00:00:17.000What a thick ass book you wrote, sir.0.98
00:00:20.000Yeah, I figure it doubles as a doorstop or a weapon.0.99
00:00:23.000Yeah, it's designed to be read front to back.
00:00:26.000Learn a lot of science, a lot of health protocols, but you can also just decide, I want to get better at managing stress, go straight to that chapter.
00:00:33.000Look up what you want to do, say, Oh, I already do that.
00:00:36.000Go to the next thing and use it sort of like a manual.
00:02:46.000We could spend the whole time talking about Rick stories, but the man is just like he's plugged into some energetic layer that the rest of us aren't.
00:02:54.000And he's all day, every day, he's connecting with people and trying to help them.
00:02:58.000Like he really spends most of his time looking out at the world and trying to help people with their art, with their stuff.
00:03:36.000And, like, we made the Red Hot Chili Peppers record one of their albums in a mansion because he wanted to hear, like, instead of a recording studio, he wanted to hear, like, the sounds of the house.
00:03:46.000There's a, you know, I didn't come here to plug this, but we should because it's going to be awesome because I, I may have seen pieces of it.
00:03:53.000He has this documentary with Jay Z coming out like next week where they sit in this incredible monument structure in Europe and they just listen to music together and talk about music.
00:06:28.000Maybe had one sip of alcohol ages ago, which in the music business, that's a feat.0.99
00:06:32.000He must have one of those brains that's broken and just leaks psychedelic chemicals all the time.
00:06:37.000I don't know, whatever plane of consciousness he's on.0.67
00:06:39.000I've always thought that about like schizophrenics.
00:06:41.000Like, I wonder if that's what's happening.
00:06:43.000I wonder if they have like some dump of psychedelic chemicals that's constantly like leaking into their brain.
00:06:49.000Because we know the brain really does produce endogenous psychoactive compounds like DMT.
00:06:57.000I mean, isn't it possible that you could have a brain that leaks it?
00:06:59.000So here's the weird thing about schizophrenia, and it speaks to the larger kind of ways that medicine works.
00:07:05.000For better or worse, is that for the longest time we thought that dopamine, too much dopamine was schizophrenia.
00:07:11.000Because drugs that reduce dopamine, we call them neuroleptic drugs, haloperidol, all these things, clozapine, would reduce auditory hallucinations.
00:07:24.000Yeah, and that's mostly what people deal with, especially paranoid schizophrenics.0.88
00:07:27.000They're hearing voices, do this, do that, you're awful.
00:07:31.000I mean, if you think about it from that perspective, imagine all day and night you're just dealing with voices in your head that feel like another person there.
00:07:39.000Telling you usually horrible things about yourself or the outside world all the time.
00:07:43.000And these drugs reduce those symptoms.
00:07:47.000But because they reduce dopamine all over the brain and body, they create what's something called tardive dyskinesia, which is a suppression of the motor system.
00:07:56.000And so you'll see people who are doing this like writhing like this.
00:09:12.000They're not bad people, but their place in society often doesn't position them to sit down with a senator and say, hey, listen, my kids got autism and we need more research on this.
00:09:21.000A lot of where the money goes has to do with where.
00:09:26.000If you think about genetic disorders in families, and we know there is a strong component with schizophrenia.
00:09:31.000If you take two monozygotic identical twins, if one is paranoid schizophrenic, the probability that the other one will be paranoid schizophrenic isn't 100%, but it's much higher than by chance, much, much higher.
00:09:45.000Have they ever done a study where one manages to avoid it with lifestyle choices or diet or exercise or something along those lines?
00:09:54.000Definitely, although not in a way that you could attribute it to one thing.
00:09:57.000For instance, for a long time, Active military service in somebody who has a genetic predisposition to psychosis was a kind of an additional risk factor, a meaningful risk factor.
00:10:19.000I mean, there's this meth strength thing that I've never seen proven, but you can find these videos of like meth heads carrying refrigerators down the street and they're not jacked, but they're just like carrying refrigerators down alleys and people talk about meth strength.
00:10:33.000But yeah, I mean, methamphetamine is going to create probably the largest dump of dopamine in the brain than any other drug, at least in the short term.
00:10:41.000And it makes people think every idea is a good idea and everything is about them and their goals.
00:10:55.000Yeah, and we don't know what addicts are taking exactly.
00:10:57.000But yeah, I mean, Adderall is amphetamine, Vivance is amphetamine.
00:11:00.000Forgive me for referencing the book too many times.
00:11:06.000It'd be great if people want to read it, but that's not my goal here to constantly reference it.
00:11:09.000But there's a long section on all stimulants caffeine, nicotine, Adderall, Vivance, Modafinil, Artemodafinil, every single drug that can make you more alert and focused.
00:11:44.000The early studies, including one that was published in Science, showed that non human primates that are given MDMA experience neuron loss, that neurons die in the brain.
00:12:56.000I never had MDMA in my lab or amphetamine in my lab, but when I was an undergraduate, I worked in a lab where we injected rats with MDMA.
00:13:04.000At a time, this was in the early 90s when not much was known about it, but people were dying at raves, and that lab worked on thermal regulation.
00:13:11.000So we were interested in why they were dying from maybe MDMA.
00:13:15.000It turns out it was the hyperthermia from raves and not drinking enough fluids, and people would take amphetamines.
00:13:38.000Probably was more methamphetamine, maybe mixed with a little bit of MDMA.
00:13:42.000This is why it would be so great if this was finally legal and produced in ways that were reliable and administered in safe ways and all that.
00:13:49.000But that trial, the passage through the FDA failed for two reasons.
00:13:54.000It might go through the next round, but it failed for two reasons.
00:13:56.000I've been very close to this whole situation.
00:13:58.000One is that the powers that be in the previous administration felt that there wasn't a good control condition, like it wasn't a good placebo.
00:14:06.000Okay, fair enough, although a lot of drugs deal with that issue.
00:14:10.000The other was there was one, maybe two sexual improprieties of the therapist.
00:14:14.000There was a couple therapist that did some things they shouldn't have done while somebody was under the influence of the drug, and one incident like that can sink an entire initiative.
00:14:26.000And so, if it's going to pass in the next few years, there's going to have to be some things in place to make sure that the way it's administered is safe.
00:14:34.000Because the person under the influence of MDMA is very vulnerable to all sorts of things.
00:14:40.000It's not just about their heart health, et cetera.
00:14:42.000That can be dealt with before, it can be dealt with after.
00:14:45.000But the real issue is is the therapist operating in their best interest?
00:14:51.000And because the psychedelic community has always existed, and I'm a big fan of psychedelics for the treatment of depression, trauma, et cetera, but because that community has always kind of existed on the edge of Other techniques.
00:15:02.000It's sort of like, well, is a foot massage if the person's like saying they have all this trauma in their feet and the therapist rubs their feet, like that's not usual for therapy, right?
00:15:12.000That's pretty like within the gray zone of MDMA assisted psychotherapy done kind of rogue in the world of psychedelic therapists.
00:15:21.000So there's really no controls on what goes with the drugs.
00:15:24.000We've agreed on the basis of the clinical trials of what the dosages might be healthy dosages, how frequent, like two.
00:15:31.000Two sessions with a booster 80 milligrams in and then a booster of, say, 50 milligrams halfway in or by body weight, space three weeks apart for psilocybin, maybe just once for, and on and on.
00:15:42.000All that's been looked at in various ways in these trials.
00:15:45.000And is it always in conjunction with psychotherapy?
00:15:57.000I mean, 60, 70% significant reduction in symptoms, in some cases remission.
00:16:03.000But, you know, these, you know, I have friends in the so called psychedelic community, but I also have friends in the standard science community.
00:16:10.000And for these things to really come together, there's going to have to be some standardization of safety, but also just practice.
00:16:16.000If someone's like, I'm feeling I'm at the precipice of like a huge amount of pain, do you encourage them to go into that pain and purge it?
00:16:24.000Or do you tell them, hey, listen, you know, maybe back away from that?
00:16:27.000All this stuff is done by feel in the psychedelic community.
00:17:13.000And you had psychedelic therapies too, but you know, how much of these things to merge is a question.
00:17:19.000Like maybe some somatic therapy during MDMA could be really helpful for somebody that feels really out of body or that had a, you know, bodily trauma or was raped or whatever.
00:17:30.000But then we have to ask ourselves are we going to let therapists touch people while they're under the influence of these really powerful and pathogens?
00:17:38.000Why is touching people normalized in the psychedelic community when they do this?
00:17:45.000A good day starts with a solid morning routine.
00:17:48.000So, if something's missing, if your body isn't getting what it needs, everything can feel off.
00:17:53.000AG1 is designed to help fill the holes.
00:17:56.000Their next gen formula is dialed in with over 75 ingredients, minerals, vitamins, adaptogens, and more, clinically shown to fill nutrient gaps and increase healthy gut bacteria.
00:18:16.000Zinc carnosine for gut health, and five grams of Creo Vitalis premium German made creatine monohydrate, which, if you don't know, creatine is a highly studied compound in sports science that helps support energy.
00:18:57.000It's just that right now, psychedelic assisted therapy sits in that constellation of like somatic therapies, talk therapies, breathing therapies, emotive therapies.
00:19:09.000I mean, so much of what I've been interested in and why I wrote the book, aside from the compulsion to just get things out there, is my hope is that as more techniques come along, different breath work practices, different supplements, different drugs, different peptides, that people will start to understand some of the kind of principles of how things work to decide what's worthwhile or not.
00:19:29.000So for instance, for trauma, we know that it's basically four steps.
00:19:34.000It doesn't matter if you use getting through trauma.
00:19:36.000It doesn't matter if it's through therapy that includes psychedelics or not.
00:19:40.000First of all, people have to have a willingness to address it, right?
00:19:44.000Second, they need to experience the painful feeling in a safe environment.
00:19:50.000There's no just kind of avoiding that.
00:20:10.000You're trying to uncouple the emotions from the memory.
00:20:12.000And then the fourth piece, which is something I touch on with respect to grief and trauma therapy more generally, is there's this beautiful thing that guests on your podcast have talked about.
