In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the podcaster and podcaster joins me to talk about his love of croissants, the dangers of plastic in the ocean, and why we should all be worried about the amount of plastic waste that ends up in our oceans. We also talk about some of the worst countries in the world for their waste and how we can do more to reduce it. And, of course, we talk about pizza. If you like the pod, you'll love this one too! It's a good one, and it's a very funny one, so don't miss it! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. All rights reserved. Used by permission. The opinions stated here are our own, not those of our companies, unless otherwise specified. We do not own the rights to any music used in this episode. This episode was produced, produced, written, and edited by us. It was produced and produced by us, and all credit given to other artists and labels given to their respective record labels. Thank you to our good friends and record labels for their excellent work. Please do not hesitate to reach out to us with any questions or concerns. or suggestions for music, suggestions, suggestions or suggestions. You can reach us at joseph@joeroganexperience.co.uk. at joeroganservice@australia.org.org . Thanks for the podcast and thank you for all the support and support we've gotten through this journey so far. and we really appreciate all the love, support, support and all the hard work you've shown so far, thank you, thanks for the support, love, respect, and support, and appreciate the support we're all of our efforts, love you all so much, thanks, and thanks, bye bye bye, bye. Joe, bye! - bye - - JOE - MURDERER, JOE ROGAN - THE JOE JOGAN PODCAST - ETC. - RYAN AND THE JOB'S BABYSEYE AND THE BOYS - SONGS, JOSEPH AND THE DOGS - PAUL MCCARTE - GOSSEY
00:01:32.000There's a chart, see if you could find this, of, you know how we're supposed to be not using plastic straws anymore because turtles are dying?
00:01:41.000You know that, you know, people give you plastic, you know, they give you paper straws.
00:01:45.000I grew up in, I remember the six-pack container, those plastic things, and you see the seagull thing around.
00:01:49.000Yeah, like the turtle, where it constricted his shell.
00:02:48.000Yeah, Boyan Slott is a gentleman who's been on the podcast before, has developed this device for, it's like, it sifts the ocean, it floats over the top of the ocean, and it has this collector.
00:03:02.000That sucks up plastic and then they take that plastic and use it and recycle it and make like eyeglasses out of it and all sorts of other different things.
00:04:59.000And then, well, what's been really interesting to me is I followed this whole lab leak thing, right?
00:05:04.000Because early in the pandemic, people in my field started chattering about that.
00:05:10.000I love exotic animals, not to own them, right?
00:05:13.000But I'm really interested in animal conservation.
00:05:16.000And so the pangolin is an amazing animal.
00:05:18.000They pinned it on the pangolin early on, right?
00:05:20.000And there were articles published in good journals, several of which I'm on the editorial board for.
00:05:24.000So early in the pandemic, there were papers coming out really fast about, you know, the sequence of the virus in pangolins, which were being sold in the Wuhan market, etc., And I was pretty disturbed by this, mostly because of the pictures of the Wuhan market, the exotic animal trade is just,
00:05:42.000Okay, close confinement, you know, these are beautiful animals that there's no justification for this stuff.
00:05:48.000But pangolin meat is sold at, I forget what it is per pound, but it's a delicacy and it's considered very lucrative to get pangolin meat, of all things.
00:05:56.000There's actually a female pangolin meat Influencer on YouTube and oh, yeah, no, it's like it's it starts to look like pangolin meat ASMR. It's crazy and disgusting.
00:06:09.000So they're they're kind of mixing, you know, sexy women with exotic meats from these rare animals.
00:06:16.000So I was going deep down this rabbit hole of trying to understand this exotic animal trade and then And then there was chatter in my field about the fact that one of the members of the laboratory in Wuhan that was working with these very high restriction viruses had done her training in the United States,
00:06:34.000which is true, has a master's degree, but was running a laboratory, which is unusual, right?
00:06:40.000Typically the head of a laboratory is someone with a PhD, MD, or both.
00:06:44.000Very rare for a so-called PI, a principal investigator.
00:06:48.000Like me or, you know, another Matt Walker, for instance, principal investigator to have less than a PhD.
00:06:56.000The fact that she ran a lab or was important in running this lab as a masters with only a masters is unusual.
00:07:03.000And then there was a lot of chatter in my field about the idea that it might have something to do with the fact that her significant other was a member of the Chinese Communist Party.
00:07:12.000And so, you know, that laboratory had deep ties to government and vice versa.
00:07:16.000And that's true of all laboratories in China, all laboratories.
00:07:19.000So the whole notion of the lab leak hypothesis was not foreign to scientists like me who thought, yeah, you know, my laboratory works with rabies viruses, adenoviruses, synbis viruses.
00:07:32.000None of these are as, It's biohazardous as something like the coronavirus, but you work with these viruses and you have to use, you know, lab coats, gloves, bleached sterilization, you're careful, you know, hoods of, you know, but human error happens.
00:07:46.000So I'm not at all convinced one way or the other that it was a deliberate leak, but the idea that it would leak from a laboratory to a scientist like me who has what's called a wet lab where you, you know, with solutions and beakers and things of that sort, Things happen all the time.
00:08:04.000The idea that human error could cause this is like it was an of course to all scientists.
00:08:09.000Well, they had been cited in 2018 for violating safety protocols.
00:08:13.000I mean, all it takes is, you know, people might not be familiar with the pipetting is, but it's basically taking a little straw that sucks up, you know, press a button, it sucks up some fluid, you move things, you know, between little little tiny vials can be done by robots, too.
00:08:26.000But typically it's done by humans and that's how they put in a center.
00:08:29.000If you spin it, take off a little piece of that or take the pellet out of the bottom that spun down, this kind of thing.
00:08:33.000All it takes is one loose thumb and it's on a lab coat.
00:08:37.000All it takes is that lab coat going on a rack.
00:08:39.000All it takes is somebody leaving work, putting their lab coat on there and touching that lab coat and it's out in the world.
00:08:53.000But the idea that it would come from a lab, to me, is far more plausible than the idea that it came from some pangolin sequence in the Wuhan market.
00:09:00.000So I think we were going down the wrong path on this for a long time.
00:09:04.000And I thought, this is kind of bananas.
00:09:14.000Because human error is the cause of most of these kinds of things.
00:09:17.000Well, it was very clear that there was a concerted effort to dismiss the idea that it came from a lab.
00:09:21.000And it wasn't logical and it wasn't scientific.
00:09:24.000And they ignored all the evidence that seemed to point that it originated from that lab, including the people that worked in that lab who got sick.
00:09:35.000And now there's some new stupid story in the New York Times about a raccoon dog.
00:09:40.000They're saying it might have come from a raccoon dog.
00:10:25.000Sagar and Jetty was actually explaining this to me on Saturday night.
00:10:29.000He was like, there's direct evidence of people being infected that predates this establishment of this animal testing positive in that wet market.
00:10:44.000So I guess people were eating that animal.
00:12:10.000You know, the gain of function, actually there is that one CRISPR experiments beginning of interesting science out of China.
00:12:16.000A guy, he actually was a postdoc at Stanford, worked for a guy named Steve Quake, and then separately on his own without permission or anything from Stanford, went off and started his own laboratory in China.
00:12:27.000And stood up at a meeting a few years ago and said he had done CRISPR in human babies.
00:12:34.000He mutated the HIV receptor, which everyone thinks, okay, that was designed to prevent these babies from getting HIV. It turns out that that mutation is thought to perhaps enhance memory by sort of parallel mechanisms.
00:12:48.000And then it was very unclear for a short while whether or not this guy was either going to get a Nobel Prize or that they were going to throw him in jail.
00:12:55.000And so everyone is very tense and waiting in my community thinking, okay, because when somebody's kind of up for a big discovery like this, everyone kind of circles maybe wanting that maybe they should be involved in getting the accolades.
00:13:07.000But as the moment that the international community, I think rightfully so, Said, this is horrible.
00:13:24.000Then China said, oh, we're going to, we're going to punish him.
00:13:26.000But I'd be willing to bet both hands that he's, his punishment consists of a jail cell that is pretty luxurious with a laboratory.
00:13:35.000There's no question that CRISPR is going on there.
00:13:38.000CRISPR is going on in certain regions of, you know, other locations on the globe where things aren't as regulated because think about the potential payoff for being able to rescue a Huntington's mutation, right?
00:13:52.000A Huntington's Korea mutation that has somebody at some point in their life, you know, unable to control their arms, hemibalism of the arms.
00:14:38.000But if you test positive for this gene, you know you're going to get Huntington's.
00:14:42.000In which case with CRISPR, you could just put the gene back in and rescue function.
00:14:46.000What causes someone to eventually succumb to that disease?
00:14:49.000If it's a late onset disease, if they don't have it when they're young and they develop when they get older, what changes?
00:14:55.000Yeah, so it's not just deterioration of those particular neurons.
00:14:59.000It's deterioration of the neurons that control those neurons.
00:15:02.000And everything's working in a kind of a top-down suppression all the time.
00:15:06.000In fact, the head neurosurgeon at Neuralink, who's somebody I know quite well named Matthew McDougall, he came up through my laboratory and Elon made a great choice in hiring him.
00:15:14.000told me recently the best way to think about the frontal cortex is that basically its main job besides picking context and strategy for a given situation is to tell certain parts of your brain that really want to do things That's the best description I've ever heard of prefrontal cortex.
00:15:30.000You know, it's what's keeping Jamie from doing things that he shouldn't right now and me doing things that I shouldn't right now.
00:15:36.000And every time you have a crazy idea, like, maybe I should jump off this bridge.
00:15:47.000With Huntington's, what happens is there's a slow deterioration of those neurons, but there's a lot of deterioration of these neurons that control motor function.
00:15:54.000And eventually what happens is the deeper neurons that control motor function start shutting down the autonomic functions like breathing.
00:16:24.000So what's first to go there, however, is the control of motor function.
00:16:29.000And it goes first in the direction of too much activity because of all these breaks and accelerators that we have in the brain.
00:16:35.000So in any case, CRISPR gene manipulation of the sort that this guy did in this laboratory in China.
00:16:41.000Again, I think an ethics committee needs to tell the world or decide for the world what people should be allowed to do and not do.
00:16:47.000But you can imagine for something like Huntington's, it would be tremendously advantageous.
00:16:51.000Like if you had a child who you knew was someday going to get Huntington's, you'd want to do a CRISPR mutation and put the healthy gene back.
00:16:58.000Is there anything that's been shown to slow down the progress of Huntington's?
00:17:07.000It's a little bit like MS, another neurodegenerative disease, multiple sclerosis, where certain things exacerbate it, like inflammation of any kind.
00:17:16.000And those things can be almost random in some ways.
00:17:20.000Like some people who have MS will eat salad dressing with mustard and have a huge inflammatory response and have a flare-up, blurry vision and get worse.
00:18:35.000And cortisol during a hard workout, and you didn't know they were doing a hard workout, I just handed you the data, and you're a medical doctor, you'd say, this person's dying.
00:18:44.000So inflammation is robust during a hard exercise.
00:18:48.000But I think what's so incredible about the human body is that the increase in blood pressure, inflammation, et cetera, is what triggers the adaptation so that blood pressure and inflammation, et cetera, are all much lower the other 23 hours of the day.
00:19:02.000And so there's something special about our system whereby, yeah, maybe if you had really hot peppers, like the most famous of these is the Carolina Reaper.
00:21:45.000We know a couple other things about spice.
00:21:47.000And here I just, I always want to make sure I give proper attribution.
