Cara Santa Maria joins Joe Rogan to critique media’s sexualization of women, citing Netflix’s Misrepresentation and her own struggles with Pivot TV’s dress codes. She links depression—treated with SSRIs like citalopram—to biological brain chemistry, not personal failure, comparing it to diabetes or hypothyroidism. The conversation exposes the U.S. healthcare system’s profit-driven flaws, contrasts GMOs’ precision with traditional breeding’s risks, and urges listeners to support independent media over sensationalist narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
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I'm telling you, thank you, by the way, but I'm telling you, when I left your studio the last time I was on, I probably got 300 tweets from people saying, start your podcast, start your podcast, we'll listen.
You need something like this because, you know, whenever you deal with a lot of producers or, you know, network folk, they mean well, but they all, everyone has their own idea of what should happen.
And even if they're nice people, it gets in the way.
And like, I, you know, right now I contribute to two different television shows and I'm very lucky.
I'm a freelancer.
I'm a contributor.
So I work on a show on Al Jazeera America called Techno, which is a great science kind of news magazine style show.
And then I work on a local show here in LA called SoCal Connected, which is on KCET, which used to be our PBS affiliate.
And now it's just a public television kind of standalone.
And that's great.
I have great producers.
I get to self-produce some stuff.
It's wonderful.
Prior to only doing those and the podcast, I was full-time on a show called Take Part Live on Pivot TV. That was daily, 8 to 12 hours a day, every day, hair and makeup for two hours straight.
And I look back and that is really when the podcast started because I was so, like you said, kind of boxed into speaking only in soundbites and presenting a version of myself that, honestly, I was not comfortable really presenting.
The podcast was amazing.
Really, really necessary outlet.
It was so psychologically freeing for me.
And now I think it really helps keep me centered and anchored when I do new jobs and new work to really understand how not to let things get out of hand like that.
And we've talked about it many times in the podcast about how you watch Fox News and all those women who like, it's almost like they have it in their contract that they have to uncross and cross their legs like a certain amount of times per minute.
Because it's like, who the fuck is that uncomfortable that you're constantly shifting and switching your legs back and forth?
And if a man dressed like that, it would be so insane.
Because there are, you know, if you watch runway shows ever, you keep up with fashion at all, there are kind of male versions of that sort of ensemble, but nobody actually wears that in real life.
Like the short, kind of tight, maybe not up to your nutsack, but like halfway down your thigh, these little like plaid shorts.
Anthony Clark, you know Anthony Clark, the stand-up comedian?
I'll never forget what he said about vaginas because he's of a different persuasion.
He goes, first time I saw a vagina, I was like, ew, when's it going to heal?
But it is a weird thing, I mean, that you're presented as a serious journalist on Fox News or as a neuroscientist, which is what you are, and yet they want you to have your vagina basically just barely protected by a little napkin that they throw over it.
Really early, just so I can piss off, like, everybody on Twitter.
It's actually a really good documentary.
It's called Misrepresentation.
You can find it on Netflix.
And it was produced and kind of narrated by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, who's Gavin Newsom's wife.
And the whole thing is kind of about media representations of women, how women are portrayed, how women, you know, make up X amount of the population, X amount of the jobs in this field, in this field, in this field, and then how they're represented both in fictional television, but also in nonfiction programming.
And they talk a little bit about that kind of why are female news readers meant to look so...
It's always kind of like the crusty old dude and then like his hot niece.
Like that's what it looks like when you look at a news reading team.
And they have these great interviews with people like Lisa Ling and Katie Couric and kind of talking about...
Katie actually is very open and says, I kind of feel guilty, like almost I played into this, like maybe I set this trend in motion.
And, you know, I was fit, I wore, you know, not ridiculously short skirts, but you could see my legs on TV. And then it seems like that's now the formula that every newsreader has to have.
And you almost just assume that they're dumb.
Like, it portrays, I don't think it portrays strength, unfortunately, when you have these, like, girls that are women that look like they're trying so hard to be sexy.
Then all of a sudden, it puts it in your head, like, oh, she's just reading a script that somebody else wrote for her.
When sometimes these are really, really bright, really successful women.
And the truth is, they also in the documentary, they showed all of the major news corporations, which there aren't that many anymore, you know, they've been kind of conglomerating and, and more and more of the property is owned by less and less people.
And they showed the number of women on the board, on the board of all of these different news organizations.
And so you look at like Time Warner, or you look at Viacom, and it's like one woman, two women, you As opposed to like 30 men or 15 men.
The people that are making the shows and the people who have ultimate control over those kinds of decisions historically and to this day are like 99% male.
I wonder if that's why women like Megyn Kelly, that fox lady, who's not dumb at all.
She's very sharp, but she's also kind of mean.
Kind of got an edge to her.
I wonder if it's to let you know, hey, fuckface, just because I've got my tits hanging out and my legs crisscrossed, barely covering my cooter, I'll still put you in your place.
Yeah, I think she probably has to.
She's on her heels all the time, always backed up.
Yeah, I don't think it's an uncommon feeling for women who are just in a position where they're surrounded by men who just are going to assume when they walk in the door that she's just dumb bimbo, she's a weather girl, she's a newsreader, but really she's writing her own copy and doing her own research and is a really strong, smart...
I mean, I disagree with, like, fucking everything she says, but I've seen her be a total brilliant shark on air before.
She's...
She's slightly more rational than most of the people on that network.
And you get that thing, too, where even if they don't overtly tell you, it's like you get off air every night.
And when you're dressed in an outfit that you love, like pants, a shirt, like you feel comfortable, but you feel good about yourself and you look in the mirror and you think your body looks good.
It's like, whatever, okay, fine show, whatever.
You wear like the dumbest little short pink skirt or dress that you're totally uncomfortable in and you're not acting like yourself.
Having someone talk to you, especially if you're in the middle of a conversation and they're saying, get off that or don't say this or bring this back and bring up that or ask this.
First of all, when you're doing post-fight interviews, you're doing it in real time, off the cuff, completely ad-libbed, and you're asking questions and adjusting based on how the fighter talks to you.
Well, that's the beautiful thing about the internet.
You know, the beautiful thing about the internet and producing your own show and creating your own show is I kind of look at those old shows, the shows that have been around for a long time like that.
Especially those news type shows where you talked about the uncle and the niece and that kind of weird format where they talk fake and everything's seven minutes cut to commercial.
Well, there's that thing that they do on networks as well where they'll, like, if you're on a talk show especially, they have the ratings based on how many people are watching up until a certain point.
Like, that's why The Tonight Show has a 20-minute first break because 15 minutes in is when they do their first rating.
So they don't want to cut the commercial because then you'll change the channel and it'll fuck up the ratings.
So they have this 20-minute thing.
So everything is geared towards, like, keep watching us!
They do anything to try to get you to hang in there for 20 minutes and then they'll bring someone on.
And that's like what the skirts are all about and that's why you have all these people that their sensibility is not based on what's the best way to get Kara's thoughts out?
