This Past Weekend with Theo Von - #595

00:00:00.000 We're getting into the final shows for the return of the rat tour. Gosh, this rat is

00:00:05.340 almost fully returned. July 9th, we'll be in Philadelphia, Rochester, New York on July 10th.

00:00:14.780 Then we're in Detroit after that. Moving on, we're in Los Angeles, Anaheim at the Honda Center in

00:00:21.480 Oceanside, California. You can get all your tickets at theovon.com slash T-O-U-R. Just thank you so much

00:00:31.220 for your support. Today's guest is a neuroscientist. He's an author and a professor at Johns Hopkins

00:00:38.880 University in Baltimore. He's written books about addiction, love, death, and what it means to be

00:00:46.500 human. I'm really grateful for his time. Today's guest is David Linden.

00:01:09.220 David, are you physically comfortable in here? Yeah, sure. Is it too hot or cold for you? No,

00:01:13.260 it's just fine. It is? Yeah. Okay. And I'm happy to see that my actual name is there. It's not just

00:01:18.720 brain researcher or something generic. No, no, no. We only do that. Sometimes we'll do that if it's

00:01:23.880 every now and then we try to get like regular folks out of society in. And sometimes we try to keep

00:01:30.640 that kind of a little bit generic. Well, you know, my wife was teasing me, of course. She said, oh yeah,

00:01:35.900 like, so you're going on there and there's been like President Trump and Bernie Sanders and David

00:01:43.760 Spade. And then some scientists nobody's ever heard of, like, you know, like who doesn't fit in this

00:01:49.120 picture? And so I had imagined, you know, brain guy. Well, look, we're happy to have you, man.

00:01:59.100 We're happy to have you. Neuroscientist David Linden, right? That's me. Okay. And so as a

00:02:05.520 neuroscientist, how do you practice that like in everyday life these days? I know you were a

00:02:08.780 professor. That's right. So I'm a professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School. And so until very

00:02:16.060 recently, what I did every day was to run a lab where I did research with mice working on brain

00:02:26.320 diseases. But the other things I do involve teaching medical students, teaching graduate

00:02:31.960 students, and then very recently also teaching undergraduates. Well, thank you for your service.

00:02:37.620 I think being a teacher and an instructor is a service in a lot of ways, and I think it kind of

00:02:41.720 maybe gets overlooked sometimes. I'm not sure if that's true, but yeah, thank you for your service.

00:02:46.520 When you're testing these mice for neurological diseases? Well, yeah. So for example, one of the

00:02:53.580 things that we're interested in is recovery of function after brain injury. Okay. So you probably

00:03:02.420 have heard that if you get injured in your spinal cord or your brain, your ability to recover is

00:03:09.700 minimal. Like if you cut a nerve, you get injured, you cut a nerve in your arm, it'll grow back and

00:03:14.800 you'll be fine. But people get injured in their spinal cord are typically paralyzed for life. You get

00:03:19.020 injured in your brain, you can recover a bit. But particularly when you're an adult or old like

00:03:23.880 me, your ability to recover is very limited. And some of that is because the long, thin information

00:03:31.500 sending part of the neuron, which is called the axon, can't grow after it's damaged. At all?

00:03:39.140 In the brain and the spinal cord. It can, like in your arm or your leg. And that is some of the

00:03:46.140 reason why it's so hard to recover from brain or spinal cord injuries. And so what we're trying

00:03:52.080 to do is develop therapies to allow that to happen. So people can recover better from a stroke

00:03:57.560 or a traumatic brain injury like a soldier might get, or someone might get in an accident like a car

00:04:03.540 crash. And so with, with an actual mouse, how would you, what are kind of the processes of doing

00:04:08.300 that? How do they cause the injuries? Well, you know, we're from Baltimore. Yeah. So we do a very

00:04:14.880 Baltimore thing, which is we stab them in the head. Is that, is that true or not? Well, that's one way

00:04:23.560 we do it. So, so, well, we also do another Baltimore thing, which was, we get them, we get them really

00:04:28.640 high on amphetamines. So yeah, there's a kind of amphetamine, which fortunately isn't actually a drug

00:04:35.380 of abuse. We just use it in the lab called perichloroamphetamine. And that fries out a particular

00:04:41.040 kind of neuron that uses the neurotransmitter called serotonin. And so it turns out these neurons

00:04:47.500 that use serotonin counter to the belief that everyone's had in science for years and years

00:04:53.060 actually can regrow after they're injured. And there's another kind of neuron that uses a

00:04:59.880 neurotransmitter called norepinephrine. They can regrow too, but they're just a tiny fraction of the

00:05:05.800 kinds of neurons in the brain. And so the goal is to try to figure out, well, what's special about

00:05:10.760 them? Why can they regrow when the other neurons count? And then use that as a clue to try to develop

00:05:17.520 therapies so that the other neurons could regrow too. And people recover from their brain injuries

00:05:22.620 or their strokes. Wow. That's exciting. It is exciting. It's been lots of fun. You know,

00:05:26.980 hopefully it'll lead to some cures. I like your attitude, man. That has been kind of thinking. So I know

00:05:32.880 that I take antidepressants, right? I think that's popular. You just mentioned SSRIs. You just mentioned

00:05:37.880 those? I mentioned serotonin, which is the first S in SSRI. Yeah. Okay. Does taking SSRIs damage our

00:05:45.700 brain? Well, taking SSRIs doesn't damage the serotonin neurons, but taking SSRIs has all kinds

00:05:55.460 of bad side effects. I'm sure you know about some of them. One of the ones that is most common is

00:06:02.180 reducing your libido, your sexual desire. Yeah. And so the other big problem with SSRIs is they

00:06:09.520 only work so-so, right? You know, actually, if you look at people who try SSRIs for depression,

00:06:16.760 about a third of the people will say, oh yeah, that works pretty good. I feel, you know,

00:06:21.240 maybe not totally better, but enough that I can notice it. About a third of the people will say,

00:06:25.260 oh, very minimal, just a little bit better. And about a third of people say, it didn't do a thing

00:06:29.180 for me at all. So, you know, it's better than nothing, but SSRIs are not that great. And they're

00:06:36.460 not as good as exercise. They're not as good as cognitive behavioral therapy. And whereas exercise

00:06:42.700 has side effects that are good for you, SSRIs have side effects that are bad for you.

00:06:48.500 Well, it's, you know, it's funny you say some of this because for myself, I noticed with,

00:06:52.940 I've been on them, I think for 20 years or something. If I am really feeling sometimes

00:06:59.740 overwhelmed, I almost need to get off of them or I will lower my own dose.

00:07:05.300 Really? Interesting.

00:07:06.960 Because sometimes I can't get feelings out of me, it feels like, because they're kind of

00:07:12.900 stopping it somehow. I don't know the science behind it. And I don't know if that's true,

00:07:17.500 but that's how it feels to me. Does that make any sense?

00:07:19.440 If it feels to you, then it's true, right? You know, I mean, everyone responds a little

00:07:23.300 differently to these things. Some people that work, some people makes them feel this way or

00:07:26.820 that way. But, you know, your experience is the truth. You know, we're talking about a drug that's

00:07:32.840 supposed to change how you feel. So how you feel is real. It's not like anyone could say to you,

00:07:37.260 well, that's not true. That's bullshit. No, that's true. That's what's happening for you. And I'm sure

00:07:41.860 for certain other people as well.

00:07:46.000 Does that heighten serotonin, does it make it so you can't have certain feelings?

00:07:50.300 Well, you know, it does damp people down a bit. For some people, it kind of sedates them. Like

00:07:57.240 some people, I know people on SSRIs who will take a little Ritalin too because they have a hard time

00:08:05.160 concentrating enough to work while they're on their SSRIs. Some people will take drugs like

00:08:11.080 Yohimbine to try to get back the sexual desire if that's been dampened out by the SSRIs.

00:08:17.940 But, you know, this, I mean, you got SSRIs, they're a stopgap solution. They're not nearly

00:08:24.580 as good as they should be. It's embarrassing for the field of neuroscience that after all these years

00:08:30.960 working on depression, we don't have something better. That our understanding of depression is so

00:08:37.920 bad that we can't offer you a better therapy than SSRIs.

00:08:43.380 Well, that's kind of fascinating to hear you say that. Do you think that is because of there's not

00:08:48.380 enough science? There's not enough information? Is that because pharmaceutical companies are so happy

00:08:54.880 with the sales that they adjust where they put their funds? I'm just, or is it just a research

00:09:01.360 issue? Or what do you think there? Yeah. So I think it is a research issue. And I think part of it is

00:09:08.580 that in neuropsychiatric disease, sometimes when we make a bucket and we throw lots of things into

00:09:14.920 that bucket, we say, oh, depression, that's the bucket. Well, depression can manifest in all kinds

00:09:20.320 of different ways. There's a depression where you just feel low and unmotivated and nothing makes you

00:09:27.100 happy. And there's another kind of like agitated depression where you're like really on edge and

00:09:33.240 anxious. And we call those both depression. But are they really the same? Well, probably not. They're

00:09:38.560 probably not. I mean, we know they're not an experience and they're probably not in your brain

00:09:42.180 as well. But let me give you an example of a way in which there's some hope for moving this forward.

00:09:49.660 So the serotonin neurons in the brain are in a part of the brain that's called the RAPHE.

00:09:56.740 The RAPHE. The RAPHE. Yeah. R-A-P-H-E. It sounds nice. I know. It sounds cool like you'd name your kid

00:10:02.400 that, right? Yeah. It sounds like a nice place to take a vacation, like a honeymoon. That's right.

00:10:06.840 That's right. We're going to RAPHE, honey. So, yeah. So the RAPHE nuclei have serotonin neurons in them

00:10:16.660 and they go all over the brain. And when we go in with an electrode to record the electrical activity,

00:10:21.920 we would say, oh, maybe there's two or three different kinds of neurons that use serotonin

00:10:27.600 in the RAPHE. Well, it turns out now we've got techniques where we can take these neurons

00:10:33.600 one by one and analyze the genes that are turned on in each of those, in each individual cell. So

00:10:43.120 there's like 20,000 genes in the genome. A typical cell might express 12,000 genes, have those turned

00:10:50.040 on. And that varies a bit from neuron to neuron. So you can say, how many flavors of serotonin neurons

00:10:56.540 are there in the RAPHE? It turns out there's 14 flavors. Wow. In the RAPHE. Well, probably only some of

00:11:03.960 those have to do with depression and some of them have to do with other things. Maybe some of the bad

00:11:10.500 side effects that you don't want from your SSRIs. So what this means is that this kind of knowledge,

00:11:16.700 knowing all these different subtypes, means that maybe that can be the basis of knowledge to develop

00:11:22.380 therapies that are more specific, that will work on the mood-altering serotonin neurons and leave the

00:11:30.720 other ones alone and be able to have us make a better drug or a better therapy.

00:11:34.540 Interesting. Yeah. I wanted, yeah, I've loved a lot of your work. I saw you had a great

00:11:39.740 conversation with Andrew Huberman and he was just on recently. He's a very fascinating guy,

00:11:43.380 a lot of information and he's great at sharing information out into the world. I believe he's

00:11:47.800 a great conduit for information. I wanted to talk to you about love, I guess, right? I think it might

00:11:55.280 be a neat place to start kind of. Did human beings always love or was that something that we learned

00:12:01.860 over time? Well, you know, that's a hard thing to know. We can't look at the fossils and know whether

00:12:12.600 people loved. What we do know about humans is that our mating system is really, really, really unusual.

00:12:22.340 All right? So, humans have a system where in one woman's cycle, she usually is only mating with one

00:12:34.680 guy. Paternity is usually pretty accurate. Like, if you go all around the world and you do genetic

00:12:41.940 testing on kids and you say, is the father really the long-term partner, spouse, whatever,

00:12:51.180 of the mom, about 90, 95% of the time paternity is accurate. It doesn't matter where you go in the

00:12:58.120 world, some jungle village in Malaysia, New York City, it's the same. Paternity is accurate.

00:13:07.160 Human dads, for the most part, tend to stick around and help. Either they help, you know,

00:13:14.260 by changing diapers and actually taking care of the baby or they provide resources. But one way or

00:13:19.540 another, they help. Humans have most of their sex recreationally. They go all through the cycle,

00:13:29.860 whereas most animals are only interested in sex when the female is in heat, right? These things make

00:13:37.840 mating behavior in humans, like, extremely rare across—if we look at our mammalian's cousins,

00:13:44.240 very few have that—and it's very rare to take care of children in that way.

00:13:48.940 So, these characteristics are unique to humans?

00:13:51.080 These are—I mean, not entirely. You know, you've probably heard about, like, these penguins,

00:13:56.620 for example, that, you know, rear the young together. You've probably seen the nature movie where,

00:14:01.460 you know, the egg is on the feet and they take care of it. So, I'm not saying it's absolutely unique

00:14:06.200 to humans, but the human situation is really, really unusual. Part of the reason it's unusual is

00:14:12.800 because human children are unusually useless, right? There's no other animal except a human

00:14:21.440 where a five-year-old can't make its way in the world. Only humans. You need your parents. When

00:14:26.420 you're five, you need your parents. If you're an elephant five-year-old, if you're an orangutan

00:14:29.820 five-year-old, if you're a mouse—well, you don't live till five-year-old, but, you know,

00:14:34.080 this is a unique human thing. So, what that means is that whereas an orangutan mom can take care of

00:14:43.560 her kid by herself just fine—doesn't matter that the dad wanders off into the forest and doesn't

00:14:49.020 help at all—for humans, it really matters. Parental contribution really matters. So, long-term

00:14:55.500 pair bonding really matters. And this is a really long, circuitous kind of answer about love. So,

00:15:04.620 if you're going to say, well, why do we have love? And is love something central to being human?

00:15:11.060 I'm going to guess and say, yeah, our first Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago in Africa probably had

00:15:19.040 love, too, because they had the biological situation that made it so that you needed to have

00:15:25.820 long-term pair bonding to help take care of kids and help the genes that you got into the next

00:15:31.820 generation survive long enough to be viable. And then you sort of think, well, why is that? Why are

00:15:37.780 human kids so hopeless, so helpless? Yeah.

00:15:43.100 You know, compared to other animals. Well, when a baby is born, its brain is about 400 cubic centimeters

00:15:51.740 in volume, right? How big is that?

00:15:54.640 Well, so, you know, about—about, yeah, about like my fist.

00:15:58.140 Okay. Right? And an adult brain is about three times that, 1,200. So, you got to go from 400 to 1,200.

00:16:07.580 We need big brains to be clever. Humans are pretty clever compared to most other critters. And so,

00:16:15.360 you might just say, well, all right, like why not just make the birth canal bigger and give birth to

00:16:22.120 a baby with a really, really big head and then have a childhood that's not so protracted. But the

00:16:30.300 problem, we think, is that in order to do that, you couldn't have women walk upright anymore. In other

00:16:36.620 words, the hips would then get too messed up to walk upright.

00:16:40.160 Right. It would probably bring the front of them down. It'd probably be almost a quad pedal or

00:16:43.980 whatever it's called.

00:16:44.440 That's right. That's right. So, probably upright posture limits the degree. As it is right now,

00:16:51.700 human childbirth is really difficult compared to childbirth in most animals. There are very,

00:16:57.360 very, very few animals that regularly die in childbirth. Humans are one. Hyenas are another,

00:17:05.160 because hyenas give birth to something called a pseudophallus. The females actually have something

00:17:10.920 that looks like a dick and their vagina goes down through the middle of it and they give birth through

00:17:14.600 that.

00:17:15.160 Wait, what? Sorry, David. I have never heard this. Bring up a little bit of that.

00:17:19.740 There's a good picture of the outside of it dangling down there.

00:17:22.360 Oh, dang. And that's on a woman?

00:17:23.920 And that is on a woman.

00:17:25.400 Wow.

00:17:26.080 That's right. That's right. So, the hyena, you don't want to mess with a female hyena. Well,

00:17:32.260 you don't want to mess with a hyena generally. But female, the whole reason I got to hyena

00:17:36.560 genitals, which is a weird thing to talk about. I mean, you probably didn't think you were going

00:17:39.920 to talk about that when you woke up this morning.

00:17:41.480 I did not at all. Here we go right here. Then there's an image of it.

00:17:44.200 So, female hyenas give birth through this pseudophallus and it's really hard, not surprisingly.

00:17:50.340 You know, just think it's like, you know, pushing a potato through a hose or something like that.

00:17:55.040 Oh, yeah. I couldn't do it.

00:17:56.100 You know, and female humans, it's not as bad. But still, you know, giving birth is super crazy

00:18:03.760 dangerous. And women die in childbirth and babies die in childbirth and you need to do

00:18:08.360 C-sections and all kinds of crazy stuff happens. This is not a normal thing if you look in the

00:18:14.420 animal kingdom. You know, most mammals give birth just fine. There aren't so many problems.

