In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Joe and his guest, Dr. Carl Huberman, discuss the differences between dog breeds and wolves in terms of genetics. They discuss the genetics of dog breeds, and how they differ from each other. They also talk about how dogs can be bred to be more like wolves, and why dogs with a short snout tend to have shorter snouts than dogs with longer snouts. And they talk about why dogs that have a longer snout are more likely to have larger bodies. Joe and Carl discuss all of this and much more on this week's episode of The J.R.O.P.E.D. Podcast by day, and by night, all day! All day all day, by night. Joe & Carl talk about all things dog breeding, genetics, and the difference between wolf and mastiff breeds. This episode was brought to you by the National Museum of American Mammal Biology, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Stanford University, where Dr. Huberman is a professor of genetics and animal behavior and genetics research. You can get a copy of the book, "Wolves and Mastiffs: The Evolution of a Dog Family" for free! by clicking here. If you like the show, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and tell us what you think of the podcast! if you're a dog lover and/or cat lover, and we'll send you a review, too! Thank you for listening to the show and sharing it on your thoughts on the pod! and a review of the show! You're awesome! :) Cheers, Joe, Sarah, Sarah and Sarah, Caitie, and Sarah! <3 - The Joe Rogans Podcast by Night Podcast by Day by Night podcast by Night, All Day All Day, by Night by Night all Day by Day, By Night, by Norma by Night! - Joe, Caitlyn McElroy "The J.J. Pod by Night" by Caitie & Sarah, by Joe, by Nicky, All Day and Night, all Day, and All Day by Nando Podcast, by Grace, Thank You, Sarah ( ) , and Sarah's Day, , by Night All Day ( ) by Night & All Day By Night ( ) - By Night by Day ( )
00:00:16.000So what were you just saying about dog breeds that, like, we're talking about Carl, like the little bulldog breeds have more mastiff than wolf?
00:00:29.000Yeah, they all originate from wolves, but then dog selection has been twofold, mainly for phenotype, like morphology, the shape, we call it, and then temperament.
00:00:41.000So there's this chart, it might be a little hard to find online, about the dosing of wolf versus mastiff genetics, essentially.
00:00:50.000And there's a bunch of other things woven into dog genetics.
00:00:52.000First of all, cool point, dogs are among, I don't know if they are the most, maybe whales are the most, but they are among the greatest variation in body size within a given species.
00:02:51.000I was going to meet with her about something.
00:02:53.000She handles a lot of undergraduate education at Stanford.
00:02:55.000And I see this chart and the chart essentially shows the dosing of kind of the original wolf line genes versus more Mastiff heavy genetic background.
00:03:04.000And there are a lot of breeds on this chart, but essentially, Shows up in the following way.
00:03:09.000The dogs that are more sight and scent, right, and with longer snouts— Like a shepherd.
00:03:17.000Like a shepherd, have more dosing of the wolf genes still in them.
00:03:21.000Then you get to the shorter snout, kind of snub-nosed like the French bulldog, the English bulldog.
00:04:07.000Well, the idea was the short snout gives them a good lever for holding on to things, right?
00:04:12.000And the mastiff genes lead to, and we know this for sure, both the droopiness of the face, it also relates to less presence of pain receptors in the front of the body.
00:04:22.000Okay, so if you've ever had a bulldog, but you know their feet can be really sensitive, but their face, you can hold onto those jowls.
00:04:27.000My bulldog, Costello, would go picking up stuff at the beach and he'd occasionally get a fish hook in his mouth and it looks super painful.
00:04:33.000And he's like, oh, you know, so not very many pain sensors in the face.
00:04:36.000They have a disruption or mutation in the gene that controls the elasticity of skin.
00:04:57.000And so what were dogs being selected for?
00:05:00.000Well, unless you're showing dogs, dogs were selected for the kind of work they were capable of doing.
00:05:04.000Like sheepdogs are great herders, this kind of thing.
00:05:06.000But when people essentially designed bred up and crossbred to get the English Bulldog or the Old English Bulldog, Which doesn't have as much of an underwrite.
00:05:29.000And they were originally used for bull baiting, for grabbing onto the nose of the bull, getting the bull super aggressive, and then being able to let go and get called off and coming back to their protector.
00:05:40.000And then basically then it was to rile up the bull, right, for bullfighting.
00:05:44.000So you can still find some of this stuff online.
00:05:47.000You can find some old descriptions, in some cases, even some old videos, but of course now bull baiting with dogs is not allowed, right?
00:05:54.000Dog fighting, everybody looks down on.
00:05:56.000But then if you start asking about the toy breeds, what were the toy breeds, quote unquote, designed for or bred for?
00:06:02.000They were basically designed to sit next to you.
00:06:04.000Some of them will seek out, you know, like the terrier breeds will find vermin.
00:06:23.000And the amazing thing is that when you start looking at the different breeds, it was basically human selecting on the basis of mostly behavior and phenotype shape and thinking, oh, like I want a smaller dog that will just sit near me or I want a small dog that will like kill rats and sit near me.
00:06:37.000No, I want a big dog that's going to guard.
00:06:39.000So you start breeding for pain tolerance.
00:06:41.000I start breeding for loyalty and aggression.
00:06:43.000And a guy that I think was on your podcast a long time ago, Sam Sheridan.
00:06:49.000In A Fighter's Heart, there's a great chapter where he talks about, I think it's dog fighting in the Philippines.
00:06:54.000And he talks about how brutal that sport is, which indeed it is.
00:06:57.000But he talks about the love between the owner and the dog.
00:07:02.000Can predict, and of course the dog and the owner, it's reciprocal, one presumes, that the strength of that relationship predicts how hard the dog will fight for the owner.
00:07:12.000And he uses this as kind of a parallel construction for why, and you tell me if this is true or not, Many of the fatalities in boxing were the consequence of, sure, 15 round as opposed to 12 round fights, but also when the corner man or the coach was the parent.
00:07:27.000And so it gets into this very complicated psychology.
00:07:30.000I actually think that's a really terrific book because I think it speaks to a lot of really interesting aspects of bonding between humans, bonding in that case between animals and humans.
00:07:41.000Of course, dog fighting I don't know if there are many things that people look down upon as much as they look down upon dog fighting, but he speaks to the relationship between the dog and the owner as a loving one, which was super surprising to me.
00:07:54.000Anyway, that's a bit of a tangent, but I don't know, maybe it's possible to find that chart.
00:07:59.000I don't want to send you on a ridiculous expedition, but if you just say, so jeans, that's a simple one.
00:08:29.000But it's just, we get a rough understanding of it all.
00:08:31.000Yeah, so now when I see like, okay, like a collie, like I see a collie down there, I think long snouts are probably has a better nose than a mastiff breed.
00:08:40.000You can ask an owner, how good is their vision?
00:08:42.000Are they a sight hound or a scent hound?
00:09:02.000Yeah, the reason why they have those long floppy ears is as they're running, their ears are wafting up smell and it gives them a better sense of the chase.
00:09:12.000I read this incredible description of why dog scent and sense of smell is so much better than ours.
00:09:20.000There's a guy named Noam Sobel, who's been on my podcast, he's over in Israel, who claims that human olfaction is just as good as dog olfaction.
00:09:47.000They're getting something like 10 or 20x the exposure to the scent in the olfactory bulb.
00:09:53.000And are able to assess both directionality, they can do right nostril, left nostril, they can sense odor plumes to steer in one direction or another.
00:10:01.000But Noam has done these crazy experiments when he was back at Berkeley, where he had people's hands mitted, eyes covered, so they can't sense touch, they can't see, everything's covered, and they can follow a scent of chocolate We're good to go.
00:10:34.000If you say kind of Berkeley chocolate tracking Sobel or something like that, it should come up.
00:10:40.000So he would do these aerial views of these people tracking these scents on the ground.
00:10:44.000And it turns out people are really good at this.
00:11:05.000So if you go to images, damn it, and you just say Berkeley, just say, there it is.
00:11:13.000Right, so they compare the tracking of a scent hound, of a bloodhound, to human tracking of a scent buried, in the case of the bloodhound, it wasn't buried.
00:11:23.000So that person, what do they have, a mask on?
00:11:24.000Yeah, they got a mask on, their hands are covered with thick gloves, they can only use, the only thing exposed are their nostrils.
00:11:31.000But that line, that yellow line is not a line with a bunch of chocolate on it.
00:12:06.000In fact, our friend, who, by the way, wanted me to say hello, Rick Rubin, turned to a good friend of mine who's the chair of neurosurgery of a major medical school department, not Stanford, I promise, and said, what percentage of the things in medical textbooks, okay, this is Rick asking this chair of neurosurgery,
00:12:23.000What percentage of things that you find in medical textbooks, basic and advanced, do you think are false based on your understanding of what we actually know now compared to when the textbooks were written?
00:12:55.00050% in currently used medical textbooks, meaning that the literature has been updated with new understanding, new scientific papers, but it has not yet been incorporated into the medical education.
00:13:05.000Let me say something, because I know that bears have insane senses of smell that are many times stronger than a bloodhound's and famously can smell people from 100, 200 yards away.
00:13:23.000There's got to be levels to it, and I just can't imagine that a bloodhound doesn't have a better sense of smell than a person.
00:13:32.000Right, so they absolutely have a better sense of smell.
00:13:35.000Under the definition that they use it, they use the same number of receptors differently.
00:13:42.000In other words, the resolution of your vision and a mouse's vision is dramatically different.
00:13:48.000The resolution of your vision Is very sharp at the fovea towards the center of your eye.
00:13:52.000And actually towards the periphery, anyone can just do this.
00:13:54.000You wiggle your fingers out here in the periphery and you can't see any detail, right?
00:13:57.000As you move that forward, you can see detail, okay?
00:13:59.000So, and that's because the density of pixels, so to speak, in the retina is much, much higher near the fovea, near the center than it is at the periphery.
00:14:07.000So what he's saying, what Noam Sobel's laboratory has found and others have found is that the number of pixels, the potential for olfactory resolution in humans and in bloodhounds is essentially the same.
00:14:21.000This is his argument, but the bloodhounds sniff much more.
00:14:24.000So it's the equivalent of having their eyes open much more, right?
00:14:36.000And in the case of the bear, for instance, I don't know how many olfactory receptors they have relative to a human or a bloodhound, but that the bear is likely spending a lot more time and can pull more air perhaps, I don't know, but is using the mechanical aspects of the olfactory system differently.
00:14:55.000In fact, and here's, now I'm recalling the experiment that led to this conclusion that humans have exceptional olfaction.
00:15:00.000Which is that there's a particular compound that when introduced to a swimming pool, people can detect a difference in the smell of the water at a dilution that is outrageously small.
00:15:14.000Forgive me because I'm not remembering the name of the chemical, but he said you can essentially add a drop of this to a swimming pool and then people can smell the difference between the water.
00:15:22.000And so his argument is not that humans are walking around sensing all these smells consciously as well as a bloodhound or as well as a bear.
00:15:30.000But that we have a tremendous capacity for olfaction that the chocolate tracking experiment It exemplifies, but it requires some removal of our most dominant sense, vision, and hearing our second most dominant sense.
00:15:45.000And in that case, tactile orientation as well.
00:15:49.000And so the idea is that we have an amazing olfactory apparatus.
00:15:53.000In fact, he makes the argument, and there's evidence for the fact that as soon as people meet, and they've done these beautiful experiments, people meet, they shake hands, and the next thing they do, they tend to, within about a minute, they wipe the scent of the other person on their face, typically.
00:16:43.000He also has this idea that I think is starting to take hold in real data, that we are constantly sensing our own odor plumes, that we, you know, that we smell ourselves a lot of times per day.
