Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh - Neuroscientist on Foot Fetishes, Drugs, and NoFap (Dr. Huberman)

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

Whats good people, we had to get Dr. Huberman (neuroscientist and researcher at Stanford University) to explain Schulzy's fetish, the benefits of NoFap, and which drugs are useful therapy. INDULGE! 00:00 - Why Andrew Schulz loves feet? 19:00 - NoFap rewiring the brain 23:59 - What we want v what we think we want 28:40 - Huberman is packing 31:20 - Kindness is the most attractive quality 42:04 - Sunlight - sets mood, focus and sleep at night 47:32 - Sleep is king - substance will impact your rest 58:14 - Let your brains develop before touching substances 01:03:17 - shrooms - effective treatment for trauma 01:08:42 - Mormons love drug therapy 01:11:25 - K therapy 01:15:35 - Gigachads don't mouth breathe 01:23:31 - Dance evolved into language 01:31:51 - Why is story so powerful? Politicians, lawyers, comedians. 01:48:36 - Peptides - everyone's gonna get swole 02:02:46 - Everyday tips for every body to use

Why do I like feet? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I need this answer as well. Big time foot fetish guy. Big time. I don't fuck them. Okay, don't make that up. That we know of.

Yeah. So there are two reasons, okay? Left foot, right foot. That's all you need to know. There are two reasons. Okay, so there's true fetish, okay? Okay, so there's true fetish, okay? And in the clinical sense,

a fetish is something that somebody actually requires in order to get aroused, okay? So fetish can be like, people talk about fetish light or people talk about, but then there are true fetishes where people actually require feet or, okay, let's think about the extreme fetishes, right? And so this is the dark side of this, right? So let's think like, let's put feet there, but that doesn't have to be dark. But then you could think like feces, dead bodies, right?

Bestiality. This is dark stuff. Exactly. It it's an immediate so we have a circuit we have circuits in our brain that immediately give us the reaction you just give you put your head back it's kind of like get me away from that topic

get me away I was going in yeah yeah he was just knocking it back right so our brain tends to put us into approach types

which we call appetitive like smell in the odor taste you want to get close to something, or aversive, right? Animals have this, humans have this. Okay. But if you think about the classic fetishes,

all of those, feet historically had the potential to be sites of infection, right? Historically, not now, right? We wash our feet, we have socks, we have shoes. Dead bodies, obviously, very infectious. What do we do with dead bodies? We preserve them and we get them into the ground or we cremate them, depending on your leanings, whatever. But you try and not get infected by them. This has been known a long time. Things like feces are contagious, right? We know this, that it's putrid or vomit.

These things are putrid, they're infectious. Can we just keep it at feet? I don't like being looked at. This is a harsh way to start off the discussion. But if you think about it, all of these tend to evoke, for most people, an aversive response. You want to get away from it.

So there are people who have this appetitive approach to things that are very infectious. And a lot of the fetishes at their extreme reflect a kind of, I don't want to say miswiring, but a flip in what normally happens, right? When you see vomit, you don't go, I'm going to take a sniff of that. But when you smell fresh baked cookies, you're like, I'm going to take a smell. I'm going to bring in- Yeah, that's how I feel about feet.

Exactly. Okay. Okay. So- Feet are like cookies. So the thing here is people don't develop fetishes to like water bottles or to tables or to light posts. It's always to things that, so there's this kind of edginess of, it's like they're sort of dancing between aversive and appetitive. And that's what makes it edgy. Leather is another fetish, right? And you know, this has to do with like animal hides. People think, now a lot of this is speculation because we don't really know how all of this evolved, but because that's extreme fetishes. But then there are people who have, like, they like a nice, clean, beautiful foot. Yo, the way you said that.

Right, exactly. Did you see me go up head and whatever that was? Or the nice, or the contour. I leaned in. Or the contour. Describe that. Contour is arch. The contour, right?

His corners are short now. You know, like, or the contour, right? His corduroys are short now. Or the contour, or you think about, like for some people, they like toes, or they will like leathers, like a turn-on to them, right? Where a lot of what we think of as a pedative kind of sexual arousal type things are right at that edge. Like, you know, everybody knows or should know, right? I think it's well known that like a little bit of leg,

like a little hint, like what's the slit up the side of the skirt? It's a hint, right? It's not, it's very different than, you know, less clothing overall. It's a hint at what's there. And the way the nervous system works is through contrast. You know, you only see light objects

through dark objects and so on. So this like playing of things. That's how I feel about those sneakers where you see each one of the toes. It's like, oh, that's a hint. Exactly. It's the hint, right. So now we're into the realm of sort of like the teeth. And sometimes on the subway, they'll like wiggle them like that. I'm like, we better stop that.

So if you look historically at clothing, you can think of like Victorian era clothing or like the high collar, everything covered, just the face, the pasty face. Or you think about, like if you watch that show, Mad Men or when there are these lines in there where they're like, shorts are getting shorter. Skirts are getting shorter, excuse me. That's my Lex Dixia coming back.

