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May 27, 2025 - This Past Weekend - Theo Von
02:18:22
#585 - Andrew Huberman

Andrew Huberman is a Stanford University neuroscientist and host of the “Huberman Lab” podcast which focuses on health, wellbeing and science.  Andrew Huberman joins Theo to talk about how we can optimize our daily routines for the better, the science behind strong romantic relationships, and the powerful connection between dopamine and addiction.  Andrew Huberman: https://www.instagram.com/hubermanlab/?hl=en  ------------------------------------------------ Tour Dates! https://theovon.com/tour New Merch: https://www.theovonstore.com ------------------------------------------------- Sponsored By: Celsius: Go to the Celsius Amazon store to check out all of their flavors. #CELSIUSBrandPartner #CELSIUSLiveFit https://amzn.to/3HbAtPJ DraftKings: Pick 6 from DraftKings is the most fun way to play fantasy sports. Download the DraftKings Pick Six app NOW and use code THEO. That’s code THEO for new customers to play $5, get $50 in bonus picks. Better payouts. Bigger wins. Only with Pick6 from DraftKings. The Crown is yours. https://draftkings.com  Moonpay: Head over to http://www.moonpay.com/theo  to sign up Shady Rays: Go to http://shadyrays.com and use code THEO to get 35% off polarized sunglasses. Amra: Go to http://tryarmra.com/THEO or enter THEO to get 15% off your first order. ShipStation: Get a free trial at https://www.shipstation.com/theo. Thanks to ShipStation for sponsoring the show! Sonic: Head to Sonic to try the Sonic Smasher. LIVE FREE EAT SONIC. http://www.sonicdrivein.com/menu  ------------------------------------------------- Gambling Problem? Call one eight hundred gambler. Help is available for problem gambling. Call eight eight eight seven eight nine seven seven seven seven, or visit c c p g dot org in Connecticut. Must be eighteen plus, age and eligibility restrictions vary by jurisdiction. Pick6 not available everywhere, including New York and Ontario. Void where prohibited. One per new customer. Bonus awarded as non-withdrawable Pick Six Bonus Picks that expire in fourteen days. Limited time offer. Terms at pick six dot draftkings dot com slash promos.  ------------------------------------------------- Music: “Shine” by Bishop Gunn Bishop Gunn - Shine ------------------------------------------------ Submit your funny videos, TikToks, questions and topics you'd like to hear on the podcast to: tpwproducer@gmail.com Hit the Hotline: 985-664-9503 Video Hotline for Theo Upload here: https://www.theovon.com/fan-upload Send mail to: This Past Weekend 1906 Glen Echo Rd PO Box #159359 Nashville, TN 37215 ------------------------------------------------ Find Theo: Website: https://theovon.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/theovon Facebook: https://facebook.com/theovon Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thispastweekend Twitter: https://twitter.com/theovon YouTube: https://youtube.com/theovon Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheoVonClips Shorts Channel: https://bit.ly/3ClUj8z ------------------------------------------------ Producer: Zach https://www.instagram.com/zachdpowers Producer: Trevyn https://www.instagram.com/trevyn.s/  Producer: Nick https://www.instagram.com/realnickdavis/ Producer: Colin https://www.instagram.com/colin_reiner/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Today's guest is a neuroscientist.
He's a professor.
He's a podcaster.
He hosts one of the biggest shows in the world called Huberman Lab, where he focuses on helping us to become our best selves and get the most out of our bodies.
I believe that he's one of the people who's responsible for bringing health and self-evaluation into the mainstream.
I'm grateful for the chance to finally link up today with the one and only Andrew Huberman.
Shine on me and I will find a song I've been singing just before.
And now I've been moving.
Whitney's been amazing to me.
Since I moved to LA, she kind of ushered me in.
I didn't really understand LA.
I moved to Topanga during the pandemic, set up there with my bulldog, started doing the podcast in a closet, and she kind of taught me about LA.
And I'd never done anything public-facing.
Let's start.
Let's just start to get a little bit more.
Yeah, we can do it.
But we can talk about it.
I mean, I think we should mention what a cute baby Henry is.
That kid is so cute.
Oh, the baby is beautiful.
I think.
Bring up Henry.
Bring up Henry Cummins.
Or I don't even know if it has a stage name.
I have no idea if the baby has a front name or last name.
I'm pretty sure it's Henry Cummings.
Oh, my God.
That's beautiful.
Oh, yeah.
Look at him.
He's got your haircut.
Wow, he does, dude.
And you can tell he cuts it himself, too.
Yeah, he's a, I've, you know, I've met him, and he's just such a good-natured kid.
He looks AI right there.
He looks like Dermot Kennedy a little as well there.
He loves animals, which is great because she's, you know, surrounded herself with animals.
Are you trying to attack a resemblance there?
I'm just saying the child has a slight resemblance to the remarkable crooner Dermot Kennedy.
And look, whoa, hold on, whoa, whoa, bro.
I'm going to have to call my sponsor, dude.
Oh, that's a great photo.
That is super cool.
Yeah.
I think that last shirt says, I think that shirt says single mom.
Yeah.
Ooh.
It's like a rock and roll.
When he's a punk rocker, we have a lot of friends through the punk rock community.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And she sometimes posts with Chris Cole, who's a guy grew up watching skateboarding.
I think he's in the Tony Hawk skateboarder game.
Is he?
Bring up a picture of Chris Cole.
I've heard of Nat King Cole, and I've heard of Cole.
There he is.
Yeah, he's a beast famous for doing tray flip down Wallenberg, which in the Bay Area, Wallenberg School is famous for a stair.
So he's a...
It's a school, and so they call it Wallenberg for skateboard.
I grew up skateboarding, and there it is.
Wallenberg's the third one down there, right?
Oh, yeah.
So this is like, this is one of the things that made Chris legendary.
That, and he always had those silly wristbands on.
Not wrist guards, wristbands.
But this is a long time ago.
That's a lot bigger than it might look.
No, it's.
And you actually have to, now they build roll-ins, but back then you would push in down the avenues.
This is so sick.
It's just him trying it over.
And it's so cool.
It's over and over and over.
And you can kind of start, even just watching this, you start to gain the and it's all bolts, as they say.
He lands perfect.
God, it's just so crazy how many times it's just such a little piece of perfection.
It's like just such an organized, specific moment, like the point of a pin when they when they land those things.
Super satisfying to watch.
It's got to feel incredible.
Yeah.
Oh, that's amazing.
He looks a little bit like your assistant that came in today, too.
Oh, yeah, he does look a little bit like Greg.
You're right.
They have a resemblance.
He looks a little bit like Greg.
Yeah, and they're friends, so that's interesting.
But yeah, that baby, God, I would have loved to have been her son or been or just had a chance.
Yeah, even I'm glad that, yeah, I'm happy that she has a baby.
Well, she's got that menagerie of animals like Mona, her pit bull ridgeback mix.
I love.
I also, I have a close relationship to her great Dane, Frank.
Oh, let me see that.
Like right now, I don't have a dog.
So a little while ago, I was like, I need some dog time.
So I went over there, and he thinks he's a puppy, and he crawled up on me on the couch.
And that's a different one.
Frank's gray, but that one's mixed.
There he is.
That's probably Frank.
And I woke up at two in the morning.
She had covered us with a blanket on the sofa and Frank was breathing into my face.
And it was a moment, but I love Great Danes because they think they're little dogs, but they're giant dogs.
So anyway, never a dull moment at Casa de Cummings.
No, she's always had excitement, and she definitely will free an animal if there's even, you know, she'll release a damn animal from anything.
Oh, if she hears that there's like a dog running around in the street, or I think this is right.
Check me on this.
We'll have to ask her.
But a while back, I think that she was trying to rescue a giraffe.
You know, you get these wealthy people that have exotic animals.
They want a giraffe or an elephant or something.
So she'll drop everything and like go try and rescue a giraffe.
She's a real animal lover.
She's definitely, who's the guy, William Wordsworth or whatever?
Who's no, who had the animal movie?
Dr. Doolittle.
She's like the female Dr. Doolittle.
Can talk to the animals.
Yeah.
I would love to see her do a show just for animals, even like a live performance just for animals and see how it goes.
But yeah, she'll pet anything, but I'm glad she's got that beautiful baby over there.
Andrew Huberman, good to see you, dude.
Great to meet you in person finally.
We've corresponded a little bit, but I'm a big fan.
And I heard your name mentioned at the inauguration of the President of the United States, and I went, this is wild.
Worlds colliding, right?
I think Dana White mentioned Joe Rogan and you at the inauguration of the most powerful person in the world.
And who else?
I'm sorry?
The Nelt Boys.
Well, he mentioned us and the Nelt Boys, and then he mentioned, and the most powerful person, Joe Rogan.
We definitely were like some satellites in the orbit, but it was really sweet of him.
I mean, I think you catch Dana White at 2 a.m., you know, and he'll drop some different names and stuff.
But yeah, that was crazy when that happened.
I remember my ex-girlfriend's mom just texted me, like, they just mentioned you on the inauguration address or something.
And I was like, what is going on that podcasting has become this thing?
It's just such a part of the universe, you know?
What do you think it is?
You know, like, what do you think it is?
Because you may even have more of a scientific look at it.
Why is podcasting just as common as like somebody saying the New York Times five years ago?
Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about this.
First of all, it's interesting that we looked at skateboarding earlier.
I've been lucky enough to get in on some things in the early phase, not the very earliest, but the early phase when things were kind of small and there wasn't a lot of money at first.
And then things kind of blow up.
When I was younger, I got into skateboarding.
Every kid in my town played soccer, swam.
I got really excited about skateboarding when it was kind of at a low point in terms of like there weren't a lot of kids skateboarding.
It had gone through a phase of popularity, then it had died in the early 90s.
What town was that you're in?
I grew up in the South Bay area.
So this is what now is known as South Palo Alto before the internet.
Oh, yeah.
So, you know, we worked hard when we were in high school to get a skate park put in.
There weren't many skate parks.
It was really small.
We used to take the 7F bus up to San Francisco, the famed Embarcadero or EMB crowd.
This is where people like Rob Deardick would show up.
Back then, he didn't have his show.
Actually, the photographer for my podcast, Mike Blayback, was taking photos of all those guys.
A lot of those guys now went on to have, well, Rob Deardick's famous, has his own show, Ridiculousness, and has done a bunch of other things, Robin Big.
Tony Hawk, of course, has lasted through all the peaks and valleys of skateboarding.
Pretty impressive.
You know, so back then it was really small.
I was going to contest where I met Frank Hawk.
Tony's dad was kind of running it a little bit like a baseball leader.
Frank Hawk, get into it.
Yeah, Frank and Nancy Hawk.
I'll tell you a funny story, actually.
When I was 14, I went to a contest at the Linda Vista Boys Club out in the middle of nowhere.
And when the contest ended, I was 14. When the contest ended, Frank came around and asked me and this kid Billy Waldman, who was like, they called him the demon child.
He's kind of a wild one.
He was my friend.
If you put Billy Waldman demon child, he'll show up.
You'll see it in his face.
Watch this.
Ready?
Look, that's what a demon child looks like.
He was a good kid.
But in any case, what ended up happening was Frank was like, hey, where are you guys going?
And we're like, well, we don't know.
I was going to take the bus to Lancaster, see my friend Joe Rickabosch, and somehow get home.
And he was like, no, no, you guys can't do that.
He was like a real protective dad.
So he and Nancy Hawk took me in.
I got to stay in Tony Hawk's bedroom that night with all the trophies everywhere.
And they took me out to dinner.
And I'll never forget, and this is how I got back in touch with Tony in recent years.
They had black coffee after dinner at like 8 p.m.
And I'd never seen that.
So a few years ago on Instagram, I wrote to Tony and said, hey, you know, your parents took me in when I was a little bit stranded.
And if you don't believe me, they drink coffee at 8.30 p.m.
after dinner.
And he wrote back and he goes, no way, you're the only person.
The only way to know that is to actually have a meal with them.
So anyway, you know, skateboarding back then, I got out of it.
I wasn't very good.
Okay.
I got put on a team out of sympathy.
I tried, but I kept getting team.
What do you mean?
The Dutch drink coffee late at night.
Bring that up real quick.
Who's drinking coffee very late at night?
Or see if Tony Hawk is Amsterdamian, if he's an Amsterdamian guy.
I believe he looks Amsterdamian to me.
Tony is like six foot five.
I know the Dutch.
And his son is tall as well.
You couldn't pick a more perfect last name for a professional skateboarder, right?
Well, that's another reason I believe that he's all in addition to his talent, which has helped him stand the test of time, is such a moniker.
There's nothing like that.
Tony Hawk.
Totally.
Tony is the most relatable name in the world.
And then just like, who don't want to be like, Tony Hawk is a predominantly British style of descent.
Oh, damn.
I was hoping we'd get him in Amsterdam.
All right.
That's all good.
But yeah, so what were you saying, brother Sarah?
Yeah, no.
So got into that early and then got hurt.
From the team, you said that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I got sponsored by a company called Thunder Truck Spitfire Wheels.
They put me on out of sympathy.
I'm still friends with the team manager from back then, and he'll tell you it was out of sympathy.
But I got to see a lot of friends turn pro, start companies.
Danny Way and Colin McKay started DC.
Oh, yeah.
DC, which eventually sold to Quicksilver.
They did that also with Ken Block, who was a rally car driver, unfortunately passed away a few years ago.
He was the guy that do Jim Conna, all the driving around cities.
You haven't seen Jim Conna in San Francisco?
Oh man, we're bringing back all the stuff.
Well, this is awesome.
Pull this up on YouTube.
So if you look at San Francisco and you say Ken Block, this is, I mean, so Ken unfortunately died in this snowmobile accident a few years ago, but this on YouTube is unbelievable.
I would go to the middle of it to really get a sense of.
And so they would drive around.
They basically just shut down big segments of the city.
So that's down at the piers.
And then all this, 119 million views, all this aerial footage shutting down, why not just jump between two streets in San Francisco?
Hell yeah.
So that was this.
Yeah, my friend Mike Blaback was the one photographing all this for DC.
So DC was initially skateboarding.
Danny and Colin and Danny's older brother, Damon, starred DC.
It has actually stood for something called Drawers Clothing, but DC Danny Colin.
And DC shoes, right?
DC shoes.
And then they went snowboarding, rally car, BMX, motocross, monster, you know, monster rock star.
All that was born out of essentially skateboarding and BMX early on.
Then X games took off.
So it's kind of like how, you know, in the 90s, skateboarding was really small.
Then it blew up.
Then it dies a little bit and it keeps coming back.
Now it's in the Olympics.
So when I got into neuroscience, because that's my official job, I'm a professor of neuroscience up at Stanford.
I don't currently run my lab anymore.
I tooled that down in 2023 so I could focus more on the podcast, but I still teach medical students, graduate students, and undergraduates.