00:21:52.000The Nobel Prize was given a couple years ago.
00:21:54.000To a guy down at the Scripps Institute in San Diego, Ardem Patapuchin and David, excuse me, oh gosh, David Julius at UCSF for the discovery of these receptors for pressure, cool, heat.
00:22:06.000And it's an amazing set of discoveries that just occurred really in the last 10 years.
00:22:11.000We know that all of those pathways go to areas of the brain that are involved in, of course, like behavior.
00:22:17.000Like if you touch something really hot or you taste something really hot, for most people, they're going to resist that.
00:22:20.000But also to the hypothalamus, which houses all these hormone control areas, et cetera.
00:22:25.000People who can tolerate stronger spice, men and women, we know it's correlated with higher levels of circulating testosterone.
00:23:08.000And in a way that also adjusts people's pain threshold.
00:23:12.000So if people get better at eating hot peppers, they're better at dealing with all types of pain.
00:23:16.000And I find this fascinating because I know you and I are both kind of obsessed with ice baths and cold plunges.
00:23:22.000And I've been going deep into that literature around cold and what's really known about cold thermogenesis and not known.
00:23:28.000And it seems like these acute adrenaline, acute pain pathways, they do exactly what exercise does, which is in the moment, if you were to measure somebody's Inflammation, et cetera.
00:23:57.000We know this, but they are actually the people that benefit the most because that really acute adrenaline spike, that pain that you feel creates a higher pain threshold later.
00:24:08.000Higher threshold for work output, all the things that most people seek.
00:24:12.000And so to me, it's always interesting that you have to look what's happening during and you have to look at what's happening afterward.
00:24:18.000And for some reason, as humans, we like these creature comforts of massages, which are great.
00:25:44.000I know fighters do this in preparation, you know, dropping weight.
00:25:46.000You can get better by doing more sauna.
00:25:48.000You get to be a better sweater, which means that you can cool more easily, even in clothes or if you're out running or hunting or doing anything.
00:25:56.000So there's some advantage to being a Better at sweating.
00:26:00.000And sweating itself is a whole interesting story.
00:26:03.000You actually have nerves that control the sweat glands.
00:26:06.000That's actually controlled by little nerve endings.
00:26:08.000And those pathways can grow very, very quickly in the presence of heat.
00:26:12.000So what I've been trying to do is learn how to dump heat better.
00:26:15.000And if I don't use the, you know, the hat, what happened was I was getting up to 220 and I'd sit in there for like 45 minutes.
00:26:21.000I'm thinking this is not doing anything for me anymore.
00:26:44.000It's going to shut it off when it hits a certain temperature.
00:26:46.000So what I'm really trying to do is get it really, really hot down near the floor because then when I stand up when it's that hot, I'm just...
00:27:28.000I start in the cold for a minute, then I go into the sauna, then back into the cold for two minutes, back into the sauna, then three minutes.
00:27:52.000Susanna Soberg did her PhD in Denmark as, I think, one of the best scientists in terms of deliberate cold exposure and its benefits because she actually did something that's remarkable, not just in that field, but overall, which is that she employed real-world-type experiences and exercise of deliberate cold and sauna and turned it into a very rigorous study of Brown fat thermogenesis,
00:28:20.000which is this sort of, think of it sort of like the oil in the candle of your body increases mitochondrial function and thermogenesis heats you up.
00:28:28.000Metabolism, subjective wellbeing, sleep, et cetera.
00:28:31.000She did all of that and published this in Cell Reports Medicine.
00:28:35.000And I realize it's just one study, but to do the studies on humans is hard.
00:28:40.000To do it with multiple variables is even harder.
00:28:43.000And to do it in a real world context is even harder.
00:28:45.000So what she showed was, That if people get 11 minutes of deliberate cold exposure per week total, and this is divided up into sessions of one to three minutes or four minutes even, so it's not 11 minutes all at once.
00:28:59.000They fundamentally change the amount of brown fat that they have, which means they fundamentally change the number of mitochondria in the brown fat, which means they fundamentally change their thermogenic properties of their body, increase their metabolism.
00:29:10.000Now, the people who don't like cold say, well, the increase in metabolism wasn't enough to offset more than a few bites of a bagel or something.
00:29:19.000What she also showed was that this increase in thermogenesis allowed people to be more comfortable in cold environments, even when they're not in the cold.
00:29:27.000And then people say, well, who cares, right?
00:29:30.000But what she was able to show is that the ability to be comfortable in the cold correlates with a bunch of other important immune functions and metabolic functions and insulin sensitivity, which is a good thing.
00:29:41.000And the inability to do that is likely to not be healthy for us.
00:29:47.000She also showed that 57 minutes per week is the threshold for sauna.
00:29:51.000So if people get 57 minutes per week of uncomfortably warm, but safe sauna exposure, they can get very similar effects.
00:29:59.000And then that gave rise to this question I always said, do you end with cold or do you end with heat?
00:30:03.000And she said, end with cold because then your body's forced to warm itself back up.
00:30:07.000And that's what's now called the Soberg Principle, which is when you end with cold, your body has to use its natural machinery to heat back up.
00:30:16.000In talking to her recently, I learned some really interesting things that I've been incorporating.
00:30:20.000First of all, I've always avoided putting my head under until the very end in the cold.
00:30:25.000Turns out that if you put your face in the water, right as you go in, you activate the mammalian dive reflex.
00:30:30.000And this reflex, It increases the so-called parasympathetic activity of the autonomic nervous system, which is nerd speak for, it lowers your heart rate, it makes you calmer, and it makes you better able to tolerate stress.
00:31:09.000I just feel like that's all psychological.
00:31:11.000I really do because there's there's a moment when you get in the cold where There's a part of your brain that goes let's get out of here You can get out of this if you will just get out right now and you got to go shut the fuck up But if you don't say shut the fuck up then that thing runs rampant through your brain and that kicks your heart rate up and that kicks your anxiety up I really think it's psychological Well,
00:31:34.000it's psychological and it's physiological.
00:31:36.000Right, physiological because of psychological.
00:31:41.000For the first 20 to 30 seconds of cold shock when you get in, just how it's described, that prefrontal cortex that normally has the job of handling context and says, shh, To the reflexes of the brain and the impulses of the brain is not active for 20 to 30 seconds.
00:31:58.000So your reflex to get the hell out of there is very, there's a clear and logical reason for that.
00:32:06.000After that 20 or 30 seconds, the forebrain starts coming online again.
00:32:10.000That's your opportunity to start negotiating with yourself of, oh, this is actually good for me.
00:36:07.000The study that was published in the European Journal of Physiology that showed these huge increases in dopamine, that was the first of these sorts of studies.
00:36:14.000I don't know if I've mentioned this, but when you go in the cold for a very brief period of time, one to three minutes, and it's shockingly cold, you have to catch your breath, stabilize your mind.
00:36:22.000That evokes a dopamine, epinephrine and norepinephrine release.
00:36:27.000These three things together are called the catecholamines.
00:36:29.000Those normally would increase from a cup of coffee and a hard sprint for 10 to 30 minutes, maybe an hour.
00:36:40.000When you do the cold exposure, the way you're doing it, or longer exposures at about 50 degrees or so, You're seeing increases in dopamine, norepinephrine and epinephrine that are two to three X above baseline.
00:37:14.000But to my knowledge, there is no drug, nor is there any form of exercise, conventional forms of exercise, that increase the catecholamines to that level for that long.
00:37:26.000And with dopamine, it's all about The amplitude and the duration, how fast it rises, how fast it stays up there.
00:38:53.000I mean, I think that it, you know, I think of Health and performance, so mental health, physical health and performance along, you know, fundamentals.
00:39:50.000That's one of the beautiful things I think that's happened in the last couple of decades is that resistance training is no longer just considered the thing that football players and bodybuilders do.
00:40:00.000Women no longer, I hope, are concerned about getting, quote-unquote, too big from weightlifting or something or turning into a bodybuilder.
00:40:26.000And our friend Peter Atiyah, I mean, his...
00:40:29.000Has talked about one of the major causes of death later is, you know, falls due to stepping down off things, inability to hang from a bar is, you know, correlated with lack of health, right?
00:40:46.000Macronutrients, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, people now think about it.
00:40:48.000So you need all that stuff, vitamins, minerals, and then the other stuff.
00:40:51.000And then I think in addition to that sleep, right?
00:40:54.000I think Matt Walker, It deserves a tremendous debt of gratitude from everybody because 10 years ago, everyone was like, I'll sleep when I'm dead.
00:41:03.000You're probably not gonna dissolve into a puddle of your own tears from a couple of bad nights sleep every once in a while, but sleep makes you mentally, physically better.
00:41:11.000And then the last one is this whole, not notion, it's social connection, right?
00:41:16.000You can't stay isolated constantly or people lose their minds.
00:41:20.000So when you look at people that get very depressed or they're suicidal, one or several of those five things is going to be diminished.
00:41:27.000And then what happens is people hear about deliberate cold exposure And if they don't like it or they want to poke at it, they say, oh, it rocks hypertrophy.
00:41:35.000Okay, well, only if you do it in the four to six hours after a hypertrophy workout.
00:42:25.000Well, how long and what's the hormetic effect?
00:42:28.000And so in terms of You know, deliberate cold exposure, people like to say, oh, it doesn't burn much fat, it blocks hypertrophy.
00:42:35.000But if you look at the mental benefits of having your catecholamines, dopamine or epinephrine and epinephrine systemically elevated to two to three X for four to six hours after a 30 second to three minute protocol, you're not going to show me a drug or a form of exercise that can do that.
00:42:55.000For me, the best thing for sleep is sauna.
00:43:05.000When you heat the surface of your body, You would think, oh, you know, my whole body temperature is getting really hot.
00:43:12.000But if I were to measure your core body temperature, what happens is your medial preoptic nucleus of the hypothalamus says, oh, the surface of my body is really hot.
00:43:19.000I'm going to cool down my core temperature.
00:43:21.000And falling asleep at night requires a one to three degree drop in bodily temperature.
00:43:26.000And when you wake up in the morning, You have a one to three degree increase in bodily temperature in the morning, that triggers a cortisol spike, that triggers norepinephrine, and then you start waking up.
00:43:36.000So body temperature and the ability to fall asleep and stay asleep and wake up are very tightly correlated.
00:43:42.000That your whole circadian rhythm is temperature driven.
00:43:45.000And so, for instance, you probably have a best time of day for you to work out where you feel best.
00:45:28.000Well, there are two things you can do.
00:45:29.000I can make you shiver, which will generate heat, or I can make you move.
00:45:35.000Shivering is just another form of moving.
00:45:38.000I can activate this very specialized fat tissue, which is not under the skin, it's not subcutaneous fat, but it's around your critical organs, which is the brown fat.
00:45:47.000Activate the mitochondria there and basically at that very core level get electrons moving and the brown fat in turn activates the thermogenic system and starts heating you up.
00:47:44.000If you teach your body to tolerate warm, then you will be more comfortable in very hot.
00:47:51.000It's sort of obvious, and vice versa for cold.
00:47:54.000Well, I certainly think that there's a great benefit to being able to tolerate temperatures, whether it's cold temperature or warm temperature, because I think there's a mental resiliency aspect to it.
00:48:03.000What's interesting to me is when I get out of the cold, my entire body, my skin is bright red.
00:48:10.000You know, where your body's trying to heat itself up, because you're in there for three minutes, or I'm in there for three minutes.
00:48:15.000But when I get out of the sauna, generally I stretch, and my house is warm, right?