But you can imagine that during the 60s in particular and in the 70s, like clothing was moving from less and less of a hint and more and more of a reveal. Nowadays, we are living in a time where there is a lot of reveal, right? I mean, it's pretty incredible, right? How much clothing has evolved. But so I do want to just frame up that there's like classic fetish that can actually be a clinical issue because people can't get aroused without exposing themselves to dangerous infection, right? That's sort of the extreme, but then there's this kind of subtle playing of, of hints and hinting and suggestion. Like a miswiring, like counterintuitive to like Darwinism and evolution and all that. No one really knows. I mean, the thing I would say is, listen,

I wasn't consulted in the design phase for any of this, you know, so like, I don't know. But there does seem to be, well, the human mating dance, right, is a very complicated thing, right? Yeah, fire, though. It's a complicated dance between, it's all about, obviously, it's about two things, really. It's about possibility and it's about two things, really. It's about possibility and

it's about negotiating power, right? And there's been a lot of beautiful writings about this that, you know, when you, like, think about objectifying somebody, or let's say them objectifying you, right? When objectifying someone is you want them, right? You desire them, but you don't need them for anything. You don't need them to pay your rent. You don't need them for emotional support. You don't need to be held. You don't need any of that. The closer you get to somebody, you form a real emotional bond. The harder it is to objectify them. They're no longer just an object. You're no longer just an object to them. So the human mating dance is one of, at first, objectification. Anyone who argues different is probably not of our species. And then slowly over time, less and less objectification and more emotional dependence.

But don't you think that you still need to objectify a little? So absolutely. And all of the literature, like the person who's most commonly- I like being objectified too a little bit. Yeah. And I think some people do and some people don't. I think that a lot of, there's a great book. It's got a terrible title in my opinion, but the book is called Can Love Last? It's written by a very serious psychologist

that talks about this, that sexual attraction is the thing of objectification. But then as you enter into relationship, you lose that. And so a lot of times people have affairs. People will start looking at pornography excessively instead of their person. So a lot of the, they give a really incredible example of how relationships can continue long periods of time with a lot of excitement, like sexual excitement, but also healthy attachment by cycling in and out of objectification, attachment, objectification, attachment.

You know, it's tricky, right? Because everyone loves the, when you get to the point of a relationship where you can just hang out, you just watch movies and stuff. But then, you know, if you're not actually objectifying each other every once in a while, it can go really flat. 100%. And then we always hear like, oh, you know, after 20 years, they're no longer together. Or you see celebrity couples where one or both are like super attractive.

And you're like, he cheated on her? Yeah. Well, how could that possibly be? It's because the world objectified her, but at some point they hit the kind of best friends mode. And I think- So how do you stop that? Well, there's, okay. So there's a chemical version to all this that has to do with kids. And this,

there are really cool data on this in humans. There's a hormone called prolactin. It's involved in milk let down for nursing, you know, when mothers nurse, you know, there, but it's also released in men and women when they have kids. And it literally suppresses sexual desire and emphasizes laying down a body fat, making you more still. It's all there to direct your energy towards raising children. The dad bod is a physiological thing. I did that before I had kids. It happens before. I'm nesting. You see this in birds. You see this in humans.

What people think is that it's laying down of fat stores in order to anticipate the long nights of no sleep. Oh, shit. Our species is fundamentally about making more of ourselves and protecting our young. And? And? Food. And? And? Feet. And food. I said feet.

But I use them interchangeably. Okay. So if you say and, food. Young bomber. So it's interesting. Also, okay, to thoroughly answer your foot question, if I were to look at the representation of your body surface in your brain,

what that means is in your brain, you have a map of your body surface. There are certain areas on your body that you have very little sensitivity. And so we measure this by two point, two point discrimination it's called. So what I do is I take two, two fingers and I poke them against the middle of your back with you looking in the other direction. I'm behind you and poke like this. I say, how, how many places am I touching? You'd say two. But if I move them this far apart, you'd say one. Why? Because it's like you don't have many pixels back there. But if I do that on your hand, right,

you have very high two-point discrimination. Two pins right next to each other, you'd say those are two points. What does this mean? In your brain, you have a lot more representation of certain areas of your body. Which areas of your body? Fingertips, lips, face, feet, and genitals. And the representation

of the feet and the genitals in males and females is right next to each other in the brain. This, some people, there's a guy at UC San Diego whose last name is Ramachandran. His first name is even harder to pronounce. I'm not going to try. And what he showed was that people who have a foot amputated, they have a phantom foot. They sort of think it's still there. And when they experience orgasm, oftentimes they will experience it in their phantom foot. So a lot of people, you know, part of the orgasm response is a curling back of the toes and a bunch of other things. Curling back? Yeah, curling back of the toes.

What about forward? Oh, that means something's really, is that what happens? No, I'm just kidding. No, I'm just kidding. Don't talk to me, bro. Curling toes. Oh, no, right before you go.

No, if you're getting crazy head. I honestly haven't, I might have this backwards, but if I do, I apologize. I don't think I've ever been like that. Maybe you're backwards when you're coming. Which way are you facing? Yeah, I think I'm facing, well, are you on all fours?

I think it's curl the toes is what you always hear. Yeah, you curl the toes. Maybe it depends if you're northern or southern hemisphere. Yeah, if you're on Australia. It's like the toilet bowl, like twirling the other way. Wait a minute, hold on, hold on, hold on. Do you spread your toes when you orgasm? Hold on, let me think about coming.

Yeah, yeah. Chill, chill, chill, chill. I? Hold on, let me think about coming. Yeah, yeah. I think sometimes I go out. You go out? Sometimes, sometimes. Yeah, I think it varies. Wow. How good they had it. Yeah.

So, there's a high. I may have it wrong. I may have it wrong. I'm sure the internet. I should have never sat down with these guys. I'm sure the internet. I'm an intellectual. I teach at one of the finest universities in the world.

I'm talking about toe curling with orgasms. What's interesting is early on in my career, I studied sex differentiation and sexual behavior. And you know, it's fundamental, right? We're all here because some sperm. I did. I really did. We went to the same university.

We went to the same university. This is almost like an alumni podcast. Bro, for real. What was the most popular street? Del Playa. And Shore 4? DP. You know what I'm saying?

Hey. I didn't live on DP. You didn't? No, but I was there in the era. You partied there. I was there in the era where people pushed houses off of cliffs on DP. It was crazy. And then a bunch of darkness happened later after I left. Mass shootings and stuff. After I left too.