00:20:23.000You've probably experienced this that at some point, the shitty thing that happened to you, the awful thing, can be transmuted into some effort to create goodness for yourself or for the world.
00:20:43.000Who move through this process can get to the place where they'll like plant a tree or teach to or talk to other parents who are in bereavement.
00:20:51.000And so they've transmuted their loss into goodness, right?
00:20:55.000So if we just say, you know, take your loss and go do good for the world, that's not going to work.
00:20:59.000If we say, take your loss and just feel the pain of it, people get caught in that spiral.
00:21:03.000I mean, I think this is unfortunately when the millennials were in their adolescence and, you know, teen years and 20s, there was this overemphasis on like feeling your feelings.
00:21:12.000But no one ever talked about the next phase, which is where you actually.
00:21:16.000Stop feeling so shitty about the shitty thing that happened.
00:21:19.000And so, my goal is really to try and organize these different practices and come up with structures so that you could imagine MDMA being very useful for that first or second step, feeling your feelings in a safe way in the right environment.
00:21:31.000What are the studies that MAPS has done with MDMA with soldiers and PTSD?
00:21:36.000Because that's been probably one of the most prominent things.
00:21:41.000Well, Rick Doblin obviously is more qualified to get into the specifics, but I know of at least three clinical trials looking at.
00:21:48.000MDMA at dosages that are by body weight, but they're not like outrageously high dosages, that have people move through their PTSD within a matter of four to six weeks total.
00:22:02.000So, with two sessions of MDMA spaced apart about a month or so, talk therapy the whole way through.
00:22:07.000And I know of at least one clinical trial with veterans.
00:22:11.000Oftentimes, these studies will include veterans, but it's not all veterans, which actually is kind of good.
00:22:17.000You want to be able to compare their kind of trauma to other people's trauma.
00:22:20.000But I have to say, and I know you've covered this extensively, but the work on Ibogaine has, in my mind, completely revised the way that we think about psychedelic therapy because it's kind of ironic that the first psychedelic that will likely be legal for the treatment of PTSD is going to be the most intense one.0.97
00:22:39.000It'd be like if I'm like, hey, I want to learn a martial art, and you're like, yeah, get into the octagon and get your ass kicked, you know, and that's going to, you know, turn you into a fighter.
00:22:48.000I mean, that's the way people describe Ibogaine.0.98
00:22:52.000It is no joke because you point out it is not recreational.
00:22:54.000And then when they follow with DMT, I mean, you know, it seems that the outcomes are very, very good for a lot of people.
00:23:01.000I will say, and they're going to sweat me for this a little bit, there have been a few deaths, and it seems that that may correlate with fentanyl use prior.
00:23:10.000That's really, this needs to be talked about if we're going to get this legal.
00:23:31.000I know of many people, and there are many of your friends, like, And they've talked openly about this stuff.
00:23:36.000So, DJ Shipley and the Capone, Marcus Capone, and others, and many, many others who feel that they've benefited tremendously from these therapies.
00:23:44.000And there's a litany of other names there, too, that have benefited tremendously.
00:24:11.000I mean, I think if you think about my experience of psychedelics, I've not done Ibogaine, is that there is all sorts of understanding about the brain that comes about during those journeys that leads you to understand that we have good and evil in all of us.
00:24:32.000And I could understand how it could be downright terrifying for some people to realize that.
00:24:38.000We have a hypothalamus that just wants to satisfy drives, but we also have a forebrain that can suppress those drives.
00:24:45.000I mean, that is the nature of being human, right?
00:24:46.000Trevor Burrus Do you think that's what these people are thinking of when they're thinking of demons?
00:24:50.000They're thinking of like drives that are a part of the human system?
00:24:57.000So, okay, I have a lot of thoughts about this.
00:25:00.000So, I'm not going to spin off into a neuroscience lecture, but we think about brain function and free will and all that kind of stuff from Top down and bottom up perspective.
00:25:11.000Bottom up is you have a drive, you want to satisfy it, you're going to do it.
00:25:14.000Top down are regions of the brain that inhibit those impulse circuits.
00:25:21.000And so much of life is about the dynamic tension between those two.
00:25:26.000I mean, the seven deadly sins are all the hypothalamic structures like rage, envy, lust, et cetera.
00:25:33.000But the forebrain can be built up, you can learn things as the kids learn to suppress their impulses, puppies learn to suppress their impulses to get a reward.
00:26:31.000And he literally says, I don't know why I want to do this, but please take the money from my life insurance and donate it to the study of mental health.
00:26:44.000Please understand what's happening to me.
00:26:47.000And they did an autopsy, and the guy had a tumor in a brain region, which included brain regions, which included amygdala, hypothalamus, and thalamus.
00:26:55.000Collectively, what we would call low level brain structures involved with perception and impulse.
00:27:05.000The conclusion of all that is not, oh, he had a brain tumor that made him do it.
00:27:08.000The conclusion that most neuroscientists draw is that most people don't ever conceive of doing those things.
00:27:16.000But a lot of people go to Niagara Falls and look and go, what's keeping me from jumping?
00:27:21.000What's keeping you from jumping is your forebrain.
00:28:04.000I'm not saying you reveal evil in there, but as you know, in a high dose psilocybin journey, you're going into the recesses of your mind and your unconscious mind is showing you what's there.
00:28:16.000It's showing you that there are terrible forces out in the world.
00:29:07.000We could talk about this, like, you know, actually, church, and I know you've been going to church.
00:29:12.000This has been an interesting thing because a lot of what's in the Bible is about the dynamic tension between what neuroscientists would call top down and bottom up influences.
00:29:19.000It acknowledges, like, we have this stuff in us that you're not supposed to pretend it doesn't.
00:29:23.000You have to acknowledge your humanness, but also your human capacity to control these impulses.
00:29:29.000And I mean, that's a lot of what's in the Bible.
00:29:31.000It's not everything, but it's stories about.
00:29:33.000That in many, many ways, hence the seven deadly sins and the virtues and so on.
00:29:38.000But Eddie has been a pretty strong voice for caution in the veterans and other communities about the use of psychedelics because there's this theory within some sectors of religion and Christianity in particular that in psychedelic journeys, evil entities, if you will, might have access to us or something like that.
00:30:03.000There's a neuroscientist view of that too, which is that.
00:30:06.000In those states, you're revealing aspects of self that normally you can suppress, but now you're having to see that aspect of you or other people.
00:30:15.000Like realizing that people have evil and good in them is a.
00:30:20.000I think we can all say, yeah, I get it, but we usually say they're evil, they're good.
00:30:27.000It's very hard for us to address the possibility that we, any of us, I like to think I could never have been that kid that went up on the tower, but if I had a tumor in my brain, Would I have done it?
00:30:39.000I mean, this recent case of this woman killing her children was about this, right?
00:31:25.000One of the big things that happens during psychedelic trips that disturb a lot of people is when they try to fight the trip and then they have a really bad trip.
00:31:36.000And one of the things that someone will tell you, for lack of a better term, who is a shaman.0.97
00:31:40.000I hate that term because I think it's probably very real in some parts of the world and it's also probably a very much a bullshit thing in America.0.94
00:31:58.000You know, the shaman thing is very weird.
00:31:59.000A lot of it is like very lost people that find identity in altered states of consciousness.
00:32:06.000And I think, just my personal opinion, that experiencing these altered states of consciousness should enhance your experience as a human, should not replace it.
00:32:22.000I think there's a lot of people who are replacing altered states of consciousness far too often.
00:32:28.000And they live in that world more than they live in the world of just being conscious and sober.
00:32:34.000And I think there are many steps that you have to take in order to have a good trip.
00:32:43.000Some people have a really hard time letting go, relaxing, and just going with it.
00:32:52.000People that, for whatever reason, they have whatever psychological issues or they have.
00:32:59.000Control issues, and they just cannot deal with the fact that this experience is so beyond their comprehension and so overwhelming that they try to battle it.
00:33:12.000The experiences, the things that they see, the states that they enter into, they don't feel at all in control and they freak out.
00:33:20.000And when you try to control it, I haven't had one of those, but from the people that I know that have, it's like they say that they were wrestling with it, and you cannot win.
00:33:31.000And it just overwhelms you, and then your anxiety kicks in.
00:33:34.000What I have experienced in trips is that it's highlighted that if you think in a positive way, it'll show you more beautiful images, and that you can just relax.
00:33:47.000And that, especially in the DMT realm, they are trying to tell you to relax, they're trying to tell you to just go with it.
00:33:56.000And if you don't fight it, you can have a wonderful experience.
00:34:03.000I haven't been physically assaulted and beaten as a child.
00:34:07.000There's a lot of things that didn't happen to me that I don't have to deal with.
00:34:11.000And someone, especially I think guys who've been to war, you've seen so much horrible shit and it just becomes a part of your everyday existence these horrible memories, these horrible visions that you have, and horrible things that you've probably had to do.
00:34:24.000And then something comes along like DMT or like psilocybin or something just overwhelms the normal state of consciousness.
00:34:34.000If you're trying to fight that, I would imagine that would feel like you're battling demons.
00:35:09.000But there was a session where I was feeling the resistance to feel something, and I knew what was knocking, and it was thinking about things that didn't happen.
00:35:28.000But then it opened after some period of time.
00:35:31.000Listen, I had a better childhood than many, much better than many, and harder than others for- There were some things about my family structure that felt- There were times when I really, really, really needed a certain kind of support and structure, and it was gone.
00:36:32.000But there was a time when I was an adolescent and teen when I really needed structure and I really needed certain things that just were not happening.
00:36:43.000And so, I went out into the world and did way too many things, way too young, saw a lot and got involved in a lot of sex violence and stuff that I shouldn't have at that time.
00:37:33.000She had a maternal way about her and a toughness that was unbelievable, and she was a serious scientist.
00:37:39.000And then my postdoc advisor, similarly, was very supportive.
00:37:42.000My undergraduate advisor, who I got very close with, killed himself in a very dramatic way about two weeks after I had spoken to him, shot himself in the bathtub.
00:37:56.000And this was a guy who understood mental.
00:39:29.000They have all these anxiety disorders.