00:48:21.000And at nighttime, I do the sauna in the house, and when I'm stretching, within a minute or two minutes after the sauna, I'm fucking freezing, because my body's trying to cool off so quickly.
00:48:32.000You know, because it's gone through the whole 25-minute session.
00:48:35.000Well, the contrast of heat and cold is we know very good for our cardiovascular system because we think of the blood vessels and capillaries and arteries as just tubes, but they're really cells, endothelial cells.
00:48:46.000They're laid out like silly putty, linking them all like tubes, and they are very contractile.
00:48:50.000They need to do that because of the pulsing of blood through them.
00:48:52.000That's the whole basis of systolic and diastolic blood pressure.
00:49:05.000You don't want it rigid, especially given what Atiyah tells us, and I believe him, is that the number one killer in the world is cardiovascular disease or cerebrovascular disease.
00:49:13.000You want the little microcapillaries of your body to be very flexible, not rigid.
00:49:17.000So when you go heat-cold, you're basically going vasoconstriction, dilation, vasoconstriction, dilation.
00:49:24.000I'm just talking about heat and stretching, just getting out of it.
00:49:27.000My body cools itself off and I get really cold in like five minutes.
00:49:31.000So that could be the drop, which is when your blood goes to the center of your body to preserve your core organs.
00:49:38.000And then the surface of your body is cold.
00:49:40.000And then as you start to heat up again and there's vasodilation and it goes out to the surface, your surface is cold and it actually cools the blood at the surface.
00:49:50.000And that's when your body temperature goes down.
00:49:53.000Now, once you put on clothes and head to your workout or head to work, what's going to happen is your body temperature is now going to increase more quickly.
00:50:00.000It normally would do that anyway, early in the day.
00:50:02.000As you wake up, your body temperature goes up, up, up, up, up, up.
00:50:04.000And then whenever you achieve a sort of a dip in Energy in the afternoon.
00:50:09.000There's probably one time in the afternoon, whether or not you need a nap or not, that you feel a little bit lethargic and then you kind of come back.
00:50:16.000That represents the peak in your body temperature for 24 hours.
00:50:20.000In fact, most people, if they want to figure out their sort of optimal bedtime, I know this gets pretty down in the weeds.
00:50:34.000Because that's when body temperature starts dropping by one to three degrees.
00:50:37.000So doing cold early in the day makes total sense.
00:50:40.000Doing deliberate cold exposure before a workout, total sense.
00:50:44.000Doing sauna before sleep, total sense.
00:50:46.000The cold in the morning, the other thing that it does when I get out is it makes me like really fucking happy, which is what you were talking about with the dopamine race.
00:52:32.000What's very clear is that when you're suffering or you're lazy or you're procrastinating, Doing something that's harder than the state that you're in bounces you back much faster.
00:52:44.000This is all based in the dynamics of dopamine.
00:53:48.000If people would just take a very cold shower or a very cold plungers, a little bit longer at 50 degrees, although I agree with you that shorter, colder is better.
00:53:56.000What I didn't describe, and I'm not trying to rescue myself here, but I do that daily.
00:54:01.000But then on Tuesdays, It's the typical day where I do very, very hot and very, very cold back and forth for well over an hour back and forth.
00:54:09.000Yeah, you do that serious growth hormone increasing protocol.
00:54:14.000I'm trying to condition myself to really be able to tolerate heat and cold.
00:54:18.000The other thing I learned again from Susanna, I take no credit for this, is I'm not suggesting people replace the cold plunge with this or a cold shower with this.
00:54:27.000You're starting to see more of this on social media and it's embarrassingly silly to think that that's a replacement, what I'm about to describe as a replacement for cold plunges.
00:54:34.000But if you put, she taught me, she said, if you even just put a small portion of your skin in ice cold water, like your hand or your arm, You actually activate the brown fat system.
00:54:45.000That's how robust this system of surface temperature to body is.
00:54:49.000And so I don't think it's a good replacement, but now you're seeing people saying, oh, you just have to put your face in a bowl of ice water.
00:54:57.000There was a device that was going around a while back that people were using when they were lifting weights, where they were putting their hand into something that was freezing their hand, and it increased their ability to do work quite substantially.
00:55:10.000Do you know what I'm So this was developed by Craig Heller's lab.
00:56:00.000It turns out when people come out of anesthesia, it's very slow.
00:56:03.000And this is a problem for all sorts of critical reasons related to keeping people alive.
00:56:09.000And if you measure people's body temperature when they're coming out of anesthesia, it's very low.
00:56:13.000And as it heats up, they wake up, just like out of sleep.
00:56:16.000His laboratory developed these heating devices that would heat people's palms or the bottoms of their feet.
00:56:22.000And they found that they could bring them out of anesthesia much faster and recovery rates were much better.
00:56:27.000Super impressive result, not talked about often enough.
00:56:30.000And the reason it's not talked about often enough is all this stuff around thermogenic studies was really hot in like the 19, no pun, sorry, in the 50s, 60s, 70s.
00:56:41.000And then it was sort of considered kind of like, not lame, but it wasn't hot science.
00:56:50.000Then what's happened in recent years is people have gotten into these protocols and it's become more popular.
00:56:55.000His laboratory also showed that one of the reasons why we fail on like a set of dips or chins, local muscular failure is due to heating of the muscle locally due to work.
00:57:06.000And then there's an enzyme called pyruvate kinase, which is very heat dependent.
00:57:10.000When your muscle gets too hot, Pyruvate kinase can't function and your muscle fails.
00:57:15.000It's one of the reasons you fail on a set.
00:57:17.000So what they figured out was if you cool people's core body temperature, they can do more work.
00:57:29.000The point is that, let's say you can do 10 sets of 10 at a given weight with two minutes of rest in between, and that's all you can do.
00:57:36.000And you're hitting failure, maybe you have to adjust the weight down on sets four, five, six, et cetera, classic 10 sets of 10. I don't know if people said, German volume training or five sets of five.
00:57:45.000If you lower the core body temperature through the proper use of palmer cooling, as it's called, or through some other device, what you find is people can continue to get the same number of repetitions provided they keep the rest the same, and they can double the amount or more of work that they're doing total.
00:58:14.000So in theory, if we'd been cooling your palms, you would have been able to keep going much longer, possibly 150. And you say, well, how could that be?
00:58:22.000Well, it's a local change in the enzymatic reaction at the level of muscle.
00:58:26.000Now, the problem with polymer cooling is people will go out there and say, I'm going to hold ice packs.
00:58:31.000But if you do that, you'll constrict the portals.
00:58:33.000It has to be the right temperature so that you can continue to pass cool in.
00:58:36.000And that's why it requires a device to heat, excuse me, to cool your palms, but not so cold that you vasoconstrict.
00:58:47.000To be honest, is it a very effective device?
00:58:49.000They've never been very effective at marketing that device, but they use athletes at Stanford use it.
00:58:54.000But nowadays what athletes mainly are doing, and I talk to pro basketball players, football players, tier one military, they're doing cold before their training because it's just simpler and you don't need a device.
00:59:06.000Inter-workout or intra-workout cooling is really an interesting topic, but it hasn't been perfected at the level of devices.
00:59:37.000Here's what I think could really help, and you could try it.
00:59:40.000If you don't have access to a cool mitt, and I can get you one for you to try, but if you hold on, you'd want to hold something cold between your hands for maybe 20-30 seconds.
00:59:49.000Well, just dunk your hand into the cold plunge.
00:59:56.000Yeah, the relationship between temperature and sleep, temperature and the deployment of these neurochemicals, temperature and performance is one of these variables that right now professional sports teams and Tier 1 military and scientists are really starting to understand.
01:00:30.000And it's clear that the cold after training is, if your goal is to train again, well then you want inflammation down.
01:00:36.000But if your goal is to improve as a consequence of that training session, you have to be careful how much you're blocking the inflammation.
01:00:41.000Yeah, I know a lot of jujitsu guys like to do cryotherapy post-training, and they say that it helps tremendously.
01:00:47.000And because of that reduction of inflammation, Because you're not really training for hypertrophy.
01:00:52.000You're training for volume and work and, you know, cardiovascular function and your ability to execute techniques over and over and over again.
01:01:00.000I mean, the ability to do more work is, I think, one of the not-so-secret secrets of performance-enhancing drugs, too.
01:01:29.000And I think, and I, for all I know, I believe he's natural, but like you think about a guy like Floyd Mayweather, and I used to see him running in the middle of the night, you know, in Vegas.
01:01:39.000If his testosterone happens to be exceedingly high, naturally, he can do more work and recover than the person whose testosterone is lower before they hit a wall.
01:01:50.000So I'm not saying he was using anything.
01:01:52.000What I'm saying is if somebody has higher levels of circulating testosterone, male or female, they can do more work and recover.
01:03:29.000Well, I don't know if we bring this up or not.
01:03:31.000But, you know, I think the tides have changed in recent years.
01:03:35.000And, you know, conventional media has used to kind of, they email you, they want a conversation.
01:03:42.000You know, I think sometimes they're surprised you don't leap to have that conversation.
01:03:46.000Or, you know, I think one of the problems with the traditional press is that It's hard to know where their heart is, like where they are on a topic.
01:03:55.000And so conversations with them have become a bit of a razor's edge, frankly.
01:04:00.000Well, they're also like deeply influenced by money.
01:04:03.000Like that raccoon dog thing, I guarantee you there are some people behind the scenes that are trying to come up with some sort of a plausible scenario that's alternative to the lab leak theory.
01:04:15.000And that's why they're coming up with this.
01:04:17.000The people that I've talked to that understand this, I've had many conversations with virologists and evolutionary biologists who explain to me why this is most likely a lab.
01:05:44.000Like, they give you what is their actual take on whatever is going on in the news and it's well-researched.
01:05:52.000And the fact that that exists now is so important because if it was not for independent journalism, we would be in a pickle.
01:06:01.000We would be in a really bad state because a lot of people got duped by the pharmacy, the pharmacological industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the medical industry, the military industrial complex.
01:06:14.000They've been duped by so many different companies and corporations that have a vested interest in We're good to go.
01:06:43.000If it wasn't for them, we would be fucked.
01:06:45.000And it's one of the beautiful things about the internet today.
01:06:48.000The internet today allows people like that to thrive because these mainstream media corporations are so corrupt.
01:06:56.000They're so obviously indebted to the companies that pay for their advertising.
01:07:01.000Yeah, I mean my initial experience of them was long before I had a podcast, did an interview with traditional media and then it comes out and They didn't say anything bad, but my quote was given to somebody else.
01:07:40.000In science or in anything, that's all we have is our reputation.
01:07:42.000So it's a scary thing to hand that over to somebody.
01:07:45.000So unless it's a particular few set of sources, I generally decline traditional media conversations.
01:07:50.000And now the fight isn't just for traditional, you know, over media, traditional or independent.
01:07:57.000You know, the universities too, right?
01:07:59.000We were asking, I have to say, and I'm not, this is not a, to be, you know, politically correct or incorrect.
01:08:05.000Stanford has been very good about letting different faculty at Stanford voice their differing opinions on everything from COVID to politics.
01:08:17.000You know, there's a free speech, a right to free speech petition that's been going around the campus for a while.
01:08:24.000Now, a lot of people also will hear things about, oh, I hear on college campuses like Stanford, you're getting a lot of pressure to do this or a lot of pressure to do that.
01:08:31.000Yeah, there are pressures from students and top down.
