Dr. Weil is a matcha fiend. He grew up in Tucson, Arizona and grew up drinking a lot of Matcha. He started a company, Macha Kari, which makes the best matcha in the world, and is one of the few places in the country where you can get a good cup of the stuff. We talk about how he makes it, what it tastes like, and why he thinks it's the best tea in the whole wide world. Plus, he gives us some tips on how to make the most of your cup of matcha and why you should be drinking it every day. And, of course, we talk about the best way to make a cup of it, which is to bring it to you in a glass of warm water and serve it in a mug of hot water. This episode is sponsored by Matcha, a Japanese matcha company that makes some of the best and most delicious matcha I've ever had. You can get 10% off your first cup by going to the website machakari.co.nz/tftheflip and entering the coupon code: MATCHA at checkout to receive $10 and receive $25 off your next cup of your first purchase. You can't ask for more than $50 and get 15% off the entire purchase when you enter the website. It's free, no credit card is required, and the shipping is free, and shipping is included in the purchase is included. you can't be charged anywhere else. If you don't have a credit card, you won't get a discount, but you'll get $5 or more. $10 or more when you sign up for the offer, and get $25 or $50, and you get $50 or more, plus they'll give you an extra $50 in free shipping. a maximum of $50 when you use the offer. You'll get a free shipping when you buy a cup at the website, and they'll also get a $50 discount when you redeem your first order of the product is reviewed. and receive a $25 offer. Thanks to MACHA Kari is listed in this episode, and $50 gets you an ad-only offer, they'll receive $35 and $75 or $75, plus a $75 discount when they receive your first carton of the offer is reviewed, plus an additional $50 they receive the offer gets you a product review.
00:01:55.000Well, it's got caffeine, of course, so you get stimulated by it.
00:01:59.000But it's also got L-theanine, which is this relaxant compound that modifies the effect of caffeine and produces a state of relaxed alertness.
00:02:08.000So it doesn't have the jangling effect of coffee.
00:02:11.000And you're getting all of these antioxidant benefits that are well documented in tea.
00:04:01.000You know, it has been in Japan for a very long time and this powdered tea preparation was originally taken up by Zen monks to help them stay awake during long hours of meditation.
00:04:11.000It was also associated with samurai and became the tea ceremony developed around that.
00:04:17.000Is there anything that is similar to it?
00:04:21.000Is it like yerba mate or guarana or any other kind of stimulants?
00:05:12.000Isn't it interesting that things that are good for you, many things that are good for you, like bell peppers or something like that, they have a beautiful color to them.
00:05:20.000Well, you know, all the health benefits of fruits and vegetables, a lot of them have to do with these pigments.
00:05:27.000And the pigments, the plants produce, they're part of their own defensive system, and they do good things in us.
00:05:32.000And one piece of advice that I often give people is you should try to eat across the color spectrum every day.
00:05:38.000Think about, you know, what did you eat today that was red?
00:05:48.000These are categories of phytochemicals or protective phytonutrients, and a lot of them are these pigments that give fruits and vegetables their bright colors.
00:05:57.000Do you think that people should vary those colors on any given day?
00:06:01.000I think as much as you can across any day, try to eat across the color spectrum.
00:06:23.000Now, one of the things I'm super concerned with, and I've been more concerned with the more I pay attention to it, is sustainability when it comes to fish.
00:07:27.000Let's see, I was, I think, 28, and I was interested in yoga, and people that I knew who were doing yoga had become vegetarian, and I saw friends of mine that had become vegetarian, and I thought, well, I'll just try it for a little while, and it agreed with me.
00:07:41.000I didn't eat fish for a number of years and I found that made international travel very difficult, especially to Japan.
00:07:48.000And then I was reading about all the research on good stuff and fish and I started eating fish and that way of eating agrees with me real well.
00:07:56.000Yeah, it is a thing, an agree with you thing, right?
00:08:03.000So, you know, it's hard to give blanket rules, except I have no problem telling people to stay away from refined, processed, and manufactured food.
00:08:33.000Short answer is it's the intelligent combination of conventional and alternative medicine.
00:08:37.000But really, it's a system that focuses on the body's ability to heal itself, that looks at people as whole persons, not just physical bodies, that takes account of all aspects of lifestyle and understanding health and illness, So I'm absolutely convinced this is the way out of the healthcare crisis.
00:09:03.000I've been training doctors and other health professionals in it for many years now.
