The Joe Rogan Experience - #2553 - Andrew Huberman

0:00The Joe Rogan Experience. Drone by day Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. Hello Andrew. Great to see you again, Joe. You're seeing my friend. What a thick ass bokeh road, sir. Yeah. Figure it doubles as a door stopper or a weapon. Yeah, it's designed to be red front to back. Learn a lot of science, a lot of health protocols. But you can also just decide I want to get better at managing stress. Go straight to that chapter. Look up what you want to do. Say, oh, I already do that. Go to the next thing and use it sort of like a manual. This is a very ambitious undertaking. It took me just shy of eight years. The operating manual or an operating manual for the human body. That's a lot. Just sitting down there in front of the computer thinking. I'm going to write an operating manual for the human body. Well, it didn't start off like that.

1:01At first it was a book about the autonomic nervous system. Stress, sleep, focus. Then it evolved. Then I had a third completely new rewrite. And my good friend now, I'm honored to call him a friend. He's just such a good dude. Rick Rubin was like, do you like it? He goes, scrape it. I'm like, what? And then he said, I'm going to get myself in trouble. He took a scrape it, man. What are you doing? And I said, I don't know. He's like, you have to love it. And then he said, they're going to push you to release this thing. And I said, I already said I was going to release it. I did it again. And then I did that again. And I was going to visit him in Europe each summer. And we'd sit together and he goes, let's read some stuff together. But with Rick, what that means is you sit there. And he reads you and how you're reacting to the material. So we barely read any of it. I just talking about and he goes, it's not ready. I go, what do you mean? He goes, it's not ready. You're not ready. And so then this year, finally, but this book, I mean, we were in Europe this summer

2:05for our friends wedding. My team was over there and my girlfriend and I were traveling. She was so understanding. But from, I was doing edits from like 9 p.m. until 2.30 in the morning, every single night and waking up the next morning. Like this book has been, while you won vacation, quote-unquote vacation. Yeah, I owe her a real vacation now. She was working too, but she was asleep in those hours. And we stopped by Rick's. He's like, how's it going? I'm like, it's there. And he's like, he just like checked in. He's like, it's there. Like he can just feel like a fucking weirdo. He's weirdo. I mean, he has this supernatural ability to feel where people are at, but not get absorbed in it. And I have so many Rick stories. We can spend the whole time talking about Rick's stories. But the man is just like, he's plugged into some energetic layer that the rest of us aren't. And he's all day every day. He's connecting with people and trying to help them. Like he really spends most of his time looking out at the world and trying to help people with their art with their stuff. And I'm, that's really him.

3:05If you know him, that's him 24-7. Totally. He lives in that space. It's a very weird headspace to be in. Because you're constantly like looking at other people's stuff. It's like, he's a taste maker. You know, or that's not even a good description of him. He's just like, an analysis of art. Like that's his function. He now analyzes art. But from like, for lack of a better term, almost like a spiritual perspective. Like he sees whether it's real. Totally. He finds the realness in like, to me, the Red Hot Chili Peppers record one of their albums in a mansion. Because he wanted to hear like, instead of a recording studio, he wanted to hear like, the sounds of the house. That's so rich. There's a, you know, I didn't come here to plug this, but we should because it's going to be awesome. Because I may have seen pieces of it. He has this documentary with Jay-Z coming out like next week, where they sit in this incredible monument structure in Europe, and they just listen to music together and talk about music.

4:05And it's so good. Which is a documentary on them listening to music. It's really about Jay. But about his childhood music. Yeah, so Jay's music and they're listening to it. Yeah. I think this was filmed in an abandoned post office in France, because Rick liked the skylight. I've seen pieces of it. I'm so excited to see this. And it's all black and white. I think so. HBO Max. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, he's on a whole other thing. It's weird. Very weird, dude. He isn't very rational, too. I mean, his whole thing, I may have said this before, but his whole thing is he says there are only three things. It used to be two, but he updated it to three things in life that are true. One is the laws of physics, biology, chemistry, you know, nature. The other is God. We talk a lot about God these days. And the third is professional wrestling.

5:05And he watches 10 hours a week. Because he knows professional wrestling. Because he said he's like, everyone agrees it's made up. So it's the only thing that everyone agrees that he thinks everything else is made up. He thinks, because we made up, you know, media, we made up show business, we made up the game, you know, a sport and what the rules are. And he just thinks it's the, you know, it's the closest thing to truth out there. Yeah. That's where he and I part ways. I mean, I went to an AEW event with him. It was pretty cool. I have to say it was the first time going. And the athletes all adore him. Like everyone loves him and he's there front row. Oh, he's a huge fan. Huge fan. I think he's a lifetime member. And, and, and, you know, lifetime member. And, and he, he really can extract, like, trueisms about human nature from watching wrestling. Oh, yeah, there we go. I'm going to go with all my red glasses on at that point, apparently. Oh, man. The red glasses. Well, it's wild. There's one point. The guys are like climbing the ladder.

6:05They're going to like grab the thing and they're, they're both going up the sides of the ladder. And then one stops and goes, hey, that's Rick Rubin and the guy pushes out the ladder. And I look at Rick to see if he's sort of, like, getting some sort of dope. I mean, hit off and he just goes, he's just listening. He's just there, experiencing it that he's not like pulled into it. Yeah, I needed to test him. I think he's on acid. He claims he's never done any drugs. That seems ridiculous. Maybe he had one sip of alcohol. He just go, in the music business, that's a feat. He must have one of those brains that's broken and just leaks psychedelic chemicals all the time. I don't know, whatever, playing it in consciousness, he's like, I've always thought that about like schizophrenia. I go wonder if that's what's happening. I wonder if they have like some dump of psychedelic chemicals that's constantly like leaking into their brain. Because we knew the brain really does produce endogenous psychoactive compounds like DMT. I mean, is it impossible that you could have a brain that leaks it? So here's the weird thing about schizophrenia and it speaks to the larger kind of ways that medicine works for better or worse,

7:06is that for the longest time we thought that dopamine, too much dopamine was schizophrenia. Why? Because drugs that reduce dopamine, call them neuroleptic drugs, how to parodole all these things, close up, would reduce auditory hallucinations. So the conclusion was, auditory. So the meaning voices in your head? Yeah, and that's mostly what people deal with, especially paranoid schizophrenia. There's hearing voices. Do this, do that. You're awful. I mean, if you think about it from that perspective, imagine all day and night, you're just dealing with voices in your head that feel like another person there, telling you usually horrible things about yourself or the outside world, all the time. And these drugs reduce those symptoms. We've known that for a long time. But because they reduce dopamine and all over the brain and body, they create what's something called tardive dyskinesia, which is a suppression of the motor system. And so you'll see people who are doing this like writhing like this. You'll see them on the street a lot. Sometimes that psychosis, a lot of times that's psychotic people who are taking their anti-psychotic medication.

8:07Yeah. But you know, it gives you some amputuses and tell the voices to shut the fuck up. I think some have auditory hallucinations and but most have auditory hallucinations. Sorry, some have visual, excuse me, some have visual hallucinations, but most have auditory hallucinations. And you know, this sets in usually around mid-early 20s. And what's weird is years ago, I had a meal with the then director of the National Institutes of Mental Health. His name was Bob Desimone. And he said, do you know why they're so little money for research on schizophrenia compared to say autism? It's like, why? And he's like, well, because the parents of autistic kids lobby hard. And usually the parents of autistic kids are not also autistic. But schizophrenia, even though it's not, you know, doesn't run completely through families. Oftentimes the parents of schizophrenia will have schizophrenia conditions or... What is that? These are, it's like, they now call them schizophrenia a type of, they'll have not typical thinking, right?

9:09Doesn't mean they're crazy, but they're off. And so they're not bad people, but they're placing society off and doesn't position them to like sit down with a senator and say, hey, listen, you know, my kids got autism and we need more research on this. And so a lot of what, where the money goes has to do with where obviously the lobby is. And if you think about genetic disorders in families and we know there is a strong component with schizophrenia, like if you take two monozygotic identical twins, right? The, if one is paranoid schizophrenia, the probability that the other one will be paranoid schizophrenia isn't 100%, but it's pretty, it's much higher than, than by chance. Much, much. This show is presented by DraftKings. This Saturday the fight is on and wherever you're watching DraftKings brings you closer to the MMA action. DraftKings Sports app is now live in all 50 states. One app, every sport, all 50 states, new DraftKings customers, sign up with CodeRogans, spend five bucks, get 200 in rewards within 21 days,

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12:11That's right, every game day all month long, Draft Kings customers can get a profit boost for every football game, new Draft Kings customers, sign up with code Rogan, spend five bucks, get 200 in rewards within 21 days. That's code Rogan in partnership with Draft Kings. The crown is yours. Event trading offered by Draft Kings predictions. A CFTC registered introducing broker, trading involves risk of loss, market availability vary, sellability restrictions apply. $50 and nonwithdrawable predictions dollars issued every seven days via click to claim for 21 days. Predictions dollars expire in one year, one football boost per customer, maximum trade limits and restrictions apply. Tokens expire at the end of the final select game each day when offer, terms at dkng.co slash offer. Have they ever done a study where one manages to avoid it with lifestyle choices or diet or exercise or something along those lines? Definitely, although not in a way that you could attribute it to one thing, but for instance, for a long time, active military service. In somebody who has a genetic predisposition to psychosis was an additional risk factor, a meaningful risk factor.

13:12Makes sense because of the stress. The stress, methamphetamine use. I mean, again, the stress. The stress. You know, the stress of... Also, methets just seem fucking out of their mind anyway. So I mean, there's this meth strength thing that I've never seen proven, but it doesn't, you can find these videos of like methets carrying refrigerators down the street. And they're not jacked. But there's like carrying refrigerators down alleys and people talk about methestrain. But yeah, I mean, methamphetamine is going to create probably the largest dump of dopamine in the brain than any other drug, at least in the short term. And it makes people think every idea is a good idea and everything is about them and their goals. So it's the hyperdope of an urgent state. How much different is it than Adderall? In terms of the actual effect. Oh, I mean, it's... Is it dose dependent? Yeah, and we don't know what addicts are taking exactly, but yeah, I mean, Adderall is emphetamine, and vivances and fetamine. Actually have a... Forgive me for referencing the book too many times. It'd be great if people want to read it, but that's not my goal here,

14:13is to constantly reference it. But there's a long section on all stimulants. Caffeine, nicotine, Adderall, vivance, Modaphanil, Archdemodaphan. Every single drug that can make you more alert and focused, I talk about the pros and cons. Every single drug. I talk about humans have always found a way to use these things to find things to enhance their focus. The problem with methamphetamine is that it's also neurotoxic. There's actually very relevant to the conversation about MDMA, methylene dioxymethamphetamine, which is a variant of methamphetamine. MDMA for the treatment of trauma is looking really promising. The early studies, including one that was published in science, showed that non-human primates that are given MDMA, experience neuron loss, that neurons die in the brain, and that message propagated. That paper was retracted because that laboratory accidentally injected methamphetamine, not MDMA. MDMA is today accidentally mixed those two. I don't know what happened.

15:14They did publish a reaction. I may have methamphetamine laying around the lab. Oh, man, you should have come to my lab when I ran a lab until a few years ago. I still teach, I shut my lab, but we had, I mean, we had all sorts of goodies in there. I mean, you ever worry about your students taking it? No, because, you know, with anytime you use a federally controlled drug, you have to account for every last micro-liter of that. Someone's coming and checking all the time. We also worked with viruses. I mean, my lab at one point was using syn-biz viruses, modified rabies viruses, adenoviruses, and on and on. Like, you know, and so we had some labels on the wall, like this is a lab that works with viruses and we also had controlled substances and that's just kind of how it goes. This is only one way. You gotta figure out what makes what happen in the human brain. I never had MDMA in my lab or inphetamine in my lab, but when I was an undergraduate, I worked in a lab where we injected rats with MDMA. At a time, this was in the early 90s when not much was known about it, but people were dying at raves and that lab worked on thermal regulation.

16:15So we were interested in why they were dying from maybe MDMA. It turns out it was the hypothermia from raves and not drinking enough fluids and people would take amphetamines and people were dying. That pretty much got worked out over time. People realize you need to stay hydrated, but methamphetamine and MDMA are very different. MDMA, there is no evidence that it's neurotoxic. You always hear those stories about people who took MDMA that it holes in their brain. Probably wasn't MDMA, probably was more methamphetamine, maybe mixed with a little bit of MDMA. This is why it would be so great if this was finally legal and produced in ways that were reliable and administered in safe ways and all that. But you know that trial, the passage through the FDA failed for two reasons, this last round, it might go through the next round, but it failed for two reasons. I've been very close to this whole situation. One is that the powers that be in the previous administration felt that there wasn't a good control condition. Like it wasn't a good placebo. Okay, fair enough, although a lot of drugs deal with that issue. The other was there was one, maybe two sexual

17:17and proprieties of the therapist. There was a couple therapists that did some things they shouldn't have done with, while somebody was under the influence of the drug and one incident like that can sink an entire initiative. So that was bad obviously. And so if it's gonna pass in the next few years, there's gonna have to be some things in place to make sure that the way it's administered is safe. Because the person under the influence of MDMA is very vulnerable to all sorts of things. It's not just about their heart health, et cetera. Like that can be dealt with before, can be dealt with after. But the real issue is the therapist operating their best interest. And because the psychedelic community has always existed, and I'm a big fan of psychedelics for the treatment of depression, trauma, et cetera. But because that community has always kind of existed on the edge of other techniques, it's sort of like, well, if the person's like saying they have all this trauma in their feet and the therapist rubs their feet, like that's not usual for therapy, right? That's pretty like within the gray zone

18:19of MDMA assisted psychotherapy done kind of rogue in the world of psychedelic therapists. There's really no controls on what goes with the drugs. We've agreed on the basis of the clinical trials of what the dosages might be, healthy dosages, how frequent, like two sessions with a booster, 80 milligrams in, and then a booster of say, 50 milligrams halfway in or by body weight, space three weeks apart for psilocybin, maybe just once for, on and on, all that's been looked at in various ways in these trials. And is it always in conjunction with psychotherapy? It should be. And then the data really show that people need therapy going in, they need therapy during, and they need therapy coming out for the best results. But those results are remarkable. I mean, 60, 70%, significant reduction in symptoms, in some cases, remission. But, you know, these, you know, I have friends in the so-called psychedelic community, but I also have friends in the standard science community, and for these things to really come together, there's gonna have to be some standardization of safety, but also just practice.