Oh, that was after you left? Yeah. That town is an interesting mix of high and low. For everybody who doesn't know, it's one square mile that's located directly next to the school and all the kids live there and nobody but kids lives there and it's absolute debauchery. It is. I mean, it was crazy. During one of the, we had a storm

that clogged all the storm drains and people just bought rafts and were literally like gongling. And just the amount of alcohol consumed there is insane. There are no adults. There are just no adults. It's a wild, wild place. So your feet are very sensitive. Your genitals are very sensitive. Your lips are very sensitive.

And so these so-called erogenous zones are really just high sensitivity zones. So I'm normal, in other words. I don't know about that. As long as you don't need feet. Are they weird that they don't like feet? I think y'all are the weird ones. Well, what do we do with people that like feet and why should we lobotomize them? Let him answer.

He's like, we're normal. That's what I heard. Well, there's this idea of an arousal template, right? Like people have an array of things that to them are arousing. And for some people, that arousal template is very narrow and very specific. Yeah. And that can be problematic, right? That means they have to find somebody or situations where that works and only that works.

Yeah. And there are safe ways that people can do that. Right now, I'm not on the apps because that's not my thing, but I research this a lot through other people. There are now apps like that app. The newest one is this app Field, right? Field is very much where people can be extremely specific about what they want. In fact, there are people now going on the internet

who are only interested in sexting, for instance. People who are like, I want a relationship only to sex. Sex is fire. I texted my wife last week and she called me. She was like, did you mean to send me that? Was this where you were both at home? No, I was trying to be cute and stuff. And she was like, what the fuck is going on?

I think she thought I was cheating or something like that. She's like, why would you say that? Did you need to send this to somebody else? You mean I had to send this to somebody else? Yeah, I did. Do you signal when you send those? I don't signal, but it was something like, when are you going to peg me again? You know what I mean?

No, I'm just kidding. He's a professional. Come on. That was another DM you got. I learned from a friend who was in the securities community for a long time that any thought that isn't in your head is available for download. And so that's scary. Oh, it's out there.

It's out there. It's out there. Okay. So basically, there are fetishes of the strict definition of fetish. You think infectious stuff, and that can be problematic. And then people have an arousal template, a bunch of things that they like, right. You know, it's like, how narrow is your template? And I think that, um, most people would probably agree that having some range, some diversity of that template, like, like, look, some people like, um, sweet, soft

sex. Some people like rougher sex. Some people like an array of that. Some people are, you know, and this is discussed in certain communities more than others, but some people are like pure dominant, pure submissive. Some people are what they call switch, right? There's this whole landscape. And that's because a lot of the, like what people don't,

the psychologists and the Freudian types really appreciated, and we understand a little bit from biology biology is that there's also a power negotiation in any kind of interaction, like a sexual interaction, right? Because both people are making themselves very vulnerable. If you look at two dogs, when they meet, let's just take animals, two dogs, when they meet, what do they do? They sniff each other's genitals and the more submissive one rolls back, opens their legs and is like making their reproductive potential vulnerable to the other one biting it off. And in the animal kingdom,

a lot of animals hurt other animals, not by killing them. They literally try and rip their testicles out. I'm laughing because when I'm having sex, the first thing I do is roll on my back. Bite off these genitals. Now wait, so it's interesting because— My go-to move. All the discussions around consent, all right, they're very valid nowadays because what we're really talking about is that there is inevitably a power negotiation. If I'm on my back, it's always consensual. Yeah.

Right? Think about it. If I'm on my back, it's always consensual, right? Right? Think about it. If I'm on my back, it's always consensual, right? If I'm on the bed like this, waiting. You can't argue the logic. Well, it might not be consensual for you. So there is a phenomenon. Yeah.

What can I even do? Called topping from the bottom. Topping from the bottom? Topping from the bottom. Now you're speaking my fucking language, my boy. That's me. Bottom top. I'm on bottom top, bro. So I'm on, that's me. Bottom top. I'm on bottom top, bro.

So I'm not a sex therapist, nor am I. Yeah, but you speak to me. If you look at the stuff. You're speaking to me right now. So I look at everything through the lens of neuroscience. And so what we're really talking about

is this brain area called the hypothalamus, which has a mix of neurons, some of them to stimulate mating behavior, some to stimulate violent behavior, some to stimulate eating, and some to stimulate violent behavior, some to stimulate eating, and some to stimulate suppression of appetite. You know, some people merge food and sex in their mind, right?

They think chocolate, and it could be because they learned, you know, maybe it was some, you know, Valentine's Day. Yeah. Valentine's Day every day with Alex Media. Or the chocolate-covered banana. Come on. Come on. Come on.

I'm just saying, they merge it. They merge it, bro. They merge it. What was that? They're coming for that chocolate. There was this movie, like, you know, things have changed now. But there was a movie in the, I think it was the 80s or the 90s, right? I think it was, was it like nine and a half weeks with Mickey Rourke before his face like was all, you know.

And there was a scene, I think, where he was like feeding her, right? And then it led into sex. And that was considered one of the raciest scenes, like the most provocative scenes, just sort of like the basic instinct thing, the leg cross uncross thing. Like now that's like nothing. Nah, nah, that shit is still something. Rewatch it. Because decency standards have changed, right?

Oh, yeah. You're saying now you could get away with that. But back then. Now that's like, I'm sure you could find that as a clip on YouTube, right? Which is then you had to like get into the radar. Our movie, it was a big deal. That was nuts. People were talking about it and talking about it.

I mean, you just remember these kind of moments in movies and things have changed a lot. I could smell her through the screen. Wait, you went to 4D? Mm-hmm. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. No, that's just how big his nose is. Okay.

