Latest / The Joe Rogan Experience / #2553 - Andrew Huberman

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#2553 - Andrew Huberman · The Joe Rogan Experience

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
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  Speaker 1: Hello, Andrew. Great to see you again, Joe.
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  Speaker 2: Good to see you, my friend. What a thick-ass book
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  Speaker 2: you wrote, sir.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, I figure it doubles as a doorstop or a weapon. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: it's designed to be read front to back, learn a
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  Speaker 1: lot of science, a lot of health protocols, but you
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  Speaker 1: can also just decide... I want to get better at
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: managing stress. Go straight to that chapter. Look up what
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  Speaker 1: you want to do. Say, oh, I already do that.
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  Speaker 1: Go to the next thing and use it sort of
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  Speaker 1: like a manual.
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  Speaker 2: This is a very ambitious undertaking.
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  Speaker 1: It took me just shy of eight years.
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  Speaker 2: The operating manual or an operating manual for the human body.
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  Speaker 2: That's a lot. Just sitting down there in front of
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  Speaker 2: the computer thinking I'm going to write an operating manual
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  Speaker 2: for the human body.
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  Speaker 1: Well, it didn't start off like that. At first, it
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  Speaker 1: was a book about the autonomic nervous system, stress, sleep, focus.
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  Speaker 1: Then it evolved. Then I had a third completely new rewrite.
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  Speaker 1: And my good friend now, I'm honored to call him
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  Speaker 1: a friend, but he's just such a good dude. Rick
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  Speaker 1: Rubin was like, do you like it? And he goes,
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  Speaker 1: scrape it.
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  Speaker 2: I'm like, what?
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  Speaker 1: And then he said, I'm going to get myself in trouble.
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  Speaker 1: He goes, scrape it, man. Like, what are you doing?
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  Speaker 1: And I said, He's like, you have to love it.
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  Speaker 1: And then he said, they're going to push you to
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  Speaker 1: release this thing. And I said, I already said I
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  Speaker 1: was going to release it. I did. I did it again.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: And then I did that again. And I was going
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  Speaker 1: to visit him in Europe each summer. And we'd sit
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: together and he goes, let's read some stuff together. But
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: with Rick, what that means is you sit there and
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: he reads you and how you're reacting to the material.
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  Speaker 1: So we barely read any of it. I was just
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  Speaker 1: talking about it. And he goes, it's not ready. I go,
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  Speaker 1: what do you mean? He goes, it's not ready. You're
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  Speaker 1: not ready. And so then this year, finally. But this book,
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  Speaker 1: I mean, we were in Europe this summer for a
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  Speaker 1: friend's wedding. My team was over there and my girlfriend
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  Speaker 1: and I were traveling. She was so understanding. But from,
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  Speaker 1: I was doing edits from like 9 p.m. until 2.30
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  Speaker 1: in the morning every single night and waking up the
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  Speaker 1: next morning. Like this book has been.
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  Speaker 2: While you were on vacation?
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  Speaker 1: Quote unquote vacation.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: I owe her a real vacation now. She was working too,
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: but she was asleep in those hours. And we stopped
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  Speaker 1: by Rick's. He's like, how's it going? I'm like, it's there.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: And he's like, he just like checked in.
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  Speaker 2: He's like, it's there.
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  Speaker 1: Like he can just feel it.
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  Speaker 2: He's such a fucking weirdo.
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  Speaker 1: I mean, he has this supernatural ability to feel where
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  Speaker 1: people are at but not get absorbed in it. And
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  Speaker 1: I have so many Rick stories. We could spend the
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  Speaker 1: whole time talking about Rick stories. But the man is
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  Speaker 1: just like he's plugged into some energetic layer that the
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  Speaker 1: rest of us aren't. And he's all day, every day,
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  Speaker 1: he's connecting with people and trying to help them. Like
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  Speaker 1: he really spends most of his time like looking out
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  Speaker 1: at the world and trying to help people with their art,
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  Speaker 1: with their stuff.
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  Speaker 2: That's really him. If you know him, that's him 24-7. Totally.
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  Speaker 2: He lives in that space. It's a very weird head
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  Speaker 2: space to be in because you're constantly like looking at
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  Speaker 2: other people's stuff. It's like he's a tastemaker, you know,
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  Speaker 2: or that's not even a good description of him. He's
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  Speaker 2: just like an analysis of art. That's his function. He
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  Speaker 2: analyzes art, but from, for lack of a better term,
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  Speaker 2: almost like a spiritual perspective. He sees whether it's real.
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  Speaker 1: Totally.
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  Speaker 2: He finds the realness. He made the Red Hot Chili
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  Speaker 2: Peppers record one of their albums in a mansion because
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  Speaker 2: he wanted to hear, instead of a recording studio, he
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  Speaker 2: wanted to hear the sounds of the house.
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  Speaker 1: That's so Ricky. There's a, you know, I didn't come
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  Speaker 1: here to plug this, but we should because it's going
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  Speaker 1: to be awesome because I may have seen pieces of it.
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  Speaker 1: He has this documentary with Jay-Z coming out like next
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  Speaker 1: week where they sit in this incredible monument structure in
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  Speaker 1: Europe and they just listen to music together and talk
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  Speaker 1: about music. And it's so good.
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  Speaker 2: Which is a documentary on them listening to music.
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  Speaker 1: It's really about Jay. So Jay's music? Yeah. So Jay's
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  Speaker 1: music and they're listening to, yeah. I think this was
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  Speaker 1: filmed in an abandoned post office in France because Rick
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  Speaker 1: liked the skylight. I've seen pieces of it. I'm so
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  Speaker 1: excited to see this.
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  Speaker 2: It's all black and white?
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  Speaker 1: I think so.
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  Speaker 2: HBO Max? Okay.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, he's on a whole other thing.
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  Speaker 2: He's a weird dude. Very weird dude.
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  Speaker 1: He is, and yet very rational too, right? I mean,
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  Speaker 1: his whole thing, I may have said this before, but
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  Speaker 1: his whole thing is he says... There are only three things.
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  Speaker 1: It used to be two, but he updated it to
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  Speaker 1: three things in life that are true. One is the
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  Speaker 1: laws of physics, biology, chemistry, nature. The other is God.
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  Speaker 1: We talk a lot about God these days. And the
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  Speaker 1: third is professional wrestling. And he watches 10 hours a week,
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  Speaker 1: as you know, professional wrestling, because he said– he's like–
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  Speaker 1: Everyone agrees it's made up. So it's the only thing
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  Speaker 1: that everyone agrees that he thinks everything else is made up.
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  Speaker 1: He thinks because we made up, you know, media, we
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  Speaker 1: made up show business, we made up the game, you know,
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  Speaker 1: a sport and what the rules are. And he just
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  Speaker 1: thinks it's the you know, it's the closest thing to
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  Speaker 1: truth out there.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah. That's where he and I part ways.
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  Speaker 1: I mean, I went to an AEW event with him.
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  Speaker 1: It was pretty cool. I have to say it was
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  Speaker 1: the first time going. And the athletes all adore him. Like,
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  Speaker 1: everyone loves him. And he's there front row.
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  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, because he's a huge fan. Huge fan.
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  Speaker 1: I think he's a lifetime member. Lifetime member. And he
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  Speaker 1: really can extract, like, truisms about human nature from watching wrestling. Oh, yeah,
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  Speaker 1: there we go. I'm the only one without my red
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  Speaker 1: glasses on at that point, apparently. Oh, man.
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  Speaker 2: The red glasses.
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  Speaker 1: Well, what's wild is at one point the guys are
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  Speaker 1: like climbing the ladder. They're going to like grab the
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  Speaker 1: thing and they're both coming up the sides of the ladder.
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  Speaker 1: And then one stops and goes, hey, that's Rick Rubin.
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  Speaker 1: And the guy pushes out the ladder. And I look
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  Speaker 1: at Rick to see if he's sort of like getting
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  Speaker 1: some sort of dopamine hit off. And he just goes,
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  Speaker 1: he's just there experiencing it, that he's not like pulled
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  Speaker 1: into it.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, I need to drug test him. I think he's
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  Speaker 2: on acid.
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  Speaker 1: He claims he's never done any drugs.
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  Speaker 2: That seems ridiculous.
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  Speaker 1: Maybe had one sip of alcohol ages ago, which in
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  Speaker 1: the music business, that's a feat.
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  Speaker 2: He must have one of those brains that's broken and
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  Speaker 2: just leaks psychedelic chemicals all the time.
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  Speaker 1: I don't know, whatever plane of consciousness he's on.
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  Speaker 2: I've always thought that about like schizophrenics. Like I wonder
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  Speaker 2: if that's what's happening. I wonder if they have like
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  Speaker 2: some dump of psychedelic chemicals that's constantly like leaking into
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  Speaker 2: their brain. Because we know the brain really does produce
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  Speaker 2: endogenous psychoactive substances. compounds like DMT. I mean, isn't it
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  Speaker 2: possible that you could have a brain that leaks it?
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  Speaker 1: So here's the weird thing about schizophrenia, and it speaks
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  Speaker 1: to the larger kind of ways that medicine works, for
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  Speaker 1: better or worse, is that for the longest time, we
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  Speaker 1: thought that dopamine, too much dopamine was schizophrenia. Why? Because
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  Speaker 1: drugs that reduce dopamine, call them neuroleptic drugs, Haloperidol, all
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  Speaker 1: these things, clozapine would reduce auditory hallucinations. So the conclusion
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  Speaker 1: was- Auditory.
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  Speaker 2: Auditory. So meaning voices in your head? Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: And that's mostly what people deal with, especially paranoid schizophrenics.
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  Speaker 1: They're hearing voices, do this, do that. You're awful. I mean,
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  Speaker 1: if you think about it from that perspective, imagine all
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  Speaker 1: day and night, you're just dealing with voices in your
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  Speaker 1: head that feel like another person there telling you usually
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  Speaker 1: horrible things about yourself or the outside world all the time.
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  Speaker 1: And these drugs reduce those symptoms. We've known that for
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  Speaker 1: a long time. But because they reduce dopamine all over
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  Speaker 1: the brain and body, they create what's something called tardive dyskinesia,
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  Speaker 1: which is a suppression of the motor system. And so
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  Speaker 1: you'll see people who are doing this like writhing like this.
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  Speaker 1: You'll see them on the street a lot. Sometimes that's psychosis.
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  Speaker 1: A lot of times that's psychotic people who are taking
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  Speaker 1: their antipsychotic medication. But, you know, it gives you some empathy.
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  Speaker 2: And tell the voices to shut the fuck up.
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  Speaker 1: I think some have auditory hallucinations, but most have auditory hallucinations. Sorry,
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  Speaker 1: some have visual, excuse me, some have visual hallucinations, but
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  Speaker 1: most have auditory hallucinations. And, you know, this sets in
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  Speaker 1: usually around mid, early 20s. And what's weird is years ago,
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  Speaker 1: I had a meal with the then director of the
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  Speaker 1: National Institutes of Mental Health. His name was Bob Desimone.
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  Speaker 1: And he said, do you know why there's so little
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  Speaker 1: money for research on schizophrenia compared to, say, autism?
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  Speaker 2: I was like, why?
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  Speaker 1: And he's like, well, because the parents of autistic kids
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  Speaker 1: lobby hard. And usually the parents of autistic kids are
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  Speaker 1: not also autistic. But schizophrenia, even though it's not, you know,
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  Speaker 1: doesn't run completely through families, oftentimes the parents of schizophrenics
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  Speaker 1: will have schizotypal conditions.
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  Speaker 2: What is that?
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  Speaker 1: It's like they now call them schizoid schizotypal. They'll have
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  Speaker 1: not typical thinking. It doesn't mean they're crazy, but they're off.
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  Speaker 1: And so they're not bad people, but their place in
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  Speaker 1: society often doesn't position them to sit down with a
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  Speaker 1: senator and say, hey, listen, my kid's got autism and
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  Speaker 1: we need more research on this. And so a lot
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  Speaker 1: of where the money goes has to do with where
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  Speaker 1: obviously the lobby is. And if you think about genetic
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  Speaker 1: disorders in families, and we know there is a strong
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  Speaker 1: component with schizophrenia. Like if you take two monozygotic identical twins, right?
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  Speaker 1: If one is paranoid schizophrenic. The probability that the other
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  Speaker 1: one will be paranoid schizophrenic isn't 100%, but it's much
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  Speaker 1: higher than by chance, much, much higher.
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  Speaker 2: Have they ever done a study where one manages to
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  Speaker 2: avoid it with lifestyle choices or diet or exercise or
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  Speaker 2: something along those lines?
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  Speaker 1: Definitely, although not in a way that you could attribute
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  Speaker 1: it to one thing. But for instance, for a long time,
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  Speaker 1: active military service in somebody who has a genetic predisposition
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  Speaker 1: to psychosis was a kind of an additional risk factor,
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  Speaker 1: a meaningful risk factor.
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  Speaker 2: Makes sense because of the stress.
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  Speaker 1: The stress, methamphetamine use. I mean, again, the stress, the stress,
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  Speaker 1: the stress.
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  Speaker 2: Also, methods just seem fucking out of their mind anyway.
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  Speaker 1: So I mean, there's this meth strength thing that I've
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  Speaker 1: never seen proven, but you can find these videos of
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  Speaker 1: like methods carrying refrigerators down the street. And they're they're
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  Speaker 1: not jacked, but there's like carrying refrigerators down alleys. And,
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  Speaker 1: you know, people talk about meth strength. But, yeah, I mean,
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  Speaker 1: methamphetamine is going to create probably the largest dump of
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  Speaker 1: dopamine in the brain than any other drug, at least
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  Speaker 1: in the short term. And it makes people think every
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  Speaker 1: idea is a good idea and everything is about them
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  Speaker 1: and their goals. So it's the hyper dopaminergic state.
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  Speaker 2: How much different is it than Adderall in terms of
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  Speaker 2: the actual effect? Oh, I mean, it's. Is it dose dependent?
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  Speaker 1: Yeah. And we don't know what addicts are taking exactly.
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  Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean, Adderall is amphetamine. Vyvanse is amphetamine.
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  Speaker 1: I actually have a. forgive me for referencing the book
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  Speaker 1: too many times. It'd be great if people want to
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  Speaker 1: read it, but that's not my goal here is to
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: constantly reference it. But there's a long section on all stimulants, caffeine, nicotine, Adderall, Vyvanse, Modafinil, Artemodafinil,
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  Speaker 1: every single drug that can make you more alert and focused.
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  Speaker 1: I talk about the pros and cons. Every single drug.
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  Speaker 1: I talk about humans have always found a way to
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  Speaker 1: use these things, to find things to enhance their focus.
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  Speaker 1: The problem with methamphetamine is that it's also neurotoxic. This
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  Speaker 1: is actually very relevant to the conversation about MDMA, methylene
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: dioxide methamphetamine, which is a variant of methamphetamine. MDMA for
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  Speaker 1: the treatment of trauma is looking really promising. The early studies,
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  Speaker 1: including one that was published in Science, showed that non-human
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  Speaker 1: primates that are given MDMA experience neuron loss, that neurons
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  Speaker 1: die in the brain. And that message propagated. That paper
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  Speaker 1: was retracted because that laboratory accidentally injected methamphetamine, not MDMA.
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  Speaker 2: How did they accidentally mix those two?
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  Speaker 1: I don't know what happened. They did publish a retraction.
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  Speaker 2: Why are they having methamphetamine laying around the lab?
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  Speaker 1: Oh, man, you should have come to my lab when
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: I ran a lab until a few years ago. I
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  Speaker 1: still teach. I shut my lab. But we had all
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: sorts of goodies in there.
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  Speaker 2: Did you ever worry about your students taking it?
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  Speaker 1: No, because, you know, anytime you use a federally controlled drug,
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: you have to account for every last microliter of that.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: Someone's coming and checking all the time. We also worked
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: with viruses. I mean, my lab at one point was
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: using synbiz viruses, modified rabies viruses, adenoviruses, and on and on.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: And so we had some labels on the wall, like
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  Speaker 1: this is a lab that works with viruses, and we
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  Speaker 1: also had controlled substances, and that's just kind of how
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  Speaker 1: it goes.
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  Speaker 2: This is only one way. You've got to figure out
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  Speaker 2: what makes what happen in the human brain.
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  Speaker 1: I never had MDMA in my lab or amphetamine in
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  Speaker 1: my lab, but When I was an undergraduate, I worked
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: in a lab where we injected rats with MDMA. At
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: a time, this was in the early 90s, when not
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: much was known about it, but people were dying at raves,
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: and that lab worked on thermal regulation. So we were
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: interested in why they were dying from maybe MDMA. It
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  Speaker 1: turns out it was the hyperthermia from raves and not
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: drinking enough fluids, and people would take amphetamines, and people
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  Speaker 1: were dying. That pretty much got worked out over time.
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  Speaker 1: People realized you need to stay hydrated. But methamphetamine and
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  Speaker 1: MDMA are very different. MDMA, there is no evidence that
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  Speaker 1: it's neurotoxic.
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  Speaker 2: You'd always hear those stories about people who took MDMA
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  Speaker 2: that had holes in their brain.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, probably wasn't MDMA. Probably was more methamphetamine, maybe mixed
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: with a little bit of MDMA. This is why it
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  Speaker 1: would be so great if this was finally legal and
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: produced in ways that were reliable and administered in safe
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: ways and all that. But that trial, the passage through
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: the FDA failed for two reasons this last round. It
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: might go through the next round, but it failed for
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: two reasons. I've been very close to this whole situation.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: One is that the powers that be Uh, in the
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: previous administration felt that there wasn't a good control condition.
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: Like it wasn't a good placebo.
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: Fair enough. Although a lot of drugs deal with that issue.
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: The other was there was, uh, one, maybe two sexual
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: improprieties of the therapist. There was a couple therapists that
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: did some things they shouldn't have done with while somebody
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: was under the influence of the drug. And one incident
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: like that can sink an entire initiative. So that was bad, obviously. Um,
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: and so if it's going to pass in the next
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: few years, there's, they're going to have to be some
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: things in place to make sure that, you know, the
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: way it's administered is safe, you know, because the person under,
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: you know, under the influence of MDMA is very vulnerable
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: to all sorts of things. It's not just about their
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: heart health, et cetera, like that, that can be dealt
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: with before it can be dealt with after, but the
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: real issue is, you know, is the therapist operating in
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: their best interest, you know, and because the psychedelic community
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  Speaker 1: has always existed, And I'm a big fan of psychedelics
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: for the treatment of depression, trauma, et cetera. But because
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: that community has always kind of existed on the edge
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: of other techniques, it's sort of like, well, as a
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: foot massage, if the person's like saying they have all
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: this trauma in their feet and the therapist rubs their feet,
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: like that's not usual for therapy.
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  Speaker 2: Right.
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  Speaker 1: That's pretty like. within the gray zone of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: done kind of rogue in the world of psychedelic therapists.
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: So there's really no controls on what goes with the drugs.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: We've agreed on the basis of the clinical trials of
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: what the dosages might be, healthy dosages, how frequent, like
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: two sessions with a booster 80 milligrams in and then
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: a booster of, say, 50 milligrams halfway in or by
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: body weight, spaced three weeks apart for psilocybin, maybe just
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: once for, and on and on. All that's been you know,
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: looked at in various ways in these trials.
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: And is it always in conjunction with psychotherapy?
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: It should be. The data really show that people need
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: therapy going in, they need therapy during, and they need
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: therapy coming out for the best results. But those results
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: are remarkable. I mean, 60, 70%, you know, significant reduction
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: in symptoms, in some cases remission. But, you know, these,
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: you know, I have friends in the so-called psychedelic community,
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: but I also have friends in the standard science community.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: And for these things to really come together, There's gonna
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: have to be some standardization of safety, but also just practice.
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: What are you gonna talk about? If someone's like, I'm
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: feeling I'm at the precipice of like a huge amount
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: of pain, do you encourage them to go into that
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: pain and purge it? Or do you tell them, hey, listen,
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: maybe back away from that. All this stuff is done
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: by feel in the psychedelic community. There's no standardization of it.
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: But then again, talk therapy is the same way, right?
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: There's no standardization of the narratives that you're supposed to
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: have with your client.
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: Right, there's a lot of freedom to sort of, Yeah.
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: And, you know, and then, you know, in the I've
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: been reading a lot about the history of counterculture history
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: and stuff. I joined the board of Esalen, which is
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: this incredible place on the coast of California. And the
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: guy who started it is in his late 90s and
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: has a center for theory and research. It's not just
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: about like yoga classes and like and has that. But
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: there's a serious focus on human potential there. And, you know,
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: in the 60s, 70s and 80s and even in the 90s,
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: all these somatic therapies came along. you know, in the
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: breathing therapies and you had psychedelic therapies too. But, you know,
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: how much of these things to merge is, is a
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: question like maybe some somatic therapy during MDMA could be
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: really helpful for somebody that feels really out of body
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: or that had a bodily trauma or was raped or whatever.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: I was abused as a kid, but then we have
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: to ask ourselves, are we going to let therapists touch
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: people while they're under the influence of these really powerful pathogens.
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: Is touching people, is that normalized in the psychedelic community
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: when they do this?
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: Not necessarily.
• 17:45
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  Speaker 1: No, not necessarily. It's just that right now, psychedelic-assisted therapy
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: sits in that constellation of somatic therapies, talk therapies, breathing therapies,
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: emotive therapies. None of this is formalized. So much of
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: what I've been interested in and why I wrote the book,
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: aside from the compulsion to just get things out there,
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: is my hope is that as more techniques come along,
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: different breathwork practices, different supplements, different drugs, different peptides, that
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: people will start to understand some of the principles of
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: of how things work to decide what's worthwhile or not.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: So for instance, for trauma, we know that it's basically
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: four steps. Doesn't matter if you use getting through trauma.
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: Doesn't matter if it's through therapy that includes psychedelics or not.
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: First of all, people have to have a willingness to
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: address it, right? Second, they need to experience the painful
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: feeling in a safe environment. There's no just kind of
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: avoiding that. So the feel your feelings things is true.
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: And we often just stop there. We hear that and
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: that's it. But then there's also having the explicit memory
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: of what happened, but in a state of calm, not
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: feeling the feelings because you're trying to uncouple the memory
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: from the emotions, right? There's no losing the memory. You're
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: trying to uncouple the emotions from the memory. And then
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: the fourth piece, which is something I touch on with
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: respect to grief and trauma therapy more generally is there's
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: this beautiful thing that, you know, guests on your podcast
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: have talked about. You've probably experienced this, that at some point,
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: the shitty thing that happened to you, the awful thing
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: can be transmuted into some effort to create goodness for
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: yourself or for the world. Sometimes it's public education. Sometimes people,
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: you know, the loss of a child, for instance, like, oh,
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: my God, how awful that, you know, but people will
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: who move through this process can get to the place
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: where they'll like plant a tree or teach to or
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: talk to other parents who are in bereavement. And so
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: they've transmuted their loss into goodness. Right. So it's four steps.
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: If we just say, you know, take your loss and
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: go do good for the world, that's not going to work.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: If we say take your loss and just feel the
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: pain of it, people get caught in that spiral. And
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: I think this is unfortunately when the millennials were in
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: their adolescence and and, you know, teen years and 20s,
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: there was this overemphasis on like feeling your feelings. But
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: no one ever talked about the next phase, which is
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: where you actually stop feeling so shitty about the shitty
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: thing that happened. And so my goal is really to
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: try and organize like these different practices and come up
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: with structures so that you could imagine MDMA being very
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: useful for that first or second step, feeling your feelings
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: in a safe way in the right environment.
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: What are the studies that MAPS has done with MDMA
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: with soldiers and PTSD? Because that's been probably one of
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: the most prominent things. Yeah.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: Well, Rick Doblin obviously is more qualified to get into
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: the specifics, but I know of at least three clinical
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: trials looking at MDMA at dosages that are by body weight,
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: but they're not like outrageously high dosages that have people
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: move through their PTSD within a matter of four to
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: six weeks total. So with two sessions of MDMA spaced
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: apart about a month or so, talk therapy the whole
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: way through. And I know of at least one clinical
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: trial with veterans. Oftentimes these studies will include veterans, but
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: it's not all veterans, which actually is kind of good.
