March 21, 2023 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:46:40
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Every now and then, pizza is good for you, right? | ||
| What is your schedule as far as, do you allow yourself bad food every now and then? | ||
| My vices in the food department are croissants. | ||
| Thing is, that hits the dopamine button and it's all about more. | ||
| I mean, I can sink. | ||
| Five of those things. | ||
| Chocolate croissants are my jam. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| I don't adulterate my croissants. | ||
| Really? | ||
| No, maybe extra butter. | ||
| For me, it's all the savory stuff. | ||
| Savory, salty. | ||
| So it's croissants every once in a while. | ||
| Have you had a chocolate croissant? | ||
| I have. | ||
| Pretty goddamn good. | ||
| You like them? | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm with them. | |
| I'm all butter. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Butter's nice. | ||
| Butter's nice. | ||
| I think the all butter for me justifies having, you know, three or four. | ||
| When I lived in New York, I used to love buttered bagels or buttered rolls. | ||
| They do not have that out here for some strange reason. | ||
| It's like a common thing. | ||
| If you go to like a deli in New York, they always had buttered rolls. | ||
| It was like just a roll with a lot of butter on it and people would eat that with coffee. | ||
| Out here, they don't have that for some strangers. | ||
| Or in LA, they don't have it either. | ||
| I like how in New York, when you get a soda, even at a little 7-Eleven type place, they offer you a straw. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's one of the last civilized things in life to be offered a straw. | ||
| You know what I saw? | ||
| There's a chart, see if you could find this, of, you know how we're supposed to be not using plastic straws anymore because turtles are dying? | ||
| You know that, you know, people give you plastic, you know, they give you paper straws. | ||
| I grew up in, I remember the six-pack container, those plastic things, and you see the seagull thing around. | ||
| Yeah, like the turtle, where it constricted his shell. | ||
| Have you ever seen that one? | ||
| Like, it got around a turtle when he was little, and as he grew, the shell became like an hourglass. | ||
| It was really gross. | ||
| But there was this chart of the countries in the world that pollute the ocean the most, and it's fucking stunning. | ||
| And if we stop using plastic straws, we're not going to put a fucking dent in it unless they do. | ||
| Like we're not even close to number one. | ||
| We're not even close to number six. | ||
| Like the leading countries that pollute the ocean, I think number one was Philippines. | ||
| I was going to say Southeast. | ||
| Why would Southeast Asia have that issue? | ||
| I would imagine that when people are very poor, the last thing they're concerned about is not polluting. | ||
| I would think that. | ||
| I've seen those images of those giant, like, icebergs of plastic junk. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I always hope that's not real. | ||
| Oh, it's real. | ||
| Yeah, Boyan Slott is a gentleman who's been on the podcast before, has developed this device for, it's like, it sifts the ocean, it floats over the top of the ocean, and it has this collector. | ||
| That sucks up plastic and then they take that plastic and use it and recycle it and make like eyeglasses out of it and all sorts of other different things. | ||
| Okay, so number one is China. | ||
| By a wide margin. | ||
| By a wide margin. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Countries polluting the oceans the most annual metric tons of mismanaged plastic waste and total amount ending up in global waters. | ||
| This is fucking insane. | ||
| So China is 8.80 metric tons. | ||
| Indonesia is number 2 with 3.2. | ||
| Philippines is number 3 with 1.9. | ||
| You go all the way down to the United States, it's 0.30. | ||
| Well, China's got no excuse because their GDP is way up there. | ||
| They could actually manage it. | ||
| But some of these other countries, as you mentioned, are definitely lower GDP relative to the United States and China. | ||
| Right. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Like, yeah, definitely like Malaysia, Nigeria, but... | ||
| China's got no excuse. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is some of that them buying our stuff, though? | ||
|
unidentified
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Don't we sell our trash? | |
| We buy it from them, bro. | ||
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unidentified
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Oh, okay. | |
| I mean, oh, trash. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Buy their trash. | ||
| They take it, and then we're like, here, you deal with it. | ||
|
unidentified
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I've heard of that happening. | |
| Not to a gigantic extent like that. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know about, you know... | |
| Right. | ||
| For waste management, right? | ||
| Yeah, like they might have a company that handles that. | ||
| Perhaps. | ||
| I mean, but also they produce so many plastic things. | ||
| I mean, think about the amount of things that are plastic that are produced in China. | ||
| It's pretty extraordinary. | ||
| I remember for a while... | ||
| There was a discussion about kids' toys with the coloring, you know, and the toxins in plastics. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I guess I don't know if we're going to go there because we might as well, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| Well, you know, it's interesting for starting 2019, I started posting things on Instagram. | ||
| That's how I got my stuff out. | ||
| Then I was going on podcasts. | ||
| Now we have the podcast, right? | ||
| But I'd stayed off Twitter largely until this last year when I started putting a lot of stuff there. | ||
| So you put stuff there, you start reading stuff there. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| And then, well, what's been really interesting to me is I followed this whole lab leak thing, right? | ||
| Because early in the pandemic, people in my field started chattering about that. | ||
| I love exotic animals, not to own them, right? | ||
| But I'm really interested in animal conservation. | ||
| And so the pangolin is an amazing animal. | ||
| They pinned it on the pangolin early on, right? | ||
| And there were articles published in good journals, several of which I'm on the editorial board for. | ||
| So early in the pandemic, there were papers coming out really fast about, you know, the sequence of the virus in pangolins, which were being sold in the Wuhan market, etc., And I was pretty disturbed by this, mostly because of the pictures of the Wuhan market, the exotic animal trade is just, it's horrible, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, close confinement, you know, these are beautiful animals that there's no justification for this stuff. | ||
| But pangolin meat is sold at, I forget what it is per pound, but it's a delicacy and it's considered very lucrative to get pangolin meat, of all things. | ||
| There's actually a female pangolin meat Influencer on YouTube and oh, yeah, no, it's like it's it starts to look like pangolin meat ASMR. It's crazy and disgusting. | ||
| So they're they're kind of mixing, you know, sexy women with exotic meats from these rare animals. | ||
| It's just awful. | ||
| So I was going deep down this rabbit hole of trying to understand this exotic animal trade and then And then there was chatter in my field about the fact that one of the members of the laboratory in Wuhan that was working with these very high restriction viruses had done her training in the United States, which is true, has a master's degree, but was running a laboratory, which is unusual, right? | ||
| Typically the head of a laboratory is someone with a PhD, MD, or both. | ||
| Very rare for a so-called PI, a principal investigator. | ||
| Like me or, you know, another Matt Walker, for instance, principal investigator to have less than a PhD. | ||
| The fact that she ran a lab or was important in running this lab as a masters with only a masters is unusual. | ||
| And then there was a lot of chatter in my field about the idea that it might have something to do with the fact that her significant other was a member of the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| And so, you know, that laboratory had deep ties to government and vice versa. | ||
| And that's true of all laboratories in China, all laboratories. | ||
| So the whole notion of the lab leak hypothesis was not foreign to scientists like me who thought, yeah, you know, my laboratory works with rabies viruses, adenoviruses, synbis viruses. | ||
| None of these are as, It's biohazardous as something like the coronavirus, but you work with these viruses and you have to use, you know, lab coats, gloves, bleached sterilization, you're careful, you know, hoods of, you know, but human error happens. | ||
| So I'm not at all convinced one way or the other that it was a deliberate leak, but the idea that it would leak from a laboratory to a scientist like me who has what's called a wet lab where you, you know, with solutions and beakers and things of that sort, Things happen all the time. | ||
| Not in my laboratory. | ||
| We're very careful. | ||
| And everyone's checked up on often. | ||
| The idea that human error could cause this is like it was an of course to all scientists. | ||
| Well, they had been cited in 2018 for violating safety protocols. | ||
| I mean, all it takes is, you know, people might not be familiar with the pipetting is, but it's basically taking a little straw that sucks up, you know, press a button, it sucks up some fluid, you move things, you know, between little little tiny vials can be done by robots, too. | ||
| But typically it's done by humans and that's how they put in a center. | ||
| If you spin it, take off a little piece of that or take the pellet out of the bottom that spun down, this kind of thing. | ||
| All it takes is one loose thumb and it's on a lab coat. | ||
| All it takes is that lab coat going on a rack. | ||
| All it takes is somebody leaving work, putting their lab coat on there and touching that lab coat and it's out in the world. | ||
| Like it's not that complicated. | ||
| So it doesn't have to be. | ||
| That somebody had a plan to let this out. | ||
| It could be. | ||
| I don't have any knowledge of that. | ||
| But the idea that it would come from a lab, to me, is far more plausible than the idea that it came from some pangolin sequence in the Wuhan market. | ||
| So I think we were going down the wrong path on this for a long time. | ||
| And I thought, this is kind of bananas. | ||
| And now everyone's so shocked. | ||
| I think to people who work in biomedical research, of course this sort of thing could happen. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Because human error is the cause of most of these kinds of things. | ||
| Well, it was very clear that there was a concerted effort to dismiss the idea that it came from a lab. | ||
| And it wasn't logical and it wasn't scientific. | ||
| And they ignored all the evidence that seemed to point that it originated from that lab, including the people that worked in that lab who got sick. | ||
| And now there's some new stupid story in the New York Times about a raccoon dog. | ||
| They're saying it might have come from a raccoon dog. | ||
| The civet? | ||
| Is that the... | ||
| No. | ||
| No, it's some sort of a raccoon dog. | ||
| A civet is actually a cat. | ||
| It's like a ferret type thing, right? | ||
| A civet is like in the cat family, I believe. | ||
| And that's where you get Kopi Luwak coffee from. | ||
| Oh yeah, from the poop of the civet. | ||
| Have you ever had it? | ||
| Oh, it's the Luwak coffee. | ||
| Yeah, it's actually very good. | ||
| Yeah, when I was a post-doc, there was... | ||
| So this is it. | ||
| That's the raccoon dog? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That one doesn't eat coffee beans. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Maybe it does. | ||
| Doesn't look like it. | ||
| It's a member of the Canid family. | ||
| It's also... | ||
| It's a beautiful animal. | ||
| Let's go with it. | ||
| Back to where you were. | ||
| A group that also includes domestic dogs and the only member that hibernates. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| They hibernate. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| But here's the problem. | ||
| Sagar and Jetty was actually explaining this to me on Saturday night. | ||
| He was like, there's direct evidence of people being infected that predates this establishment of this animal testing positive in that wet market. | ||
| So I guess people were eating that animal. | ||
| Is that the idea? | ||
| But many months before that, people were sick from this. | ||
| What was this in? | ||
| I believe it was in December of 2019. Is that what they're saying? | ||
| November or December of 2019. And it was March 2020 when everything kind of blasted, right? | ||
| Yeah, but it was September or August of 2019 when the first people were infected. | ||
| So it predates it by a considerable amount. | ||
| I think the lab leak hypothesis is far more plausible. | ||
| Well, the ferment cleavage site, this thing that they've established that it seems to indicate that this virus was manipulated. | ||
| Like, this is the furin cleavage site, excuse me. | ||
| Yeah, there too, you know, we hear about gain-of-function research, and now everyone associates gain-of-function of this particular virus. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Gain-of-function research happens all the time in essentially every laboratory in the US and abroad that does mouse genetics. | ||
| You knock out a gene and you ask, what happens to this animal in the absence of a gene? | ||
| And then you knock it in and you see if it replaces that. | ||
| Because in humans, human genetics is only loss of function. | ||
| You don't have the option yet, CRISPR will allow this, to put Things back in that are missing. | ||
| And so gain of function research is extremely common. | ||
| We're no longer working on animals. | ||
| To be clear, we only do human studies now. | ||
| But this is something that you're trained to do as a postdoc. | ||
| Everyone learns loss of function, gain of function. | ||
| You need to do both. | ||
| You know, the gain of function, actually there is that one CRISPR experiments beginning of interesting science out of China. | ||
| A guy, he actually was a postdoc at Stanford, worked for a guy named Steve Quake, and then separately on his own without permission or anything from Stanford, went off and started his own laboratory in China. | ||
| And stood up at a meeting a few years ago and said he had done CRISPR in human babies. | ||
| This has been done. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was arrested for this, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| He mutated the HIV receptor, which everyone thinks, okay, that was designed to prevent these babies from getting HIV. It turns out that that mutation is thought to perhaps enhance memory by sort of parallel mechanisms. | ||
| And then it was very unclear for a short while whether or not this guy was either going to get a Nobel Prize or that they were going to throw him in jail. | ||
| And so everyone is very tense and waiting in my community thinking, okay, because when somebody's kind of up for a big discovery like this, everyone kind of circles maybe wanting that maybe they should be involved in getting the accolades. | ||
| But as the moment that the international community, I think rightfully so, Said, this is horrible. | ||
| You can't do this. | ||
| There's no ethics committee. | ||
| You need to think about what you're doing. | ||
| Everyone was like, I had nothing to do with this guy. | ||
| Never had anything. | ||
| And you know, there was a deep excavation of emails and all sorts of everyone's like, I got nothing to do with this guy. | ||
| So it was pretty interesting. | ||
| Then China said, oh, we're going to, we're going to punish him. | ||
| But I'd be willing to bet both hands that he's, his punishment consists of a jail cell that is pretty luxurious with a laboratory. | ||
| There's no question that CRISPR is going on there. | ||
| CRISPR is going on in certain regions of, you know, other locations on the globe where things aren't as regulated because think about the potential payoff for being able to rescue a Huntington's mutation, right? | ||
| A Huntington's Korea mutation that has somebody at some point in their life, you know, unable to control their arms, hemibalism of the arms. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Huntington's disease. | ||
| It's a deterioration of the parts of the brain that control motor function. | ||
| The parts of the brain that control motor function have two main pathways. | ||
| One is a go pathway, like reach for this coffee mug. | ||
| And the other one is a no-go pathway, resisting movement. | ||
| And the no-go pathway degenerates substantially. | ||
| Other things too. | ||
| And people with Huntington's chorea end up with these writhing ballistic movements. | ||
| And it's an inherited disease. | ||
| So you know what gene. | ||
| It's the Huntington's. | ||
| Gene. | ||
| And if you know that your, for instance, parent has it, you can get tested for it. | ||
| A lot of people don't want to get tested. | ||
| They don't want the answer because it's late onset. | ||
| So you can be normal a certain portion of your life and then get it. | ||
| It's a tragic disease. | ||
| But if you test positive for this gene, you know you're going to get Huntington's. | ||
| In which case with CRISPR, you could just put the gene back in and rescue function. | ||
| What causes someone to eventually succumb to that disease? | ||
| If it's a late onset disease, if they don't have it when they're young and they develop when they get older, what changes? | ||
| Yeah, so it's not just deterioration of those particular neurons. | ||
| It's deterioration of the neurons that control those neurons. | ||
| And everything's working in a kind of a top-down suppression all the time. | ||
| In fact, the head neurosurgeon at Neuralink, who's somebody I know quite well named Matthew McDougall, he came up through my laboratory and Elon made a great choice in hiring him. | ||
| told me recently the best way to think about the frontal cortex is that basically its main job besides picking context and strategy for a given situation is to tell certain parts of your brain that really want to do things That's the best description I've ever heard of prefrontal cortex. | ||
| You know, it's what's keeping Jamie from doing things that he shouldn't right now and me doing things that I shouldn't right now. | ||
| And every time you have a crazy idea, like, maybe I should jump off this bridge. | ||
| Why would I think that? | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| That's a healthy operation of your brain saying, I want to because I'm kind of curious, but I don't want to, so I'm not going to. | ||
| Right. | ||
| With Huntington's, what happens is there's a slow deterioration of those neurons, but there's a lot of deterioration of these neurons that control motor function. | ||
| And eventually what happens is the deeper neurons that control motor function start shutting down the autonomic functions like breathing. | ||
| come to some basic, you know, we call them housekeeping functions, you know, so they'll have to be on a respirator and they have to, you know, they have to use a catheter tube and, you know, they have to defecate into a bag. | ||
| And, you know, at some point they just become a deteriorated mess of neurons. | ||
| So what's first to go there, however, is the control of motor function. | ||
| And it goes first in the direction of too much activity because of all these breaks and accelerators that we have in the brain. | ||
| So in any case, CRISPR gene manipulation of the sort that this guy did in this laboratory in China. | ||
| Again, I think an ethics committee needs to tell the world or decide for the world what people should be allowed to do and not do. | ||
| But you can imagine for something like Huntington's, it would be tremendously advantageous. | ||
| Like if you had a child who you knew was someday going to get Huntington's, you'd want to do a CRISPR mutation and put the healthy gene back. | ||
| Is there anything that's been shown to slow down the progress of Huntington's? | ||
| There I'm not so versed. | ||
| It's a little bit like MS, another neurodegenerative disease, multiple sclerosis, where certain things exacerbate it, like inflammation of any kind. | ||
| And those things can be almost random in some ways. | ||
| Like some people who have MS will eat salad dressing with mustard and have a huge inflammatory response and have a flare-up, blurry vision and get worse. | ||
| Mustard. | ||
| Is mustard inflammatory? | ||
| Well, mustard isn't necessarily whole body inflammatory. | ||
| But if it's spicy mustard, it binds to what's called the substance P receptor or the capsaicin receptor. | ||
| We have receptors for anything that's kind of hot and spicy. | ||
| And those are the same receptors that respond to hot liquid. | ||
| Heat and spicy, obviously, very closely linked. | ||
| And pain, all three of those very close. | ||
| Pain relief, very closely related to menthol and cool, not just the taste but the actual physical sensation of cool. | ||
| So heat, pain and inflammation are cousins in this sense. | ||
| And cool, menthol and lack of inflammation are also cousins in terms of receptors, neural circuits, this kind of thing. | ||
| So can spicy food cause inflammation? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I think one of the best ways to think about inflammation, and here I definitely hat tip to Lane Norton, who we both know, and Andy Alpin, who both really impressed upon me the fact that if we were to measure somebody's blood pressure, inflammatory markers, heart rate, and cortisol inflammatory markers, heart rate, and cortisol during a hard workout, and you didn't know they were doing a hard workout, I just handed you the data. | ||
| And you're a medical doctor. | ||
| You'd say, this person's dying. | ||
| So inflammation is robust during a hard exercise. | ||
| But I think what's so incredible about the human body is that the increase in blood pressure, inflammation, et cetera, is what triggers the adaptation so that blood pressure and inflammation, et cetera, are all much lower the other 23 hours of the day. | ||
| And so there's something special about our system whereby, yeah, maybe if you had really hot peppers, like the most famous of these is the Carolina Reaper. | ||
| The Carolina Reaper. | ||
| I have some in my hot sauce. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Señor Lechuga made me this trio of hot sauces, and there's Reapers in there. | ||
| Is that a person or a brand, Señor Lechuga? | ||
| It's a brand. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I thought it'd be awesome. | ||
| There's three hot sauces that we developed. | ||
| One of them is my friends over at Half Face Blades. | ||
| They developed this one that I really like, so he added that to my little three collection, and it's like... | ||
| I think it's reapers, sun-dried tomatoes, and some other stuff, and truffles. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Yeah, and then he's got two other ones. | ||
| One of them with habanero, but there it is. | ||
| Those are the three. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| Yeah, so if you like hot shit, I like it hot. | ||
| This stuff is, like, legit. | ||
| So one of them is Heirloom Tomatoes, Winter Truffles, and Reapers. | ||
| That's the Half-Faced Blades Cooperative. | ||
| And then the other one is, I don't even know how to say that word, Chulacale? | ||
| How do you say that? | ||
| Chihuahua. | ||
| I'm in Texas, I'll embarrass myself even more. | ||
| Get your car shirt off that please. | ||
| Kalima salt and ghost pepper. | ||
| That one's rough. | ||
| It's really delicious though. | ||
| And the other one's habanero, urfa, chili, and paprika. | ||
| And I love them all. | ||
| But I like really hot. | ||
| If you're like, boy, this Tabasco is rough, stay the fuck away from that stuff. | ||
| Because the stuff I like is pretty rough. | ||
| Well, the Carolina Reaper in small amounts, I'm sure you can spice it just right. | ||
| There are these pepper eating contests that people... | ||
| Oh, I've seen them. | ||
| We've played them on the podcast. | ||
| So a few years back, somebody ate a Carolina Reaper and ended up with what's called thunderclap headache. | ||
| Thunderclap headache is a massive inflammation of the meninges of the brain. | ||
| So you got your brain, it's sitting in fluid. | ||
| Everyone knows that. | ||
| And then there's some thick dura stuff around it. | ||
| There's thick, thick fibrous tissue. | ||
| Like, well, you're a hunter. | ||
| So when you want to take the brain out, people think, oh, you just kind of pop the brain out. | ||
| You need a sharp razor, really sharp scissors to get through a sharp knife. | ||
| The swelling of the meninges is what happened to this person. | ||