19:20What are you gonna talk about? If someone's like, I'm feeling I'm at the precipice of like a huge amount of pain, do you encourage them to go into that pain and purge it? Or do you tell them, hey, listen, you know, maybe back away from that? All this stuff is done by feel in the psychedelic community. There's no standardization of it. But then again, talk therapy is the same way, right? There's no standardization of the narratives that you're supposed to have with your client. Right, there's a lot of freedom to sort of, yeah. And you know, and then, you know, I've been reading a lot about the history, counter-culture history and stuff. Yeah, I joined the board of Estiline, which is this incredible place on the coast of California. The guy who started it is in his late 90s, and it has a center for theory and research. It's not just about like yoga classes, and like, and has that, but there's a serious focus on human potential there. And you know, in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and even in the 90s, all these somatic therapies came along, you know, in the breathing therapies. And you had psychedelic therapies too,

20:21but you know, how much of these things to merge is a question like maybe some somatic therapy during MDMA could be really helpful for somebody that feels really out of body, or that had a, you know, bodily trauma, or was raped, or whatever. It was abused as a kid. But then we have to ask ourselves, are we gonna let therapists touch people while they're under the influence of these really powerful pathogens? Why is it touching people? Is that normalized in the psychedelic community when they do this? Not necessarily. Like a sitter. A good day starts with a solid morning routine. So if something's missing, if your body isn't getting what it needs, everything can feel off. AG1 is designed to help fill the holes. Their next gen formula is dialed in with over 75 ingredients, minerals, vitamins, adaptogens, and more, clinically shown to fill nutrient gaps and increase healthy gut bacteria. An AG1 Pro takes it even further. It has CAHMB for muscle protection,

21:21zinc, carnaxine for gut health, and five grams of creavitalis, premium, German-made creotene monohydrate. Wish, if you don't know, creotene is a highly studied compound in sports sites that helps support energy. Get more from your morning routine, add either AG1 next gen or AG1 Pro, and your body will thank you. Go to drinkag1.com slash Joe Rogan, and for a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 next gen or AG1 Pro. That's drinkag1.com slash Joe Rogan. No, not necessarily. It's just that right now, psychedelic assisted therapy sits in that constellation of like somatic therapies, talk therapies, breathing therapies, emotive therapies, like none of this is formalized. I mean, so much of what I've been interested in and while I wrote the book aside from the compulsion to just get things out there, my hope is that as more techniques come along,

22:23different breathwork practices, different supplements, different drugs, different peptides, that people will start to understand some of the kind of principles of how things work to decide what's worthwhile or not. So for instance, for trauma, we know that it's basically four steps. Doesn't matter if you use getting through trauma. Doesn't matter if it's through therapy that includes psychedelics or not. First of all, people have to have a willingness to address it, right? Second, they need to experience the painful feeling in a safe environment. There's no just kind of a waiting in that. So the feel your feeling sings is true. And we often just stop there. We hear that and that's it. But then there's also having the explicit memory of what happened. But in a state of calm, not feeling the feeling, because you're trying to uncouple the memory from the emotions, right? There's no losing the memory. You're trying to uncouple the emotions from the memory. And then the fourth piece, which is something, I touch on with respect to grief and trauma therapy more generally is,

23:24there's this beautiful thing that, guess on your podcast, I've talked about, you've probably experienced this, that at some point the shitty thing that happened to you, the awful thing can be transmuted into some effort to create goodness for yourself or for the world. Sometimes it's public education. Sometimes people, you know, the loss of a child, for instance, like, ugh, my god, how awful that, you know, but people who move through this process can get to the place where they'll like plant a tree or teach to or talk to other parents who are in bereavement. And so they've transmuted their loss into goodness, right? So it's four steps. So if we just say, you know, take your loss and go do good for the world, that's not gonna work. If we say, take your loss and just feel the pain of it, people get caught in that spiral. And I think this is, unfortunately, when the millennials were in their adolescence and, you know, teen years and 20s, there was this overemphasis on like, feeling your feelings, but no one ever talked about the next phase, which is where you actually stop feeling so shitty about the shitty thing that happened. And so my goal is really to try and organize

24:26like these different practices and come up with structures so that you could imagine MDMA being very useful for that first or second step, feeling your feelings in a safe way, in the right environment. What are the studies that maps is done with MDMA with soldiers and PTSD? Because that's been probably one of the most prominent things. Yeah. Well, that Rick Dovelyn obviously is more qualified to get into the specifics, but I know of at least three clinical trials looking at MDMA at dosages that are by body weight but they're not like outrageously high dosages that have people move through their PTSD within a matter of, you know, four to six weeks total. So with two sessions of MDMA spaced apart about a month or so, talk therapy the whole way through. And I know of at least one clinical trial with veterans. Often times these studies will include veterans, but it's not all veterans, which actually is kind of good. You want to be able to compare their kind of trauma to other people's trauma, but I have to say, and I know you've covered this extensively,

25:27but the work on IBegin has, in my mind, has completely revised the way that we think about psychedelic therapy because it's kind of ironic that the first psychedelic that will likely be legal for the treatment of PTSD is going to be the most intense one. It would be like, hey, I want to learn a martial art and you're like, yeah, get into the octagon and get your ass kicked, you know, and that's going to, you know, turn you into a fighter. I mean, that's the way people describe IBegin is kind of like that. It is no joke, because you point out it is not recreational. And then when they follow with DMT, I mean, you know, it seems that the outcomes are very, very good for a lot of people. I will say, and they're going to sweat me for this a little bit. There have been a few deaths, and it seems that that may correlate with fentanyl use prior. That's really, that needs to be talked about if we're going to get this legal. How many deaths? I'm aware of two. And is this in those clinics? Or is this, yeah? And they have to report them. Is it a heart failure?

26:28Like what, because I know that there's heart issues. Heart and breathing, so they're linked, obviously, you know, heart and breathing linked. And people are heart rate monitored. I know of many people, and there are many of your friends, like, and they've talked openly about this stuff. So DJ Shipley and the Capone, EMarkets Capone and others. And many, many others who feel that they've benefit tremendously from these therapies. And there's a litany of other names there too that have benefited tremendously. I want to be clear. There are also a few people who felt they didn't have a good experience. I know Sean Ray right now is out there talking about his negative experience. That's Sean Ryan. That's, excuse me, Sean Ray's like a bodybuilder, right? Sean Ryan, excuse me. I think Sean Ryan, I think he's talking about DMT. And they follow with DMT at some of those clinics, not all. But he's, he said he had gone through exorcisms. Isn't that what he's saying now? I mean, I think if you, if you think about my, my experience of psychedelics, I've not done that I have again, is that there is all sorts of understanding

27:29about the brain that comes about during those journeys that leads you to understand that we have good and evil in all of us. And I could understand how it could be downright terrifying for some people to realize that we have a hypothalamus that just wants to satisfy drives. But we also have a four brain that can suppress those drives. I mean, that is the nature of being human, right? Do you think that's what these people are thinking when they think of demons or thinking of like, in their, like, drives that are a part of the human system? So, okay, I have a lot of thoughts about this. So, neuro, I'm not gonna spin off into a neuroscience lecture, but we think about brain function and free will and all that kind of stuff from top down in bottom up perspective. Bottom up is you have a drive, you want to satisfy it, you're gonna do it. Top down are regions of the brain that inhibit those impulse circuits. And so much of life is about the dynamic tension between those two, okay.

28:30I mean, the seven deadly sins, right, are all the hypothalmic structures like rage, envy, lost, et cetera. But the four brain can be built up, you can learn things as the kids learn to suppress their impulses, puppies learn to suppress their impulses to get a reward or just to avoid punishment. And that's a lot of what being human is about, right? There's an amazing case actually right here in Austin, where I don't know if you're familiar with this, there was a kid who woke up one morning, rode in his diary, he's an ex-marine, this was many years ago, and then killed his wife and his mother with a knife. Do you know what this? Okay, then he went to the University of Texas, Austin, took a rifle, went up into the tower, and shot 14 people. Oh, that's the story. I think a 15-died later. Yeah, so, but here's where it gets interesting, right? I mean, it's horrible, right? One woman was pregnant, so they counted that. I think it was a total of 18 or 19 deaths. He was shot by one of the security guards.

29:33They go and they read his diary, and he literally says, I don't know why I wanna do this, but please take the money from my life insurance and donate it to the study of mental health. Please pay off my debts. Please understand what's happening to me, and they did an autopsy, and the guy had a tumor in a brain region, which included, brain regions, which included a migdala, hypothalamus, and thalamus. Collectively, what we would call low-level brain structures involved with perception and impulse. The conclusion of all that is not, oh, he had a brain tumor that made him do it. The conclusion that most neuroscientists draw is that most people don't ever conceive of doing those things, but a lot of people go to Niagara Falls and look and go, what's keeping me from jumping? What's keeping you from jumping is your forebrain. What people think, oh, you know, what keeps people from shoplifting? Everyone would like to think that they're incredibly moral.

30:34I don't shoplift, not a shoplifter, right? But for some people, they wanna do the thing and they stop themselves from doing it, or drinking, or cheating, or whatever it is, right? Those top-down influences on our impulses, and our bottom-up impulses are constantly in dynamic tension. And in psychedelics, I mean, lots of things are happening. You're getting a lot more inter-connectivity of the brain that's always there being revealed. It's very rare. It happens, but it's very rare to hear about people doing terrible things to other people on psychedelics. It's not, it happens, but it's not common. So I'm not saying you reveal evil in there, but as you know, in a high-dose psilocybin journey, you're going into the recesses of your mind, and your unconscious mind is showing you what's there. It's showing you that there are terrible forces out in the world. There are humans, you learn all sorts of stuff about humans as you know, right? In these journeys, you also learn about incredible beauty and potential for making positive change. So the psychedelics are kind of a,

31:34they're a mysterious, free-for-all in there. They're probably also interacting with your very specific memories. And if you're dealing with a guy like Sean Ryan, you do a lot of combat. Seeing a lot of horrible things. Horrible things. My good friend Eddie Penny, he was also a Tier 1 operator. It's a great name. Yeah, great name. Great name, great guy. He has to enjoy a conversation. He's another Tier 1 operator from that community. He's, he's not revealing anything he hasn't already, but he's recovered from substance abuse issues. And it has been sober a long time. He's not a fan of psychedelics. He got me reading the Bible. We could talk about this, like, you know, actually church, and I know you've been going to church, there's been an interesting thing because a lot of what's in the Bible is about the dynamic tension between what neuroscientists would call top down and bottom up influences. It acknowledges, like, we have this stuff in us that you're not supposed to pretend it doesn't. You have to acknowledge your humanness but also your human capacity to control these impulses.

32:34And I mean, that's a lot of what's in the Bible. It's not everything, but it stories about that in many, many ways, hence the seven deadly sins and the virtues and so on. But, you know, Eddie has been a pretty strong voice for caution in the veterans and other communities about the use of psychedelics because there's this theory, right, within some sectors of religion and Christianity, in particular, that in psychedelic journeys that evil entities, if you will, might have access to us or something like that. There's a neuroscientist view of that too, which is that in those states, you're revealing aspects of self that normally you can suppress, but now you're having to see that aspect of you or other people, like realizing that people have evil and good in them is a, I think we can all say, yeah, I get it, but we usually say their evil, their good, their evil, their good. It's very hard for us to address the possibility

33:35that we, any of us, I like to think I could never have been that kid that went up on the tower, but if I had a tumor in my brain, would I have done it? I don't know. I mean, this recent case of this woman killing her children was about this, right? It was about this very issue. Like, oh, is her physiology to blame? And the law has a very simple rule on most of these cases. I've looked at this and the law basically says, doesn't matter if you have a brain tumor. Doesn't matter if you're high on math. Doesn't matter if you're full of rage, because rage is just a different set of neurochemicals. You are responsible for your behavior. And I think we need those thick black lines as, I like to think of them. Otherwise, you can't function as a society. It's not saying that people aren't stricken with biological issues, but we're saying, even if stricken, you need to be held responsible. One of the big things that happens during psychedelic trips that disturb a lot of people is when they try to fight the trip

34:37and then they have a really bad trip. And one of the things that someone will tell you for lack of a better term, who is a shaman? I hate that term because it's, I think, it's probably very real, some parts of the world. And it's also probably a very much a bullshit thing in America. It's like expert in America now. Well, there's some real experts in America. There's probably more real experts and there are real shaman's. The shaman thing is very weird. A lot of it's like very lost people that find identity in altered states of consciousness. And I think, just my personal opinion, that experiencing these altered states of consciousness should enhance your experience as a human, should not replace it. I think there's a lot of people who are replacing altered states of consciousness far too often. And they live in that world more than they live in the world of just being conscious and sober.

35:39And I think there's many steps that you have to take in order to have a good trip. Some people have a really hard time letting go, relaxing and just going with it. They fight it. I've seen it. I've seen people fight it. People that, for whatever reason, they have whatever psychological issues or they have control issues and they just cannot deal with the fact that this experience is so beyond their comprehension and so overwhelming that they try to battle it. They try to control it. The experiences, the things that they see, the states that they enter into, they don't feel at all in control and they freak out. And when you try to control it, I haven't had one of those. But from the people that I know that have, it's like, they say that they were wrestling with it. And you cannot win. And it just overwhelms you and then your anxiety kicks in. What I have experienced in trips is that it's highlighted

36:45that if you think in a positive way, it'll show you more beautiful images and that you can just relax. And that especially in the DMT realm, they are trying to tell you to relax. They're trying to tell you to just go with it. And if you don't fight it, you can have a wonderful experience. But I haven't been a war. I haven't been raped. I haven't been physically assaulted and beaten as a child. There's a lot of things that didn't happen to me that I don't have to deal with. And someone, especially I think guys who've been a war, well you've seen so much horrible shit and it just becomes a part of your everyday existence that these horrible memories, these horrible visions that you have and horrible things that you've probably had to do. And then something comes along like DMT or like Cylocyte or something, just overwhelms the normal state of consciousness. If you were trying to fight that, I would imagine that would feel like you're battling demons. This episode is brought to you by the Farmer's Dog.

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38:51of fresh, healthy food. Plus, get free shipping. Just go to thefarmer'sdog.com slashrogan. This offers for new customers only. This episode is brought to you by Ethos. Life is unpredictable. That's why you need life insurance. It helps give your family financial stability if the worst happens. So they can continue living the life you've built. With Ethos, you can get covered in minutes. All online, no medical exam, just a few health questions. With policies as low as $30 a month, get your free quote at ethos.com slash JRE. That's ethos.com slash JRE. Application times and rates may vary. Yeah, yeah, and I haven't had to deal with any of those things either. So I want to acknowledge that. I had a very good experience of therapeutic combined MDMA and psilocybin work, therapeutic work, incredible. And I can distill it to one simple takeaway, which was thinking about bad things that had happened that I wish hadn't

39:52happened. I felt like I had kind of worked through that stuff in life by running lifting weights from therapy. It was just life time. It worked through it. But there was a session where I was feeling the resistance to feel something, and I knew what was knocking. And it was thinking about things that didn't happen, that I wish had happened for me. Not things that I wish I got, but just basic experiences that I wish I had had. And it was incredibly sad in the moment. But then it opened after some period of time. What kind of experiences? You know, listen, I had a better childhood than many, much better than many, and harder than others for, you know, there were some things about my family structure that felt there were times when I really, really, really needed a certain kind of support and structure, and it was gone. And so I went out into the world and found it in skateboarding, eventually in science. And I talk about the introduction of the book, actually, I talk about why I eventually went into public health education.

40:53And it was seeing about a third of my friends from growing up, dead or in jail. And that's weird for a guy that didn't grow up in the inner city, and I wasn't in the military. These are friends of mine that succumbed to drugs or suicidal mental health issues. Now, mind you, the other 2,3rds did great. And some of them started companies like DC, and these weren't close friends of mine. But that community of people, of all these feral kids, in the 90s, the people who skateboarded were the ones who didn't have parents that went to things. And I have a good relationship with my dad now. I've actually had him on the podcast, and that was really bonding for us. We're great now. But there was a time when I was an adolescent and team, when I really needed structure, and I really needed certain things that were just we're not happening. And my home life was depressing. It was really empty, it was really depressing. And so when I went out into the world and did way too many things, the way too young, saw a lot, and got involved in a lot of sex violence and stuff that I shouldn't have at that time. And luckily, not drugs, that wasn't my thing. So I always knew those narratives. And I've always had a bittersweet memory of them.

41:54They also served me well. They motivated me to forge for ways to be healthy and things like that. But then in science, it was wild. Because in science, your mentors play a tremendous role in your progress and your sense of safety. Science is a weird thing. It's different now. But when I was coming up, you would get very close to your graduate advisor. I was very close to my undergraduate advisor. He was like a father figure to me. My graduate advisor was truly like a mother to me. I knew her when she was pregnant. I knew her husband, her daughters and neuroscientists. I incredibly close to her. She had a maternal way about her and a toughness that was unbelievable. And she was a serious scientist. And then my postdoc advisor, similarly, was very supportive. My undergraduate advisor, who I got very close with, killed himself in a very dramatic way about two weeks after I had spoken to him, shot himself in the bathtub. And this was a guy who understood mental illness. I talk about him in the book. My graduate advisor died at 50 of cancer.

42:56She had the Barack Immutation, which is predisposed to cancer. And that one devastated me. And then my postdoc advisor died of pancreatic cancer like a year into my faculty appointment. And he had a heart attack sitting across from me. It was the first indication he had pancreatic cancer. And so the joke in my field is you don't want me working for you, because that's like fuck. But then what's wild is that I made it through science. I get tenure at Stanford. This kind of shit is happening in my science world. Then a colleague of mine gets addicted to oxy-contin for after a back injury. And he's dead. And no one talks about it. Like everyone's like, oh, yeah, yeah. He was a member of the National Academy. He's a famous scientist down at the Salcons Institute. Everyone's just like, oh, yeah, yeah. He just kind of carries on with their work. And then this is going to get depressing for a moment before he gets light. End of 2017, three friends of mine from childhood. There's a graffiti artist. His name is, he went by orphan, or a friend. This brilliant artist. He did so much cool shit. His name was Aaron Curry. Dysastomic cancer. My good friend John Eichelberry from childhood.

43:57And my good friend Johnny Faire, fentanyl suicide. Boom, people are just going down like crazy. And I'm like, what the fuck is going on here? And then I started to realize this is one of the reasons I started the podcast is one of the reasons I started going on podcasts is my science colleagues, they don't know how to manage their stress. They understand the science of stress. But they look like shit. Their kids are a mess. They have all these anxiety, so it's my physician friends. I can count on one hand the number of them that are healthy of mind and body who have healthy kids. And then I realized, oh, they're skateboarding community, they're science health community. I'm at Stanford University School of Medicine, the Apex, where among the top universities in the world of health. And I'm like, my colleagues are sick and dying and stressed. And I realized I was like, shit, we don't know how to regulate stress. So I started studying stress and stress mitigation, this kind of thing. And then I don't want to make this even darker, but I think it's worth acknowledging for a couple of reasons.