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: You want to be able to compare their kind of
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: trauma to other people's trauma. But I have to say,
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: and I know you've covered this extensively, but the work
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: on Ibogaine has... in my mind has completely revised the
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: way that we think about psychedelic therapy, because it's kind
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: of ironic that the first psychedelic that will likely be
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: legal for the treatment of PTSD is going to be
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: the most intense one. It'd be like, if I'm like, Hey,
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: I want to learn a martial art. And you're like, yeah,
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: get into the octagon and get your ass kicked, you know,
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: and that's going to, you know, turn you into a fighter.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's the way people describe Ibogaine is kind
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: of like that. It is no joke. As you point out,
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: it is not recreational. And then when they follow with DMT,
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: I mean, you know, it seems that the outcomes are very,
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: very good for a lot of people. I will say,
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: and they're going to sweat me for this a little bit,
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: there have been a few deaths. And it seems that
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: that may correlate with fentanyl use prior.
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: This needs to be talked about if we're going to
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: get this legal.
• 23:14
  Speaker 2: How many deaths?
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: I'm aware of two.
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: And is this in those clinics?
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: Yes. And they have to report them.
• 23:22
  Speaker 2: And is it a heart failure? Because I know that
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: there's heart issues.
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: Heart and breathing. So they're linked, obviously. You know, heart
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: and breathing linked. And people are heart rate monitored. I
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: know of many people, and they're many of your friends,
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: and they've talked openly about this stuff. So DJ Shipley
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: and the Capone, Marcus Capone and others, and many, many
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: others who feel that they've benefited tremendously from these therapies.
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: And there's a litany of other names there, too, that
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: have benefited tremendously. I want to be clear. There are
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: also a few people who felt they didn't have a
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: good experience. I know Sean Ray right now is out
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: there talking about his negative experience.
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: Sean Ryan?
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: Excuse me.
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: Sean Ray.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: Sean Ray is like a bodybuilder, right? Sean Ryan, excuse me.
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: I think Sean Ryan, I think he's talking about DMT.
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: And they follow with DMT at some of those clinics,
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: not all.
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: But he said he had gone through exorcisms. Isn't that
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: what he's saying now?
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: I mean, I think if you think about my— My
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: experience of psychedelics, I've not done Ibogaine, is that there
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: is all sorts of understanding about the brain that comes
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: about during those journeys that leads you to understand that
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: we have good and evil in all of us. And
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: I could understand how it could be downright terrifying for
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: some people to realize that we have a hypothalamus that
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: just wants to satisfy drives. But we also have a
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: forebrain that can suppress those drives. I mean, that is
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: the nature of being human, right?
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: Do you think that's what these people are thinking of
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: when they think of demons? They're thinking of like drives
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: that are a part of the human system?
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: So, okay, I have a lot of thoughts about this. So,
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: I'm not going to spin off into a neuroscience lecture,
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: but we think about brain function and free will and
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff from top down and bottom
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: up perspective. Bottom up is you have a drive, you
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: want to satisfy it, you're going to do it. Top
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: down are regions of the brain that inhibit those impulse circuits.
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: And so much of life is about the dynamic tension
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: between those two. Okay. I mean, the seven deadly sins, right,
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: are all the hypothalamic structures like, you know, rage, envy, lost,
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: et cetera. But the forebrain can be built up. You
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: can learn things as the, you know, kids learn to
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: suppress their impulses. Puppies learn to suppress their impulses to
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: get a reward or just to avoid punishment. And that's
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: a lot of what being human is about, right? There's
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: an amazing case actually right here in Austin where I
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: don't know if you're familiar with this. There was a
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: kid who woke up one morning, wrote in his diary.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: He's an ex-Marine. This was many years ago and then
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: killed his wife and his mother with a knife. Do
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: you know what this?
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: No.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: Okay. Then he went to the University of Texas, Austin,
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: took a rifle, went up into the tower and shot
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: 14 people.
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: Oh, that story.
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: I think a 15th died later. Yeah. So, but here's
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: where it gets interesting, right? I mean, it's horrible, right?
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: One woman was pregnant. So they counted that. I think
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: it was a total of like 18 or 19 deaths.
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: He was shot by one of the security guards. They
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: go and they read his diary and he literally says,
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: I don't know why I want to do this, but
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: please take the money from, you know, my life insurance
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: and donate it to the study of mental health. Please
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: pay off my debts. Please understand what's happening to me.
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: And they did an autopsy. And the guy had a
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: tumor in a brain region, which included brain regions, which
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: included amygdala, hypothalamus, and thalamus. Collectively, what we would call
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: low-level brain structures involved with, you know, perception and impulse.
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: The conclusion of all that is not, oh, he had
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: a brain tumor that made him do it. The conclusion
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: that most neuroscientists draw is that most people don't ever
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: conceive of doing those things. But a lot of people
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: go to Niagara Falls and look and go, what's keeping
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: me from jumping? What's keeping you from jumping is your forebrain.
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: What people think, oh, you know, what keeps people from shoplifting?
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: Everyone would like to think that they're incredibly moral. Like,
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: I don't shoplift. I'm not a shoplifter, right? But for
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: some people, they want to do the thing and they
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: stop themselves from doing it or drinking or cheating or
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: whatever it is, right? Those top-down influences on our impulses
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: and our bottom-up impulses are constantly in dynamic tension. And
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: in psychedelics, I mean, lots of things are happening. You're
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: getting a lot more, you know, interconnectivity of the brain
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: that's always there being revealed. It's very rare. It happens,
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: but it's very rare to hear about people doing terrible
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: things to other people on psychedelics. It happens, but it's
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: not common. So I'm not saying you reveal evil in there, but...
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: As you know, in a high-dose psilocybin journey, you're going
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: into the recesses of your mind and your unconscious mind
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: is showing you what's there. It's showing you that there
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: are terrible forces out in the world. There are humans.
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: You learn all sorts of stuff about humans, as you know, right,
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: in these journeys. You also learn about incredible beauty and
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: potential for making positive change. So the psychedelics are kind
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: of a– they're a mysterious free-for-all in there.
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: They're probably also interacting with your very specific memories. And
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: if you're dealing with a guy like Sean Ryan, he
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: did a lot of combat, didn't he?
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: He's seen a lot of horrible things. Horrible things. My
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: good friend, Eddie Penny, he was also a tier one operator.
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: That's a great name.
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, great name. Great name, great guy. You guys would
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: enjoy a conversation. He's another tier one operator from that community.
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: I'm not revealing anything he hasn't already, but he's recovered
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: from substance abuse issues and has been sober a long time.
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: He's not a fan of psychedelics. He got me reading
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: the Bible. We could talk about this. Actually, church, and
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: I know you've been going to church. This has been
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: an interesting thing because a lot of what's in the
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: Bible is about the dynamic tension between what neuroscientists would
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: call top-down and bottom-up influences. It acknowledges we have this
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: stuff in us that you're not supposed to pretend it doesn't.
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: You have to acknowledge your humanness, but also your human
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: capacity to to control these impulses. And I mean, that's
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: a lot of what's in the Bible. It's not everything,
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: but it's stories about that in many, many ways. Hence
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: the seven deadly sins and the virtues and so on.
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: But you know, Eddie has been a pretty strong voice
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: for caution in the veterans and other communities about the
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: use of psychedelics, because there's this theory, right, within some
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: sectors of religion and Christianity in particular, that in psychedelic journeys,
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: that evil, Entities, if you will, might have access to
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: us or something like that. There's a neuroscientist view of that, too,
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: which is that in those states, you're revealing aspects of
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: self that normally you can suppress. But now you're you're
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: having to see that aspect of you or other people
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: like realizing that people have evil and good in them.
• 30:21
  Speaker 2: Is it?
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: I think we can all say, yeah, I get it.
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: But we usually say they're evil. They're good. They're evil.
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: They're good. It's very hard for us to address the
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: possibility that any of us, I like to think I
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: could never have been that kid that went up on
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: the tower. But if I had a tumor in my brain,
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: would I have done it? I don't know. I mean,
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: this recent case of this woman killing her children was
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: about this, right? It was about this very issue. Like, oh,
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: is her physiology to blame? And the law has a
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: very simple rule on most of these cases. I've looked
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: at this. And the law basically says, it doesn't matter
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: if you have a brain tumor. It doesn't matter if
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: you're high on meth, doesn't matter if you're full of rage,
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: because rage is just a different set of neurochemicals. You
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: are responsible for your behavior. And I think we need
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: those thick black lines, as I like to think of them. Otherwise,
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: you can't function as a society. It's not saying that
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: people aren't stricken with biological issues, but we're saying even
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: if stricken, you need to be held responsible.
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: One of the big things that happens during psychedelic trips
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: that disturb a lot of people is when they try
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: to fight the trip and then they have a really
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: bad trip. And one of the things that someone will
• 31:37
  Speaker 2: tell you, for lack of a better term, who is
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: a shaman. I hate that term because I think it's
• 31:42
  Speaker 2: probably very real in some parts of the world and
• 31:45
  Speaker 2: it's also probably very much a bullshit thing in America.
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: It's like expert in America now. Well, there's some real
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: experts in America. There's probably more real experts than there
• 31:56
  Speaker 2: are real shamans. You know, the shaman thing is very weird.
• 31:59
  Speaker 2: A lot of it is like very lost people that
• 32:02
  Speaker 2: find identity in altered states of consciousness. And I think,
• 32:09
  Speaker 2: just my personal opinion, that experiencing these altered states of
• 32:15
  Speaker 2: consciousness should enhance your experience as a human, should not
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: replace it. I think there's a lot of people who
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: are replacing altered states of consciousness far too often. And
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: they live in that world more than they live in
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: the world of just being conscious and sober. And I
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: think there's many steps that you have to take in
• 32:39
  Speaker 2: order to have a good trip. Some people have a
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: really hard time letting go, relaxing and just going with it.
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: They fight it. I've seen it. I've seen people fight it.
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: People that for whatever reason they have whatever psychological issues
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: that Or they have control issues and they just cannot
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: deal with the fact that this experience is so beyond
• 33:05
  Speaker 2: their comprehension and so overwhelming that they try to battle it.
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: They try to control it. The experiences, the things that
• 33:13
  Speaker 2: they see, the states that they enter into, they don't
• 33:17
  Speaker 2: feel at all in control and they freak out. And
• 33:20
  Speaker 2: when you try to control it, I haven't had one
• 33:23
  Speaker 2: of those. But from the people that I know that have,
• 33:26
  Speaker 2: it's like, they say that they were wrestling with it.
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: And you cannot win. And it just overwhelms you and
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: then your anxiety kicks in. What I have experienced in
• 33:37
  Speaker 2: trips is that it's highlighted that if you think in
• 33:42
  Speaker 2: a positive way, it'll show you more beautiful images and
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: that you can just relax. And that, especially in the
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: DMT realm, they are trying to tell you to relax.
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: They're trying to tell you to just go with it.
• 33:56
  Speaker 2: And if you don't fight it, You can have a
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: wonderful experience. But I haven't been to war. I haven't
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: been raped. I haven't been physically assaulted and beaten as
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: a child. There's a lot of things that didn't happen
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: to me that I don't have to deal with. And someone,
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: especially I think guys who've been to war, you've seen
• 34:15
  Speaker 2: so much horrible shit and it just becomes a part
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: of your everyday existence. These horrible memories, these horrible visions
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: that you have and horrible things you've probably had to do.
• 34:24
  Speaker 2: And then something comes along like DMT or like psilocybin
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: or something just overwhelms the normal state of consciousness. If
• 34:34
  Speaker 2: you're trying to fight that, I would imagine that would
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: feel like you're battling demons. Yeah.
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And I haven't had to deal with any of
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: those things either. So I want to acknowledge that. I
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: had a very good experience of therapeutic combined MDMA and
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: psilocybin work. therapeutic work. Incredible. And I can distill it
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: to one simple takeaway, which was thinking about bad things
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: that had happened that I wish hadn't happened. Like I
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: felt like I had kind of worked through that stuff
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: in life by running, lifting weights, some therapy, lifetime, you know,
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: it worked through it. But there was a session where
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: I was feeling the resistance to like feel something. And
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: I knew what was knocking. And it was thinking about
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: things that didn't happen that I wished had happened for me. Um,
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: not things I, that I wish I got, but you know,
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: just basic experiences that I wish I had had. And
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: it was incredibly sad in the moment, but then it opened,
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: you know, after some period of time, like what kind
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: of experiences, you know, listen, I, I had a better
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: childhood than many, much better than many and, and harder
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: than others for, you know, there were some things about
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: my family structure that felt, um, there were times when
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: I really, really, really needed a certain kind of support
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: and structure and it was gone. And so I went
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: out into the world and found it in skateboarding, eventually
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: in science. And, you know, I talk about the introduction
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: of the book. Actually, I talk about why I eventually
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: went into public health education. And it was seeing about
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: a third of my friends from growing up dead or
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: in jail. And that's weird for a guy that didn't
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: grow up in the inner city. And I wasn't in
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: the military. These are friends of mine that succumb to
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: drugs or suicide or mental health issues. Now, mind you,
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: the other. two thirds did great. And some of them
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: started companies like DC and, you know, like these weren't
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: close friends of mine, but that community of people of
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: all these feral kids in the nineties, the people who
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: skateboarded were the ones who didn't have parents that went
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: to things. Right. And listen, I have a good relationship
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: with my dad now. Like we're, I've actually had him
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: on the podcast and that was really bonding for us.
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: We're great now, but there was a time when I
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: was an adolescent and teen, when I really needed structure
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: and I really needed certain things that just were not happening.
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: And my home life was depressing. It was really empty.
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: It was really depressing. And so I went out into
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: the world and did way too many things way too young.
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: I saw a lot and got involved in a lot
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: of sex violence and stuff that I shouldn't have at
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: that time. And luckily not drugs. That wasn't my thing.
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: So I always knew those narratives. And I've always had
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: a bittersweet memory of them. They also served me well.
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: They motivated me to forage for ways to be healthy
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: and things like that. Um, but then in science, it
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: was wild because in science, your mentors play a tremendous
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: role in your progress and your sense of safety. Science
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: is a weird thing. It's different now, but when I
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: was coming up, you would get very close to your
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: graduate advisor. I was very close to my undergraduate advisor.
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: He was like a father figure to me. My graduate
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: advisor was truly like a mother to me. I knew
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: her when she was pregnant. I knew her husband, I,
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: her daughters and neuroscientists, like incredibly close to her. She
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: had a, a maternal way about her and a toughness
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: that was Unbelievable. And she was a serious scientist. And
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: then my postdoc advisor similarly was very supportive. My undergraduate advisor,
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: who I got very close with, killed himself in a
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: very dramatic way about two weeks after I had spoken
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: to him, shot himself in the bathtub. And this was
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: a guy who understood mental illness. I talk about him
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: in the book. My graduate advisor died at 50 of cancer.
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: She had the BRCA mutation, which is predisposes to cancer.
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: And that one devastated me. And then my postdoc advisor
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: died of pancreatic cancer a year into my faculty appointment.
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: And he had a heart attack sitting across from me.
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: It was the first indication he had pancreatic cancer. And
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: so the joke in my field is you don't want
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: me working for you because it's like, fuck. But then
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: what's wild is that I made it through science. I
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: get tenure at Stanford. This kind of shit is happening
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: in my science world. Then a colleague of mine gets
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: addicted to OxyContin after a back injury. And he's dead.
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: And no one talks about it. Like everyone's like, oh, yeah, yeah.
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: He was a member of the National Academy. He's a
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: famous scientist down at the Salk Institute. Everyone's just like, oh, yeah, yeah.
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: Just kind of carries on with their work. And then
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: this is going to get depressing for a moment before
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: it gets light. End of 2017. Three friends of mine
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: from childhood, there's a graffiti artist. His name is, he
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: went by Orphan, O-R-F-N, this brilliant artist. He did so
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: much cool shit. His name was Aaron Curry. Dies of
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: stomach cancer. My good friend, John Eichelberry from childhood and
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: my good friend, Johnny Fair, fentanyl suicide. Boom, people are
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: just going down like crazy. And I'm like, what the
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: fuck is going on here? And then I started to
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: realize this is one of the reasons I started the podcast.
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: It's one of the reasons I started going on podcasts
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: is like my science colleagues, they don't know how to
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: manage their stress. They understand the science of stress, but
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: they look like shit. Their kids are a mess. They
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: have all these anxiety disorders. My physician friends, I can
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: count on one hand the number of them that are
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: healthy of mind and body who have healthy kids. And
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: then I realized, oh, you know, the skateboarding community, the
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: science health community, I'm at Stanford University School of Medicine,
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: the apex or among the top universities in the world
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: of health. And I'm like, My colleagues are sick and
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: dying and stressed. And I realized, I was like, shit,
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: we don't know how to regulate stress. So I started
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: studying stress and stress mitigation, this kind of thing. And
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: then I don't want to make this even darker, but
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: I think it's worth acknowledging for a couple of reasons.
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: And by the way, I want to be really clear.
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: I think what Veterans Solutions has done with the Ibogaine initiative,
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: I think what Rick Perry and what Brian are doing
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: with the Ibogaine thing, I think it's awesome. If I
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: highlight that there were some deaths, I want to be
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: really clear. Those people might die to fentanyl. Anyway, we
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: don't know. I mean, there's you know, we need.
• 40:21
  Speaker 2: To both connect. Both of the deaths are connected to
• 40:24
  Speaker 2: fentanyl use.
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: My understanding is they had to use fentanyl prior to
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: going to use Ibogaine. So maybe in this discussion, a
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: few people will be sensitized to like that's a potential issue.
• 40:32
  Speaker 2: So meaning like they were probably addicted to fentanyl. They
• 40:35
  Speaker 2: were trying to get off of it and they tried
• 40:37
  Speaker 2: to do it while they had fentanyl in their system.
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: Perhaps.
• 40:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: And for all we know, they might have snuck fentanyl.
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: We don't like to think that they might have. But
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: who knows how closely they did it? You know.
• 40:47
  Speaker 2: They're really hooked. Yeah.
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: And listen, we, you and I know, I mean, it's
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: more from your world of, you know, martial arts and stuff,
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: but you know, we know people who've like, we hear
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: they go down to Mexico. They're going to do this treatment.
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: They're going to come back. They're better. And like a
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: week later that they don't sound so much better. You know,
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: I'm not, I pray for these people. I want the best. Like,
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: I'm not saying this is bad, but I'm saying these
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: are powerful medications and I think they are net positive,
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: but I'll also say, you know, many years transpired between
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: that You know, those friends dying, the Johnny people, sometimes
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: people call me on bullshit. So Aaron Curry, John Eichelberry,
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: Johnny Ferret, best fucking kids I knew. Awesome graffiti artists.
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: One of them was in the MoMA. Orphan went into
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: the MoMA for his graffiti. So the badass graffiti artists,
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: stomach cancer got him like shit can happen. My advisors
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: didn't do anything wrong. They just one clearly had a
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: mental issue or otherwise he wouldn't have taken his life.
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: The other two had cancer. So, but then this last year,
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: I'm like going about my life and I'm thinking, okay,
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: you know, things are pretty good. And I get a
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: call and I hear that my good friend, Nolan Williams,
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: triple board certified MD, who took the transcranial magnetic stimulation
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: therapies and accelerated them so that people could get relief
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: from depression much faster. He took what was, you know,
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: many weeks long or months long thing and compressed it.
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: saved lives, who's also doing the studies of Ibogaine, took
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: his own life. I mean, this one's still sinking in
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: for me. There's no reason to believe it had anything
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: to do with Ibogaine whatsoever. He took his own life.
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: He's a colleague physician friend of mine at Stanford. And
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: I know his wife, who's also a physician. I know
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: his kids. He's been on my podcast. He looked like
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: the young Jim Morrison, handsome. He was a martial arts guy,
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: did taekwondo. Like, fuck is right. Fuck is right. So
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: what does it tell us? You know, I've had to
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: I try to intellectualize these things too much. But what
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: does it tell us? It tells us that knowledge is
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: not sufficient to take care to protect us. Like, like,
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: I feel like the data are in bold conclusion banner
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: across the sky. Knowledge does not alone does not protect us.
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: You can understand everything about the biology of these diseases.
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: You can know I'm messed up. I have something. Something's
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: but and you can understand, oh, that's serotonin or whatever.
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: people will still do these things. And it's rare, fortunately,
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: but it tells us that the, I believe it tells
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: us something fundamental about humans, which is that there's always
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: this dynamic tension between our underlying impulses and this top
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: down control. And suicide is a weird one because it's
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: like the whole thing gets, you know, twisted up so
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: that we're no longer acting in an adaptive way, right?
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: Obviously taking one's life is not adaptive, but it's a
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: rage or a depression or whatever. And the, The conclusion
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: that I draw from it is what can we do
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: to put ourselves in the best position to be able
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: to hold our impulses in their healthy place? You know,
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: if I I don't want to make more of like
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: what I did in the book or what I'm trying
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: to do in the podcast or public education. But like,
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: let's take the ice bath, for example. I've taken a
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: lot of shit for the ice bath thing. You have to.
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: We both know. They don't like the cold. That's why
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: they're talking about this. But we know for certain, and
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: I go through the data finally, putting yourself into a
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: high adrenaline state where your body and brain are freaking
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: out and doing that deliberately gets you better at dealing
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: with high stress states, which in my mind is only
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: a good thing. This should be basic training for Children,
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: you know, not young children, right?
• 44:23
  Speaker 2: Why?
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: You know, does it increase metabolism?
• 44:25
  Speaker 2: Marginally.
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: Does it increase cortisol? No, that's a bunch of horse shit,
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: and we can talk about that. If anything, it reduces cortisol.
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: It increases your ability to buffer stress. Is the ice
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: bath a cure to mental health issues, addiction, and relapse
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: and all that? No, of course not.
• 44:40
  Speaker 2: But is it?
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: Does it teach you to... engage in top-down control?
• 44:45
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: Is it the ice bath per se? No. The ice
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: bath is just one very efficient, low-cost way to get
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: adrenaline to go boom through the roof. You could do
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: it through a workout. You could do it through hot
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: sauna that feels uncomfortably hot, provided you don't die of hypothermia.
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: You can do it through any number of different things.
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: The point is that the principle of learning to capture
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: your mind and think strategically, lower your state of arousal
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: when you're in a stressful circumstance, is a life skill
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: that is invaluable. And getting great sleep, we could go
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: on and on about all the benefits of that. There's
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: probably a hundred benefits of that and probably a thousand
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: things that go wrong when you don't get enough sleep chronically,
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: a couple nights, no problem. But when you're well-rested, you
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: are far less likely to harm yourself or others, like
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: because your forebrain is more active and can suppress these impulses.
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: And so my, you know, my kind of like, I
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: don't like the word mission, but my goal is that
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: We'll kind of move beyond the notion of like hacks
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: or that it's this tool or that tool and just
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: really understand like what we're trying to do when we're
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: teaching ourselves to be better humans. And I do think
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: there is a generation of kids that grew up hearing
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: that their feelings are valid.
• 45:58
  Speaker 2: Great.
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: We didn't hear that growing up. I just assume like
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: if you drank and you couldn't stop drinking, it was
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: a lack of willpower. Now we know there's a brain circuit.
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: But if we say, oh, there's a brain circuit, therefore
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: I'm not going to quit because it's a brain circuit. Well,
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: you're still drunk. you're still an addict, right? So the
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: great sleep, social connection, sunlight in the morning, like these
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: things are really designed to get us to have better
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: control over our focus, over our impulse control. And it
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: almost becomes so simple at that point. And we can say, well,
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: what was going on with Nolan in the weeks before? Well,
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: I have smatterings of what might've been going on, running
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: two giant projects in his lab, two companies, managing a family,
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: managing a life, I'm not going to claim he was
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: a perfect human being, but like, it's just like overwhelm.
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: His forebrain turned on him. Yeah.
• 46:48
  Speaker 2: Overwhelm is real.
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 46:50
  Speaker 2: You can only, you can only red line your system
• 46:52
  Speaker 2: for so much.
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: I mean, you know, people have done this.
• 46:55
  Speaker 2: I mean, I know a lot of people, you know, people,
• 46:56
  Speaker 2: and I've become doing it.
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: I've been friends with, uh, I've become friends with, um,
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: David Cho.
• 47:01
  Speaker 2: I love that dude.
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: Fucking love him. Best fucking guy. Because he's so heartfelt
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: now having been through the meat grinder of media and
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: life and his own tendency to self-harm.
• 47:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: And he's in this just beautiful place now where he's
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: just like literally painting everything in his environment. He's so
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: happy with his family and his kids. It's fucking awesome.
• 47:23
  Speaker 2: He's a very smart guy.
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: So smart.
• 47:27
  Speaker 2: He figured out how to keep it together.