Okay, so you're still practicing?
Yes.
Yeah.
And I ran a lab for more than a decade and really got into science when I was in college.
I decided, listen, I'm not going to become a professional skateboarder, not a musician.
I got to do something with my life.
I got into biology and psychology, and I started working in a lab.
And so even when I got into neuroscience, it was early.
There was no such thing called a neuroscience degree or a neuroscientist.
There was biology, there was genetics, but there wasn't something official.
Then came the decade of the brain, and now neuroscience is everywhere.
Yeah, you hear about it a lot.
Yeah.
You didn't hear about it 10 years ago, for sure.
You did not.
And it really drew from people from different fields.
And then now we have a better, not complete, but we could talk about a better understanding of lots of different things, memory, addiction, et cetera.
When I got into podcasting, I started my podcast in 2021.
As we were talking about before, it was just, you know, small closet.
I was living in Topanga, kind of self-appointed, sabbatical.
It was the pandemic.
Everything had to shut down.
And my bulldog mastiff, Costello.
And he passed away at some point?
2021, I had to put him down.
I had to do it myself.
No.
At home, I had them come.
He hated the vet.
You know, I mean, a bulldog's an amazing animal.
The contract between a bulldog and owner is very simple.
They will die for you, and you can feel that.
They will die for you.
But if your life is not on the line, they're not doing shit at all.
That's the contract.
They will die for you.
They'll also take a nap.
They'll also take a nap for you.
They will take a nap for you.
So he used to just snore.
You can hear him snoring in our early episodes and fart.
And, you know, that's what they do.
But if there was a threat, they don't hesitate.
You know, he was skunked something like 27 times because they don't learn.
He was stung by bees?
No, no, skunked.
Oh, by skunked.
Yeah, they always say there are two kinds of dogs, dogs that get skunked once and then all the other kinds of dogs.
But in any case, we started the podcast and we weren't thinking about, oh, we're going to make money with this or it'll be a big podcast.
Sat down, put up a couple of cameras and me and what I now call my producer, but my friend Rob Moore just did that.
Mike Blayback from DC, because I knew people from skateboarding, he took the photos.
And then what happened between 2021 and 2025 is you all, right, thanks in large part to Joe, right?
We could talk about, I have theories about why Joe is the king of podcasting and the biggest media channel on the planet, not just podcasting.
What happened was people wanted to hear conversation where it's not scripted and where the ads and commercials are things that people actually use.
Right.
know, and, and it went from this little niche community of comedians and people that like to talk about UFC to, you know, Lex Friedman was the one that inspired me to start a podcast.
So he was my kind of my brother in crime in terms of.
Yeah, because he is an academic, right?
I mean, he has a PhD.
A lot of people don't know this, but it's Dr. Lex Friedman.
So he's not a medical doctor, but he has a PhD.
And he was the AI computer science guy.
And I was the neuroscience guy, but then I'm also very interested in health and health and fitness.
But you guys didn't podcast together.
No, we've done a few, but a few episodes together.
You were kind of the science podcast.
Right.
Oh, for sure.
And then it just, you know, the comedians led the way, right?
You, Joe, you know.
Mark Marin.
Mark Marin.
And then it just kind of Pete Holmes was a big one early.
Remember, Pete Holmes was before everybody.
Pete Holmes was a very early podcast.
But no, it's definitely gotten where I think it's nice not having people are like, you know, sometimes I'll see things.
People seem like, oh, this, this group, now you're working with this group or you're working with this group or you've been like infiltrated by this country or this idea.
It's like, no, I don't work for anybody.
It's just, I try my best, you know, and.
Oh, you do an amazing job because it's so, it's pure.
So the parallels I was setting up with skateboarding and neuroscience and then this, I realized at some point, and I, you know, I'll get accused of name-dropping, but I'm very blessed to be very close friends with Rick Rubin.
I spent a lot of time with Rick, either here when he's in the States or fascinating Rubin.
Rick Rubin is a, I know him mostly.
He's a music producer.
Yep.
Music producer.
You know, he's also produced comedy.
He did, he worked with Andrew Dice Clay.
And he has great stories about that.
Oh, I bet he does.
You know, and so what's interesting is I talked to Rick about this.
I was like, why is podcasting experiencing this surge?
The question you asked.
And he said, and this is kind of how Rick talks.
He actually talks like this.
He's like, because it's real.
You know, people, when something's early, they're not thinking about how it's going to be received.
You're not thinking about whether or not your corporate sponsors are going to be happy.
This is why Rick, you know, remember, Rick produced Beastie Boys, LO Cool J, Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Adele, Kanye.
He's doing classical music stuff now, Country.
And he tends to work with people at the beginning and then not necessarily again, maybe on a song or two.
And I asked him why, and he's like, because at the beginning, they're in what Josh Waitskin, the great chess player, has described as the pre-consciousness phase of creativity.
You're not trying to defend a title.
You know, you're not trying to defend a title.
You're not thinking about how it's going to be received because you really have nothing to compare it to.
You have nothing to lose.
Yeah.
Listen, when Chris Cole, 360 flipped down Wallenberg, someone was filming it, right?
But after he did that, I'm sure that he thought about, God, like, how do I like supersede that the next time?
But when it's the next big thing, you're just thinking about the next thing.
And there's something really beautiful to that.
And that's what people tend to gravitate toward, whether or not it's media, podcasting, skateboarding, motocross, I don't care what it is.
We can feel when something is real.
In fact, Rick has this great saying, and I love it, because one time I saw this whole thing in the media related to somebody I knew, and it turned out that their whole company was just a complete sham.
At least that's what the media was claiming.
And he said to me, he goes, it's all lies.
And I said, yeah, apparently it's all lies.
And he said, no, no, no, no.
Everything is made up.
He said, there's only two things that are true.
Nature, like the laws of chemistry, biology, physics, and professional wrestling.
He said, because everyone knows professional wrestling is made up.
And Rick watches 12 hours a week of professional wrestling.
And when I go and see him and we watch professional wrestling, I'm like, why do you watch so much professional wrestling?
And he said, you know, it relaxes me.
And also, you can see all the theater of life there.
And he also likes that people don't actually get hurt.
But you're also wondering, wait, was that really part of the act?
And when you look at politics or you look at the world, you know, a lot of it's made up.
Like Bitcoin's on a run today.
Everyone's excited.
It broke 109 or 110.
I mean, great, but Bitcoin's made up.
I mean, its value is dependent on people's kind of perceived value of it.
Right.
And so he's right.
Everything basically is made up.
And so when you capture something that's real to a person, like a song and the way they sing it, and they're not comparing it to the way they sang it last time, they're not thinking about whether or not their tour is bigger than the other big tour that's out there there's something that i think really resonates with people and we just go wow like that's you know i i see it as like that's the human spirit in action it's really beautiful yeah it's like seeing a duck like a little duck try to take it learn to fly or whatever you know that's the funnest part once you see a duck flying you're like oh it's fine you know it can fly
that's great or whatever looks cool still beautiful but seeing that duck give those give those tries and take that shot out of the nest or whatever that's kind of like the funnest part you know well and and the i think that's the beauty of childhood right you know is is everything's new oh yeah you know it's and you know this is actually a an interesting segue to dopamine because you know dopamine uh is triggered by a bunch of things but mostly by anticipation of something okay right so let me think about that so dopamine is when people say dopamine because you hear it all the time right dopamine
hits dopamine hits dopamine right you hear about dopamine or give you know you're getting dopamine out of that you're so what is it it's a it's something that's in your body naturally okay so and where is it hidden in your body behind your ears yeah basically uh so real quick lesson in dopamine dopamine is a neurochemical some people call it neurotransmitter neuromodulator let's just say it's a chemical because it's a chemical so it's a liquid it's a yeah basically it's released from neurons neurons are nerve cells and it's going to bind to the next
it's going to park in a parking spot we call a receptor on the next nerve cell and trigger the activity of that nerve cell nerve cells communicate through electricity and chemicals the chemicals stimulate electricity okay and neurons can make the next neuron more active they can make the next neuron less active so this is important in fact a good kind of mechanical example is if you flex your bicep you are inhibiting you are preventing the neurons that flex your tricep they are antagonistic muscles got it and as just kind of a parallel
where you can get to when you for instance smell something you like it's what's called an appetitive response it's kind of appetite that inhibits the repulsion response when you smell vomit or something really putrid yeah you tend to retract and it tends to shut down at the same time the circuits that would bring you closer to something so it's it you know every circuit in the brain is like that there's a push and a pull an accelerator and a break and if you do one it
limits the other yeah think of it like a seesaw one goes up the other goes down got it you know everything from if you step on a pin you move your foot up and guess what what happens your other leg automatically extends yeah okay this is called a monosynaptic stretch reflex if you touch a fish on the side there's a big old neuron giant neuron called the moudner neuron and what does the fish do it heads in the opposite direction this is just a you know these circuits have been selected for because the dumb fish that went toward the thing that touched it probably got eaten so
all these responses are hardwired responses this chemical dopamine exists in a couple different places in your brain it has several roles the most important ones to know about are that it's involved in generating movement people with parkinson's lose the neurons that create dopamine okay in an area called the substantia nigra if you were to cut open a human brain you'd see two dark areas at the bottom of the brain and in latin nigra dark black it's down at the bottom of the brain those are the neurons that degenerate and
there's a picture of it but maybe if we can find it's really impressive you can see even without a microscope if you just say um i don't know if you said like actual brain tissue or something um there you go look so see that first um that first one look at there that's probably without any staining you're just looking at the brain with no microscope in parkinson's those degenerate you can see it on the right and what happens is when there's so dopamine is critical for movement and it's important to keep that in mind because the other thing that dopamine does is it's involved in a set
of brain circuits that are involved in motivation so if you think about any animal human dog rat cat monkey bat that animal has three choices for movement you can move towards something you can stay still or you can move backward right dopamine is involved in motivation not reward so when you like what's something that you really enjoy doing um making quesadillas making quesadillas when you get the ingredients and you put them out yeah your dopamine
is starting to rise yeah okay if you're if you're somebody who likes gambling it's on the way to vegas you're walking in you're getting your chips it's the feel of the chips the dopamine's going up okay this is a hardwired set of circuits that were designed to have us do things that were adaptive so dopamine starts to rise in anticipation of food when we're hungry okay cold when we're hot heat when we're cold sex when we're horny right right and it's going to be involved in anything that we
think is going to bring a feeling or a resource so a lot of dopamine is based on perception absolutely you nailed it in fact in fact whether or not we're talking about bitcoin us dollars likes on instagram or x followers views or any of that the currency is dopamine got it there's one currency of motivation so dopamine is about wanting and craving not about having then something happens you
make the quesadilla hold on let me slow it down just real quick and just show that because sometimes it's hard for me so i know it might be hard for some of our listeners but so the dopamine is based on the motivation so it's not about like the fact that when i'm sitting there and i'm making my quesadilla like that's the that's the dopamine is like knowing that i'm gonna get the quesadilla soon that's dopamine but then when i actually get the quesadilla what okay so it depends on the quesadilla let's let's go with three different scenarios okay and we could change out quesadilla here for
jackpot at the casino table sex winning a ufc fight or winning the bet on the ufc fight being nervous about asking a girl out and then actually doing it comedy when you move to crowd work and you're like this feels like i'm out on a tightrope yeah yeah okay yeah so any of those things anything where there's a potential payoff then something happens let's let's use the quesadilla example because it's it's straightforward you have the quesadilla and it's pretty good tastes like the quesadilla you usually make okay
what happens your dopamine starts dropping a little bit yeah not a lot but you're okay yeah it's it starts dropping let's say just by way of example you eat four quesadillas each time it's gonna be a little bit less dopamine from the actual eating of the quesadilla yeah the second quesadilla you can barely even taste it sometimes let's say you bite into the quesadilla and it's like oh this tastes weird like there's something off here dopamine plummets so how much dopamine you get
depends on the anticipation minus what you actually get something called reward prediction error but the language doesn't really matter that's a bunch of nerds speak for when an experience is worse than you expected your dopamine drops below where it started wow when an experience is better than you expected surprise it's way above where you started and it stays up there for a while so the dopamine system loves surprise now all of this is related to learning this is an ancient
system designed for you to learn where are the payoffs where's the water where's the food where are the mates where's the money where's the resources these are ancient circuits that we are doing non-ancient things with and so for instance if you do tour you do comedy tours right when you do your comedy tours and like you really nail it one night like really nail it it does two things it raises your baseline level of dopamine so the next time you go out you have confidence right you're still feeling that but
it also raises the threshold for dopamine right now it's harder to get dopamine you can't have the same experiences that you had prior to that really killer night and get the same amount of dopamine that you used to it's officially the best time of the year for hoops fans playoff drama buzzer beaters and the chaos we live for and if you're done just watching and ready to actually win some cash you got to check out pick six from
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sonic and when you think about dopamine the most important thing to think about is how quickly does it go up how quickly and how far does it go down because every time it goes up it goes down why because remember earlier we were saying everything's like a seesaw.
If you feel motivated, there is, and this is so important for people to understand, especially people with compulsions, addictions, and this kind of thing.
The better it feels, the lower you're going to feel afterwards, and the longer it will take you to get back to baseline.
So, the drug of all drugs for this to really nail home dopamine as a concept.
Sex.
Or what?
Well, behaviorally, sex.
You're right.
So, and people have behavioral addictions, process addictions.
Methamphetamine.
If you were going to look at what creates the biggest rise in dopamine the fastest, so it's dopamine over time.
Okay.
Because listen, when you write jokes or, you know, when I'm reading papers, I love reading science papers.
I'm like mine in for papers.
Every once in a while, I'll take a little break and I'm super into cephalopods, octopuses.
I'm building an octopus tank at home right now.
So that's kind of my indulgence is octopus.
It's a little bit of dopamine.
Methamphetamine is a huge rapid increase in dopamine.
Then what happens?
How much do we get off that?
Bring it up real quick.
I just want to see what is it.
So it's how fast it occurs.
It occurs within minutes.
This is why crack cocaine was so much more addictive than snorted cocaine, right?
It was the speed with which it hits the system.
How much dopamine does an activity release?
Baseline is 100%.
Food is 150%.
So in 50% increase, video games, 175%.
Sex, 200.
I disagree with sex, by the way.
I think it depends on, you know, if you're, and people should notice, if you live with somebody and you guys are having sex a lot and you've known each other a long time, there's a lot of the reason why people are like looking for novelty in their relationship, et cetera.
I'm not trying to be salacious here, but new sexual partner is probably about 400, 500%.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think most people would not dispute that.
Cocaine goes to 450%.
Amphetamine, 1,000%.
Methamphetamine, 1,300%.
That meth, that methyl group increases the speed.
That speed increases dopamine.
So it's almost the same.
It could potentially almost be kind of the same, but the speed at which it happens is so much greater that it intensifies it so much.