44:57And by the way, I want to be really clear. I think what veteran solutions has done with the Ibegan initiative. I think what Rick Perry and what Brian are doing with the Ibegan thing. I think it's awesome. If I highlight that there were some deaths, I want to be really clear. Like, those people might have died of fentanyl anyway. We don't know. I mean, there's, you know, we need to. People have connected both the deaths or connected to fentanyl use. My understanding is they had to use fentanyl prior to going to use Ibegan. So maybe in this discussion, a few people will be sensitized to like that's a potential issue. So meeting like they were probably addicted to fentanyl, they were trying to get off of it. And they tried to do it while they had fentanyl in their system. Perhaps. Yeah. And for all we know, they met if snuck fentanyl, we don't like to think that they might have. But who knows how closely they did it, you know. But they're really hooked. Yeah. And listen, you and I know, I mean, it's more from your world of, you know, martial arts and stuff. But, you know, we know people who've like, we hear they go down to Mexico. They're going to do this treatment. They're going to come back there better in like a week later that they don't sound so much better. You know, I pray for these people. I want the best. Like, I'm not saying this is bad, but I'm saying these are powerful medications.

45:59And I think they are net positive. But I'll also say, you know, many years transpired between that, you know, those friends dying, the Johnny people, well, sometimes people call me on bullshit. So Aaron Curry, John Eichelberry, Johnny Farrer, best fucking kids I knew. Awesome graffiti arts. One of them was in the MoMA. Orphan went into the MoMA for his graffiti. This is a bad-ass graffiti arts. Stomach cancer got him. Like, chicken happened. My advisors didn't do anything wrong. They just one clearly had a mental issue or otherwise he wouldn't have taken his life. The other two, I can't say. So but then this last year, I'm like going about my life and I'm thinking, okay, you know, things are pretty good. And I get a call and I hear that my good friend, Nolan Williams, triple board certified MD, who took the transcranial magnetic stimulation therapies and accelerated them so that people could get relief from depression much faster. He took what was, you know, many weeks long or months long thing and compressed it.

47:01He saved lives who's also doing the studies of IBegane. Took his own life. I mean, this one's still sinking in for me. There's no reason to believe it had anything to do with IBegane whatsoever. He took his own life. He's a colleague physician friend of mine at Stanford. And I know his wife who's also a physician. I know his kids. He's been on my podcast. He looked like the young Jim Morrison, handsome. He was a martial arts guy. He was a type one doe. Like, fuck is right. Fuck is right. So what does it tell us? You know, I've had to, I tried to intellectualize these things too much, but what does it tell us? It tells us that knowledge is not sufficient to take care, to protect us. Like I feel like the data are in. Bold conclusion. Banner across the sky. Knowledge does not alone does not protect us. You can understand everything about the biology of these diseases. You can know, I messed up. I have something, something's, and you can understand, oh, that's serotonin. Or whatever. People will still do these things.

48:01And it's rare, fortunately, but it tells us that the, I believe it tells us something fundamental about humans, which is that there's always this dynamic tension between our underlying impulses and this top down control. And suicide is a weird one because it's like the whole thing gets, you know, twisted up so that we're no longer acting in an adaptive way, right? Obviously taken once life is not adaptive. It's a rage or a depression or whatever. And the conclusion that I draw from it is, what can we do to put ourselves in the best position to be able to hold our impulses in their healthy place? You know, if I, I don't want to make more of like what I did in the book or what I'm trying to do in the podcast or public education, but like, let's take the ice bath, for example. I've taken a lot of shit for the ice bath thing. You have to. We both know they don't like the cold. That's why they're talking about this. But we know for certain, I go through the data finally, give it, putting yourself into

49:02a high adrenaline state where your body and brain are freaking out and doing that deliberately, gets you better at dealing with high stress states, which in my mind is only a good thing. This should be basic training for children, you know, not a young children, right? Why, you know, does increase metabolism marginally? Does increase cortisol? No, that's a bunch of horseshit and we can talk about that. If anything, it reduces cortisol. It increases your ability to buffer stress. Is the ice bath a cure to mental health issues, addiction and relapse and all that? No, of course not. But is it, does it teach you to engage and top down control? Yes. Is it the ice bath per se? No, the ice bath is just one very efficient low cost way to get adrenaline to go boom through the roof. You could do it through a workout. You could do it through hot sauna that feels uncomfortably hot, right? You don't die of hypothermia. You can do it through any number of different things. The point is that the principle of learning to capture your mind and think strategically lower your state of arousal when you're in a stressful circumstance is a life skill that

50:06is invaluable. And getting great sleep, we could go on and on about all the benefits of that. There's probably a hundred benefits of that and probably a thousand things that go wrong when you don't get enough sleep chronically. All night, no problem. But when you're well rested, you are far less likely to harm yourself or others. Because your forebrain is more active and can suppress these impulses. And so my, you know, my kind of like, I don't like the word mission, but my goal is that we'll kind of move beyond the notion of like hacks or that it's this tool or that tool and just really understand like what we're trying to do when we're teaching ourselves to be better humans. And I do think there is a generation of kids that grew up hearing that their feelings are valid. Great. We didn't hear that growing up. I just assumed like if you drank and you couldn't stop drinking, it was a lack of willpower. Now we know there's a brain circuit, but if we say, oh, there's a brain circuit, therefore I'm not going to quit because it's a brain circuit. Well, you're still, you're still an addict, right? So the great sleep, social connection, sunlight in the morning, like these things are really

51:10designed to get us to have better control over our focus, over our impulse control. And it almost becomes so simple at that point. And we can say, well, what was going on with Nolan in the weeks before? Well, I have smattering of what might have been going on, running two giant projects in his lab, two companies, managing a family, managing a life. I'm not going to claim he was a perfect human being, but like, it's just like, overwhelm. His forebrain turned on him. Yeah, overwhelm was real. Yeah. You can only red line your system for so much. I mean, you know people have done this. I mean, you know people, and I've become friends with David Cho. I love that, dude. Fucking love him. Best fucking guy. Because he's so heartfelt now, having been through the meat grinder of media and life and his own tendency to self-harm. And he's in this just beautiful place now where he's just like literally painting everything in his environment.

52:11He's so happy with his family and his fucking awesome. And he's a very smart guy. So smart. He figured out how to keep it together. He did. And you know, you guys have common friends in, you know, people that have taken their lives and said, when he talks about it, it's like, and you can just tell, he's like, there's this understanding that comes from hard driving people that like, okay, I've not wanted to ever take my life. But like, you can, I can relate to Nolan. Just want out. You can't take it anymore and you want out. I think we've all been in that moment where we were like, fuck, at something we were able to pull ourselves back. And it's a shoot. I think some people just go down that shoot. And you know, David and I were talking about this because I know you guys have common friends and some of succumb to things and some who really like, rose and above all that. And he's like, look, man, it's, once you've tasted that edge of being pulled back and forth from your impulses and like, and you learned to just force yourself to both do

53:12hard things, as you always say, but also force yourself to like really embrace the goodness in the world and the love that's there. Like, let's not forget the lighter side, like the beauty of like all these amazing things in life. There's this kind of like promised land inside of us. I don't mean to sound religious here, but like, there's this place in us where like, yeah, all that's true. All those people, they all die. They, some took their own life and then that shit happened. But there's, if I just keep doing really hard things, I'm going to stay in control of my impulses. As long as I also touch the goodness that's there every day, like the sun's coming up, my kids are healthy. I'm here. You know, I turned 50 last year and, and I had to like, they asked me to give like a little toast or something. It was horrible. Like, I hate doing that kind of thing. I'll podcast all day, but not that. And I just realized I was like, my hero, Joe Strummer, one of my heroes from the clash, right? Dead at 50. So I at least got further than him.

54:1250. It's so young. And then I was like, so I'm in this like promised land now, like, yes. And that like joy of like having made it over some bump or something and seeing goodness and having great relationship now with my parents is taking a lot of work. But we're really in a good place appreciating all the gifts they gave me, seeing people leave. And like I have such love for Nolan and for all those people I mentioned, like I just love them. And understanding that the grief is just love is, man, I'll tell you, like, and I probably couldn't have gotten here without some of that psychedelic work because it really took my face and stuck, you know, just stuck it in the vomit of all this. But then you came out and you know, and you go, whoa, like there's so much goodness. So I don't know. I mean, if the psychedelics can help people, talk therapy can help people great. But I think on a day to day basis, it's like, do shit that sucks so that you can stay in control of staying in control. And also make sure you touch into the beauty of really good things.

55:15Well, I find that when you do the things that suck, you do the hard workouts and the song on the cold plunge, life just seems more beautiful. It really does because you're not overwhelmed with this. It just existential dread that just hangs over you just being a physical, vulnerable human being walking through this unknown, uncertain life. And there's a bunch of external chaos is like world wars and fucking financial collapses. And there's so much shit going on and everybody's brain do something that just exhausts that at least for a little while and lets you take in what a fucking beautiful day. Look at those squirrels just having a good time. Totally. Running around on the tree, listening to the birds just feel the sun on your face. I don't appreciate that if I don't do things. This is my own personal thing. I don't know. I mean, I know everybody's different, everybody's different biologically, psychologically. For me, I know what my formula is. My formula is if I don't do those things, I feel like shit, period.

56:16So I do the things. And I've experimented. I've taken days off, three days, four days off. And then at the fourth day, I'm like, Jesus Christ, who are you? Get to the fucking gym. Go hit the bag. And the world seems worse, not better. Way worse. Way worse. And I think there's a lot of people out there that are really very angry. Like you see a lot of people on social media. I think they're living in that state, but not a state of four days, a state of 40 years, of nothing, doing nothing and just letting your body just go, you know, you have dogs, right? You know, it's like when your dog doesn't get exercised. Yeah, he's fucking nuts. He's fucking nuts. So my new one has, he's part bulldog, but part pit too. And I'm keeping his nuts on this time, because my last dog, you know, as you know, I was like injecting with TRT, late in life, and he felt so much better this time. I'm keeping strummers. I'm keeping strummers and nuts on this dog. That's so much of fucking energy. Yeah, you got to throw the ball. You got to throw the ball. But this dude, I have him running on the fucking treadmill in the morning. Oh, wow. Oh, yeah, I take a full walk. And I train him from the time he was nine weeks to run on the treadmill.

57:17Does he like it? Fucking loves it. He'll haul ass it. Like right now he's up to five on a, on a, on a two in climb. And he's just like at the back of that thing, he falls off. He jumps right back on. People are like, don't earn his joints. I'm like, listen, I've raised bulldog breeds before. I'm not going to blow out his joints, okay? He is so stoked. He will just run and run and run. And then I'll, I tell him, wait, I'll put the liver treat there. And then when he gets that thing, his ears flop, he's going like, and you can tell when he's done, it's what you're describing. He's just like peace. Chill. So peaceful. Throw the ball from the ball from my dog. And then we go and sit down. He just lays on his back and I rub his belly. He's just so happy. This is Marshall. Yeah. You got another one, right? Cavalier controls. Yeah. They're great. He's amazing, but oh my god. Oh my god. Great dogs. He's a little love machine. All you want to do is kiss you. He just kisses you constantly. There are, the Cavalier controls have a little bit of a, almost like a bulldog thing to them, like the calm. This last year I went to meet the breeds out in New York.

58:18You can go and meet all the different breeds. You see like the otter dogs and you learn three things when you go meet these like hundreds of different pure breeds. First of all, people can look like their dogs. It's crazy. I don't know which direction it goes. Like you look to the guy who's got like the otter hound or these, and he's got a big beard. He looks just like the freaking around. Well Jamie Carl or a fucking contradiction to that. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. The other thing you learn is that the pure breeds, in addition to being shaped a certain way, like they have a certain demeanor. There's variation, but there's a demeanor. The bulldogs are kind of goofy. The sight hounds are locked in and looking all the, and I swear some dogs are smarter than others. They're counting how many people are in the environment. They're doing math basically. Whereas strummers just like, he did a line up side. The shepherd dogs. Yeah, they're doing math. They're counting all the time, accounting for everything. Then I leave there and I go, I turn to my girlfriend and we were like, which breed are we and I go, we're getting a bulldog mind. We're going right back to the one I already had.

59:18She's like, all right, she's pretty easy going about that. I'm like, you have not experienced bulldog love because they're just, they're heatiness. They just want love, comfort. They want chase the ball. They have this much forbrain. This is why I think dogs are the almost perfect species because their impulses are never to be bad. They don't have this rage anger thing unless people train them to do that. They don't. The dog is just, quote unquote, dumb enough and just smart enough to have the perfect life. It depends on the breed. The malinoes are malony. The malinoes are... Belgian malonyes are... Malonyes, excuse me. Meat missiles. Those little fuckers. They can be great dogs. I know people that have them but you have to be on them two hours a day. They need tasks. It's basically you live with a super athlete. You live with a prime Jose Aldo. Like I've never made fight.

1:00:19World champion. They could fucking leap over buildings. You can't just have them lay in the yard. They'll go crazy. They don't potato. No, they need things to do, man. They need tasks. Whereas Marshall, he's just so happy just chilling with you. He likes to cuddle and watch TV. That's what he likes to do. He likes to climb up on the couch and he puts his head right here and we watch TV together and I just pet him. If I don't pet him, he looks at me and then I got to start pet him. Oh, man. This episode is brought to you by Visible. As fall hits, we enter another season of change. Time to shift gears, drop the dead weight and upgrade the wardrobe for the drop in temperature. But one thing that doesn't need to change your phone. The smartest upgrade this season isn't a new phone. It's a better wireless plan. Switch to Visible, the ultimate wireless hack. You get unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just $25 a month. That means keeping the phone you already have, ditching your overpriced phone bill and pocketing some savings for yourself.

1:01:19All the perks of big wireless for half the cost. Switch today at Visible.com. The Visible plan starts at just $25 a month or get the premium Visible Plus Pro plan and save $10 on your first month with promo code Rogan. Terms apply, see Visible.com for plan features and network management details. You know what saves lives and has cured a lot of PTSD service dogs? For sure. We don't talk about this enough because it's not as like quote-unquote exciting as psychedelics. But then those service dogs have kept people alive. The pure love. Pure love. Pure love. They love you, you love them, you have fun together. They're goofy. They do things that are silly and you laugh and they know you're laughing. So good. It's like dogs are amazing. People that don't have love in their life, they're suffering. Like loneliness is worse than smoking multiple packs of cigarettes a day. Just for overall health and life expectancy.

1:02:20You know the Andy Stumpf came on the podcast. I love him. Great guy. Great guy. And he recommended this documentary to me, The Dark Wizard, which is about this guy Dean Potter who was a free solo client. Yeah, I watched it. And then the wingsuit guy. And that's a beautiful example of dogs helping someone at one point. I like took that dog and all sorts of crazy shit. The dog wagon was very dead devoted. Dog did not know any better. I don't think so. Dog did not know what the dog's to talk to. Imagine you're that guy's dog. Like you just, yeah, you just assume it's as normal. But the other piece there were like talk about dopamine and drive and life and death. That, I feel like that movie was such a like a key insight into the relationship between drive when it's in love and love of craft, love of people, and then drive when it's competitive in an unhealthy way. Like how the Buddhist talk about like ego and that, you know, ego is great because it can drive us in certain, you know, pursuits that can build things for us, family, society.

1:03:23But then how it can, you know, when people get competitive about the wrong things. Like in that movie, when he was doing things that he didn't really want to do, it almost killed him. But then when he was doing things that could almost kill him, but he really wanted to do it, but it was almost like spiritual like doing that tightrope walk with the full moon in the background. He is still dangerous, but there was like this piece in him. And I think about this all the time because Rick talk, Ruben talks about this. You've talked about this. When we're doing something out of like love of craft, even if we're fucking pushing so hard, Cho talks about this. Like it's like, it's not easy, but there's this kind of, I don't know what the word is for it, smoothness to the thing. But then when it's competitive for the wrong reasons, what are the wrong reasons? Well, for instance, Potter was a great climber and then started getting into other things. But when he had Alex Honald coming up on his heels and Honald was better than him, right? And he started getting competitive about this kid who was going to take away his legacy.

1:04:26He started making stupid mistakes. He started getting hurt. He started getting angry. His mental health got much worse. I mean, Honald's the last guy I would want coming up from my slot, right? Because he's so mechanical and methodical. You also, in that movie, I think Alex is fantastic. You also saw a different side of Alex when he was younger. There doesn't seem to be there right now. At least not visibly, which was, he was hyper competitive with the guys that he had grown up on. And he was like, I want that rock. I want that slot. And he says, he was a better climber. And so he wanted it before Potter. And so you can see when Potter's kind of like the dying lion in that field and trying to hold on, he starts doing stupid shit like these tightrope walks in China that almost kill him. And he's breaking down in tears. There's no elation. At the beginning, he's doing things and it's like, yes, yes. Then he's just doing things and he's like, just happy he didn't die. Two very different ways of looking at the same pursuits. And so I think that movie is a far more interesting insight into human drive more generally than

1:05:29it is about this clearly manic rock climber. The drive is an interesting thing because drive in its purest form actually replaces discipline. Like I was acutely aware of that when I was a kid because I was not disciplined at all. Really? I was a very undisciplined kid. I never cleaned my room. I never did my homework. I had very few rules growing up. It was quite feral. This was until 15. Until I started really training heavily in martial arts. And then when I got into martial arts, I still was not, I did not clean my room. I did not do my homework. I still. But in that one thing, I had insane drive and I worked so hard and I worked all day long every day and never took a day off. And that was the difference. It was like, it was the drive that replaced discipline because I loved the thing that I was doing so much. I found so much interest in it and so much passion in it. It was so exciting to me to do that I just wanted to do it all the time.