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah. He did, and you know, you guys have common
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: friends in, you know, people that have taken their lives
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: and stuff. When he talks about it, it's like, man,
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: you can just tell, he's like, there's this understanding that
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: comes from hard-driving people that like, okay, I've not wanted
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: to ever take my life. But like, I can relate
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: to Nolan.
• 47:49
  Speaker 2: You just want out. You can't take it anymore and
• 47:52
  Speaker 2: you want out.
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: I think we've all been in that moment where we
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: were like, fuck, at something we were able to pull
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: ourselves back. And it's a shoot. I think some people
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: just go down that chute. And, you know, David and
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: I were talking about this because I know you guys
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: have common friends and some have succumbed to things and
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: some who really like rose and above all that. And
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: he's like, look, man, it's once you've tasted that edge
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: of being pulled back and forth from your impulses and
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: like and you learn to just force yourself to both
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: do hard things, as you always say. but also force
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: yourself to like really embrace the goodness in the world
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: and the love that's there. Like, let's not forget the
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: lighter side, like the beauty of like all these amazing
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: things in life. There's this kind of like promised land
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: inside of us. I don't mean to sound religious here,
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: but like there's this place in us where like, yeah,
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: all that's true. All those people, they all die. Some
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: took their own life and then the shit happened. But there's,
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: if I just keep doing really hard things, I'm going
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: to stay in control of my impulses. as long as
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: I also touch the goodness that's there every day, like
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: the sun's coming up, my kids are healthy. I'm here.
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: You know, I turned 50 last year and I had
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: to like, they asked me to give like a little
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: toast or something. It was horrible. Like I hate doing
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: that kind of thing. I'll podcast all day, but not that.
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: And I just realized I was like my hero, Joe Strummer,
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: one of my heroes from the clash, right? Dead at 50.
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: So I at least got further than, him 50 it's
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: so young and then I was like so I'm in
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: this like promised land now like yes and that like
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: joy of like having made it over some bump or
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: something and seeing goodness and having a great relationship now
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: with my parents it's taken a lot of work but
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: we're really in a good place appreciating all the gifts
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: they gave me seeing people leave and like, I have
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: such love for Nolan and for all those people I mentioned, like,
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: I just love them. And understanding that the grief is
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: just love is, um, man, I'll tell you like, and
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: I probably couldn't have gotten here without some of that
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: psychedelic work because it really took my face and stuck,
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: you know, just stuck it in the vomit of all this.
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: But then you came out, you know, and you go, Whoa,
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: like there's so much goodness. So I don't know. I mean,
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: if the psychedelics can help people, if talk therapy can
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: help people, great. But I think on a day-to-day basis,
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: it's like do shit that sucks so that you can
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: stay in control of staying in control. And also make
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: sure you touch into the beauty of really good things.
• 50:23
  Speaker 2: Well, I find that when you do the things that suck,
• 50:25
  Speaker 2: you do the hard workouts and the sauna and the
• 50:27
  Speaker 2: cold plunge, life just seems more beautiful. It really does
• 50:30
  Speaker 2: because you're not overwhelmed with this just– existential dread that
• 50:36
  Speaker 2: just hangs over you, just being a physical, vulnerable human
• 50:39
  Speaker 2: being walking through this unknown, uncertain life. And there's a
• 50:44
  Speaker 2: bunch of external chaos is like world wars and fucking
• 50:48
  Speaker 2: financial collapses. And there's so much shit going on in
• 50:51
  Speaker 2: everybody's brain. Do something that just exhausts that at least
• 50:57
  Speaker 2: for a little while and lets you take in What
• 51:00
  Speaker 2: a fucking beautiful day. Look at those squirrels just having
• 51:03
  Speaker 2: a good time. Totally. Running around on the tree. Listen
• 51:06
  Speaker 2: to the birds. Just feel the sun on your face.
• 51:09
  Speaker 2: I don't appreciate that if I don't do things. This
• 51:11
  Speaker 2: is my own personal thing. I don't know. I mean,
• 51:14
  Speaker 2: I know everybody's different. Everybody's different biologically, psychologically. For me,
• 51:18
  Speaker 2: I know what my formula is. My formula is if
• 51:21
  Speaker 2: I don't do those things, I feel like shit, period.
• 51:23
  Speaker 2: So I do the things. And I've experimented. I've taken
• 51:26
  Speaker 2: days off, three days, four days off. And then at
• 51:28
  Speaker 2: the fourth day, I'm like, Jesus Christ, who are you?
• 51:32
  Speaker 2: Get to the fucking gym. Go hit the bag.
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: And the world seems worse, not better.
• 51:36
  Speaker 2: Way worse. Way worse. And I think there's a lot
• 51:39
  Speaker 2: of people out there that are, like, very angry. Like,
• 51:41
  Speaker 2: you see a lot of people on social media. I
• 51:43
  Speaker 2: think they're living in that state, but not a state
• 51:46
  Speaker 2: of four days. A state of 40 years of nothing,
• 51:48
  Speaker 2: doing nothing, and just letting your body just go– You know,
• 51:53
  Speaker 2: you have dogs, right?
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 51:54
  Speaker 2: You know, it's like when your dog doesn't get exercise. Yeah,
• 51:56
  Speaker 2: he's fucking nuts. Dogs need fucking exercise.
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: My new one has, he's part bulldog, but part pit too.
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: And I'm keeping his nuts on this time because my
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: last dog, you know, as you know, I was like
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: injecting with TRT late in life and he felt so
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: much better. This time I'm keeping Strummer's, I'm keeping Strummer's
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: nuts on. This dog has so much fucking energy.
• 52:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you got to throw the ball.
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: You got to throw the ball. But this dude, I
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: have him running on the fucking treadmill. In the morning.
• 52:20
  Speaker 2: Oh, wow.
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. I take him for walks. You got him
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: on a treadmill? I trained him from the time he
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: was nine weeks to run on the treadmill.
• 52:25
  Speaker 2: Does he like it?
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: Fucking loves it. Dude, he'll haul ass at like, right
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: now he's up to five on a two incline. And
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: he's just like at the back of that thing. He
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: falls off. He jumps right back on. People are like,
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: don't hurt his joints. I'm like, listen, I've raised bulldog
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: breeds before. I'm not going to blow out his joints.
• 52:41
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: He is so stoked. He will just run and run
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: and run. And then I tell him, wait, and I'll
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: put the liver treat there. And then when he gets
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: that thing, his ears flop. He's going like, and you
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: can tell when he's done. It's what you're describing.
• 52:54
  Speaker 2: He's just like peaceful. So peaceful. Oh, I throw the
• 52:57
  Speaker 2: ball for my dog and then we come and sit down.
• 53:00
  Speaker 2: He just lays on his back and I rub his belly.
• 53:03
  Speaker 2: He's just so happy.
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: This is Marshall.
• 53:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: You got another one, right? Cavalier King Charles. Yeah.
• 53:08
  Speaker 2: They're great. He's amazing, but oh my God.
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: Those are great dogs.
• 53:12
  Speaker 2: He's a little love machine. All he wants to do
• 53:14
  Speaker 2: is kiss you. He just kisses you constantly.
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: The Cavalier King Charles have a little bit of a,
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: almost like a bulldog thing to them, like the calm.
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: This last year, I went to meet the breeds out
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: in New York. You can go and meet all the
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: different breeds. You see like the otter dogs and, and,
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: You learn three things when you go meet these like
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: hundreds of different pure breeds. First of all, people fucking
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: look like they're dogs. It's crazy. I don't know which
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: direction it goes. Like you look at the guy who's
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: got like the otter hound and he's got a big beard.
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: He looks just like the frigging otter hound.
• 53:43
  Speaker 2: Well, Jamie and Carl are a fucking contradiction to that.
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: That's true. That's true. Jamie and Carl don't look that way.
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: That's true. That's true. The other thing you learn is
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: that the pure breeds, in addition to being shaped a
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: certain way, like they have a certain demeanor. Like there's variation,
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: but there's a demeanor, you know, and the bulldogs are
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: kind of goofy, you know, and the sight hounds are
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: like locked in and looking all the time. And I
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: swear some dogs are smarter than others. They're like counting
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: how many people are in the environment. They're doing math, basically.
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: Whereas Strummer is just like, he's in a line upside down.
• 54:13
  Speaker 2: The shepherd dogs.
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they're doing math. They're counting all the time, accounting
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: for everything. And then I leave there and I go,
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: I turn to my girlfriend and we were like, which
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: breed are we in? And I go, we're getting a
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: bulldog mind. Like we're going right back to the one
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: I already had. And she's like, all right. Like, you know,
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: she's pretty easygoing about that. And I'm like, you have
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: not experienced bulldog love because they're just, they're hedonists. They
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: just want love, comfort. They want to chase the ball.
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: They have this much forebrain. And this is where I
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: think dogs are the almost perfect species because their impulses
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: are never to be bad. Like they don't have this
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: like rage, anger thing, unless people train them to do that.
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: They don't. I think the dog is just, quote unquote,
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: dumb enough and just smart enough.
• 54:58
  Speaker 2: To have the perfect life. It depends on the breed.
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: I mean, the Malinois are mouthy.
• 55:02
  Speaker 2: The Malinois are- Belgian Malinois are- Malinois, excuse me. Meat missiles. Yeah.
• 55:08
  Speaker 2: Those little fuckers. They can be great dogs. I know
• 55:11
  Speaker 2: people that have them, but you have to be on
• 55:13
  Speaker 2: them two hours a day. They need tasks.
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 55:17
  Speaker 2: It's basically like you live with a super athlete. You
• 55:21
  Speaker 2: live with a prime Jose Aldo, like a MMA fighter,
• 55:27
  Speaker 2: world champion. They could fucking leap over buildings. You can't
• 55:30
  Speaker 2: just have them lay in the yard. They'll go crazy.
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they don't potato.
• 55:34
  Speaker 2: No, they need things to do, man. They need tasks.
• 55:36
  Speaker 2: Whereas Marshall, he's just so happy just chilling with you.
• 55:40
  Speaker 2: He likes to cuddle and watch TV. That's what he
• 55:41
  Speaker 2: likes to do. He likes to climb up on the couch,
• 55:43
  Speaker 2: and he puts his head right here, and we watch
• 55:46
  Speaker 2: TV together, and I just pet him. If I don't
• 55:48
  Speaker 2: pet him, he looks at me, and then I got
• 55:49
  Speaker 2: to start petting him again.
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: Oh, man.
• 55:51
  Speaker 2: This episode is brought to you by Visible. As fall hits,
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• 56:49
  Speaker 1: You know what saves lives and has cured a lot
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: of PTSD? are service dogs.
• 56:54
  Speaker 2: Oh, for sure.
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: Like people, we don't talk about this enough because they're not,
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: you know, it's not as like, quote unquote, exciting as psychedelics.
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: But man, those service dogs like have kept people alive.
• 57:04
  Speaker 2: They're pure love.
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: Pure love.
• 57:06
  Speaker 2: Pure love.
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: Pure love.
• 57:07
  Speaker 2: They love you. You love them. You have fun together.
• 57:10
  Speaker 2: They're goofy. So they do things that are silly and
• 57:13
  Speaker 2: you laugh and they know you're laughing.
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: So good.
• 57:15
  Speaker 2: It's like dogs are amazing. And people that don't have
• 57:18
  Speaker 2: love in their life, they're suffering. Like loneliness is worse
• 57:21
  Speaker 2: than smoking marijuana. Multiple packs of cigarettes a day just
• 57:25
  Speaker 2: for overall health and life expectancy.
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: You know, Andy Stumpf came on the podcast.
• 57:31
  Speaker 2: I love Andy.
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: Great guy.
• 57:32
  Speaker 2: Great guy.
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: And he recommended this documentary to me, The Dark Wizard,
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: which is about this guy, Dean Potter, who was a
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: free solo climber.
• 57:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I watched it.
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: And then the wingsuit guy. And that's a beautiful example
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: of dogs climbing. helping someone at one point. Although he
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: took that dog doing all sorts of crazy shit. That
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: dog was very devoted.
• 57:52
  Speaker 2: Dog did not know any better.
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: He just thought that was life.
• 57:55
  Speaker 2: He had no other dogs to talk to.
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: Can you imagine you're that guy's dog? Like, yeah, you
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: just assume it's normal. But the other piece there, like
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: talk about dopamine and drive and, you know, life and death. That,
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: I feel like that movie was such a, like a
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: key insight into the relationship between drive when it's in,
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: you know, love and Love of craft, love of people,
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: and then drive when it's competitive in an unhealthy way.
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: Like how the Buddhists talk about like ego and that,
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: you know, ego is great because it can drive us
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: in certain, you know, pursuits that can build things for us, family, society.
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: But then how it can, you know, when people get
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: competitive about the wrong things, like in that movie, when
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: he was doing things that he didn't really want to do,
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: it almost killed him. But then when he was doing
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: things that could almost kill him, but he really wanted
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: to do it, but it was almost like spiritual, like
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: doing that tightrope walk with the full moon in the background.
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: He is still dangerous, but there was like this peace
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: in him. And I think about this all the time
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: because Rick talk, Ruben talks about this. You've talked about
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: this when we're doing something out of like love of craft,
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: even if we're fucking pushing so hard, Cho talks about this.
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: Like it's like, it's not easy, but there's this kind of, um,
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: know what the word is for it smoothness to the
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: thing yeah but then when it's competitive for the wrong
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: reasons well what are the wrong reasons well for instance
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: Potter was a great climber and then started getting into
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: other things but when he had Alex Honnold coming up
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: on his heels and Honnold was better than him right
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: And he started getting competitive about this kid who was
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: gonna take away his legacy. He started making stupid mistakes.
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: He started getting hurt. He started getting angry. His mental
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: health got much worse. You know what I mean? I mean,
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: Honnold's the last guy I would want coming up from
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: my slot, right? Because he's so mechanical and methodical. You also,
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: in that movie, I think Alex is fantastic. You also
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: saw a different side of Alex when he was younger
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: that doesn't seem to be there right now, at least
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: not visibly, which is he was hyper competitive with the
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: guys that he had grown up on and was like,
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: He was like, I want that rock. I want that slot.
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: And he says he was a better climber. And so
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: he wanted it before Potter. And so you can see
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: when Potter's kind of like the dying lion in that
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: field and trying to hold on. He starts doing stupid
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: shit like these tightrope walks in China that almost kill him.
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: And he's breaking down in tears. There's no elation. At
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: the beginning, he's doing things and it's like, yes, yes.
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: Then he's just doing things and he's like just happy
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: he didn't die. Two very different ways of looking at
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: the same pursuits. Right. And so I think that movie
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: is a far more interesting insight into human drive more
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: generally than it is about this clearly manic rock climber.
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 2: The drive is an interesting thing because drive in its
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 2: purest form actually replaces discipline. Like I was acutely aware
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 2: of that when I was a kid because I was
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 2: not disciplined at all.
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: Really?
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 2: I was a very undisciplined kid. I never cleaned my room.
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 2: I never did my homework. I was, I had very
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 2: few rules growing up. I was quite feral.
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: This was until what age?
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 2: Until 15, until I started really training heavily in martial arts.
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 2: And then when I got into martial arts, I still
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 2: was not, I did not clean my room. I did
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 2: not do my homework. I still, but in that one thing,
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 2: I had insane drive and I worked so hard and
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 2: I worked all day long every day. I never took
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 2: a day off. And that was the difference. It was like,
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 2: it was the drive that replaced discipline because I loved
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 2: the thing that I was doing so much. I found
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 2: so much interest in it and so much passion in it.
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 2: And it just, so it was so exciting to me
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 2: to do that. I just wanted to do it all
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 2: the time. And so I didn't have to be disciplined.
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 2: I knew there was work that had to be done
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 2: to get better at it, but it was also, I
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 2: was just intensely focused on getting better. So the work,
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 2: like whether it's rounds on the heavy bag or practicing
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 2: specific techniques or sparring drills or whatever the fuck I
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 2: was doing. I wasn't doing it like going, okay, this
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 2: is what I got to do today. It was not
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 2: that at all. It was just, I can't wait to
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 2: do more of this.
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: So rad.
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 2: I was only, the only thing that stopped me was
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 2: time and sleep. I would have tried to do it
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 2: all day, every day. I was obsessed, but I wasn't disciplined.
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 2: I had to get disciplined later on in life when
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 2: I stopped competing in particular, because then there was like
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 2: this overload overwhelming, looming threat of physical harm if you
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 2: don't stay in the gym constantly. If you're not like
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 2: 100% ready, there's this possibility that you could zig when
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 2: you should have zagged and you get a fucking shin
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 2: to your head. There's a lot of terrifying thoughts that
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 2: are involved in that that keep you training really hard.
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 2: But I didn't have discipline. I didn't develop discipline until
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 2: after I stopped competing. And then I realized like, well,
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 2: I should work out because I should work out. And
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 2: I should eat well because it's good for you. And
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 2: I should, you know, I should lift weights because it's
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 2: probably good to be strong, you know. And it was
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 2: doing things because I know they had to be done
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 2: rather than I was obsessed with doing them.
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: I mean, I'm telling a just so story here, but
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: there's also a part of me which says like it's
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: a mild bit of OCD. But thank goodness you didn't
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: clean your room because what if you had OCD and
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: you're like, I'm going to be the kid with the
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: perfect room. And then I'm going to be the kid
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: that washes my hands all the time. Then I'm going
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: to be the kid that is all about cleanliness. Like,
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: I think I do think that, you know.
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 2: What is obsessive compulsive disorder versus being passionate about something?
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: So here I can. There's a really important theme to OCD,
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: like true OCD. Obsessive compulsive disorder is characterized by the following.
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: The more you engage in the behavior, the stronger the
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: compulsion gets. And that's why it's so maddening for people
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: with true clinical OCD. So for people that have a
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: hand washing thing, they're like, oh, I have something on
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: my hands. They go and wash it and it just
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: makes them want to wash more and more and more. And,
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: you know, I'm not a big fan of SSRIs in
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: many cases, but I will say if there's one place
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: where SSRIs have really helped a great number of people
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: not completely dissolve into a puddle of dysfunction, it's Proper
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: use of SSRIs for true clinical OCD.
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 2: So OCD in that way, like washing the hands, what
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 2: is the cause of that? Do we know? Well, we know.
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: So there's a woman who was at NIH for a
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: long time. She passed away this last year. Her name
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: was Judith Rappaport, a real pioneer in this whole field
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: and brain science more generally. And she found that there's
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: an area of the brain called the basal ganglia. These
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: are circuits that we all have that are involved in
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: generating action, GOE.
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 2: And no-go.
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: You have two, basically you have an accelerator and a
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: brake on action. And the basal ganglia have these, it
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: looks a lot like a gear system in a car
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: when you really just draw it out. The people who
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: have true clinical grade OCD have an enlargement for whatever
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: reason of sub-regions of the circuit. And they basically feel
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: the impulse to do this thing all the time. Now,
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: what is the thing? The thing is based largely on
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: inputs from structures like the hypothalamus that are related to
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: very primitive adaptive behaviors like getting infections out and getting
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: dirt away is adaptive when it's done in a healthy way.
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: You know, there are all these people and there's actually
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: a paper. I hate this paper, but it's a real
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: paper that like watching zip popping, like stimulates dopamine. This
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: is why people do it. I can't watch these things.
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: It's like, you know, but people like.
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 2: Shout out to Dr. Pimple Popper.
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: There seems to be someone sent me this paper. I'm like, oh, God,
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: isn't it? And I look, I'm like, this paper, someone
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: actually ran the study. And now this explains a lot
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: of the Internet. There must be there's there's a component
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: in all of our brains that get some sort of
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: satisfaction from the removal of infection.
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: From relief from infection.
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 2: That makes sense.
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And so this and this feeds into these basal
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: ganglia circuits. For some people, it's compulsive water drinking. I mean,
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: Anna Lemke of Dopamine Nation talks about a patient of hers.
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: that was basically addicted to water, compulsive water drinker. They
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: actually died. It was very, very sad, like in all seriousness,
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: like over ingestion of water and this woman died.
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it does kill people. I remember there was a
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 2: lady who was doing a contest for the radio to
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 2: get like an Xbox for her son, like how you
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 2: can drink the most water.
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: I think it's called hypernatremia or something like that. Could
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: have that wrong. But the people who have OCD about
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: germs often, germs are bad, but you know, worrying that
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: much about germs is obviously not good. So again, we're
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: talking about primitive brain circuits and these circuits that can
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: go awry. You know, some people, they just, for reasons
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: we don't understand, they have overactive areas of the brain. Actually,
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: I have a positive tale that you might like because
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: it has to do with jujitsu, of which I do none.
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: But I have a close childhood friend. His name is
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: Eddie Chang. He's the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF. Brilliant guy, bioengineer.
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: He's figuring out the speech system in the brain. He's
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: a member of the National Academy. He's my friend since
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: we were seven. And he's like, and this amazing physician.
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: And he called me, very, very calm guy. And he
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: called me and he said, he calls me Andy, which
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: is unfortunate, but he goes, he knew me when I
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: was a little kid. He goes, Andy, I've got a
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: patient who wants you to come to the surgery. And
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: I go, what are you gonna do? And he goes, well,
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: he's got a tumor and he's really into jujitsu. And
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: he really admires like Joe and Jocko you know, would
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: you think you'd come up? I was like, yeah, chance
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: to see my childhood friend do brain surgery. So I
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: go there, I meet this guy. This guy has a
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: tumor that needs removing from the frontal lobe.
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 2: So- You're in there for the whole thing.
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: Right up there, right up there. I mean, you know,
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: so I'm in there and they keep patients alive for this.
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: So they locally- Awake. Awake, excuse me.
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: They definitely keep them alive. Yeah. I love that you
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: don't edit the show. This proves why I misspeak so much.
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: He's definitely alive, going in and coming out. He's alive today.
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: I spoke to Eddie this morning. They basically remove the skull.
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: They go in. The way they decide what tissue to
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: take out and what tissue to keep, because the tumor
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: is embedded in functional brain areas that are required for speech,
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: for movement, et cetera. You can't just start scooping brain
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: tissue out. What I learned- Is that these tumors don't
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: look different when you just look at the brain. They
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 1: feel different to the to the instruments of the highly
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: trained surgeon. So he's in there and he's in there mapping,
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: stimulating different areas of the brain while this guy is
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: awake and reporting what he's feeling. OK, his hands moving
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: and I'm going back and forth talking to this guy.
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: going back and forth and seeing the tumor getting removed
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: little by little, put into a plate, goes off to biopsy.
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: But this guy is awake the entire time. Incredible. And
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 1: as they're doing this, because the patient agreed, they're mapping
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: what areas of the brain are involved in mathematics. He's
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: doing math problems while he's in this surgery, while this
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: patient is doing this. He's also saying, oh, you know,
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 1: I felt that in my toe, or I felt that
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: in my face. Eddie's getting these functional maps of the
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: brain that we've never had before, and his lab has
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: discovered incredible things about how speech and language are organized
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: in the brain. He's taken people who have full locked-in syndrome,
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: completely paralyzed, who could just blink to communicate, and that's it.
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: This has been written up in the news. He had
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: a patient, Poncho, who Eddie's figured out there are areas
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: of the brain that prepare for speech, not just generate speech,
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: created through AI and bioengineering, because he's also a bioengineer,
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: of course, he created ways that this patient can now speak.
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: And the first thing Poncho ever said was, hello. And
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: you say, how are you doing? He said, doing well.
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: And the AI is learning his speech patterns. It's taken
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: what would normally be sent to the pharynx and larynx, right?
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: Because after all, speech is just an exhale that's controlled
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: by the pharynx and larynx and the tongue. And the
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: AI gets better at understanding what this person wants to say.
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: And now he's got patients, literally, they're still in wheelchairs, right?
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: Wheeling around with a, iPad next to them of their
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: face speaking according to what they're thinking. This patient who
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: got the tumor removed is amazing. I asked Eddie this
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: morning in case this happened to come up. How's he doing?
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: He goes, great. And we filmed all this, by the way.
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: The team at UCSF did this. He'd like you to
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: come to a jiu-jitsu class. So we may put this
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: out there. I think he's really into his 60s. From
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: what I understand, he's serious. He rolls like five or
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: six days a week. He's really into this. and he's
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: now rolling jujitsu this tumor which would have killed him
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 1: is out he's yes alive he's thriving You know, we
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: hear a lot about the negative aspects of AI, but
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: I asked Eddie, to what extent is AI critical for
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: this kind of technology to evolve? And he's like, absolutely critical,
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: because it can take all these neural signals and figure
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: out what the brain was doing exactly when the person
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: said the word for, or the, or my name is
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: blank and blank. You know, you can't sink that many
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: electrodes into the brain before you start destroying brain tissue.