Yeah. No, that's just how big his nose is. I mean, food is a, you know, so some people merge like flavors and sensuality in general. Yeah. And it could be because they had an experience. It was an amazing meal, which led to a, you know, amazing sexual interaction, which led to a relationship. And so they link up to all of those experiences. That's just kind of, we're very Pavlovian in that way. Can we do that to ourselves?

What's that? Can we create Pavlovian reactions to ourselves and the things that we want? Well, and there's a dark side to this too. And it's something that I think especially guys, young guys have to be careful of, which is nowadays the availability of pornography is nothing like it used to be, right?

Someone used to have a magazine or a video. Now there's access to pornography is just a couple thumb taps to a couple people and people can get very you know young people can develop a lot of their arousal template yeah to very extreme experiences right because of the availability of extreme porn to and never actually have any real world experience yes so if you think about their brains are becoming wired up to become aroused watching other people have sex. Instead of having sex themselves? Exactly. I've heard people like, they need to watch porn in order to come. So they're having sex while watching porn. Or even to get aroused. And I have to say, I get hundreds and hundreds,

maybe thousands of questions, different health topics and science topics. One of the most common questions I get is how to quit porn addiction. And I would say about 25% of the people that I'm aware of based on those questions and a few people that I happen to know who are porn addicted are women. And it becomes an issue where, so there can be, so you ask, can there become a self-conditioned Pavlovian response? Yeah. It's like, absolutely.

Just to clarify real quick for people listening, what a Pavlovian reaction is. Oh, yeah, yeah. So Pavlov won the Nobel Prize, the so-called Pavlov dog experiments, where basically you offer an animal some food or the smell of food, it starts salivating. But right before that, you ring a bell. Yeah. And then pretty soon, all you need to do is ring the bell and the animals start salivating. So now they're reacting to the bell ring, right? Not the actual psychology major. You see, you could take the final exam now.

Oh my goodness. It'd be amazing. So I think that, you know, anytime, not, I think you're saying we're doing that with porn. Well, and with any, anytime we experience a powerful emotional response or physical response. So that could be sexual arousal. It could be hunger. It could be fear. It could be excitement. Whatever preceded that becomes the thing

that our brain basically thinks leads to that. So the brain is a prediction machine. So for, you know, and this has all sorts of roots around trauma and things that could be positive or negative. So you can imagine that if every time, you know, your parent blinked and then they hit you when you were a kid, you see that blink, you see someone blinking and you get kind of your heart rate goes up, et cetera, because the brain generalizes, but it wants to predict what's going to happen next. On the positive side, if every time you arrived at your grandmother's house, like you knew that there was going to be delicious food and you're going to feel very nourished, like no trauma, then, well then, you know, just walking up to a doorbell of a similar

home, you might find like, oh, I just feel good right now. We are very kind of crude in our wiring, right? Our brain generalizes to try and predict. So, but in terms of the extreme things like sexual arousal, if young, and I do say guys, it's women watch pornography also, that's been well-established, but I get a lot of questions from guys who are addicted to porn and who have challenges in sexual interactions in the real world, because they either need that or they don't really understand, they haven't been socialized in terms of normal, consensual sexual interactions. And I always say, you know, there's four, anytime we're talking about this sort of thing, we,

the disclaimer is we're talking about age appropriate, consensual, context appropriate, species appropriate, right? You know, throwing species appropriate. Cause you know, there's all sorts of things out there. So, um, Scottish people listening right now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. so Scottish people listening right now yeah yeah shout out to my family yeah so I think that it's interesting you know like extreme stuff of any kind or even for instance people who get really into fetish type sex

or they get into you know having multiple they get really into threesomes right this is a very you know as long as we're talking openly there are a lot of people that I know who got really into this during the kind of early stages of the polyamory movement

yeah right so you know what started in the 70s but then came back again in the like early 2000s and then they found that they could not get aroused with just one partner and that's because their brain was so used to a certain set of things preceding this that's extreme right i mean it's you know for some people it it's less extreme. I have less empathy for a person in my company than the guy who just can't get off without two girls. But that person is rendered sometimes challenged with one person, sometimes not.

It depends on the diversity of their arousal template. So I'm not saying porn is bad, or for some people, listen, it's not my proclivity, or for some people, listen, it's, you know, not my proclivity, but for some people, you know, polyamory is their thing. So we're not judging the behavior. What we're saying is the brain, anytime there's a big release of dopamine. It's wiring towards it. Yeah. Every, whatever preceded it. You got to diversify.

Yeah, exactly. Now, I don't think it's only with these extreme examples. I think a lot of times, and I'm curious your thoughts on this, but let's say we open up Instagram or TikTok, right? The algorithm is just feeding you attractive women, stunningly attractive women. Seems to be feeding me like random bodega fights lately. I don't even know how that happened. I think I watched a Michael Rapaport clip or something, and now all I'm getting is like bodega violence. And like, I didn't ask for this. Like bodega violence and

badly proportioned male bodybuilders. Like I didn't look this stuff up. Like what is going on? Interesting. I'm getting thoughts. We need to change. We need to swap. We really need to do that immediately. But I guess what I'm saying is I'm seeing all this, right? And I'm like, I think this is unhealthy for me. Because I'm just seeing all these girls that are filtered. Their bodies are filtered. They have plastic surgery. They have makeup.

Not one of these girls is naturally looking this way. And I think it's tricking my brain to, not even tricking my brain, but there is this reaction where I'm like, oh, this is normalcy. You know, people obviously have attraction to different phenotypes. Do they, though? They do. 100%. They do, absolutely.