00:09:07.000Now when you say the body's ability to heal itself, how would you accentuate that?
00:09:12.000This to me is the thing that's most missing from medical education.
00:09:17.000I think the only time I heard the word healing used in medical school was in wound healing, which in my first year course in histology.
00:09:26.000To me, the most marvelous thing about our bodies is that they have the capacity to heal themselves.
00:09:31.000You get a cut, you can watch it heal, and that happens throughout the body.
00:09:36.000The DNA molecule, this is the big molecule on the border of life and non-life, it has within it the ability To know, in quotes, when it's been injured, if a cosmic ray knocks a part of it out, instantly it begins to manufacture repair enzymes that duplicate the missing piece and paste it in.
00:09:55.000And you can see that same thing at any level of biological organization.
00:09:58.000And to me, that's where good medicine should start, that the body has within it the ability to maintain equilibrium, heal itself.
00:10:05.000Now, knowing that the body has this ability, what do you do to accentuate that?
00:10:09.000Well, when I listen to a patient and hear their story, at the back of my mind I'm thinking, why is healing not happening here?
00:10:16.000What can I do from outside that can facilitate that?
00:10:19.000I can't put it into somebody, but I can help it along by either supplying energy, missing materials, remove obstacles to it.
00:10:28.000You know, like you have a wound that doesn't heal, maybe there's a foreign body in it.
00:10:34.000Now, when you have people that come to you that have issues, like say if someone comes to you and they have a back issue, they've got a little bit of lower back pain, do you approach that in terms of how they're eating, how they're living their lifestyle first?
00:10:51.000I'm a great follower of a man who died recently named John Sarno.
00:11:37.000Now, John Sarno's idea was that it's a lot of stress and anxiety and a lot of different psychological factors that are causing his back pain.
00:11:46.000I'm sure he was some kind of incredible healer.
00:11:49.000He required that people who came to him come to two evening lectures that he gave.
00:12:13.000And this problem of muscle spasm, which shuts off blood supply and it's a vicious cycle, that'll localize in an area you've had physical injury.
00:12:23.000But the pain is not coming from the injury.
00:12:25.000It's coming from muscle spasm, and that's controlled by Greatly influenced by the mind.
00:12:30.000So when your back seizes up, that is a muscle spasm.
00:14:17.000No, there's got to be something to that, right?
00:14:20.000There's something to the placebo effect, right?
00:14:23.000So if that is a real thing, if you can convince your body that it's got the medicine that it needs and it starts to heal even though there's no medicine, there's got to be something that is working against you as well with the wrong mindset, right?
00:14:36.000Look, it's funny to me to hear people rediscovering the placebo effect now.
00:14:39.000I wrote a book in 1983 called Health and Healing.
00:14:42.000I had two chapters in there on placebos.
00:14:44.000And what I wrote is that the greatest problem is that we, you know, when we talk about placebos, it's in phrases like, how do you know that's not just a placebo effect?
00:14:53.000The most interesting word there is just.
00:14:55.000Or we have to rule out the placebo effect.
00:16:07.000What we really concentrate on is actual medicine.
00:16:10.000But one way to concentrate on that is by giving people greater confidence in their body's ability to do that.
00:16:15.000And doctors have great power to do that because patients project a lot of belief on them.
00:16:19.000I've had many patients over the years who said that the most important thing I did for them was that I was the only doctor who told them they could get better.
00:17:21.000So, but this, obviously, you're not talking about catastrophic injuries.
00:17:25.000You're just talking about general wellness.
00:17:27.000I think even in the case of catastrophic injury, this stuff operates.
00:17:31.000I worked a lot with hypnotherapists over the years.
00:17:34.000And one of my colleagues did a lot of work in training paramedics to be really careful about what you say around unconscious people who have been massively injured.
00:17:44.000You know, if a paramedic takes an automobile accident victim and they're putting them in and says, this one's a goner, that is a bad thing.
00:17:52.000You know, the unconscious mind hears that.
00:17:55.000And on the other hand, you say something opposite to a person.
00:17:58.000You can see cases where you can stop bleeding in unconscious people severely injured just by giving them suggestions.
00:18:22.000How strange is it that sometimes your life is hanging on the border of you believing you're going to be okay and you believing you're not going to be okay?
00:18:29.000So you want to be very careful about, you know, whose hands you place yourself in.
00:19:12.000And so you try to tend to look at them?
