Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman breaks down genetic alcohol tolerance variations (8% of Scandinavians/Northern Europeans) and the risks of stimulant misuse, like ADHD drugs repurposed recreationally. He links aggression to testosterone, estrogen, and peptides like tachykinins—highlighting how sleep deprivation (e.g., NBA players dropping from 88th to 32nd percentile in testosterone) and glyphosate exposure (banned in 32 countries) disrupt health. Red light therapy emerges as a tool for mitochondrial repair and potential testosterone boosts, though Huberman warns against unproven claims like massive hair regrowth. Both stress physical activity’s cognitive benefits, debunking Rogan’s past skepticism about meditation, while noting comedians’ tragic decline from substance abuse. Ultimately, they argue that open science communication—like their podcast—can counter misinformation and promote evidence-based longevity. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, I mean, obviously there's a tolerance that's built up with drinking a lot, but I believe the number is approximately 8% of people have a mutation in a gene such that when they drink alcohol, it increases their dopamine levels very quickly and they get euphoric.
They feel great.
These are the people like that character in Mad Men, the Don Draper character, like he would go out and just get plastered and the next day, you know, he's all fresh and And ready, and part of that is tolerance.
But in certain Scandinavian countries, Northern European countries, this gene tends to be more prevalent.
And these people are the people that can just keep drinking and drinking.
They feel great when they drink, whereas most people, they feel disinhibited at the beginning.
You know, you have a couple of drinks, the forebrain shuts down a little bit, because that's what it does.
They start talking more, talking more, but if they keep drinking, they're blacking out, you know, they're stumbling, they're slurring their words.
This 8% of people, by way of this genetic mutation, alcohol affects them very differently.
It offsets all that sedative property and they could just go and go and go.
This is the person who's doing a quesaday or at the party and just shot for shot and just looking like they're improving in function.
Obviously they're not.
But you put one of those people against Ari Shafir.
Is universal, but in terms of how it impacts brain function, and you see this across all these different categories of drugs too, right?
You know, somebody takes Ritalin, Adderall, Modafinil, or R-Modafinil.
These are the common prescribed drugs now, and people use them recreationally for ADHD. In fact, in researching an episode for our podcast on ADHD, it turns out that more than 80% of college students will rely on ADHD meds Quote, unquote, recreationally not prescribed.
They buy it from each other in order to study.
80%.
And those drugs work mainly by increasing dopamine and increasing adrenaline.
And they make your focus like this narrow and you're in a trench and you can function.
But a number of people take them and feel super distracted and lousy.
But this is, of course, what they prescribe to kids with ADHD. Yeah.
It was originally for narcolepsy, so to offset daytime sleepiness.
That was the original use of the drug.
And then it also does work for enhancing focus, right?
I mean, it has drawbacks.
It's not...
Perhaps as detrimental as recreational drugs to increase focus.
But most of the students out there and the tech workers, and this is big in the finance world too, are relying on Ritalin, Adderall, and things like Vyvanse.
And to be clear, they have legitimate clinical uses.
Well, and if you can arrange your life such that most of your stuff is around that, great.
But these kids prove that if you like something, you can focus.
And it comes as no surprise then that the drugs for ADHD... Universally increase dopamine, because dopamine is this incredible molecule that enhances focus, motivation, and drive, and literally narrows the aperture of your visual attention.
And we've all experienced that.
And of course, drugs like cocaine amphetamine do that to a hyper extent, and then there's a crash.
But with these drugs, if prescribed in the right way, in the right situation, they're terrific.
Kids' brain how to focus.
But nowadays there is rampant adult ADHD and ADD. Part of that is probably due to the phone.
Part of that is probably just due to All sorts of things.
But there is also a lot of recreational use of these prescription drugs, not illicit drugs like cocaine amphetamine, but prescription drugs that increase dopamine and supplementation for increasing dopamine as well.
I had read something about Modafinil, NuVigil, ProVigil, whichever one it was, that initially it was created as a performance enhancing drug, but they needed some sort of an ailment.
For it to be prescribed.
And that was when they decided to prescribe it for noculepsy.
I thought it was in the reverse, but I'm open to hear it.
And listen, the course of a lot of these drugs and how they hit market is super interesting.
Learning more and more about this because one of my colleagues who works on aggression and mating behavior, which fascinates me, has identified some peptides that can really reduce anxiety.
They put these to the pharmaceutical industry.
Pharmaceutical industry wasn't interested in them at all, even though the safety margins are huge.
So you say, why wouldn't they want this?
Well, it turns out these same drugs failed in a schizophrenia trial a long time ago, so no one will go near it with a 10-foot pole.
So the way the pharmaceutical industry generally approaches drugs is they love to re-market drugs for which there's already FDA approval because then they don't have to go through all the safety stuff.
And when they do that, they can renew the patent.
This is crucial, right?
Because if you can get the generic version now with things like GoodRx and these like little apps, you can get them.
You can go into a pharmacy, hit GoodRx, and it'll say, oh, yeah, we've got some stuff that's about to expire.
This $300 a month drug is $10.
I've had this happen.
It's amazing.
If they can keep it out of the generic market, that's huge.
And the way to do that is to find a new clinical use.
So I don't know which one came first, narcolepsy or these focusing ADHD uses or as a performance enhancer.
But if the pharmaceutical industry, the people that own the patent to that drug can find a new legitimate use – They just bought themselves, I think, another 10 years on the patent.
He has work related to humans and the neighboring lab works on humans, but in mice and in humans.
But these areas of the brain are really conserved.
We can talk about which brain area.
But what he discovered is that – Meaning, sorry, that in mice and in humans, these brain structures look identical.
And that the same classes of neurons exist, that if you were to stimulate them, because neurosurgeons have done this, people go into a rage.
Or in animals, if you stimulate them, the animals go into a rage.
In fact, there are these videos online, they're incredible, where this is Dayu Lin's work when she was in David Anders' lab.
So you take two mice, a male mouse and a female mouse, and they're mating, right, as it were.
And then they stimulate these neurons, because they can do that now using light, believe it or not.
And the male immediately tries to kill the female.
You can even just put him in a cage alone with a glove filled with air.
He's walking around, you stimulate these neurons and he just goes into a rage, right?
Just trying to destroy this glove.
But here's what's super interesting and no one understands.
If you put this animal into a cage alone and stimulate, it looks pretty normal.
It doesn't do anything.
So it's not like it attacks itself.
And you know, and every time there's this, you know, horrible news event, like the school shooting thing or something like that, I always think, you know, like what's going on in the, there's a certain brain area, it's called the ventromedial hypothalamus.
And this is a brain area that's really interesting because it has a population of neurons that control mating.
You stimulate them and animals will just start trying to copulate with basically whatever's around.
If you give them a choice of their usual preference of, you know, females, if they're male, Males, if they're female, because that's the way mice go, one or the other, they will just try and start mating.
You stimulate the other group of neurons, and they will try and kill the other males.
So for many decades, it was known that if you stimulate this brain area, you could get a This is actually Nobel Prize winning work of a guy whose last name is Hess.
And what they found was if you stimulate this brain area, cats would go into either two kinds of aggression.
It was either defensive aggression, kind of with, you know, hair up, or you would stimulate a little bit more and they would do the, you know, predatory aggression, right?
I'm probably doing this wrong, but, you know, like ears forward and, you know, you're the hunter last time.
I'm still learning about, you know, animal behavior in this way.
But what's really interesting is that for years, no one could understand why if you also stimulate this brain area and you used a different pattern of stimulation, you get mating behavior.
And it turns out that the neurons are mixed in there like salt and pepper.
David Anderson's lab figured out that these are molecularly distinct neurons.
And what makes them distinct is really interesting.
If they stimulate only the neurons that have the estrogen receptor, They become aggressive.
And this again goes back to this thing that we talked about a while ago, which is that testosterone, aromatized, converted into estrogen, has these incredible effects on aggression and masculinization of the brain.
And a lot of people think, in fact, people heard me say that last time and said, oh, you're trying to say that estrogen is doing everything testosterone is doing.
It's that things like testosterone and estrogen control gene expression.
And so the fact that it's estrogen or testosterone, it doesn't really matter.
It's the fact that these are molecularly distinct neurons, they can trigger these neurons and they can get very distinct outputs of behavior.
But what's crazy is you stop stimulating the animal, just goes back to doing whatever, and then it goes, oh yeah, I think I'll try and mate again.
Now, eventually, the female's like, hey, this is getting confusing.
But this, it's clear that these sorts of things are also happening in humans.
But normally, we have kind of a weighting of aggression versus mating behavior, right?
Some people choose to combine those, right?
There's kind of extremes of that.
rape, there's rough sex, there's all sorts of, you know, it's uncomfortable for people to think about that, but there's a continuum between aggressive versus approach type behaviors.
And for whatever reason, this drove me to start looking at different mating behaviors of animals online.
Like if you watch ferrets mating, it's like he's biting the back of her neck, she's squealing all over the place.
Like this is uncomfortable for some people to see, some people probably like watching this stuff.
But you look at animals mating and there's a kind of a balancing act between, you know, what looks...
You wouldn't call it lovemaking, let's put it that.
Is it common in the animal kingdom because in order to have strong genes that pass on, you need a strong animal and so they express themselves in this aggressive way.
To prove to the female that they're strong enough to mate and procreate?
Like what is the reason for that sort of aggressive?
So there's this theory called hydraulic pressure theory.
This was developed by Conrad Lorenz, which is Another Nobel Prize winner who studied animal behavior.
And here's the idea is that all of these different populations of neurons are in the hypothalamus.
This is a little tiny, tiny thing.
I mean, it's the size of like a little gobstopper candy, like a little gumball.
And you've got neurons for aggression, neurons for mating, neurons that turn on to make sure that animals don't try and mate with the wrong species, right?
We take this for granted.
Like, how come a cat doesn't try and mate with the dog?
Now, the dog might hump, but that's a different thing altogether.
So it's all harbored in there and this hydraulic theory is that all of these things are kind of weighted probabilities.
So there's never zero probability that any of this will happen unless they're in sleep.
But maybe it's 10% aggression, 80% mating while they're mating.
Maybe another male enters the arena and now there's sort of like a confusion like am I going to have to fight or can I keep mating?
These kinds of things because oftentimes these animals are communal.
And so the way that Anderson explained this to me, and we had a conversation about this recently, is that the brain might actually get confused in certain moments.
And there's also a kind of opioid pain relief thing that gets released during sexual activity.
Pain threshold goes way up, right?
And we were talking about this in the context of fetishes because if you look at fetishes, they're not random.
True fetishes can be pathologies where people actually require the presence of something in order to become aroused.
And those things almost always, if you look at true fetishes, are things like feet, dead bodies, feces, animals, things that are all very infectious, exactly.
So, you know, that's disgust and you have circuits in your brain that are for disgust that are about getting you away from that thing because it's infectious, putrid, disgusting and out of context.
And then you think about sex and food appetite and all that and it's all appetitive as they call it.
It's moving towards it.
It's bringing in more of those molecules as opposed to trying to get away from like vomit or something.
You know, we're very visual animals, and so it may cross over into visual perception.
And what arouses people differs, obviously.
People have their different proclivities.
But true fetishes are kind of a confusion of this circuitry, right, where people confuse or learn arousal associated with something that's actually quite dangerous.