Because my boxing trainer likes them thick. Yeah, yeah. Some people like people that are curvier. But I think that that's a function of something else. Some women report. I think he wants's a function of something else. Some women report. I think he wants more warmth in the winter. Because in the summer, he doesn't like thick girls as much. But in the winter, I think he wants a warmer bed.

It actually makes sense. He's this Egyptian dude, and he's just like, I don't think he knows how to. He's this awesome, amazing boxer, but I don't know if he knows how to work his radiator or whatever like that. So I think in the winter, it's like he wants a little bit more. Someone to get cozy with. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know that the phrase three dogs.

I bought him a blanket, and he was like, okay, this is good too. You know the phrase three dog night originates, three dog night, that phrase originates because it used to be that people would sleep with three dogs in order to stay warm really yeah actual animals i never do you need three of them in order to stay warm yeah animals used to be for work not for for pets eventually now they're bred to basically be like there as little it's like now especially in new york i feel like dogs are like like i sell it's like they're like an accessory oh yeah which i don't like because i'm a huge animal lover i don't like when people because i need to to see people take really good care of animals. When I see animals that are badly taken care of, there's this part of me that wants to steal them. Yeah.

Give them away to people. Like the guys pushing the fucking dog in the stroller. Have you seen that? That's crazy. Yeah, that's crazy. Oh, that's all new. Depriving an animal of its ability to walk. It's the craziest thing.

Yeah. Homeless people actually are some of the best pet owners. Have you ever seen the way, like how obedient their pets can be? Compared to some of the rich people in major cities. Fucking pit bulls. The way that their dogs can't behave. They got these cavapoos that go crazy. Well, the cavapoos are pretty mellow.

These rich people whose dogs can't behave, I wonder. But you can also, but I do think people do like different biological shapes. People like different shapes. So there's a guy down at UT Austin who's one of the founders of evolutionary biology, David Buss. And, you know, there is a – it's a ratio issue. So there is this thing about, you know, what signals fertility, right? Oh, yeah.

Now – and then with women they'll report, you know, that some women like guys that are really heavily muscled and some like men that are more, more svelte, more, you know, more slim. Right. You know, and, uh, svelte is crazy. Imagine your girl described you as svelte. I don't want that Jack Brad Pitt guy. And this is changing too. On your back. Like guys, I thought it was you that's on your back. She was telling me in that situation. So I think that the, you know, it's all changing. Like now, because of action movies, there's this tendency for, especially young guys, to think that they have to look like action heroes. Yeah, like Mark.

Like they want to be really muscled out. Yeah. But, you know, in reality, it doesn guys, to think that they have to look like action heroes. Like they want to be really muscled out. But in reality, it doesn't, on average. Average women don't want it. Everything are averages. Everything are averages. And then remember, these guys don't eat anything. They're eating so much, they're trying to put on all this weight and stuff like that. Girls don't like that.

Evolutionarily, aren't women more attracted to the ability? It's all ability to provide for offspring, right? So for men, it's portions that can give me offspring. For women, it's who can make the money to take care of our offspring. So what's interesting is if you— Evolutionarily. It's about pistol length, too.

Is that an important thing? So here I'm— Well, okay. It used to be that people would wear belts with sash, like a long belt hanging out. That was, I mean, or swords, like the length of swords and things like that. There's a whole literature on this. Literally, look what he has.

There's a whole literature on this. Definitely not in my arousal template. While we're talking about pistols real quick that was something I noticed when we went to your show there were so many beautiful women

at this show and I'm like what the fuck is going on here like this is really cool like women are interested in like neuroscience and everything

you have to do and then you stepped on stage and you had the bulge working bro it was crazy literally what did I

I literally messaged Mark. I was like, I can't even concentrate. I saw the message, too. Everyone was taking notes on the lecture. No, the girls were zooming in. There were two girls in front of us. They're joking, folks. No, they were.

No, no, no. You were wearing black, which is slimming, but not that day. It was crazy. And the girls were zooming in. We were fourth row. And then you turned around and showed off the hee-haw. Yeah, you did, dude. No, you were packing that day, man. You were a fourth row. Yeah. And then you turned around and showed off the hee-haw. Yeah, you did, dude. No, you were packing that day, man.

You were absolutely packing. Do you fluff before the show? Dude, I'm just saying, it was abnormal. It was abnormal. You had a little cuttlefish in there. We can talk about cuttlefish. I know. That's one of my favorite topics in the world. Is that what you call it? Your cuttlefish? That's the cuttlefish. I know. That's one of my favorite topics

in the world. Is that what you call it? Your cuttlefish? That's the cuttlefish come for a cuddle. It's objectification. That's all it is. Objectification.

This is what it feels like. Again, he's like, how long do I have to be here? Why did I give them my sun jacket? You got the doctor's speech first. We just had to talk about the root. But for real. You did. You brought one of them redwoods on the stage at the Beacon Theater.

It was crazy. That was crazy because we were trying to learn some things, right? And you were trying to hammer. Yeah. That's where nootropics come from, bro. He's a donor. Okay. Okay, let's be serious.

Let's be serious. Can we be serious right now? Can we be serious? I really have a genuinely serious question. This is a dark one. Please. When you say you have to stare at the sun, you don't mean it. No, no, no.

Okay, so thanks for taking us out of that deep water, Andrew. How deep was that? To close the hatch on ranges. So there are a number of – there are also issues of sort of body type preference and safety. And by safety, I mean two different things, right? Yeah. I mean – Safety for the woman. And listen, and for the man.

Listen, there's a really interesting literature about this. If you look at sort of who people select to have sex with versus who people select to try and form long-term relationships with them, I mean, there are many men who would not choose to be with the woman that is most attractive to everybody because they don't have the confidence they could keep her. That's a good point. Even if she's not a flirt and wouldn't be looking, right? Even if she didn't have a wandering eye.

