Andrew Huberman critiques CBD inconsistencies and supplement regulation, exposing melatonin’s unreliable dosing (±85% variation) and its potential to disrupt natural sleep cycles by shrinking reproductive organs in seasonal breeders like Siberian hamsters. He recommends a magnesium-threonate/apigenin/theanine "sleep cocktail" for deeper rest, contrasting it with Rogan’s Epsom salt use, while debunking apigenin’s prostate myths. Huberman links testosterone to brain function—criticizing TRT’s 200 mg weekly approach—and highlights supplements like Tongat Ali and Fadogia agrestis for raising free testosterone without sports detection. The discussion underscores how proper hormone optimization and electrolyte balance (e.g., sodium during dehydration) can enhance performance, longevity, and even animal health, like his dog Costello’s TRT success, while exposing the dangers of combat sports’ extreme weight-cutting practices. Ultimately, Huberman stresses that foundational habits—morning light, fasting, saunas—outperform peptides or government health guidance, emphasizing Rogan’s platform as a vital 2020-era education tool. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, anyway, I'm just a giant fan of CBD. I use it constantly.
I use it for, like, I use the roll-ons for muscle aches, and I use gummies, and CBDMD is one of my sponsors, but this Kill Cliff Company, this is actually a drink that I designed.
You know, the problem, like, I used to get CBD with THC from a local company in LA, and they were so inconsistent in that, like, I'd take, like, I had a thing.
I'd do, like, three droplets.
I'm like, okay, I got three droppers full, and then one day I did three droppers, and I was on the fucking moon.
I think with supplements, they're so poorly regulated.
I'm not pushing for regulation.
The last thing we need is regulation on it, but it's like melatonin.
I was talking to Matt Walker about this, my friend Matt, amazing sleep scientist.
And it turns out that the amount of melatonin, if it's listed like three milligrams or six milligrams, it can vary anywhere from being 15% of what's actually listed on the bottle to 85% more.
And if you look at how much melatonin is actually made by the pineal gland, It's a tiny fraction of the three milligrams it's supposed to be.
So in humans, it's probably not as dramatic as it is in animals that are seasonal breeders.
But long ago, when I was a graduate student at Berkeley, we would do these experiments on these little, what are called Siberian hamsters, these little hamsters.
And these hamsters only breed in long days because light, Basically suppresses melatonin, okay?
So in short days, long nights, seasonal breeding animals shut down breeding, right?
Humans can breed all year long, of course.
But if you give melatonin to a male Siberian hamster, its testes go from the size of standard marbles to the size of a grain of rice within a week.
They basically turn into like little shriveled, not even raisins, but little specks.
So when I hear about people taking a lot of melatonin and you've got this whole issue with falling testosterone, dysregulated estrogen in men and women, I just think it's not the best sleep aid.
The other thing, and Matt and I have talked about this a lot recently, just we've been hanging out and Chatting about science, or as he would say, splashing around in the science of sleep.
He's a Brit after all.
The problem with melatonin is it will help you fall asleep, but it won't help you stay asleep.
And so some people have this problem.
They take melatonin, they fall asleep, and then they wake up three or four hours later.
My favorite sleep cocktail based on really good, solid, peer-reviewed science is magnesium threonate.
It's T-H-R-E-O-N-A-T-E, threonate.
And something called apigenin, A-P-I-G-E-N-I-N, which is basically a derivative of chamomile.
Those two things work really well to – they essentially shut down the forebrain thinking, anticipating part of your brain, allow you to drift off into sleep really well.
Magnesium citrate is a great laxative, but magnesium threonate is going to be the one that's going to allow you to drift into sleep You know, it's interesting that you're saying this because one of the things that I've found that relaxes me more than anything is Epsom salts.
You know, I'm a big proponent of the isolation tank and the sensory deprivation tank is all filled with magnesium.
Malate, again, it's good for muscle soreness, but three and eight, what you want to take is about 300 to 400 milligrams.
But what you'll notice is on the bottle, it'll say elemental magnesium and then magnesium will be 300 to 400. And then it'll say equals 1000 milligrams.
Basically just go for 300 to 400 milligrams and you're good.
And then the other thing is apigenin, A-P-I-G-E-N-I-N. And this stuff is terrific.
It basically, that's the only source I'm aware of.
Yeah, whereas all the gym rats are like testosterone in a bottle.
Yeah, fuck it up, bro.
So apigenin turns on a chloride channel.
The way neurons work is you got stuff going in and out of them, and the chloride channel tends to turn off neurons a little bit in a good way and creates a...
For theanine, it's going to be 100 to 400 milligrams.
However, if you're a sleepwalker or you have what are called night terrors where you have really disturbing dreams, leave the theanine out because the dreams on theanine are intense.
The one thing about magnesium threenate I should mention is that there are some data, not a ton, that it's also neuroprotective.
So there's at least one study, peer-reviewed, independent, you know, not a company paying for the study, but done by a laboratory with no bias, that shows that magnesium threenate can offset some forms of atrial cognitive decline.
There seems to be some sort of synergistic effect because some people, of course, will take something for a long period of time and then it'll stop working.
You can take these, they're not habit-forming.
I mean, I've taken them consistently and then taken breaks and then go back on them.
And they really, in most cases, I mean, I guess if someone had a heart condition, a serious heart condition, anytime you mess with magnesium, because you have neurons in your heart, magnesium is involved in neuron function, obviously the usual things, check with your doctor, you know, and obviously I'm not a doctor, I'm a professor, so I profess things, I'm not prescribing anything.
sleep better and stay asleep.
And I think Walker would generally agree.
I can't speak for him.
He's really into all this new, like I don't want to take away his next kind of, he's planning some really amazing public education stuff.
I mean, like I think, first of all, that was an important podcast issue.
It wasn't just a brilliant podcast.
It was important because people were ignoring sleep.
We heard go hard driving, hard driving, hard driving.
And it's very important that people understand that the fundamental layer of health, mental health and physical health is regular quality sleep.
So he scared people appropriately, I think.
And now he's shifting to how can you get better at sleeping?
And we're joining forces in that mission.
But I want to be really clear.
He's doing it on his own, too.
I don't want to give away what he's got planned, but basically he, so Matt, David Sinclair, me, you know, Lex, all the nerds were kind of like, we're trying to get out there with the scientific information and help people.
And so Matt's got some really terrific sleep science and actionable sleep tool plans for the world.
He is talking about doing a brief weekly podcast on sleep health, launching sometime in August or September, which I just think is going to help so many people.
Now, using theanine to help sleep seems so strange to me that it would also be a nootropic, that it would also be something that enhances brain function.
Because it kind of...
I take...
AlphaBrain just released it today, AlphaBrain Black Label, the strongest version of AlphaBrain, which I've been testing over the last six months.
So the theanine is going to take down some of the stimulant effect of the caffeine and kind of, you know, the best way to work, the best nootropic is something that's going to put you in alert but calm.
I mean, if you're on them, you think you want to be on them.
You don't want to be on them.
So the theanine is going to take the edge off.
The caffeine anhydrous is the right form of caffeine.
You guys have good people working on this.
The phosphatidylsteine is going to actually be a little bit of a reduction of cortisol.
Which is good.
Most people are riding high on cortisol and not a good way.
You want cortisol each day, and we can talk about how to time it, but you want to time that peak in the right way.
Acetylcholine is going to increase acetylcholine, which is involved in the brain's ability to focus, to create that tunnel of attention, which is critical, right?
I mean, you can't be all over the place.
And the Ludimax 2020, I don't know.
That looks like a proprietary blend.
Let's see.
Marigold carotenoids.
Oh, lutein.
That's going to be good for vision.
Those are going to be good for eye health.
And actually, I looked into it based on our last discussion.
So for moderate to advanced macular degeneration, the data on lutein are good.
I have another theory, which is you're living in Texas now.
No joke.
And because this isn't a joke...
Because you're living in Texas, you're actually getting longer vista views.
You're looking at things at a distance more often.
I'm guessing.
I don't know your home environment or your lifestyle terribly much, at all really.
But we know that long distance viewing and getting outside into sunlight can offset macular degeneration and myopia, nearsightedness.
There's a huge, meaning thousands of subjects.
Study that was done in the US, also overseas, so the multiple site clinical trial, showing that if children get outside for two hours a day, even if they're on their phones, I hate to say it, but even if they're on their phones and they're reading and doing their thing, they don't develop nearsightedness.
And just being outside in natural light seems to help Offset vision loss.
And the reason is that when you look at things up close, the eyeball actually lengthens.
And because there's a lens there, the light gets focused in front of the retina, not on the retina, which is what you need in order to pass that information to the brain.
So that when you put on eyeglasses, you're basically giving it another lens to focus at the right place.
When you look at things at a distance, you use the musculature of the eye in a process called accommodation.
People can look it up.
We don't have to get into the details.
That lens becomes and remains bendy.
The lens in your eye bends.
It actually squishes and bends.
It's not like a standard rigid lens.
And so looking at things in the distance, getting natural light, actually blue light is good for us in the sense during the daytime, improves eye health.
It reduces myopia nearsightedness and can offset the progression of age-related macular degeneration.
Now, people shouldn't be blasting themselves with bright light because that can cause other issues.
But as long as the light isn't painful to look at, you're in safe territory.
So if someone is experiencing the beginning of macular degeneration, do you recommend going somewhere where you can see long distances and just concentrate on just how often should you do something like that?