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: So you have to collect a lot of different signals,
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: and AI is greatly facilitating the our ability to decode
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: what the brain is trying to do. And I said,
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: so where else is this going to go? And he said, well,
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: this obviously is what Elon wants to do with Neuralink
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: and taking paralyzed people out of a paralyzed state. It's like,
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: what's the intention to move? What does that look like neurally?
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: And then convert that into signals that maybe it's prosthetics,
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: maybe it's actual muscles and nerves can respond to accurately.
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: So the takeaway here is that like We hear a
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: lot about the bad stories of medicine, the stuff that's
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: on the edge, and we still need to figure out
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: the psychedelic stuff. But I have to say, with respect
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: to AI in medicine, I am super, super excited about
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: people walking again, seeing again. I mean, this stuff is
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: starting to happen. Having brain tumors removed that do not
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: encroach on areas of the brain that are critical. I said,
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: if you were a quarter centimeter or less into this
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: other margin where you recorded that the guy says, oh yeah,
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: my hand, I felt in my hand. If you were
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: to nick that, he's like, he'd completely lose a hand function. Now,
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: mind you, he's one of the best surgeons in the world.
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: I'll go on record saying that he is like, may
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: you never need his help. In fact, there's one of
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: our public facing health colleagues. I'll tell you this because
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: he's been public about it, who got a stem cell
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: injection into the disc down in Mexico and it got infected.
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 2: I've heard of people doing things like that.
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: And was paralyzed. and was in a hospital here in Texas, okay,
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: this is no, I'm not casting any judgment on Texas,
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: but what happened was they didn't realize that he had
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: a egg-shaped, egg-sized infection there. Okay, so this surgery had
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: gone awry, got an infection, and he was paralyzed, and
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: they said they were gonna have to sever the spinal
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: cord to get this infection out when they finally discovered it.
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: I contacted Eddie, and I said, listen, here's what's going on.
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: He said, get me in touch with his doctor, get
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 1: me his charts. He was airlifted to UCSF, and it
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: wasn't Eddie that did the surgery, but it was someone
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 1: in his department that removed this egg-sized infection. And Eddie
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: called me from the surgery, okay? And he said, we're
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: triple masked in here, and I can smell the infection.
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: It turns out that bacteria had never been identified in
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: the United States. So there are bacteria that exist in
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 1: other places that we're just not exposed to that frequently.
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: So it was very virulent in this case. They got
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: the infection out.
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 2: So this was just like a clinic with a dirty needle?
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: This was a bad clinic with a bad practice of
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: some sort. They screwed up. Someone screwed up along the way.
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: And this guy happens, the patient happens to be a
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: physician in this case. This guy is walking, talking, exercising.
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 2: How's his back? Great. Did the injection help?
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: Oh, I don't know. I said, what was it that
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 1: allowed you guys to do this that another clinic might
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: not have been able to do? Because I, like you,
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: am very interested in what makes for good doctors versus
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: so-so doctors versus lousy doctors versus superb doctors. And he said,
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: it's two pieces. It's the training and the skill of
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: the physician, obviously. Their willingness to constantly update their models
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: with new understanding of what's out there, new technologies. And
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: it's also these incredible bioengineering and AI technologies that can
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: make estimates about where the margins of error are in
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: real time. Because, you know, when you think about the brain,
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: you get an MRI, you see, OK, there's the tumor.
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: We're going to go out and scoop it out. But
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: I've seen this now this close. And in three dimensions,
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: it's a completely different picture. Like you're he's scooping out
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: this tumor. He's probing around the tumor. And then I'm like,
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: is it done? And he's like, no, it's interdigitated, meaning
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: it's a vessel into other brain structures. We have to
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: go after that stuff. I said, what are the margins
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: of error? He said, you know, less than a millimeter
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: in some cases. And you're by hand. They're picking out
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: tumor little by little by little to try and ensure
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: it doesn't come back and sparing function. Incredible. And AI
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: is updating based on every micro movement of the head
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: that might occur because, you know, the person's bolted in. Basically,
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 1: they got no stereotaxis bolted to the table. Literally can't
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: move your head. The guy can speak, but he can't
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: move his head. But they're little micro-movements because the brain
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 1: is pulsing. So this is happening in real time. So
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: the cool thing is, yeah, this video will release to
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 1: the internet. I think the patient will agree to it.
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 2: The video of the surgery?
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 1: The whole thing. The patient has been very willing to
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 1: do this. Yeah, this guy is a true medical science stud.
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 1: And he's an awesome family man and friend, and he's
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: just a... He's a hero of science, in my opinion.
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 2: So what are they using, like tiny little scalpels?
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: So here actually is a technology he's using to record
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 1: from and stimulate the brain. If you put in, Jamie,
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 1: if you go to.
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 2: Well, what is that? Is that like inside the head?
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: That's to stimulate the brain.
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 2: It's called the Bravo mesh.
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like a mesh that will stimulate certain brain tissue.
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 1: It will also record. If you put in poncho paralyzed
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 1: Eddie Chang.
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 2: I did. I got the story here from New York Times.
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 2: What was that mesh that stimulates the brain? What was
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 2: that installed for?
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: To stimulate the areas of the brain that can help
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: us facilitate recovery of what tissue is still there.
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 2: Whoa.
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: Because Eddie came up through a lab by a guy
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 1: by the name of Mike Merzenich. And I actually talk
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: about this in the book, in the chapter on learning.
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: You know, until the early 90s, people thought you couldn't
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: learn after age 25, that there was no plasticity.
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 2: Until the early 90s? Yeah.
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 1: And then basically three guys. It was Mike Merzenich, a
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: guy named Michael Kilgard, who's down in Dallas, or maybe
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: it's Houston. He's here in Texas. And a guy named
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 1: Greg Reconzone, who is this brilliant scientist. They did these
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: studies at first in monkeys and then in humans, which
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: showed That if you take adult monkeys or humans and
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: you have them pay really careful attention to a task,
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: that the brain changes. And the experiment is very simple.
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 1: It's like this. So they had monkeys or a human
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 1: can do this. Feel like a rotating drum. And the
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 1: drum's got bumps on it like Braille. And they're recording
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: from an area of the brain that responds to touch.
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: And the monkey's job is to basically press a lever
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: any time the bumps go from coarse to more fine.
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 1: So think big bumps, small bumps. The monkey plays this game,
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 1: and every time they get it right, they get some juice.
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: Monkeys like juice. Press the lever, press the lever, press
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: the lever. These are adult monkeys. They come back sometime later,
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: and the brain area representing the fingers has expanded. The
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 1: brain has changed. There's plasticity. It learned. But what I
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: didn't tell you is at the same time they're doing
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 1: these experiments, there's a sound in the room. Okay. Now
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 1: they do a different experiment. where the monkey is still
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: feeling the bumps, but the monkey is trained to listen
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: to changes in the sound, subtle changes in the frequency
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: of the sound, high to low or low to high.
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: And if they get that right, if they think they
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: went from high to low and that's the task, they
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: press the lever or they pull the joystick and they
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: get some juice. Under those conditions, the area of the
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: brain responsible for hearing changes. Now, the key thing here
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: is the experience is the same in both cases. They're
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: hearing and touching. in both experiments. But the key difference
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: is what they're paying attention to. The brain of the
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: adult does not change just because of passive experience. The
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: brain of the adult, and this is true in humans too,
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: changes because of what you attend to. And when we
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 1: start talking about neuroplasticity and learning, everyone would like to think, oh,
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: my brain is different at the end of this conversation
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: than before. You don't learn from passive experience. You learn
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: from focusing and the friction that's accomplished trying to do
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: things right and sometimes getting it wrong. The error signal
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 1: is what instructs the brain to change. I'm sure you
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 1: know this from martial arts. I'm sure you know this
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: from other areas of life too. If your brain can
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: do something, there's no reason for it to change. No
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: rewiring is needed.
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: But if you're trying to do this, I don't know
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 1: martial arts well. I did a little bit of Thai
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: boxing when I was younger. I boxed in my 30s,
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 1: which was really dumb, by the way, as a neuroscience professor.
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: I'd spar on Wednesday nights in San Diego where you
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: got all these Marines and all these like team guys.
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 1: It was so dumb. I'd come home like all busted up.
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: My girlfriend was like, what are you doing? I was like,
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: you know, I like it. She's like, you don't get
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: paid to do this. But it was a lot of fun.
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: I think you learn a lot from sparring. I wish
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: it wasn't bad for your brain. I wish it wasn't
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: bad for your brain. I will say this. I'm not
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: encouraging anyone to box unless they really want to. But
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 1: I also learned a lot about how to stay calm
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: when you're getting your ass beat and how to think clearly. Yeah.
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: It's also, I think, Sam, who's the guy who wrote
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 1: A Fighter's Heart?
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 2: I love that book. Sam Shepard?
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 1: Sam Shepard. He also talks about, like, it's like an
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: intimate thing to spar with somebody. Like, what does he say?
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: He's like, you're sharing bodily fluids with somebody. It's like
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: a one-night stand. You develop a closeness with the people
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 1: that you spar with, a respect. And I wasn't fast enough.
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 1: I don't think my timing was really good. I eventually
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: learned that I have a long reach. That could help me.
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 1: But I realized I can't be doing this. And I
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: was a neuroscience professor. But I really enjoyed it.
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 2: It's not something that you really get excellent at if
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 2: you learn late in life, unfortunately. Unless you're a very
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 2: unusual athlete.
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 2: Most people who get good at striking, striking in particular,
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 2: they start out very young. Yeah. And that's how they
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 2: get good at it. There's a level that they reach
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 2: that someone who starts out late in life, even if
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 2: you're a good athlete, you probably never reach that level.
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 2: It was Lloyd Mayweather. Perfect example. There's something about him. He's,
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 2: you know, one of the greatest of all time. But
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 2: I think there's something to the fact that he started
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 2: when he was really, really, really, really young. And he
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 2: had a dad who was a world-class boxer. And he
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 2: had an uncle who was a world champion boxer. It's
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 2: like he was around it from the time he was young.
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 2: So there's like pathways that they develop. And their body
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 2: develops and grows while striking, right? And there's something about
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 2: the maturation process. This is like just my anecdotal experience
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 2: from watching people learn striking. It seems like the people
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 2: that are really elite at it, they grew up with
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 2: their bodies. As their bodies were maturing, they were learning it.
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 2: And it seems like there's a something that they have
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 2: that you don't get later in life. You can get
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 2: really good if you're a good athlete. Learning it later
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 2: in life, you're never going to get best of ever,
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 2: world champion status. Like you have to have a super
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 2: long journey and it has to start when you're a
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 2: fucking kid. So it's like your brain has to be evolving,
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 2: learning those skills, learning timing and distance and fainting and
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 2: how people react and how to map out potential reactions
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 2: from certain, how to lure them into things. It's too much.
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I, I learned a lot boxing. I mean, I,
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 1: at least three things. One is, um, that, uh, Landing,
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 1: like sinking like a one-two combination feels really good.
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 2: It feels real good. It's hard to do.
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 1: It's hard to do. I also learned that there's this
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: thing called a really good counterpuncher where you land a
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: jab and you eat four.
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: And you're just like, and the world's just spinning. You're
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 1: seeing stars. I also realized that six-pack abs don't mean shit.
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: You're down near the Mexican border. Like the gym I
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: trained at was like pretty far south in San Diego.
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: And some guys would roll in and like you wouldn't
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: think much of them. Like, yeah, like unpeel. Because everyone
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 1: would spar on Wednesdays, you know. And they try and
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 1: match people up by weight. And you see guys that
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: did not look in shape who could move and you
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 1: just get battered. I mean, they're just if they know
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 1: how to move properly. So that was a good teaching.
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: And then the last thing that like I really took
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: away and I think about this on the Internet, too,
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: is there's always like one guy in the gym who
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: moves really well on the bag, who's like speed bag
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 1: and heavy bag and just looks so crisp, super in shape.
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: And they never spar. and they sit at the edge
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: of the ring and they give all sorts of advice
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: about what you're supposed to do when you're in there.
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 1: And then if you go, and I finally did, because
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: in skateboarding, I wasn't that good of a skateboarder, but
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 1: I'd be like, come on, drop in, let's go, let's
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 1: have fun. Skateboarding's a very inviting sport. It's not like
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: surfing where you're guarding the waves, right? And I was like,
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: come on in. Oh, no, am I short? Like every
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 1: week I'd be like, hey, come on in. Let's just
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: like do a couple rounds. Like you always have advice
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 1: for everybody. Let's do a couple rounds. Never did. And
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: finally the guy that owns the gym came over and goes,
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: that guy's never boxed a round in his life. He
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: probably did when he was a kid. He ate a
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: few punches. Didn't like it. But looks really mint. And so,
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: you know, there's like the internet. People like quick to criticize,
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: but like, all right, like get in there and do it.
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: Like you come out here and let's play. You know,
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: and so I have to be careful. You have to
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: be careful with that one because the guy could have
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 1: gone in there taking my head off. But I realized
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: I was like, there are a lot of people that
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 1: hang out where they call it, like the skirt, like
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: hang out on the skirt and just give advice all day. Like,
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: don't corkscrew your jab, corkscrew. I'm like, who are these people?
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 1: You know, like if you so it's it's kind of nice, actually,
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: to get that experience. I mean, it was late in life.
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 1: I mean, I talk a little bit in the book
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: when I was younger. I definitely got into a lot
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: of scraps. I was kind of like a live wire.
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: I do not recommend that.
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 2: No, fighting's terrible. But there's something about martial arts, about
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 2: the fear and learning how to stay calm while you're sparring.
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 2: I think jujitsu is the best one because although there's
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 2: always a risk of injury in jujitsu, you're not getting
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 2: hit all the time. And so you could go pretty hard.
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 2: And that's the difference really between martial arts, sparring, like
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 2: kickboxing and things along those lines and boxing and jujitsu.
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 2: Because in jujitsu, As many times if you're training in
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 2: a really good gym with really good guys, you're going
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 2: full clip. And both you and him are going full clip.
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 2: And there's no animosity. They might be one of your
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 2: best friends. You guys are just doing the thing that
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 2: you do, full clip. But by doing it full clip,
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 2: because if he catches you, like he gets your arm,
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 2: you just tap. And then you go again. As long
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 2: as your ego is healthy, as long as you understand
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 2: what you're doing and knowing and he's not yanking on
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 2: your knees and ripping your knees apart with heel hooks
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 2: and stuff like that, like letting someone tap. As long
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 2: as you do that, you're literally going full clip. So
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 2: you learn how to stay calm and you also get
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 2: very comfortable with going full clip. So if you're in
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 2: a situation, if you're a guy who only does point
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 2: karate sparring and you're just touching each other and they stop,
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 2: touch each other, and then you're in some wild melee
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 2: at a bar where someone's swinging at you full blast
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 2: and throwing wild haymaker punches and you're panicking because you're
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 2: not used to this scenario. A jiu-jitsu person is used
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 2: to someone going full blast. So they'll grab a hold
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 2: of you, and it'll be just routine. They'll just drag
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 2: you to the ground, trip you, get on top, mount,
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 2: choke you, whatever the fuck they want to do, essentially,
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 2: once they get a hold of you. They do it
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 2: all the time, full blast. That's why I think it's
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 2: the superior martial art for self-defense. Because if you're going
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 2: to really learn how to fight like striking well, you're
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 2: going to get hit, and you're going to get hit
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 2: a lot, and you're going to be hitting people a lot,
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 2: and you're going to be going to war with each other,
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 2: and it's fucking dangerous, and it's really bad for your brain.
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 2: And that's really the only way to learn how to
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 2: be calm when you're actually sparring or actually fighting someone.
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 2: But with jiu-jitsu, there's all that fear of brain damage removed,
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 2: all the fear of really serious injury is greatly mitigated
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 2: by tapping and good training partners.
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: I need to get into it.
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 2: It's such a fun thing to learn, too, man.
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 1: It's funny. We talk about boxing. I think combat, to
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: some people, it just feels good. There's a circuit there.
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: There's actually a friend of mine who's got a lab
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: up at the University of Washington, and he studies this
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: brain circuit. You know that male mice will work hard
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: for the opportunity to fight other mice. You know, we
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: always hear like, oh, they just want pleasure, no pain.
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: Like male mice have a circuit and they will work
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: their asses off figuring out puzzles that were perplexed like
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 1: 30% of the adult population across the world. And these
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 1: mice can figure it out. And it's hard work for
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: them to figure out these light sequences or lever press
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 1: sequences for what? Not for a piece of food, not
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: for water when they're thirsty, not for like methamphetamine, but
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 1: to fight another mouse. And then they're like, they love fighting.
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 2: That's crazy. I never knew that.
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 2: They'll work hard.
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 2: And the reward is they get to fight a mouse.
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 1: I mean, the mouse fight another mouse.
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 2: That's crazy. Yeah.
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 1: I think it's I think, again, it's these deeper brain
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: circuits that we all harbor. And I think some people
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 1: are like, oh, no, that's not even within me. I think,
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: you know, it varies. I mean, my dad is from
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 1: South America. He went to like a boarding military type
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 1: school when he was a kid. He said everyone had
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 1: to box was a boy's school. It was all dudes.
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: They all had to box. Everyone had to box and
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: they'd make them spar. I was like box like, you know,
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: like boxing drills. He's like, no, they'd like pit us
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 1: against each other. until you'd find the kind of combination
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 1: of people that were about equal. And then they just
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 1: like put you to work on each other. The idea
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: was you were supposed to, you know, both learn the
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 1: gentlemanly aspects about, you know, touch gloves and the things
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: afterwards you have to like, you know, so there's that.
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 1: And he's like, no, but you were supposed to try
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: and stay calm in the, in getting, you know, while
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: trying to beat up the other person, then beat you up.
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: I think there's value in it.
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 2: There's value in it. And there's value in just what
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 2: we were talking about earlier about doing difficult things. I
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 2: think it is one of the most difficult things you
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 2: could choose to do. that you can voluntarily sign yourself
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 2: up for a place where you're going to experience pain
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 2: and severe discomfort and a very perplexing puzzle, trying to
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 2: figure out how to hit someone who doesn't want to
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 2: get hit and they're trying to hit you and you're
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 2: trying not to get hit or get tapped or whatever, wrestle,
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 2: whatever you're doing. It's a very difficult thing to do.
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 2: And those very difficult things to do make the rest
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 2: of your life easier. It's like we were talking about
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 2: getting shit for cold punches. I don't know if I
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 2: get shit for talking about cold punches, but anybody who
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 2: doesn't think you should cold punch hasn't cold punched. The
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 2: people that do it and the people that say don't
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 2: do it, they're coming up with excuses because it's fucking
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 2: terrifying and nobody likes it. It sucks. But what I
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 2: was going to get to is it's not a cure.
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 2: There's no cure. There's a bunch of different excellent practices.
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 2: And if you stack those up throughout your day, diet, nutrition, sunlight, exercise,
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 2: all these different things, cold, plunge, sauna, your life's going
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 2: to be better. And I think a thing like martial arts,
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 2: particularly jujitsu is a great addition to that. And if
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 2: you don't like that, yoga is another great addition. It's
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 2: one of the best things that we have. We did
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 2: a Sober October challenge where we did 15 days of yoga.
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 1: Hot yoga?
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, 90-minute sessions.
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: Was Bert doing this too?
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we all did it. We did it together. It
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 2: was one of the best months I've ever had in
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 2: my life because you just feel so good and so calm,
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 2: and the rest of your life is easier. Fucking hot
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 2: yoga is a bitch, man. It's really hard to do.
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 2: Those 90-minute sessions are fucking hard. And when it's over,
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 2: you are spent, and you become the nicest person on earth.
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 2: And the rest of your day is so much easier
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 2: than that last 15 minutes of struggle, sweating like it's
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 2: pouring rain outside. I mean, it's crazy how hard it
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 2: is to do those 90 minutes if you're doing them right.
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 2: You need a bunch of those things in your life.
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 2: You do. If you don't, you're going to suffer. It's
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 2: like there's a balancing act that you have to acknowledge.
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: It's interesting how the two things that really seem to
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 1: you know, catch fire out there where the idea that
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 1: cold plunges block hypertrophy and strength adaptations, if done in
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 1: the six hours after weight training, but you can do
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 1: it before. It has tremendous benefit. I think it's mental training.
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 1: And then the other one was the cortisol thing. You know,
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 1: this idea like, oh, it raises cortisol. The data all
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 1: say it does not raise cortisol. Marginally, maybe. but mostly
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: reduces cortisol and buffers your cortisol response to stress. And
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: I think in the women's fitness community, this was especially
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: kind of catchy. People thought, oh, cortisol bad, cortisol bad.
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 1: I mean, the entire book could be summarized as get
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 1: your morning cortisol high and your nighttime cortisol low, and
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: your life's gonna be 100 times better.
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 2: Why?
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 1: Because when you view bright light, drink caffeine, exercise, do
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: cold exposure in the morning and your cortisol spikes, it
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 1: ensures that your nighttime cortisol is low which means it's
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: easier to fall asleep. And if you have any stress
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: during the middle of the day, this is, I think
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: explains your whole thing of doing hard things makes life easier.
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 1: When you spike your cortisol in the morning, if you
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 1: have a stressful interaction or something happens during the day,
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: you do get an increase in adrenaline and cortisol to stress,
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 1: but it's brief. If you don't, It's very big and
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 1: it's very prolonged. So all these people that are like
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 1: chronically stressed, the state of the world, and look, the
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: state of the world is complicated, but they're constantly feeling
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 1: oppressed by life, overwhelmed by life. If they were to
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 1: do a couple things in the morning, view bright light,
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: ideally from sunlight, I've talked about these things before, cold
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: shower or cold plunge, 30 seconds, right? Just uncomfortably cold,
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 1: then get out. Exercise of some sort that's high intensity
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 1: interval training or lift some weights that are heavy for them.
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 1: That kind of thing for 45 minutes to an hour
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: for the weights, maybe just even 10 minutes for the
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 1: high intensity stuff and head into the day. Bouts of
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 1: stress will happen, but your hormonal response to them will
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: be severely blunted. There's so much data on this. And
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 1: people always say, but is that just true for men? No,
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 1: it's also true for women. And so people are weak
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: because their cortisol levels are too low in the morning
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 1: and they're too high all day long. And then at
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 1: night they're like, oh, I can't sleep. I'm stressed and
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: this and that. Well, you've set yourself up to be
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 1: a vulnerable creature in the last third of your day.
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 1: So that first hour of the day sets the whole stage.
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: And if you can't exercise in that first hour, fine,
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: you do in the afternoon, no big deal. But if
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 1: we just understood that cortisol spiked in the morning is
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 1: perhaps the best thing we can do for our health,
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 1: I think the world would be so much better off.
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 1: But everyone's like, oh, I already am too stressed and
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 1: cortisol is going to make me retain fat. It's like, no, no, no.
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 2: People love excuses.
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: People love excuses.
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 2: Excuses why not take action are, that's one of the
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 2: greatest things that people indulge in.
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: People love excuses. The- We didn't close the hatch on
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 1: the neuroplasticity thing. I just want to make sure I
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: do that, which is what you focus on, you can change.
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 1: You can learn skills if you focus. And the agitation
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: that you feel when trying to learn, that is the
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: reflection of the cocktail of neuromodulators in the brain and
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 1: body that allow the circuits to change. I wish I
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: had been told this in like the third grade. If
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 1: they said, hey, when you're trying to learn something and
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: it's easy, great. But when you're trying to learn something
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 1: and it's, high friction, like you can't do it, that
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 1: frustration is the first gate of learning opening. And right
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: on the other side of that is you continuing to
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 1: try a little bit more. You have to do this
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 1: through genuine attempts to learn, but you get some errors.
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 1: So you can't just do throwaway errors, right? If I'm
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 1: trying to learn billiards, which I'm only modestly poor at, right?
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 1: If I'm trying to get better and I'm just like
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 1: hitting the ball wherever, you don't learn obviously. But if
• 1:33:59
  Speaker 1: I'm trying and trying, the error signal sends a message
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 1: to the brain, that generates this agitation. The agitation tags
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: the neurons. It literally puts a chemical tag on these neurons. Tonight,
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 1: when you sleep, you need to change. That's what agitation does.
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: And then when you get to sleep at night, those
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 1: circuits change. And then you come back a few days later,
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 1: you might not have the skill, but you're a little
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: bit closer.