| They got an unbelievable headache, and it's actually inflammation-induced brain damage. | ||
| Now, that's only eating an extremely hot pepper in huge quantities. | ||
| How many peppers did this guy eat? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think... | ||
| Just eating one of those things. | ||
| You know, in the pepper sauce, my stuff, it's like the tiniest amount. | ||
| It'll wreck you. | ||
| Yeah, thunderclap headache. | ||
| We know a couple other things about spice. | ||
| And here I just, I always want to make sure I give proper attribution. | ||
| The Nobel Prize was given a couple years ago. | ||
| To a guy down at the Scripps Institute in San Diego, Ardem Patapuchin and David, excuse me, oh gosh, David Julius at UCSF for the discovery of these receptors for pressure, cool, heat. | ||
| And it's an amazing set of discoveries that just occurred really in the last 10 years. | ||
| We know that all of those pathways go to areas of the brain that are involved in, of course, like behavior. | ||
| Like if you touch something really hot or you taste something really hot, for most people, they're going to resist that. | ||
| But also to the hypothalamus, which houses all these hormone control areas, et cetera. | ||
| People who can tolerate stronger spice, men and women, we know it's correlated with higher levels of circulating testosterone. | ||
| That I think is interesting. | ||
| What we're really talking about is higher pain threshold. | ||
| And you and I have talked before about if there's one clear effect of testosterone, it's that it makes effort feel good. | ||
| That that pain starts to have a little bit of a come-hither kind of thing to it. | ||
| It feels a little bit enticing when testosterone levels are elevated. | ||
| When testosterone levels are lower or if people have lower levels of testosterone, effort feels more... | ||
| How's that? | ||
| And the other thing is that ingestion of spicy peppers resets your calibration for what's spicy. | ||
| I think we know that too. | ||
| And in a way that also adjusts people's pain threshold. | ||
| So if people get better at eating hot peppers, they're better at dealing with all types of pain. | ||
| And I find this fascinating because I know you and I are both kind of obsessed with ice baths and cold plunges. | ||
| And I've been going deep into that literature around cold and what's really known about cold thermogenesis and not known. | ||
| And it seems like these acute adrenaline, acute pain pathways, they do exactly what exercise does, which is in the moment, if you were to measure somebody's Inflammation, et cetera. | ||
| You'd say, this person is dying. | ||
| They're in a terrible state. | ||
| They might as well be getting, you know, open heart surgery with no anesthesia, the way some people react to the ice bath. | ||
| It's kind of silly to us, but for people that don't like the cold, they're like, you gotta be kidding me. | ||
| I'd never go near it. | ||
| They try and disparage it. | ||
| They try and poke every hole in the data. | ||
| They're just scared, right? | ||
| They're just scared. | ||
| We know this, but they are actually the people that benefit the most because that really acute adrenaline spike, that pain that you feel creates a higher pain threshold later. | ||
| Higher threshold for work output, all the things that most people seek. | ||
| And so to me, it's always interesting that you have to look what's happening during and you have to look at what's happening afterward. | ||
| And for some reason, as humans, we like these creature comforts of massages, which are great. | ||
| You know, the sauna, which is great. | ||
| Although if you crank it up really hot, it's work at some level. | ||
| It's always work at the end. | ||
| There's that moment. | ||
| The last five minutes of a 25-minute session at 190 degrees, that's work. | ||
| Yeah, and there's something about the burning in the nose for me. | ||
| At least my heart rate starts, like, I want to get the hell out of here. | ||
| Burning in the nose. | ||
| So are you using water on the rocks a lot? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's what's giving you the burning in the nose? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it's always hard to know how hot it is right at the place where it reaches your body. | ||
| I've been cranking it way, way up. | ||
| Like what temperature? | ||
| Like 260. What? | ||
| 260? | ||
| But I cover my head. | ||
| What are you, a brisket? | ||
| What the fuck are you doing? | ||
| Well, what I've found is... | ||
| Why are you doing that? | ||
| So, what's interesting is your desire to get out of the... | ||
| Of the hot tub or the too hot hot tub is because of burning on the skin, right? | ||
| But your desire to get out of the sauna is usually a brain thing. | ||
| You'll notice this because if you go to a Russian banya, they all wear the little wool hats. | ||
| That's to insulate their brain against the heat so they can stay in at hotter temperatures on their body. | ||
| So I'm in at 260, but I've got my head covered with a wool cap. | ||
| So it doesn't feel as stressful. | ||
| But I'm doing it because I like to sweat. | ||
| But if it doesn't feel as trustful, wouldn't it have less of a positive effect? | ||
| Okay, so this is great because what you're starting to do is tease out the variables. | ||
| So this is where I think it gets interesting. | ||
| You can get better at sweating. | ||
| I know fighters do this in preparation, you know, dropping weight. | ||
| You can get better by doing more sauna. | ||
| You get to be a better sweater, which means that you can cool more easily, even in clothes or if you're out running or hunting or doing anything. | ||
| So there's some advantage to being a Better at sweating. | ||
| And sweating itself is a whole interesting story. | ||
| You actually have nerves that control the sweat glands. | ||
| That's actually controlled by little nerve endings. | ||
| And those pathways can grow very, very quickly in the presence of heat. | ||
| So what I've been trying to do is learn how to dump heat better. | ||
| And if I don't use the, you know, the hat, what happened was I was getting up to 220 and I'd sit in there for like 45 minutes. | ||
| I'm thinking this is not doing anything for me anymore. | ||
| I want to increase my sweating. | ||
| Have you brought in an independent thermometer? | ||
| If you're not trusting the 260 measurement. | ||
| No. | ||
| So what I did is I had the... | ||
| No, I haven't. | ||
| Who makes your sauna? | ||
| This is Dundalk. | ||
| So what I had the guy do who had installed it for me is put the thermometer down low because it's a trigger, right? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| It's going to shut it off when it hits a certain temperature. | ||
| So what I'm really trying to do is get it really, really hot down near the floor because then when I stand up when it's that hot, I'm just... | ||
| Ready to pass out. | ||
| No chance. | ||
| But, you know, I think Laird, I don't want to get this wrong on the numbers, but I know Laird brings his Airdyne bike in there. | ||
| With oven mitts on. | ||
| So he's got to be putting himself at at least 260, right? | ||
| Himself? | ||
| I don't think he has a sauna set at 260. I think a sauna set in the 200s, though. | ||
| I think it's like 215 or 220. But pedaling on the Airdyne. | ||
| No, he's a psycho. | ||
| Yeah, that's psycho. | ||
| But he's a different kind of human being. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I'm contrasting this with cold. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's a difference. | ||
| Are you going cold and then 260? | ||
| I'm a wimp. | ||
| I start in the cold for a minute, then I go into the sauna, then back into the cold for two minutes, back into the sauna, then three minutes. | ||
| But you're not a wimp. | ||
| Why are you saying that? | ||
| Well, listen, if I were tougher, I'd go five minutes in the cold straight off. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I just had Susanna Soberg out for a podcast, and she taught me some really interesting things. | ||
| First of all, this has really helped. | ||
| We should explain that she's the woman who created the Soberg principle. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Susanna Soberg did her PhD in Denmark as, I think, one of the best scientists in terms of deliberate cold exposure and its benefits because she actually did something that's remarkable, not just in that field, but overall, which is that she employed real-world-type experiences and exercise of deliberate cold and sauna and turned it into a very rigorous study of Brown fat thermogenesis, | ||
| which is this sort of, think of it sort of like the oil in the candle of your body increases mitochondrial function and thermogenesis heats you up. | ||
| Metabolism, subjective wellbeing, sleep, et cetera. | ||
| She did all of that and published this in Cell Reports Medicine. | ||
| And I realize it's just one study, but to do the studies on humans is hard. | ||
| To do it with multiple variables is even harder. | ||
| And to do it in a real world context is even harder. | ||
| So what she showed was, That if people get 11 minutes of deliberate cold exposure per week total, and this is divided up into sessions of one to three minutes or four minutes even, so it's not 11 minutes all at once. | ||
| They fundamentally change the amount of brown fat that they have, which means they fundamentally change the number of mitochondria in the brown fat, which means they fundamentally change their thermogenic properties of their body, increase their metabolism. | ||
| Now, the people who don't like cold say, well, the increase in metabolism wasn't enough to offset more than a few bites of a bagel or something. | ||
| But that's not the point, really. | ||
| What she also showed was that this increase in thermogenesis allowed people to be more comfortable in cold environments, even when they're not in the cold. | ||
| And then people say, well, who cares, right? | ||
| I'll throw on a jacket. | ||
| But what she was able to show is that the ability to be comfortable in the cold correlates with a bunch of other important immune functions and metabolic functions and insulin sensitivity, which is a good thing. | ||
| And the inability to do that is likely to not be healthy for us. | ||
| She also showed that 57 minutes per week is the threshold for sauna. | ||
| So if people get 57 minutes per week of uncomfortably warm, but safe sauna exposure, they can get very similar effects. | ||
| And then that gave rise to this question I always said, do you end with cold or do you end with heat? | ||
| And she said, end with cold because then your body's forced to warm itself back up. | ||
| And that's what's now called the Soberg Principle, which is when you end with cold, your body has to use its natural machinery to heat back up. | ||
| In talking to her recently, I learned some really interesting things that I've been incorporating. | ||
| First of all, I've always avoided putting my head under until the very end in the cold. | ||
| Turns out that if you put your face in the water, right as you go in, you activate the mammalian dive reflex. | ||
| And this reflex, It increases the so-called parasympathetic activity of the autonomic nervous system, which is nerd speak for, it lowers your heart rate, it makes you calmer, and it makes you better able to tolerate stress. | ||
| So try this next time. | ||
| You could even just put your face in before- I go right under. | ||
| You go right under. | ||
| So that's the right way to do it. | ||
| I plug my nose, I go right under. | ||
| So I didn't know this. | ||
| A lot of people that do deliberate cold get headaches, they don't feel good. | ||
| And a lot of times it's because they slowly immerse themselves up to the neck. | ||
| And then right at that interface of cold and hot, It creates vasoconstriction right below, a little bit vasodilation above. | ||
| They get headaches. | ||
| They don't feel good. | ||
| The heart rate is way too high. | ||
| Putting your face under really helps. | ||
| Isn't that anxiety, though? | ||
| I just feel like that's all psychological. | ||
| I really do because there's there's a moment when you get in the cold where There's a part of your brain that goes let's get out of here You can get out of this if you will just get out right now and you got to go shut the fuck up But if you don't say shut the fuck up then that thing runs rampant through your brain and that kicks your heart rate up and that kicks your anxiety up I really think it's psychological Well, it's psychological and it's physiological. | ||
| Right, physiological because of psychological. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So here's what we know for sure. | ||
| For the first 20 to 30 seconds of cold shock when you get in, just how it's described, that prefrontal cortex that normally has the job of handling context and says, shh, To the reflexes of the brain and the impulses of the brain is not active for 20 to 30 seconds. | ||
| So your reflex to get the hell out of there is very, there's a clear and logical reason for that. | ||
| After that 20 or 30 seconds, the forebrain starts coming online again. | ||
| That's your opportunity to start negotiating with yourself of, oh, this is actually good for me. | ||
| I can handle this. | ||
| I got through that so I can get through the next one. | ||
| What I've been doing recently is trying to not go for time, but going for the only way I can describe this would be walls. | ||
| Like sometimes just getting in the thing is a wall for me. | ||
| So I go, okay, I got over one wall just getting in the damn thing. | ||
| Then I'm like, oh God, here it comes. | ||
| Forebrain's shutting down. | ||
| I'm like panicking. | ||
| I'm going to get through this. | ||
| And then I'm watching for when I have the impulse to get out. | ||
| And what I start to notice is that the gaps between those walls start getting longer and longer. | ||
| The more you do it. | ||
| The more you do it. | ||
| You have one at your house? | ||
| I do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then pretty soon what's happened is- How cold is it? | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| I suppose it's probably in the low 50s. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Low 50s or high 40s. | ||
| Why is it so warm? | ||
| I don't know, low 50s, high 40s. | ||
| Why do you do that? | ||
| Stay in there longer. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, we have two. | ||
| I confess we have the Mrozco one, which is, that one's really cold. | ||
| And that one is... | ||
| You avoid that one. | ||
| Sometimes. | ||
| Look at you. | ||
| I like to go in the sauna first. | ||
| I don't like what I'm hearing. | ||
| Well, here's the thing. | ||
| I've been doing longer exposure in the warmer one. | ||
| That's so much easier, though. | ||
| It is. | ||
| We had one here that was kind of broken, and it was at 54 degrees. | ||
| Okay, that's too warm. | ||
| And I climbed in, and I'm like, this is a fucking joke. | ||
| What, 50's okay, though? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Listen. | ||
| 34. 34? | ||
| That's what I like. | ||
| Yeah, you and Cam Haynes. | ||
| 34. I like it where the ice breaks off the bottom of the thing and floats to the top. | ||
| You realize I just uninvited myself on the Cam Haynes hunting trip? | ||
| Because he was like, you should come hunting. | ||
| I've never gone. | ||
| But I think he'll probably just say I'm a wuss until I get down to the 30s on these cold plunges. | ||
| No. | ||
| I did a workout with him. | ||
| I went up there. | ||
| I was sore for two weeks. | ||
| Those high rep weight workouts that he does, they're insane. | ||
| Yeah, he does a lot of that stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like I'm a slow, lazy bear in the gym. | ||
| Like I like to lift heavy rest, go like, you know, this kind of thing. | ||
| Well, he does a lot of endurance work. | ||
| You know, he does a lot of his stuff is about muscular endurance and pain threshold and you know, what you can tolerate. | ||
| It's all repetitions because repetitions, like if you just do three to five reps, it's pretty easy. | ||
| As you said, testosterone rewards, that kind of effort. | ||
| There's a big difference between that kind of stuff and like, you know, he's an ultra marathon runner. | ||
| He likes to push the mind. | ||
| Well, I'll do the long runs. | ||
| I do a long run on Sunday. | ||
| I did two hours yesterday around... | ||
| They call it a lake, but it looks more like a river. | ||
| It is a river. | ||
| It's a branch of the Colorado River. | ||
| So I kept going around that thing until I couldn't go around anymore. | ||
| But, yeah, I need to go colder. | ||
| I will get in the ice one. | ||
| What is this will need to go? | ||
| Why don't you just do it? | ||
| Well, there are mornings I'll just jump in the cold one for 30 seconds. | ||
| I do it every fucking day. | ||
| I don't have any negotiation. | ||
| There's no negotiation. | ||
| No. | ||
| I'm not saying I don't go in every day. | ||
| I'm saying I don't always go into that one first. | ||
| I go first thing in the morning. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, you're a better man. | ||
| No, it's not a better man. | ||
| Just do it. | ||
| It's just if you have like all these room, this negotiation room and all this leeway, then you won't do it. | ||
| I brush my teeth every day. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| Twice a day? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Get in the fucking cold. | ||
| Just do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| I'll start going with ice. | ||
| Just do it. | ||
| It's three minutes. | ||
| In the beginning, when I first got it, I would procrastinate. | ||
| I'd get a cup of coffee, and then I'd look down at my phone, and it was 12 minutes later. | ||
| I was like, I'd already be done. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I would have been done eight minutes ago. | ||
| Well, I'm going to get thermometers, a second thermometer for the sauna, verify. | ||
| I'm going to verify the data, second independent measurement, and the cold. | ||
| I may have to imagine that the Mrazco one, because it has pieces of ice floating in it, It's got to be colder than 50. Yeah, I bet it is. | ||
| You can tell. | ||
| If you know the Morosco has two lids, you have the lid where you climb in and there's another lid where the equipment is. | ||
| If you lift up that equipment lid, you'll see a thermometer. | ||
| You'll see a digital thermometer that's a setting. | ||
| It's like what it's set at and what it's actually at. | ||
| And I guarantee you're probably in the 30s. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So I've been doing shorter exposures there and then longer exposures in the 50 one. | ||
| What's the longer in the 50 one? | ||
| Well, I'm in there a while. | ||
| Like how long? | ||
| So that one, when I go in there, I'm staying, you know, 10, 20 minutes. | ||
| And here's the reason. | ||
| The study that was published in the European Journal of Physiology that showed these huge increases in dopamine, that was the first of these sorts of studies. | ||
| I don't know if I've mentioned this, but when you go in the cold for a very brief period of time, one to three minutes, and it's shockingly cold, you have to catch your breath, stabilize your mind. | ||
| That evokes a dopamine, epinephrine and norepinephrine release. | ||
| These three things together are called the catecholamines. | ||
| Those normally would increase from a cup of coffee and a hard sprint for 10 to 30 minutes, maybe an hour. | ||
| When you do the cold exposure, the way you're doing it, or longer exposures at about 50 degrees or so, You're seeing increases in dopamine, norepinephrine and epinephrine that are two to three X above baseline. | ||
| This is huge. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| This is huge. | ||
| This is on the order of many drugs, but the difference is most drugs spike dopamine and then drop it below baseline. | ||
| The increases in this case are lasting many hours, two to four to even six hours. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Whenever people criticize deliberate cold exposure, they go, it's not leading to that much fat loss. | ||
| Granted. | ||
| But to my knowledge, there is no drug, nor is there any form of exercise, conventional forms of exercise, that increase the catecholamines to that level for that long. | ||
| And with dopamine, it's all about The amplitude and the duration, how fast it rises, how fast it stays up there. | ||
| There's nothing quite like it. | ||
| And I did three plunges here. | ||
| I'm staying at a place that actually has a plunge. | ||
| I don't know the temperature, but it felt cold to me. | ||
| So I did three minutes, three minutes, three minutes, and they had a hot tub, so I bounced back and forth for a minute in between. | ||
| And as you know, you feel better much of the day, if not the entire day. | ||
| That is not a coincidence. | ||
| Your system is circulating much higher levels of the catecholamines. | ||
| And this is shown in that paper. | ||
| It's now been shown in a series of other papers. | ||
| My colleague, Craig Heller at Stanford, has known this for a long time. | ||
| And this is why, and for other reasons, the athletes at Stanford who use cold do it before their workouts. | ||
| Everyone now knows that it blocks hypertrophy if you do it after. | ||
| But if you wait a few hours, you're okay. | ||
| Four to six hours, you're probably fine. | ||
| Yeah, I like to do it first thing in the morning just because I don't want to do it first thing in the morning. | ||
| And that's why I like when people complain about cold plunges. | ||
| That it's not worth it, it doesn't do anything. | ||
| I'm like, fuck you, it doesn't. | ||
| You're just... | ||
| You just don't like the fact that other people can do it every day. | ||
| And you don't like the fact that you can't do it every day. | ||
| You're talking to me specifically. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Other people. | ||
| Not you. | ||
| You do. | ||
| But there's people out there that will complain about something and find an excuse why it's not beneficial. | ||
| And the reason for that excuse is not that there's not data. | ||
| The reason for that excuse is coming up with some sort of an excuse for themselves. | ||
| That's what that is. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, I think that it, you know, I think of Health and performance, so mental health, physical health and performance along, you know, fundamentals. | ||
| You talk about these all the time. | ||
| I think the five pillars, if you will, are sunlight, if I may, getting light in your eyes. | ||
| Avoiding too frequent bright light exposure in your eyes at night, unless you're doing something you really enjoy. | ||
| Okay, so you're doing comedy. | ||
| You're out past 10 p.m., right? | ||
| You're not going to wear sunglasses or something necessarily. | ||
| That would be ridiculous. | ||
| It'd be ridiculous, right? | ||
| People would go, what the fuck is this weirdo doing with sunglasses on? | ||
| It's past 10 p.m. | ||
| I have to have my blue blockers on. | ||
| I've got friends that wear the red lights at night and dim all the lights, you know, that whole thing. | ||
| That's a little extreme. | ||
| That's a little extreme. | ||
| Those people are always weird. | ||
| Yeah, but sunlight... | ||
| So sunlight during the day, morning and day, and trying to limit bright light exposure at night as much as normally possible. | ||
| Then I would say movement. | ||
| So you've got to move. | ||
| Cardiovascular resistance training. | ||
| That's one of the beautiful things I think that's happened in the last couple of decades is that resistance training is no longer just considered the thing that football players and bodybuilders do. | ||
| Everyone. | ||
| Old, young, female, male. | ||
| Women no longer, I hope, are concerned about getting, quote-unquote, too big from weightlifting or something or turning into a bodybuilder. | ||
| I think that's kind of gone away. | ||
| I like to think that's gone away. | ||
| Most women realize that the only reason why women do get too big is they take exogenous hormones. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They're taking steroids. | ||
| Yeah, you throw a bunch of Anivar in there, you get the square jaw. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what they want to avoid. | ||
| But women who don't do that and who lift weights regularly look way better. | ||
| They look way better. | ||
| And our friend Peter Atiyah, I mean, his... | ||
| Has talked about one of the major causes of death later is, you know, falls due to stepping down off things, inability to hang from a bar is, you know, correlated with lack of health, right? | ||
| In men and women. | ||
| So being able to have some strength. | ||
| So exercise, then nutrients, right? | ||
| Macronutrients, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, people now think about it. | ||
| So you need all that stuff, vitamins, minerals, and then the other stuff. | ||
| And then I think in addition to that sleep, right? | ||
| I think Matt Walker, It deserves a tremendous debt of gratitude from everybody because 10 years ago, everyone was like, I'll sleep when I'm dead. | ||