When you look at measures of longevity, and of course, Sinclair is the ninja on all this, but how fast people are able to stand up.
You know, some people say, okay, let's go, and they...
It's like a slow, low-gear movement that takes half an hour, you know?
And other people, they just pop up.
The ability to jump, they're very well correlated with health and well-being and the ability to, I think, as Sinclair says, hip fractures are a big cause of early death.
It sounds weird, you think it's a hip fracture, Then you're sedentary.
Circulation slows down.
Everything gets messed up.
But knees over toes, guys, I love his stuff because he's really pointing to the fact that this muscle on the shin, right, is so vital for knee health.
And for me, it's really helped with the lower back thing.
And it's an odd thing to sit there and kind of point your toes like ballerina exercises, but you feel stable when you run.
This knee, I got a cadaver ACL. It's actually not an ACL. They take the Achilles tendon, which is thicker and stronger, so it's 150% stronger than the original ACL, and then they replace it.
And then the other one, I have a patella tendon graft ACL. Wow.
Yeah, I mean, I agree completely with your statement.
It's all connected.
These days, I'm still a neuroscientist, obviously, thinking about the brain a lot, but the connections between the brain and body and all the stuff going on in the body, we now know impacts the brain.
I mean, it's a whole system.
And I think that maybe he was on here a few years ago, Kelly Starrett?
And he's already deadlifting, doing all kinds of crazy stuff.
And apparently the way they do it now, if you go to a really good doctor, you know, there's obviously, you want to be real careful with something like this because this is something that It's not necessarily really permanent.
You know, if you beat it up, because they're using different surfaces, different people using different plastics and ceramics and different things to resurface the knee.
But, you know, he's able to do all kinds of wild shit that he couldn't do anymore.
So for him, it was one of those choices that it's an unfortunate choice, but he had to make it.
Michael Bisping, former UFC middleweight champion, He actually just got both of his knees resurfaced.
When we were kids, we'd go to these what are called lock-ins, they'd lock up the skate park at night, you could skate all night, but if you left, you couldn't come back in.
And Danny and his buddy Colin McKay, they were this little gang, they called themselves the Red Dragons, and they would just, for every time, it's like one run when you drop in and take a run, Danny would get 20 runs to everyone's run.
So John Cavanaugh, who's Conor McGregor's coach, That's Laura.
Laura Sanko is one of the UFC commentators, and she did an excellent interview with Kavanaugh, and they went over all the things that happened, and one of the things that happened in training camp was they think it probably cracked in training camp, and he got it scanned, and they said there might have been something there, but it's hard to tell.
It's probably some sort of a hairline fracture.
And they did their best to just stay healthy until they get into the fight.
But if you go to Laura's interview, it's really excellent.
And Kavanaugh explains that.
And it looks like John Wayne Parr picked up something too.
It looked like the shin was compromised on one of the leg kicks too.
Not the one that Dustin thought.
Dustin thought that it was probably damaged more than once.
Because Dustin checked one of the kicks and then pointed to Conor's shin.
Like, I know that hurt you.
But this one, this is from John Wayne Parr's page.
He throws his kick.
If you watch Conor's shin, see, look, it kind of buckles right there.
There's been so many fights in the UFC, and to have all these breaks in a row, there's been Jacques-Roy Sousa got his arm broken, Chris Weidman got his leg broken.
There's been a ton of breaks over and over and over again.
And then I'll have to go watch a video and go, oh, he sets it up with a wrist.
And you see, like, these weird ankle locks or some new foot lock or some new way to set up a heel hook or some new kind of, like, a choke.
And you're like, this...
It's wild.
Like, jujitsu is...
You know, there's two arms and two legs and a neck, right?
These are basically the things that you're trying to submit.
But the combinations and the variables, when you add them all together, there's just so many possibilities of things that you can do to someone and things that you can do to counter someone when they're trying to do something to you.
Well, he's literally, you couldn't ask for a better coach because he's so obsessed.
And because of that obsession, it's almost impossible to get a better coach.
No, it's impossible to get a better coach.
Literally impossible.
You get a really good coach.
There's great coaches.
You cannot get a better coach.
It's not possible.
There's guys that are probably as good as John.
I never met him.
But there's guys that are really good.
You know, Eddie Bravo is really fucking good.
I mean, he might be as good as John as a coach.
But to get a better coach is not humanly possible.
And to get a more dedicated coach, they don't exist.
You're not going to find someone that can teach the way that guy does seven days a week and also afterwards study tape all day.
So something will happen in class where someone will catch someone with some sort of a technique and then they'll say, okay, what is the counter to this?
How does someone get out of this?
Let's start in that position and let's analyze it.
So they'll do that and he'll go home and he'll find incidences of this technique being used in MMA, this technique being used in wrestling, and he'll analyze it and he'll break it down in slow motion and then he'll take notes and then he'll come back to class the next day with some new strategies.
Yeah, the way you describe it is the way a scientist gets obsessed with a problem and goes into the literature and then starts tinkering around in the lab, and it's a process.
And Stanford has a whole growing interest in human performance.
And I've had an interest in this for a long time.
I mean, you know, there are all the things that we talk about for normal health and well-being for the general public, all the stuff that before 2020 no one thought about.
And now people are saying, oh, maybe I should take some responsibility for my mental and physical health sleep.
Yes.
Hydration, physical exercise, all the things that you talk about and that I certainly believe in wholeheartedly people should do.
In the world of high performance, Those same things, it's gonna be light, temperature, hormone.
The hormone augmentation thing is always a little bit of a complicated discussion, but there's so much that's happening there right now that's really interesting.
Well, for instance, sort of back to the topic of supplements, I always say, look, their behaviors are the fundamental layer.
You have to do the right things for anything, for sleep, for learning, for sports performance, but then there's nutrition, supplementation, Prescription drugs and then off-label stuff, right?
And so we always think about when you hear hormones in sports, you always think just the raw conversation about anabolics, all the band stuff.
We can talk about that stuff and how it works.
Years ago, I used to work on androgens, testosterone and its derivatives and how it impacts brain development and body function, fear and also mental states.
But there's a category of supplements that are very interesting That for most people who aren't exploring testosterone augmentation for sport, work very well to increase testosterone by about 100 to 200 points.
Not, you know, 300, you know, not a tripling or anything like that.
I mean, I actually think that a lot of people who think they need TRT, when I hear about guys in their 20s and 30s, Look, I'm in my mid 40s and I can tell you that you can get and maintain very healthy testosterone levels without TRT if you do the right things, the behaviors, the nutrition, all the other stuff early on.
There's sometimes people have hypogonadal syndromes and things like that.
And it'd be an interesting conversation to talk about the role of testosterone in neural repair.
It's very interesting.
But when you look at TRT, I mean, the way that the clinics and the doctors typically do it is to give 200 milligrams and then send people out for two weeks and then they come back because they can charge them to come back repeatedly.
It's clear that without any TRT, the testes normally make anywhere from seven to 15 milligrams of testosterone per day.
So taking this massive dose and then waiting two weeks is absolutely foolish.
It's amazing to me that the medical profession does this because it doesn't match anything about the normal patterns of endocrinology.
So 0.2 mil, so maybe 20 to 60 milligrams every few days, every third day or so.
That much more closely matches.
The normal pattern of release and avoids these estrogenic crashes.
And a lot of problems that are layered onto estrogen are actually problems with prolactin, which is a molecule that's involved in milk letdown and lactating women, but it actually shuts down the sexual desire and aggression.
This is interesting about prolactin.
So this happens in brooding birds and it happens in humans.
They've done this, a study published in the journal Nature, which is our kind of apex journal.
Showed that when the husbands of pregnant women, because of something, maybe a pheromone, maybe some odor of the pregnant woman, actually increases the man's prolactin when they're pregnant, puts body weight on the guy, starts laying down body fat, presumably to prepare The father for the long sleepless nights ahead because humans have always co-parented.
And testosterone and prolactin are kind of working in opposite fashion.
So it's a very interesting thing, but the way you describe it is correct.
Now, for people that aren't getting prescribed TRT but want the increase in testosterone, there are these plant compounds like Tonga Ali and another one which is very interesting.
It's a Nigerian shrub called Fadojia agrestis, And it mimics luteinizing hormone, which is the hormone that comes out of the hypothalamus that stimulates the testes if you got those and the ovaries if you've got those to make more testosterone or estrogen.
And so those two herbal supplements together can give a significant boost in free and active testosterone.
Well, the reason I know about this stuff, people are probably thinking like, you know, Huberman's running gear out of the back of his cars.
And that's not what this is about, is that I do a certain amount of work with military and I do a certain amount of work with professional athletes who cannot take androgen compounds out of a syringe because they'll lose their job.
Or they've been doing that and they want to come off.
Although, and I'm not going to out the organization, but there is one major professional sports organization where, let's just say if somebody gets injured, they have permission to take up to 200 milligrams a week of testosterone.
And the decision to walk away is a choice usually.
They usually don't kill each other, although I know some of the injuries can lead to death.
So testosterone, these surges in testosterone that happens seasonally in certain species like rams or even these little hamsters, the males will rip each other's testicles off in order to fight for the right to mate.
So males of a given species have to actually overcome the fear of pain and punishment.
And the surge in testosterone is what causes the shift to the willingness to engage in battle.