Well, I've been reading up on this because I'm fascinated by the primitive as in addition to the more evolved parts of the brain.
So the way Anderson describes is, you know, you'll see animals mating and then all of a sudden, you know, he'll bite the back of her neck or sometimes she'll bite him.
And the theory is that some of the neurons and they've seen this in brain imaging in real time.
Because they can do that in animals.
Some of the neurons that are responsible for aggression will just suddenly, you know, spike up there, right?
And will kind of overtake the other behavior and then they'll go back to mating.
Now, when you're talking about studies on animals and they're doing this, there's these ethical questions if you're going to do a study on humans, if you wanted to stimulate those same neurons and try to incite aggression or hostility or even arousal.
So a good friend of mine, Eddie Chang, he's the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF. He spends his life and he makes his living probing around in the brain of people who have epilepsy, looking for the site where if they stimulate, the person will have a seizure so that they can burn that area out or make some other manipulation.
And he's told me that you can't poke around at random, right?
Every scientist would love to just do that experiment, just go in and kind of search.
But there are sites where they'll stimulate, thinking they might evoke a feeling of pleasantness or no feeling at all, and the person will go into a rage in the OR, in the operating room, because they're wide awake.
You've probably seen these things of people with neurosurgery and they're playing the violin or things of that sort.
Occasionally they'll hit an area where the person will say, I'm feeling super angry right now.
And they'll say, let's back off a little bit from there.
I think it is neurochemical and I think it is learned as well.
This peptide that we were talking about earlier becomes relevant in this context.
So David's lab discovered there's a peptide called tachykinin.
It's related to another molecule that's involved in pain relief called substance P that we all make.
Tachykinin has a bunch of different forms, but in humans there's tachykinin 1 and tachykinin 2. In mice or humans that are socially isolated for a period of time, tachykinin levels go through the roof.
This is very relevant to the recent past around the pandemic, in my opinion.
It goes through the roof, and what happens?
It creates anxiety, anger, and in particular, aggression.
And so there are drugs that are tachykinin inhibitors.
And I asked David, I said, well, why aren't we giving tachykinin inhibitors to people that are feeling anxious and aggressive and, you know, kind of tamp that down?
And we just had yet another school shooting and we can talk about what that's about or not.
And it was the most eerie experience because we were there recording some podcasts.
And...
Something came over the news that, you know, there's literally killer loose and it was like I in Brooklyn went into a subway, released some smoke bombs and shot people, right?
They found him in the Lower East Side walking around.
Someone found him.
So like killer on the loose in New York became a real thing for the time we were there.
And it was super weird because we're staying down near the Lower East Side.
And they get the guy and what do they say?
They say the same thing they always say about these guys.
He was a loner.
He was really socially isolated.
Then you find the angry posts, you find the things online, but it's never like, oh, this, okay, you've got crazies like the BTK killer and people who were like in their church and stuff, but were sociopathic killers on the sly.
But these kind of random act, what seemed like random acts of aggression, almost always these people were highly socially isolated.
And I'm not evoking sympathy.
I want to be very clear.
I know what you're saying.
Nothing makes me more...
I think everyone is furious and frustrated about this situation with the shooting.
But I asked David about this.
I was like, why aren't these drugs being used or prescribed?
And he said, because years ago, there was a trial at a pharmaceutical company exploring the role of this drug in schizophrenia for reasons that aren't clear.
And it didn't work.
And it cost the company a ton of money.
So now no companies want to go near it.
There's this kind of, you know, blacklisting of drugs that failed in trials.
And as a consequence, there's probably dozens if not hundreds of very useful medications out there that are just not being explored.
So when they do studies on people to try to find out what areas of the brain that you can ignite to get people hostile, how would they perform those studies?
So unfortunately, I guess fortunately for guys like Elon, because they have companies based on this, but unfortunately for kind of exploratory purposes, making this easier, They shave the head in a little spot, they drill, they make a tiny little hole in the skull and they're lowering electrodes down there.
And the way these electrodes are built, they're not just a single wire, it's actually pretty cool.
It's like a barrel of wires and they're able to like put them to different depths.
So, you know, you imagine a hundred or a thousand wires all at different depths and, you know, probing around and stimulating at different levels.
So it's all happening very fast.
And then they'll hit a spot where the person will say, I feel like I'm about to have a seizure, or sometimes we'll have a full-blown seizure, and they go, okay, that's the spot.
I mean, the brain, I'd love to tell you that we understand so much about how the brain works.
I think we understand a lot, but most of what we know about how human brain structures work are from experiments like the one I just mentioned, which is clinically oriented, but then you're doing some experimentation along the way.
Or case studies like the famous HM. They always give their initials, not their names because to maintain anonymity.
But we know more about human memory from one guy who had both his hippocampi lesioned because he had epilepsy in his hippocampi.
This is a memory encoding area.
They kept him in the laboratory for years and studied him.
And they learned things like, you might appreciate this.
If you went in and you said, hey, I'm Joe.
Nice to meet you.
He'd say, I am, you know, whoever he was, HM, Henry, whatever.
And you'd say, great.
And you'd walk out and come back in and say, hi, who are you?
And you'd say, I'm Joe.
I'm going to tell you a joke.
They did this experiment.
And you'd tell him a joke and he'd laugh.
He'd laugh.
You leave, you come back, you tell him the same joke.
He doesn't remember the joke, but he laughs a little bit less and the next time a little bit less.
So something in his brain is familiar, right?
This speaks to the importance of novelty and surprise and comedy, but he can't remember that he remembers.
And so that starts to open up all sorts of interesting questions about consciousness and novelty.
It's very hard to describe what comedy is, because you don't even know it unless you're doing it.
While you're doing it, you're trying to work out bits.
It's almost like you're on instinct.
You're trying to sort.
Almost like the way you're probing the brain in the dark, you're kind of doing that a little bit with comedy.
Some of it's sneaky.
Some of it, you're sneaking things in on people.
You're catching them before they...
Because the worst thing is when you know where someone's going, and you see the setup, and you anticipate the punchline, then the punchline comes, and you don't think it's funny.
Because you're like, ah, I thought that myself.
I saw that coming.
The best ones are when you think something's going to happen, and then another thing happens instead, and it's even funnier.
I mean, I think that for us, we were just thinking like, wow, for two scientists, like two super nerds, to put yourself into a situation deliberately where you don't know what's going to happen, it's like the worst.
Everything about science is trying to control variables.
Yeah, you know, there's a really cool phenomenon where in early in the day or after, we should say, after someone's been asleep for a while, for that first zero to nine hours of the day, I call this phase one, just cause gotta label everything with a name to make it clear.
During that time, we know that dopamine, adrenaline and cortisol, healthy levels of cortisol are highest in your system.
In those first nine hours.
You might not wake up quickly, but they're highest.
And then those start to taper off and molecules like serotonin start to predominate.
And the way these molecules like dopamine, serotonin, they do a lot of different things.
They're involved in tons of things, but we can generally say that they modulate.
They're called neuromodulators.
Bias the probability that certain brain circuits in areas will be active and certain ones won't.
So when dopamine and epinephrine are really churning around in your brain, you're really good at linear types of things, like math, organization, working out, sets and reps, this does this, does this, we're going here, itineraries, where there's a right answer and you're just trying to plug and chug.
As serotonin and other molecules kick in, which is later in the day and at night, The brain becomes much better at these, I call this phase two of the day.
They become, so it's like seven to 16 hours, sorry, 10 to 17 hours after waking.
So zero to nine for phase one and 10 to 17 for phase two.
Your brain is much better at nonlinear thinking, creative thinking, brainstorming.
I don't know what the writing process, comedy process is for you, but You know, you're doing anything creative, you're organizing existing things into new ways, you're kind of playing with ideas, and it actually can be beneficial to be slightly sedated.
This is actually why so many great writers and musicians and maybe comics have used A little bit of alcohol, a little bit of cannabis to put their brain into that kind of liminal state where you're not super lasered in.
You're not looking for the right answer.
The right answer just kind of comes to you.
And for some people, they have a hard time accessing that when they're in this hyperdrive mode.
And jazz musicians, right?
Famous for abusing a lot of substances because jazz is all about the spontaneous incorporation of notes and et cetera.
So I think that late night creativity makes a lot of sense.
That's sort of his drug, you know, like he's sleepy, and he's kind of just like half out of it.
And, you know, when he puts the sunglasses on, he just, it's almost like he's in an altered state of consciousness, but without having to snort ketamine or whatever the fuck he was doing.
This receptor is a receptor that becomes active only when you're hyper-focused on something and it has the capacity to create brain change in a very dramatic way.
They say, oh, your brain is different five minutes after this conversation than it was before.
That's bullshit.
Basically, your brain doesn't change unless it needs to.
And that signal of need to comes from something being really intense, really stressful, really exciting, really novel, right?
Makes sense, right?
Why reprogram the machine unless there's a need?
And so you have a chemical signal.
Ketamine basically was initially used to block memory formation after trauma.
So people would come into the...
Into the emergency room.
Let's just imagine a horrible scenario, right?
And someone was just in the passenger seat and watched their closest loved one get impaled on a steering column.
That person is in a state of shock and they're never going to forget what they see.
So what do you do?
You give them ketamine, you try and dampen the plasticity, the brain change that would occur to remember that incredibly traumatic event.
Now it's being used as a way to bring people into The clinic or it seems like it is pretty rampant use now and put people into this dissociative state so that they see themselves having an experience.
In fact, I've talked to people who've gone through cut to mean trials and they describe it as watching themselves get out of their own car.
They're like third person in themselves.
This to me sounds like a horrible state to be in, but a lot of why is that?
I mean, I've been working my whole life to just be comfortable with the body I'm in and I'd like to stay in it, not because it's always comfortable to be there, but because, you know, getting good at that seems to be the key to having a good life, being able to tolerate discomfort.
Yeah, but isn't the point for these people to try to figure out what they're doing wrong with their life so they can look at it objectively as a third party?
Yeah, that makes sense to me that they would look at, like, for instance, their suicidal depression and say, you know, like the new agey kind of thing is like, you are not your feelings.
That's a tough one for people to incorporate because when I have really strong feelings, it certainly feels like it's happening inside me.
So this is allowing them to get next to their feelings and see their feelings as an experience, not them.
Yeah, and it seems to work quite well for intractable depression, as it's called.
What's really odd about the fact that it works, at least to me, is that if you look at the other new emerging, very effective treatment for severe depression, it's the exact opposite.
It's this incredible work that Matthew Johnson and colleagues are doing out at Johns Hopkins, giving people macrodoses of psilocybin.
I talked to him, we had him on the podcast, and I asked him, I'm like, what are your thoughts on microdosing?
And he was like, pfft.
Macrodose.
And I thought, like, whoa, this is an academic saying this.
This isn't like some guy who's, you know, trying to push psychedelics for his own agenda.
This is a guy who's studying these, like, purely through the lens of science.
Like, what are you talking about?
What's critical about the macro dose of psilocybin?
We should check with Matt before people run off and start to take it.
But certainly not micro, right?
They're hallucinating.
They're feeling a lot.
And I said, what's the key thing?
You're seeing success after success after eating disorders, depression.
And he said, it seems to be, quote unquote, letting go.
And I'm like, that's not science, right?
