Andrew Huberman joins Joe Rogan to dissect canine genetics, revealing how selective breeding—like Old English Bulldogs for bull baiting or Jack Russells for rat hunting—stripped wolf traits from smaller breeds while preserving them in hounds. They link olfaction to threat detection, citing the amygdala’s role in rapid scent-based reactions, and contrast Floyd Mayweather’s centimeter-perfect boxing slips with UFC featherweight Ilya Tapuria’s efficient counters. Huberman warns of GLP-1 drugs’ muscle loss side effects and critiques MDMA trials for PTSD, flagging ethical lapses like sexual misconduct under "safe spaces." The duo also debunks cannabis sativa/indica myths, noting edibles’ risks, and ties neuroplasticity to movement, citing Nobel laureates like Wiesel (95, still running) and Sacks (600-lb squat). Resilience through adversity—like Cam Haynes running on a broken foot—underscores their argument: behaviors, not just meds, build nervous system health. Authenticity over algorithmic conflict defines their ideal media approach. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, they all originate from wolves, but then dog selection has been twofold, mainly for phenotype, like morphology, the shape, we call it, and then temperament.
So there's this chart, it might be a little hard to find online, about the dosing of wolf versus mastiff genetics, essentially.
And there's a bunch of other things woven into dog genetics.
First of all, cool point, dogs are among, I don't know if they are the most, maybe whales are the most, but they are among the greatest variation in body size within a given species.
You think of Chihuahua and Great Day.
And it looks like it's dosing of the genes controlling IGF-1.
So for instance, like the English bulldog, that line came from the crossing of essentially pug, like short snout, right?
But with mastiffs or with dogs with heavy mastiff genetic dosing.
Why?
Well, the idea was the short snout gives them a good lever for holding on to things, right?
And the mastiff genes lead to, and we know this for sure, both the droopiness of the face, it also relates to less presence of pain receptors in the front of the body.
Okay, so if you've ever had a bulldog, but you know their feet can be really sensitive, but their face, you can hold onto those jowls.
My bulldog, Costello, would go picking up stuff at the beach and he'd occasionally get a fish hook in his mouth and it looks super painful.
And he's like, oh, you know, so not very many pain sensors in the face.
They have a disruption or mutation in the gene that controls the elasticity of skin.
Well, unless you're showing dogs, dogs were selected for the kind of work they were capable of doing.
Like sheepdogs are great herders, this kind of thing.
But when people essentially designed bred up and crossbred to get the English Bulldog or the Old English Bulldog, Which doesn't have as much of an underwrite.
So I had an old English Bulldog.
So whereas the English Bulldog is elbows out, so inward rotation, the thing we're all supposed to not do, an underwrite.
And they were originally used for bull baiting, for grabbing onto the nose of the bull, getting the bull super aggressive, and then being able to let go and get called off and coming back to their protector.
And then basically then it was to rile up the bull, right, for bullfighting.
So you can still find some of this stuff online.
You can find some old descriptions, in some cases, even some old videos, but of course now bull baiting with dogs is not allowed, right?
Dog fighting, everybody looks down on.
But then if you start asking about the toy breeds, what were the toy breeds, quote unquote, designed for or bred for?
They were basically designed to sit next to you.
Some of them will seek out, you know, like the terrier breeds will find vermin.
The West Highland Terriers, the Westies, the Cairn Terriers, they're always, they're really great hunters.
For little things, right?
And the amazing thing is that when you start looking at the different breeds, it was basically human selecting on the basis of mostly behavior and phenotype shape and thinking, oh, like I want a smaller dog that will just sit near me or I want a small dog that will like kill rats and sit near me.
No, I want a big dog that's going to guard.
So you start breeding for pain tolerance.
I start breeding for loyalty and aggression.
And a guy that I think was on your podcast a long time ago, Sam Sheridan.
In A Fighter's Heart, there's a great chapter where he talks about, I think it's dog fighting in the Philippines.
And he talks about how brutal that sport is, which indeed it is.
But he talks about the love between the owner and the dog.
Can predict, and of course the dog and the owner, it's reciprocal, one presumes, that the strength of that relationship predicts how hard the dog will fight for the owner.
And he uses this as kind of a parallel construction for why, and you tell me if this is true or not, Many of the fatalities in boxing were the consequence of, sure, 15 round as opposed to 12 round fights, but also when the corner man or the coach was the parent.
And so it gets into this very complicated psychology.
I actually think that's a really terrific book because I think it speaks to a lot of really interesting aspects of bonding between humans, bonding in that case between animals and humans.
Of course, dog fighting I don't know if there are many things that people look down upon as much as they look down upon dog fighting, but he speaks to the relationship between the dog and the owner as a loving one, which was super surprising to me.
Anyway, that's a bit of a tangent, but I don't know, maybe it's possible to find that chart.
I don't want to send you on a ridiculous expedition, but if you just say, so jeans, that's a simple one.
Okay.
This one, the one I'm thinking about is a vertical one.
That was in Science Magazine or Scientific American, but it's wild.
Again, I don't want to send you on an expedition that has us paused, but...
Yeah, so now when I see like, okay, like a collie, like I see a collie down there, I think long snouts are probably has a better nose than a mastiff breed.
You can ask an owner, how good is their vision?
Are they a sight hound or a scent hound?
And of course, they're both.
But some dogs, like, I'm really interested now, in part because of...
You and Cam Haines and others about dogs that hunt or go on hunts.
Yeah, the reason why they have those long floppy ears is as they're running, their ears are wafting up smell and it gives them a better sense of the chase.
So if you go to images, damn it, and you just say Berkeley, just say, there it is.
Right, so they compare the tracking of a scent hound, of a bloodhound, to human tracking of a scent buried, in the case of the bloodhound, it wasn't buried.
In fact, our friend, who, by the way, wanted me to say hello, Rick Rubin, turned to a good friend of mine who's the chair of neurosurgery of a major medical school department, not Stanford, I promise, and said, what percentage of the things in medical textbooks, okay, this is Rick asking this chair of neurosurgery, okay?
What percentage of things that you find in medical textbooks, basic and advanced, do you think are false based on your understanding of what we actually know now compared to when the textbooks were written?
And he said, 50%.
And then Rick said, I know I was wide-eyed too.
And then Rick said, and what is the extent of impact on treatment of patients modern day?
50% in currently used medical textbooks, meaning that the literature has been updated with new understanding, new scientific papers, but it has not yet been incorporated into the medical education.
Let me say something, because I know that bears have insane senses of smell that are many times stronger than a bloodhound's and famously can smell people from 100, 200 yards away.
Like...
There's got to be levels to it, and I just can't imagine that a bloodhound doesn't have a better sense of smell than a person.
Right, so they absolutely have a better sense of smell.
Under the definition that they use it, they use the same number of receptors differently.
In other words, the resolution of your vision and a mouse's vision is dramatically different.
The resolution of your vision Is very sharp at the fovea towards the center of your eye.
And actually towards the periphery, anyone can just do this.
You wiggle your fingers out here in the periphery and you can't see any detail, right?
As you move that forward, you can see detail, okay?
So, and that's because the density of pixels, so to speak, in the retina is much, much higher near the fovea, near the center than it is at the periphery.
Okay.
So what he's saying, what Noam Sobel's laboratory has found and others have found is that the number of pixels, the potential for olfactory resolution in humans and in bloodhounds is essentially the same.
This is his argument, but the bloodhounds sniff much more.
So it's the equivalent of having their eyes open much more, right?
In the example, so to speak.
They have these vortices that are created by the structure of their nose and nostrils.
So they have longer exposure.
And in the case of the bear, for instance, I don't know how many olfactory receptors they have relative to a human or a bloodhound, but that the bear is likely spending a lot more time and can pull more air perhaps, I don't know, but is using the mechanical aspects of the olfactory system differently.
In fact, and here's, now I'm recalling the experiment that led to this conclusion that humans have exceptional olfaction.
Which is that there's a particular compound that when introduced to a swimming pool, people can detect a difference in the smell of the water at a dilution that is outrageously small.
Forgive me because I'm not remembering the name of the chemical, but he said you can essentially add a drop of this to a swimming pool and then people can smell the difference between the water.
And so his argument is not that humans are walking around sensing all these smells consciously as well as a bloodhound or as well as a bear.
But that we have a tremendous capacity for olfaction that the chocolate tracking experiment It exemplifies, but it requires some removal of our most dominant sense, vision, and hearing our second most dominant sense.
And in that case, tactile orientation as well.
And so the idea is that we have an amazing olfactory apparatus.
In fact, he makes the argument, and there's evidence for the fact that as soon as people meet, and they've done these beautiful experiments, people meet, they shake hands, and the next thing they do, they tend to, within about a minute, they wipe the scent of the other person on their face, typically.
He also has this idea that I think is starting to take hold in real data, that we are constantly sensing our own odor plumes, that we, you know, that we smell ourselves a lot of times per day.
People check their sniff, and it's an indication of hormone status, immune status.
When you have babies or puppies, like, you know, you're looking at like, oh, is it good poop or a bad poop?
You know, you're also paying people, some people will smell the poop.
I'm not a proponent of that, but we're constantly sensing the scent and taste of, for instance, our partner's saliva.
Actually, an ex-girlfriend of mine wrote to me recently.
I don't know what this question represented, but she said, do you think that when you become unattracted to somebody, the taste of their mouth becomes bad to you or the other way around?
I guess she might have been dating somebody and maybe had fallen out of favor and she was kind of not attracted and she was sort of noting that their mouth no longer, it tasted kind of aversive now as opposed to before.
The cribriform plate is a bunch of Swiss cheese-like thin bone, and the olfactory neurons, which basically sit right behind the back of your nostrils, they send axons, their little wire-like connections, back into the brain.
And when somebody gets hit hard on the head, that cribriform plate shears it, and that's why people become anastomic.
Now, what's amazing about the olfactory neurons Is that they are among the very few neurons in the human and other mammalian nervous system that regenerates throughout the lifespan.
So there's a little area of your hippocampus where there's some neurons that everyone makes a big deal of that frankly don't do a lot to regenerate throughout the lifespan, so-called neurogenesis, new neurons.
But the olfactory neurons, even though they're a central nervous system neuron, just like your retinal neuron or your cerebral cortex, they can regenerate throughout the entire lifespan.
And they do.
Every time somebody takes a head hit or there's some shearing off of these axons, excuse me, they regenerate.
Now, under conditions like, we saw this a lot during COVID where people were complaining about loss of smell.
We see this when people age.
Some people are thinking that loss of smell may be a correlate, not the cause, but obviously, but a correlate of age-related cognitive decline, dementia, and Alzheimer's, things like that.
There are a few things, actually, I think I recommended it to a couple of friends of ours.
Now there's very little data on this, but I will say, and I'll catch heat for this, but these days I catch heat anyway, so I don't care.
There are good data, in my opinion, small amount of data, but let's call it decent enough data to explore that alpha lipoic acid at 600 milligrams per day, During the time when you're starting to lose your smell might rescue some of that smell.
Well, anything that clogs the sinuses, certainly, but there are influenza viruses that do this.
Now, I know as we're saying this, that some people would say, in fact, Noam Sobel told me that he felt that the data about alpha lipoic acid were kind of on the weak side, but when people are losing their sense of smell and taste, it's really scary.
I mean, it's one of those things where, you know, you kind of feel like so much of pleasure in life, unbeknownst to us is- Yeah, especially with food.
Oh, I'll never forget when I got a viral infection and I took, and I lost my sense of smell.
And I did the smell training, which has also been shown to work.
Because these olfactory neurons, this is amazing, their survival is activity dependent.
They require electrical activity driven by sniffing and smelling.
It is true that the behavioral tool of taking a lemon and really just like getting it close to that nostril and just really trying to get whatever little whiff of lemon you can and then taking you know your coffee and Getting that little whiff of coffee, whatever little remnants of smell that you can get in there has been shown to improve the survival and eventually the durability of not just the olfactory neurons, but scent.
In other words, the behavioral training works.
The alpha lipoic acid thing is debated.
The thing about alpha lipoic acid is diabetics and people with blood sugar issues probably shouldn't take it.
They can kind of reduce blood sugar a little bit.
But when I had that happen, Lost my sense of smell.
I was like, listen, I want my smell back.
So I took 600 milligrams of alpha lipoic acid and I was doing the scent training.
I was like sniffing lemon, sniffing coffee, sniffing Parmesan cheese, sniffing anything that was pungent that I could recognize.
And my smell came back in a couple of days, but then again, I don't know because I didn't run the control experiment whether or not it would have come back anyway.