And so when humans are taking low doses or reasonable doses of testosterone or they're increasing their testosterone or they're going through puberty, Effort and leaning into pain and challenge actually has the effect of making the body feel soothed and good.
It's a drive, just like sex is a drive or drinking water when you're thirsty is a drive.
This stuff is all anchored deep within the hypothalamus.
But what's interesting is another male lion comes along in this particular segment.
Normally these two male lions would fight, but this other male lion comes in and essentially saves the other one, runs off the hyenas.
And if you think about that behavior, it's incredible because this is an animal whose natural innate drive is to kill the other competition within his species, kill the other lion, and instead puts his own life on the line To try and rescue the other member of his species.
And lions don't sit around and think like, oh, I'm going to post this later on Instagram, or this is the right thing to do for my species.
It's a switch in the brain.
And those switches reside in the hypothalamus.
This kind of core area of our brain right above the roof of our mouth.
This is where all the fundamental drives are managed and regulated.
And there are chock-a-block full of testosterone receptors and estrogen receptors.
On the female side, it's also really interesting.
So in...
Species where there's pair bonding.
Humans are a really good example of that, but also other animal species where there's strong elements of pair bonding.
There is female-female competition.
Hmm.
Female animals of a given species start being nasty to one another in different ways.
Sometimes it's actual physical aggression.
Sometimes it's resource allocation.
They start blocking other females from getting access to the sires, the males that are desirable.
So they're playing this game around DNA. But they're not conscious of it, obviously.
And humans do this, too.
When, you know, female-female competition, when there's a male, desirable male in the equation, can be brutal.
I mean, you know, remember, I think there was this astronaut lady who, like, drove in diapers down to kill somebody Yeah, she was having an affair with this guy, and she...
It was either the guy's girlfriend or the guy's wife, but she drove for a full day to go to meet the lady, maest her, tried to get her to open up the door.
The girl wouldn't open up the door, she maest her, and she had worn a diaper so that she didn't have to stop to go to the bathroom, so she just...
And you know, there are all sorts of interesting facts around how hormones regulate brain development.
One of the ones that always makes usually men kind of go wide-eyed is that during development, the testes give off testosterone, no surprise there.
But the actual masculinization of traits within the brain, and there are certain traits that anatomically you can see, The masculinization of the brain is not by testosterone.
It's by testosterone that's aromatized, converted into estrogen.
So estrogen is actually what masculinizes the male brain.
And so going back to the sort of the TRT discussion and the testosterone discussion, these days there's a lot of discussion around, oh, you know, if your testosterone's too high, then, you know, it converts to estrogen and that creates these effects like, you know, gynecomastia, growth of the male breast tissue, reduction in libido, all these things.
Most of those effects are not actually caused by estrogen.
This is a common misconception.
Those effects are created by excessive levels of prolactin.
And the more common medical practice now is to not include estrogen blockers when people are doing testosterone replacement.
No anastrozole, none of those things, because they actually have very bad effects on the vasculature of the brain.
So prolactin is what's causing that growth of breast tissue.
Because I went down a rabbit hole the other day and I watched a bunch of YouTube videos of guys having their, what they call bitch tits, have them removed.
I teach neuroanatomy and I, years ago we used to do, I would do the labs also, now I don't do the lab part.
You occasionally see this.
I have a colleague, he's a physician, he always says, you know, the male breast tissue, it's one of those things that it's there, it's just not very interesting.
It just happens to be there and it's very small.
But if there's a big increase in prolactin, then you will see that.
People who take opioids, Like with the opioid crisis or heroin users, the reason why they get breast development is because dopamine inhibits prolactin.
So dopamine and testosterone are close cousins.
And this will immediately be familiar to you or anyone else that has had that experience of really being in the zone and hard driving and you're getting wins.
And we know that testosterone goes up as you're succeeding.
We know this.
I mean, I didn't do the blood serum analysis, but you can bet that in the Poirier-McGregor fight, if you did blood draws before, I don't know whose testosterone would be higher, doesn't really matter.
But afterward, you're going to see a significant decrease in the loser.
And you're going to see a significant increase in the winner.
You see this in day traders, you see this in school teachers.
Because testosterone feeds back on the brain and releases more dopamine because the brain is trying to learn what was the behavior that led to the win.
They mostly make it from their adrenal glands, these little glands that ride atop the kidneys and the lower back.
And at the core of the adrenals, they can release these androgens.
Occasionally, and just as a kind of a side note, occasionally a female child is born with a very enlarged clitoris.
Oftentimes you'll find a tumor on the adrenals in the pregnant mother.
It's not entirely uncommon.
There could be other reasons for that, but it's from elevated levels of androgens, testosterone.
And when females have a given species, You know, humans included.
When they have a win, they succeed, you know, get a degree or something good happens to them, whatever that is, they will release more dopamine and testosterone will go up a little bit.
And testosterone is responsible, a little increase in testosterone each month during the menstrual cycle is responsible for an increase in libido about 10 to 14 days before ovulation that kicks in right around ovulation for the purpose of trying to fertilize the egg.
It's what causes you to grow bald and it's what causes beard growth.
It has an inverse effect on the hair follicles of the face and on the hair follicles on the head.
And how many DHT receptors you have is very strongly genetically determined.
You go to some areas of the world, like Chile, and the men are all bald with like serious beards, legit beards, not like mine, like which is an attempt at a beard, right?
They have real beards or in Afghanistan, serious beards, that's genetic, okay?
So DHT has 600 times the affinity for the testosterone receptor than actual testosterone.
And nandrolone, deca, that the bodybuilders take to give that really hard look and the females in particular, female bodybuilders like, that gives that really hard kind of crisp grainy look.
Deca has, it's basically It's anabolic, but it's not androgenic.
It causes a lot of the muscle growth, the muscle repair without creating the deepening of the voice.
Actually, an Olympic runner was eliminated, sadly, because she was a phenomenal runner for, you know, urinalysis that was positive for DECA recently.
She blamed it on a pork burrito that she ate from a taco truck or something a couple nights before.
And my mind on this is, I hope she did Decca, only because if she lost her career from a pork burrito, that's tragic.
But if she took Decca and lost her career, well then, you know...
It would be very unusual for a meat to maintain that, especially if the meat was cooked.
So no one asked me, but a few people reached out, and I have some relationship to some Olympic committees, not the ones that drug test, but Olympic teams, I should say, to be specific.
So you've got receptors on your heart and on your blood vessels that dilate or constrict them.
And there's a drug, Climbuterol, that creates a lot of increase in core body temperature, helps you burn fat, but it also has this effect of maintaining muscle.
So it's not really a steroid, it's not working on hormones, it's working on the so-called autonomic nervous system, heating and cooling of the body.
Yeah, because when guys cut weight, one of the things that happens during these, I mean, it's not just starvation, but it's also massive dehydration, and you have a lot of decreased bodily function that's directly related to that.
I mean, gosh, I always say this, people who think they have low blood sugar, please try putting a little bit of salt in a glass of water and drinking it first.
My sister used to think she had labile blood sugar, would like pass out, all this stuff.
She's a bit of a hypochondriac anyway.
But anyway, there's a genetic thing there.
I said, look, just consume a small teaspoon of salt in your water.
Completely transformed everything.
And especially if you're on a low carbohydrate diet, you're gonna be excreting sodium.
Neurons require sodium to generate what's called the action potential, the firing of neurons.
Yeah, I think some bodybuilders died from clenbuterol.
So could he have gotten clenbuterol from bad meat?
Very unlikely.
If you think about the cattle industry and what they want to do, they want to make bigger, heavier cows, but they don't want to make big, heavy, super lean cows.
They want marbling in there and all that stuff.
Again, I didn't look at the blood analysis.
If he got popped for clembuterol and he didn't take it, that's tragic.
If he got popped for clembuterol and he did take it, it doesn't seem to be harming his career anyway.
Well, they have great knowledge of these plant compounds and how they affect the hormone system overseas.
You know, over here we are, you know, I'm a serious patriot, so it hurts me to say this, but we are miles behind what other countries are doing in terms of hormone augmentation and sports performance.
In the realm of hormones, but also temperature modulation, there are incredible plant compounds out there.
Like there's this thing that's now kind of going wild on the internet.
I've never tried it, but it's called Turkesterone.
And this is basically, and I actually reviewed, I did one episode of my podcast all about hormones, and I went deep into this literature, and Turkesterone, side by side with Deca or another testosterone derivative, it essentially acts the same way.
It increases testosterone and performance and recovery.
So these ectosterones, where it says ectosterone, ectosterones are actually known to, they are insect hormones.
That doesn't mean people are ingesting insects, but in insects, they have hormone systems that are similar to ours, but different, and they get their hormones often from plants.
You might appreciate this one.
There's a very interesting relationship between the marijuana plant and estrogen and testosterone.
And I want to say this is a very controversial area.
And when I say this, a lot of pot smokers get upset.
For some people, not all, marijuana and certain components of the plant, including the seeds, do you remember that rumor way back when, when I was in college, they'd say, you know, the seeds will make you sterile?
Turns out that certain elements of the marijuana plant increase aromatase, the enzyme that converts testosterone into estrogen.
And in talking to some of my colleagues who are plant biologists, they said, yeah, I'm not surprised at all.
There's an active component of plant to animal warfare where in order to control the populations of animals that eat a plant, a plant will make certain hormones that will sterilize the males of that species.
So I'm not saying smoking pot will make you sterile.