| Now we know. | ||
| You're probably not gonna dissolve into a puddle of your own tears from a couple of bad nights sleep every once in a while, but sleep makes you mentally, physically better. | ||
| You perform better. | ||
| And then the last one is this whole, not notion, it's social connection, right? | ||
| You can't stay isolated constantly or people lose their minds. | ||
| So when you look at people that get very depressed or they're suicidal, one or several of those five things is going to be diminished. | ||
| And then what happens is people hear about deliberate cold exposure And if they don't like it or they want to poke at it, they say, oh, it rocks hypertrophy. | ||
| Okay, well, only if you do it in the four to six hours after a hypertrophy workout. | ||
| I thought it was two. | ||
| Well, they've looked immediately after. | ||
| Immediately after is bad. | ||
| Immediately after is bad. | ||
| But you can do it after cardio, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The only time I do it right after workouts is after I do... | ||
| Generally, I do a really hard cardio workout, and then I'll do the sauna for 25 minutes, and then I'll do the cold plunge. | ||
| I'll end with the cold plunge. | ||
| That's okay, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, it lowers inflammation, which is what you want from the resistance training. | ||
| Again, it goes back to this, you know, it wasn't just these guys. | ||
| But again, I point to Lane and to Andy Galpin, who have been shouting from the rooftops for years. | ||
| Blood pressure up, inflammation up is a good thing. | ||
| So you have to be careful when someone says, oh, you know, you eat the hormetic effect. | ||
| You eat this, you become inflamed. | ||
| Well, how long and what's the hormetic effect? | ||
| And so in terms of You know, deliberate cold exposure, people like to say, oh, it doesn't burn much fat, it blocks hypertrophy. | ||
| But if you look at the mental benefits of having your catecholamines, dopamine or epinephrine and epinephrine systemically elevated to two to three X for four to six hours after a 30 second to three minute protocol, you're not going to show me a drug or a form of exercise that can do that. | ||
| For me, the best thing for sleep is sauna. | ||
| Like, sauna pre-sleep is amazing. | ||
| Do you know why that is? | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| It's really interesting. | ||
| When you heat the surface of your body, You would think, oh, you know, my whole body temperature is getting really hot. | ||
| But if I were to measure your core body temperature, what happens is your medial preoptic nucleus of the hypothalamus says, oh, the surface of my body is really hot. | ||
| I'm going to cool down my core temperature. | ||
| And falling asleep at night requires a one to three degree drop in bodily temperature. | ||
| And when you wake up in the morning, You have a one to three degree increase in bodily temperature in the morning, that triggers a cortisol spike, that triggers norepinephrine, and then you start waking up. | ||
| So body temperature and the ability to fall asleep and stay asleep and wake up are very tightly correlated. | ||
| That your whole circadian rhythm is temperature driven. | ||
| And so, for instance, you probably have a best time of day for you to work out where you feel best. | ||
| If I were to have you train at 2 a.m. | ||
| when you went to bed a couple hours before, you'd feel miserable. | ||
| You're not going to perform as well. | ||
| Grip strength in the middle of the night. | ||
| I wake you up, I take your grip strength measurement. | ||
| It's going to be strong, but not as strong as it would be it. | ||
| Your peak time during the day. | ||
| If we looked at your body temperature, we'd find that your grip strength is weakest when your body temperature is lowest. | ||
| So you'd say, well, I'm asleep. | ||
| That's why. | ||
| Ah, but there's an easy experiment. | ||
| This has been done. | ||
| We just keep you awake for 24 hours. | ||
| We measure your body temperature. | ||
| It has a very regular circadian rhythm. | ||
| That persists. | ||
| And we measure grip strength. | ||
| That's been done numerous times. | ||
| People living in caves, they've done those experiments. | ||
| Have they done experiments where people do the sauna and then work out? | ||
| Because of grip strength, although it's tied to body temperature, if you can raise your core body temperature from the sauna. | ||
| Sauna's dropping your core body temperature. | ||
| The inside of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But even while you're at peak sauna, you're sweating like a pig? | ||
| So at some point, you won't be able to thermoregulate anymore, and then your body temperature will go up and you can become hyperthermic. | ||
| So when you are in the sauna, and it's 210 degrees, and you're sweating like a pig, your body temperature is lower? | ||
| Your core body temperature is fighting to get lower, and when you get out, your core body temperature continues to go down. | ||
| It plummets. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And the exact opposite happens when you get in the cold plunge. | ||
| You feel cold on the surface, so your body goes, oh shit. | ||
| Hypothalamus, again, medial pre-optic area, gets a signal from... | ||
| I mean, if you think about how beautiful this mechanism is, I still get goosebumps, no pun intended, when I think about it. | ||
| You have receptors on your skin surface that sense cold. | ||
| Send that to your hypothalamus, which says, ha, it's cold out there. | ||
| I'm going to generate heat. | ||
| How do I generate heat? | ||
| Well, there are two things you can do. | ||
| I can make you shiver, which will generate heat, or I can make you move. | ||
| Shivering is just another form of moving. | ||
| I can activate this very specialized fat tissue, which is not under the skin, it's not subcutaneous fat, but it's around your critical organs, which is the brown fat. | ||
| Activate the mitochondria there and basically at that very core level get electrons moving and the brown fat in turn activates the thermogenic system and starts heating you up. | ||
| It's so crazy. | ||
| And then what's beautiful is that the brown fat has a sort of memory of that experience. | ||
| So even after you get out, you're walking around right now. | ||
| I did cold plunge this morning. | ||
| You did cold plunge this morning, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay. | ||
| So your body temperature is about one to three degrees hotter, probably about one or two degrees hotter than it normally would be. | ||
| Dopamine's getting cranked out. | ||
| And so all day long, you're warmer at, let's say, cool ambient temperature. | ||
| In fact, in Scandinavia, I learned this in researching the Soberg work. | ||
| I went in and I went deep into this cold thermogenesis world over there that they've been researching this really carefully. | ||
| And they have a saying in Norway. | ||
| I obviously don't know it in Norwegian, but it translates to essentially in the spring as it's getting warmer in Texas. | ||
| What you want to do is to put, they say, put on more layers. | ||
| Why? | ||
| So that you can prepare yourself for being able to cool yourself off easily in the summer when it's really hot. | ||
| You'll be more comfortable In the heat of summer in Texas, if you bundle up a bit more in the spring. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you're adapting. | ||
| And then they say the opposite, too. | ||
| That just sounds annoying. | ||
| But then they say in the fall, what you're supposed to do is not walk around with a sweater, you wear a t-shirt, and then guess what? | ||
| In the winter, you're thermogenically... | ||
| How about just fucking wear clothes for the weather? | ||
| This is ridiculous. | ||
| I get the whole idea of sauna and cold plunge and adapting your body, but now we're just... | ||
| I think too much of this is mental masturbation with some people. | ||
| Let me be clear. | ||
| It's the principle. | ||
| It's the principle. | ||
| I understand the science behind it. | ||
| I'm not saying wear a sweatshirt in the spring. | ||
| Wear what's comfortable. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| What I'm saying is that when we... | ||
| Jamie's laughing. | ||
| He's from Ohio. | ||
| They're just like, this is ridiculous. | ||
| It's cold enough out there, you don't need to plunge. | ||
| I'm from Boston. | ||
| Same thing. | ||
| I think the principle is what's interesting, right? | ||
| Yes, it is interesting. | ||
| If you teach your body to tolerate warm, then you will be more comfortable in very hot. | ||
| It's sort of obvious, and vice versa for cold. | ||
| Well, I certainly think that there's a great benefit to being able to tolerate temperatures, whether it's cold temperature or warm temperature, because I think there's a mental resiliency aspect to it. | ||
| What's interesting to me is when I get out of the cold, my entire body, my skin is bright red. | ||
| You know, where your body's trying to heat itself up, because you're in there for three minutes, or I'm in there for three minutes. | ||
| But when I get out of the sauna, generally I stretch, and my house is warm, right? | ||
| And at nighttime, I do the sauna in the house, and when I'm stretching, within a minute or two minutes after the sauna, I'm fucking freezing, because my body's trying to cool off so quickly. | ||
| You know, because it's gone through the whole 25-minute session. | ||
| Well, the contrast of heat and cold is we know very good for our cardiovascular system because we think of the blood vessels and capillaries and arteries as just tubes, but they're really cells, endothelial cells. | ||
| They're laid out like silly putty, linking them all like tubes, and they are very contractile. | ||
| They need to do that because of the pulsing of blood through them. | ||
| That's the whole basis of systolic and diastolic blood pressure. | ||
| It's the top measurement. | ||
| It's a pressure when it's not blood pumping through and it's pressure when it's relaxed, okay? | ||
| The system can become very dynamic. | ||
| You don't want it rigid, especially given what Atiyah tells us, and I believe him, is that the number one killer in the world is cardiovascular disease or cerebrovascular disease. | ||
| You want the little microcapillaries of your body to be very flexible, not rigid. | ||
| So when you go heat-cold, you're basically going vasoconstriction, dilation, vasoconstriction, dilation. | ||
| But I'm not talking about heat-cold. | ||
| I'm just talking about heat and stretching, just getting out of it. | ||
| My body cools itself off and I get really cold in like five minutes. | ||
| So that could be the drop, which is when your blood goes to the center of your body to preserve your core organs. | ||
| And then the surface of your body is cold. | ||
| And then as you start to heat up again and there's vasodilation and it goes out to the surface, your surface is cold and it actually cools the blood at the surface. | ||
| And that's what's called the drop. | ||
| And that's when your body temperature goes down. | ||
| Now, once you put on clothes and head to your workout or head to work, what's going to happen is your body temperature is now going to increase more quickly. | ||
| It normally would do that anyway, early in the day. | ||
| As you wake up, your body temperature goes up, up, up, up, up, up. | ||
| And then whenever you achieve a sort of a dip in Energy in the afternoon. | ||
| There's probably one time in the afternoon, whether or not you need a nap or not, that you feel a little bit lethargic and then you kind of come back. | ||
| That represents the peak in your body temperature for 24 hours. | ||
| In fact, most people, if they want to figure out their sort of optimal bedtime, I know this gets pretty down in the weeds. | ||
| You just look at that number. | ||
| So maybe it's three o'clock and you say about seven hours after that, plus or minus an hour. | ||
| That's probably when somebody should go to sleep. | ||
| How do I know that? | ||
| Because that's when body temperature starts dropping by one to three degrees. | ||
| So doing cold early in the day makes total sense. | ||
| Doing deliberate cold exposure before a workout, total sense. | ||
| Doing sauna before sleep, total sense. | ||
| The cold in the morning, the other thing that it does when I get out is it makes me like really fucking happy, which is what you were talking about with the dopamine race. | ||
| It's so significant. | ||
| I mean, it really, it is a joy of life feeling. | ||
| And then as I start my workout, I generally start really slow. | ||
| I just do like a lot of like shadow boxing and maybe I'll skip a little rope to try to get my blood up. | ||
| And then once I do that for a few minutes, then I have a series of 100 push-ups and 100 bodyweight squats that I do every day. | ||
| So I go through that and that's my warm-up for everything else because it's pretty low stress, low impact, very easy to do. | ||
| And then by the time the 100 is 100 squats and 100 push-ups are done, I'm warm. | ||
| And then I start whatever workout I'm gonna do. | ||
| But god damn, I feel happy. | ||
| The people that are trying to avoid it because, oh motherfucking, it doesn't do anything. | ||
| Shut up. | ||
| Just do it. | ||
| Stop your excuses and stop arguing about it. | ||
| You're only arguing about it because you don't want to experience discomfort. | ||
| I know what you're doing. | ||
| You know what you're doing. | ||
| We all know what you're doing. | ||
| Shut the fuck up. | ||
| Just get in there. | ||
| Just do it. | ||
| It's great for everybody. | ||
| And if you can't fucking handle it, don't talk about it. | ||
| But don't pretend that it's not good for you. | ||
| It's nonsense. | ||
| It's one of the most... | ||
| If you could sell that shit in a pill, it would be so valuable. | ||
| I mean, how many people are on SSRIs and they're like, I kind of feel better? | ||
| Well, first of all, I completely agree with you. | ||
| Completely agree. | ||
| And I'm not the... | ||
| You know, again, Craig Heller in our biology department at Stanford has been talking in this general theme for a long time. | ||
| Anna Lemke, who you had on here, talked about patients of hers who got sober Using cold plunges. | ||
| You say, well, how do they get sober using cold plunges? | ||
| You just, you know, taking one addiction and replacing it with another? | ||
| No. | ||
| What's very clear is that when you're suffering or you're lazy or you're procrastinating, Doing something that's harder than the state that you're in bounces you back much faster. | ||
| This is all based in the dynamics of dopamine. | ||
| It's sort of crazy. | ||
| You know how people are procrastinating to write something and they start cleaning the house? | ||
| Something they normally don't want to do. | ||
| Well, it's just something that's easier than the thing that you're supposed to do. | ||
| It turns out, and I learned this from Ana, if you do something that's even harder than the thing that you're trying to avoid... | ||
| All of a sudden you're able to do that. | ||
| And you're like, oh, okay. | ||
| Well, it's just psychology, right? | ||
| No, it's not psychology alone. | ||
| It's psychology, but once dopamine is deployed at that level, you're a different person. | ||
| And I know this because if you take someone's dopamine and lower it, that makes them depressed. | ||
| That gives them, if you lower it even more and give them movement disorder, Parkinson's. | ||
| If you give them their dopamine back, Their focus increases. | ||
| How do I know that? | ||
| There's a reason there's an ADHD drug shortage right now. | ||
| Ritalin, Adderall, they all tap into this system, the dopaminergic and adrenaline norepinephrine system. | ||
| So one of the most prescribed and over-prescribed classes of drugs is a drug designed to try and get exactly this effect of cold plunges. | ||
| And so I completely agree. | ||
| If people would just take a very cold shower or a very cold plungers, a little bit longer at 50 degrees, although I agree with you that shorter, colder is better. | ||
| What I didn't describe, and I'm not trying to rescue myself here, but I do that daily. | ||
| But then on Tuesdays, It's the typical day where I do very, very hot and very, very cold back and forth for well over an hour back and forth. | ||
| Yeah, you do that serious growth hormone increasing protocol. | ||
| I'm trying to condition myself to really be able to tolerate heat and cold. | ||
| The other thing I learned again from Susanna, I take no credit for this, is I'm not suggesting people replace the cold plunge with this or a cold shower with this. | ||
| You're starting to see more of this on social media and it's embarrassingly silly to think that that's a replacement, what I'm about to describe as a replacement for cold plunges. | ||
| But if you put, she taught me, she said, if you even just put a small portion of your skin in ice cold water, like your hand or your arm, You actually activate the brown fat system. | ||
| That's how robust this system of surface temperature to body is. | ||
| And so I don't think it's a good replacement, but now you're seeing people saying, oh, you just have to put your face in a bowl of ice water. | ||
| There was a device that was going around a while back that people were using when they were lifting weights, where they were putting their hand into something that was freezing their hand, and it increased their ability to do work quite substantially. | ||
| Do you know what I'm So this was developed by Craig Heller's lab. | ||
| It's called the Cool Mitt. | ||
| It's a bit controversial and I'll tell you why. | ||
| So you have on the surface of your hands, on the bottoms of your feet and on your upper face, you have what's called glabrous skin. | ||
| It's the only skin on your body that's incapable of growing hair because there are no hair stem cells there. | ||
| It's also the place where, believe it or not, it goes, normally things go arteries, veins, capillaries. | ||
| But in this case, you're missing one of those components. | ||
| And what it is is that the top of your face, the palms of your hands and the bottom of your feet are like radiators. | ||
| You can, heat passes out of your body very readily. | ||
| This is why animals like bears who are covered with hair will stand in cold water to cool off. | ||
| It's very effective. | ||
| It's also true that if you want to heat up, you do it through these portals. | ||
| And so, Craig's lab did two really important experiments. | ||
| The first one was heating people up. | ||
| It turns out when people come out of anesthesia, it's very slow. | ||
| And this is a problem for all sorts of critical reasons related to keeping people alive. | ||
| And if you measure people's body temperature when they're coming out of anesthesia, it's very low. | ||
| And as it heats up, they wake up, just like out of sleep. | ||
| His laboratory developed these heating devices that would heat people's palms or the bottoms of their feet. | ||
| And they found that they could bring them out of anesthesia much faster and recovery rates were much better. | ||
| Super impressive result, not talked about often enough. | ||
| And the reason it's not talked about often enough is all this stuff around thermogenic studies was really hot in like the 19, no pun, sorry, in the 50s, 60s, 70s. | ||
| And then it was sort of considered kind of like, not lame, but it wasn't hot science. | ||
| Ah, there we go again. | ||
| I'm really not trying to pun here. | ||
| Then what's happened in recent years is people have gotten into these protocols and it's become more popular. | ||
| His laboratory also showed that one of the reasons why we fail on like a set of dips or chins, local muscular failure is due to heating of the muscle locally due to work. | ||
| And then there's an enzyme called pyruvate kinase, which is very heat dependent. | ||
| When your muscle gets too hot, Pyruvate kinase can't function and your muscle fails. | ||
| It's one of the reasons you fail on a set. | ||
| So what they figured out was if you cool people's core body temperature, they can do more work. | ||
| Now, it got a little confused. | ||
| People say, oh, I didn't double my bench press after cooling my hands. | ||
| Well, that's not really the point. | ||
| The point is that, let's say you can do 10 sets of 10 at a given weight with two minutes of rest in between, and that's all you can do. | ||
| And you're hitting failure, maybe you have to adjust the weight down on sets four, five, six, et cetera, classic 10 sets of 10. I don't know if people said, German volume training or five sets of five. | ||
| If you lower the core body temperature through the proper use of palmer cooling, as it's called, or through some other device, what you find is people can continue to get the same number of repetitions provided they keep the rest the same, and they can double the amount or more of work that they're doing total. | ||
| So they can increase their volume. | ||
| The interesting thing is they preserve The training effect. | ||
| So if you can go from doing, I don't know, how many dips? | ||
| I saw you do a bunch of pushups right there on a podcast recently. | ||
| He's like 75, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So in theory, if we'd been cooling your palms, you would have been able to keep going much longer, possibly 150. And you say, well, how could that be? | ||
| Well, it's a local change in the enzymatic reaction at the level of muscle. | ||
| Now, the problem with polymer cooling is people will go out there and say, I'm going to hold ice packs. | ||
| But if you do that, you'll constrict the portals. | ||
| It has to be the right temperature so that you can continue to pass cool in. | ||
| And that's why it requires a device to heat, excuse me, to cool your palms, but not so cold that you vasoconstrict. | ||
| And so there is the Cool Mitt device. | ||
| To be honest, is it a very effective device? | ||
| They've never been very effective at marketing that device, but they use athletes at Stanford use it. | ||
| But nowadays what athletes mainly are doing, and I talk to pro basketball players, football players, tier one military, they're doing cold before their training because it's just simpler and you don't need a device. | ||
| Inter-workout or intra-workout cooling is really an interesting topic, but it hasn't been perfected at the level of devices. | ||
| They're still kind of clunky. | ||
| You gotta go put your hand in the thing. | ||
| No knock on CoolMed. | ||
| I mean, I think they're trying really hard. | ||
| I actually got one for Cam that I still need to deliver to him. | ||
| Well, what if someone just is in the middle of a workout and they just get in a cold plunge for five seconds? | ||
| Yeah, you need to lower your core body temperature. | ||
| 20 seconds? | ||
| Half hour? | ||
| How long are you going there for? | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Here's what I think could really help, and you could try it. | ||
| If you don't have access to a cool mitt, and I can get you one for you to try, but if you hold on, you'd want to hold something cold between your hands for maybe 20-30 seconds. | ||
| Well, just dunk your hand into the cold plunge. | ||
| You could do that too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you have your cold plunge right there. | ||
| Yeah, my cold plunge is right next to the gym. | ||
| I could just dunk my hands in there. | ||
| Yeah, the relationship between temperature and sleep, temperature and the deployment of these neurochemicals, temperature and performance is one of these variables that right now professional sports teams and Tier 1 military and scientists are really starting to understand. | ||
| Like, this is not a small variable. | ||
| This is a super powerful variable. | ||
| It's just not an easy one for the conventional gym to have. | ||
| Maybe at some point in the future, they'll have stations in the gym where you kind of plug in. | ||
| And you can just do more work. | ||
| It's all about the ability to do more work. | ||
| Yeah, and recover. | ||
| And recover. | ||
| And it's clear that the cold after training is, if your goal is to train again, well then you want inflammation down. | ||
| But if your goal is to improve as a consequence of that training session, you have to be careful how much you're blocking the inflammation. | ||
| Yeah, I know a lot of jujitsu guys like to do cryotherapy post-training, and they say that it helps tremendously. | ||
| And because of that reduction of inflammation, Because you're not really training for hypertrophy. | ||
| You're training for volume and work and, you know, cardiovascular function and your ability to execute techniques over and over and over again. | ||
| I mean, the ability to do more work is, I think, one of the not-so-secret secrets of performance-enhancing drugs, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's everything. | ||
| It's even at the level of being able to get a really good night's sleep even when you're slightly overtrained. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, people always say, well, what do these performance... | ||
| Do steroids make you grow muscle? | ||
| Well, they'll increase protein synthesis. | ||
| Well, look at Lance Armstrong. | ||
| I mean, he was on steroids and he was real thin. | ||