01:08:34.000Listen, students are under pressure, administrators are under pressure, faculty under pressure.
01:08:38.000But Stanford has been very good about allowing people to have their own independent social media channels and talk to the public the way they feel is best.
01:08:54.000And I'm not going to throw out names here because it's not my place and they should probably just come on the podcast separately, but you've got people at every end of the major debates out there about public health and everything in between on Twitter, fewer on Instagram, but on Twitter, voicing their opinion.
01:09:10.000And honestly, I think it's beautiful that they are allowed to do it.
01:09:14.000Well, they're allowed to now because Elon bought Twitter.
01:09:16.000But before Elon bought Twitter, people were being silenced for things that have been absolutely proven to be correct, which is crazy.
01:09:24.000The value that he's given back to people in the last, what has it been, four or five months since he's been in there?
01:09:31.000I mean, I remember people picking on, oh, it's this feature, that feature, we're gonna have to buy a verified check or whatever, you know, these things that when you compare that to the ability for people to have honest, open discourse, honest for them, because, you know, there's no regulator.
01:09:46.000So that to me is incredible and fundamentally important.
01:10:14.000It's kind of bananas where we went in the last few years.
01:10:18.000But what's happened in health and public health, I think, is pretty remarkable and encouraging.
01:10:23.000From my standpoint anyway, which is people now realize that medical doctors have a certain type of information that is extremely valuable and they come in a range of flavors and qualities.
01:10:33.000Same with psychologists, same with scientists, same with public health officials, same with everything from your masseuse to your chiropractor.
01:10:41.000Like there is a range of quality and expertise and orientation and to silence any one of those At the exclusion of the others is not only foolish, it's dangerous.
01:10:56.000Now people seek advice on multiple dimensions.
01:10:58.000You know, a few years ago, if you said supplements, people were like, oh, that's expensive urine.
01:11:01.000Well, that's true if you're talking about vitamins and minerals, but how many people, Do I know who during the pandemic started taking vitamin D, getting some sunshine?
01:11:10.000What do you mean by that's true if you're talking about vitamins and minerals?
01:11:12.000Well, I think when we hear the word supplements, it gets confusing for people.
01:11:15.000I actually am wishing for a better word because when people hear supplements, they think vitamin minerals.
01:11:26.000And if you over-ingest fats, excuse me, water-soluble vitamins, you will excrete some.
01:11:31.000But then there's a whole category of supplements like food supplements, protein, etc.
01:11:35.000And then there's an entire category of compounds that we call supplements that have nothing to do with proteins, fats, or carbohydrates, vitamins, or minerals.
01:11:44.000Things that are known to have very potent effects.
01:11:47.000There's a reason why the National Institutes of Health Has a division now simply for these types of studies.
01:11:53.000Things like ashwagandha can potently reduce cortisol.
01:11:57.000Shouldn't be used long term, but in the short term, this can be very beneficial for people, especially late day, because late day peaks in cortisol.
01:12:21.000It's a nootropic, post concussion, post surgery, postpartum depression, headache, I mean, fish oils.
01:12:29.000So there's this whole category of things that in theory you could get from food, but the volumes that you would have to eat and the sourcing is just impractical.
01:12:37.000And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
01:12:38.000I mean, there's Rhodiola rosea, which is, you know, reducing cortisol.
01:13:17.000No, this is what, you know, my, you know, when I was young, I got into this, you know, training and supplementation early and people would say, oh, it's just expensive urine, you know, don't spend your money on that.
01:13:26.000There are certain things like within supplementation, also the foundational supplementation, as I call it, like things like athletic greens, right?
01:13:35.000Things that are in such combinations of herbs and plant-based compounds, you can't take them one by one.
01:13:41.000And then other things like magnesiums for sleep or inositol and the date on depression or inositol and insulin sensitivity.
01:13:48.000You know, the number of people that are out there who are pre-diabetic or type 2 diabetes, of course they need to exercise and eat right, but things like inositol can improve insulin sensitivity.
01:13:57.000Inositol, it's similar to a vitamin, but it works in a pathway that makes cells more insulin sensitive, which is good.
01:14:03.000So you can use the glucose and insulin that you make, so you're not overproducing insulin.
01:14:08.000Type 2 diabetes is essentially overproduction of insulin because your cells aren't able to use the insulin that surrounds you, crank out more of it.
01:14:15.000Type 1 diabetes, lack of insulin from the pancreas.
01:14:18.000That's why people have to inject it who have type 1 diabetes.
01:14:20.000So things like inositol, I mean, and the list just goes on and on, you know?
01:14:25.000And so to me, I think the view is changing.
01:14:27.000I hope that, you know, the idea previously was that before the pandemic, frankly, was that supplements are just kind of like nootropic that, or, you know, it's kind of, you don't need it.
01:14:37.000I'm not saying you need it, but they are a powerful augment To good sleep, good nutrition, good training, good social connection.
01:14:56.000But I think for you and me, it's a duh.
01:14:59.000But I think for a lot of people out there, they seem to think that there's something unique about prescription drugs that makes them better than supplements.
01:15:10.000Well, that's because they've been lied to.
01:15:11.000That's the real problem is that the corporations who control these prescription drugs and sell these prescription drugs and sell advertising on television have got it into people's heads.
01:15:21.000That's why it was maddening when I had Peter Hotez on the podcast.
01:15:25.000And he was talking to me about the importance of vaccination.
01:15:50.000Yeah, vitamin D seems to have made it through the chute, like where anyone will take it because it doesn't seem scary to them or Yeah.
01:16:11.000Theoretically been prevented with vitamin D supplementation.
01:16:14.000This was based on the number of people that were in the ICU that were deficient from COVID, or excuse me, deficient from vitamin D that were in the hospital for COVID, and it was in the high 80s or in the low 80% rather.
01:16:26.000And then they did this study showing what would have happened if they had just supplemented vitamin D. I mean, I know many physicians.
01:17:07.000I think that when I step back from what you were saying a few moments ago, You know, I think people need to remember that scientific journals of which I'm on the advisory board of several and have been for a long time and are well-meaning things.
01:17:22.000Let's keep in mind, they're run by people.
01:17:25.000And, you know, the goal of those journals, ultimately, is to publish papers that are true, but that get people to read them.
01:17:32.000The more subscriptions, the more they sell, right?
01:17:35.000So I have a good friend who is a senior editor at a journal.
01:17:39.000There's really only three top-tier journals, Nature, Cell, and Science.
01:17:42.000And I asked him once, I said, what determines whether or not one paper is accepted or not?
01:17:46.000And he said, well, we get to determine, obviously, the reviewers have to give it thumbs up at some point, but We get to determine the direction that the journal wants to go.
01:17:56.000So during the pandemic, there was an enormous incentive for publishing papers in these journals that provided some other hope or fear or whatever.
01:18:05.000It was exciting at the time because people were buying up these journals like crazy.
01:18:08.000I mean, they have to pay their staff, too.
01:18:10.000So it's a business like anything else.
01:18:13.000Unfortunately, there is, aside from the federal research budget, which is frankly, we're We have a much greater budget than in other countries for research relative to the total amount available, but it's still very low compared to what we need.
01:18:30.000I mean, it's not gonna, the more money you have, the more margin for error you can have in terms of the people in your lab.
01:18:35.000Like if you only have a million dollar a year operating budget, like it's a business, you can have two or three really good people, and if someone's not so good, that's bad.
01:18:42.000If you have a giant budget, You can have 20 people and 10 of them can suck.
01:19:33.000The lab heads, to get to a position where you're running a laboratory at a major university, Or any university, frankly, you have to love what you're doing.
01:19:41.000I mean, you don't make a lot of money as a university professor.
01:19:43.000There are incentives through things like companies, and a lot of professors now have companies, and we can talk about that, and that's complicated sometimes or not complicated.
01:19:51.000But the point is that heads of labs want to make fundamental discoveries.
01:19:57.000The three biggest fears for a real scientist are to get something wrong and to get it wrong for the wrong reasons.
01:20:04.000The wrong reasons would be someone comes to your laboratory and sees an opportunity to please the PI. This is, I think, one of the major sources of error in science.
01:20:13.000Publishing papers as a postdoc is what gets you a job.
01:20:16.000So I've known over the years postdocs and there's a lot of discussion about this is inside ball of science where someone gets there and realizes that the head of this lab has a pet hypothesis that's really exciting to them.
01:20:34.000And then that person goes and does experiments and shows the PI the experiments that work and doesn't show them the experiments that don't work.
01:20:41.000And then tells themselves those experiments didn't work because, you know, the centrifuge was off or the mouse was sick or something, you know, gives themselves reasons why it was okay to remove data.
01:20:52.000That occurs, I think, I'm gonna guess here.
01:20:55.000I don't know, but based on my observation, that's probably about, 10 to 15% of the top tier published papers, I think, don't last, meaning in the years following, they don't replicate and they go nowhere.
01:21:08.000And I don't think it's because people made up data, quote unquote.
01:21:10.000I think it's because they threw out bad data or data that, excuse me, they threw out data that didn't fit their hypothesis and labeled it no good.
01:21:43.000The theory of Alzheimer's that's still very prominent is that it's the accumulation of these things called plaques and tangles, which you can see under the microscope.
01:21:50.000And they've always been considered a signature that you can see with your eyes of neurodegeneration that's associated with Alzheimer's dementia.
01:21:58.000And it's been the way that people have measured whether or not a treatment has worked or not worked is whether or not it could decrease these plaques and tangles in mouse tissue and sometimes in human tissue.
01:22:09.000Now we have to be clear that plaques and tangles do accumulate in the brains of people with Alzheimer's and mice that have mutations that make them kind of like good models for Alzheimer's.
01:22:18.000But early on in the research on Alzheimer's, so dating back well over a decade now, there was basically a data fraud, fudging of data, we call it, where someone essentially said that there was a label for a particular plaque or tangle of protein that represented something that it didn't and then What this has cascaded into over many,
01:22:40.000many years is an entire set of theories about which drugs ought to be beneficial for the treatment of Alzheimer's.
01:22:45.000And I would say now trillions of dollars put into research along those particular lines of inquiry.
01:22:52.000So what we're basically saying is one mistake can cascade into a series of thousands or tens of thousands of mistakes that can take a field really far astray.
01:23:02.000They realized that there was a problem with the early data.
01:23:04.000Now, the thing that's kind of baffling is how the field continued down this path for so long without actually considering alternative hypotheses with any seriousness.
01:23:15.000Why somebody didn't say, hey, let's go back and test the initial premise of all of this.
01:23:19.000And part of that has to do with if, you know, biotech is neither good nor bad, nor evil, nor anything.
01:23:25.000And there's a pretty quick runway from a big landmark discovery to a couple of verifications to people founding companies to big dollars coming in through investments.
01:23:36.000And then, I mean, how many times have we been told blockbuster finding in mice and then people with Alzheimer's say, well, when is there going to be treatment?
01:24:08.000I'm going to go a different direction and explore.
01:24:10.000But in the sociology of science and science funding, it is very, very hard to impossible to get funding from the federal government to do truly high-risk pioneering science.
01:24:23.000You might say like, how could that be?
01:24:25.000In general, when you get funded by the government, my lab has been funded by the government for many years, you get funded for work that is already completed.
01:24:44.000Because when you put in a grant that says, this is a really exciting idea, they're not going to fund that.
01:24:49.000So this is why philanthropy and private money comes into science and is very exciting and enticing to scientists because they can start testing things that the federal government funding bodies are just too conservative to test.