You prompted me to take several new experiences that we can talk about.
But one other thing before I forget.
I know I go down these nerdy rabbit holes here.
But when I did the smelling salts a moment ago...
I sniffed with both nostrils, but it came in mainly through my left nostril.
And so I asked Noam Sobol, what's the deal with this left nostril, right nostril stuff?
You know, you have the yogis, the switching of the nostril things.
Here's what's wild.
This is so wild.
It turns out that every two hours or so, the dominant breathing nostril switches.
Now, that could be interesting or that could not be interesting, right?
There are a lot of things in biology that happen, but like what is the meaning?
Turns out it's a direct reflection of a shift in your so-called autonomic nervous system from parasympathetic dominant to sympathetic dominant, meaning from more relaxed to more alert.
And this is happening periodically throughout the day, like a seesaw.
Enduring sleep.
So this whole thing with the yogis of, you know, breathe through one nostril or the other nostril.
Look, the olfactory bulbs, there's a lot of crossing over of information at later stages and even some early stages once the information gets to the brain.
So that whole thing is probably a little bit like weak sauce, but this idea that you're breathing easier through one nostril or the other is reflecting an underlying brain state and body state.
That is absolutely true, he tells me.
And the last thing is you said, why would bears or bloodhounds have such better smell?
Well, in the case of a bear, the size of the olfactory bulbs and the amount of brain real estate devoted to processing that information is much more.
So we have a huge visual cortex.
Most of our brain, frankly, is devoted to vision and to movement.
Whereas the brain of, let me think of like a turtle, it's mostly movement.
They have very little cerebral cortex.
Maybe that's not the best example, but certainly in a scent hound, the olfactory bulbs are much bigger than they are in a sight hound.
And both of those have olfactory bulbs that are much, much bigger than Jamie's bulldog over there.
Those guys sniff all the time, but they're mostly snorting, trying to get sense in.
Their sense of smell is much, much worse than Marshall's than your dog, because Marshall's a retriever.
So what Noam is saying is not that humans have smell that is as good, but that when you push the conditions, you can reveal a heightened sense of smell that most people don't think humans have.
Now, as I say this, there are a lot of people out there, and it's usually women, who are like, oh no, I can smell everything.
I can smell the subtlest difference.
And so it may be something related to maternal behavior.
It might be something related to Estrogen, it might be something in the Y chromosome that suppresses that, we don't know.
But some people are very olfactory.
They can smell when somebody's not feeling right or when they're not feeling right.
But it's absolutely the case that we're constantly taking the chemicals off other people through shaking hands, through hugging, rubbing them on ourselves, analyzing our own smells unconsciously.
That's why, like, if somebody takes a stimulant, There's a thing that people do when they're full of shit where they're anticipating your response in a different way.
Like when someone's telling the truth, like if you tell me the truth, you seem relaxed to my response.
Like you're telling, even if it's something that you're not proud of, you're telling me the truth, this is the thing.
When someone's lying, it's almost like they're waiting to see how you buy it.
Yeah, and some of the best manipulators, certainly in my experience, are people that have really figured out the combination lock of the things that...
That I have felt deprived of and they come in and those tend to be unique things like that you can't get out anywhere, you know, and boy, somebody said that to me recently, like there are certain categories of humans that I just, I can't be seduced by.
I'm not talking about just sexual seduction.
Right, right, right.
I'm saying it just can't be seduced by.
And then there are some people that just are able to get past that force field.
And so I consider myself pretty good at threat sensing, except in that domain, where like my threat sensing is like the equivalent of a stuffed animal.
Yeah, I mean, I think that the – well, I'm listening to a really good book that a really smart person suggested to me called Five Types of People That Will Ruin Your Life.
And I only wish I had read it years ago.
And here's the main takeaway, that there are about 10% of people out there and it cuts across all the standard labels of like narcissists and borderline and all that.
Like they include some of that, but they depart from that and they just focus on what, there's a guy who's a psychologist, it's written by a guy who's a psychologist, he's worked a lot on conflict resolution over the years, courtroom type stuff, et cetera.
And he says, in this 10% of people, they are high conflict people.
But within, they like conflict.
They feed off it.
They like drama.
They like conflict.
They like creating it.
But within that category, it's pretty evenly divided, he claims, between women and men.
And then there's a further division where about half of them play passive and victim, but are highly manipulative.
They use other people to try and basically harm.
And then the other 5% are very aggressive and abrasive.
And so he has this great set of protocols, I love protocols, that are essentially like, don't move in with Marry or get engaged to or have a child with somebody in the first year.
And this cuts in both directions.
Just don't make that agreement in year one.
As well as for any behavior that kind of cues those senses, gets your spidey senses up like you were describing, ask yourself, would 90% Or more of people do that behavior.
And if it's a no, like you have to pause.
In other words, what he's saying in this book is that most people are actually pretty healthy, but that most of the woes of the world are created by about 10% of people, which he calls these high conflict people, but they don't always come out high conflict, like screaming and yelling.
They're often very tactical and manipulative and very vindictive.
They'll leverage victimhood.
They'll leverage a lot of different things.
And again, cuts across men and women equally, he claims.
Again, I don't know the data behind this book, but the book itself just feels like a very useful thing that everybody should know about.
So I'm enjoying reading this book going, oh my God, I wish I had this book years ago.
Plus, I'm realizing like, oh yeah, like we always hear this.
Like most of our problems come from a very small set of people and things.
So we tend to call them narcissists or sociopaths or psycho, you know, but those labels, while very useful in the clinic, I think have been overused in the general public.
And like, we're not clinicians.
We're not diagnosing anybody.
And so, but...
Difficult people that can ruin your life abound, but it turns out it's only about 10%.
And it has some very specific protocols of how to deal with the people who are more outwardly aggressive versus play victim, etc.
A lot of it is like listening to what you have to say or asking you questions about your thoughts and your feelings, which a lot of people are unaccustomed to.
And that's intoxicating to people.
Because a lot of people just want to talk about themselves.
So when someone wants to talk about you and really is asking questions about your feelings, that can kind of manipulate you in a weird way.
Yeah, it almost feels like a parental type of care that we're probably wired to look for.
I mean, I always marvel at this and also just kind of shake my head and go, why?
Why did God design us this way?
But, you know, the circuitry in our brain that creates infant-child attachment Is the same circuitry that is repurposed for all other relationships in adulthood.
It's not like you get your like, your childhood attachment stuff and then you go, okay, well, you know, you're like 15, 16, you're moving on in the world, you're hitting puberty, you're starting to date a bit, whatever.
Now let's like work with a different set of Mechanics, a different set of algorithms.
No, it's the same set of algorithms repurposed.
We know this based on the studies of infant parent attachment and on the basis or infant caretaker and on the basis of studies of romantic love.
It's the same circuitry.
So you're using...
A set of algorithms and circuitry that were designed for one thing in a very different context.
But in this sort of pattern of repurposing childhood attachment patterns, and then people bringing that forward into their adult attachment patterns, I think what ends up happening is that, you know, people, quote unquote, trying to get their needs met, oftentimes like the worst ones, sometimes it's called trauma bonding, but they kind of go lock and key, or somebody identifies somebody that's really healthy, and they're like, them.
I'm going to latch on to them because they're healthy.
And you say, well, the healthy person should be able to spot all the landmines.
But if somebody is able to really tap into something you didn't have or something that just feels like oxygen, right?
Goodness gracious, you could be the smartest, most Well-acclimated person with the best parents or whatever upbringing, which most people aren't, but some people do have that, and still fall kind of into this fog that is like, gosh, you wanna be with this person, but it doesn't feel good, that mishmash.
And I think the thing I've learned Clearly, is that when you feel that trepidation, run, don't walk.
The gray zone is actually the thing to just exit fast.
Gray doesn't mean hover and check it out and run some experiments here.
It's also, I think, there's some people that are very sheltered, and they've been well taken care of, and they're not accustomed to manipulative people, and they're not accustomed to dangerous people.
I've seen that before, both with people choosing the wrong friends and people choosing the wrong partners.
Not that I had the hardest upbringing, but it was, I would say, easier than some, harder than others.
But I always had great friends, great friendships, but my threat sensing wasn't always great in romantic relationships, for sure.
I've also had some great relationships.
I think what tends to happen Is that if we're very busy, we have this tendency to be easily manipulated by certain things that are unusual that we just that really feel like extra oxygen to us or just feel so nourishing.
And because I think people always will often default to sex.
Like it's all about sex.
Depending on who you are, like sex is either more or less readily available to you, right?
Like, I think that for some people it's nurturing, like a certain form of nurturing.
And then there's also this thing of we know how to survive certain things so they don't feel as dangerous.
So people who've had like very, you know, Overbearing or complicated childhoods or abusive childhoods, sometimes they're set to perceive danger at way too high a threshold.
So their perception of what's dangerous is like way too high.
And so they walk into even still dangerous situations, but they don't think of them as dangerous.
And they're like, oh, I can navigate this.
They're good at navigating difficult people or they're good at navigating borderline people or something like that.
I think it's also exciting, which is part of the problem.
People like excitement.
And if you have a boring life, and a life that doesn't have a lot of stimulation in it, and then you find someone, even if they're bad for you, but they're exciting, there's some conflict, some something.
There's fights and breakups and then make-ups, which are exciting.
And so then you get locked into this stimulation pattern, which is, or I've seen that multiple times with people.
Do you think it's more of a problem with people that like excitement and adventure and are super curious, but like excitement and adventure?
So I'm thinking comics, I'm thinking people who like high intensity sports, that they seek relationships that are higher intensity because, you know, I've received great advice from people like Rick, who've said, you know, your relationship should be a sanctuary.
That should be where peace is.
You know, and actually I don't pay a lot of attention to Instagram kind of little mottos and things, but someone sent me one that I was like, yes, that feels so true, which is that men eventually settle where they feel peace.
Yeah, I think that's probably the healthiest way to do it.
But I think people like, like I said, I think people like stimulation.
And I don't think a lot of people are stimulated by their day-to-day existence.
I think they're bored.
I think a lot of people are just like trudging along every day.
And then when someone comes along that makes you excited in your life, you know, someone who's just a little wilder, a little crazier, maybe some lady's got a bunch of tattoos, like, look at her, you know?
You know, people get excited by people that are a little bit dangerous.
Well, a friend of mine who admittedly is a psychologist said, you know, tattoos are largely an expression of what you feel on the inside put to the outside.
That's the weirdest one is tattoos of people's faces on your body forever.
And there's...
I don't know how many of them are me.
There's thousands of them.
I mean, I used to post them on Instagram all the time, but then I thought I was encouraging people to get my face tattooed so that I'd put it up on my Instagram.
This is so wild because it's the most primitive part of our brain and nervous system.
We were chemical sensors before we were light sensors.
We were sensing chemical environments.
Is this a safe chemical environment?
We evolved from that.
We know that, for instance, memories that are associated with smell, like people will say, the smell of my grandmother's kitchen or somebody's hands, my grandfather's hands, those memories stick with us longer than anything.
Because the olfactory bulb has a direct line to a couple of structures in the brain So we have an olfactory bulb, which is the main thing for smell.
Then there's something called the accessory olfactory bulb.
It sort of divides into primitive smells that are like aversive, get away quick.
Those tend to go through a really fast line, through the old accessory olfactory bulb, takes us straight to the amygdala, to the piriform cortex that says, move your body and face and away from that.
Like I didn't sit there and Right, right, right.
On the smoking cell, it's like, boom, get away.
It's like a reflex.
It's like in fish, there's this thing called the Maldonar neuron, where you touch on one side of the body, what does the fish do?
They're sensing, electro-sensing at a distance, and these Maldner neurons are incredible.
You touch, boom!
The fish head's the opposite direction.
Doesn't go like, oh, are you another friendly fish?
You want a mate?
They go, I'm out of here.
Oh, and then they check you out.
Right?
So it's a reflex for safety.
The olfactory system has these two pathways.
The olfactory bulb for kind of like, oh, Is this black rifle coffee?
And then there's the smelling salt one that goes through the accessory olfactory bulb straight to the amygdala, which is associated with threat detection and other things, straight to the piriform cortex, and then to a motor circuit.
Boom, turn the head the other way, get out, exhale, don't inhale more.
Aversive, okay?
So the thing about smell is that it's got these very hardwired components.
And they're set up for either a petitive, like, hmm, let me explore more, sniffing more, as opposed to aversive behaviors, like, get me the hell away.
And these brain areas are among the more ancient brain areas.
Now, when I say ancient, people nowadays start picking apart it, like, well, it's not just limbic and cortex.