| It's not about that. | ||
| It's about recovery. | ||
| It's about what do you ask your body to do. | ||
| He could just do more work. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think, and I, for all I know, I believe he's natural, but like you think about a guy like Floyd Mayweather, and I used to see him running in the middle of the night, you know, in Vegas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| If his testosterone happens to be exceedingly high, naturally, he can do more work and recover than the person whose testosterone is lower before they hit a wall. | ||
| So I'm not saying he was using anything. | ||
| What I'm saying is if somebody has higher levels of circulating testosterone, male or female, they can do more work and recover. | ||
| That's just the way it is. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Floyd Mayer reportedly took banned IV prior to Manny Pacquiao's fight. | ||
| But this is banned IV for what? | ||
| It might be banned IV just because they had some sort of protocol set for USADA. So USADA, they're the ones who regulate the UFC testing. | ||
| And they won't allow people to use IVs because IVs will allow you to mask whether or not you've done Performance-enhancing drugs. | ||
| I don't think it was just that. | ||
| I think he tested positive for something. | ||
| I mean, amphetamines can vary by dose, etc. | ||
| But at least a thousand-fold increase in basal catecholamine levels. | ||
| That's what they do. | ||
| How many people do you know that are on Adderall? | ||
| I don't have a lot of friends in the finance world, but of the ones that are... | ||
| The friends I have who are in finance... | ||
|
unidentified
|
100%. | |
| The scientists I know, zero. | ||
| But scientists generally aren't of the Adderall type. | ||
| Musicians, not so much. | ||
| Those are kind of the categories. | ||
| And podcasters, I don't know how many. | ||
| Quite a few podcasters. | ||
| There's a lot of people that are journalists that are on it. | ||
| A lot of writers and journalists are on it. | ||
| I've been shocked when I talk to these people. | ||
| Well, you know my feeling about writers and journalists. | ||
| What's your feeling? | ||
| Well, I don't know if we bring this up or not. | ||
| But, you know, I think the tides have changed in recent years. | ||
| And, you know, conventional media has used to kind of, they email you, they want a conversation. | ||
| You know, I think sometimes they're surprised you don't leap to have that conversation. | ||
| Or, you know, I think one of the problems with the traditional press is that It's hard to know where their heart is, like where they are on a topic. | ||
| And so conversations with them have become a bit of a razor's edge, frankly. | ||
| Well, they're also like deeply influenced by money. | ||
| Like that raccoon dog thing, I guarantee you there are some people behind the scenes that are trying to come up with some sort of a plausible scenario that's alternative to the lab leak theory. | ||
| And that's why they're coming up with this. | ||
| The people that I've talked to that understand this, I've had many conversations with virologists and evolutionary biologists who explain to me why this is most likely a lab. | ||
| They're not arguing with this. | ||
| So when someone comes along with this and they're saying, oh, we found it, like, no, you didn't. | ||
| No, you know you didn't. | ||
| You're writing this article because you're being influenced to do so. | ||
| Like someone is telling them That this is a good thing to put out. | ||
| Someone is giving them information and saying, we believe this and you should print this. | ||
| There's money behind that that doesn't reach independent journalism. | ||
| That's the difference. | ||
| Like the amount of money behind an advertisement that goes to CNN or an advertisement that goes to the New York Times. | ||
| It's a different thing than what goes to Breaking Points with Crystal and Sagar, than what goes to Matt Taibbi's Substack. | ||
| There's none there. | ||
| There's no influence there. | ||
| These people are influenced by gigantic corporations. | ||
| That's why they put out articles that are not plausible. | ||
| That's why people don't trust them anymore. | ||
| That's why, you know, people think they're fucking shady. | ||
| Yeah, well, you're right. | ||
| They're incentivized by a whole set of things that are not obvious from the articles themselves. | ||
| I'm a huge fan of what Sagar and Crystal have done and are doing. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| Huge fan. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| It's incredible and it's important. | ||
| And they're so fucking honest. | ||
| Like, they give you what is their actual take on whatever is going on in the news and it's well-researched. | ||
| And the fact that that exists now is so important because if it was not for independent journalism, we would be in a pickle. | ||
| We would be in a really bad state because a lot of people got duped by the pharmacy, the pharmacological industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the medical industry, the military industrial complex. | ||
| They've been duped by so many different companies and corporations that have a vested interest in getting one narrative out. | ||
| And if you can get that narrative out through the traditional pipelines of mainstream media with no one fact checking, no one interfering, no independent journalist saying, actually, that's not true at all. | ||
| Here's why they did that. | ||
| This was the influence. | ||
| Here's where the money is. | ||
| We have emails. | ||
| We can show you they were influenced. | ||
| If it wasn't for them, we would be fucked. | ||
| And it's one of the beautiful things about the internet today. | ||
| The internet today allows people like that to thrive because these mainstream media corporations are so corrupt. | ||
| They're so obviously indebted to the companies that pay for their advertising. | ||
| Yeah, I mean my initial experience of them was long before I had a podcast, did an interview with traditional media and then it comes out and They didn't say anything bad, but my quote was given to somebody else. | ||
| Their quote was given to me. | ||
| And then you say, and I wrote and said, hey, this is factually incorrect. | ||
| I didn't say this. | ||
| First of all, I'm not a medical doctor. | ||
| They swapped the names accidentally. | ||
| And then I got this, oh, well, kind of response, like too late. | ||
| No retraction. | ||
| No. | ||
| And when it's your neck on the line, it's your name. | ||
| I mean, in science, all we have is our reputation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In science or in anything, that's all we have is our reputation. | ||
| So it's a scary thing to hand that over to somebody. | ||
| So unless it's a particular few set of sources, I generally decline traditional media conversations. | ||
| And now the fight isn't just for traditional, you know, over media, traditional or independent. | ||
| You know, the universities too, right? | ||
| We were asking, I have to say, and I'm not, this is not a, to be, you know, politically correct or incorrect. | ||
| Stanford has been very good about letting different faculty at Stanford voice their differing opinions on everything from COVID to politics. | ||
| You know, there's a free speech, a right to free speech petition that's been going around the campus for a while. | ||
| You can find this online. | ||
| Now, a lot of people also will hear things about, oh, I hear on college campuses like Stanford, you're getting a lot of pressure to do this or a lot of pressure to do that. | ||
| Yeah, there are pressures from students and top down. | ||
| Listen, students are under pressure, administrators are under pressure, faculty under pressure. | ||
| But Stanford has been very good about allowing people to have their own independent social media channels and talk to the public the way they feel is best. | ||
| That's excellent. | ||
| And I have to say, it's one of the things that makes me really proud to be there. | ||
| It's an amazing place too. | ||
| And I'm not going to throw out names here because it's not my place and they should probably just come on the podcast separately, but you've got people at every end of the major debates out there about public health and everything in between on Twitter, fewer on Instagram, but on Twitter, voicing their opinion. | ||
| And honestly, I think it's beautiful that they are allowed to do it. | ||
| Well, they're allowed to now because Elon bought Twitter. | ||
| But before Elon bought Twitter, people were being silenced for things that have been absolutely proven to be correct, which is crazy. | ||
| The value that he's given back to people in the last, what has it been, four or five months since he's been in there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tremendous. | ||
| I mean, I remember people picking on, oh, it's this feature, that feature, we're gonna have to buy a verified check or whatever, you know, these things that when you compare that to the ability for people to have honest, open discourse, honest for them, because, you know, there's no regulator. | ||
| So that to me is incredible and fundamentally important. | ||
| He's given people their voice back. | ||
| And that includes both sides. | ||
| That's what's often not stated, is that people on both sides are starting to get the ax, mostly on one side. | ||
| But it's really incredible. | ||
| I'm hopeful. | ||
| I'm a live and let live type person. | ||
| As long as people aren't harming other people, I truly just encourage people to do what feels right to them. | ||
| As we should all be. | ||
| It's kind of bananas where we went in the last few years. | ||
| But what's happened in health and public health, I think, is pretty remarkable and encouraging. | ||
| From my standpoint anyway, which is people now realize that medical doctors have a certain type of information that is extremely valuable and they come in a range of flavors and qualities. | ||
| Same with psychologists, same with scientists, same with public health officials, same with everything from your masseuse to your chiropractor. | ||
| Like there is a range of quality and expertise and orientation and to silence any one of those At the exclusion of the others is not only foolish, it's dangerous. | ||
| And so I think there's no going back. | ||
| There's no going back. | ||
| Now people seek advice on multiple dimensions. | ||
| You know, a few years ago, if you said supplements, people were like, oh, that's expensive urine. | ||
| Well, that's true if you're talking about vitamins and minerals, but how many people, Do I know who during the pandemic started taking vitamin D, getting some sunshine? | ||
| What do you mean by that's true if you're talking about vitamins and minerals? | ||
| Well, I think when we hear the word supplements, it gets confusing for people. | ||
| I actually am wishing for a better word because when people hear supplements, they think vitamin minerals. | ||
| Isn't that just expensive urine? | ||
| But it's not. | ||
| Your body absorbs it if you take it with fat and protein and carbohydrates. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And if you over-ingest fats, excuse me, water-soluble vitamins, you will excrete some. | ||
| But then there's a whole category of supplements like food supplements, protein, etc. | ||
| And then there's an entire category of compounds that we call supplements that have nothing to do with proteins, fats, or carbohydrates, vitamins, or minerals. | ||
| Things that are known to have very potent effects. | ||
| There's a reason why the National Institutes of Health Has a division now simply for these types of studies. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Things like ashwagandha can potently reduce cortisol. | ||
| Shouldn't be used long term, but in the short term, this can be very beneficial for people, especially late day, because late day peaks in cortisol. | ||
| Not good for us. | ||
| We know this correlated with depression, anxiety, insomnia. | ||
| Which then has a cascade of negative effects. | ||
| Things like creatine, not just for, we think creatine muscles, and indeed it brings water into the muscles and make you stronger. | ||
| Most of the data, clinical data on creatine are to enhance forebrain function. | ||
| It's a nootropic. | ||
| It's a nootropic, post concussion, post surgery, postpartum depression, headache, I mean, fish oils. | ||
| So there's this whole category of things that in theory you could get from food, but the volumes that you would have to eat and the sourcing is just impractical. | ||
| And that's just the tip of the iceberg. | ||
| I mean, there's Rhodiola rosea, which is, you know, reducing cortisol. | ||
| There's interesting data on that. | ||
| And then there's the stuff we've talked about before about hormone augmentation. | ||
| But for the typical person out there nowadays, I think they're thinking about, well, what can I do? | ||
| What can I eat? | ||
| How can I take better care of myself? | ||
| Am I magnesium deficient or not? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| But will taking some additional magnesium help me sleep? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Will it hurt me? | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, are you magnesium deficient? | ||
| Get your blood work done. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| If you want to find out that, get your blood work done. | ||
| Everyone should have their blood work done. | ||
| But I was curious about why you were saying that it's just expensive urine. | ||
| Oh, no, no. | ||
| This is what other people have to say. | ||
| Right, but they're wrong. | ||
| No, this is what, you know, my, you know, when I was young, I got into this, you know, training and supplementation early and people would say, oh, it's just expensive urine, you know, don't spend your money on that. | ||
| There are certain things like within supplementation, also the foundational supplementation, as I call it, like things like athletic greens, right? | ||
| I guess they call it AG1 now. | ||
| Things that are in such combinations of herbs and plant-based compounds, you can't take them one by one. | ||
| And then other things like magnesiums for sleep or inositol and the date on depression or inositol and insulin sensitivity. | ||
| You know, the number of people that are out there who are pre-diabetic or type 2 diabetes, of course they need to exercise and eat right, but things like inositol can improve insulin sensitivity. | ||
| What is inositol? | ||
| Inositol, it's similar to a vitamin, but it works in a pathway that makes cells more insulin sensitive, which is good. | ||
| So you can use the glucose and insulin that you make, so you're not overproducing insulin. | ||
| Type 2 diabetes is essentially overproduction of insulin because your cells aren't able to use the insulin that surrounds you, crank out more of it. | ||
| Type 1 diabetes, lack of insulin from the pancreas. | ||
| That's why people have to inject it who have type 1 diabetes. | ||
| So things like inositol, I mean, and the list just goes on and on, you know? | ||
| And so to me, I think the view is changing. | ||
| I hope that, you know, the idea previously was that before the pandemic, frankly, was that supplements are just kind of like nootropic that, or, you know, it's kind of, you don't need it. | ||
| I'm not saying you need it, but they are a powerful augment To good sleep, good nutrition, good training, good social connection. | ||
| Yeah, if you want to optimize. | ||
| If you want to optimize. | ||
| The idea of needing it. | ||
| Like, what do you mean? | ||
| To exist? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| You could eat McDonald's and just live. | ||
| Like, if you want to optimize your health, yeah, supplements are very beneficial. | ||
| Very beneficial. | ||
| But I think for you and me, it's a duh. | ||
| But I think for a lot of people out there, they seem to think that there's something unique about prescription drugs that makes them better than supplements. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, that's because they've been lied to. | ||
| That's the real problem is that the corporations who control these prescription drugs and sell these prescription drugs and sell advertising on television have got it into people's heads. | ||
| That's why it was maddening when I had Peter Hotez on the podcast. | ||
| And he was talking to me about the importance of vaccination. | ||
| I said, do you exercise? | ||
| How do you eat? | ||
| Do you take vitamins? | ||
| And there was zero going on with him. | ||
| He goes on walks occasionally. | ||
| I mean, there was heat, fucking junk food. | ||
| He wasn't taking vitamins. | ||
| You know, he told me that some internist told him to take vitamin D. So he took that for a while. | ||
| I'm like, for a while? | ||
| Yeah, vitamin D seems to have made it through the chute, like where anyone will take it because it doesn't seem scary to them or something. | ||
| Well, there was a recent study that talked about people that died or were hospitalized from COVID and they could have prevented somewhere in the neighborhood. | ||
| See if we can find this. | ||
| It was a very high number, a very high percentage of hospitalizations and deaths could have theoretically been prevented with vitamin D supplementation. | ||
| This was based on the number of people that were in the ICU that were deficient from COVID, or excuse me, deficient from vitamin D that were in the hospital for COVID, and it was in the high 80s or in the low 80% rather. | ||
| And then they did this study showing what would have happened if they had just supplemented vitamin D. I mean, I know many physicians. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| New study reveals vitamin D in the body can significantly reduce the risk of severe outcomes for COVID-19. | ||
| Does it have the numbers? | ||
| What year is this from? | ||
| Is this recent? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, but this seems like a strange website, I'll be honest with you. | |
| Oh, is it? | ||
| I clicked quick because it said two weeks ago. | ||
| Original.newsbreak.com. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I think they're selling something. | |
| A little TikTok icon in the corner. | ||
| God, people are selling things. | ||
| It's so hard. | ||
| There's so many wacky websites. | ||
| You don't know what's real. | ||
| I think that when I step back from what you were saying a few moments ago, You know, I think people need to remember that scientific journals of which I'm on the advisory board of several and have been for a long time and are well-meaning things. | ||
| Let's keep in mind, they're run by people. | ||
| And, you know, the goal of those journals, ultimately, is to publish papers that are true, but that get people to read them. | ||
| The more subscriptions, the more they sell, right? | ||
| So I have a good friend who is a senior editor at a journal. | ||
| There's really only three top-tier journals, Nature, Cell, and Science. | ||
| And I asked him once, I said, what determines whether or not one paper is accepted or not? | ||
| And he said, well, we get to determine, obviously, the reviewers have to give it thumbs up at some point, but We get to determine the direction that the journal wants to go. | ||
| So during the pandemic, there was an enormous incentive for publishing papers in these journals that provided some other hope or fear or whatever. | ||
| It was exciting at the time because people were buying up these journals like crazy. | ||
| I mean, they have to pay their staff, too. | ||
| So it's a business like anything else. | ||
| Unfortunately, there is, aside from the federal research budget, which is frankly, we're We have a much greater budget than in other countries for research relative to the total amount available, but it's still very low compared to what we need. | ||
| But money is what drives research. | ||
| I mean, it's not gonna, the more money you have, the more margin for error you can have in terms of the people in your lab. | ||
| Like if you only have a million dollar a year operating budget, like it's a business, you can have two or three really good people, and if someone's not so good, that's bad. | ||
| If you have a giant budget, You can have 20 people and 10 of them can suck. | ||
| That's rare to see that. | ||
| Usually it's a mixture of competent to talented, the occasional bad apple. | ||
| And those bad apples are very, very dangerous. | ||
| And the bad apples I'm talking about are not the kind of people that necessarily go around creating data out of nowhere. | ||
| These are the people who slice off and make experiments that didn't work kind of disappear. | ||
| Oh, there was something wrong with that mouse. | ||
| That is a serious problem in science, far more than fabrication of data. | ||
| And how often does that occur? | ||
| Oh, it's incalculable, but I would say that kind of... | ||
| I've been in laboratories big and small across my career. | ||
| I've been around them a lot. | ||
| Everyone in every field knows the papers that are like, yeah, nobody believes that. | ||
| And these papers are influenced by money? | ||
| Generally? | ||
| Not directly. | ||
| So the PIs, this is the way it works. | ||
| The lab heads, to get to a position where you're running a laboratory at a major university, Or any university, frankly, you have to love what you're doing. | ||
| I mean, you don't make a lot of money as a university professor. | ||
| There are incentives through things like companies, and a lot of professors now have companies, and we can talk about that, and that's complicated sometimes or not complicated. | ||
| But the point is that heads of labs want to make fundamental discoveries. | ||
| They want to be true. | ||
| The three biggest fears for a real scientist are to get something wrong and to get it wrong for the wrong reasons. | ||
| The wrong reasons would be someone comes to your laboratory and sees an opportunity to please the PI. This is, I think, one of the major sources of error in science. | ||
| Publishing papers as a postdoc is what gets you a job. | ||
| So I've known over the years postdocs and there's a lot of discussion about this is inside ball of science where someone gets there and realizes that the head of this lab has a pet hypothesis that's really exciting to them. | ||
| Why is it exciting? | ||
| Because it's exciting. | ||
| They like the idea, but also it would allow them to renew their funding. | ||
| Yes, definitely money's involved. | ||
| And then that person goes and does experiments and shows the PI the experiments that work and doesn't show them the experiments that don't work. | ||
| And then tells themselves those experiments didn't work because, you know, the centrifuge was off or the mouse was sick or something, you know, gives themselves reasons why it was okay to remove data. | ||
| That occurs, I think, I'm gonna guess here. | ||
| I don't know, but based on my observation, that's probably about, 10 to 15% of the top tier published papers, I think, don't last, meaning in the years following, they don't replicate and they go nowhere. | ||
| And I don't think it's because people made up data, quote unquote. | ||
| I think it's because they threw out bad data or data that, excuse me, they threw out data that didn't fit their hypothesis and labeled it no good. | ||
| That is very common. | ||
| Now, people who, quote unquote, fudge data, make up data, I would say that's... | ||
| 2%? | ||
| But that's the Alzheimer's study. | ||
| Okay, so the Alzheimer's stuff was legitimately a data fraud issue. | ||
| Which is really crazy. | ||
| Which is really crazy. | ||
| It lasted for so long before people discovered it. | ||
| So then you say, why could that happen? | ||
| Can you explain to people what happened? | ||
| Yeah, so basically... | ||
| The theory of Alzheimer's that's still very prominent is that it's the accumulation of these things called plaques and tangles, which you can see under the microscope. | ||
| And they've always been considered a signature that you can see with your eyes of neurodegeneration that's associated with Alzheimer's dementia. | ||
| And it's been the way that people have measured whether or not a treatment has worked or not worked is whether or not it could decrease these plaques and tangles in mouse tissue and sometimes in human tissue. | ||
| Now we have to be clear that plaques and tangles do accumulate in the brains of people with Alzheimer's and mice that have mutations that make them kind of like good models for Alzheimer's. | ||
| But early on in the research on Alzheimer's, so dating back well over a decade now, there was basically a data fraud, fudging of data, we call it, where someone essentially said that there was a label for a particular plaque or tangle of protein that represented something that it didn't and then What this has cascaded into over many, many years is an entire set of theories about which drugs ought to be beneficial for the treatment of Alzheimer's. | ||
| And I would say now trillions of dollars put into research along those particular lines of inquiry. | ||
| So what we're basically saying is one mistake can cascade into a series of thousands or tens of thousands of mistakes that can take a field really far astray. | ||
| And that's what's happened now. | ||