01:25:01.000But that also leaves it open to manipulation by bad actors.
01:25:04.000The whole system is – there's no way to bulletproof the system against bad actors, meaning people who fudge data or I think the more sinister aspect of my field – Are these individuals who come to a laboratory and go, I want a job.
01:25:20.000Being a postdoc, you're not paid much.
01:25:21.000Oftentimes they have families, they're under stress.
01:25:40.000And some people will just figure out that if they can just give the lab director Figure out their pet hypothesis, like figure out what mommy and daddy like, what mommy or daddy like most, and give them those results.
01:25:53.000Those people get promoted very quickly.
01:25:56.000Now, in the long run, they don't do well, or what you'll find is they often just switch to an entire new area of science when they start their lab.
01:26:38.000Then you get the paper, anonymous peer review.
01:26:40.000And then they're like, that's when people attack each other, kill people's grants, kill people's papers.
01:26:45.000Science is a it's not a cutthroat game, but it's a very human game.
01:26:49.000And now, I also want to highlight, because I feel like as an ambassador for my field, I do want to say that there are excellent scientists who care so very much about the truth and who go through every detail of every paper.
01:27:19.000Subject to human emotions and human instincts and ego and jealousy and...
01:27:55.000And a partner at home who's probably like, It says they're either really good at picking questions and being very consistent, or they are very good at hiring people that are extremely careful and hardworking, or sometimes both.
01:28:07.000But listen, the bigger the labs, the higher the probability of a bad apple.
01:28:38.000And there's a whole other aspect to the sociology of science that I think is not often discussed, which is that There's a huge incentive to being promoted by your elders, by your graduate advisor and postdoc advisor, because they are the ones that write the letters,
01:30:00.000And I've had people say, hey, listen, we're having a really hard time getting letters for this person.
01:30:04.000And, you know, this person really needs tenure and they've got a family and, you know, and you look at the work and, you know, and you want to say no.
01:30:12.000And you can't because you don't want that person to review your paper and ask your next paper.
01:30:17.000Now, I've been very lucky because I don't...
01:30:20.000First of all, I think it's maybe just the way I'm wired.
01:30:23.000I just don't care about that aspect of human...
01:30:26.000You know, I'm one of these people, sort of like my bulldog Costello was.
01:30:28.000Like, I'm going to go along with things until you try and push me, and then I just have kind of a resistance thing.
01:30:33.000It's some developmental error or something.
01:30:38.000I think it's helped me a lot because what I've told those people asking for letters is, listen, I think they're not getting strong letters because they're not good enough for tenure at this place.
01:30:49.000Everyone plays this nice, nice game because when you're nice to people, they think you get stuff.
01:30:54.000And it creates a rather dark underbelly of science that people don't talk about.
01:31:01.000So in this field of Alzheimer's, What I think ended up happening was there was such incentive to go with the party line and publish things that were validating of previous papers because, let's be honest, when you say nice things about other people in papers, it's easier to get your papers in.
01:31:17.000And, you know, scientists on Twitter is changing things because now people will really pick apart a figure.
01:31:26.000And I learned from you early on and from Lex early on If you're going to be out there as a scientist or on social media at all, you have to ignore a lot of stuff.
01:31:35.000But if there's something to pay attention to, like Lex and I talk about this, he and I, I'll just reveal a writing an article for one of the nature journals about science and social media.
01:31:44.000The journals are now starting to pay attention to podcasts.
01:31:47.000And so conversation and being able to really rip something apart and having a pretty thick skin about it, that's the nature of good science.
01:31:55.000And I think that that field of Alzheimer's was all pre-social media.
01:31:59.000And people knew there was bullshit in there.
01:33:06.000And I think they were only paid like $50,000, which is kind of crazy, because it changed dietary guidelines for fucking decades.
01:33:13.000Oh, scientists, you know, I guess this is an opportunity to bring up Jeff Epstein.
01:33:17.000So, you know, people sometimes wonder, you know, like, were scientists, you know, hanging out with him to get, you know, to get with these young women or something?
01:33:40.000I know people who knew him, but he clearly understood social engineering.
01:33:48.000He understood that rich people have, they can get anything they want, anything they want.
01:33:53.000Except the one thing they can't easily control is their reputation, because that requires other people's perceptions, and just being rich doesn't make you necessarily respected.
01:34:03.000By certain people, yes, by certain people, no.
01:34:05.000So he understood that very wealthy people feel more important And can derive more sense of self-respect when they're surrounded by brilliant people.
01:34:14.000And he was very good at bringing truly brilliant people into that mix.
01:34:19.000People like Murray Gell-Mann who discovered the quark, right?
01:35:11.000Scientists will show up to dinners that normally they'd rather be in their labs or writing grants or with their families, frankly, if there's the possibility of money being given to their laboratory because then they can hire more people and do more science.
01:35:23.000Money alone doesn't drive good science, but the more money you have, the bigger margin of error you have.
01:35:28.000So if Epstein offered laboratories, you know, a million dollars a year for four years, To a guy of that wealth as trivial, to a laboratory, that is four national institutes of health grants per year.
01:35:42.000And the workload to maintain those four grants is immense.
01:35:45.000So they'd show up with the possibility of getting money.
01:35:47.000That's where they were hanging out with a dirtbag like him.
01:35:51.000Either they knew or they didn't know what he was up to, but they had blinders on because they weren't thinking about the implications.
01:35:56.000Well, it's also one of the things about something like that must be that if you go there and you see Steven Pinker and you see Lawrence Krauss and you see Bill Gates, it seems like you should be there.
01:37:35.000They want to hang out with their girlfriend or their four girlfriends, whatever it is.
01:37:38.000You tell them tier one operators who do high-risk, high-consequence work And are on deployment schedules that would dissolve you into a puddle of your own tears, because it's a vampire schedule, you don't get to sleep when you want to, and you get, you potentially die, you potentially all die, and their running times are faster,
01:37:54.000their recovery times are faster, their shooting accuracy is far better than your shooting accuracy, and that's with a gun, and getting shot at, and they go, okay, I'll listen.
01:38:05.000And so if you want them to listen, you understand that fact.
01:38:08.000You look at what Tier 1 operators are doing.
01:38:09.000That's what professional sports teams are trying to glean that information.
01:38:14.000Billionaires, they have different interests, obviously.
01:38:16.000Some race yachts, some want to start new projects, but they want to be around really innovative, interesting people.
01:38:23.000And in academia, there are a very small subset of those running big laboratories, and Epstein just got that down to the detail.
01:38:31.000And then he understood, I think, with politicians.
01:38:34.000They can—their reputations are everything, and so he gave them a vaulted world where they could behave how they wanted.
01:38:41.000I mean, in some sense, I mean, his story is one of multiple psychologies, not just his.
01:38:48.000Yeah, that's why people that have studied him and the whole case believe that—and from other evidence and information as well—that he was part of some sort of an intelligence operation, and there was compromising these people.
01:39:00.000Oh, I'm sure that at some point he had information on other people and he just used it as a – and it doesn't have to be stronghand blackmail, right?
01:39:08.000He could just say, you know, we've got information.
01:39:13.000Well, you would just – you don't even have to blackmail someone.
01:39:18.000If you know they have information on you and they have not used it, you will act in their best interest to try to get them on your good side.
01:39:26.000Well, I mean, in the unraveling of all the dark, sordid shit around Weinstein, it was discovered, I think, in New York, like near that avenue, down in Alphabet City Police Precinct.
01:39:41.000It turns out that there were, you know, a boatload of files that date back ages.
01:39:45.000And, you know, it's not that cops are corrupt, it's that they're incentivized by certain things, too.
01:39:49.000And their bosses were telling them, you got to do certain things, you got to put away certain files.
01:39:52.000And, you know, people are trying to make careers.
01:39:53.000I think that's why that show, it's a little outdated now.
01:39:56.000From technology standpoint, but the wire was so brilliant is that every aspect of that was a human endeavor.
01:40:04.000And we're kind of paying attention to the darker unfortunate side.
01:40:07.000They're also, again, I always feel like I got to shine light where it belongs to, which is that a lot of amazing science is happening because of Yes, of course.
01:40:35.000And this has been known in law schools and business schools for a long time, because you'd see it on this, that was kind of more accepted there, because it's business and law.
01:40:43.000But if you walk onto any campus, I don't care if it's UT Austin or Stanford or it's Harvard, the names on those sides of buildings, sometimes it's the Kennedy Building, sometimes it's the Rockefeller Building.
01:40:53.000More often than not, these are names of people you don't recognize anymore, and names of people don't even live in the United States.
01:40:58.000They gave $100 million for a building that trains medical students.
01:41:14.000And I think the human side, actually, to your credit, I learned from you.
01:41:19.000I think you may or may not remember, but a few years ago we were talking about everything that was going on in the public health thing.
01:41:23.000And you're like, the reason I'm curious about this, and I don't trust this, these were your words more or less, was because I know about people.
01:41:30.000And that's, at the end of the day, it's all about people and their psychology.
01:42:30.000If I had a super high-powered psychiatric microscope, I'd go back and find out how everyone that you would ever work with or that you're getting information from, you would find out what their kind of core developmental dissatisfaction is,
01:43:10.000Like she tweeted, Caroline Elson, tweeted that talking to people when you're like normal people when you're on amphetamines is very boring.
01:43:59.000He is wonderful and amazing and such a pioneer of this whole psychedelic space.
01:44:05.000And you might say, well, there were others.
01:44:07.000There's Terence McKenna and there's the classic people.
01:44:09.000But I started off that evening by saying, we need to take a step back.
01:44:13.000And just acknowledge what's happening here, which is saying the word psychedelics on a podcast for me five, six years ago could have cost me my job easily.
01:44:22.000Saying, yeah, I've taken MDMA as part of a clinical trial three times.
01:44:26.000I think psilocybin can aid with depression.
01:44:28.000That would have cost me my job, done, fired.
01:44:30.000I would have walked out of here, done.
01:44:32.000Now, just this last month, the cover of UCSF Magazine and Stanford Magazine, Alice in Wonderland, psychedelics, deep feature about MDMA, ketamine, psilocybin, DMT. What's happened now is this is what used to cost university professors their jobs in the 60s and 70s and did cost them their jobs at places like Harvard in particular,
01:44:55.000is now the subject of research studies, clinical studies at Stanford and elsewhere, right?
01:45:02.000This is now really big science and pharma's moving in very quickly.
01:45:06.000What they're trying to do is create non-psychedelic psychedelics, figure out what sorts of chemistry changes that doesn't give you hallucinations and create new antidepressants.
01:45:15.000That's what they want to do with psilocybin because doing two journeys on a drug and then you're done, that's not good business.
01:45:21.000And what I love about what Michael Pollan is saying is that he's the one that's really, he's really hitting the drum on this one.
01:45:39.000And now the universities are behind it.
01:45:41.000But they're behind it because laboratories are getting funded to do it.
01:45:44.000Laboratories are getting funded to do it because there are grants.
01:45:47.000Why are there now grants from the federal government?
01:45:50.000Philanthropists came in early and provided money, and now people are starting to see that there are big, big potential outcomes at the level of pharma.
01:46:00.000Now, the classic psychedelics community isn't gonna like that.
01:46:04.000They're like, no, this is plant medicine, it's got 100,000 year history or more, indigenous people, et cetera.
01:46:10.000Academia and pharma don't care about that.
01:46:12.000And I'm one of these people, I'm not saying they're bad and they're good.