The cortex is part of limbic.
That's all true.
But if you look at our brains and you look at the brains of, like, a turtle or even a snake, all the stuff we're talking about right here are all...
They're not exactly the same, but they're all present.
When you get to humans, what you really add is a lot of cerebral cortex for the thinking and association stuff, like, you know, I've been here before, so I'm a little bit less, you know, like looking around as much as I did last time, like things that, you know, context-dependent learning, context-dependent stuff, whereas all the highly reflexive stuff, It's going to be hardwired, circuitry you find in every animal, every person.
And you need to divide things into three different responses in humans, okay?
In order to survive.
Yum, I'm going to move toward it.
Yuck, I'm going to move away.
And meh.
There's basically only three motor responses to anything.
Yum, yuck, or meh.
Now there's a matter of degrees, like you might see somebody you really like, you want to, I don't know, Joey Diaz or something, you know?
You see him, you want to run over, see him, right?
So there's an appetitive circuit moves you towards it.
See something that's a little odd, you might pause, I don't know what that is, or something aversive, like something happens in the parking lot and you're like, I'm getting the hell out of here.
So the brain, as complex as it is, needs to divide things into one of three different motor responses, forward, pause, or retreat.
Okay, I was playing with Jamie's dog out there before.
I was like, I couldn't get him to back up.
That's what's kind of cool about the bulldog.
You charge him and he just goes, I'm like, 20 times his size.
Long, complicated, boring history as to why it's named two things.
Noradrenaline, nor epinephrine, same molecule.
So let's just call it adrenaline for sake of simplicity.
Adrenaline is released from the adrenals in the body and it's released from a...
There's an area in the brain called the locus coeruleus, which sends out a bunch of little wires, axons, to sprinkler the brain with adrenaline.
And both systems work in parallel.
So when you smell something aversive, it goes, inhale, ugh, okay, certain olfactory neurons, cue that to the accessory olfactory bulb, bam, straight to the amygdala.
Amygdala sends a signal down to the adrenals atop the kidneys.
They release adrenaline.
Sends a, believe it or not, a signal up to locus coeruleus, it sprinklers the brain with adrenaline, and you just had within a couple hundred milliseconds, you just got a parallel adrenaline response in brain and body that allows you to do what more easily?
Move.
To move.
Now you're ready for motion.
You're ready for movement.
In fact, I'm sure if you put that under the deepest sleeper's nose in the middle of the night, they're going to wake up like a gunshot went off.
So some pain, if you get punched in the gut and you're tidying up in anticipation it still hurts, it hurts!
But then you move a little bit and then you're okay again.
But the liver is the opposite.
The liver, you get hit and then there's this sharp pain and a delay and then Everything just shuts off.
It's very hard to fake that you're fine and move away.
You see like telltale signs, like one thing guys will do all the time when they get hit in the liver, they drop their right arm down and they pin it to their body.
So maybe they're fighting like this, they're moving, they whack the liver and you see them do like that and they're still moving, but they can't help it.
They have their arm pressed because they know one more shot there and they're fucked.
So they barely can keep a poker face and move around.
But there's telltale signs that you see that are just instinctive.
You see them just drop their hand.
And a lot of times guys will use that to set them up with a head kick.
A good example of that is Islam Makachev and Alexander Volkanovski.
He hit them with a left kick to the body multiple times in that fight and then fired off one to the head and knocked them out.
You see the leg come up and it's very hard to reckon.
There's a kick called a question mark kick and it's called a question mark kick because in Taekwondo we used to call it a fake front kick roundhouse kick.
And what it is is you're lifting the knee up as if you're kicking to the body in a straight line.
And then you whip it over and go like that and turn it into a roundhouse kick.
Pull up Glaube Feitosa.
Glaube Feitosa was the best at it.
So much so that a lot of people started calling it the Brazilian kick.
Because this guy was a K1 champion who had the most flexible hips and the craziest question mark kick.
And he would literally bring it up and down.
Over the guard, so your hands would be up this, like you think your hands are protecting your head.
He would bring it up around like this and drop it down on your head and knock people out.
It's so wild, because to this day, I don't know anybody who can kick as good as him with that kick.
To this day, he has the best highlight.
There's a lot of people that are really good at that kick.
But Glaube had a very unusual flexibility of his hips.
Watch this.
Look at this.
Well, that's just a regular one, but he's got some of them that go over the...
That's one thing, but it's also pattern recognition.
You've been doing it so many times, and you know...
So, really good fighters, one of the things that you see is they don't just charge out in the first round.
The first round is like a feeling out process.
So you're downloading a lot of data points, you're downloading foot movement, and a lot of guys watch tape, and they download it from that, but then you don't really know until you're in there with a person.
So they're downloading positions.
They're downloading what a guy does.
Like if you pivot to the left, does he move forward?
Does he move back?
Does he throw the left hook?
Does he throw the right hand?
What does he do?
And how good is he at closing distance?
Does he try to fire from where he's at?
Or does he skip forward and fire?
Does he give any telltale signs?
Does he telegraph?
So there's a lot of things that a fighter looks for.
Mayweather had...
Some of the best counter punchers in the history of the fucking sport.
And so look how straight he throws that right hand.
See how straight he threw that?
So Canelo is throwing these big wide punches and Floyd is just cutting him off at the path and then moving his head out of the line of those hooks that come his way.
Well, you know how you do it, but you've also done it so many times in the gym and in fights that it's second nature, so you're not thinking of it as you're doing it.
One of the things about countering people is, and I used to...
When I was in my prime, when I was fighting all the time, I would throw kicks and they would land before I even knew I was going to do it.
Because someone would do something, and as they would do something, I instinctively knew, because of pattern recognition, there's going to be an opening.
Like, say, if some guy lifts his left leg, if he's standing with his left leg forward, and he lifts his left leg and he's coming towards me with his left leg, I know that he's balancing on that right leg and that the left leg is coming this way, and if I spin and catch him, I can catch him as his momentum is going this way, and I'll catch him that way, and he'll double the power of the punch or the kick.
Because there's like a conscious awareness of how you do it.
I think this notion of pattern recognition, it's interesting, because earlier we were talking about pattern recognition for finding people who are lying, right?
You have this pattern recognition thing that, you know, you're not saying it's perfect, but like you can sense something.
There's things, yeah.
And so it's a combination of things that we aren't always aware of.
That's the unconscious part of the unconscious genius thing that I'm referring to.
And so there's this idea, like our brains are pattern recognition prediction machines.
And so do you think, like, in other words, two questions.
Do you think Mayweather was ever pulled aside and said, listen, pay attention to their left shoulder and keep your eye on his right eye?
And one of the things that – Mayweather's father was a great fighter.
Mayweather's father fought Sugar Ray Leonard back in the 1970s when Sugar Ray was in his prime and gave him a hell of a fight.
And his brother – or his uncle, rather, his uncle Roger was Roger Mayweather, the Black Mamba.
He was a great fighter.
So he grew up as a child around some of the best boxers in the world and so he was constantly seeing the successful motions that they did and constantly seeing them exploit weaknesses in other fighters and then constantly sparring so in sparring You're not just fighting when you're sparring, but you're sort of downloading data.
You're downloading data points for a real fight.
And then you're doing drills where a guy will, you know, some guys, they'll do it with mitts.
Well, they'll throw a hand at you and they'll slip and counter.
Here, let me show you this.
There's this guy, Ilya Tapuria.
And Ilya Tapuria is one of the absolute best fighters in the world.
He's the current UFC featherweight champion.
And the dude is just fucking phenomenal.
But one of the things that's phenomenal about him is his technique.
His technique is perfect.
There's like no...
There's no fat in his technique.
There's no wasted movement.
So when an opportunity presents itself, everything is so fast because the technique is so streamlined.
But look at how he hits the pads.
And when you watch how he hits the pads, and Mayweather is a great example of that as well.
But see how those punches, they're not even talking, so when he's throwing the mitts at his head to get him to duck, there's no communication.
He just sees that hand coming towards him and he's ducking.
He sees this hand coming towards him and he's ducking.
It's all slight slips away and it's slight motions, which is all you need to get away from a punch, right?
You don't want to move too far.
You're wasting a lot of energy and you can't counterattack.
One of the best things about Floyd and one of the most brilliant things about him, he's one of the most elusive fighters of all time, but he didn't move around.
He stood right in front of you and you couldn't fucking hit him.
That's true mastery of space and true mastery of technique.
In my opinion, he's the best boxer that's ever lived.
What it does is a punch that goes over the top of the guard and catches him in the exposed area of the head.
It's a perfect punch.
And for the referee to interfere there.
And also, it's literally like someone who probably doesn't know how to box at all telling the greatest boxer of all time that what he's doing is wrong, which is just bananas.
So he got rid of the guy in the middle of the fight.
But he's still doing these bouts at 46 years old, still boxing these young kids.
Again, John Gotti III, who is a very good up-and-coming MMA fighter.
So, you know, he has all the weapons, takedowns, submissions, kicks, all that jazz.
But he's choosing to fight Floyd in a boxing fight just for money, just like Conor McGregor did.
It's really a trick.
He gets these people to box with him.
They have no business boxing with him.
And he's making millions and millions of dollars doing this way after his competitive career is over.
He would go to a nightclub with everybody else, be drinking water, everybody's partying, having a good time.
Floyd would leave the nightclub at 2 a.m., have his bodyguards drive the car, and he would run in front of the car for hours.
Run home, two o'clock in the morning.
Run five, six miles.
And did it all the time.
Just always did.
He was always fit.
Always in shape.
Never got fat.
Never got lazy.
Always was ready.
And so never really experienced decline.
And then decided at a certain point in time, like after the Conor McGregor fight, okay, I'm done.
Done.
Did it all.
Beat everybody.
Undefeated.
Bye!
And now he just has these demonstration fights where they're weird little exhibitions where he's just beating people up that have no business in the ring with him.
And one of them, he was walking around with a fucking card, a ring card.
He took it from the ring card girl and he started dancing around.
So you combine motivation with adrenaline, which gets your body in a position to move better, and noradrenaline, which kind of works in between those two.
It's a little more complicated, not worth going into.
But they work as kind of like a gang of three to raise alertness, directional motivation, and go.
And so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a little bit of a dopaminergic aspect to those smelling salts.
We were just talking about Twitter where all the different nootropics or Let's not call them smart drugs, but things that can enhance alertness.
Things like alpha-GPC. As you know, 600 milligrams alpha-GPC. I don't care who it is that's like, where's the double-blind placebo-controlled study that shows it raises alertness and focus?
Look, as much as I believe in science, you don't need a double-blind placebo-controlled study to know that a swift kick in the shin hurts and that 600 milligrams of alpha-GPC is going to make you more alert.
Theanine takes away the jitters, like 100 to 200 milligrams of theanine will take away the jitters associated with stimulants, which is why it's now in a lot of energy drinks.
So you'll see alpha GPC, theanine, sometimes L-tyrosine, which is a precursor to dopamine.
But there were a couple of things on that list, including prescription drugs like modafinil, for instance, which was originally designed for the treatment of narcolepsy.
Yeah, and so for anybody out here, listen to this, because my manager told me this, it's really important.
If you think you're going to fall asleep, there's a great way to mitigate it that's pain-free.
Get a rag, like a washcloth, and some ice and some water, and have like a little thing next to you with a cold, wet rag, and just wipe that rag on your face, and then you're good for like five more minutes.
Reach in there and start, oh man, I'm just going to sleep again.
This is a great one, and it fits right in with what Matt Walker says to do the opposite to fall asleep, where you wash your face with warm water, take a hot shower.
But you heat up the surface of your body, and the medial preoptic area of your hypothalamus, which is your brain's thermostat, says, hey, the surface of the body is heating up.
What should I do?
Cool down my core temperature, and that puts you to sleep.
Well, this gets to something that I know we've talked a little bit about before offline, not on microphone, which is doing hard things translates to an ability to do hard things and probably translates, provided it doesn't kill you, to a longer life.
So there's a brain area that most neuroscientists aren't aware of called the anterior mid cingulate cortex, okay?
Scientists who are in the know know about it.
It's, you know, I teach your anatomy, medical students at Stanford.
It's an area that we cover in passing, but there are a lot of brain areas.
You got to get, you know, can't get to everything.
But in the last couple of years, there've been studies of this area, the anterior mid cingulate cortex that make it super important for everybody to know about, not just neuroscientists.
And here's the deal.
A colleague of mine at Stanford, Joe Parvisi, he's a neurosurgeon.