What is letting go?
Are you talking about heart rate 50% above baseline?
Are you talking about breathing?
And he said, there does seem to be something crucial about the people in these trials experiencing what would normally give them a complete panic attack and being able to just let go and go into the experience without trying to control it, without trying to tamp it down or ramp it up.
For some people, he said there was one woman who came in, I believe it was a woman, there was a painting on the wall and she thought she could jump through it.
And so they're holding her back.
Yeah, they're holding her back.
And they do give them tools to control their anxiety.
So my lab works on a lot of breathing tools for real-time rapid control of anxiety.
And we handed some of those off to Matt.
So they give these to people as tools.
They also have defibrillators in there.
They have everything because it's a university setting just in case.
And he said that...
The key thing is that they kind of feel overwhelmed, but then they feel supported enough by the therapist to lean into whatever's happening, and they stop trying to regulate it.
And that's where apparently he thinks the breakthrough is.
And so that reveals something very fundamental.
It says that there's something powerful in terms of long-term depression relief that can be learned in those states that has to do with not...
Regulating oneself or one's need to run for safety.
And I find that fascinating because, you know, it raises all these questions.
For instance, do you need to hallucinate?
Maybe not.
Maybe it has nothing to do with hallucinations.
Maybe it just has to do with getting the person into a state of like real fear and then allowing them to lean into it.
I don't know, that's a speculation, but I think that what's interesting about all this work on psychedelics is it's clearly working in these clinical trials.
I mean, overwhelmingly the data are more positive than negative, and yet no one knows exactly why it's working.
No one knows what's being rewired in the brain.
There's all this speculation like, oh, dendrites grow and there's plasticity.
Sure, but like in what direction?
I mean, trauma is plasticity too.
So something powerful is happening under these Under the control of these psychedelic drugs in these clinical settings that are teaching people something valuable they can export.
And everyone has a different narrative, like, oh, I saw this face or the green gremlins or whatever, you know, melting reality.
But it seems to be the ability to let go of the attempt to control one's internal state.
One of the weird things they found out when they started studying people while they were under the influence of psilocybin was the lack of brain activity.
Well, I was part of a clinical trial looking at...
This was originally intended to be three dose of MDMA. I did two, and then I decided that was enough.
This, again, was part of a clinical study.
I found it to be incredibly beneficial.
I mean, I thought I was a nice guy before, but it made me...
It made me not afraid to feel feelings.
And I think before that, I could feel from the neck up and from the waist down, but I had this block.
And I remember taking MDMA. There's a physician there.
They're talking to you.
And all of a sudden, I felt like Now I sound like a crazy person, but this is how it felt since from a sensation perspective, as if like my body had been in Saran wrap before and it just kind of unzipped.
And from that point on, I've been able to feel things body wide.
And then I started thinking about all sorts of things like, I have unusual number of deaths and losses in my life for somebody who wasn't in the military or didn't grow up in the inner city.
It just had some bad luck, you know, like, you know, new people that had bad luck.
And all of a sudden I was able to kind of digest that and think about it in a more reasonable way.
I think before that I was just pack it away, just work, work, ignore it, or try and sublimate it or turn it into anger or fuel, which, you know, it can be its own use, as you know, but at some point I was like, you know, I think I need to actually spend some time on this.
And yeah, I think it made me a nicer person to myself.
Yeah, I think there's real benefit in those things, whether it's MDMA or psilocybin.
I think there's real benefit in a lot of them.
And I think there's definitely benefit in macro, but I think there's benefit in micro, too.
I know a lot of people that microdose, and they just feel like an elevated mood all throughout the day.
I don't think you're going to get these sort of transformative, life-changing experiences where you transcend whatever it means to be a person and get a chance to look at yourself and look at the way you interface with reality in a different way.
But I think what it does do is it alleviates a certain amount of anxiety and tension for people and it allows them to have a more enjoyable experience just in like regular everyday life without being intoxicated.
That's the key.
It's like it doesn't change the way your motor functions are.
It doesn't change your visual.
Well, it just actually improves your visual experience.
Which is really weird.
I forget who the scientist was, but he did a study on being able to recognize whether or not...
It was like edge detection and being able to recognize the changing in parallel lines.
And he did it...
See if we can find out who this scientist was.
But he was a very straight-laced scientist.
He wasn't a whack job.
And his joke was, it seems like you can detect reality better when you're high than when you're not high.
Because people that were on psilocybin were able to detect, so if you have two parallel lines and they move one slightly off parallel, the people on psilocybin were able to detect it quicker than the people that were sober.
Well, first of all, psilocybin at a basic level, when we think of it as like a drug, but it's like In many ways, it's a lot like the so-called SSRIs like Prozac, Zoloft and those things that they work on serotonin.
It mainly increases serotonin but different receptors than things like Prozac and Zoloft.
The ability to – we call that a psychophysics experiment.
They vary that ever so slightly as you described.
The thresholds for that are going to be different for different people.
But if anything that can more narrowly tune attention is really going to help.
I was surprised to learn this.
I'd be curious what your thoughts are.
I'm not a cannabis smoker.
I just never really liked it.
But I had a guest on my podcast named Paul Conti.
He mainly works.
He's an MD. Mainly works on trauma, incredible trauma therapist and has written about trauma, wrote the book on trauma that I think is the one in my opinion.
And then we got into a discussion about like different substances and do they have application?
So we talked about ketamine, et cetera.
Asked about alcohol, just by way of comparison.
And he said, There are basically zero therapeutic uses for alcohol, right?
Therapeutic.
But then I asked about cannabis.
Now, this isn't something he does in his own clinic.
He does talk therapy, not drug therapy.
Although he's a psychiatrist, he can prescribe things.
And he said, you know, cannabis is interesting and it may actually have some therapeutic potential, but the The main effect of cannabis is to narrow attention and focus.
It actually can increase attention and focus.
Now, the problem is it's not a very good filter, so people can narrowly attend to just video games or just to their anxiety if they're already anxious.
That's a problem.
But when it comes to psilocybin, psilocybin seems to increase creative thinking, new kind of new rules and algorithms about what could be an answer.
So I'm not aware of how it might directly impact visual perception unless it narrows focus, but most of the drugs that impact serotonin are going to increase focus to some degree or another.
And that can be good if what you're focusing on is pleasant.
It can be really bad if what you're focusing on is really unpleasant.
I knew people, I'm sure you've known, who just smoke weed and they have a panic attack.
Yeah, the smoke weed thing is a weird one because it's like many things.
It's completely dependent upon the individual.
Like their individual genetics, their biology, whatever it is that they've had in their past.
I know people that smoke marijuana and they're high-functioning.
And I know people who smoke marijuana and they don't get anything done.
And I don't know if those two things are related.
I think people who generally have drive and discipline, marijuana gives them a break.
It gives them a nice little, just a little rest stop.
And I think that's probably beneficial.
And I also think it makes you a little kinder, a little more compassionate, a little more sensitive, which is probably very beneficial to someone who's hyper-focused.
Like people that are like type A personalities and trying to get things done all the time.
You smoke a little pot and you're like, what am I doing?
Let's fucking relax a little.
And then you get back to it.
You're alright.
I think there's a great benefit to that.
But I should also say that it's very popular in the jiu-jitsu world.
It's almost like I'm more aware of, like, what's going on.
Instead of, like, this blunt sort of, you know, almost, like, distance from each individual muscle fiber, which I am normally...
Normally I'm just trying to warm up, and then I warm up, and then I start getting going, and then I lift light first, and then I work my way up to what I normally use.
But when I'm high, it's like I could feel like where it connects to the bone.
I feel everything.
It just makes you more sensitive about what you're actually doing.
And for martial arts techniques, particularly for striking, I feel like I incorporate leverage better into things.
I have better balance in terms of not trying to execute a technique when I'm off position.
It just makes me more aware of what's going on with my body.
The nerd in me wants to say, in neuroscience, they call that interoception.
People vary tremendously in their awareness of their internal state.
You can know if you have a high or low degree of interoception by trying to count your heartbeats without taking your pulse.
Some people can just do that.
It's a skill you can build up over time.
This is great for some people, but some people are highly anxious.
It sucks to have a lot of interoception.
But we know, of course, that the mind-muscle connection is really powerful.
And it's not just, Mind muscle connection is a, whatever they call it, bro science thing.
The reality is that from peer reviewed studies, that if people focus on the contraction of a muscle during resistance training, as opposed to moving the weight, something that's hard to measure if they're actually doing it, the strength and hypertrophy gains are much greater.
I think it's like a 15%.
I had Andy Galpin on the podcast and he would know the exact number.
I always wonder about this, like in gyms where there are mirrors and people are watching themselves lift in the mirror.
I mean, you're exterocepting.
You're not focused as much as you could on the actual feeling.
So, you know, there's always a weighting between exteroception to everything beyond the confines of your skin and interoception.
And if cannabis allows more interoception, you can imagine that those workouts would be more effective in that way.
I mean, you always see those people like their shoulders hunch and they're, you know, they're making a mess of themselves, overworking their strong parts.
And, you know, I mean, some people walk in the gym and it's clear they've never actually looked at, like, you know, the lower half of the mirror.
The skip leg day thing is a cruel joke, but it's a cruel joke in the right direction because there's nothing worse than an imbalanced I mean, where someone has done a lot of work to try and create something.
Well, structurally and also just neurally, you know, again, as a neuroscientist, you think the nerve to muscle connection is what contracts fibers.
And if you think about somebody who's, you know, big upper body, small legs, That person, the neurons in their brain that represent their body are also completely contorted.
Well, he's not the fastest guy, you know, and his whole thing is he's the best at controlling distance because he's very tall, especially for light heavyweight.
Not going to be as tall for heavyweight, but he's fantastic at controlling distance.
If you're a person who wants to maximize your...
Like, you have a certain amount of weight you can beat.
One of the ways I know it's a real issue is we didn't get steroids that showed up on its supplements, but when we were initially starting out, we used this third-party company that would mix our ingredients.
And they would mix ingredients for other supplement companies as well.
It was a company that packaged stuff for you.
And so we did third-party tests on some of our stuff, and we'd find vitamins in there that weren't supposed to be in there.
And then we'd just trace them out.
So we realized, oh, they're getting it from the vats.
These guys aren't cleaning the vats properly that they used for the previous supplement.
Now, if you're getting a lot of cheap stuff, particularly if you're getting stuff that's made overseas, that's the same companies that are making steroids.
So they're making, you know, wherever it is in China, what have you, they're allowed to do that or whatever, it's not regulated.
So there's guys that are buying off-the-counter, real, normal supplements that are supposed to be steroid-free that have steroids in them.
Now there's also unscrupulous companies that will add steroids to their products just to make them more beneficial, just to make them more functional.
And that's true too.
So there's a guy named Tim Means.
He got busted with tainted supplements.
And if you look at Tim, he does not at all look like a guy who takes steroids.
I mean, not at all.
And he was just taking some normal stuff that he bought from some health food store, and it turned out he popped for a very small trace amount of this stuff.
Previous tests is nothing, and then this tiny small amount, which would indicate that, and this is what they said about John as well, the problem with what John did was like John tested negative, and then he tested positive, but the positive amount was so small that it's almost like he's getting off of it.
So he would have to be on it for a long period of time.