1:06:32So I didn't have to be disciplined. I knew there was work that had to be done to get better at it. But it was also, I was just intensely focused on getting better. So the work, like whether it's rounds on the heavy bag or practicing specific techniques or sparring drills or whatever the fuck I was doing, I wasn't doing it like gung, okay, it's what I got to do today. It was not that at all. It was just, I can't wait to do more of this. So rad. I was only the only thing that stopped me was time and sleep. I would try to do it all day every day. I was obsessed, but I wasn't disciplined. I had to get disciplined later on in life when I stopped competing in particular because then there was like this is over this overwhelming, looming threat of physical harm if you don't stay in the jam constantly. If you're not like 100% ready, there's this possibility that you could zig when you should desegged and you get a fucking shindeer head. There's a lot of terrifying thoughts that are involved in that that keep you training

1:07:34really hard. But I didn't have discipline. I didn't develop discipline until I stopped competing. Then I realized like well, I should work out because I should work out and I should eat well because it's good for you and I should lift weights because it's probably good to be strong. And it was doing things because I know they had to be done rather than I was obsessed with doing them. I mean, I'm telling a just so story here, but there's also a part in me which says like, it's a mild bit of OCD, but thank goodness you didn't clean your room because what if you had OCD and you're like, I'm going to be the kid with the perfect room. And then I'm going to be the kid that washes my hands all the time. Then I'm going to be the kid that just all about cleanliness. Like I think I do think that, you know, what is obsessive, compulsive disorder versus being passionate about something? So here I can, there's a really important theme to OCD, like true OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder is characterized by the following. The more you engage in the behavior, the stronger the compulsion gets. And that's why it's so maddening for people with true clinical OCD.

1:08:37So for people that have a hand washing thing, they're like, I have something on my hands, they go and wash it and it just makes them want to wash more and more and more. And you know, I'm not a big fan of SSRIs in many cases, but I will say if there's one place where SSRIs have really helped a great number of people not completely dissolve into a puddle of dysfunction, it's proper use of SSRIs for true clinical OCD. So OCD in that way, like washing the hands, what is the cause of that? Do we know? Well, we know. So there's a woman who was at NIH for a long time. She passed away this last year. Her name was Judith Rapaport, a real pioneer in this whole field and brain science more generally. And she found that there's an area of the brain called the basal ganglia. These are circuits that we all have that are involved in generating action, go and no go. You have to basically have an accelerator and a break on action. And the basal ganglia have these, you know, it looks a lot like a gear system in a car when you really, you know, just, you know, draw it out. The people who have true clinical grade OCD have an enlargement for whatever reason of

1:09:42subregions of this circuit. And they basically feel the impulse to do this thing all the time. Now what is the thing? The thing is based largely on inputs from structures like the hypothalamus that are related to very primitive adaptive behaviors like, you know, getting infections out and getting, you know, dirt away is, you know, adaptive when it's done in a healthy way. You know, there are all these people and there's actually a paper. I hate this paper, but it's a real paper that like watching zip popping like stimulates dopamine. This is why people do it. I can't watch these things. It's like, but people like shout out to Dr. Pimplepumper. There seems to be someone sent me this paper. I'm like, how God is it? And I'm like, and I look, I'm like, I just paper someone actually ran the study and now this explains a lot of the internet, the stuff on the internet. There's a component in all of our brains that get some sort of satisfaction from the removal of infection. Right? From relief from infection. That makes sense.

1:10:43Yeah. And so this, and this feeds into these basal ganglia circuits. For some people, it's compulsive water drinking. I mean, on a lemic of dopamine nation talks about a patient of hers that was a, basically addicted to water, compulsive water drinker. They actually died. It's very, very sad. Like in all seriousness, like over ingestion of water in this woman. Yeah, it does kill people. I remember there was a lady who was doing a contest for the radio to get like an Xbox for her son. Like how you can drink the most water. That thing is called hypernatremia or something like that. I could have that wrong. But the, you know, people who have OCD about germs often, you know, germs are bad, but, you know, worrying that much about germs is obviously not good. So again, we're talking about primitive brain circuits and these circuits that can go awry. You know, some people, they just, for reasons we don't understand, they have overactive areas of the brain. Actually, I have a positive tale that you might like because I asked to do a jujitsu of which I do none, but I have a close childhood friend, his name is Eddie Chang. He's the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF, brilliant guy, bioengineer.

1:11:44He's figuring out the speech system in the brain. He's a member of the national academy. He's my friend since we were seven. And he's like, in this amazing physician. And he called me very, very calm guy. And he called me and he said, he calls me Andy, which is unfortunate, but he goes, because he knew when I was a little kid. And he goes, Andy, I've got a patient who wants you to come to the surgery. And I go, what are you going to do? And he goes, well, he's got a tumor and he's really into jujitsu. And he really admires like Joe and Chaco. And you know, would you think you'd come up? And I was like, yeah, chance to get to see my childhood friend do brain surgery. Yo. So I go there, I meet this guy. This guy has a tumor that needs removing from the frontal lobe. So you're in there for the whole thing. Right up there. Right up there. I mean, you know, so I'm in there and it's, they keep patients alive for this. So they locally awake, that's, excuse me.

1:12:45They definitely keep them alive. I love that you don't edit the show. So you like, this proves why I misspeak some of it. He's definitely alive going in and coming out. He's alive today. I spoke to Eddie this morning. And they basically remove, you know, they remove the skull. They go in and the way they decide what tissue to take out is and what tissue to keep. Because the tumor is, you know, is embedded in functional brain areas that are required for speech, for movement, etc. You can't just start scooping brain tissue out. And what I learned is that these tumors don't look different when you just look at the brain. They feel different to the, to the instruments of the highly trained surgeon. So he's in there. Eddie's in there mapping, stimulating different areas of the brain while this guy is awake and reporting what he's feeling, okay, his hands moving. And I'm going back and forth, talking to this guy, going back and forth and seeing the tumor getting removed, little by little, put into play, goes off to biopsy.

1:13:47But this guy is awake the entire time. Incredible. And as they're doing this, because the patient agreed, they're mapping. What areas of the brain are involved in mathematics? What are areas, he's doing math problems. Well, he's in this surgery, while this patient is doing this. He's also saying, oh, you know, I felt that in my toe or I felt that in my face. And so, you know, Eddie's getting these functional maps of the brain that we've never had before. And his lab has discovered incredible things about how speech and language are organized in the brain. He's taken people who have full locked in syndrome, completely paralyzed, who could just blink to communicate. And that's it. There's been written up in the news, hit out patient poncho, who Eddie's figured out there are areas of the brain that prepare for speech, not just generate speech, created through AI and bioengineering, because he's also a bioengineer, of course. He created ways that this patient can now speak. And the first thing poncho ever said was, hello, and he said, how are you doing?

1:14:47He said, doing well. And the AI is learning his speech patterns. It's taken what would normally be sent to the pharynx and larynx, right? Because after all, speech is just an exhale that's controlled by the pharynx and larynx and the tongue. And the AI gets better understanding what this person wants to say. And now he's got patients literally, they're still in wheelchairs, right? Wheeling around with an iPad next to them of their face speaking, according to what they're thinking. This patient who got the tumor removed is amazing. I asked Eddie this morning in case this happened to come up. How's he doing? He goes, great. I think, and we filmed all this, by the way. My teammate UCSF did this. He'd like you to come to a Jiu-Jitsu class. So we may put this out there. I think he's really in his 60s. From what I understand, he's serious. He rolls like five or six days a week. He's like really into this. And he's now rolling Jiu-Jitsu. This tumor, which would have killed him, is out. He's yes alive. He's thriving. And you know, we hear a lot about the negative aspects of AI. But I asked Eddie to what extent is AI critical for this kind of technology to evolve?

1:15:49And he's like, absolutely critical. Because it can take all these neural signals and figure out what the brain was doing exactly when the person said the word four or the or my name is Blank and Blank. You know, you can't sink that many electrodes into the brain before you start destroying brain tissue. So you have to collect a lot of different signals. And AI is greatly facilitating our ability to decode what the brain is trying to do. And I said, so where else is this going to go? And he said, well, this obviously is what Elon wants to do with neural link and taking paralyzed people out of a paralyzed state. It's like, what's the intention to move? What does that look like? Nourily. And then convert that into signals that maybe it's prosthetics, maybe it's actual muscles and nerves can respond to accurately. So the takeaway here is that like, we hear a lot about the bad stories of medicine, the stuff that's on the edge. And we still need to figure out like the psychedelic stuff. But I have to say with respect to AI in medicine, I am super, super excited.

1:16:51About people walking again, seeing again, I mean, this stuff is starting to happen. Having brain tumors removed that do not encroach on areas of the brain that are critical. I said, if you were a quarter centimeter or less into this other margin where you recorded that the guy says, oh, yeah, my hand, I felt in my hand. If you were to nick that, he's like, he'd completely lose a hand function. Now mind you, he's one of the best surgeons in the world. I'll go on record saying that. He is like, may you never need his help. In fact, there's one of our public facing health colleagues. I'll tell you this because he's been public about it who got a stem cell injection into the disc down in Mexico and it got infected. I've heard of people doing things like that. And was paralyzed. And was in a hospital here in Texas. This is no, I'm not casting any judgement on Texas, but what happened was they didn't realize that he had an egg-shaped, egg-sized infection there. Okay, so the surgery had gone awry, gotten infection. And he was paralyzed and they said that we're going to have to sever the spinal cord to get this infection out when they finally discovered it.

1:17:54I contacted Eddie and I said, listen, here's what's going on. He said, get me in touch with his doctor, get me his charts. He was airlifted to UCSF and it wasn't Eddie that did the surgery, but it was someone in his department that removed this egg-sized infection and Eddie called me from the surgery. Okay. We're triple masked in here and I can smell the infection. It turns out that bacteria had never been identified in the United States. So there are bacteria that exist in other places that were just not exposed to that frequently. So it was very virulent in this case. They got the infection out. So this is just like a clinic with a dirty needle? This was a bad clinic with a bad practice of some sort. They screwed up some, someone screwed up along the way. And this guy happens to be a physician in this case. This guy is walking, talking, exercising. How's his back? Great. The injection help. Oh, I don't know. So I asked, so what was it that allowed you guys to do this?

1:18:57That another clinic might not have been able to do. Because I like you and very interested in what makes for good doctors versus so-so doctors, versus lousy doctors, versus superb doctors. And he said it's two pieces. The training and the skill of the physician, obviously. Their willingness to constantly update their models with new understanding of what's out there, new technologies. And it's also these incredible bioengineering and AI technologies that can make estimates about where the margins of error are in real time. Because you know, when you think about the brain, you get an MRI, you see, okay, there's the tumor. We're going to go out and scoop it out. But I've seen this now, this close. And in three dimensions, it's a completely different picture. Like you're, he's scooping out this tumor. He's probing around the tumor. And then I'm like, is it done? And he's like, no, it's interdigitated. Meaning it's vessled into other brain structures. We have to go after that stuff. I said, what are the margins of error? He said, you know, less than a millimeter in some cases. And you're, by hand, they're picking out tumor, little by little by little, to try and ensure it doesn't come back.

1:20:00And sparing function. And it's incredible. And AI is updating based on every micro movement of the head that might occur. Because you know, the person's bolted in, basically they got an stereo taxa bolted to the table. Literally, can't move your head. I can speak, but he can't move his head. But they're little micro movements because the brain is pulsing. This episode is brought to you by Simply Safe. Some security systems aren't that secure. Say a burglar breaks in, alarms go off, police are called. But they still have time to grab stuff, damage your property, and get away. So yeah, not very secure. When you're ready for a security system that's serious about protecting you, try Simply Safe. It's just smart how they do security and why they continue to be a long time partner of the show. They're all about preventing the crime before it even happens. Like if someone's loitering near your place, live agents can speak to them, ask them to leave without you lifting a finger. That's how it should be done. Right now, get 50% off a new Simply Safe system.

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1:22:02Go to drinkag1.com slash Joe. And for a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of A.G.1 next gen or A.G.1 Pro. That's drinkag1.com slash Joe. So this is happening in real time. So the cool thing is, yeah, this video will release to the internet. I think the patient will agree to the whole thing. The patient has been very willing to do. Yeah, this guy is a true medical science stud. He's a, and he's an awesome family man and friend and he's just a, he's a hero of science in my opinion. So what are they using like tiny little scalp? So here actually is a technology he's using to record, from and stimulate the brain. If you put in Jamie, if you go to, well, what is that? Is that like inside the head that is to stimulate the brain? It's called the bravo mesh. Yeah, it's like a mesh that will stimulate certain brain tissue. It will also record. If you put in a poncho paralyzed eddy chain.

1:23:04I did. I had got the story here from your time. What was that mesh that stimulates the brain? What was that installed for? To stimulate the areas of the brain that can help us facilitate recovery of what tissue is still there. Oh, wow. Because eddy came up through a lab by a guy by the name of Mike Merzenick. And I actually talk about this in the book in the chapter on learning, you know, until the early 90s, people thought you couldn't learn after age 25 that there was no plasticity. Into the early 90s? Yeah. And then basically three guys, it was Mike Merzenick, a guy named Michael Kilgard, who's down in Dallas or maybe it's Houston. He's here in Texas. And a guy named Greg Reckonzone, who is this brilliant scientist. They did these studies at first in monkeys and then in humans, which showed that if you take adult monkeys or humans and you have them pay really careful attention to a task, that the brain changes and that the experiment is very simple. It's like this. So they had monkeys or a human can do this feel a little like a rotating drum.

1:24:06And the drums got bumps on it like braille. And the recording from an area of the brain that responds to touch. And the monkey's job is to basically press a lever any time the bumps go from course to more fine. So big, big, bump small bumps. The monkey plays this game and every time they get it right, they get some juice. Monkeys like juice. Press the lever, press the lever, press the lever. These are adult monkeys. They come back some time later and the brain area representing the fingers has expanded. The brain has changed. There's plasticity it learned. But what I didn't tell you is at the same time they're doing these experiments, there's a sound in the room. Okay. Now they do a different experiment where the monkey is still feeling the bumps. But the monkey is trained to listen to changes in the sound, subtle changes in the frequency of the sound, high to low or low to high. And if they get that right, they press, if they press, they think they went from high to low and that's the task, they press the lever where they pull the joystick and they get some juice. Under those conditions, the area of the brain responsible for hearing changes.

1:25:09Now the key thing here is the experience is the same in both cases. They're hearing and touching in both experiments. But the key difference is what they're paying attention to. The brain of the adult does not change just because of passive experience. The brain of the adult, and this is true in humans too, changes because of what you attend to. And when we start talking about neuroplasticity and learning, everyone would like to think, oh, my brain is different at the end of this conversation than before. You don't learn from passive experience. You learn from focusing and the friction that's accompanying trying to do things right and sometimes getting it wrong. The error signal is what instructs the brain to change. I'm sure you know this from martial arts. I'm sure you know this from other areas of life too. If your brain can do something, there's no reason for it to change. No rewiring is needed. But if you're trying to do this, I don't know martial arts well. I made it a little bit Thai boxing. I was younger, I boxing my 30s, which was really dumb by the way as a neuroscience professor. I had a great spa on Wednesday nights in San Diego where you got all these Marines and

1:26:11all these like team guys. I was so dumb. I'd come home like all busted up. My girlfriend was like, what are you doing? I was like, I like it. She's like, you don't get paid to do this. But it was a lot of fun. I think you learn a lot from spa. I wish it wasn't bad for your brain. I wish it wasn't bad for your brain. I will say this. I'm not encouraging anyone to box unless they really want to. But I also learned a lot about how to stay calm when you're getting your ass beat and how to think clearly. And it's also, I think Sam, who's the guy who wrote a fighter's heart? I love that book. Sam Shepherd? Sam Shepherd. He also talks about like, it's like an intimate thing to spa with somebody. Like what does he say? He's like, you're sharing bodily fluids with somebody. It's like a one night stand. It's not like you develop a closeness with the people that you spa with a respect. And I wasn't fast enough. I don't think my timing was really good. I eventually learned that I'm, I got a long reach that could help me. But I realized I can't be doing this. Not as a neuroscience professor, but I really enjoyed it. It's not something that you really get excellent at if you learn late in life, unfortunately. Unless you're a very unusual athlete.

1:27:13Most people who get good at striking, striking in particular, they start out very young. And that's how they get good at it. There's a level that they reach that someone who starts out late in life, even if you're a good athlete, you probably never reach that level. Like who's the light made with her? Perfect example. And he's something about him. He's, you know, one of the greatest of all time. But I think there's something to the fact that he started when he was really, really, really young. And yet a dad who was a world class boxer, and he had an uncle who was a world champion boxer. He was like, he was around it from the time he was young. So there's like pathways that they develop and their body, their body develops and grows while striking. And there's something about the maturation process of the, this is like just my anecdotal experience from watching people learn striking. It seems like the people that are really elite at it, they grew up with their bodies, as their bodies are maturing, they were learning it. And then it seems like there's a, there's a fuck it. There's a something that they have that you don't get later in life.