00:18:21.740 We have that problem because even giving birth to that 400 CC brain is like right on the edge

00:18:29.700 of being possible for human women. Oh, that's pretty fascinating. So, even that down to the

00:18:36.200 millimeter, centimeter of it, it's very precarious. Yeah, it's very precarious. And so-

00:18:46.680 And precise. If you look at it, things have to go right. There's all kinds

00:18:51.720 of ways for things to go wrong during childbirth, as women will tell you, as OB-GYNs will tell you.

00:18:58.500 And to get back to love, right? So, then now you got this 400 CC baby that is hopeless, right?

00:19:06.480 And it's, in order for the brain to mature, that takes 20 years. I mean, that's a ridiculously long

00:19:14.260 amount of time. That's a really, really, really long childhood. So, maybe you can make your way

00:19:19.600 independently, you know, before 20. But not that much before 20.

00:19:26.100 Right. And you need support.

00:19:27.120 And you need support. And so, to have a social system that promotes that, that's where love

00:19:32.120 comes from, to get all the way back to your question.

00:19:34.280 Yeah.

00:19:34.700 Yeah.

00:19:34.960 And that could be love. I mean, from your parent, it could be love that even comes from a society.

00:19:39.440 It could be, I mean, that love could then be in different forms, kind of.

00:19:41.860 Well, absolutely right. In a sense, so, yes, we can talk about romantic love, which is the

00:19:47.800 kind most of us think about. But there are all these other important kinds of love. And

00:19:52.700 to some certain extent, it actually does reduce to that. It reduces to getting your genes in

00:20:00.340 the next generation. In other words, we're most attached to the people we share genetic history

00:20:07.360 with. And as a society, we are too. Like, I'd be willing to speculate. If you look in Europe,

00:20:15.400 in Northern Europe, like in Finland and in Sweden and Norway and places like that, those are the

00:20:22.640 places that have the most socialist economies. Well, people share, taxes are high, people share the

00:20:29.280 most with each other. And people are pretty happy to do it because they see their neighbors and the

00:20:34.960 people around them as being fundamentally like them. You go to the United States, you go to

00:20:40.160 Southern Europe, we're more of a melting pot, right? People don't necessarily want to share.

00:20:46.280 And I think the reason is because people don't see their neighbors as being as much like them as

00:20:51.440 they do in a place like Finland, where all five million modern Finns, you know, came from 1200

00:20:58.380 founders who came whatever in the year 800 or something. Right. And I think that kind of makes

00:21:03.520 sense like that, that there's something inside of us where you feel safest taking care of your own.

00:21:09.900 Is that what you're saying? Kind of? Well, you know, I mean, you would like to think,

00:21:13.240 well, we're all brothers, you know, you would like to be, you would like to, you know, a lot of the

00:21:18.940 world's religions, certainly Christianity has this idea, you know, you should help everyone,

00:21:23.140 you should share with everyone. In practice, though, people are most likely to help people who are

00:21:27.920 like them. Yeah. Yeah. And it even, and that goes down to our DNA.

00:21:33.880 It goes down to our DNA, and it goes down to the way we divide people culturally. Yeah.

00:21:40.140 Yeah. At a scientific level, why do you find someone beautiful? Like, is it only visual?

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00:24:18.680 slash T-H-E-O. That's BetterHelp.com slash Theo. At a scientific level, why do you find someone

00:24:28.320 beautiful? Is it only visual? Well, that's a good question. I mean, obviously, it's not just visual,

00:24:38.540 but vision is the dominant sense for beauty. So obviously, people are attracted to voices,

00:24:47.500 right? And of course, that's something, it's not a universal, it's a cultural thing.

00:24:52.540 Like, British guys come to the US to get laid, because American women hear a British voice,

00:25:00.200 and they just, you know, they want, you know, they want to, you know, some British guy could say,

00:25:04.760 oh, fuck me on the floor. Yeah. I guess I'm doing a Scottish guy, but, you know.

00:25:08.540 That's fair, dude. Well, the Scots, yeah, the Scots will do anything on the floor, first of all.

00:25:11.840 But, you know, and it's just, oh, you know, so we love British accents in the USA.

00:25:17.280 Come colonize this vagina type of thing.

00:25:19.280 So, you know, this, I mean, this is a thing. So obviously, voices can be attractive, too. But,

00:25:24.700 yeah, visual is really important. Smell is important. I know you were talking about this

00:25:29.040 with Huberman, right? Weren't you talking about the dirty t-shirt experiment?

00:25:34.620 He may have mentioned it. My brain falls off sometimes.

00:25:37.720 Well, you know, so.

00:25:39.140 But, yeah, I'm just wondering, like, is there, like, what elements go into that attraction,

00:25:43.060 that feeling when you find somebody, I guess, attractive is more the kind of what I'm looking

00:25:47.320 towards that of beautiful? You know, I think, really, the main thing it gets down to is we're

00:25:54.220 attracted to people who seem like if we were to mate with them, we would have children that would

00:26:00.680 be likely to thrive and survive, you know. So the most attractive faces are the most symmetrical faces.

00:26:08.820 People who have smooth skin are more attractive than people who have mottled skin, right? And there

00:26:19.980 are various other things that go there. In other words, things that signal fitness, and I don't

00:26:25.660 really mean, I don't mean fitness in the sense of, like, going to the gym. I mean fitness in the

00:26:30.840 sense of being able to survive and get your genes into the next generation, sort of the Darwin way of

00:26:37.880 saying the word. Yeah, I guess that's what I mean.

00:26:39.840 Those are the things we find beautiful. When you're saying, I find someone beautiful,

00:26:44.400 most of the time you're saying, yeah, you look like somebody who would be good to mate with and

00:26:49.240 have my children with. And the thing is, if you're gay, you still have that feeling, even if you're not

00:26:55.580 making children with people. In other words, that's such a fundamental human thing about

00:27:00.820 attractiveness, that these fitness signifiers, like being symmetrical, having clear skin,

00:27:06.580 being tall, being well-muscled, these sorts of things, are, you know, things we find beautiful,

00:27:15.780 you know, even if you aren't thinking about mating with that person.

00:27:20.280 Are there any scientific differences between straight and gay people?

00:27:26.320 Well,

00:27:27.000 Does that question make sense, kind of?

00:27:28.360 Yeah, no, it's a, it's a fundamental question. And so, well, let's approach it a couple of

00:27:36.440 different ways. So, one way you could say, well, how much of the trait of who you're interested in

00:27:44.480 sexually is heritable? Do you get it, inherit it from your parents?

00:27:50.000 Okay, so heritable means you can inherit it from your parents?

00:27:52.200 That's right.

00:27:52.560 And you can pass it down?

00:27:53.880 Yeah, that's right. Exactly. That's right. So, you know, eye color, for example, is something we

00:27:59.620 well understand that we inherit from our parents.

00:28:03.200 Got it.

00:28:03.480 Mom's got this, your dad's got this. But most traits are not so defined that way. They're only

00:28:10.400 partially heritable. They're only partially determined by the genes you get from your mom

00:28:15.160 and your dad. So, sexual orientation turns out it's actually different for men and women. The best

00:28:23.440 estimates for genetic studies are that sexual orientation in men is about 40% heritable. And

00:28:34.320 in women, it's about 20% heritable.

00:28:37.940 So, that means you could pass down gay from an adult to a child?

00:28:42.000 You could pass down gay or straight or bi or whatever you happen to be from a parent to

00:28:49.380 a child. But keep in mind, kid, what these numbers are. Like, 40%, that's only 40%. That's

00:28:54.740 not the whole story. That's still leaving 60% that you're not getting from the genes you

00:29:01.100 inherit from your parents. But that still doesn't mean that that 60%, part of that isn't biological.

00:29:09.260 It's just not heritable. So, for example, we know that women who, for various different reasons,

00:29:18.780 were exposed to testosterone in the womb or as they were young because the adrenal glands

00:29:28.000 secrete testosterone. There is a disease called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which just means

00:29:35.740 the adrenal glands get big and they secrete a lot of testosterone. So, women who have that

00:29:40.740 can be slightly masculinized in their appearance sometimes. And they're way more likely to be into

00:29:48.240 other women sexually, right?

00:29:51.580 Which makes sense because you have more testosterone.

00:29:53.160 That's right. So, that's not something you're going to pass down to your kids.

00:29:56.260 Got it.

00:29:56.860 But it's a biological way in which your sexual orientation can be affected.

00:30:01.720 I see. So, that's an example of a biological way.

00:30:04.420 That's a biological. I mean, biological is the whole thing. Biological means the hereditary stuff,

00:30:10.060 the heritable stuff, and the non-heritable stuff that's also biological.

00:30:14.660 Got it.

00:30:15.300 And then, so you might say, well, what about how your parents raised you?

00:30:19.140 Here's something that, to me, is shocking, right? There was this major study done by the

00:30:26.360 American Psychological Association to say, if you are raised by gay parents or straight parents or a

00:30:34.400 single mom or two parents or you're religious or non-religious or you're politically this way

00:30:41.340 or that way, does it make a difference on how likely you are to be straight versus gay?

00:30:47.180 The answer doesn't make any damn difference at all. It's unimportant. Now,

00:30:54.740 it make a difference in terms of how willing you are to express it. Like, if you grow up

00:31:00.400 in a super religious family or any religious family where being gay is looked down on,

00:31:05.880 you might not want to admit it. You might not come out, but it doesn't mean you don't feel it

00:31:11.960 in yourself.

00:31:13.160 But, so you're saying if a couple's driving a Subaru, they're not more likely to have a child

00:31:16.900 that could be gay than somebody else.

00:31:19.380 No, they're more likely to have, if they do have a kid that's gay, they're more likely to have a kid

00:31:23.180 that's comfortable with being gay as opposed to repressed about it and feeling like they can't

00:31:30.480 express that.

00:31:32.180 Oh, I feel like this.

00:31:33.120 But there is, I mean, and this is, you know, kind of surprising, right? You would, you know,

00:31:37.180 because people say, oh, parents are so important. Parents are important, but they're not important

00:31:41.140 in everything. And whether you're gay or straight, parents don't have a damn thing to do with it.

00:31:47.040 Now, what if you're, what if somebody's almost gay, right? They're all, they think about being

00:31:52.380 gay sometimes, but they're not being gay. Are they like, I just wonder, is there a level

00:31:59.800 of that kind of myth, you know, like almost gay where then the kid is gay? You know what

00:32:04.420 I'm saying?

00:32:05.120 Well, so when you say the kid is gay though, what do you mean? You mean...

00:32:08.920 Just the kid is...

00:32:09.720 Well, like, I mean, to me, what I'm talking about is what do you feel in your heart about

00:32:13.980 your own self?

00:32:15.000 Right.

00:32:15.300 What do you answer in an anonymous survey? You know, not when you're too scared to be

00:32:19.360 in your school or your community or with your coworkers or with your family, but what's

00:32:23.640 really inside you? Parents don't matter for that. Parents matter a lot and your community

00:32:30.100 matters a lot for it. Are you willing to admit it? Are you willing to come out? Are you

00:32:34.080 willing to, you know, bring your gay partner home to meet the folks? You know, their parents

00:32:42.060 and community matter enormously.

00:32:44.000 Yeah.

00:32:44.500 Right?

00:32:45.260 Does nature, and this is awesome, and it's Pride Month too, so I'm glad that we're talking

00:32:48.840 about some of this stuff.

00:32:49.740 Yeah.

00:32:50.000 Does nature, is being gay an abnormality to nature?

00:32:56.500 Well, let's put it this way.

00:32:58.780 And I don't mean a negative abnormality.

00:33:00.560 Yeah.

00:33:00.780 I just mean, is it something unique to nature?

00:33:04.080 Or is that the right term?

00:33:05.320 Well, I don't know what unique to nature is. Nature is everything we got.

00:33:08.900 So, but, well, I can tell you this, and you've probably heard this before. We're not the only

00:33:13.680 animals that wear their same-sex sexual behavior, right? You can find in lots of different critters.

00:33:23.940 What is true, though, is that if you look at examples, sheep are a good example, right?

00:33:31.000 Okay, some male sheep will mount other male sheep, right?

00:33:34.080 Yeah.

00:33:34.580 Okay.

00:33:35.200 Are they really gay?

00:33:36.940 Well, actually, they're bi.

00:33:41.440 So, it turns out when you look at critters and you look at same-sex behavior, it's almost

00:33:47.460 never exclusive same-sex behavior.

00:33:49.980 Ah, so they're just having a good time.

00:33:51.020 Behavior.

00:33:51.740 They're in a frat.

00:33:52.440 Yeah, no offense, dude.

00:33:55.460 And, yeah, and that's just-

00:33:56.300 You know, so that is somewhat different.

00:34:00.660 But in terms of, you know, is there, like, can we divine a larger purpose for gay and bisexual

00:34:11.760 behavior?

00:34:12.620 You know, people have theorized about this.

00:34:16.480 They've theorized about the contribution of the gay aunts or uncles and helping to raise

00:34:21.960 kids.

00:34:22.400 The same way people talk about the grandparent effect, you know, pitching in, whether that

00:34:28.320 is really a true thing or not, I would say, is still very much up in the air.

00:34:32.320 Interesting.

00:34:32.880 That's a cool answer, man.

00:34:33.960 Bring up the sheep again.

00:34:34.880 That's really interesting.

00:34:35.840 I didn't know this.

00:34:37.280 Homosexual behavior in sheep has been well-documented and studied.

00:34:39.920 The domestic sheep is the only species of mammal, except for humans, which exhibits exclusive

00:34:45.960 homosexual behavior.

00:34:47.380 Well, so that's contradicting what I just said.

00:34:49.720 That's interesting.

00:34:50.200 That's a good point.

00:34:50.620 I wonder if this is, but this is also Wikipedia.

00:34:53.380 Well, but Wikipedia probably is more up-to-date than me.

00:34:57.260 Sheep may be an exception.

00:34:59.180 But if you look, I mean, there's a whole lot of different species that do have homosexual

00:35:04.620 behavior.

00:35:05.940 And for most of them, it's not exclusive homosexual behavior.

00:35:11.500 Go back to that again, actually, because I think a lot of what you're saying is in here.

00:35:15.100 30% of all rams, which are male sheep, demonstrate at least some homosexual behavior.

00:35:21.000 One report on sheep found that 8% of rams exhibited homosexual preferences.

00:35:25.320 That is, even when given a choice, they chose male over female partners.

00:35:30.060 This documented homosexual preference has garnered much discussion.

00:35:33.700 Such rams prefer to court and mount other rams only, even in the presence of estrous

00:35:38.920 ewes.

00:35:41.240 Anyway, it's just, it's interesting.

00:35:43.000 I never thought about this or even talked about it with somebody.

00:35:45.140 So this is pretty cool.

00:35:46.140 Well, so, I mean, I think the important thing here is that this is not just something humans

00:35:52.280 came up with.

00:35:53.820 Right?

00:35:54.160 It's not, and if you're trying to explain it as a moral failing, right, as many religions

00:36:02.480 would, well, you would have to say, well, you know, it didn't start with us.

00:36:08.480 You know?

00:36:09.240 Pete Buttigieg says, you know, had a real good quote, and I'm paraphrasing him.

00:36:14.860 And he was saying, you know, I've been felt gay as soon as I had any sexual feelings whatsoever.

00:36:24.180 It wasn't a choice.

00:36:25.620 Yeah.

00:36:25.980 If your quarrel with me, Mike Pence, is not with me.

00:36:30.180 It's with my creator.

00:36:31.320 I got made gay.

00:36:33.280 I was born that way.

00:36:34.940 That's a great statement, huh?

00:36:36.220 Yeah.

00:36:36.700 No, I think it gets to the heart of the matter.

00:36:39.080 Like, if you ask a straight man, when did you decide to be straight?

00:36:44.100 Yeah.

00:36:44.400 No guys go, oh, yeah, I was thinking about it, and I was weighing the pro and cons, and

00:36:48.200 I was like, well, all right, you got to put you over here.

00:36:50.380 You know, it's February.

00:36:51.540 Well, and so, yeah, okay, I kind of came down like I'm going to be straight.

00:36:55.000 No, like no guy ever answers that way.

00:36:57.380 You're right.

00:36:57.740 Oh, yeah, I think that's pretty ridiculous, and I think that, yeah, to me, it doesn't

00:37:02.240 feel like that would be a moral thing.

00:37:04.440 I just wonder, I guess I wonder, I wonder sometimes does nature, because nature, I guess

00:37:10.820 I always look at it as male and female needed to reproduce to keep existence happening, right?

00:37:19.720 And so then I wonder at some point, does nature need more like gay energy just in the unit?

00:37:25.760 You know what I'm saying?

00:37:26.240 I just don't know sometimes like what nature's plan is, I guess.

00:37:29.860 Yeah, well.

00:37:31.500 And I guess it's TBD, some of it.