00:17:00.000People check their sniff, and it's an indication of hormone status, immune status.
00:17:05.000When you have babies or puppies, like, you know, you're looking at like, oh, is it good poop or a bad poop?
00:17:09.000You know, you're also paying people, some people will smell the poop.
00:17:12.000I'm not a proponent of that, but we're constantly sensing the scent and taste of, for instance, our partner's saliva.
00:17:20.000Actually, an ex-girlfriend of mine wrote to me recently.
00:17:22.000I don't know what this question represented, but she said, do you think that when you become unattracted to somebody, the taste of their mouth becomes bad to you or the other way around?
00:17:35.000I guess she might have been dating somebody and maybe had fallen out of favor and she was kind of not attracted and she was sort of noting that their mouth no longer, it tasted kind of aversive now as opposed to before.
00:18:29.000That's something called the cribriform plate.
00:18:32.000The cribriform plate is a bunch of Swiss cheese-like thin bone, and the olfactory neurons, which basically sit right behind the back of your nostrils, they send axons, their little wire-like connections, back into the brain.
00:18:44.000And when somebody gets hit hard on the head, that cribriform plate shears it, and that's why people become anastomic.
00:18:54.000Now, what's amazing about the olfactory neurons Is that they are among the very few neurons in the human and other mammalian nervous system that regenerates throughout the lifespan.
00:19:04.000So there's a little area of your hippocampus where there's some neurons that everyone makes a big deal of that frankly don't do a lot to regenerate throughout the lifespan, so-called neurogenesis, new neurons.
00:19:14.000But the olfactory neurons, even though they're a central nervous system neuron, just like your retinal neuron or your cerebral cortex, they can regenerate throughout the entire lifespan.
00:19:38.000Some people are thinking that loss of smell may be a correlate, not the cause, but obviously, but a correlate of age-related cognitive decline, dementia, and Alzheimer's, things like that.
00:19:48.000There are a few things, actually, I think I recommended it to a couple of friends of ours.
00:19:52.000Now there's very little data on this, but I will say, and I'll catch heat for this, but these days I catch heat anyway, so I don't care.
00:19:58.000There are good data, in my opinion, small amount of data, but let's call it decent enough data to explore that alpha lipoic acid at 600 milligrams per day, During the time when you're starting to lose your smell might rescue some of that smell.
00:20:15.000So if someone's getting COVID and they start to lose their sense of smell?
00:20:20.000Or any viral infection where they are losing the sense of smell.
00:20:23.000What other viral infections cause a loss of sense of smell?
00:20:25.000Well, anything that clogs the sinuses, certainly, but there are influenza viruses that do this.
00:20:30.000Now, I know as we're saying this, that some people would say, in fact, Noam Sobel told me that he felt that the data about alpha lipoic acid were kind of on the weak side, but when people are losing their sense of smell and taste, it's really scary.
00:20:42.000I mean, it's one of those things where, you know, you kind of feel like so much of pleasure in life, unbeknownst to us is- Yeah, especially with food.
00:20:49.000Oh, I'll never forget when I got a viral infection and I took, and I lost my sense of smell.
00:20:54.000And I ate a handful of blueberries, which I love.
00:20:57.000And it just tasted like bags of water.
00:21:05.000And I did the smell training, which has also been shown to work.
00:21:08.000Because these olfactory neurons, this is amazing, their survival is activity dependent.
00:21:14.000They require electrical activity driven by sniffing and smelling.
00:21:19.000It is true that the behavioral tool of taking a lemon and really just like getting it close to that nostril and just really trying to get whatever little whiff of lemon you can and then taking you know your coffee and Getting that little whiff of coffee, whatever little remnants of smell that you can get in there has been shown to improve the survival and eventually the durability of not just the olfactory neurons,
00:21:40.000In other words, the behavioral training works.
00:21:42.000The alpha lipoic acid thing is debated.
00:21:45.000The thing about alpha lipoic acid is diabetics and people with blood sugar issues probably shouldn't take it.
00:21:49.000They can kind of reduce blood sugar a little bit.
00:21:51.000But when I had that happen, Lost my sense of smell.
00:21:55.000I was like, listen, I want my smell back.
00:21:57.000So I took 600 milligrams of alpha lipoic acid and I was doing the scent training.
00:22:01.000I was like sniffing lemon, sniffing coffee, sniffing Parmesan cheese, sniffing anything that was pungent that I could recognize.
00:22:07.000And my smell came back in a couple of days, but then again, I don't know because I didn't run the control experiment whether or not it would have come back anyway.
00:23:37.000So as somebody who had a laboratory with chemicals in it for a long time, now we run clinical trials on humans, so no more chemicals in my lab.
00:25:56.000It turns out that every two hours or so, the dominant breathing nostril switches.
00:26:05.000Now, that could be interesting or that could not be interesting, right?
00:26:07.000There are a lot of things in biology that happen, but like what is the meaning?
00:26:10.000Turns out it's a direct reflection of a shift in your so-called autonomic nervous system from parasympathetic dominant to sympathetic dominant, meaning from more relaxed to more alert.
00:26:21.000And this is happening periodically throughout the day, like a seesaw.
00:26:26.000So this whole thing with the yogis of, you know, breathe through one nostril or the other nostril.
00:26:30.000Look, the olfactory bulbs, there's a lot of crossing over of information at later stages and even some early stages once the information gets to the brain.
00:26:38.000So that whole thing is probably a little bit like weak sauce, but this idea that you're breathing easier through one nostril or the other is reflecting an underlying brain state and body state.
00:26:52.000And the last thing is you said, why would bears or bloodhounds have such better smell?
00:26:57.000Well, in the case of a bear, the size of the olfactory bulbs and the amount of brain real estate devoted to processing that information is much more.
00:27:57.000So what Noam is saying is not that humans have smell that is as good, but that when you push the conditions, you can reveal a heightened sense of smell that most people don't think humans have.
00:28:05.000Now, as I say this, there are a lot of people out there, and it's usually women, who are like, oh no, I can smell everything.
00:28:25.000They can smell when somebody's not feeling right or when they're not feeling right.
00:28:29.000But it's absolutely the case that we're constantly taking the chemicals off other people through shaking hands, through hugging, rubbing them on ourselves, analyzing our own smells unconsciously.
00:28:38.000I always say that I can smell bullshit.
00:29:05.000That's why, like, if somebody takes a stimulant, There's a thing that people do when they're full of shit where they're anticipating your response in a different way.
00:29:16.000Like when someone's telling the truth, like if you tell me the truth, you seem relaxed to my response.
00:29:22.000Like you're telling, even if it's something that you're not proud of, you're telling me the truth, this is the thing.
00:29:27.000When someone's lying, it's almost like they're waiting to see how you buy it.
00:30:28.000You don't want them to be full of shit.
00:30:30.000Yeah, and some of the best manipulators, certainly in my experience, are people that have really figured out the combination lock of the things that...
00:30:38.000That I have felt deprived of and they come in and those tend to be unique things like that you can't get out anywhere, you know, and boy, somebody said that to me recently, like there are certain categories of humans that I just, I can't be seduced by.
00:30:52.000I'm not talking about just sexual seduction.
00:30:56.000I'm saying it just can't be seduced by.
00:30:59.000And then there are some people that just are able to get past that force field.
00:31:03.000And so I consider myself pretty good at threat sensing, except in that domain, where like my threat sensing is like the equivalent of a stuffed animal.
00:31:11.000My friend Tony always says that erotic and psychotic are so close to each other that, you know, like, it crosses over back and forth.
00:31:20.000And I think there's something to that, too, that some of the craziest people are also some of the sexiest people for some weird reason.
00:31:28.000Like, you want to be with them even though you know they're dangerous, like they're crazy.
00:31:33.000Like, there's some weird thing going on there.
00:31:35.000Almost like you want wild kids, because wild kids could survive better.
00:31:42.000Yeah, I mean, I think that the – well, I'm listening to a really good book that a really smart person suggested to me called Five Types of People That Will Ruin Your Life.
00:31:51.000And I only wish I had read it years ago.
00:31:55.000And here's the main takeaway, that there are about 10% of people out there and it cuts across all the standard labels of like narcissists and borderline and all that.
00:32:05.000Like they include some of that, but they depart from that and they just focus on what, there's a guy who's a psychologist, it's written by a guy who's a psychologist, he's worked a lot on conflict resolution over the years, courtroom type stuff, et cetera.
00:32:18.000And he says, in this 10% of people, they are high conflict people.
00:32:28.000But within that category, it's pretty evenly divided, he claims, between women and men.
00:32:33.000And then there's a further division where about half of them play passive and victim, but are highly manipulative.
00:32:40.000They use other people to try and basically harm.
00:32:43.000And then the other 5% are very aggressive and abrasive.
00:32:47.000And so he has this great set of protocols, I love protocols, that are essentially like, don't move in with Marry or get engaged to or have a child with somebody in the first year.
00:33:01.000Just don't make that agreement in year one.
00:33:03.000As well as for any behavior that kind of cues those senses, gets your spidey senses up like you were describing, ask yourself, would 90% Or more of people do that behavior.
00:33:17.000And if it's a no, like you have to pause.
00:33:19.000In other words, what he's saying in this book is that most people are actually pretty healthy, but that most of the woes of the world are created by about 10% of people, which he calls these high conflict people, but they don't always come out high conflict, like screaming and yelling.
00:33:32.000They're often very tactical and manipulative and very vindictive.
00:34:02.000So we tend to call them narcissists or sociopaths or psycho, you know, but those labels, while very useful in the clinic, I think have been overused in the general public.
00:34:54.000And it's, and again, I think we are often, you mentioned that the relationship between erotic and manipulative and crazy, or just erotic and crazy.
00:35:04.000I think there's also that when we finally receive the sorts of, I don't know, love or affection, it's not always sex.
00:35:20.000A lot of it is paying attention to you.
00:35:22.000A lot of it is like listening to what you have to say or asking you questions about your thoughts and your feelings, which a lot of people are unaccustomed to.
00:35:31.000Because a lot of people just want to talk about themselves.
00:35:33.000So when someone wants to talk about you and really is asking questions about your feelings, that can kind of manipulate you in a weird way.
00:35:40.000Yeah, it almost feels like a parental type of care that we're probably wired to look for.
00:35:46.000I mean, I always marvel at this and also just kind of shake my head and go, why?
00:35:51.000But, you know, the circuitry in our brain that creates infant-child attachment Is the same circuitry that is repurposed for all other relationships in adulthood.
00:36:03.000It's not like you get your like, your childhood attachment stuff and then you go, okay, well, you know, you're like 15, 16, you're moving on in the world, you're hitting puberty, you're starting to date a bit, whatever.
00:36:12.000Now let's like work with a different set of Mechanics, a different set of algorithms.
00:36:18.000No, it's the same set of algorithms repurposed.
00:36:20.000We know this based on the studies of infant parent attachment and on the basis or infant caretaker and on the basis of studies of romantic love.
00:36:50.000You know, I've learned so much recently about just how it is that, you know, we can We lose our vision of other people, right?
00:37:05.000And I think this thing that we hear, like manipulation, it often sounds like, oh, it's really tactical, someone's rubbing their hands.
00:37:10.000I think the really tricky part about it is I do think that most people in the world are just doing their best to feel safe, to get their needs met.
00:37:17.000I think there are very few evil people.
00:37:21.000But in this sort of pattern of repurposing childhood attachment patterns, and then people bringing that forward into their adult attachment patterns, I think what ends up happening is that, you know, people, quote unquote, trying to get their needs met, oftentimes like the worst ones, sometimes it's called trauma bonding,
00:37:36.000but they kind of go lock and key, or somebody identifies somebody that's really healthy, and they're like, them.