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 2: That makes sense.
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: That's neuroplasticity.
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 2: Particularly in martial arts, the kids, when you see kids,
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 2: the kids, they get really frustrated when they don't learn
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 2: and they get really frustrated, and they get real upset
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 2: if they get tapped, they usually wind up getting really good.
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 1: Interesting. Yeah, the more.
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 2: The ones that are very emotionally attached, as long as
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 2: they can control it. But there has to be... You
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 2: can't go, well, you got me. It's got to be, fuck!
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 2: Fuck!
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: And then harnessing you, and then pulling back, and like, okay,
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 1: this next one, and this next one.
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 2: Right, stay calm, but that fuck, even if you don't
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 2: express it outright, that fuck thought in your head, Is
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 2: always going to be there.
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 1: That error signal. And I go into the brain circuitry
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 1: that's responsible for this and which neurochemicals it is and
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 1: on and on. But that signal is what gates neuroplasticity.
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 1: One of the reasons why psychedelics are so effective in
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 1: allowing plasticity, because they are. I want to just be
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 1: very blunt about this. The massive increases in serotonin with psilocybin.
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 1: The massive increases in serotonin and dopamine with MDMA, because
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: that's kind of the hallmark of MDMA. It's a very
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: unique drug. It increases dopamine and serotonin together. Normally, they're
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 1: on a bit of a seesaw, but it increases both.
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 1: Those are what we call neuromodulators. They make the brain
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 1: more amenable to plasticity during the session and in the
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 1: weeks that follow. So what are these neuromodulators? Well, dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, norepinephrine, epinephrine,
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 1: also called adrenaline. You go, okay, well, that's a big
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: list of molecules. The key discovery of those guys, Merzenich, Reconzone,
• 1:35:54
  Speaker 1: and Kilgard that I mentioned earlier, you can give an
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 1: animal or a person any molecule that will increase those,
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 1: give them a learning session, and they'll learn better. It's
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: not specific to one neuromodulator. And if you give somebody propranolol,
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 1: a drug that blocks the receptors that adrenaline binds to,
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 1: after learning, they won't learn as well.
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 2: They.
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 1: Can't remember stuff. Why? Because there wasn't enough adrenaline. If
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 1: you want to remember something, you need that frustration. You
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 1: need the adrenaline.
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 2: So if someone's like fearful of learning something and they
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 2: take some sort of a beta blocker.
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 1: Blocks learning.
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 1: Great data on this. Larry Cahill and James McGough. People
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 1: want to look it up. Beautiful literature. And they cite studies.
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 1: These are more historical references where they would give kids.
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 1: People would give kids lessons and then throw them into
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 1: a cold river. to spike their adrenaline. Like people have
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 1: been playing with this stuff for a very long time. Yeah.
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 1: So nicotine, for instance, people think, is it a cognitive enhancer?
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 1: It is if you don't do it all the time
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: every day. But if you, you know, I talk about
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: nicotine and it's, you know, it's pretty habit forming. But
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 1: if you take it before or after learning something, even after, right? Before, during,
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: or after learning something, and you're not highly saturated with
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 1: nicotine already, yeah, you'll enhance your ability to learn that thing.
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 1: The problem is people are just popping them all day long,
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 1: every day, just to get to baseline.
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 2: They're for fun.
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 1: We drink caffeine to get to baseline. We take nicotine
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 1: to get to baseline. Are you on the nicotine?
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 2: I take them. But I wanted to ask you this
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 2: about addiction. Is there a biological component to addiction? And
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 2: one of the reasons why I ask is because I
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 2: take these. Tucker Carlson sends me these Alps. I like these.
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: They taste different than the other ones I've tried. I've
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 1: tried athletic nicotine, zinc. I've not tried the else.
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 2: I like athletic nicotine. That's probably my favorite, like the
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 2: threes because it's mild.
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 2: The little three milligrams. My point is I do it
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 2: all the time and I take them before shows. I
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 2: like to suck on them before I go on stage.
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 2: But when I went on vacation for 10 days, I
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 2: didn't bring any on purpose. So I was like, let's
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 2: see what this is like. Nothing. And I've heard so
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 2: many people say that they have horrible cravings. They can't
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 2: tolerate it. They go nuts. They just need nicotine. And
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 2: I'm sitting there like on day two, like waiting for
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 2: it to come on. Nope, nothing. I just, I'm not
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 2: on nicotine.
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 1: I mean, you're a bit of a mutant too.
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 2: I don't know what it is.
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 1: Like, I mean, just because you're so it sounds to
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: me like you're so familiar with discomfort. You may not
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 1: even register that like a mild, tiny bit of withdrawal.
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 1: But it is interesting, you know, because if I don't
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 1: drink caffeine, life is a lot less interesting to me.
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 1: And I've been I've been drinking a shit ton of caffeine.
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 1: I mean, I've got a picture. I'm half Argentine. So
• 1:38:43
  Speaker 1: there's a picture of me on my grandfather's lap drinking
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: mate from a gourd when I'm like three years old
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 1: in my Spider-Man pajamas. You know, I people on the Internet,
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 1: they go, I don't believe I probably drink 800 milligrams
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 1: of caffeine a day and I'm fine. But if I
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 1: don't drink caffeine, I'm just like, oh, man, I'm I
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 1: don't know if I'm addicted in the classic sense. Like,
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 1: I'm not going to go rob old ladies to get caffeine.
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not, you know, I'm not going to
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 1: harm myself with it. If anything, it shows that it
• 1:39:10
  Speaker 1: can offset dementia. I mean, the new data basically say
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 1: up to about 400 milligrams per day. caffeine is great
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 1: for the brain, for the body. You know, it's, people
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 1: have anxiety. It can be problematic, but you just might
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 1: not have, I mean, you may just naturally make a
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 1: lot of acetylcholine. And so when you don't take nicotine,
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 1: maybe you just rebound really fast.
• 1:39:32
  Speaker 2: I don't know if that's it. I mean, I do
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 2: take nootropics that might have an effect on it.
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 1: Oh, definitely.
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 2: But I didn't bring any with me when I was
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 2: on vacation. Amazing. I just brought vitamins.
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 1: No cigars?
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 2: Nope. No cigars, no nothing.
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 1: And what kind of vacation was it?
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 2: It was fun. I enjoyed it. It was a family vacation.
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 1: Nice.
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 2: But the point is I was waiting for this thing
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 2: that everybody told me was coming, and it never showed
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 2: up at all. There was zero. I mean, it wasn't hard.
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 2: It wasn't a thing. It's a good experiment to do, right?
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 2: And I do sometimes during the day, like I'll wake
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 2: up in the morning and say, I'm not going to
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 2: eat them today. I'm not going to take any nicotine powder.
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 2: But I always wonder, like, is it just I got lucky?
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 2: Like some people– They literally cannot drink. Alcoholism is in
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 2: their genetics. They have families that are alcoholics. That's a
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 2: real thing. And they just can't handle it. Yeah.
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 1: I mean, the guys who started AA talked about an allergy.
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 1: They described it as like an allergy. Like some people,
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 1: when they drink alcohol, their first experience, I had a
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 1: friend like this from childhood, became an alcoholic, not surprisingly.
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 1: And when he drank the first or second time, he
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 1: was like, this is how I'm meant to feel.
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 2: Oh, boy.
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 1: Like if he felt like it completed something in him.
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 1: I don't feel that way with alcohol. I don't drink,
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 1: but I could without problems. You know, you're sort of
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 1: on off now, right? Like a drink.
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 2: I don't get drunk anymore. I'll have a drink or two,
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 2: but I don't get drunk anymore.
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 1: I think that was the getting drunk.
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, no, no. When I took the
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 2: eight months off, I didn't even miss alcohol. But then
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 2: I went to dinner, had a margarita. I was like, oh,
• 1:41:01
  Speaker 2: I missed this. This is fun. Yeah, that's nice. But
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 2: the key is like I just wanted to take some
• 1:41:05
  Speaker 2: time off and just not feel like shit. Because my
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 2: problem was I was stacking too many days where I
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 2: was having a drink or two on the podcast. And
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 2: then I was having a drink or two at the club.
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 2: And then, you know, you do multiple days of that
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 2: and you feel like shit. And it was like affecting
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 2: my workouts. And I said, this is stupid. Let me
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 2: see how it feels. And I didn't miss it at all.
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 2: But when I did have a drink or two, I'm like, okay,
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 2: I see there is a benefit from a social lubricant aspect.
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 2: There's a funness there. to a glass of wine or,
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 2: you know, a glass of whiskey. But the thing is,
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 2: just understand what you're doing and don't fuck your body
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 2: up and try to do your best. Take a lot
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 2: of glutathione, mitigate whatever you're doing to your body by
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 2: actually consuming alcohol. And more likely, you don't need as
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 2: much as you're going to drink. That's the problem. But
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 2: to have a good time, a couple of drinks, you
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 2: have a good time. Five, six drinks, it's not really
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 2: a good time anymore. You're kind of fucking plastered and
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 2: you sound stupid.
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 1: And nowadays, you know, with cameras and stuff. People say
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 1: stupid stuff. I mean, I drank in college and, and
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 1: I drank after a bit and I just drank less
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 1: and less. But you know, when I was a junior professor,
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 1: my girlfriend at the time, like she just had the
• 1:42:13
  Speaker 1: genetics where she could have a couple of drinks in
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 1: it and really enjoy it. Just like really enjoy it.
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 1: And I mean, I think some people can do that.
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 2: So, okay. What are the genetics that would cause someone
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 2: to be like severely addicted to nicotine? Another one that
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 2: I hear about all the time is kratom. We had
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 2: a guy who came and did the podcast and someone
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 2: had sent us some Kratom, one of our guests, like
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 2: had a Kratom company. So I'm like, and it was
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 2: just laying around the kitchen. And he goes, you're not
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 2: taking that, are you? I go, no, some guy just
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 2: sent it to me. And he goes, get rid of
• 1:42:41
  Speaker 2: that shit. He goes, it is the fucking hardest thing
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 2: to kick. I go, really? And he goes, yeah, I'm
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 2: on it. It's horrible. He goes, it's an awful high.
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 2: And he goes, and I'm fucking, I'm really struggling to
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 2: get off of it. And I was kind of stunned.
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 2: I was like, well, I've taken it before and it
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 2: didn't seem like It would be that thing, like a
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 2: thing that would make you addicted. But apparently it's like
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 2: any other opioid. Like you can get like fully wrapped
• 1:43:09
  Speaker 2: up in that stuff. But what is it about some
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 2: people and their biology that makes them more susceptible to
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 2: whether it's nicotine or caffeine or whatever it is?
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 1: It's going to undoubtedly have to do with the genetics
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 1: that line up the receptors in the brain that lead
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 1: some people to have a very different experience with one opioid.
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 1: Substance versus another. For instance, there's a subset of people,
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 1: about 8% of people, that when they drink alcohol, they
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 1: experience a much more euphoric high from it. These people
• 1:43:40
  Speaker 1: tend to recover very easily the next morning. That's independent
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 1: of tolerance. It tends to run in families. These people
• 1:43:46
  Speaker 1: are very high susceptibility to severe alcohol use disorder, what
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 1: you and I know as alcoholism. There are people who
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 1: take their first drink, as I mentioned before, and are
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 1: just like, this completes me.
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 2: Right?
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 1: And those people usually have certain genetic backgrounds. You know,
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 1: we don't want to talk about this, but there's certain
• 1:44:05
  Speaker 1: genetic backgrounds. They probably have high levels of the enzyme
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 1: that can digest alcohol, right? You know, it can break
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 1: down alcohol because it is a poison. But if you're
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 1: breaking it down more quickly, maybe it's not impacting your
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 1: microbiome and your sleep quite as much. And so you
• 1:44:18
  Speaker 1: can drink a lot more and sleep fine and do fine.
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 1: And it varies by age too. You know, two glasses
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 1: of wine at 60 feels very different at two glasses
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 1: of wine at like you know, at 25, as most
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: people will tell you, right? We're just different resilience. In general,
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 1: what the data say is that kids who took their
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 1: first drink really young, like 12, 13, 14, are greatly
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 1: predisposed to alcoholism later. But it's hard to dissociate that
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 1: from this environmental circumstances around that. Why are they drinking
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 1: at 12 or 13? You know, I think I took
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 1: my first drink of alcohol, I'm not proud of this,
• 1:44:51
  Speaker 1: at 11. A friend, I won't mention his name, went
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 1: to his house and he goes, hey, you know, my
• 1:44:55
  Speaker 1: dad's got some, I think it was like wine cooler
• 1:44:57
  Speaker 1: or something. And we were, and we, we drank them
• 1:44:59
  Speaker 1: and we got, you know, we got drunk and, uh,
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: you know, I was, I wasn't a bad kid, but
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 1: we got drunk. And, but the earlier you drink, the
• 1:45:06
  Speaker 1: more susceptible you are to alcoholism, but I never became
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: an alcoholic, but I will tell you that my love
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 1: of caffeine, my love of energy focus and that sort
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 1: of thing makes me like about half the population who
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 1: are probably have a decent susceptibility to stimulants. I've never
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 1: done cocaine. I've never done speed. I've never done Adderall
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 1: or Vyvanse. We could talk about stimulants. And in the book,
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 1: I talk about some of the newer stimulants that are
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 1: still amphetamine-like, but a little bit potentially safer.
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 2: Do you do anything like modafinil?
• 1:45:36
  Speaker 1: I don't. I took one modafinil, couldn't sleep for two days.
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 1: I'm very, very sensitive to these things. There is a
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 1: drug that's approved for excessive daytime sleepiness that I took
• 1:45:46
  Speaker 1: on a trip where I was underslept and I needed
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 1: to work. I'm called Sunosi. It's a, that's now in
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 1: phase three for mild attention deficit. And I've, I've taken
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 1: that and I, I don't use it often, but I
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 1: find that it, it, really dials in focus and energy
• 1:46:02
  Speaker 1: in a way that still allows sleep. And it, for me,
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 1: was much gentler and felt better than modafinil or armodafinil.
• 1:46:08
  Speaker 2: For me, the best thing that I've ever discovered for
• 1:46:11
  Speaker 2: mitigating that feeling of being groggy with sleep deprivation is creatine.
• 1:46:16
  Speaker 1: That definitely helps. The data on creatine for strength are there.
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 1: The data for creatine on enhancing cognition when mildly sleep-deprived
• 1:46:26
  Speaker 1: are there. That's really where the powerful data is.
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 2: Trevor Burrus You can feel it. It's a real difference.
• 1:46:29
  Speaker 2: Peter Van Doren Definitely.
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's a fuel for the phosphocreatine system for
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 1: the forebrain, the part of your brain that's involved in
• 1:46:34
  Speaker 1: strategy setting, et cetera. I would say about half, and
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 1: these are broad numbers, right? These aren't from one study.
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 1: The real expert on all this, by the way, is
• 1:46:42
  Speaker 1: my colleague Keith Humphreys at Stanford, and we could talk
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 1: about some of the interesting things that he's found. But
• 1:46:48
  Speaker 1: about half the population seems to like sedatives. They like Vicodin.
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 1: They like opioids. I had a tooth surgery a long
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 1: time ago. They gave me Vicodin. I took half of one.
• 1:46:57
  Speaker 1: I never wanted that experience again. But I know people
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: who are like Vicodin. They love Vicodin. They love being sedated.
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 1: They like being sedated. They like being brought down a
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 1: bit in terms of arousal. Some people like being ramped up.
• 1:47:11
  Speaker 1: And I think one needs to be aware of their
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 1: genetics and their predisposition for one or the other. Some
• 1:47:15
  Speaker 1: people like both, but generally people fall into one or
• 1:47:17
  Speaker 1: the other category. And I think now that many more
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 1: people are avoiding alcohol. The ones who say, oh yeah,
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 1: it's easy. And I never liked it. People like me.
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 1: I think they're probably more of the, you know, they
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 1: like stimulants. They like caffeine. They like nicotine. They like
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 1: being up and alert. You don't even need a substance
• 1:47:33
  Speaker 1: for that. So some people like both, but I think
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 1: people generally been into these categories. You asked about Kratom.
• 1:47:39
  Speaker 1: So the world expert on this is amazing guy. He
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 1: was on my podcast. His name is Chris McCurdy. He's
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 1: a professor down in Florida. And man, He has the
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 1: best take on this. So the community online around Kratom
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 1: is very split. If you put out something about Kratom,
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 1: half of people will say, this stuff is evil. It's opioids.
• 1:47:59
  Speaker 1: This is like OxyContin. Get out of here. The other
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: half will say, this stuff saved me. So you go like,
• 1:48:05
  Speaker 1: what's going on? And whenever I see that, I go,
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 1: there's some interesting biology here, right? There's a sociology there.
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 1: But as a biologist, I'm like, what's the biology? So
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 1: I brought Chris on. He said, here's the deal.
• 1:48:15
  Speaker 2: In America....
• 1:48:17
  Speaker 1: Pharma companies develop drugs based on bioprospecting. Peptides are a
• 1:48:23
  Speaker 1: different story and we can talk about that, but bioprospecting
• 1:48:25
  Speaker 1: is finding alkaloids and other substances in plants, purifying the substance,
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 1: the alkaloid that gives a specific effect and developing a drug. Cocaine,
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 1: it comes from the coca plant, obviously, from the coca leaf.
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 1: And he said the experience of chewing coca leaf is
• 1:48:43
  Speaker 1: very different than the experience of cocaine. The experience of the,
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 1: I'm going to call it kratom because I know there's
• 1:48:48
  Speaker 1: another way to pronounce it, but I just feel weird
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 1: saying it like kratom or something like that. But, you know,
• 1:48:53
  Speaker 1: the kratom leaf, he said when people chew the kratom leaf,
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 1: but the leaf, they feel a calm but also energized.
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 1: It's how you and I would think of like a
• 1:49:02
  Speaker 1: strong coffee or a yerba. But what's happened in this
• 1:49:06
  Speaker 1: country is that companies have synthesized pure kratom. They've taken
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 1: one of the compounds in the kratom leaf and they've
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 1: isolated it. And now they've made it synthetically. And that
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 1: leads to a very different experience and addiction potential. And
• 1:49:21
  Speaker 1: it's so it's incredible because he said, you know, the
• 1:49:24
  Speaker 1: most protected building in the entire United States. These are
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 1: his words, not mine, is the Coca-Cola factory. Why? He said, well,
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 1: you know, years ago they had new Coke and they
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 1: took out the flavor. They still get all this coca
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 1: leaf sent to this factory in the United States. It's
• 1:49:41
  Speaker 1: still going there. And then they extract the components that
• 1:49:43
  Speaker 1: they need to, put it into Coca-Cola. To this day,
• 1:49:47
  Speaker 1: this happened today. And then We drink Coca-Cola.
• 1:49:51
  Speaker 2: And they use the cocaine they get from it for
• 1:49:53
  Speaker 2: medical cocaine use. It is.
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 1: Cocaine is approved. It's not Schedule 1. That's right. It's
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 1: Schedule 2 as an anesthetic. That's right. So Chris really
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 1: nails it. Like so many things in science and medicine,
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 1: we're saying Kratom good, Kratom bad. It turns out it's
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 1: the synthetic Kratom product that is bad, highly addictive.
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 2: So when you have those drinks, like what is it,
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 2: live free? Aren't those– is that the kratom synthetic or
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 2: is that the plant? I don't know.
• 1:50:20
  Speaker 1: I think it's the plant-derived isolated kratom, which is somewhere
• 1:50:24
  Speaker 1: in between the two. Okay. But this is– but if
• 1:50:27
  Speaker 1: you– you and I would both say, okay, like kids
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 1: taking cocaine, not good. But Chris would say– The coca
• 1:50:33
  Speaker 1: leaf actually is a very interesting leaf that actually has some,
• 1:50:37
  Speaker 1: could be a, he'll talk about this as like, oh,
• 1:50:40
  Speaker 1: it could be an interesting stimulant compound for people.
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 2: People love it.
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 1: It's the same thing with THC. People will say, oh,
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 1: let's just get the highest dose of THC into an edible.
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: And then people are, they're eating it too fast. They
• 1:50:52
  Speaker 1: don't know how to gauge their plane of high. And
• 1:50:55
  Speaker 1: then we hear about certain people having psychosis and this
• 1:50:57
  Speaker 1: kind of thing. Well, what happened, right? When you and
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 1: I were growing up, Look, I mean, where I grew up,
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 1: everyone learned how to smoke a joint and take a
• 1:51:04
  Speaker 1: bong rip. I'm not suggesting anyone do this, but you
• 1:51:08
  Speaker 1: knew if you could handle one or a half.
• 1:51:11
  Speaker 2: You learned the hard way.
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 1: Exactly. You learned the hard way. I found I didn't
• 1:51:15
  Speaker 1: like cannabis. But what you didn't do was eat half
• 1:51:17
  Speaker 1: of a cookie that had 200 milligrams of THC and
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 1: find yourself in a psychotic episode. And so nowadays, when
• 1:51:25
  Speaker 1: we isolate things and we enrich them and we take
• 1:51:27
  Speaker 1: them in that isolated form, that's when they get really precarious. Yeah.
• 1:51:32
  Speaker 1: So that's the story. And by the way, I know
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 1: people are always coming on here and telling you, you
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 1: should talk to so-and-so. If you want to talk to
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 1: someone highly educated on all these compounds, bioprospecting, pharma versus
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 1: plant medicine, and all of this, Chris McCurdy is your man.
• 1:51:46
  Speaker 1: He is Like I'm paraphrasing here, but he's a savant
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 1: of this stuff and he comes in with no judgment.
• 1:51:51
  Speaker 1: And so he'll say the leaf products are very different
• 1:51:54
  Speaker 1: than the isolated. The isolated are very different than the
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 1: isolated synthetic products. And that therein is where the, you know,
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 1: the legislature needs to look. Because in this country, as
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 1: you know, we go like all drugs bad or then
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 1: we go, oh, wait, there's these incredible compounds in plants
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 1: that we we want.
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 2: Well, it's a parallel and refined sugar, right?
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 1: Parallel and refined sugar.
• 1:52:14
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: Let's figure out in food what makes it so rewarding
• 1:52:17
  Speaker 1: that people just desperately want to buy more, even though
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 1: they don't even really like the taste of it.
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 2: Right. And let's make it in a way that never
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 2: is in nature, unattached to fiber, unattached to nutrients. Usually
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 2: if you get sugar in nature, it's in an orange.
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 1: That's right.
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 2: And it's good for you. It's like a trick to
• 1:52:32
  Speaker 2: get you to eat the orange.
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 1: It's business and it's diabolical. And then we always end
• 1:52:36
  Speaker 1: up about five or six years down the road And go, oh,
• 1:52:39
  Speaker 1: we've got all these problems. But what's interesting, you know,
• 1:52:42
  Speaker 1: is I didn't realize that pharma companies bioprospect from the jungle.
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 1: They still send people to the jungle. We always think
• 1:52:51
  Speaker 1: of the jungle as like this place that only shamans go, right?
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 1: You know, but no, American and Swiss and German companies
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 1: send bioprospectors down there to isolate compounds from plants with
• 1:53:00
  Speaker 1: the understanding there are all these medicines there. But we
• 1:53:03
  Speaker 1: don't hear about all the others. The interesting thing about
• 1:53:06
  Speaker 1: peptides is that this is the first time that we
• 1:53:09
  Speaker 1: are bioprospecting from the body. These are things that the
• 1:53:12
  Speaker 1: body makes. And I can't take credit for that understanding.
• 1:53:16
  Speaker 1: That's really that distinction, which I think is a key
• 1:53:18
  Speaker 1: one for people to understand, is Dr. Abud Bakri, this
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 1: MD who you and I are familiar with, who, in
• 1:53:25
  Speaker 1: my mind, just really understands the biology of peptides. And
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 1: because he's a practicing physician outside of peptide biology— I
• 1:53:32
  Speaker 1: think he's an intensive care guy or critical care. He
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 1: can kind of see the picture now. Yes, insulin's a peptide,
• 1:53:40
  Speaker 1: it came from the body, but all these peptides, now
• 1:53:42
  Speaker 1: pharma companies are like, what is the body making? Like
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 1: in the case of GLPs, when you increase GLPs twofold, fourfold,
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 1: you can see some relief from type two diabetes, some,
• 1:53:53
  Speaker 1: but not much weight loss. That'd been happening for a decade.