00:19:15.000We teach them all the things they didn't get in medical school.
00:19:18.000Nutrition, mind-body interactions, strengths and weaknesses of alternative medicine, herbal medicine, all that.
00:19:23.000Like say someone comes to you and maybe they have a bad case of psoriasis or some autoimmune issue like that.
00:19:28.000Prime target for mind-body medicine, for traditional Chinese medicine, which often works well in that.
00:19:36.000Dietary change, put people on an anti-inflammatory diet, use of natural products that reduce inflammation.
00:19:42.000So there's a wide range of things to choose from.
00:19:44.000And this does not reject conventional treatment.
00:19:47.000You know, we may use conventional medication, but if you do, I recommend using the lowest dose to the least potent agent.
00:19:55.000Start off with that, and you can ramp up if you need to.
00:19:57.000Well, a lot of people, and me, I'm definitely guilty of this, they hear terms like holistic or Eastern medicine or Chinese medicine, you go, bullshit, right?
00:20:08.000Well, I have a good bullshit detector, too, and so I'm really careful about what I accept and what I don't.
00:20:16.000What do you not buy into when you see your bullshit detector?
00:20:31.000How about the colonic irrigation people that tell you that they see watermelon seeds coming out and you haven't eaten a watermelon in months?
00:20:49.000That's a weird one, the colonic thing, because...
00:20:53.000Your body has all this natural bacteria that you're supposed to keep in there, right?
00:20:57.000Not only keep in there, we're finding out that that's like more and more a really important determinant of everything, of general health, of mental health, too.
00:21:34.000It started as early as 1500 BC. Ebers Papyrus, an ancient Egyptian medical document, described the many benefits of colon cleansing.
00:21:43.000In ancient times, the practice of cleansing the colon was administered in a river by using a hollow reed to induce water to flow into the rectum.
00:21:51.000You don't want to drink downstream of that.
00:21:54.000And, you know, there's no need to do this.
00:21:57.000What you want to do is make sure that things are going through in the right direction regularly, and it cleans itself.
00:22:03.000That's how it's supposed to do it, right?
00:22:31.000You know, you put something into your body, the liver, within seconds of seeing a compound it has never seen before, can begin making a specific enzyme to take that apart and get rid of it.
00:23:29.000That's the most important thing, because each attempt to quit, it doesn't matter if you succeed, it's making the attempt to quit It goes into a reservoir of motivation that one day will be full enough that it's easy.
00:23:42.000And this, by the way, happens with heroin addicts, happens with cigarette addicts.
00:23:46.000I've seen many people, lifelong cigarette addicts, struggled, gave it up, came back.
00:23:51.000One day they wake up and they look at stained fingers or a dirty ashtray, and they don't want to do it anymore, and it's easy.
00:26:53.000It's called tardive dysphoria, meaning lingering bad mood due to the drug.
00:26:57.000So the drug actually prolongs or intensifies the depression.
00:27:01.000It may be okay for very short-term use of very severe depression, but these are not things you want to go on and stay on for lengths of time.
00:27:08.000What's fascinating to me is when I talk to people that are on them that want to talk to you like they're on some cancer medication or they're on something that cures polio.
00:27:19.000They make it seem like you're insensitive to the possibility that there's other solutions.
00:27:47.000So again, it gets back to inflammation.
00:27:50.000And it gets back to an integrative approach and not just relying on a single thing like a pharmaceutical treatment.
00:27:56.000Yeah, I've talked to intelligent people that are on SSRIs in one form or another, and even ones that have struggled, were on one for a while, and then it stopped working, and then they tried another one, and then they're combining ones, and they're on this weird sort of chemical rollercoaster,
00:28:12.000and they reject any possible notion that there's other alternatives, especially when you bring up the exercise one.
00:28:41.000But what was interesting about it to me was not just that your body sort of adapts when you force it to work out that many hours, but that your mood is phenomenal.
00:29:44.000Yeah, I have a good friend who has an issue with anxiety medication, and he takes it all the time, and when he doesn't take it, apparently it has that rebound effect.
00:30:55.000They did a study where they show the difference between someone taking psilocybin to try to quit smoking cigarettes and some really large number of people, I think it was in the neighborhood of 80%, quit.
00:31:08.000And then over the course of X amount of years, they were still at 60%.
00:31:13.000So only 20% of those people had come back.