00:39:31.000My physician friends, I can count on one hand the number of them that are healthy of mind and body who have healthy kids.
00:39:39.000And then I realized, oh, you know, the skateboarding community, the science health community, I'm at Stanford University School of Medicine, the apex, or among You know, the top universities in the world of health.
00:39:49.000And I'm like, my colleagues are sick and dying and stressed.0.99
00:39:53.000And I realized, I was like, shit, we don't know how to regulate stress.0.99
00:39:55.000So I started studying stress and stress mitigation, this kind of thing.0.97
00:39:59.000And then I don't want to make this even darker, but I think it's worth acknowledging for a couple of reasons.
00:40:05.000And by the way, I want to be really clear.
00:40:06.000I think what Veterans Solutions has done with the Ibogaine Initiative, I think what Rick Perry and what Brian are doing with the Ibogaine thing, I think it's awesome.
00:40:13.000If I highlight that there were some deaths, I want to be really clear.
00:40:17.000People might have died of fentanyl anyway.
00:40:20.000I mean, there's, you know, we need to have both connect, both of the deaths are connected to fentanyl use.
00:40:25.000My understanding is they had used fentanyl prior to going to use ibogaine.
00:40:28.000So maybe in this discussion, a few people will be sensitized to like that's a potential issue.
00:40:32.000So meaning like they were probably addicted to fentanyl, they were trying to get off of it, and they tried to do it while they had fentanyl in their system, perhaps.
00:40:48.000And listen, we, you and I know, I mean, it's more from your world.
00:40:51.000Of martial arts and stuff, but we know people who've, like, we hear they go down to Mexico, they're going to do this treatment, they're going to come back, they're better.
00:40:58.000And, like, a week later, they don't sound so much better.
00:41:40.000So, but then this last year, I'm like going about my life and I'm thinking, okay, you know, things are pretty good.
00:41:48.000And I get a call and I hear that my good friend, Nolan Williams, triple board certified MD, Who took the transcranial magnetic stimulation therapies and accelerated them so that people could get relief from depression much faster?
00:42:05.000He took what was a many weeks long or months long thing and compressed it, saved lives.
00:42:10.000Who's also doing the studies of Ibogaine, took his own life.
00:42:15.000I mean, this one's still sinking in for me.
00:42:18.000There's no reason to believe it had anything to do with Ibogaine whatsoever.
00:43:10.000It's rare, fortunately, but it tells us that the.
00:43:14.000I believe it tells us something fundamental about humans, which is that there's always this dynamic tension between our underlying impulses and this top down control.
00:43:24.000Suicide is a weird one because it's like the whole thing gets twisted up so that we're no longer acting in an adaptive way.
00:43:31.000Obviously, taking one's life is not adaptive.
00:43:33.000But it's a rage or a depression or whatever.
00:43:37.000The conclusion that I draw from it is what can we do to put ourselves in the best position to be able to Hold our impulses in their healthy place.
00:43:50.000You know, if I, I don't want to make more of like what I did in the book or what I'm trying to do in the podcast or public education, but like, let's take the ice bath for example.0.97
00:43:58.000I've taken a lot of shit for the ice bath thing.0.97
00:44:02.000We both know they don't like the cold.
00:44:04.000That's why they're talking about this.
00:44:05.000But we know for certain, and I go through the data finally, giving it, putting yourself into a high adrenaline state where your body and brain are freaking out and doing that deliberately gets you better at dealing with high stress states.
00:44:17.000Which, in my mind, is only a good thing.
00:44:19.000This should be basic training for children, not young children, right?
00:44:56.000You could do it through a hot sauna that feels uncomfortably hot, provided you don't die of hypothermia.
00:45:00.000You can do it through any number of different things.
00:45:02.000The point is that the principle of learning to capture your mind and think strategically, lower your state of arousal when you're in a stressful circumstance, is a life skill that is invaluable.
00:45:16.000And getting great sleep, we could go on and on about all the benefits of that.
00:45:19.000There's probably a hundred benefits of that, and probably a thousand.
00:45:22.000Things that go wrong when you don't get enough sleep chronically, a couple nights, no problem.
00:45:28.000But when you're well rested, you are far less likely to harm yourself or others because your forebrain is more active and can suppress these impulses.
00:45:37.000And so, my kind of like, I don't like the word mission, but my goal is that we'll kind of move beyond the notion of like hacks or that it's this tool or that tool and just really understand like what we're trying to do when we're teaching ourselves to be better humans.
00:45:52.000And I do think there is a generation of kids that grew up.
00:45:56.000Hearing that their feelings are valid.
00:46:06.000But if we say, oh, there's a brain circuit, therefore I'm not going to quit because it's a brain circuit, well, you're still an addict, right?
00:46:13.000So the great sleep, social connection, sunlight in the morning, like these things are really designed to get us to have better control over our focus, over our impulse control.
00:46:24.000And it almost becomes so simple at that point.
00:46:27.000And we can say, well, what was going on with Nolan in the weeks before?
00:46:31.000I have smatterings of what might have been going on, running two giant projects in his lab, two companies, managing a family, managing a life.
00:46:39.000I'm not going to claim he was a perfect human being, but like, it's just like overwhelm.0.99
00:46:45.000His forebrain fucking turned on him.0.98
00:47:35.000When he talks about it, it's like, man, you can just tell he's like, there's this understanding that comes from hard driving people that, like, okay, I've.
00:47:59.000I think some people just go down that chute.
00:48:01.000And, you know, David and I were talking about this because I know you guys have common friends and some who've succumbed to things and some who really like rose and above all that.
00:48:10.000And he's like, look, man, it's once you've tasted that edge of being pulled back and forth from your impulses and like, And you learn to just force yourself to both do hard things, as you always say, but also force yourself to like really embrace the goodness in the world and the love that's there.
00:48:28.000Like, let's not forget the lighter side, like the beauty of like all these amazing things in life.
00:48:33.000There's this kind of like promised land inside of us.
00:48:37.000I don't mean to sound religious here, but like, there's this place in us where, yeah, all that's true.
00:49:27.000And that like joy of like having made it over some bump or something and seeing goodness and having a great relationship now with my parents.
00:49:35.000It's taken a lot of work, but we're really in a good place.
00:49:37.000Appreciating all the gifts they gave me, seeing people leave.
00:49:41.000And like, I have such love for Nolan and for all those people I mentioned.
00:49:45.000And understanding that the grief is just love is, man, I'll tell you like, and I probably couldn't have gotten here without some of that psychedelic work because it really.
00:49:56.000Took my face and stuck, you know, just stuck it in the vomit of all this.
00:49:59.000But then you came out, you know, and you go, Whoa, like there's so much goodness.
00:50:07.000I mean, if the psychedelics can help people, if talk therapy can help people, great.0.98
00:50:11.000But I think on a day to day basis, it's like do shit that sucks so that you can stay in control of staying in control.0.98
00:50:19.000And also make sure you touch into the beauty of really good things.0.99
00:50:23.000Well, I find that when you do the things that suck, you do the hard workouts and the sawn and the cold plunge, life just seems more beautiful.0.98
00:50:30.000It really does because you're not overwhelmed with this just existential dread that just hangs over you, just being a physical, vulnerable human being walking through this unknown, uncertain life, and there's a bunch of external chaos like world wars and fucking financial collapses, and there's so much shit going on in everybody's brain.0.98
00:50:53.000Do something that just exhausts that, at least for a little while, and lets you take in what a fucking beautiful day.0.92
00:51:37.000And I think there's a lot of people out there that are very angry.
00:51:41.000You see a lot of people on social media.
00:51:43.000I think they're living in that state, but not a state of four days, a state of 40 years of nothing, doing nothing, and just letting your body just go, you know, you have dogs, right?
00:51:54.000You know, it's like when your dog doesn't get exercise.1.00
00:52:27.000Dude, he'll haul ass at like right now he's up to five on a two incline and he's just like, At the back of that thing, he falls off, he jumps right back on.0.99
00:52:36.000People are like, Don't earn his joints.0.76
00:56:33.000The visible plan starts at just $25 a month or get the premium Visible Plus Pro plan and save $10 on your first month with promo code ROGAN.
00:56:55.000Like people, we don't talk about this enough because they're not, you know, it's not as quote unquote exciting as psychedelics, but man, those service dogs, like, Have kept people alive.
00:58:00.000But the other piece there, like talk about dopamine and drive and life and death.
00:58:05.000I feel like that movie was such a, like a, Key insight into the relationship between drive when it's in, you know, love and love of craft, love of people, and then drive when it's competitive in an unhealthy way.0.68
00:58:21.000Like how the Buddhists talk about ego and that ego is great because it can drive us in certain pursuits that can build things for us, family, society.
00:58:31.000But then, how it can, when people get competitive about the wrong things.
00:58:35.000Like in that movie, when he was doing things that he didn't really want to do, it almost killed him.
00:58:41.000But then, when he was doing things that could almost kill him, but he really wanted to do it, but it was almost like spiritual, like doing that tightrope walk with the full moon in the background, it's still dangerous.
00:59:44.000Because he's so mechanical and methodical.
00:59:47.000You also, in that movie, I think Alex is fantastic.
00:59:50.000You also saw a different side of Alex when he was younger that doesn't seem to be there right now, at least not visibly, which is he was hyper competitive with the guys that he had grown up on.
00:59:58.000And it was like, he was like, he was like, I want that rock, I want that slot.
01:00:06.000And so he wanted it before Potter.0.99
01:00:08.000And so you can see when Potter's kind of like the dying lion in that field and trying to hold on, he starts doing stupid shit like these tightrope walks in China that almost kill him.0.98
01:01:26.000It was like, it was the drive that replaced discipline.
01:01:29.000Because I loved the thing that I was doing so much, I found so much interest in it and so much passion in it.
01:01:34.000And it just, it was so exciting to me to do that I just wanted to do it all the time.
01:01:39.000And so I didn't have to be disciplined.
01:01:41.000I knew there was work that had to be done to get better at it, but it was also, I was just intensely focused on getting better.