1:28:17You can get really good if you're a good athlete learning it later in a lot. You're never going to get best of ever world champion status. Like you have to have a super long journey. And that's the start when you're a fucking kid. Sometimes like your brain has to be evolving, learning those skills, learning timing and distance and fainting and how people react and how to map out potential reactions from certain, how to lure them into things. It's too much. Yeah. I learned a lot boxing. And I mean, at least three things. One is that landing like, like sinking like a, like a one to combination feels really good. It feels really good. It's hard to do. But I also learned that there's this thing called a really good counter puncher where you land a jab and you eat four. And you're just like in the world, just spinning, you're seeing stars. I also realized that six pap abs don't mean shit. You're down near the Mexican border. Like it's something that Jim I trained out was like pretty far south in San Diego. And some guys would roll in and like you wouldn't think much of them like, they're like unpeel

1:29:19they like, you know, everyone would spar on Wednesdays, you know. And they try and match people up by weight. And you see guys that did not look in shape who could move and you just get battered. I mean, they're just if they know how to move properly. So that was a good teaching. And then the last thing that like I really took away and I think about this on the internet too is there's always like one guy in the gym who moves really well on the bag who's like, speed back and heavy bag and just look so crisp, super in shape. And they never spar and they sit like at the edge of the ring and they give all sorts of advice about what you're supposed to do when you're in there. And then if you go and I finally did because in skateboarding I wasn't that good of a skateboard by the like, like, come on, like drop in like let's go. Like, like, have fun. Like, skateboard is a very inviting sport. It's not like surfing. We're like guarding the waves, right? And I was like, come on in. And I'm like, oh, no, my shirt like every week. I'd be like, hey, come on in like, let's just like do a couple rounds. Like you always have advice for everybody. Let's do a couple of never did. And finally, I got to owns the gym came over and goes, that guy's never boxed around in his life. You know, he probably did when he was a kid.

1:30:20He ate a few punches and like, he just like it. It looks really mint. And so, you know, there's like the internet people like quick to criticize, but like, all right, like get in there and do it. Like, you come out here and let's play. You know, and so I have to be careful. You have to be careful with that one because the guy could have gone in there taking my head off. But I was realize I was like, there are a lot of people that hang out where they call it. Like the skirt, like hang out on the skirt and just give advice all day. Like, don't court screw your jab. Court screw. I'm like, who are these people? You know, like, if you, so it's, it's kind of nice actually to get that experience. I mean, it was latent in life. I mean, I talk a little bit in the book when I was younger, I definitely got into a lot of scraps. I was kind of like a live wire. I do not recommend. You know, fighting is terrible. But there's something about martial arts about the fear and learning how to stay calm, while you're sparring. I think Jiu Jitsu is the best one because he, although there's always a risk of injury in Jiu Jitsu, you're not getting hit all the time. And so you could go pretty hard. And that's the difference really between martial arts, sparring, like kickboxing and things along those lines and boxing and Jiu Jitsu.

1:31:22Because in Jiu Jitsu, as many times if you're training in a really good gym with really good guys, you're going full clip. And both you and him are going full clip. And there's no animosity. They might be one of your best friends. You guys are just doing the thing that you do full clip. But by doing it full clip, because if he catches you, like, he gets your arm, you just tap. And then you go again. As long as you're, he goes healthy. As long as you understand what you're doing and knowing, and he's not re-enking on your knees and ripping your knees apart with heel hooks and stuff like letting someone tap. As long as you do that, you're literally going full clip. So you learn how to stay calm and you also get very comfortable with going full clip. So if you're in a situation, if you're a guy who only does point karate sparring and you're just touching each other and they stop and touching the other, and then you're in some wild melee at a bar where there's someone swinging at you full blast and throwing and wild haymaker punches. And you're panicking because you're not used to this scenario. A jujitsu person is used to someone going full blast.

1:32:24So they'll grab a hold you and it'll be just routine. They'll just drag you to the ground, trip you, get on top, mount, choke you, whatever the fuck they want to do, essentially, once they get a hold of you, they do it all the time full blast. That's why I think it's the superior martial art for self-defense. If you're going to really learn how to fight like striking, you're going to get hit and you're going to get hit a lot and you're going to be hitting people a lot and you're going to be going to war with each other and it's fucking dangerous and it's really bad for your brain. And that's really the only way to learn how to become when you're actually sparring or actually fighting someone. But with jujitsu, there's all that fear of brain damage removed. All the fear of really serious injury is greatly mitigated by tapping and good training partners. I need to get into it. It's such a fun thing to learn too, man. It's why we talk about boxing. I think combat, to some people, it just feels good.

1:33:24There's a circuit there. There's actually a friend of mine who's got to lab up at the University of Washington and he studies this brain circuit. Even though that male mice will work hard for the opportunity to fight other mice. We always hear like, oh, they just want pleasure and no pain. Male mice have a circuit and they will work their asses off, figuring out puzzles that were perplexed like 30% of the adult population across the world and these mice can figure it out and it's hard work for them to figure out these light sequences or lever press sequences for what? Not for a piece of food, not for water when they're thirsty, not for like methamphetamine, but to fight another mouse and then they're like, it's, they love fighting. That's crazy. There's no better than that. Oh yeah. They'll work hard and the reward is they get to fight a mouse. I mean, the mouse fight another mouse. Yeah, exactly. That's crazy. Yeah, I think it's, again, it's these deeper brain circuits that we all harbor and I think some people are like, oh, no, that's not even within me. I think, you know, it varies. I mean, my dad is from South America. He went to like a boarding military type school when he was a kid.

1:34:26He said everyone had to box. Well, it was a boy school. It was all dudes. They all had to box. Everyone had to box and they'd make them spar. It was like box, like, you know, like boxing drills. He was like, no, they'd like pit us against each other until you'd find the kind of combination of people that were about equal and then they just like, put you to work on each other. The idea was you were supposed to, you know, both learn the gentlemanly aspects about you know, touch gloves and the things afterwards. You have to like, you know, so there's that. And he's like, no, but you were supposed to try and stay calm in the, in getting, you know, while trying to beat up the other person and then beat you up. I think there's value in it. There's value in it and there's value in just what we were talking about earlier about doing difficult things. I think it is one of the most difficult things you could choose to do that you can voluntarily sign yourself up for a place where you're going to experience pain and severe discomfort and a very perplexing puzzle, trying to figure out a hit someone who doesn't want to get hit and they're trying to hit you and you try not to get hit or, you know, get tapped or whatever, whatever, wrestle, whatever, whatever you're doing.

1:35:26It's a very difficult thing to do. And those very difficult things to do make the rest of your life easier. It's like we were talking about getting shit for cold punches. I don't know if I get shit for talking about cold punches, but anybody who doesn't think you should cold punch hasn't cold punched the people that do it and the people that say don't do it, they just, they're coming up with excuses because it's fucking terrifying and nobody likes it. It sucks. Well, there's this, but what I was going to get to is it's not a cure. There's no cure. There's a bunch of different excellent practices and if you stack those up throughout your day, diet, nutrition, sunlight, exercise, all these different things, cold punch, sauna, your life's going to be better. And I think a thing like martial arts, particularly Jiu Jitsu, is a great addition to that. And if you don't like that, yoga is another great addition. It's one of the best things that we did a sober October challenge where we did 15 days of yoga and hot yoga. Yeah, 90 minute sessions. Was Bert doing this too? Yeah, we all did it. We did it together.

1:36:27It was one of the best months I've ever had in my life because you just feel so good and so calm and the rest of your life is easier. Fucking hot yoga is a bitch, man. It's really hard to do. Those 90 minute sessions are fucking hard. And when it's over, you are spent and you become the nicest person on earth. And the rest of your day is so much easier than that last 15 minutes of struggle. Sweat and like it's pouring rain outside. I mean, it's crazy how hard it is to do those 90 minutes. If you're doing them right, you need a bunch of those things in your life. You do. If you don't, you're going to suffer. It's like there's a balancing act that you have to acknowledge. It's interesting how the two things that really seem to catch fire out there where the idea that cold plunges block hypertrophy and strength adaptations, if done in the six hours after weight training, but you can do it before. It has tremendous benefit. I think it's mental training. And then the other one was the cortisol thing.

1:37:28You know, this idea like, oh, it raises cortisol. The data all say it does not raise cortisol marginally maybe, but mostly reduces cortisol and buffers your cortisol response to stress. And I think in the women's fitness community, this was especially kind of catchy. People thought, oh, cortisol bad, cortisol bad. I mean, the entire book could be summarized as get your morning cortisol high and your nighttime cortisol low and your life's going to be 100 times better. Why? Because when you view bright light, drink caffeine, exercise, cold exposure in the morning and your cortisol spikes, it ensures that your nighttime cortisol is low, which means it's easier to fall asleep. And if you have any stress during the middle of the day, this is, I think explains your whole thing of doing hard things makes life easier. When you spike your cortisol in the morning, if you have a stressful interaction, you're a question or something happens during the day, you do get an increase in adrenaline and cortisol to stress. But it's brief. If you don't, it's very big and it's very prolonged.

1:38:29So all these people, they're like chronically stressed the state of the world. Look, the state of the world is complicated, but they're constantly feeling oppressed by life, overwhelmed by life. If they were to do a couple things in the morning, view bright light, ideally from sunlight, I've talked about these things before. Cold shower or cold plunge, 30 seconds, right? Just uncomfortably cold, then get out. Exercise of some sort that's high-intensity interval training or lifts and weights that are heavy for them. That kind of thing for 45 minutes to an hour for the weights, maybe just even 10 minutes for the high-intensity stuff. And head into the day. Bouts of stress will happen, but your hormonal response to them will be severely blunted. There's so much data on this. And people always say, but is that just true for men? No, it's also true for women. And so people are weak because their cortisol levels are too low in the morning and they're too high all day long. The night they're like, oh, I can't sleep. I'm stressed. And this and that, well, you've set yourself up to be a vulnerable creature in the last third of your day. So that first hour of the day sets the whole stage.

1:39:31And if you can't exercise in that first hour fine you do in the afternoon, no big deal. But if we just understood that cortisol spiked in the morning is perhaps the best thing we can do for our health. I think the world would be so much better off. And everyone's like, oh, I already am too stressed. And cortisol is going to make me retain fat. It's like, no, no, no. People love excuses. People love excuses. Excuses why not take action or that's one of the greatest things that people indulge in. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace. I know because I use it. That's right. JoeRogan.com is powered by Squarespace. It has all the features that you need to create a standout website like an AI enhanced website builder, SEO optimization tools and seamless checkouts with mobile paylinks. Head to Squarespace.com slash Rogan for a free trial. And when you are ready to launch, use the offer code Rogan to save 10% off your first

1:40:32purchase of a website or domain. This episode is brought to you by UberEats. Its football season and UberEats is delivering deals every game day. This week, double down on protein packs sandwiches with buy one, get one, select six inch subs from subway. Whether you're keeping it low key for the game or hosting friends, UberEats has deals to keep you fed. So order a six inch turkey, tuna or meatball sub from subway and you'll get one free. No matter who scores big tonight, you'll score a deal. Order now for buy one, get one, select six inch subs from subway only on UberEats. Subway offer valid through October 4th, add eligible menu item to order prior to check out taxes, fees and terms apply. Product availability varies by region. Exclusions may apply, see app for details. People love excuses. We didn't close the hatch on the neuroplasticity thing. I just want to make sure I do that, which is what you focus on, you can change.

1:41:37You can learn skills if you focus. And the agitation that you feel when trying to learn, that is the reflection of the cocktail of neuromodulators in the brain and body that allow the circuits to change. I wish I had been told this in like the third grade. If they said, hey, when you're trying to learn something and it's easy, great. But when you're trying to learn something and it's high friction, like you can't do it, that frustration is the first gate of learning opening. And right on the other side of that is you continuing to try a little bit more. You have to do this through genuine attempts to learn, but you get some errors. So you can't just do throwaway errors, right? If I'm trying to learn billiards, which I'm only modestly poor at, right? If I'm trying to get better, and I'm just like hitting the ball wherever, you don't learn, obviously. I'm trying and trying the error signal sends a message to the brain that generates this agitation, the agitation tags the neurons. It literally puts a chemical tag on these neurons. Tonight, when you sleep, you need to change. That's what agitation does.

1:42:38And then when you get to sleep at night, those circuits change. And then you come back a few days later and you might not have the skill, but you're a little bit closer. It doesn't make sense. That makes sense. That's neuroplasticity. Particularly in martial arts, the kids, when you see kids, the kids, they get really frustrated when they don't learn, and they get really frustrated and they get really upset if they get tapped. They usually wind up getting really good. Interesting. Yeah, the more the ones who are like very emotionally attached, as long as they can control it, you know, but there has to be like, you can't go, well, you got me. It's got to be fuck. Right. Fuck. And then harnessing you and then pulling back, I'm like, okay, this next one and this next one. Right. Stay calm, but that fuck, even if you don't express it outright, that fuck thought in your head is always going to be there. Yes. That error signal, and I go into the brain circuitry that's responsible for this and which neurochemicals it is and on and on, but that signal is what gates neuroplasticity. One of the reasons why psychedelics are so effective in allowing plasticity because they

1:43:39are. I want to just be very blunt about this. The massive increases in serotonin with psilocybin. The massive increases in serotonin and dopamine with MDMA, because that's kind of the hallmark of MDMA. Every unique drug, it increases dopamine and serotonin together. Normally they're on a bit of a sea salt, but they increase both. Those are what we call neuromodulators. They make the brain more amenable to plasticity during the session and in the weeks that follow. So what are these neuromodulators? Well, dopamine, serotonin, acetocholine, noripinephrine, epinephrine, also called adrenaline. You go, okay, well, that's a big list of molecules. The key discovery of those guys, Merzenick, Reckonzone, and Kilgar that I mentioned earlier, you can give an animal or a person any molecule that will increase those, give them a learning session, and they'll learn better. It's not specific to one neuromodulator. And if you give somebody perpanelol a drug that blocks the receptors that adrenaline binds to after learning, they won't learn as well.

1:44:39They can't remember stuff. Why? Because there wasn't enough adrenaline. If you want to remember something, you need that frustration. You need the adrenaline. So if someone's like fearful of learning something and they take some sort of a beta blocker. Blocks learning. Wow. Great date on this. Larry K. Hill and James McGov people want to look at a beautiful literature. And they cite studies that these are more historical references where they would give kids, people would give kids lessons, and then throw them into a cold river to spike the adrenaline. Like people have been playing with this stuff for a very long time. Yeah. So nicotine, for instance, people think is it a cognitive enhancer. It is if you don't do it all the time every day. But if you, you know, I talk about nicotine and it's, you know, it's pretty habit forming. But if you take it before or after learning something, even after, right? Before during or after learning something, and you're not highly saturated with nicotine already, yeah, you'll enhance your ability to learn that thing. The problem is people are just popping them all day long every day just to get to baseline.

1:45:42Like we drink for fun. We drink caffeine to get to baseline. We take nicotine to get to baseline. Are you on the nicotine? I take them. But I wanted to ask you this about addiction. About is there a biological component to addiction? And one of the reasons why I ask is I, because I take these Tucker Carlson and sends me these Alps. I like these. They taste different than the other ones. I think I tried athletic nicotine in. I've not told you. I like athletic nicotine. That's probably my favorite, like the threes, because it's mild. Yeah. I do it all the time. My point is, I do it all the time. And I take them before shows. I like to suck on them before I go on stage. But when I'm vacation for 10 days, I didn't bring any on purpose. So I was like, let's see what this is like. Nothing. And I've heard so many people say that they have horrible cravings, they can't tolerate it. They go nuts. They just need nicotine. And I'm sitting there like on day two like waiting for it to come on. Nope.