There's one study that shows that it increases testosterone and several studies that show that it decreases it.
And that means that they probably have a genetic predisposition towards high levels of aromatase.
So it's all over the place.
Just like some people do real well on the carnivore diet, other people do well on a vegan diet, and some people like me are omnivores and we're happy that way.
There are going to be people that just don't do well hormonally on marijuana, and there are going to be other people that do.
It is highly individual and it's so interesting when it comes to whether it's diet or when it comes to consuming something controversial like marijuana that everybody wants this one size fits all approach and it's not realistic.
Like for me, I know that fasting in the early part of the day, I'm more focused and I'm a little bit high strong early in the day.
And so I train then and then I dig into work and then I eat low carb throughout the day.
So I'm effectively low carbohydrate because when you're low carbohydrate, because carbohydrates trigger the release of serotonin, they have a calming effect.
We know this.
You have a big plate of pasta, it kind of mellows you out.
It soothes you.
It blunts cortisol.
Whereas if you don't eat carbohydrates, you tend to have a little bit of adrenaline in your system and it's go, go, go, go, go.
And then in the evening I eat pasta and rice and less protein so that I can get to sleep easily.
And I repack all the glycogen that I burned throughout the day, training and doing a bunch of things like that.
So this idea that you have to be low carb Every day, all day, or you have to be high-carb.
That's crazy.
I mean, I think, I do know people who've done well on the carnivore diet.
I only learned about it through your podcast and through, I forget his name, the guy with- Paul Saladino?
And I'm almost, like, every day there's some kind of heavy exercise going on, pretty much, except for Sundays.
And sometimes Saturdays I take off too, but unless there's something crazy going on where I can't work out during the day on a weekday, most weekdays there's a pretty brutal workout session in there.
And so by the time the end of the day comes with podcasts, then I'm doing stand-up at night a lot of these nights, I'm tired.
I don't, but, so there's a really interesting thing around temperature.
We hear so much about light, hormones, nutrition.
To me, temperature is the untapped power tool.
It's just amazing what you can do with temperature.
So when you wake up in the morning, your temperature is increasing.
If you exercise early in the day, your temperature will undergo a further increase.
And then what you effectively do by exercising early in the day, especially viewing light and exercising early in the day, is you time the onset of that melatonin pulse to come on 16 hours later, which is going to put you to sleep.
But in order to get into sleep and stay asleep, your temperature's got to drop.
And that starts for most people around 4 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon, although it depends on when you're waking up.
As that temperature drops, it's going to be much easier to get into sleep.
So there are a couple ways to accelerate that transition.
One is to get into a sauna, which sounds counterproductive, or take a hot bath or a hot shower.
But when you do that, the body actively cools.
And when you get out, your body is dumping heat like crazy.
And then you have that kind of almost coma-like feel where you get into sleep.
Well, there you also get something really powerful.
I know Rhonda Patrick has talked a lot about this and knows more about this than I do, but in researching some of the literature, if you do 20 minutes of sauna or so in the evening and you crank it up, you're getting up to the 200, 210 zone or 190 to 210. And that has this huge effect on growth hormone release, 16-fold increase in growth hormone release.
If you do it regularly, you kind of adapt to it.
And you might say, well, how does that work?
Well, temperature.
One of the ways to coordinate the systems of the body is by changing core body temperature.
And it sounds so obvious when you hear it, but we don't often think about that.
So when you wake up early in the day and you view sunlight, you're creating an increase in body temperature by the signals that go through the eye to the hypothalamus and to the systems of the body.
And then that exercise in the day also sets you up for a lot of energy during the day and then a kind of a crash into sleep later that night.
The other thing is they say to keep the room cool at night while you're sleeping, or if you need it, one of these eight sleep things, or chili pad, I think is the other one.
I don't have any relationship to either one.
I asked my colleague, Craig Heller at Stanford, who's a world expert in thermal regulation, temperature regulation.
I said, why keep the room cold?
And he said, well, that's interesting because it turns out that most of your heat dumping occurs through three locations on your body.
It's called a glabrous skin.
It's very interesting.
It's the hairless skin, which is on the upper part of the face, the palms of the hands and the bottoms of your feet.
Now you can dump heat through those, they're like portals where you dump heat and you actually can pass cool and heat into the body too, but this is a separate conversation.
So you're asleep in the middle of the night and if you start heating up, what you'll notice is you start putting a foot out or a handout and what you're doing is you're dumping heat in order to stay asleep.
You just do this subconsciously.
Whereas if the room is too hot, What are you going to do?
You're going to put your hand in an ice bucket?
You'd need to have some cooling device in the room.
So this is why it's good to drop the temperature in the room at night.
And these surfaces are super interesting.
They have what are called AVAs, arteriovenous astimoses.
It's a fascinating aspect of how we're built and how animals are built.
Normally blood goes from the heart through arteries, then goes through the little capillaries, which are like the little fine ones and then to veins and then back to the heart.
There's some exceptions that that's basically how it works.
In the palms of our hands, in the bottoms of our feet, and in our upper face, it goes direct from arteries to veins, these AVAs.
And animals and humans where there's, it's because there's no hair follicles there.
Even if you're not really hairy, you have hair, little tiny hair follicles everywhere except these three locations.
And we dump heat very readily from the body through them.
And so this is why I was going to say, you know, in the hot months, it's actually really hot here in Texas.
If you're overheating, people will put like a cold ice bucket or a blanket or something around their neck.
It's terrible.
It cools the blood going to the brain.
The brain thinks that you're cooling off and the hypothalamus starts to heat up the body.
This is how people cook their organs.
The best way, and they do this now with firefighters, have done some work and we're starting to do some work, Craig and I, with military and with the UFC guys, with Duncan French, we've got something planned here.
It's spinning up now.
You want to get the palms or the bottoms of the feet into cool water.
And that has the effect of cooling off the core of the body much, much faster.
And this has profound effects on athletic performance and job performance.
We always think about the athlete stuff, but there are a lot of guys working construction sites, they're out in the desert, you know, sitting around like shooting bad guys and doing all sorts of stuff.
And hyperthermia is dreadful.
So you can cool the body by effectively taking something like this.
There's a device that Craig has, there's this company called Cool Mitt.
It's only available now to athletes and to military, but it should be available to consumers soon, where you can cool the core of the body simply by holding Something of the appropriate cold temperature.
Now, if it's too cold, it'll constrict the vessels and it just shuts down the system.
Not good.
So this is amazing.
They've done some experiments in Craig's lab with the guys from the 49ers who could come in, they give them 10 sets of dips.
This is wild, but it's published peer-reviewed data, 10 sets of dips.
One of their athletes, I forget, because he's a pro athlete, did 40 dips on the first set, and then it kind of drops 10, 10, with three minutes rest in between.
Comes back in a few days, and now they have him in between sets for three minutes.
I think it was three, maybe two minutes.
Hold on to the appropriate temperature cooling device.
Now he punches out six-fold more dips.
He can just go set after set after set.
He's increasing volume and repetitions.
So he's not getting stronger, he can do more.
I know it's crazy, but the way it works is very well understood.
Do you have, when your muscle works, like let's say you're doing curls on, yeah.
This is cool, man.
So this is at work in a lot of Special Forces guys, 49ers.
It's only one hand because you're passing, you can't really pass cool into the body, but you're cooling off the heat of the body.
And we don't often think about the relationship between heat and performance, but it's very straightforward.
So when you, let's say you're doing a set of curls, curls always seem to be the example, but you're doing a set of curls, the bicep is heating up and eventually you hit failure.
The reason you hit failure is not because you don't have the strength to do it.
You just did a rep with that.
It's because muscle contraction is dependent on an enzyme called pyruvate kinase.
And as the muscle heats up, pyruvate kinase can't work and you can't convert energy into ATP in the muscle.
That's failure.
Is the heating of the actual muscle tissue.
So when you cool the body at its core, pyruvate kinase can continue to convert ATP into energy and the muscle keeps contracting.
And they've done this with endurance also.
It's a really interesting area.
And this literature actually goes back about 10 years, but no one had ever devised this.
So what we're planning with UFC is we're going to get, so there is to have people cool between rounds properly, not by putting ice on the back of the neck, which just feels good or by dampening the, but by actually cooling the core of the body.
And we think this is going to have important effects, not the hypothesis is it will have important effects, not just for performance, but also a lot of the brain injury that occurs, you know, part of it is the head hit, but part of it is the hyperthermia, the dehydration.
You know, if you look at the history of fights where guys died in boxing, when they went from 15 rounds to 12, fewer people were dying.
And it could be more head hits, but the idea that we're going to test Duncan and the folks out at the UFC and the folks at Stanford is that we know it improves performance, but that it will also help with recovery and hopefully that it'll help with some of the brain injury issues.
I think one of the things that happens with boxers in particular, with deaths, is most of them, like the vast majority in the lighter weight classes, which indicates that these guys are, again, they're dehydrating themselves, they're cutting weight, which is...
One thing that I've been really vocal about that I've tried to get people to listen to, but right now it falls on deaf ears, except for fans and athletes who agree, is to cut weight cutting out.
And I think there's got to be a way to do it.
My position is that it's legalized cheating.
I think when you look at what weight cutting is, weight cutting is essentially you're pretending you're lighter than you are.
Imagine you're doing this 24 hours before you engage in a cage fight.
It's the dumbest fucking thing we do.