01:46:18.000So why are universities suddenly okay with the idea of discussions about psychedelics in front of their top tier donors, the people that literally supply the blood to the university?
01:46:27.000Well, because top tier donors are now really interested in psychedelics.
01:46:31.000So what drives every aspect of it from the student who's pipetting in the lab to the highest tier of administration and university all the way up to directors of NIH? It's all interconnected at the level of incentives.
01:46:49.000Right, but the top-tier donors are clearly influenced by the zeitgeist.
01:46:53.000And the way people have approached and thought about psychedelics has radically changed over the last ten years.
01:46:59.000And Michael Pollan is one of the reasons for that because of the omnivores dilemma.
01:47:03.000He had established himself as a legitimate journalist who would comb through and parse through all the data to give you a comprehensive understanding of what exactly is going on.
01:47:15.000And he went out and did them, or at least some of them, as a kind of late, typical person.
01:47:20.000And didn't come out with wearing a robe.
01:48:05.000Wanted to, you know, sit here and take praise from your guests, but I'm going to just say that you've been talking about this for a long time, about the tremendous value of these things, not just for gaining new perspective, because I think in the 60s and 70s, it was, remember, it was tune in and drop out, right?
01:48:20.000Now, we're talking about the use of psychedelic medicine to be able to lean into life in a healthy way.
01:48:25.000That's the major difference, and you've really pioneered the discussion around that, Michael Pollan, and there are others, too, I realize, but...
01:48:32.000You know, at a time when it was considered really wacky and out there, now it's becoming, it's headed towards mainstream medicine.
01:48:39.000And I think it's fundamentally important.
01:48:42.000I mean, I think Robin Cardhart Harris's laboratory at UCSF has a paper out just today on the use of DMT for treatment of psychiatric illness.
01:48:50.000His laboratory has been looking at high dose psilocybin, two sessions, guided sessions, Treatment of anorexia, ADHD, and depression with very high success.
01:49:00.000Nolan Williams Lab at my university at Stanford.
01:49:04.000He's a triple board certified psychiatrist, neurologist, running the studies with Veteran Solutions, the group down in Mexico of tier one operators and other people who come back who are just Messed up.
01:49:15.000They're either heading towards suicidal depression or they're just not feeling quite right and using Ibogaine DMT in tandem and getting tremendously positive results.
01:49:25.000So he's doing the neuroimaging on them.
01:49:27.000So times are really changing and you and Michael and others really deserve a token of gratitude.
01:49:32.000I've completely revamped my stance on psychedelics.
01:49:35.000I'm still yet to do a high dose psilocybin journey.
01:49:41.000And I'll be honest, so I was kind of a wild youth, barely finished high school, and I did, recreationally, I took LSD and psilocybin in high school, hung around with a wild bunch, and we were just partying with it.
01:49:58.000I drank a little bit, smoked a little bit of weed here and there, but never really liked We'd very much, it just wasn't my thing.
01:50:03.000And then when I did this three sessions with MDMA, that completely transformed my understanding of how these drugs work.
01:50:10.000I also realize, and you might, you probably already know this, but I was very curious about MDMA and the reputation that puts holes in the brain, kills serotonin neurons.
01:50:19.000You know, the study on MDMA that showed neurotoxicity was retracted from science.
01:50:24.000They actually inadvertently injected methamphetamine into those monkeys, but you never hear about that.
01:50:30.000How do you inadvertently inject methamphetamine?
01:50:38.000So they now have data in humans asking what are the safety profiles on MDMA for people that take it every once in a while to people who have taken hundreds of doses of MDMA. And there's one population of people that you can do this on that makes it a really good experiment.
01:50:52.000Those people can't do any other drugs because then it becomes confounded by are they doing meth?
01:51:19.000And so I'm not saying that Mormons are all taking MDMA, but there is a substantial number of LDS, Latter-day Saints, I think they call themselves now Mormons, as most people know them, who have taken tons of MDMA. And they've done brain imaging and psychiatric profiles on them.
01:51:35.000Those data say that as long as it's not contaminated with something else, which is a serious issue, the neurotoxicity is nil to none.
01:51:53.000The recent data I saw was that you go out and buy MDMA from a quote-unquote trusted source, and 6 out of 10 are going to have potentially lethal levels of fentanyl in them.
01:52:05.000Six out of 10. Yeah, and everyone nowadays knows to say, oh, this is from maps, you know, because it's like saying like, you know, it's clean, right?
01:52:12.000So in any way, I've completely changed my stance on psychedelics.
01:52:16.000I think they have tremendous power if done responsibly.
01:52:19.000I think that they hold the greatest promise for drug-based psychiatric treatments.
01:52:25.000And I think we're looking at a time in which it's absolutely clear that That these things should be available to people.
01:52:33.000Robin will tell you the worst part about running his laboratory is someone will come in with intractable suicidal depression.
01:52:37.000They'll do two psilocybin treatments and they're better.
01:52:40.000And then two years later, they'll come back and they'll say, how can I do another one?
01:52:44.000Because it made me feel so much better.
01:52:45.000And he'll say, sorry, they're still illegal.
01:53:06.000Which is kind of crazy because that's one of the more interesting aspects of the way podcasts have infected the popular opinion on things because it's sort of changed people's understanding through data and through talking to people like Michael Pollan or Rick Doblin or,
01:53:23.000you know, any of these experts that really could tell you What's actually going on and how this helps.
01:53:30.000And then there's many people that have these stances on these drugs that hear these things now and go, you know what?
01:53:37.000God damn it, maybe I'm ruining my life by not being open.
01:53:40.000Like maybe this could actually help me.
01:53:47.000You know, there's so many people out there that really could use some help.
01:53:52.000And human beings have been using these compounds, these substances and these mushrooms and these psychedelics for thousands of years.
01:54:02.000There's a reason why they put them in rituals.
01:54:04.000They may be the source of most religious experiences.
01:54:07.000They may be the source Of many religious texts.
01:54:10.000In fact, John Marco Allegro, one of the head, the guys who was hired to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls, he wrote a book called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross after translating the Dead Sea Scrolls for 14 years.
01:54:26.000His belief was that the entire Christian religion was initially based on psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals.
01:54:34.000And so he wrote this book that was bought out by the Catholic Church.
01:54:40.000It's reprinted now, but you had to buy used copies of it online to get it.
01:54:46.000And so then he made another book called The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth that was based on the same material.
01:55:18.000So what's happened is a lot of the money that's going into psychedelic research that's coming from philanthropy is coming from these very...
01:55:28.000And they're going to universities and saying, what can you do for my kid?
01:55:32.000And the university are saying, well, we've got transcranial magnetic stimulation and that works on some people but not others.
01:55:36.000And they're saying, great, what else do you have?
01:55:38.000And they're saying, well, we have talk therapy.
01:55:39.000And they're saying, well, that's important too, but what else do you have?
01:55:41.000And they're saying, well, there's these interesting compounds that seem to relieve depression.
01:55:45.000And they're like, well, why isn't that available?
01:55:46.000Well, it's still illegal and we don't have money to fund it because the federal government's been very reluctant to get involved in it.
01:55:52.000I mean, it's an odd thing that we have, you know, we have bodies within the government that are designed to put people in prison for drugs.
01:56:02.000And then we also have bodies of the same government that funds from the top down that study drugs.
01:56:08.000But keep in mind that the NIH up until recently was only studying drugs of abuse.
01:56:56.000Yeah, 22 hours and horrific experiences were just...
01:57:01.000Intensely introspective breaking down of all the pathways in your mind that have been carved throughout all of your traumatic experiences your whole life that led you to be the person you are today I know multiple people that have done it because of an addiction to opiates and it's helped them it's helped them tremendously kicked them How can you argue with the data?
01:57:23.000I mean, when you hear that, I mean, opioid addiction is one of the hardest things for people to kick.
01:57:28.000I mean, people die trying to go cold turkey.
01:57:32.000Yeah, I think Ibogaine was described to me by a friend who was a former SEAL team operator because he went down to Veteran Solutions and he said it was eyes open, no hallucinations.
01:57:40.000Every time he would close his eyes, he would get a...
01:57:43.000High definition, movie quality view of an experience from his life.
01:57:58.000And then down there, they follow that up with DMT. One or two.
01:58:02.000And he described DMT as being strapped to the shockwave of an atom bomb.
01:58:07.000This is somebody who's obviously been through some intense experiences anyway.
01:58:10.000And all of that might just sound really crazy and extreme, but keep in mind, those same people are coming back to Stanford and Nolan is scanning their brains before and after and seeing incredible changes in the positive direction.
01:58:22.000I think for most people, the psilocybin macrodose, two macrodoses seems to be the depression treatment.
01:58:29.000So this is 25 milligrams of psilocybin.
01:58:32.000I think it translates to about 2.5 to 5 grams of mushrooms, is that about right?
01:58:39.000And what's interesting is the microdosing, because now there's the comparison of daily one milligram, aka microdosing, versus the two heroic doses.
01:58:49.000The microdosing has not shown impressive results for treating depression.
02:00:41.000Robyn Cardhart-Harris again describes it as one of the more quote-unquote honest psychedelics.
02:00:46.000Like you can't really decide what's going to come up.
02:00:49.000And a key thing he mentioned is that people need – this is – you may find interesting.
02:00:53.000I'd love to know if you believe this for your own experience as well.
02:01:07.000Yeah, I would imagine that's the case because you're just distracted by visuals and you could concentrate on that instead of just...
02:01:16.000Terence McKenna used to always say silent darkness is the most important aspect to a real trip where you're learning and you're going in with the intention to interface with this divine consciousness and learn something.
02:01:37.000Of all the topics that you could cover, you'd think, oh, you know, water is very benign, right?
02:01:41.000The prescriptive that comes out of the data, if you want to keep your cognitive and physical function best, it's an average, not every hour, an average of eight ounces for every hour Up to 10 hours after you're awake.
02:01:52.000So that's 80 ounces during the daytime.
02:02:25.000And every free hydrogen water, structured water, and it's bananas.
02:02:31.000And so the key thing is there's the Galpin equation, which is your body weight in pounds divided by 30 equals the number of ounces of water to drink for every 15 minutes you train.
02:02:40.000Like Galpin's figured out that can improve performance.
02:02:42.000Like there's all this, like water gets super geeky and I love it.
02:02:45.000One thing before I forget, the Robin Carter Harris, he said, eye mask, And he said the power, I was so surprised.
02:02:53.000This is like a hardcore researcher tells me the most important variables are the dose.
02:03:00.000So set and setting, obviously, but the eye mask and music.
02:03:05.000He's like, when people don't have music, somehow the music and that the music during a psilocybin journey Have a kind of a build and then have a kind of more emotional soft tone in the kind of taper of the final hours or two.
02:03:19.000He said that he thinks that that's a very important component to guiding the introspection.
02:03:24.000And for me as a biomedical researcher at a school of medicine, and he's at a school of medicine dude, to hear this conversation, like, I don't know whether or not to laugh or cry because These are the kinds of conversations that A, would cause you to lose your job for legal reasons 10 years ago,
02:03:40.000or people would just say they've lost their minds.
02:04:31.000Stance in why I love your podcast, why I pay attention to podcasts in addition to scientific journals is that if you look at, let's say, let's look at like this really niche, crazy field of bodybuilding.
02:04:41.000Like how many people wanna look like Doreen Yates?
02:04:43.000How many people wanna look Arnold Schwarzenegger, female body?
02:04:48.000And yet that niche community understood hormone augmentation at the extremes.