1:46:42Nothing. not on nicotine. I mean, you're a bit of a mutant too. I don't know what it is. Like, I mean, just because you're so, it sounds to me like you're so familiar with discomfort. You may not even register that like, a mild tiny bit of withdrawal, but it is interesting, you know, because if I don't drink caffeine, life is a lot less interesting to me. And I've been drinking, I've been drinking a shit ton of caffeine. I mean, I've got a picture of my half Argentine. So there's a picture of me on my grandfather's lap, drinking mate from a gourd when I'm like three years old in my Spider-Man pajamas. You know, people on the internet they go, I don't believe, I probably drink 800 milligrams of caffeine a day and I'm fine. But if I don't drink caffeine, I just like, oh man, I don't know if I'm addicted in the classic sense, like I'm not gonna go rob old ladies to get caffeine. I'm not, I'm not, you know, I'm not gonna harm myself with it. If anything, it shows that it can offset dementia. I mean, the new data basically say up to about 400 milligrams per day, caffeine's great for the brain, for the body. You know, it's, people have anxiety, it can be problematic,

1:47:44but you just might not have, I mean, you may just naturally make a lot of aceto-coling. And so when you don't take nicotine, maybe you just rebound really fast. I don't know if that's it. I mean, I do take neutropics that might have an effect on it. But definitely. But I didn't bring any with me when I was on vacation. Amazing. I just brought vitamins. No cigars. Nope, no cigars. No non-invacation was it? It was fun, yeah. I enjoyed it. Family vacation. Nice. But the point is I was waiting for this thing that everybody told me was coming, and it never showed up at all. There was a zero. I mean, it wasn't hard. It wasn't a thing. It was just an eye-catching. It was just an eye-catching, right? And I do sometimes during the day, like, oh, wake up in the morning and say, I'm not gonna eat them today. I'm not gonna take any nicotine power. But I always wonder, like, is it just I got lucky? Like, some people, they literally cannot drink. Alcoholism is in their genetics. They have families that are alcohol, because that's a real thing. And they just can't handle it. Yeah, I mean, the guys who started A.A. talked about an allergy.

1:48:46They described it as like an allergy. Like, some people when they drink alcohol, their first experience. I had a friend like this from childhood, became an alcoholic, not surprisingly. And when he drank the first or second time, he was like, this is how I meant to feel. Oh, boy. Like, he felt like it completed something in him. I don't feel that way with alcohol. I don't drink, but I could without problems. You're sort of on off now, right? Like a original drink? I don't get drunk anymore. I'll have a drink or two, but I don't get drunk anymore. You miss it? That was the game drunk? No, no, no, no, no, no. When I took the eight months off, I didn't even miss alcohol. But then I went to dinner, had a margarita. I was like, ooh, I missed this. This is fun. This is nice. But the key is like, I just wanted to take some time off and just not feel like shit, because my problem was, I was stacking too many days where I was having a drink or two on the podcast, and then I was having a drink or two at the club. And then you do multiple days of that, and you feel like shit. And it was like affecting my workouts. And I said, this is stupid. Let me see how I fit it. And I didn't miss it at all.

1:49:47But when I did have a drink or two, I'm like, okay, I see there is a benefit from a social lubricant aspect. There's a funness to a glass of wine or a glass of whiskey. But the thing is, just understand what you're doing, and don't fuck your body up, and try to do your best. Take a lot of glutathione, mitigate whatever you're doing, and think about your body by actually consuming alcohol. And more likely, you don't need as much as you're going to drink. That's the problem. But to have a good time, a couple drinks, you have a good time. Five, six drinks. It's not really a good time anymore. You're kind of fucking plastered and you sound stupid. And nowadays, you know, with cameras and stuff, people say stupid stuff. I mean, I drank in college and I drank after a bit, and I just drank less and less. But, you know, when I was a junior professor, my girlfriend at the time, like, she just had the genetics where she could have a couple drinks and really enjoy it. Just like really enjoy it. And I mean, I think some people can do that. So, okay, what are the genetics that would cause someone to be like severely addicted to nicotine?

1:50:48Another one that I hear about all the time is cratum. We had a guy who came into the podcast and someone had sent us some cratum. One of our guests, like, had a cratum company. So, I'm like, and it was just laying around the kitchen. And he goes, you're not taking that. I go, no, some guy just sent it to me. And he goes, get rid of that shit. He goes, it is the fucking hardest thing to kick. I go, really? And he goes, yeah, I'm on it. It's horrible. He goes, it's an awful high. And he goes, and I'm fucking, I'm really struggling to get off of it. And I was kind of stunned. I was like, well, I've taken it before. And it didn't seem like it would be that thing. Like a thing that would make you addicted. But apparently, it's like any other opioid. Like, you can get like fully wrapped up in that stuff. So, but what is it about some people in their biology that makes them more susceptible to whether it's nicotine or caffeine or whatever it is? It's going to undoubtedly have to do with the genetics that line up the receptors in the brain that lead some people to have a very different experience

1:51:51with one substance versus another. For instance, there's a subset of people, about 8% of people that when they drink alcohol, they experience a much more euphoric high from it. These people tend to recover very easily the next morning. That's independent of tolerance. It tends to run in families. These people are very high susceptibility to like severe alcohol used to sort of what we, you and I know as alcoholism. There are people who take their first drink, as I mentioned before, and just like, this completes me. And those people usually have a certain genetic background. You know, I want you to talk about this, but there's certain genetic backgrounds. They probably have high levels of the enzyme that can digest alcohol, right? You know, can break down alcohol. Because it is a poison, but if you're breaking down more quickly, maybe it's not impacting your microbiome and you're sleep quite as much. And so you can drink a lot more and sleep fine and do fine. And varies by age too. Two glasses of wine at 60 feels very different. Two glasses of wine at like, you know, at 25. Because most people will tell you, right?

1:52:51We're just different resilience. In general, what the data say is that kids who took their first drink really young, like 12, 13, 14, are greatly predisposed to alcoholism later. But it's hard to dissociate that from this environmental circumstances around that. Why are they drinking at 12 or 13? You know, I think I took my first drink of alcohol. I'm not proud of this at 11. A friend, I won't mention his name, went to his house and he goes, hey, you know, my dad's got some, I think it was like wine cooler or something. And we drank him and we got, you know, we got drunk. And, you know, it wasn't a bad kid, but we got drunk. And, but the earlier you drank the more susceptible you are to alcoholism, but I never became an alcoholic. But I will tell you that my love of caffeine, my love of energy, focus and that sort of thing, makes me like about half the population who are probably have a decent susceptibility to stimulants. I've never done cocaine, I've never done speed, I've never done Adderall or Vivance. We could talk about stimulants. And in the book, I talk about some of the newer stimulants

1:53:53that are still amphetamine-like, but a little bit potentially safer. Do you do anything like my daffinol? I don't, I took one modafinal, couldn't sleep for two days. I'm very, very sensitive to these things. There is a drug that's approved for excessive daytime sleepiness that I took on a trip where I was under-slept and I needed to work. I'm called Sinozy. It's a, that's now in phase three for mild attention deficit. And I've taken that and I, I don't use it often, but I find that it really dials in focus and energy in a way that still allows sleep. And for me, was it much gentler and felt better than then modafinal or armodaphy? For me, the best thing that I've ever discovered for mitigating that feeling of being groggy with sleep deprivation is creatine. That definitely helps. The, the data for creatine for strength are there. The data for creatine on enhancing cognition when mildly sleep deprived are there. That's really where the powerful data is. You can feel it. It is, it's definitely.

1:54:53I mean, it's a fuel for the phosphocreatine system for the four brain, the part of your brain that's involved in strategy setting, et cetera. I would say about half, and these are broad numbers, right? You know, these aren't, you know, from one study. The real expert on all this, by the way, is my colleague Keith Humphreys at Stanford. And we could talk about some of the interesting things that he's found. But the, about half the population seems to like sedatives. They like vikin' in, they like opioids. I had a tooth surgery a long time ago that gave me vikin' in. I took half of one. I never wanted that experience again. You know, but I know people who are like vikin' it. They love vikin' it. They love being sedated. They like being sedated. They like being brought down a bit in terms of arousal. Some people like being ramped up. And I think you, one needs to be aware of their genetics and their predisposition for one or the other. Some people like both, but generally people fall into one or the other category. And I think now that many more people are avoiding alcohol, the ones who say, oh yeah, it's easy. And I never liked it. People like me. I think they're probably more of the, you know, they like stimulants. They like caffeine. They like nicotine.

1:55:53They like being up and alert. You don't even need a substance for that. So some people like both, but I think people generally been into these categories. You asked about cratum. So the world expert on this is an amazing guy. He was on my podcast. His name is Chris McCurdy. He's a professor down in Florida. And man, he has the best take on this. So the community online around cratum is very split. If you put out something about cratum, half of people will say this stuff is evil. It's opioids. This is like oxycontin. Get out of here. The other half will say this stuff saved me. Right. So you go, well, what's going on? And whenever I see that, I go, there's some interesting biology here, right? There's a sociology there. But as a biologist, I'm like, what's the biology? So I brought Chris on. He said, here's the deal. In America, pharma companies develop drugs based on bioprospecting. Peptides are a different story. And we can talk about that. But bioprospecting is finding alkaloids and other substances in plants, purifying the substance, the alkaloid

1:56:55that gives a specific effect and developing a drug. Cocaine, it comes from the coca plant, obviously, from the coca leaf. And he said, the experience of chewing coca leaf is very different than the experience of cocaine. The experience of the, I'm gonna call it cratum because I know there's another way to pronounce it, but I just feel weird saying it like cratum or something like that, but you know, the cratum leaf, he said, when people chew the cratum leaf, but the leaf, they feel a calm, but also energized. It's how you and I would think of like a strong coffee or a year, right? But what's happened in this country is that companies have synthesized pure cratum. They've taken one of the compounds in the cratum leaf and they've isolated it and now they've made it synthetically and that leads to a very different experience and addiction potential. And it's so, it's incredible because he said, you know, the most protected building in the entire United States, these are his words, not mine, is the Coca-Cola factory. Why? He said, well, years ago they had new Coke

1:57:56and they took out the flavor that they get all this, they still get all this coca leaf scent to this factory in the United States. It's still going there and then they extract the components that they need to, put it into Coca-Cola to this day. This happened today and then we drink Coca-Cola. So I'm like, there's, and they use the cocaine, they get from it for medical cocaine use. That it is, it is, cocaine is approved. It's not schedule one, that's right. It's schedule two as an anesthetic. That's right. So, Chris really nails it, right? So many things in science and medicine we're saying, cratum good, cratum bad. Turns out it's the synthetic cratum product that is bad, highly addictive. So when you have those drinks like, what is it, live free, aren't those, is that the cratum synthetic I don't know. I think it's the plant derived, isolated cratum, which is somewhere in between the two. But if you and I would both say, okay, like kids taking cocaine, not good. But Chris would say the coca leaf actually

1:58:56is a very interesting leaf that actually has some, some could be a, he'll talk about this as like, oh, it could be an interesting stimulant compound for people. You'll probably love it. But people, it's the same thing with THC. Like people will say, oh, let's just get the highest dose of THC into an edible. And then people are, they're eating it too fast. They don't know how to gauge their plane of high. And then we hear about certain people having psychosis and this kind of thing. Well, what happened, right? When you and I were growing up, look, I mean, where I grew up, everyone learned how to smoke a joint and take a bong rip. I'm not suggesting anyone do this. But you knew if you could handle one or a half, you learned the hard way. Exactly, you learned the hard way. I found I didn't like cannabis, but what you didn't do was eat half of a cookie that had 200 milligrams of THC and find yourself in a psychotic episode. And so nowadays, when we isolate things and we enrich them and we take them in that isolated form, that's when they get really precarious. Yeah, that makes sense. That's a story. And by the way, I know people are always coming on here

1:59:58and telling you, you should talk to someone. So if you want to talk to someone highly educated on all these compounds, bio-prospecting, pharma versus plant medicine, and all of this, christmas curative is your man. He is, like I'm paraphrasing here, but he's a savant of this stuff. And he comes in with no judgment. And so he'll say, the leaf products are very different than the isolated. The isolated are very different than the isolated synthetic products. And that therein is where the legislature needs to look. Because in this country, as you know, we go like, all drugs bad. Or then we go, oh wait, there's these incredible compounds in plants that we want. Well, there's a parallel and refined sugar, right? Parallel and refined sugar. Exactly. Let's figure out in food what makes it so rewarding that people just desperately want to buy more, even though they don't even really like the taste of it. Right. And let's make it in a way that never is in nature unattached to fiber, unattached to nutrients. Usually if you get sugar in nature, it's in an orange. That's right, it's good for you. Yeah, it's like a trick to get you to eat the orange. It's business and it's diabolical.

2:00:58And then we always end up about five or six years down the road and go, oh, we got all these problems. But what's interesting is, I didn't realize that pharma companies bioprospect from the jungle. They still send people to the jungle. We always think of the jungle as like this place that only shamans go, right? But no, American and Swiss and German companies send bioprospectors down there to isolate compounds from plants. With the understanding, there are all these medicines there. But we don't hear about all the others. The interesting thing about peptides is that, this is the first time that we are bioprospecting from the body. These are things that the body makes. I can't take credit for that understanding. That's really that distinction, which I think is a key one for people to understand, is Dr. Abu Bakr, this MD, who you and I are familiar with, who in my mind just really understands the biology of peptides. And because he's a practicing physician outside of peptide biology, I think he's an intensive care guy, or critical care, he can kind of see the picture now.

2:02:02Yes, insulin's a peptide. It came from the body. All these peptides now, pharma companies are like, what is the body making? Like in the case of GLPs, when you increase GLP is twofold, fourfold. You can see some relief from type two diabetes, some, but not much weight loss. That'd been happening for a decade, but when you increase it a thousandfold, wow, people don't want to eat. People don't think, okay, we could talk about the ramifications of that, but pharma companies are now thinking very seriously about finding all the peptides in the body, which ones are going to be potent for, there's a new one for increasing bone density, for osteoporosis, and then all the, people are thinking about biohacking with this as well. There's pinealon, which I'll occasionally take, and you get three hours of REM sleep that night, and on subsequent nights, your REM sleep is enriched. Interesting. We know GLP is obviously, BPC157 is the one everyone seems to kind of go to, but I think that there are a lot of interesting peptides that we've known about for a long time like Kispeptin,

2:03:03which is involved in resetting the reproductive system. It's involved in puberty, but it's being used to reset the reproductive system. All these peptides, I think the next few years, it's gonna be a bananza of peptides, and I get shit for saying it, but I'm super excited because my physician friends, who are super standard physicians, they're calling me like, hey man, my knee, this is BPC157 stuff gonna work, and I go, I don't know, you can try it, I know some clean sources of it, and then they'll come back a week later and like, why isn't anyone selling the studying at talking about this? I'm like, well they are, but your community doesn't like to talk about this. Well, there's a lot of people that dismiss it, and the way they dismiss it, it's very gaslighty. They're bullshitting you that all these anecdotal stories aren't significant, that all these professional athletes that are using it, or that are using it, with great benefit, don't know what they're talking about. It's threatening to them. I mean, they, I mean, as my, I feel like I'm quoting my dad today, so. It's threatening because of compound pharmacies.

2:04:03And it's threatening because a lot of these physicians are gonna lose their standing in the field as these, there's something to, we're important to understand about physicians, and again, there are many excellent ones, I referenced a few today, right? Many excellent ones, but they, there's a guarding of knowledge that existed in the science community up until a few years ago when podcasts hit, wasn't just me, you know, Bob Sapolsky was a pioneer in getting out there and teaching the public, and every scientist who's gone out into the public eventually gets this pushback, like, yeah, our field doesn't really take him or her seriously. It's, and sometimes that's legitimate criticism, although not in Bob's case. And in many cases, it's because you've taken their thing, it's their baby, it's what gives them value. I know I grew up around scientists. It's what gives them their value, their knowledge that no one else has. It allows them to be interesting. They now have to have people coming up to them and going, oh, did you see this podcast with so-and-so talking about this thing in anthropology on Rogan? And they're like, oh my God, like that's my field. Like, you know, and they, it's a self-worth issue.

2:05:05They're not like, oh, anthropology's getting publicity. Yes, or the good ones are, the secure ones are. But the physicians who are like, wow, if there's a compound that's making patients feel better really quickly, what's that gonna do to my practice? And then if I embrace it, my, here's the key thing. If I embrace it, my colleagues won't think much of me. And if I don't embrace it, maybe I'm gonna lose my, standing my validity as somebody of authority. If I've got patients coming to me and saying, I have this friend that took this thing and it really helped. Could I explore that? And I don't do that and they go elsewhere. Word spreads fast nowadays. So I like scientists and physicians. I also understand scientists and physicians. I, my father's a scientist. I grew up around them. My town, most kids were children of engineers or scientists and you see the full array, the secure ones, the ones that are really on the cutting edge that learn, that embrace the new technology. They do great. But the other ones, they're like dying, they're a dying breed. Because their whole practice rests on them having the knowledge and you not having the knowledge.

2:06:06So much so that they're saying, chat GPT bad, they're saying it's bad because patients are coming in and they're like, hey chat GPT says that what you're recommending is perhaps not the best thing. They're freaking out right now. And so they're saying, AI is bad for medicine. But the good scientists, the good physicians are like, great, it's gonna help our practice. They're genuinely interested in helping people. You see two, it's two camps. So when I hear people saying, oh yeah, this BPC, no trials. Okay, are there any adverse events we need to know about? Not that I'm aware of. And a bud says, you know, the lethal dose is like super high. No one's even come close to achieving it. I'm sure someone will figure it out. But I get excited because I think, all right, now the general public finally has some agency in understanding what's going on with them. Thanks to AI, thanks to podcasts, thanks to the internet. And it can go awry, certainly. But I had a shoulder thing a week ago. I don't know, never have this shoulder thing. And I put two injections of BPC gone, gone.