What's the best way to get Megan's thoughts out?
The thing is how do I get someone to watch this chick?
And also, there is a problem, I think, where people say, okay, well, people in the industry, especially, when you talk to them about this, they go, well, whatever, we just give people what they want.
So you look at, like, bad reality TV, where there's catfights and humiliation television and all the shit that, you know, the Kardashians, all the shit that we're like, ugh, it breaks my heart that this is so popular in America.
And then people say, well, that's what the people want.
And we're just answering to what their needs are.
And, you know, we're not actually affecting any sort of social change.
We're just playing into the hands of what they're interested in.
But I say that that's fucking bullshit because we have an illusion of choice in this country.
Like, we don't have viable options.
If I want to watch the news, I've either got Fox News, MSNBC, or CNN. Those are the things that are easy for me to find.
I probably, unless I have an expanded cable package, don't have Al Jazeera or BBC World News or another option.
Or RT or another option available to me.
So I'm watching this programming that's no longer even news.
It's just, you know, fucking advertiser blowjobs and like ratings runoffs.
She dresses, she'll wear slacks, she'll wear, I mean, she's very pretty, but she'll wear, you know, she'll wear something that makes her look hot, if that's what she wants to wear, or she'll wear something different, but she has a weird situation there, too, where she's criticized Russia, like, especially what's going on in the Ukraine, and, you know, and they were like, we're going to send you to the Ukraine, and she's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, the fuck you are?
Like, no, you're not sending me to the Ukraine.
Like, they, like, made a public, a press statement, because she was criticizing Putin's administration and what was going on.
It was very public on television, she did this thing.
And so they said, we're going to send her to Crimea so she can see what it's like on the ground.
She's like, are you out of your fucking mind?
I'm not going to a war zone.
You didn't talk to me?
This is not happening.
I'm just telling you right now, this is not happening, but it's weird.
I'm pretty good friends with Alona Minkowski and Jenny Churchill, who used to work at RT on the Alona show back in the day, and then they went over to HuffPost and were at HuffPost Live, which is where I kind of met them.
I mean, look at SNL. Obviously, people still watch it, if you want to believe Nielsen ratings, but that show is not good anymore.
It hasn't been good in a really long time, but they really reinvented themselves with the digital shorts a few years ago, and as those were getting released, I mean, there was this new kind of resurgence of young people being like, oh, SNL is actually funny.
Yeah, it's the whole problem with this, and there's a bunch of problems, but trying to do a new show every week and then just doing it live in front of an audience is a terrible idea.
And they don't have, it's like, make it a half-hour show.
Like, don't make it an hour, because what ends up happening is they have good ideas for clips, and then they just, every single sketch, they just run it into the ground.
It's just like, they get the joke, and then they repeat it ten times.
Well, it's also like a super competitive environment.
And, you know, Phil Hartman, who is a good friend of mine, We were on news radio together, and he was on Saturday Night Live, and he had nightmare stories.
Like, after talking to him about what it was like, the backstabbing and all the weird behind-the-scenes shit that goes on, people trying to force their sketches in and other people cock-blocking them, it was just like, ugh.
But people have these expectations, and they want to live up to those expectations, and they want to keep up with the ratings, and make enough money, and ugh.
The old school TV model is, I don't know how much life it has left in it.
The problem is that's where the money is still.
It's a legacy model.
It's all of the investors, all of the advertisers, it's how they know how to do their jobs because they've been doing it for so long that they still pump so much money into that machine.
I mean, I see it as a freelancer.
When I get offered a TV job, it always pays better than a web job.
Across the board.
That's where the money is still.
And that's where my agent is trying to push me.
I do a lot of web work because I like new media.
And I like that I can be free on it.
But the truth is, we're still in this kind of legacy world with old school media.
And until those large corporations start to understand new media, I think that you're going to see this weird inflated bubble where all the money still stays there, but nobody's even fucking watching anymore.
It's adjusting slowly, but it's definitely in this transitionary period where more people are kind of realizing, hey, isn't everybody online?
Everyone's online, right?
So aren't the same people that are online also watching television shows?
Like, we can reach them in both ways.
And then it'll slowly shift.
In my opinion, it's going to shift to the internet almost entirely.
I really don't see...
The only benefit that I could see in networks is things like Game of Thrones, where you need massive budgets to put on these spectacular special effects and film everything in Ireland.
But Kinsey and Masters and Johnson are probably the most cited sex research, historical sex researchers in, you know, psychology courses where you learn about sexual behavior.
But Masters and Johnson are really interesting thing because Masters was an OBGYN.
Johnson was his research assistant and they fucked.
When you don't have female physicians and you don't have female researchers because the institutions don't allow them, then you don't have a female research perspective.
So all of a sudden, all of your research subjects are men because nobody thinks that it matters to research what happens to a woman's body.
And it took decades for research on female sexual response to catch up to research on male sexual response, which is crazy because females are the child bearers.
And they probably gave them like early versions of psychiatric medications and they basically let them leave whatever stressful environment they were in.
Get away from the babies that were making you depressed.
Do you think it's fair to think that as life becomes easier and as like society and civilization is more like goods are more accessible.
It's easier to get food.
It's easier to get water.
It's easier to get services.
And then, slowly but surely, things sort of equalized in terms of the more aggressive sex, males paying more attention to the needs of the female.
But in the old days, when things were much harsher, people lived less, they have a shorter lifespan, the world was a darker place, then it was more sexist.
The thing was more like men were just like, look, these are tough times, fuck off, bitch.
You look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs and it's like this pyramid.
It's like the food pyramid, but it's the needs pyramid.
And at the bottom are things like food and water and shelter.
Like when you're concerned about food and water and shelter, you're not concerned about things like- Love and friendship.
And then as you get to the top, it's things like self-actualization and blah, blah, blah.
So I think that there is a component of, yes, if you're just struggling to survive, contemplating or waxing philosophical about...
You know, civil liberties and things like that.
So you may be very instinctual and you may be aggressive because of that.
Or for whatever reason, you may see kind of patriarchal lines that are drawn in the sand and some sexism and some violence.
But I think on top of that, maybe that would always be the case so long as women didn't have a voice.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure of just moving to the future and I'm not sure if it's a function of people having more access to food and goods and services or if it's really a function of women.
Because what happened was women were mothers and men said, okay, mothers bring life.
This is something that we should respect and we should honor.
And this was a historical norm for a very long time.
And then as, you know, these kind of hunter-gatherer societies moved into more agrarian societies and started to form cultural structures, men realized, I can overpower that bitch.
Like, I have physical strength, and I can physically...
Put this woman in her place.
And as they realized that there was a power differential between them, that men were physically stronger, I think that's where a lot of patriarchal wisdom comes from, is that men are physically stronger than women.
Well, if you are a hunter-gatherer type and so you're living in a very small tribe and you're concerned about kinship or the welfare of your children, then I think that there's a certain amount of respect and honor that you are going to pay to your wife if But why does that go away with agriculture?