He'd have to be on it for weeks in order to reap any benefit.
But meanwhile, it was less than that time ago, he was negative, and now he's got this trace amount in his system.
So there's a lot of things that seem to lean towards the idea that he was accidentally dosed, that he took a tainted supplement.
But he calls bullshit on a lot of guys in the UFC. And he goes over their specific blood work.
And what he was concerned with was more the testosterone to epitestosterone ratio.
He said it was off, way off, and not normal.
And also the amount of testosterone that John had, the free testosterone system, he also felt was so low that it seemed to indicate that he was coming off exogenous hormones and that there's maybe some masking going on or whatever.
But it was enough to make John ban him.
He blocked him.
On social media.
Derek goes, that seems to indicate he hit a sore spot.
Yeah, well, and the lines have become really blurry because there's, you know, it used to be if anyone was taking any exogenous androgens, they were, quote unquote, on steroids.
But now, of course, there's TRT, which is up to 200 milligrams per week.
And there are now additional papers showing that, yeah, it raises testosterone and estrogen a little bit in parallel with that.
It, you know, it looks like it's not going to cause people to, you know, to flag red on in most leagues, but the increases are not what one sees with, you know.
And people will take it before workouts because it immediately makes you feel, or pretty quickly makes you feel kind of aggressive and like you want to train.
Not angry aggressive, but you want to move your body.
But then it also blunts, and a lot of doctors prescribe it for this reason, it reduces sex hormone binding globulin, SHBG. There aren't a lot of things out there that can reduce SHBG. SHBG is what prevents testosterone from being free testosterone.
And I asked a Tia, Peter Tia, like what's the healthy level of free testosterone that a normal person should have, normal male should have?
And he said, it should be about 2% of your total testosterone.
And there aren't a lot of tools to do that.
So if someone has a testosterone of, you know, Of 1000 and their free testosterone is five, that's bad, right?
You'd expect it to, you know, be up in the 20. So, you know, as the Oxandrolone, Anavar can adjust that, but it also can crank up liver enzymes, but it's very fast acting.
So a lot of athletes, especially female athletes will take this In the short run and then, you know, train with it, cut with it.
That's how they get the, like, I have this theory.
And again, this is just theory that a lot of these female CrossFit athletes, they get those turtle shell abs.
Some of them might have low body fat to begin with, but sometimes you'll see a look and you just have to, you know, you're projecting, but it's like, okay, they're taking something.
They don't look androgenized, but they look like they're definitely taking something.
But he was just weirded out that she was like taking testosterone and just to try to, you know, be better at strangling people.
But it's really unregulated in a lot of ways.
Like, I mean, some jujitsu competitions test, but...
They kind of test in the realm of the old UFC testing where it's really just an IQ test.
Because if you're smart, you know what to take and when to get off of it and when to cycle off before you weigh in.
It's not that big of an issue.
But these in-between competitions is where they're making all their gains, right?
So in-between competitions, what USADA does is they do random drug tests throughout the year.
And even Derek says even that like is you can get away with it.
He explained what they're testing for and why you can get away with it in multiple videos and I don't want to fuck it up because the science of it I'm sure I'll butcher.
I mean I think that testosterone replacement therapy part has also contaminated the public I really appreciate that years ago you just kind of outed with it.
Yeah, I don't know what part of human psychology that reflects either.
I mean, I think that, I mean, look, it's clear that testosterone, whether or not it's replacing or maxing out or whatever, not maxing out like super physiological doses, but to raise testosterone through injection or whatever, cipionate in reasonable dosage with the doctor, you feel better.
Your effort feels good, you recover quicker, et cetera.
There are limits to that, right?
You can convert to estrogen, it has to be done properly, but that's very clear.
No, you get people retain water, they get puffy, they get really emotional, they get gynecomastia.
I mean, there's all sorts of issues.
And then there is this issue that if there's a pre-existing prostate cancer, it can make it worse.
But I don't think there's any evidence that it can cause prostate cancer.
The opposite.
If estrogen is too high and testosterone is too low, that's actually worse for prostate health.
I mean, young guys don't tend to get prostate cancer.
They can, but it's pretty rare.
But in general, as it relates to sports, it's tricky because like, for instance, last time I kind of walked around this issue, but this time I'll just say it.
I mean, I don't like basketball anyway, enough that I would worry that it'd be.
I know someone who's a professional basketball player and I asked him about Steroids.
And he said, well, if you get injured, you can take up to 200 mg a week, which is considered a TRT dose.
Right, because most people are either, we talked about this, I think, before, but breaking that up into some smaller injections amounts is probably better to just keep androgen levels more reasonable.
Most typical now, people will take somewhere, it pays to think about it in milligrams, people will take somewhere between You know, 10 and 40 milligrams every third day or so, right?
Yeah, somewhere between 10. Yeah, because some people, you know, came into it with their testosterone at 650. And when you talk about replacement, you know, nowadays people will prescribe- 40 is so high.
40 milligrams every three or four days, that's still 120 milligrams, you know, per week or so.
You're taking, if it's 200 mg per ml, which almost certainly it is in this country, testosterone cypionate, it's going to be, you are taking 30 mg every four days.
So Hoyer and his staff consider their efforts to counter sleep loss, like deep breathing exercise to optimize sleep, to be all but a Band-Aid for a broken bone.
By the 2014-2015 season, Royer and his staff had fully committed to their investigation of sleep deprivation, tracking 18 players over multiple teams in each conference.
When the season began, those players' testosterone levels ranked on average in the 88th percentile.
Compared to males their own age after two months of NBA play and travel their levels had fallen to the 70th percentile by March the 32nd percentile a 64 percent drop in just five months So that's just being worn the fuck out.
Yeah, I mean I get called a lot Do some work with military do some work with any kind of high-performance teams that are dealing with this kind of thing They want to know how can we maintain hormone levels and performance and you always start with Get regular sleep as much as you can.
It's everything.
And how do you, you know, one night, no big deal, but two nights, three nights, you're impaired.
And a lot of these guys also are really disciplined, but some go out and party afterwards and that whole thing.
So it's always maximize exposure to sunlight in the first half of the day.
Number one thing for just making sure that you sleep well that night and then limiting artificial light exposure by dimming lights from 10 p.m.
to 4 a.m.
Very few people do those two things, but they have an outsized effect on sleep.
And there's a really nice study out of Israel this last year that showed that if you had people, this was men and women, go outside for 20 minutes, Three times a week and try and expose as much of their skin as they possibly could to sunlight while still being decent, right?
That it raised testosterone and estrogen significantly.
Why?
Because skin isn't just a organ to, you know, tattoo and protect our organs.
It's a organ that actually functions as an endocrine, as a hormone organ, like vitamin D, right?
This kind of thing.
And there was this whole pathway that they delineated in this study, really interesting, based on keratinocytes, which are these particular skin cells, and P53, which is a cell cycle molecule, super interesting.
It showed getting sunlight on your body, getting sunlight exposure to your eyes early in the day, increases testosterone and estrogen, increases feelings of wellbeing, improves sleep, et cetera.
It's like all the things we know, but people are finally catching onto this.
And even though I kind of blab about this ad nauseam on my podcast, people always say, well, Can't I just crank up my phone really bright in the morning and sit there?
There's always this kind of negotiating.
You're not going to out-negotiate the sun.
And then people think, oh, the sun, that's really kind of woo technology.
No, we evolved to get sunlight during the day and to avoid light at night.
Have they done studies on people that live in, say, the Pacific Northwest where they don't get a lot of sunlight and whether or not that affects their testosterone and estrogen?
Yeah, so they definitely, it depends on where they start out, because there's some genetic variation.
I mean, the variation in testosterone levels is huge, hence the huge reference range of like 300 nanograms per tesli or all the way up to, you know, 1200, right?
This is what makes TRT kind of a tricky topic, but more seasonal depression for sure.
Greater requirement for sunlight viewing, but in order to keep mood high and hormone levels high.
But the good news is people that are very susceptible mood wise and hormone wise to lack of sunlight respond best when they start getting light.
So there's this really nice study that looks at like night owls and people that don't get much sunlight during the day.
If they start doing, getting some caffeine exercise in sunlight in the early part of the day.
Just to ramp up their energy levels early on, get them outside, but also eating in the earlier part of the day, you know, just trying to bring their active schedule into the earlier part of the day.
There's actually a trick to avoid the daytime, the afternoon crash.
It's not a trick, it's biology.
But caffeine is an adenosine antagonist.
It basically, as the longer you're awake, adenosine, or Matt Walker would say adenosine, adenosine builds up in your bloodstream.
It's what makes you feel fatigued.
Caffeine essentially blocks the adenosine receptor, but then when caffeine wears off, the adenosine that's still around binds to that receptor and you crash, you feel really sleepy.
So one thing that you can do is when you wake up in the morning, Don't ingest caffeine for the first 90 minutes or so.
Like really push that off so that the adenosine and adenosine receptor interactions can all take place and dissipate.
Then you drink caffeine and what you'll find is that if normally you would crash around two or three in the afternoon, you don't experience that crash anymore.
Because the caffeine wears off but there isn't a lot of adenosine there to bind the receptor.
By the way, though, Some pasta makes me feel less like that and I don't know what that is.
I don't know how much you've looked into glyphosate and how much of an impact glyphosate contamination has on people because we looked at it the other day.
There was a study that showed They went over a bunch of different things, different plants and produce and things, and the amount of glyphosate they found was pretty stunning.
Glyphosate, which is Roundup, which is a very common pesticide, or herbicide, I guess.
Is it herbicide?
Is it a pesticide?
I forget.
But either way, it's fucking really bad for you.
And there's many people that speculate that what a lot of people are calling gluten sensitivities is if really you're having a reaction to glyphosate.
There are ophthalmologists that can't spell ophthalmology.
I'm in ophthalmology department.
I see it misspelled all the time.
Her talk was amazing, right?
And you asked about kind of regional differences and relate to light in terms of testosterone.
But what I took away from her talk was that people who live in rural areas because of the use of pesticides, that sperm counts and testosterone counts are way, way down.
They're really suppressed in those areas.
Stunningly.
Stunningly.
And I mean, why that isn't front page news, I don't know.
I mean, I believe it was 2015 when they figured out the phthalate connection with people's dip in testosterone, dip in sperm count, and then also an uptick in women having miscarriages.
And so when there's no solution to something like that, plus it could harm the economy, like I think people panic.
They don't know what to do about something like that.
If there's a thing and this thing has a solution like, you know, like, oh, don't drink this, eat that.
Because if you drink this, this fucks you up.
But if you eat that, you're going to be good.
You know, that's something that they would talk about.
But when something like this, when you find out that the average person eats a credit card-sized portion of plastic and microplastics every week, that's a little weird, too, right?
I mean, I feel like you can do things to offset some of the damage, like getting sunlight, getting exercise, trying to eat well, but yeah, not direct compensation.
Following the landmark case against Monsanto, which saw them being found liable for a former groundskeeper, 46-year-old Dwayne Johnson's cancer, 32 countries to date have banned the use of glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup weed killer.
But I was reading this whole thing about someone equating gluten sensitivities with glyphosate because they were saying that how much of wheat is contaminated with glyphosate.
And they were saying that may be what people are calling gluten sensitivities with some folks.
Maybe I'm getting older because I care a lot about next generation.