Right.
And remember, the brain is thinking in terms of approach, pause, or retract.
So when there's a ton of dopamine, listen, anyone on cocaine or methamphetamine, everything's a good idea to them.
Oh, yeah, anything.
Right.
And then you think about cannabis.
Cannabis has its own discussion, its own effects, but very different system and tends to make people pretty happy with right where they are.
The opioids tends to make people overly happy with right where they are.
They tend to be amotivated, not motivated.
So dopamine, in this context, what happens is then dopamine drops below baseline after a drug or porn or even, you know, somebody's, you know, let's say they make the huge mistake of like going outside their marriage to a prostitute or something.
It's the anticipation, the fear, the excitement, boom, then it drops below baseline.
And now here's the real rub.
In order to get back to baseline, most people, when they're in that trough, what do they do?
They use more.
But each time they use, while they're in that trough, when dopamine is low, this is the key thing.
When dopamine is low, no matter how much you do of that substance, no matter how much you engage in that behavior, that dopamine is going to have less and less of an effect and it's not even going to get you above baseline.
Wow.
You have to wait.
The period of abstinence is when these circuits return to normal.
And with the exception of alcohol, where people can die from rapid withdrawal, this is why every addiction recovery program has a period of abstinence.
They don't tell you to kind of taper off cocaine.
They're like, listen, this has got to stop.
And then when people relapse, the problem is they get, you know, no pun intended, they get a bump, but that dopamine level is not where it used to be.
And they're constantly, quote unquote, chasing the dragon or whatever you want to call it.
So, you know, these dopamine circuits evolved for a good reason to drive us toward adaptive behaviors.
But listen, I have friends in the tech sector, in the finance sector.
You see this in the finance guys.
It's often finance guys.
They're doing Adderall.
They're day trading.
They're night trading.
You know, their friends are making a ton of money.
And we also have the social comparison thing.
So I'm not going to say that social media hijacks all of this, but let's just say, and I love social media.
I'm on Instagram and X. I teach there.
I learn there.
Love your content.
Love Segura's content.
You know, I'm learning there.
Tim Dylan, right?
Like, I love it.
But there are elements of this where if you find yourself on social media, but you're kind of like, what am I doing here?
Like, this is like nothing's happening here.
You are in a dopamine trough.
You're in a trough.
So we've already gotten your high.
You've gotten it.
And we hear it dopamine hits.
If it were really dopamine hits, you'd be going, whoa, yeah, amazing.
Cool.
No, that happens now and again.
But what's happening is the threshold for what really draws you in is getting higher and higher.
Which goes to show why when it comes sometimes to like sex addiction and pornography addiction that people's, what the kink that they need or the thing they need to see gets more out there because they have to, just to even get back to the baseline, they have to, they've got to find more.
They need a higher arc, definitely.
I had a couple questions.
Sorry.
No, no, no.
And save where you're at.
Can you distill dopamine?
Like, is it manufacturable dopamine?
There are things, yes.
So there are things that are precursors to dopamine and things that stimulate the release of dopamine.
So things that stimulate the release of dopamine, the amino acid L-tyrosine.
Okay.
It's found in hard cheeses like Parmesan cheese, believe it or not.
Some people think they're a little bit addicted to cheese in some ways.
Oh, they do?
Some people think that.
Yeah.
L-tyrosine is a supplement as well.
Ooh, L-tyrosine.
He sounds like he's from Rome, huh?
There's a very interesting hairy little bean.
No joke.
This is a hairy little bean called Macuna Purines.
He's going to say this.
Macuna Purines.
Macuna Purines?
Macuna Purines.
This is a velvety bean.
If you just put velvet bean L-Dopa, it is 99% L-Dopa, which is the precursor.
It gets converted to dopamine.
I'll take L-8 ball of it.
Remember that movie Awakenings where people were frozen?
Yes.
With Robert De Niro.
That's right.
And Robin Williams.
Yes, Robin Williams.
And they gave those patients, it was a true story.
It's based on a story by the neurologist writer Oliver Sachs.
And they gave those people L-Dopa.
That velvety little bean is L-Dopa.
So you say, can you manufacture it?
You can take the thing that is the precursor.
Now, if you do that, you'll feel dopaminergic, as neuroscientists say.
You'll be like buzzed.
You'll be energized.
That's Shakira.
Absolutely.
And then you'll feel the drop.
And then methamphetamine stimulates the release, as we saw.
Cocaine stimulates release behaviors.
Listen, I don't want to demonize dopamine.
No, not at all.
Dopamine is, you know, I'm sure I had a surge of dopamine walking in here today.
I'm a fan of your show.
I had a surge of dopamine when I saw you.
I was excited, nervous about it, and then it happened.
And hopefully I will, the reward prediction error won't be less than you anticipated.
That's my goal.
So it's already fascinating.
So I think that, you know, can you manufacture it?
Well, there are things that can stimulate its release.
Now, what's beautiful, what's really beautiful is when, I think usually it happens when you're a teen.
For me, it was 19 when I discovered biology.
You know, wasn't good at skateboarding.
It wasn't bad, but, you know, I liked running and working out, but I never thought about becoming a professional athlete.
And then I discovered learning and biology.
And I thought, wow, this is something that I'm highly motivated to do.
I didn't really understand dopamine then.
We didn't know that much about it, but I'm motivated to do it.
So there's dopamine from doing it.
It brings me resources at first degrees and knowledge.
Later, the ability to buy a house, right?
So much of my life is built around the work that I did like a maniac, really, between the age of 19 and I'm 49 now, just working nonstop.
And so there's functional dopamine.
And pretty soon you start weaving it in like, oh, I can also rest and have some recreation.
And that's giving me dopamine.
And so our lives are built around this molecule we call dopamine.
And so the ways that you can manage and almost orchestrate dopamine to use it to your advantage, it's very usable.
I think the thing to remember are the following.
Dopamine is not about the pursuit of pleasure.
It's about the pleasure of pursuit.
It's about motivation.
The other thing to remember about dopamine is it can, if it's increased very dramatically and very fast, it can drive addiction.
And I define addiction as a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure.
A great life is where many, many things bring you pleasure.
And then perhaps the most important thing for people, especially if they're concerned about porn, gambling, internet use, or whatever, even if they're not a full-blown addict, if they're just kind of feeling like a slave to everything going on, you know, just everything, highly processed foods, all of that, is that any high amount of dopamine that comes to you without effort before it will eventually destroy you or bring you close to destruction.
So something that just feels so good that all you had to do was open a package.
All you had to do was take a pill.
Or open a website.
Or open a website.
That is the slippery slope.
And if we think more in terms of, you know.
Yeah, Pandora's box doesn't really have a key on it, huh?
Yeah, like I'd listen, I'm not a huge UFC fan, but I've been to a few fights and it's fun.
And I see you guys down there in the front row and this kind of thing.
Look, someday I imagine given my friends set and given my interests, maybe I'll just buy a ticket and it'd be a great thrill, right?
But if I were a kid and I suddenly were just planted there every single night, guess what?
You move one row back, it's going to feel like bad seating.
You know, and it's, this is why the children of very wealthy people, unless your father is like a Warren Buffett who insists that you actually work and this kind of thing, the children of very wealthy people often destroy their lives.
You know, they destroy their lives because they haven't had to work to have all this stuff.
And there's this huge cushion below them.
In fact, my graduate advisor.
And they're almost swimming in dope.
They're almost in the hot tub, but they've never been in the pool.
Exactly.
And then they're and then they're down below baseline.
And then it takes more and more and more.
So is that genetic then?
Sorry to interrupt you, but is that genetic, your baseline level for dopamine?
Is that genetic?
No.
This is all behaviorally driven.
And I'm not saying parents should.
So you said it's all behaviorally driven.
All behaviorally driven.
So I'm just saying, yeah, say if you had a, like, you know, your father was an addict or somebody, and then could the next generation have that same like need to get back to that baseline?
And it could be inherited type of thing.
Well, okay, so there are certain addictions that appear to have some genetic component, but it's confounded, as we say.
It's mixed up with the behavioral stuff around that.
Like, for instance, the probability of somebody becoming a severe alcoholic.
They now call it alcohol use disorder.
And I'm not trying to be irreverent, but I just call it alcoholism.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah.
I'm going to try and stay out of the lanes of that.
Great.
So the probability that somebody will become an alcoholic greatly increases if their first drink, just their first sip, comes before age 13. Okay.
Now, some parents think, hey, listen, if my kid has a beer when they're eight and 10, then they won't have this kind of mysterious feeling around alcohol.
That's one theory, but we know on good statistics that drinking before the age of 13 greatly increases the probability of becoming an alcoholic.
So now you can imagine in which households will that happen?
Well, where they're trying to normalize high alcohol intake.
So it can be both genetic and circumstantial.
But do some countries then suffer with the higher alcoholism rates than even European ones?
Northern European countries, especially in the winter.
I have northern European relatives, and I'll tell you in the winter, they can drink up there and it's dark and alcohol is a depressant.
There's also about 8% of people have a gene variant that when they drink, they don't feel the same sedative type quality to alcohol.
When you drink, the first thing that happens for everybody is your prefrontal cortex.
This is like the part of your brain right behind your forehead.
It's the part that sets context, like what's appropriate in different places.
It inhibits you.
Everybody gets a little more talkative, right?
Everyone's talking, talking, talking.
But then you drink more and people are trying to pass on the couch and people are slurring their words.
About 8% of people get a dopamine surge and an energy increase from alcohol with increasing alcohol intake.
These are the people, remember you're in your 20s and there's that guy and he's still awake at like 3 in the morning.
He's in the kitchen and he's bumping around.
He's in the cupboard.
And you see him the next morning.
Yeah.
And he's like, hey, and you're like, we were passed out, blacked out, drunk.
He's doing laundry or whatever.
He's just like, hey, let's go running.
Yeah, he's doing making a lemonade or whatever.
That's a genetic predisposition.
Wow.
but is that a positive one?
It sounds like it is kind of.
Well, it's probably adaptive in some, you know, they've got you got the cursor on Russia.
I mean, listen, I'm friends with Lex Friedman.
I mean, that kid can drink compared to me.
Oh, dude, yeah, he did.
I don't drink.
I had my last sip in 2019.
Amen.
Well, and Lex has the depression to show it, man.
He's got that emo side of him that takes over him.
You know, he's definitely.
I think he just put something out again on X. I mean, it's perfect.
No, I love Lex because there's this transparency about him to me that is remarkably human, you know, like this ever hopeful, talented, but also very like honest.
He's so Lex.
He just said, I'm an introvert who hides in the world often way too much.
One thing I wish I did more is call and text my friends.
I think about them often and feel lucky to know them, but experience a strange anxiety that prevents me from texting and calling.
Silly introvert brain wants to pull me into isolation and darkness.
Then again, once I hang out with said friends, it's like we've been talking every day, so maybe there's no problem.
And it's just how dude friendships are.
BSC thoughts brought to you by a brain on six shots of espresso.
It's perfect.
And I think, you know, with love.
Dioctane.
You know, I won't claim that he posted that because of me, but I'd been texting for like three weeks now, and it's just crickets.
And then I'll get something back that just says, here.
Yeah.
And you just learn with him over time.
That's just, you know, that's just that.
Well, that's Russian communication.
I mean, it can take five generations to get a hug out of somebody.
You know, it's like, I love the Russians.
Oh, they're unbelievable.
And they, you know, a lot of them had carried stone dolls as children.
Like, imagine if you're a doll, your baby doll is made of stone.
It's like that's your whole concept of the world is going to be so different.
Bring up bring back that chart up again.
I want to see what they were doing over there.
Alcoholism by country.
United States, 13.9%.
Canada, only 8%.
UK, 8.7.
And what's the darkest one over there?
It's Russia.
And what's it at?
20.9%.
Hell yeah.
It's cold and bleak.
Oh, yeah.
You got to be fucking brain dead.
North Korea is lowest, but we don't really know what's going on in North Korea.
No, we don't know.
This is just a fun chart, but it's also exciting to just make.
That's one place I never want to visit.
Be reminded that the Russians live like that.
I want to ask you about this.
So one of the big things that I think is a huge problem that's about to happen in the world is pornography addiction, right?
I believe it's humongous.
I believe it's bigger than alcoholism.
I believe it's like the wave of it that we're starting to see like people really suffering from.
And I think it's one of the reasons why there's a lot of divorce.
What do you see like neuroscientifically about how people can start to manage that?
And then even just what you just talked about about dopamine, it's like, I think it's helping people realize with that, that it's like such a hole that you're getting into.
No, no, whatever that thing's called, no pun intended.
How does that, how can people start to cut that off for themselves?
Is there anything they can do manage like, or do they have to get help if they believe that they're suffering from like pornography or sexual addiction?
Yeah, super important questions.
I'm so glad you're raising this because it's interesting.
If you look at the research on pornography and sexual behavior generally, what you'll find mostly in the academic studies of those areas is kind of an attempt to normalize a lot of behavior.
There are reasons for that, some pseudo-political, some just kind of the way those studies were done for a long time.
But it's really important to emphasize that it takes a while for science to catch up to culture.
Okay, it takes a while for science to catch up to culture.
And the reason is not because scientists are lazy or they're uninterested, is that doing science well takes a long time.
Look, I've run studies in my lab on animals, on humans, clinical trials.
It takes a long time, like three, four years sometimes to get to the bottom.
To get all information to get a really good study done.
Meanwhile, life is happening.
And in the last five years, especially, there's been an exponential growth of the amount of pornography available online, the different formats, right?
OnlyFans, all the different sites that people can go to.
Oh, yeah.
Free pay.
AI.
And within each of those, there's also been a huge amplification of what's called like high-intensity porn.
What's high-intensity porn?
It's more than two people.
It's BDSM.
Now, BDSM is its own discussion that maybe we could talk about at some point, just separately about this merge of pain and pleasure.
The reason, I'll just, the punchline, is that dopamine is also increased by what we call the cessation of pain.
When pain starts and then stops, you get an amplified dopamine surge.
So a lot of people are watching or engaging in what we would call violent porn, right?
And we're, as primate species, humans, we have an empathy.
So when people are watching pornography, they're obviously not experiencing the same things exactly those people are doing and experiencing, but they're tuning into it, right?
They're getting to it.
And we can only speculate as to what they're doing to themselves, right?
Typically, when we're talking about porn, let's just be direct, we're also talking about masturbation, right?
Typically, when we're talking about watching video porn, sometimes it's women.
Most often it's men by a huge majority.
Oh, yeah.
The men are the one watching it.
Yeah.
Although, you know, years ago, I had a girlfriend, a woman I was dating very seriously, and she confessed to me that prior to our relationship, she had developed a porn compulsion.
It wasn't an addiction.
You know, addiction, again, is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure.