00:31:42.000I think I know people who have experienced some pretty severe benefits of it, especially people that weren't doing so good health-wise and were just really kind of feeling down and depressed, and all of a sudden their outlook radically changed, particularly psilocybin,
00:32:08.000It would be gigantic, and I think once we realize that no one's dying and a lot of people are getting helped, and a lot of people that are terminal are having some really amazing alleviation of anxiety and understanding that it's going to be okay.
00:32:23.000And just, I think, between friends and just the camaraderie, it sort of...
00:32:32.000When you have these group experiences together, there's some incredible benefits to that in terms of reinforcing community and civilization, the way we feel about each other.
00:32:43.000Now, aside from the psychological and emotional benefits, I think you would be fascinated by some of the things that I've observed and written about of real physical benefits of psychedelics.
00:33:35.000Instant disappearance of an allergy that had been there all my life.
00:33:38.000What would be the physiological mechanism for something like that?
00:33:41.000Well, clearly that's a very profound mind-body interaction.
00:33:44.000Now, we know that allergies are influenced by that because you can show a person allergic to roses, a plastic rose, and they'll have an allergy.
00:33:52.000So there's a learned component to allergy that can be unlearned.
00:34:20.000So I just accepted that's how I was, you know, I can't get tanned.
00:34:23.000So again, high on LSD, lying out naked in my great woods in my home in Virginia, and the sun was up there, and I thought, this is ridiculous, you know, I should not be afraid of the sun.
00:34:37.000The next day I got tanned and I have ever since.
00:34:40.000Now that's a little more, I'm not quite sure of the mechanism there, but it's pretty amazing.
00:34:59.000Again, you know, there must be a way in which the nervous system influences melanocytes, which are, you know, the pigment cells in the body that can either extend their, you know, projections with pigment granules.
00:35:12.000So the nervous system controls that and the mind connects the nervous system.
00:35:15.000But what about someone who's, like, ridiculously fair?
00:35:18.000Like, what about someone who lives in Scotland or some shit?
00:35:19.000Well, see, what I would do is, when Dr. Weil's psychedelic clinic opens, I would have, like...
00:38:37.000And if I stood on them, you could see dents in my feet.
00:38:42.000On MDMA, I was able to like dance on those stones, no pain.
00:38:46.000But the interesting thing is there were no marks on my feet.
00:38:48.000So the pain is easy to figure out how that happens.
00:38:51.000But what's happening that, you know, you don't get a dent?
00:38:54.000I mean, it seems to me If your mind is out of the way, maybe little muscles there are free to press back with just the amount of force to neutralize the pressure.
00:39:05.000It's like if your mind is not interfering, I think the body has amazing capabilities.
00:39:10.000Well, I definitely think you can mindfuck yourself, right?
00:39:13.000And you can definitely think, ah, oh God, this is...
00:39:15.000You can start thinking it's worse than it is.
00:39:17.000And if you can relax, oftentimes, there's many situations where you relax and things aren't nearly as bad as you are making them out to be.
00:40:10.000There's no doubt about it, but I am absolutely aware that there's some component, there's something about the mind and the way the mind interacts with matter and with life that has a profound effect on your body, and it would be really nice if we were all better at controlling that.
00:40:26.000One of the insights that I've had in psychedelic states is that everything is conscious, that consciousness permeates everything, that I feel whatever in me, that my consciousness is also in rocks and in plants and in animals,
00:40:44.000that there's some universal something out there.
00:40:47.000And there are two really different ways of looking at reality.
00:40:53.000One is the materialist one, which is that consciousness is a product of brain biochemistry and electricity and that is dominant in science today.
00:41:01.000The other is that the brain is a receiving apparatus for consciousness and that consciousness is primary, maybe existed before matter, maybe organized matter into forms that are more and more able to experience themselves.
00:41:29.000He has an idea that everything has memory, right?
00:41:32.000He believes that this would be like the reason, I guess, why some people would not want to live in a haunted house, right?
00:41:40.000They would think that if someone was murdered in a house that it would retain some memory of these atrocities and that you would somehow or another interact with that if you were in that house.
00:43:28.000You know, we have two language centers in our left frontal cortex.
00:43:33.000People that have strokes that damage them often lose language completely, but they can still swear.
00:43:39.000So swearing is coming from somewhere else.
00:43:43.000It may be coming from the right hemisphere, but it's also coming from deeper centers in the brain that connect to the limbic system and the amygdala, and that connects to the involuntary nervous system.