I really do.
I mean, I feel like I've kind of made it through the shoot.
You know, if I get hit by a bullet cancer or something tomorrow, like I've had a really good life.
I want to keep going.
But...
I worry.
I think about the school shooting thing.
I worry about what that represents at a larger thing in terms of just people feeling that disenfranchised and then people feeling that scared and concerned all the time that things like that are going to happen.
And if you can't trust the food you eat, what can you trust?
And I'm not a paranoid person, but I like to think that we are emerging or have emerged from the last few years, the whole pandemic bit, with people more focused on what they can and need to do for their own health.
It seems that way, but then again, on social media, you get a limited window.
But I worry tremendously that people are still waiting for...
Some large governing body to deliver the school lunch that's gonna make everybody healthy.
I think it's very clear at this point that Everybody has to take responsibility for their own health.
And that's two things.
That's learning information and then trying the things that are going to, you know, accessing the things that are going to work.
I mean, that's a huge part of what my life's about these days.
And this is why I find that whether or not it's a discussion about carnivore diets or vegan diets, I mean, I look at the debates around that and I just have to chuckle mostly about the way that debates are playing out.
Because it's so theatrical, like Liver King on the one hand and then these like dweeby vegan scientists, many of whom I'm not talking about Stanford colleagues, of course, but others that are just like so combative in different spheres and there's no solution to come from that.
One of his main assertions, and others have made this assertion, is that when you eat an organ, like a testicle or a liver, that the nutrients in that organ are specifically channeled to the organ that it would most benefit from.
There's some old, old studies using radioactive labeling of Of organs, having animals ingest those organs and then slicing up the brain and body and looking.
And there was some small but interesting specific diversion of brain to brain.
But in my opinion, if you're eating brain and it's diverted to your brain, that's actually a concern, not a benefit because of prions.
You did prions, yeah.
I'll go on record saying, to my knowledge, there's no evidence that eating testicles, for instance, supports your testicles because it's directed to the testicles.
Now, there may be some bioactive, may be some bioactive hormones in there that go and support testicular function in some other way.
But when things are brought into the gut, they're broken down into their component parts and they go out into the bloodstream.
And then which organ gets that stuff depends on whether or not there's, say, a blood brain barrier, which keeps a lot of stuff out of the brain, or blood testes barrier or blood ovary barrier.
Every organ, like the spleen, et cetera, has a barrier.
So some things get in more readily than others.
But to my knowledge, zero evidence that eating spleen helps your spleen.
Well, I think it's because I think it's because that there are nutrients, for instance, in liver, like very high concentrations of choline precursor to acetylcholine.
It is true that liver is one of the most choline-dense foods in the world, far more than an egg, far more than any vegetable or nut is gonna give you, and now I'm sure some celery, Warrior will come after me.
Something like that.
You know, at the moment, as you know better than I, the moment you say one thing categorically, you know, you're kind of inviting it, but I've kind of learned to enjoy that response.
I learned from it and correct me if I'm wrong, but liver incredibly high in choline.
So you could see how the, the, the lore would emerge that eating liver is really good for you because it is, if you're interested in getting a lot of choline and vitamin D or vitamin A and other things of that sort.
But the idea that it would be diverted specifically to your liver, that seems kind of crazy.
Now, there's also this idea, I won't name names here, but there were people on social media for a while saying, well, walnuts are really good for your brain because walnuts actually look like a brain.
And testicles look a lot like testicles too.
But the point is that walnuts have certain things in them that are good for lots of cells, not just for brain tissue.
So one of the things that Paul Saladino always wants to talk about is plant defense chemicals and about eating plants that plants don't want you to eat them.
And so when you eat them, they're excreting these plant defense chemicals.
Now, my thing on that is, and this is one of the things that Rhonda Patrick likes to talk about, is that that may have a hormetic effect.
So there might be benefit to that, just like there's benefit to cold therapy and hot therapy, and that there's some foods that eating them, even though they do have these defense chemicals, those defense chemicals, at least in certain doses, might have a beneficial effect on your body.
I'm going to try carnivore because I told Paul I would.
I'm going to do blood work first and then after, but I'm not giving up my athletic greens and I'm still going to eat cucumbers, which he says are a fruit.
And so I'm home free.
He told me I have to cut the skin off them too.
So I'm going to try it and see what happens.
But I've also talked to Rhonda and she's really big on this broccoli sprout thing.
And a lot of things that are incompatible in the Instagram space make a lot of sense to me scientifically, like eating some greens, but also eating some meat, et cetera.
In terms of plants being bad for us, I mean, there are a lot of toxic components of plants.
Typically, the further out on the branch you go towards fruit, the less toxic they become, right?
Eating the bark is generally more dangerous, although berberine, a commonly used substance for lowering blood glucose, right?
Like metformin.
So our poor man's metformin is made from tree bark, basically.
Aspirin derivatives, things of that sort, alkaloids.
There is something interesting about plants, and I've talked to Paul and other You know, serious colleagues in the, you know, amino acid science space.
So there is something called non-protein amino acids.
There used to be a guy at Stanford who studied these.
And he's a world expert in non-protein amino acids.
Many seeds and plants contain amino acids that can't be incorporated into proteins and may have some toxicity to them if they are ingested.
Now, there's never been a widespread systematic exploration of all the seeds and all the plants that people eat to see whether or not there are a lot of non-protein amino acids, but these things act in a sort of prion-like way when they get into the brain.
Or they get into different tissues.
And so, you know, I don't want to spark fear that every, you know, sunflower seeds are going to give you prion-like syndromes, but it's conceivable that by eating certain plant compounds, one could ingest these non-protein amino acids that they would get incorporated in To existing proteins or that they would look enough like protein amino acids that they could sneak their way in across the blood-brain barrier or into cells and cause certain kinds of dysfunction.
And this particular lab's focus was on figuring out whether or not neurodegeneration was a downstream effect of some non-protein amino acids.
Their conclusion was that a lot of plants, and in particular a lot of types of seeds, contain non-protein amino acids that if they were to be incorporated into mammalian tissues and cells, that that would be very bad.
And there was this idea years ago that the marijuana plant could inhibit The reproduction of animals that want to eat it by way of increasing aromatization, the conversion of testosterone to estrogen.
And then when I was in college, there was this thing, everyone would say, don't smoke the seeds, it'll make you sterile.
Either she was hyperfertile or he was hyperfertile or both, but there are two kids that he claimed were conceived on everything from Debaldox androlone to...
Did you hear about that child who is abnormally large at two years old because the father was taking testosterone cream and the kid started showing pubic hair and an enormous penis at two years of age?
I mean, you know, I've gone on and on social media and elsewhere about the fact that I am not a fan of melatonin.
You know, low doses every once in a while for treatment of jet lag or something.
But melatonin has a specific role, which is to suppress puberty during development, in addition to all its effects on sleep, et cetera.
And the idea that people are prescribing that to their kids, I don't know that it's screwed up their kids' puberty trajectory, but just the idea that you would take high doses of hormone.
Look, we're talking about low, well-controlled doses of TRT, people freak out.
But then people pop melatonin like it was M&Ms and they give it to their kids when they're clearly better alternatives.
Well, now there's some evidence coming out that it may have other negative effects.
I mean, I don't like to be the scare tactic guy, but it just seems to me there are a lot of reasons to just avoid it unless you really need it and occasional use.
But the stuff in kids is really serious.
Dr. Shana Swan stuff about phthalates, and then you're talking about evening primrose oil, or you're talking about, I mean, this kid, I have a confession, that didn't happen to me, but when I was a kid, I had, When I was five or six, I had hair growing on my Adam's apple and my voice was the same as it is now.
They called me froggy when I was a little kid.
I basically grew into my voice.
And so I had a genetic test recently and I actually have a mutation in an androgen receptor.
Now that didn't make me super strong.
I wasn't a super impressive athlete or anything like that.
This particular mutation probably is what allowed me to work really long hours.
It relates to kind of cortisol production and things like that.
And when you start exploring, you find that, yeah, about 12% of young males have mutations in one or the other of these hormone pathways that sort of shift you towards being able to, for instance, like I can work very, very long hours and it's not because I'm I'm no David Goggins, right?
It's just, I can just like work a lot.
And there are other mutations that are more subtle.
Like you seem to have, I can't believe you can do four podcasts a week, the MMA thing and the comedy thing.
Like to me, doing one podcast a week is like, it feels like a lot.
Plus I run my lab, but that just feels like a lot.
But I asked you a while ago if you, you know, your voice ever goes or you ever get super tired and you're like, No.
I think some people just naturally have more androgen receptor.
They make more androgen.
And then, of course, if they supplement androgen through TRT or something, they can get away with lower dose because it just hits their system more efficiently.
Well, I loved Aquarian goldfish, but I knew that most of those fish were going to die because people weren't dechlorinating the water.
So I used to go buy dechlor and go to these carnivals.
My mom used to take me when I was little, and I would give you free dechlor for the fish if you wanted, but you had to listen to me lecture about the dechlorination process.
Careful you decide who elected who, but I'm independent.
But the fact of the matter is that they're really nice, but we've gotten into discussions around sleep because they're on these crazy sleep cycles and how to regulate sleep and fitness stuff.
And this one real nice Secret Service agent, she said to me, are you always like this?
And I said, what do you mean?
And she said, every time you walk by here, you end up giving us a 30-minute lecture about And then you give us a supplement.
I do worry about them, though, because some of these people presumably have other things they're trying to pursue, and they don't realize that they're kind of circling the drain slowly by focusing so much on other people.
Yeah, I mean, we've done episodes on grief and on eating disorders.
I thought when I did one on eating disorders, especially anorexia, they were going to be like, oh, you know, this white guy with a shaved head who lifts weights, what does he know about eating disorders?
And the feedback was wonderful.
People were like, I didn't know, for instance, that the frequency of anorexia is not going up.
It's been constant since the 1600s and maybe even earlier.
So there's a scientist out of Scandinavia, her name is Dr. Susanna Soberg, S-O-E-B-E-R-G. And she showed up on social media a few, you know, six months ago and then published this really amazing paper in humans.
What they showed was that they figured out the thresholds for how much deliberate cold exposure you need and how much sauna for it to really start having beneficial effects.
Now, all the nutrition PT people, which seem to me some of the more frustrated human beings on the planet, I don't know why, but online, sort of like nutrition and physical therapy are where there's a lot of contention.
They love to nitpick, and I respect that they know a lot about what they do, but there seems to be a lot of infighting around nutrition and around physical therapy.
I don't know why.
It probably relates to some childhood feelings of powerlessness.
I don't know.
But what's very clear is that, from Susannah's work, is that if you put people into deliberate cold up to the neck, like uncomfortable cold.
People always say, how cold?
It should be, I want to get the hell out, but you can stay in safely.
And that's going to vary person to person, even day to day.
But if you get people into that for 11 minutes total per week, so not one session, But they're doing three minutes, three minutes, three minutes, whatever.
Get to 11 minutes.
At that 11 minutes per week threshold, they observe legitimate increases in brown fat, the good kind of fat thermogenesis, like the oil in the candle goes up.
People become more comfortable at cold temperatures and metabolism increases.
The increases in metabolism aren't huge.
And the PTs and nutrition folks have really been like, those increases in metabolism are like a cracker or something.