It hadn't taken her to the point where it was destructive, but she had the wisdom to cut herself off from it early on.
Okay, so it does happen with women, but it's much more frequent with men.
So here's the thing.
We can think of pornography now as like the methamphetamine of pornography compared to the pornography of, you know, we always hear about, oh, you know, like when I was growing up, Playboy or, or, you know, that thing when I was a kid, like, I'll confess this first, didn't know I was going to do a confession, but they had those like sex education books where they were like sketch drawings in pencil.
Oh, yeah, bring them in.
And I, you know, When I was, you know, probably 14, 13, I was like, this is awesome.
Yeah.
You know, this was awesome.
But it was about, you know, teaching you basically about sex.
It was teaching you about body parts.
And that was, you know, for sure.
Pencil drawings.
I can't believe we're looking this up.
No, it's interesting because I think a lot of people.
If you do pencil drawings, who knows what kind of freaky stuff's going to jump up here?
No, we have a blocker on.
I'm pretty sure.
Yeah.
There we go.
There we go.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
See, human loving.
This is very different than today's porn.
Sex and hue.
I love how they used to call it human loving.
Human loving.
That's nice, though.
There's some, at least it makes more sense.
It puts even your head into something, you know, instead of like Britney's butt world or whatever, you know, which takes it to a whole different deal.
And there was no discussion whatsoever of elements of pain or BDSM or power play.
There you go.
You know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, for a heterosexual young male, the fact that they put her naked facing us as opposed to the guy on the other side, you're like, okay, cool.
But, you know, the other thing about pornography is that in a young brain, this is very important.
And it relates to everything we're talking about today.
From about age zero to 25, your brain is incredibly plastic.
It's modified by experience just by being in those experiences.
When you say plastic, you mean it's more like it's not solid yet?
That's right.
You can literally wire neurons, plasticity.
You can wire neurons to other neurons very readily.
I mean, this was known for a long time, but it was really formalized by my scientific great-grandparents, David Hubel and Tornston Weasel.
They won a Nobel Prize for showing that if you take a cat, a monkey, or a kid, and you close one eyelid for just a few hours each day, the brain becomes blind to visual input through that eye once you open the eye up, unless you do something else like close the other eye in order to reverse that plasticity.
However, if today I just said, yeah, that's how fast and permanent it is unless you do something to reverse it.
But if I did that same thing to you now or me now, there'd be no brain change.
Close your eye, obviously you can't see through a closed eye.
Pop open the eyelid later, you see just fine.
So we know that from until about age 25, the brain just modifies itself based on experience.
So if you're doing cocaine and amphetamine, or let's just stay with this example, you're watching high-intensity violent porn with more than two people, right?
You know, we forget that every time you add another person, even if it's two women and one guy, or it's, you know, what's this woman on X?
I mean, I have to say, it makes, it gives me an aversive response, which I think is the healthy response.
Every time she announces, I think she's like sleeping with 100 and then 1,000 people.
And listen, she's obviously in control of her own.
It's a Western conference right now.
I think I saw the other day.
I don't know what it Barbara.
Is it Barbara Blue?
Body Blue.
Body Blue.
Body.
This is blue.
This is like methamphetamine with heroin.
And, you know, you get the picture.
It's starting to layer in all these different things.
And so the young, you think about the young male brain in particular, young female brain watching this stuff.
And it's not just setting a behavioral expectation because we always hear about that.
You know, they think sex is like that and it's not.
It's setting this incredibly high threshold for what they consider stimulating.
Not just stimulating sexually, but stimulating mentally.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, it's crazy.
It's like, you know, listen, I like playing cards every once in a while.
So you go play a card game with your friends.
It'd be like the first time you play cards, you got a million bucks, you know, or you're back there in the high stick.
You're in like the Dana White room, right?
Like I know like when I see sometimes his gambling hands, right?
He's, you know, but he can afford to play.
Right.
And he also knows where that fits into the rest of his life.
But you think about a kid, you know, you have a chance to win a million dollars.
Actually, there's this scene in that movie, that show, remember Succession?
Yes.
A show that it's all about dopamine, this family of rich brats who are completely corrupt.
Everything's about more, more, more.
Dopamine has been called in a book, I forget the author, the molecule of more.
It's all about wanting more.
And there's this dreadfully sad scene where they go out to play, I think it was like a baseball game or something, and they bring their garden help.
And they take the kid and they say, hey, if you can hit a home run, these people's kids, people are clearly.
And they say, if you hit a home run, you have a million dollars.
And you see the anticipation, this would transform these kids and their parents' life.
And then he doesn't get the million dollars.
And they give him like some watch that's probably worth $25,000.
This is dopamine reward prediction error in a nutshell.
Had they given him the watch, the family probably would have been pretty thrilled.
They could sell it.
They could use it.
Had they not been involved in the game, their dopamine is the same as when they go home at night.
But they had a chance at a million dollars.
And when they didn't get that, it drops them below baseline.
And then you see the kid that evening, like sitting around his apartment, just completely despondent with the watch sitting there as if it was worth nothing.
That's dopamine.
And when you think about pornography, that's what young people are being exposed to.
So their first sexual experiences not only are quite different.
Remember, pornography is about, obviously, people are getting aroused by watching other people have sex.
You know, I don't know what kind of sex people are having out there, but in my experience, you know, the whole, the whole business of sex and learning how to have great sex is about learning to be in the in the experience with somebody.
And it's a communication.
It's an ongoing communication.
And it's about being in the experience, being present, not watching someone else have sex.
Oh, yeah.
I was thinking the other day, watching some other dude like have sex with a woman, it's kind of, I don't even know if it's homoerotic.
I don't know what it is.
It's definitely when you really, when you take a step back from it, it's a little bizarre.
It's definitely intrusive, right?
But for surely it alters the way that you think about things.
I mean, I know in my own life, I got exposed to pornography real early.
I would bike across town to get a little look at some pornos.
Perfectly normal behavior for a young male.
Pretty normal.
I was breaking into houses to freaking, you know, get that.
I had friends like you growing up.
Where did you grow up?
Louisiana.
I had friends growing up.
I mean, in South Bay Palo Alto, it's pretty tame, but when I started getting in the skateboard thing, you know, we drew from kids from all over.
And listen, I'm very grateful for that early exposure.
Oh, yeah.
It's easy to jerk off if you've got some good graffiti.
Oh, no, I meant early exposure to kids from all walks of life, but I knew kids like you breaking in the house.
Oh, dude, yeah, I remember.
Yeah, it would be crazy with like, you know, yeah, just like breaking in that, just like, yeah, we made some poor choices.
But I think the fact that here's one thing I noticed for myself, right?
So, well, I had like a lot of disorder, like, I had kind of a disorder, I guess, where like I had some intimacy issues where I couldn't.
I had like some issues like just like probably with my mom from growing up of not having a connection.
And so if a woman, if I got around a woman, I got very nervous, right?
It was like very, extremely nervous, right?
So I think it made it like once I saw pornography, I was like, okay, well, here's a way that I can be near a woman or near as a female where I can have some form of intimacy without having to have a real person there.
So that for one, for me, was it was okay.
It made sense that it, that that's how I adapted to it as a kid or how I understood it as a kid.
It makes sense.
But as an adult, it didn't help me at a certain point.
And then the secondary part for me was, you know, you would just see, you would see sex like in images or scenes or a way a camera's set up.
And so then that's how you start to think of intimacy.
It's like, you know, it's like, okay, well, we have to do this scene.
You know, it's not like you would stage things around your room or anything.
You didn't have any cameras or anything, but you would just like, you thought of each thing as like a scene or a scenario.
So yeah, you're not out there shooting baskets.
You're trying to like recreate the NBA final, you know?
Right.
And that's a lot.
That's a lot of pressure.
So it was a ton of pressure.
So it was like, and you almost couldn't even, yeah, there was no real connection.
So that for me was a real cul-de-sac of like trying to figure out how to evolve like intimately, you know, and it's some of that's taken a long time to get through and different like class, like not classes, but like ayahuasca really helped me a lot.
Different medicines helped a lot with like just unbinding all that anxiety that was just like this young person who just didn't know how to relate to females, you know?
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Yeah, I think it's a really important conversation.
If I may, I mean, listen, like I said, I'm 49 now, but you know, I am forever grateful to my first girlfriend.
I was a virgin when she and I started sleeping together.
She had slept with this other guy.
All I knew about him was he was like some buff football player.
I'm like the skinny skateboard kid.
Oh, dude, my first girlfriend slept with a dude before me who wore a cape, dude.
Fucking cape?
Yeah.
Like, fuck, dude.
What the heck?
Yeah.
Listen, I mean, I remember going into that, like any young male, thinking, like, my goodness, you know, this is like, is a lot of pressure.
And one of the things I'm so grateful to her for is, you know, we were able to talk a bit.
At first, no, you know, it was just like, you just want it to go perfect, right?
You just want it to go perfect.
And I will say, one of the huge mistakes people make, maybe we can save some people, some men and women, young, young men and women, some serious stress.
One of the huge mistakes people make is to try and take that edge off with alcohol.
First of all, it starts to really muddy all the consent stuff.
So you're already like, you're already playing with fire, right?
Because when people are inebriated, they're not in their right mind.
So the other thing is that by chemically removing that stress, many people come to depend on those chemicals to relax and they don't learn the skills, right?
As I always joke, it's not a joke.
It's serious.
Nowadays, like every young male who wants to get a little bit jacked is like, should I take TRT?
And I'm like, dude, you're 25. You're already filled with testosterone.
They're like, yeah, but you know, and you're like, learn how to train, learn how to eat.
And when you're in your late 40s, talk to a doctor, freeze some sperm because it's going to shut down your sperm production.
Maybe then, but like just chill.
And in the same way, it's like, I think there's immense pressure.
There's also something that's happening now that I hear about a lot, which is from the beginning of time, women have talked to one another.
Okay.
I had these chatty kathy.
You heard of that term?
Is that what it's called?
Yeah, it's a famous term.
Who brought it up?
Let's get to the bottom of that term really quick because people have heard it a lot.
And you don't know where it really started.
Do we know that the phrase chatty Kathy originally came from the name of popular talking doll manufactured by Mattel in the 1960s?
The doll's pull string mechanism played pre-recorded phrases when the string was activated like you don't make any money or you get your own dinner.
I made those up.
But damn, Kathy's a vibe.
Look at her.
She said bucktooth, a little bucktooth there.
Yeah.
Pack when you get a good British gal.
But go on.
Was there anything left on that information?
Over time, the term chatty Kathy became a common idiom to describe someone who is especially talkative.
And I'm just joking, ladies, but that's interesting where that came from.
I never knew, always heard that.
Alver heard that term.
You know, so I had the great benefit and the disadvantage as well of having a sister, right?
Having a sister is great because you don't think women are weird.
Like I grew up with a girl living next door to me, my sister who shared a bathroom, all that.
But I also heard the way her and her friends talk about boys.
And so from a young age, I was like, man, I can't make a mistake on a first date.
I got to do everything perfect because it's going to be the rundown.
But back then, there was no social media.
Now young guys, tell me, they are terrified to go out on dates because let's say they do something wrong.
Let's say they're less than perfect.
They are very concerned.
It's going to end up on some site and they're going to be ashamed.
And I'll tell you, I do think, and of course I take the male perspective because that's the only body I've ever lived in.
But I do think that a lot of the complaints about, you know, young, you know, there are no men today, young, young males, like in the 20s and 30s, you know, a lot of these guys are terrified because they feel like everything's potentially going to become public, positive or negative.
And I hear a lot from young males about the pornography question, about all this.
And I like, there's one kid that I've kind of mentored over time.
I've known him since he was a little kid and now he's in his 20s and he's doing great in life, but he's had his challenges.
And he, I'll tell you, it's really interesting.
He said to me, he goes, look, you know, it's hard.
He's good looking kid.
He's working right now.
He's working construction.
He's doing great.
And he said, look, it's hard to find someone who just kind of want to keep your relationship just for the two.
Private.
But he did.
He had a girlfriend and she wasn't the one.
So he found one and they have a closed container, they call it.
It was like the new language or something.
And he's like, man, it's awesome.
He's like, you know, if I'm nervous about something related to intimacy, we talk about it.
Turns out she's nervous too.
And he feels super safe.
But he had to literally ante that up because where he went to school, I won't say where he went to school because he'll murder me.
But, you know, it's like the opposite, Arizona State, right?
There's all this stuff about people talking behind this and then posting it to the internet.
And so that drives guys more into the loneliness and isolation of porn and substance abuse.
And so I'm not blaming women here.
I'm not blaming men here.
I'm just saying that when it comes to intimacy, everybody's nervous about that, right?
When I was a kid, there was like Dr. Ruth and there were those books.
And then you had this thing called experience and you'd have to, well, that went less well.
That went really well.
And then over time, you learn how to have the communication and enjoy yourself in it.
Yeah.
But it's hard.
It's difficult.
Now you can have a thing where it's like, say you go out on a date with a girl and then they could make a video like, oh, this guy tried to kiss me.
What a lose.
Just like, but I guess guys could do that too.
But just the risk of that on either side, it's like, then that wins, you know, it's like, how many times are we going to let technology defeat what just means being human, right?
And like, and at what point do we start to choose like, hey, I want to make a moral like a choice for myself and whoever I'm going to date with, maybe have a talk with them first or something.
Like, you know, but it's like every time it's like technology is the one that seems to like take away like things that used to be so real to us.
Yeah, because then you're both in a cave.
You're both just masturbating or whatever and you're both like brokenhearted in some semblance, it seems like, is that crazy to say that?
No, I don't think so at all.
I mean, listen, text messages, I hate telling people this, but like everything you text is potentially public.
I don't care if you're a public-facing aka famous person or not.
And that terrifies people.
At the same time, you know, there can be great intimacy through writing.
You know, my first girlfriend and I wrote each other letters for years, for years.
I still have letters from girlfriends.
You know, I cherish those.
I don't break them out too often.
If you have a new girlfriend, you basically got to hide those away pretty carefully.
But I assume anyone I date's got those from their former relationship.
Every now and then.
Don't be bothered by that.
I mean, that's part of the name.
you go get them out.
But I agree, man.
I get nervous because sometimes, like, for a date or something, I would like to do, well, let's do a Zoom call or something first because it's like, you know, especially if we live a little bit away from each other, let's see if we even talk well or something.
But then you're worried, like, well, is somebody recording this or what's going on?
Yes.
They're recording it.
Now I'm just kidding.
Listen, the old stereotype was girls feared getting slut shamed.
Right.
Guys feared getting dorked shamed.
Like loser shamed.
Yeah.
Right.
You know, it's been said by the evolutionary biologists.
Donnie's a loser, dude.
And they speculate a lot, but the evolutionary biologists will say, you know, woman's greatest fear is violence from a man.
Man's greatest fear is being laughed at by a woman.
Oh, God.