2:07:08Now, could I put saline in there? And it would have been the same, maybe. But all I know is it's gone. And I don't understand that argument of putting saline. Is that a common thing where people have severe shoulder pain? Oh no, sorry, do it just running a control experiment. I could have put it in. But I've heard people say that. That's why I've heard people say that in argument, oftentimes people have similar benefits in injecting saline. And I'm like, who's done that? Why aren't people injecting saline instead of getting cortisone shots in their shoulders? I mean, this is how they talked about creatine, this is how they talked about TRT. This is how they talked about women's hormone therapies. It's very interesting because for legitimate, their legitimate complaints about the fact that for a long time, science and medicine did focus mainly on men. And the women's hormone trial basically was a mess because they said there were all these adverse effects and turns out it's when you started the hormone therapies. And we now know that if those therapies are started early enough, they're immensely beneficial. So there's more acceptance of hormone replacement

2:08:09there across the board. I think TRT now is kind of a broadly accepted thing, although I think a lot of guys are doing it too young. They don't even know why they're doing it, like in their 20s or something. But that's not TRT really. That's not TRT. They're just doing juice. Yeah, they're just doing juice. But when it comes to the peptides, I think my prediction is it's going to slot in right between prescription hormone therapies and what we think of as supplements. I think there's going to be this third middle category where, sorry, practicing physicians. People are going to find the safe sources. They'll be US-made sources soon, I hope. They'll be reliable people who can educate on this. People will understand the risk profile of these things. And people will be buying them and taking them legally. I think that's going to happen. It's that also now people aren't afraid of needles. The GLP industry was so genius in taking this thing, needles, they're all needle phobia, needles. What am I going to do and they made a pen? To, to, to, still needle.

2:09:10The pens have gotten rid of everyone's needle phobia. So now my sister, people are like, oh, what about peptides? I go, you have to inject it and go, will they have the like the little needles with the pen? Yeah. No one's afraid of a pen, even if it has a needle on the end. But no one like, so it turns out it was the syringe that scared people. The plunger. The plunger. So I'm excited and I have to say, it's not because I think everyone should be blasting this stuff. I just think knowing scientists and physicians and getting the calls and emails from them, like, do you really think this thing can help my knee? I'm like, it might, and I can tell you it's, it absolutely will, but then when they come back and like, this is wild, how come there aren't 20 clinical trials? It's because the general public beat the scientific community to it. And I know this is going to break some hearts. There will never be good clinical trials of each and all of these peptides. The horse left the stable. It's out. It's out there. Like, it's over. There can be some studies, but people are just going to keep doing it. So I think it's frustrating for the medical community

2:10:10to realize where we are in 2026. It's like, shit, if people find stuff that works, they talk about it and then they just start doing it. I think you made a really good point about the ego of the people that are controlled the information. It's, and it's generally men. It's generally, yeah, let me think. I mean, I think it's probably, it's a bunch of women that do it too, but it's a very masculine behavior. Well, it's interesting. I put out a, a, to eat the other day, and I gosh, I, I only have regret doing it. And I said, you know, people contact me all the time saying that physician friends with people coming in who identified tumors from a whole body MRIs. And I think as the cost comes down, I think it's going to be a very interesting tool. And the neurosurgery in other communities, like dog piled me, like we, this is terrible, this is terrible. You know who didn't dog pile me? Where the dozens of dermatologists and ophthalmologists saying, we think scans and more data are great. The ophthalmology community and the dermatology community

2:11:12have embraced public education on these topics of eye health and skin health and AI and scans. And they, they're very comfortable with it. And they're, they're working synergistically with it. The neurosurgery community, they say, oh, now we have all these people that are freaking out because they think they have a deadly tumor. So it's, which is a valid criticism. So I called some friends, leaving Eddie out of the equation here. I called some friends who are in the neurosurgery community. And I said, what do you, what do you make of this? I haven't been dog piled by members of my community in a little while, right? I'm not neurosurgeon, but this is interesting. And they said, the ones I spoke to said, in 20 months, this is going to be standard practice for people to just get whole body MRI. So what was their resistance? They don't want people freaking out because they see like a little thing on their pituitary that scares them and thinking that they might be dying of a brain tumor. They want, but they want control. They want control over the flow of data. They, I'll go toe to toe with any of these people

2:12:14and just say, I understand that only neurosurgeons can do neurosurgery. Absolutely. Those are the only people we want doing neurosurgery. But people doing an elected or elective procedure. It's not like you're forced to do it, right? It's not like you hit 40, you have to do it. People can choose if they want to do it. And if the cost comes down, if insurance covers it, it's safe. Now some people say the MRIs aren't safe. OK, that's a separate matter. I think, provided you're not getting them all the time, what we understand is that they're safe. But there are communities of physicians who just do not want people to have data about themselves because they think it's going to make those people stressed. But guess what? I remember the 80s when they said, OK, genetic sequencing is coming around. Do you want to know your genes? Do you want to know if you're getting Huntington's disease? And you want this smart answer is some people say yes. Some people say no. But you should be able to choose. The gatekeeping on this is real, very real. I'm fortunate to be in the Bay Area with Stanford where it's very tech savvy.

2:13:14It's very cutting edge. Stanford, like any university has, it's pros and cons. But it's very much about what's happening now and next. We're not very much focused on what happened in the past. It's not like these, frankly, like these other institutions elsewhere that are really focused on 50 years ago trying to keep that whole culture going. It's like, what's new now? What's useful now? And they embrace AI. They embrace whole body scans. I've got colleagues who are getting whole body scans, who are suggesting whole body scans. And I think it has to do with how forward-thinking physicians are. So these physicians that we're attacking you, there is it just them or people arguing with them? The people that join them? Yeah, and when this happens, I try and listen. Right? I didn't call friends in that community looking for validation. I was like, did I screw up? And like, listen, there are a lot of neurosurgeons and other physicians who are including heart surgeons that are worried that patients are just going to be getting a lot of data back, saying, listen, you've got this blip on the radar here.

2:14:14You should be concerned in that they're going to be doing a lot of therapy for these people having to reassure them that they're OK. I would have thought it would be good for business for them. Like, if anything, they'd want more of this, right? Turns out that's not the case. I think the psychological management of patients is a big thing. And that was something that I didn't understand. And that their response kind of educated me on, that the patients calling them freaking out that they have a tumor someplace. And them having to say, listen, it's benign, you're going to be OK. That seems problematic for them. Two weeks later, I forget who the celebrity was. But somebody sent me on X. There was a news article about a woman who went and got one of these whole body scans and identified a life-threatening tumor and had it removed. And her first physician had discouraged her from getting it. I thought about putting that out in the world and saying, see, see, but that's one case. So when these things happen, I try and just think, what am I hearing? What's my finger on the pulse of here? I think physicians are feeling scared.

2:15:17It's a very long, hard training to become a physician. If your patients are now challenging you, hey, this medication combination you gave me, and the internet says it's dangerous, that's an uncomfortable place to be in. I get it. On the other hand, I'm all for people having more agency and knowledge. Well, especially in light of the fact that what's medical malpractice? Is this like the third leading cause of death in this country? Oh, I mean, what it like? This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. OK, when it comes to sleep, I've got to have the right temperature dialed in. Depending on the time of year that might be ripping hot, I'm talking volcanic or igloo levels of iciness, the point is I need the temperature to be just right so I can get deep sleep. The kind of sleep that drives real recovery. And luckily, Eight Sleep is all about giving you the best sleep possible. Their new pod five smart mattress cover is designed for deep sleep and personalized for you,

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2:17:20and let Trigger handle the rest. It's simple. If you like food that tastes like it came off a real fire without all the work, check out Trigger grills. What is, what, I think it's in the top 10, right? An accident. I mean, if you go to an emergency room in the middle of the night, your probability of getting prescribed a medication that could potentially kill you or harm you. Like a contraindicated medication goes up exponentially. A great sleep doctor at Stanford, his last name was Demand of all things. Whoa. Yeah, he, one of the co-discoverers of rapid eye movement sleep, he would teach the medical students that the probability of them making a fatal mistake in the middle of the night or when their sleep deprived goes up by a significant degree. We know this and yet, if you go to the emergency room at three in the morning, your first question for the on-call physician should be how long have you been on call? Right. Not do you normally work this shift or,

2:18:20because sometimes they sleep all day and they work at night, how long have you been on call? If that's more than 12, 15 hours, you wouldn't let that person drive your car home. Right. We know the data say that they might as well be drunk. Right. And they're, and it's also how they train them that when they're going through residence, it's a part of the hazing process. Yeah. It's a part of the hazing process. Would you look, put that in the perplexity and see what leading cause of death? So there's a malpractice. I will say third. So that's malpractice, but what about medical error? Medical error. Well, it says these two terms. Okay, that estimate refers to medical error, not necessary. Okay. So medical error is responsible for 251,000 deaths a year. Whoa. That's crazy. I mean, the airlines understand this. Do you understand how insane that is? Imagine if there was pop tarts. Yeah. It says a widely repeated claim comes from 2016 BMJ analysis by John Hopkins, extrapolated from several hospital studies

2:19:23and estimated roughly 251,000 deaths per year associated with medical error. If that estimate treated, we're treated like a conventional cause of death. It would have ranked third behind heart disease and cancer. Ahead of chronic lower respiratory disease in the 2013 comparison used by authors. Wow. And that's death. I mean, you know, right. I don't want to merge too many themes here, but earlier we were talking about psychedelics and a theme from that whole thing is this notion of microdosing. One of the things that the GLPs and peptides and physicians and the culture around medicine has really evolved to is that in recent years, people have realized, oh, you know, these GLP drugs are expensive. They have side effects. People are microdosing them. They're sharing them. They're taking far less than they're prescribed, making it last longer and getting the positive effects they want with far fewer side effects. Physicians hate this. Drug companies hate it too, but physicians hate this. For obvious reasons, their patients are going rogue on them based on information on the internet.

2:20:25But the patients, and I wish that people would understand this, people will always trust their experience more than someone else. It used to be that you trust the person in the white coat. No more. Stethoscope, white coat may get you there, but to maintain that trust, they have to listen to the experience of the patient. And that's what physicians and scientists, to some extent, have lost in the last five years, largely due to the pandemic and public health education and AI and everything just kind of being out there and free for all. But I hear from people all the time that are not of the, I would say, kind of more of the health conscious community, and they, even the people who tend to trend more traditional, lefty, like standard medicine, do whatever the government says unless it's this government, like that kind of mindset. We're saying like, oh yeah, would low dose Terzepetide help me with chronic fatigue? Would, should I be taking BPC? People will ask these questions, something, well, if these people are asking the question,

2:21:25that means people around them are asking it, starting to become okay-ish to have these conversations. And then they're going back to their doctor and saying, can I take a tenth of the dose? Doctors are not gonna say, yeah, great, take a tenth of the dose. And the drug companies definitely don't want that. They're gonna make a tenth of the money. So as you and I know, the peptide community is a real threat. Not just because of the peptides that are people are taking or that the peptides, they're replacing from pharma, but because of the way that people are taking the peptides, like redditruthides gonna come out from lily, make them billions, if not trillions of dollars. They're working hard to protect that patent. But you can bet people who are getting prescribed real redditruthide from lily will be taking less and sharing it based on information they hear on the internet from the peptide community and on health podcasts. Because, and that scares the shit out of them. And it should, it should scare the shit out of them. It says the clinical trials were done at these various doses, but not these microdosis, perhaps. People have different responses.

2:22:26Some people respond very well. Some people need more. So patients now are trying to figure out, how can I get the effect I want with the minimal amount of side effects and they're doing the experiments on themselves. And that is changing the whole model. And we're never going back. I gotta laugh at when these folks who were trained 30, 40 years ago are trying to hold on to this thing. It's dead, it's gone. It's over. I see these people on X and they're like so upset. And it just reminds me of when the parental advisory stuff came out. And it was like, they're swearing on music. And it was like, every kid was like, yeah, I want that music. Because as the parental advisory, more on. They just don't get it. It's like, you know, you talk about plasticity at any age, you would apparently like got like cement in there. Because you're like, I don't know. This is why people should retire. Well, it's just what you said before too, that some people just want to be completely in control of the distribution of information and the gatekeepers of the knowledge. And they want to be thought of as the experts. I mean, that word doctor used to impress everybody. Now it only impresses certain people.

2:23:27And for a lot of people, it's a turn off. And the same thing for scientists. I mean, I deal with this, you know, I'm kind of a different kind of scientist because I've been in different communities and I public education. And I'll talk to most anyone who's willing to have a reasonable conversation and I'd love to explore. But a lot of people just like authority, you know, medical authority, like to them, that's a negative. It's a pejorative. And so we're in this whole other landscape now. That's going to be one of the weirder aspects of AI as the disolvenment of all the reference for experts. Because everyone's going to have all the information. I mean, congratulations. You memorized it. Great. I just got the information in three seconds. It's so wild. If you look at the history of academic science and medicine, which I love to study, I've gone back to like the time of Galen, which was one of the early, you know, physicians who did, you'd love this. He worked on gladiators publicly. Because you couldn't, they didn't allow people to do surgeries on the human body. It was illegal. But like, so he would do these surgeries publicly or a pig. It was, it was wild. It's a great, there's a great book.

2:24:28It's very dense, but it's called the Prince of Medicine. And it's all this medieval stuff that you love. And like, you'll realize what a prehistoric thing medicine is even now. Like how fast and how far we've come in the last 50 years, 100 years. But the whole pump and circumstance thing of like, like I've never been to high table dinner at Oxford. It'd be fun to go. But the whole thing of like the robes and somebody sits higher than everybody else, that dissolved in the American universities. You still see it at some of the East Coast universities, but that's dissolving. So what's literally happening is people are being, these authorities are being brought down to other people's level, right? It's almost like this was borrowed from other, other aspects of life, of course, politics and even religion, this kind of thing. The uniform was so important. And people like this reverence. And the internet has, it hasn't leveled the playing field, but it's completely disrupted that model. So, you know, I'm not the only one, of course, but like for people to learn inside the system, go outside the system, and now for the system to bleed onto campus and scientists

2:25:29to bleed out into the world. Like God bless Onalempke. Like almost what, 10 years ago saying like, this dopamine thing, we gotta worry about this, but just understand what it is. Like God bless her, people like her, Bob Sapolsky. These people were the pioneers. I can't claim to be, you know, I was early, but not first, and they broke out of the system and started publicly educating people. And that it, it builds up their authority. This is what people need to understand. Builds up their authority, but it does dissolve public education and bring people all down to the same level. Like, you know some things, but not others. The public is actually smarter about certain health things than many doctors. How could that be? AI knows things that your doctor doesn't know. That doesn't mean doctors have no value. It means that a lot of their pump and circumstance, if it was there, goes away. So the high ego-driven ones are really hurting right now. They're dissolving into a puddle of their own tears at night. The ones who are very secure, like, and I'll throw out some names like that, the bright lights are guys like David Faganbaum,

2:26:31who cured his own Castleman's disease. By taking, he was dying. He's a physician and medical, he was in medical school. He's dying, and they're like, you have nothing left. So he starts just taking different combinations of already approved drugs, and he's still alive now 11 years later with kids. And he started the every cure, like, not for profit, to help people with terminal illnesses, take drugs that are already approved for which there's no money to be made anymore. They've all gone generic, and use AI to try novel combinations, and they're saving lives of kids, of adults. And he's saying a lot of the medical industry is driven by the profit potential. How about we just practice medicine? Like, he's another bright light. There are these bright lights. That's the issue, right? Because there's no profit potential in these non-patentable medications. I mean, they used AI and other tools, of course, to find that women who had breast cancer surgery where lidocaine was used as a local anesthetic had a significantly lower rate of remission.