It's not so much agriculture as it is all of the things that come along with agriculture, which is maybe political power, which is starting to stratify and have jobs.
And no longer are you making your own clothes, making your own shoes, doing your own hunting, doing your own cooking.
All of a sudden now you're a cobbler and you're a butcher and you're whatever.
And so people have to depend on one another for goods and services.
And they have to say, OK, I'll trade you this for that.
and then money comes into play and bartering And all of a sudden, whereas it was a lot more egalitarian before, where everybody kind of had a strong role because they were taking care of themselves or they're very small groups, they're family groups.
Now, all of a sudden, they have a place in society.
And that's, I think, where you really start to see subjection of women is because men start to develop power within societies.
And if you look back historically, there are no known societies that were matriarchal societies, but you do see in smaller kind of tribal communities more matriarchal ideology.
More kind of honoring and worshiping of mother figures and mother gods.
But every time there's a society, it becomes patriarchal historically throughout all time.
There's no such thing as those Amazonian, like, women tribes that, you know, people talk about, like, the Amazonian women— That's just dudes jerk off fantasies.
But do you think that that evens out once civilization and society becomes more complex and has, see, my point was that scarcity makes people desperate.
And when people get desperate, they victimize not just women, but they victimize weaker men as well.
It's such a brutish and such an underdeveloped way to value strength, to only value strength in, like, I punch harder.
Because there's other forms of strength.
But you're right.
When people are desperate, people know that...
Think about if you're having an argument with another guy or if something comes to a head, even at work, wherever, and you're having an argument and you can't agree with each other and you start to get more and more frustrated.
What's the way in every film, in every book, what's the way that it finally gets settled?
You roll up your sleeves and you get in a physical altercation with each other, which is just not a form of strength or not a form of settling a score that's common in females.
counterintuitive but the best way to avoid that with men is martial arts Get men in a situation where they train and they compete against each other on a regular basis.
They don't have this need to dominate each other the way.
It's true, because I do think that it's a bit stupid to just completely ignore the role that things like testosterone play in gender dimorphism, like in female-male differences in humans and other higher-order mammals.
And testosterone is a chemical that actually is highly linked to things like aggression and feeling tension and having this need to release that in some way.
And we have less of it.
We have significantly less of it.
And some women are more aggressive and some women are completely passive and are never aggressive that way.
But there is a significant difference between males and females and testosterone is a big reason for that.
So being able to get that aggression out, whether it's on a heavy bag or whether it's through martial arts or whatever exercises you use, I think it's irresponsible to think that that's not part of the equation.
Yeah, it definitely is for a man coming from a male point of view.
I know that it makes a significant difference with me whether or not I can release it or not.
But it's also just doing martial arts and being involved in something that gives you an understanding of what physical confrontation is really all about.
It's not this scary thing that every man has to puff his chest up to avoid happening or you go into it completely ignorantly Thinking it's like a movie.
Like you're gonna sock some guy and that's gonna be the end of it.
And meanwhile you throw a punch at him and he moves his head and you're like, oh shit, this guy actually knows how to fight.
It also comes from other ridiculous, these media depictions of what happens when people hit each other.
One of the things that drives me fucking crazy, and I really wanted to talk to you about this because I wanted to get into depression, is head trauma.
Like, there's so many goddamn movies where someone hits someone in the head and they fall down, they get up and they rub their head and they're out cold, and then they go out and they fucking have a crazy fist fight with a hundred people or, you know, they make it like they're back to normal.
Like, they get shut off and they come back to normal and they're fine.
Or a guy is like, you know, this like great martial artist is in a fight with like 10 other dudes, right?
And then he's like punching and he's kicking.
And then he does that thing where he like headbutts like tons of guys, like cracks his skull against the skull of like multiple people in a row and is like in no way affected by it.
Because you're using this part of your head, your forehead, which is a really hard part, and you smash someone in the nose, and your nose kind of gives in.
Well, there's a great video of a woman knocking a guy out in a bar.
There was some sort of a bar fight, and this guy was involved in a fight with this woman's boyfriend, and the guy grabs the woman, and the woman grabs the guy's shirts and Slams him in the head.
Right on his nose.
And the guy goes out cold and goes limp.
And it's hilarious.
Because it's like this little woman and this big man.
But yeah, they're finding that soccer players, just the movement of hitting a ball with your head over and over and over and over and over causes mild concussive injuries.
So yeah, cracking people in the skulls a lot is probably...
Well, you know, and me, obviously, I come from this background of not just constantly doing it my whole life, but being around it my whole life.
I've been around so many guys getting hit in the head, and I've seen them from the beginning of their career, and then I see them at the end of their career, and I see a significant decline.
And how they communicate and I'm sure how they feel.
And it's one of the reasons why I wanted to bring this up.
My friend Mark Gordon, Dr. Mark Gordon, who's an expert in traumatic brain injury.
And he works a lot with soldiers and athletes that have...
Had significant brain trauma and they have a lot of issues with their hormones afterwards.
The pituitary gland is extremely sensitive and he wrote a piece connecting Robin Williams with depression, not just based on a lot of factors.
I mean, Robin had a lot of things going on.
He obviously had Substance abuse issues.
He obviously had the Parkinson's issue, which was also taking medication for Parkinson's, which has been connected to depression.
But he also had heart surgery.
And his...
Dr. Gordon's connection was that Robin Williams, having had this major heart valve replacement, which entails many hours of anesthesia, lowered blood pressure, and the literature speaks of post-cardiac surgery depression in over a hundred publications, and that the prolonged surgery with low blood pressure, they believe, precipitates or performs A form of Sheehan syndrome, which is the loss of important brain hormones.
Well, and that's something that I think that we've historically had this really weird approach to medicine, which I think is kind of a secondary effect of thinking scientifically.
And obviously, my background is in neuroscience.
I worked as a scientist for many years, and I am very much a scientific thinker, and I'm all about the scientific method.
But I think that we sometimes are at fault when we're a little bit too reductionistic in our views.
And so if you look at the history of modern medicine, of evidence-based medicine, what ends up happening is that we look at a problem and we try to fix the problem.
And we look at it as if you can somehow cut that piece of the person's physiology completely out of them, solve it, and then put it right back in itself.
And it doesn't have any effect on anything else in their bodies.
I mean, you look at medication, right?
Any form of pharmaceutical.
They all have side effects.
If you think about what a side effect is, it comes down to how medication works.
So medicine is a molecule.
It's some sort of molecule that fits in a receptor somewhere in your body.
And the idea is that you want it to have really high efficacy.
So let's say that I'm somebody who has a problem with blood pressure, for example.
Or actually, let's just jump into depression because I've been talking about this a lot lately around Robin Williams.
I had Paul Gilmartin on my podcast just last week to talk about that.
He hosts the Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast and has really great insights into mental illness.
And I, of course, publicly have dealt with depression most of my life.
Isn't that, for a lot of people, they would look at you, especially people that don't have any issues with depression, they look at you, obviously, very intelligent, beautiful, young.