Right?
And right, exactly.
And so there's this battle nowadays.
I'm glad we're talking about this because there's this kind of unspoken battle between the masculine and feminine forces.
Well, it's just funny.
Do you say that?
Because I just realized that the majority of my childhood was some woman.
I don't even know who it was, laughing in the distance in my head.
Oh, man.
Like, especially when I got into purbody and that kind of time.
Well, and there's nothing that feels better than, you know, feeling like you can deeply satisfy your partner and they're devoted to you and you're devoted to them.
It's a wonderful, I mean, that's the stuff that, you know, love and marriages and families and to be direct, great sex are made of, right?
But this is one of the most important conversations to our audience because I think this is the thing that's, it's killed, you know, relationships are falling up.
It's like, if we don't, if this doesn't get fixed now, it's going to be, I think it's, you know, societies can change and end really fast, especially with like technology now.
To me, it's, it's just like we're at a crucial moment for relationships.
I totally agree.
I mean, you know, young guys approach me a lot about the porn thing, about concern about like, are they going to be shamed on one of these sites if they, you know, do something wrong?
And I'm not talking about like wrong, like they were forceful.
I'm talking about wrong, like they, they made a mistake.
Yeah.
They said something dumb or, you know, I think a lot- This is one right here.
Are we dating the same guy?
Women turn to Facebook to uncover cheating and violence.
Experts say use of groups to warn others about dangerous men is indictment on government's failure to keep women safe.
This is from The Guardian, so it's obviously very pro the groups, but there's negative consequences like people being reported just for dating multiple women that they're not exclusive with and stuff like that.
But it's also very pro who, you said?
The Guardian is very pro the app as like an empowerment for women, the way they can stay safe.
Yeah, well, I think apps that protect people against violence are great.
I think that, you know, if you look at the data on infidelity in and out of marriage, it's equally distributed between men and women.
Okay, it's equally distributed.
So there's no men cheat more than women.
It's clearly equally distributed.
So the data play that over and over again.
You look at divorce data, but you just look at self-report data, all different forms of data collection that really orient towards honesty because people lie all the time in studies and statistics point to that.
I think that the most important thing really, if we're talking about forming intimacy, whether or not sexual intimacy, emotional intimacy, or both, is that people feel that their communications are vaulted between them, right?
Vaulted means it's just between them.
What's exchanged between them stays better than that.
That's intimacy in its own right, is it?
That it's something here.
It's between us.
That's right.
I mean, I have a half-joking solution to this, but I'm only half-joking.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
And I should say, I've had some great relationships and I've had some not great relationships, right?
I'm on great terms with most all of my ex-girlfriends, you know, and I'm so grateful to, especially one from about, it was a long relationship, about seven years, where she really taught me how to like have the uncomfortable conversation.
Wow.
And I'm still learning, right?
And we're still good friends.
But I'll tell you one of the solutions to this.
Men, find a good lesbian friend.
You want to really understand where you're strong, where you're weak, and you want to learn to just kind of relax around women.
Be around a woman that you have no chance of sleeping with.
That buddy Oyster.
You know, I have a couple of lesbian friends, and I'll tell you, I've always had a couple of lesbian friends.
I'm convinced lesbians are going to save us all.
God, I got to get one.
They are.
You know, you know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
And you got to get it out of your head that you're going to sleep with them.
Yes.
Because these are what we call platinum star lesbians.
They are interested in women and women only.
Oh, yeah.
I'm talking chicken of Westbrook.
And it's interesting because they have an amazing perspective on men that's from a women's perspective.
And they also have an amazing perspective on women.
They can say things like, she's crazy.
Andrew, you date her, you're going to be in pain.
And they can also say things like, she seems pretty cool.
I would date her, except she's not into women.
And you women can see things in women that men can't see.
Men can see things in men that obviously women can't see.
I mean, I grew up in a big pack of guys.
Like I only hit bullseyes when it comes to assessment of friends and business partners, men and women.
But, you know, with men, I can just tell.
He's a sociopath.
He's cool.
He's not cool.
I can just tell.
It's like a sixth sense.
The other thing, you know, across the sexes, you know, a macaque monkey blindfolded on LSD has better options.
And I don't think I'm alone in that, right?
Because we get stirred.
It's not all about the anticipation of sex.
It's that the styles of communication are different.
The way that stories and information is turned into things by one sex.
It's like a whole different world.
Lesbians normalize all of this and they're extremely direct.
And some of my best friends are lesbians.
I love them to death.
I would get some damn lesbians over here.
Lesbians are going to save us all, man.
Yeah.
I love that.
That would be a great musical, lesbians are going to save us all.
And I believe that I would love to see that.
And I think that, yeah, I think there is just, you know, for a while there, people were like, gays and gays and, you know, don't be gay and that kind of stuff.
Probably like 50 years ago, that was like a thing, you know.
And then, but now I think one of the, one of the neat things about gay folks is there are that they have like a special recipe, you know, that male has worked out.
Like I have a good friend I've known since childhood.
It was wild because he basically slept with like more women than any of us.
He's a gay gentleman?
He ended up being gay.
Wow.
Went off to college.
He's as gay as could be.
Yeah.
And, you know, and the communication, he's explained like the communication in the gay community, gay male community.
I don't know.
Well, it's just very direct.
Right.
People ask for sex if they want it.
They say no if they don't want to.
Want lunch?
You want to come?
Yeah.
I mean, that's it.
It's a, it's straight up.
I mean, the stereotype is it matches.
There are some married gay couples, obviously monogamous, et cetera, but it aligns with all the male stereotypes of promiscuous, multiple partners.
That's the kind of stereotype, right?
It's grill and cum.
That'd be my team, dude.
If you had a gay flag football team in college, dude.
Oh, man.
For the rec center.
Grill and cum.
You want to hear some wild data on homosexuality and hormones?
Okay, so years ago when I was a graduate student at Berkeley, I was part of a study, I wasn't the main author, that looked at finger length ratios and homosexuality in men and women and how much testosterone was in utero.
Now, I don't want anyone to freak out and just start staring at their fingers, because it has to be measured correctly.
All right.
So if you hold up your right hand, like I'm holding up my right hand, my ring finger here is a little bit longer than my pointer finger.
Okay.
Which one's ring finger?
Yeah.
So turn it, but turn it the other way around for me.
Yeah.
Okay.
So your ring finger is a little bit longer than your pointer finger.
Yeah.
Okay.
That is the typical heterosexual male pattern.
Okay.
Now, people are going to be like, this is bullshit.
Listen, this has been replicated more than five times in humans.
Okay.
So on the right hand, and you don't know, sometimes they look a little more equal.
But it's replicated five generations.
Five different studies have repeated this and it holds up every single time.
So and if sometimes you have to measure from that first crease on the palm side.
Oh, crease.
But if we were to measure it, yeah.
So this pointer finger is smaller than the ring finger.
It's called the D2 to D4 ratio.
Scientists are super nerdy.
Okay.
Turns out that if you look at gay men, men that identify as gay, there are very few men that identify as bisexual, actually.
But if you look at gay men, that difference is much more pronounced, much bigger.
They have a hyper male pattern.
Now, it can't be due to behavior, right?
You could say, well, they're having sex with a lot more people.
Sex increases testosterone.
No, it's directly related to how much testosterone you were exposed to in utero when you were in your mommy's belly.
Now.
Can you get exposed to testosterone in your mom's belly if someone ejaculates into the mom?
That hasn't been looked at, but I don't think so.
There's a lot to talk about here.
So yeah, you can put that hand down.
So gay men have a hypermale pattern.
The index finger, excuse me, the pointer finger tends to be relatively shorter than the ring finger.
So the pointer finger is shorter than the ring finger.
Yeah.
Yeah, on the right hand.
On the right hand is where it's there.
You go.
See, so yep, yeah.
Yeah.
There you go.
Fuck.
Okay.
So it's close.
Well, no, no, it's a very small difference in everyone, but in gay men, it tends to move much greater.
So in the gay men, the pointer finger is a little bit more shorter than the ring finger.
Correct.
Wow.
And we're not talking about absolute.
We're talking about the ratio.
Okay, now check this out.
Now, check it out.
Lesbians tend to have the same pattern as heterosexual men, which is not to say they are men, right?
Believe me, I got lesbian friends.
They are women.
A lot of people, when they hear lesbian, they think of like a sort of cartoon stereotype of a lesbian.
Trust me, there are a lot of different lesbians.
Actually, my lesbian friends recently have been trying to school me on how you spot a lesbian.
Turns out there's all sorts of interesting things that the lesbian community is going to get.
I'm not supposed to give away these secrets.
It's kind of like magicians, you know, but let's just say like number of rings and stuff is our like interesting correlates.
Okay.
Love the lesbian community.
Yeah, we got to find some good lesbians, man, in the future.
So here's what's wild.
Yeah.
The more older brothers a guy has, the more testosterone he's exposed to in utero and the higher probability it is that he'll be gay.
Wow.
Now, that's not always the case.
It doesn't mean you have five older brothers, you'll be gay, but much higher probability of being gay if you have more older brothers.
With each older brother, the probability of a male baby growing up into a gay man increases significantly.
Gosh.
Okay, super interesting.
Now, all of this is interesting because it shows that there's what we call organizational effects of hormones in utero.
None of this can be because of behavior.
In fact, these differences are present at birth.
Okay.
Okay.
And then, of course, the question I asked when I was on the study is if I would chop off my index finger, does my testosterone go up?
The answer is no.
So when we think about like partner selection, like, you know, heterosexual, homosexual, you know, I think years ago, it was thought that this was, you know, there were still people that thought this was a behavioral choice.
Listen, news flash, this is clearly a biological phenomenon.
None of it, clearly, like, you know, and I understand that, but there's, but there's, of course, also flexibility.
You could imagine that some people, because of experience, decide that they're going to, you know, bat for the other team.
Oh, for sure.
A lot of my gay friends are like, it's not a choice, right?
It's just like, it's who you are.
And I'm like, well, why after you've had a drink are you trying to get me to choose it?
That's a thing for me.
That's a very good question.
It's like reverse psychology.
Are they trying to trick you or something?
Wiener trick.
That's interesting.
My lesbian friends have never tried to convince me to be a lesbian.
But I don't blame gay dudes if they, because I think the ultimate thing you can get as a gay dude is a straight dude, you know?
That's hot shit.
Well, okay, so in the, I can't speak for lesbians, but my close lesbian friends tell me that, also, yeah, like flipping somebody for them is like considered a trophy, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But, you know, so the last sort of study in this.
They're catching a Bigfoot or whatever.
There's a neuroscientist by the name of Simon LeVay who years ago looked in the brain for brain differences between gay and straight men.
And he found one.
There's a little area of the hypothalamus called the interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus, area 4, that is different in size between gay men and straight men.
And, you know, it's hard to argue that that comes from behavior.
It could have.
The problem with that study is they got the brains from deceased AIDS patients, and AIDS is a known neurodegenerative condition.
So, you know, there's no perfect study of any of this.
I don't know how we got into this, but I think basically we're talking about lesbians are going to save us all.
But, you know, one thing that I think is so important about the work you do, seriously, one of the reasons I wanted to come here today is because you're normalizing conversations about addiction, porn, sex, intimacy.
You know, you asked why, I think you answered your question earlier.
Why is podcasting so big and important now?
Because you're not going to get this kind of conversation on a legacy news channel.
They're going to bring in somebody who's like the expert and they're going to talk about things from the perspective of never having done them.
They're not going to reveal anything about themselves.
And here we are kind of, you know, like, you know, brushing up against the barbed wire of some of these topics in an effort to really talk about them because this is what a lot of people are struggling with.
Yeah.
Some of that intimacy disorder stuff was a nightmare for me because when I was in my 20s, I was so nervous around women that a lot of times I had erectile dysfunction, you know?
Could you talk to your partner about it?
Right.
Back then, it was probably taboo, right?
Oh, yeah.
No, I think I just felt defeated.
You know, it felt very much like, damn, something's wrong with me.
I don't know what's wrong with me, you know?
And it was like, I remember I had, it's funny because kind of with like my first girlfriend, I didn't really have it.
And then it started to happen.
And then the same thing happened with my second girlfriend.
And then after that, once I kind of got into like age 23, it was, or like 24, it was like a problem for a long time.
So I was like a bug in your brain.
Oh, yeah.
So once it was like, I knew it was there, then it was like always this thing.
So, oh, fuck, I can't even, I forgot about all these nightmare times where you'd be on a date and you'd be like, how's this date going?
And then like, are we going to get like animate?
Then what's going to happen?
And I would like, you know, I remember like I would eat like, you know, those gas station wiener pills like, you know, like black attack 40 or whatever.
I've seen them on the counter.
They don't work, dude.
I think they're all just caffeine and stimulants.
Oh, bro.
Can't be good.
Can't be good.
One of them I took.
Yeah.
Just zoom in on some of those.
No, that's Dayquil.
I mean, that's not going to help anybody.
Yeah, Triple Green, Rhino 87, Macho Man, White Black Guy.
That's a crazy name for one.
Wait, what?
Yeah, I made that up.
Okay, I didn't see that there.
I have a visual defect or something.
Oh, yeah.
Body beast or whatever.
King Kong.
But nowadays, a lot of this is worked out because, you know, the drug Tadalophil, also known as Cialis, was developed as a way to increase blood flow to the prostate.
By the way, every male 35 or older, this was suggested by the director of male sexual health at Stanford School of Medicine, Mike Eisenberg.
So I'm not just pulling this out of nowhere.
Every male 35 or older should probably be on a low dose, 2.5 to 5 milligrams of Tadalafil in the evening.
It's very inexpensive.
It does require a prescription.
Why?
Because the prostate needs blood flow and it also serves, it has this pro-erectile function, right?
And of course, one has to do all the other things correctly.
You got to be sleeping, exercising, et cetera.
Also, a lot of guys think they should be doing kegels, you know, that thing where you're like, you know, kind of tighten.
That actually will tighten your pelvic floor and block blood flow to the penis and make erection more difficult.
Had minutes.
Yeah.
So they did, you know, a lot of this stuff wasn't taught.
Yeah, I remember I would take some of them so much sometime.
I remember one time I was trying to like perform, like have sex with this gal or something.
And my, I had taken some of those wiener pills, my nose just started bleeding all over this woman.
And I was like, no, did she freak out?
Huh?
I don't know.
It was in Miami.
Everybody, we had like a belly full of crab or whatever.
But it was like this nice crab place, but it was like, and my nose just, it was just like, that was crazy.
But it just became this crazy dance in my head where it was like wiener pills, trying to be normal, like trying to calm down, like put an ice in my shirt, just all these things to like chill, like just be able to be normal for sex.
That shit was a nightmare.
Yeah.
I mean, it was a nightmare.
And then you're stuck in this universe where that is becomes like your whole battle.