00:43:54.000So here's a couple of interesting facts.
00:43:57.000Swearing is associated with sweating, increased sweating.
00:46:10.000They're taboo words and often associated with things that we find offensive or with bodily acts that freak people out.
00:46:17.000So there's a psychological, social aspect to it, but there's also a neurological aspect to it.
00:46:23.000Now, when the words, like some words for some people, like I remember when I was a kid, I lived in Florida for a little bit, and I said hell once, and in Florida in the 1970s, hell was a swear.
00:47:36.000So what it would be, different parts of the brain would be activated by that versus, if you said it, it would be not that big a deal, but if someone was like super conservative and they said it- Probably even, yeah, more.
00:47:55.000Another finding that I came across is that people who learn a second language, that swearing in the second language does not have the same emotional impact that your first language does.
00:50:08.000I think, ultimately, you find what you enjoy, and the best way to find what you enjoy is people actually doing what they want to do, and then you figure it out.
00:50:25.000A person like you, you could just put together a podcast and if people find it interesting, if it resonates, you could get 100,000 downloads out of nowhere.
00:50:36.000If you have a radio show, 100,000 people listening, that's a lot of damn people.
00:50:48.000Holy shit, this is a successful business.
00:50:50.000But you could be doing that just from your office.
00:50:53.000Just put together with a laptop and a microphone and no distribution whatsoever in terms of like no string of executives and gigantic corporation behind you.
00:52:49.000You know, my first book, The Natural Mind, was published in 1972. It argued that everybody has an innate drive to alter their consciousness.
00:54:09.000Who had never had marijuana before in a lab, you could show slight decreases in performance in motor function and cognitive function, but people who were regular users of it, you couldn't show that, that they had adapted to it.
00:54:23.000Yeah, my take on that is that I think the people that are not regular users are freaking out.
00:55:51.000I had to get permission from the FDA, which said that I couldn't do it unless I first got permission from, it was the old Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which was the Treasury guys.
00:57:07.000That was later when research got going and the government started a pot farm in Mississippi to provide pot for research, which was much better.
00:57:17.000And there was only a handful of people that were under these experiments, correct?
00:57:21.000They made it so difficult to conduct research, as they have with psychedelics.
00:57:34.000The spirit molecule and he did all those tests with those people.
00:57:37.000That was really groundbreaking stuff because doing it at the University of New Mexico and doing it under clinical conditions, they were able to document the similarities between all these people's psychedelic experiences and do this with government approval, which I thought was really fascinating.
00:58:30.000But, you know, the big stumbling block now, we've got to get cannabis out of that federal Schedule I. That's, like, causing a lot of problems.
00:58:38.000Yeah, there's been some noise about decriminalizing it federally, which is like step one, I guess.
00:59:10.000Hawaii is more uptight than a lot of other states, but it's happening.
00:59:14.000But our licenses for Maui County, which includes Maui, Molokai, and Lanai.
00:59:20.000So people from Molokai and Lanai can come to Maui to buy product in our dispensary, but they can't take it back because the waters between the island are federal.
01:00:08.000Like, I had friends that had, like, long, elaborate excuses they had planned out.
01:00:13.000Like, you know, I was in a car accident while I was six, and when I go to bed at night, I have these horrible dreams, and the only thing that helps me is marijuana, and I'm just trying to feed my family, and they would go, stop, stop, stop.
01:00:29.000My joke was that if you can't get a license for marijuana, you should probably go to a hospital immediately because you've got a real problem.
01:00:35.000They're like, no man, you need actual doctors.
01:02:31.000I'm sure you've heard the recording of the police officers who stole the pot from the kids and then ate it and then called 911 on themselves.
01:04:47.000You can't unravel the early botanical history of cannabis because as far back in history as we go, it's always associated with human settlements.
01:04:55.000So that plant wants nothing other than to be with us and to serve us.
01:06:03.000Well, it's also a really excellent example of the contradictions in our society and the difference between something that's accurate and something that's perceived.
01:06:29.000Because back then, you know, in the 50s, 60s, it was associated with Mexican migrant workers, with black jazz musicians in the South, and then with radicals and hippies.
01:06:39.000So all scary people to mainstream, you know...
01:07:13.000They just keep ramping that one up and making it more and more potent.
01:07:16.000The idea that opioids weren't killing people quick enough, that we needed to make some ridiculously potent versions of it, and apparently now they're approving something that's even more powerful than fentanyl.