That's just one of the effects.
The big effect of the cold is that you get this 2.5x increase in dopamine that lasts many hours after the cold exposure.
I mean, it really puts your brain into an anti-depressed state and to a more alert-motivated state.
So norepinephrine, epinephrine, and dopamine are called the catecholamines.
Those three catecholamines all increase substantially.
And that can be from a very brief exposure to very cold.
So like one minute or three minutes really cold.
Or in the study that was published in the European Journal of Physiology, where this initially was first shown, they put people into 60 degree Fahrenheit water up to their neck.
For like 45 minutes or an hour, which isn't super annoying.
They had them on lawn chairs with weights, so they're just sitting there.
But you can do a much shorter exposure.
Rhonda was telling me you can even do like 45 seconds really, really cold and still get that blast effect, which makes sense.
So if you get into cold water and you're completely still, like you're super stoic, you're building a thermal layer that's keeping you a little bit warmer.
So if you really want to make it tougher, you can sift your body a bit because you break up that thermal layer.
Well, they're now using local heating, and people really need to be careful with heat, because burning yourself to burn body fat is just dumb and dangerous.
But They have this UCP device in the laboratory, but what they're doing is they're using a laser that heats up locally the tissue, and they're seeing a systemic increase in body fat utilization.
If you're eating more food than you're burning off total, you're not gonna lose fat, right?
I mean, the rules of the laws of thermodynamics still apply, because sometimes people hear you can do anything and still lose fat, and that's not true.
Yeah, well, I have a theory about the same reason women wear corsets, although there are other reasons for that, too, which is that they like the way that it makes them feel and look.
And yet there are legitimate uses of infrared light.
For instance, viewing infrared light, as long as it's not too intense in the early part of the day, if you're over 40, there's amazing data out of University College London, my friend Glenn Jeffrey's lab showing that can help Improved mitochondrial function in photoreceptors and offset age-related macular degeneration and visual loss can be offset.
It sets in, you know, red light is different than other light because it's long wavelength and that means it can pass through tissues.
Short wavelength doesn't go as deep into tissues.
So that's why the red part is important.
Not just that it looks cool.
When it passes through the upper layers of the dermis, it appears that it can go in and trigger some activation of things in the so-called stem cell niche that creates new hair cells, new skin cells, so they're using it for hair growth.
Well, I think the result that's relevant there, which is a real result, is the one we talked about earlier, which is getting sunlight exposure on your skin, provided you don't burn.
Obviously, people wear sunscreen if you need it, but sunscreen is an interesting conversation, too.
But getting sunlight onto your skin can increase testosterone and estrogen, feelings of well-being, et cetera.
This is a place that I went to that has a more robust bed and they have like these goggles and they tell you with this red light therapy that you should put goggles on.
And it also, you know, it depends on where you hang it.
If it's on a wall and it's coming right into your eyes, like flashlight to your eyes, it's very different than if it's on your body and you're getting it indirectly to your eyes.
But as a rule of thumb, you know, getting healthy amounts of sunlight, as long as you don't, your skin doesn't burn and getting that to your eyes and your skin is good.
If you've ever had a cut, you'll notice it heals much quicker if it gets sunlight.
And so there's a group at Stanford, actually, and elsewhere also, of course, that are studying why is it that the environment of the mouth is so effective at healing itself?
I mean, it's crazy.
I've got scars from 20 years ago, but I've bitten through this cheek a bunch of times and it's painful, but then it's perfectly fine.
More so, there's kind of this idea that because we cover topics like trauma and some mental health issues, there's more the idea that we contain answers there and, you know, people aren't, their thinking isn't always so correct.
No one has said, I'm this upset with you about something you said about butter or something that I want to kill you, although some people might feel that way.
And for that reason, I now live in New Zealand and you're welcome to look for me there.
There are compounds that exist in commercial products, not just sunscreen, that can cross the blood brain barrier and that are bad for neurons, period.
That is indisputable.
Some of those compounds have been shown to be in abundance in certain sunscreens and other cosmetics.
So I'm not saying that all sunscreen are bad.
I'm saying that there are some sunscreens that contain some things Were they to get across the blood-brain barrier would be bad.
This is really a place where I want to tread carefully.
Here's what I think is important for people to know.
Not all sunscreens are safe.
Not all cosmetic lotions are safe.
Not all cosmetics are safe.
I think we're probably going to arrive in a place not that different from the silicone breast implant kind of landscape where It turns out, depended on what implant and how long they were in and what they were packaged in.
Like so many things, like tryptophan, the amino acid that people used to enhance sleep, now you get it readily, but it was banned for a long time because a few people actually took tryptophan that had contaminated binders.
It was the stuff that was in there with it and they got very sick and there were some fatalities even.
And so it was taken off market for years for all the wrong reasons.
I mean, taken off for good reason, but it was the binders, not the tryptophan.
With sunscreen, there are many things that are good about sunscreen, like avoiding skin cancer, but many sunscreens are bringing in these triclosans and other small, even if a molecule is small enough, it'll cross into the blood-brain barrier, and we don't know what the long-term effects of those are, but I think it's worth paying attention to.
Similarly, I used to teach this in a big undergraduate course, If you look at the data on EMFs and you look at the data on cell phones, you will find animal studies that show that if you put a cell phone under a rat's cage or a litter of rat's cage, and two separate studies, you'll find dramatic decreases in testosterone in some studies, and you'll find subtle increases in testosterone in others.
I don't know what the effect is or how it's working, but clearly, There needs to be an exploration of this.
And clearly, it's going to be a really inconvenient thing to do that, right?
I mean, I use the earbuds.
I use the earbuds.
But nowadays, I sort of wonder, should I maybe use the wire things more?
You know, so they're not really incentivized to get it right, nor am I a conspiracy theorist.
But here's my wish is that we look at everything and we look at it objectively.
And that we take into account that there are some animal data that point to the fact that getting these EMFs in close proximity all the time might not be the best idea.
Well, and I think, you know, we go back to Liver King and some of the other more colorful aspects of online nutrition and health information.
People wonder, I actually saw some, I made the huge mistake of going onto Twitter in the last couple of years.
I never really was on Twitter and it's such a weird landscape as you know.
But one of the things I discovered was that a lot of the people in the science and medical community are there kind of poking fun at online health and nutrition and they wonder why.
They're sort of like, how is it that this person has millions of followers and so on?
And the reason is actually because they're doing such a poor job of communicating health information in a meaningful, clear, and actionable way.
And so it provides this enormous opportunity for someone to just show up and kind of just say whatever and grab a huge audience.
You'd have to find an established portal or create your own, and that's a long, laborious task of building up an audience and providing them with good content and hopefully getting on a podcast where people have a large audience and an appetite for that kind of a thing.
I think that what you do and to some extent what I do, what Lex does, and of course there are others, is try and provide a venue for people that would otherwise be locked away in their laboratories or locked away in their clinics to get information out there.
And to have someone across the table for them like this, kind of pushing and saying, but tell me more.
What exactly?
What do we know?
What don't we know?
Mice or humans?
How many people?
This kind of thing.
Because in the absence of that, I really think that people are just left to kind of, there's a kind of gravitational pull towards the thing that's most sensational.
So they go, oh, like maybe just eating testicles is like the key to a good life, or maybe just eating plants is the only way to live and be healthy.
And I think that there are, I mean, there's incredible science and incredible medicine.
And I think most, at least my experience has been that most scientists Want to share what they know.
We've never had someone tell us no.
And we've had Howard Hughes investigators.
We've had, you know, we've got a few future Nobel Prize winners and Nobel Prize winners coming.
You've had dozens more than we ever have.
I have learned so much from Shayna, from, I found out about, you know, Atiyah.
I mean, those of us in the game of science, I still run a lab, so I'm familiar with this.
It's the number of people that will actually read a paper start to finish who are qualified to parse what's in there is you can count on one hand maybe two.
And for really, you know, blockbuster papers that have a huge impact, that number might get into the hundreds or thousands.
Like, if someone's upset at you, and the thing about the social media, the bickering that I do see, the one thing that it does do is make me know that you're an extremely flawed person.
This person who is, like, concentrating, whether it's nutrition or whatever it is, which I agree with you, there is this weird sort of...
It's not feeling you're getting enough attention for your own research and then finding whatever one thing that you think someone's doing wrong and going after them and attacking them.
And then there's also people that are legitimately upset that people are pushing out fake information and bullshit.
I mean, and he does a really good job of finding those people and pointing those things out.
But that's the thing is that there's this appetite for information.
So when someone comes along and says something that's counter to what everyone's been told, It reinforces this desire to have like, ooh, there's some secret information out there that I didn't know about.
All I have to do is eat testicles and I'll have more testicle power.
Like that kind of shit is like, for whatever reason, very attractive to people.
So it's very important that someone in his...
I'm not talking about him when I'm talking about bickering, really.
I'm talking about some very bizarre...
Characters that haven't developed these online followings, but try really hard to get them.
And I also think there's probably a bunch of social issues that these people have as well.
But he does a great job of mocking these folks and a good counter to some of these more preposterous claims that you do see very, very prevalent, particularly in the alternative health space.
You see it from a lot of these vegan people and all these alternative health people.
There's so much horseshit going on.
There's so much weird nonsense that these people push, and that's how they make their, you know, that's how they get attention.
Yeah, and Lane has done, for instance, a pretty good job of using kind of more sensational-like content to combat sensational content.
So he does these like, ohs, and these, you know, that's not the style that I use.
Although I will say he called me out on something that's worth mentioning because I think I was grateful that he did.
I mentioned in a tweet that there is evidence that alcohol can increase the aromatization of testosterone and estrogen and he pointed out quite correctly that it depends on dose and there might be some individual variation.
So that's where like someone saying, wait a second, hold on, that's not the whole story.
Science is like you have a certain amount of data and you discuss that data and then someone else who has a deeper understanding of it can maybe point to some other study that maybe you weren't aware of and you add that to it.
As long as everyone's not dogmatic.
But when you get into the heavy-duty carnivore space, when you get into the heavy-duty vegan space, my problem with a lot of that is it's very dogmatic.
And a lot of people claim that they have all the answers to all the things like, you know, Paul Saladino likes to do, is this bullshit?
Well, one of the things that I believe, and this is really...
Hybridizing, as we say.
Nerdy speak for crossing over two separate things.
I think that people that have a lot of different kinds of friends can look at any conversation about politics or about guns or about nutrition in a more nuanced way.
I've always enjoyed, I believe this is you as well, I'm speculating here, but what I see is that, you know, I've got friends who are hippies, punk rockers, Republicans, Democrats, libertarians, gun owners, gun haters, all of it.
By being friends with a lot of different kinds of people, you just kind of get, you just come to understand, as you put it once to me, and I really internalize this, like, it's about people, right?
The dogmatic stuff is when you, you know, 99% of your friends are of one orientation or another, Your worldview just shrinks to the size of an atom.
There's also a problem with people wanting to be right, you know, and they want to win.
Like, if you believe that the Democratic Party is the only way forward for a rational, peaceful society, and you have this confirmation bias that only the Democrats have the answers to this, to that, the other things, or if you're a person that believes in God and the Republicans and we need the First and Second Amendment and this and that,
And you're so committed, people get so committed to these ideas that they're not willing to entertain any other idea and then they fight rigorously.