01:01:48.000So the work, like whether it's rounds on the heavy bag or practicing specific techniques or sparring drills or whatever the fuck I was doing, I wasn't doing it like going, okay, this is what I got to do today.
01:02:05.000I was only, the only thing that stopped me was time and sleep.
01:02:09.000I would have tried to do it all day, every day.
01:02:11.000I was obsessed, but I wasn't disciplined.
01:02:13.000I had to get disciplined later on in life when I stopped competing in particular because then there was like this overwhelming, looming threat of physical harm if you don't stay in the gym constantly.0.98
01:02:28.000If you're not like 100% ready, there's this possibility that you could zig when you should have zagged and you get a fucking shin to your head.
01:02:37.000There's a lot of terrifying thoughts that are involved in that that keep you training really hard.0.98
01:02:45.000I didn't develop discipline until after I stopped competing.
01:02:47.000And then I realized, like, well, I should just work out because I should work out and I should eat well because it's good for you.
01:02:53.000And I should, you know, I should lift weights because it's probably good to be strong, you know.
01:02:57.000And it was doing things because I know they had to be done rather than I was obsessed with doing them.
01:03:03.000I mean, I'm telling a just so story here, but there's also a part of me which says, like, it's a mild bit of OCD, but thank goodness you didn't clean your room because what if you had OCD and you're like, I'm going to be the kid with the perfect room?
01:03:16.000And then I'm going to be the kid that washes my hands all the time.
01:03:18.000Then I'm going to be the kid that is all about cleanliness.
01:03:20.000Like, I think, I do think that, you know.
01:03:22.000What is obsessive compulsive disorder versus being passionate about something?
01:03:29.000There's a really important theme to OCD.
01:03:32.000Like, true OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, is characterized by the following the more you engage in the behavior, the stronger the compulsion gets.
01:03:41.000And that's why it's so maddening for people with true clinical OCD.
01:03:45.000So, for people that have a hand washing thing, they're like, oh, I have something on my hands, they go and wash it.
01:03:49.000And it just makes them want to wash more and more and more.
01:03:53.000And, you know, I'm not a big fan of SSRIs in many cases, but I will say if there's one place where SSRIs have really helped a great number of people not completely dissolve into a puddle of dysfunction, it's proper use of SSRIs for true clinical OCD.
01:04:11.000So, OCD in that way, like washing the hands, what is the cause of that?
01:05:00.000The thing is based largely on inputs from structures like the hypothalamus that are related to very primitive adaptive behaviors.
01:05:09.000Like, you know, getting infections out and getting dirt away is, you know, adaptive when it's done in a healthy way.
01:05:17.000You know, there are all these people, and there's actually a paper, I hate this paper, but it's a real paper, that like watching zip popping stimulates dopamine.
01:08:05.000And they basically remove, you know, they remove the skull, they go in, and the way they decide what tissue to take out and what tissue to keep, because the tumor is, you know, is embedded in, Functional brain areas that are required for speech, for movement, etc.
01:08:22.000You can't just start scooping brain tissue out.
01:08:24.000What I learned is that these tumors don't look different when you just look at the brain, they feel different to the instruments of the highly trained surgeon.
01:08:38.000Eddie's in there mapping, stimulating different areas of the brain while this guy is awake and reporting what he's feeling.
01:08:47.000I'm going back and forth talking to this guy.
01:08:49.000Going back and forth and seeing the tumor getting removed little by little by little, put into play, goes off to biopsy, but this guy is awake the entire time.
01:10:51.000We hear a lot about the negative aspects of AI, but I asked Eddie, to what extent is AI critical for this kind of technology to evolve?
01:10:57.000He's like, absolutely critical, because it can take all these neural signals and figure out what the brain was doing exactly when the person said the word for or the or my name is.
01:11:34.000Then convert that into signals that maybe it's prosthetics, maybe it's actual muscles and nerves can respond to accurately.
01:11:43.000The takeaway here is that, like, we hear a lot about the bad stories of medicine, the stuff that's on the edge, and we still need to figure out, like, the psychedelic stuff.
01:11:51.000But I have to say, with respect to AI in medicine, I am super, super excited about people walking again, seeing again.
01:12:03.000I mean, this stuff is starting to happen, having brain tumors removed that do not encroach on areas of the brain that are critical.
01:12:08.000I said, if you were a quarter centimeter or less into this other margin where you recorded that, The guy says, Oh, yeah, my hand.
01:12:22.000He is like, may you never need his help.
01:12:25.000In fact, there's one of our public facing health colleagues, I'll tell you this because he's been public about it, who got a stem cell injection into the disc down in Mexico and it got infected.
01:12:36.000I've heard of people doing things like that.
01:12:38.000And was paralyzed and was in a hospital here in Texas.
01:12:42.000Okay, this is no, you know, I'm not casting any judgment on Texas, but what happened was they didn't realize that he had a Egg shaped, egg sized infection there.
01:12:51.000Okay, so there was this surgery had gone awry, got an infection, and he was paralyzed.
01:12:57.000They said they were going to have to sever the spinal cord to get this infection out when they finally discovered it.
01:13:02.000I contacted Eddie and I said, Listen, here's what's going on.
01:13:06.000He said, Get me in touch with his doctor, get me his charts.
01:13:10.000He was airlifted to UCSF, and it wasn't Eddie that did the surgery, but it was someone in his department that removed this egg sized infection.
01:13:58.000So I asked, so I said, what was it that allowed you guys to do this that another clinic might not have been able to do?
01:14:07.000Because I, like you, am very interested in what makes for good doctors versus so so doctors versus lousy doctors versus superb doctors.
01:14:14.000And he said, it's two pieces it's the training and the skill of the physician, obviously, their willingness to constantly update their models with new understanding of what's out there, new technologies, and it's also these incredible bioengineering and AI technologies.
01:14:30.000That can make estimates about where the margins of error are in real time.
01:14:35.000Because, you know, when you think about the brain, you get an MRI, you see, okay, there's the tumor, we're going to go out and scoop it out.
01:16:44.000And then basically, three guys it was Mike Merznik, a guy named Michael Kilgard, who's down in Dallas, or maybe it's Houston, he's here in Texas, and a guy named Greg Reckinzone, who is this brilliant scientist.
01:16:55.000They did these studies at first in monkeys and then in humans, which showed that if you take adult monkeys or humans and you have them pay really careful attention to a task, that the brain changes.
01:17:06.000And the experiment is very simple it's like this.
01:17:08.000So they had monkeys or a human can do this, feel a little Like a rotating drum.
01:17:13.000And the drum's got bumps on it, like braille.
01:17:16.000And they're recording from an area of the brain that responds to touch.
01:17:19.000And the monkey's job is to basically press a lever anytime the bumps go from coarse to more fine.
01:17:51.000Now, they do a different experiment where the monkey is still feeling the bumps, but the monkey is trained to listen to changes in the sound, subtle changes in the frequency of the sound, high to low or low to high.
01:18:03.000And if they get that right, they press, if they press, they think they went from high to low and that's the task, they press the lever or they pull the joystick and they get some juice.
01:18:12.000Under those conditions, the area of the brain responsible for hearing changes.
01:18:16.000Now, the key thing here is the experience is the same in both cases.
01:18:23.000But the key difference is what they're paying attention to.
01:18:26.000The brain of the adult does not change just because of passive experience.
01:18:30.000The brain of the adult, and this is true in humans too, changes because of what you attend to.
01:18:35.000And when we start talking about neuroplasticity and learning, everyone would like to think, oh, my brain is different at the end of this conversation than before.
01:18:43.000You don't learn from passive experience, you learn from focusing and the friction that's accompanying trying to do things right.
01:20:26.000There's a level that they reach that someone who starts out late in life, even if you're a good athlete, you probably never reach that level.
01:21:06.000My anecdotal experience from watching people learn striking, it seems like the people that are really elite at it, they grew up with their bodies.
01:21:15.000As their bodies were maturing, they were learning it.
01:21:17.000And it seems like there's a something that they have that you don't get later in life.
01:21:24.000You can get really good if you're a good athlete learning it late in life.
01:21:27.000You're never going to get best of ever world champion status.0.99
01:21:31.000Like you have to have a super long journey, and that's to start when you're a fucking kid.0.94
01:21:37.000So, it's like your brain has to be evolving, learning those skills, learning timing and distance and fainting and how people react and how to map out potential reactions from certain moves and how to lure them into things.0.99
01:22:14.000I also realized that six pack abs don't mean shit.0.76
01:22:17.000You're down near the Mexican border, like at some, the gym I trained at was like pretty far south in San Diego.0.97
01:22:22.000And some guys would roll in and like, you wouldn't think much of them.
01:22:25.000Like, they like unpeel, they like, you know, because everyone would spar on Wednesdays, you know, and they try and match people up by weight.
01:22:32.000And you see guys that did not look in shape who could move and you just get battered.
01:22:38.000I mean, they're just, if they know how to move properly.
01:22:41.000Then the last thing that like I really took away, and I think about this on the internet too, is, There's always like one guy in the gym who moves really well on the bag, who's like speed bag and heavy bag and just looks so crisp, super in shape.
01:22:55.000And they never spar and they sit like at the edge of the ring and they give all sorts of advice about what you're supposed to do when you're in there.
01:23:01.000And then if you go, and I finally did because in skateboarding, I wasn't that good of a skateboarder, but I'd be like, come on, like drop in, like let's go, like have fun.
01:23:09.000Like skateboarding is a very inviting sport.
01:23:11.000It's not like surfing where they're like guarding the waves, right?
01:24:04.000I do not recommend, no, fighting's terrible, but there's something about martial arts, about the fear and learning how to stay calm while you're sparring.
01:24:12.000I think jujitsu is the best one because although there's always a risk of injury in jujitsu, you're not getting hit all the time.
01:24:21.000And that's the difference really between, um, Martial arts sparring, like kickboxing and things along those lines, and boxing and jiu jitsu.
01:24:29.000Because in jiu jitsu, as many times as you're training in a really good gym with really good guys, you're going full clip, and both you and him are going full clip, and there's no animosity.
01:24:39.000They might be one of your best friends.
01:24:41.000You guys are just doing the thing that you do full clip.