Why would you be depressed?
Guys are probably tripping over themselves, trying to date you.
You're obviously very successful in pursuing intellectual pursuits.
And that almost can make it worse for certain people.
I mean, you look at somebody like Robin Williams.
He had so much going for him, right?
He was famous.
He was loved.
He had all this money.
How could he be depressed?
He didn't have the problems that you or I have.
And you know what?
Then you have this extra layer of guilt.
You have this extra layer of shame, this extra layer of Why the fuck am I still depressed?
No matter how much success I get, no matter how much money I make, no matter how much people write me letters and say that they love me and whatever, I can't seem to beat this feeling inside of me, this constellation of symptoms, because it's not coming from that.
I don't suffer from depression, but I have had many friends who do.
And I've always wondered, because it seems to be that when you go to a doctor and they start treating it, whether they treat it with medication or they try to adjust your diet and prescribe exercise first, that there's no one simple fix.
And people get upset about that because I think it goes back to kind of what I was talking about before, which is a meandering way to...
Okay, so again, to go back to this idea of a drug, you take a drug.
Let's say I take an antidepressant.
My antidepressant specifically is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, an SSRI, that's called citalopram.
That's the off-brand.
I think it's Celexa.
Is the brand name.
I take that.
It binds to my serotonin receptors in my brain, and it allows me to dump more serotonin into the synapse, the gap between two brain cells, so that I always have more available.
It basically tells my brain that I need more serotonin, so I make more serotonin available to myself.
It's a reuptake inhibitor.
Sorry, it keeps more serotonin in the gap instead of sucking it back into the cells, so I always have more available to me.
Now, it's a molecule.
It's got a shape, just like anything out there.
It has geometry.
So it binds to this specific receptor in the brain because it's got a similar shape to that.
There are other things in your body that are similarly shaped.
And so what ends up happening is, when you take a drug, The specificity of the drug is only based on whether or not the key fits in a lock somewhere in your body.
But let's say that you had hundreds of thousands, millions of locks available to you and one key, and you started going through, you'd be able to stick that in a bunch of locks.
Some of them it might even turn, but it would fit in the lock of multiple locks hanging on that wall.
So what ends up happening is I take this drug, it binds in my brain, it does what it's supposed to do in my brain, but it also maybe does other shit, like makes me really fucking tired.
Or it makes it so I don't want to have sex as often.
It's a side effect.
And the reason that you have a side effect is because there's other parts of your body that the drug binds to.
It's the same thing with medicine.
Like you were saying, you operate on somebody's heart.
I think.
It's the source of blood flow throughout your body.
It is connected to hormone levels.
There's all sorts of things that can happen when you put somebody under anesthesia, when you cut them open, when you cause an immune response, an inflammatory response.
Your body is a holistic thing.
And so when you start jacking with certain things, other things are going to happen, right?
That doesn't mean you should throw the baby out with the bathwater, but medicine is a risk-benefit analysis always.
You can't go, as a doctor, you can't come to me, stick a needle in my spinal cord, take out my cerebrospinal fluid and measure how much serotonin I have in it.
I wish you could.
I wish I could take some sort of a blood test or I could, you know, pee in a cup and then you could analyze that pee and say, you're low on serotonin.
You need an SSRI. That would be what works for you.
because other people's depression comes from problems with dopamine, comes from problems with norepinephrine or some combination thereof, but there's no test for it.
It fucking sucks.
There's no test for it.
And so what ends up happening is you have to play musical chairs.
You try a drug.
The first drug I tried when I decided to finally go on antidepressants fucked me up so bad.
I took an SNDRI, a selective serotonin norepinephrine dopamine reuptake inhibitor.
I was so fucking depressed I couldn't function.
And we decided let's throw the book at it.
Let's take the drug of all drugs, the monster drug that does everything.
And I couldn't sleep for a week.
I felt like I was on straight-up crank, like on crystal.
So as soon as I got off the drug again, I immediately wanted to smoke again.
But at that point, I pushed through it.
And I said, you know, I'm at my lowest.
I was at my lowest point I've ever been at.
So I was like, fuck it.
Can't get any worse.
And I did.
I quit smoking.
And it's been a couple years.
But I did.
I tried.
But the truth is, this is why addiction research is so important.
This is why researchers go into the lab with a bunch of mice or whatever.
And they feed them a bunch of cocaine and they, you know, do these different kind of experiments where you've heard of the famous experiment where you have the mouse in the cage and it's got a bar pressing paradigm.
So it can push the bar, it gets coke.
And then like it just fucking does that until it dies.
Like it like there's food right next to it.
And it's like, no, I want more coke.
And then it just, you know, dies.
And so obviously there's something happening.
This is a natural phenomenon because mice don't have value judgments.
They're not thinking about this from a religious perspective.
They're not saying, I don't know, maybe I should stop doing this coke and maybe exercise a little more and that'll give me the same kind of high.
What we have to understand, too, is, of course, all psychiatric disorders are spectrum disorders, right?
There's really extreme examples, and there's barely any examples.
And if anybody who's ever taken a psych course or who's studied, you know, if you were a psych major in college, you know that as you studied the DSM-IV, which is like, it's called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that they use in psychiatry and psychology...
It's basically the big bible of all the things you can be diagnosed with.
The more you study it, the more you're like, I have that.
Oh, I have that.
Oh, I totally fucking have that.
And you realize everybody has...
Everybody can convince themselves that they have these...
It's like WebMD.
You know what I mean?
Right.
It's only once it is sufficiently detrimental to your life that it affects your relationships, it affects your ability to work, it affects your health, whatever the case may be.
And usually within the DSM, there may be like eight things, and it's like you have to have five out of these eight things.
And so anybody can read it and go, oh, I felt depression before.
But what they don't realize is there is a difference between depression and sadness.
There's also a difference between parody depression.
So depression that lasts years, decades, and the type of depression that people get that's directly linked to life events.
Like we've seen so many documentaries lately about this.
As the economy took a downturn, people lose their job and then they end up committing suicide because they can't.
This cascade of awfulness, that's a really common one.
You know, family member dies, you have a stillborn, or you have an abortion, or you have a baby, a healthy baby.
Postpartum depression is incredibly common.
And in that case, that's much more common that people can take meds, they can do all these things, and once they get back to where they were before that horrible life event...
They're okay to get off the meds.
Some people are able to get their depression managed without medication perfectly well.
Is the different reactions that different people have to different medication, is it because their depression has a different source or is it just a biodiversity thing?
I think it's more of a biodiversity thing than a source thing.
I mean, source is hard to say.
So depression is both when you think about it.
Well, brain and mind are the same thing.
You know, most modern neuroscientists say that brain and mind are two sides of the same coin, that mind is just an emergent property of brain.
Nobody's a dualist anymore.
They don't think that you can, like, heal the mind and it has no effect on the brain because it's the same fucking thing.
So there are, you know, some people's depression comes from the fact that their dopamine levels are not healthy or their norepinephrine levels are not healthy or whatever the fuck.