00:37:41.000I'm going to latch on to them because they're healthy.
00:37:44.000And you say, well, the healthy person should be able to spot all the landmines.
00:37:48.000But if somebody is able to really tap into something you didn't have or something that just feels like oxygen, right?
00:37:54.000Goodness gracious, you could be the smartest, most Well-acclimated person with the best parents or whatever upbringing, which most people aren't, but some people do have that, and still fall kind of into this fog that is like,
00:38:10.000gosh, you wanna be with this person, but it doesn't feel good, that mishmash.
00:38:15.000And I think the thing I've learned Clearly, is that when you feel that trepidation, run, don't walk.
00:38:24.000The gray zone is actually the thing to just exit fast.
00:38:28.000Gray doesn't mean hover and check it out and run some experiments here.
00:38:38.000It's also, I think, there's some people that are very sheltered, and they've been well taken care of, and they're not accustomed to manipulative people, and they're not accustomed to dangerous people.
00:38:48.000I've seen that before, both with people choosing the wrong friends and people choosing the wrong partners.
00:38:55.000Yeah, that certainly hasn't been my pattern.
00:38:58.000Not that I had the hardest upbringing, but it was, I would say, easier than some, harder than others.
00:39:02.000But I always had great friends, great friendships, but my threat sensing wasn't always great in romantic relationships, for sure.
00:39:11.000I've also had some great relationships.
00:39:12.000I think what tends to happen Is that if we're very busy, we have this tendency to be easily manipulated by certain things that are unusual that we just that really feel like extra oxygen to us or just feel so nourishing.
00:39:26.000And because I think people always will often default to sex.
00:39:31.000Depending on who you are, like sex is either more or less readily available to you, right?
00:39:35.000Like, I think that for some people it's nurturing, like a certain form of nurturing.
00:39:39.000And then there's also this thing of we know how to survive certain things so they don't feel as dangerous.
00:39:44.000So people who've had like very, you know, Overbearing or complicated childhoods or abusive childhoods, sometimes they're set to perceive danger at way too high a threshold.
00:39:56.000So their perception of what's dangerous is like way too high.
00:40:01.000And so they walk into even still dangerous situations, but they don't think of them as dangerous.
00:40:05.000And they're like, oh, I can navigate this.
00:40:06.000They're good at navigating difficult people or they're good at navigating borderline people or something like that.
00:40:13.000I think it's also exciting, which is part of the problem.
00:40:18.000And if you have a boring life, and a life that doesn't have a lot of stimulation in it, and then you find someone, even if they're bad for you, but they're exciting, there's some conflict, some something.
00:40:30.000There's fights and breakups and then make-ups, which are exciting.
00:40:35.000And so then you get locked into this stimulation pattern, which is, or I've seen that multiple times with people.
00:40:42.000Do you think it's more of a problem with people that like excitement and adventure and are super curious, but like excitement and adventure?
00:40:50.000So I'm thinking comics, I'm thinking people who like high intensity sports, that they seek relationships that are higher intensity because, you know, I've received great advice from people like Rick, who've said, you know, your relationship should be a sanctuary.
00:41:08.000You know, and actually I don't pay a lot of attention to Instagram kind of little mottos and things, but someone sent me one that I was like, yes, that feels so true, which is that men eventually settle where they feel peace.
00:41:21.000Yeah, I think that's probably the healthiest way to do it.
00:41:25.000But I think people like, like I said, I think people like stimulation.
00:41:29.000And I don't think a lot of people are stimulated by their day-to-day existence.
00:41:35.000I think a lot of people are just like trudging along every day.
00:41:38.000And then when someone comes along that makes you excited in your life, you know, someone who's just a little wilder, a little crazier, maybe some lady's got a bunch of tattoos, like, look at her, you know?
00:41:49.000You know, people get excited by people that are a little bit dangerous.
00:41:52.000It's this idea that anything could happen.
00:42:18.000He's got a bunch of written shit all over his face.
00:42:21.000Yeah, I mean, they're the nicest people.
00:42:23.000The thing about, like, Jelly Roll and Post is, like, once you talk to them, once you're talking to them, you don't see the tattoos anymore.
00:43:45.000Yeah, we're a little bit more open-minded to decorations, but it is a thing, though, that you're taking a giant-ass chance by tattooing your hands.
00:43:54.000Well, a friend of mine who admittedly is a psychologist said, you know, tattoos are largely an expression of what you feel on the inside put to the outside.
00:44:34.000I mean, I used to post them on Instagram all the time, but then I thought I was encouraging people to get my face tattooed so that I'd put it up on my Instagram.
00:44:47.000Before I forget this, can I ask you this?
00:44:49.000The people that are into this smelling salt stuff, they're power lifters, and they take a big sniff of that stuff before they lift weights.
00:45:17.000We know that, for instance, memories that are associated with smell, like people will say, the smell of my grandmother's kitchen or somebody's hands, my grandfather's hands, those memories stick with us longer than anything.
00:45:28.000Because the olfactory bulb has a direct line to a couple of structures in the brain So we have an olfactory bulb, which is the main thing for smell.
00:45:36.000Then there's something called the accessory olfactory bulb.
00:45:39.000It sort of divides into primitive smells that are like aversive, get away quick.
00:45:43.000Those tend to go through a really fast line, through the old accessory olfactory bulb, takes us straight to the amygdala, to the piriform cortex that says, move your body and face and away from that.
00:45:52.000Like I didn't sit there and Right, right, right.
00:45:53.000On the smoking cell, it's like, boom, get away.
00:46:25.000The olfactory system has these two pathways.
00:46:28.000The olfactory bulb for kind of like, oh, Is this black rifle coffee?
00:46:32.000And then there's the smelling salt one that goes through the accessory olfactory bulb straight to the amygdala, which is associated with threat detection and other things, straight to the piriform cortex, and then to a motor circuit.
00:46:41.000Boom, turn the head the other way, get out, exhale, don't inhale more.
00:46:47.000So the thing about smell is that it's got these very hardwired components.
00:46:54.000And they're set up for either a petitive, like, hmm, let me explore more, sniffing more, as opposed to aversive behaviors, like, get me the hell away.
00:47:04.000And these brain areas are among the more ancient brain areas.
00:47:09.000Now, when I say ancient, people nowadays start picking apart it, like, well, it's not just limbic and cortex.
00:47:16.000But if you look at our brains and you look at the brains of, like, a turtle or even a snake, all the stuff we're talking about right here are all...
00:47:23.000They're not exactly the same, but they're all present.
00:47:25.000When you get to humans, what you really add is a lot of cerebral cortex for the thinking and association stuff, like, you know, I've been here before, so I'm a little bit less, you know, like looking around as much as I did last time, like things that, you know, context-dependent learning,
00:47:42.000context-dependent stuff, whereas all the highly reflexive stuff, It's going to be hardwired, circuitry you find in every animal, every person.
00:47:49.000And you need to divide things into three different responses in humans, okay?
00:48:02.000Now there's a matter of degrees, like you might see somebody you really like, you want to, I don't know, Joey Diaz or something, you know?
00:48:08.000You see him, you want to run over, see him, right?
00:48:11.000So there's an appetitive circuit moves you towards it.
00:48:13.000See something that's a little odd, you might pause, I don't know what that is, or something aversive, like something happens in the parking lot and you're like, I'm getting the hell out of here.
00:48:20.000So the brain, as complex as it is, needs to divide things into one of three different motor responses, forward, pause, or retreat.
00:48:27.000Okay, I was playing with Jamie's dog out there before.
00:48:29.000I was like, I couldn't get him to back up.
00:48:31.000That's what's kind of cool about the bulldog.
00:48:33.000You charge him and he just goes, I'm like, 20 times his size.
00:49:10.000Long, complicated, boring history as to why it's named two things.
00:49:13.000Noradrenaline, nor epinephrine, same molecule.
00:49:16.000So let's just call it adrenaline for sake of simplicity.
00:49:20.000Adrenaline is released from the adrenals in the body and it's released from a...
00:49:24.000There's an area in the brain called the locus coeruleus, which sends out a bunch of little wires, axons, to sprinkler the brain with adrenaline.
00:49:34.000So when you smell something aversive, it goes, inhale, ugh, okay, certain olfactory neurons, cue that to the accessory olfactory bulb, bam, straight to the amygdala.
00:49:43.000Amygdala sends a signal down to the adrenals atop the kidneys.
00:49:50.000Sends a, believe it or not, a signal up to locus coeruleus, it sprinklers the brain with adrenaline, and you just had within a couple hundred milliseconds, you just got a parallel adrenaline response in brain and body that allows you to do what more easily?
00:50:09.000In fact, I'm sure if you put that under the deepest sleeper's nose in the middle of the night, they're going to wake up like a gunshot went off.
00:50:17.000They used to give it to boxers when they got hurt in the corner.
00:50:20.000They'd give them smelling salts and wake them up.
00:50:22.000Yeah, because one of the best painkillers is adrenaline.
00:51:24.000The liver, you get hit and then there's this sharp pain and a delay and then Everything just shuts off.
00:51:33.000It's very hard to fake that you're fine and move away.
00:51:38.000You see like telltale signs, like one thing guys will do all the time when they get hit in the liver, they drop their right arm down and they pin it to their body.
00:51:46.000So maybe they're fighting like this, they're moving, they whack the liver and you see them do like that and they're still moving, but they can't help it.
00:51:52.000They have their arm pressed because they know one more shot there and they're fucked.
00:51:55.000So they barely can keep a poker face and move around.
00:51:59.000But there's telltale signs that you see that are just instinctive.
00:52:03.000And a lot of times guys will use that to set them up with a head kick.
00:52:07.000A good example of that is Islam Makachev and Alexander Volkanovski.
00:52:13.000He hit them with a left kick to the body multiple times in that fight and then fired off one to the head and knocked them out.
00:52:20.000So it's like they're just hiding this slow deep pain.
00:52:23.000You see the leg come up and it's very hard to reckon.
00:52:25.000There's a kick called a question mark kick and it's called a question mark kick because in Taekwondo we used to call it a fake front kick roundhouse kick.
00:52:33.000And what it is is you're lifting the knee up as if you're kicking to the body in a straight line.
00:52:38.000And then you whip it over and go like that and turn it into a roundhouse kick.
00:55:12.000But it was always amazing to me in the slow-mo, like, where he would slip punches by, like, centimeters.
00:55:18.000And they may think that, like, his depth perception and the depth perception of fighters, successful fighters, must just be exquisite.
00:55:26.000Because, I mean, like, slipping at that distance with just a chin movement...
00:55:29.000That's one thing, but it's also pattern recognition.
00:55:32.000You've been doing it so many times, and you know...
00:55:35.000So, really good fighters, one of the things that you see is they don't just charge out in the first round.
00:55:40.000The first round is like a feeling out process.
00:55:42.000So you're downloading a lot of data points, you're downloading foot movement, and a lot of guys watch tape, and they download it from that, but then you don't really know until you're in there with a person.
00:56:39.000So Canelo is throwing these big wide punches and Floyd is just cutting him off at the path and then moving his head out of the line of those hooks that come his way.
00:56:53.000You know, I'm obsessed with this notion of unconscious genius.
00:56:56.000Like, you know, like different domains of super high performance where the people don't exactly know how they do it, but they do it.
00:57:04.000Well, you know how you do it, but you've also done it so many times in the gym and in fights that it's second nature, so you're not thinking of it as you're doing it.
00:57:13.000One of the things about countering people is, and I used to...