Some men deliberately wouldn't want to be with the most beautiful. People tend to match up pretty closely in terms of attractiveness. Pretty closely. Pretty closely. Not always. It's not because the pretty ones are airheads. But you asked about income. And I want to make sure that, because I had David Buss on my podcast,

and he's really the expert on this. So we're going to have to fact check this with him. But yes, it's true that resource potential is an important variable because people have to think about safety and childcare and a number of things. But women work too, right? Women can work too, right? They can opt to work and make money. But more often than, more important than any other feature across all cultures is that the woman reports that she sought someone who is kind to them. Not necessarily kind to everybody, but kind to them, right? Kind to them. Okay. So even if you think of like extreme money, right, extreme money, or you think of extreme bodies or extreme resources, right, that somebody has, women in terms of who they tend to pair up with long term, assuming heterosexual, right, that they're heterosexual because here we're making a bunch of assumptions.

But in that mold, what is shown up over and over again in the data is that their top priority is that someone be kind to them. In other words, they're not interested in being with someone who's really wealthy who treats them like garbage. And I think this gets lost because people think, oh, it's all about money. It's not all about money. It's about safety and kindness

because you're talking about a long-term bond. Now then people say, well, what about this notion of gold diggers? And by the way, there are male and female gold diggers. I mean, I had friends in college who would say things like they wanted to marry a really wealthy woman. I was like, really? I just heard this from a few people. I was like, wow, you're thinking about that as your primary concern? They're like, no, but it would be great. I would hear people say that. They're also the

female to male version of that. It's actually pretty rare, right? It's about safety and resources. And this also varies by culture whether or not women tend to work or not work but overall again i don't you know i don't mean to you know be a dead horse with this but it's really that kindness towards them is critical but not necessarily kindness to everybody is that tied to reproductive success also and that like if he's kind to me he'll be kind to my kids and they have a better chance of surviving yeah we're doing a bit of a just so story there like Like we, I don't know exactly what the experiment would look like and I'm sure the experiment's been done, but I have to assume yes. Right. Because

the last thing you want is someone with a ton of reproductive potential resource potential, who's going to treat you like garbage. Chances are they're not going to stay with you or you're going to be there, but then they're going to have a, they're going to bring in other mates, you know? And so when you look at the roots of jealousy and concerns about infidelity, Yeah. Or you're going to be there, but then they're going to bring in other mates. Yeah. You know, and so when you look at the roots of jealousy and concerns about infidelity, or you look at the roots of sort of like concerns about resource potential and all that, it all kind of makes sense in this very old fashioned model. It also makes sense in the model that we live in now. Kindness toward each other is fundamentally the most important variable which is kind of reassuring i don't say that to be politically correct that's how the data fall out yeah and

that never gets discussed because it's not as edgy as thinking like oh yeah it's all about money it's all about beauty it's all about this it's it's about the lamborghini it's like no like how is how is he going to treat you and so there's also something very special to people about the other person who is very desired by a lot of people treating them particularly nicely. You hear this notion of being picked, right? And there's mutual picking. And everything is changing now too, right? I mean, the way that there are apps like Bumble

where women actually have to say, yes, I will talk to you. It's not a bidirectional conversation. There's an asymmetric conversation. Again, not on the apps, but I'm fascinated by this because it's human dating behavior, but it's always going to be through the filter of biology. Well, maybe you can answer this because you're a neuroscientist. So can the brain outpace evolution where we have millions of years of evolution that men say, I'm attracted to these proportions that will nourish my kids the best. And women say, I'm attracted to these features that say he'll take care of my kids. Now society's changing in the last 70 years, crazy rate of change. All this is like getting changed up. Can your brain outpace your evolution,

which has been hardwired for millions of years and say, you know what, I don't care about all these things. Um, well people can make, so we have this real estate in our brain, right behind our forehead, um, called the prefrontal cortex and it's your rule setting machine. Okay. So you can create new rules for what's going to drive your behavior. Like we can decide that what's important in a given set of situations is blank. You actually see this, right? If people go away on retreats or they go to some event and there's only, you know, let's say, again, we're assuming heterosexual relationships here, 10 men and 10 women, they're all heterosexual, you know, who you find most attractive will be gauged against the other nine, right? And so, but in a

world in New York City, right, then the mean is, the distribution is much broader and the mean is shifted perhaps, right? And so you can't beat evolution. You're always going to be constrained by brain wiring, but you can condition certain things. And also sometimes people are selecting for somebody who's really nice, really funny. We get along so well. I mean, there are other criteria, right? I'm just trying to get you to say it's okay for us to be shallow, really, at the end of the day.

I mean, it's as okay to be shallow as being shallow is as important to you, right? There are people who are like, they have their list, right? They're like, I want to be with someone who graduated college, or I don't care. Or I want to be with somebody who, you know, is physically attracted to, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, the reality is that no matter how attracted two people are to one another, like at some point it becomes familiar.

But there are certain people, like I'll just disclosure, I'm actually become in a relationship, monogamous relationship, actually become more attracted to the person I'm with. And I think it's something through the nose. It's like a pheromone thing. I become very conditioned to them, right? It's not that no one else becomes attracted to me, but I become very conditioned to them. And so I don't know that everyone's like that. I've only been me, but I know that there are some people that get really restless after they've been with the same person for a little while. And sometimes that's psychological, like they never got it out of their system. They married the first person they were with.