00:37:33.320 A lot of it, yes.

00:37:34.900 Yeah.

00:37:35.720 Is love scientifically quantifiable?

00:37:40.320 Well, it kind of is.

00:37:42.260 In other words, if, certainly new love is, right?

00:37:47.160 New love.

00:37:47.640 So if we take people who are in that like obsessional, you know, first six months, like, oh, just

00:37:54.960 crazy about you phase.

00:37:56.700 Fucking drool in your eyes, yeah.

00:37:58.080 And we put them in a brain scanner and show them a picture of their beloved, right?

00:38:03.620 And then we image it, and we look at what do we see?

00:38:07.340 Well, we see that there's this part of the brain that's part of kind of the pleasure and

00:38:12.300 reward circuitry that lights up.

00:38:15.160 That's, and Huberman was talking about this.

00:38:17.480 It's called the dopamine neurons of the ventral tegmental area.

00:38:22.060 So they light up.

00:38:24.460 And then we also see the prefrontal cortex of the brain, the part of the brain that's really

00:38:30.300 involved in making careful, reasoned, rational decisions.

00:38:37.520 That's like turned way the hell down, you know?

00:38:40.560 So what that means is like, you know, think about this in terms of your own subjective

00:38:43.880 experience of being truly madly, deeply in love.

00:38:46.320 You're going like, oh yeah, she's so great.

00:38:48.740 And that sore on her lip will clear up.

00:38:50.640 Yeah.

00:38:51.020 Right?

00:38:51.420 Yeah.

00:38:51.700 You know, like, and the other thing that happens, there's this part of the brain called

00:38:57.160 the amygdala that's very involved in fear and feeling under threat.

00:39:01.480 And that's also turned way down, even below normal, right?

00:39:05.480 Because you feel very comfortable.

00:39:06.920 You feel very safe.

00:39:09.280 So the interesting thing, right, is, so this study was done with people who were in that

00:39:17.000 truly madly, deeply early phase.

00:39:19.140 So then you go to old married people who've been together for a real long time and you

00:39:24.320 ask them, you say, do you feel the same way about your partner as you did when you first

00:39:35.080 met?

00:39:35.420 And 19 out of 20 people will say, well, no, right?

00:39:38.680 It's not that same crazy, passionate, you know, wonderful, obsessed, got to have sex every

00:39:44.600 minute thing that when we first met.

00:39:46.300 But it's sort of settled into a more mature, loving, kind of respectful sort of thing.

00:39:53.420 But one out of 20 people will say, no, it's just as intense, just as passionate as always

00:39:57.660 was.

00:39:57.940 And I know when I heard this, I said, you're lying.

00:39:59.720 That's what I thought.

00:40:00.200 This person is crazy.

00:40:01.520 Well, not just lying.

00:40:02.400 They're full of shit.

00:40:03.320 Yeah.

00:40:03.340 And they're pervert.

00:40:04.040 They're probably a swingers.

00:40:04.780 Maybe they just want to appear a certain way, you know?

00:40:06.520 They're swingers, David.

00:40:07.280 But, you know, they're saying this about, you know, not their piece on the side, but

00:40:12.540 their long-term partner.

00:40:14.260 Got it.

00:40:14.540 And so what happens when you put old married people in the brain scanner?

00:40:20.160 Well, you know, the 19 out of 20 people who say, no, it's not the same way it was when

00:40:27.880 we first met.

00:40:29.260 Their amygdala is not turned down.

00:40:31.520 Their prenatal frontal cortex is not turned down.

00:40:33.540 They're seeing their partner in the cold, clear light of day with all their rational

00:40:38.840 faculties.

00:40:40.460 But that one out of 20 people that says they are truly, madly, deeply still, the brain agrees

00:40:47.240 with them.

00:40:47.780 In other words, their brain scan looks like someone feeling new love.

00:40:52.940 And that's, now what do these people have that most of us don't have and how can we

00:40:57.560 get it?

00:40:57.860 We don't know.

00:41:00.100 Be good to bottle that.

00:41:01.440 Yeah, gosh.

00:41:02.160 I'd do a couple of grams of it right now, dude.

00:41:04.460 I wouldn't say anything.

00:41:05.500 I'd eat it.

00:41:05.960 I'd put a pill under my tongue and let it, you know, I'd do a half an eight ball of it

00:41:10.000 right now and take you to a damn sphere show of the Grateful Dead.

00:41:13.840 It'd be fun.

00:41:16.120 Yeah.

00:41:16.480 I think love, love is something that certainly gives us a sense of purpose.

00:41:19.820 I think, you know, absolutely.

00:41:21.600 Do you feel like humans these days, we talk a lot about purpose on here.

00:41:26.800 Do you feel like humans these days that we're losing a, like, that we're losing a sense

00:41:32.120 of purpose?

00:41:32.540 That's what it feels like sometimes to me.

00:41:34.960 Well, you know, certainly there are fewer and fewer people who are involved in relationships

00:41:43.360 and fewer and fewer people who are living together and more and more people who are living alone.

00:41:49.440 And the people who are living alone aren't always replacing a romantic partner with lots of time

00:41:57.700 with friends.

00:41:58.420 A lot of times they're replacing it with, you know, the internet, with watching podcasts like

00:42:03.260 this, not to disparage podcasts like this.

00:42:05.540 But, you know, what I'm saying is not the same, right?

00:42:08.640 So, you know, I think there is a crisis of connection that people are feeling right now.

00:42:18.560 And I think it is something to really, really be concerned about.

00:42:25.120 Why do you think it's so important for the human brain or humans to seek meaning in life?

00:42:30.320 I think we can't help but do it.

00:42:32.380 I think our brains are hardwired to take fragments of information and then try to make a story

00:42:41.520 out of them.

00:42:42.020 We are a story-making, story-telling species.

00:42:46.920 We can't help but do it, right?

00:42:50.300 It is a deeply human thing.

00:42:53.300 And, you know, let me tell you a little bit of what I mean, right?

00:42:58.360 So, people say, well, science and faith are somehow in opposition.

00:43:06.680 I say science and faith are two branches of the same human stream.

00:43:15.560 We're starting with fundamental questions that we can't know.

00:43:20.300 What is our purpose?

00:43:21.860 How did we get here?

00:43:23.360 How should we live our lives?

00:43:25.260 What happens after we're gone, right?

00:43:29.780 And faith takes one path.

00:43:33.960 It says, all right, you know, I've got an explanation for doing that.

00:43:38.280 It involves the divine and I will believe that and that is my way forward.

00:43:42.240 And science says, well, I'm going to address those mysteries in a different way.

00:43:47.460 I'm going to do experiments and observations and subject those to falsifications.

00:43:52.360 And I'll take some wrong turns, but I'll fix them and eventually I'll get closer and closer to the truth.

00:43:57.740 And they are two different ways of getting at it, but they have the very same root.

00:44:03.100 We as humans are curious.

00:44:06.080 We want to know what's going on.

00:44:09.940 We want to put it together.

00:44:11.320 We want to make a story.

00:44:12.400 And it happens in the most basic sensory level.

00:44:15.220 Like if you're walking through the woods and you hear, you can't help but imagine that someone's coming up behind you, right?

00:44:24.260 You're making a story in your mind about what those sounds mean.

00:44:29.480 Our whole brains are built to take fragmentary information and put them together in a story.

00:44:36.280 It's the most fundamental human thing there is.

00:44:39.280 Why does it feel that science is always trying to defeat faith?

00:44:44.240 Does it make any sense?

00:44:46.320 Well, I just thought – and maybe not always.

00:44:48.400 Maybe that's not true.

00:44:49.780 I don't know.

00:44:50.300 That just popped in my head.

00:44:51.640 Well, I mean certainly that's the way that a lot of people think about it.

00:44:55.920 I mean there are certain aspects of certain faith stories where science will weigh in.

00:45:02.640 In other words, if you say, I believe the literal Bible that the earth was created 6,000 years ago by God.

00:45:16.780 Well, scientists will say, you know, we got some observations that say it's been around a lot longer than that and it didn't happen that way.

00:45:24.460 And so, you know, we have a problem with that.

00:45:28.380 Yeah, science is going to be like, hold my degree, yeah.

00:45:30.300 Yeah.

00:45:30.860 But, you know, when you look at it, a lot of faiths don't really have as much of a quarrel.

00:45:38.040 I mean there are some people who are really fundamental literalists and they're going to say, no, that Bible story about 6,000 years is right.

00:45:44.740 And if you scientists disagree with me, well, then we got problems.

00:45:47.860 There's really no way to reconcile this.

00:45:50.440 But, like, if you look at the Catholic Church, right, so, you know, the popes say, well, all right, you know, that Old Testament stuff shouldn't be taken entirely literally.

00:46:02.780 We've got astronomers.

00:46:04.480 The Vatican actually sponsors some scientific research, you know.

00:46:07.720 And you can be a person in the Catholic faith and you can believe in God and you can believe fundamental aspects of the credo of the faith and still be all right with the scientific model of the Big Bang or evolution or humans being 200,000 years old.

00:46:29.060 Bring this up really quick.

00:46:29.900 I do think this is interesting.

00:46:31.140 Let me take a peek here.

00:46:32.160 The Vatican supports research through various initiatives, most notably the Vatican Observatory and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

00:46:39.260 Wow, that's where Harry Potter went, I think.

00:46:41.800 The Vatican Observatory conducts research in astronomy and related sciences, while the Pontifical Academy of Sciences promotes advancements in various scientific fields.

00:46:50.460 The Vatican also supports research in the stem cells, rare diseases, and other areas.

00:46:55.660 Huh.

00:46:55.880 That's right.

00:46:56.820 So, you know, this is an example of a major branch of Christianity that doesn't have like a fundamental basic problem with the scientific method.

00:47:10.160 And it's not just Christianity.

00:47:12.560 Like, for example, if you were to look at Buddhism, the Dalai Lama, our present Dalai Lama, says, yeah, I'm really interested in science.

00:47:20.060 If science conflicts with Buddhism, then Buddhism is going to have to change a little bit.

00:47:24.280 We're going to have to adapt.

00:47:25.880 And so, you know, you can be a Buddhist and you can live according to Buddhist principles and still have a scientific worldview and respect science and believe in the scientific method.

00:47:43.080 These things aren't at their core irreconcilable.

00:47:47.980 Excellent.

00:47:48.320 Yeah.

00:47:48.820 Thank you so much, man.

00:47:49.900 And I think a lot of people need to hear stuff like this because I think, especially that last piece, it was like, you can do both of these things.

00:47:56.680 You can.

00:47:57.020 You know?

00:47:57.340 I think there's a lot of people who get stuck in the word of like, well, if I don't do exactly this, then God's not going to love me or God's not going to care about me.

00:48:04.040 Or if I even imagine, like I remember there were, it felt like when I was, sometimes when I was young in certain environments that if you even like neighbors that I had and stuff, if they even had like an imagination that it would go against some of their beliefs that were like really iterated strongly in their household.

00:48:26.600 Right.

00:48:27.040 And no judgment against that.

00:48:28.660 Those beliefs may have kept them in a pattern that was safe and great for them.

00:48:32.500 Right.

00:48:32.880 And it may do that for millions of people.

00:48:35.580 But I do think it's just interesting how we manage, how do you manage both?

00:48:40.040 And I don't think that God would let us have this, these thoughts if it weren't, we weren't supposed to have these thoughts, you know?

00:48:48.640 So, um, he gave you the hardware to have those thoughts.

00:48:53.360 You're absolutely right.

00:48:54.420 Uh, you know, like Pete Buttigieg said about being gay, you know, ultimately this goes back to my creator, not me.

00:49:01.980 Bring it up, PDB.

00:49:02.680 I want to see exactly what he said, man.

00:49:04.760 Started over going.

00:49:06.900 You may be religious and you may not.

00:49:09.140 But if you are, and you are also queer, and you have come through the other side of a period of wishing that you weren't, then you know that that message, that this idea that there is something wrong with you, is a message that puts you at war, not only with yourself, but with your maker.

00:49:28.420 And speaking only for myself, I can tell you that if me being gay was a choice, it was a choice that was made far, far above my pay grade.

00:49:45.460 And that's the thing I wish the Mike Pence's of the world would understand.

00:49:49.320 That if you've got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me.

00:49:53.320 Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.

00:49:56.560 And did Mike Pence directly attack him or was that – some of that could be political kickballing.

00:50:00.700 I don't remember exactly.

00:50:02.400 But either way, that's a – that's – yeah, I think that's such a – it's just a – it's an important thing to hear, you know?

00:50:08.760 I think it's a very important thing to hear.

00:50:10.540 And to me, like the interesting thing when we talk about faith is what does it mean that you find faith everywhere in the world?

00:50:18.940 In other words, if you talk to the anthropologists who go all around the world and, you know, studied every society all around the world, there isn't a single place that doesn't have some kind of supernatural explanation.

00:50:32.980 Amen.

00:50:33.540 Right?

00:50:33.860 And they can be different.

00:50:34.860 That's going to be fascinating, right?

00:50:35.220 Now, that's something that also makes us unique.

00:50:37.500 Is it?

00:50:38.080 Well, who knows?

00:50:38.980 I mean, if there's chimpanzee religion, how would we know?

00:50:41.240 So even animals could be in heaven.

00:50:43.060 Dude, if I get to heaven, there's lots of mosquitoes up there.

00:50:45.960 If their beliefs, if they – that's going to piss me off.

00:50:49.480 You know, I had an advisor when I was an undergraduate and I worked in a lab.

00:50:54.880 And he said, you know, I had a bad dream last night.

00:50:57.560 And I said, Joe, what was that?

00:50:59.220 And he said, you know, this is a lab where we work with rats.

00:51:02.060 And he said, you know, I had this dream that I died and I went up to heaven and I met St. Peter and he had pink eyes and little whiskers.

00:51:10.700 Oh, no.

00:51:12.420 No, I'm in the ship now.

00:51:14.400 Maybe he had conjunctivitis.

00:51:15.860 Who knows what he had, huh?

00:51:17.260 That's right.

00:51:17.920 Maybe he had a long Saturday night, huh?

00:51:21.040 Oh, dang.

00:51:21.760 So even animals –

00:51:23.000 Well, I don't know.

00:51:24.100 Look, I'm not going to tell you – I'm not going to tell you that chimpanzees have religion.

00:51:26.980 I'm just saying that if they did, it wouldn't be something that it would be straightforward for us to know.

00:51:36.140 For sure.

00:51:36.580 The fascinating thing is that it's a human universal.

00:51:39.980 In other words, not everyone is a person of faith, but everywhere around the world, every single society has people of faith.

00:51:48.880 It's pretty cool, though.

00:51:49.900 Think about how cool it is.

00:51:50.960 Well, you know, so it can't be an accident.

00:51:53.360 Okay.

00:51:53.640 Right.

00:51:54.120 It's like, you know, this fulfills some fundamental human need to have these ideas.

00:52:01.720 And, you know, if you like, if we talk about mortality later, I can tell you a particular theory I have about that.

00:52:07.940 But we don't have to get into it now.

00:52:10.700 So this – no, David, that leads exactly to kind of what I was thinking about.

00:52:14.640 My next question is how does our quality of life affect our beliefs about death or the afterlife?

00:52:22.400 Well, you know, I think this is something where neuroscience actually has something to offer.

00:52:28.160 Okay.

00:52:28.420 Right?

00:52:29.400 So when I first started studying the brain, you know, 40-plus years ago, I was taught, well, the brain just kind of sits there and it waits to react to something.

00:52:40.600 Something comes in your senses.

00:52:41.740 You hear something.

00:52:42.280 You see something.

00:52:42.960 Your brain does something.

00:52:43.880 And then you move your muscles and you respond to it.

00:52:46.200 And that's what it is.

00:52:46.760 The brain is kind of sitting there waiting for something to happen.

00:52:48.700 It's a reactive organ.

00:52:49.880 Like a two-stroke motor or something.

00:52:51.300 And, well, even not – like a two-stroke motor that isn't even started yet.

00:52:56.300 It's waiting for someone to pull the ripcord, right, for it to start up.

00:53:00.960 And what we now know, the modern conception of the brain is that when you're just sitting there spacing out, your brain is really busy.

00:53:09.100 And it is a prediction machine.

00:53:12.380 Your brain is trying to figure out what's going to happen next in the near term.

00:53:17.800 It's doing like, is that a person who's walking up there, friend or foe?

00:53:24.560 Am I likely to be hungry lately?

00:53:27.520 Oh, I see those French fries.

00:53:30.700 Should I secrete some saliva of the type that's particularly good for breaking down starch or am I going to eat meat?

00:53:36.800 And so should I secrete this kind of saliva that's particularly good for breaking down protein?

00:53:40.840 All of these are examples of where our brains and our body working together are trying to predict stuff in the near term.

00:53:47.480 Well, what does that mean?