But I think the common view of depression now is that there's some sort of biological difference in your brain.
And oftentimes that's either caused or it develops out of childhood or early life experiences.
Where, you know, you have some sort of trauma or you have some sort of development, you have some sort of, you know, interaction with family, whatever the case may be.
And it doesn't have to be, you know, you were molested as a child.
It can literally just be like you didn't feel loved or whatever the case may be.
And you've got this brain difference combined with this emotional experience.
And what ends up happening, because when you're very young, your brain is very plastic.
So when you're very young, you're learning skills that are going to last you the rest of your life, and you're actually building your brain architecture.
Certain neurons are connecting and disconnecting and reconnecting and pruning out.
The tree, the beautiful tree that is all of the cells in your brain, is getting pruned when you're young.
And if you're depressed when you're young, and you're experiencing those kinds of things when you're young, you're going to prune a tree that's prone to depression as you age because you're going to keep reinforcing those neuronal connections.
That's why therapy...
Is so important.
Meds in and of themselves are never going to get you in a place where your depression is really well managed.
It's going to get you in a place where therapy is going to be working better for you.
Meds are going to be an immediate and necessary interventional strategy so that you're not crying or you're not trying to kill yourself or you're not whatever your symptoms of depression.
So you can actually fucking get out of bed to work on yourself.
I always liken it to the women who are listening to the podcast.
I liken it to when you were first deciding to go on birth control.
A lot of women will go to their gynecologist when they're 15, 16, 17 and say, I want to go on birth control.
And they'll give them orthotricycline or whatever the pill, the regular old pill, and they'll be fine.
A lot of women will take the pill the first time and it'll make them really sick.
Like every time they take the pill, it makes them want to throw up or it gives them cramps or something's weird about it.
It affects their...
And they go, oh, this drug doesn't work for me.
And they go, oh, fuck.
Okay, let's try one with lower levels of estrogen or progesterone or let's try the ring or the Depo-Provera shot or maybe you need an IUD drug.
I was like that.
It took me multiple times to find the right drug.
And I think it's the same thing with therapy.
I think it's the same thing with psychiatric medicines.
We're not monolithic, so the same combination isn't going to work for everybody.
And the truth is, if that makes you afraid of modern medicine or if it makes you think that psychiatry is woo or something like that, it's the same thing as cancer.
In many ways, there's so many parallels.
Cancer is not one disease.
It's a spectrum of diseases.
If I got diagnosed with breast cancer and you got diagnosed with breast cancer and we both went in with our diagnosis the same day, our oncologist would give us different treatments because we would have different genetic markers.
We would respond differently to different types of chemotherapy.
Chemotherapy means chemical therapy.
It's a really big umbrella term for all the different kinds of cancer treatments that are available.
Maybe you would get more radiation.
Maybe I would need surgery, but your metastasis would make it so that surgery wasn't a viable option.
It's a spectrum disease, and psychiatric illness are the same way.
Well, there's, you know, I was talking to a friend about this the other day, and he is a pretty philosophical older guy.
and he was he's been through two divorces and he was talking about how sex starved so many people are and like you're dealing with all these scenarios where you're like oh this guy was a creep and this you know this woman is ridiculous and there are people out there that no one's touching and they so true are so hungry just to be held and I mean, this is a minor story, but when I first came to California, I didn't have any friends, came here from New York, and I wasn't happy.
I wasn't happy because I didn't enjoy acting, I didn't enjoy being around actors, and I didn't have any friends.
And I didn't have a girlfriend, didn't have any dates, and I got a hug from this girl on the set.
And I'll never forget that feeling of that hug because it wasn't like a sexual hug.
It was a friend gave me a hug.
And when she gave me the hug, it was like my level went...
There's all sorts of hormones, like a cascade of hormones that you...
you are affiliative, when you're close to somebody else.
And it's absolutely necessary.
And kind of going back to what we were talking about, about aggression, like a male-female difference, I also feel strongly that many men have a deep need that's slightly different than women.
That our sexual needs are much more affiliative and emotional, and there is some physiological basis for female sexual need, don't get me wrong.
Like, any girl can tell you that she's had this I'm not craving this passionate feeling where she's like, I just need to come or I just need to have sex with somebody.
But with men, there's literally a backup of fluid that you have to release.
That's a very different physiological thing than women.
And again, that goes back to testosterone.
So the same thing as you were saying, MMA can be really helpful for clearing the mind and for lowering your base levels of aggression.
I think cumming does the same thing.
I think it's healthy for guys to jerk off if they're not having a lot of sex.
Because guys can get pent up and be aggressive because they're not cumming enough.
Well, if you looked at it, and also if you looked at it objectively, if you looked at the human beings on this planet as like a giant mathematical equation, you would say, okay, why are there so fucking many of them?
Well, because there's this intense need to breed.
And this intense need to breed was back when it was really difficult to stay alive.
We are essentially the same organism that used to get cut down by each other, by animals, predators, natural illnesses, disease, injuries.
And again, when you also talk about the biodiversity, there's some folks that are just more fucking primitive today or more animalistic or more kinetic.
And just the range is so massive when we talk about what is, quote, normal and what is hyper and what is hypo.
So many people are so different.
And that's why it's cool to see when people actually...
Manage to partner up or whatever sexual or emotional partnerships make sense for them, whether they're monogamous or polygamous, whether they're gay, straight, somewhere in between.
It's so cool when you see people that make it work because they're on the same page when there's so many differences that exist out there.
When two people go, you're awesome, or three or four, whatever, and they go, you're awesome, I'm into you, we're into the same stuff, we abide by the same rules, we have the same sexual proclivities, and it works?
How fucking cool is that?
Because there's so many combinations out there.
When those two ends of the magnet kind of find each other in that way, it's pretty dope.
It's like, how many people truly have their shit together to the point where anybody would want to be with them?
And so many people are so goddamn codependent and so fucked up that they can't attract anyone because their own biology, their psychology, the mix that makes them a person is just so chaotic.
You can't expect to be happy in a relationship because you're not happy alone.
You have to offer somebody just as much as you get from them.
And you have to be, like you said, very standalone.
I mean, that's a common theme for me in therapy is this conversation about If I am in a relationship, feeling very confident and comfortable because I have like an insane fear of commitment.
Because I'm so used to thinking about a relationship as if it's a prison sentence.
And I've been really relearning what it means to be in a relationship with my therapist.
And how the idea of living for now is a healthier way to look at life.
Like I don't have to think about hardcore future kinds of conversations.
Like if I'm comfortable with myself right now and I can be comfortable with a partner right now and not have all this like Sense of intense obligation.
That's where that codependent stuff comes from.
And that's what I think is so incredibly unhealthy in a relationship.
It's like, I'm going to bring my best self to the table, and hopefully I'll find a partner that does the same thing, instead of needing a partner, which is a common motivation for people to get in relationships.
I need somebody else.
I can't handle it on my own.
Well, then you're not going to end up working it out.