He's in there stimulating different brain areas, including anterior mid-cingulate cortex and areas near it in human patients while they're awake, preparing them for neurosurgery for other reasons.
Stimulates anterior mid-cingulate cortex.
And what do all people who have their anterior mid-cingulate cortex report?
They feel like there's something about to happen, something's kind of looming, a challenge, a storm, some will report it as a storm or a physical challenge, but their overall sensation is one that they want to lean into it, they want to challenge it.
Now, this area has subsequently been imaged in people who are successful dieters, it grows larger.
In people that fail at a dieting or nutrition program, it gets smaller.
People that embrace a new form of exercise, and here's the key point, that they don't want to do, this area gets bigger.
People that are just doing things that they enjoy doing does not change in shape or size.
Now, here's where it gets even more interesting.
The anterior mid-cingulate cortex is larger in volume in a group of people called super-agers, okay?
That's a bit of a misnomer because it implies they age faster.
They actually age more slowly as it relates to cognitive decline.
The slope of cognitive decline is not as steep in these people, meaning they're holding on to cognitive abilities longer than other people into older age.
And the universal quality among these superagers is not just a larger anterior mid cingulate cortex, but that they challenge themselves to do things that are challenging and they kind of don't want to do or really don't want to do.
So when we hear, oh, you know, people should do crossword puzzles to maintain their memory, probably good to keep some cognitive flexibility going.
But if you love crossword puzzles, you're not going to grow your anterior mid cingulate cortex.
If you love 45 degrees in the cold plunge after an hour long run, In the hills, which I do, probably not going to do much to grow this area.
If you really don't want to do something and you do it, this area gets bigger.
And it's got inputs and outputs from all of these different brain areas that make all of this make sense.
Like the dopamine system, like the learning and memory system, like the areas of the brain that say, no, I'm going to, Retreat from that.
It's aversive, but you push yourself to do something that you don't want to do.
This area gets bigger.
And the best part is it translates to an ability to do harder things elsewhere.
This to me, I get obviously super excited about because it's nested in human data and animal data in real world examples of dieting and exercise and aging and longevity and all of that.
And it speaks to much of what you've talked about on this podcast for years and years, which is do hard things.
It will give you an ability to do other hard things.
But if you love doing deadlifts, Honestly, even sets to failure on those deadlifts, enjoy them, benefit from them, all the wonderful things that come with doing deadlifts, great, but you should probably also do something that you don't enjoy doing if you have an interest in the kind of benefits that we're talking about.
Well, it completely makes sense that your brain would have to develop an ability to continue to do difficult things, and that ability to not hesitate and push through, the ability to not procrastinate and go forward, and that that thing is probably like all things.
It's like cardiovascular endurance, muscular endurance.
You develop an ability to do more of it because of that.
Right, and movement itself, like physical movement or cognitive movement, if you're learning new things like comedy, preparing new things, or learning poetry, or drawing.
Like I used to draw a lot, start drawing again, carry around this notebook everywhere.
I'm not going to show the drawings, they're just for me.
But pushing myself to do something that I enjoy, but that like there's a barrier there.
But the point, I'm obsessed with this thing that somewhere between perfect accuracy and total representation of biology, like a brain or a set of cells, and at the other end of the continuum, like ball and stick, there's like a perfect sweet spot for teaching.
And so what I'm doing there is what I do in the classroom.
I go, okay, listen, we're going to talk about how muscle releases a microRNA that helps you burn fat.
And then I kind of remind people, like, there's fat.
So I don't want too much detail, but I don't want too little detail.
Because there's certain people that, like, if their parent was a singer, but then you go, well, maybe they were singing around the house a lot when they were growing up.
And there's a skateboarder named Jimmy Wilkins who's like breaking every barrier on skateboarding and he actually uses his knees to contact the board and move the board while his hands are free.
And he's a smaller guy, real small, real wide, super loose ankles.
And I said to him, like, what do your parents do?
And he goes, my mom's a ballerina and my dad's an orchestra conductor.
This guy's using his knees on the board.
So like he does everything, not everything, but he does a lot of things hands-free at mock speed.
For people in skateboarding, they probably just want to see flips and 900 varials and that stuff's cool.
But he makes everything look so good.
I mean, Jimmy, for those that are in the know, Jimmy Wilkins is the next, is like the next, like Tony will say, Tony Hawk, everyone will say like watching Jimmy, look, see, the whole thing here is that Jimmy's Skateboarding is like perfect poetry.
So his back knee is often used to stabilize the board.
Because he's got that hip looseness that you were talking about earlier.
I went out because I'm a big Rancid fan, and I like the other guys too, but I'm a big, big Rancid fan.
I was like, holy cow, people love this stuff.
Again.
Anyway, we watched it again there, and then I've watched it again.
I will say it felt very cathartic to me.
I don't know how it felt for you, but it felt really cathartic.
The subject matter the subject matter and also like the next day was pure like delight and just Baffled and shocked all at the same time when on Twitter I see a clip taken completely out of context about a bit About taking things out of context.
It's like life had looped back on itself.
You were talking about things being taken out of context and they were taking it out of context.
They had cut it.
And I was like, wait, wait, wait.
I remember that very differently.
Because I remember things that I hear pretty well.
And I went back and I was like, wait, he's talking about things being taken out of context and they're taking it out of context.
But there's always some people that are just—they're not—this is not in good faith.
Everything they're doing is just trying to find something wrong with everything you're doing.
And it's usually people that their life is a mess.
There's no one who does that who is a healthy, accomplished person who has great relationships in their life and is doing really well at some skill or chosen profession that they enjoy very much.
So there's a business in that and then there's also people that are doing like MSNBC did this recently and There's they this has gotten so popular that my fucking stepdad contacted me to tell me he's happy that I'm suing MSNBC I'm like I'm not suing MSNBC, but this is what MSNBC did they took a clip of me talking about Tulsi Gabbard and And they edited it up and made it look like I was saying great things about Kamala Harris.
Yes, they did it about politics, but they didn't do it like AI. They just deceptively edited the things that I was saying.
Took it completely out of context, where I was talking about, first of all, I was talking about Tulsi Gabbard, and then I was talking about that...
The media behind Kamala Harris, all this surge and all these people deciding that she could win.
And they put the two of those together and made it seem like I was praising Kamala Harris and saying a bunch of things that aren't even true about her.
Like, I was talking about Tulsi Gabbard being a congresswoman for eight years and about how she served overseas.
Two deployments in medical units dealing with people who were blown up from the war.
That's not something Kamala Harris did.
It's something Tulsi Gabbard did.
I was just saying things about her and they put it out there as a clip of me praising Kamala Harris.
But they don't care about the truth.
They just want a narrative to get out there amongst enough people because most people are just surface readers, right?
They read a headline and I'd be guilty of that many times.
You read a headline.
Oh, I know what that is.
And then you shut your laptop.
I got it now.
I got the whole...
So if you read an article that says, you know, Andrew Schultz is a liar.
Like, oh, he's a liar.
I heard he's a liar.
And then you just start repeating he's a liar.
It doesn't have to be real.
And so all they have to do with...
How many people are actually going to watch my Netflix special?
Well, it was a lot, but...
Compared to the amount of people in the country?
Not a lot.
You know, small percentage.
So all you have to do is take something out of context from someone who's never going to watch it in the first place, put it in front of them like, oh, that piece of shit.
Can't believe he said that.
Even though I'm literally talking about things being taken out of context.
The part about this is so frustrating to me is that at some point, especially as a scientist, that's data selection.
If you look at data and you look at scientific experimentation, it starts with a question, you generate a hypothesis, you collect data, you publish the results, and you get to state your conclusions.
Now let's talk about what you're talking about.
In the world of science, I don't think there's a lot of outright data fraud, but a lot of experiments that don't work, people come up with excuses to eliminate those data.
There's certainly some data fraud, and there's a range of underlying reasons.
One of the more common reasons that people don't talk about, which is something to really strongly inoculate in laboratories against, is when a laboratory is known for doing very, very good work, Oftentimes the graduate students and postdocs that go there feel like they need to give the boss the result.
So sometimes it's unbeknownst to the person running the lab.
There have been a lot of cases in recent years of papers being discovered as having major issues.
And that's like, well, do you go after the lab head or do you go after the person who did it?
Lab heads are responsible for everything in their lab.
AI is helping with this because you can scan data and look at things.
Ambition is a dangerous thing.
You know, if somebody puts ambition ahead of accuracy.
I mean, there was this nanotechnologist guy from some years back.
I think his last name was shown who had like 20 papers in science and nature in two years.
And it turns out he wasn't even bothering to he was fabricating data.
The papers were all retracted and I don't know what he's doing now, but the Noise plots, the random noise plots in these papers were the way he got caught.
What it turned out is that, I mean, I'm juggling because it's like he was so lazy, ambitious, but so lazy that he didn't even bother to use new random noise plots from one paper to the next.
So somebody said, wait, random, random should be random.
So he was particularly ambitious, lazy, and that was outright fraud.
There are all sorts of...
Other cases and things like that.
And you know, there's people who make this their sport to talk about.
Most scientists are trying to get the correct answers.
I do believe that most scientists have good faith.
They're trying to get the answer, but it's hard.
Science is hard.
Now what you're talking about to me sounds like People deliberately grabbing from the pallet of paints, that is the words that are spoken by anybody on the internet, especially people with podcasts, you or me or anybody else, and then literally cutting and pasting things together to create a story which is fiction.
He does that with a lot of stuff, like people pretending to be in love with me, makes it like there's a romance between me and different people.
But that's funny.
That's art, right?
He's making a story that doesn't exist.
It's really funny, right?
But there's people that do it just to either, in this case, it was to promote Kamala Harris, to get the passive Listener the people that are you know the casual to go.
Oh wow Joe Rogan likes Kamala Harris I've heard you I heard you're endorsing and not endorsing all sorts of people Yeah, you can't say even say I like somebody without it being an endorsement and people getting mad But I think the MAGA people are happy now that Robert F. Kennedy is now with Trump.
Yeah, I think we're in a very weird time with the media and I think truth is super important I think someone that's willing to do something like that That's a real offense.
It's a real offense.
It's not a small thing.
It's a real lie.
And it's a lie that changes other people's opinions.
You take what's perceived to be an influential person and you distort their views in either a way to shame them, make them look bad, or to promote someone else.
That's a real lie.
That's a dangerous lie.
It's a real offense.
And I think that there's no laws against that right now, except libel law.
I mean, you could take someone to court, I guess.
But...
It's a real gross lie, and it's used right now to manipulate public opinion.
The reason I gave the counter example of science is, you know, when you're trained as a scientist, you're trained to try and parse what's real and what's not real and give the best, you know, Version of that that you can.
And then you are allowed to state your conclusions.
But I have a question.
At what point do you think the general public Will come to understand that this is the way that a lot of things that they see out there are constructed, to some degree or another, and stop actually believing it.
All they do is watch the news and read the newspaper.
And whatever's printed, they believe.
And it's very difficult to get them to consider, like, hey, maybe someone's lying.
Maybe there's propaganda campaigns.
Maybe there's like this widespread media narrative that they're pushing because corporations are behind it and advertising is behind it and they're figuring out a way to manipulate the public opinion on things.
It's very hard to get old boomers to believe that because they're old, okay?
So they're set in their ways.
Their mind has formed around, you know, I am a liberal, I'm a Democrat, I've been a Democrat my whole life, this is how I feel about these issues, this is my community, this is my tribe, these are my people, and the news says this, and I'm with them, and oh great, we're up in the polls now.
And for them, it's like they're on a team.
It might as well be the Dolphins versus the Raiders.
It's the same kind of mentality in their head.
They don't want to be challenged.
That little part of their brain that exists when you challenge yourself and do things you don't want to do, that bitch is shriveled up to almost nothing.
And they're real boring, and their lives are entirely excited by political discourse.
Well, I'll tell you, you know, I'll non-reluctantly tell you, you know, my dad and I, over the years, like, we had some early issues and we resolved them and we're good now.
But when some not-so-kind press came out about me, they interviewed a lot of people.
They interviewed a lot of people from my high school class and friends and co-workers and then cherry-picked for the story they wanted to create.
But they talked to my dad.
Okay, and I would not put my dad into the political camp that you described or any camp, really.
But he's a first-generation immigrant, moved here from Argentina, did his PhD under a scholarship from the Navy.
You know, it was like a story of an immigrant who came here and became a scientist.
There wasn't a lot of science to do in Argentina.
There's not a lot of funding for it, right?
So came here.
I would say that When they reached out to him, he was like, oh, yeah, a reporter was super nice.