01:07:50.000Overdoses, of course, that kills you by stopping your respiration.
01:07:53.000But there are many examples of people who have been addicted to opioids Who've been able to get legal supplies and use them sensibly, they're healthy.
01:08:02.000I've heard about that in terms of regular heroin use.
01:08:06.000I had a friend who was a longshoreman, and this is like when I was a kid, he was explaining to me how this guy that he worked with would get a bag of heroin every day at lunch, and he would shoot it in his car.
01:08:17.000And he would just sit in his car during lunch hour, and then when the time was up, he'd go back to work.
01:10:48.000State of Oregon, a couple of years ago, passed an integrative pain management initiative saying that all...
01:10:53.000Pain, chronic pain management had to be integrative and they listed the different modalities.
01:10:57.000They left out mind-body medicine which to me is one of the most important Yeah, mind, body, medicine, though, on any sort of a report, that seems like that's one like, okay, what kind of...
01:11:09.000Yeah, I studied hypnosis after I got out of my medical training, one of the most interesting courses I ever took.
01:11:15.000There's a well-known demonstration in the literature on hypnosis.
01:11:20.000You can take a person deeply hypnotized who's got good trance capacity, touch them with a finger that you represent to be a piece of hot metal, and they get a blister.
01:11:29.000And you can take the same person and touch them with a piece of hot metal and tell them it's cold and they don't get a blister.
01:12:18.000Yes, I'll tell you why that's bullshit.
01:12:20.000My experience was, the first time I tried it, I was with a group of maybe 40 people, and the standard length of the fire walk was about 12 feet.
01:12:58.000And most people that have walked that night...
01:13:01.000It looked like they were not in the right mental state, but I saw a few people who strolled across it that looked they were in some interesting altered state.
01:14:43.000Do you know the Tony Robbins one, what's really interesting is recently they've developed this issue with people trying to take selfies while they're walking across the coals and burning their feet.
01:14:53.000It's become a significant issue because it didn't happen until within the last few years.
01:16:06.000You know, the usual scientific explanation is that- It seems like we probably shouldn't talk about this until they do do studies because it seems so simple to do these studies.
01:17:13.000I think certainly you can mitigate the sensation of pain.
01:17:18.000I don't believe that you can do anything about the actual physiological change to a hot piece of metal interacting with the tissue of your skin.
01:17:27.000I just think the steak does not know it's being cooked.
01:18:22.000I know, but this is a significant conversation point.
01:18:26.000Because if it's proven, this is really huge.
01:18:28.000If you could really take a hot metal rod right out of the fire and touch someone's skin, they're in the right state of mind, you don't burn them?
01:18:59.000Because this is something that woo-woo people, healers, and a lot of people like to bring up, and when you press them on it, there's no evidence for it.
01:19:08.000And it's like, well, anecdotal evidence, well, I've heard, well, I work with a healer, and he tells me, like, okay.
01:21:44.000I did read once that there was this...
01:21:47.000I think it was a young man who had some awful, one of those awful wart diseases.
01:21:55.000There was one called ichthyosis, which is like the whole skin gets covered with this calloused, tarred tissue, and it went away through hypnosis.
01:22:57.000I mean, this is actual real documented science.
01:22:59.000And that is what is so interesting to me about the placebo effect is that it is a real thing that your mind has this capability of healing itself in this very, very powerful way, but we don't exactly know how to turn it on or off.
01:23:16.000There's a phenomenon called voodoo death, where in societies where there are witch doctor shamans, a malevolent witch doctor can curse a person, and the person goes home, lies in bed, stops eating, and over days or weeks dies.
01:25:39.000Like, there was a fighter that we had in here the other day, Deontay Wilder.
01:25:42.000He's the WBC heavyweight champion of the world.
01:25:44.000And he said that from the time he was a little boy, his grandmother had him convinced that he was like an anointed one, that he was special.
01:26:27.000And he's got this weird confidence, too.
01:26:30.000And you've got to wonder how much of him actually is operating under this idea that his grandmother was right about him having some magical properties.
01:26:38.000And so he goes through life with his vision.
01:26:58.000It's like, you know, when you present a treatment to a patient...
01:27:02.000Your belief in the treatment as a practitioner catalyzes the patient's belief.
01:27:08.000The best way I can do that is if I give a patient something that I've tried myself and I know from my own experience that it works, and then I can present it in a way with my confidence, and that increases the patient's confidence and increases the likelihood of a favorable outcome.