00:57:18.000When I was in my prime, when I was fighting all the time, I would throw kicks and they would land before I even knew I was going to do it.
00:57:25.000Because someone would do something, and as they would do something, I instinctively knew, because of pattern recognition, there's going to be an opening.
00:57:32.000Like, say, if some guy lifts his left leg, if he's standing with his left leg forward, and he lifts his left leg and he's coming towards me with his left leg, I know that he's balancing on that right leg and that the left leg is coming this way, and if I spin and catch him, I can catch him as his momentum is going this way,
00:57:50.000and I'll catch him that way, and he'll double the power of the punch or the kick.
00:57:54.000Because there's like a conscious awareness of how you do it.
00:57:58.000I think this notion of pattern recognition, it's interesting, because earlier we were talking about pattern recognition for finding people who are lying, right?
00:58:04.000You have this pattern recognition thing that, you know, you're not saying it's perfect, but like you can sense something.
00:58:32.000And were you ever told, hey, if his left leg comes up, that means he's bouncing on his right, so you need to prepare a counterattack or an attack.
00:58:39.000Well, that's where drills come in, okay?
00:58:42.000So you do drills, and you do drills constantly.
00:58:45.000And one of the things that – Mayweather's father was a great fighter.
00:58:48.000Mayweather's father fought Sugar Ray Leonard back in the 1970s when Sugar Ray was in his prime and gave him a hell of a fight.
00:58:54.000And his brother – or his uncle, rather, his uncle Roger was Roger Mayweather, the Black Mamba.
00:59:01.000So he grew up as a child around some of the best boxers in the world and so he was constantly seeing the successful motions that they did and constantly seeing them exploit weaknesses in other fighters and then constantly sparring so in sparring You're not just fighting when you're sparring,
01:01:28.000But see how those punches, they're not even talking, so when he's throwing the mitts at his head to get him to duck, there's no communication.
01:01:36.000He just sees that hand coming towards him and he's ducking.
01:01:39.000He sees this hand coming towards him and he's ducking.
01:01:41.000It's all slight slips away and it's slight motions, which is all you need to get away from a punch, right?
01:01:49.000You're wasting a lot of energy and you can't counterattack.
01:01:52.000One of the best things about Floyd and one of the most brilliant things about him, he's one of the most elusive fighters of all time, but he didn't move around.
01:02:00.000He stood right in front of you and you couldn't fucking hit him.
01:02:03.000That's true mastery of space and true mastery of technique.
01:02:08.000In my opinion, he's the best boxer that's ever lived.
01:02:11.000Yeah, I mean, I'm not qualified to rank people, but I watched when he was making that ascent towards, it ended up being 50, you know?
01:02:18.000He just fought last weekend, this weekend.
01:02:20.000Yeah, he fought a match against John Gotti's grandson.
01:04:35.000And for the referee to interfere there.
01:04:37.000And also, it's literally like someone who probably doesn't know how to box at all telling the greatest boxer of all time that what he's doing is wrong, which is just bananas.
01:04:47.000So he got rid of the guy in the middle of the fight.
01:04:48.000But he's still doing these bouts at 46 years old, still boxing these young kids.
01:04:55.000Again, John Gotti III, who is a very good up-and-coming MMA fighter.
01:05:01.000So, you know, he has all the weapons, takedowns, submissions, kicks, all that jazz.
01:05:06.000But he's choosing to fight Floyd in a boxing fight just for money, just like Conor McGregor did.
01:06:58.000And now he just has these demonstration fights where they're weird little exhibitions where he's just beating people up that have no business in the ring with him.
01:07:06.000And one of them, he was walking around with a fucking card, a ring card.
01:07:10.000He took it from the ring card girl and he started dancing around.
01:07:13.000So he's like under no threat whatsoever.
01:10:03.000So you combine motivation with adrenaline, which gets your body in a position to move better, and noradrenaline, which kind of works in between those two.
01:10:12.000It's a little more complicated, not worth going into.
01:10:14.000But they work as kind of like a gang of three to raise alertness, directional motivation, and go.
01:10:21.000And so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a little bit of a dopaminergic aspect to those smelling salts.
01:10:49.000We were just talking about Twitter where all the different nootropics or Let's not call them smart drugs, but things that can enhance alertness.
01:10:57.000Things like alpha-GPC. As you know, 600 milligrams alpha-GPC. I don't care who it is that's like, where's the double-blind placebo-controlled study that shows it raises alertness and focus?
01:11:07.000Look, as much as I believe in science, you don't need a double-blind placebo-controlled study to know that a swift kick in the shin hurts and that 600 milligrams of alpha-GPC is going to make you more alert.
01:11:16.000Well, we did double-blind placebo-controlled studies for alpha brain.
01:11:20.000Right, right, and so they exist, and certainly that's one that I would put kind of high on the tier of things for if you want alertness and focus.
01:11:27.000It's certainly more benign than a lot of prescription drugs that create alertness.
01:11:30.000But theanine's also really effective for that too, and I don't know how many studies there are on that.
01:11:35.000Theanine takes away the jitters, like 100 to 200 milligrams of theanine will take away the jitters associated with stimulants, which is why it's now in a lot of energy drinks.
01:11:43.000So you'll see alpha GPC, theanine, sometimes L-tyrosine, which is a precursor to dopamine.
01:11:48.000But there were a couple of things on that list, including prescription drugs like modafinil, for instance, which was originally designed for the treatment of narcolepsy.
01:11:58.000Was it designed for that or was it designed as a performance enhancing drug, but they needed a way to prescribe it?
01:12:31.000And if I would drive home, there'd be that risk of the sleep coming on because there's a weird thing about being on the highway, about those lines.
01:12:45.000Yeah, and so for anybody out here, listen to this, because my manager told me this, it's really important.
01:12:51.000If you think you're going to fall asleep, there's a great way to mitigate it that's pain-free.
01:12:56.000Get a rag, like a washcloth, and some ice and some water, and have like a little thing next to you with a cold, wet rag, and just wipe that rag on your face, and then you're good for like five more minutes.
01:13:08.000Reach in there and start, oh man, I'm just going to sleep again.
01:13:10.000Wipe that rag on your face, you wake right up.
01:13:14.000This is a great one, and it fits right in with what Matt Walker says to do the opposite to fall asleep, where you wash your face with warm water, take a hot shower.
01:13:26.000But you heat up the surface of your body, and the medial preoptic area of your hypothalamus, which is your brain's thermostat, says, hey, the surface of the body is heating up.
01:13:59.000And the core body temperature goes up because the medial pre-optic area, your brain's thermostat says, wait, the surface of the body is cooling down.
01:14:05.000I'm going to heat up and waking up in the morning is Largely the consequence of body temperature going up.
01:14:11.000So why do you wake up more quickly in the cold?
01:14:14.000Well, body temperature goes up more quickly.
01:14:15.000Also, big shot of adrenaline from cold water.
01:14:18.000Nobody escapes the adrenaline from cold water.
01:16:28.000Because if I feel like I can get away with making it a little bit easier, I feel like a bitch.
01:16:34.000So that's why I do it as cold as it can get before it freezes solid, which seems to be 34 degrees.
01:16:40.000Well, this gets to something that I know we've talked a little bit about before offline, not on microphone, which is doing hard things translates to an ability to do hard things and probably translates, provided it doesn't kill you, to a longer life.
01:16:55.000And you've explained that there's actually a part of your brain that grows.
01:16:58.000So there's a brain area that most neuroscientists aren't aware of called the anterior mid cingulate cortex, okay?
01:17:04.000Scientists who are in the know know about it.
01:17:06.000It's, you know, I teach your anatomy, medical students at Stanford.
01:17:08.000It's an area that we cover in passing, but there are a lot of brain areas.
01:17:11.000You got to get, you know, can't get to everything.
01:17:13.000But in the last couple of years, there've been studies of this area, the anterior mid cingulate cortex that make it super important for everybody to know about, not just neuroscientists.
01:17:23.000A colleague of mine at Stanford, Joe Parvisi, he's a neurosurgeon.
01:17:26.000He's in there stimulating different brain areas, including anterior mid-cingulate cortex and areas near it in human patients while they're awake, preparing them for neurosurgery for other reasons.
01:17:38.000And what do all people who have their anterior mid-cingulate cortex report?
01:17:42.000They feel like there's something about to happen, something's kind of looming, a challenge, a storm, some will report it as a storm or a physical challenge, but their overall sensation is one that they want to lean into it, they want to challenge it.
01:17:55.000Now, this area has subsequently been imaged in people who are successful dieters, it grows larger.
01:18:01.000In people that fail at a dieting or nutrition program, it gets smaller.
01:18:04.000People that embrace a new form of exercise, and here's the key point, that they don't want to do, this area gets bigger.
01:18:10.000People that are just doing things that they enjoy doing does not change in shape or size.
01:18:15.000Now, here's where it gets even more interesting.
01:18:17.000The anterior mid-cingulate cortex is larger in volume in a group of people called super-agers, okay?
01:18:24.000That's a bit of a misnomer because it implies they age faster.
01:18:26.000They actually age more slowly as it relates to cognitive decline.
01:18:30.000The slope of cognitive decline is not as steep in these people, meaning they're holding on to cognitive abilities longer than other people into older age.
01:18:37.000And the universal quality among these superagers is not just a larger anterior mid cingulate cortex, but that they challenge themselves to do things that are challenging and they kind of don't want to do or really don't want to do.
01:18:50.000So when we hear, oh, you know, people should do crossword puzzles to maintain their memory, probably good to keep some cognitive flexibility going.
01:18:55.000But if you love crossword puzzles, you're not going to grow your anterior mid cingulate cortex.
01:18:58.000If you love 45 degrees in the cold plunge after an hour long run, In the hills, which I do, probably not going to do much to grow this area.
01:19:06.000If you really don't want to do something and you do it, this area gets bigger.
01:19:11.000And it's got inputs and outputs from all of these different brain areas that make all of this make sense.
01:19:16.000Like the dopamine system, like the learning and memory system, like the areas of the brain that say, no, I'm going to, Retreat from that.
01:19:22.000It's aversive, but you push yourself to do something that you don't want to do.
01:19:26.000And the best part is it translates to an ability to do harder things elsewhere.
01:19:30.000This to me, I get obviously super excited about because it's nested in human data and animal data in real world examples of dieting and exercise and aging and longevity and all of that.
01:19:40.000And it speaks to much of what you've talked about on this podcast for years and years, which is do hard things.
01:19:46.000It will give you an ability to do other hard things.
01:19:49.000But if you love doing deadlifts, Honestly, even sets to failure on those deadlifts, enjoy them, benefit from them, all the wonderful things that come with doing deadlifts, great, but you should probably also do something that you don't enjoy doing if you have an interest in the kind of benefits that we're talking about.
01:20:05.000Well, it completely makes sense that your brain would have to develop an ability to continue to do difficult things, and that ability to not hesitate and push through, the ability to not procrastinate and go forward, and that that thing is probably like all things.
01:20:22.000It's like cardiovascular endurance, muscular endurance.
01:20:24.000You develop an ability to do more of it because of that.
01:20:27.000Because your brain recognizes this is something that we're going to have to deal with.
01:20:31.000Let's figure out how to respond to this.
01:20:35.000Right, and movement itself, like physical movement or cognitive movement, if you're learning new things like comedy, preparing new things, or learning poetry, or drawing.
01:20:42.000Like I used to draw a lot, start drawing again, carry around this notebook everywhere.
01:20:46.000I'm not going to show the drawings, they're just for me.
01:20:48.000But pushing myself to do something that I enjoy, but that like there's a barrier there.