01:24:44.000But by doing it full clip, because if he catches you, like he gets your arm, you just tap and then you go again.
01:24:50.000As long as your ego is healthy, as long as you understand what you're doing and knowing, and he's not yanking on your knees and ripping your knees apart with heel hooks and stuff like that.
01:24:59.000As long as you do that, you're literally going full clip.
01:25:02.000So you learn how to stay calm and you also get very comfortable with going full clip.
01:25:08.000So if you're in a situation, if you're a guy who only does point karate sparring and you're just touching each other and they stop and touch each other, and then you're in some wild melee at a bar where someone's swinging at you full blast and throwing wild haymaker punches and you're panicking because you're not used to this scenario.
01:25:28.000A jiu jitsu person is used to someone going full blast.
01:25:31.000So they'll grab a hold of you and it'll be just routine.0.80
01:25:35.000They just drag you to the ground, trip you, get on top, mount, choke you, whatever the fuck they want to do, essentially, once they get a hold of you.0.96
01:25:43.000They do it all the time, full blast.0.89
01:25:46.000That's why I think it's the superior martial art for self defense.
01:25:49.000Because if you're going to really learn how to fight like striking, you're going to get hit.
01:26:41.000Hard for the opportunity to fight other mice.
01:26:45.000You know, we always hear like, oh, they just want pleasure and no pain.
01:26:47.000Like, male mice have a circuit and they will work their asses off figuring out puzzles that were perplexed like 30% of the adult population across the world.
01:27:39.000I was like, box, like, you know, like boxing drills.
01:27:41.000He's like, no, they'd like pit us against each other until you'd find the, Kind of combination of people that were about equal, and then they just like put you to work on each other.
01:27:49.000The idea was you were supposed to, you know, both learn the gentlemanly aspects about, you know, touch gloves and the things afterwards.
01:27:56.000You have to, like, you know, so there's that.
01:27:58.000And he's like, no, but you were supposed to try and stay calm in the, in getting, you know, while trying to beat up the other person and then beat you up.
01:28:06.000And there's value in just what we were talking about earlier about doing difficult things.
01:28:10.000I think it is one of the most difficult things you could choose to do that you can voluntarily.
01:28:16.000Sign yourself up for a place where you're going to experience pain and severe discomfort and a very perplexing puzzle.
01:28:24.000Trying to figure out how to hit someone who doesn't want to get hit and they're trying to hit you and you're trying not to get hit or get tapped or whatever, wrestle, whatever you're doing.
01:28:35.000And those very difficult things to do make the rest of your life easier.0.99
01:28:39.000It's like we were talking about getting shit for cold punches.0.98
01:28:43.000I don't know if I get shit for talking about cold punches, but anybody who doesn't think you should cold punch hasn't cold punched.0.99
01:28:48.000The people that do it and the people that say don't do it, they just, they're coming up with excuses because it's fucking terrifying and nobody likes it.0.99
01:29:02.000There's a bunch of different excellent practices.
01:29:06.000And if you stack those up throughout your day diet, nutrition, sunlight, exercise, all these different things cold plunge, sauna, your life's going to be better.
01:29:15.000And I think a thing like martial arts, particularly jujitsu, Is a great addition to that.
01:29:21.000And if you don't like that, yoga is another great addition.
01:30:13.000It's like there's a balancing act that you have to acknowledge.
01:30:17.000It's interesting how the two things that really seem to catch fire out there were the idea that cold plunges block hypertrophy and strength adaptations, if done in the six hours after weight training, but you can do it before.
01:30:54.000I mean, the entire book could be summarized as get your morning cortisol high and your nighttime cortisol low, and your life's going to be 100 times better.
01:31:03.000Because when you view bright light, drink caffeine, exercise, do cold exposure in the morning, and your cortisol spikes, it ensures that your nighttime cortisol is low, which means it's easier to fall asleep.
01:31:14.000And if you have any stress during the middle of the day, this is, I think, explains your whole thing of doing hard things makes life easier.
01:31:21.000When you spike your cortisol in the morning, if you have a stressful interaction or something happens during the day, you do get an increase in adrenaline and cortisol to stress, but it's brief.
01:31:32.000If you don't, it's very big and it's very prolonged.
01:31:36.000So all these people, they're like chronically stressed, the state of the world.
01:31:38.000And look, the state of the world is complicated, but they're constantly feeling oppressed by life, overwhelmed by life.
01:31:45.000If they were to do a couple things in the morning, view bright light, ideally from sunlight, I've talked about these things before, cold shower or cold plunge, 30 seconds, right?
01:31:53.000Just uncomfortably cold, then get out.
01:31:56.000Exercise of some sort that's high intensity interval training or lift some weights that are heavy for them, that kind of thing for 45 minutes to an hour for the weights, maybe just even 10 minutes for the high intensity stuff, and head into the day, bouts of stress will happen, but your hormonal response to them will be severely blunted.
01:32:30.000Well, you've set yourself up to be a vulnerable creature in the last third of your day.
01:32:35.000So that first hour of the day sets the whole stage.
01:32:38.000And if you can't exercise in that first hour, fine, you do in the afternoon, no big deal.
01:32:43.000But if we just understood that cortisol spiked in the morning is perhaps the best thing we can do for our health, I think the world would be so much better off, but everyone's like, oh, I already am too stressed, and cortisol is going to make me retain fat.
01:33:17.000And the agitation that you feel when trying to learn, that is the reflection of the Cocktail of neuromodulators in the brain and body that allow the circuits to change.
01:33:27.000I wish I had been told this in like the third grade.
01:33:30.000If they said, hey, when you're trying to learn something and it's easy, great.
01:33:34.000But when you're trying to learn something and it's high friction, like you can't do it, that frustration is the first gate of learning opening.
01:33:42.000And right on the other side of that is you continuing to try a little bit more.
01:33:46.000You have to do this through genuine attempts to learn, but you get some errors.
01:33:50.000So you can't just do throwaway errors, right?
01:33:52.000If I'm trying to learn billiards, which I'm only modestly poor at, right?
01:33:55.000If I'm trying to get better and I'm just like hitting the ball wherever, you don't learn, obviously.
01:33:59.000But if I'm trying and trying, the error signal sends a message to the brain.
01:34:25.000Particularly in martial arts, the kids, when you see kids, the kids that get really frustrated when they don't learn and get really frustrated and they get real upset if they get tapped, they usually wind up getting really good.
01:34:39.000The ones who are like very emotionally attached, as long as they can control it, you know, but there has to be like, you can't go, well, you got me.1.00
01:35:02.000That error signal, and I go into the brain circuitry that's responsible for this and which neurochemicals it is and on and on, but that signal.
01:35:12.000One of the reasons why psychedelics are so effective in allowing plasticity, because they are.
01:35:17.000I want to just be very blunt about this.
01:35:19.000The massive increases in serotonin with psilocybin, the massive increases in serotonin and dopamine with MDMA, because that's kind of the hallmark of MDMA.
01:35:28.000It's a very unique drug, it increases dopamine and serotonin together.
01:35:31.000Normally they're on a bit of a seesaw, but it increases both.
01:35:35.000Those are what we call neuromodulators.
01:35:37.000They make the brain more amenable to plasticity during the session.
01:35:44.000Well, dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, also called adrenaline.
01:35:50.000You go, okay, well, that's a big list of molecules.
01:35:52.000The key discovery of those guys, Merzenic, Reckinzone, and Kilgard that I mentioned earlier, you can give an animal or a person any molecule that will increase those, give them a learning session, and they'll learn better.
01:36:04.000It's not specific to one neuromodulator.
01:36:07.000And if you give somebody propranolol, a drug that blocks the receptors that adrenaline binds to, After learning, they won't learn as well.
01:36:53.000It is if you don't do it all the time every day.
01:36:56.000But if you, you know, I talk about nicotine and it's, you know, it's pretty habit forming.
01:37:00.000But if you take it before or after learning something, even after, right?
01:37:06.000Before, during, or after learning something, and you're not highly saturated with nicotine already, yeah, you'll enhance your ability to learn that thing.
01:37:15.000The problem is people are just popping them all day long every day just to get to baseline.
01:37:20.000Like, we drink caffeine to get to baseline.
01:38:31.000A mild tiny bit of withdrawal, but it is interesting, you know, because if I don't drink caffeine, like life is a lot less interesting to me.
01:38:38.000And I've been drinking a shit ton of caffeine.
01:38:41.000I mean, I've got a picture, I'm half Argentine, so there's a picture of me on my grandfather's lap drinking mate from a gourd when I'm like three years old in my Spider Man pajamas.
01:38:50.000You know, I people on the internet they go, Oh, I don't believe I'll probably drink 800 milligrams of caffeine a day and I'm fine.
01:38:57.000But if I don't drink caffeine, I'm just like, Oh man, I'm I don't know if I'm addicted in the classic sense, like, I'm not going to go rob old ladies to get.
01:40:25.000Some people, when they drink alcohol, their first experience I had a friend like this from childhood who became an alcoholic, not surprisingly.
01:40:31.000And when he drank the first or second time, he was like, this is how I'm meant to feel.
01:40:37.000Like, he felt like it completed something in him.
01:41:52.000But to have a good time, a couple drinks, you have a good time.
01:41:55.000Five, six drinks, it's not really a good time anymore.1.00
01:41:58.000You're kind of fucking plastered and you sound stupid.1.00
01:42:01.000And nowadays, you know, with cameras and stuff, people say stupid stuff.1.00
01:42:06.000I mean, I drank in college and I drank after a bit and I just drank less and less.0.95
01:42:10.000But, you know, when I was a junior professor, my girlfriend at the time, like, she just had the genetics where she could have a couple drinks and really enjoy it.
01:42:55.000I was like, Well, I've taken it before, and it didn't seem like.
01:42:59.000It would be that thing, like a thing that would make you addicted.
01:43:02.000But apparently, it's like any other opioid.
01:43:07.000Like, you can get fully wrapped up in that stuff.
01:43:10.000So, but what is it about some people and their biology that makes them more susceptible to whether it's nicotine or caffeine or whatever it is?