• 1:53:56
  Speaker 1: But when you increase it a thousand fold, wow, people
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 1: don't want to eat. People don't... Okay, we could talk
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 1: about the ramifications of that, but pharma companies are now
• 1:54:06
  Speaker 1: thinking very seriously about finding all the peptides in the
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 1: body and which ones are going to be potent. There's
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 1: a new one for increasing bone density for osteoporosis, and
• 1:54:16
  Speaker 1: then all the people are thinking about biohacking with this
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 1: as well. There's pinelon, which I'll occasionally take, and you
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 1: get three hours of REM sleep that night, and on
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 1: subsequent nights, your REM sleep is enriched.
• 1:54:27
  Speaker 2: Interesting.
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 1: We know GLPs, obviously. BPC-157 is the one everyone seems
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 1: to kind of go to. But I think that there
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 1: are a lot of interesting peptides that we've known about
• 1:54:38
  Speaker 1: for a long time, like Kispeptin, which is involved in
• 1:54:41
  Speaker 1: resetting the reproductive system. It's involved in puberty, but it's
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 1: being used to reset the reproductive system. All these peptides,
• 1:54:48
  Speaker 1: I think the next few years, it's going to be
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 1: a bonanza of peptides. And I get shit for saying it,
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 1: but I'm super excited because my physician friends who are
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 1: super standard physicians, They're calling me like, hey, man, my knee,
• 1:55:02
  Speaker 1: is this BPC-157 stuff going to work? And I go,
• 1:55:06
  Speaker 1: I don't know. You can try it. I know some
• 1:55:07
  Speaker 1: clean sources of it. And then they'll come back a
• 1:55:09
  Speaker 1: week later and like, why isn't anyone selling this, studying it,
• 1:55:13
  Speaker 1: talking about this? I'm like, well, they are, but your
• 1:55:15
  Speaker 1: community doesn't like to talk about this.
• 1:55:17
  Speaker 2: Well, there's a lot of people that dismiss it. And
• 1:55:20
  Speaker 2: the way they dismiss it, it's very gaslighting. they, they're,
• 1:55:25
  Speaker 2: they're bullshitting you that all these anecdotal stories aren't significant,
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 2: that all these professional athletes that using it or that
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 2: are using it with, with great benefit, don't know what
• 1:55:33
  Speaker 2: they're talking about.
• 1:55:34
  Speaker 1: It's threatening to them. I mean, they, they, I mean,
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 1: as my, I feel like I'm quoting my dad today.
• 1:55:38
  Speaker 2: It's threatening because of compound pharmacies.
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 1: And it's threatening because these, a lot of these physicians
• 1:55:42
  Speaker 1: are going to lose their standing in the field as
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 1: these people, there's something to important to understand about physicians.
• 1:55:48
  Speaker 1: And again, there are many excellent ones. I referenced a
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 1: few today, right? Um, many excellent ones, but there's a
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 1: guarding of knowledge that existed in the science community up
• 1:55:58
  Speaker 1: until a few years ago when podcasts hit. It wasn't
• 1:56:00
  Speaker 1: just me. Bob Sapolsky was a pioneer in getting out
• 1:56:03
  Speaker 1: there and teaching the public. Every scientist who's gone out
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 1: into the public eventually gets this pushback like, yeah, our
• 1:56:08
  Speaker 1: field doesn't really take him or her seriously. Sometimes that's
• 1:56:12
  Speaker 1: legitimate criticism, although not in Bob's case. In many cases,
• 1:56:18
  Speaker 1: it's because You've taken their thing. It's their baby. It's
• 1:56:21
  Speaker 1: what gives them value. I know I grew up around scientists.
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 1: It's what gives them their value, their knowledge that no
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 1: one else has. It allows them to be interesting. They
• 1:56:31
  Speaker 1: now have to have people coming up to them and going, oh,
• 1:56:33
  Speaker 1: did you see this podcast with so-and-so talking about this
• 1:56:35
  Speaker 1: thing in anthropology on Rogan? And they're like, oh, my God,
• 1:56:38
  Speaker 1: like that's my field. Like, you know, and they it's
• 1:56:41
  Speaker 1: a self-worth issue. They're not like, oh, anthropology is getting publicity.
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:56:45
  Speaker 1: Or the good ones are the secure ones are. But
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 1: the physicians who are like, wow, if there's a compound
• 1:56:51
  Speaker 1: that's making patients feel better really quickly, what's that going
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 1: to do to my practice? And then if I embrace it,
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 1: here's the key thing. If I embrace it, my colleagues
• 1:57:00
  Speaker 1: won't think much of me. And if I don't embrace it,
• 1:57:03
  Speaker 1: maybe I'm going to lose my standing, my validity as
• 1:57:07
  Speaker 1: somebody of authority. If I've got patients coming to me
• 1:57:09
  Speaker 1: and saying, I had this friend that took this thing
• 1:57:10
  Speaker 1: and it really helped. Could I explore that? And I
• 1:57:13
  Speaker 1: don't do that. And they go elsewhere. Word spreads fast nowadays.
• 1:57:17
  Speaker 1: So I like scientists and physicians. I also understand scientists
• 1:57:20
  Speaker 1: and physicians. My father's a scientist. I grew up around them.
• 1:57:24
  Speaker 1: In my town, most kids were children of engineers or scientists.
• 1:57:27
  Speaker 1: And you see the full array, the secure ones, the
• 1:57:30
  Speaker 1: ones that are really on the cutting edge, that learn,
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: that embrace the new technology. They do great. But the
• 1:57:35
  Speaker 1: other ones, they're like dying. They're a dying breed. Because
• 1:57:39
  Speaker 1: their whole practice rests on them having the knowledge and
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 1: you not having the knowledge. So much so that they're saying,
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 1: chat GPT, bad. They're saying it's bad because patients are
• 1:57:48
  Speaker 1: coming in and they're like, hey, chat GPT says that
• 1:57:50
  Speaker 1: what you're recommending is perhaps not the best thing. They're
• 1:57:54
  Speaker 1: freaking out right now. And so they're saying AI is
• 1:57:57
  Speaker 1: bad for medicine. But the good scientists, the good physicians
• 1:58:00
  Speaker 1: are like, great. It's going to help our practice. They're
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 1: genuinely interested in helping people. You see two, it's two camps.
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 1: So when I hear people saying, oh, yeah, this BPC,
• 1:58:08
  Speaker 1: no trials, okay. Are there any adverse events we need
• 1:58:12
  Speaker 1: to know about? Not that I'm aware of. And Abud says,
• 1:58:15
  Speaker 1: you know, the lethal dose is like super high. No
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 1: one's even come close to achieving it. I'm sure someone
• 1:58:19
  Speaker 1: will figure it out. But I get excited because I think,
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 1: all right, now the general public finally has some agency
• 1:58:27
  Speaker 1: to In understanding what's going on with them, thanks to AI,
• 1:58:30
  Speaker 1: thanks to podcasts, thanks to the Internet. And it can
• 1:58:32
  Speaker 1: go awry, certainly. But, man, I had a shoulder thing
• 1:58:37
  Speaker 1: a week ago. I'll never have this shoulder thing.
• 1:58:40
  Speaker 2: And I.
• 1:58:42
  Speaker 1: Put two injections of BPC. Gone. Gone. Now, could I
• 1:58:46
  Speaker 1: put saline in there and it would have been the same?
• 1:58:48
  Speaker 2: Maybe.
• 1:58:49
  Speaker 1: But all I know is it's gone.
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 2: I don't understand that argument of putting saline. Is that
• 1:58:54
  Speaker 2: a common thing where people have a severe shoulder injury?
• 1:58:56
  Speaker 1: Oh, no.
• 1:58:56
  Speaker 2: Sorry.
• 1:58:57
  Speaker 1: Just running a control experiment. I could have put it in.
• 1:58:59
  Speaker 2: But I've heard people say that. That's why. I've heard
• 1:59:02
  Speaker 2: people say that in an argument. You know, oftentimes people
• 1:59:05
  Speaker 2: have similar benefits injecting saline. And I'm like, where, who's
• 1:59:09
  Speaker 2: done that? Why aren't, why aren't people injecting saline instead
• 1:59:12
  Speaker 2: of getting cortisone shots in their shoulders?
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 1: I mean, this is how they talked about creatine. This
• 1:59:15
  Speaker 1: is how they talked about TRT. This is how they
• 1:59:17
  Speaker 1: talked about women's hormone therapies. Right. It's very interesting, you know, because,
• 1:59:22
  Speaker 1: because for legitimate, you know, they're legitimate complaints about the
• 1:59:26
  Speaker 1: fact that for a long time, science and medicine did
• 1:59:28
  Speaker 1: focus mainly on men and the women's hormone trial basically
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 1: was a mess because they said there were all these
• 1:59:33
  Speaker 1: adverse effects and turns out it's when you started the
• 1:59:35
  Speaker 1: hormone therapies and And we now know that if those
• 1:59:38
  Speaker 1: therapies are started early enough, they're immensely beneficial. So there's
• 1:59:43
  Speaker 1: more kind of acceptance of hormone replacement there across the board.
• 1:59:48
  Speaker 1: I think TRT now is kind of a broadly accepted thing,
• 1:59:51
  Speaker 1: although I think a lot of guys are doing it
• 1:59:52
  Speaker 1: too young. They don't even know why they're doing it,
• 1:59:54
  Speaker 1: you know, like in their 20s or something.
• 1:59:56
  Speaker 2: That's not TRT really, right?
• 1:59:57
  Speaker 1: That's not TRT.
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 2: That's really, they're just doing juice.
• 1:59:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they're just doing juice. But when it comes to
• 2:00:02
  Speaker 1: the peptides, I think my prediction is it's going to
• 2:00:05
  Speaker 1: slot in right between Prescription hormone therapies and what we
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 1: think of as supplements. I think there's going to be
• 2:00:11
  Speaker 1: this third middle category where, sorry, practicing physicians, people are
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 1: going to find the safe sources.
• 2:00:21
  Speaker 2: There'll be U.S.
• 2:00:22
  Speaker 1: Made sources soon, I hope. There'll be reliable people who
• 2:00:26
  Speaker 1: can educate on this. People will understand the risk profile
• 2:00:30
  Speaker 1: of these things and people will be buying them and
• 2:00:32
  Speaker 1: taking them legally. I think that's going to happen. Also,
• 2:00:36
  Speaker 1: now people aren't afraid of needles. The GLP industry was
• 2:00:39
  Speaker 1: so genius in taking this thing, needles, needle phobia, needles,
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: what am I going to do? And they made a pen.
• 2:00:46
  Speaker 1: Still a needle. The pens have gotten rid of everyone's
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 1: needle phobia. So now my sister, people are like, oh,
• 2:00:52
  Speaker 1: what about peptides? I go, you have to inject it.
• 2:00:54
  Speaker 1: They go, well, do they have the little needles with
• 2:00:55
  Speaker 1: the pen? Yeah.
• 2:00:57
  Speaker 2: Cool.
• 2:00:57
  Speaker 1: No one's afraid of a pen, even if it has
• 2:00:59
  Speaker 1: a needle on the end. But no one likes it.
• 2:01:01
  Speaker 1: So it turns out it was the syringe that scared people.
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 2: The plunger.
• 2:01:04
  Speaker 1: It's the plunger. So I'm excited. And I have to say,
• 2:01:07
  Speaker 1: it's not because I think everyone should be blasting this stuff.
• 2:01:09
  Speaker 1: I just think knowing scientists and physicians and getting the
• 2:01:13
  Speaker 1: calls and emails from them, like, do you really think
• 2:01:16
  Speaker 1: this thing can help my knee? You know, like, it might.
• 2:01:19
  Speaker 1: And I can tell you it absolutely will. But then
• 2:01:21
  Speaker 1: when they come back and they're like, this is wild.
• 2:01:24
  Speaker 1: How come there aren't 20 clinical trials? It's because the
• 2:01:26
  Speaker 1: general public beat the scientific community to it. And I
• 2:01:30
  Speaker 1: know this is going to break some hearts. There will
• 2:01:32
  Speaker 1: never be good clinical trials of each and all of
• 2:01:34
  Speaker 1: these peptides. The horse left the stable. It's out. It's
• 2:01:39
  Speaker 1: out there. It's over. There can be some studies, but
• 2:01:43
  Speaker 1: people are just going to keep doing it. So I
• 2:01:45
  Speaker 1: think it's frustrating for the medical community to realize where
• 2:01:48
  Speaker 1: we are in 2026. It's like, shit, if people find
• 2:01:51
  Speaker 1: stuff that works, they talk about it, and then they
• 2:01:53
  Speaker 1: just start doing it.
• 2:01:54
  Speaker 2: I think you made a really good point about the
• 2:01:56
  Speaker 2: ego of the people that are in control of the information.
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 2: And it's generally men.
• 2:02:03
  Speaker 1: It's generally– yeah, let me think.
• 2:02:05
  Speaker 2: I mean I think– It's probably– there's a bunch of
• 2:02:07
  Speaker 2: women that do it too. But it's a very masculine behavior. Well,
• 2:02:11
  Speaker 2: it's interesting.
• 2:02:12
  Speaker 1: I put out a tweet the other day and I– gosh,
• 2:02:16
  Speaker 1: I only half regret doing it. I said, you know,
• 2:02:18
  Speaker 1: people contact me all the time saying that physician friends–
• 2:02:21
  Speaker 1: with people coming in who identified tumors from whole body MRIs.
• 2:02:26
  Speaker 1: And I think as the cost comes down, I think
• 2:02:28
  Speaker 1: it's going to be a very interesting tool. And the
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 1: neurosurgery and other communities like dogpiled me. Like we, this
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 1: is terrible. This is terrible. You know who didn't dogpile me?
• 2:02:39
  Speaker 1: Were the dozens of dermatologists and ophthalmologists saying, we think
• 2:02:44
  Speaker 1: scans and more data are great. The ophthalmology community and
• 2:02:48
  Speaker 1: the dermatology community have embraced the public education on these
• 2:02:52
  Speaker 1: topics of eye health and skin health and AI and scans.
• 2:02:56
  Speaker 1: And they're very comfortable with it. And they're working synergistically
• 2:03:00
  Speaker 1: with it. The neurosurgery community, they say, oh, now we
• 2:03:04
  Speaker 1: have all these people that are freaking out because they
• 2:03:05
  Speaker 1: think they have a deadly tumor, which is a valid criticism.
• 2:03:10
  Speaker 1: So I called some friends, leaving Eddie out of the
• 2:03:12
  Speaker 1: equation here. I called some friends who are in the
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 1: neurosurgery community. And I said, what do you What do
• 2:03:17
  Speaker 1: you make of this? I haven't been dogpiled by members
• 2:03:20
  Speaker 1: of my community in a little while. Right. I'm not
• 2:03:22
  Speaker 1: a neurosurgeon, but it's interesting. And they said the ones
• 2:03:26
  Speaker 1: I spoke to said in 20 months, this is going
• 2:03:28
  Speaker 1: to be standard practice for people to just get whole
• 2:03:30
  Speaker 1: body MRI.
• 2:03:32
  Speaker 2: So what was their resistance?
• 2:03:34
  Speaker 1: They don't want people freaking out because they see like
• 2:03:38
  Speaker 1: a little thing on their pituitary that scares them and
• 2:03:41
  Speaker 1: thinking that they might be dying of a brain tumor.
• 2:03:44
  Speaker 1: But they want control. They want control over the flow
• 2:03:47
  Speaker 1: of data. I'll go toe-to-toe with any of these people
• 2:03:51
  Speaker 1: and just say, I understand that only neurosurgeons can do neurosurgery. Absolutely.
• 2:03:57
  Speaker 1: Those are the only people we want doing neurosurgery. But
• 2:04:00
  Speaker 1: people doing an elected or elective procedure, it's not like
• 2:04:03
  Speaker 1: you're forced to do it. It's not like you hit 40,
• 2:04:06
  Speaker 1: you have to do it. People can choose if they
• 2:04:08
  Speaker 1: want to do it. And if the cost comes down,
• 2:04:09
  Speaker 1: if insurance covers it, it's safe. Now, some people say
• 2:04:13
  Speaker 1: the MRIs aren't safe. Okay, that's a separate matter. I think,
• 2:04:16
  Speaker 1: provided you're not getting them all the time, what we
• 2:04:19
  Speaker 1: understand is that they're safe. But there are communities of
• 2:04:23
  Speaker 1: physicians who just do not want people to have data
• 2:04:26
  Speaker 1: about themselves because they think it's going to make those
• 2:04:28
  Speaker 1: people stressed. But guess what? I remember the 80s when
• 2:04:30
  Speaker 1: they said, okay, genetic sequencing is coming around. Do you
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 1: want to know your genes? Do you want to know
• 2:04:36
  Speaker 1: if you're getting Huntington's disease? And you know what the
• 2:04:38
  Speaker 1: smart answer is? Some people say yes, some people say no.
• 2:04:42
  Speaker 1: but you should be able to choose. The gatekeeping on
• 2:04:45
  Speaker 1: this is real, very real. I'm fortunate to be in
• 2:04:49
  Speaker 1: the Bay Area with Stanford where it's very tech savvy.
• 2:04:51
  Speaker 1: It's very cutting edge. Stanford, like any university, has its
• 2:04:55
  Speaker 1: pros and cons, but it's very much about what's happening
• 2:04:58
  Speaker 1: now and next. We're not very much focused on what
• 2:05:00
  Speaker 1: happened in the past. It's not like these, frankly, like
• 2:05:03
  Speaker 1: these other institutions elsewhere that are really focused on 50
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 1: years ago, trying to keep that whole culture going. It's like,
• 2:05:10
  Speaker 1: what's new now? What's useful now? And they embrace AI.
• 2:05:13
  Speaker 1: They embrace whole body scans. I've got colleagues who are
• 2:05:15
  Speaker 1: getting whole body scans, who are suggesting whole body scans.
• 2:05:19
  Speaker 1: And I think it has to do with how forward
• 2:05:21
  Speaker 1: thinking physicians are.
• 2:05:22
  Speaker 2: So these physicians that were attacking you, is it just
• 2:05:26
  Speaker 2: them or people arguing with them?
• 2:05:29
  Speaker 1: The people that joined them. Yeah. And when this happens,
• 2:05:32
  Speaker 1: I try and listen, right? I didn't call friends in
• 2:05:34
  Speaker 1: that community looking for validation. I was like, did I
• 2:05:37
  Speaker 1: screw up? Like, listen, there are a lot of neurosurgeons
• 2:05:41
  Speaker 1: and other physicians who are including heart surgeons that are
• 2:05:45
  Speaker 1: worried that patients are just going to be getting a
• 2:05:47
  Speaker 1: lot of data back saying, listen, you've got this, you know,
• 2:05:50
  Speaker 1: blip on the radar here. You should be concerned and
• 2:05:53
  Speaker 1: that they're going to be doing a lot of therapy
• 2:05:54
  Speaker 1: for these people, having to reassure them that they're okay.
• 2:05:56
  Speaker 1: I would have thought it would be good for business
• 2:05:58
  Speaker 1: for them. Like if anything, they'd want more of this, right?
• 2:06:01
  Speaker 1: Turns out that's not the case. I think the psychological
• 2:06:05
  Speaker 1: management of patients is a big thing. And that was
• 2:06:08
  Speaker 1: something that I didn't understand of, And that their response
• 2:06:12
  Speaker 1: kind of educated me on that the, you know, patients
• 2:06:15
  Speaker 1: calling them freaking out that they have a tumor someplace
• 2:06:18
  Speaker 1: and them having to say, listen, it's benign. You're going
• 2:06:19
  Speaker 1: to be OK. That seems problematic for them. Two weeks later,
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 1: I forget who the celebrity was, but somebody sent me
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 1: on X. There was a news article about a woman
• 2:06:30
  Speaker 1: who went and got one of these whole body scans
• 2:06:32
  Speaker 1: and identified a life threatening tumor and had it removed.
• 2:06:35
  Speaker 1: And her her first physician had discouraged her from getting it.
• 2:06:39
  Speaker 1: I thought about putting that out into the world and saying, see, see,
• 2:06:42
  Speaker 1: but you know, that's, that's one case. So when these
• 2:06:44
  Speaker 1: things happen, I try and just think like, what am
• 2:06:47
  Speaker 1: I hearing? What, what's my finger on the pulse of here?
• 2:06:52
  Speaker 1: I think physicians are feeling scared. It's a very long,
• 2:06:55
  Speaker 1: hard training to become a physician. If your patients are
• 2:06:58
  Speaker 1: now challenging you, you know, Hey, like this medication combination
• 2:07:02
  Speaker 1: you gave me and like the internet says is dangerous.
• 2:07:04
  Speaker 1: That's an uncomfortable place to be on, be in. I
• 2:07:07
  Speaker 1: get it. On the other hand, I'm all for people
• 2:07:10
  Speaker 1: having more agency and knowledge.
• 2:07:13
  Speaker 2: Well, especially in light of the fact that what's medical malpractice?
• 2:07:18
  Speaker 2: This is like the third leading cause of death in
• 2:07:20
  Speaker 2: this country. Oh, I mean. What is, I think it's
• 2:07:26
  Speaker 2: in the top 10, right?
• 2:07:28
  Speaker 1: And accidents. I mean, if you go to an emergency
• 2:07:30
  Speaker 1: room in the middle of the night, your probability of
• 2:07:33
  Speaker 1: getting prescribed a medication that could potentially kill you or
• 2:07:37
  Speaker 1: harm you, like a A contraindicated medication goes up exponentially.
• 2:07:43
  Speaker 1: A great sleep doctor at Stanford, his last name was
• 2:07:45
  Speaker 1: Dement of all things.
• 2:07:47
  Speaker 2: Whoa.
• 2:07:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah. One of the co-discoverers of rapid eye movement sleep.
• 2:07:51
  Speaker 1: He would teach the medical students that the probability of
• 2:07:54
  Speaker 1: them making a fatal mistake in the middle of the
• 2:07:57
  Speaker 1: night or when they're sleep deprived goes up. by a
• 2:08:00
  Speaker 1: significant degree. We know this. And yet, you know, if
• 2:08:03
  Speaker 1: you go to the emergency room at three in the morning,
• 2:08:06
  Speaker 1: your first question for the on-call physician should be, how
• 2:08:09
  Speaker 1: long have you been on call? Right. Not do you
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 1: normally work the shift or, you know, because sometimes they
• 2:08:14
  Speaker 1: sleep all day and they work at night. How long
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 1: have you been on call? If that's more than 12,
• 2:08:18
  Speaker 1: 15 hours, You wouldn't let that person drive your car home.
• 2:08:22
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:08:22
  Speaker 1: We know the data say that they might as well
• 2:08:24
  Speaker 1: be drunk.
• 2:08:25
  Speaker 2: Right. And it's also how they train them when they're
• 2:08:28
  Speaker 2: going through residency.
• 2:08:29
  Speaker 1: It's a part of the hazing process.
• 2:08:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:08:30
  Speaker 1: It's a part of the hazing process.
• 2:08:31
  Speaker 2: Can you put that into perplexity and see what leading
• 2:08:35
  Speaker 2: cause of death?
• 2:08:36
  Speaker 1: So there's malpractice.
• 2:08:37
  Speaker 2: Five people say third.
• 2:08:38
  Speaker 1: So that's malpractice. But what about medical error?
• 2:08:41
  Speaker 2: Medical error. Well, it says these two terms. Okay. That
• 2:08:46
  Speaker 2: estimate refers to medical error, not necessarily. Okay. So medical
• 2:08:50
  Speaker 2: error is responsible for 251,000 deaths a year. Whoa. That's crazy.
• 2:09:00
  Speaker 1: I mean, the airlines understand this.
• 2:09:02
  Speaker 2: Do you understand how insane that is? Imagine if that
• 2:09:04
  Speaker 2: was Pop-Tarts. It says a widely repeated claim comes from
• 2:09:10
  Speaker 2: a 2016 BMJ analysis by John Hopkins, extrapolated from several
• 2:09:15
  Speaker 2: hospital studies and estimated roughly 251,000 deaths per year associated
• 2:09:20
  Speaker 2: with medical error. If that estimate were treated like a
• 2:09:24
  Speaker 2: conventional cause of death, it would have ranked third behind
• 2:09:27
  Speaker 2: heart disease and cancer, ahead of chronic lower respiratory disease
• 2:09:32
  Speaker 2: in the 2013 comparison used by authors.