They fight as if you're defending your own life, your own soul.
You don't fight, you don't discuss these things on the merits of their, you know, whether or not this is a good concept or that's a good concept.
You're literally almost arguing for your very existence being valid.
And it's very strange, because people equate themselves, they attach themselves to ideas.
And when their idea gets challenged, they get emotional, they get excited, they get angry, they get aggressive.
And it's so sad to watch, especially as people get older.
When I see a 60-year-old man who gets hyper-aggressive and starts yelling at people about ideas, It's like, goddammit, calling people morons, calling people assholes.
It's like, just talk about the idea.
Just don't attach yourself to it.
Talk about the idea.
You'll look far better.
You'll appear far more intelligent.
It's a far more evolved way to communicate about things.
But so many people are just completely incapable of it.
When they're challenged on their ideas, they can never say, I'm wrong.
They can never say, oh, I was incorrect.
I thought this.
They literally don't have the ability to do that.
They will find some way to try to pretend that they were wrong or that they weren't wrong.
I immediately think of neuroplasticity as robust early in life and it tapers off.
And brilliant people like Richard Feynman, the great theoretical physicist, I mean, he was known for doing crazy things, bongo drumming naked on the roof of Caltech, but also decided to become an artist, not a great one, but an artist late in life, or he also wrote a lot of theorems and did his work in strip bars in Pasadena.
He loved being among different types of people, and he believed, he wrote a lot about this, that remaining curious, genuinely curious, and I define curiosity as being interested in something without being attached to the outcome, right?
You legitimately want to find out what's on the other side.
That that maintains this youthfulness and this plasticity.
And I think when one approaches a conversation of any kind from the stance of, I don't want to find out, I want to be shown to be right, curiosity is dead, right?
It's just very difficult to get people to sit down and have civil conversations when they have hot-button topics that they're opposed to.
Like if one person is hardcore right-wing and one person's hardcore left-wing, to have them sit down and have calm, rational conversations is incredibly difficult.
Because everybody wants to win.
Everybody wants to, because you're literally defending yourself.
You're defending, it's not just an idea.
Like say if you want to talk about the First Amendment and whether or not freedom of speech should be, like the First Amendment protection should be extended to social media.
Or whether or not social media should be thought, like things like Twitter, which is it the town square or is it a private company?
Like, these kind of discussions, like, people will get fucking emotional and furious and angry and ad hominems and they...
Well, this is one place where I think a scientific training is useful, independent of whether or not one decides to become a career scientist.
When you take your so-called oral defense examination, You get up there and there's five or six different faculty and your qualifying exam and they ask you questions until you say, I don't know.
The idea is to find where your cliff is.
The moment that you start wondering and stumbling, that's when you actually know you're doing a good job.
I mean, you don't want to do that too early, but they'll ask crazy questions, hard questions that are unrelated to anything you think you should have have to prepare.
And I sit on these committees now.
I sit on the other side of the fence.
Social media for me has actually become a good kind of repeat of my qualifying exam because occasionally something comes in that I go, wow, I never thought about it that way.
You're absolutely right.
But the moment you say, I don't know, that's when you are allowed to pass up to the next level in science.
It's not when you know, it's when you are willing to admit that you don't know.
That they say, now you can go pursue a dissertation.
Then you do a dissertation, and then you have to defend it.
And everyone thinks, so you have to defend it by showing it's watertight.
You actually defend it, but a really good defense committee, we all meet beforehand, and we're like, how are we going to beat this guy or this gal up?
And we decide, we're going to find where the leaks are and get them to admit that their study is wonderful.
I'm tempted to raise the story, but I'm not going to because I don't want to draw fire again.
But no, I once credited a colleague who was an amazing colleague and someone picked up on something in the article about them that was totally unrelated and was And it was like suddenly the conversation shifted completely and then you realize it's all about them.
It actually has nothing to do about the topic.
And that's where I think things can get really diverted.
I mean, I tend to not respond to comments too often.
Occasionally, you know, thanks for your interest in science and like give people, cue people to an episode.
I do not get into online debates.
I'm happy to do it on a podcast, but I don't do it in comment sections.
You know, if you sit down across from someone, you look them eye to eye and have a conversation, people tend to be more civil, they tend to be more kind.
It's so easy to be shitty with text over Twitter.
It's just so easy and so many people engage in it.
I was watching a friend of mine who's a comedian.
Arguing with people back and forth.
I was gonna reach out to him, and I was gonna go, what the fuck are you doing?
And I'm looking at his timeline, and it's like, this is taking place over many hours in his day.
I'm like, bro, that hour, those hours, you're never gonna get back.
That day's gone.
That day's toast.
And you're arguing with people about some shit that has very little to do with you.
It's more to do with your ideological position, like you're standing in this whatever group you're in, right or left.
Yeah, and as a creator the goal is always to create new and better what it works And so it really does seem like a a true time sink It is a time sink and it's also like your time is fucking valuable You're giving your time to something and that's robbing you of effort It's robbing you of whatever you could be doing to increase your proficiency in something increase your knowledge and your Enjoyment doing things you enjoy you don't fucking enjoy arguing with people People on Twitter that you don't even know.
I actually have rules for my engagement on social media and the podcast.
I always try and put out information that's really about the audience.
I want them to benefit.
It's not about me.
Occasionally, that can get murky because you'll say, You know, I learned this thing and it can seem like it's about you, but it's really about them getting something that I think will be useful to them.
And the other one is, I don't generally get angry anyway.
There are things in life that make me angry, but I never bring that to the table.
Now, when you're talking about all these things for optimizing health and fitness and performance, Obviously, you're very fit and you work out a lot, but how much of your own body and your own experiences do you experiment on these things so that you could have more data or you could have at least anecdotal data?
I know right now intermittent fasting became really controversial recently because there was a study showing that there's no additional benefit of fasting for weight loss as compared to caloric restriction.
Clearly, and that set off a storm, and it was a storm I was happy to sidestep and enjoy, watch, go by.
Because it was really interesting that the headline in the New York Times was, frankly, was terrible because it said, study shows no benefit to intermittent fasting.
But what the actual finding was is that the study showed no additional benefit to fasting over caloric restriction for obesity.
Fox News got it right in this case, and I have no bias.
I don't subscribe to any of these things.
Canceled all my subscriptions.
The New York Times got it, blah.
Fox News got it right, and then that sort of science post...
They said no additional benefit, I believe, or something like that, to fasting over caloric restriction for weight loss, or something like that.
Something very true to the concluding arguments of the paper.
The other ones were really designed to say, fasting bad.
Here you've got millions and millions of people who have now figured out a way to control their appetite, Because they're better at eating nothing for certain periods of day than eating like half the muffin.
Because there's all these neural mechanisms.
When you start ingesting food, there's this desire to eat more food.
And for some people, not eating for a period is better than eating.
And then some of the smaller news sites got it somewhere in the middle.
So I'll eat my first meal somewhere around 11 a.m.
But occasionally I'll have like a protein drink at nine if I'm really starving when I wake up.
But I do those things.
I do the red light therapy.
I stand in front of the red light to get the eye benefits.
And I don't, I'm not trying to heal acne or anything, but I just kind of do it all over my body anyway.
Early in the day, a few times a week.
I definitely have a, what I call non-sleep deep rest protocol.
So instead of naps and meditation, I'll listen to like a yoga nidra script or I'll do some sort of hypnosis script three or four times a week to just, Do what I call deliberate decompression, to just take my mind to a space, not unlike the one you were describing for cannabis for some people, where I'm just not thinking about anything.
In order to reset, there's an amazing study out of Scandinavia, a hospital in Denmark did this study in humans showing that with positron emission tomography imaging, so brain imaging in humans showed that a 30 minute yoga nidra, so just lying down and listening to this deep relaxation script, Increased dopamine resting levels in an area of the brain called the striatum by 65%, basically putting people into a state where they're ready for action again when they come out of it.
I find it incredibly rejuvenating.
The CEO of Google has written about NSDR, non-sleep deep rest.
That's an acronym I coined because I didn't like the words yoga nidra and meditation, all sounds kind of magic carpet-y and acts as a barrier for people.
So I'll do NSDR almost every day.
10 to 30 minutes.
What else do I do?
I dim the lights at night.
I make sure I get sunlight in the morning.
I try and eat well, good minimally, excuse me, processed or unprocessed foods.
What else?
I try and do some Stretching.
I try and stretch and do that sort of thing.
And I'm also really trying to avoid toxic people in interactions.
And I think probably the biggest surprise in researching the podcast over the last 18 months, because that's when we started, was we decided to do an episode on Gratitude.
And I thought, okay, Gratitude.
We did it for Thanksgiving.
I thought, okay.
It's gonna be thanking people and things.
It turns out that if you look at the research on gratitude, first of all, the increases in dopamine and serotonin and feelings of subjective wellbeing from people that have a regular effective gratitude practice, we'll talk about what that is, is immense.
It's immense.
These are skyrocket effects.
What is the most effective gratitude practice?
It turns out it's not sitting there and being thankful, it's receiving gratitude or observing someone else receiving gratitude.
I thought that gratitude was all about being grateful.
It's actually receiving gratitude or observing some instance in which somebody is receiving genuine gratitude.
Totally surprised me.
So this means give gratitude, give thanks, but also be in a position to receive thanks.
These kind of nuanced things might seem small, but one thing I try and do is, since I can't walk around asking for gratitude, that's not my style.
I like to think my ego's at least slightly more in check than that.
I try and really let people that I care about and I'm grateful to know that, but I do that for them, not for me.
And so that's something I pay a lot of attention to.
It feels kind of weak sauce.
It's kind of like people go, that's kind of like weenie stuff, like gratitude.
The data show that gratitude and avoiding toxic people and focusing on good quality social interactions, physical contact with animals, kids, and loved ones like, you know, that huge increases in serotonin, oxytocin.
These are no longer the kinds of things that are just talked about at the end of a yoga class, right?
This is real science with brain imaging and measurements of chemicals from the brain and blood.
And so I've tried to incorporate more of that stuff that isn't as kind of forward center of mass, you know, like get after it kind of stuff.
I do that stuff, but I also try and, you know, have a good life and surround myself with good people.
And I think of it as not just good in the present, but it's also buffering me and everyone who does these sorts of things against the inevitable, right?
I mean, shit happens and people die and terrible things happen.
And so in order to be in the best position to really see that stuff and react to it in the best possible way and also continue to move forward and do what's important to me in life, I feel like all the stuff I'm doing is great in the day-to-day, but it's also about the long-term arc.
I mean, my parents are getting to the age.
Look, I hope they live to be another 20 years more, but chances are they're going to go in the next 20 years.
I want to be in the best position to support them, and I want to be able to be the best position to support me, frankly, as well.
So I think that doing all this stuff positions us to be You know, like leaders and supporters of ourselves and of other people.
And I know that all sound kind of like, you know, word mumbo jumbo, but it's the day, you've talked about this before, it's the daily rituals.
Like none of the things I described are something that you can just take and then it's all done.
And of course I do take supplements.
So, you know, we advertise these, so sure.
But I take omegas and I take athletic greens and I take some Tonga Ali and I do as many of the things as I possibly can.
I actually really enjoy that stuff.
And I think they're good data.
All of it, if your one is willing to look and be open-minded.