It is literally the dumbest thing we do in the sport.
And I would love it if they instituted some sort of a radical change where they...
There's a company called One FC. I don't know how they do it.
They're out of Singapore and they have some sort of a hydration test that they use on athletes.
I know they also have this in wrestling.
They have hydration tests that they use, particularly, I believe, in high school and college wrestling.
They want to make sure that these guys aren't, because in those days, they're making weight the day of the event.
At least the UFC athletes have ample time to rehydrate, but it's still, it's a ridiculous stressor on the body to make someone dehydrate to the tone of, so for some guys, it's 30 pounds.
Well, what I don't understand is it seems like You know, one of the reasons athletes take steroids is because they want to break records and crowds love it when athletes break records.
No one wants to see everyone run progressively slower in the Olympics every year.
So, you know, now you don't let them take anabolics just ad libitum because otherwise that would just be a mess.
Although they do it anyway, let's be honest.
There are so many ways around these tests.
In terms of dehydration and weight cutting, you would think in the UFC that the fans would love it because they would see better performances.
I think you'd see longer careers because there's some guys that...
I think there's quite a few issues.
And some of them are just related to the organization itself.
I believe we need more weight classes.
There's not enough weight classes and there's large gaps in between these weight classes which encourages this dehydration.
Especially when you get to the heavier weight classes.
There's a gap between middleweight and light heavyweight.
It's 20 pounds.
That's an enormous gap.
85 and 205. It's just enormous.
And if you're a guy who's walking around at 195 or whatever and you decide to fight at 85 pounds, you're cutting 10 pounds, you might have a guy who's 215 pounds and decides to get down to 85 pounds.
And when he gets down to 185, what he's going to do is try to grab ahold of you.
A lot of these guys, or they'll have more punching power, or they take a shot better because they're just larger human beings.
And again, there's bad weight cuts where it doesn't work out well, and the guys have poor performances, and they blame it on a bad weight cut, and it's true.
I would like all that to be factored out, and I think it's 100% possible.
And I've spoken to the UFC about it multiple times, but I'm like, alright, no one's listening to me.
It's like, it should be too big of a change.
But I think it would be very important for the health of the athletes, the longevity of the athletes, and then also the integrity of the sport.
You're pretending, like, I'll give you an example.
You stand next to him and you go, how is that guy 170?
Well, he's not.
He's 170 at the weigh-ins.
And he's not even the most egregious.
There's been guys that have cut way more weight than that.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe on fight day he's 190. Maybe.
But he's a big guy.
There's no way he's 170. He's not even close to 170. And he's the 170-pound champion.
And this is not a knock on him, because I'm a giant fan of him, because everybody does it.
You go down to 155, the champion, Charles Oliveira, used to fight at 145. And he was killing himself to make 145, and he kept losing.
It just wasn't sustainable.
And you could see he missed weight a couple of times, and then he goes up to 155, and then he becomes the champion.
But even then, he's really not 155, he's probably 170. You know, he's probably walking around at 170 and then he dehydrates himself down to 55 and then weighs in and then rehydrates himself up again.
It's just bad for you.
It's just bad for you and it's a terrible thing to do a day before you're about to do the most difficult thing in all of sports.
There's too many belts That's why when you get a rare the very very rare undisputed champion of the world You know where the guy owns all the weight classes.
It's so rare and box the last person to have that good question Somebody probably has it today.
I don't know.
I think Tyson Fury had the opportunity if he fought Anthony Joshua or, you know, either one.
Years ago, I was down in Australia for a meeting called Vision Down Under, and it rained the whole time.
We were on this little island called Fraser Island.
And on the last day, we were boarding the boat, and it was beautiful.
And I said to the guy who was riding the boat, I was like, oh, man, I wish I had...
Gone swimming here.
I wish the weather had been nice.
And he said, you know, you can't swim here.
This place is loaded with tiger sharks and these jellyfish that will kill you.
I said, but there are no signs.
You know, in the U.S., like they got a sign for everything.
And he goes, oh, yeah, well, everybody knows that.
And I thought, oh, my goodness, like basically the bad weather saved my life because I would have just gone during one of the breaks or probably during one of the sessions.
You know, in the laboratory we have all these toxins.
Fugu toxin from the Puffervish TTX. We've got alpha-latra toxin, which is from Black widow spiders.
You have alpha bungro toxin from the pit vipers.
These are research tools that are used to block transmitters, what, you know, the chemicals that neurons use to communicate with one another.
And they were all derived and discovered from these animals.
And the animal actually that can kill you the fastest is one of these cone fish, Or it's a cone snail, excuse me, it's like a snail that sits on the bottom of the ocean and it shoots this little tentacle up into the body of the fish.
And it puts in these neurotoxins that their potency, they work at what we call, you know, sort of picomolar concentration, which for the non-scientists out there just means very, very tiny concentrations.
And so in the lab, you know, you have a tiny vialis that could kill, you know, 40, 50 people.
They're all regulated, of course, because these are bio-warfare.
They're actually botulinum neurotoxin, you know, from cans.
Remember, cans could have botulinum that would cause freeze-up of the muscles.
I'm guessing it's because the so the sweat gland As interesting, we were talking about temperature.
The sweat gland is actually controlled by the same receptor, the acetylcholine receptor, as is the muscles that contract.
When you move a muscle of any kind, it's because you have acetylcholine receptors.
Botox blocks acetylcholine receptors.
It's alpha-bungarotoxin from the pit viper.
They're injecting it there.
So there's acetylcholine's release and the muscle can't contract.
It just sits there flaccid.
So it's this like flaccid paralysis.
There are all these things that can kill you that you have in the laboratory that uses a research tool.
You're obviously very careful with them, but it was reported, I don't know if they ever verified it, that before he was killed, Saddam Hussein had botulinum spores.
He was growing botulinum.
In laboratories over there because all you would have to do is release a small amount of these spores into the air and you could kill an entire city with botulinum easily.
So bioterrorism is something that we don't hear about as much these days because now we hear more about information terrorism and control over information grids and The internet, the viruses and the whole thing, but these toxins work at extremely low concentrations and they all come from the natural kingdom, you know, pit vipers and the black widow's spider one is a, I can imagine be a particularly bad death.
Alpha-lateral toxin causes the nerve that releases acetylcholine to vomit all the acetylcholine at once.
So if you had A lot of alpha-latra toxin injected in your body.
Every muscle would be completely flaccid.
Every nerve cell would dump all the acetylcholine and you would just, it's gotta be the most horrible death ever.
So this little toddler is walking around by the water, and this fucking alligator came out, snatched the toddler, and dragged it into the water and ate it.
Yeah, my friend Jim Shockey, he's a famous hunter.
He lives in Canada, and they actually hired him to go to, I think it was Zimbabwe.
There was some river in Africa where the local people were getting preyed upon by crocodiles at such an alarming rate that everyone in the village had scars.
There was guys missing an arm, a lady would miss a leg, people with, like, bites taken out of their thighs.
These things would just snap.
And while he was there setting up, one of the women who was washing clothes got snatched up from the beach.
They're everywhere there.
And they're fucking huge.
These are enormous, like, 18-foot crocodiles that are just snatching people.
But, you know, you're putting a dent in a population of super predators that's probably established itself very deeply, like the roots of those things.
There's probably so many of them, you're not really going to do enough to keep these people safe.
But they would put these poles in the ground and set up almost like a crude fence around an area where they could gather water and then, you know, and wash their clothes and stuff.
And the crocodiles would figure their way through it.
I spent a lot of time, I work for a journal called the Journal of Comparative Neurology, where you compare the eyes and brains to a lot of different species.
When you look at the brain of a given species, you get a really good picture about what that species cares about.
If you look at the brain of a sent hound, These are scent hounds that went down in veterinary clinics.
Never want to kill a dog.
Love dogs.
But they have huge olfactory bulbs compared to a sight hound, which has small olfactory bulbs.
Or a bulldog, which basically has no olfactory bulbs.
I mean, along these lines, I just to your doctor is a good one because whoever that is, because there was an article recently, I think it was Wall Street Journal, maybe it was Washington Post that said that they've been pulling vets and vets are starting to say, yeah, if you really ask me, it's not the right thing to do for their health.
Just about the joint pain.
I mean, Costello was a 90 pound Bulldog Mastiff.
He has to carry that load.
And he can't repair his joints.
The moment he started getting regular TRT. I'm coming clean.
My dog was on TRT. Usada, come after me.
He was happier.
He slept better.
His breathing got better.
Everything was better.
At the end, like a nerve degeneration thing got him.
What we do to these animals is terrible.
You can't castrate a male animal unless you have an exceptionally good reason to do it.
I think it's actually cruelty to animals to do it.
And I confess I did it not knowing better.
There's a reason why they give testosterone to help depression in male species.
I mean, sociopathic, it's actually technically, it's not sociopathy.
It's called antisocial personality disorder, if you look in the psychiatric handbook.
Forebrain damage is part of that.
I mean, an inability to regulate behavior.
Sociopaths are a little bit different because they're very calculating.
It's not impulsivity.
It's more they're playing long game, kind of terrible stuff.
In any event, when your cat shifts into seeing something it wants to eat, complete transformation.
And then the stalking is a lot of top-down control, as we call it, the forebrain going, no go, no go, no go.
And that teeth chatter is a little bit of behavior sneaking through It's like in that tonic, tonic, as we call it, tonic paralysis, and then bam, it just does the attack.