Like, the sexual variable, the emotional variable.
There's so many different things that are going on, and then it's almost like, okay, I found this waterhole.
I can't leave.
I finally found water.
I was alone.
Like, my experience of going several weeks without being hugged, and then being hugged, like, ugh...
And that was just a friend.
It was like someone on the set.
The difference between that and someone who's gone years without a relationship that really worked and you finally have one that works and you fuck it up because you're too goddamn clingy and too crazy.
And like that kind of shit is what makes me run out the door.
That's what I'm talking about when I talk about my quote-unquote fear of commitment.
What it really is is it's an intense feeling of stress when I feel obligated to somebody else.
So, in the healthiest relationships I've been in, they're the relationships where there's not a lot of jealousy, not a lot of possession, not a lot of that checking in.
It's just trust.
You trust each other.
And when you're really into somebody, you want to be around them.
And you spend time with them.
But when you want to be around your friends, they're not like, where are you?
Why aren't you checking in?
When are you coming home?
It's like, fuck off, dude.
Like, I don't want to be with you if it's going to be like this.
You were talking about your experience when you first came to Los Angeles and not having a lot of friends and kind of being depressed.
So when I first moved to LA, I was in New York.
I'm usually not that comfortable talking about this, but for some reason I'm going to right now.
I was living in New York and I was working on my PhD and then I started dating Bill Maher.
Like, that's why I came to Los Angeles is because...
We started dating.
I was living in New York.
I would kind of come and go and see him.
And we weren't committed to each other.
I had a life on the East Coast.
He had his life here on the West Coast.
And eventually we got close enough that we decided, hey, let's give this thing a go.
And so I was like, fuck it.
I was actually really not happy in my degree program.
So in some ways, it was a double whammy.
I was very happy to be exploring a deeper relationship with this guy that I'd grown to love.
And also, I was more and more not happy with my situation in New York.
And so it was a new opportunity.
I moved out to LA. And we ultimately ended up dating very seriously for about three years.
And that was my...
My first LA experience was bizarre as fuck.
I was dating somebody who was incredibly famous in the public eye who had a lot of money.
There was a big equity problem in the relationship.
I didn't know what I was going to do with my life.
I had just left my degree program.
I was searching for answers and I was young.
I was like 24. But I had no friends.
None.
I mean, I was friends with people in their 50s.
Like, that was my social circle.
And yeah, I would meet people.
Like, I would hang out with Sarah Silverman a little bit.
But they weren't really my friends.
I was the come-along.
I was the girlfriend.
And they were all very nice to me.
And I was like, what a weird life!
But it was almost like I was living somebody else's life.
And I was pretty depressed.
And...
I was very lucky to have my best friend at the time, Kelly, was still living in Dallas, where I grew up, and kind of worked with her and hooked her up with a job working with Bill.
She ended up becoming his wardrobe stylist, and she still does that to this day, which is really amazing.
It was a huge opportunity for her.
She always wanted to come to LA, and now she's this incredible celebrity stylist and has this great job in And so I was very lucky when she first came out maybe six months later because we got an apartment together and I finally had somebody, but I just had her.
And it took probably until just a couple of years ago, so now that's maybe been five years out, before I met this group of friends that we affectionately call each other the Nerd Brigade.
Yeah.
We hashtag Nerd Brigade on Twitter all the time.
And they're like, one of my best friends just finished her PhD in molecular neuroscience from Caltech.
One of my other best friends got his PhD from USC in animal cognition.
I have a friend who, another neuroscience student at Caltech, I have a friend who has a marine biology degree.
They're all like science communicators, writers, academics, but cool, young, edgy, fun people who like we get each other.
We're friends because we have a lot in common.
It took a long time to get close to these people and to meet them and to finally find because LA is a fucking hard city if you're used to living in a university town.
That's where I did my undergrad and my master's at the University of North Texas.
And then, yeah, I was in New York City, but I was living in Queens, specifically in Forest Hills, because I would take the bus to Flushing every day to Queens College.
That's where I was working on my PhD.
At the City University of New York Graduate Center, but Queens College was my campus.
And a lot of my friends live in Pasadena still, which is very much a college town because they were Caltech students and now they're working there or some of them are still taking courses.
But I saw, I mean, Brian just shook his head.
Like, LA, it's hard to meet smart people in this city.
It's so full of fucking vapid people and people who will...
I learned this quickly.
I moved to LA dating somebody who was like an A-list celebrity.
And all of a sudden, I was like, wait, why do you want to be friends with me?
Wait, what's going on?
I also, I've dated another very, very famous person in my life where I don't publicly talk about that relationship at all just to respect each other's privacy.
But I would learn things about people.
Like I had this one group of friends who I thought were my friends.
And I remember dating this person and being like, hey, do you want to come to a barbecue?
you.
I don't know.
Oh, but, you know, so-and-so thought that you might want to play tennis.
We're going to do it at so-and-so's house.
Oh, so-and-so will be there?
Oh, yeah.
I'm totally down.
And you would get that all the time.
This, like, oh, is that why you're friends with me?
I didn't have that dynamic personality that all of the reality TV stars have where they're like, I'm going to win this competition because I'm the best.
I just walked up and I was like, are you ready for me to sing?
I'm so scared.
I was meek.
I didn't have that kind of self-assertive thing going on.
My parents first put me in therapy when they first started to decide that they were thinking about getting a divorce.
And I was young then.
I was maybe six or seven.
So from the time I remember, I've understood the therapeutic process.
And they always really promoted that in me.
So then even after the divorce and the remarriages and all of that, I started doing the therapy thing on my own.
Then when I went to college and I was very much on my own.
I went to college when I was 16, by the way, and lived on my own at 16. I was a fucking weird kid.
Wow.
So I was a little, I'm an adult, but I wasn't.
I did that.
I went to therapy.
I did all those things by myself.
But I always had this mental block.
I always had this like, oh, I don't need meds.
Meds means you're really crazy.
Meds means you really don't have control.
And not until I kind of hit a very bad rock bottom a few, maybe three years ago.
Did I finally say, you know what?
Fuck it.
I think I actually have to do this.
I think it would be good for me.
And then it was the same experience that I've heard over and over and over from people where finally they get on the meds that are right for them and they calibrate to their dosage and maybe they've been on it for about two months and they just have this epiphany of like, why the fuck did I wait so long?
I could have felt like this my whole life.
What the fuck was I thinking?
Because you're so, societally, we're so resistant to looking at mental illness the same way we look at physical illness.
It's so easy.
Paul Gilmartin just made this point when he was on my podcast last week.
If you went up to somebody with diabetes, type 1 diabetes, and you were like, what the fuck, dude?
Why don't you just think more positively so that your pancreas makes more insulin?
What's wrong with you?
Why can't you just make more insulin?
They'd be like, what are you talking about?
It's the same thing with depression.
People put the onus on, like, they look at it like it's a disease of will, but it's not.
It's a biological illness.
And that's just very hard for people to understand.