00:53:49.820 It means that our brain is wired to presume that there will always be a near term, that there will be a future, right?

00:54:00.560 And so, you know, I got diagnosed with terminal cancer.

00:54:06.420 I was told four years ago that I had six to 18 months to live.

00:54:11.660 And, you know, while, I mean, of course, that was really upsetting and I was freaking the fuck out about it.

00:54:18.820 In addition, you know, I could do practical stuff.

00:54:21.220 Oh, I better write my will.

00:54:23.060 I better have this conversation with my kids.

00:54:25.320 I better, you know, make sure this is done in the house and like these letters are written for my students, you know, so then to go on the next part of their career.

00:54:33.800 Like all that practical stuff.

00:54:35.000 Better fix that window screen.

00:54:35.340 Right, exactly.

00:54:37.100 And but in terms of actually deeply engaging with myself not being there anymore with my own demise, I felt like, you know, I was skittering across the ice.

00:54:50.180 You know, I couldn't really dig in and grab it.

00:54:54.300 I couldn't really think about what it's like for me not to be there anymore.

00:55:00.200 And I thought, well, is this a personal failing?

00:55:03.160 Do I just suck?

00:55:05.000 And I thought, well, maybe.

00:55:08.180 But I mean, I do.

00:55:10.240 But we all do.

00:55:11.700 But, you know, what I'm thinking fundamentally is that this is not something that we as humans are designed to do.

00:55:18.880 Our brains are hardwired to predict the near future, which presumes that there will be a near future.

00:55:26.060 Yeah.

00:55:26.480 Right?

00:55:27.200 And so if you extrapolate this a little bit.

00:55:33.980 And what does extrapolate mean just so people know?

00:55:35.500 I'm sorry.

00:55:36.320 If you kind of move on to the next step.

00:55:38.400 Okay.

00:55:39.120 Right?

00:55:39.540 Of what this means for faith.

00:55:42.360 Right?

00:55:42.600 If you go around the world, nearly every, not absolutely every, but nearly every religion in the world has an afterlife or reincarnation story.

00:55:53.400 Very few religions.

00:55:55.660 Judaism is one.

00:55:57.380 You're dead.

00:55:58.340 And there isn't actually a story about what happens after you're dead.

00:56:01.220 But almost every other one does.

00:56:04.520 Or the big invoice.

00:56:05.440 You go to heaven.

00:56:06.760 You meld with the divine.

00:56:08.080 You're reincarnated.

00:56:08.980 But there's something that happens.

00:56:10.580 These stories are exceedingly popular all over the world in all cultures.

00:56:15.180 Well, I think that the reason they are is because of this brain bug we have.

00:56:21.800 We can't imagine ourselves dead because our brains are hardwired to predict the future.

00:56:28.700 And that's why we have these afterlife and reincarnation stories in faiths all over the world.

00:56:34.240 And so I have total sympathy for these, not just because I'm diagnosed with terminal cancer, because I see them as something deep and fundamental to what it is to be human and something that binds us all.

00:56:49.260 It's so funny, man.

00:56:50.080 My next question is why is it so hard for us to think about our own deaths?

00:56:53.800 Yeah.

00:56:54.160 Well, we got there.

00:56:55.480 You got my answer.

00:56:56.120 And it is funny because I'll start to think about it, right?

00:56:59.900 And I can – at first I can think about, okay, you're going to die, right?

00:57:06.200 I can think about the certain – like the mechanics of like, okay, I'm in a hospital bed and I'm laying there and someone's holding my hand, all of that.

00:57:13.660 But the part where I start to – like it almost like makes my soul like – it's like when I – you're not going to exist.

00:57:22.680 That's the part I just – my brain, it can't – it won't accept that.

00:57:28.440 It's like, well, what do you mean I won't exist?

00:57:31.520 It's a very hard thing to deal with.

00:57:35.360 And, you know –

00:57:35.860 But you think it's a clue?

00:57:38.060 Yeah.

00:57:38.500 I don't know if it's a clue or not.

00:57:40.040 I mean, for me, in sort of dealing with my terminal cancer diagnosis, it's like, you know, for myself, I'm 63 years old.

00:57:49.880 Yeah.

00:57:50.220 Well, I mean, yeah, I would love to have 20 more years or something like that.

00:57:54.820 You know, that would be great.

00:57:56.240 But I've had a really good life.

00:57:58.560 I got no complaints.

00:57:59.960 You know, I've had – I've got a terrific wife.

00:58:02.600 Yeah, you got to be in love.

00:58:03.600 I got great kids.

00:58:04.440 I've gotten to be in love.

00:58:05.300 I've gotten to do good work, have good friends, have adventures, you know, do the things I want to do.

00:58:11.520 I got to have a job where I don't have a boss and follow my own curiosity.

00:58:15.120 Almost no one gets that, you know.

00:58:16.940 So, like, I've had a really good life.

00:58:20.920 And when I think about not being there, it's not so much, oh, like, you know, I do want more of it.

00:58:28.180 That's not the first thing.

00:58:29.060 I think about my family, you know.

00:58:35.780 Yeah, man.

00:58:36.760 You know, I don't want to leave them.

00:58:39.080 I don't want to leave my wife.

00:58:40.680 I don't want to leave my kids.

00:58:41.720 I don't want to leave the people who are close to me.

00:58:44.800 That's the part that gets me fundamentally.

00:58:50.860 Not like, oh, shit, I wish I could have 20 more years of partying.

00:58:54.220 Yeah.

00:58:54.640 Yeah, for sure.

00:58:55.620 Yeah.

00:58:56.600 Yeah.

00:58:57.000 I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:58:59.060 I mean, I wouldn't mind listening to a couple more Grateful Dead tunes, you know, in between love and my family.

00:59:03.220 Are you a deadhead man?

00:59:04.640 I just got into him in the past year and a half, man.

00:59:06.360 Really?

00:59:06.760 Also a nouveau deadhead.

00:59:08.680 All right.

00:59:09.280 Okay.

00:59:10.720 But, no, you know what's so funny, David?

00:59:12.380 And thank you for sharing that, man.

00:59:14.300 You know what sometimes makes me, like, I guess it may, I don't know if it's lame or whatever to say, but, like, sometimes I feel like I could never let certain people know how much I love them, you know?

00:59:25.480 You know, it almost feels like it's not even physically possible sometimes to let, like, like, if I did, the cops would have to, like, you almost like, you know what I'm saying?

00:59:34.600 Like, it wouldn't be a perversion thing, but it would be like, hey, you can't loiter on my porch anymore.

00:59:39.400 It's like, sometimes it feels like a feeling that's so impossible to completely share, like, to let your kids know how much you love them.

00:59:47.680 Like, you probably could never do it.

00:59:49.600 Yeah, I don't think I could.

00:59:51.060 I mean, for me, I do struggle with that, but I struggle with it less for the people I'm really close to, who I, you know, I think I'm pretty good about telling them how I feel.

01:00:02.360 Right.

01:00:02.560 I think my wife knows how I feel.

01:00:04.140 I think my kids know how I feel.

01:00:07.140 I think, you know, my friends, my colleagues, you know, who I love deeply, I don't think, you know, it's harder for that.

01:00:18.220 It's harder for me to, you know, go to my best work buddy and say, dude, like, you don't know how much I love you.

01:00:24.600 You know, that would be a little weird, right?

01:00:25.820 Yeah, that's what I'm saying, dude.

01:00:27.800 It's hard to express some things without becoming an HR issue.

01:00:31.800 That's right.

01:00:32.200 So I think that's, and I don't know if that's scientific or not, but love sometimes gets shut down by the HR department.

01:00:38.120 And I think more in men.

01:00:39.600 Yeah.

01:00:39.900 I think men have a harder time with this.

01:00:41.800 Yeah.

01:00:42.200 But it is funny that that's the one feeling sometimes for me, it's like, I almost, you couldn't put together how much you love somebody or something, you know, or somebody, you know, you just couldn't put together how much you love somebody.

01:00:55.980 It's like, you can't, I don't know, love is this thing.

01:00:58.180 It's so hard.

01:00:58.880 It's like, I don't know.

01:01:00.400 To me, it's just a, it's such a fascinating energy.

01:01:03.960 It is.

01:01:05.520 And, you know, it's remarkable to think that something that profound ultimately originates in this biological imperative to mate.

01:01:20.600 Right.

01:01:20.800 And even though this love, you know, translates into situations that don't have anything to do with, you know, making babies or whatever, it generalizes, you know, that's where it came from, you know.

01:01:35.280 And it's easy to think, oh, well, like it must have come from, you know, something like this deep wellspring of mysticism.

01:01:46.840 But, you know, I don't, I don't know that it, that it means that.

01:01:51.240 It can be that transportive and that surreal and that important and still be fundamentally natural in the end.

01:02:03.400 Like a teammate of the reproductive process.

01:02:05.800 Yeah, you know, you know, you go, oh, my God, you know, I'm so in love.

01:02:09.880 Well, you know, why is that?

01:02:12.100 Well, you know, ultimately, get your genes in the next generation.

01:02:15.240 Yeah.

01:02:15.700 Well, it's kind of interesting because even this kind of moment is a little bit of that, is a little bit of that faith in science.

01:02:22.280 A little bit of that, you know, there's some mysticism.

01:02:24.640 Yeah.

01:02:24.880 And then there's some science, right, right there with it.

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01:04:17.100 Thank you.

01:04:17.560 Man, thank you so much, David.

01:04:20.880 We're not done.

01:04:21.980 I just want to say thank you, man.

01:04:23.020 I just appreciate it.

01:04:23.780 I think it's – you know, one of the things I feel so lucky about this job is just that I get to have – I get to have moments with people sometimes that mean something, you know?

01:04:32.620 Yeah.

01:04:33.100 And it's nice.

01:04:34.040 Yeah, I'm very happy to be here.

01:04:35.580 Yeah, I really appreciate it.

01:04:36.800 So let's talk a little bit about individuality because – well, for one, you have a book actually – yeah, there it is.

01:04:48.700 The Unique, The New Science of Human Individuality.

01:04:52.840 Know it, be it, live it.

01:04:53.960 Buy it for your friends.

01:04:55.180 Okay.

01:04:55.680 Know it, be it, live it.

01:04:56.780 Buy it for your friends right there.

01:04:58.540 You can get it online, right?

01:04:59.760 And we'll put a link below in our YouTube video.

01:05:03.080 So let me just start with this.

01:05:05.700 It's kind of just a very basic – are our fingerprints the only thing that makes us individual?

01:05:13.400 No.

01:05:13.920 There's all kinds of things that make us individual, but I love fingerprints.

01:05:17.540 Let's talk about fingerprints, right?

01:05:20.500 So identical twins – and actually, I hate this term, identical twins, because they're not really identical, but genetically identical twins.

01:05:29.340 The science term we use for it is monozygotic twins.

01:05:34.620 It turns out they don't have identical fingerprints.

01:05:39.180 Oh, really?

01:05:40.740 Yeah, this is an important –

01:05:41.460 I've never believed in twins.

01:05:42.040 Yeah, this is an important thing for like solving crimes.

01:05:44.660 Right.

01:05:44.960 Right?

01:05:45.340 You can imagine a mystery story.

01:05:47.180 No, my identical twin did it.

01:05:48.720 Well, no, he didn't, asshole.

01:05:49.880 He has different fingerprints than you.

01:05:52.660 Yeah, I've never trusted twins that much.

01:05:55.360 Oh, I have twins.

01:05:56.700 Oh, you do?

01:05:57.300 Not identical twins.

01:05:58.720 I have boy-girl twins.

01:05:59.700 Oh, that's – yeah.

01:06:00.580 I'm willing to at least hear about that.

01:06:03.280 Well, so yeah, fingerprints are something – like the statistics of fingerprints, like how many ridges you have, that has a heritable component, meaning that is partly determined by genes you get from your mother and father.

01:06:18.340 And so if you have an identical twin, you're probably going to have the same number.

01:06:21.760 But the exact precise pattern, exactly where the whorls and swirls are on your fingertip, that is individually determined.

01:06:29.620 And even genetically identical twins have different fingerprints.

01:06:33.200 Wow.

01:06:33.480 So that's pretty wild.

01:06:34.540 So that's saying that even in this moment where there's a lot of replication, I guess, between twins, that even there, each one is – has a stamp of uniqueness to them.

01:06:45.400 Yeah, and I think this brings up something that's super, super crazy important.

01:06:48.900 And it brings up – you know, have you known some so-called identical twins in your life?

01:06:54.500 Yeah.

01:06:54.720 Yeah, and so you know they're not really identical, right?

01:06:58.720 In other words, like you can look at them and you can tell them apart and they don't have the same personalities.

01:07:05.060 And even if you met them as newborns, they wouldn't truly be identical down to the last hair and molecule and their temperament.

01:07:15.840 Like one would cry more, one would be more calm, one would be more this way.

01:07:21.020 Interestingly, this is a tangent, right?

01:07:22.520 People study this a lot in armadillos because the nine-banded armadillo, they are born every time as identical quadruplets.

01:07:34.360 Wait.

01:07:34.940 So there's a – the nine-banded armadillo, every time that they're born, there's four of them?

01:07:39.380 There's four of them and there are four genetically identical ones and it's coming up on your screen.

01:07:46.040 Wow.

01:07:46.920 Why?

01:07:47.560 Yeah.

01:07:47.900 And so like if you take nine-banded armadillos and like – so you can do stuff with armadillos you're not going to do with people like dissect them and look at their organs as soon as they're born.

01:07:58.420 And like you'll see, all right, these are genetically identical critters, but one of them has got a liver that's 50 percent bigger than the other.

01:08:05.660 The other one has got like a spleen that's different than this one.

01:08:08.540 They're not really identical even at birth.

01:08:11.400 Well, so how did that happen?

01:08:13.660 Well, they got the same DNA and they grew up right next to each other in the same womb, in the same mom.

01:08:23.560 So how did they get different even when they were born?

01:08:27.080 Yeah.

01:08:27.480 And the answer is this.

01:08:29.120 It turns out that the DNA is not like a blueprint.

01:08:32.700 It's not like a wiring diagram for the body and the brain that absolutely specifies everything.

01:08:39.140 It's more like a really vague recipe, right, that says – like if we're imagining this for the brain, instead of saying, hey, you, neuron number 1,407, grow a little bit towards the top and then after four millimeters, make a left turn and go across the other side of the brain.

01:08:58.640 No, it doesn't work that way.

01:08:59.900 It isn't a wiring diagram.

01:09:01.760 It's more like, hey, you bunch of neurons over there.

01:09:04.940 About half of you cross over the other side of the brain and half of you keep going.

01:09:09.140 And in one identical twin, maybe 40 percent will cross over and another 60 percent, on average 50 percent do.

01:09:17.220 But even in genetically identical animals, the variation in how they develop gives rise to individuality.

01:09:28.360 I see.

01:09:28.620 So you're saying it's not like a dictator.

01:09:30.080 It's more like a crossing guard, like you this way, this way, you guys that way.

01:09:32.800 That's right.

01:09:33.140 It's like, you know, so there's this guy in Ireland.

01:09:37.580 His name is Kevin Mitchell.

01:09:38.580 He's a neurogeneticist.

01:09:40.100 Does he seem like a neat guy?

01:09:41.080 And he is a neat guy.

01:09:42.800 And so Kevin Mitchell says, if I were to make a hundred clones of you and they grew up, they wouldn't be a hundred theos.

01:09:52.340 They'd be a hundred individuals, each with their own experience that developed in different ways.

01:09:58.640 And not just because they had different experiences from you.

01:10:01.340 Even the hundred baby clones would already be different because the way they grew in the womb isn't exactly the same, isn't 100 percent specified by the DNA, right?

01:10:13.740 And so this is some of the way we say, well, how do we become individuals?

01:10:18.060 Well, some of it is what you inherit from your parents in your DNA.

01:10:22.040 And some of it is other biological stuff like, you know, what hormones were flying around when you were in utero or growing up.

01:10:29.400 And some of it is your experiences in the world.

01:10:31.980 And then some of it is this fundamental randomness of development that I just talked about, what we call the stochastic nature of development in science speak.

01:10:42.520 Like, that's a fun word, isn't it?

01:10:44.060 It's not stochastic.

01:10:45.140 Say that at the, you know, tonight and impress your friends.

01:10:48.960 Yeah.

01:10:51.220 I don't want to just go back to fingerprints on this, but to use that as a marker for individuality, could someone throughout time even have had the same fingerprints?

01:11:01.940 Do we know?

01:11:02.520 Like, do we know if someone else in history could have had the same fingerprints as you, like, back throughout time?

01:11:07.700 Oh, that I don't know.

01:11:09.600 In other words, I don't know if there's so much, you know, if there's – if patterns get repeated.

01:11:17.040 I mean, I think if so, the answer is not very often.

01:11:22.940 I mean, otherwise, you know, the fingerprint databases that all these law enforcement groups have would be worthless.