And so it's a beautiful example.
Predation is a beautiful example of the brain regulating its own behavior because it gets one shot to bolt out after that mouse or bird or whatever it is.
And so that teeth chatter is just a little bit of reflex that is creeping through that, and then it, whoosh, the valve hits.
I go, this is some meat from a deer who liked to kick babies and was about to join ISIS. And then I wrote hashtag vegan.
And because I wrote hashtag vegan, it got in the hashtag vegan world.
So people look for other vegan posts.
People who are really into veganism, they look up other vegans and they're all excited about vegan posts.
And so for me having this hunk of deer meat and a joke, you know, that it was a deer that liked to kick babies and was about to join ISIS. When I did that all these fucking people came after me in like the most mean Vicious way like what are they do?
They said so compassionate these vegans, but one of the things they did was this one lady came at me in this really Ruth when people get really mean one things I always like to do is like to try to see This is before I stopped reading people's comments by the way.
I want to get very important so I get to the to this lady's page and she's a fucking complete lunatic and And one thing I see in one of her hashtags is hashtag vegan cat.
So, literally in my bit, I go, fuck, should I click this?
Because it was late at night, and I was like, goddammit, this is going to keep me up all night long, because I know I'm going to go down a rabbit hole.
And I did, so I went down this rabbit hole.
And what I said is, it's a series of photographs of cats that look like they're in a house with a gas leak.
And I confess, in my research career, I've worked on animals.
I have worked on a lot of animals.
Nowadays, I work on humans, which feels much better because they consent.
And animal research is important.
I mean, you have to be thoughtful about what you do and why, but it is important because you're not going to put experimental stuff into humans, you know.
You could, but legally you can't.
So when we take these animals and we domesticate them, sometimes It's kind, and we enter this reciprocal, symbiotic relationship with them.
But sometimes you're depriving the animal of some basic instincts that's so innate that you're actually torturing the animal.
He really parses the literature on sports performance physiology.
I mean, he does it right down to the muscle microscopy, but he also works with athletes and typical people.
He's a real practitioner.
I mean, I really have respect for him.
I love these people.
I guess it sounds like Donaher is his name.
People have just really poured themselves into something, but he's a hunter as well.
Hunters and ranchers really understand the relationship between animal and human, and they understand that before this thing is your pet, before it's got its name or it's your dog or it's your cat, it's an animal.
And if you look at the brain of an animal, you can understand that this brain needs certain things.
And if you deprive it of those things, it is a form of animal cruelty.
Because those were brought by the King of India, brought them to King Kamehameha, who was the king of Hawaii at the time, and they brought in this incredibly prolific animal with no predators.
So, in the island of Lanai, you gotta say it right.
I usually say Lanai, but it's Lanai.
They have 3,000 people and somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 deer.
When you're there at night and you drive, like we were there and this lady turned the headlights on for us and turned towards the field, and you see...
A fucking thousand eyeballs.
You can't believe how many eyeballs you see looking back at you.
Well, one of the beautiful things about Lanai is that you're there and there's a Four Seasons there.
So you stay in the Four Seasons.
Or you could rent a house.
One of the guys rented a house and a few of the other hunters stayed there.
But there's only a few.
It's paradise, essentially.
So you're staying at the beach in paradise and then you hang out all day.
Lift weights, fuck around, swim in the pool, and then in the late afternoon you go hunting.
So you go hunting, you leave at like 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and that's when the wind starts to pick up, and that wind will disguise your sound and your movement, and we found that to be the most effective way.
To hunt.
We figured out somewhere along the line that we're way more effective in the afternoon than we were in the morning.
And because I was there with my family as well, I said, okay, this is what I'll do.
I'll just dedicate my entire day to hanging out with my wife and kids, and then in the afternoon we'll get to hunt again.
It's an odd place to hunt because it's kind of unnatural, right?
You're in paradise and it's also an invasive species.
But it's one of the best places to hunt ethically because they must kill these things because they're very overpopulated.
They don't have a disease problem, but it's always a possibility that something could be introduced into the population, whether it's brucellosis or CWD or something that does...
Yeah, well, this whole thing, whether or not it was from a lab or it was from an animal, this whole thing with the virus out of China, it was definitely out of China.
We know that much.
Tells you that the relationship between animals and humans is a very thin veil.
Like there's a place that I hunt in Utah, and it's a really rare place.
It's a beautiful place in the mountains of Utah.
And the people that run this enormous ranch, it's like 250,000 acres.
The people that run this, it's all like free range, wild animals.
But they won't allow anyone to hunt an animal that's less than nine years old.
So every animal that you're hunting is an animal that's evolved or evaded, rather, bears and mountain lions and even wolves there.
They've started to see some wolves in this one area.
So these are wise animals.
And that's the idea, is that this animal has bred.
They have passed on their genetics, and they have successfully, you know, bred for multiple years.
Now, here they are in, you know, when you're around nine years old, an elk, if they're lucky, lives to be like 11 or 12. Oh, that's the full lifespan.
I mean, maybe if you have them and you have no predators and you feed them, maybe they can live longer.
But the odds are, I mean, if you find a 15-year-old elk in the wild, that's crazy.
And usually they're going downhill.
Like, usually their antlers are shrinking, their body's shrinking like an old man, and they're deteriorating.
So when someone gets an animal with large antlers, it's A, good for conservation, because you're not taking an animal out before it spreads its genetics.
In fact, it spreads its genetics from multiple seasons.
And this idea of taking that and bastardizing it and feeding these animals this insane diet out of feeders.
So these animals literally will wander up to the feeder in the afternoon because they know it's about to go off.
They're on a timer.
And there's...
They'll spread these pellets, so they'll hear the noise of the machine go off, and they'll wade towards the pellets like it's dinner time, like a fucking dog.
There's a guy at Caltech, great university obviously, a guy named David Anderson who studies things like aggression and whatnot.
And he's looked at these.
The hypothalamus is really interesting.
It's like this group of neurons.
They're all densely packed together.
But with modern methods now, you can really...
Turn on and off the different populations of neurons.
So they did this study a few years ago, looking at an area of the hypothalamus called the ventromedial hypothalamus.
And for years, people were confused about this area because you'd lesion it in an animal and the animals wouldn't fight, but they also wouldn't mate.
And what they eventually discovered is they have two populations of neurons in the structure, some that are responsible for mating and some for fighting.
So then using modern methods, what the Anderson lab showed is that if you trigger activation of one set of neurons in these In this ventromedial hypothalamus, the animals will just, the males will go and mount the female and mate as a mice.
If you at that moment, turn off those neurons and turn on the neurons that are right near them that are responsible for aggression, the male mouse will try and kill the female mouse.
But it's so extreme that if you just give a male mouse a glove filled with air or water and you turn on these neurons, The mouse will just go into a rage and try and kill the glove.
Or the dog park phenomenon, where people always say, if your dog is mounting another dog, they always say, oh, yeah, they're dominating them.
And female animals have this circuit too.
You'll see a female pit bull.
My ex-partner and I, we had a pit bull as well.
It was an amazing dog, but you know, she was pretty dominant pit bull.
And we'd take her to the dog park and she would sometimes mount another dog.
And that isn't sexual mounting, that is dominance mounting.
And there's actually a separate circuit in the brain for dominance mounting.
And we, you know, people have been puzzled by this for a long time.
You know, is it sex?
Is the sex the dominant dominance?
And of course, this is in humans.
This is a very thin line.
Yeah, and who knows, right?
But let's face it, all of that would not fetishes and mounting and subs and doms and all that stuff would not be as much interest as it was if that circuitry didn't exist.
That's why you got the part up front But I do have to say that there is a part of whatever we're made out of that deeply connects with hunting if you're a meat-eater and when you Kill an animal and then eat it that day over a fire It is like a door opens up to the past and you get this rush of Whatever the endorphin is that I'd never experienced before I did that and
And it convinced me on the spot that I was going to be a hunter for the rest of my life.
I was like, that day, I can remember that day, my friend Steve Rinell that I talked about earlier took me hunting, we shot a mule deer, and then we're eating its liver, we cooked it over the fire.
Both her parents actually are Stanford professors.
And early on, she was obsessed with animal welfare and like the relationship between animals and humans.
And look, it's very hard to do in talking with her.
You know, it's it's hard to do that at scale.
That's the problem.
How do you grow that?
And that's the issue.
But I think what's what's great is as people start to understand more about how I would say the five pillars essentially of health are like light, temperature, movement, nutrients, and then there's the other stuff like breathing and all the other stuff you do.
But in that nutrients category, it's like the quality of what you eat is without question as important as the amount and all that.
And I think that a focus on food quality and sourcing is it's such an important conversation.
I think that hunters And ranchers, they understand this relationship.
He got into it to be the best bow hunter he could be because it's very difficult.
Bow hunting success, general bow hunting success, and a lot of this, you have to factor in public land, which is, I generally hunt private land.
A, because I have the financial resources, and B, because I don't want to be around that many people.
It's just like public land is, it's kind of, you're hunting two things.
You're doing two things that are difficult.
You're hunting a wild animal and you're in competition with a bunch of other people that are hunting the wild animal.
To me, I understand that there's an access issue that's tied to finances and I understand that for a lot of these people there's a badge of courage to be able to be successful hunting on public land.
But these animals are heavily, heavily pressured.