And so what you end up doing is carrying around a lot of guilt and shame and a lot of feelings like, I'm not good enough, I can't will myself out of this if I just think more positively.
It's not about that.
And I did that for years.
Years.
You just deal with it and I destroyed so many relationships.
There's such a stigma in this country, not just about mental illness, but about...
where people can't openly, freely talk about it.
So you end up living in this weird bubble where you don't really...
Like, I know people that have mental illness that didn't even realize they had mental illness until they finally had a conversation with a doctor about it.
And they were like, oh, this isn't normal.
Like, everybody doesn't hear voices or everybody doesn't...
It's like, yeah, because you're so afraid to talk to somebody about it.
So that's, I mean, that's a really important...
And part of this, I think, is just getting past the stigma.
That's why when something like this with Robin Williams, which is so fucking depressing, happens, a lot of people rally around it and they say, hey, maybe we can use this as a teaching moment because this guy, no matter how good his life was, he had this thing that he ultimately couldn't kick.
And it wasn't his fault.
It just is that way sometimes.
And hey, maybe you have it too.
I think in some ways it's good when high-functioning people come out and talk about their illnesses, because then people who are actually experiencing things like Loss of employment, loss of a loved one, whatever, or who have had a bad go of it for other reasons or like, even you, like you had said before, like even you, but you're pretty or but you're successful, you're whatever.
Well, if you could have that, then, of course, it's not weird that I have, you know, it's like it's a good thing for people to be able to see that they're not alone like that.
Do you believe, as a person who's a neuroscientist, is it possible that they could eventually come up with something that balances your brain out instead of just adding something to your neurochemistry, which sort of enhances your serotonin levels, but rather something where they can get it at a genetic level?
We're starting to see major improvements in cancer biology with personal genomic medicine.
My fear with genomic medicine is only, not to put a dark cloud on it because I think that it has amazing prospects, my fear is that it's going to further increase the kind of class divide where you've got people who are sick because sickness strikes rich and poor the same.
But for some reason, we are a very class-based system and I think that you're going to see that rich people get those kinds of treatments and poor people don't.
Yes, I do think that time always tells, and that hopefully, eventually, that kind of stuff trickles down.
But I wish it didn't have to trickle down.
I wish medication, I wish health and wellness were a more egalitarian enterprise.
One of the biggest problems, I think, with the structure of American government and being such a capitalist society, which I'm all about capitalism, don't get me wrong.
I think we need to be a socialist-capitalist blend just like we are.
We have a lot of socialist systems in our country.
The mail is socialist.
Public education is socialist.
We have a lot of capitalist systems in this country.
I hate that healthcare is a for-profit system in America.
The argument is obviously that people who work harder, are more ambitious, become better at it, should be rewarded for that, and that's what's going to motivate them to work harder and be the best heart surgeon, to be the best brain doctor, to be the best guy who fixes bones, whatever it is.
Fundamentally, and it's very, if you can provide me an argument that solves this problem for a capitalist health care system, then I'm all about to, and I don't mean you, but I mean anybody listening, I'm all about hearing it.
The problem is that when you have a capitalist system that's a competition-based system for profit, what ends up happening is that people compete.
That's how it works, right?
You compete.
And a lot of times they say that's what drives prices down, is that you compete and prices get better and then you've, you know, the best, whatever.
But what ends up happening when you have for-profit healthcare is that illness is incentivized, wellness is not.
People make more money the sicker you get.
People make more money the more procedures you have to get.
People make more money the longer you stay in the hospital.
I'm not saying there's some grand conspiracy to keep people sick, but if you've got an industry like the insurance and pharmaceutical and for-profit hospital industry where the profit comes from sickness, where is the incentive to get people well?
I'm not saying that doctors aren't very noble people.
They are.
And they work every day, doctors, nurses, other healthcare officials, to get people better.
But the system itself does not incentivize wellness.
It incentivizes sickness.
So at that very basic level, it's a bit broken because somewhere along that chain, people are going to take advantage.
They're going to say, oh, I make more money if...
This guy has to stay in the hospital an extra day.
Or I make more money if this guy has to get this quote-unquote unnecessary procedure.
All the way across the board, the sicker you are, the more money goes into the system.
And that's really gross.
It's gross.
There are certain things that capitalism don't work on.
And I think that wellness, which is a basic human right, is one of those things.
It just doesn't make sense.
It's fundamentally incompatible with that type of monetary system.
But people who do the right thing, who motivate themselves to become the best orthopedic surgeon and treat the Lakers and fix all their knee issues and these people rise to the occasion, shouldn't they be rewarded for that?
So the fact that it even trickles down to the people who took a Hippocratic oath, to the people who we think of as being the most noble of the most noble of citizens in this country, if it even trickles down to them, how is it going to In fact, somebody who's pushing paper at the insurance company, where you're just a number on a piece of paper, you're just a statistic, and you're a bottom line.
So is the answer to cut out that aspect of it, that the insurance company is the issue, and that really socialized medicine would be compensating the doctors?
And that the doctors would still be potentially able to rise above the others?
My answer is the same, I think, as any other industrialized Western nation.
We're the only industrialized Western nation that doesn't have national health care.
So what ends up happening is you have a public option.
You have the option to have A healthcare system that is free and available to you.
And it has basic levels of treatment and care for anything that could go wrong with you.
And there are doctors you can see and there are hospitals you can go to.
If you want to go private, it's the same way that we have education in this country.
I had an amazing public education.
I have friends who went to private school.
Their parents wanted them to go to private school.
good for them.
They may have had a better education than me.
They may not have because there were still amazing teachers available and an incredible infrastructure in place for me to get an incredible education as a public student.
Well, it's certainly a problem in how we view and what we think about in terms of where our money should go.
Like, if we had privatized police force and privatized fire, like every time your house was on fire, you had to pay someone to come and fix the issue and put the fire out.
Yeah, you can find stories online of people living in regions where they have a privatized fire service, like it's a four-pay fire service, and people's houses have burned down because they can't afford to put it out.
And the thing is, when you put the kind of money into preventive care that's necessary, you end up saving so much money on the back end.
When people who can't afford to go to the doctor until they have a festering wound or until they've allowed the cancer to spread or whatever are going to the doctor early on and they're getting a checkup because they can afford it, because it's free to them.
When you've got somebody who's living on the street, who's obviously going to be subject to much more infection, much more disease because they're living in squalor.
If they can go to the doctor on a regular basis and get a checkup, they're not going to be then going to the doctor later to get some multi-thousand dollar procedure that Hippocratic Oath, they have to do this.
If somebody goes into and their fucking arm is hanging off, no doctor is going to be like, I can't reattach your arm, you're just going to die.
They're going to do it, they're going to bill these people, and they're never going to fucking pay their bills because they can't afford to.
And then you and I are going to absorb that cost in the money that we're paying for our insurance.
They were taking these people that were in mental institutions, and they changed the standards of what you needed to keep these people in these facilities, and they would just release them on the streets?