01:11:30.060 You know, sometimes in groups that are very genetically homogeneous, you walk down the street and you feel like you've seen the same face.

01:11:37.920 Like, I spent some time in Finland.

01:11:39.720 All 5 million Finns were – came from like 1,000 founders and you walk down the street and you go, oh, let's see that, dude.

01:11:50.560 Like, 10 people later, you go, is that the same guy or is that your brother or like, what the hell?

01:11:56.120 That's the same face again, right?

01:11:57.720 You know, so there's some groups that had so few founders that there actually isn't that much genetic variation, right?

01:12:05.300 Oh, try to pick out of a police lineup in Finland.

01:12:07.960 Yeah.

01:12:08.240 Now, of course, you know, maybe I'm just being racist against Finns and the Finns would say, well, no, no, no, no, no, right, you know.

01:12:14.440 But why does nature make us so individual, I wonder?

01:12:17.200 Like, why does that – why is that important?

01:12:19.000 Well, so there's a couple of levels of that.

01:12:22.640 You know, one way to think about it is the way that individuality starts is by sexual reproduction.

01:12:30.460 In other words, when you are the mixture of your mother and your father, then you're stirring the pot and making a new mixture and that makes individual you, right?

01:12:39.380 Not all animals reproduce that some way.

01:12:42.260 Some animals just split and they make genetically identical copies of themselves.

01:12:47.780 They make clones.

01:12:49.580 And you might say to yourself, well, that's easy.

01:12:51.680 Like, why doesn't every animal just split and make identical copies of themselves?

01:12:57.640 And the idea behind this is that if you are constantly mixing and recombining as you do with sexual reproduction, then you're getting a population that has more different traits, very – you know, maybe this person is an early riser

01:13:17.640 and this one is a late riser.

01:13:18.900 This one can tolerate heat.

01:13:20.180 This one can tolerate cold.

01:13:22.200 And so if a disaster happens, you're less likely to kill off the whole population.

01:13:26.520 So in populations, genetic diversity is good.

01:13:30.880 And sexual reproduction as opposed to just splitting yourself and making a clone doesn't get you that diversity.

01:13:38.320 Interesting thing, there are some animals – like there are some insects that can reproduce both ways.

01:13:43.460 They can reproduce sexually or they can split themselves.

01:13:47.580 Yeah.

01:13:48.460 And in times aplenty, they tend to do one and in times of lean, they tend to do the other.

01:13:57.640 Bring that up.

01:13:57.960 And there are plants that do the same way.

01:14:00.000 Like ferns are a good example.

01:14:02.240 Ferns can propagate with runners and make clones or they can propagate sexually and mix their genes and make individual mixed offspring.

01:14:11.900 Oh, hell yeah.

01:14:12.660 Oh, ferns look like they've been partying.

01:14:14.260 If you just look at them, you know what I'm saying?

01:14:16.400 It looks like –

01:14:16.740 I know what you mean.

01:14:17.780 If I'm going to come back as a plant, I think I want it to be a fern.

01:14:20.480 Yeah.

01:14:21.520 Are those devil horns or are you doing ferns in – no, see, this is the fern sign, right?

01:14:25.540 Oh, yeah.

01:14:26.160 Yeah, this is the horns.

01:14:27.060 This is the fern sign.

01:14:27.880 I'll do both, dude.

01:14:29.340 It's like they've been at Ferning Man, dude.

01:14:31.340 Ferning Man.

01:14:32.480 Thanks for even –

01:14:33.180 That's comedy gold right there.

01:14:34.520 Yeah, it's copper.

01:14:35.760 Comedy copper I'll go with.

01:14:37.080 But thank you for even entertaining it.

01:14:39.180 Yeah, go back to this.

01:14:39.920 Let me see.

01:14:41.160 Insects that can reproduce sexually and also through parthenogenesis, a form of asexual reproduction include aphids and some species of stick insects.

01:14:49.600 That's right.

01:14:50.360 That's right.

01:14:50.840 So parthenogenesis is a term – it comes from Athena, the Greek goddess, right, who sprung from the head of Zeus.

01:15:04.020 So the idea is that she didn't come from sex.

01:15:07.080 So the word parthenogenesis, the reason where that word comes from is coming from that Greek myth, right?

01:15:12.920 Dude, that's cool.

01:15:14.080 Yeah.

01:15:14.700 Yeah.

01:15:14.940 Wow.

01:15:15.980 Yeah.

01:15:16.400 Interestingly, it's – some animals that normally reproduce sexually, it's a very rare thing.

01:15:23.180 But occasionally a woman's egg will actually start dividing in a way that it can actually make a whole embryo.

01:15:32.020 And you can have a female that gives birth to an exact copy of itself.

01:15:40.560 Dudes can't do that, right?

01:15:42.020 Only females can do it.

01:15:45.260 And that's –

01:15:45.780 Female, humans?

01:15:46.040 And that's called parthenogenesis.

01:15:47.620 People have argued about whether it happens in humans.

01:15:50.680 I don't know what the internet will say right now.

01:15:54.040 When I looked into it about 20 years ago, some people were saying yes and some people were saying no.

01:15:59.440 I don't know what the latest is on that.

01:16:01.440 And some people say that in addition that their fingerprint, that people's sphincters, like their butthole or b-hole or whatever, that it is like the 11th fingerprint, some people say.

01:16:11.040 Is that –

01:16:12.040 You know, remember when people would straddle Xerox machines and make photographs of their nethers?

01:16:18.240 That's the Christmas party.

01:16:19.300 That's right.

01:16:19.880 That's right.

01:16:20.340 Well, so that could be your scanner for the 11th fingerprint.

01:16:23.900 But can you look up if the sphincter – I don't know how you would even say that.

01:16:29.040 While not considered the 11th fingerprint in any official capacity, the concept of the anus as a potential biometric identifier has been explored due to its unique characteristics.

01:16:39.300 Historically – this is the only information I'm seeing here – the artist Salvador Dali is credited with having observed the unique nature of anal creases and comparing them to fingerprints.

01:16:47.820 Huh.

01:16:48.040 So this has been thought of before, you know.

01:16:50.460 Well, you know, it means, you know, if you're undergoing anal bleaching, right, then you can evade the cops if you're using that as a way of identifying you.

01:17:01.140 I'll ride with that.

01:17:02.440 We'll figure – we'll look at that more another time.

01:17:05.620 But, yeah, I've always heard that.

01:17:07.640 Do we have nerves in our – we have nerves in our butt, right?

01:17:11.080 Oh, absolutely.

01:17:12.580 Yeah, yeah.

01:17:13.260 Well, you know, you've got nerves in all your skin.

01:17:15.160 But it turns out that, you know, in the places where people like to get sexy, you've got a special kind of nerve.

01:17:22.720 And so, you know, the lips, the genitals, the butthole, right?

01:17:29.940 So these places aren't just random.

01:17:33.520 They're a special kind of skin.

01:17:35.020 And so for years and years and years, people said, well, how come you can have sexual sensations from certain places on your body but not others?

01:17:43.360 Like the back of your hand doesn't feel that sexy.

01:17:46.760 End of your nose, not that sexy.

01:17:48.500 But, you know, your genitals, sexy.

01:17:50.620 Your lips, you know, maybe your butthole, sexy, you know.

01:17:54.060 And so why is that?

01:17:56.420 And nobody really knew the answer until there was a fundamental discovery.

01:18:10.320 And it actually started in the 1850s.

01:18:13.740 There was a German anatomist named Krauss and he took sections of the skin of the penis and the skin of the clitoris.

01:18:21.860 And he looked at them under a microscope and he said, well, there's this one kind of little nerve ending and it's kind of like wiggly like this and it has a little capsule around it.

01:18:33.220 And I see a lot more of them here than I do in other places in the body.

01:18:38.260 And maybe this is the special nerve ending that makes sexual sensation.

01:18:44.320 Oh, that's interesting.

01:18:45.000 And people said, well, yeah, maybe, but maybe not.

01:18:48.000 We don't really have a way of testing it.

01:18:49.420 We didn't have a way of like specifically activating those ones and not other ones, turning them on or turning them off.

01:18:56.660 And this was like a total mystery.

01:18:59.500 But there were some things that really made it seem possible.

01:19:02.000 So, all right.

01:19:02.640 So, like if we're going to talk about dicks here, like if you talk to most guys and you say, on your dick, what is the most very sensitive part of the dick?

01:19:11.060 Well, most guys will say, well, like the ridge right around the head of the dick, what's called the corona.

01:19:16.360 That's a real hot spot.

01:19:17.940 And the underside of the dick, particularly that kind of elastic tissue towards the bottom is called the frenulum is what the doctors call it.

01:19:24.980 Oh, yeah.

01:19:25.760 Right.

01:19:26.100 That baseboard or whatever.

01:19:27.380 Right.

01:19:27.820 These are like the hottest sexy hot spots on a guy's dick.

01:19:32.080 All right.

01:19:32.760 And it turns out that's where the very largest number of these Krauss corpuscle endings are.

01:19:38.340 So, oh, well, that seems like likely to be true, but is it really true?

01:19:43.640 But a couple of years ago, a buddy of mine, David Ginty at Harvard, figured out how to specially label and then electrically turn on or turn off these endings in laboratory mice.

01:20:00.140 And he proved that these really are the nerve endings that are involved in sexual sensation.

01:20:08.080 And so –

01:20:08.780 Now, mice are partying, huh?

01:20:09.900 Well, you know, mice got what we got, right?

01:20:12.480 I mean, they've got – you know, mice have sex.

01:20:15.600 Mice have orgasms.

01:20:18.500 They do what we do.

01:20:21.620 Yeah, and they're willing to be tested too.

01:20:23.760 Well, you know, they don't get to say no.

01:20:26.000 So, you know –

01:20:27.420 I've never heard one complaint, to be honest with you.

01:20:30.080 You know?

01:20:30.640 And so, you know, this brings up some things.

01:20:34.480 Like so, you know, like so people always joke about like how young men come really fast, right?

01:20:41.300 Well, you know, that's for a lot of different reasons and, you know, being nervous and being new and all that.

01:20:48.240 But part of the reason is actually not just these Krauss endings but all the different endings in your skin from about 20 as you age.

01:20:57.720 You lose about 1% of them every year.

01:21:00.220 So, you get less and less sensitive in your skin as you get older.

01:21:06.980 So, yeah.

01:21:08.240 Well, we don't really know why.

01:21:09.640 That's a good question why.

01:21:11.000 But this seems to happen.

01:21:12.580 It happens in humans.

01:21:13.580 It happens in other critters.

01:21:14.800 And so, part of the reason why old guys don't come as soon and sometimes have a problem coming at all is because fewer and fewer of the nerve endings that trigger orgasm are there.

01:21:31.940 You lose them as you age.

01:21:34.580 The same thing happens, interestingly, with nerve endings for pain.

01:21:37.820 So, you might have heard, for example, like old folks that are confined to bed get bed sores.

01:21:43.920 Well, and you might think, well, why, like, you know, and they get it from just laying in one position and wearing a hole in the skin.

01:21:50.640 You would think, oh, God, that would hurt like hell.

01:21:52.400 Why don't they just move to a different spot?

01:21:54.980 And the reason is as you get older, you not only lose the sexy nerve endings and the fine touch nerve endings, you lose the pain nerve endings too.

01:22:03.720 They don't feel it.

01:22:04.520 They don't feel it.

01:22:05.700 Wow.

01:22:06.240 Yeah.

01:22:06.460 I mean, that's why.

01:22:09.880 Yeah, oh, dude, if I'm a, yeah, even if I ejaculate or whatever, it's like a couple mealworms getting out of a sleeping bag, you know?

01:22:16.560 I mean, there's nothing.

01:22:18.160 Definitely things change, you know?

01:22:19.700 Things change.

01:22:20.080 And my father was 70 when I was born, which is just, I just say that now because I never really thought about this.

01:22:25.220 Could there be something different about his DNA or like genetics or something at that age?

01:22:31.960 Could there be something at that age that would make me any different than a young, like a child, say, if his father was 35?

01:22:40.400 Well, so, you know, that's an interesting thing.

01:22:42.080 So men are different in the sense that, you know, you can still, you know, produce sperm later into your years, whereas, you know, women have menopause and there's a hard stop.

01:22:53.540 But I'm not an expert in this, but it is my understanding that there are some things that are more likely to occur with older paternal age.

01:23:04.000 And it's not something I know a lot of the details about.

01:23:08.400 I heard you talk on the Huberman podcast about having traits which we often think are genetic, but that are actually attributed to early life experiences.

01:23:21.400 Can you talk a little bit more about that?

01:23:23.460 There's a really interesting one of these that was discovered in World War II.

01:23:31.060 So early in World War II, the Japanese army was just rolling through Asia, right?

01:23:36.180 You know, they rolled through China and British, Malaysia and Singapore and Burma and, you know, they were up to the edge of India and just nobody could stop them.

01:23:46.100 They were just a machine, but like not everything was perfect.

01:23:51.120 And part of the problem was that a lot of the Japanese soldiers were having heat stroke.

01:23:57.260 You know, it was hot there in the tropics where they were fighting and they were just keeling over with heat stroke.

01:24:03.120 And so the doctors in the Japanese armies were looking into this because it was going to be a problem.

01:24:09.100 They said, oh, well, the soldiers that are having the problem with heat stroke are more likely to come from northern Japan.

01:24:19.020 You know, Japan is oriented north to south.

01:24:21.540 The island, the most northern island, Hokkaido, is pretty chilly.

01:24:24.920 They've got mountains and snow.

01:24:27.000 The most southern island, Kyushu, is pretty tropical.

01:24:30.200 And so there's a big variation.

01:24:32.360 It's like San Diego to, you know, Seattle or something like that, right?

01:24:36.760 And so they said, well, the people who come from the north, they're the ones who are having the problem with hot weather.

01:24:41.140 And you might think, oh, well, I know how that happened.

01:24:44.020 You know, they come from families that have been there a long time.

01:24:47.720 And then gradually they've evolved to be less good in hot weather because their sweat glands aren't as good.

01:24:57.660 And what it is is that we actually all have pretty much the same density of sweat glands.

01:25:03.060 But if you come from a hot climate, more of your sweat glands receive nerves from your brain and can get the signal to sweat more when you're hot.

01:25:14.580 And it turns out if you come from south Japan, you've got a lot of those sweat glands that get messages from your brain.

01:25:24.300 And if you come from north Japan, you've got fewer of them.

01:25:26.920 People say, oh, that's just evolution over a long period of time.

01:25:29.820 But when they looked into the data a little more carefully, it was really interesting.

01:25:32.740 It turns out that if you grew up in southern Japan, even if your parents and your grandparents and all your line before you came from northern Japan, you had lots of innervated sweat glands and you did fine in the heat.

01:25:46.500 Or if it went the other way, and let's say you're from an old south Japan family, but your parents moved to north Japan and you grew up there in the first years of your life.

01:25:54.960 No, you developed the sweat glands of a northerner and you'd have a problem with the heat.

01:25:59.640 So it's something that you would think, oh, that's a genetic thing.

01:26:04.220 Like, you know, that got selected for by evolution over many generations.

01:26:08.680 But actually, it's a developmental thing.

01:26:11.960 It is something that is imprinted upon you in the first years of life and then stays with you through your whole life.

01:26:19.420 What are some things that parents could best do to set their children up for neurobiological success?

01:26:27.100 Does that make any sense?

01:26:28.020 Yeah, the best thing you can do to set your children up for neurobiological success is to pay attention to them, to give them your own attention, to read with them, to play with them, to have game night, to go hiking, to do sports together, to do the normal stuff.

01:26:47.720 There is no replacement for parental attention.

01:26:54.020 It is the absolute number one best thing you can do for your kids.

01:26:59.360 Now, I'm assuming that you're not in a situation where you're starving and, you know, they're basically okay.

01:27:04.140 They have food.

01:27:04.760 They have medicine.

01:27:06.400 They got shelter, right?

01:27:07.580 You know, if you're in that situation and you're asking what you can do for your kids, it's like it's your attention.

01:27:14.460 You know, you can't buy them fancy software and then, like, you know, put your own nose in your phone and not pay attention to them.

01:27:22.480 You know, the biggest thing is the habit of reading, right?

01:27:27.460 You know, and the kids model your own behavior.

01:27:30.580 If you read books, they're going to read books.

01:27:32.760 Oh, yeah.

01:27:33.140 If you're curious, they're going to be curious.

01:27:35.840 If you play sports and exercise and, you know, engage with the world, then they will.

01:27:43.500 So those are the things you can do.

01:27:45.340 It's not like some special thing to feed them for lunch or some special, you know, game to buy to put on their phone or their laptop.

01:27:54.120 Yeah.

01:27:54.800 Yeah.

01:27:55.400 Yeah, that's interesting.