You know, they asked me all these questions and then he called me.
And at the same time, you know, like we're enjoying nicotine here, or you are, because I will say I'm not in defense of the pharmaceutical industry, nor am I on attack of them.
But there are certain things that, you know, push through traditional science.
You get great information about dosage and safety.
Look at Ozempic, right?
I get asked about this all the time.
I don't know how this became politicized.
I will say, if you do things to offset the muscle loss for certain people, reducing their appetite with it might be a useful tool.
It's expensive, is there dependence?
Those are important issues.
But we learn one thing for sure from Ozempic, Monjaro, et cetera.
The main cause of the obesity crisis is people eat too many calories.
On average, about 3,500 calories per day, and they don't move enough.
They don't exercise enough.
And then we can get into what they eat, et cetera.
You know, we'd have a discussion about seed oils if we really want to cause some friction.
I don't like seed oils.
I don't eat them, but I'm not aware of any randomized control trial that says that they're bad.
I just don't like them.
I like olive oil and butter, and I like cooking beef and beef fat.
Tastes better, and I feel better.
I feel better, and that's enough of a reason for me.
So there's this whole thing about ratios of omega-3s versus the omega-6s, and you get a lot of omega-6s with the seed oils, and Olive oil is good for us.
I think I will conclude that.
I think drinking less alcohol or no alcohol is good for you.
I think I'm of the belief that high quality meat is good for you.
I'm also of the belief that fruits and vegetables are good for you.
I think all the data point to these things.
I think that there isn't an abundance of data yet that says seed oils are bad.
And I think Lane Norton would support that statement.
And he's kind of my go-to in terms of what the randomized controlled trials say, right?
But in my experience, I feel better when I'm not eating them.
So I choose personally not to eat them.
And frankly, there may be something to it, right?
I mean, now we're hearing all about microplastics.
We're hearing about all that.
But when it comes to the GLP-1 agonists, right?
I spent a lot of time on this, done two podcasts or more, one with an expert, one solo, et cetera.
You know, of all the peptides that broke through, you know, we've talked about peptides, we've talked about more.
There's this one peptide.
Glucagon-like peptide one that when raised to levels about a thousand fold over normal levels leads to massive suppression of appetite and people lose weight, which for some people is an emergency situation.
They're really fat and there's nothing they can do to lose the weight and they're getting sicker and sicker.
My hope would just be that those people would also try and eat correctly and exercise.
And so the debate has become, is it good for you?
Is it bad?
Well, there's muscle loss.
So offset the muscle loss.
But, let's be realistic, most people won't offset the muscle loss.
So, you know, I think there are a lot of themes here, but...
I'm not opposed to certain pharmaceuticals.
I think certain people need drugs for ADHD, a lot don't.
And, you know, dose response curves and lethal dose analysis and that kind of stuff is super valuable.
What I don't like, because I don't think it's necessary, is when people default to the most expensive Side effect, risky, kind of reflexive option because I think that the basics, sunlight, exercise, you know, cardio and weight training.
I mean, we're in a, like these things work.
They work so well.
They've always worked well and they'll always work well.
And I also think there's great data emerging that they transform mental health.
I mean, the data on resistance training two or three times a week and mental health is striking.
I mean, compare that to what people get from certain SSRIs and you're like, For goodness sake, 45, 60 minutes a week, lift some heavy objects.
And I know you've talked about this recently and I'm, you know, I'm kind of like hitting a bunch of things here, but I think a lot about this relationship between traditional science, FDA, NIH.
I reviewed grants for the NIH for years until very recently.
I was a regular study section member.
I understand the process.
I understand the limitations and the benefits.
And I also understand that like in the cases recently where the FDA decided to not approve MDMA for the treatment of PTSD, you go like, whoa, what's it going to take?
I think, you know, I had a lot of feelings about that ruling.
Yeah.
I think it's unfortunate given the really strong data that support the use of MDMA for the treatment of PTSD. I mean, more than 60%, you know, successful in air quotes, plus some people just go into total remission.
But the hazards are there, and if there aren't safeguards in place for the practitioner-patient relationship, which is one of the major concerns, if those aren't there, well, then it's never going to be legalized.
So there were two major issues plus some others, but the ones that I'm most aware of is that lack of an adequate control group.
People don't know if they got the drug or they didn't.
And then the other one is during the course of the trials, there were some Issues that came up about improprieties between practitioners and and Patients that like sexual stuff there were my understanding is that there were that there were certain things may have arisen that kind of like pricked up, you know people's ears but the major issue was this is Is a person who's under the influence of MDMA in a position to advocate for what they need during the course of the session, right?
Like, are they in a quote-unquote truly safe space?
But the same thing could be said of psilocybin trials.
So the solution there is my understanding is that you have two therapists there.
It's not one therapist, one patient, you have two therapists.
That there are safeguards in place.
The same way that when somebody, a brain surgeon does a brain surgery, there's an anesthesiologist there and multiple nurses and staff to get things and hemostats.
So I think that there needs to be, I think, a next phase evolution of the way that we think about things like MDMA-assisted It's just striking.
The work of Veteran Solutions is doing with a guy at Stanford, Nolan Williams, in our Department of Psychiatry.
He's been doing brain imaging before and after Ibogaine with the veterans that are taking Ibogaine, followed by DMT. And those are...
Looking very, very interesting.
So to me, it's also the kind of emotional loading of things like MDMA. When we call it MDMA, if I tell you this is MDMA, this is a drug that raises serotonin dramatically, raises dopamine dramatically, opens neuroplasticity and allows people to rewire their brains if adequately supported.
To feel relief, if not remission from PTSD. You'd say, I'm awesome.
How do we move this forward safely?
But if I start using words like ecstasy, I start using, now I call it what it really is, MDMA, methylene, dioxy, methamphetamine.
You hear methamphetamine, you hear ecstasy.
You start hearing a bunch of stuff that starts shifting your brain towards, okay, this is like a party drug, they want to use it.
Same thing was said about cannabis.
I've done multiple episodes about cannabis.
I'm not anti-cannabis.
I think there's case studies where, excuse me, that's a specific thing in science, use cases where, or examples where people with a propensity for psychosis should probably not be doing high THC cannabis.
I learned something really interesting, by the way, about this.
We brought on an expert, brought on in part where there was a little bit of a Twitter battle.
I put out a solo episode about cannabis years ago.
No one had a problem with it.
Put a clip on X. Oh, people came at me.
Like crazy.
Like crazy.
So I invited one of the main academics in that area onto my podcast.
When he came on, he was very gracious, offered a lot of useful knowledge, but he really didn't counter with that much.
There were some issues around CBD biology versus THC. What is his field of expertise?
He works on animal models, but focuses on cannabis biology.
And so he's very knowledgeable.
And I don't think he's anti-cannabis at all.
But he was checking me on some things that he felt that I- Maybe he does smoke weed.
Yeah.
He's from Canada.
He's a very nice guy.
He was checking me on some things that he felt I had not gotten correctly or that weren't adequately supported.
So my response was, I did this publicly, come on the podcast.
Like, I'm not afraid to talk science.
That's what I do.
Like, let's go.
And not in a combative way.
He agreed to come on the podcast.
We had a great discussion.
And one of the things that he said was, The whole idea that there's so much more THC in weed now that's leading to all these problems, like the weed of today is not the weed of yesterday.
He said when people inhale, they take it by vape or they smoke it or whatever, his words are that there's far fewer cases of people taking in more.
They're able to reach that point that they want to be at without going too far.
However, even though it's higher potency, however, when people take it by edible, right?
There are cases where people get to genuine freak out in psychotic episodes because they're taking in far too much too quickly because you can eat the edible quickly.
unidentified
You don't they're not layering in until they hit that plane that they want to be Well, it's also the conversion to 11-hydroxy metabolite.
Cam Haynes pointed this out recently, and I'm not saying this to focus the positive energy on us, but it will invariably do that, or inevitably do that, excuse me.
Which is, he said, it's kind of interesting that all of the Top podcasters like really fit, you know?
Like all the people that are like really into their health, right?
Like you and you know, there's, David's out there like influencers.
He was saying like, there's a healthy, a health component or a fitness component.
Not always, but I think most of them, I think he may have said all of them.
He may have said many of them.
But, you know, Chris Williamson, you know, Lex, like there's a tendency to merge kind of intellectual discourse with physical.
And I think that's a unique theme of podcasting also, at least of certain, let's just say what it is, like a lot of the top podcasts, that's like a pretty consistent theme for the female podcasters too.
Like Whitney works out, she does her podcast.
Like there's a kind of merging of those things.
And I think that when it comes to the discussion about anything about health, It also is beneficial if people are engaging in healthy behaviors, right?
Or if they've tried things, like they're trying to be fit.
I see Rhonda posting pictures of herself deadlifting now, right?
You know, and like Peter's talking about his workouts and he's a physician, he's an MD. So I think it's not sufficient to just study something, right?
To just look at the data and papers.
I think it really helps if you're able to get in close contact with the things that, you know, you're hearing about.
But also it helps me to know whether or not you have any discipline.
So there's people that think about a certain thing because it comforts their own thoughts about their decisions that they've made.
And there's certain rationales that people make.
They rationalize certain aspects of their life and certain things that are going on in society to sort of make up for the fact that they haven't done the work that they probably should have done in the first place.
So when I see a guy that's built like Chris or Lex or someone who I know or yourself that I know stays very physically fit and takes care of their health, then I have more respect for them because I go, okay, I have more respect for this person's opinion because this person is doing difficult things on a regular basis and confronting their own hesitations,
their whatever, procrastination, discipline issues, and the physical ability to put in work Which requires mental strength.
And for the longest time, for whatever strange reason, people have had this mutually exclusive notion that a person who is physically fit is probably stupid and a person who doesn't care about their body and only concentrates on the mind.
For some reason that is admired, that this person has no ego at all and doesn't care.
But I think that person's a fool because you don't have as much energy to think because your physical body that you have, you've let decay to this terrible point where your posture is down.
I've had some unfortunate conversations with older intellectuals that don't take care of themselves.
And you realize that at a certain point they've gotten lazy physically and they don't have the energy to engage.
And so they sort of just sort of repeat things that they've said over and over and over again.
And when you ask them to think on the spot, they almost don't have the will to do it anymore.
And there's a direct correlation between this ability to continue moving your body and your intellectual ability.
I mean, you have to still go and learn and read and acquire knowledge and try hard things.
You just can't just work out.
But I can think of a number of key examples that are historical.
The greatest neurobiologist of all time, supernatural levels of ability was a guy named Ramoni Cajal, won the Nobel Prize in 1906. He was the one who first defined the synapse, etc.
He carried an iron umbrella to work.
He lifted weights.
Oliver Sacks, one of the greatest neurologists and writers of our time, passed away in 2015, had a 600-pound squat, okay?
Yeah, he had the state powerlifting record at one point.
Just a beast of a guy who was also a neurologist and wrote all these beautiful books about how the mind works, the man who mistook his wife for a hat.
He was behind the movie Awakenings, et cetera, et cetera.
Don Kennedy, former president of Stanford, ran into his late 70s, and then after that had a hip replacement and then was doing other stuff.
So Richard Axel is a Nobel Prize from Columbia University.
First person to find ways to introduce genes to novel genes to cells.
Played racquetball, I don't know if he's still playing racquetball.
I'll name one more.
These are incredible people.
Like the guy who essentially defined the understanding of the visual system and neuroplasticity.
My scientific great grandfather is David Hubel and Torntzen Wiesel.
Torntzen just turned something like 95 or something.
Maybe it's 93. He still runs.
He runs slowly, but he still goes and he is mentally sharp.
So this is not an accident.
This is not just a correlation.
This is the anterior mid cingulate cortex in action.
And of course, cancer, a bus, or a bullet can still take you out, but assuming you make it into your 60s, 70s, 80s, movement, movement, movement is the way to stay mentally strong and to continue to have the capacity to learn.
I mean, just to kind of weave these two things, if we're talking about MDMA, psilocybin, or some other agent that raises serotonin and dopamine, Or we're talking about movement.
All we're really talking about are ways to increase these neuromodulators like dopamine, acetylcholine, serotonin, epinephrine, and they create the opportunity for neuroplasticity.
They don't create plasticity on their own.
They create a milieu that's very much like the young brain where it's like, okay, what's new here?
This is why adrenaline is such a powerful tool for plasticity.
Probably, I'm not going to suggest people use smelling salts to try and do better on their exams.
So, but neuroplasticity is the most impressive feature of the human brain.
It can rewire itself.
But when you're a kid, you rewire in response to a passive experience, for better or worse, as an adult.
