the galaxy.
02:52:47.000Yeah, when I did this infinite monkey cage with Brian Cox recently, and they were talking about how much more complex a frog is than the universe.