01:27:56.220 What's something that you think you inherited from, like, inherited, like, learned inherited?

01:28:02.900 Is that possible to have?

01:28:04.480 That you, I guess, a learned trait maybe that you got from one of your parents early that you never thought you would have gotten.

01:28:09.880 Is there anything like that that kind of showed up for you?

01:28:11.560 Well, you know, I would say the things I got from my parents are pretty, you know, there's a lot of things my parents did that benefited me a lot.

01:28:21.380 And I think the main thing is that they gave me a lot of attention.

01:28:23.660 I had a really weird family.

01:28:25.340 Yeah?

01:28:25.560 Really weird family.

01:28:26.840 Maybe even weirder than yours, right?

01:28:29.480 Okay.

01:28:30.240 So my parents met when they were young and they got divorced within a year.

01:28:36.680 And then they moved to – they met in Chicago.

01:28:40.060 My mom moved to New York.

01:28:41.140 My dad moved to L.A.

01:28:42.600 After a couple of years, my dad said, let's try again.

01:28:44.600 He must have been really convincing because my mom moved to L.A.

01:28:47.160 They got married a second time.

01:28:48.880 They got divorced a second time.

01:28:50.560 But they were so hot for each other, they couldn't keep their hands off each other.

01:28:55.280 And I was conceived in a hot pillow joint on Sepulveda Boulevard in L.A.

01:29:01.340 Yeah.

01:29:01.920 Right.

01:29:02.380 Yeah.

01:29:02.600 I would – we would drive high to – my mom would say, that's the place.

01:29:05.200 Like, oh, jeez, thanks, mom.

01:29:06.400 That's embarrassing.

01:29:07.320 Yeah.

01:29:07.360 You're all in room 212.

01:29:08.920 Exactly.

01:29:09.500 Exactly.

01:29:10.060 There was a magic fingers attachment on the bed, as I remember, she would say.

01:29:13.820 And so, you know, I grew up a child of divorce, but my parents never divorced while I – they were already divorced.

01:29:22.700 That's hilarious.

01:29:23.220 So there was no divorce trauma.

01:29:25.400 Yeah.

01:29:25.980 Right?

01:29:26.340 That's just the way things always were.

01:29:28.200 And my dad was around.

01:29:29.320 I lived with my mom, but I saw my dad every weekend and every Wednesday night from dinner from where I could remember

01:29:35.280 till, like, the day I went away to go to college.

01:29:38.100 And so it was a weird way to grow up, but it was a great way to grow up because I had great parents and they gave me a lot of attention.

01:29:45.280 But an example of something, my dad was a psychiatrist, an old-fashioned talking cure psychoanalyst.

01:29:53.580 Lie on the couch.

01:29:54.520 Tell me about your dreams.

01:29:55.680 Tell me what you're thinking.

01:29:57.020 Kind of shrink.

01:29:58.300 Right?

01:29:58.800 And so, you know, Wednesday night dinner with my dad, what would we do?

01:30:02.600 We'd talk about his patients.

01:30:03.740 Now, of course, like, he wouldn't say their names or any – he'd keep it anonymous.

01:30:07.460 He was ethical.

01:30:08.260 Yeah, he was a hippo hero.

01:30:09.280 But, you know, I would say, hey, dad, like, what's up with your narcissist?

01:30:12.280 Oh, well, yeah, you know, he's got – he had this dream.

01:30:15.020 I think it's really important because – so, you know, it was really fun.

01:30:18.360 And as I was growing up, it became clear to me I didn't have the personality to be a psychiatrist.

01:30:25.740 I'm not empathetic enough for that.

01:30:29.500 And I don't have the tolerance to listen to people's problems enough for that.

01:30:32.880 I'm glad there are people who do.

01:30:34.560 Yeah, yeah, there's good –

01:30:35.520 Good therapists are a wonderful thing.

01:30:37.740 I'm not cut out for that.

01:30:39.620 My dad was really good.

01:30:41.540 But I thought, you know, I want to understand the biology of this.

01:30:46.020 And that's why really fundamentally that I became a brain scientist.

01:30:50.220 It's because my dad was a therapist and I wanted to get at it from a different angle.

01:30:57.180 Yeah.

01:30:57.580 I had a question about evolution, if we can go into that a little.

01:31:02.040 Yeah, sure.

01:31:02.620 Okay.

01:31:03.360 Does evolution have like a set speed?

01:31:08.860 Wow, that is a really good question.

01:31:11.080 It turns out that's something that evolutionary biologists argue about.

01:31:16.640 So some people think fundamentally that evolution does have a set speed and it kind of goes on and it's always, always really slow.

01:31:27.440 But now there's more and more evidence for something that the scientists call punctuated equilibrium.

01:31:34.960 And what that just means is times where there's really, really big change that occurs really, really quickly.

01:31:44.240 I mean, one example I would give is reading, right?

01:31:48.040 Humans have been around for 200,000 years ago starting in Africa.

01:31:53.820 Yeah.

01:31:54.040 But it's only been in the last few thousand years, a blink of evolutionary time that we've had written language, right?

01:32:04.240 So when we think about things like people who struggle with dyslexia, right?

01:32:09.060 Reading is not something that our brain is deeply evolved to do, right?

01:32:14.180 We've only been doing it for a few generations in evolutionary time.

01:32:18.060 So it's not that problem that in some folks it screws up, you know?

01:32:22.700 Yeah, it's kind of weird because we're making fun of the dyslexic kid.

01:32:24.960 It's like that makes the most sense.

01:32:26.620 That's right.

01:32:27.060 This is an absolutely new thing.

01:32:29.020 This is just like – this is the latest trend in humanity when you look in evolutionary time is reading.

01:32:36.900 Interesting.

01:32:37.700 Yeah.

01:32:38.180 So, yeah, sometimes evolution is slow and steady and sometimes it is – it can change really quickly.

01:32:47.040 One thing that changed really quickly, it's a classic thing that people talk about in evolution, is when cows got domesticated and people started eating a lot of dairy, suddenly you started to have a situation where the gene to digest the sugar lactase, which you find in milk, which is normally present in kids but turned off in adults, it tends to persist into adults.

01:33:12.700 And this only happened relatively recently, about 10,000 years ago.

01:33:19.940 When we started drinking milk.

01:33:20.480 When we started drinking milk.

01:33:22.360 Interestingly, it happened separately several different times in different human groups.

01:33:28.460 It happened once in East Africa and once in Turkey and once in Iraq, maybe even more times than that.

01:33:35.660 But this is convergent evolution, things that happened in different places to achieve the same result but something that happened pretty quickly and pretty recently in evolutionary time.

01:33:48.000 Do you think that that could have been the cause of a ton – that that could have led to a lot of different medical problems that humans face or –

01:33:57.280 Well, there are some people who think that dairy is really problematic in terms of disease.

01:34:04.460 I'm not convinced by that, honestly.

01:34:06.800 I think it bears a lot more research but in my own life, I eat dairy just fine.

01:34:17.940 I love cheese.

01:34:18.700 I love pizza.

01:34:20.220 Yeah, I'll have a little bit of cheese.

01:34:21.280 I'll have a little.

01:34:21.880 And I don't think there's any reason to think that it's poison for you.

01:34:27.180 Yeah.

01:34:27.540 Yeah.

01:34:27.820 It doesn't feel like it.

01:34:29.180 Yeah.

01:34:29.340 Like even if I even just think about it a little – it's like if somebody said that, I'd be like, I don't know, dude.

01:34:35.480 You know, here's the thing right now.

01:34:38.280 Here's my theory about foods and sort of the mania for people including or not including certain foods right now.

01:34:47.740 People are feeling so messed with right now.

01:34:52.020 People feel so disempowered.

01:34:54.320 They feel like they're messed with by the government.

01:34:56.520 They feel like they're messed with by corporations, by they're messed with like their boss, like they have so little in their lives they can control.

01:35:03.500 But what can I control?

01:35:04.400 I can still damn control what I eat.

01:35:07.340 Right?

01:35:07.900 You know?

01:35:08.400 So people focus on that because, you know, they're feeling so fucked around with in so many other ways.

01:35:15.640 Yeah.

01:35:16.100 I'll have the cheese.

01:35:17.180 And I understand that.

01:35:17.740 And so it's like, yeah, I'm going to eat this.

01:35:19.800 No, I'm not going to eat this.

01:35:21.100 Yeah.

01:35:21.600 And, you know, it gives –

01:35:22.460 It's like let me do something.

01:35:23.940 Right.

01:35:24.280 And it gives rise to a whole lot of nuttiness.

01:35:26.500 Like, yeah, oh, man, I'm only going to eat meat and nothing else.

01:35:29.360 Well, that's really not a very good idea.

01:35:31.480 Oh, no, I got to absolutely avoid dairy because it's going to kill me.

01:35:35.800 No, it won't kill you.

01:35:37.060 It's OK.

01:35:37.880 Yeah.

01:35:38.260 Yeah.

01:35:40.020 Yeah, I feel that.

01:35:40.600 But I understand where it's coming from.

01:35:42.540 It's like, you know, there aren't that many things left where you really feel like you control it.

01:35:47.340 Yeah.

01:35:48.440 Do you think that humans can – can we stop evolution from happening?

01:35:55.020 No.

01:35:55.840 Evolution is going to – that train is going to roll on no matter what we do.

01:36:00.260 It's just, you know, some people like to think, oh, evolution is something that happened a long time ago.

01:36:04.040 And now, like, that doesn't happen anymore.

01:36:05.660 They think technology insulates it from us.

01:36:08.480 Like, we don't have to worry about being cold right now because, like, I got a heater in my house.

01:36:12.020 I got AC.

01:36:12.860 I don't – you know, my food comes to me, you know, from DoorDash.

01:36:16.740 And so, I don't have to, like, hunt the bear to eat.

01:36:21.640 And, yeah, those things are true.

01:36:23.740 But, you know, evolution never stopped happening.

01:36:26.960 Maybe right now the thing that we're evolutionarily selecting for is being able to deal with certain pollutants in our atmosphere.

01:36:39.740 Right?

01:36:40.340 Oh, right.

01:36:41.020 We don't know what evolution is doing right now with us.

01:36:43.280 That's right.

01:36:44.060 You know, we – evolution never stops.

01:36:46.600 It doesn't stop for humans.

01:36:47.580 It doesn't stop for any other –

01:36:48.900 We're all of its mice.

01:36:50.560 We're all guinea pigs in this plan.

01:36:55.360 But the forces that are molding us right now are different.

01:37:00.820 The planet's warming.

01:37:02.480 That's molding us.

01:37:03.680 We are subject to different environmental pollutants.

01:37:06.160 That's molding us.

01:37:07.060 You know, maybe right now it's going to turn out that we're being selected for people who can tolerate microplastics in their body.

01:37:15.520 Right?

01:37:15.940 Because that is something in our environment that didn't used to be there.

01:37:19.660 That wasn't an evolutionary pressure that mattered 100 years ago, but it matters right now.

01:37:25.600 So, yeah, evolution is still happening.

01:37:27.680 Yeah.

01:37:27.900 We're all – yeah, it's constantly like the experiment is ongoing.

01:37:30.960 It is.

01:37:31.560 Oh, that's pretty fascinating when you think about it like that.

01:37:33.780 When you – you mentioned microplastics.

01:37:35.940 Yeah, that's like a fear right now.

01:37:37.320 Like I've honestly started to buy like cotton underpants and stuff like that because I'm just like – you start to wonder, well, how are things getting into our system, right?

01:37:49.040 Do you have a lot of fear?

01:37:50.200 Is that like a fear in the scientific community?

01:37:52.900 Well, I don't think you have to worry about your underpants.

01:37:54.900 I mean unless you're eating them for lunch, I think you're fine.

01:37:58.180 I've got to worry about things you're ingesting or inhaling, things that have an obvious way of getting in.

01:38:03.400 Yeah.

01:38:03.960 Right?

01:38:04.520 You know.

01:38:05.420 So, yeah, yeah.

01:38:07.280 Worry about microplastics in your water, in your food that you inhale, that are in your cookware that might get – those are valid things to be concerned about.

01:38:20.320 You know, if there are – you know, if there's a plastic band in your underpants, there probably isn't really a way that that plastic is getting in your body.

01:38:28.360 Got it.

01:38:28.800 Yeah.

01:38:29.740 We've been evolving as humans, right?

01:38:33.100 Absolutely.

01:38:33.800 If we develop too much technology, are we still humans at a certain point or do we have to like reclassify ourselves or something?

01:38:40.720 Does that make any sense?

01:38:41.640 Well, you know, maybe where you're going at is like if we all have Elon's brain implant.

01:38:46.600 Yeah.

01:38:47.200 Right?

01:38:47.480 You know, so Elon's got this company and other people have these companies where they're trying to, you know, build something that would actually be implanted in your brain.

01:38:56.180 And, you know, maybe you could have a device that would enhance your perception or your cognition like you could see in the infrared.

01:39:04.480 You could remember everything that's on the internet.

01:39:08.700 Things of – you know, this kind of science fiction stuff that you could imagine in the future.

01:39:12.120 You know, and if that were to come to pass, well, then I think, yeah, fundamentally you would have to think are we still Homo sapiens or are we, you know, Homo sapiens muskensis?

01:39:22.800 You know, I don't know.

01:39:24.300 Oh, yeah, muskensis.

01:39:25.560 I see.

01:39:25.900 Like that's the evolution of it, right?

01:39:27.880 Because they would probably name the evolution after whoever ever owned it, you know?

01:39:31.140 Well, you know, and then, you know, I – right.

01:39:35.120 I'm deeply skeptical of everything corporate, right?

01:39:39.200 Yeah.

01:39:39.740 You know, I get an implant in my brain.

01:39:41.300 What am I going to get?

01:39:42.260 I'm going to get ads.

01:39:43.300 Yeah.

01:39:44.320 Yeah.

01:39:44.720 Well, like, you know, you ever read the science fiction writer named Philip K. Dick?

01:39:49.220 You know, he was the guy who wrote the stories that were the basis for films like Blade Runner and, you know, a lot of our other famous science fiction films.

01:39:57.900 He was a writer who was active in the 60s and the 70s.

01:40:00.820 Man in the High Castle, for example.

01:40:04.220 D'Android's Dream of Electric Sheep became Blade Runner.

01:40:08.940 So he'd be a cool person to talk to.

01:40:10.540 Minority Report, right?

01:40:12.000 That became – that film came from Philip K. Dick.

01:40:15.220 Wow.

01:40:15.700 Right?

01:40:16.020 Lots of famous science fiction stories came from his books, things that got made into shows or films.

01:40:25.280 And, you know, he – yeah, he had – in Blade Runner, you know, you're walking down the street and things are being beamed into your retina.

01:40:33.920 Yeah.

01:40:34.220 You know, like the government wants you to go off-world and see another planet or they want you to buy this thing or, you know, this company wants you to do that.

01:40:44.320 And so, yeah, people have been imagining this for a long time.

01:40:47.180 The science fiction writers are always ahead of the curve.

01:40:49.860 Yeah.

01:40:49.900 I remember when I was a kid and I was a really nerdy kid and I read a lot of science fiction, there were stories about this thing that hadn't happened yet.

01:40:59.560 It was called a computer virus.

01:41:01.940 And everyone was going, oh, could that ever really happen?

01:41:03.780 Well, could that be a thing?

01:41:04.340 Yeah.

01:41:04.600 Some code that could hop from computer to computer and infect it and mess with it and make it do things.

01:41:10.340 And people were like, oh, could this ever really happen?

01:41:12.540 Oh, maybe that's just science fiction.

01:41:13.900 And then, you know, it happened big time, right?

01:41:16.800 Yeah.

01:41:16.860 And that's our world right now.

01:41:19.300 So, you know, this is one of the many examples where science fiction writers were ahead of the curve in imagining the future.

01:41:26.600 Yeah.

01:41:27.260 I mean, we're living in our own future.

01:41:29.000 That's the crazy part sometimes, you know?

01:41:30.960 Like the thing we imagined when we were kids, like we're living in it, you know?

01:41:34.540 Sometimes it happens so gradually you just don't even notice little parts of it.

01:41:38.480 Yeah.

01:41:38.760 And it's not all bleak.

01:41:40.520 Let me put it that way, right?

01:41:41.980 You know, it's not all bleak, right?

01:41:44.600 You know, and, you know, being a biomedical researcher, I think about this a lot.

01:41:51.520 You know, cancer is the area where perhaps it's been the most dramatic, right?

01:41:56.200 There's a kind of leukemia called ALL, acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

01:42:00.740 It used to be if your kid had acute lymphoblastic leukemia, 95% they were going to die.

01:42:06.380 Forget it.

01:42:07.120 You know, no hope.

01:42:08.580 Now it's the other way around.

01:42:10.260 95% of kids with ALL are going to live and thrive.

01:42:16.420 And this is happening more and more.