And many times what these real hardcore guys do is they'll hike into the backcountry 20 miles so they get away from people that aren't willing to do that.
Well now, because of people like Cam Haynes, because of a lot of these like Aaron Snyder and a lot of these crazy backpacking people, other people are doing that now too.
You'll go 20 miles in and you'll see a fucking wall tent filled with five guys and you're like, shit!
Okay, got another 10 miles.
And you're trying to get the fuck away from everybody.
I want to be around animals that behave like wild animals.
Animals that, if you're lucky, they've never seen a person.
Or, you know, maybe they saw someone from a distance riding a horse and they're like, what the fuck is that?
And they got out of there.
The more undisturbed they can be, the better.
And I find that's more likely the case on private land.
The issue is an issue of economics.
The issue is an issue of access and whether or not these highfalutin fuckheads like me who can afford to go to these private places, whether it's just as much of an accomplishment.
It's certainly you have more opportunity because there's more animals and they're more undisturbed.
So they're not going to be as jumpy.
There's a real problem with that.
If you go to a place that's a public land place on opening day, like I was in Wisconsin for opening day of deer season, and it sounds like World War II. Oh, because most people aren't using bow hunting.
Have you seen, there's this kid, Michael, he goes by Guanzhou Sound on Instagram, and he's been doing these song mashups of Lex and Donaher and you and, dare I say, me?
They're hilarious.
So he does like remixes, like songs of them, and they're pretty funny.
The problem with these animals, the crazy antlers, is not just that it's gross and that they feed these animals and then they release them on these properties and these guys shoot them and make it look like they did a big thing when they really are basically shooting a tamed animal.
The problem is they spread CWD. And one of the main ways that CWD gets spread is the captive-servit industry.
So there's a whole thing about this where some people that have a vested interest in the captive-servit industry are in denial about CWD and how dangerous it is.
And it's spreading.
I had a scientist, God, I can't remember his name, Brian, who came on with my friend Doug Duren.
My friend Doug, who owns a large farm in Wisconsin, a beautiful place, in the Driftless area, do you know what that means?
That's the area where the glaciers flattened it out.
This is an area where the glaciers missed.
So it's the driftless area of Wisconsin.
It's gorgeous.
It's called Cazenovia, Wisconsin, is where he's at.
And they are finding, like, you know, a large percentage of their deer that have this CWD. And the problem with CWD is when an animal's infected, it starts oozing out of its mouth.
Yeah, they start dripping CWD, that's blue tongue, I guess that's a different disease.
They start dripping this CWD out of their mouth and nose, and it gets into the tree, see if I can find some other versions of it.
It gets into the plants, and when it gets into the plants, it actually, I don't want to fuck this up, but I think it actually gets into the DNA of the plants.
And somehow or another, it stays in those plants.
Like, it has a really long fucking half-life.
And these new animals come along, and they can eat the plant, and then get CWD from it.
So, the odds are, and these things, they...
Deer travel, right?
They travel for miles, and so they're traveling, and they're spraying this oozy shit out of their mouth, and it's getting onto these other plants, and then other deer coming along and getting it and doing the same thing and spreading it, and it's now all through most of the country, and it's jumped from...
It's now they found it in mule deer, and I believe they may have found it in elk.
I'm pretty sure there's some instances of elk that have CWD as well.
Yeah, and there's a particularly nasty type of coyote that lives in B.C. that they took out a woman in, I want to say it was like 2007 or something like that, a young singer.
She was a very promising singer, and she was apparently really talented, and she went for a walk, and a pack of coyotes ate her.
They're very aggressive and they're nasty to each other.
Like this idea that they're these cute little fluff balls.
That's always drove me crazy about bears in general.
Like people get mad at people shoot bears.
Like don't kill bears.
Like listen to me.
First of all, if you don't shoot bears, you're going to have bears everywhere because bears don't have any natural predators other than other bears.
And if you think you like bears, you're not going to like bears if they eat your family because that's what they'll do because bears have been eating people since the beginning of time.
Well, and if there are sufficient numbers, I mean, actually, you might find this interesting.
I was researching taste recently, the sense of taste, and there are these five senses, right?
Salty, sweet, da-da-da.
We have the umami, the savory receptor.
That's what gives like that really nice taste of meat.
It's actually cueing the brain and the gut of the presence of amino acids, which is one of the most important things to ingest, amino acids.
Lions and bears and carnivores have 5,000 times the density of umami receptors in their mouth, but they have, except for the panda bear, Which has 5,000 times more sweet receptors.
So your dog actually doesn't have sweet receptors in its mouth.
It only has umami receptors.
So it can taste salty, it can taste sour, but it has the taste of meat for a bear.
So seasonally breeding animals, there's more light, more dopamine, more testosterone, they mate.
Days get shorter, less dopamine, less testosterone and estrogen, and they don't mate.
But the other thing that's really fascinating is that in animals that during the winter, their coat is white, and in the summer and spring months, their coat is dark.
Dopamine has a precursor.
It's a molecule called tyrosinase.
Anytime you see ASE, that's an enzyme, the tyrosinase molecule is actually what causes pigmentation.
So sunlight causes the pellage, the color of the fur to go dark because of dopamine.
And so people who are albinos or animals that are albinos, it's because they have a mutation in this tyrosinase.
So with the white, red eyes, typically, not always red eyes, but often red eyes, white fur, They can't actually take sunlight and convert it into melanin.
Basically it goes sunlight and then there's a bunch of other biochemical steps and melanin.
So there's this beautiful relationship between light, dopamine, testosterone, mating, hair color, right?
And temperature, because in long days, generally it's warmer than in short days where it's cooler.
So light and temperature are kind of pushing on a bunch of physiological mechanisms to make some animals want to breed at particular times of year.
And the break on breeding is what we talked about earlier is melatonin.
When there's very little light, you get a lot more melatonin and it shuts down dopamine.
It shuts down breeding.
It shuts.
So melatonin, you want it a little bit, but you don't want too much of it.
And when you're saying that light makes the brain produce dopamine, I wonder if there's long periods of rain and a lack of light if then once you hit sunlight you have more dopamine.
This is, I mean, if you go to Scandinavia, I have a relative, my stepmom is Danish.
You go to Scandinavia, you go to Denmark in the winter, and everyone is, some people are resilient too, but most people are a little bit, I'm not gonna say clinically depressed, but everything is depressed.
It's darker, it's darker.
People get their head down.
It's cold.
Days are extremely short.
The spring hits.
And literally, people start going, or at least they did when I was in college, you know, like women and men start going topless in the sun, in the parks.
People are definitely mating a lot more than they are in the winter months.
Even though they're drinking more alcohol in the winter months, for sure, they're mating a lot more.
People get spring fever.
Spring fever has a biological basis.
And near the equator, like the Brazilians, they're like that all year long.
I have a lot of Brazilian friends, so I realize they're Yeah, I do as well.
I was thinking about this because I went to Prince of Wales Island, which is, I think, the rainiest spot in North America.
And we were there for a week.
It was crazy how much it rained.
It rained every single day, except for a few hours.
We were able to start a campfire one day.
When I came back, I came back to LA, and of course it was sunny, because it's always sunny in LA, and I called my friend up, I go, dude, I don't know what's going on, I've never been happier in my life.
Bodybuilders take something called, you know, there's this whole world of peptides that we should, you know, maybe that the peptide world is blowing up.
So you're talking about this effect, or I talked about this effect in Scandinavia, of sunlight comes out, people have dopamine, they have also melanocyte stimulating hormone, they're not as hungry, they wanna have sex a lot, that's MSH, alpha MSH is the molecule.
White German model claims she's well on her way to becoming a black girl now that she's undergone a series of tanning injections to darken her skin and somehow has convinced an African hairdresser to give her black textured hair.
And not everything leads back to dopamine, but many things do.
Because...
Things like dopamine are basically a kind of a trigger for a menu of a bunch of other things, of testosterone or estrogen, primarily in females, but also for motivation, for sexual behavior, for drive, for tan, you know, Pigmentation and these kinds of things.
So peptides are just small strings of amino acids.
They can act as hormones.
So a hormone is a molecule that would release in one point in the body and goes and acts on a bunch of other areas of the body.
There's like testosterone doesn't do one thing.
It does many, many things.
So it acts kind of, as we say, systemically.
Peptides can act as hormones, so melanotan obviously changes the skin, changes libido, all sorts of things.
There are peptides like GP157, gastric peptide 157. This is a peptide that is naturally made by the body, but people have synthesized and turned into a compound that they take and inject, that does seem to have the ability to repair damaged tissues of various kinds.
It mimics some of the downstream effects of growth hormone.
So this is actually, I actually trained with him once, although he with far more weight than I, this guy, Ryan Crowley, who tore his pack recently, this very dramatic Instagram video where you see him doing an incline press with like 515 and it rips off the bone.
Now I'm not going to say whether or not Ryan's using GP157 or not, but I don't think there's anyone needs to do a Natty or Not video on him.
Or maybe they do.
Doesn't matter.
The point is that things like GP157 definitely do accelerate the healing of an injury.
BPC is a different, I think it's either a different string of amino acids, excuse me, or something related.
You know, the gut has a bunch of stuff that it secretes that tells the rest of the body about health status.
This is why the gut microbiome is so critical.