And then you get afraid to even talk to girls sometimes or relate to them because you're like, well, what, you know, if I take a girl down this road and it's not able to work out, then who am I?
Then where am I at?
You know?
Yeah.
And then imagine that.
But layered on top of that is the fear of being shamed by, oh, listen, I don't know that I should, you know, I'm just going to bring it up.
I don't know the specifics, but I remember hearing a few years ago, there was a comedian who was like shamed for being bad in bed or something.
Wasn't this like, and that was one of the first kind of, it was got, he was kind of canceled for being bad in bed.
Wasn't that?
That was it.
I don't know.
All right.
Well, and listen, if there was like coercive stuff or whatever, I don't know, but I wasn't there, obviously.
Obviously, you didn't read the article either.
But I think, you know, you layer on top the fear of being shamed.
Right.
And all of a sudden, you know, like you're talking about like collapsing a young male's existence.
I mean, you know, I think, yeah, I, like I said, for the fourth time, forgive me for repeating myself, 49. So I thanks, man.
I feel good.
Well, listen, I quit drinking.
I never drank that much, but also I've been doing things that I love.
I was going to say that one of the things that will keep you young is dopamine.
Really?
Not from pharmacology, but being in pursuit of things that you love.
Positive anticipation.
But I think that.
Let's go into that in just a second, but let's finish out this way you were saying.
Yeah.
I think that, you know, I benefited tremendously from being open with that first girlfriend.
Yes.
That first girlfriend, just saying, hey, like, you know, like, she had this like buff boyfriend in another school.
Actually, it was wild because he ended up killing himself.
And that was years later.
And I remember thinking, this guy was like the football hero, right?
He ended up committing suicide.
And I remember thinking, wow, in my mind, he was like, couldn't be outdone.
Right.
And so talking to Her, I remember her just saying, like, first, she said something like, We were kids, right?
We were like 16, you know, she said, you know, you're, you're wonderful.
And I remember thinking, like, I don't want to be called wonderful.
Like, I'm trying to get good at this thing.
Yeah.
And I think if I've learned anything, like, if I could send like a like all-points bulletin out, it's like everything we know about the erectile response is that it's what we call parasympathetic.
It comes from the relaxation response.
Orgasm is related to, it's almost like a stress of sorts.
It's pleasureful, but high arousal.
Yeah.
The key to all of it is a lot of exhales, a lot of nasal breathing, and just slow the whole thing down.
Slow the whole thing down.
That you, you know, later once you're comfortable with somebody, if you got like five minutes and you're going to like go for the quickie thing in the kitchen before you leave to work.
Okay, that's a whole program.
Okay.
That's like that guy lethal shooter on Instagram.
The guy can make a basket from anywhere.
Like he worked up to that.
What you're trying to do is slow down the whole thing and get into sensation.
You got to get out of your head.
Now, it's one thing to say get out of your head.
It's another to do it.
So the whole process there starts with just only going so far as then you communicate with the person.
Slow down.
These things have a real beauty to them because when people start entering that dance and communicating well with one another, all of a sudden, like the magic of biology takes over.
And then someone thinks, oh, well, now it's going to go back.
Then you just kind of restart and do the whole thing.
And nowadays, I think young males go quickly.
They're like, I'm going to take 20 milligrams.
It's a dowel fill this out.
Listen, that probably would help, but learning how to do this, this thing that we call intimacy, right?
I mean, intimacy is a lot of things, but knowing that what's happening there is between the two of you, and that also means you guys, because there's also been a long history of men talking about all the women they slept with.
And then that doesn't feel good necessarily to the other women.
So the real, the art of intimacy is something that we've lost.
And listen, I'm not saying that all sexes has this element.
Sometimes people just want to get together and get raw, but that's, that's a, you know, that's an advanced skill that you may or may not want to engage in.
Right.
And I think that slowing the whole thing down, like, hey, we're going to be together in bed four times before we ever actually have intercourse.
Like that's weird to look at you and say that, but you know what I'm talking about.
No, hell no.
It wouldn't be.
You know, this is the kind of thing that can transform, not only avoids problems, but can transform your notion of like what's possible in a relationship.
Oh, I had to do it.
Slow, slow, slow, slow.
And then once that intimacy is set, then there can be some, you know, more adventurous exploration at speed.
But, you know, it's all about it's all about slowing that thing down, slowing the whole process down.
Yeah, dude.
I remember, oh, dude, I remember this freaking my girlfriend at the time.
I was like, I thought I couldn't get an erection, right?
So I had her call me a different name like we were making out.
That was your, that was your solution.
Well, this dude Robert in our, in our grade was getting mad erections, everybody was saying.
And I'd be like, call me.
And I, oh, this is so embarrassing.
But I'd be like, call me Robert.
Call me Robert.
And it didn't fucking help.
And she's like, it was just the most embarrassing.
That shit was super embarrassing, dude.
Because even if I was Robert, I couldn't even get an erection at the time.
So that was horrible.
Trying to think of what else happened.
Dude, oh, I've gone, I mean, you know, over the years, I've gone, you know, down the gamut of all of it, like hiring escorts or, you know, thinking like, oh, we need more than one part, like all that, like just thinking like all these things would change it, you know, drugs, alcohol, like all these different things to like trying to fine tune how I would feel okay.
I think even just to be in like a conversation, like just to be like in an intimate conversation, like, oh, I wished I would have from the beginning been like just with a girl, I've been, hey, like, this is what's going on and this is how I'm feeling and this is what's popping, you know, and like, and even made it cool or whatever, and it would have brought us closer together.
But instead, I took this huge bypass of like things that I thought would, like, I thought that intimacy was just a one-man show.
Well, that, yeah, you know, it's so important what you're saying that it was all your responsibility.
Does that make any sense or not?
Yeah, listen, news flash, men and women.
There are women who are great in bed and there are women who are not great in bed.
You know, there are great lovers who are women.
There are not great lovers.
I'll tell you what makes a great female lover.
Yeah.
Somebody who can relax and enjoy herself.
And part of that is the communication and also somebody who's tuned into what works for you.
You know, it took me a long time because I listen, I think all young men deal with this, right?
You want to perform well.
And it's interesting you mentioned Robert and I mentioned this other guy that sadly eventually killed himself.
But every young male knows the experience of there's like this satellite male, you're holding yourself up against this image and an idea, right?
This image and an idea.
That's very dangerous thinking.
You know what I think?
I think that every male should understand that at some point, you're the satellite male.
You're the satellite male.
So you got to get out of that kind of thinking and understand that like, like dancing, like athletics, like it takes time to get good at.
You need reps.
And you need reps under conditions where you can learn.
You know, I think, you know, it sounds like you put the pressure on yourself to be like a sexual athlete from Go.
And like you got to learn layups, no pun intended.
You got to learn that your free throws.
You got to learn.
Lay downs, bro.
I look at all that pornography.
That's what it was.
I've been looking at all that parno, you know, and it got me all bent out.
Yeah, it's like if you want to play basketball, you don't go look at Lethal Shooters Instagram and go, I'm going to do that tomorrow.
I mean, he built up to that, you know?
So I think we're using an analogy here and metaphor, but it's just so important that this guy right there, Lethal Shooter.
This guy is like.
He's just like that.
Yeah, and I'll tell you, no, it's reps.
It's reps, reps, reps.
He did a live one night that I caught really late at night when I was in New York.
He can visually measure the angle the ball has to go in.
He's not shooting.
He is shooting for the basket, but he's trying to put the ball in a cone of a particular angle.
He's looking above the basket at the angle he needs to sink that thing.
He'll put a gummy bear into a 16-ounce bottle from across a court.
Damn.
And then he yells at you for doubting him.
Oh, I love that.
What's he doing here?
Oh, he's, what do they call that game?
Game cornhole.
What a weird name for a game.
Yeah, you wonder how it started.
Boom.
Look at this guy.
Beanbag.
And he goes, I understand it now.
Yeah, he's really good.
That man, lethal shooter right there.
Yeah, he reps.
He worked up to that.
And he didn't work up to it by picking up a basketball, metaphorically speaking, and saying, okay, I got to make this or else my life is destroyed and people are going to be talking about it.
No.
So I think there has to be a private world, an intimate world where people can explore in a healthy way, communicate in a healthy way, know it's between them.
And then you get to this beautiful vista with intimacy where you're like, I love this or I love that.
And, you know, I mean, and it brings people together.
Oh, I mean, listen, I mean, I want to be respectful to, you know, my former partners, but you know, it's one of these things where you go like, wow, like I really, I really learned something from that person.
Now, of course, as a man, you also have to have an ego intact enough to know she learned a few things from somebody else too.
Right.
Unless it's a first relationship.
Right.
This notion that you're the only person that's ever been there is quite rare.
And part of being a grown male is accepting that.
And frankly, you know, different strokes for different folks, you know, but I think you got to understand, like, we're all, we're all here because either in a dish or in a human, sperm met egg, okay?
This drive that's dopamine driven and to reproduce and sex, the reason those things are so closely woven is, and that drives so much of culture and behavior and shame and addiction and pleasure and all this stuff is because that's why we're here.
Like, right.
I mean, this is, this is, this is everything.
And, you know, now Elon and other people are talking about how the, you know, the replacement rate for humans is way, way down because we have birth control and people aren't having sex as much.
I mean, it is possible that humans fail to replace themselves as a species, you know?
And then you got guys like him who are trying to make up for that deficit.
Oh, yeah, he's popping off, dude.
He's got like, what, like 14 kids or something?
He'll knock up a fucking parking meter up, dude.
You don't give a damn, boy.
He's the only dude who puts.
Yeah, he put definitely, he'll get it.
I want to pivot a little bit.
I saw an, there's, we're starting to see stuff like I've been, I've been noticing recently these articles about measles.
Have you seen this stuff hitting the airwaves?
Is that realistic?
It just starts to seem, if you can see one of them, Nick and bring it up.
Person may have spread measles at Shakira concert in MetLife Stadium, health officials say, right?
This just seems like a person who attended a Shakira concert at MetLife Stadium on May 15th was infected with measles and may have spread the highly contagious virus at the event.
Health officials say this almost reads like the beginning of a movie, right?
Like highly contagious, infected, spread at a concert.
So it makes it super scary, right?
All these, like, all the viruses tend to spread more quickly indoors.
Measles can live in an airspace for up to two hours and it's highly transmissible, especially amongst the unvaccinated.
So this is an article.
What's this in?
This is NorthJersey.com, which is owned by USA Today.
Okay.
Conventional media.
So I'm just like, what is going on here?
Are they just trying to see another thing that will stick to society?
What do you, as a scientist, what do you even think when you read something like this?
Okay.
Super important, specific and general question you're asking.
First question as a scientist, I would ask is, what was the frequency of people with measles coming into the hospital before there was a focus on measles?
Got it.
Like two years ago, before the discussion about measles and vaccines was as prominent, at least measles vaccines, right?
Back then it was all about COVID vaccines.
But so I'd say, how, you know, if we were to look in the medical history, because hospitals keep records, you know, in the, this was in East Rutherford.
Okay, so in New Jersey, I have relatives in New Jersey.
How many measles cases were identified in the last 10 years?
Right.
And what percentage of those reported having been in a public place prior?
That's what I'd want to know, because that will tell you whether or not this is the media amplifying.
Here we go.
Texas outbreak drives up early U.S. measles cases in early 2025.
Number of measles cases reported in the U.S. per year.
Yeah, well, we hear about these things like bird flu.
Remember a few years back, it was monkeypox?
Yeah.
Monkey pox.
We don't hear about monkeypox anymore.
That was like monkeypox is coming for us.
Yeah, every couple months, there's something that pops off like this.
Every few months, it's like hoof mouse syndrome or scary baby.
There are cases of measles that can be very detrimental, but there's an episode of the Brady Bunch.
Do you remember this episode of the Brady Bunch?
Where they all get measles.
And then at the end, Alice walks in and she's got the spots and she goes, I've got measles too.
You know, when I was a kid, I had the chicken pox.
Now, I'm not trying to make light of the measles, right?
Like any infectious disease, there's inflammation of the body and brain.
There are cases where these diseases cause serious long-term effects.
And then there are cases where it has less of an effect.
The most important thing to understand for me would be what are the real statistics of like, is measles becoming more frequent?
Is that tied to this shift?
Because let's face it, regardless of where you stand on the issue of vaccination, people are now taking a look again at vaccination.
The vaccine schedules have expanded, right?
You know, I'm part of the medical community.
I'm an employee of Stanford School of Medicine.
And I would say I fall more, just full disclosure, into the more conventional standpoint of this.
I want to be really clear because of I do believe that there are certain vaccinations that are highly beneficial.
I also think there are a number of vaccinations that for public health reasons should be explored further, if for no other reason, to discover that, yes, we were right or no, we were wrong.
It's just critically important.
I mean, you know, I think any good, any self-respecting scientist would say, those are the data.
Let's look again.
Now, there's this real twist in the data around the autism vaccine thing that's very, that's really unfortunate.
And this is one of the reasons why this is such a hot-button issue is that the guy, Andrew Wakefield, who originally tried to tie the vaccine to autism, he was found guilty of fraud.
Okay, now I wasn't involved in the papers or the case, but like that puts a twist in everything because he go to jail?
I believe he did, or he at least lost his medical license.
Okay, there have been other instances, you know, of scientific fraud, but that one in particular caused the Entire field to assume he was completely wrong about everything.
And now there are folks like Robert Kennedy, who is, like him or not, is our head of HHS.
Okay, I actually know Robert.
I actually am going to host Chey Bhattacharya, who is my colleague at Stanford, on the head of NIH.
And so I think right now there's a, there's, here, what were the consequences?
Andrew Wakefield did not go to prison, although he was found guilty of serious professional misconduct by the UK General Medical Counsel and was struck off the medical register, effectively ending his career as a physician.
There's no record or evidence that he was ever criminally prosecuted or in prison for his actions related to the fraudulent 1998 Lancet study linking the MMR vaccine to autism.
The sanctions against him were professional and civil, not criminal.
So an important thing that must be done, I know this issue is, you know, I'm going to catch hate either way.
Well, it's a hot issue, right?
It's a super hot issue.
Listen, as a parent, can you imagine you have a kid and your kid seems for all measures perfectly healthy, has some treatment, vaccine or a pill or a trip to the supermarket, and that kid fundamentally changes their behavior afterwards?
You know, the one thing we know is, you know, this is also a deep hypothalamic circuit, as we say.
There is a hardwired circuit for mothers, especially.
You know, dads can be protective, but mothers to protect their young.
So, you know, when the moms are pissed off and curious, they are unrelenting.
And no amount of discussion about that was resolved because the Wakefield thing was gone is going to satisfy them.
So my personal take is run the studies you need to run.
Make sure they're run properly with an unbiased look at all of this.
So important because the thing about vaccines and autism is really a microcosm for a much larger theme about how much can we trust the medical community.