| They realized that there was a problem with the early data. | ||
| Now, the thing that's kind of baffling is how the field continued down this path for so long without actually considering alternative hypotheses with any seriousness. | ||
| Why somebody didn't say, hey, let's go back and test the initial premise of all of this. | ||
| And part of that has to do with if, you know, biotech is neither good nor bad, nor evil, nor anything. | ||
| It's just, but it's a business. | ||
| And there's a pretty quick runway from a big landmark discovery to a couple of verifications to people founding companies to big dollars coming in through investments. | ||
| And then, I mean, how many times have we been told blockbuster finding in mice and then people with Alzheimer's say, well, when is there going to be treatment? | ||
| 10 years. | ||
| How long? | ||
| About 10 years. | ||
| This 10 years thing has been kicked down the road for 50 years. | ||
| I mean, I've been in the research game 30 years, close to it, you know, and so many things have just been kicked down the road. | ||
| Now, there are kind of maverick folks within science who test very alternative hypotheses. | ||
| And they are really the heroes of science in my opinion, because they're saying that's all fine and good, or maybe it's all false. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm going to go a different direction and explore. | ||
| But in the sociology of science and science funding, it is very, very hard to impossible to get funding from the federal government to do truly high-risk pioneering science. | ||
| You might say like, how could that be? | ||
| In general, when you get funded by the government, my lab has been funded by the government for many years, you get funded for work that is already completed. | ||
| You show it to them in a grant. | ||
| You say, this is what I want to do. | ||
| You get the money and wow, the paper comes out like the same year. | ||
| How did that happen? | ||
| And then you use the money to fund the next thing. | ||
| Every card carrying laboratory head knows this. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because when you put in a grant that says, this is a really exciting idea, they're not going to fund that. | ||
| So this is why philanthropy and private money comes into science and is very exciting and enticing to scientists because they can start testing things that the federal government funding bodies are just too conservative to test. | ||
| But that also leaves it open to manipulation by bad actors. | ||
| The whole system is – there's no way to bulletproof the system against bad actors, meaning people who fudge data or I think the more sinister aspect of my field – Are these individuals who come to a laboratory and go, I want a job. | ||
| Being a postdoc, you're not paid much. | ||
| Oftentimes they have families, they're under stress. | ||
| I'm not justifying their actions. | ||
| And people go, how do you get the job at the best places? | ||
| Well, you get it by publishing papers in really great journals and with your name first. | ||
| So what does that lead to? | ||
| It leads to really high ambition people working very, very hard. | ||
| And science is hard. | ||
| A lot of experiments fail. | ||
| And some people will just figure out that if they can just give the lab director Figure out their pet hypothesis, like figure out what mommy and daddy like, what mommy or daddy like most, and give them those results. | ||
| Those people get promoted very quickly. | ||
| Now, in the long run, they don't do well, or what you'll find is they often just switch to an entire new area of science when they start their lab. | ||
| Get there. | ||
| And then years later, or even a year later, you go, whatever happened to that result? | ||
| Well, if you ask people in the laboratory, postdocs and graduate students, it's sort of, I think, probably like any career path. | ||
| They know the truth. | ||
| So if you ask them, what do you think of that paper? | ||
| And they're like, yeah, I don't know. | ||
| That means it's bullshit. | ||
| Well, shouldn't they be allowed to have one of those witness things where they do their voice differently and shade their face? | ||
| Well, the problem is they're all colleagues. | ||
| That study is bullshit. | ||
| And science is weird, too, because unlike in UFC or something like that, everyone's really nice to each other's faces. | ||
| They're like, oh, yeah, great to see you. | ||
| Great to see you. | ||
| Then you get the paper, anonymous peer review. | ||
| And then they're like, that's when people attack each other, kill people's grants, kill people's papers. | ||
| Science is a it's not a cutthroat game, but it's a very human game. | ||
| And now, I also want to highlight, because I feel like as an ambassador for my field, I do want to say that there are excellent scientists who care so very much about the truth and who go through every detail of every paper. | ||
| Their families suffer. | ||
| Everybody suffers as a consequence of their neurotic tendency, but those people Are they heroes of science? | ||
| Because they won't let something go to publication unless they know it's absolutely watertight. | ||
| I think what you said is very important. | ||
| It's a very human thing. | ||
| You know, subject to human emotions and human instincts and ego and jealousy and and a partner at home who's probably like, hey, when are you going to get out of graduate school? | ||
| And we're going to actually move out of this one bedroom apartment where I want kids or all our friends are like taking vacations in Tulum and we're like suffering here. | ||
| And yeah, or people who think, you know, you get a Ph.D. and that guarantees a win. | ||
| I mean, all it does is give you the opportunity to keep competing. | ||
| So when you see people at the high, the best institutions or even somebody at a at a not one of the top, top institutions who's able to keep their lab funded over a long period of time, that says one of two things. | ||
| It says they're either really good at picking questions and being very consistent or they are very good at hiring people that are extremely careful and hardworking or sometimes both. | ||
| But listen, the bigger the labs, the higher the probability of a bad apple. | ||
| And it happens all the time. | ||
| It's just stunning when something like the amyloid plaques issue in terms of Alzheimer's is established and stays for so long. | ||
| There was decades of like people were acting on that bad. | ||
| It wasn't just bad. | ||
| It was falsified data. | ||
| Well, it was truly falsified data. | ||
| And there's a whole other aspect to the sociology of science that I think is not often discussed, which is that There's a huge incentive to being promoted by your elders, by your graduate advisor and postdoc advisor, because they are the ones that write the letters, they get you promotions, et cetera. | ||
| And so what tends to happen is people tend to continue to do science that pleases their elders. | ||
| Now, for myself, I had both the curse and the blessing of my undergraduate advisor, graduate advisor, and postdoc. | ||
| We're all incredible people and scientists in different ways. | ||
| I was very, very blessed. | ||
| But the first one killed himself. | ||
| He had a bad depression, killed himself. | ||
| Second one, cancer at 50. Third one, had a heart attack across the desk from me. | ||
| First day of work at Stanford. | ||
| He was my postdoc advisor. | ||
| Eventually died of pancreatic cancer. | ||
| So the joke in my field is you don't want me to work for you, right? | ||
| Like it's like a death sentence. | ||
| Now they're all dead, but the good, you know, is a terrible thing to be orphaned in science because promotions, things like that. | ||
| Other people stepped in and helped me and I'm very grateful to those people. | ||
| But one of the blessings, the hidden blessings, the silver lining in all this is like, I didn't have to please anybody. | ||
| And so when it came time to do a podcast or to look at data or review a paper, I was not worried about pleasing anyone. | ||
| But prior to that, I'll tell you, I've been asked to write letters for people's tenure. | ||
| You know, can this person have a job for life or not? | ||
| They get 10 to 12 letters. | ||
| And I've had people say, hey, listen, we're having a really hard time getting letters for this person. | ||
| And, you know, this person really needs tenure and they've got a family and, you know, and you look at the work and, you know, and you want to say no. | ||
| And you can't because you don't want that person to review your paper and ask your next paper. | ||
| Now, I've been very lucky because I don't... | ||
| First of all, I think it's maybe just the way I'm wired. | ||
| I just don't care about that aspect of human... | ||
| You know, I'm one of these people, sort of like my bulldog Costello was. | ||
| Like, I'm going to go along with things until you try and push me, and then I just have kind of a resistance thing. | ||
| It's some developmental error or something. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Probably healthy. | ||
| I think it's helped me a lot because what I've told those people asking for letters is, listen, I think they're not getting strong letters because they're not good enough for tenure at this place. | ||
| But that is unusual. | ||
| Everyone plays this nice, nice game because when you're nice to people, they think you get stuff. | ||
| And it creates a rather dark underbelly of science that people don't talk about. | ||
| So in this field of Alzheimer's, What I think ended up happening was there was such incentive to go with the party line and publish things that were validating of previous papers because, let's be honest, when you say nice things about other people in papers, it's easier to get your papers in. | ||
| And, you know, scientists on Twitter is changing things because now people will really pick apart a figure. | ||
| They'll really go after them. | ||
| I think it's great. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| And I learned from you early on and from Lex early on If you're going to be out there as a scientist or on social media at all, you have to ignore a lot of stuff. | ||
| But if there's something to pay attention to, like Lex and I talk about this, he and I, I'll just reveal a writing an article for one of the nature journals about science and social media. | ||
| The journals are now starting to pay attention to podcasts. | ||
| And so conversation and being able to really rip something apart and having a pretty thick skin about it, that's the nature of good science. | ||
| And I think that that field of Alzheimer's was all pre-social media. | ||
| And people knew there was bullshit in there. | ||
| And they just went along with it. | ||
| Whole companies were founded. | ||
| Investor money. | ||
| Where are those companies? | ||
| Where are those drugs? | ||
| It's so sketchy. | ||
| And, you know, that's just one. | ||
| I mean, we're talking about the Alzheimer's thing. | ||
| That's one. | ||
| And then the other one was connecting... | ||
| Heart disease, desaturated fat that was funded by the sugar companies in, I believe, the 1960s, right? | ||
| Was it in the 1960s? | ||
| Yeah, this is less in my wheelhouse, but, you know, the whole... | ||
| But it's also fraudulent work. | ||
| With a relationship between dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol doesn't exist... | ||
| The relationship between saturated fat and serum cholesterol, however, I think there is a link there. | ||
| This is more Atiyah's territory than mine. | ||
| But even the markers that he's really highlighted are so key. | ||
| Things like ApoB. | ||
| He's big on your ApoB level is a... | ||
| Critical determinant of your longevity. | ||
| What they were trying to do was take away the option that sugar was responsible. | ||
| And so they were putting an improper blame on other things. | ||
| And they were just doing this funded by the sugar companies. | ||
| And it's transparent. | ||
| Like, we know... | ||
| And I think they were only paid like $50,000, which is kind of crazy, because it changed dietary guidelines for fucking decades. | ||
| Oh, scientists, you know, I guess this is an opportunity to bring up Jeff Epstein. | ||
| So, you know, people sometimes wonder, you know, like, were scientists, you know, hanging out with him to get, you know, to get with these young women or something? | ||
| I know scientists. | ||
| There are some scientists like that. | ||
| They were spending time with him because he was giving their laboratories money that they didn't have to write grants for. | ||
| Why was he doing that, though? | ||
| Oh, there are very strong opinions. | ||
| I never met him. | ||
| I know people who knew him, but he clearly understood social engineering. | ||
| He understood that rich people have, they can get anything they want, anything they want. | ||
| Except the one thing they can't easily control is their reputation, because that requires other people's perceptions, and just being rich doesn't make you necessarily respected. | ||
| By certain people, yes, by certain people, no. | ||
| So he understood that very wealthy people feel more important And can derive more sense of self-respect when they're surrounded by brilliant people. | ||
| And he was very good at bringing truly brilliant people into that mix. | ||
| People like Murray Gell-Mann who discovered the quark, right? | ||
| He's a particle physicist. | ||
| I mean, head of the Santa Fe Institute, Nobel Prize. | ||
| I mean, Gell-Mann used to pick on Richard Feynman. | ||
| He was one of the few people who could maybe not verbally joust with him, but at a scientific level could pin that guy. | ||
| They were on more or less equal tier, but Gilman was right up there. | ||
| So Epstein understood, like, bring around the Gilmans. | ||
| Bring around the top genetic researchers from Harvard. | ||
| By doing that, he made these rich people feel like they were in the company of interesting, important people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Interesting. | |
| And why would scientists spend time with rich people? | ||
| I'll be really honest. | ||
| I do a lot of work these days. | ||
| Talking about science and trying to generate science philanthropy. | ||
| That's a big part of my life now, trying to generate money to give to studies that are really interesting and valid. | ||
| We could talk about that if you like. | ||
| Scientists will show up to dinners that normally they'd rather be in their labs or writing grants or with their families, frankly, if there's the possibility of money being given to their laboratory because then they can hire more people and do more science. | ||
| Money alone doesn't drive good science, but the more money you have, the bigger margin of error you have. | ||
| So if Epstein offered laboratories, you know, a million dollars a year for four years, To a guy of that wealth as trivial, to a laboratory, that is four national institutes of health grants per year. | ||
| And the workload to maintain those four grants is immense. | ||
| So they'd show up with the possibility of getting money. | ||
| That's where they were hanging out with a dirtbag like him. | ||
| And they had blinders on. | ||
| Either they knew or they didn't know what he was up to, but they had blinders on because they weren't thinking about the implications. | ||
| Well, it's also one of the things about something like that must be that if you go there and you see Steven Pinker and you see Lawrence Krauss and you see Bill Gates, it seems like you should be there. | ||
| It seems fine to be there. | ||
| Also on, you know, sinister, diabolical, narcissistic and sociopathic, but brilliant social engineering on the part of it. | ||
| He understood that they felt comfortable in the room because of who else was there. | ||
| Rich people like will show up to a place for who's not there. | ||
| As we know, they like to have space, right? | ||
| And scientists generally don't like to hobnob. | ||
| It's not really their thing. | ||
| What they like to do is work on their pet projects. | ||
| They're a little bit like comedians in the sense that they have a craft they want to be working on. | ||
| They're only going to do things like go out and get money if they have to get money. | ||
| And they do a lot to get money. | ||
| Well, I'm sure there's a lot of social aspect of it and hanging around with other brilliant scientists at a wonderful place. | ||
| You have good food and drink and there's pretty girls around. | ||
| It's probably exciting. | ||
| It's probably exciting, although I think that at some level scientists... | ||
| Real scientists, dyed-in-the-wool scientists would rather just be doing science and living their lives. | ||
|
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I'm sure. | |
| I mean, this is a very rare occasion. | ||
| I'm sure that they're doing this. | ||
| So he had the whole thing. | ||
| The Harvard, sure. | ||
| I mean, he kind of ingratiated himself in this community. | ||
| He just understood. | ||
| It was sort of like I do some work with some professional sports teams, right? | ||
| And the only people that they look up to are tier one special operators. | ||
| You tell a pro NBA player, like, oh, in the NFL they do this, they're like, whatever. | ||
| You tell them that, you know, this will increase your output by 10%. | ||
| They're like, whatever. | ||
| They don't care. | ||
| They want to play video games. | ||
| They do not care. | ||
| They want to hang out with their girlfriend or their four girlfriends, whatever it is. | ||
| You tell them tier one operators who do high-risk, high-consequence work And are on deployment schedules that would dissolve you into a puddle of your own tears, because it's a vampire schedule, you don't get to sleep when you want to, and you get, you potentially die, you potentially all die, and their running times are faster, their recovery times are faster, their shooting accuracy is far better than your shooting accuracy, and that's with a gun, and getting shot at, and they go, okay, I'll listen. | ||
| They look up to tier one operators. | ||
| That's a fact. | ||
| And so if you want them to listen, you understand that fact. | ||
| You look at what Tier 1 operators are doing. | ||
| That's what professional sports teams are trying to glean that information. | ||
| Billionaires, they have different interests, obviously. | ||
| Some race yachts, some want to start new projects, but they want to be around really innovative, interesting people. | ||
| And in academia, there are a very small subset of those running big laboratories, and Epstein just got that down to the detail. | ||
| And then he understood, I think, with politicians. | ||
| They can—their reputations are everything, and so he gave them a vaulted world where they could behave how they wanted. | ||
| I mean, in some sense, I mean, his story is one of multiple psychologies, not just his. | ||
| Yeah, that's why people that have studied him and the whole case believe that—and from other evidence and information as well—that he was part of some sort of an intelligence operation, and there was compromising these people. | ||
| Oh, I'm sure that at some point he had information on other people and he just used it as a – and it doesn't have to be stronghand blackmail, right? | ||
| He could just say, you know, we've got information. | ||
| We'll hold it secure. | ||
| Well, you would just – you don't even have to blackmail someone. | ||
| If you know they have information on you and they have not used it, you will act in their best interest to try to get them on your good side. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mm-hmm. | |
| Well, I mean, in the unraveling of all the dark, sordid shit around Weinstein, it was discovered, I think, in New York, like near that avenue, down in Alphabet City Police Precinct. | ||
| It turns out that there were, you know, a boatload of files that date back ages. | ||
| And, you know, it's not that cops are corrupt, it's that they're incentivized by certain things, too. | ||
| And their bosses were telling them, you got to do certain things, you got to put away certain files. | ||
| And, you know, people are trying to make careers. | ||
| I think that's why that show, it's a little outdated now. | ||
| From technology standpoint, but the wire was so brilliant is that every aspect of that was a human endeavor. | ||
| And science is a human endeavor. | ||
| And we're kind of paying attention to the darker unfortunate side. | ||
| They're also, again, I always feel like I got to shine light where it belongs to, which is that a lot of amazing science is happening because of excellent philanthropy of people that are not pedophiles. | ||
| Yes, of course. | ||
| And those people, you know, and but let's be honest, walk onto any university campus, look at the names on the sides of the buildings. | ||
| Do you think they're there to honor those people because those were great people? | ||
| Sometimes they're great people. | ||
| They're there because those people donated 50 to 100 million dollars. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, and this has been known in law schools and business schools for a long time because you'd see it on this. | ||
| That was kind of more accepted there because it's business and law. | ||
| But if you walk onto any campus, I don't care if it's UT Austin or Stanford or it's Harvard, the names on those sides of buildings, sometimes it's the Kennedy Building, sometimes it's the Rockefeller Building. | ||
| More often than not, these are names of people you don't recognize anymore, and names of people don't even live in the United States. | ||
| They gave $100 million for a building that trains medical students. | ||
| Universities are a business too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| And it doesn't mean that they're trying to corrupt anybody, but they have to survive. | ||
| You've got to pay the janitor. | ||
| You've got to pay the cops. | ||
| You get on the campus. | ||
| I mean, so it is a business. | ||
| And I think the human side, actually, to your credit, I learned from you. | ||
| I think you may or may not remember, but a few years ago we were talking about everything that was going on in the public health thing. | ||
| And you're like, the reason I'm curious about this, and I don't trust this, these were your words more or less, was because I know about people. | ||
| And that's, at the end of the day, it's all about people and their psychology. | ||
| Well, that is science as well. | ||
| I mean, the human aspect of science is science. | ||
| It's understanding motivations and incentives. | ||
| And there's just a lot. | ||
| I mean, look, that's how they got this whole FTX thing, you know, with Sam Bankman Freed. | ||
| You know, he's parked at home prison two blocks from Stanford campus. | ||
| Is he really? | ||
| Go visit him. | ||
| No, he needs a haircut, that guy. | ||
| Does he? | ||
| Well, have you seen... | ||
| Guys, I don't know. | ||
| I just see this kid with an afro. | ||
| It looks like he hasn't been really... | ||
| I think what happened there is so... | ||
| But no, there was a lot of celebrity endorsements, is my point. | ||
| Tom Brady. | ||
| But that's what it is. | ||
| You get people to think, oh, Tom Brady's investing. | ||
| It must be good. | ||
| Oh, there you go. | ||
| And that kind of thing is exactly the sort of methods that Jeffrey Epstein used. | ||
| It's just like... | ||
| Having this association with people that are respected... | ||
| And popular. | ||
| It's... | ||
| How should I say this? | ||
|
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It's... | |
| If I had a super high-powered psychiatric microscope, I'd go back and find out how everyone that you would ever work with or that you're getting information from, you would find out what their kind of core developmental dissatisfaction is, right? | ||
| Because I think therein you see. | ||
| It's like I'm sure everyone has this. | ||
| I'm sure Bankman-Fried felt like a... | ||
| Like this big as the consequence of something in his psychology or experience and as a consequence justified doing this horrible thing. | ||
| Well, I think he was clearly on amphetamines. | ||
| That's part of the problem. | ||
|
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Well, that won't help. | |
| That won't help. | ||
| That whole organization was backed up by amphetamines. | ||
| And this is publicly known. | ||
| Like she tweeted, Caroline Elson, tweeted that talking to people when you're like normal people when you're on amphetamines is very boring. | ||
| And people are boring. | ||
| This overuse of amphetamines is, I mean, all we know is that, and we do know, that they narrow your focus. | ||
| They become very outward and goal-directed. | ||
| I mean, that's what cocaine and amphetamines do. | ||
| They make you very of what's in the future and what you can go get, as opposed to being in bliss in yourself. | ||
| Perhaps an interesting intersection of this idea of neurochemistry and psychology and universities and sciences. | ||
| Recently, I was asked to give a talk at Stanford to a bunch of potential donors, and on the stage next to me was Michael Pollan. | ||
| Who I have tremendous respect for. | ||
| Love that guy. | ||
| Yeah, even though he's over at Berkeley, like we tolerate him. | ||
| No, I'm kidding, Michael. | ||