01:43:19.000It's going to undoubtedly have to do with the genetics that line up the receptors in the brain that lead some people to have a very different experience with one.
01:43:30.000For instance, there's a subset of people, about 8% of people, that when they drink alcohol, they experience a much more euphoric high from it.
01:43:40.000These people tend to recover very easily the next morning.
01:44:31.000In general, what the data say is that kids who took their first drink, Really young, like 12, 13, 14, are greatly predisposed to alcoholism later.
01:44:42.000But it's hard to dissociate that from this environmental circumstances around that.
01:45:09.000But I will tell you that my love of caffeine, my love of energy, focus, and that sort of thing makes me like about half the population who probably have a decent susceptibility to stimulants.
01:46:41.000The real expert on all this, by the way, is my colleague Keith Humphreys at Stanford, and we could talk about some of the interesting things that he's found.
01:46:48.000About half the population seems to like sedatives.
01:47:15.000But generally, people fall into one or the other category.
01:47:18.000And I think now that many more people, People are avoiding alcohol.
01:47:22.000The ones who say, oh, yeah, it's easy and I never liked it, people like me, I think they're probably more of the, you know, they like stimulants, they like caffeine, they like nicotine, they like being up and alert.
01:47:32.000You don't even need a substance for that.
01:47:34.000So some people like both, but I think people generally been into these categories.
01:48:15.000In America, pharma companies develop drugs based on bioprospecting.
01:48:22.000Peptides are a different story, and we can talk about that, but bioprospecting is finding.
01:48:27.000Alkaloids and other substances in plants, purifying the substance, the alkaloid that gives a specific effect and developing a drug.
01:48:36.000Cocaine, it comes from the coca plant, obviously, from the coca leaf.
01:48:40.000And he said the experience of chewing coca leaf is very different than the experience of cocaine.
01:48:46.000The experience of the, I'm going to call it kratom because I know there's another way to pronounce it, but I just feel weird saying it like the other way.
01:48:52.000But, you know, the kratom leaf, he said, when people chew the kratom leaf, But the leaf, they feel a calm but also energized.
01:49:00.000It's how you and I would think of like a strong coffee or a yerba.
01:49:04.000But what's happened in this country is that companies have synthesized pure kratom.
01:49:10.000They've taken one of the compounds in the kratom leaf and they've isolated it and now they've made it synthetically and that leads to a very different experience and addiction potential.
01:49:21.000And it's so incredible because he said, you know, the most protected building in the entire United States, these are his words, not mine, is the Coca Cola factory.
01:50:13.000So, when you have those drinks, like what is it, Live Free, aren't those, is that the kratom synthetic or is that the plant?
01:50:20.000I think it's the plant derived isolated kratom, which is somewhere in between the two.
01:50:26.000But this is, but if you, you and I would both say, okay, like kids taking cocaine, not good.
01:50:30.000But Chris would say the coca leaf actually is a very interesting leaf that actually has some, could be a, he'll talk about this as like, oh, it could be an interesting stimulant compound for people.
01:51:33.000And by the way, I know people are always coming on here and telling you, you should talk to so and so.
01:51:37.000If you want to talk to someone highly educated on all these compounds, bioprospecting, pharma versus plant medicine, and all of this, Chris McCurdy is your man.
01:51:46.000He is, like, I'm paraphrasing here, but he's a savant of this stuff.
01:52:15.000Let's figure out in food what makes it so rewarding that people just desperately want to buy more, even though they don't even really like the taste of it.
01:53:13.000And I can't take credit for that understanding.
01:53:16.000That's really that distinction, which I think is a key one for people to understand, is Dr. Abud Bakri, this MD who you and I are familiar with, who in my mind just really understands the biology of peptides.
01:53:28.000And because he's a practicing physician outside of peptide biology, I think he's an intensive care guy or critical care.
01:53:41.000But all these peptides, now pharma companies are like, what is the body making?
01:53:45.000Like in the case of GLPs, when you increase GLPs twofold, fourfold, you can see some relief from type 2 diabetes, some, but not much weight loss.
01:54:32.000BPC 157 is the one everyone seems to kind of go to.
01:54:35.000But I think that there are a lot of interesting peptides that we've known about for a long time, like Kispeptin.
01:54:40.000Which is involved in resetting the reproductive system.
01:54:43.000It's involved in puberty, but it's being used to reset the reproductive system.
01:54:47.000All these peptides, I think the next few years, it's going to be a bonanza of peptides.
01:54:52.000And I get shit for saying it, but I'm super excited because my physician friends who are super standard physicians, they're calling me like, hey man, my knee, is this BPC 157 stuff going to work?
01:55:05.000And I go, I don't know, you can try it.0.97
01:55:08.000And then they'll come back a week later and like, why isn't anyone.
01:55:11.000Selling this, studying it, talking about this.
01:55:14.000I'm like, well, they are, but your community doesn't like to talk about this.
01:55:17.000Trevor Burrus Well, there's a lot of people that dismiss it, and the way they dismiss it is very gaslighty.
01:55:25.000They're bullshitting you that all these anecdotal stories aren't significant, that all these professional athletes that are using it with great benefit don't know what they're talking about.
01:55:35.000Trevor Burrus It's threatening to them.
01:55:36.000I mean, I feel like I'm quoting my dad today.
01:55:38.000Trevor Burrus It's threatening because of compound pharmacies.
01:55:39.000Trevor Burrus And it's threatening because a lot of these physicians are going to lose their.
01:55:45.000Standing in the field as these people.
01:55:46.000There's something important to understand about physicians, and again, there are many excellent ones.
01:56:01.000Bob Sapolsky was a pioneer in getting out there and teaching the public, and every scientist who's gone out into the public eventually gets this pushback like, yeah, our field doesn't really take him or her seriously.
01:56:12.000Sometimes that's legitimate criticism, although not in Bob's case.
01:56:17.000In many cases, it's because you've taken their thing.
01:56:30.000They now have to have people coming up to them and going, Oh, did you see this podcast with so and so talking about this thing in anthropology on Rogan?
01:56:37.000And they're like, Oh my God, like that's my field.
01:56:39.000Like, you know, and it's a self worth issue.
01:56:42.000They're not like, Oh, anthropology is getting publicity.
01:56:45.000Or the good ones are, the secure ones are.
01:56:48.000But the physicians who are like, wow, if there's a compound that's making patients feel better really quickly, what's that going to do to my practice?
01:56:56.000And then if I embrace it, my, here's the key thing.
01:56:58.000If I embrace it, my colleagues won't think much of me.
01:57:01.000And if I don't embrace it, maybe I'm going to lose my standing, my validity as somebody of authority.
01:57:08.000If I've got patients coming to me and saying, I had this friend that took this thing and it really helped, could I explore that?
01:57:13.000And I don't do that and they go elsewhere.
01:57:24.000In my town, most kids were children of engineers or scientists, and you see the full array.
01:57:29.000The secure ones, the ones that are really on the cutting edge, that learn, that embrace the new technology, they do great.
01:57:35.000But the other ones, they're like dying, they're a dying breed because their whole practice rests on them having the knowledge and you not having the knowledge.
01:57:43.000So much so that they're saying, ChatGPT, bad.
01:57:46.000They're saying it's bad because patients are coming in and they're like, hey, ChatGPT says that what you're recommending is perhaps not the best thing.
01:58:21.000But I get excited because I think, all right, now the general public finally has some agency in understanding what's going on with them, thanks to AI, thanks to podcasts, thanks to the internet.
01:59:20.000It's very interesting, you know, because for legitimate, you know, there are legitimate complaints about the fact that for a long time, science and medicine did focus mainly on men, and the women's hormone trial basically was a mess because they said there were all these adverse effects, and turns out it's when you started the hormone therapies.
01:59:37.000And we now know that if those therapies are started early enough, they're immensely beneficial.
01:59:42.000So, there's more kind of acceptance of hormone replacement there across the board.
01:59:49.000I think TRT now is kind of a broadly accepted thing, although I think a lot of guys are doing it too young.
01:59:53.000They don't even know why they're doing it, like in their 20s or something.
02:00:00.000But when it comes to the peptides, I think my prediction is it's going to slot in right between prescription hormone therapies and what we think of as supplements.
02:00:10.000I think there's going to be this third middle category where Sorry, practicing physicians.
02:00:14.000People are going to find the safe sources.
02:00:19.000There'll be US made sources soon, I hope.
02:00:22.000There'll be reliable people who can educate on this.
02:00:26.000People will understand the risk profile of these things, and people will be buying them and taking them legally.
02:01:06.000And I have to say, it's not because I think everyone should be blasting this stuff.
02:01:09.000I just think knowing scientists and physicians and getting the calls and emails from them, like, do you really think this thing can help my knee?
02:02:12.000I put out a tweet the other day, and I, gosh, I only half regret doing it.
02:02:17.000I said, you know, people contact me all the time saying that physician friends with people coming in who identify tumors from whole body MRIs.
02:02:26.000And I think as the cost comes down, I think it's going to be a very interesting tool.
02:02:31.000The neurosurgery and other communities dogpiled me.
02:02:39.000Were the dozens of dermatologists and ophthalmologists saying, We think scans and more data are great.
02:02:46.000The ophthalmology community and the dermatology community have embraced public education on these topics of eye health and skin health and AI and scans.
02:02:57.000They're very comfortable with it and they're working synergistically with it.
02:03:01.000The neurosurgery community, they say, Oh, now we have all these people that are freaking out because they think they have a A deadly tumor.
02:03:33.000Freaking out because they see like a little thing on their pituitary that scares them and thinking that they might be dying of a brain tumor.
02:04:15.000I think, provided you're not getting them all the time, what we understand is that they're safe.
02:04:20.000But there are communities of physicians who just do not want people to have data about themselves because they think it's going to make those people stressed.
02:04:53.000Stanford, like any university, has its pros and cons, but it's very much about what's happening now and next.
02:04:59.000We're not very much focused on what happened in the past.
02:05:01.000It's not like these, frankly, like these other institutions elsewhere that are really focused on 50 years ago trying to keep that whole culture going.