01:21:42.000But the point, I'm obsessed with this thing that somewhere between perfect accuracy and total representation of biology, like a brain or a set of cells, and at the other end of the continuum, like ball and stick, there's like a perfect sweet spot for teaching.
01:21:58.000And so what I'm doing there is what I do in the classroom.
01:22:00.000I go, okay, listen, we're going to talk about how muscle releases a microRNA that helps you burn fat.
01:22:05.000And then I kind of remind people, like, there's fat.
01:22:07.000So I don't want too much detail, but I don't want too little detail.
01:22:49.000Because there's certain people that, like, if their parent was a singer, but then you go, well, maybe they were singing around the house a lot when they were growing up.
01:22:57.000People are going to think I'm weird for saying this, but I don't care.
01:23:23.000And there's a skateboarder named Jimmy Wilkins who's like breaking every barrier on skateboarding and he actually uses his knees to contact the board and move the board while his hands are free.
01:23:33.000And he's a smaller guy, real small, real wide, super loose ankles.
01:23:37.000And I said to him, like, what do your parents do?
01:23:40.000And he goes, my mom's a ballerina and my dad's an orchestra conductor.
01:23:44.000This guy's using his knees on the board.
01:23:46.000So like he does everything, not everything, but he does a lot of things hands-free at mock speed.
01:23:50.000For people in skateboarding, they probably just want to see flips and 900 varials and that stuff's cool.
01:23:59.000I mean, Jimmy, for those that are in the know, Jimmy Wilkins is the next, is like the next, like Tony will say, Tony Hawk, everyone will say like watching Jimmy, look, see, the whole thing here is that Jimmy's Skateboarding is like perfect poetry.
01:24:15.000So his back knee is often used to stabilize the board.
01:24:20.000Because he's got that hip looseness that you were talking about earlier.
01:27:21.000He's on tour, so he's on this fully loaded tour where he's doing all these arenas with all these friends, and they're doing activities constantly.
01:28:58.000Anyway, we watched it again there, and then I've watched it again.
01:29:01.000I will say it felt very cathartic to me.
01:29:04.000I don't know how it felt for you, but it felt really cathartic.
01:29:07.000The subject matter the subject matter and also like the next day was pure like delight and just Baffled and shocked all at the same time when on Twitter I see a clip taken completely out of context about a bit About taking things out of context.
01:29:29.000It's like life had looped back on itself.
01:29:31.000You were talking about things being taken out of context and they were taking it out of context.
01:29:46.000But there's always some people that are just—they're not—this is not in good faith.
01:29:50.000Everything they're doing is just trying to find something wrong with everything you're doing.
01:29:53.000And it's usually people that their life is a mess.
01:29:56.000There's no one who does that who is a healthy, accomplished person who has great relationships in their life and is doing really well at some skill or chosen profession that they enjoy very much.
01:30:18.000So there's a business in that and then there's also people that are doing like MSNBC did this recently and There's they this has gotten so popular that my fucking stepdad contacted me to tell me he's happy that I'm suing MSNBC I'm like I'm not suing MSNBC,
01:30:34.000but this is what MSNBC did they took a clip of me talking about Tulsi Gabbard and And they edited it up and made it look like I was saying great things about Kamala Harris.
01:31:00.000Yes, they did it about politics, but they didn't do it like AI. They just deceptively edited the things that I was saying.
01:31:08.000Took it completely out of context, where I was talking about, first of all, I was talking about Tulsi Gabbard, and then I was talking about that...
01:31:15.000The media behind Kamala Harris, all this surge and all these people deciding that she could win.
01:31:21.000And they put the two of those together and made it seem like I was praising Kamala Harris and saying a bunch of things that aren't even true about her.
01:31:28.000Like, I was talking about Tulsi Gabbard being a congresswoman for eight years and about how she served overseas.
01:31:35.000Two deployments in medical units dealing with people who were blown up from the war.
01:31:39.000That's not something Kamala Harris did.
01:32:31.000So all you have to do is take something out of context from someone who's never going to watch it in the first place, put it in front of them like, oh, that piece of shit.
01:32:39.000Even though I'm literally talking about things being taken out of context.
01:32:42.000The part about this is so frustrating to me is that at some point, especially as a scientist, that's data selection.
01:32:50.000If you look at data and you look at scientific experimentation, it starts with a question, you generate a hypothesis, you collect data, you publish the results, and you get to state your conclusions.
01:32:59.000Now let's talk about what you're talking about.
01:33:01.000In the world of science, I don't think there's a lot of outright data fraud, but a lot of experiments that don't work, people come up with excuses to eliminate those data.
01:33:11.000Oh, there certainly is some data fraud.
01:33:13.000The AMOLED plaques thing with Alzheimer's.
01:33:14.000There's certainly some data fraud, and there's a range of underlying reasons.
01:33:18.000One of the more common reasons that people don't talk about, which is something to really strongly inoculate in laboratories against, is when a laboratory is known for doing very, very good work, Oftentimes the graduate students and postdocs that go there feel like they need to give the boss the result.
01:33:36.000So sometimes it's unbeknownst to the person running the lab.
01:33:39.000There have been a lot of cases in recent years of papers being discovered as having major issues.
01:33:43.000And that's like, well, do you go after the lab head or do you go after the person who did it?
01:33:46.000Lab heads are responsible for everything in their lab.
01:33:48.000AI is helping with this because you can scan data and look at things.
01:34:00.000I mean, there was this nanotechnologist guy from some years back.
01:34:03.000I think his last name was shown who had like 20 papers in science and nature in two years.
01:34:10.000And it turns out he wasn't even bothering to he was fabricating data.
01:34:14.000The papers were all retracted and I don't know what he's doing now, but the Noise plots, the random noise plots in these papers were the way he got caught.
01:34:24.000What it turned out is that, I mean, I'm juggling because it's like he was so lazy, ambitious, but so lazy that he didn't even bother to use new random noise plots from one paper to the next.
01:34:34.000So somebody said, wait, random, random should be random.
01:34:37.000Why is it the same in these two papers?
01:34:39.000Boom, and then the whole thing unraveled.
01:34:59.000Now what you're talking about to me sounds like People deliberately grabbing from the pallet of paints, that is the words that are spoken by anybody on the internet, especially people with podcasts, you or me or anybody else, and then literally cutting and pasting things together to create a story which is fiction.
01:37:33.000He does that with a lot of stuff, like people pretending to be in love with me, makes it like there's a romance between me and different people.
01:37:47.000But there's people that do it just to either, in this case, it was to promote Kamala Harris, to get the passive Listener the people that are you know the casual to go.
01:37:59.000Oh wow Joe Rogan likes Kamala Harris I've heard you I heard you're endorsing and not endorsing all sorts of people Yeah, you can't say even say I like somebody without it being an endorsement and people getting mad But I think the MAGA people are happy now that Robert F. Kennedy is now with Trump.
01:38:12.000So I Think they've unified they've unified the belts.
01:38:15.000Yeah, I think we're in a very weird time with the media and I think truth is super important I think someone that's willing to do something like that That's a real offense.
01:38:32.000And it's a lie that changes other people's opinions.
01:38:33.000You take what's perceived to be an influential person and you distort their views in either a way to shame them, make them look bad, or to promote someone else.
01:39:16.000Like where the story is completely different.
01:39:18.000The reason I gave the counter example of science is, you know, when you're trained as a scientist, you're trained to try and parse what's real and what's not real and give the best, you know, Version of that that you can.
01:39:32.000And then you are allowed to state your conclusions.
01:39:35.000At what point do you think the general public Will come to understand that this is the way that a lot of things that they see out there are constructed, to some degree or another, and stop actually believing it.
01:40:25.000Their mind has formed around, you know, I am a liberal, I'm a Democrat, I've been a Democrat my whole life, this is how I feel about these issues, this is my community, this is my tribe, these are my people, and the news says this,
01:40:40.000and I'm with them, and oh great, we're up in the polls now.
01:40:43.000And for them, it's like they're on a team.
01:40:46.000It might as well be the Dolphins versus the Raiders.
01:40:48.000It's the same kind of mentality in their head.
01:40:54.000That little part of their brain that exists when you challenge yourself and do things you don't want to do, that bitch is shriveled up to almost nothing.
01:41:00.000And they're real boring, and their lives are entirely excited by political discourse.
01:41:39.000These young kids coming up today, like people in their 20s, they don't believe it at all.
01:41:44.000Well, I'll tell you, you know, I'll non-reluctantly tell you, you know, my dad and I, over the years, like, we had some early issues and we resolved them and we're good now.
01:41:55.000But when some not-so-kind press came out about me, they interviewed a lot of people.
01:42:00.000They interviewed a lot of people from my high school class and friends and co-workers and then cherry-picked for the story they wanted to create.
01:44:21.000And at the same time, you know, like we're enjoying nicotine here, or you are, because I will say I'm not in defense of the pharmaceutical industry, nor am I on attack of them.
01:44:30.000But there are certain things that, you know, push through traditional science.
01:44:35.000You get great information about dosage and safety.
01:45:24.000I feel better, and that's enough of a reason for me.
01:45:26.000Isn't there some science about why they're bad for you?
01:45:28.000So there's this whole thing about ratios of omega-3s versus the omega-6s, and you get a lot of omega-6s with the seed oils, and Olive oil is good for us.
01:46:23.000Glucagon-like peptide one that when raised to levels about a thousand fold over normal levels leads to massive suppression of appetite and people lose weight, which for some people is an emergency situation.
01:46:35.000They're really fat and there's nothing they can do to lose the weight and they're getting sicker and sicker.
01:46:40.000My hope would just be that those people would also try and eat correctly and exercise.
01:46:45.000And so the debate has become, is it good for you?
01:46:57.000Or, come off the Ozempic Manjaro eventually by replacing your behaviors.
01:47:01.000You know, it's hard to move when you're I've never been big and overweight, but the way that Goggins talks about it, it's gotta be uncomfortable.
01:47:09.000Like when you're feeling kind of just not great, like just to move, you can get injured easily.
01:47:13.000I would say one of the best ways to get and stay in great shape your whole life is yes, exercise, eat right, et cetera, but also don't get badly hurt.
01:47:20.000That's a huge one that nobody talks about.
01:47:23.000And the number one way, in my opinion, to get badly hurt is do a workout that a friend suggests at 10 out of 10. Well, especially with heavy stuff.
01:47:33.000Or go to one of these boot camp things like, I want to sweat a lot.
01:47:36.000You go in, you do a bunch of circuit training for an hour, and two days later, your shoulder's like, oh, boy.
01:47:41.000You've got to build up to that kind of stuff.
01:47:43.000So, you know, I think there are a lot of themes here, but...
01:47:47.000I'm not opposed to certain pharmaceuticals.
01:47:49.000I think certain people need drugs for ADHD, a lot don't.
01:47:53.000And, you know, dose response curves and lethal dose analysis and that kind of stuff is super valuable.
01:47:59.000What I don't like, because I don't think it's necessary, is when people default to the most expensive Side effect, risky, kind of reflexive option because I think that the basics, sunlight, exercise, you know,
01:48:20.000They've always worked well and they'll always work well.
01:48:22.000And I also think there's great data emerging that they transform mental health.
01:48:26.000I mean, the data on resistance training two or three times a week and mental health is striking.
01:48:32.000I mean, compare that to what people get from certain SSRIs and you're like, For goodness sake, 45, 60 minutes a week, lift some heavy objects.
01:49:14.000I had a lot of feelings about that ruling.
01:49:20.000I think it's unfortunate given the really strong data that support the use of MDMA for the treatment of PTSD. I mean, more than 60%, you know, successful in air quotes, plus some people just go into total remission.