But even if you don't have access to those things, there's so much that you can do with sunlight, exercise, gratitude, hydration, yoga nidra.
90% of the really effective things don't cost anything except time.
Well, when we're talking about, there's another, there's a benefit to what we're talking about with intermittent fasting is that you give yourself structure.
And that's very important for people, even for people that are disciplined.
Like, I find myself, when I have a full day off and I don't have to do anything, I find myself putting off my workout until later and later in the day, and then I kind of, like, lazily get through my workout, and I go, oh my god, like, I'm better off when I'm busy.
Because when I'm busy, I have a structure.
And I think there's a thing about, like, I used to think that, or I do still think that, about, like, Sober October.
Like, when we do Sober October, I'm not drinking or doing anything for one month.
And that structure helps me, you know?
And I think when you say, oh, I'm going to cut back on my drinking, what does that even mean?
I never thought about that, because I'm not a drinker, although these days I'm hearing a lot about all these delicious whiskeys in Texas, and I don't have a problem with alcohol, so I'm always willing to try.
I think I watched your election night episode and there was like all the comments coming through about there might have been a fast food hamburger on the table.
He's a longtime Hollywood guy who's a kind of a photographer who does these adventures.
So then one of the divers saw me and I was like, you know, like I need air and he kind of looked at me, but, and so he kicked his way back over, but that was a long wait.
And then we did the share air thing, but now two divers are out and we're there sharing air.
And there's only so much air before you eventually run out and there's nothing in the reserves.
Eventually they came back and then we pulled the rope and got out.
And it was, yeah, it was enough of a scary experience for me that I was like, oh God.
So we, and actually I got out and a guy from the SEAL teams came over to me, super calm, like typical of those guys.
He was like, so what do you take away from that experience?
And I was like, check the safety tanks.
He was like, check the safeties.
But I will say this, I'm not tough.
Like this is not to kind of inflate myself, but the next day, I woke up and I was seriously freaked out.
And so I actually went down the next day again and I cage exited.
And the reason I did it is because first of all, when I cage exited, I was on scuba.
So I felt totally contained.
I knew I wasn't going to die of an air failure.
And the other reason is everything we know about trauma and the treatment of trauma is that if you live with that bug in your brain about quote unquote almost dying, in fact, I don't even like to say that, that's stuck in you.
So I went down there in the cage and then I cage exited.
The next day, I woke up, and I was just so distraught about what happened the day before, I decided there's only one way to deal with this, and that's to cage exit, to go down there, but this time leave the cage, and this time leave it on scuba.
But in the culture of cage exit great white shark diving, there's an interesting twist.
For years, guys have been going out to Guadalupe and doing this stuff.
It's a real kind of machismo culture.
Who can get closest?
Who can get the camera almost into the shark's mouth, et cetera?
And for years, there was a lot of kind of one-upping and posting things online.
And then a couple years ago, Out of what seemed like nowhere, Ocean Ramsey, this female freediver shark expert, shows on BBC video her swimming with no scuba, With the biggest great white shark anyone's ever seen.
I think they call it Big Blue.
And she's holding on to the fins.
So all these guys, like all this testosterone of like, I cage exited and I got this close and that close.
And here comes this lady and she just demolishes the scene.
Like no one has done what she's done.
This shark is so big.
This is her.
This is insane.
Her husband shot this footage from what I understand.
Some politician in Mexico, his wife had an affair with some guy and apparently they put the guy out there on the island, but the island is known, maybe that's just lore, but people were spearfishing out there and getting eaten.
They were putting the bloody fish on their hip and getting munched.
And so they realized this is filled with great whites.
And when you drop anchor there, I remember every time going out there, and we've been there twice now, I was thinking, oh, we're not going to see any sharks.
And, you know, we have a couple cocktails, and then the next thing you know, a couple is three or four, and then we do podcasts, and podcasts a lot of times will be drinking.
If it's anything that I should do less of, it's definitely booze.
But I'm around a very boozy culture.
You know, a lot of my friends drink, and drink pretty hard.
And when it comes to how many of them are actually healthy, it's a fucking small number.
Well, the Belushi thing and the Pryor thing are probably both related to drugs.
You know, I was around Pryor in his dying days, unfortunately, because when he was doing really poorly, he decided to go back on stage.
And I think it's like, you know, to try to recapture his lost love.
You know, his body was failing him.
And so the thing that excited him or got him at least to give him some sort of sense of purpose was to go back at the comedy store.
And I worked with him for about five, maybe six weeks, where he was going up all the time, and I was always going on after him.
So it would be richer prior than me.
And so I got to see him.
They had to carry him to the stage, and then they had to put him in the chair, and then they had to crank up the sound like...
Like, he was really loud because his voice was, you know, he had no energy.
And I remember thinking, like, he's not old enough for this.
Like, whatever this neurologically degenerative disease that he has, like, whether that happened because he was, you know, had a genetic propensity, predisposition for this, or whether it's because of a lot of cocaine.
Because I know a lot of people...
I don't know if they're related, but I know a lot of people that did a lot of cocaine in the 70s and the 80s, and they developed some serious neurological problems as they got older.
I mean, the early studies of MDMA and whether or not it was neurotoxic actually...
One of them had to be retracted because they accidentally used an amphetamine and cocaine-like substance instead, accidentally, in these monkeys, and they showed neurodegeneration.
Guys I grew up with, and these names won't mean anything to people, but guys that were kind of famous in the San Francisco skateboarding, punk rock scene, a lot of them have died young, died of heart attacks five or six years after they stopped doing a lot of cocaine.
I think there is evidence that it can adjust the function of calcium channels on the heart, and then later, you know, it takes a smaller insult to put them under.
Anyway, it's sad.
As we were talking about with hormones and all the other things and light, etc., it's not just about the effect it has in the short term.
It's the long arc.
And the long arc can be negative, like we're talking about, or the long arc can be positive.
No, it turns out the measures, and I know Atiyah talks about this in a much more sophisticated way than I can, but one's ability to get up off the ground without assistance, one's ability to jump and land, one's ability to hang from a bar for a minute, these are measures not unlike blood pressure and Heart rate, resting heart rate and things of that sort about how well your nervous system can communicate to your musculature and whether or not your musculature and ligaments and bones can handle all that.
And so I think being the one thing we know is that being physically active is superb at extending your life and improving your life.
Yeah, improving your life is, I mean, I don't know how much you can really extend.
Here's the deal.
It's like, we really don't have a lot of data on people that started working out when they were like in their early teens and kept going, supplementing their hormones, supplementing vitamins, supplementing, and then got into their 50s and 60s and 70s.
If you're a professional athlete, you don't put in that effort because you're not going to be a professional athlete when you're 60 and 70 years old.
You're just not.
So a lot of times when people that are professional athletes, they get to the point where they retire, one of the things they do is they get fat and they stop.
Well, this is the old thing about that they used to say, you know, you stop lifting weights, you'll quote unquote turn to fat, which is Impossible.
It was because people kept eating and they stopped training.
My role model in all this is actually, you know, very perhaps surprising to some people.
Recently, I had Ido Portal, you know, on the podcast.
You know who my hero is?
His mother.
He has a video of his mother when she's in her 60s.
She started training at 58, and this was like seven years ago, doing pull-ups for reps, doing backbends, doing all the kind of stuff that, you know, Ido-ish stuff, but in her 60s, which means that now she's in her early 70s, and he told me that she's still doing five sets of five pull-ups, dips.
Well, I think that the transition from unfit to fit is where people see the most dramatic effects.
And that should be encouraging.
I have a colleague, her name is Wendy Suzuki.
For years she studied memory.
She's at NYU. Now she's the incoming dean of students at NYU. The reason I'm so happy about that is that she's talked about and published really good scientific studies on 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise early in the day, and now she's a 10-minute cold shower person because she lives in New York, harder to get access to ice tubs and things.
I mean, finally there are data to point to the fact that doing cardiovascular or weight training exercise, if it's intense enough and it comes early in the day, especially, but also if you do it late in the day, they've also shown that people's cognitive function actually goes up.
This was all correlative before.
It was like, When you exercise, your heart, your cardiovascular system is better, therefore your brain is better, therefore there's this indirect effect on mood and performance.
But now they know everything from grip strength to attention capacity to task switching.
There are all these measures like the Stroop test of all these things of cognitive flexibility and all of that improved.
By physical exercise, categorically, over and over.
It doesn't matter if it's boys, girls, men, women, what age.
And so now we no longer have to speculate as to whether or not exercise is good for the brain also.
It absolutely is.
And her work is now being transferred into basically curriculum for students.
Her goal is that students are gonna go through college, not just getting their grades, but coming out healthier than they came in.
And hopefully that'll wick out to everybody, not just people in college, obviously, but will wick out to everybody.
So they're going to be running studies, getting data from these kids.
I think it's really important because I think that everything is kind of murky and kind of indirect up to a point, and now they're actually really solid data.
Yeah, well, a colleague at Columbia who has a Nobel Prize, Richard Axel, plays squash like multiple times per week.
He used to play basketball, though he says not very well.
Eric Kandel, Nobel Prize in, for research and memory, swam a mile three times a week, now it's half a mile, because he's in his late 90s, he still does it.
Tornos and Weasel, Nobel Prize revision, my scientific great-grandparents, 96 years old, still jogs every morning, 45 minutes, and still mentally sharp.
So the smartest people, most accomplished scientists I know, all extremely physically active for decades.
So whatever smart people think that physical activity is just for meatheads and jocks, they're obviously not smart enough to know how it really works.
I think there's also a little bit of the tone that came back to me early on.
Like, you know, some colleagues have been really interested in like, oh, I'm really excited about, you know, eating more omegas or eating more fish or, you know, whatever, taking athletic greens, etc.
And then some of them like, oh, it's all pills and powder kind of stuff.
They see it as over there when they don't realize that, sure, you don't need those things, but a general theme of taking care of oneself physically can translate, does translate to taking care of oneself mentally.
The reverse is not true, right?
Plenty of intellectual smart people who look like melted candles, right?
And who function like melting it.
They sleep with their mouth open, they have sleep apnea, I mean, they're a wreck.
And that wreck shows up somewhere in their 60s, and I see this all the time because I've attended no fewer than 10 funerals for brilliant people.
And those funerals, with one or two exceptions, were all because they took terrible care of themselves.
Well, in my world, in the comedy world, obviously I see that because most of my friends don't take care of themselves.
There's a good percentage of people in that world, when they get to a certain age, like there's friends that are my age and they look like they're my dad.
But if you look at the top people, I say you, or you look at a Chappelle, or you look at the people that are, like I talked about three Nobel Prize winners, that their work will carry on for health and science for thousands of years, if we exist that long.
So in that top tier, they get it.
In the lower tier, I don't know.
But in the middle tier is where I see a lot of the unfortunate behavior of not preserving oneself.
So if you look at the best of the best, Do you see good self-care there?
Well, listen, man, I appreciate you very much, and I appreciate your podcast and all the information that you put out there.
You very, very much helped me.
And I think people like you are a really valuable resource, and I'm really glad that you're not just contained to classrooms and that putting out that podcast and making it accessible to so many people, it's really, really valuable.
We're super fortunate that we have these kind of platforms, that this exists, because this has never been a thing in history before, and it's a thing now.