And listen, I know scientists.
I was weaned in this.
My dad's a scientist.
Like most scientists, like 99.9% of scientists want to get things right.
We are in the business of trying to untease the secrets of nature and do good things with them.
Okay.
And yet there are those that will manipulate the system.
No one goes into science to get rich.
They go into biotech to get rich, but you don't become a bench scientist at a university to get rich.
Trust me.
But how can those scientists be manipulated as a group?
Like when you look back at, like, how can that happen?
Like, is it journals that are compromised?
Is it the medical energy that gets compromised?
But how do you have like a whole, you know?
Sure.
So I'll try and keep this relatively succinct.
This is a whole landscape, and it's something that is like really deep and important to me as a science communicator, health communicator, who has friends on both sides, you know, of these debates.
The most important thing to understand is scientists are trying to figure out the truth.
They are also human and they are highly incentivized to advance their careers.
One of the things that I've observed in science is not people making up data.
That's exceedingly rare.
But scientists sometimes, when they don't get the answer they want in an experiment, they'll come up with reasons for why that experiment probably wasn't run right and maybe we should discard the data.
Okay, let's say when they don't get the answer they want, they will come up with reasons why, oh, that antibody wasn't as fresh or, you know, the conditions weren't right.
And they will start to steer the data, steer the experiment.
I have observed that.
Okay.
I've observed that a lot in my career, sadly.
Far less common are people outright making up data, what we call fudging data, just like making up numbers.
There's a famous case in nanotechnology of this kid whose last name was Shoan.
He was like a wonderkind in the sense that he had like, it's very hard to publish papers in science or nature.
This is like the Super Bowl rings of science.
I've had a couple in nature, a couple in science, and I feel immensely blessed for that.
Sean was publishing 12 papers a year in nature and science.
And at some point, people start looking more closely at their data.
Okay.
And what happened?
They saw that the random noise plots, random should be random, right?
You don't need to be a scientist or a genius to understand that random should be random.
He was so lazy that he was replotting the random noise in two different experiments.
You can't get the same random noise in two different experiments.
So there are bad apples like him.
He's gone now.
But most scientists are trying to get it right.
And yet there's this thing that we have to constantly check ourselves on.
This is why you have to, what we call blind the data.
You look at it not knowing what condition you're looking at.
This is why replication is so key.
And the big problem in science, and I do think this new administration cares about this, it's hard to get a job as a professor for replicating work.
Everyone wants to see the new thing.
So a PhD student comes into my lab, they want to study something.
We rarely say, oh, let's go do what someone else did, make sure they're right.
No, you pick something new.
So a lot of mistakes of past get kind of baked into the field.
And this is what happened in the Alzheimer's field.
This is why, you know, one mistake, which probably was somebody outright fudging as well, making stuff up, kind of get woven into the lineage.
Then other papers get published more easily.
And then lo and behold, 25 years later, we say, we don't have a single good treatment for Alzheimer's.
Best thing you can do is get good sleep.
There's a little study out today about creatine maybe helping, but we're just nipping around the corners of this extremely important problem.
I must say, and this is not for political correctness.
Listen, I'm a tenured professor at Stanford, so I don't have to worry about quote unquote losing my job.
I mean, there are ways you can lose your job even with tenure, but I just want to say, with all the bad things about science, the Wakefield thing, the Alzheimer's thing, the replication crisis, the lack of incentive for people to replicate work, I do have to say something very important.
There are so many treatments for diseases that exist nowadays that we take for granted that were born out of basic research.
Scientists in a lab just trying to figure things out without the idea of a treatment someday.
My scientific great-grandparents, I mentioned them earlier, David Hubele and Torrance of Weasel, did that experiment of closing one eye in a kitty cat and monkey.
Showed that the brain is immensely plastic.
That gave birth, excuse me, that gave birth to an entire field of the molecules involved and the hormones involved and why it shuts down with age, how to open plasticity in adulthood.
In many ways, it's given rise to this whole field of psychedelics for the treatment of brain disorders in order to reopen plasticity.
They did not do those experiments thinking there would be any medical application, but we now know, as compared to the 70s, when a kid has a lazy eye or a cataract or what we call strabismus or any of that, we now know to get in and treat those eye diseases early while the brain is still plastic.
Their work has saved the vision, in other words, has prevented blindness of countless people around the world.
And there's this whole initiative in places overseas to remove cataracts, save vision.
So I can give you a million examples, not a million, I can give you thousands of examples of that.
Immunotherapies for cancer, neuroplasticity, the incredible work being done on psilocybin for depression, MDMA, which hopefully will be approved by the FDA soon for the treatment of PTSD.
Incredible 70%, 7-0 remission rates.
The understanding of that drug, methylened dioxine, methamphetamines, methamphetamine with a little twist, okay?
The understanding of that was born out of serious scientists slaving away in their labs for very little pay because they love discovery.
And I'm not saying that to just, you know, kind of say, oh, all scientists are great, but I think we have to be very careful.
The replication crisis is real.
We need to take another look at all issues related to public health.
You can tell I'm very passionate about this.
Listen, I text Bobby all the time.
I'm like, listen, man, we got to look at this.
We got to look at it.
And you know what?
We can't allow ourselves to go too far in one direction or the other.
I say, let's not waste any time.
Let's take a look at all these vaccines again in great control.
Yeah, what do we lose by looking at them?
Nothing.
But I'll tell you, to say what I'm saying here, like I'm going to, this will be cut and clipped and contorted.
You know, I'm just going to come out with it.
Trad medias, you know, the moment I started showing up on Rogan, listen, I think Joe Rogan has done tremendous amount of good for science communication.
Matt Walker, me, David Sinclair, other people on there, physicists, you know, but then the adjacency to anyone who's asking these larger questions puts you in the bullseye of, oh, you know, he, you know, Andrew's a science denier of flat earth or whatever.
No, I believe that any solid field should be subject to self-scrutiny and outside scrutiny.
And this is why, listen, I've published a number of papers and I always say, listen, I'm happy to be wrong for the right reasons.
Like we were trying our damnedest to get it right.
You can't be wrong for the wrong reasons, like making shit up.
You make a mistake, you correct yourself.
It's called being an adult.
And you can tell that like my, this gets my energy going because I will tell you, I am very concerned about the future of science in this country either way, because we've got to split right down the middle.
And there's all this finger pointing.
And somebody, hopefully Jay Bhattacharya, our new director of the NIH, God willing, he's going to bridge this gap.
I'm trying to do what I can behind the scenes to really get people talking because there's so much shit talking behind the, you know, I hate them and I hate them.
But listen, we all got to live in this world.
Forgive me for going on a monologue, but I'm telling you, we need to take a hard look at ourselves and we really, really need to, whatever we explore, we need to explore it properly.
But scientists are good people, man.
And I don't make my living doing science anymore.
So I can say that with no bias.
They're good people, 99.9% of them.
And those bad apples, excuse my language, but fuck them.
Oh, for sure.
Because they ruin it all for everybody.
Oh, yeah.
Well, and it also leads to impairment.
It leads to disease.
It leads to atrocities that happen to people.
And it's usually for the sake of profit.
Do you believe that big pharma would lobby against certain tests being done or residual testing, re-examination of past findings, et cetera, in order to keep things a certain way?
Okay, so does that make sense?
Yeah, absolutely.
So two things about Big Pharma.
First of all, I don't have any direct links to Big Pharma.
You know, people think because I'm at Stanford, I've been accused of being part of MKUltra.
I don't even know what that is, but sounds scary.
Oh, I don't know.
It is.
What's MK Ultra?
I've been told I'm a CIA plant, MK Ultra.
I mean, that stuff is crazy.
Oh, dude, somebody told me I went to the Middle East or something.
Somebody said I was working for something, Bangladesh or something.
I was like, dude, I don't, I've never had anybody ask me to do anything.
I wasn't even born.
I wasn't even born.
I was born in 75. Yeah, well.
So big pharma, look, they're a business.
Okay.
So there are drugs like SSRIs, which we will say have been not so helpful for the treatment of depression for most people.
But guess what?
SSRIs are tremendously helpful for people with OCD.
Real OCD is a condition where the compulsion, the behavior makes the obsession worse.
Imagine a mosquito bite.
Every time you scratch it, itches worse and worse and worse.
Destroys lives.
SSRIs have helped those people a lot.
The drug companies are highly incentivized to keep drugs out of generic so that the prices come down.
They do a game.
I know this because I was involved in exploring drugs for eye disease years ago and I would learn from these companies.
If you can have a drug that goes through all the research and development, costs millions of dollars, and then is used, say, for the treatment of a heart condition.
If you can bypass the need to do all the safety studies because you discovered that that drug is now also useful for, say, preserving vision and macular degeneration or glaucoma or diabetes, whatever, you save yourself a lot of money.
Same drug, you maintain the patent and you can't have generic competitors.
So drug companies, I don't think people talk about this enough, are highly incentivized to not discover new drugs, but rather to continue with the same drugs and find new uses for the same drugs.
Wow.
That's rarely talked about.
That's a serious problem.
The other thing about drug companies.
Because the negative side effect of that is what?
Something gets kind of shoehorned in and working for something, but the- Because if you look at the difference between like there are these new sleep medications called the DORAs, they shut down the wakefulness system as opposed to making you sleepy.
They have a lot less abuse potential.
They're like $300 a month.
And as long as they can maintain the patent on that, there won't be the generic version because it probably costs the profit margins on these things are huge because they're trying to cover the research and development they did.
So that's just one example.
But the drug companies are incentivized.
Yeah, the Doras.
I've tried them.
I felt lousy.
And is that like Ambien or whatever?
No.
So Ambien is a problem because it can give you memory issues.
This works through something called the hypocretinorexin system.
It was discovered in narcoleptic dogs in the basement of Stanford, believe it or not.
There's all sorts of cool stuff there.
But the drug companies are a concern in one sense, which is that, look, dopamine, as we learned, is involved in movement.
It's involved in reward.
Schizophrenics take drugs to block dopamine.
And if you see someone on the street corner, nowadays it's complicated with fentanyl, but you see the person kind of writhing, it's called cardive dyskinesia.
That's because those drugs, the neuroleptics, as we call them, reduce the auditory hallucinations.
They relieve a lot of those symptoms of schizophrenia, but it also hits dopamine in the spinal system, the motor system, and then they have these motor side effects.
So the problem is most pharmaceuticals have side effects because most chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, they're in multiple places in the brain, not just the area that you're concerned about repairing.
So, you know, I'm not super anti-big pharma, but I will say I am very pro self-directed healthcare.
This is why I'm, you know, a big part of my initiative with the podcast is get people getting sunlight in their eyes in the evening, get some sunlight in your eyes in the after, in the morning, excuse me, sunlight in your eyes in the morning.
You know, hydrate, exercise, get on a normal circadian rhythm.
One of the most important things for mental health is bright mornings and days, dark nights.
And how do you get on that circadian rhythm?
And that's something that I've struggled with.
I think my circadian rhythm is, God, I'm going to turn into a cicada.
Well, we got to get you some of the red lens glasses.
I'm not doing a promotional here, but getting the screens dim or wearing red lens glasses in the evening to block the blue and green lights.
But how do you even set up a circadian rhythm?
Bright light in the morning.
If you wake up and the sun's out, get outside, take that brimmed hat off, take the sunglasses off, look in the direction of the sun.
You don't have to force yourself to look at it.
Get five to 15 minutes of sunlight.
Drink your coffee, get some exercise, maybe even do like 100 jumping jacks.
Get your system going.
Very simple way to put this is early in the day, you want movement, caffeine, hydration, sunlight.
If you can't get sunlight, you get bright light from like an artificial light.
You can get a 10,000 lux light on Amazon for like 100 bucks.
I have no relationship to any of those companies.
Get your morning kind of going.
You know, it's hard to be jocko-willing.
It's hard, but you got to kind of force a little bit of that on yourself.
And then in the afternoon, taper off the caffeine, dim the screens, lower your heart rate, do some long exhale breathing.
You know, just take it down a notch.
And over about three days of doing that, what you'll find is I start to wake up in anticipation of the day.
You have this circadian rhythm that learns, well, I'm going to be active in a few hours.
And you start waking up in the morning at a particular time.
That whole phenomenon, you set your clock for 7 a.m.
and you wake up at 6.59.
Your brain is clocking time.
So does that mean you need to go to bed at like 8 p.m.
for a week to get your circadian rhythm set or what's the truth?
Everyone's slightly different, different chronotypes.
So I do best, for instance, I know if I had total control, going to bed sometime between 10 and 11 p.m.
and I wake up around 6 a.m.
Okay, yes, I can go to bed at 9 and wake up at 4, but I can't stick to that schedule very long.
My system just genetically is not wired for it.
Some people are real night owls.
They do best going to sleep at 2 a.m.
and waking up at 10. They just feel better.
Try a couple different schedules for at least three days.
And then wherever you feel kind of most yourself, kind of like, you know, for me, going to bed by 10.30 and waking up by 6 is kind of a natural antidepressant.
When I sleep in and go to bed late, I start feeling off.
Then I start abusing caffeine because I love caffeine.
Love, love, love caffeine.
And I'm a big fan of caffeine.
I like it.
But then I start abusing it.
I start taking too much.
And then, you know, and then it, you know, potentially can drift into other stimulants.
Oh, yeah.
You know, and then you're a mess.
So, but, you know, some people do really well going to bed at 8.30 and waking up at 4 a.m.
But look, the world is not really wired for that.
If you're going to have any kind of social life.
Like Mark Wahlberg or something.
He's always like, I wake up at 3. Well, him and Ari Emmanuel from WME.
Like, yeah, those guys are like the 4 a.m.
club.
They're like texting each other and like up.
I get texts from Ari every once in a while.
He's like, man, up early.
He's hyperbear at chamber.
But he's, I mean, he's got like 12 cylinders.
That guy's like, go, go, go, go, go, go.
And listen, some people need more sleep than others.
I do great on six or six and a half.
When I sleep eight, I actually feel more groggy.
So if you get your schedule right, you don't need quite as much sleep.
But before I came out here today, I did a half hour, what I call, it used to be called Yoga Nidra.
It's non-sleep, deep rest, NSDR.
You just do long exhale breathing.
You listen to a script.
You relax your body.
The data show you come out of that with your dopamine level 60% higher than you went into it.
It replenishes your vigor.
Yoga Nidra?
Yeah, well, Yoga Nidra or NSDR, non-sleep, deep rest.
And these are zero-cost tools, right?
Got it.
So how many milligrams of caffeine are you taking a day?
Are you usually taking a day for this?
Yeah.
All right.
A normal cup of coffee would be about 200 milligrams of strong coffee.
I consume about 800 milligrams of caffeine a day.
I drink, I'm half Argentina, so I drink.
I drink Yerba Mate.