01:49:32.000But the hazards are there, and if there aren't safeguards in place for the practitioner-patient relationship, which is one of the major concerns, if those aren't there, well, then it's never going to be legalized.
01:49:44.000What is the hazard of the participant with the person that's helping them?
01:49:50.000So there were two major issues plus some others, but the ones that I'm most aware of is that lack of an adequate control group.
01:49:57.000People don't know if they got the drug or they didn't.
01:49:59.000And then the other one is during the course of the trials, there were some Issues that came up about improprieties between practitioners and and Patients that like sexual stuff there were my understanding is that there were that there were certain things may have arisen that kind of like pricked up,
01:50:14.000you know people's ears but the major issue was this is Is a person who's under the influence of MDMA in a position to advocate for what they need during the course of the session, right?
01:50:24.000Like, are they in a quote-unquote truly safe space?
01:50:26.000But the same thing could be said of psilocybin trials.
01:50:28.000So the solution there is my understanding is that you have two therapists there.
01:50:32.000It's not one therapist, one patient, you have two therapists.
01:50:37.000The same way that when somebody, a brain surgeon does a brain surgery, there's an anesthesiologist there and multiple nurses and staff to get things and hemostats.
01:50:47.000So I think that there needs to be, I think, a next phase evolution of the way that we think about things like MDMA-assisted It's just striking.
01:51:08.000And there's a tremendous amount of anecdotal data.
01:51:10.000Just people who haven't been in a study but talk about the benefits they've had from it and how much it's...
01:51:36.000So to me, it's also the kind of emotional loading of things like MDMA. When we call it MDMA, if I tell you this is MDMA, this is a drug that raises serotonin dramatically, raises dopamine dramatically, opens neuroplasticity and allows people to rewire their brains if adequately supported.
01:51:55.000To feel relief, if not remission from PTSD. You'd say, I'm awesome.
01:52:23.000I think there's case studies where, excuse me, that's a specific thing in science, use cases where, or examples where people with a propensity for psychosis should probably not be doing high THC cannabis.
01:52:35.000I learned something really interesting, by the way, about this.
01:52:37.000We brought on an expert, brought on in part where there was a little bit of a Twitter battle.
01:52:41.000I put out a solo episode about cannabis years ago.
01:52:56.000He didn't like a bunch of things I said, but mainly three statements.
01:53:00.000One was that I said that there was evidence because there is a published paper.
01:53:03.000I must say this, there is a published paper looking at the differences in subjective effects that people experience with sativa versus indica strains.
01:53:11.000And he said, there's no evidence that there's a different experience from sativa versus indica strains.
01:54:17.000And one of the things that he said was, The whole idea that there's so much more THC in weed now that's leading to all these problems, like the weed of today is not the weed of yesterday.
01:54:31.000He said when people inhale, they take it by vape or they smoke it or whatever, his words are that there's far fewer cases of people taking in more.
01:54:44.000They're able to reach that point that they want to be at without going too far.
01:54:48.000However, even though it's higher potency, however, when people take it by edible, right?
01:54:54.000There are cases where people get to genuine freak out in psychotic episodes because they're taking in far too much too quickly because you can eat the edible quickly.
01:55:02.000You don't they're not layering in until they hit that plane that they want to be Well, it's also the conversion to 11-hydroxy metabolite.
01:55:09.000It's five times more psychoactive than THC. I used to do a joke about it that lets you talk to dolphins.
01:55:16.000It's a true story about edibles and dolphin experience.
01:56:18.000Especially long form, because then you get to understand how a person thinks about things, not just the subject at hand, but maybe other things.
01:56:24.000You get to hear their speech patterns, their thinking patterns.
01:56:28.000And I think direct experience is real.
01:56:30.000Cam Haynes pointed this out recently, and I'm not saying this to focus the positive energy on us, but it will invariably do that, or inevitably do that, excuse me.
01:56:43.000Which is, he said, it's kind of interesting that all of the Top podcasters like really fit, you know?
01:56:50.000Like all the people that are like really into their health, right?
01:56:54.000Like you and you know, there's, David's out there like influencers.
01:56:57.000He was saying like, there's a healthy, a health component or a fitness component.
01:57:01.000Not always, but I think most of them, I think he may have said all of them.
01:57:07.000But, you know, Chris Williamson, you know, Lex, like there's a tendency to merge kind of intellectual discourse with physical.
01:57:14.000And I think that's a unique theme of podcasting also, at least of certain, let's just say what it is, like a lot of the top podcasts, that's like a pretty consistent theme for the female podcasters too.
01:57:25.000Like Whitney works out, she does her podcast.
01:57:27.000Like there's a kind of merging of those things.
01:57:28.000And I think that when it comes to the discussion about anything about health, It also is beneficial if people are engaging in healthy behaviors, right?
01:57:38.000Or if they've tried things, like they're trying to be fit.
01:57:41.000I see Rhonda posting pictures of herself deadlifting now, right?
01:57:43.000You know, and like Peter's talking about his workouts and he's a physician, he's an MD. So I think it's not sufficient to just study something, right?
01:57:52.000I think it really helps if you're able to get in close contact with the things that, you know, you're hearing about.
01:57:57.000But also it helps me to know whether or not you have any discipline.
01:58:02.000So there's people that think about a certain thing because it comforts their own thoughts about their decisions that they've made.
01:58:11.000And there's certain rationales that people make.
01:58:15.000They rationalize certain aspects of their life and certain things that are going on in society to sort of make up for the fact that they haven't done the work that they probably should have done in the first place.
01:58:25.000So when I see a guy that's built like Chris or Lex or someone who I know or yourself that I know stays very physically fit and takes care of their health, then I have more respect for them because I go, okay, I have more respect for this person's opinion because this person is doing difficult things on a regular basis and confronting their own hesitations,
01:58:46.000their whatever, procrastination, discipline issues, and the physical ability to put in work Which requires mental strength.
01:58:57.000And for the longest time, for whatever strange reason, people have had this mutually exclusive notion that a person who is physically fit is probably stupid and a person who doesn't care about their body and only concentrates on the mind.
01:59:13.000For some reason that is admired, that this person has no ego at all and doesn't care.
01:59:19.000But I think that person's a fool because you don't have as much energy to think because your physical body that you have, you've let decay to this terrible point where your posture is down.
01:59:30.000I've had some unfortunate conversations with older intellectuals that don't take care of themselves.
01:59:37.000And you realize that at a certain point they've gotten lazy physically and they don't have the energy to engage.
01:59:43.000And so they sort of just sort of repeat things that they've said over and over and over again.
01:59:47.000And when you ask them to think on the spot, they almost don't have the will to do it anymore.
02:00:05.000But I can think of a number of key examples that are historical.
02:00:08.000The greatest neurobiologist of all time, supernatural levels of ability was a guy named Ramoni Cajal, won the Nobel Prize in 1906. He was the one who first defined the synapse, etc.
02:00:30.000Yeah, he had the state powerlifting record at one point.
02:00:33.000Just a beast of a guy who was also a neurologist and wrote all these beautiful books about how the mind works, the man who mistook his wife for a hat.
02:00:39.000He was behind the movie Awakenings, et cetera, et cetera.
02:00:43.000Don Kennedy, former president of Stanford, ran into his late 70s, and then after that had a hip replacement and then was doing other stuff.
02:00:49.000So Richard Axel is a Nobel Prize from Columbia University.
02:00:53.000First person to find ways to introduce genes to novel genes to cells.
02:00:57.000Played racquetball, I don't know if he's still playing racquetball.
02:01:24.000This is the anterior mid cingulate cortex in action.
02:01:26.000And of course, cancer, a bus, or a bullet can still take you out, but assuming you make it into your 60s, 70s, 80s, movement, movement, movement is the way to stay mentally strong and to continue to have the capacity to learn.
02:01:39.000I mean, just to kind of weave these two things, if we're talking about MDMA, psilocybin, or some other agent that raises serotonin and dopamine, Or we're talking about movement.
02:01:49.000All we're really talking about are ways to increase these neuromodulators like dopamine, acetylcholine, serotonin, epinephrine, and they create the opportunity for neuroplasticity.
02:02:00.000They don't create plasticity on their own.
02:02:02.000They create a milieu that's very much like the young brain where it's like, okay, what's new here?
02:02:06.000This is why adrenaline is such a powerful tool for plasticity.
02:02:09.000Probably, I'm not going to suggest people use smelling salts to try and do better on their exams.
02:02:14.000There are other ways to do better on their exams.
02:03:48.000There's a brain area called nucleus basalis, which sits in the base of the brain, and it can serve as a spotlight by releasing acetylcholine onto what?
02:03:57.000Onto nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in certain circuits and provide focus.
02:04:03.000Unless you take so much of it every day that those, your kind of baseline levels of acetylcholine either drop or become kind of regulated, To the point where you're not getting that spotlighting anymore, which is why people then are taking more and more.
02:04:16.000But as our, you know, your former guest and my colleague, Dr. Anna Lemke has said, the worst thing you can do when you're in a trough of dopamine is try and boost dopamine again.
02:04:25.000You just got to wait for it to come back.
02:04:26.000So if people want nicotine to continue to work, they should use it sporadically or when they feel like it's not working anymore, take a break.
02:04:32.000That's what McKenna used to say about cannabis.
02:04:37.000Terrence McKenna would freely admit that he had a problem with cannabis because he was like a daily cannabis user.
02:04:45.000But he said the real way to take it, he said, is to take a long time off, a long time off, So that your body is completely desensitized to it and then take as much as you can stand in like one dose.
02:05:53.000There needs to be some recognition, but there's a certain percentage of people that have a tendency towards schizophrenia or maybe psychotic breaks, and they can get triggered by high doses of cannabis, for sure.
02:06:20.000And he's a respected researcher in this area.
02:06:22.000And I thought his stance was very, very nuanced.
02:06:25.000And then after he came on the podcast, other people...
02:06:28.000Not Berenson necessarily, although I haven't checked my DMs that closely, contacted me and said, no, I have counters to that guy, which just told me everything I already know, which is that science is a field with people with differing opinions, right?
02:08:22.000So it's almost like the way things have split politically has become the way that health information has split.
02:08:28.000And I'm fighting tooth and nail, and I know you are and other people are as well, to try and continue to shine light on the field that is psychedelics, the field that includes cannabis, the field that includes things like weight loss and Ozempic, but also exercise and all the other good things.
02:08:43.000And somehow, and maybe you can tell me, because I'm new to the media thing, newer than you, certainly.
02:08:50.000For some reason, people don't like that.
02:08:53.000It's like the brain needs like a black and white thing.
02:08:57.000It's like they can't seem to just deal with the fact that like, look, you'll find evidence for and evidence against.
02:09:02.000You just gotta make it the best decision for you.
02:09:04.000Well, there's also people that write articles with a specific narrative because they're gamifying the social media algorithms.
02:09:16.000Unfortunately, one of the things that happen in journalism is people stop buying newspapers.
02:09:20.000And when people stop buying newspapers, the only way you can get someone to go to your website and click on a link is you have to have some sort of inflammatory headline, something that excites you.
02:09:31.000Something that angers you, something that like gives you some information, some secret information that wasn't available before.
02:10:48.000Whereas I think so much of what we've been talking about today is like the media At what point do we realize there are portions that are true, there are portions that are made up?
02:10:56.000Well, they're making themselves obsolete.
02:11:00.000I believe that human beings should be able to differ on opinions.
02:11:04.000But I should know that you're being honest and you're telling the truth.