| That's a Stanford Berkeley joke. | ||
| He is wonderful and amazing and such a pioneer of this whole psychedelic space. | ||
| And you might say, well, there were others. | ||
| There's Terence McKenna and there's the classic people. | ||
| But I started off that evening by saying, we need to take a step back. | ||
| And just acknowledge what's happening here, which is saying the word psychedelics on a podcast for me five, six years ago could have cost me my job easily. | ||
| Saying, yeah, I've taken MDMA as part of a clinical trial three times. | ||
| It was tremendously beneficial. | ||
| I think psilocybin can aid with depression. | ||
| That would have cost me my job, done, fired. | ||
| I would have walked out of here, done. | ||
| Now, just this last month, the cover of UCSF Magazine and Stanford Magazine, Alice in Wonderland, psychedelics, deep feature about MDMA, ketamine, psilocybin, DMT. What's happened now is this is what used to cost university professors their jobs in the 60s and 70s and did cost them their jobs at places like Harvard in particular, is now the subject of research studies, clinical studies at Stanford and elsewhere, right? | ||
| UCSF, Johns Hopkins. | ||
| This is now really big science and pharma's moving in very quickly. | ||
| What they're trying to do is create non-psychedelic psychedelics, figure out what sorts of chemistry changes that doesn't give you hallucinations and create new antidepressants. | ||
| That's what they want to do with psilocybin because doing two journeys on a drug and then you're done, that's not good business. | ||
| And what I love about what Michael Pollan is saying is that he's the one that's really, he's really hitting the drum on this one. | ||
| He's saying, These things work. | ||
| The clinical data are showing that. | ||
| 65% plus success rate for what would otherwise be intractable, untreatable suicidal depression. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| And now the universities are behind it. | ||
| But they're behind it because laboratories are getting funded to do it. | ||
| Laboratories are getting funded to do it because there are grants. | ||
| Why are there now grants from the federal government? | ||
| Philanthropists came in early and provided money, and now people are starting to see that there are big, big potential outcomes at the level of pharma. | ||
| Now, the classic psychedelics community isn't gonna like that. | ||
| They're like, no, this is plant medicine, it's got 100,000 year history or more, indigenous people, et cetera. | ||
| Academia and pharma don't care about that. | ||
| And I'm one of these people, I'm not saying they're bad and they're good. | ||
| I'm saying that it's humans again. | ||
| So why are universities suddenly okay with the idea of discussions about psychedelics in front of their top tier donors, the people that literally supply the blood to the university? | ||
| Well, because top tier donors are now really interested in psychedelics. | ||
| So what drives every aspect of it from the student who's pipetting in the lab to the highest tier of administration and university all the way up to directors of NIH? It's all interconnected at the level of incentives. | ||
| Right, but the top-tier donors are clearly influenced by the zeitgeist. | ||
| And the way people have approached and thought about psychedelics has radically changed over the last ten years. | ||
| And Michael Pollan is one of the reasons for that because of the omnivores dilemma. | ||
| He had established himself as a legitimate journalist who would comb through and parse through all the data to give you a comprehensive understanding of what exactly is going on. | ||
| And he went out and did them, or at least some of them, as a kind of late, typical person. | ||
| And didn't come out with wearing a robe. | ||
| Or sit in the lotus position. | ||
| And he can discuss them like a journalist. | ||
| And then having podcasts discuss it, then you're getting these positive drug stories out to... | ||
| And I don't even like calling them drugs. | ||
| Positive compound stories about psychedelics that are going out to millions and millions and millions of people... | ||
| And you're hearing about these people, particularly soldiers who are coming back with PTSD, who are having tremendous results. | ||
| People with overwhelming depression. | ||
| People with all sorts of problems with drug addiction and so many different ailments that are being helped in this way. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And look, you deserve tremendous credit here. | ||
| I know you're not... | ||
| Wanted to, you know, sit here and take praise from your guests, but I'm going to just say that you've been talking about this for a long time, about the tremendous value of these things, not just for gaining new perspective, because I think in the 60s and 70s, it was, remember, it was tune in and drop out, right? | ||
| Now, we're talking about the use of psychedelic medicine to be able to lean into life in a healthy way. | ||
| That's the major difference, and you've really pioneered the discussion around that, Michael Pollan, and there are others, too, I realize, but... | ||
| You know, at a time when it was considered really wacky and out there, now it's becoming, it's headed towards mainstream medicine. | ||
| And I think it's fundamentally important. | ||
| I mean, I think Robin Cardhart Harris's laboratory at UCSF has a paper out just today on the use of DMT for treatment of psychiatric illness. | ||
| His laboratory has been looking at high dose psilocybin, two sessions, guided sessions, Treatment of anorexia, ADHD, and depression with very high success. | ||
| Nolan Williams Lab at my university at Stanford. | ||
| He's a triple board certified psychiatrist, neurologist, running the studies with Veteran Solutions, the group down in Mexico of tier one operators and other people who come back who are just Messed up. | ||
| They're either heading towards suicidal depression or they're just not feeling quite right and using Ibogaine DMT in tandem and getting tremendously positive results. | ||
| So he's doing the neuroimaging on them. | ||
| So times are really changing and you and Michael and others really deserve a token of gratitude. | ||
| I've completely revamped my stance on psychedelics. | ||
| I'm still yet to do a high dose psilocybin journey. | ||
| I haven't done that yet. | ||
| What was your original stance on psychedelics? | ||
| I don't want to lose my job. | ||
| And I'll be honest, so I was kind of a wild youth, barely finished high school, and I did, recreationally, I took LSD and psilocybin in high school, hung around with a wild bunch, and we were just partying with it. | ||
| I didn't know what I was doing. | ||
| So my view of it was, it was associated with a time in my life where I was pretty wayward. | ||
| Then I never touched it. | ||
| I drank a little bit, smoked a little bit of weed here and there, but never really liked We'd very much, it just wasn't my thing. | ||
| And then when I did this three sessions with MDMA, that completely transformed my understanding of how these drugs work. | ||
| I also realize, and you might, you probably already know this, but I was very curious about MDMA and the reputation that puts holes in the brain, kills serotonin neurons. | ||
| You know, the study on MDMA that showed neurotoxicity was retracted from science. | ||
| They actually inadvertently injected methamphetamine into those monkeys, but you never hear about that. | ||
| How do you inadvertently inject methamphetamine? | ||
| Oh, I thought it was aspirin. | ||
| You don't hear about that retraction. | ||
| So they now have data in humans asking what are the safety profiles on MDMA for people that take it every once in a while to people who have taken hundreds of doses of MDMA. And there's one population of people that you can do this on that makes it a really good experiment. | ||
| Those people can't do any other drugs because then it becomes confounded by are they doing meth? | ||
| Are they doing coke? | ||
| Are they getting psilocybin? | ||
| What else? | ||
| It's not a good experiment. | ||
| You want single variable manipulation. | ||
| There's only one group that you can do that on, and that's who they did it on, and that's Mormons. | ||
| So the Church of Latter-day Saints has one drug that's not on the banned substance list, and that's MDMA. Wow. | ||
| And I'm not saying all Mormons— They can't even drink coffee. | ||
| It makes an even better experiment. | ||
| And so I'm not saying that Mormons are all taking MDMA, but there is a substantial number of LDS, Latter-day Saints, I think they call themselves now Mormons, as most people know them, who have taken tons of MDMA. And they've done brain imaging and psychiatric profiles on them. | ||
| Those data say that as long as it's not contaminated with something else, which is a serious issue, the neurotoxicity is nil to none. | ||
| Amazing, right? | ||
| At the appropriate dosages, etc. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| So I've changed my stance. | ||
| Contaminated MDMA is super common. | ||
| The recent data I saw was that you go out and buy MDMA from a quote-unquote trusted source, and 6 out of 10 are going to have potentially lethal levels of fentanyl in them. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Six out of 10. Yeah, and everyone nowadays knows to say, oh, this is from maps, you know, because it's like saying like, you know, it's clean, right? | ||
| So in any way, I've completely changed my stance on psychedelics. | ||
| I think they have tremendous power if done responsibly. | ||
| I think that they hold the greatest promise for drug-based psychiatric treatments. | ||
| And I think we're looking at a time in which it's absolutely clear that That these things should be available to people. | ||
| Robin will tell you the worst part about running his laboratory is someone will come in with intractable suicidal depression. | ||
| They'll do two psilocybin treatments and they're better. | ||
| And then two years later, they'll come back and they'll say, how can I do another one? | ||
| Because it made me feel so much better. | ||
| And he'll say, sorry, they're still illegal. | ||
| And he can't provide them. | ||
| He'd lose his job. | ||
| So right now, the legalization effort is really important. | ||
| And I intend to get more vocal about this. | ||
| Well, that's great. | ||
| I'm glad you will. | ||
| And I think it's a popular stance now. | ||
| I don't think it's nearly as dangerous as it was five, ten years ago. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is kind of crazy because that's one of the more interesting aspects of the way podcasts have infected the popular opinion on things because it's sort of changed people's understanding through data and through talking to people like Michael Pollan or Rick Doblin or, you know, any of these experts that really could tell you What's actually going on and how this helps. | ||
| And then there's many people that have these stances on these drugs that hear these things now and go, you know what? | ||
| God damn it, maybe I'm ruining my life by not being open. | ||
| Like maybe this could actually help me. | ||
| Maybe this could help my mom. | ||
| Maybe this could help my father. | ||
| Maybe this could help my brother. | ||
| You know, there's so many people out there that really could use some help. | ||
| And human beings have been using these compounds, these substances and these mushrooms and these psychedelics for thousands of years. | ||
| There's a reason why they put them in rituals. | ||
| They may be the source of most religious experiences. | ||
| They may be the source Of many religious texts. | ||
| In fact, John Marco Allegro, one of the head, the guys who was hired to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls, he wrote a book called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross after translating the Dead Sea Scrolls for 14 years. | ||
| His belief was that the entire Christian religion was initially based on psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals. | ||
| And so he wrote this book that was bought out by the Catholic Church. | ||
| It's reprinted now, but you had to buy used copies of it online to get it. | ||
| And so then he made another book called The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth that was based on the same material. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| You know, this is really an opportunity to say that About that positive aspect of philanthropy. | ||
| You know, one thing that I know about very wealthy people is they almost always have at least one family member who's really screwed up. | ||
| Really screwed up. | ||
| Mentally, especially. | ||
| Not just wealthy people. | ||
| Poor people too, but it's like most people. | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
|
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I'm talking about that category. | |
| Most people have a family member that's fucked. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So what's happened is a lot of the money that's going into psychedelic research that's coming from philanthropy is coming from these very... | ||
| They feel desperate. | ||
| Very wealthy people. | ||
| And they're going to universities and saying, what can you do for my kid? | ||
| And the university are saying, well, we've got transcranial magnetic stimulation and that works on some people but not others. | ||
| And they're saying, great, what else do you have? | ||
| And they're saying, well, we have talk therapy. | ||
| And they're saying, well, that's important too, but what else do you have? | ||
| And they're saying, well, there's these interesting compounds that seem to relieve depression. | ||
| And they're like, well, why isn't that available? | ||
| Well, it's still illegal and we don't have money to fund it because the federal government's been very reluctant to get involved in it. | ||
| I mean, it's an odd thing that we have, you know, we have bodies within the government that are designed to put people in prison for drugs. | ||
| And then we also have bodies of the same government that funds from the top down that study drugs. | ||
| But keep in mind that the NIH up until recently was only studying drugs of abuse. | ||
| Remember, it's NIDA, right? | ||
| It's about drugs of abuse, addiction and abuse. | ||
| So they're studying cocaine, amphetamine for their addictive properties. | ||
| Studying psychedelics becomes a little bit of a tricky thing. | ||
| Where are you going to fund that? | ||
| Is it – because if anything, they're anti-addictive according to the data, right? | ||
| And here I should be careful and say that like the Ibogaine studies, there is a heart risk. | ||
| They do have – they usually have someone measuring – For Ibogaine? | ||
| Yeah, for Ibogaine. | ||
| Have there people died of heart attacks from Ibogaine? | ||
| No, but not that I know of, but they're always monitoring. | ||
| Blood pressure and heart rates. | ||
| For like Veterans Solutions, they have physicians there and they're very careful. | ||
| Great organization. | ||
| Ibogaine is a very strange one. | ||
| I've never done it. | ||
| But the people that have have had crazy stories. | ||
| 22 hours. | ||
| Yeah, 22 hours and horrific experiences were just... | ||
| Intensely introspective breaking down of all the pathways in your mind that have been carved throughout all of your traumatic experiences your whole life that led you to be the person you are today I know multiple people that have done it because of an addiction to opiates and it's helped them it's helped them tremendously kicked them How can you argue with the data? | ||
| I mean, when you hear that, I mean, opioid addiction is one of the hardest things for people to kick. | ||
| I mean, people die trying to go cold turkey. | ||
| I mean, it's unbelievable. | ||
| Yeah, I think Ibogaine was described to me by a friend who was a former SEAL team operator because he went down to Veteran Solutions and he said it was eyes open, no hallucinations. | ||
| Every time he would close his eyes, he would get a... | ||
| High definition, movie quality view of an experience from his life. | ||
| And he had agency. | ||
| He could move himself differently within that experience. | ||
| And then it would move like a cube and he'd get another experience. | ||
| And then he was in that experience. | ||
| 22 hours. | ||
| And then down there, they follow that up with DMT. One or two. | ||
| And he described DMT as being strapped to the shockwave of an atom bomb. | ||
| This is somebody who's obviously been through some intense experiences anyway. | ||
| And all of that might just sound really crazy and extreme, but keep in mind, those same people are coming back to Stanford and Nolan is scanning their brains before and after and seeing incredible changes in the positive direction. | ||
| I think for most people, the psilocybin macrodose, two macrodoses seems to be the depression treatment. | ||
| So this is 25 milligrams of psilocybin. | ||
| I think it translates to about 2.5 to 5 grams of mushrooms, is that about right? | ||
| That's what Robin tells me. | ||
| That's the heroic dose. | ||
| The heroic dose. | ||
| And what's interesting is the microdosing, because now there's the comparison of daily one milligram, aka microdosing, versus the two heroic doses. | ||
| The microdosing has not shown impressive results for treating depression. | ||
| And I think people should know that. | ||
| I'm not saying microdosing is bad, but in terms of treatment of depression, it is not proved to in the clinical studies. | ||
| So for that application, but I can tell you personally that microdosing for just daily life makes things really fun. | ||
| Tell me more. | ||
| I enjoy it. | ||
| Are you on it now? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Right now I'm not. | ||
| I'm not on anything with coffee. | ||
| But I have done it many times, and I've taken a gram a day, 30 days in a row. | ||
| Okay, so a gram a day is probably about five milligrams a season. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I take days off here and there, but I enjoy it a lot. | ||
| It gives you a silly, carefree consciousness that is unperturbed. | ||
| Meaning that it doesn't affect my judgment. | ||
| It doesn't affect my ability to have a conversation with someone. | ||
| It doesn't affect my ability to do my job, whether it's do a podcast or even do UFC commentary or do anything else. | ||
| It just puts me in this very appreciative, thankful, low anxiety state. | ||
| Can I ask you a question about that? | ||
| And sort of earlier, in an earlier podcast, you brought up that when things got a little hectic in life that you were doing mushrooms. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Were those mushroom doses higher dose mushrooms than you're referring to? | ||
|
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|
No. | |
| One gram. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I mean, occasionally higher. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, but one gram seems to be like the magic number for me. | ||
| Like one gram just sort of, you skate around for like four or five hours. | ||
| And there's no come down. | ||
| There's no, it's just like, you're just happy. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, people in my field have been encouraging me to do the macrodose psilocybin. | ||
| It's in the books. | ||
| I really want to do it. | ||
| Robyn Cardhart-Harris again describes it as one of the more quote-unquote honest psychedelics. | ||
| Like you can't really decide what's going to come up. | ||
| And a key thing he mentioned is that people need – this is – you may find interesting. | ||
| I'd love to know if you believe this for your own experience as well. | ||
| He said there are a couple of variables to these successful treatments of depression with high dose psilocybin. | ||
| One of them is that people stay in the eye mask. | ||
| That if they spend too much time in the room with the eye mask off, they don't do enough of the introspective. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine that's the case because you're just distracted by visuals and you could concentrate on that instead of just – Terence McKenna used to always say silent darkness is the most important aspect to a real trip where you're learning and you're going in with the intention to interface with this divine consciousness and learn something. | ||
| I gotta pee. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Let's pee and we'll come back. | ||
|
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Okay. | |
| I'll be right back, Bob. | ||
| I did an episode on water. | ||
| The water people are crazy. | ||
| Water people? | ||
| Of all the topics that you could cover, you'd think, oh, you know, water is very benign, right? | ||
| The prescriptive that comes out of the data, if you want to keep your cognitive and physical function best, it's an average, not every hour, an average of eight ounces for every hour Up to 10 hours after you're awake. | ||
| So that's 80 ounces during the daytime. | ||
| You gotta be peeing constantly. | ||
| Yeah, that's probably good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then less at night. | ||
| But yeah, the water people, because what happens is people go, oh, you know, pH water doesn't change your body's pH. | ||
| True. | ||
| But there are some advantages to pH water, like it has minerals in it. | ||
| Then people go, no, it's all about deuterium depleted water. | ||
| Near the ocean, there's more deuterium in water. | ||
| Not from ocean water. | ||
| And then people are like really into deuterium deplete water for cancer. | ||
| This is all these niche communities in water. | ||
| Reverse osmosis water, which has no magnesium or calcium. | ||
| And then it's like, people are really into that. | ||
| People say, that's terrible. | ||
| And every free hydrogen water, structured water, and it's bananas. | ||
| And so the key thing is there's the Galpin equation, which is your body weight in pounds divided by 30 equals the number of ounces of water to drink for every 15 minutes you train. | ||
| Like Galpin's figured out that can improve performance. | ||
| Like there's all this, like water gets super geeky and I love it. | ||
| One thing before I forget, the Robin Carter Harris, he said, eye mask, And he said the power, I was so surprised. | ||
| This is like a hardcore researcher tells me the most important variables are the dose. | ||
| So set and setting, obviously, but the eye mask and music. | ||
| He's like, when people don't have music, somehow the music and that the music during a psilocybin journey Have a kind of a build and then have a kind of more emotional soft tone in the kind of taper of the final hours or two. | ||
| He said that he thinks that that's a very important component to guiding the introspection. | ||
| And for me as a biomedical researcher at a school of medicine, and he's at a school of medicine dude, to hear this conversation, like, I don't know whether or not to laugh or cry because These are the kinds of conversations that A, would cause you to lose your job for legal reasons 10 years ago, or people would just say they've lost their minds. | ||
| And this is the hottest topic. | ||
| In biomedical research right now, in terms of psychiatry, the hottest topic. | ||
| Psychedelics? | ||
| Or psychedelics with music? | ||
| Psychedelics in general. | ||
| Just what's happening in a journey, how to do a journey properly, how much dosing. | ||
| And so, you know, take your life five, ten years ago or even before, things that you've been talking about with people for a long time. | ||
| And now it's being talked about by these, by, in the biomedical research community, funded by... | ||
| 20 years ago, I was being warned by producers of a television show. | ||
| They're like, why are you doing this? | ||
| You're talking about this openly. | ||
| This is terrible. | ||
| Why are you doing this to your brain? | ||
| You guys don't know what the fuck you're talking about. | ||
| I'm like, I don't know what to tell you, but I'm not scared to express my opinions on things if I actually believe them. | ||
| Well, this is my strongest... | ||
| Stance in why I love your podcast, why I pay attention to podcasts in addition to scientific journals is that if you look at, let's say, let's look at like this really niche, crazy field of bodybuilding. | ||
| Like how many people wanna look like Doreen Yates? | ||
| How many people wanna look Arnold Schwarzenegger, female body? | ||
| Very few, very, very few. | ||
| And yet that niche community understood hormone augmentation at the extremes. | ||
| And now we understand hormone augmentation at a healthy dosages. | ||
| In men and women has tremendous longevity health span effects, mental and physical. | ||
| And so there's value in these early niche communities, you know, psychedelics or in bodybuilding or martial arts or in yoga communities or in breath work. | ||
| It's just that we see these extremes of like a Wim Hof or a, you know, or somebody who's doing deliberate heat exposure and cold exposure. | ||
| And the question for a really good scientist should be, is there value there? | ||
| What can we extract that the general population could benefit from at a more subtle level? | ||
| Like weight training. | ||
| Everyone used to say, oh, you only lift weights if you're going to the military, playing football, you're a bodybuilder. | ||