Oh, yeah.
Polaro zero sugar yerba mate, or I drink yerba mate out the gourd.
If you're going to drink yerba mate, don't get the sugary kind.
Nope, get the loose sleef.
No, I have a yerba mate brand.
It's not that one.
Ours is Matina, which is, I'm not going to do a promotional here, but the point here is that if you like energy drinks, you like yerba mate, you like coffee, I'm like, more power to you.
So this is 200 and a cup of coffee?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
And what's in one of these?
200 drinks.
So there was actually a study just published on taurine that everyone's worried about, but that study was in vitro.
I need to see a lot of data.
There's a lot of data actually that taurine is beneficial for the heart and it has kind of an anti-aging thing.
It's in a lot of energy drinks and coffee.
Yeah, that's like a lysine and a taurine.
I love caffeine.
I mean, man, caffeine and nicotine.
Right now I'm kind of easing back on it.
The delivery mechanism, MAMS, you don't want to smoke vape, dip or snuff.
You get cancer.
People go, oh, vaping's not bad.
Popcorn lung is real.
People hate me for saying this.
Vaping is bad.
Not as bad as smoking.
Vaping ain't good.
And what flavor is the worst flavor?
Any flavor?
It's all bad for you, man.
But the gums and the pouches, provided it's a low dose, it's very habit forming, but you know, three to six milligrams or something on occasion.
This is the problem.
People go pretty soon.
They're doing a whole canister a day.
Oh, yeah.
But I'm good.
I got a buddy got a fucking mouthful of my buddy like damn cotton eyed Joe over there.
Nicotine's a very interesting drug because it's a stimulant, but it relaxes you too.
But it does cause, excuse me, vasoconstriction.
And that's not good for all the stuff we were talking about earlier.
You want blood flow to the brain and to your extremities, you know?
And so some Nicotine early in the day, little bit, no big deal with caffeine to get work done.
Remember, effort that precedes dopamine in constructive areas of life, writing comedy, podcasting, school, sports, socializing in healthy ways, like this is good.
Can you get just as much dopamine from doing those positive things as you can from doing things that we would consider, you know, that sometimes add a level of disappointment or shame?
And maybe shame is not the word I want to use.
Yes, you can.
It just, you need to be more determined and focused on it.
You know, remember, it's how quickly the dopamine comes in with porn and methamphetamine, cocaine and all of that.
It's how quickly gambling raises dopamine.
You know, the stuff we're talking about, work, focus, learning, all that, it's work.
I mean, it's hard work, but the effort that precedes dopamine is a completely different beast because you're in control and it doesn't put you in the trough.
But I did see a, you know, I guess we don't call them tweets now.
What do we call them?
On X. Some guy made a billion dollars and a couple of weeks later, he said, I don't know what's going on, but I feel like I'm suicidally depressed.
And I just said, that's dopamine.
He got the reward.
And what he misses is the hunt.
You have to stay in the hunt.
This is like the will to live is the hunt for new things.
Ah, the will to live.
31-year-old guy who sells his startup for 100 million shares.
Why he is depressed and how to think about your career and life.
I sold my company, MVMT.
I know that company.
They made watches, right?
A few years ago for a lot of money and thought all my problems would be solved.
I made my life really cushy and comfortable.
I optimize for being as stress-free as possible.
I play video games when I want.
I wake up when I want and really have no reason to get out of bed if I don't want to.
I always thought this was a dream that I'd be happy forever.
I realize I'm in an incredibly unique situation and wanted to share some things I've learned and am still working through.
I mean, for you, you know, and forgive me, I've been monologuing a bit because I just want to make sure I blast through some of this info that hopefully people can make to you.
But I, you know, for you, right, you've got the podcast.
You do your comedy tours.
You know, I'm not a comedian, but I love going to see live comedy.
Oh, yeah, it's fun.
And I just have to imagine that staying busy in pursuit has got to be super important to your overall well-being.
What's funny you say it?
I think it's like, yeah, I didn't know that I liked to work really.
You know, I mean, I knew that I was persistent maybe and I liked comedy.
But then like as other things have started to arise and like learning a podcast and then you're running a business and then, you know, I, I like to work.
You know, I really enjoy it.
I think I'm probably competitive in some ways.
Do you have a, you don't, I'm not going to ask you to tell us, but do you have a couple of comedians in your mind that like you're like, I can, I can best that or is it besting against yourself?
Oh, no, I think it's just, can you still make yourself laugh?
That's my thing.
What's your writing?
I'm very curious about this.
What's your writing process?
Oh, I'll talk to somebody.
Usually I'm trying to talk with a gal and entertain her or talk with one of my buddies and entertain them.
And there's something that'll get said that's just kind of like, oh, that's perfect, man.
So that's kind of how I'll do it.
And then I'll put it on the stage from there, you know, and I'll record my sets and I've started to put some of them into like Chat GPT or AI so it can like show me what was new during this one or the last one and learn little intricacies and things like that, things that worked and things that changed.
Do you get ideas in your dreams?
Do you ever wake up laughing?
Ayahuasca, I've gotten ideas.
I've gotten, I got like some good bits.
How often are you doing ayahuasca?
Maybe every 18 months.
I'm kind of due again to do something like that.
I want to talk to this guy, Brian Hubbard, I believe is your name, who does the ibogaine.
He talks about ibogaine.
I can't take any credit for that project, but my colleague at Stanford, Nolan Williams, triple board certified psychiatrist and neurologist.
He's the one running the brain imaging of the veterans that Brian has been bringing down to Mexico to do the Ibogaine DMT work.
Wow.
And Nolan has discovered there are these changes in brain areas like the insula, which are involved in kind of self-reflection, self-body relationship, all sorts of things.
The data from those studies are incredible.
I mean, these tier one operators, you know, which is code for have to be ready in 24 hours to go overseas and kill a high risk, high consequence work.
The number of those guys I've talked to that were dependent on alcohol, drugs, and other substances that go down there and do it once or twice and never even feel the desire to use again is just striking.
Yeah, the Ibogaine sounds amazing.
I also hear it's terrifying.
A couple of those guys told me, and they have a high bar for this.
A couple of those guys have told me it is the most terrifying experience of their entire life, but also brought them the most amount of peace.
Well, it's a 22-hour psychedelic journey followed by DMT.
Are you asleep during it?
No, you're awake.
And what I hear is that you don't hallucinate when your eyes are open, but when you close your eyes, you get high-definition recall of previous experiences, but you have agency.
You can act differently in there and rewire.
I've never done it.
I'm very curious to do.
I've never done ayahuasca.
I have had some incredibly beneficial clinical experiences with MDMA and with psilocybin.
And it's just complete.
I don't encourage kids to do it.
You need a really good practitioner.
You have to find a way to do it legally.
And there are ways.
Oh, yeah.
Man, it is a game changer.
A lot of bootleg stuff going on out there, but I do think that, yeah, it's like getting back to nature, getting back to the roots, and literally you're getting back to the roots of like what will what can reorganize.
I think the nature inside of us that gets so rattled by us maneuvering it and existing in the world.
I don't know how we manage to damage our own nature so much over time.
Well, maybe it's instead of saying lesbians will save us all, it's lesbians and psychedelics will save us all.
That's kind of my new campaign.
Look at this guy right here.
That's Rick Rubin.
I was saying earlier, you know, that's me when it comes to being able to see clearly along certain dimensions of life, but that's when you come to rely on good friends and you do your work, your inner journey work and figure it out.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's fascinating.
And I think just the fact that we can- This thing is awesome.
Man.
How'd y'all get that?
Just ChatGPT.
Oh, it's so great.
Cock A monkey blindfolded on LSD.
Yeah.
Sometimes I've looked at decisions I've made in my life and go, you know, I pretty much had the clarity that that guy right there had.
Yeah.
And, but in other areas of my life, like the decision to go into skateboarding and leave, the decision to pursue science and then podcasting.
And, you know, my life's a dream, man.
Yeah.
Like, I can't tell you, like, you know, people will think I'm just trying to puff you up, but like to be sitting here talking to you, I'm a fan to be able to explore ideas and to learn from such a diverse array of people.
Like I love talking to scientists, but I love talking to comedians and creatives.
And like my childhood hero became one of my best friends because he heard the podcast.
Really?
Yeah.
I mean, it's kind of embarrassing to say, but Tim Armstrong, the singer for Rancid and the Transplants, he has that band with Rob Aston and Travis Barker.
I mean, Tim's like my hero, and we've become very good friends.
He's a real life poet.
He's an incredible musician.
He's produced a ton of music for others.
He's a very, you know, soft-spoken.
He's a true music producer and performer.
That's fascinating.
And we became, he's one of my best friends.
Like me and David Spade.
I just can't even believe that we're buddies.
And I get to ask him about stuff or even listen to him tell jokes over dinner.
Yeah, things like that, like not to name drop, but yeah, it just blows your mind some of the people you get to come across, you know?
Well, and for people listening, I have to say, like, I used to watch and, you know, watch things and read and listen to podcasts.
And like, I wanted to be part of it, but like being myself, and that's really the key.
Rick always says this.
He's like, the way to succeed in any genre that you're interested in is to be you because no one's done that yet.
The moment you try and be like the other guy, you know, or the other gal is when it falls flat, right?
The reason Tony Hawk's Tony Hawk is because he's a pioneer and he just kept going.
There's only one of him.
Yeah.
You know, and there are others in skateboarding and others in podcasting, but like, like it's like that trust in self.
You just have to, if you just show up you and do your personal work too, I do think, you know, journaling, meditation, working out.
And you're psychedelic.
Just like you.
Yeah.
Like and you just show that, you just show up you.
So like, you know, I think we got the answer to your initial question.
Why is podcasting what it is?
It's because like we just show up.
We didn't have a, we didn't have a template.
There's no script.
Nothing.
We just show up.
There's a couple guys in their closets.
Yeah, and we're talking about finger lengths and lesbians and monkeys on LSD and measles vaccine and some of the biggest issues in public health.
And, you know, your name was mentioned in a moment of praise at the inauguration of the president of the United States.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
We are living.
I don't think we're living in a simulation.
I think what's so fucking awesome about this life is it's real.
Not that it's fake.
It's all the shit that's real that blows my mind.
And just I think what you can be called upon to be a part of, you know, and taking agency, having some more agency.
The biggest thing I noticed in my life is how do I get to know myself better and get to utilize myself better?
And not just for me, but for like, and really to listen to God better.
How do I learn to have a relationship with something that's bigger than me so that I can get better direction, you know, and better and better peace at times?
Because God's not just there for direction, I believe.
I believe that he's also there for reflection and for rest, you know, and just to be able to, you know, I don't know.
Do you pray every day?
I pray every day.
Yeah.
Me too.
I'm a scientist, but I'm a believer.
You know, I've always believed in God and I used to hide praying because I grew up in a complicated home religiously for different, we've got a real mixed family, but also like the attitudes about religion are very mixed.
Some very positive, some not positive.
But a few years ago, a friend of mine who's a former tier one operator and he's running some of my security stuff, like he encouraged me to start reading the Bible.
And I was like, wow, there's so much wisdom here.
And then he encouraged me to start praying.
And it's, I know people are going to, some people roll their eyes.
Some people will be like, get it immediately.
When you start praying before sleeping in the morning, yeah, I prayed right before I came in here in the bathroom.
I literally get on my knees and pray before anything important this morning at night.
And, you know, people, how can you be a scientist and believe in God?
And it's like, well, easy.
Because as a scientist, you learn that like, even as a, let's just say a vision scientist, there are animals that can see parts of the visual spectrum that we can't see.
UV light, infrared light, pit vipers can see it.
Mosquitoes see things we don't see.
So the moment you start just thinking, wait, our human brain can understand and make sense of certain things, but not others through logic and reasoning and emotion, you go, well, there's this not just possibility of an entire set of energies out there that we're not aware of.
It's absolutely certain.
And then you go, well, that's a big leap to the idea that there's a guy or, you know, and his son is the, you know, is, you know, is Christ and Christ was resurrected.
But when you start reading the stories and you start like looking at our real world experience, you go, you know, so much of this makes sense.
And it doesn't make nature and science any less interesting.
It makes it more interesting.
It makes it more important.
It's like we're here, I believe, that we're here to like access that energy and allow it to come through us.
Yeah.
I don't think like we podcast.
I think energy comes through us and we podcast.
Oh, I think the funnest thing sometimes is like getting an idea because I'm like, this didn't come from me.
Right.
What the hell am I doing?
I'm just like something out here that's trying to position myself to be the best receptor.
It's almost like when you're trying to like put those dog ears out for a television or whatever, like an old black and white TV, you're trying to pick up the signal.
It's like, I'm just trying to best get myself in situation to receive a decent signal.
Do you believe, sorry, yesterday I was in a conversation with a Stanford and Harvard trained psychiatrist, one of the smartest people I know.
And he said to me, he said, you know, him talking, he said, you know, I believe in miracles.
He's like, there are miracles.
And I was like, really?
And he explained a case of a patient, like, there is no way this person should still be alive, let alone flourishing as they are.
The number of things that had to organize for that to work out.
And, you know, so I'm kind of obsessed these days with like this notion of miracles.
Well, I love that.
Have you considered, because we will sometimes interview people who have had a miracle experience happen to them.
And it's really fascinating sometimes just to hear some of their stories.
It's something I would like to do more.
One of the things I want to do is just I want to come over to your pod, man, next time I'm in town.
Let's see.
And we can do this again sometime.
I feel like we only got to talk about a few things, but that's perfect.
It'll give us more stuff to talk about in the future.
And just thank you, Andrew, for just being a good voice.
You have a lot to say and you share information well.
And it's like, I think we're at a time where people just need to have information that isn't compromised by like a bank or an advertiser that's telling someone they have to speak a certain way, you know, unless it's an advertisement where you're reading for Tacovas or for Liquid IV or something, you know?
But yeah, thank you for all your commitment to sharing information with us, man.
Thank you.
Yeah, and thanks for spending time with us today.
Thanks for having me on.
And I want to say, you know, the universal love that I see out there for you is not a coincidence.
You know, it's so interesting.
Like people can't put you in a box.
And I love that because there's so much pressure to like put people in a box.
And people really people really feel your heart in everything you do.
And in part, it's the vulnerability.
It's also when you say like, the hell with that and really stretch your wings the way you've developed this incredible expertise at the various things you do, comedy and others.
So, you know, I'm very grateful to be here today.
I'm a fan and you just have the love of so many people.
And it's not an accident, man.
You're a real leader.
And I appreciate you.
That's very nice of you to say, man.
I appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
That's a very thoughtful thing to say.
And yeah, thank you for being here today.
And I'll look forward to seeing you out in Malibu.
Yeah, let's do it again on the HLP.
Amen.
Now I'm just floating on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves.
I must be cornerstone.
Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind I found.
I can feel it in my bones.
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