01:27:25.000Give me an example of something you don't know.
01:27:27.000When you give a pharmaceutical drug to a patient, I think there's the direct effect of the drug and then there's a halo of belief effect.
01:27:36.000An interesting phenomenon is that there's a famous saying in medicine that you should use a new remedy as much as possible before it loses the power to heal.
01:27:45.000This is a common experience that drugs work best near the time of their introduction.
01:27:50.000That's also the case with diets as well, right?
01:27:52.000And the longer they're around, I think what happens is people have faith in new things.
01:27:58.000So there's a big halo of placebo effect.
01:28:01.000Over time, that shrinks and it leaves the stuff on its own, which may not be very impressive.
01:28:05.000This is often the case when people take on a radical diet, like on opposite ends of the spectrum, whether it's a carnivore diet, you're aware of that.
01:28:12.000A lot of people swear it fixes them all these ales, or a vegan diet.
01:28:16.000Very similar effects, obviously a very different diet.
01:28:36.000When you're talking about mind-body interactions or wart cures, placebo effects, you're talking about a non-material cause of a physical event.
01:28:46.000And that is not allowed in the materialistic paradigm that dominates science.
01:29:21.000Well, if the placebo effect is real and it's documented, so obviously something is going on with the way you feel about things and think about things that it's having an actual physiological effect.
01:29:32.000There's something happening to your body because of the way you're thinking about it happening to your body.
01:29:35.000Now, one of the things that has made this suddenly of interest in the medical world Is that we now have these techniques like functional MRIs and PET scans where we can observe living brains.
01:29:48.000And you can show that the placebo response is associated with particular activity in certain brain centers.
01:29:53.000That has made it real for people that otherwise didn't believe in it.
01:30:30.000You know, another thing I looked at over the years was healing shrines in the world like Lourdes.
01:30:37.000There's two interesting facts about that.
01:30:39.000Over the years, the Catholic Church has accepted very few healings as genuine that have like full medical documentation and some of them are quite spectacular like Miraculous disappearance of widely disseminated cancer.
01:30:52.000No native of Lourdes has ever been cured.
01:30:55.000And the chances that a person is going to be healed there...
01:31:15.000And thousands and thousands of people over the years have gone there.
01:31:18.000So as I said, very – there's relatively few reported healings that have been fully documented medically.
01:31:25.000But no native of Lourdes has ever been healed.
01:31:27.000And the – there's something called the Lourdes phenomenon which is fascinating that the chances that a person is going to be healed at Lourdes or a place like that is directly proportional to the length of the journey traveled to get there.
01:32:38.000Now, is there a specific, you know, like there's like transcendental medication, there's Yeah, now this is a formal system of therapy that people are trained in where you sit with a practitioner and they help you explore your mental imagery and may give you specific kinds of images to work with depending on the condition that you're dealing with.
01:33:00.000I would think, knowing the fact that we have real evidence that placebo effect works, why isn't there more study done to try or more thought and more people that are trying to emphasize this ability of the brain?
01:33:15.000I'm telling you, we're up against this problem that in the dominant paradigm in science and medicine, we don't believe in non-physical causation of physical events.
01:33:25.000But that doesn't jive with me because we do believe in the placebo effect.
01:33:28.000Everybody says that, oh, it's just a placebo, right?
01:34:34.000300 and whatever million people we have in this country.
01:34:37.000How many of those people could guide you towards a proper integration of mind and body and a positive way of interfacing with reality that's beneficial to you physically, mentally, spiritually?
01:34:59.000With all these human beings, and essentially most of them trying to improve in some way, even people that fail on diets, boy, they'd like to get skinny.
01:35:07.000Even people that fail at school, well, I wish I was smart enough to graduate, I wish I had enough discipline.
01:35:14.000So there's this vast need for coaching that would lead to improvement, yet almost...
01:35:21.000I mean, nothing to speak of and certainly nothing large scale in any city that has this approach where, look, we are going to teach you how to better engage with the material world around you and better engage with reality itself that's going to leave you more spiritually,
01:35:45.000Now, one way to teach this stuff is by example, that if a person exemplifies You know, good mind-body functioning, they can inspire that in another person.
01:35:56.000One strategy that if I can do this, if I have a patient, if I can introduce that patient to someone who's had their condition is now better, that is a very powerful way to up their belief in the possibility of getting better.