| How about extending neural function in the brain by stimulating the neuromuscular system, right? | ||
| In people in their 70s. | ||
| I mean, that's being done now. | ||
| So I think that an open-mindedness is really what's needed in biomedical research and public health. | ||
| And I think, I can't speak for you obviously, but I get very frustrated as I think you do and other people do when people immediately just shut the door like, oh, that's just like crazy bro science biohacking. | ||
| Actually, there's a different name for it. | ||
| It's called ahead of its time. | ||
| It's called paying attention to things that clearly have big effects and that at lower dosages or done in a particular way might actually have tremendously positive effects. | ||
| And the best example I can point to would be physical training, resistance training, but also If you jogged in the 1950s, I'll never forget that scene in Mad Men where the woman's out for a jog and all the housewives are like, oh, what is she doing? | ||
| No one ran outside of PE class. | ||
| Well, jogging craze. | ||
| Now it's like accepted to be a runner. | ||
| It's encouraged to be a runner. | ||
| Huge effects. | ||
| Psychedelics. | ||
| And so I think I'm old enough now in 47 to just see like, ah, the stuff that everyone thought was crazy. | ||
| Supplements, you don't need that. | ||
| This is the stuff that can make life better. | ||
| And so, you know, I don't encourage people to die, but I encourage many of them to retire. | ||
| I'm like, just a lot of voices just need to retire. | ||
| Just go away. | ||
| And let the next generation come in. | ||
| And they'll eventually replace me, too. | ||
| And they'll replace us all. | ||
| And they'll get replaced. | ||
| But let these new ideas at least be considered and talked about. | ||
| That to me is what's exciting about podcasting and social media. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And also, if you're getting advice, particularly advice about physical health, about metabolic health or about mental health or about the possible – the actual benefits, whatever they may be. | ||
| And it's very – It's not just dose-dependent when we're talking about psychedelics. | ||
| It's dependent upon the psychology of the individual. | ||
| It's dependent upon your life experiences, whether or not you have a tendency to schizophrenia. | ||
| It's not like... | ||
| Those people shouldn't do it. | ||
| Bipolar schizophrenia very clearly. | ||
| You ramp up the dopamine and or serotonin system, you amplify psychosis. | ||
| In fact, I was studying cannabis for a while for an episode. | ||
| Clear health benefits of cannabis. | ||
| And yet, we also know that if young males, in particular, study out of Canada who Have a predisposition to psychosis, do very high THC cannabis. | ||
| They are at a much greater risk. | ||
| The estimate is up to four times greater risk for a major and possibly permanent psychotic episode. | ||
| Now, I am not saying that weed is bad. | ||
| I'm saying that there are individuals for which it is not going to be a good idea. | ||
| And there are other individuals for which it might be a very good idea. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Look at the individual. | ||
| Like if you're talking to someone who's fat and they're talking to you about health, maybe that person is not really qualified to have this discussion. | ||
| Maybe they haven't taken care of their own physical health. | ||
| So they really shouldn't be distributing information. | ||
| If you knew something that could radically change the way your body responded to diseases, the kind of energy levels that you would have, your mental health, but yet you were ignoring it for some strange reason, well that person has a giant hole in their life game, right? | ||
| And there's a lot of people out there distributing health advice that have a giant fucking hole in their health game. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Like Bill Gates is a great example of that. | ||
| He's got this big fat belly and he's telling people they have to get vaccinated. | ||
| Like this kind of binary thinking, this kind of ridiculous way of looking at the world through only pharmacological interventions, through only medicine, through only this, through only that. | ||
| There's so many different things that you have to do to be healthy and it's too much work. | ||
| For most people. | ||
| So they're not going to weight train enough. | ||
| They're not going to eat the proper foods. | ||
| They're not going to supplement their hormones. | ||
| They're not going to do blood work on a regular basis and have someone who is a qualified physician who goes over that blood work with them and gives them a comprehensive understanding of what they need to do or not need to do. | ||
| Hey, your blood pressure's too high. | ||
| Hey, your body fat's too high. | ||
| Hey, you're this. | ||
| You're dehydrated. | ||
| You're this. | ||
| You're that. | ||
| You have low vitamin D. You have low magnesium. | ||
| All that shit is massively important. | ||
| So when you see someone who's distributing advice and they clearly aren't paying attention to everything that we know today, well, they're not on the cusp. | ||
| They're not ahead of the game. | ||
| They shouldn't be the type of person that's telling the rest of the world what to do. | ||
| It's like a dentist with bad teeth. | ||
| Cosmetic surgeons and dentists with bad teeth, you don't see them. | ||
| You don't see a wrinkled doc with a prune face because it's right there. | ||
| That's the product that people are paying for. | ||
| Unless he's really good. | ||
| This guy doesn't give a fuck about what he looks like, but he can make you look great. | ||
| Well, and their reputations, I have to imagine, travel really fast. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You'd have to be a genius. | |
| Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I did an episode on hair recently, and it was like the guy who did a hair transplant for the first time, his name escapes me for the moment. | ||
| You know, he figured out how to make his practice popular. | ||
| He worked on politicians and celebrities, and word spread quickly. | ||
| And, you know, he was the one who was the mind behind that brand Clinique. | ||
| He said, we should call it something clinical, so it sounds like medicine. | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, and he died at 96, with a full head of hair, by the way. | ||
| It's interesting that, you know, you were talking about people won't do the thing. | ||
| Right now there's a lot of excitement about semaglutide. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, so this is a GLP-1, glucagon-like peptide. | ||
| The story of that, since you like animals and the natural world, a guy down in South America, It was looking at Gila monsters, those really scary things. | ||
| And he realized they don't have to eat very often. | ||
| I wonder if they're hungry all the time or not. | ||
| Turns out it takes their blood, isolates a peptide, which turns out to be GLP-1, puts it into other animals and realizes it suppresses appetite. | ||
| Amazing, right? | ||
| Like this is what I love about biology. | ||
| Some dude who studies Gila monsters, turns out humans make GLP-1. | ||
| GLP-1 is stimulated by things like yerba mate tea, certain other compounds, plant compounds stimulate its release. | ||
| But what does it do in the hypothalamus? | ||
| It suppresses hunger by way of, there's a particular brain arcuate pathway, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But it also affects the mechanosensors of the gut so that you feel like your gut's full. | ||
| Like you got, it's almost like you're getting like a pharmacologic tummy, stapled stomach, right? | ||
| So when people take a drug that mimics GLP-1, Their brain is like, well, I'm not as hungry. | ||
| And their stomach feels full, even though it's empty. | ||
| And so people lose weight. | ||
| It has other effects too, but it's working on body and brain. | ||
| This becomes obviously the blockbuster drug of our times. | ||
| This is reminiscent of the fen-fen. | ||
| Remember fen-fen? | ||
| Yeah, I remember. | ||
| A couple people died of fen-fen, right? | ||
| I knew a gal who developed a heart problem. | ||
| It's a valve thinning and some issues there. | ||
| Gone. | ||
| Done. | ||
| It was off the market. | ||
| I remember that I was in college. | ||
| Fen-fen, gone. | ||
| It was an amphetamine, right? | ||
| It was an amphetamine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it probably felt pretty good to be on too. | ||
| Because things like Adderall, Ritalin, all that, people like that because it's amphetamine. | ||
| If I show you the structure of amphetamine, I show you the structure of Adderall, Ritalin, you don't have to be a chemist to just go. | ||
| Those look very similar. | ||
| So GLP-1 is changing Everything. | ||
| Type 2 diabetes, people are taking it, obesity, people are taking it, people crave food less. | ||
| And somehow, and I don't know how to explain these data, Atiyah would know far more about this than I would, is somehow it's also allowing people to lose weight even though they're eating similar amounts. | ||
| And so it's probably impacting metabolic pathways. | ||
| It's not without its side effects, but getting, I think it's called a Zempick is the brand name. | ||
| That's going to be like Adderall soon. | ||
| It's going to be hard to find. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Soon it will be because it is so, I mean, everybody's trying to get this stuff. | ||
| But won't they just ramp up production of it? | ||
| If they can, if they can keep up. | ||
| But right now, there's an Adderall shortage. | ||
| There's an Adderall shortage? | ||
| And there's a huge... | ||
| Because of all the non-prescript... | ||
| People get the prescriptions and sell it. | ||
| Big, big money on college campuses. | ||
| Big money in finance. | ||
| Then there must be a real problem with, like, cartel fake Adderall. | ||
| It's now being... | ||
| It's laced. | ||
| It's being cut. | ||
| It's being cut and resold. | ||
| Yeah, so... | ||
| But I think the semaglutide thing... | ||
| You know, I'm more of the... | ||
| I always feel like behavior is first. | ||
| Nutrition, supplementation, and then prescription drugs. | ||
| I have a question for you about the semaglutide stuff because one of the things that we've discovered when we started going into it and talking about it on the podcast was that 34% of the weight loss was muscle mass, bone mass, and connective tissue. | ||
| Doesn't surprise me. | ||
| My thought was, was that because they were losing weight? | ||
| Because if you just get someone to lose weight, if someone just stops eating food and just starts like really kind of starving themselves, they are 100% going to lose bone mass, they're going to lose muscle mass, and they'll probably lose some connective tissue mass too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They get skinny fat. | ||
| Is there anything that's been done where they've examined people who have done weight training and done resistance training while they're taking semaglutide and does that mitigate the effect of that stuff? | ||
| I have to imagine it would. | ||
| I'm not aware of any trials. | ||
| I mean, you know, doing human research is so tedious and expensive. | ||
| You'd have to have people, you could do it. | ||
| You could, you know, and, but you know, if you had 50 subjects in each group doing weight training and are they doing sets to, how hard are they, it's hard. | ||
| So I'm not dismissing it. | ||
| It's an awesome study. | ||
| You'd want to see that. | ||
| You'd want to encourage people to weight train, to offset the muscle loss. | ||
| And fat loss. | ||
| One thing that's interesting is that when you trigger the hypothalamus with GLP-1, the hypothalamus sends out signals to multiple tissues, if not all the tissues of the body. | ||
| So it doesn't just send signals to the adipose tissue saying, oh, you know, lose body fat. | ||
| It's going to also signal to the musculature. | ||
| And Lane and I get into some really deep dives on this kind of thing. | ||
| Years ago, there's a study of what's called NEAT, non-exercise-induced thermogenesis. | ||
| If you look at people that move around a lot, bounce their knee, kind of moving around, those people like very staccato with their movements, they can burn up to 1,800 calories more per day than a person that sits very still. | ||
|
unidentified
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Whoa! | |
| This is beautiful work done by Rothwell and Stock. | ||
| If people want to look up those papers, amazing papers. | ||
| Is there health benefit to that in any way? | ||
| Or is it just a matter of burning off calories? | ||
| Just burning calories. | ||
| This is so micro movements. | ||
| And so then, you know, for instance, in the treatment of anorexia, the most deadly, by the way, of the psychiatric illnesses, most many anorexics die and they have low muscle mass. | ||
| This is where I'm going with this because it relates to the semaglutide thing. | ||
| They are often in their treatment forbidden from doing these kinds of fidgeting things because they're constantly trying to lose weight all the time. | ||
| Anorexics are very aware of the caloric content of food. | ||
| They have a near precision calculator in their head of the caloric content in foods. | ||
| They can look at a hamburger and they can tell you how many fats, carbohydrates, and proteins are in there. | ||
| They're a computer and it's horrible. | ||
| And they're also always trying to lose weight, always trying to burn calories, always. | ||
| And so this neat non-exercise induced thermogenesis Thermogenesis, excuse me, is very robust. | ||
| In people that move around, even there's a study out of University of Texas, Houston. | ||
| This is wild. | ||
| The soleus muscle, the wider muscle of the calf, for those that don't know that, there's a guy down there who's running a human physiology laboratory. | ||
| And he's like, you know, insulin insensitivity is a real problem, type two diabetes. | ||
| The soleus muscle is 1% of our total musculature. | ||
| And he asks a really great question. | ||
| He's like, what if when people are sitting during the day, because everyone's sitting, they just bounced one, you know, did what he called a soleus pushup, which is kind of, it's a one-legged seated calf raise, right? | ||
| With no weight. | ||
| And they're just bouncing their heel like this, like I used to do in class. | ||
| What turns out the soleus is an unusual muscle because it's very small percentage of our total musculature, but its energy utilization is enormously high. | ||
| What does he see? | ||
| Well, when people just bounce their heel, Their insulin sensitivity improves, their resting glucose improves, and all they're doing is moving a bit more, but they are moving their soleus. | ||
| What's happening? | ||
| It's likely that they're mimicking walking enough during the day that they're getting these positive effects. | ||
| Now, I'm not encouraging people to just do this. | ||
| And when I put some of this out on social media, you know, The gym jockeys, who I'm friends with, they were like, dude, come on, don't get people thinking this is exercise. | ||
| I'm not saying that people should just do this. | ||
| But these micro-movements that we do add up a lot during the day. | ||
| Well, there's nothing wrong with facts. | ||
| No, there's nothing wrong with facts. | ||
| You're not saying this is all you need to do. | ||
| If you were doing that, that would be an issue. | ||
| I try and avoid the words only as much as I can in life, unless it's appropriate. | ||
| So you asked about loss of musculature. | ||
| When we are losing weight or when we have high levels of GLP-1, signals are actually sent to the musculature to become catabolic. | ||
| Like the body wants to conserve its most precious resource, which is muscle and fat. | ||
| And so GLP-1 very likely, based on my knowledge of the output of the hypothalamus, the animal studies tell us that it's signaling to the most metabolically expensive tissue of the body, To conserve itself or to catabolize itself. | ||
| So, you know, fat is one of the harder reserves to lose for that reason, but losing muscle is bad, and I guess the short and sweet of this is anyone trying to lose weight should be doing resistance exercise, especially if they're in a caloric deficit. | ||
| What is this here? | ||
| People take semaglutide but don't resistance train risk losing muscle as well as fat, doctors warn. | ||
| Here's why it's important to have a healthy balance of the two. | ||
| I found a couple recent articles that say some doctors are telling people with this, you have to weight train or you're going to lose muscle. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| But that is literally the case when people starve themselves. | ||
| It's one of the things that happens when you starve yourself. | ||
| It happens to fighters when they're cutting weight. | ||
| If they do it improperly, if you're not just cutting water, your body starts to absorb your muscle tissue. | ||
| And your core body temperature goes down because you're less thermogenically active. | ||
| Jamie, I don't think I've ever asked you to... | ||
| Put that back up, please. | ||
| There have been a few studies of muscle loss of semaglutide so far, but Japanese researchers reported that people lost half a kilo of muscle after three months on the drug. | ||
| That's not that much. | ||
| Half a kilo of muscle is a pound. | ||
| Why are they saying it that way? | ||
|
unidentified
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Like they're making it look like it's one pound of muscle. | |
| It depends how much they had to start with it. | ||
| Traditional media. | ||
| Right, but it's two pounds is a kilo, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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I know. | |
| 2.2, yeah. | ||
| So what the fuck are you saying? | ||
| They lost a pound of muscle? | ||
| That's not hard. | ||
| It's a common problem with interventions to lose fat, but yes, that is a common problem with interventions to lose fat. | ||
| It makes it imperative to also prescribe resistance training to prevent muscle loss, but my concern is that semaglutide is seen as a magic bullet by some people and isn't always combined with exercise. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| You know, there's so many confusions in exercise science and weight loss that I've learned about recently from Lane that just make me – like, I'm baffled. | ||
| So, for instance, you hear that if you eat fewer carbohydrates, you burn more fat, right? | ||
| Okay, so it seems like a simple statement. | ||
| So people go, yeah, I'm going to have a low-carb diet. | ||
| I'll burn more fat. | ||
| But when you say fat, what they're talking about is not necessarily body fat. | ||
| Like when people mistake body fat from dietary fat, this is how like kindergarten or nursery school or illiterate we are about our own health because people, so it is true that if you, Lane has been educating me on this, if you reduce your carbohydrate intake, yes, you'll burn a greater percentage of your calories from fat. | ||
| But if you're eating a lot of fat, you're going to burn a greater percentage of it from those fat calories that you're eating. | ||
| It doesn't necessarily mean you're losing fat stores. | ||
| All that matters in the end is that calories in and calories out balance. | ||
| What helps people with, you know, like particularly things like the carnivore diet or something like that, what helps them is with satiety. | ||
| Like there's something about carbohydrates. | ||
| They're so good. | ||
| You want to keep eating them. | ||
| Like if I have a steak by itself... | ||
| I eat the steak and I'm good. | ||
| But if there's like lobster mashed potatoes or fries sitting there, I keep going and that's like an extra thousand calories at least. | ||
| Well, part of that is the blood sugar response. | ||
| Some people will say, why do I crave a big dessert or dessert something sweet after a big meal? | ||
| That should make no sense, right? | ||
| Well, that's a blood sugar increase. | ||
| But the other reason is your gut has neurons in it. | ||
| Those neurons signal to the dopamine centers in your brain. | ||
| And those neurons are looking for basically three things. | ||
| They want amino acids. | ||
| We are basically amino acid foraging machines. | ||
| Fatty acids, because fats are good for us too. | ||
| That's my opinion, not in excess, but they're good for us, and sugar. | ||
| And when you get enough steak, you're getting enough amino acids and fatty acids, and that signal is sent to your brain and a pathway shuts down that says, I need more. | ||
| The moment you throw in a cookie after that steak, all of a sudden your appetite goes, and it's not blood sugar. | ||
| Or at least not blood sugar alone. | ||
| It's those neurons in your gut going, oh, there's sugar coming into my system. | ||
| Get more of that because it's an evolutionary conserved system designed to get you more resources. | ||
| So this is why if you look at your gut brain access as yes, there's a microbiome and that's important too. | ||
| But if you think about it as it's sensing things independent of taste, it's actually looking for specific nutrients. | ||
| Then I think if people forage most for high quality protein, And high quality fats, it's kind of obvious that that's the best way to build the basis of your diet. | ||
| And then carbohydrates on a kind of as needed basis, right? | ||
| If you're doing a lot of weight training, depleting glycogen, et cetera. | ||
| So that's where I think there's a place for lower zero carbohydrate diets. | ||
| I tried carnivore with the fruit and honey and all that, and I just could gorge myself and gorge myself. | ||
| I didn't do well on that. | ||
| If I've ever just done meat, I actually feel pretty good, I confess. | ||
| But I'm an omnivore. | ||
| So you gorge yourself on fruit and honey? | ||
| Is that what you're doing? | ||
| So I've done just meat, and I felt pretty good. | ||
| Great. | ||
| I mean, you feel lighter. | ||
| You definitely lose weight. | ||
| You're holding less water. | ||
| I found it hard to train really hard with the weights. | ||
| Yeah, me too. | ||
| And so I asked Paul Saladino, I said, I want to bring in some of my rice and oatmeal here because I'm suffering in the gym and that's my... | ||
| I love working out. | ||
| And he said, well, do fruit and honey in addition to that. | ||
| So I added in fruit, non-pasteurized cheese and honey the way they do that. | ||
| And sorry, Paul, for me, all it did was just send my appetite through the roof. | ||
| I was just like gorging myself with cheese and fruit and meat all the time. | ||
| I didn't feel well and I still couldn't train well. | ||
| So for me, what works best is mostly... | ||
| Quality proteins and quality fats. | ||
| I eat a bit of butter and saturate fats, but also carbohydrates. | ||
| Is there any evidence that rice is bad for you? | ||
| No. | ||
| I judge things on, you know, obviously on science, but also on how I feel after I eat them. | ||
| And when I eat pasta, I feel like I ate a brick. | ||
| I feel like I ate like paste. | ||
| How much pasta are we talking? | ||
| I eat a lot. | ||
| I'm a glutton. | ||
| I like a big bowl of spaghetti with like sausage and meatball. | ||
| So good. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Lasagna. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| But if you train hard, it should be fun. | ||
| My point is, I don't feel like that with rice. | ||
| When I have rice, like say if I have like a steak and some rice, I eat the rice and I'll feel full, I feel good, but I do not feel like... | ||
| I don't feel terrible. | ||
| And it seems to give me energy for workouts. | ||
| The problem that I had with pure carnivore was that I work out very hard. | ||
| And when I work out very hard on pure carnivore, I was struggling. | ||
| I didn't like it. | ||
| When I added fruit, though, I didn't have the same problem that you had. | ||
| That's like most of my diet. | ||
| We're talking like 90%. | ||
| 90% of my diet is just meat and fruit. | ||
| That's 90% of my diet. | ||
| I'll eat a salad if I feel like eating a salad. | ||
| I enjoy salads, but I always make sure that I'm only putting olive oil and balsamic vinaigrette. | ||
| That's all I use. | ||
| I don't use, like, bullshit salad dressings because they're all filled with seed oils. | ||
| And sugar. | ||
| Yeah, it's all garbage. | ||
| It's like, so many people think they're eating well. | ||
| I'm like, my God, you have 500 calories of fucking nonsense on your salad. | ||
| You know, and it's like, it's not good for you. | ||
| Yeah, you and I eat pretty similar. | ||
| I do eat rice, oatmeal, typically after I train. | ||
| And in the evening, I like some carbohydrates for my meal because it helps me sleep. | ||
| I've read things about glyphosate and oatmeal, and that some oatmeals have a very high level of glyphosate contamination. | ||
| Or Shayna Swan, or phthalates. | ||
| Yes, phthalates. | ||
| Glyphosate's a different thing. | ||
| That's Roundup. | ||