As a not unrelated aside, I have a colleague upstairs from my lab at Stanford, Justin Sonnenberg, who's shown that the ingestion of two or three servings of fermented food per day It dramatically decreases the levels of interleukin-6, these inflammatory cytokines.
The Sonnenberg lab published a paper in Cell, another one of these premier journals, super, super stringent journal, today showing that if you ingest two or three servings of these fermented foods, basically what you do is you create an acidity in the gut that's perfect for the anti-inflammatory environment.
Or I shouldn't say it's perfect.
It's ideal.
It pushes you in the right direction.
And GP157 and these other peptides are things that when the gut is happy, the body starts secreting these things that allow you to heal faster.
This is why when people are like, when they're sick in a hospital or they can't move, they get sores that turn into massive infections, right?
And it's not just because hospitals have a lot of infection.
It's because when we're sedentary, the gut suffers.
When we're eating the kind of garbage they feed you in most hospitals, the gut suffers.
Yeah, I mean this is why this is why 2020 to me has changed everything because I look I work alongside many doctors I train and teach medical students and I have great reverence and respect for the field of medicine however It's clear that most places are not updating the training to stay modern.
This is a great thing about Stanford.
You have people, the scientists and the physicians talk.
And so, and there are other places too, but I think that this kind of communication, when that happens, then the physicians learn about all the modern studies.
I mean, that's why, God forbid, you have to go to a hospital, try and go to a hospital that's related to a research institution because they hear all the latest.
So, you take it systemically, but people have this thing, just like with testosterone, people, it acts systemically, but people, like, if they want to repair a tissue, they'll inject locally, and there are local effects of these hormones and these peptides.
Higher concentrations delivered to a particular area, if it has to be distributed systemically, you have receptors everywhere, putting it locally can definitely enhance the effect.
And I should say the stem cell therapies are very controversial because the academic community and the clinics that are doing these in various places, they haven't joined forces.
And then eight months later, she's like, I can walk with no pain.
This is crazy.
And Mel Gibson sent his dad down there when his dad was 92. When he was 100, he was getting boners, which Mel wanted to tell us about for whatever reason.
I had some stem cells in Santa Monica shot into my shoulder, or maybe, no, this was Vegas.
And this was Dr. Roddy McGee did some stuff in Vegas, and then we did an MRI eight months later, I believe it was, and I had a full-length tear in my rotator cuff.
Well, there have been, I agree with everything you're saying.
In fairness, there was a case in Florida of an eye clinic treating macular degeneration with stem cells, injected these people to try and save their vision.
So I do think when you talk about the brain and the eyes, which as we talked about last time I was on here, are two pieces of brain hanging out outside the crying, you know, vault.
This clinic was making claims about curing blindness, Alzheimer's, all this stuff.
They're shut down now.
But so also when that happens, it sets back the field of stem cell therapies in this country 10 years or more.
So it's a slippery slope.
And I think this is why I think people need to approach this with caution.
It's one of the reasons why people are looking to peptides because like, for instance, you have what are called secretagogues, sounds like synagogue, but secretagogue, which is basically a hormone stimulating hormone.
So growth hormone, as we know, various people use AIDS and growth hormone really causes metabolism and repair.
That's really what it controls.
It makes organs grow, but it also increases metabolism, burns fat, et cetera.
You heal faster.
But there's growth hormone-releasing hormone, and those go under the names like ipamoralin, tesamoralin, things of that sort.
And now there are a lot of people who are taking those peptides in order to stimulate their more growth hormone, as opposed to taking growth hormone directly.
So now there's this whole class of peptides that are not hormones per se, but that they stimulate more hormones.
Because they can take certain peptides because every time something's on a banned substance list, all you have to do is get right outside the list and take something that is chemically similar enough They don't ban pathways.
They ban particular molecules.
So you can't take clenbuterol.
You can't test.
You can't take DECA. You can't do other stuff.
But people will take hormones, stimulating hormones.
And things like sermorelin, which is another growth hormone secreting peptide.
There are 10 or 20 of these things that can promote the release of these different hormones.
And so the peptides are an area that is considered gray market.
They're not illegal.
They're not legal.
They're not prescribed by doctors, except Sermoralin is actually prescribed by MDs for growth hormone deficiency.
And it's actually was a popular diet a few years ago where people were given Sermoralin and told to go on very low calorie diets and because of the way growth hormone can preserve muscle and kill appetite.
People were losing weight.
And so in Hollywood, peptides are really big because unlike steroids, unlike hormones, peptides don't scare the category of people in Hollywood who don't want to put on muscle.
Let's just say it's big with the ladies.
They're big because it keeps your appetite down.
You burn fat.
But some of those people I've spoken to And they've said they're getting joint pain.
Well, if you take growth hormone-secreting peptides, you're going to start making more collagen.
Your skin will look more youthful, but you'll also start building more cartilage in your wrists.
And, you know, the skeleton has to contend with that.
And so when you say, you know, do these things work, they absolutely work.
What are the risks?
Well, you're tickling cells in the pituitary to secrete more hormone.
So you're going to get some balancing out of other hormones.
If guys want to run out and just increase growth hormone, you'll increase testosterone and you'll also increase estrogen in parallel.
So people have different sensitivities and so this is why it's an experimental science and this is why Most MDs are not going to prescribe any of this stuff because an individual has to really be able to think intelligently and know, they have to understand their system.
It's clear you know your system, you know when you're feeling good and you know when you're not feeling good.
But when you see all these crazy videos on the web of guys getting ridiculous gyno and like tanning to the point where they look like a different human being, it's because people just have this more is better mentality.
I mean, one of the reasons, you know, 2020, thanks to you coming on your podcast, thanks to Lex and his encouragement, the whole reason for teaching about science and health and practices about sleep and light and stress and hypnosis and all this stuff is because 2020 sparked a health communication crisis.
I mean, it was I'm not going to name names, but it was very clear that the big ups in the in government, in the national institutes of whatever and et cetera, well intentioned, very educated people.
We're not coming out with public statements that were clear about how people should manage their stress, how they should manage their children's stress, how they should stay on a sleep schedule.
And so that's why I essentially just stepped up.
I think, well, I got a mouth and I know the literature.
And where I don't know the literature, I can communicate with these amazing colleagues that I have.
I can ask four of the best MDs on gut health.
I can talk to Matt Walker, the Stanford Sleep Clinic and find out what are the three things everyone should do to optimize their sleep.
And so from pulling from these various sources and communities, you can put it out there.
So I feel like social media has this very dark and kind of strange side.
And then it also is the opportunity to just put information out there for free.
And I think, you know, all the stuff about peptides and hormones, et cetera, that's kind of the more niche, but for most people, they're just struggling to figure out, like get oriented, like what is happening in the world with viruses and should I take vitamin D3? It's so hard to get good information.
And that's one of the more rewarding things about this podcast is that I can have people like you on and Matthew Walker and David Sinclair and all these people that are experts in health and wellness and they understand all these things and you can...
I mean, it's just an amazing resource, and it's free, and people can get educated about this stuff and understand that you can take some control over your own destiny in a small way by actually a pretty large way.
I mean, the peptides and all these various things, they have a cost, but the basic things of viewing light in the morning, controlling your breathing as a way to modulate yourself.
It's great if you have a sauna, but you can also take a hot shower.
Most people have access to that.
Not everybody, of course, but most people.
Fasting for some portion of the day, trying to make better food choices.
These things don't just have a small effect on health and wellbeing.
They have a huge outsized effect and no one is going to provide it in pill form.
It's never going to be delivered by the government.
It's never going to be delivered in schools, although I would hope it would be someday.
But basically what we're trying to do, those of us that are interested in public science and health education, is provide a kind of a user manual for all this stuff, this technology that's been built into us.
I mean, we always think about a device technology, but the eyes, there's dopamine, the gut.
I mean, everyone's equipped with this stuff, but we never actually learn how to use it.
And so that's what, like you said, David and Matt and Rhonda Patrick, who I don't know, but has done great, you know, I think is doing great work.
Yeah, I think it's I think we're entering a new era now where people are feeling comfortable to do it.
And I, you know, and I'm grateful to you because I think this podcast, it's actually I'm absolutely clear that this podcast has promoted more health information than any other Media venue, clear directives or opportunities to explore.
You know, I know a few months back things got a little crazy around stuff and even Fauci was commenting back, but that just told me that this podcast is actually a primary source of public health information and for people to go ferret out The people, the resources, the papers enter the discussion.
And I think that is fundamentally important.
Without that, we are never going to make it.
And because we have that, I think I speak for many people, I'm extremely grateful.
Not just for this opportunity to come on here and speak, but for the opportunity for people to learn about choices, basically.
Well, I'm extremely grateful for people like you that come on here and are willing to share all your information and help educate people about this stuff because it's super important.
So tell me, we hit three hours, believe it or not, just flew by.
It's four o'clock.
Tell people when this podcast, you're doing a podcast right now.
So every episode is about 90 minutes or two hours.
And we do the deep dive on some topics.
But we cluster them.
So like the month one was all about sleep and how to get better at sleeping.
What dreams mean.
If you're a jet lag or shift worker.
I care a lot about the...
The firemen and firefighters and police officers and military, they have shift work.
They can't do the perfect schedule.
So we did an episode about that, then we spent a month on hormones, growth hormone, peptides, and we spent a month on sleep and eye health and just basically everything.
So it's kind of a class that you can go and watch or listen to.
And then I also teach on Instagram, just Huberman Lab.