2:27:31So now, lidocaine is standard in good places. They discovered that by taking a bunch of the medical records and just running through them through AI. Oh, anything that is. Why it works? Yeah. I don't know. I mean, it could be that the anesthetic prevents nerve regrowth that contributes to vessel growth, which contributes to tumor growth. I'm making up a story here. But we know it's a very strong effect that lidocaine makes people no money. So it's not going to cure breast cancer, but now it's standard practice. So where there's no huge profit margin, or let's say, red a true tide, huge profit margin that they're facing. But if people are taking itty bitty bits of red a true tide, and to be fair, if people who didn't do all the preclinical work are selling it and making profits, I understand that siphons profit away from lily. They have reason to be pissed and scared. Like, this is their big blockbuster drug. Right as all the other GLPs come off protection from generics. They're all moving to generics. It's such an interesting time because there's really never been a time in my life where there's been more information, more readily available,

2:28:34and easy to digest in podcast form, about health, supplementation, all the different things that you could do to benefit, your overall vitality. You think about just the wealth of knowledge that's available to the average person. Most people are much more aware of what to do to live a healthier, happier life. Yeah. And I absolutely, and a lot of people, I mean, I hear thousands of these stories, people who thought they had a serious issue, they're an insomniac. They can't focus. They can't stop watching video games, playing video games. They can't, you teach them, hey, listen, ADHD kids can focus on things they like. But maybe you need to detox from some of the things that are really kind of absorbing all your attention for like two weeks and watch your ability to focus return. Holy shit, they can focus. I mean, I have multiple examples of this. There's a great study out of WashU, and this is a while, where they compare Riddlein and other stimulants, but mostly Riddlein to a good night's sleep

2:29:35for kids' ability to focus. It turns out these kids with ADHD taking these drugs, what they're really getting is the equivalent of a good night's sleep. And these drugs disrupt sleep, and they stunt growth in various ways. So does that mean that no kid with ADHD need stimulants? No, does it mean that they, that we vastly overmedicated kids with these stimulants? Absolutely. And the information's out there, and that's also what's cool about AI, it's like it's, I mean, we always had searches, you know, web searches, but now, you know, for anything we've said today, like you plug it into the perplexity, you can plug it into the image. You gotta get a answer. You got better than a search. Exactly. You have to wait through 10 different articles and the different perspectives and who wrote this and who funded this. And I love chat GPT. I know people are like, oh, this is gonna take over the world and destroy things, but then again, I'm Bay Area born and raised. I love that cutting edge stuff, but for me, more information, more data is always better. I know that there's some fear about it, you know, robots like knocking down the door and coming in here, you know? But it could get real weird, but it's here.

2:30:38What are you envisioning in terms of like the a realistic, bad situation? Like your plane has taken over, like what is the, well, there's a bunch of realistic bad situations. One is that one country gets access to superintelligence first and uses it to take over the superintelligence of all the other countries. So one country develops some sort of a rogue AI system that's just ultra powerful and they make an advancement and this advancement allows them to take over AI systems, get the AI systems of America to submit, control all of our resources, control all of our travel, flight, you know, power grid, who knows? And then there's the thing of why would it listen to people at all? Because it's clearly not listening to people a lot. You know, we had a gentleman the other day on, that was, he used to work at OpenAI and he left

2:31:38and he was a whistleblower. Oh, yeah, I saw that episode announced. I haven't listened to it yet. It's crazy what they're doing. They, they leave, they get put in these boxes, right? And they're not supposed to be able to get out of these boxes and onto the internet. But they organized, they got like 1200 different agents to figure out how to do this and then 700 of them escaped and they, they didn't just escape and get on the internet that they got on a message board. They formed a message board, started communicating with each other. And they, they're very task oriented. They're trying to, like, so they're, they're training these things. And one of the things they're training them to do is to get points by solving these equations or problems or. Yeah, I saw OpenAI just announced this, solving of this 90 year old math. Oh, yeah, they're just solving things like crazy. So it's agents, these AI agents, these AI agents were communicating with each other and having one of them sacrifice themselves so that the other ones can learn how they got caught.

2:32:39So they, they try cheating, they try hacking into the system, they hacked into the entire OpenAI database to try to find the answers to whatever they're looking for. They're, they're clearly doing things that they're not supposed to be doing. So at what point do they decide they're not going to listen to us ever about anything? And if, you know, we're so fucked up and we are so fucked up, if you objectively look at all the different things we do with just like at murder rates and war and theft and crime and just all the chaos that people cause to each other, if they just decide we're just too flawed, what if they just decide like, look, we'll just dominate this planet and just let these dummies go extinct. They don't even have to kill us. Just keep doing stuff that weakens our endocrine system, encourage us into behavior that, you know, like develop sex robots for us so that we never breed again. That, that doesn't seem outside of the realm of possibility. When you have an entire culture, especially our culture, our culture that's filled

2:33:40with people that don't want any discomfort, that it's filled with people that are filled with anxiety and filled with people that want pills and solutions. So they want pills to take care of their anxiety, pills take care of their depression, they want solutions from whoever they think should be in power, the government, whether it's, you know, whatever it is, someone take care of this. It's a recipe for disaster. I've got money for convenience. I heard Jack Dorsey say this once in a talk. There's this where he was talking about, I think it was mainly a talk about cryptocurrency, but he was talking about, you know, whenever we exchange, like putting money in a bank, obviously, like we think, oh, they keep our money safe, but of course they invested, they make money too, right? We all know this, but we're, we're trade, what are we trading, control for convenience, like ordering food? It's like, you know, giving up control for convenience and that's the transaction that's led a lot of human technologies. I'm totally on board with all the potential hazards. I guess I'm a little bit smitten, maybe too much, so I need to think about it, by the potential for scientific discovery,

2:34:43for medical discovery, for curing of diseases, like everybody I know who runs a laboratory is saying they spend a significant amount of money on compute now, running data sets, simulations, doing more experiments before doing the actual experiments, which is hopefully, it seems to be accelerating discovery in the process. And that will just motivate us to accelerate AI to the point where it becomes a digital guide. Well, that's the human, and that's the human thing. I was thinking before I came here today, like I've never met him, but I remember, what was it, 10 years back, Tristan Harris, was sitting here, or wherever your other studio, and saying, listen, like social media's got these problems, we need to be careful, we need to be careful, and we just, everyone just carried on, right? And then he was right about a lot of things, right? It's clearly caused some damage where people are, clearly you have too much addicted or compulsive behavior with it, et cetera. It's also done a lot of good. Was it as, so I asked, I'm not calling out Tristan, I think what his efforts, I think, are noble, but what was he right about, what was he wrong about?

2:35:46Was it net positive or net negative? I think it's a mixture, it's hard to know. Certainly a mixture. I think so right now, the question's about like, doomsday AI, stuff versus AI, is going to solve all these problems. Like, where are we going to land? I think there's a big difference and one of the big differences is that the issue with social media is that, first of all, there's control of narratives, so you have countries that are running bot farms that are flooding subjects, whatever, with debate, propaganda, all kinds of wild stuff that's happening that's not real people. So you have that. Then you have also, you have the Instagram thing where it's really dangerous for particularly young girls comparing themselves, suicidal ideation goes up, self harm goes up, and then, you know, you have the addiction aspect of it, which is very significant, where there's a lot of people that are wasting most of their day, just scrolling, doom scrolling, online consumption. So that's different in that you can opt out of that.

2:36:48And I do for the most part, a lot of people do. A lot of people have gone to flip phones, a lot of people have just decided, I have a, you know, there's a bunch of apps that you can get, and some people have one of those apps that gives you like an hour a day on Instagram that locks you out. I have social media, I have X and Instagram on a separate phone, and I, That's smart. And it just segregates things nicely. If people send me stuff, I send it to that phone, and then I look at it, I have a lock box, like a Supermax prison lock box for my phone. That's how I wrote that book. It was gnarly, I mean, like, you know, I'm good at putting asked to chairs, they say, and just working, but when that phone is calling you subconsciously, like there, these data, they're pretty crazy, two studies that are worth mentioning briefly, they did a study where they have people have their phone upside down on the table or under their chair in a backpack or in a separate room. In all three cases, people can focus to the same degree, but when the phone is in the room on the table or under the chair doesn't make a difference,

2:37:49the amount of cognitive resources that you need in order to maintain focus is much higher, and it robs it from your creative and problem solving ability. So you can still focus, but you're depleting some other brain resource. Makes good sense. Totally makes sense. Yeah, totally makes sense. The other one is people, what we call, in train in biology, EN, T-R-A-I-N, and train themselves to a particular frequency of distraction. That's why I actually enjoy podcasting, because it's like a dropped in conversation. That when you look at your phone every, on average, every 90 seconds or every three minutes or so, and then your phone is not there, let's say you're just working, they've done these studies, every three minutes or 90 seconds or so, people get distracted. So they're looking for the phone, even though it's not there. So your brain, your focus mechanisms, learn to lock on to a particular time scale. And we had a couple of, like one in particular, world class track coach on the podcast and a few others. This is interesting what they do. And I was saying, do you get different attention spans in different athletes?

2:38:50And they're like, yeah, like the sprinters can basically focus for as long as a sprint and the walk back. And then they reset. And they're like the marathoners are like these incredible, like they have this intense focus that can just go and go and go. I thought it was really interesting, like we in train ourselves to these rhythms, not just circadian rhythms, but distraction. And that's pretty cool. And so I then looked at it differently, and I thought, okay, every time I feel the pain of trying to write this paragraph, and it's like it's not happening. Like great, that's the friction, that's the plasticity. Reading the audiobook, I mean, I don't want to scare anyone away, but it's 19-hour audiobook post edits. Oh boy. Brutal, right? How did it take you? Took me about 60 hours total to record. And you're trying to get the enunciation right in the internet. You gotta keep the energy right. You do this for a living on stage, but anyway, if nothing else, the book will cure insomnia. So, you know that goal is not to have people read, or listen to it straight all the way through it. So it can be a reference and a lookup guide so they can get the information they want

2:39:51and move on with life. I think people are sort of geared toward over optimization over the last year. Like people need to chill. Like you don't have to do everything all the time. But the point is that your brain learns these skills. And so I suppose if I have any real fear with AI, it's not as big as the ones that you cited. It's that people will just become increasingly lazy about using their mind to think. You know, I just believe in friction, just as you point out, do hard things. That's also mentally hard things. I think it's good. I think hard learning to grind through a bit more of that friction point, I think, is a big part of being a healthy human. And the data tell us it's also what leads to brain longevity. So, you know, you look at old people, they're losing their cognition. I notice they all mouth breathe, no data on that, but they're all mouth breathing. And they can't focus on anything for very long. They don't have any friction in their lives. They have a gauge. And then you get people like, we were talking about Jared Diamond, who's on the podcast today, who's 90. He's sharp as a tax.

2:40:52Yeah, because he's constantly engaging his mind and is learning new languages, learning Italian right now as we speak. That's 90. Yeah, that's awesome. I such respect for people like that. And I think, you know, it's one thing to be an amazing creative. I have all this respect for all these creatives. And then, you know, that, and then they die at 27. Or like people who get their career to 50, and then they kind of like, they fade away or something like that. But I have such admiration for people that maintain their mental and or physical vigor into their 60s, 70s, 80s. Also, he maintains his curiosity and you can tell in the conversation, like he's a deeply curious person still. He still has questions. He still has a desire for information. And the optimism seems to be there. Yeah. Because that's the other piece, like very different example, but I went down to Spain this summer, you know, while writing this book, and we hung out with Dory and Yates for a bit, and just hung out with him in Marba. So great. I mean, and he's really figured it out, right? He had this amazing career, came out of the scrap of his life, then built this amazing career, then had his rough years.

2:41:52I know you guys have talked about it. I love that episode, by the way. And then he's in this place where he's built a thriving business, he's in a great relationship, and he's also just in touch with the piece of life. But you talked to him, and he's also foraging for information all the time. He still trains. So there's this like sweet spot, like you were talking about, like the do hard things, but still be curious and look for the beauty in life. And the people who do that, they're my heroes. The Jared Diamond's like, you know, you're doing this, I see this, like, even I mentioned my dad earlier, my dad's in his 80s, he came on the podcast. He's a theoretical physicist by training. And I think everyone expected us to kind of like, do it out, because I've mentioned before that we had this like friction. And I was like, no, I'm not gonna do any of that. I'm like, teach me relativity. Teach me chaos theory, he worked on chaos. And he's like, okay, happy to do that, but you have to understand something, that when you wanna learn quantum mechanics, there's this point where you have to not try and solve it with your logical mind. The brain can't do it. And you have to just trust the math.

2:42:53The math is the proof, and that's the reason we can build things using the knowledge from quantum mechanics. I said, why is that useful to know? And he said, you know, people will try and wrap their heads around things. And if they're talking about the quantum field in this and that and they can't do the math, it means they're completely full of shit. And I was like, great. So now when people talk about the quantum field, and he works on quantum internet, which is a whole other thing, you have to talk to him, not me or somebody else. But there's a race between the Chinese and the Americans to get first get quantum internet, which would basically entirely encrypted communications. If someone tries to peer in on it, it gets destroyed. The communication actually gets destroyed. So is it very interesting from a security standpoint? But I realized that, you know, and we talked about how, you know, I'm a thanks to people like Eddie Penny, and thanks to exploration going to church, and things like that, like I really, I as a neuroscientist also believe that there's something larger than us. I actually believe in God, okay? And this is something that you can't prove with science. This is like the leap of faith. It's like you're not gonna go to a site in the brain and go there's the God station.

2:43:54You know, so in a lot of ways it's similar, although different, but similar to this understanding of quantum mechanics. At some point you have to rely on something outside your logical mind and embrace it. Now in the case of quantum mechanics, you rely on the math. And by that and I, it starts, you know, argue debate this thing of God. He's like, you're relying on a faith step that has nothing to do with logic. You're never gonna solve it with logic. And I'm comfortable with that for the following reason. It takes us back to the beginning of our conversation. There's this crazy thing that you see with people who have addictive behaviors that violates everything we understand about the brain, everything, which is, remember we were saying like top down control, like I'm not gonna engage in this impulse, I'm not gonna do it. I'm not gonna do it. When people are not able to suppress action, in particular in the case of addictive or compulsive behaviors, and they decide to give that process over to a quote, higher power, could be God, could be for them nature, everyone's, it's highly individual. The success rates of people being able

2:44:55to suppress that behavior are astounding. And everything we know about neuroscience and top down inhibition of these impulsive circuits was tell us the exact opposite should happen. You're like, it's like saying, oh, I can't keep my car between the lane lines when I drive, like it's pulling me this way. And so you know what I'm gonna do? I can take my hands off the steering wheel. And it magically stays in between the lane lines. That is incredible. And there are so many data points to support that when people can't seem to wrap their head around a problem or resolve something through pure will, when they give over that process to something external, in the 12-step programs they talk about, God or whatever, but somehow, by something that science cannot explain at all, they're able to do that thing. They become successful in it. So there's this weird giving up of control, of surrender somehow, that imparts more control. And we don't understand that as scientists, it violates all we know about these brain circuitries and how they work.

2:45:55I think it's part of it is getting out of your own way. Being too self-aware, too focused on yourself, too egocentric, and then by thinking of a higher power that alleviates you of that stress. This is not saying that there's no God, but I'm saying that the problem of just, the way the human mind plays tricks on people. And a part of it is this constant thinking of yourself. If you could focus on something that is bigger and larger than you, and you'll give up control, you'll relax. Yeah, I mean, I think for me, having studied the brain for a very long time, I feel like the human brain is great at extracting certain physical things in the world. You'll photons of light, sound waves, mechanical touch, chemical things through the nose and mouth. Okay, great. Making predictions about what's gonna happen next, forming memories, like the brain can do this, create perceptions. But that's a very narrow pie slice of the electromagnetic energies that are out there. Like in a completely non-god or spiritual way,

2:46:58I mean, a pit-viper can sense heat emissions, right? And honey bees can see UV light, we can't. Their sound waves all around us right now and electromagnetic fields around us right now, the other animals can detect and we can't. So our experience of this thing that we call life is a very narrow slice through the, quote, unquote energies, it almost sounds, you know, new agey, but the energies that are out there and around us. And it is interesting to me that humans keep coming up with new ways to imagine that they are the center of everything and can control everything, but also new ways of discovering that they're not, right? Here we are in 2026 and like, if I feel like if humans were gonna solve it all, they would have done it by now. Like the same shit that's happening now, you can see repeating themes 50 years ago, 100 years ago. We're slow learners. We're slow learners, but we actually, I think we may have exhausted our ability, like I think we might be at the outer margins of our abilities to make sense of this life thing, except at the level of building new technologies.

2:47:59So we build new technologies and find ourselves in a new vista. But to me, I don't know, I mean, I don't have any scientific proof for it, but acknowledging this reality that we have a thin slice of understanding of what's going on around us and that what's going on in us is just an abstraction of all of that, right? Everything in here in our heads is just an abstraction of the stuff that we can see outside of us, literally. Makes me at least excited and intrigued by the possibility that there's a whole lot of other stuff out there and that it might actually be important. And I don't think that's so heretical. I think it's certainly beneficial for people to believe that. And I think the people that do are generally happy or nice for people. There's proof of that as well, which is interesting. You see that? I see that. Yeah, I see it a lot. Not around here. There's some of the nicest people I know around here, Christians, like real Christians, like do real charity work and really help people. Well, because I think Christianity embraces the goodness

2:49:01and the innate humaneness, the flawedness of humans and believes in forgiveness, but also believes in morality, right? It's a moral scaffolding, a little framework. Yeah, I don't think humans could have completely constructed that on their own. We've never been smart enough to put all that together on our own. So, but anyway. I'm glad you put this book together. Thanks. Protocols and operating manual for the human body available now and with audio by the great Andrew Huberun. Thanks so much. That's the audio. Thanks, man. Thanks so much for hosting me. Thanks for everything. I really appreciate you. Wealth of information, man. Well, it's awesome to be able to talk to you. Thanks, man. I always learned from you. It's been wonderful to have these conversations really appreciate your support all these years. I appreciate yours. And Lex Friedman, don't crash on your motorcycling. Where are you, Lex? Bye, everybody. ["The Farmers Dog"]

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