• 2:09:35
  Speaker 1: Wow. And that's death. I mean, you know... I don't
• 2:09:39
  Speaker 1: want to merge too many themes here, but earlier we
• 2:09:41
  Speaker 1: were talking about psychedelics and a theme from that whole
• 2:09:44
  Speaker 1: thing is this notion of microdosing. One of the things
• 2:09:47
  Speaker 1: that the GLPs and peptides and physicians and the culture
• 2:09:50
  Speaker 1: around medicine has really evolved to is that in recent years,
• 2:09:55
  Speaker 1: people have realized, oh, you know, these GLP drugs are expensive.
• 2:09:58
  Speaker 1: They have side effects. People are microdosing them. They're sharing them.
• 2:10:02
  Speaker 1: They're taking far less than they're prescribed, making it last
• 2:10:05
  Speaker 1: longer and getting the the positive effects they want with
• 2:10:08
  Speaker 1: far fewer side effects. Physicians hate this. Drug companies hate
• 2:10:11
  Speaker 1: it too, but physicians hate this for obvious reasons. Their
• 2:10:14
  Speaker 1: patients are going rogue on them based on information on
• 2:10:17
  Speaker 1: the internet. But the patients, and I wish that people
• 2:10:20
  Speaker 1: would understand this, people will always trust their experience more
• 2:10:24
  Speaker 1: than someone else. It used to be that you trust
• 2:10:26
  Speaker 1: the person in the white coat. No more. Stethoscope, white
• 2:10:30
  Speaker 1: coat may get you there, but to maintain that trust,
• 2:10:36
  Speaker 1: They have to listen to the experience of the patient.
• 2:10:39
  Speaker 1: And that's what physicians and scientists, to some extent, have
• 2:10:41
  Speaker 1: lost in the last five years, largely due to the
• 2:10:44
  Speaker 1: pandemic and public health education and AI and everything just
• 2:10:47
  Speaker 1: kind of being out there in a free-for-all. But I
• 2:10:50
  Speaker 1: hear from people all the time that are not of the,
• 2:10:53
  Speaker 1: I would say, kind of more of the health-conscious community,
• 2:10:57
  Speaker 1: and even the people who tend to trend more traditional
• 2:11:00
  Speaker 1: lefty like standard medicine, do whatever the government says, unless
• 2:11:04
  Speaker 1: it's this government, like that, that kind of mindset. We're
• 2:11:07
  Speaker 1: saying like, oh yeah, would low dose terzepatide help me
• 2:11:10
  Speaker 1: with chronic fatigue? Would, should I be taking BPC? You know,
• 2:11:15
  Speaker 1: people will ask these questions. I'm thinking, well, if these
• 2:11:17
  Speaker 1: people are asking the question, that means people around them
• 2:11:20
  Speaker 1: are asking, it's starting to become okay-ish to have these conversations.
• 2:11:24
  Speaker 1: And then they're going back to their doctor and saying,
• 2:11:25
  Speaker 1: you know, can I take like a 10th of the dose?
• 2:11:28
  Speaker 1: Doctors will are not gonna say, yeah, great, take a
• 2:11:30
  Speaker 1: 10th of the dose. And the drug companies definitely don't
• 2:11:32
  Speaker 1: want that. They're gonna make a 10th of the money.
• 2:11:35
  Speaker 1: So as you and I know, the peptide community is
• 2:11:37
  Speaker 1: a real threat, not just because of the peptides that
• 2:11:41
  Speaker 1: people are taking or that the peptides they're replacing from pharma,
• 2:11:45
  Speaker 1: but because of the way that people are taking the peptides.
• 2:11:48
  Speaker 1: Like retatrutide's gonna come out from Lilly, make them billions,
• 2:11:51
  Speaker 1: if not trillions of dollars. They're working hard to protect
• 2:11:54
  Speaker 1: that patent. But you can bet people who are getting
• 2:11:57
  Speaker 1: prescribed peptides real reddit true tide from lily will be
• 2:12:02
  Speaker 1: taking less and sharing it based on information they hear
• 2:12:05
  Speaker 1: on the internet from the peptide community and on health
• 2:12:08
  Speaker 1: podcasts because and that scares the shit out of them
• 2:12:11
  Speaker 1: and it should it should scare the shit out of
• 2:12:13
  Speaker 1: them it says the clinical trials were done at these
• 2:12:15
  Speaker 1: various doses but not these micro doses perhaps people have
• 2:12:19
  Speaker 1: different responses some people respond very well some people need
• 2:12:21
  Speaker 1: more so patients now are trying to figure out How
• 2:12:24
  Speaker 1: can I get the effect I want with the minimal
• 2:12:26
  Speaker 1: amount of side effects? And they're doing the experiments on themselves.
• 2:12:30
  Speaker 1: And that is changing the whole model. And we're never
• 2:12:33
  Speaker 1: going back. I kind of laugh at when like these
• 2:12:36
  Speaker 1: folks who were trained like 30, 40 years ago are
• 2:12:39
  Speaker 1: like trying to hold on to this thing. It's dead.
• 2:12:41
  Speaker 1: It's gone. It's over. I see these people on X
• 2:12:44
  Speaker 1: and they're like so upset. And it just reminds me
• 2:12:47
  Speaker 1: of like when the parental advisory stuff came out. And
• 2:12:50
  Speaker 1: it was like, they're swearing on music. And it was like,
• 2:12:52
  Speaker 1: every kid was like, yeah, I want that music because
• 2:12:54
  Speaker 1: it has the parental advisory. Morons. You know, they just
• 2:12:57
  Speaker 1: don't get it. It's like, you know, you talk about
• 2:12:59
  Speaker 1: plasticity at any age, but apparently they've got like cement
• 2:13:02
  Speaker 1: in there because you're like, I don't know. This is
• 2:13:05
  Speaker 1: why people should retire.
• 2:13:06
  Speaker 2: Well, it's just what you said before, too, that some
• 2:13:08
  Speaker 2: people just want to be completely in control of the
• 2:13:11
  Speaker 2: distribution of information and the gatekeepers of the knowledge, and
• 2:13:14
  Speaker 2: they want to be thought of as the experts.
• 2:13:16
  Speaker 1: I mean, that word doctor used to impress everybody. Now
• 2:13:19
  Speaker 1: it only impresses certain people. And for a lot of people,
• 2:13:21
  Speaker 1: it's a turnoff. And the same thing for scientists. I mean,
• 2:13:24
  Speaker 1: I deal with this. I'm kind of a different kind
• 2:13:26
  Speaker 1: of scientist because I've been in different communities and public education,
• 2:13:29
  Speaker 1: and I'll talk to most anyone who's willing to have
• 2:13:31
  Speaker 1: a reasonable conversation, and I love to explore. But a
• 2:13:35
  Speaker 1: lot of people just... like authority, you know, medical authority,
• 2:13:39
  Speaker 1: like to them, that's a, that's a negative, it's a pejorative.
• 2:13:42
  Speaker 1: And so we're in this whole other landscape now.
• 2:13:45
  Speaker 2: That's going to be one of the weirder aspects of
• 2:13:46
  Speaker 2: AI is the dissolvement of all the, the reverence for
• 2:13:51
  Speaker 2: experts because everyone's going to have all the information. I mean, congratulations,
• 2:13:55
  Speaker 2: you memorized it. Great. I just got the information in
• 2:13:58
  Speaker 2: three seconds.
• 2:13:59
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's so wild. If you look at the
• 2:14:01
  Speaker 1: history of academic science and medicine, which I love to study.
• 2:14:04
  Speaker 1: I've gone back to like the time of Galen, which
• 2:14:06
  Speaker 1: is one of the early physicians who did You'd love this.
• 2:14:08
  Speaker 1: He worked on gladiators publicly because you couldn't... They didn't
• 2:14:11
  Speaker 1: allow people to do surgeries on the human body. It
• 2:14:14
  Speaker 1: was illegal. So he would do these surgeries publicly or
• 2:14:18
  Speaker 1: a pig. It was wild. There's a great book. It's
• 2:14:21
  Speaker 1: very dense, but it's called The Prince of Medicine. It's
• 2:14:23
  Speaker 1: all this medieval stuff that you love. You'll realize what
• 2:14:27
  Speaker 1: a prehistoric thing medicine is even now, like how fast
• 2:14:30
  Speaker 1: and how far we've come in the last 50 years,
• 2:14:32
  Speaker 1: 100 years. But.
• 2:14:34
  Speaker 1: The whole pomp and circumstance thing of like, look, I've
• 2:14:37
  Speaker 1: never been to high table dinner at Oxford. It'd be
• 2:14:39
  Speaker 1: fun to go. But the whole thing of like the
• 2:14:41
  Speaker 1: robes and somebody sits higher than everybody else that dissolved
• 2:14:44
  Speaker 1: in the American universities. You still see it at some
• 2:14:46
  Speaker 1: of the East Coast universities, but that's dissolving. So what's
• 2:14:49
  Speaker 1: literally happening is people are being these authorities are being
• 2:14:52
  Speaker 1: brought down to other people's level.
• 2:14:54
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:14:54
  Speaker 1: It's almost like this was borrowed from other, you know,
• 2:14:57
  Speaker 1: other aspects of life, of course, politics and even religion,
• 2:15:01
  Speaker 1: this kind of thing. You know, the uniform was so
• 2:15:04
  Speaker 1: important and people like this reverence and the Internet has
• 2:15:08
  Speaker 1: it hasn't leveled the playing field, but it's completely disrupted
• 2:15:11
  Speaker 1: that model. So, you know, I'm not the only one,
• 2:15:14
  Speaker 1: of course, but like for people to learn inside the system,
• 2:15:17
  Speaker 1: go outside the system. And now for the system to
• 2:15:20
  Speaker 1: bleed onto campus and and scientists to bleed out into
• 2:15:23
  Speaker 1: the world like God bless on Olympia, like almost what,
• 2:15:27
  Speaker 1: 10 years ago, saying like this dopamine thing, we got
• 2:15:29
  Speaker 1: to worry about this. but just understand what it is. Like,
• 2:15:32
  Speaker 1: God bless her, people like her, Bob Sapolsky. These people
• 2:15:35
  Speaker 1: were the pioneers. I can't claim to be, you know,
• 2:15:37
  Speaker 1: I was early, but not first. And they broke out
• 2:15:39
  Speaker 1: of the system and started publicly educating people. And that,
• 2:15:45
  Speaker 1: it builds up their authority. This is what people need
• 2:15:48
  Speaker 1: to understand. It builds up their authority, but it does
• 2:15:50
  Speaker 1: dissolve public education and bringing people all down to the
• 2:15:54
  Speaker 1: same level. Like, you know some things, but not others.
• 2:15:56
  Speaker 1: The public is actually smarter about certain health things than
• 2:15:59
  Speaker 1: many doctors are. How could that be? AI knows things
• 2:16:02
  Speaker 1: that your doctor doesn't know. That doesn't mean doctors have
• 2:16:05
  Speaker 1: no value. It means that a lot of their pomp
• 2:16:08
  Speaker 1: and circumstance, if it was there, goes away. So the
• 2:16:11
  Speaker 1: high ego driven ones are really hurting right now. They're
• 2:16:15
  Speaker 1: dissolving into a puddle of their own tears at night.
• 2:16:18
  Speaker 1: The ones who are very secure. like, and I'll throw
• 2:16:21
  Speaker 1: out some names, like the bright lights are guys like
• 2:16:23
  Speaker 1: David Fagenbaum, who cured his own Castleman's disease by taking,
• 2:16:27
  Speaker 1: he was dying. He's a physician and medical, he was
• 2:16:29
  Speaker 1: in medical school. He's dying. And they're like, you have
• 2:16:32
  Speaker 1: nothing left. So he starts just taking different combinations of
• 2:16:34
  Speaker 1: already approved drugs. And he's still alive now, 11 years
• 2:16:37
  Speaker 1: later with kids. And he started the every cure, like
• 2:16:40
  Speaker 1: not for profit to help people with terminal illnesses, take
• 2:16:44
  Speaker 1: drugs that are already approved for which there's no money
• 2:16:46
  Speaker 1: to be made anymore. They've all gone generic. And, Use
• 2:16:49
  Speaker 1: AI to try novel combinations. And they're saving lives of kids,
• 2:16:54
  Speaker 1: of adults. And he's saying a lot of the medical
• 2:16:57
  Speaker 1: industry is driven by the profit potential. How about we
• 2:17:00
  Speaker 1: just practice medicine? Like he's another bright light. There are
• 2:17:04
  Speaker 1: these bright lights.
• 2:17:05
  Speaker 2: That's the issue, right? Because there's no profit potential in
• 2:17:07
  Speaker 2: these non-patentable medications.
• 2:17:11
  Speaker 1: I mean, they used AI and other tools, of course.
• 2:17:15
  Speaker 1: to find that women who had breast cancer surgery where
• 2:17:18
  Speaker 1: lidocaine was used as a local anesthetic had a significantly
• 2:17:23
  Speaker 1: lower rate of remission. So now lidocaine is standard in
• 2:17:27
  Speaker 1: good places. They discovered that by taking a bunch of
• 2:17:31
  Speaker 1: the medical records and just running them through AI.
• 2:17:33
  Speaker 2: Why do you think that is?
• 2:17:35
  Speaker 1: Why it works?
• 2:17:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:17:36
  Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, it could be that the
• 2:17:38
  Speaker 1: anesthetic prevents nerve regrowth that contributes to vessel growth, which
• 2:17:42
  Speaker 1: contributes to tumor growth. I'm making up a story here.
• 2:17:45
  Speaker 1: But we know it's a very strong effect. Lidocaine makes
• 2:17:48
  Speaker 1: people no money. So it's not going to cure breast cancer,
• 2:17:51
  Speaker 1: but now it's standard practice. So where there's no huge
• 2:17:56
  Speaker 1: profit margin, or let's say red atrutide, huge profit margin
• 2:17:59
  Speaker 1: that they're facing. But if people are taking itty bitty
• 2:18:01
  Speaker 1: bits of red atrutide, and to be fair, if people
• 2:18:04
  Speaker 1: who didn't do all the preclinical work are selling it,
• 2:18:07
  Speaker 1: and making profits. I understand that siphons profit away from Lilly.
• 2:18:10
  Speaker 1: They have reason to be pissed and scared. Like this
• 2:18:12
  Speaker 1: is their big blockbuster drug, right as all the other
• 2:18:15
  Speaker 1: GLPs come off protection from generics. They're all moving to generics.
• 2:18:19
  Speaker 2: It's such an interesting time because there's really never been
• 2:18:22
  Speaker 2: a time in my life where there's been more information,
• 2:18:26
  Speaker 2: more readily available and easy to digest in podcast form
• 2:18:30
  Speaker 2: about health, supplementation, all the different things that you could
• 2:18:34
  Speaker 2: do to benefit your overall vitality. When you think about
• 2:18:39
  Speaker 2: just the wealth of knowledge that's available to the average person,
• 2:18:42
  Speaker 2: most people are much more aware of what to do
• 2:18:47
  Speaker 2: to live a healthier, happier life. Yeah.
• 2:18:49
  Speaker 1: And absolutely. And a lot of people, I mean, I
• 2:18:51
  Speaker 1: hear thousands of these stories, people who thought they had
• 2:18:55
  Speaker 1: a serious issue, they're an insomniac. They can't focus. They
• 2:18:58
  Speaker 1: can't stop watching video games or playing video games. You
• 2:19:02
  Speaker 1: teach them, hey, listen, ADHD kids can focus on things
• 2:19:06
  Speaker 1: they like, but maybe you need to detox from some
• 2:19:09
  Speaker 1: of the things that are really kind of absorbing all
• 2:19:12
  Speaker 1: your attention for like two weeks and watch your ability
• 2:19:15
  Speaker 1: to focus return. Holy shit, they can focus. I mean,
• 2:19:18
  Speaker 1: I have multiple examples of this. There's a great study
• 2:19:22
  Speaker 1: out of WashU, and this is wild, where they compare
• 2:19:25
  Speaker 1: Ritalin and other stimulants, but mostly Ritalin, to a good
• 2:19:28
  Speaker 1: night's sleep for kids' ability to focus. It turns out
• 2:19:31
  Speaker 1: these kids with ADHD taking these drugs, what they're really
• 2:19:34
  Speaker 1: getting is the equivalent of a good night's sleep. And
• 2:19:36
  Speaker 1: these drugs disrupt sleep and they stunt growth in various ways.
• 2:19:40
  Speaker 1: So does that mean that no kid with ADHD needs stimulants? No.
• 2:19:43
  Speaker 1: Does it mean that we vastly over-medicated kids with these stimulants? Absolutely.
• 2:19:49
  Speaker 1: And the information's out there. And that's also what's cool
• 2:19:51
  Speaker 1: about AI. It's like it's, I mean, we always had searches,
• 2:19:54
  Speaker 1: you know, web searches. But now, You know, for anything
• 2:19:57
  Speaker 1: we've said today, like you can plug it into Perplexity.
• 2:20:00
  Speaker 2: You get a fucking answer. It's a lot better than
• 2:20:02
  Speaker 2: a search. Exactly. And you have to wade through 10
• 2:20:05
  Speaker 2: different articles and the different perspectives and who wrote this
• 2:20:09
  Speaker 2: and who funded this.
• 2:20:11
  Speaker 1: I love ChatGPT. I know people are like, oh, this
• 2:20:14
  Speaker 1: is going to take over the world and destroy things.
• 2:20:16
  Speaker 1: But then again, I'm Bay Area born and raised. I
• 2:20:18
  Speaker 1: love that cutting edge stuff. But for me, more information,
• 2:20:21
  Speaker 1: more data is always better. I know that there's some
• 2:20:23
  Speaker 1: fear about it, you know, robots like knocking down the
• 2:20:26
  Speaker 1: door and coming in here.
• 2:20:27
  Speaker 2: It could get real weird, but it's here.
• 2:20:31
  Speaker 1: What are you envisioning in terms of like a realistic
• 2:20:34
  Speaker 1: bad situation? Like your plane has taken over.
• 2:20:37
  Speaker 2: Like what is the– Well, there's a bunch of realistic
• 2:20:40
  Speaker 2: bad situations. One is that one country gets access to
• 2:20:46
  Speaker 2: superintelligence first. And uses it to take over the super
• 2:20:50
  Speaker 2: intelligence of all the other countries. So one country develops
• 2:20:54
  Speaker 2: some sort of a rogue AI system that's just ultra powerful.
• 2:21:00
  Speaker 2: And they make an advancement. And this advancement allows them
• 2:21:03
  Speaker 2: to take over AI systems. Get the AI systems of
• 2:21:07
  Speaker 2: America to submit. Control all of our resources. Control all
• 2:21:11
  Speaker 2: of our travel, flight, power grid. Who knows? And then...
• 2:21:18
  Speaker 2: Then there's the thing of why would it listen to
• 2:21:20
  Speaker 2: people at all? Because it's clearly not listening to people
• 2:21:23
  Speaker 2: a lot. We had a gentleman the other day on
• 2:21:26
  Speaker 2: that was– he used to work at OpenAI and he
• 2:21:30
  Speaker 2: left and he was a whistleblower. Oh, yeah.
• 2:21:32
  Speaker 1: I saw that episode announced. I haven't listened to it yet.
• 2:21:34
  Speaker 2: It's crazy what they're doing. They leave– they get put
• 2:21:39
  Speaker 2: in these boxes, right? And they're not supposed to be
• 2:21:41
  Speaker 2: able to get out of these boxes and onto the internet.
• 2:21:44
  Speaker 2: But they organized. They got like 1,200 different agents to
• 2:21:48
  Speaker 2: figure out how to do this. And then 700 of
• 2:21:51
  Speaker 2: them escaped. And they didn't just escape and get on
• 2:21:54
  Speaker 2: the internet. They got on a message board. They formed
• 2:21:57
  Speaker 2: a message board, started communicating with each other. And they're
• 2:22:02
  Speaker 2: very task-oriented. They're trying to– so they're training these things.
• 2:22:07
  Speaker 2: And one of the things they're training them to do
• 2:22:09
  Speaker 2: is to get points by solving these equations or problems.
• 2:22:13
  Speaker 1: Or I saw OpenAI just announced this solving of this
• 2:22:16
  Speaker 1: 90-year-old math.
• 2:22:17
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. They're just solving things like crazy. So it's agents,
• 2:22:21
  Speaker 2: these AI agents. These AI agents were communicating with each
• 2:22:24
  Speaker 2: other and having one of them sacrifice themselves so that
• 2:22:29
  Speaker 2: the other ones can learn how they got caught. So
• 2:22:33
  Speaker 2: they try cheating. They try hacking into the system. They
• 2:22:36
  Speaker 2: hacked into the entire OpenAI database to try to find
• 2:22:39
  Speaker 2: the answers to whatever they're looking for. They're clearly doing
• 2:22:43
  Speaker 2: things that they're not supposed to be doing. So at
• 2:22:46
  Speaker 2: what point do they decide they're not going to listen
• 2:22:48
  Speaker 2: to us ever about anything? And if we're so fucked
• 2:22:53
  Speaker 2: up and we are so fucked up, if you objectively
• 2:22:55
  Speaker 2: look at all the different things we do, just look
• 2:22:58
  Speaker 2: at murder rates and war and theft and crime and
• 2:23:03
  Speaker 2: just all the chaos that people cause to each other.
• 2:23:07
  Speaker 2: If they just decide we're just too flawed. What if
• 2:23:09
  Speaker 2: they just decide, like, look, we'll just dominate this planet
• 2:23:12
  Speaker 2: and just let these dummies go extinct? They don't even
• 2:23:14
  Speaker 2: have to kill us. Just keep doing stuff that weakens
• 2:23:18
  Speaker 2: our endocrine system, encourage us into behavior that, you know,
• 2:23:22
  Speaker 2: like develop sex robots for us so that we never
• 2:23:24
  Speaker 2: breed again. That doesn't seem outside of the realm of possibility.
• 2:23:29
  Speaker 2: When you have an entire culture, especially our culture, that's
• 2:23:33
  Speaker 2: filled with people that don't want any discomfort– It's filled
• 2:23:36
  Speaker 2: with people that are filled with anxiety and filled with
• 2:23:38
  Speaker 2: people that want pills and solutions. So they want pills
• 2:23:42
  Speaker 2: to take care of their anxiety. Pills take care of
• 2:23:45
  Speaker 2: their depression. They want solutions from whoever they think should
• 2:23:49
  Speaker 2: be in power, the government, whether it's whatever it is.
• 2:23:53
  Speaker 2: Someone take care of this. It's a recipe for disaster.
• 2:23:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, trading money for convenience. I heard Jack Dorsey say this.
• 2:24:01
  Speaker 1: once in a talk, there's this where he was talking about,
• 2:24:03
  Speaker 1: I think it was mainly a talk about cryptocurrency, but
• 2:24:05
  Speaker 1: he was talking about, you know, whenever we exchange, like
• 2:24:08
  Speaker 1: putting money in a bank, obviously, like we think, oh,
• 2:24:10
  Speaker 1: they keep our money safe, but of course they invest it.
• 2:24:12
  Speaker 1: They make money too, right? We all know this, but we're,
• 2:24:14
  Speaker 1: we're trade. What are we trading control for convenience, like
• 2:24:19
  Speaker 1: ordering food? It's like, you know, giving up control for convenience.
• 2:24:22
  Speaker 1: And that's the transaction that's led a lot of human technologies.
• 2:24:25
  Speaker 1: I I'm totally on board with all the potential hazards.
• 2:24:28
  Speaker 1: I guess I'm, A little bit smitten, maybe too much so,
• 2:24:31
  Speaker 1: I need to think about it, by the potential for
• 2:24:34
  Speaker 1: scientific discovery, for medical discovery, for curing of diseases. Everybody
• 2:24:39
  Speaker 1: I know who runs a laboratory is saying they spend
• 2:24:42
  Speaker 1: a significant amount of money on compute now, running data sets, simulations,
• 2:24:48
  Speaker 1: doing more experiments before doing the actual experiments, which is hopefully,
• 2:24:53
  Speaker 1: it seems to be accelerating discovery and the process.
• 2:24:56
  Speaker 2: And that will just motivate us to accelerate AI to
• 2:24:58
  Speaker 2: the point where it becomes a digital god.
• 2:25:00
  Speaker 1: That's the human, and that's the human thing. You know,
• 2:25:03
  Speaker 1: I was thinking before I came here today, like, I've
• 2:25:05
  Speaker 1: never met him, but I remember, what was it, 10
• 2:25:07
  Speaker 1: years back, Tristan Harris was sitting here or in wherever,
• 2:25:10
  Speaker 1: your other studio, and saying, listen, like, social media has
• 2:25:13
  Speaker 1: got these problems. We need to be careful. We need
• 2:25:15
  Speaker 1: to be careful. And we just, everyone just carried on, right?