You can rewire your brain, but you have to create the milieu, the environment that the brain wants to rewire itself.
So these neuromodulators like adrenaline or dopamine or serotonin, they need to be spiked.
And nicotine, what you're now taking another one, is we know does many things in the brain and body, but God, that stuff's strong.
Yeah, man.
There's a brain area called nucleus basalis, which sits in the base of the brain, and it can serve as a spotlight by releasing acetylcholine onto what?
Onto nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in certain circuits and provide focus.
So that's what nicotine's doing.
Unless you take so much of it every day that those, your kind of baseline levels of acetylcholine either drop or become kind of regulated, To the point where you're not getting that spotlighting anymore, which is why people then are taking more and more.
But as our, you know, your former guest and my colleague, Dr. Anna Lemke has said, the worst thing you can do when you're in a trough of dopamine is try and boost dopamine again.
You just got to wait for it to come back.
So if people want nicotine to continue to work, they should use it sporadically or when they feel like it's not working anymore, take a break.
Terrence McKenna would freely admit that he had a problem with cannabis because he was like a daily cannabis user.
But he said the real way to take it, he said, is to take a long time off, a long time off, So that your body is completely desensitized to it and then take as much as you can stand in like one dose.
And to deny it as a zealot and to say, oh, marijuana is just great.
Everybody should be high.
Like, no, no, no.
Everybody shouldn't eat peanuts either.
You know, some people have a weird reaction to things.
And there's a certain...
I mean, Alex Berenson wrote that book, Tell Your...
Tell your parents or tell your children.
Tell your children.
It's all about that.
There needs to be some recognition, but there's a certain percentage of people that have a tendency towards schizophrenia or maybe psychotic breaks, and they can get triggered by high doses of cannabis, for sure.
Yeah, and I covered that in my solo episode on cannabis.
This person, this researcher from Canada, who's, I don't think he's pro or anti-cannabis, but had differing views, came on my podcast.
And then...
What's his name?
Matt Hill.
And he's a respected researcher in this area.
And I thought his stance was very, very nuanced.
And then after he came on the podcast, other people...
Not Berenson necessarily, although I haven't checked my DMs that closely, contacted me and said, no, I have counters to that guy, which just told me everything I already know, which is that science is a field with people with differing opinions, right?
Which is good.
Which is great.
I mean, you don't have a field until you have differing opinions.
You don't want to be the only person working on something.
You want that.
It's something that, you know, you can tell I get really impassioned smelling salts or no about this because somehow in the media version of is cannabis good is cannabis bad.
And honestly, the the political aspects to it, like I wasn't tracking the fact that cannabis was just about to be approved for more, more legalization right about the time that that clip got amplified.
But I wasn't saying it should or shouldn't.
I'm just giving you the information same as I did for alcohol.
we, I would love to put this to rest once and for all.
Every couple of weeks or months, you're going to see media outlets say, some drinking is good for you.
Others will say, some drinking, any drinking is bad for you.
Here's the deal.
Zero is better than any.
A little bit's probably fine, especially if you do other things to offset the sleep loss and microbiome stuff.
If you're going to drink, probably should be doing other healthy behaviors anyway.
No one's saying it's terrible.
I'll have a drink every once in a while.
I'm not an alcoholic.
If you're a non-alcoholic adult, one or two, I love like a good white tequila with soda and lime, so good.
But I don't really like alcohol enough to be able to comment past that.
And I haven't had a drink in years.
But the reality is that One study after another saying moderate drinking's good for you, no drinking's better for you, cancer risk.
This is never gonna stop.
It's a field.
Now we have enough data, people can make their decision.
Right?
Everyone knows sleep is important.
There's no field to be had except to how to figure out to get sleep better, in my opinion, okay?
Sleep deprivation's bad, but you're not gonna get dementia or die from a couple bad nights sleep.
That's also true.
So it's almost like the way things have split politically has become the way that health information has split.
And I'm fighting tooth and nail, and I know you are and other people are as well, to try and continue to shine light on the field that is psychedelics, the field that includes cannabis, the field that includes things like weight loss and Ozempic, but also exercise and all the other good things.
And somehow, and maybe you can tell me, because I'm new to the media thing, newer than you, certainly.
For some reason, people don't like that.
It's like the brain needs like a black and white thing.
It's like they can't seem to just deal with the fact that like, look, you'll find evidence for and evidence against.
Unfortunately, one of the things that happen in journalism is people stop buying newspapers.
And when people stop buying newspapers, the only way you can get someone to go to your website and click on a link is you have to have some sort of inflammatory headline, something that excites you.
Something that angers you, something that like gives you some information, some secret information that wasn't available before.
Well, they're jumping around in the ring, and they'll stop every once in a while and look and go, hey, Rick Rubin.
Like, it's wild.
Like, he's that much of a fixture.
It's so great.
He's there with his red lens glasses and the whole thing.
He does the sunlight.
He's gotten much healthier.
He looks great.
He takes really great care of himself.
But I think he's right.
I think nature has a truth.
It has an order to it.
Science's job is to try and unveil that truth to the best of our abilities.
But wrestling, admittedly, everyone agrees it's made up.
So at least we agree on that.
Whereas I think so much of what we've been talking about today is like the media At what point do we realize there are portions that are true, there are portions that are made up?
I believe that human beings should be able to differ on opinions.
But I should know that you're being honest and you're telling the truth.
So as soon as you write something that I know is biased and twisted and you've distorted things and taking things out of context, well, I know that you're not in the truth game.
So your opinion's nonsense.
Whatever you say is horseshit.
I want to talk to someone that's trying to figure out what's right and what's wrong, not someone who's trying to win.
And everybody's trying to win.
This is a real problem.
But win what?
Win the discussion.
They attach whatever the discussion is.
Whether it's weightlifting is more important than cardio, or you should be a vegan versus you should be a carnivore.
They attach whatever this argument is to their own sense of self-worth.
And it's very important to them that they counter your arguments and win this little chess match.
And that's what it is.
They're playing a little game.
I play games, so I don't like playing games when I talk to people.
I like playing pool.
The game is like making people laugh.
The game is jujitsu.
How do I get your back?
Like these are games I like.
I like games.
So when I communicate, I don't like games, but I recognize that especially earlier in my life before I I started recognizing patterns in podcasts like, what don't I like when people are talking?
I don't like when someone's biased.
I don't like when someone is talking over people.
I don't like when someone's misrepresenting someone's words or someone's trying to win rather than considering what the other person's saying.
So when someone's considering what the other person's saying, then you get this beautiful sort of sharing of ideas without ego.
And the real problem is the ego.
The ego getting attached to winning a conversation and being correct.
And they get in this fucking frenzy where they can't even communicate anymore.
And they're completely attached and married to their ideas.
The best thing, the best advice I can give people on this is don't be attached to your ideas.
They're just ideas.
Examine why you believe them.
There's many times in my life where someone has hit me with some facts and I've thought about my...
I go, oh, you know why I believe that?
This is why.
Because I thought this.
And then I was saying, well, if you believe that, then this has to be untrue.
But I don't want to say that.
So I've attached myself to this thing.
And now I've connected my...
And when I'm engaging with someone, I'm not just engaging in this...
Pure intellectual sharing of ideas and a discussion of merit.
I'm now in a win-lose situation.
I'm trying to win.
And I could win by deception.
And you see people do that all the time.
And it's so gross when you catch people doing that on a podcast.
When you realize you're not even considering these other possibilities because you're dismissing them without any consideration because you just want to achieve a goal of victory.
You just want to play checkmate.
And that's all they're doing.
And that's why the media is going to make themselves obsolete, because that's not happening in podcasts.
In the best podcasts, whether it's Chris Williamson, whether it's Lex Friedman, the best podcasts are a true conversation.
And I want to know why you think the way you think.
And when I get that in my head, I can consider it.
And then I can say, well, this is why I don't think that's true.
Because I think this way.
This is my perspective.
I might be wrong.
I might be right.
Who knows?
But this is just how I feel.
When you can do that and learn how to do that, and it took me a while to learn how to do that, it makes all conversations better.
It makes all friendships better.
Like you get to really understand why a person, like maybe you and a buddy had a disagreement about something.
You say, well, what did you think?
You're like, I thought you were going to do that.
I'm like, I never said I was going to do that.
Why would I do that?
Like, I thought you were going to do that, but we didn't talk about that, did we?
No.
So you're mad at something that you didn't even talk to me about.
Like, and you thought that I should have just known.
Come on, man.
That's crazy.
You're just attributing all these negative things to a person, and then you can work things out.
You can talk about things, as long as the person's not bullshitting you.
As soon as you've got people in your life that are bullshitting you, it's like, oh, you're not even having real conversations.
You're playing a stupid game of tic-tac-toe all day long with your friends.
When your friends can open up to you, and this is one of the reasons why people like sharing embarrassing information with friends, because I know I can trust you.
I can tell you this stupid fucking thing that I did.
I will say, and I'm not just saying that, you know, with each passing year, and I've looked forward to like approaching 50, because I'm like, now I can say things like with each passing year or by this stage.
But I also realized the other day, I lived a long period of my life where I didn't really have a sense of the fact that I would die.
I'd watched the Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford, 2005, where he talks about this notion that we're going to die is so critical, and I couldn't get in touch with it.
Recently, I'm like, oh, Like time's gonna come up.
Every time I go down for a meditation, I do this like non-sleep deep rest yoga nidra meditation.
I like go do the long exhale.
I'm like, someday it's gonna just be last exhale.
And I'm not looking forward to dying.
Lord knows I'm not looking forward to dying.
But I realized, I'm like, this is great.
It's very freeing.
Cause I had this realization the other day in a meditation.
No psychedelics involved in this one.
And I realized I can continue to just be curious and explore.
And I think it's that ego detachment, a little slice of that.
This is bad.
This is good.
I'm learning from this.
This was good.
This was hard.
I learned a lot from that.
I learned what I needed to change from that and just be moving forward.
It's this removing this thing of like, like you said, like this game all day long of like, not that I was in that mode or I didn't think I was, but this need to win, right?
It's sort of like being an explorer.
I'm a brain explorer.
I've been a brain explorer for a long time.
I love biology, love animals, like I'm an explorer.
And I think the definition of curiosity to me is that you're not attached to the outcome.
I will say, we know how we feel about people when we see them succeed.
Because I think there's this natural reflex, like when you hear like, oh, that really shitty person that you knew in school, like they got pancreatic cancer.
Everyone just goes, oh, like that sucks.
That sucks.
But when you hear, hey, you know that person that you used to really dislike or that you had friction with?
And like, they just like, IPO'd, like they're doing great.
You know immediately, do I like that person or not?
Because if you're happy for them, presumably you like them.
Rarely is it neutral either.
I mean, I can't think of anyone that I don't want to see succeed, except maybe a few individuals I think are actually evil.
But those are extremely rare.
But I think, it sounds like you're also a competitive person.
I didn't do a lot of competitive sports.
I'm very curious about this.
I'm competitive with myself, but you did combat sport.
I did skateboarding, played a little soccer, did some swimming, running, weightlifting.
Your brain was weaned in fighting a lot of the time.
You do develop like this insane kind of hyper-competitive, because the consequences are so grave.
You know, I always say about MMA that it's high-level problem-solving with dire physical consequences.
And that's really what it is.
It's high-level problem-solving.
You're literally doing combat, hand-to-hand combat, with your body, with someone who's an expert at it.
Which is so crazy.
Fighting a black belt is so crazy.
This is a person who's dedicated their life to kicking people into the shadow realm and you're deciding to try to kick them first before they kick you.
Which is just nuts.
It's a nutty way to live.
But the negative aspects of it You develop this hyper competitiveness because you're also developing at an accelerated rate when you're a teenager.
So when I was a teenager, I had no bills, I had no problems, I lived at home, I didn't have any real Like an adult-type stress.
You know, bills, family to feed, dealing with the community, work problems.
I had nothing.
So my entire focus was just on this one thing, martial arts.
I mean, like, literally, you come into the world, baby's flopping, you know, like, little bug, move, move, move, move.
Neuronal connections are being removed by the thousands, tens of thousands by the day so that you get fine-tuned movement.
It's like you're a plasticity machine and then you're thinking and your notions about boys and girls and teachers and parents and good things and bad things and what that means and what that means and who's a hero and who's a villain.
Like the brain is just placing things into boxes and symbols.
It's like it's an unbelievable phenomenon.
And it's happening when you're a teenager, then you throw hormones into the mix.
People often don't talk about this.