01:36:10.000Yeah, that makes sense, which is why people love user testimonials.
01:36:20.000But user testimonials are so huge for that razor.
01:36:22.000You know, I was skeptical at first, but then I tried it, and boy, he was skeptical just like me.
01:36:28.000To me, when I look at the giant number of people that are unhappy and displaced and just seem like they're left out of society, I was...
01:36:41.000Listening to, oh, it was Johan Hari on Sam Harris' podcast, and they were talking about the number of people that are happy with what they do for a living.
01:37:54.000Yeah, when you were doing those studies in the 1960s and you thought that marijuana was going to be legal in five years, how could you have ever, first of all, how could you have ever thought of the internet, right?
01:38:03.000That's the big one, the distribution of information.
01:38:27.000A patient comes, they think they know everything.
01:38:29.000Yeah, but I have seen many, many patients who have gotten exactly the information they needed and were able to take it to the doctor who didn't know about it.
01:38:38.000I mean, I think on the whole, it's a really good thing.
01:39:17.000There's good data showing that states that have a higher number of primary care physicians, family doctors, have better medical outcomes than patients with a higher percentage of specialists.
01:39:30.000But the problem is specialties pay more.
01:39:34.000We should be providing financial incentives for people to go into general medicine.
01:39:38.000Yeah, it also makes sense, too, that by the time you get to a specialist, usually you're really messed up.
01:39:42.000If you're going to a back specialist, you might have a real situation that's been bothering you for a long time, whereas you go to a general practitioner for a checkup.
01:40:22.000You know, there's been studies on the amount of time in a medical encounter when a patient starts to talk, how soon a doctor interrupts the patient.
01:40:33.000Do you have any guess what that is now?
01:41:37.000And it's become an incredibly successful restaurant concept.
01:41:40.000Well, that's a great idea to be able to serve people things that you know for a fact are going to be healthy and nutritious, not just taste good, but good for you.
01:41:48.000But primarily it's food that looks great and tastes great.
01:41:50.000It happens to conform to good nutritional science.
01:42:57.000About a year or so, maybe a little bit more than that.
01:42:59.000Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense and I will continue to experiment with it.
01:43:05.000What I haven't done that I really have been thinking a lot about doing is doing a multiple day fast, just a water fast for three or four days.
01:43:12.000The longest I've done it for is three days.
01:44:28.000And then when I started doing the intermittent fasting, and then I started doing fasted exercise, I think it was...
01:44:36.000I'm sure if you probably measured me in terms of like you did a bunch of weightlifting exercises and measured my output, I probably would be able to lift more weights if I had some fruit first.
01:44:48.000I'm pretty sure I'd have a little bit more energy.
01:46:20.000Well, when you're talking about that half of a grain of sand putting you on Pluto for 12 hours, a grain of rice, a grain of sand, that'd be funny.
01:46:57.000Well, even sober, you have some pretty trippy experiences while you're in there.
01:47:00.000But there's something about the – what I experienced with edible marijuana is that when you close your eyes, you get a lot of really cool visuals.
01:47:11.000Like I've had it before when I take pot and then get on a plane.
01:47:14.000Like I'll eat right when I park my car at the airport or when I'm leaving the house.
01:47:19.000Then it kicks in when you're on the plane.
01:48:05.000Because you started out with 10 and then you worked your way up to 500. I mean, I guess this is a tolerance issue with a lot of folks, right?
01:48:25.000I first practiced Zen and then I took some Vipassana training and now I get up, I sit down, I do my breathing routine and then I just try to focus on body sensations and sounds in the room and when I'm caught up in my thoughts,
01:48:45.000I just bring my attention back to my breathing.
01:48:48.000But for me, I think that the sitting meditation, that's fine, but I think the goal is to be able to carry that state in all of your activities.
01:49:01.000Chopping vegetables, working with knives, that's very meditative for me.
01:49:07.000So do you think that when you're having this meditation, whether it's Zen or whatever, that you're resetting the way you're going to go through life for the rest of the day?
01:49:56.000But I've had friends who had pill problems who did it and cured them, but they said the ride is just 24 hours of like, what in the fuck am I doing?
01:50:07.000And then once it's over, you have zero desire.
01:50:09.000You know the way that it's used traditionally in Africa, the root?
01:50:13.000These tribes that use it, it's hunters take it.
01:50:17.000And they remain motionless for many hours on it.