I mean, there's so many variables that when people like to look at these issues and look at them in a black and white term, I'm a liberal, so I think this.
I'm a conservative, so I think that.
And that's really, you know, I have a lot of ideas that are very liberal and a lot of ideas that are fairly conservative.
Me too, yeah.
There's real issues with picking a side like that, especially when it comes to ideologies.
I get a lot of hate when I come on your podcast, but also when I go on The Young Turks, anytime I talk about GM foods or genetically modified crops in any way.
Because what ends up happening is people look at me and they go, oh, you're a liberal.
It can be really helpful for health and human safety across, especially in lower income and globalized areas where they're not very industrialized.
The second problem is that people have a really hard time with the concept of synecdoche, this idea of, you know, that's a literary term for like looking at the part for the whole or the whole for the part.
So people say GM food.
Monsanto.
Oh, Monsanto.
It's the same thing.
It's not the fucking same thing.
That's a company that utilizes GM technology.
And yes, recently I got offered a branded entertainment job with Monsanto and I had to turn it down.
And the reason I turned it down was not necessarily because I really disagree with their practices, even though I do fucking disagree with their practices.
Like, let's be honest, there are a lot of Monsanto things that make me mad.
But the reason I had to turn down this brand to deal is because I knew that if I ever took a dime from a company like Monsanto, my ability as a journalist to talk about GM crops from a very neutral perspective would be out the window.
Nobody would ever take me seriously again.
So it's the same thing with big pharma.
People go like, oh, big pharma's evil.
And it's like, so what?
Should you never take drugs again?
Are you out of your fucking mind?
It's like you've got to be able to look at these things in a nuanced way and understand that there are problems and there are evils, but you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater and you can't say, oh, all modern medicine is terrible because Pfizer is making money on the backs of poor people.
It's like, yeah, that's fucked up about Pfizer, but that doesn't mean modern medicine is terrible.
It's also people, when they start talking about genetically modified foods, one of the things that they have to take into consideration is that almost everything you eat is genetically modified.
When you go to the grocery store, if you're getting corn, if you're getting apples, if you're getting tomatoes, stop thinking that just because it's organic that it's not genetically modified.
The corn that you eat today has no resemblance to the original corn.
So transgenic foods would be actually a scientist going into the genome of an organism.
Let's say it's a type of corn.
They go into the genome and they go, okay, this corn tends to die readily when the temperature gets above 101. Well, the climate is changing.
It's getting hotter and hotter where they farm it.
So we're going to tinker with the genome and we're going to delete a gene or insert a gene or move the genes around in some way so that this corn is now drought resistant.
Change the genome, produce a new corn crop, and then continue to breed that corn crop.
And that is really the goal and generally the motivation behind GM crops.
It's to make them withstand things like droughts or pests or whatever so that they can live hardier and feed more people in that way.
Well, I think we're good to go.
This is why a lot of scientists get pissed off about all the GM hysteria because they're like, okay, if I were to take this random corn crop and that random corn crop and breed them, I'm shuffling like 30,000 genes.
If I were to go in targeted and change three genes that only affect the ability for it to withstand a higher temperature, it's a much more specific and targeted way to change this plant.
I trust it more.
I know exactly what I'm eating.
But people are like, ah, it's horrifying!
Because you're going in with, you know, pipetters and tools.
You know what, as somebody, as a person who has never studied lab science, to try and make sense of all the bullshit in the media, and to be reading articles that were written by journalists who have never studied lab science, how are you expected to keep things straight?
That's why I do what I do for a living.
I'm a science communicator and my job is to look at research that exists and to try and translate that to the public.
But I also want to try and understand where the public is coming from.
Why are you afraid of this thing?
Why does this thing worry you?
Let's understand the psychological reasons behind it.
Let's understand what you've been fed your whole lives by the media and see what's reasonable and what's not and come to a rational conclusion about it.
Unfortunately, we as a species respond better in some ways to fear and hysteria.
We see something on the news that's like, holy shit, this thing could kill you.
And you're like, oh my god, really?
I need to know about this.
Because if the media was always presenting things rationally, like, okay, let's take a balanced approach to this.
Let's look at the pros and the cons.
And people would tune out.
It's not that interesting anymore.
The things that we find salient are the things that raise the hairs on the backs of our necks.
And what that ends up breeding is It's just a media landscape of fear-mongering and screaming matches and worst-case scenario conversations, which I don't think is very helpful for anybody.
And if you absorb that information and that is what you preach, that's your mantra now, it's very difficult to be open-minded and then sort of accept other ideas.
That contradict those original ideas that you've been telling everybody about.
And the truth is, it's hard to figure out who to trust, especially in a landscape like this.
That's why I never promote...
I have no intention, as a science communicator, that the work that I do is going to necessarily promote a lot of people to go off and become scientists themselves.
I mean, hopefully young children or some teens, people who are in that...
In that age group and who are interested, maybe they'll be influenced a little bit about some of the work that I do.
But more than that, I want to see a higher level of scientific literacy in this country.
All that means is that we think more with our brains and less with our emotions and less with that Stephen Colbert truthiness.
We've got to get away from truthiness.
Just because something feels right doesn't necessarily mean that it is right.
And the other thing that you brought up there about political, about financial, all the different motivations, all the different things, the variables, that's also stuff that you have to try to pay attention to and squeeze into your head.
It's hard.
It's impossible.
We need someone like you to sort of break it down, someone who has a background in this particular area.
To break it down in a way that we can understand.
Okay, I'm comfortable that Cara Santa Maria is being honest with me about this particular aspect of depression and neurochemistry.
This is her experience.
This is also what she knows about the science behind it.
And I think that this is why we, as the listeners of the Joe Rogan experience, the listeners of Talk Nerdy with Cara Santa Maria, the people who are really involved in the next movement of...
Alternative and new media.
It is our responsibility to continue to support these kinds of programs and to continue to speak up and become engaged and involved because if we're not happy with the way that traditional media is handling things because they're playing to the ratings and they're playing to the lowest common denominator.
We can't be passive about it.
We have to support the news outlets and the organizations and the podcasts and the web shows that we support.
We have to do our part to make sure that those things don't fail.
The backers that they have, you know, I have Squarespace on my side.
I have Computer Learning Zone on my side.
You have these wonderful sponsors on your side that help you keep doing this so that you can offer it for free to your listeners.
And so that whole chain, we're all in it together.
I think that's the important thing.
I agree.
We're here for you.
You're here for us.
And we're all on that kind of same team to be that counterculture and to...
To offer opinions, but also offer facts that are based in evidence, that are based in reason, that aren't based in some sort of corporate interest, or because some producer is in that fucking thing in my ear telling me that I have to do or say or act like somebody that I'm not.
I would love to talk to you about this to the end of time, and I would love to not tell you that you're already past the time you were supposed to leave.
You know what's so funny, too, is the reason I have to leave, and I'm so sorry, you guys, is because I have therapy at 3, and I've got to make it all the way across town to see my therapist.