| Yeah, I think the nutrition, you know, it's clear, again, I'm citing him a lot because, frankly, he's like an encyclopedia for this stuff, and he can call up meta-analysis like nobody's business. | ||
| You know, Lane's Made it very clear by pointing out the data that carbohydrates aren't going to disrupt your ability to burn fat, right? | ||
| It's about keeping calories in check. | ||
| Yeah, it's calories in, calories out. | ||
| Lane is very specific about that, and I think he's absolutely right. | ||
| You know, there's so many people that have these ideas that if you eat carnivore, you burn fat because of, you eat less calories. | ||
| You get satisfied quicker, you eat less calories. | ||
| Well, I have one idea that I'm hoping someone will test, which is when you're on a low carbohydrate diet or you're doing intermittent fasting, one thing that's very clear is that your adrenaline and noradrenaline, epinephrine levels are higher. | ||
| And one of the things that you see is that people are more alert and when they're more alert, they move more. | ||
| And that brings us back to NEAT, this non-exercise-induced thermogenesis. | ||
| As you said, you eat a big bowl of pasta and it tends to make you feel kind of sedentary. | ||
| Whereas when you just eat meat, you can go, go, go. | ||
| I ran into Jordan Peterson not that long ago. | ||
| And you know, he's really big. | ||
| He does three stakes a day. | ||
| And not just for his age, he looks very fit and he feels strong. | ||
| Now, I don't know what he's doing in the realm of training. | ||
| I don't think he lifts weights. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So I don't think he has to replenish glycogen the same way many people do. | ||
| But I think for people who are doing mostly cardiovascular exercise, some resistance training, I think he does some. | ||
| The carnivore thing may work very well. | ||
| But I think that also just being a mobile moving person and, you know, this thing about meat was discovered because they noted that people that were very thin tend to move a lot. | ||
| It was a reverse core. | ||
| It was kind of correlation in both directions. | ||
| Whereas people who are larger tend to be pretty sedentary and they move slower. | ||
| I think one of the best examples online, at least, of someone who's on a pure carnivore diet who's very active is Sean Baker. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and Sean Baker is just, I mean, he regularly posts his workouts. | ||
| He's 56 years old. | ||
| I mean, he's doing heavy deadlifts, and he holds world records for rowing. | ||
| I mean, he's like a serious power-based athlete who only eats steak. | ||
|
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Mm-hmm. | |
| That's all he eats. | ||
| He doesn't incorporate organs. | ||
| He doesn't do anything else. | ||
| I mean, I don't know if he's taking any vitamins or minerals, but I mean, most of what that guy eats is steak. | ||
| He looks super fit. | ||
| Great. | ||
| He's very fit. | ||
| I know a number of police officers and firefighters are doing that now because a lot of their job, especially police officers, is sedentary and then it's go, go, go. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| They seem to like that. | ||
| There's a study on intermittent fasting that was done by Sachin Panda's lab out of the Salk on firefighters that, because their schedules are crazy and that being a night owl and then swing shifts is just terrible, wreaks havoc on your metabolic system. | ||
| I mean, it's just one of the quickest ways to make yourself ill, but we need shift workers, right? | ||
| Thank you, shift workers. | ||
| So the intermittent fasting and these Let's just call them elimination diets, where it's mainly carnivore, really help those communities stay fitter and more active. | ||
| There's a guy on Instagram, I don't know his name, but I love his police posts. | ||
| He shows us. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| And he sometimes puts up this post. | ||
| I love these ones. | ||
| I do see how intense that job is. | ||
| I'm like, wow. | ||
| But he'll post supplements and it's a steak. | ||
| He's just all about protein training and the job. | ||
| In other aspects of life, he keeps quiet. | ||
| For good reason, of course. | ||
| But it's clear that for people that need to be active or who are sitting a ton, that the carnivore diet might be a great thing. | ||
| And now I'm not talking about the carnivore fruit, meat, honey thing. | ||
| Again, apologies, Paul. | ||
| I'm not saying that's bad. | ||
| But these are people who are mainly just doing meat. | ||
| And they just feel like their appetite is more regular. | ||
| And cops, you kind of see it's a binary distribution. | ||
| They're either really fit or they're really unfit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And listen, it's got to be an incredibly hard job. | ||
| Firefighters, the fitness part, it seems a little bit more aligned to like working out at the station and things like that. | ||
| In any case, they have a lot more downtime. | ||
| They have a lot more downtime. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I think that we were talking, I think last time we spoke about supplementation as it relates to, you know, metabolic pathways. | ||
| And one thing I've been tracking pretty closely is this whole The NMN thing has now taken a different direction. | ||
| I was going to bring that up before we wrap this up. | ||
|
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So let's explain NMN for people. | |
| It's a precursor for NAD+. Right. | ||
| So NAD is critical to energy production in all cells. | ||
| Vital. | ||
| Levels of NAD tend to go down as we age. | ||
| It's an absolute requirement for cellular health and life. | ||
| You need it. | ||
| Some years ago, as David Sinclair came on this podcast and... | ||
| And discussed that his laboratories, a tenured professor of genetics, Harvard Medical School, and other laboratories are starting to explore, stimulating the NAD pathway as a tool for extending lifespan in mice. | ||
| And that there were already some data from yeast. | ||
| There are now some clinical trials in humans. | ||
| You can't just take NAD, or you can, but it doesn't get into cells very easily. | ||
| Here I'm painting with a broad brush, but there are basically two ways that you can tickle this pathway, increase NAD. One is to take NMN, right? | ||
| Some people will try different B vitamins, but NMN, which the idea is that it gets into cells and is converted into NAD. Some people are more proponents of taking NR. And the end product is thought to be the same. | ||
| However, there's a lot of controversy about whether or not NAD or NR are better. | ||
| NR is what was initially sold under the brand name Elysium with a unbelievable cast of scientific advisors, Nobel Prize winners. | ||
| There's a very East Coast oriented thing, but a colleague of mine right downstairs from me at Stanford School of Medicine who has a Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of RNA, Roger Kornberg. | ||
| His daddy discovered RNA, Arthur Kornberg. | ||
| There was literally an ad of him holding a true Niagen bottle like this, and it's like, okay, I started paying attention to this. | ||
| NR and NMN are taking an oral form in capsules. | ||
| Some people are giving NAD infusions out there. | ||
| This is a more expensive boutique thing, but after David started talking about NMN, a lot of people, including myself, started experimenting with it. | ||
| Now, just to take a step back, I know a lot of people out there Like, if there isn't a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, you know, random trial, then why would you ever take something? | ||
| And then there are a lot of people, like David or me, or a lot of people out there who think, well, if there are some mouse data or something safe, why wouldn't I try, right? | ||
| Because when it comes to longevity, nobody wants to be in the control group, right? | ||
| So this is a highly contentious field. | ||
| But then what's happened is, So you can take NMN as a sublignal powder. | ||
| Which seems to be more effective, NMN or NR? Okay, there are people who will argue NR. Are there people that take both? | ||
| I was taking both for a while. | ||
| How'd you feel? | ||
| I felt like I had more energy. | ||
| Now, it's subjective. | ||
| It's an NM1 thing. | ||
| But I still take NMN sublingually. | ||
| I take a pretty high dose. | ||
| So the recommendation was anywhere from, you know, 500 milligrams to about a gram and a half. | ||
| When you say sublingually, are you taking it? | ||
| You take a powder and put it under my tongue. | ||
| No. | ||
| How are you getting this powder? | ||
| Should I tell you how it was banned and how I'm still getting it? | ||
| I was buying it. | ||
| You could buy it from Renew by Science. | ||
| And now it's banned? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I have no relationship to Renew by Science. | ||
| But now it's banned officially? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what happened was this last year, something was sent to the FDA. There's a company called Metro International Biotech. | ||
| Sometimes just referred to as Metro Biotech. | ||
| This is a company that has a trial. | ||
| They're studying something similar to NMN. It's a slight variation on NMN. And it's an experimental drug. | ||
| And the way the FDA works is if something is being explored as an experimental potential prescription drug or pharmaceutical compound, it cannot be sold as a supplement. | ||
| So it's a question of what went in first. | ||
| Now, this happened a few years ago for something called NAC, N-acetylcysteine. | ||
| And NAC is still available despite it initially getting banned. | ||
| And I'll tell you how it was rescued from that. | ||
| So it turns out that Metro International Biotech is a company that It has a pretty impressive advisory board, Li Wei Sai from MIT, who I know, Alzheimer's researcher, some other folks. | ||
| David Sinclair is part of the company. | ||
| It's either his company or he's certainly on the head of the advisory board or on the advisory board. | ||
| That's what the website says. | ||
| So there are a lot of people that are a bit inflamed, if you will, because this thing was popularized through the discussion of NMN and its potential virtues. | ||
| And then now the FDA sent out a ruling early this year that supplement companies cannot sell it. | ||
| Many supplement companies responded to that and said, okay, we won't sell it. | ||
| Other companies, such as Renew by Science, we'll see what happens after this podcast, have continued to sell it. | ||
| If you go on there this morning, you could buy NMN. So the FDA... I want to buy some before this podcast gets to air. | ||
| Yeah, I have a boatload. | ||
| I'll give you some too. | ||
| And it's clean. | ||
| Yeah, so the bags of it are the best way to go because you can buy it in pretty high volume and the bags are canisters. | ||
| And I personally take, because I'll tell you the results that I experienced, which I really liked, I take about two grams per morning under my tongue. | ||
| Definite increase in subjective feeling of increase in energy. | ||
| And you believe that sublingual is the way to go as opposed to taking it in oral form and pills? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's because Atiyah, who, again, Peter, forgive me if I'm misspeaking here, but Atiyah was like, there's no way that's going to get into your cells, taking his capsules. | ||
| And I said, what about sublingual? | ||
| He's like, I just don't see how it could happen. | ||
| But it's been proven that it gets in through IV. Yeah. | ||
| Right, it gets in through IV, and there are also electrophoretic patches, some NAD patches. | ||
| I managed to stock up on those. | ||
| I can send you some of those. | ||
| I have a huge cache of those. | ||
|
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NAD patches? | |
| So this is a patch you put on, and it's slow release of NAD. Interesting. | ||
| Yeah, it's got two electrodes, and you just put it... | ||
|
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Oh, boy. | |
| Yeah, it's pretty good stuff. | ||
| That's some robot shit. | ||
| So, Lex Friedman, you know, who takes no supplements? | ||
| He lives on meat, athletic greens, element, and mint tea, you know? | ||
| Well... | ||
| Those are all good. | ||
| Element's a good supplement. | ||
| Athletic Greens is awesome. | ||
| Yeah, so people are upset because they feel like they were turned on to this stuff and then it's now... | ||
| So this could soon be a prescription drug. | ||
| Now, keep in mind that the resveratrol thing was similar in the sense that There was a variation on resveratrol that was patented and sold to a company. | ||
| And that sort of didn't pan out or is still a work in progress. | ||
| And you can still buy resveratrol. | ||
| It's not a problem because it was different enough. | ||
| So the FDA, We decided to let NAC stay on the market because many, many people wrote letters to the FDA saying, this is ridiculous, this is of value, and it was out as a supplement. | ||
| You can't do that. | ||
| What's the benefits of NAC? NAC is again in these metabolic pathways for metabolic health. | ||
| This isn't my area of expertise, so I don't want to talk out of turn here. | ||
| I don't know the specific details of why people are taking it. | ||
| I don't take that. | ||
| So part of the reason I think it's healthy to have this conversation is to understand how this stuff happens. | ||
| NMN could soon be a prescription drug that you can only get with a prescription. | ||
| And then I think Metro International Biotech will likely hold the patent. | ||
| If people are interested in certain compounds remaining on market, they should definitely write to the FDA. The FDA, as much as that's a mysterious big stone block kind of company, very opaque to us, I think they listen when things happen in large volume. | ||
| And so I'm certainly going to write letters. | ||
| And I think that keeping NMN on the market as a supplement would be wonderful for many people that want to take it. | ||
| Now, the folks who are involved with NR companies are delighted because for them, this is, again, I'm not going to get into the debate of what's better NR, NMN, because I just don't have the expertise to parse that. | ||
| There are other people that are better suited to do that. | ||
| But the people that work on NR are thinking, like, this is great. | ||
| Like, let this whole NMN thing pan out because it's a market competition. | ||
| Does NR have a shelf life? | ||
| Like, does NR, like, if you, like, have a jar of that stuff from a year ago, is it still good? | ||
| I have to imagine it is. | ||
| I didn't refrigerate my True Niagen. | ||
| And I liked True Niagen. | ||
| I experienced the same effects. | ||
| Again, I have no relationship to that company. | ||
| They're not a podcast bond, so they don't pay me a dime, etc. | ||
| The problem is it's very expensive to take the kind of dosages that I'm taking. | ||
| You think high dosages is the way to go? | ||
| I do. | ||
| Yeah, why is that? | ||
| I just didn't experience much of a subjective effect at low dosages. | ||
| So something like Elysium? | ||
| Yeah, same. | ||
| Like how much were you taking of that? | ||
| I was getting up to a gram and a half. | ||
| How many pills is that? | ||
| It was up to like seven or eight pills, I think. | ||
| I don't quite recall. | ||
| But I will say with NMN, a couple of things happened. | ||
| First of all, energy, my recovery from workouts, much better. | ||
| I had to take it early day because it was giving me a lot of energy. | ||
| And then I'm not into my nails and hair, frankly. | ||
| Not one of those. | ||
| When my hair is starting to go, I'm just going to let go. | ||
| But I did notice like my hair and nails are growing at a ridiculous rate. | ||
| And then I came off it just as a control experiment, slowed down again. | ||
| So it was really interesting. | ||
| I think there's something there in cellular growth pathways. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| And I didn't change anything else. | ||
| I was doing blood work. | ||
| I still do blood work regularly. | ||
| So, you know, is it going to make me live longer? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But I don't know how I'm going to... | ||
| The day I die, I won't know whether or not I would have lived shorter or longer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like, how do you feel now is what's important. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| So I really like the sublingual NMN. There's some other talk about the FDA making testosterone something where you're going to have to go to your doctor once a month. | ||
| They don't want it by telehealth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I think I saw one of Chris Bell that posted something about this. | ||
| There are a lot of click clinics, as I call them, online clinics, who are prescribing testosterone. | ||
| At whatever dosages that they deem are appropriate for someone based on blood work. | ||
| I mean, if you go to the doctor, you're basically gonna get the same blood work. | ||
| I don't really- Once a month is preposterous. | ||
| People do not have the time to go to a doctor once a month. | ||
| That is very annoying. | ||
| Well, originally what they wanted to do with TRT, remember people were going in and getting their full 200 milligrams, because it's typically testosterone cipionate in this country, 200 milligrams per mil, which is one syringe full if it's a one ml syringe, obviously. | ||
| People were getting that once every two weeks. | ||
| And that's a crazy dosage scheme. | ||
| The best way we know is to divide it up. | ||
| Sublingually, every three days. | ||
| Subcutaneous. | ||
| Subcutaneous, excuse me. | ||
| Yeah, don't go under the tongue. | ||
| Yeah, don't do that. | ||
| There was an oral version that they were working on for a while. | ||
| There was an oral version of testosterone. | ||
| Well, there are. | ||
| I mean, things like oxandrolone and anavar were always taken as pills. | ||
| Yeah, but it was a spray. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| It was a sublingual spray. | ||
| There's the cream, there's the dermal scrotal patches. | ||
| That gets weird. | ||
| But subcutaneously, every three days is supposed to be the way to go. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Every other day or every three days at a lower dose to spread it out because the testes normally kick out somewhere between 7 and 15 milligrams of testosterone per day. | ||
| And you got two testes, most people anyway. | ||
| So most men have two testes, obviously. | ||
| So... | ||
| What you're talking about is 200 mg on one day and then coming back two weeks later is crazy, but that was really serving the physicians well because you had to go in for a clinic visit, etc. | ||
| But people would get these giant spikes and then the crash. | ||
| And the conversion to estrogen from a massive dose all at once. | ||
| A ridiculous dose that you should never take. | ||
| And sometimes too big a dose can crush libido, it's a mess. | ||
| So I think if people need to be able to self-administer. | ||
| And all this ruling would do, frankly, is send people into gray market routes. | ||
| That's all it would do. | ||
| There's like zero minus one. | ||
| Is that gonna happen? | ||
| I sure hope not. | ||
| I sure hope not. | ||
| Because I think the number of people that can afford to go to a physician who's really good, who's gonna dose it correctly, Is so infinitesimally small. | ||
| And, you know, testosterone is not particularly expensive, but I'm very sensitive to the idea that, you know, a lot of the things that hold great health benefits are just outside the financial reach of a lot of people. | ||
| Well, it will become outside the financial reach if you're making people have a doctor's appointment once a month. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| You're going to have to pay for that appointment. | ||
| I mean, I don't imagine your insurance is going to cover all of that. | ||
| No, I think it's going to kick up the black market. | ||
| So right now, I'm sure there are people who are starting to stock up Sippy and Eight so they can sell it. | ||
| It's sending us back into the dark ages, frankly, of that stuff. | ||
| So hopefully not. | ||
| If someone tells me who to talk to or petition, you know, as you can tell, I'm getting more vocal about stuff. | ||
| I also feel safer nowadays to talk about things than I did a few years ago. | ||
| Because things are becoming more commonplace, mostly because I have colleagues who contact me and say, like, hey, how do I get on testosterone? | ||
| Do I need testosterone? | ||
| Once they start getting older and they see you still look healthy. | ||
| Psilocybin. | ||
| Psilocybin, testosterone, so many different things that are, like, very beneficial. | ||
| Just look at people that are healthy and happy. | ||
| Like, what are they doing? | ||
| And are they honest? | ||
| Talk to them. | ||
| You know, and beautiful thing about a podcast is people who are healthy and happy will tell you this is what I do and this is what you can do and this is the pros. | ||
| This is the cons. | ||
| Go to a doctor. | ||
| Get yourself checked out. | ||
| Don't do it if you're this. | ||
| Don't do it if you're that. | ||
| But there's probably a great number of people that could benefit from these things. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And to say, because we were talking about NMN and David Sinclair, I mean, he's going to know the nuance there. | ||
| I mean, I don't know all the nuance. | ||
| I haven't talked to him in a while. | ||
| But, you know, I think he's definitely in the camp of people in science who are thinking, you know, what's possible, taking some significant steps based on mouse work. | ||
| And I do want to be fair to people that do that, right? | ||
| I do that, too. | ||
| I mostly focus on human studies and human stuff. | ||
| But... | ||
| There are many people out in the world that are interested in things they can do for their health, and they know that if they're waiting for the random controlled trial and huge numbers of subjects, and especially for people with diseases in their family or that have diseases, they're not interested in waiting. | ||
| They don't want to do anything sketchy or dangerous, but they're not interested in waiting. | ||
| So I think David's, you know, he's really driving certain things hard. | ||
| And some people agree with him, some people don't. | ||
| But he's got a vision. | ||
| The one thing I can say for sure about David is he's got a vision and he's going for it. | ||
| And there are, you know, this thing about FDA controlling or non-FDA controlling, I think is vexing some people. | ||
| And it'll be interesting to see how it goes. | ||
| But if you're interested in keeping NMN or anything on the market, write letters. | ||
| I know it sounds like a, It's like the high school thing, like write letters to your... | ||
| But in the absence of those letters, there's no chance of things going the way you want. | ||
| In the presence of those letters, it's like one letter. | ||
| You can type it and just email it or email it five times, you know, and see what happens. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, Andrew, it's always a treat having you on. | ||
| I have to process so much information. | ||
| I have to listen to this three or four times after it's over, but I appreciate you very much. | ||
| And tell people about your podcast, where they can download it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Well, thank you for having me on. | ||
|
unidentified
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My pleasure. | |
| I always enjoy these conversations. | ||
| I always learn from you, and I really appreciate you and your team. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| The podcast is Huberman Lab. | ||
| That's how we... | ||
| So hubermanlab.com, you can find all our episodes, and they're linked out in all the formats from there. | ||
| A wealth of information. | ||
| Yeah, you just scroll. | ||
| It's sort of infinite scroll. | ||
| One thing that we have that maybe I'll just mention is if you go to the menu and you go to newsletter... | ||
| A lot of people don't have time to listen to the whole podcast. | ||
| You can subscribe for free. | ||
| But if you scroll down, I've got PDFs of like deliberate heat exposure protocols, deliberate cold exposure. | ||
| You don't have to sign up. | ||
| You can literally just get the PDF. And so there's no ask here. | ||
| You can just get toolkit for sleep and all that stuff with link out. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| You know, because I do realize that, you know, not everybody has, you know, four and a half hours or two hours to listen to all the details with a notebook. | ||
| I would hope people would listen. | ||
| But anyway, that's all there for people so they can grab that content if they want. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| I'm so glad you provide that. | ||
| That's really, really cool. | ||
| Thanks so much for having me. | ||
| Appreciate you, brother. | ||
| Thank you, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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Appreciate you. |
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