02:11:07.000So as soon as you write something that I know is biased and twisted and you've distorted things and taking things out of context, well, I know that you're not in the truth game.
02:12:04.000So when I communicate, I don't like games, but I recognize that especially earlier in my life before I I started recognizing patterns in podcasts like, what don't I like when people are talking?
02:12:17.000I don't like when someone is talking over people.
02:12:19.000I don't like when someone's misrepresenting someone's words or someone's trying to win rather than considering what the other person's saying.
02:12:27.000So when someone's considering what the other person's saying, then you get this beautiful sort of sharing of ideas without ego.
02:13:35.000And you see people do that all the time.
02:13:37.000And it's so gross when you catch people doing that on a podcast.
02:13:40.000When you realize you're not even considering these other possibilities because you're dismissing them without any consideration because you just want to achieve a goal of victory.
02:14:51.000You're just attributing all these negative things to a person, and then you can work things out.
02:14:56.000You can talk about things, as long as the person's not bullshitting you.
02:15:00.000As soon as you've got people in your life that are bullshitting you, it's like, oh, you're not even having real conversations.
02:15:05.000You're playing a stupid game of tic-tac-toe all day long with your friends.
02:15:10.000When your friends can open up to you, and this is one of the reasons why people like sharing embarrassing information with friends, because I know I can trust you.
02:15:16.000I can tell you this stupid fucking thing that I did.
02:15:18.000And you go, oh my god, I did that too.
02:16:01.000It's just different form of intelligence.
02:16:02.000I will say, and I'm not just saying that, you know, with each passing year, and I've looked forward to like approaching 50, because I'm like, now I can say things like with each passing year or by this stage.
02:16:13.000But I also realized the other day, I lived a long period of my life where I didn't really have a sense of the fact that I would die.
02:16:19.000I'd watched the Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford, 2005, where he talks about this notion that we're going to die is so critical, and I couldn't get in touch with it.
02:16:28.000Recently, I'm like, oh, Like time's gonna come up.
02:16:31.000Every time I go down for a meditation, I do this like non-sleep deep rest yoga nidra meditation.
02:17:08.000I learned what I needed to change from that and just be moving forward.
02:17:11.000It's this removing this thing of like, like you said, like this game all day long of like, not that I was in that mode or I didn't think I was, but this need to win, right?
02:18:20.000I will say, we know how we feel about people when we see them succeed.
02:18:25.000Because I think there's this natural reflex, like when you hear like, oh, that really shitty person that you knew in school, like they got pancreatic cancer.
02:18:32.000Everyone just goes, oh, like that sucks.
02:19:58.000This is a person who's dedicated their life to kicking people into the shadow realm and you're deciding to try to kick them first before they kick you.
02:20:07.000But the negative aspects of it You develop this hyper competitiveness because you're also developing at an accelerated rate when you're a teenager.
02:20:17.000So when I was a teenager, I had no bills, I had no problems, I lived at home, I didn't have any real Like an adult-type stress.
02:20:28.000You know, bills, family to feed, dealing with the community, work problems.
02:20:44.000Until 25, your brain is a plasticity machine.
02:20:47.000It's there to map according to your experience.
02:20:50.000I mean, like, literally, you come into the world, baby's flopping, you know, like, little bug, move, move, move, move.
02:20:56.000Neuronal connections are being removed by the thousands, tens of thousands by the day so that you get fine-tuned movement.
02:21:03.000It's like you're a plasticity machine and then you're thinking and your notions about boys and girls and teachers and parents and good things and bad things and what that means and what that means and who's a hero and who's a villain.
02:21:12.000Like the brain is just placing things into boxes and symbols.
02:21:16.000It's like it's an unbelievable phenomenon.
02:21:19.000And it's happening when you're a teenager, then you throw hormones into the mix.
02:21:23.000Then you add hormones and now you're adding the drive that is hormones related to like really hardwired, evolutionarily selected things like reproduction.
02:22:20.000As Jung said, we have all things inside of us.
02:22:22.000The extent to which we learn to suppress or exacerbate depends on experience, its nature, and nurture.
02:22:27.000But we come into this world hardwired with the capacity for most any of these behaviors to emerge.
02:22:33.000Your daughter fortunately got very good at drawing, right?
02:22:36.000That probably is handed off through some slight genetic bias handed on through you.
02:22:41.000And your partner, your wife, to create a slight bias towards looking at the world in a particular way, an artistic sense, something about aesthetics, pay attention to curved corners versus square corners, whatever it is.
02:22:54.000But what we do feeds back on that circuit.
02:22:57.000So if you draw more, you get better at drawing.
02:23:12.000And it's not a hard, fast rule because there's some freaks out there, some athletic freaks, and there's some people that come from other sports that have incredible speed and dexterity and an understanding over their body that allows them to pick up striking better than others.
02:23:26.000But there's something about people that learn when they're young that are always better than everybody else.
02:23:32.000No matter how good you are, there's certain guys like Anderson Silva or there's certain fighters that learn at a young age and you just can't fuck with them.
02:23:58.000He's been in those patterns for his whole life, and his body evolved.
02:24:02.000It literally developed in those patterns.
02:24:05.000This is why when people say, like, what should I do?
02:24:07.000I always think, like, I don't know what people should do.
02:24:09.000And, you know, I took a formal education path eventually.
02:24:11.000But if we look back to the things that really delighted us and that we naturally oriented towards when we were young, there's often information there.
02:24:19.000For me, it was animals and fish tanks and biology.
02:27:42.000So afterwards, there's a bunch of posting on Instagram.
02:27:44.000Then they show a picture of Cole Hawker when he's like eight years old holding a medal where he was running the 1500 and he's doing like four minutes and change.
02:28:00.000So this brings it back to your point, which is, like, nowadays we're seeing the selection of people who probably have a genetic bias towards something, a love of it, like running, right, plus immense amounts of experience.
02:28:14.000And their nervous system, like he was shaped miling.
02:28:18.000I'll tell you, you can also walk and talk and eat because I've met him, but that's a nervous system that was shaped around running the 1500 per mile.
02:28:26.000So when you see it, they're like the top, top, top 1%, it's so different than like my field where you can't go to graduate school to get a training in neuroscience until you're in your twenties, unless you're a phenom.
02:29:00.000I think because of the online learning platforms, I think of, because of, I even like the sport that I grew up, unfortunately wasn't very good at, or maybe fortunately, who knows, I was skateboarding, right?
02:29:10.000So many of my friends went on to start companies, became pro skateboarders, a lot of them didn't, but I didn't have a propensity for it, kept getting hurt, broke my foot three times, I was like so frustrated, it was unbelievable, so I went in a different direction, went in the science direction, turned out to be my thing.
02:29:23.000But now, The little kids, literally little kids, boys and girls, like this girl Reese Nelson, she skates with power on vert, not like a little kid going.
02:29:37.000And guys like Tony Hawk are like, whoa.
02:29:39.000It's because they have all this exposure to 900s and tricks and ramps, and there's just way more people feeding the pool of potential Professional skateboarders.
02:29:48.000So when you look at the Olympics or the X Games now, you're getting a much greater selection of the huge pool, bigger sample size, feeding into it.
02:31:18.000The problem If you have an incredible drive, an incredible discipline, but you didn't start striking until you're 26, if you have a Thai boxing fight against a guy like, there's a guy right now who's one of the best in the world,
02:31:35.000his name is Tawanchai, and he has this insane left kick.
02:31:40.000Most of his game is his left kick, but it's so goddamn good.
02:31:45.000He just slams it into the guy's arms, slams it into the guy's legs, and he has this snake-like movement of his ability to just slide out of the way and then counter and then slam you with a hard left low kick.
02:33:05.000So if you're a guy and you're some badass Navy SEAL dude and you're 30 years old and you make it to the Muay Thai gym and you decide, hey, I'm only 30. I'm going to fight pro.
02:33:54.000It's so goddamn good, it's so much better than most people's, that everybody who fights him doesn't understand what he can do until he does it.
02:34:27.000But he just didn't have the understanding yet that a guy can whip that left hook so fast and catch him and fuck him up in these weird angles.
02:35:53.000So if we look at this through the lens of nervous systems, I know that there have been conversations that you've had here and elsewhere, like, would a crocodile versus a gorilla, these kind of crazy things.
02:36:08.000Discussion around true peak performance, like somebody grew up running miles, who grew up throwing left hooks, who grew up slipping punches.
02:36:17.000Yes, they're both homo sapiens, they're both humans, but you're talking about two different animals.
02:36:22.000When you're talking about the person that got into it in their 20s and 30s versus the person that started off young, You're talking about two different nervous systems.
02:36:30.000If we were to look at their brains under magnetic resonance imaging, you'd see a lot of things that are similar.
02:36:35.000The breathing centers, the stuff that controls the heart rate.
02:36:37.000Everything is mostly in the same place.
02:36:39.000But I'd be willing to bet everything that you look at Ryan Garcia's brain and you go, that left hook, if you were able to throw the left hook in the thing, you see it light up, you'd be like, wow, either more efficient, more Maybe more space allocated to it, maybe less space, but the speed of transmission is just faster.
02:36:55.000You're talking about a different nervous system, which is just a different way of saying a different person, but it's more meaningful in my view because what you're talking about is Cars with extra cylinders.
02:37:07.000You're talking about a race between two different vehicles.
02:37:10.000And so I think if somebody is very educated in the fight game or is educated in any domain, they're able to see that difference and give people really good advice.
02:37:19.000Whereas with the person themselves, they can't see that.
02:37:21.000It's like we look the same, he trains, I train, I train harder, I'm driven.
02:37:27.000And I think that's why, to me, something like a Cole Hawker win over a world record holder, as is the other stuff we were just watching, incredibly impressive because you say he's in fifth position and he's got a shorter stride and the other guy's got all this world record stuff under his belt and he's done great as well.
02:37:44.000I think he won the 5,000, Ingebrigtsen won the 5,000.
02:37:47.000But Cole's just like, Pulls something out, like they're very close in terms of their abilities.
02:37:54.000They're the same, roughly the same species, right?
02:37:57.000You know, in the context that we're talking about.
02:37:58.000And then somehow through sheer will is able to outkick him.
02:38:11.000I've never been to, I've been to Louisville once, but someone told me, I don't know if this is true or not, but they're more, if you looked at the number of medals from people from Kentucky, It's almost like in a complete country.
02:38:42.000I have a friend who just retired as chair of the neurobiology department, it's actually neuroanatomy there, my friend Bill Guido at University of Louisville.
02:38:51.000Isn't it unfortunate though that Kentucky's not associated with intellectual prowess?
02:38:55.000Not so much, but it's a great department.
02:39:18.000In St. Louis, I had one of the best meals of my life.
02:39:21.000I don't think I'd ever go to St. Louis, but I was visiting Wash U. And then there are certain cities that you hear terrible things about, and they're true.
02:39:27.000One of the greatest pool players in the history of the world came from Paducah, Kentucky.
02:39:31.000The guy's name was Buddy Hall, the rifleman.
02:39:34.000To this day, one of the all-time greats.
02:40:02.000Like, there you have this unconscious genius based on all this life experience.
02:40:06.000Right, so it's almost like they're selecting the same way, like someone, if you wanted to build a Floyd Mayweather, you would select, you know, great father was a great boxer, uncle's a great boxer, boxing's in the family, starts up young, he's got great genetics, the whole deal.
02:40:18.000Or the Williams sisters, like that movie, the King James movie.
02:40:24.000Or the kids that I grew up with skateboarding, like there's this kid, you know, Guy Mariano, I knew him when he was a little kid, he would waddle.
02:40:32.000The board looked bigger than him, and now growing up, he's so good.