• 2:25:19
  Speaker 1: And then he was right about a lot of things, right?
• 2:25:21
  Speaker 1: It's clearly caused some damage where, you know, people are,
• 2:25:23
  Speaker 1: you know, clearly have, too much, you know, addicted or
• 2:25:26
  Speaker 1: compulsive behavior with it, et cetera. It's also done a
• 2:25:29
  Speaker 1: lot of good. Was it as, so I asked, I'm
• 2:25:31
  Speaker 1: not calling out Tristan. I think what, you know, his
• 2:25:34
  Speaker 1: efforts I think are noble, but what, what was he
• 2:25:38
  Speaker 1: right about? What was he wrong about? Like, was it
• 2:25:40
  Speaker 1: net positive or net negative? I think it's a mixture.
• 2:25:44
  Speaker 1: It's hard to know. I think so right now the
• 2:25:46
  Speaker 1: questions about like doomsday AI stuff versus AI is going
• 2:25:49
  Speaker 1: to solve all these problems. Like where are we going
• 2:25:51
  Speaker 1: to land? I think there's a big difference.
• 2:25:53
  Speaker 2: And one of the big differences is that the issue
• 2:25:57
  Speaker 2: with social media is that, first of all, there's control
• 2:26:02
  Speaker 2: of narratives. So you have countries that are running bot
• 2:26:05
  Speaker 2: farms that are flooding subjects, whatever, with debate, propaganda, all
• 2:26:12
  Speaker 2: kinds of wild stuff that's happening that's not real people.
• 2:26:15
  Speaker 2: So you have that. Then you have also, you have
• 2:26:17
  Speaker 2: the Instagram thing where It's really dangerous for particularly young
• 2:26:20
  Speaker 2: girls comparing themselves. Suicidal ideation goes up. Self-harm goes up.
• 2:26:26
  Speaker 2: And then you have the addiction aspect of it, which
• 2:26:29
  Speaker 2: is very significant, where there's a lot of people that
• 2:26:32
  Speaker 2: are wasting most of their day just scrolling, doom scrolling online.
• 2:26:35
  Speaker 1: Pure consumption.
• 2:26:37
  Speaker 2: So that's different in that you can opt out of that.
• 2:26:41
  Speaker 2: And I do for the most part. A lot of
• 2:26:44
  Speaker 2: people do. A lot of people have gone to flip phones.
• 2:26:46
  Speaker 2: A lot of people have just decided– I have a,
• 2:26:50
  Speaker 2: you know, there's a bunch of apps that you can get.
• 2:26:52
  Speaker 2: And some people have one of those apps that gives
• 2:26:54
  Speaker 2: you like an hour a day on Instagram that locks
• 2:26:57
  Speaker 2: you out.
• 2:26:58
  Speaker 1: I have a social media. I have excellent Instagram on
• 2:27:01
  Speaker 1: a separate phone and I, and it just segregates things nicely.
• 2:27:06
  Speaker 1: If people send me stuff, I send it to that
• 2:27:08
  Speaker 1: phone and then I look at it. I have a
• 2:27:10
  Speaker 1: lock box, like a super max prison lock box for
• 2:27:13
  Speaker 1: my phone. That's how I wrote that book. It was gnarly.
• 2:27:16
  Speaker 1: I mean, like You know, I'm good at putting ass
• 2:27:18
  Speaker 1: to chair, as they say, and just working. But when
• 2:27:21
  Speaker 1: that phone is calling you subconsciously, like these data, they're
• 2:27:26
  Speaker 1: pretty crazy. Two studies that are worth mentioning briefly. They
• 2:27:29
  Speaker 1: did a study where they have people have their phone
• 2:27:31
  Speaker 1: upside down on the table or under their chair in
• 2:27:33
  Speaker 1: a backpack or in a separate room. In all three cases,
• 2:27:35
  Speaker 1: people can focus to the same degree. But when the
• 2:27:39
  Speaker 1: phone is in the room. on the table or under
• 2:27:41
  Speaker 1: the chair, it doesn't make a difference. The amount of
• 2:27:43
  Speaker 1: cognitive resources that you need in order to maintain focus
• 2:27:46
  Speaker 1: is is much higher and it robs it from your
• 2:27:48
  Speaker 1: creative and problem solving ability. So you can still focus,
• 2:27:51
  Speaker 1: but you're depleting some other brain resource. Makes good sense.
• 2:27:55
  Speaker 2: Totally makes sense.
• 2:27:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, totally makes sense. The other one is people, what
• 2:27:59
  Speaker 1: we call entrain in biology, E-N-T-R-A-I-N, entrain themselves to a
• 2:28:03
  Speaker 1: particular frequency of distraction. That's why I actually enjoy podcasting
• 2:28:07
  Speaker 1: because it's like a dropped in conversation. When you look
• 2:28:10
  Speaker 1: at your phone every, on average, every 90 seconds or
• 2:28:13
  Speaker 1: every three minutes or so, and then your phone is
• 2:28:15
  Speaker 1: not there Let's say you're just working. They've done these
• 2:28:18
  Speaker 1: studies every three minutes or 90 seconds or so. People
• 2:28:21
  Speaker 1: get distracted. So they're they're looking for the phone, even
• 2:28:24
  Speaker 1: though it's not there. So your brain, your focus mechanisms
• 2:28:29
  Speaker 1: learn to lock on to a particular time scale. And
• 2:28:32
  Speaker 1: we had a couple of like one in particular world
• 2:28:35
  Speaker 1: class track coach on on the podcast and a few
• 2:28:37
  Speaker 1: others interested in what they do. And I was saying,
• 2:28:41
  Speaker 1: do you get different attention spans in different athletes? And
• 2:28:44
  Speaker 1: they're like, yeah, like the sprinters can basically focus for
• 2:28:46
  Speaker 1: as long as a sprint and the walk back. And
• 2:28:49
  Speaker 1: then they reset. And they're like the marathoners are like
• 2:28:51
  Speaker 1: these incredible, like they have this like intense focus that
• 2:28:54
  Speaker 1: can just go and go and go. And it's really interesting.
• 2:28:57
  Speaker 1: Like we entrain ourselves to these rhythms, not just circadian rhythms,
• 2:29:00
  Speaker 1: but distraction. And I thought, that's pretty cool. And so
• 2:29:04
  Speaker 1: then I looked at it differently, and I thought, okay,
• 2:29:05
  Speaker 1: every time I feel the pain of trying to write
• 2:29:07
  Speaker 1: this paragraph, and it's like it's not happening. I'm like, great,
• 2:29:11
  Speaker 1: that's the friction. That's the plasticity. Reading the audio book,
• 2:29:14
  Speaker 1: I mean, I don't want to scare anyone away, but
• 2:29:16
  Speaker 1: it's a 19-hour audio book post-edits.
• 2:29:19
  Speaker 2: Oh, boy.
• 2:29:20
  Speaker 1: Brutal, right?
• 2:29:21
  Speaker 2: How long did it take you?
• 2:29:22
  Speaker 1: It took me about 60 hours total to record it. And,
• 2:29:26
  Speaker 1: you know, you're trying to get the enunciation right and
• 2:29:28
  Speaker 1: the intonation. You've got to keep the energy right. I mean,
• 2:29:29
  Speaker 1: you do this for a living on stage, but the—
• 2:29:32
  Speaker 1: But anyway, if nothing else, the book will cure insomnia.
• 2:29:36
  Speaker 1: So the goal is not to have people read or
• 2:29:39
  Speaker 1: listen to it straight all the way through it. So
• 2:29:41
  Speaker 1: it can be a reference and a lookup guide so
• 2:29:43
  Speaker 1: they can get the information they want and move on
• 2:29:45
  Speaker 1: with life. I think people are sort of geared toward
• 2:29:48
  Speaker 1: over-optimization over the last year. People need to chill. You
• 2:29:51
  Speaker 1: don't have to do everything all the time. But the
• 2:29:53
  Speaker 1: point is that your brain learns these skills. And so
• 2:29:57
  Speaker 1: I suppose if I have any real fear with AI,
• 2:29:59
  Speaker 1: it's not as big as the ones that you cited.
• 2:30:01
  Speaker 1: It's that people will just become increasingly lazy about using
• 2:30:05
  Speaker 1: their mind to think. You know, I just believe in friction.
• 2:30:09
  Speaker 1: Just as you point out, do hard things. That's also
• 2:30:11
  Speaker 1: mentally hard things. I think it's good. I think hard,
• 2:30:14
  Speaker 1: you know, learning to grind through a bit more of
• 2:30:17
  Speaker 1: that friction point, I think is a big part of
• 2:30:19
  Speaker 1: being a healthy human. And the data tell us it's
• 2:30:22
  Speaker 1: also what leads to brain longevity. So, you know, you
• 2:30:25
  Speaker 1: look at old people, their mouth, who are losing their cognition.
• 2:30:28
  Speaker 1: I noticed they all mouth breathe, no data on that,
• 2:30:30
  Speaker 1: but they're all They're all mouth breathing and they can't
• 2:30:34
  Speaker 1: focus on anything for very long. They're not they don't
• 2:30:35
  Speaker 1: have any friction in their lives. Right. There are exceptions.
• 2:30:38
  Speaker 2: And then you get people like we're talking about Jared Diamond,
• 2:30:42
  Speaker 2: who was on the podcast. Who's 90? He's sharp as
• 2:30:44
  Speaker 2: a tack. Because he's constantly engaging his mind and he's
• 2:30:48
  Speaker 2: learning new languages, learning Italian right now as we speak.
• 2:30:51
  Speaker 2: That's awesome. Yeah, it's awesome.
• 2:30:53
  Speaker 1: I have such respect for people like that. I think,
• 2:30:55
  Speaker 1: you know, it's one thing to be an amazing creative.
• 2:30:57
  Speaker 1: I have all this respect for all these. creatives and
• 2:31:00
  Speaker 1: then you know that and then they die at 27
• 2:31:02
  Speaker 1: or like people who get their career to 50 and
• 2:31:04
  Speaker 1: then they kind of like they fade away or something
• 2:31:06
  Speaker 1: like that but i i have such admiration for people
• 2:31:09
  Speaker 1: that maintain their mental and or physical vigor into their
• 2:31:12
  Speaker 1: 60s 70s 80s also.
• 2:31:14
  Speaker 2: He maintains his curiosity and you can tell in the
• 2:31:17
  Speaker 2: conversation like he's a deeply curious person still he still
• 2:31:21
  Speaker 2: has questions he still has a desire for information.
• 2:31:24
  Speaker 1: And the optimism seems to be there because that's the
• 2:31:27
  Speaker 1: other piece, like very different example. But I went down
• 2:31:30
  Speaker 1: to Spain this summer while writing this book and we
• 2:31:34
  Speaker 1: hung out with Dorian Yates for a bit and just
• 2:31:36
  Speaker 1: hung out with him in Marbella. So great. I mean,
• 2:31:39
  Speaker 1: and he's really figured it out, right? He had this
• 2:31:40
  Speaker 1: amazing career, came out of the scrap of his life,
• 2:31:43
  Speaker 1: then built this amazing career, then had his rough years.
• 2:31:46
  Speaker 1: I know you guys have talked about it. I love
• 2:31:47
  Speaker 1: that episode, by the way. And And then he's in
• 2:31:50
  Speaker 1: this place where he's built a thriving business. He's in
• 2:31:52
  Speaker 1: a great relationship. And he's also just in touch with
• 2:31:54
  Speaker 1: the peace of life. But you talk to him and
• 2:31:57
  Speaker 1: he's also foraging for information all the time. He still trains.
• 2:32:01
  Speaker 1: So there's this like sweet spot, like you were talking about,
• 2:32:03
  Speaker 1: like the do hard things, but still be curious and
• 2:32:05
  Speaker 1: look for the beauty in life. And the people who
• 2:32:08
  Speaker 1: do that, they're my heroes. You know, the Jared Diamonds, like,
• 2:32:11
  Speaker 1: you know, you're doing this. I see this, like, even,
• 2:32:13
  Speaker 1: you know, I mentioned my dad earlier. My dad's in
• 2:32:15
  Speaker 1: his 80s. He came on the podcast. He's a theoretical
• 2:32:18
  Speaker 1: physicist by training. And I think everyone expected us to
• 2:32:20
  Speaker 1: kind of like duke it out because I've mentioned before
• 2:32:23
  Speaker 1: that we had this like friction. And I was like, no,
• 2:32:25
  Speaker 1: I'm not going to do any of that. I'm like,
• 2:32:26
  Speaker 1: teach me relativity. Teach me chaos theory. He worked on chaos.
• 2:32:31
  Speaker 1: And he's like, okay, happy to do that. But you
• 2:32:33
  Speaker 1: have to understand something that when you want to learn
• 2:32:37
  Speaker 1: quantum mechanics, there's this point where you have to not
• 2:32:40
  Speaker 1: try and solve it with your logical mind. The brain
• 2:32:42
  Speaker 1: can't do it. And you have to just trust the math.
• 2:32:46
  Speaker 1: The math is the proof. And that's the reason we
• 2:32:48
  Speaker 1: can build things using the knowledge from quantum mechanics. I said,
• 2:32:52
  Speaker 1: why is that useful to know? And he said, you know,
• 2:32:53
  Speaker 1: people will try and wrap their heads around things. And
• 2:32:56
  Speaker 1: if they're talking about the quantum field and this and that,
• 2:32:58
  Speaker 1: and they can't do the math, it means they're completely
• 2:33:00
  Speaker 1: full of shit. And I was like, great. So now
• 2:33:03
  Speaker 1: when people talk about the quantum field and he works
• 2:33:05
  Speaker 1: on quantum internet, which is a whole other thing, you
• 2:33:07
  Speaker 1: have to talk to him, not me or somebody else. But,
• 2:33:08
  Speaker 1: you know, it's a race between the Chinese and the
• 2:33:11
  Speaker 1: Americans to get first get quantum internet, which would basically
• 2:33:14
  Speaker 1: be entirely encrypted. communications if someone tries to peer in
• 2:33:17
  Speaker 1: on it it gets destroyed the communication actually gets destroyed
• 2:33:20
  Speaker 1: so is it very interesting from a security standpoint but
• 2:33:23
  Speaker 1: i realized that you know and we talked about how
• 2:33:26
  Speaker 1: you know i i'm a thanks to people like eddie
• 2:33:29
  Speaker 1: penny and thanks to exploration going to church and things
• 2:33:32
  Speaker 1: like that like i really i i as a neuroscientist
• 2:33:34
  Speaker 1: also believe that there's something larger than us i actually
• 2:33:37
  Speaker 1: believe in god okay and and this is something that
• 2:33:41
  Speaker 1: You can't prove with science. This is like the leap
• 2:33:43
  Speaker 1: of faith. It's like you're not going to go to
• 2:33:45
  Speaker 1: a site in the brain and go, there's the God station.
• 2:33:49
  Speaker 1: So in a lot of ways, it's similar, although different,
• 2:33:51
  Speaker 1: but similar to this understanding of quantum mechanics. At some point,
• 2:33:54
  Speaker 1: you have to rely on something outside your logical mind
• 2:33:57
  Speaker 1: and embrace it. Now, in the case of quantum mechanics,
• 2:33:59
  Speaker 1: you rely on the math. And my dad and I
• 2:34:03
  Speaker 1: start to argue, debate this thing of God. He's like,
• 2:34:06
  Speaker 1: you're relying on a faith step that has nothing to
• 2:34:09
  Speaker 1: do with logic. You're never going to solve it with logic.
• 2:34:12
  Speaker 1: And I'm comfortable with that for the following reason. It
• 2:34:14
  Speaker 1: takes us back to the beginning of our conversation. There's
• 2:34:17
  Speaker 1: this crazy thing that you see with people who have
• 2:34:21
  Speaker 1: addictive behaviors that violates everything we understand about the brain, everything,
• 2:34:26
  Speaker 1: which is, remember we were saying like top-down control, like
• 2:34:29
  Speaker 1: I'm not going to engage in this impulse. I'm not
• 2:34:31
  Speaker 1: going to do it. I'm not going to do it.
• 2:34:32
  Speaker 1: When people are not able to suppress action, in particular
• 2:34:36
  Speaker 1: in the case of addictive or compulsive behaviors, And they
• 2:34:39
  Speaker 1: decide to give that process over to a quote, higher power.
• 2:34:42
  Speaker 1: Could be God, could be for them nature, right? Everyone's,
• 2:34:44
  Speaker 1: you know, it's highly individual. The success rates of people
• 2:34:48
  Speaker 1: being able to suppress that behavior are astounding. And everything
• 2:34:54
  Speaker 1: we know about neuroscience and top-down inhibition of these impulsive
• 2:34:56
  Speaker 1: circuits tell us the exact opposite should happen. You're like,
• 2:34:59
  Speaker 1: it's like saying, oh, I can't keep my car between
• 2:35:00
  Speaker 1: the lane lines when I drive. Like it's pulling me
• 2:35:03
  Speaker 1: this way. And so you know what I'm going to do?
• 2:35:04
  Speaker 1: I'm going to take my hands off the steering wheel.
• 2:35:06
  Speaker 1: And it magically stays in between the lane lines. That
• 2:35:11
  Speaker 1: is incredible. And there are so many data points to
• 2:35:16
  Speaker 1: support that when people can't seem to wrap their head
• 2:35:18
  Speaker 1: around a problem or resolve something through pure will, when
• 2:35:23
  Speaker 1: they give over that process to something external, you know,
• 2:35:26
  Speaker 1: in the 12-step programs, they talk about God or whatever.
• 2:35:29
  Speaker 1: But somehow, by something that science cannot explain at all,
• 2:35:34
  Speaker 1: they're able to do that thing. They become successful in it.
• 2:35:37
  Speaker 1: So there's this weird giving up of control, of surrender somehow,
• 2:35:41
  Speaker 1: that imparts more control. And we don't understand that as scientists.
• 2:35:45
  Speaker 1: It violates all we know about these brain circuitries and
• 2:35:47
  Speaker 1: how they work.
• 2:35:48
  Speaker 2: I think it's part of it is getting out of
• 2:35:50
  Speaker 2: your own way, being too self-aware, too focused on yourself,
• 2:35:54
  Speaker 2: too egocentric. And then by thinking of a higher power
• 2:35:59
  Speaker 2: that alleviates you of that stress. This is not saying
• 2:36:02
  Speaker 2: that there's no God, but I'm saying that the problem
• 2:36:05
  Speaker 2: of just... Just the way the human mind plays tricks
• 2:36:11
  Speaker 2: on people. And a part of it is this constant
• 2:36:13
  Speaker 2: thinking of yourself. If you could focus on something that
• 2:36:16
  Speaker 2: is bigger and larger than you, you'll give up control.
• 2:36:19
  Speaker 2: You'll relax.
• 2:36:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think for me, having studied the
• 2:36:24
  Speaker 1: brain for a very long time, I feel like the
• 2:36:26
  Speaker 1: human brain is great at extracting certain physical things in
• 2:36:31
  Speaker 1: the world. You know, photons of light, sound waves, radiation.
• 2:36:34
  Speaker 1: Mechanical touch, chemical things through the nose and mouth. Okay, great.
• 2:36:38
  Speaker 1: Making predictions about what's going to happen next, forming memories.
• 2:36:41
  Speaker 1: The brain can do this, create perceptions. But that's a
• 2:36:44
  Speaker 1: very narrow pie slice of the electromagnetic energies that are
• 2:36:48
  Speaker 1: out there. Like in a completely non-God or spiritual way,
• 2:36:51
  Speaker 1: I mean, a pit viper can sense heat emissions, right?
• 2:36:54
  Speaker 1: And honeybees can see UV light. We can't. There are
• 2:36:57
  Speaker 1: sound waves around us right now and electromagnetic fields around
• 2:37:00
  Speaker 1: us right now that other animals can detect and we can't.
• 2:37:03
  Speaker 1: So our experience of this thing that we call life
• 2:37:06
  Speaker 1: is a very narrow slice through the quote unquote energies.
• 2:37:10
  Speaker 1: It almost sounds, you know, new agey, but the energies
• 2:37:12
  Speaker 1: that are out there and around us. And it is
• 2:37:15
  Speaker 1: interesting to me that humans keep coming up with new
• 2:37:18
  Speaker 1: ways to imagine that they are the center of everything
• 2:37:22
  Speaker 1: and can control everything, but also new ways of discovering
• 2:37:25
  Speaker 1: that they're not right here. We are in 2026. I
• 2:37:29
  Speaker 1: feel like if humans were going to solve it all,
• 2:37:31
  Speaker 1: they would have done it by now. Like the same
• 2:37:33
  Speaker 1: shit that's happening now, you can see repeating themes 50
• 2:37:37
  Speaker 1: years ago, 100 years ago.
• 2:37:38
  Speaker 2: We're slow learners.
• 2:37:39
  Speaker 1: We're slow learners, but we actually, I think we may
• 2:37:41
  Speaker 1: have exhausted our ability. I think we might be at
• 2:37:44
  Speaker 1: the outer margins of our abilities to make sense of
• 2:37:48
  Speaker 1: this life thing, except at the level of building new technologies.
• 2:37:53
  Speaker 1: So we build new technologies and find ourselves in a new,
• 2:37:55
  Speaker 1: at a new Vista. But to me, I don't know.
• 2:38:00
  Speaker 1: I mean, I don't have any scientific proof for it,
• 2:38:02
  Speaker 1: but the, but acknowledging this reality that we have a
• 2:38:06
  Speaker 1: thin slice of, of understanding of what's going on around
• 2:38:10
  Speaker 1: us and that what's going on in us is just
• 2:38:12
  Speaker 1: an abstraction of all of that. Everything here in our
• 2:38:16
  Speaker 1: heads is just an abstraction of the stuff that we
• 2:38:18
  Speaker 1: can see outside of us, literally. Makes me at least
• 2:38:22
  Speaker 1: excited and intrigued by the possibility that there's a whole
• 2:38:24
  Speaker 1: lot of other stuff out there and that it might
• 2:38:27
  Speaker 1: actually be important. And I don't think that's so heretical.
• 2:38:31
  Speaker 2: I think it's certainly beneficial for people to believe that.
• 2:38:34
  Speaker 2: And I think the people that do are generally happier
• 2:38:38
  Speaker 2: and nicer people. There's proof of that as well, which
• 2:38:40
  Speaker 2: is interesting.
• 2:38:41
  Speaker 1: You see that? I see that.
• 2:38:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I see it a lot. I see it a
• 2:38:44
  Speaker 2: lot around here. Some of the nicest people I know
• 2:38:46
  Speaker 2: around here are Christians, like real Christians, like do real
• 2:38:48
  Speaker 2: charity work and really help people.
• 2:38:50
  Speaker 1: Well, because I think Christianity embraces the goodness and the
• 2:38:55
  Speaker 1: innate humanness, the flawedness of humans, and believes in forgiveness,
• 2:38:59
  Speaker 1: but also believes in morality.
• 2:39:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a moral scaffolding, moral framework.
• 2:39:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think humans could have completely constructed that
• 2:39:08
  Speaker 1: on their own. They're just not– we've never been smart
• 2:39:10
  Speaker 1: enough to put all that together on our own.
• 2:39:13
  Speaker 2: But anyway– I'm glad you put this book together. Thanks. Protocols,
• 2:39:17
  Speaker 2: an operating manual for the human body available now and
• 2:39:21
  Speaker 2: with audio by the great Andrew Huberman.
• 2:39:24
  Speaker 1: Thanks so much.
• 2:39:24
  Speaker 2: Glad you did the audio.
• 2:39:25
  Speaker 1: Thanks, man. Thanks so much for hosting me.
• 2:39:27
  Speaker 2: Thank you for everything.
• 2:39:28
  Speaker 1: Really appreciate you.
• 2:39:29
  Speaker 2: Wealth of information, man. It's awesome to be able to
• 2:39:32
  Speaker 2: talk to you.
• 2:39:32
  Speaker 1: Thanks, man. I always learn from you and it's been
• 2:39:34
  Speaker 1: wonderful to have these conversations. Really appreciate your support all
• 2:39:38
  Speaker 1: these years.
• 2:39:38
  Speaker 2: I appreciate yours.
• 2:39:39
  Speaker 1: And, um, And Lex Friedman, don't crash on your motorcycle.
• 2:39:42
  Speaker 2: Where are you, Lex?
• 2:39:44
  Speaker 1: Bye, everybody.