And other times it could be physiological. You know? Both of them. So there's a lot of range on these. I mean, the biology constrains it, to answer your question. It constrains it. It sets some outer bounds on this. Like I don't think, for instance, that we can become attracted to like tree frogs, for instance,

just because we decide that they're the only option left. Have you been to India? That's true. I have not. No, they did. They had 14 dudes who raped the lizard. You didn't hear about this? I was trying to make a little joke here.

But no, for real. Be doing another study. This is a joke on the podcast. No, this is not a joke. There are these guys that gang raped a lizard. And then ate it afterward. How big was this lizard? I mean, I don't know.

Fun question. That's an interesting question. That is very important. I don't think anyone's taught to ask. When I was a kid, you occasionally catch a lizard, but it was like a little lizard. That's because he's like, no lizard is big enough for me.

You're not fitting in a lizard, dude. There's no way. There's no way. There's no way. Take this guy to King's Landing. Yes. Dracarys! Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones.

You need a dragon. The dragons. That's what they're saying. That's the lizard you need. Yeah, you need the big one. You know what I mean? So there are limits, right? Just like anything, right?

It's sort of like food, right? I mean, could I get used, like I like fermented food. So like I love kimchi and I love Korean food. But like Japanese natto, the first time I tried that, I was like, wow, it's really like stringy. Like it's kind of mucusy. But I ate it a few times. I kind of got to like, same thing with the uni, the herchen.

Not into it. Right? Hate it. Everyone's like, you thing with the uni, the urchin. Not into it. Right? Hate it. Everyone's like, you have to try. You have to try. And I was like, this just tastes like bad tongue. Yeah. And like, it's just, but now over time, I've gotten a little more used to it, a little

more used to it. But it's just barely in balance for me. Whereas people love it, right? That's prefrontal cortex conditioning. You can override things to some extent. Now there is an asymmetry to all this. So if you ever get sick eating something, you have a really bad experience. Even a bad experience in a city. I have some friends that visited San Francisco. I texted them, be careful,

don't leave your computers in your car. They wrote back too late. They had 11 laptops stolen. They'll break into your car in the middle of the day in front of cops. They don't care, okay? They hate San Francisco. That's one incident on one street. Those guys are right. In one street, right? Now, some people, they have a bad meal at like, is House of Nanking still here? That Chinese restaurant that serves congee

in the middle of the night? So good. Okay. So good. Like, I will forever have good associations to that place. Yeah. I've had that. Like, I got really drunk and I was really hungover or something like that. Like, I threw up the food that I had eaten that place. I've had that. I got really drunk and I was really hungover

or something like that. I threw up the food that I had eaten that night. You're never going near it again. You drank Fireball. It took years. It's called One Trial Conditioning. It took me years. It's like a hot flame. You're never going near it again. It was ramen. I had ramen. It literally took me maybe 10 years before I had ramen again. Now I can eat it and I don't associate it,

but for those 10 years, all I thought of was that exact smell and flavor. Exactly. You still get it. There's that aversive thing. And notice like, it's like, we tend to close up the various controls that we have when we see something we really like. Like if I see puke on the street and sorry to use these extreme examples, but hopefully they'll resonate with people. I'm like, oh, like you cringe, you close up your airways. Why? Because it's infectious. Now remember when you something, good or bad, you are literally inhaling the molecules from that thing. And so, like, this always gets people because they're like, oh, it smells like shit, you know? And that's like, you're literally inhaling little

bits of feces. I fart and everybody smells it. They're taking in my ass. Yeah. Unfortunately. Yeah. Okay, now, back to just looking at the sun. You don't literally want me to stare at this fucking sun. No. Okay. So the reason I encourage people to get sunlight in their eyes, especially early in the day, is that it helps wake you up.

It improves your mood, improves hormone output, improves focus. It's good for so many aspects of biology. But how do I do it without hurting my eyes? And it helps you sleep at night. Okay. So what you want to do, people have different levels of sensitivity. You want to look in the general direction of the sun. Okay. If it's low in the sky, it's no problem. You could literally look at it like this. Now, the higher it gets in the sky, the more imposing it is and you'll want to close your eyes. If it forces you to blink, you need to look away from it a little bit. Indirect light is fine on a really clear day. If it's very, very bright and you need to blink, blink. I'd say take your sunglasses off for doing this.

Eyeglasses and contacts are fine. And after two, three minutes, you're good. And if you're walking to work in the morning and it's a nice sunny morning, but the sun is New York, so a lot of the sun is blocked by these big buildings, you just get the indirect sunlight. And that's okay too? That's okay. But through a window, these tinted windows that are everywhere here, or through a windshield, it's not going to happen.

It's just never going to set this mechanism in the ways you need. So if you, you know, watching a sunset, you can literally watch it. Yeah. Isla Vista, we used to watch sunsets, right? They disappear off Del Playa with the oil rigs out there. And for the people who don't know, there are these oil platforms that sit off the beach in Santa Barbara, and it seeps up all this tar. But it's very beautiful sunsets out

there and you can look directly at it when the sun is low in the sky. When the sun is overhead is when it tends to be really bright, don't stare at it. And what is the advantage of this? It just wakes you up or something besides that? So you have neurons, nerve cells in your eye that when that sunlight hits them, they send a signal to your brain that's a wake-up signal. Gotcha. Improves your mood, increases testosterone, it increases metabolism,

it lets you focus better, and it sets a timer so that you can fall asleep at night about 12 to 16 hours later. If you're not getting light in your eyes, if you wake up and you're just on your phone, that's fine if the sun isn't out, but if you're on your phone for the first two hours a day and then you get outside and get sunlight and the sun's already overhead

and you go out with your sunglasses on, that kind of thing you're going to find it's very hard to fall asleep that night. Because you're not setting the timer. That's right. Think of the morning bright light as your wake up signal. Get as much sunlight in your eyes as you safely can throughout the day. I wear sunglasses

but not when I do this morning sunlight viewing. And then in the evening, try and catch some sun before it goes down. In the winter, obviously, that's going to happen earlier. And then at night, you really want to try and dim the lights. I always say like the fighters at the fight last night, like wearing sunglasses. Yeah. You know, dim the lights, dim the screens between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. Now, look, you guys were at the fight last night.