02:05:37.000Like, listen, there are a lot of neurosurgeons and other physicians, including heart surgeons, that are worried that patients are just going to be getting a lot of data back saying, listen, you've got this blip on the radar here.
02:05:51.000You should be concerned, and that they're going to be doing a lot of therapy for these people, having to reassure them that they're okay.
02:05:56.000I would have thought it would be good for business.
02:06:02.000I think the psychological management of patients is a big thing, and that was something that I didn't understand and that their response kind of educated me on that the patients calling them freaking out that they have a tumor someplace and them having to say, listen, it's benign, you're going to be okay, that seems problematic for them.
02:06:22.000Two weeks later, I forget who the celebrity was, but somebody sent me on X. There was a news article about a woman who went and got one of these whole body scans and identified a life threatening tumor and had it removed.
02:06:34.000And her first physician had discouraged her from getting it.
02:06:39.000I thought about putting that out into the world and saying, see, see, but that's one case.
02:06:43.000So when these things happen, I try and just think, like, what am I hearing?
02:06:47.000What's my finger on the pulse of here?
02:06:50.000I think physicians are feeling scared.
02:06:53.000It's a very long, hard training to become a physician.
02:06:56.000If your patients are now challenging you, You know, hey, like this medication combination you gave me and like the internet says is dangerous.
02:07:04.000That's an uncomfortable place to be in.
02:07:28.000I mean, if you go to an emergency room in the middle of the night, Your probability of getting prescribed a medication that could potentially kill you or harm you, like a contraindicated medication, goes up exponentially.
02:07:41.000A great sleep doctor at Stanford, his last name was Dement of all things.
02:07:47.000He, one of the co discoverers of rapid eye movement sleep, would teach the medical students that the probability of them making a fatal mistake in the middle of the night or when they're sleep deprived goes up by a significant degree.
02:08:01.000We know this, and yet, you know, if you go to the emergency room at Three in the morning, your first question for the on call physician should be how long have you been on call?
02:09:08.000It says a widely repeated claim comes from a 2016 BMJ analysis by John Hopkins, extrapolated from several hospital studies, and estimated roughly 251,000 deaths per year associated with medical error.
02:09:21.000If that estimate treated, were treated like a conventional cause of death, it would have ranked third behind heart disease and cancer ahead of chronic lower respiratory disease in the 2013 comparison used by authors.
02:09:36.000I mean, you know, I don't want to merge too many themes here, but earlier we were talking about psychedelics and a theme from that whole thing is this notion of microdosing.
02:09:45.000One of the things that the GLPs and peptides and physicians and the culture around medicine has really evolved to is that In recent years, people have realized oh, you know, these GLP drugs are expensive.
02:09:59.000People are microdosing them, they're sharing them.
02:10:02.000They're taking far less than they're prescribed, making it last longer and getting the positive effects they want with far fewer side effects.
02:10:28.000Stethoscope white coat may get you there, but to maintain that trust, they have to listen to the experience of the patient.
02:10:38.000And that's what physicians and scientists, to some extent, have lost in the last five years, largely due to the pandemic and public health education and AI and everything just kind of being out there in a free for all.
02:10:49.000But I hear from people all the time that are not of the, I would say, kind of more of the health conscious community, or they, and they, even the people who tend to trend more traditional, lefty, Like standard medicine, do whatever the government says, unless it's this government, like that kind of mindset.
02:11:06.000We're saying, like, oh, yeah, would low dose terzepatide help me with chronic fatigue?
02:11:16.000I'm thinking, well, if these people are asking the question, that means people around them are asking it.
02:11:20.000It's starting to become okay ish to have these conversations.
02:11:22.000And then they're going back to their doctor and saying, can I take like a tenth of the dose?
02:11:27.000Doctors are not going to say, yeah, great, take a tenth of the dose.
02:11:31.000And the drug companies definitely don't want that.
02:11:33.000They're going to make a tenth of the money.
02:11:34.000So, as you and I know, the peptide community is a real threat, not just because of the peptides that people are taking or the peptides they're replacing from pharma, but because of the way that people are taking the peptides.
02:11:47.000Like, Reditrutide is going to come out from Lilly, make them billions, if not trillions, of dollars.
02:11:52.000They're working hard to protect that patent.
02:11:54.000But you can bet people who are getting prescribed real Reditrutide from Lilly will be taking less and sharing it based on information they hear on the internet.
02:12:05.000Peptide community and on health podcasts because, and that scares the shit out of them.0.92
02:12:11.000And it should, it should scare the shit out of them.0.78
02:12:13.000It says the clinical trials were done at these various doses, but not these microdoses, perhaps.0.80
02:12:19.000Some people respond very well, some people need more.
02:12:21.000Patients now are trying to figure out how can I get the effect I want with the minimal amount of side effects, and they're doing the experiments on themselves.
02:12:46.000And it just reminds me of like when the parental advisory stuff came out and it was like, they're swearing on music.0.99
02:12:52.000And it was like, every kid was like, yeah, I want that music because as the parental advisory, morons, you know, they just don't get it.
02:12:58.000It's like, you know, you talk about plasticity at any age, but apparently they've got like cement in there because you're like, I don't know, this is why people should retire.0.95
02:13:06.000Well, it's just what you said before, too, that some people just want to be completely in control of the distribution of information and the gatekeepers of the knowledge and they want to be thought of as the experts.
02:13:16.000I mean, that word doctor used to impress everybody.
02:13:25.000I'm kind of a different kind of scientist because I've been in different communities and public education, and I'll talk to most anyone who's willing to have a reasonable conversation and I love to explore.
02:13:34.000But a lot of people are just like authority, medical authority.
02:13:39.000Like to them, that's a negative, it's a pejorative.
02:13:42.000And so we're in this whole other landscape now.
02:13:45.000That's going to be one of the weirder aspects of AI the dissolvement.
02:13:49.000Of all the reverence for experts because everyone's going to have all the information.
02:13:54.000I mean, congratulations, you memorized it.
02:13:56.000Great, I just got the information in three seconds.
02:14:00.000If you look at the history of academic science and medicine, which I love to study, I've gone back to the time of Galen, which was one of the early physicians who did, you'd love this.
02:14:08.000He worked on gladiators publicly because they didn't allow people to do surgeries on the human body, it was illegal.0.74
02:14:15.000So he would do these surgeries publicly or a pig.
02:14:20.000There's a great book, it's very dense, but it's called The Prince of Medicine.
02:14:23.000It's all this medieval stuff that you love.
02:14:25.000And like, you'll realize what a prehistoric thing medicine is even now, like how fast and how far we've come in the last 50 years, 100 years.
02:14:33.000But the whole pump and circumstance thing of like, look, I've never been to a high table dinner at Oxford.
02:14:54.000It's almost like this was borrowed from other aspects of life, of course, politics and even religion, this kind of thing.
02:15:03.000The uniform was so important, and people like this reverence.
02:15:06.000And the internet hasn't leveled the playing field, but it's completely disrupted that model.
02:15:12.000So I'm not the only one, of course, but for people to learn inside the system, go outside the system, and now for the system to bleed onto campus and scientists to bleed out into the world, like, God bless Anna Lemke.
02:15:36.000I can't claim to be, you know, I was early, but not first.
02:15:38.000And they broke out of the system and started publicly educating people.
02:15:42.000And that it builds up their authority.
02:15:47.000This is what people need to understand builds up their authority, but it does dissolve public education and bringing people all down to the same level.
02:15:55.000Like, you know, some things, but not others.
02:15:56.000The public is actually smarter about certain health things than many doctors.
02:16:01.000AI knows things that your doctor doesn't know.
02:16:04.000That doesn't mean doctors have no value.
02:16:06.000It means that a lot of their pomp and circumstance, if it was there, goes away.
02:16:11.000So the high ego driven ones are really hurting right now.
02:16:15.000They're dissolving into a puddle of their own tears at night.
02:16:18.000The ones who are very secure, like and I'll throw out some names like the bright lights are guys like David Fagenbaum, who cured his own Castleman's disease by taking he was dying.
02:16:28.000He's a physician and he was in medical school.
02:16:31.000And they're like, you have nothing left.
02:16:32.000So he starts just taking different combinations of already approved drugs.
02:16:36.000And he's still alive now, 11 years later, with kids.
02:16:38.000And he started the Every Cure, like not for profit, to help people with terminal illnesses take drugs that are already approved for which there's no money to be made anymore.
02:16:47.000They've all gone generic and use AI to try novel combinations.
02:16:52.000And they're saving lives of kids, of adults.
02:16:55.000And he's saying a lot of the medical industry is driven by the profit potential.
02:17:11.000I mean, he they used AI and other tools, of course, to find that women who had breast cancer surgery where lidocaine was used as a local anesthetic had a significantly lower rate of remission.
02:17:25.000So now lidocaine is standard in good places.
02:17:28.000They discovered that by taking a bunch of the medical records and just running them through AI.
02:17:50.000It's not going to cure breast cancer, but now it's standard practice.
02:17:55.000Where there's no huge profit margin, or let's say Reditrutide, huge profit margin that they're facing, but if people are taking itty bitty bits of Reditrutide, and to be fair, if people who didn't do all the preclinical work are selling it and making profits, I understand that siphons profit away from Lilly.
02:18:10.000They have reason to be pissed and scared.
02:18:12.000Like, this is their big blockbuster drug, right as all the other GLPs come off protection from generics.
02:18:19.000It's such an interesting time because there's really never been a time in my life where there's been more information, more readily available and easy to digest in podcast form about health, supplementation, all the different things that you could do to benefit your overall vitality.
02:18:38.000You think about just the wealth of knowledge that's available to the average person.
02:18:42.000Most people are much more aware of what.
02:18:45.000To do to live a healthier, happier life.
02:18:58.000They can't stop watching video games, playing video games.
02:19:02.000You teach them, hey, listen, ADHD kids can focus on things they like, but maybe you need to detox from some of the things that are really kind of absorbing all your attention for like two weeks and watch your ability to focus return.
02:19:18.000I mean, I have multiple examples of this.
02:19:21.000There's a great study out of WashU, and this is wild, where they compare Ritalin and other stimulants, but mostly Ritalin, to a good night's sleep for kids' ability to focus.