02:04:52.000And now we understand hormone augmentation at a healthy dosages.
02:04:59.000In men and women has tremendous longevity health span effects, mental and physical.
02:05:04.000And so there's value in these early niche communities, you know, psychedelics or in bodybuilding or martial arts or in yoga communities or in breath work.
02:05:15.000It's just that we see these extremes of like a Wim Hof or a, you know, or somebody who's doing deliberate heat exposure and cold exposure.
02:05:22.000And the question for a really good scientist should be, is there value there?
02:05:26.000What can we extract that the general population could benefit from at a more subtle level?
02:05:45.000So I think that an open-mindedness is really what's needed in biomedical research and public health.
02:05:51.000And I think, I can't speak for you obviously, but I get very frustrated as I think you do and other people do when people immediately just shut the door like, oh, that's just like crazy bro science biohacking.
02:06:02.000Actually, there's a different name for it.
02:06:07.000It's called paying attention to things that clearly have big effects and that at lower dosages or done in a particular way might actually have tremendously positive effects.
02:06:16.000And the best example I can point to would be physical training, resistance training, but also If you jogged in the 1950s, I'll never forget that scene in Mad Men where the woman's out for a jog and all the housewives are like, oh, what is she doing?
02:07:10.000And also, if you're getting advice, particularly advice about physical health, about metabolic health or about mental health or about the possible – the actual benefits, whatever they may be.
02:07:24.000And it's very – It's not just dose-dependent when we're talking about psychedelics.
02:07:29.000It's dependent upon the psychology of the individual.
02:07:31.000It's dependent upon your life experiences, whether or not you have a tendency to schizophrenia.
02:07:47.000And yet, we also know that if young males, in particular, study out of Canada who Have a predisposition to psychosis, do very high THC cannabis.
02:08:18.000Like if you're talking to someone who's fat and they're talking to you about health, maybe that person is not really qualified to have this discussion.
02:08:28.000Maybe they haven't taken care of their own physical health.
02:08:30.000So they really shouldn't be distributing information.
02:08:32.000If you knew something that could radically change the way your body responded to diseases, the kind of energy levels that you would have, your mental health, but yet you were ignoring it for some strange reason, well that person has a giant hole in their life game, right?
02:08:47.000And there's a lot of people out there distributing health advice that have a giant fucking hole in their health game.
02:08:55.000Like Bill Gates is a great example of that.
02:08:57.000He's got this big fat belly and he's telling people they have to get vaccinated.
02:09:00.000Like this kind of binary thinking, this kind of ridiculous way of looking at the world through only pharmacological interventions, through only medicine, through only this, through only that.
02:09:13.000There's so many different things that you have to do to be healthy and it's too much work.
02:09:19.000So they're not going to weight train enough.
02:09:21.000They're not going to eat the proper foods.
02:09:23.000They're not going to supplement their hormones.
02:09:25.000They're not going to do blood work on a regular basis and have someone who is a qualified physician who goes over that blood work with them and gives them a comprehensive understanding of what they need to do or not need to do.
02:09:51.000So when you see someone who's distributing advice and they clearly aren't paying attention to everything that we know today, well, they're not on the cusp.
02:10:27.000Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I did an episode on hair recently, and it was like the guy who did a hair transplant for the first time, his name escapes me for the moment.
02:10:34.000You know, he figured out how to make his practice popular.
02:10:37.000He worked on politicians and celebrities, and word spread quickly.
02:10:40.000And, you know, he was the one who was the mind behind that brand Clinique.
02:10:45.000He said, we should call it something clinical, so it sounds like medicine.
02:11:00.000Okay, so this is a GLP-1, glucagon-like peptide.
02:11:05.000The story of that, since you like animals and the natural world, a guy down in South America, It was looking at Gila monsters, those really scary things.
02:11:13.000And he realized they don't have to eat very often.
02:11:16.000I wonder if they're hungry all the time or not.
02:11:18.000Turns out it takes their blood, isolates a peptide, which turns out to be GLP-1, puts it into other animals and realizes it suppresses appetite.
02:12:50.000Type 2 diabetes, people are taking it, obesity, people are taking it, people crave food less.
02:12:55.000And somehow, and I don't know how to explain these data, Atiyah would know far more about this than I would, is somehow it's also allowing people to lose weight even though they're eating similar amounts.
02:13:06.000And so it's probably impacting metabolic pathways.
02:13:09.000It's not without its side effects, but getting, I think it's called a Zempick is the brand name.
02:13:14.000That's going to be like Adderall soon.
02:13:51.000Nutrition, supplementation, and then prescription drugs.
02:13:53.000I have a question for you about the semaglutide stuff because one of the things that we've discovered when we started going into it and talking about it on the podcast was that 34% of the weight loss was muscle mass, bone mass, and connective tissue.
02:14:09.000My thought was, was that because they were losing weight?
02:14:13.000Because if you just get someone to lose weight, if someone just stops eating food and just starts like really kind of starving themselves, they are 100% going to lose bone mass, they're going to lose muscle mass, and they'll probably lose some connective tissue mass too.
02:14:31.000Is there anything that's been done where they've examined people who have done weight training and done resistance training while they're taking semaglutide and does that mitigate the effect of that stuff?
02:14:51.000I mean, you know, doing human research is so tedious and expensive.
02:14:56.000You'd have to have people, you could do it.
02:14:59.000You could, you know, and, but you know, if you had 50 subjects in each group doing weight training and are they doing sets to, how hard are they, it's hard.
02:15:15.000One thing that's interesting is that when you trigger the hypothalamus with GLP-1, the hypothalamus sends out signals to multiple tissues, if not all the tissues of the body.
02:15:23.000So it doesn't just send signals to the adipose tissue saying, oh, you know, lose body fat.
02:15:28.000It's going to also signal to the musculature.
02:15:31.000And Lane and I get into some really deep dives on this kind of thing.
02:15:35.000Years ago, there's a study of what's called NEAT, non-exercise-induced thermogenesis.
02:15:39.000If you look at people that move around a lot, bounce their knee, kind of moving around, those people like very staccato with their movements, they can burn up to 1,800 calories more per day than a person that sits very still.
02:16:07.000And so then, you know, for instance, in the treatment of anorexia, the most deadly, by the way, of the psychiatric illnesses, most many anorexics die and they have low muscle mass.
02:16:16.000This is where I'm going with this because it relates to the semaglutide thing.
02:16:19.000They are often in their treatment forbidden from doing these kinds of fidgeting things because they're constantly trying to lose weight all the time.
02:16:26.000Anorexics are very aware of the caloric content of food.
02:16:29.000They have a near precision calculator in their head of the caloric content in foods.
02:16:34.000They can look at a hamburger and they can tell you how many fats, carbohydrates, and proteins are in there.
02:17:01.000The soleus muscle, the wider muscle of the calf, for those that don't know that, there's a guy down there who's running a human physiology laboratory.
02:17:07.000And he's like, you know, insulin insensitivity is a real problem, type two diabetes.
02:17:12.000The soleus muscle is 1% of our total musculature.
02:17:17.000He's like, what if when people are sitting during the day, because everyone's sitting, they just bounced one, you know, did what he called a soleus pushup, which is kind of, it's a one-legged seated calf raise, right?
02:17:27.000And they're just bouncing their heel like this, like I used to do in class.
02:17:30.000What turns out the soleus is an unusual muscle because it's very small percentage of our total musculature, but its energy utilization is enormously high.
02:17:39.000Well, when people just bounce their heel, Their insulin sensitivity improves, their resting glucose improves, and all they're doing is moving a bit more, but they are moving their soleus.
02:17:51.000It's likely that they're mimicking walking enough during the day that they're getting these positive effects.
02:17:58.000Now, I'm not encouraging people to just do this.
02:18:00.000And when I put some of this out on social media, you know, The gym jockeys, who I'm friends with, they were like, dude, come on, don't get people thinking this is exercise.
02:18:10.000I'm not saying that people should just do this.
02:18:12.000But these micro-movements that we do add up a lot during the day.
02:18:16.000Well, there's nothing wrong with facts.
02:18:19.000You're not saying this is all you need to do.
02:18:22.000If you were doing that, that would be an issue.
02:18:25.000I try and avoid the words only as much as I can in life, unless it's appropriate.
02:18:30.000So you asked about loss of musculature.
02:18:33.000When we are losing weight or when we have high levels of GLP-1, signals are actually sent to the musculature to become catabolic.
02:18:42.000Like the body wants to conserve its most precious resource, which is muscle and fat.
02:18:48.000And so GLP-1 very likely, based on my knowledge of the output of the hypothalamus, the animal studies tell us that it's signaling to the most metabolically expensive tissue of the body, To conserve itself or to catabolize itself.
02:19:03.000So, you know, fat is one of the harder reserves to lose for that reason, but losing muscle is bad, and I guess the short and sweet of this is anyone trying to lose weight should be doing resistance exercise, especially if they're in a caloric deficit.
02:19:17.000People take semaglutide but don't resistance train risk losing muscle as well as fat, doctors warn.
02:19:24.000Here's why it's important to have a healthy balance of the two.
02:19:27.000I found a couple recent articles that say some doctors are telling people with this, you have to weight train or you're going to lose muscle.
02:20:00.000There have been a few studies of muscle loss of semaglutide so far, but Japanese researchers reported that people lost half a kilo of muscle after three months on the drug.
02:20:27.000It's a common problem with interventions to lose fat, but yes, that is a common problem with interventions to lose fat.
02:20:32.000It makes it imperative to also prescribe resistance training to prevent muscle loss, but my concern is that semaglutide is seen as a magic bullet by some people and isn't always combined with exercise.
02:20:46.000You know, there's so many confusions in exercise science and weight loss that I've learned about recently from Lane that just make me – like, I'm baffled.
02:20:54.000So, for instance, you hear that if you eat fewer carbohydrates, you burn more fat, right?
02:20:58.000Okay, so it seems like a simple statement.
02:21:00.000So people go, yeah, I'm going to have a low-carb diet.
02:21:03.000But when you say fat, what they're talking about is not necessarily body fat.
02:21:07.000Like when people mistake body fat from dietary fat, this is how like kindergarten or nursery school or illiterate we are about our own health because people, so it is true that if you, Lane has been educating me on this, if you reduce your carbohydrate intake,
02:21:23.000yes, you'll burn a greater percentage of your calories from fat.
02:21:27.000But if you're eating a lot of fat, you're going to burn a greater percentage of it from those fat calories that you're eating.
02:21:32.000It doesn't necessarily mean you're losing fat stores.
02:21:34.000All that matters in the end is that calories in and calories out balance.
02:21:37.000What helps people with, you know, like particularly things like the carnivore diet or something like that, what helps them is with satiety.
02:21:46.000Like there's something about carbohydrates.
02:22:26.000We are basically amino acid foraging machines.
02:22:29.000Fatty acids, because fats are good for us too.
02:22:33.000That's my opinion, not in excess, but they're good for us, and sugar.
02:22:37.000And when you get enough steak, you're getting enough amino acids and fatty acids, and that signal is sent to your brain and a pathway shuts down that says, I need more.
02:22:47.000The moment you throw in a cookie after that steak, all of a sudden your appetite goes, and it's not blood sugar.
02:22:55.000It's those neurons in your gut going, oh, there's sugar coming into my system.
02:22:58.000Get more of that because it's an evolutionary conserved system designed to get you more resources.
02:23:03.000So this is why if you look at your gut brain access as yes, there's a microbiome and that's important too.