02:40:36.000He's kind of in my generation, so he's kind of like in the late 40s thing.
02:40:58.000His body, his nervous system is skateboarding.
02:41:01.000And I love this aspect to people in sport, cause we see it, but it's, you know, I think I remember listening to like In hearing conversations like this and thinking, yeah, but like, if you're not into that, where is it?
02:41:13.000And this is where, man, I could just keep thinking about all the time, but forgive me.
02:41:16.000Rick has always said, the key to being really great at something is to just be you.
02:41:22.000And I'm like, that sounds like about as mystical wrapped in a riddle as it possibly be.
02:41:25.000I could hear it in his voice when he said it.
02:41:27.000But what he's saying is, what he's saying, and I finally got it.
02:41:31.000It's like, what are the things that really pull that energy out of you?
02:42:46.000I go over to visit Rick, and we'd tread water in the morning, and we'd listen to this podcast, A History of 100 Rock and Roll Songs by Andrew Hickey.
02:42:54.000It's sort of like Cuban Lab Podcast, but rock and roll, like super nerdy, long, drawn out.
02:42:58.000There are a few podcasts like that, like Founders Podcast, I love that one.
02:43:39.000And he told me his practice of coming up with ideas is after his kids are asleep at night, sits down and he keeps his body completely still and he forces himself to think in complete sentences, keep his mind super active.
02:43:52.000And it turns out that if you look historically, a number of scientists have talked about this, a number of creatives have talked about this.
02:43:58.000And then it, I don't have any studies to support this, but then I realized, what is the state of our brain or time when the brain is very active and our body is still, and our mind is coming up with all sorts of ideas?
02:44:15.000And everybody knows based on dream studies and studies of creativity that during rapid eye movement sleep is two things happen.
02:44:22.000There's a removal of some of the emotional load of previous days experiences, which is why rapid eye movement sleep is so critical for emotion regulation afterwards.
02:44:31.000And for the regulating depression and things like that.
02:44:33.000But also we come up with new configurations.
02:44:37.000And so Carl Diceroth, Einstein, there are reports of this, of him walking and then closing his eyes and stopping and describing his mind moving forward while his body was still.
02:44:59.000Kind of interesting in light of creativity.
02:45:01.000But the other thing, and this goes to what you were saying before, you know, Rick came up through punk rock, punk rock and hip hop, right?
02:45:08.000I love punk rock music, grew up on it.
02:45:10.000That era in their 80s, punk rock in New York is amazing.
02:45:14.000But the whole thing, like Beastie Boys, he was close with the Ramones, Joe Strummer, all this, and then hip hop.
02:45:20.000What he understands, and I can't speak for him, but what he understands is that there's this energy in an early field, let's say of music, where they're not thinking about making money doing it.
02:45:30.000Like NWA, those guys were just being themselves when they were making music, right?
02:45:36.000I watched that movie, The Defiant Ones, about Dre and I think it's Jimmy Iovine, about- But it's really about the energy of early hip hop.
02:45:47.000And then they talk about Eminem and a bunch of other things.
02:45:49.000Or you watch, Rick and I at night, we'd watch Ramones documentaries or Clash documentaries.
02:45:53.000And it's like, it's the energy of something that's new where people are just being themselves and they're not thinking about making a ton of money on a record.
02:46:01.000A really great producer comes in and captures that energy.
02:46:15.000There's kind of a consistent theme over and over, but it's like, and then one of the things that came up when I was visiting Rick, cause I was like, you know, I feel like, like I came up through skateboarding, punk rock music.
02:46:25.000I'm not a musician, that incredible energy.
02:46:27.000I don't know much about hip hop, I was like, science had that when I first got into neuroscience.
02:46:32.000Like no one talked about neuroscience.
02:46:34.000We're just like brain explorers, cutting up brains, figuring out what to do, trying to figure out what these structures did and all this stuff.
02:46:46.000It's like hip hop because we're not thinking about, I wasn't just sit down and like start my podcast and be like, I'm going to start the Kuperman Lab podcast.
02:46:52.000I was like, I've just got all this stuff in me that I want to tell people because I think it's super cool.
02:46:56.000And a lot of it I think might also be really useful to them.
02:47:00.000So when Rick or Lex is just being Lex, or Chris Williamson is just being Chris Williamson, or Whitney Cummings is just being Whitney Cummings.
02:47:06.000So when a podcast works, I think it's because you're just being you.
02:47:11.000And it seems so obvious, it's kind of almost trite, but Rick is like, exactly.
02:47:16.000And the biggest mistake is to take the feedback, the comments, whatever, the hit pieces, whatever, and to change who you are.
02:47:23.000Now, there is sometimes useful information that comes back to us in ways we could do better in life, and certainly I am doing that.
02:47:29.000But the point is, at its essence, it's like the thing that makes podcasting beautiful to me is that I think we're right now, thanks in large part to you and some of the other early entrants, guys, guys that paved the way, is that It's a real thing.
02:48:07.000If you look, you are consistently, this podcast is consistently miles and miles ahead of everybody else in terms of The amount of consumption of it.
02:49:04.000If people haven't seen it, they should just look up on YouTube, like how long does it take to get famous from the movie Basquiat?
02:49:10.000And it's Penisio del Toro who plays the young Vincent Gallo telling him, here's what happens when you get famous.
02:49:16.000And it's an amazing clip because it explains the arc of fame and people becoming famous for being themselves and then doing the things that they think they should do to stay Popular and it destroys the whole thing.
02:49:29.000And so Rick's message is, Rick's talent is to feel real energy.
02:49:34.000He can tell what's real and what's fake.
02:50:01.000This is really about, hopefully, if people hear it, like Rick is saying in that book and in all his messages, we all have some little spark or gift or genetic bias towards something.
02:50:12.000And if you feed that, and it's a benevolent thing, you become that, it stays real.
02:50:29.000Again, I don't know hip-hop that well, but you don't have to see Eminem very many times or watch 8 Mile more than a couple of times or listen to his music and understand there's an energy there.
02:52:20.000There's a great quote in the Oliver Sacks book.
02:52:22.000He said he had a teacher that said, Oliver will go far, provided he does not go too far.
02:52:27.000And I saw that I read that right about the point that I recently saw the documentary Roadrunner about Bourdain And I actually had a chance to sit down and talk to Morgan Neville, who made that movie.
02:52:39.000And I didn't know much about him, but like, what I saw there was just like an adventurer, like a super curious person, an adventurer and a punk rocker.
02:52:48.000Like he was from that era of like Ramones, like it was like, and it was just a spectacular, like, I don't know why I didn't know more about him.
02:52:56.000I should have, because we have, there's kind of overlap in interest sets around like the, you know, New York, punk rock, that era that I've always been fascinated by.
02:53:03.000I'm a few years behind there, but I was like, wow, I just saw genuine curiosity in people and things.
02:53:10.000And I realized the food part was kind of incidental.
02:53:29.000He was also brilliant as a writer and he would write all of his own narratives.
02:53:34.000All the narration was all his writing and he was just so good at it.
02:53:38.000So good at expressing his joy for different cultures and trying out their cuisine and what he admired about them as human beings and about their spirit.
02:56:00.000But there's something about I might die cardio.
02:56:03.000I might die cardio is a different kind of cardio.
02:56:05.000It's like if you can swim to the point where you do laps in the pool and you do laps in the pool where you're like, I don't know if I'm gonna make it to the end of that fucking pool.
02:56:15.000And when you do get out of that pool, regular life is way easier.
02:56:33.000I will get on the assault bike and not go very fast and do 50 minutes and watch television.
02:56:40.000You know, I will do that, but I also do Tabata sprints on that motherfucker where I do 20 minutes sprinting, 10 second rest, excuse me, 20 seconds sprinting, 10 second rest, 20 seconds sprinting, and I do that in sets of four, four, eight reps.
02:57:40.000I've known a lot of people who are kind of compulsive, anxious, or even outright addicts who then get really into running or any kind of cardio long distance endurance type sport.
02:57:51.000And they seem to Again, not a scientific study.
02:57:57.000Whereas I find that while weightlifting is really healthy and I really enjoy it, I've observed that it can create a kind of like tension in the body that doesn't like release completely, maybe even builds energy into the nervous system, so to speak.
02:58:11.000And I do know a number of people Who have had challenges with drugs and alcohol.
02:58:15.000I'm grateful that I haven't had those challenges, but have challenges with drugs and alcohol.
02:58:19.000And they've gone the way of just weightlifting and they've been like multiple relapsers.
02:58:24.000Now that is not a knock against weightlifting.
02:58:26.000I think people should do resistance training and cardio, but it is kind of remarkable that people that do a lot of cardio seem to successfully beat their addictions.
02:58:35.000And maybe it's just the time involved, who knows?
03:01:24.000Well, there's a guy where in his whatever it was, late 20s, took a look at his childhood, was like, well, I wasn't, you know, being, you know, my nervous system shaped to be a great athlete or a Navy SEAL, etc.
03:01:36.000Looked at everything he had become, and he basically said a big hard no.
03:01:40.000He's like, whatever it was that happened before then, he was going to shape his nervous system by putting in endless hours.
03:01:48.000So it runs counter to everything that we talked about earlier, which is that one has to start early, but he's making up the time and then some.
03:01:55.000You know, I saw a poster where he couldn't move his legs for whatever reason.
03:02:08.000He's like a noun and a verb and an adjective.
03:02:11.000I just wish that there was stem cell technology and regenerative technology available now to help his joints stay healthy.
03:02:19.000Because the problem is that will, that mind, that power is eventually going to break down his body and mechanically it's not going to work anymore.
03:02:55.000BPC-157, while only animal data, it's very clear, you know, it has the propensity to encourage fibroblasts, which are cells that, you know, make up things like, you know, tendon and cartilage, etc., and can really repair tissues.
03:03:07.000I mean, you know, and I certainly have experienced, it can help repair things.
03:03:22.000Well, my wish, I mean, I have no plans to go to Washington, but my wish is that things like BBC 157, some very interesting, I would say not cutting edge, but even further out, like bleeding edge, things like pinealine, which can help with regeneration of the pinealocytes are incredible for sleep,
03:04:20.000Because the healthcare system, the business of healthcare, is really set up not...
03:04:27.000Looking at people is like, what's the best way and the most efficient way and the most cost-effective way in terms of for the actual patient to treat them?
03:05:18.000And then everyone telling me how much benefit they got out of McGill's big three.
03:05:21.000And then the war among the physios, like the physios, that's an ugly field, I'll tell you.
03:05:26.000And I asked someone, why is this field of, you know, exercise physiology so brutal?
03:05:29.000I asked Andy Galpin, I asked, and it turns out it's because it's very hard to get a lot of clients.
03:05:34.000And the moment that somebody comes out with knowledge that's very useful for a lot of people, they're potentially taking away their So, you know, to say nothing of the pain treatment world, we had a guy on our podcast named Sean Mackey.
03:06:00.000Like he's basically trying to incorporate all these different things.
03:06:02.000He's very holistic for lack of a better word.
03:06:05.000But if you look at most pain docs, They're not that evolved.
03:06:09.000They're just like, okay, this is what you use.
03:06:11.000It might be addictive, might not be addictive, but they're not ever talking about strengthening the systems that gave away in the first place.
03:06:47.000You've been a great friend to me and a great source of support through a bunch of different aspects of podcasting and supporting the discussions about health and exercise and forcing me to make my cold plunge a little colder, have me sniff smelling salt.
03:07:04.000You know, there are very few places in the world where you can have a real discussion about real things from all the angles and know that the person sitting across from you is being truly open-minded about it.