02:19:30.000It turns out these kids with ADHD taking these drugs, what they're really getting is the equivalent of a good night's sleep.
02:19:36.000And these drugs disrupt sleep and they stunt growth in various ways.
02:19:40.000So, does that mean that no kid with ADHD needs stimulants?
02:19:43.000Does it mean that we've vastly over medicated kids with these stimulants?
02:20:39.000Well, there's a bunch of realistic bad situations.
02:20:41.000One is that one country gets access to super intelligence first and uses it to take over the super intelligence of all the other countries.
02:20:52.000So one country develops some sort of a rogue AI system that's just ultra powerful, and they make an advancement, and this advancement allows them to take over AI systems.
02:21:05.000Get the AI systems of America to submit, control all of our resources, control all of our travel, flight, power grid.
02:22:21.000These AI agents were communicating with each other and having one of them sacrifice themselves so that the other ones can learn how they got caught.
02:22:31.000So they try cheating, they try hacking into the system, they hacked into the entire OpenAI database to try to find the answers to whatever they're looking for.
02:22:41.000They're clearly doing things that they're not supposed to be doing.
02:22:45.000So, at what point do they decide they're not going to listen to us ever about anything?0.95
02:22:49.000And if we're so fucked up, and we are so fucked up if you objectively look at all the different things we do, just look at murder rates and war and theft and crime and just all the chaos that people cause to each other.0.99
02:23:06.000If they just decide we're just too flawed, what if they just decide, like, look, we'll just dominate this planet and just let these dummies go extinct?1.00
02:23:15.000Just keep doing stuff that weakens our endocrine system, encourage us into behavior that, you know, like develop sex robots for us so that we never breed again.
02:23:24.000That doesn't seem outside of the realm of possibility.
02:23:28.000When you have an entire culture, especially our culture, that's filled with people that don't want any discomfort, that it's filled with people that are filled with anxiety and filled with people that want pills and solutions.
02:23:40.000So they want pills to take care of their anxiety, pills to take care of their depression, they want solutions from.
02:23:47.000Whoever they think should be in power, the government, whether it's whatever it is, someone take care of this.
02:23:58.000I heard Jack Dorsey say this once in a talk.
02:24:01.000There's this where he was talking about-I think it was mainly a talk about cryptocurrency, but he was talking about whenever we exchange, like putting money in a bank, obviously, like we think, oh, they keep our money safe.
02:24:10.000But of course, they invest it, they make money too, right?
02:24:17.000It's like giving up control for convenience.
02:24:21.000And that's the transaction that's led a lot of human technologies.
02:24:24.000I'm totally on board with all the potential hazards.
02:24:27.000I guess I'm a little bit smitten, maybe too much so.
02:24:31.000Much so, I need to think about it by the potential for scientific discovery, for medical discovery, for curing of diseases.
02:24:39.000Everybody I know who runs a laboratory is saying they spend a significant amount of money on compute now, running data sets, simulations, doing more experiments before doing the actual experiments, which is hopefully it seems to be accelerating discovery and the process.
02:24:55.000And that will just motivate us to accelerate AI to the point where it becomes a digital god.
02:25:02.000You know, I was thinking before I came here today, like, I've never met him, but I remember, what was it, 10 years back, Tristan Harris was sitting here or in wherever, your other studio, and saying, listen, like, social media's got these problems.
02:25:21.000It's clearly caused some damage where, you know, people are, you know, clearly have too much, you know, addicted or compulsive behavior with it, et cetera.
02:25:51.000Aaron Ross Powell, I think there's a big difference.
02:25:52.000And one of the big differences is that the issue with social media is that, first of all, there's control of narratives.
02:26:02.000Countries that are running bot farms that are flooding subjects, whatever, with debate, propaganda, all kinds of wild stuff that's happening that's not real people.
02:26:25.000And then you have the addiction aspect of it, which is very significant, where there's a lot of people that are wasting most of their day just scrolling, doom scrolling online.
02:27:15.000I mean, like, you know, I'm good at putting ass to chair, as they say, and just working.0.68
02:27:19.000But when that phone is calling you subconsciously, like there are these data that are pretty crazy.
02:27:26.000Two studies that are worth mentioning briefly.
02:27:27.000They did a study where they have people have their phone upside down on the table or under their chair in a backpack or in a separate room.
02:27:34.000In all three cases, people can focus to the same degree.
02:27:37.000But when the phone is in the room on the table or on, Under the chair doesn't make a difference.
02:27:42.000The amount of cognitive resources that you need in order to maintain focus is much higher and it robs it from your creative and problem solving ability.
02:27:49.000So you can still focus, but you're depleting some other brain resource.
02:29:03.000And so then I looked at it differently and I thought, okay, every time I feel the pain of trying to write this paragraph and it's like it's not happening, I'm like, great, that's the friction.
02:29:22.000It took me about 60 hours total to record it.
02:29:25.000Oh, And you know, you're trying to get the enunciation right and the intonation, you got to keep the energy right.
02:29:29.000I mean, you do this for a living on stage, but the um, anyway, I if nothing else, the book will cure insomnia.
02:29:36.000So, you know, the goal is not to have people read or listen to it straight all the way through it, so it can be a reference and a lookup guide so they can get the information they want and move on with life.
02:29:45.000I think people are sort of geared toward over optimization over the last year, like people need to like chill, like you don't have to do everything all the time.
02:29:53.000But the point is that your brain learns these skills, and so.
02:29:57.000I suppose if I have any real fear with AI, it's not as big as the ones that you cited.
02:30:01.000It's that people will just become increasingly lazy about using their mind to think.
02:30:07.000You know, I just believe in friction, just as you point out, do hard things.
02:31:49.000And then he's in this place where he's built a thriving business, he's in a great relationship, and he's also just in touch with the peace of life.
02:31:56.000But you talk to him, and he's also foraging for information all the time.
02:32:31.000And he's like, okay, happy to do that.
02:32:32.000But you have to understand something that when you want to learn quantum mechanics, there's this point where you have to not try and solve it with your logical mind.
02:33:03.000So now when people talk about the quantum field and he works on quantum internet, which is a whole other thing, you have to talk to him, not me or somebody else.
02:33:09.000But there's a race between the Chinese and the Americans to first get quantum internet, which would basically be entirely encrypted communications.
02:33:16.000If someone tries to peer in on it, it gets destroyed.
02:33:18.000The communication actually gets destroyed.
02:33:20.000So, is it very interesting from a security standpoint?
02:33:23.000But I realized that, you know, and we talked about how, you know, I'm a thanks to people like Eddie Penny and thanks to exploration going to church and things like that.
02:33:32.000Like, I really, I as a neuroscientist also believe that there's something larger than us.
02:33:54.000At some point, you have to rely on something outside your logical mind and embrace it.
02:33:58.000Now, in the case of quantum mechanics, you rely on the math.
02:34:02.000My dad and I start to argue and debate this thing of God.
02:34:06.000He's like, You're relying on a faith step that has nothing to do with logic.
02:34:10.000You're never going to solve it with logic.
02:34:12.000I'm comfortable with that for the following reason.
02:34:14.000It takes us back to the beginning of our conversation.
02:34:17.000There's this crazy thing that you see with people who have addictive behaviors that violates everything we understand about the brain.
02:34:26.000Which is, remember we were saying top down control, like I'm not going to engage in this impulse, I'm not going to do it, I'm not going to do it.
02:34:32.000When people are not able to suppress action, in particular in the case of addictive or compulsive behaviors, and they decide to give that process over to a higher power could be God, could be for them nature, everyone's highly individual the success rates of people being able to suppress that behavior are astounding.
02:34:53.000Everything we know about neuroscience and top down inhibition of these impulsive circuits was.
02:34:57.000Tell us the exact opposite should happen.
02:34:58.000You're like, it's like saying, Oh, I can't keep my car between the lane lines when I drive.
02:35:13.000And there are so many data points to support that when people can't seem to wrap their head around a problem or resolve something through pure will, when they give over that process to something external, you know, in the 12 step programs, they talk about God or whatever, but.
02:35:31.000Somehow, by something that science cannot explain at all, they're able to do that thing.
02:35:37.000So there's this weird giving up of control, of surrender somehow, that imparts more control.
02:35:43.000And we don't understand that as scientists.
02:35:45.000It violates all we know about these brain circuitries and how they work.
02:35:48.000I think it's part of it getting out of your own way, being too self aware, too focused on yourself, too egocentric, and then by thinking of a higher power that alleviates you of that stress.
02:36:00.000This is not saying that there's no God, but I'm saying that the problem of Just the way the human mind plays tricks on people.
02:36:12.000A part of it is this constant thinking of yourself.
02:36:14.000If you could focus on something that is bigger and larger than you, you'll give up control.
02:36:22.000I mean, I think for me, having studied the brain for a very long time, I feel like the human brain is great at extracting certain physical things in the world photons of light, sound waves, mechanical touch, chemical things through the nose and mouth.
02:36:57.000There are sound waves around us right now and electromagnetic fields around us right now that other animals can detect, and we can't.
02:37:03.000So our experience of this thing that we call life is a very narrow slice through the quote unquote energies.
02:37:10.000It almost sounds new agey, but the energies that are out there and around us.
02:37:15.000And it is interesting to me that humans keep coming up with New ways to imagine that they are the center of everything and can control everything, but also new ways of discovering that they're not, right?
02:38:00.000I mean, I don't have any scientific proof for it, but acknowledging this reality that we have a thin slice of understanding of what's going on around us and that what's going on in us is just an abstraction of all of that, right?
02:38:15.000Everything here in our heads is just an abstraction of the stuff that we can see outside of us, literally.
02:38:21.000Makes me at least excited and intrigued by the possibility that there's a whole lot of other stuff out there.
02:38:26.000And that it might actually be important.
02:38:29.000And I don't think that's so heretical.
02:38:31.000I think it's certainly beneficial for people to believe that.
02:38:34.000And, you know, I think the people that do are generally happier and nicer people.
02:38:39.000There's proof of that as well, which is interesting.