01:42:18.380 You know, we're at the precipice of fundamental new cures.

01:42:25.140 So there's a very bad kind of cancer called multiple myeloma.

01:42:29.360 It's a blood cancer, but it causes your bones to get brittle.

01:42:32.800 Not only is the prognosis really bad, but it's a really, really bad, painful way to die.

01:42:40.320 There are indications right now there's an engineered T-cell therapy where they take cells from your blood, take them out of your body, genetically modify them and put them back in.

01:42:51.480 People are thinking it might even be a cure for multiple myeloma.

01:42:55.620 Wow.

01:42:55.780 It's amazing.

01:42:56.580 I mean, right now it costs a million dollars and only a few people can get it, but, you know, there's going to be a point where that's the standard of care for people all around the world.

01:43:05.180 So, you know, let's not all be doom and gloom entirely about technological change.

01:43:11.240 It's a great point.

01:43:11.960 A lot of it is going to be really good, but, you know, it depends upon biomedical research.

01:43:21.020 Yeah, I was just about to ask you about that.

01:43:22.600 Yeah, I know we had mentioned before we even started talking that the government is cutting or potentially cutting funding for biomedical research.

01:43:31.060 How does – what does that look like realistically and then how does that – how could that affect our everyday lives?

01:43:37.840 Yeah, well, it turns out that it is a potential absolute disaster for biomedical research.

01:43:43.620 So, in the president's budget for the next year, 40 percent cut to the National Institutes of Health, about the same to the National Science Foundation.

01:43:55.560 This would devastate biomedical research.

01:43:59.060 It would basically – it would basically, you know, turn off the tap.

01:44:05.440 So many promising things would be lost.

01:44:08.260 There is so much right now that's changing in terms of new therapies for cancer, for neurological illness, new devices, new therapies.

01:44:23.680 You know, just think about things that you know about in your own life like these weight control and diabetes drugs, these GLP-1s, right?

01:44:33.680 They've only been around for a couple of years, right?

01:44:35.820 And those are – you're talking about like Ozempic and West Wego or whatever?

01:44:39.680 Yes, Wegovy, Ozempic, Zepbound, these drugs.

01:44:43.040 Like they are changing – they are saving lives, right?

01:44:45.940 You know, it's not just like, oh, I want to look better, right?

01:44:48.900 It's helping people with diabetes.

01:44:51.160 It's helping liver disease, heart disease.

01:44:54.020 It's remarkable how useful they are.

01:44:57.860 And you might say, well, all right, but didn't this just come about from drug companies?

01:45:01.520 Didn't drug companies do that?

01:45:02.740 Well, no, the fundamental – the basic research that gave the drug companies the idea, it came from funding from the federal government.

01:45:11.340 The federal government does the basic research.

01:45:14.360 And sometimes like these are the sort of things that people like to make fun of and they think our money is being wasted.

01:45:20.260 So you ever heard of a lizard called a Gila monster?

01:45:23.080 Yeah.

01:45:23.420 Right?

01:45:23.780 So they're out in the desert in Arizona and places like that and they've got venom.

01:45:27.340 And in their venom, there's something that looks like this hormone called GLP-1.

01:45:34.160 GLP-1 is the hormone that's secreted by your small intestine that goes to your brain and suppresses your appetite.

01:45:41.040 And that's the basis.

01:45:42.500 That's what these drugs like Ozempic mimic.

01:45:45.720 They're like GLP-1 with some – natural GLP-1 with some modifications.

01:45:49.720 Now, the problem, you might say, well, people knew about GLP-1.

01:45:53.220 Why can't you just take GLP-1 and inject it into your body?

01:45:58.260 And the reason is it's broken down in your bloodstream like in a minute or two.

01:46:02.100 It doesn't linger long enough.

01:46:03.360 It turns out that there are modifications in the Gila monster venom GLP-1-like molecule that make it linger and last.

01:46:12.040 And that was the innovation that allowed these drug companies to make these long-lasting compounds that allow you to suppress appetite and lose weight.

01:46:22.520 And they also seem to have anti-inflammatory properties.

01:46:25.940 So the receptors for the GLP-1, what it binds to to make it work is not just in your brain to suppress your appetite.

01:46:31.880 Those receptors are in your heart.

01:46:34.020 They're in your liver.

01:46:34.940 They're in your kidneys.

01:46:35.900 They're in all kinds of organs.

01:46:38.280 They're in your guts.

01:46:39.060 And they seem to have additional beneficial properties beyond just losing weight.

01:46:46.240 But this kind of innovation would never happen if it weren't for the United States government funding fundamental biomedical research,

01:46:57.420 the kind of thing that somebody in the Senate might get up and say,

01:47:01.260 these eggheads are wasting our money on studying Gila monster venom.

01:47:06.900 What a waste of your taxpayer dollars.

01:47:08.720 This is such bullshit.

01:47:10.500 But really, where did it get us?

01:47:13.440 It got us to a fundamental medical breakthrough that helps everybody.

01:47:17.720 Yeah.

01:47:18.160 What are some of the other positive effects of that?

01:47:20.600 That's a great point, man, because you would just hear, yeah, they were studying like drool from a baby walrus or whatever.

01:47:28.340 But where did it get us, right?

01:47:30.200 So, yeah, bring up what are the other positive effects of GLP-1?

01:47:34.420 I never really looked at this.

01:47:35.640 I hear about it all the time.

01:47:37.000 Well, so like one interesting claim that's being made right now is that these drugs just help suppress appetite, also help other compulsive behaviors, whether it's drug addiction, compulsive shopping, gambling.

01:47:54.340 The GLP-1 receptor agonists, like semiglutide, show promise in reducing alcohol and opioid use disorders by targeting reward pathways in the brain and reducing cravings.

01:48:06.200 They may also help by calming the stress response and reducing drug-seeking behaviors.

01:48:10.700 However, more research is needed to fully understand their effectiveness and safety in addiction treatment.

01:48:19.240 Are there side effects of GLP-1?

01:48:21.340 Yeah, there are.

01:48:23.220 Sometimes people get constipated on them.

01:48:27.180 Sometimes people feel nauseated.

01:48:29.480 Shit, I get constipated off a bad waffle, you know, so.

01:48:32.700 No, look, dude, I'm willing to risk it.

01:48:34.720 And some people feel tired.

01:48:37.200 Oh, yeah.

01:48:37.640 So there are some side effects.

01:48:39.100 And sometimes they can be serious enough that, you know, people will want to quit the drug because they can't handle the side effects.

01:48:45.040 But mostly the side effects are not bad.

01:48:48.240 Yeah, doesn't look like it.

01:48:49.480 And there are even some hints.

01:48:52.960 It's early days.

01:48:54.200 You know, I wouldn't bet my money on this.

01:48:55.960 But there are some hints that it may actually be beneficial in terms of likelihood of developing Alzheimer's disease.

01:49:02.100 Wow.

01:49:02.740 Yeah.

01:49:02.980 And there are some potential benefits for Parkinson's disease as well.

01:49:08.280 So, you know.

01:49:09.460 Do you, go on.

01:49:10.840 You know, right now, every drug company in the world is making another drug for this.

01:49:15.100 There's an absolute gold rush for them.

01:49:16.960 So right now, you know, Lilly's got one drug.

01:49:19.900 Novo Nordisk drug company has got another drug.

01:49:23.820 Oh, yeah.

01:49:24.100 But there are many, many, many of them in the pipeline and clinical trials.

01:49:28.040 Wow.

01:49:28.300 And so, you know, these, we'll know more about their positive effects on things like kidney and liver disease, but we'll also know more about their effects on behavior, on compulsive behaviors like shopping, gambling, drug addiction.

01:49:46.940 You know, which, you know, anything we can do to help people get clean, you know, is a godsend.

01:49:53.520 Oh, for sure, man.

01:49:54.820 Yeah.

01:49:55.100 Look, I've been down that road myself.

01:49:56.680 I do want to look at what are Trump's proposed budget cuts on that?

01:50:00.320 Forty percent.

01:50:03.120 Documents released late last week are providing new details about the breadth and depth of the spending cuts the White House is asking Congress to make to public health and biomedical research programs in the 2020 fiscal year that begins on October 1st.

01:50:13.940 Among other things, the plans call for deeper spending and staff cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, and were outlined in a less detailed skinny budget.

01:50:23.980 Yeah.

01:50:24.540 And then scroll down to the other places you noticed.

01:50:27.480 Okay.

01:50:27.880 The request largely confirms cuts outlined in documents that leaked last month.

01:50:31.520 It proposes to cut NIH's discretionary budget by about 40 percent or 18 billion to 27.5 billion and consolidate NIH's 27 institutes and centers into just eight.

01:50:42.920 The reorganization would preserve National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a couple of other places, but eliminate institutes studying minority health, alternative medicine, nursing, and global health.

01:50:55.320 The remaining institutes would be folded into four new ones.

01:50:59.560 Biomedical research proponents sharply criticize the proposed cuts.

01:51:03.060 If the proposal is enacted, Americans today and tomorrow will be sicker, poor, and die younger.

01:51:07.080 Why do they want to do this, I wonder?

01:51:11.740 Well, you know, I mean, some of it has to do with, you know, they want to save money.

01:51:20.040 I don't think this is a place to save money.

01:51:22.140 Something that has to do with an actual hatred for academic scientists and people in the public health world.

01:51:33.360 You know, I think it's become a partisan issue in a way it shouldn't be, right?

01:51:37.800 Everybody gets sick and everybody benefits from new therapies.

01:51:42.500 For years and years and years, it didn't matter what side of the aisle you're on.

01:51:46.320 Republicans supported biomedical research.

01:51:48.320 Democrats supported biomedical research.

01:51:50.380 It was something that people agree on.

01:51:52.360 Now, just in these last couple, in this last time, it's starting to, really since COVID, it started to get really politicized.

01:52:01.320 And, you know, the Trump administration will tell you, oh, this is waste, fraud, and abuse, or this all has to do with, like, DEI efforts, and that's the only stuff we're cutting.

01:52:09.780 But, like, it's nonsense.

01:52:11.500 Forty percent, it's a fucking hatchet, right?

01:52:14.100 You know, it's not just, oh, we got rid of a few bad studies that were misguided or some waste or fraud that we found over here.

01:52:23.700 It's like we are going to cut it down to the bone.

01:52:27.460 And when that happens, the therapies to help everyone's families for, you know, for cancer, for heart disease, for mental health, for everything that you're hoping for, new therapies and cures, all that stuff's coming to a screeching halt.

01:52:47.100 And the United States has been the world leader on this.

01:52:50.200 This is a place where America absolutely kicks ass.

01:52:54.260 We are the acknowledged world leader in biomedical research.

01:53:00.160 And to give it up would be the stupidest fucking thing we could possibly do.

01:53:04.620 How much of the funding is negatively influenced by big pharmacy stuff?

01:53:12.140 I'm just wondering, because otherwise I don't understand this doesn't make that much sense.

01:53:15.760 Just to be clear, this funding doesn't go to drug companies, right?

01:53:19.560 This funding goes to research institutes, it goes to universities, and it goes to the NIH itself in Bethesda, Maryland, where some of the research is done.

01:53:30.940 This funding by and large, this isn't a way that the government is subsidizing Pfizer or Lilly or any of these giant corporations.

01:53:40.460 These corporations are really good at taking an idea and turning it into a product, right?

01:53:46.300 Okay, they're not good at the basic research that gives the idea to do it in the first place.

01:53:54.700 Is there anything in there that tells?

01:53:57.160 Pentagon, that's defense stuff, that's horrible.

01:54:00.400 Department of Homeland Security, I feel like all these people are building us up to be in some type of a war I don't even know.

01:54:07.220 It's very scary days.

01:54:09.180 Oh, the budget proposal aims to cut funding for research related to radical gender ideology and diverse racialism.

01:54:15.180 That sounds so vague, though.

01:54:17.740 Well, you know, the truth is that, yeah, so there have been some grants that do involve stuff like that.

01:54:26.980 But it's a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction, right?

01:54:30.260 Don't believe that 40% of the NIH has to do with studying things like trans folks.

01:54:36.780 I mean, I think it's perfectly legitimate to study trans folks myself.

01:54:39.820 Oh, yeah, I'm curious about them.

01:54:41.080 Most people are curious.

01:54:42.180 Even if you think that's bad, that's like a tiny, tiny fraction of the NIH.

01:54:47.540 It's not – there's not 40% of that to be cut.

01:54:50.240 I wish we could talk to someone who was involved with – I don't know if it's DOGE or what the exact group is that's organizing a lot of these proposed cuts.

01:54:58.140 Well, you've had RFK Jr. on here.

01:55:00.100 Yeah.

01:55:00.620 Yeah.

01:55:01.120 So, you know, he's –

01:55:01.920 Maybe if we get to have him back on and we get to talk to him about it.

01:55:04.080 You know, he's the one who's involved in this and the new head of the NIH and the new head of the CDC.

01:55:13.160 That's a great point.

01:55:13.980 These are all folks that are fundamental to this.

01:55:17.940 Yeah.

01:55:18.100 What did that article say about RFK I saw, the one part?

01:55:21.020 Let me see.

01:55:22.620 The budget request reflects priorities advanced by the Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., including a focus on food additives and chronic diseases at the expense of infectious disease studies.

01:55:33.460 And a real-world data platform to allow scientists to study the causes of autism.

01:55:39.360 Oh, that's awesome.

01:55:40.360 It also proposes using artificial intelligence and big data analysis to research the exposome, the collection of environmental factors that can influence human health.

01:55:49.240 So I wonder if they're just trying to redirect it to things that he cares more about.

01:55:53.220 Well, so I think the thing to realize is, first of all, it's a 40% cut.

01:55:57.580 So it's not like you're taking the same pot of money and then just reshuffling around to different priorities.

01:56:02.140 First of all, you start with a 40% cut.

01:56:04.500 And then the 60% that's left, you're going to take away from stuff like vaccines and put it into bullshit clothes, cold plunge therapy and other stuff that are his pet projects.

01:56:16.640 I mean, let me just be clear.

01:56:19.440 There are some things where I really agree with RFK Jr.

01:56:22.560 He is absolutely right that we should be taking a closer look at food additives.

01:56:27.440 He is absolutely right that ultra-processed foods are a big problem.

01:56:32.140 In health.

01:56:32.720 And he is absolutely right that environmental pollutants are a big problem in health and there should be a lot more attention paid to that.

01:56:43.380 Where I get off the bus has to do with cutting all these other areas that are so very, very promising and also with some of the other very unproven things that he has advocated for.

01:57:02.580 So, for example, the drug ivermectin, he's a big fan of it for COVID and other things.

01:57:08.640 It's nonsense.

01:57:09.640 It doesn't work.

01:57:10.560 It's not true.

01:57:11.540 It's fraudulent.

01:57:12.560 Don't believe it.

01:57:13.580 I've had friends that have taken it.

01:57:14.620 They've had success with it.

01:57:15.820 Yeah.

01:57:16.200 Well, you know, that's the reason we don't make biomedical policy based on anecdotes that something that happened to our buddy, right?

01:57:23.100 We do studies for it, right, you know?

01:57:26.480 And so, you know, like I go and I take some vitamin C and I feel better for my cold.

01:57:31.540 Well, maybe I was going to get better anyway.

01:57:33.280 We don't know.

01:57:34.080 Yeah.

01:57:34.340 Right?

01:57:34.560 Maybe the vitamin C did something.

01:57:36.060 Well, what's the way to know that?

01:57:37.660 You have to do a real controlled study the way, the proper way.

01:57:42.160 Assuming that there aren't budget cuts or even assuming that there are, right?

01:57:46.480 What do you feel like the next 10 years of biomedical research looks like?

01:57:50.560 Well, I think it's going to involve a lot of really, there are a lot of really exciting things that we're on the precipice of.

01:58:01.080 One of them is really finally realizing the promise of individualized medicine.

01:58:07.480 In other words, you go in, you give a little blood or they scrape the cells from your cheek.

01:58:13.980 They read a lot of your genetic situation and they know how to give therapies that are precisely designed for you for the very best outcome and the fewest side effects.

01:58:25.540 This is the sort of thing that's already happening in cancer, right?

01:58:28.220 Like it used to be like you went and you'd say, oh, you got lung cancer.

01:58:32.300 All right.

01:58:32.480 Well, we're going to treat you generically for lung cancer with a thing that works the best for the most amount of people.

01:58:37.380 But it turns out that like depending on the flavor of what's in your tumor, actually for some people it might be much better to get this one than some people it might be better to get that one, right?

01:58:47.500 And this is something where AI is actually and machine learning are extremely valuable.

01:58:53.360 Another thing that's extraordinarily exciting is the use of gene editing technology, so-called CRISPR.

01:59:03.220 You may have heard that term.

01:59:04.500 CRISPR is a technology for changing your DNA.