Then you add hormones and now you're adding the drive that is hormones related to like really hardwired, evolutionarily selected things like reproduction.
Fighting, right?
We all have brain circuits for fighting.
There's a brain area.
David Anderson's laboratory at Caltech has studied this.
I think we talked about it before.
You stimulate this little region of the ventromedial hypothalamus, the specific neurons, and the animals will mate.
They'll mount or the females will go into lordosis.
They'll arch their back to expose their genitals.
You stimulate other neurons in that exact same area, ventromedial hypothalamus.
You know what happens?
They go into a rage.
They want to rip apart the other animal.
There are videos of this online.
You can put the mouse in there with a plastic glove filled with air, stimulate these neurons and the animal will just attack that thing.
And then you stop the stimulation and the animal just Wow, little robots.
Our brains have these circuits.
As Jung said, we have all things inside of us.
The extent to which we learn to suppress or exacerbate depends on experience, its nature, and nurture.
But we come into this world hardwired with the capacity for most any of these behaviors to emerge.
Your daughter fortunately got very good at drawing, right?
That probably is handed off through some slight genetic bias handed on through you.
And your partner, your wife, to create a slight bias towards looking at the world in a particular way, an artistic sense, something about aesthetics, pay attention to curved corners versus square corners, whatever it is.
And she's been doing it since she was really little.
But also, going back to Floyd Mayweather, Floyd Mayweather started boxing when he was a little kid.
And there's a thing about striking.
And it's not a hard, fast rule because there's some freaks out there, some athletic freaks, and there's some people that come from other sports that have incredible speed and dexterity and an understanding over their body that allows them to pick up striking better than others.
But there's something about people that learn when they're young that are always better than everybody else.
No matter how good you are, there's certain guys like Anderson Silva or there's certain fighters that learn at a young age and you just can't fuck with them.
So afterwards, there's a bunch of posting on Instagram.
Then they show a picture of Cole Hawker when he's like eight years old holding a medal where he was running the 1500 and he's doing like four minutes and change.
That's a mile.
He's a mile or he's a kid running four and some change as a little kid.
So this brings it back to your point, which is, like, nowadays we're seeing the selection of people who probably have a genetic bias towards something, a love of it, like running, right, plus immense amounts of experience.
And their nervous system, like he was shaped miling.
That's a nervous system that miles.
I'll tell you, you can also walk and talk and eat because I've met him, but that's a nervous system that was shaped around running the 1500 per mile.
So when you see it, they're like the top, top, top 1%, it's so different than like my field where you can't go to graduate school to get a training in neuroscience until you're in your twenties, unless you're a phenom.
So you can't go to school for this.
And so I think when people look at what They naturally oriented to when they were young and they stayed with that.
That's the thing that you had maybe a genetic, probably a genetic leaning toward.
I think because of the online learning platforms, I think of, because of, I even like the sport that I grew up, unfortunately wasn't very good at, or maybe fortunately, who knows, I was skateboarding, right?
So many of my friends went on to start companies, became pro skateboarders, a lot of them didn't, but I didn't have a propensity for it, kept getting hurt, broke my foot three times, I was like so frustrated, it was unbelievable, so I went in a different direction, went in the science direction, turned out to be my thing.
But now, The little kids, literally little kids, boys and girls, like this girl Reese Nelson, she skates with power on vert, not like a little kid going.
She's got power and technical.
And guys like Tony Hawk are like, whoa.
It's because they have all this exposure to 900s and tricks and ramps, and there's just way more people feeding the pool of potential Professional skateboarders.
So when you look at the Olympics or the X Games now, you're getting a much greater selection of the huge pool, bigger sample size, feeding into it.
You're getting the genetic gifts.
Her mom travels with her everywhere.
She dedicates near 100% of her time to this.
So it's a lot of what you were saying, like we're selecting earlier.
We're pulling from a larger pool, so you're going to get the genetic freaks.
The pole vaulter guy keeps winning world records or beating his own world record.
I saw him get at the Worlds at Eugene about two years ago.
He broke the world record.
He keeps beating the world record.
This guy's been pole vaulting his whole life.
He's been playing for a little kid.
So the earlier you get him, the more the nervous system can be shaped that way.
Well, this is a problem that I see in combat sports.
Because in combat sports, you have guys who have a championship mentality.
Like, they could have been a champion, but they didn't start early enough.
And even though they have this extraordinary mind, so do the people that started when they were four.
Like, this idea that you're tough, so you're the only one that's tough, that's an egocentric idea that a lot of men have.
And it's a very bizarre conversation to have with these men.
I don't think he's tough.
I think if the going gets tough, you're never gonna find out if the going gets tough.
He's gonna fuck you up.
It's not even gonna be hard for him.
You don't even understand what you're saying.
But there's the mind, the ego, plays this cruel trick on you that doesn't allow you to accurately assess your abilities.
So you have this bizarre notion that you are exceptional for no reason whatsoever.
And there's a lot of men have that.
A lot of men have that bizarre thing.
The problem If you have an incredible drive, an incredible discipline, but you didn't start striking until you're 26, if you have a Thai boxing fight against a guy like, there's a guy right now who's one of the best in the world, his name is Tawanchai, and he has this insane left kick.
He's so left kick dominant.
Most of his game is his left kick, but it's so goddamn good.
He just slams it into the guy's arms, slams it into the guy's legs, and he has this snake-like movement of his ability to just slide out of the way and then counter and then slam you with a hard left low kick.
He's terrifying.
And I don't care how tough you are.
You don't have that ability.
And you probably are never gonna get there.
Like the margins, the differences of tenths of a second, hundredths of a second here and there.
He's so good.
You're not gonna catch him.
So even if you're the baddest fucking dude in the world, in your mind, this is Talanchai.
Let me hear some of this.
But go for the beginning.
Go to the beginning so you can hear the volume of him hitting the pads.
But this guy is fucking nasty, but he's all left kick.
Like, it's like 80% of his game, man.
It's crazy how much of his game...
I mean, he can do everything.
The guy does everything.
But his left kick is so fucking powerful that every time it hits you, your power bar goes down.
If he hits your arms, if he hits your body, it's just like all left kick.
Bang, bang, bang.
And it's so smooth.
He's so good, man.
He's so good.
So if you're a guy and you're some badass Navy SEAL dude and you're 30 years old and you make it to the Muay Thai gym and you decide, hey, I'm only 30. I'm going to fight pro.
You don't have enough time.
There's not enough time in the world for you to get to where he's at and he's going to get better quicker.
So if we look at this through the lens of nervous systems, I know that there have been conversations that you've had here and elsewhere, like, would a crocodile versus a gorilla, these kind of crazy things.
We don't need to reignite that.
But I think when we're at the...
Discussion around true peak performance, like somebody grew up running miles, who grew up throwing left hooks, who grew up slipping punches.
Yes, they're both homo sapiens, they're both humans, but you're talking about two different animals.
When you're talking about the person that got into it in their 20s and 30s versus the person that started off young, You're talking about two different nervous systems.
If we were to look at their brains under magnetic resonance imaging, you'd see a lot of things that are similar.
The breathing centers, the stuff that controls the heart rate.
Everything is mostly in the same place.
But I'd be willing to bet everything that you look at Ryan Garcia's brain and you go, that left hook, if you were able to throw the left hook in the thing, you see it light up, you'd be like, wow, either more efficient, more Maybe more space allocated to it, maybe less space, but the speed of transmission is just faster.
You're talking about a different nervous system, which is just a different way of saying a different person, but it's more meaningful in my view because what you're talking about is Cars with extra cylinders.
You're talking about a race between two different vehicles.
And so I think if somebody is very educated in the fight game or is educated in any domain, they're able to see that difference and give people really good advice.
Whereas with the person themselves, they can't see that.
It's like we look the same, he trains, I train, I train harder, I'm driven.
It's like, no, it's not the same.
And I think that's why, to me, something like a Cole Hawker win over a world record holder, as is the other stuff we were just watching, incredibly impressive because you say he's in fifth position and he's got a shorter stride and the other guy's got all this world record stuff under his belt and he's done great as well.
I think he won the 5,000, Ingebrigtsen won the 5,000.
But Cole's just like, Pulls something out, like they're very close in terms of their abilities.
They're the same, roughly the same species, right?
You know, in the context that we're talking about.
And then somehow through sheer will is able to outkick him.
I've never been to, I've been to Louisville once, but someone told me, I don't know if this is true or not, but they're more, if you looked at the number of medals from people from Kentucky, It's almost like in a complete country.
I have a friend who just retired as chair of the neurobiology department, it's actually neuroanatomy there, my friend Bill Guido at University of Louisville.
One of the great things about being a scientist was, you know, my lab now is run at a much smaller scale.
But for years, I just traveled the country, these places I would never think to go to.
I had a great Argentine meal in Louisville.
I went to...
In St. Louis, I had one of the best meals of my life.
I don't think I'd ever go to St. Louis, but I was visiting Wash U. And then there are certain cities that you hear terrible things about, and they're true.
Right, so it's almost like they're selecting the same way, like someone, if you wanted to build a Floyd Mayweather, you would select, you know, great father was a great boxer, uncle's a great boxer, boxing's in the family, starts up young, he's got great genetics, the whole deal.
Went through all the trials and tribulations, and this has been public.
Had his issues, then got sober and came back to skateboarding and just Skateboard of the year for Thrasher, which is a huge deal.
You just see like the young Danny way.
Tony Hawk grew up skateboarding.
His body, his nervous system is skateboarding.
And I love this aspect to people in sport, cause we see it, but it's, you know, I think I remember listening to like In hearing conversations like this and thinking, yeah, but like, if you're not into that, where is it?
And this is where, man, I could just keep thinking about all the time, but forgive me.
Rick has always said, the key to being really great at something is to just be you.
And I'm like, that sounds like about as mystical wrapped in a riddle as it possibly be.
All right, so I go over there to spend time with him.
He's out of the U.S. right now.
And it was the weirdest visit ever.
I go over to visit Rick, and we'd tread water in the morning, and we'd listen to this podcast, A History of 100 Rock and Roll Songs by Andrew Hickey.
It's sort of like Cuban Lab Podcast, but rock and roll, like super nerdy, long, drawn out.
There are a few podcasts like that, like Founders Podcast, I love that one.
Mine is like super nerdy, right?
About a given topic.
So we would do that and then we would just like sit around.
And I'm like, what are you gonna do?
He's like, well, let's just like sit.
And we would just sit with eyes closed.
And I was like, all right, then we have lunch.
And then he was like, well, let's just sit.
And then at one point, I'm like, Rick, what are we doing?
And he's like, well, when you keep your body still and your mind is really active, amazing ideas come forward.
And that's when I was like, oh my goodness.
Because my first guest on my podcast was a guy named Carl Diceroth.
He's the world's best bioengineer.
He's a psychiatrist.
He raised five kids.
He's a phenom.
He'll probably win a Nobel Prize.
And he told me his practice of coming up with ideas is after his kids are asleep at night, sits down and he keeps his body completely still and he forces himself to think in complete sentences, keep his mind super active.
And I was like, wow.
And it turns out that if you look historically, a number of scientists have talked about this, a number of creatives have talked about this.
And then it, I don't have any studies to support this, but then I realized, what is the state of our brain or time when the brain is very active and our body is still, and our mind is coming up with all sorts of ideas?
It's rapid eye movement sleep.
We're paralyzed during rapid eye movement sleep.
We have sleepatonia.
And everybody knows based on dream studies and studies of creativity that during rapid eye movement sleep is two things happen.
There's a removal of some of the emotional load of previous days experiences, which is why rapid eye movement sleep is so critical for emotion regulation afterwards.
And for the regulating depression and things like that.
But also we come up with new configurations.
And so Carl Diceroth, Einstein, there are reports of this, of him walking and then closing his eyes and stopping and describing his mind moving forward while his body was still.
Very kind of subjective.
Rick has this practice.
And I thought to myself, like, wow.
So I've started trying to do a sort of meditation where I force myself to be very bodily still with my mind very active.
I can't.
You know, just started this.
Kind of interesting in light of creativity.
But the other thing, and this goes to what you were saying before, you know, Rick came up through punk rock, punk rock and hip hop, right?
I love punk rock music, grew up on it.
That era in their 80s, punk rock in New York is amazing.
But the whole thing, like Beastie Boys, he was close with the Ramones, Joe Strummer, all this, and then hip hop.
What he understands, and I can't speak for him, but what he understands is that there's this energy in an early field, let's say of music, where they're not thinking about making money doing it.
Like NWA, those guys were just being themselves when they were making music, right?