02:23:09.000But if you think about it as it's sensing things independent of taste, it's actually looking for specific nutrients.
02:23:15.000Then I think if people forage most for high quality protein, And high quality fats, it's kind of obvious that that's the best way to build the basis of your diet.
02:23:25.000And then carbohydrates on a kind of as needed basis, right?
02:23:29.000If you're doing a lot of weight training, depleting glycogen, et cetera.
02:23:31.000So that's where I think there's a place for lower zero carbohydrate diets.
02:23:34.000I tried carnivore with the fruit and honey and all that, and I just could gorge myself and gorge myself.
02:24:00.000And so I asked Paul Saladino, I said, I want to bring in some of my rice and oatmeal here because I'm suffering in the gym and that's my...
02:26:29.000Yeah, I think the nutrition, you know, it's clear, again, I'm citing him a lot because, frankly, he's like an encyclopedia for this stuff, and he can call up meta-analysis like nobody's business.
02:26:38.000You know, Lane's Made it very clear by pointing out the data that carbohydrates aren't going to disrupt your ability to burn fat, right?
02:26:50.000Lane is very specific about that, and I think he's absolutely right.
02:26:53.000You know, there's so many people that have these ideas that if you eat carnivore, you burn fat because of, you eat less calories.
02:27:01.000You get satisfied quicker, you eat less calories.
02:27:04.000Well, I have one idea that I'm hoping someone will test, which is when you're on a low carbohydrate diet or you're doing intermittent fasting, one thing that's very clear is that your adrenaline and noradrenaline, epinephrine levels are higher.
02:27:16.000And one of the things that you see is that people are more alert and when they're more alert, they move more.
02:27:20.000And that brings us back to NEAT, this non-exercise-induced thermogenesis.
02:27:23.000As you said, you eat a big bowl of pasta and it tends to make you feel kind of sedentary.
02:27:27.000Whereas when you just eat meat, you can go, go, go.
02:27:30.000I ran into Jordan Peterson not that long ago.
02:27:44.000So I don't think he has to replenish glycogen the same way many people do.
02:27:47.000But I think for people who are doing mostly cardiovascular exercise, some resistance training, I think he does some.
02:27:52.000The carnivore thing may work very well.
02:27:55.000But I think that also just being a mobile moving person and, you know, this thing about meat was discovered because they noted that people that were very thin tend to move a lot.
02:28:52.000I know a number of police officers and firefighters are doing that now because a lot of their job, especially police officers, is sedentary and then it's go, go, go.
02:29:03.000There's a study on intermittent fasting that was done by Sachin Panda's lab out of the Salk on firefighters that, because their schedules are crazy and that being a night owl and then swing shifts is just terrible, wreaks havoc on your metabolic system.
02:29:15.000I mean, it's just one of the quickest ways to make yourself ill, but we need shift workers, right?
02:29:20.000So the intermittent fasting and these Let's just call them elimination diets, where it's mainly carnivore, really help those communities stay fitter and more active.
02:29:31.000There's a guy on Instagram, I don't know his name, but I love his police posts.
02:31:04.000Some years ago, as David Sinclair came on this podcast and...
02:31:08.000And discussed that his laboratories, a tenured professor of genetics, Harvard Medical School, and other laboratories are starting to explore, stimulating the NAD pathway as a tool for extending lifespan in mice.
02:31:21.000And that there were already some data from yeast.
02:31:25.000There are now some clinical trials in humans.
02:31:28.000You can't just take NAD, or you can, but it doesn't get into cells very easily.
02:31:33.000Here I'm painting with a broad brush, but there are basically two ways that you can tickle this pathway, increase NAD. One is to take NMN, right?
02:31:42.000Some people will try different B vitamins, but NMN, which the idea is that it gets into cells and is converted into NAD. Some people are more proponents of taking NR. And the end product is thought to be the same.
02:31:56.000However, there's a lot of controversy about whether or not NAD or NR are better.
02:32:00.000NR is what was initially sold under the brand name Elysium with a unbelievable cast of scientific advisors, Nobel Prize winners.
02:32:10.000There's a very East Coast oriented thing, but a colleague of mine right downstairs from me at Stanford School of Medicine who has a Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of RNA, Roger Kornberg.
02:32:18.000His daddy discovered RNA, Arthur Kornberg.
02:32:21.000There was literally an ad of him holding a true Niagen bottle like this, and it's like, okay, I started paying attention to this.
02:32:28.000NR and NMN are taking an oral form in capsules.
02:32:31.000Some people are giving NAD infusions out there.
02:32:34.000This is a more expensive boutique thing, but after David started talking about NMN, a lot of people, including myself, started experimenting with it.
02:32:43.000Now, just to take a step back, I know a lot of people out there Like, if there isn't a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, you know, random trial, then why would you ever take something?
02:32:55.000And then there are a lot of people, like David or me, or a lot of people out there who think, well, if there are some mouse data or something safe, why wouldn't I try, right?
02:33:03.000Because when it comes to longevity, nobody wants to be in the control group, right?
02:33:08.000So this is a highly contentious field.
02:33:11.000But then what's happened is, So you can take NMN as a sublignal powder.
02:33:16.000Which seems to be more effective, NMN or NR? Okay, there are people who will argue NR. Are there people that take both?
02:34:12.000They're studying something similar to NMN. It's a slight variation on NMN. And it's an experimental drug.
02:34:21.000And the way the FDA works is if something is being explored as an experimental potential prescription drug or pharmaceutical compound, it cannot be sold as a supplement.
02:34:31.000So it's a question of what went in first.
02:34:33.000Now, this happened a few years ago for something called NAC, N-acetylcysteine.
02:34:38.000And NAC is still available despite it initially getting banned.
02:34:41.000And I'll tell you how it was rescued from that.
02:34:43.000So it turns out that Metro International Biotech is a company that It has a pretty impressive advisory board, Li Wei Sai from MIT, who I know, Alzheimer's researcher, some other folks.
02:34:54.000David Sinclair is part of the company.
02:34:56.000It's either his company or he's certainly on the head of the advisory board or on the advisory board.
02:35:02.000So there are a lot of people that are a bit inflamed, if you will, because this thing was popularized through the discussion of NMN and its potential virtues.
02:35:12.000And then now the FDA sent out a ruling early this year that supplement companies cannot sell it.
02:35:17.000Many supplement companies responded to that and said, okay, we won't sell it.
02:35:21.000Other companies, such as Renew by Science, we'll see what happens after this podcast, have continued to sell it.
02:35:26.000If you go on there this morning, you could buy NMN. So the FDA... I want to buy some before this podcast gets to air.
02:35:36.000Yeah, so the bags of it are the best way to go because you can buy it in pretty high volume and the bags are canisters.
02:35:42.000And I personally take, because I'll tell you the results that I experienced, which I really liked, I take about two grams per morning under my tongue.
02:35:51.000Definite increase in subjective feeling of increase in energy.
02:35:54.000And you believe that sublingual is the way to go as opposed to taking it in oral form and pills?
02:35:59.000And that's because Atiyah, who, again, Peter, forgive me if I'm misspeaking here, but Atiyah was like, there's no way that's going to get into your cells, taking his capsules.
02:36:47.000Yeah, so people are upset because they feel like they were turned on to this stuff and then it's now...
02:36:53.000So this could soon be a prescription drug.
02:36:56.000Now, keep in mind that the resveratrol thing was similar in the sense that There was a variation on resveratrol that was patented and sold to a company.
02:37:06.000And that sort of didn't pan out or is still a work in progress.
02:37:14.000It's not a problem because it was different enough.
02:37:15.000So the FDA, We decided to let NAC stay on the market because many, many people wrote letters to the FDA saying, this is ridiculous, this is of value, and it was out as a supplement.
02:37:44.000So part of the reason I think it's healthy to have this conversation is to understand how this stuff happens.
02:37:51.000NMN could soon be a prescription drug that you can only get with a prescription.
02:37:55.000And then I think Metro International Biotech will likely hold the patent.
02:37:59.000If people are interested in certain compounds remaining on market, they should definitely write to the FDA. The FDA, as much as that's a mysterious big stone block kind of company, very opaque to us, I think they listen when things happen in large volume.
02:38:15.000And so I'm certainly going to write letters.
02:38:18.000And I think that keeping NMN on the market as a supplement would be wonderful for many people that want to take it.
02:38:24.000Now, the folks who are involved with NR companies are delighted because for them, this is, again, I'm not going to get into the debate of what's better NR, NMN, because I just don't have the expertise to parse that.
02:38:34.000There are other people that are better suited to do that.
02:38:36.000But the people that work on NR are thinking, like, this is great.
02:38:39.000Like, let this whole NMN thing pan out because it's a market competition.
02:40:08.000So I really like the sublingual NMN. There's some other talk about the FDA making testosterone something where you're going to have to go to your doctor once a month.
02:40:49.000Well, originally what they wanted to do with TRT, remember people were going in and getting their full 200 milligrams, because it's typically testosterone cipionate in this country, 200 milligrams per mil, which is one syringe full if it's a one ml syringe, obviously.
02:41:03.000People were getting that once every two weeks.
02:41:36.000Every other day or every three days at a lower dose to spread it out because the testes normally kick out somewhere between 7 and 15 milligrams of testosterone per day.
02:41:45.000And you got two testes, most people anyway.
02:41:47.000So most men have two testes, obviously.
02:41:51.000What you're talking about is 200 mg on one day and then coming back two weeks later is crazy, but that was really serving the physicians well because you had to go in for a clinic visit, etc.
02:42:00.000But people would get these giant spikes and then the crash.
02:42:03.000And the conversion to estrogen from a massive dose all at once.
02:42:06.000A ridiculous dose that you should never take.
02:42:08.000And sometimes too big a dose can crush libido, it's a mess.
02:42:12.000So I think if people need to be able to self-administer.
02:42:17.000And all this ruling would do, frankly, is send people into gray market routes.
02:42:30.000Because I think the number of people that can afford to go to a physician who's really good, who's gonna dose it correctly, Is so infinitesimally small.
02:42:37.000And, you know, testosterone is not particularly expensive, but I'm very sensitive to the idea that, you know, a lot of the things that hold great health benefits are just outside the financial reach of a lot of people.
02:42:48.000Well, it will become outside the financial reach if you're making people have a doctor's appointment once a month.
02:43:13.000If someone tells me who to talk to or petition, you know, as you can tell, I'm getting more vocal about stuff.
02:43:17.000I also feel safer nowadays to talk about things than I did a few years ago.
02:43:21.000Because things are becoming more commonplace, mostly because I have colleagues who contact me and say, like, hey, how do I get on testosterone?
02:43:43.000You know, and beautiful thing about a podcast is people who are healthy and happy will tell you this is what I do and this is what you can do and this is the pros.
02:44:10.000But, you know, I think he's definitely in the camp of people in science who are thinking, you know, what's possible, taking some significant steps based on mouse work.
02:44:21.000And I do want to be fair to people that do that, right?
02:44:28.000There are many people out in the world that are interested in things they can do for their health, and they know that if they're waiting for the random controlled trial and huge numbers of subjects, and especially for people with diseases in their family or that have diseases, they're not interested in waiting.
02:44:44.000They don't want to do anything sketchy or dangerous, but they're not interested in waiting.
02:44:47.000So I think David's, you know, he's really driving certain things hard.
02:44:52.000And some people agree with him, some people don't.
02:46:23.000You know, because I do realize that, you know, not everybody has, you know, four and a half hours or two hours to listen to all the details with a notebook.