01:59:10.120 So what this is like if you have kids that are born with these rare genetic diseases where like there's a disease where you can't do your metabolism right and you build up ammonia in your body and these kids die within a few years, right?

01:59:30.340 So right now there is great promise for using CRISPR to be able to modify their DNA to correct the genetic deficit and allow them to live normally.

01:59:46.800 This is just starting right now.

01:59:49.140 It's the very dawn of the age of CRISPR therapy.

01:59:53.900 But the next 10, 20 years are going to see this sort of thing explode.

01:59:58.660 Is AI helping us?

02:00:00.960 AI is helping us massively because there are certain sort of things where you want to – what you want to know is like what happens when you put a thousand different variables that you measure from your blood test, from testing your DNA in to predict what the best therapy is for you or how you are likely.

02:00:28.660 To respond to a different drug or antibody or something like that.

02:00:33.120 Right.

02:00:33.540 And AI is extraordinarily good.

02:00:36.240 There is a fellow named Eric Topol at the Scripps Institute just wrote a book called Super Agers that is really excellent.

02:00:45.120 And he spends a long time talking about the promise of AI and big data in the next era of medicine.

02:00:55.420 He would be a wonderful person for you to have on the podcast.

02:00:59.420 Thank you, David.

02:00:59.980 Yeah, I'm going to check that out.

02:01:00.860 Super Agers.

02:01:01.880 Yeah.

02:01:01.980 Do you think – I wonder if one of the reasons why they could be – or one of the reasons why they even could be proposing budget cuts if they think that AI could – would it save money, you think, for research?

02:01:13.080 No.

02:01:13.440 AI is a good – in other words, bringing AI to medicine is a good idea.

02:01:17.420 I mean it's not always a good idea, but there are many areas where it is genuine.

02:01:24.020 It's not like doing things with AI is going to allow you to achieve economies of scale or cut this or do things in fundamentally different ways so much as – it's another tool in the armamentarium.

02:01:40.320 There's nothing wrong with bringing AI to biomedical research.

02:01:44.060 What's wrong is that 40 percent cut.

02:01:46.760 And it's not just that.

02:01:48.260 They're doing dirty tricks, right?

02:01:50.640 Congress allocates money for biomedical research and then right now the administration is just slow walking actually allocating it.

02:01:57.860 So the rate at which the money is actually getting to the scientists to support the research is only about half the level that it was the previous year.

02:02:09.660 And this is illegal and unconstitutional.

02:02:13.360 The constitution says the power of the purse resides with Congress.

02:02:17.820 And the executive branch is saying, well, no, we're not really doing anything.

02:02:22.600 But if you want to throw sand in the gears, if you want to slow things down and screw things up, it's so – there's a million ways to do it.

02:02:31.100 Oh, yeah.

02:02:31.620 Well, I mean the same thing happened.

02:02:32.920 We had like a border patrol guy on and he said that they would arrest the same guys over and over again.

02:02:37.280 And the executive – the judicial branch, they would never process any of them.

02:02:41.100 So it was like these parties just keep kind of finding ways.

02:02:44.920 There's always a way for them to choose to make things tougher on the regular person I feel like, you know?

02:02:52.600 Well, yeah.

02:02:53.340 There are ways to get around, to claim you're not doing something but really do it.

02:02:56.620 Claim you're not cutting biomedical research.

02:02:58.740 Point at the next guy.

02:02:59.520 But, you know, actually it just will slow down getting the money out there and fundamentally you're cutting biomedical research.

02:03:05.160 Or in this case, you know, the Trump administration is actually saying, yeah, we want to cut 40 percent and that's a good idea.

02:03:11.020 And then what it's really going to be is more than 40 percent because it's going to be 60 percent and then they're going to throw the sand in the gears of the 60 and it will be even less than that.

02:03:18.380 Yeah.

02:03:19.020 Yeah.

02:03:19.200 I'd love to get to talk with Bobby Kennedy again and see – to learn more about that, you know?

02:03:26.260 Yeah.

02:03:26.560 So hopefully I'll get that opportunity.

02:03:27.820 And if I do, I'll make sure to bring that up.

02:03:29.220 Please do.

02:03:29.800 Yeah.

02:03:30.060 I appreciate that.

02:03:31.300 Yeah.

02:03:31.540 I think one thing that makes us America also is that we are always trying to be at the forefront, that we are trying to research, trying to figure out the best way, right?

02:03:40.680 And trying to figure out new ways, right?

02:03:42.320 I think that's one thing that's always made us America.

02:03:46.700 What – oh, your cancer diagnosis.

02:03:48.680 Can I get an update on it?

02:03:49.740 Is that okay to ask?

02:03:50.600 Yeah, that's totally okay to ask.

02:03:51.880 Thanks for asking, actually.

02:03:53.880 So yeah, four years ago, I had a giant tumor removed from my heart.

02:04:00.360 It was a kind of cancer called synovial sarcoma.

02:04:03.160 The tumor was about the size of a Coke can.

02:04:05.940 I know.

02:04:06.700 It was a crazy, awful surgery.

02:04:08.700 And the tumor had grown into the wall of my heart.

02:04:11.060 So in the end, they couldn't take it all away.

02:04:13.200 They could take away most of it, but the part that was in the wall of my heart, if they took that, I'd have a hole.

02:04:17.820 And my heart would be broken, and I would have died right there on the table.

02:04:21.160 So I got out of that.

02:04:22.380 They biopsied it.

02:04:23.280 They said, yeah, it's this malignancy.

02:04:25.300 And the oncologist said, you got six to 18 months to live.

02:04:30.780 Well, that was over four years ago.

02:04:33.560 And so I'm feeling very fortunate to still be here.

02:04:37.940 I didn't expect to still be here.

02:04:40.260 The amazing thing is during all this time, the only thing that's made me feel bad has been the therapy.

02:04:46.080 In other words, recovering from the surgery made me feel bad.

02:04:48.620 The chemo, the radiation made me feel bad.

02:04:50.760 But I've never actually had any symptoms from the tumor itself.

02:04:56.380 I got – so now the tumor is like the size of a walnut, and it's in the wall of my heart.

02:05:00.840 And it means my heart muscle can't work quite as well as efficiently.

02:05:05.620 So like I can't do really high-intensity exercise.

02:05:09.100 Like I can't really run full out anymore.

02:05:13.400 I used to like to downhill ski.

02:05:14.680 I don't downhill ski anymore.

02:05:16.180 Oh, bummer.

02:05:16.400 But, you know, pretty much everything else that I want to do, I can do.

02:05:20.240 You know, I can be completely active in my world.

02:05:24.760 And so, you know, so one of the things is that it's made me really interested in cancer.

02:05:36.360 Honestly, before I thought cancer was kind of a boring area of biology.

02:05:39.540 Oh, cells start to grow, and they keep growing.

02:05:41.500 You know, it's important for people's lives.

02:05:43.140 But, you know, intellectually, I don't really care about it.

02:05:45.180 Now, of course, I'm really interested in it.

02:05:47.240 And one of the things that is most interesting to me is that it's come full circle.

02:05:52.780 So I'm a brain researcher.

02:05:53.980 I got cancer.

02:05:55.320 It turns out what we're learning now is that most solid tumors in the body eventually become innervated.

02:06:03.280 In other words, nerves come from the brain and the spinal cord, and they come to the tumor,

02:06:07.580 and they wrap around, and they send messages.

02:06:09.160 And when tumors get innervated, it's almost always bad news.

02:06:14.940 When a tumor gets innervated, it means your prognosis is worse.

02:06:19.240 The chance of it spreading is more.

02:06:20.760 The chance of the tumor growing is more.

02:06:22.960 And the innervation happens so that the user will know they have the tumor?

02:06:26.820 So the person—

02:06:27.540 No, you're not.

02:06:28.120 This is all subconscious.

02:06:29.220 In other words, you don't feel it.

02:06:30.320 It's like, I can't go, oh, yeah, I feel the tumor in my heart right now.

02:06:32.960 Like, you know, I can't do that.

02:06:34.060 But why does the brain do that?

02:06:36.380 Well, we don't know.

02:06:37.340 We don't know.

02:06:38.180 But it happens.

02:06:40.120 But here's the interesting thing, right?

02:06:44.420 So people ask me, you know, why are you still alive after four years?

02:06:49.940 To what do you attribute it?

02:06:52.800 And I say, and when I say this, I am not being like woo-woo or metaphorical.

02:06:57.340 I'm saying I attribute it to the love of my wife, a wonderful wife.

02:07:01.340 She is the best.

02:07:02.840 And I say, my wife's love is keeping me alive.

02:07:07.260 And, like, that sounds like some very airy fairy kumbaya kind of thing to say.

02:07:14.220 But what's exciting to me is that, like, there may well be a biological basis to this.

02:07:21.340 When I receive my wife's love, my brain's reward circuitry, those dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area that we were talking about before,

02:07:31.620 they light up.

02:07:32.460 They fire.

02:07:33.460 We now know from studies in laboratory animals that when those neurons fire, it activates the immune system in a way that can fight cancer.

02:07:44.980 Love will keep us alive.

02:07:46.340 Love will keep us alive, right?

02:07:48.180 Love will not tear us apart, like Joy Division said.

02:07:50.920 Love will keep us alive.

02:07:52.200 And so, I think that there are potential biological ways in which these things that we think of acting on sort of the spiritual level,

02:08:06.840 love and faith and community, can affect your body and the progression of disease.

02:08:14.580 Because I think the way that happens isn't a mystical way.

02:08:19.020 Ultimately, it's a biological way.

02:08:20.700 And ultimately, we'll understand that.

02:08:22.660 And that's what my new book is going to be about.

02:08:25.180 My new book, which I'm writing right now, won't be out for quite a while,

02:08:29.040 is going to be called The Real Science of Mind-Body Medicine.

02:08:33.360 And it's going to be about exactly that.

02:08:35.600 Let's go, David.

02:08:36.940 Man, that's so fascinating because you're talking about like a cross between – well, we're talking about – throughout this, we've talked about love.

02:08:43.320 We started off with talking about love.

02:08:44.600 Yeah.

02:08:44.920 And we talked about faith and science and how they don't have to be just one or the other, right?

02:08:49.300 And then see a moment really where your wife's – your faith and your love that you have with your wife, something that's tangible, that's real.

02:08:59.820 Yeah.

02:08:59.980 And how that makes you feel scientifically affects the way your body feels and behaves.

02:09:10.340 That's right.

02:09:11.040 And, you know, we kind of know this already.

02:09:13.120 So you've probably heard of the placebo effect, right?

02:09:15.240 A sugar pill or a sham injection.

02:09:18.160 Placebo effect, the best thing it's for is chronic pain.

02:09:21.220 Placebo effect is a pretty strong effect for chronic pain.

02:09:25.220 But how does the placebo effect work?

02:09:27.680 Well, it turns out that if you give people Narcan, you know, this drug that you use to save people if they're having like a fentanyl or a heroin overdose,

02:09:36.900 it blocks the receptors for both, you know, fentanyl and heroin but also your body's own natural morphine-like molecules, the endorphins.

02:09:47.980 This drug will block the placebo effect.

02:09:50.600 So the placebo effect, you think, oh, it's a psychological thing.

02:09:53.460 It acts on this different realm.

02:09:55.160 It acts in the clouds somehow.

02:09:56.800 No, it doesn't.

02:09:57.560 It acts on the damn mu opioid receptor.

02:10:00.700 It's a biological thing, right?

02:10:02.680 So the idea that the thoughts you have, the beliefs you have, your emotional state can affect your brain and your body in fundamental ways

02:10:14.480 to do things like change the progression of your cancer, to change your chronic pain, to influence depression and anxiety,

02:10:24.380 these are, you know, these are areas that I think are some of the most fascinating things to research.

02:10:35.520 And there's going to be an explosion of this in the next 10 years.

02:10:39.960 Let's go.

02:10:41.160 Well, that's very exciting, man.

02:10:42.900 And I appreciate you for coming and helping us think about stuff.

02:10:45.280 I appreciate you for thinking about, like, how we feel and some of the sciences behind it.

02:10:49.820 And just for answering some of my questions, man, I couldn't be more grateful for your time.

02:10:54.260 And are you going to be okay with your health?

02:10:57.660 What's the latest?

02:10:59.020 Well, you know, I go in and I get a scan every six months.

02:11:02.240 And at any point, they could say, sorry, dude, the scan, you know, your cancer's now spread to your liver or your lungs.

02:11:07.840 And then things would be a lot worse.

02:11:09.460 And I'd have to decide, you know, do I do another round of chemo?

02:11:12.460 Do I do surgery?

02:11:13.400 Do I say, fuck it?

02:11:14.260 No.

02:11:15.080 You know, but fortunately that hasn't happened.

02:11:17.160 I get the scan every six months.

02:11:18.660 And so far it's been okay.

02:11:21.620 But, you know, in planning your life, you know, so I closed my lab, right?

02:11:28.100 Because my lab is full of people who are getting their training, you know, they're getting their PhD, they're getting their postdoctoral training.

02:11:36.360 If I kick off in the middle of their training, they're out of luck.

02:11:39.540 Like, it's really bad for them.

02:11:40.760 So I don't think morally that I can take somebody on new in my lab if I can't guarantee that I can see them through to the end of their training.

02:11:47.620 Yeah.

02:11:47.900 And so when I got diagnosed four years ago, I told the people in my lab, I said, hey, guys, you know, you might want to bail out because, you know, I'll support you because, you know, I can't guarantee I'm still going to be here.

02:11:59.340 Yeah.

02:11:59.640 And, you know, they all stuck with me.

02:12:04.060 Man, I don't know, really, you know, they all stuck with me.

02:12:08.800 And I thought, oh, man, I really can't die now because, like, I don't want them to be screwed because they were loyal, right?

02:12:17.020 And there's a lot of reasons to want to be alive, but that's one of them is to not screw your good friends and, you know, the people you work with.

02:12:23.860 And so fortunately, they all got to move through, do their projects, publish their papers, get new jobs, move on to the next stage of their life in a natural way.

02:12:33.780 Last November, the last dude in my lab finished.

02:12:38.560 He's done.

02:12:39.620 I closed the door in the lab.

02:12:41.180 So I still work at Hopkins.

02:12:42.700 Now I teach more.

02:12:44.160 I write more.

02:12:44.980 I do a little more admin.

02:12:47.020 But I'm still a Hopkins professor.

02:12:48.720 And so, yeah, I'm living life to its fullest.

02:12:56.400 But, you know, at any moment, the hammer could drop.

02:12:59.560 Well, let's hope the hammer stays alive and vigilant and far away from dropping, man.

02:13:05.580 Thank you.

02:13:06.260 Yeah.

02:13:06.520 Thank you so much.

02:13:07.460 Well, thank you, man.

02:13:08.500 Thank you just for research.

02:13:09.440 And you start to realize how important research is to even just talking to you, you know.

02:13:12.880 And how and then it's like you being a person that's dealing with this right now, you just you're like a living example of, you know, hearing you say that it's powerful because it's like we need research in order to help people that are sick, you know, and it's just important.

02:13:28.180 So I just think, yeah, and just the power that we can have to help each other and the science behind, you know, believing in one another, all of that.

02:13:40.180 It's just really, man, I can't thank you more for your time.

02:13:44.080 It's been a pleasure to be here.

02:13:45.300 Yeah.

02:13:45.620 You have your book, Unique, The New Science of Human Individuality.

02:13:51.420 And you're working on a new project.

02:13:52.860 Keep working on stuff, man.

02:13:54.480 I just, yeah, I'm excited to hear more.

02:13:57.440 And just be able to have another conversation down the line.

02:13:59.740 All right.

02:14:00.080 Well, maybe you can have me back when the new book comes out.

02:14:02.480 That would be fun.

02:14:03.120 Yeah, that sounds cool, man.

02:14:04.500 All right.

02:14:04.960 All right, David, Lyndon, thank you so much.

02:14:07.240 All right.

02:14:07.700 Thanks so much, Theo.

02:14:08.720 It's been a pure delight to be here.

02:14:10.340 Now I'm just floating on the breeze

02:14:13.500 And I feel I'm falling like these leaves

02:14:16.460 I must be cornerstone

02:14:19.780 Oh, but when I reach that ground

02:14:24.320 I'll share this peace of mind

02:14:26.480 And I found I can feel it

02:14:28.560 In my bones

02:14:30.660 But it's gonna take

02:14:33.140 Thank you so much Thank you

02:14:37.160 Thank you so much for being able to hear about

02:14:37.560 Let's take糊

02:14:39.800 And take care of me

02:14:40.940 I'll share my finances

02:14:41.060 If I can feel it

02:14:41.360 Do you wanna stay

02:14:41.840 I'll use it

02:14:42.700 In my bones

02:14:42.940 But it better

02:14:43.800 With you

02:14:44.040 I'll see you

This Past Weekend with Theo Von - July 08, 2025

#595 - Dr. David Linden

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