I watched that movie, The Defiant Ones, about Dre and I think it's Jimmy Iovine, about- But it's really about the energy of early hip hop.
And then they talk about Eminem and a bunch of other things.
Or you watch, Rick and I at night, we'd watch Ramones documentaries or Clash documentaries.
And it's like, it's the energy of something that's new where people are just being themselves and they're not thinking about making a ton of money on a record.
A really great producer comes in and captures that energy.
And rolls it forward.
And usually what ends up happening is then the general public falls in love with it.
And then a bunch of things happen to those people.
And then whatever dysfunction exists in their world gets amplified.
And then we hear about it.
There's kind of a consistent theme over and over, but it's like, and then one of the things that came up when I was visiting Rick, cause I was like, you know, I feel like, like I came up through skateboarding, punk rock music.
I'm not a musician, that incredible energy.
I don't know much about hip hop, I was like, science had that when I first got into neuroscience.
Like no one talked about neuroscience.
It didn't even have a name.
We're just like brain explorers, cutting up brains, figuring out what to do, trying to figure out what these structures did and all this stuff.
And then podcasting.
It's like, I really feel like the podcasters, at least some of us, right?
It's like, it's like punk rock.
It's like hip hop because we're not thinking about, I wasn't just sit down and like start my podcast and be like, I'm going to start the Kuperman Lab podcast.
I was like, I've just got all this stuff in me that I want to tell people because I think it's super cool.
And a lot of it I think might also be really useful to them.
And you're just being you.
So when Rick or Lex is just being Lex, or Chris Williamson is just being Chris Williamson, or Whitney Cummings is just being Whitney Cummings.
So when a podcast works, I think it's because you're just being you.
And it seems so obvious, it's kind of almost trite, but Rick is like, exactly.
And the biggest mistake is to take the feedback, the comments, whatever, the hit pieces, whatever, and to change who you are.
Now, there is sometimes useful information that comes back to us in ways we could do better in life, and certainly I am doing that.
But the point is, at its essence, it's like the thing that makes podcasting beautiful to me is that I think we're right now, thanks in large part to you and some of the other early entrants, guys, guys that paved the way, is that It's a real thing.
It's a real discussion.
There's no script.
We didn't talk about what we were going to talk about before.
Whereas when you go out there and you see these highly overproduced or media-infused podcasts, it's not real.
If you look, you are consistently, this podcast is consistently miles and miles ahead of everybody else in terms of The amount of consumption of it.
Why?
Because it's a place where people immediately and consistently go, oh, it's like Joe's just being Joe.
It's just like a real thing.
And when I say a real thing, this is what Rick means.
Like people just being themselves, which like your loves, the things that bother you.
And so I think that podcasting to me, it's like skateboarding.
It's like punk rock.
It's like hip hop.
It's like a sport.
It's like an art.
Like if you watch the movie, one of my favorite movies, the Basquiat movie, right?
With Benicio Del Toro and Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walker and David Bowie.
Like, why was he so amazing?
Is because Jean-Michel Basquiat was just being himself until the fame got to him.
An article got written about how he was, you know, Warhol's lapdog, they called him or something like that.
And you can see him obsessing about it.
And there's this amazing riff.
If people haven't seen it, they should just look up on YouTube, like how long does it take to get famous from the movie Basquiat?
And it's Penisio del Toro who plays the young Vincent Gallo telling him, here's what happens when you get famous.
And it's an amazing clip because it explains the arc of fame and people becoming famous for being themselves and then doing the things that they think they should do to stay Popular and it destroys the whole thing.
And so Rick's message is, Rick's talent is to feel real energy.
He can tell what's real and what's fake.
That's why he likes wrestling.
He knows it's fake.
And then feel that and encourage somebody to do more of that, less of other stuff.
But the message he just keeps saying, and most of our conversations end with him just saying like, yeah, man, just continue to be you.
You, curious, adventure, whatever makes Andrew, Andrew.
I know what those things are.
It's not about me.
This is really about, hopefully, if people hear it, like Rick is saying in that book and in all his messages, we all have some little spark or gift or genetic bias towards something.
And if you feed that, and it's a benevolent thing, you become that, it stays real.
Again, I don't know hip-hop that well, but you don't have to see Eminem very many times or watch 8 Mile more than a couple of times or listen to his music and understand there's an energy there.
He said he had a teacher that said, Oliver will go far, provided he does not go too far.
And I saw that I read that right about the point that I recently saw the documentary Roadrunner about Bourdain And I actually had a chance to sit down and talk to Morgan Neville, who made that movie.
And I didn't know much about him, but like, what I saw there was just like an adventurer, like a super curious person, an adventurer and a punk rocker.
Like he was from that era of like Ramones, like it was like, and it was just a spectacular, like, I don't know why I didn't know more about him.
I should have, because we have, there's kind of overlap in interest sets around like the, you know, New York, punk rock, that era that I've always been fascinated by.
I'm a few years behind there, but I was like, wow, I just saw genuine curiosity in people and things.
And I realized the food part was kind of incidental.
It was like the person.
It was just being him.
And that's why I think so many people loved him is because he was just being him.
And I don't know any more about it, but I feel like People just being themselves is like the ultimate in personal development.
He was also brilliant as a writer and he would write all of his own narratives.
All the narration was all his writing and he was just so good at it.
So good at expressing his joy for different cultures and trying out their cuisine and what he admired about them as human beings and about their spirit.
And that thing that you were talking about Basquiat experienced, I think everybody experiences.
There's a temptation towards audience capture.
There's this desire to appease those and please those who love you, maybe at the expense of your own self-esteem and your own perspective.
Because you see things through others' eyes and how they perceive you to be rather than who you actually are.
And you're so aware and so painfully self-aware that you lose your ability to just be yourself, what Rick's talking about, just to be you.
And that happens to most people because it is a complicated drug, which is why it's a terrible drug to give to young people.
Fame is a terrible drug to give to young people.
And one of the ways that I mitigate all this stuff is through voluntary adversity, voluntary physical adversity, and then mental adversity, doing difficult things.
And the more difficult things that I do, the easier this weird state that I find myself in is.
And I think one of the reasons why I'm so comfortable with it, because I'm uncomfortable all the fucking time.
I'm voluntarily uncomfortable most of the day.
So regular uncomfortable, it's like, yeah, whatever.
It's not 196 degrees for 25 minutes.
I did that this morning before I got here.
That shit's hard.
That's really hard.
That's like you're going to die hard.
You're going to die hard is so much harder than, oh, somebody doesn't like me.
Oh, somebody took my clip and took it out of context.
Cardio is one of the very best things for alleviating anxiety.
And I know there's a lot of studies that have been done on weightlifting and about strength resistance training and alleviating anxiety.
And I think that's a fact.
I think that's true as well.
But there's something about I might die cardio.
I might die cardio is a different kind of cardio.
It's like if you can swim to the point where you do laps in the pool and you do laps in the pool where you're like, I don't know if I'm gonna make it to the end of that fucking pool.
And when you do get out of that pool, regular life is way easier.
Period.
Full stop.
No discussion.
I think when people are talking about cardio, they're engaging in maybe zone 2 type cardio.
I will get on the assault bike and not go very fast and do 50 minutes and watch television.
You know, I will do that, but I also do Tabata sprints on that motherfucker where I do 20 minutes sprinting, 10 second rest, excuse me, 20 seconds sprinting, 10 second rest, 20 seconds sprinting, and I do that in sets of four, four, eight reps.
And so I use that because you can really move easily in that.
I don't like a heavily loaded military vest.
It doesn't feel right to me.
And if I load from the back like a rock, I feel pitched forward.
So I like how smooth those morphos are.
Front and back.
Yeah, nice smooth feel.
And then I'll walk far that way, but then I'll do the same thing.
Except if I do it a little different, I'll go 10 second sprint.
20 second rest, do that eight times.
That's my Friday morning HIIT workout.
And I feel like I want to die by the last one.
But I think that I have an observation that's not backed by any formal science.
I'd like your thoughts on it.
I've known a lot of people who are kind of compulsive, anxious, or even outright addicts who then get really into running or any kind of cardio long distance endurance type sport.
And they seem to Again, not a scientific study.
They seem to get and stay sober.
Whereas I find that while weightlifting is really healthy and I really enjoy it, I've observed that it can create a kind of like tension in the body that doesn't like release completely, maybe even builds energy into the nervous system, so to speak.
And I do know a number of people Who have had challenges with drugs and alcohol.
I'm grateful that I haven't had those challenges, but have challenges with drugs and alcohol.
And they've gone the way of just weightlifting and they've been like multiple relapsers.
Now that is not a knock against weightlifting.
I think people should do resistance training and cardio, but it is kind of remarkable that people that do a lot of cardio seem to successfully beat their addictions.
Well, there's a guy where in his whatever it was, late 20s, took a look at his childhood, was like, well, I wasn't, you know, being, you know, my nervous system shaped to be a great athlete or a Navy SEAL, etc.
Looked at everything he had become, and he basically said a big hard no.
He's like, whatever it was that happened before then, he was going to shape his nervous system by putting in endless hours.
BPC-157, while only animal data, it's very clear, you know, it has the propensity to encourage fibroblasts, which are cells that, you know, make up things like, you know, tendon and cartilage, etc., and can really repair tissues.
I mean, you know, and I certainly have experienced, it can help repair things.
Well, my wish, I mean, I have no plans to go to Washington, but my wish is that things like BBC 157, some very interesting, I would say not cutting edge, but even further out, like bleeding edge, things like pinealine, which can help with regeneration of the pinealocytes are incredible for sleep, potentially.
We need these things explored.
And everyone for a while was like, peptides?
Oh, it sounds really kind of gray market weird.
And it can be.
But let's face it.
GLP-1 agonists.
That's a peptide that existed for years in the fitness and bodybuilding industry.
Now it's probably approaching a trillion dollar industry someday.
The difference is that has a tremendous windfall in terms of the amount of money you can generate from it.
BPC-157 can be made by virtually any laboratory.
And it's probably going to cut back on orthopedic surgeries.
And that's the gross...
The gross reality of a lot of this stuff.
A lot of this stuff is going to cost companies money because people won't be taking pain medication.
They won't be taking anti-inflammatory medication.
They won't be getting as many surgeries.
And that's where it gets fucked up.
Because the healthcare system, the business of healthcare, is really set up not...
Looking at people is like, what's the best way and the most efficient way and the most cost-effective way in terms of for the actual patient to treat them?
No.
It's how do I make the most money from this person?
Well, we did an episode on back health and strengthening the back and back pain.
We had Stu McGill on and it was wild.
I've never received emails and stuff like that.
Like half of the people or more saying this, the McGill big three helped me so much, might stabilize my back.
It's like a, you know, he's got his three movements.
You can look it up on YouTube.
They're easy to find there, but it's all about, and he's in great shape in his late sixties.
Incredible, incredible shape.
Chops wood, he's up in Canada.
He basically is giving behavioral tools to stabilize and strengthen the spine and deal with back pain.
The other half were like, what is this?
You know, you can't treat back pain.
There's a pseudoscience.
And then everyone telling me how much benefit they got out of McGill's big three.
And then the war among the physios, like the physios, that's an ugly field, I'll tell you.
And I asked someone, why is this field of, you know, exercise physiology so brutal?
I asked Andy Galpin, I asked, and it turns out it's because it's very hard to get a lot of clients.
And the moment that somebody comes out with knowledge that's very useful for a lot of people, they're potentially taking away their So, you know, to say nothing of the pain treatment world, we had a guy on our podcast named Sean Mackey.
He's an MD-PhD.
He runs our pain clinic at Stanford.
And he talks about the biopsychosocial model of pain.
And he's very open-minded.
Meds work in some cases.
So does your emotional or cognitive interpretation of the pain.
What does it mean?
So do things like meditation.
Like he's basically trying to incorporate all these different things.
He's very holistic for lack of a better word.
But if you look at most pain docs, They're not that evolved.
They're just like, okay, this is what you use.
It might be addictive, might not be addictive, but they're not ever talking about strengthening the systems that gave away in the first place.
So I totally agree with you.
There is no replacement for self-care.
There's just no replacement, no pill, no potion, no injection, no nothing.
There are things that can help, but there's nothing that can replace behaviors.
Because our nervous system was evolved for these behaviors.
You've been a great friend to me and a great source of support through a bunch of different aspects of podcasting and supporting the discussions about health and exercise and forcing me to make my cold plunge a little colder, have me sniff smelling salt.
You know, there are very few places in the world where you can have a real discussion about real things from all the angles and know that the person sitting across from you is being truly open-minded about it.