I happened to be there too. I'm sort of a new UFC fan, so I'm not very educated on this. But it was really bright. It's not a big deal every once in a while to stay up late. I was up till 1.30, which for me is very late. But I would say 80% of the days and nights of your life, get some sunlight in your eyes and try and dim the lights at night. I mean, you're in New York, bright lights, big city, right? So you're going to have to do a little

bit more sunlight viewing in the early part of the day. And if you wake up and the sun isn't out yet, you know, once it's out, get out there. Yeah. It has huge outside positive effects on your health. I get it now because I didn't understand it first. Like a lot of guys and women say, oh, you know, I don't feel well. I'm having trouble focusing. I'm having trouble sleeping. Before we could get into any discussion about supplements or hormone therapy or ice baths and saunas,

all that stuff is great. But the number one thing for health is going to be quality sleep. And the best way to get quality sleep is to get sunlight in your eyes early in the day. And on cloudy days, when you can't see the sun, people always say there's no sun here. I'm like, the sun is still there. Yeah. It cloudy days, when you can't see the sun, people always say, there's no sun here.

I'm like, the sun is still there. Yeah. It's just, and you get a lot of sun through those clouds. Just get outside a little bit longer. All right, guys, we're going to take a break real quick so I can tell you about Rocket Money, formerly Truebill. Rocket Money is an all-in-one finance platform that helps you save more and spend less.

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That is this weekend, November 17th through the 19th. Then, December 1st, I'm going to be in Tempe, Arizona. And January 14th, super excited about this. I'm going to be at the Wilbur Theater. We will sell these tickets out. You need to get them now. And January 21st and 22nd, I'm going to be in Vegas. I'm not supposed to announce that, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Who cares? Get your tickets at akashsingh.com. Now let's get back to the show. Now everybody, and I think that this is partially because of you, everybody right now is obsessed with sleep and recovery. Right. And I think you're about to absolutely destroy the alcohol industry. Yeah.

Please tell me why alcohol is so bad for recovery or is it smarter to go to talk about sleep and recovery first and then talk about? Well, we can make some general statements about sleep that dovetail with the alcohol thing. And look, I'm not anti-alcohol. I don't have an alcohol problem. I have a drink every once in a while, no big deal.

But I'm one of these people that can either do it or not do it. Yeah. Whereas some people, they really enjoy alcohol. Yeah. I'm not one of those people. It's just never been my thing. But in any case, sleep, meaning getting enough quality sleep, 80% of the nights of your life.

And I always say the other 20%, just try and make the fact that you're not getting enough sleep for fun reasons. out with friends, relationship. Ideally, it's not because you're lying in bed stressing or et cetera. But try and get enough quality sleep, 80% of the nights of your life. How much sleep do you need? Enough to feel rested during the day. Maybe you need a short nap. Napping's great, as long as it doesn't screw up your nighttime sleep. How long should a nap be? No longer than 90 minutes. And if you can't nap, don't worry about it. It's not a big deal. You don't have to be a napper. But a lot of people need a nap in the early afternoon or late afternoon in order to reset.

That's totally normal. It has to do with body temperature regulation. As your body temperature goes up in the afternoon and then starts to drop, you tend to get a little bit sleepy. One way to avoid the afternoon crash, by the way, is don't drink caffeine for the first hour and a half to two hours after you wake up. Let a bunch of the sleepy molecules get cleared away. Sleepy molecules, things like adenosine, blah, blah, blah. And then drink your caffeine. At first, it's kind of painful to do,

but you'll just go all day feeling great. It's pretty fantastic. Now, alcohol disrupts the architecture, the quality of your sleep. You can fall asleep, but the sleep you get is not restorative. And the first part of your night when you sleep is really for repair of the body, growth hormone release, et cetera. The second half is when two things happen.

One is you tend to have dreams that are very emotionally laden, but you are paralyzed. You have sleep atonia. You can't move. And it's a kind of trauma therapy. You actually, if you ever had like a disturbing interaction or something's bothering you, if you get a few nights good sleep,

you're like, okay, like it's like water under the bridge. If you don't, people tend to kind of maintain the emotional load of things. Now, the sleep atonia is kind of interesting. Has anyone here ever woken up and you were still paralyzed? Yeah. And they jolt. That happens to my wife. It's terrifying.

Yeah. Well, it happens more often to cannabis users, but it's not uncommon for non-cannabis users too. So you wake up and it's just like you kind of jolt awake. It's pretty terrifying actually to be wide awake, but you can't move. But that's what it's like in that second half of the night of sleep. If you drink alcohol, you tend to screw up the first part of the night of sleep. If you drink alcohol, you tend to screw up the first part of the night of sleep. And so the physical repair doesn't happen as well. Now, look, I'm not somebody saying like you can never have a glass of wine or a cocktail or something. It depends on how many other healthy things you're doing and how many other unhealthy things. This is

important. So, you know, if you were to be really strict, you'd say the data point to the fact that no alcohol is better for your immediate and long-term health than any alcohol. And people say, well, red wine's good. And in these blue zones where people live to be 110, they're doing a lot of other things too. The reality is the resveratrol and red wine, you'd have to drink so much red wine in order to get the resveratrol. you'd be drinking all day. That argument is feeble. But if you're going to drink, you can probably have two drinks, maybe three per week, no problem. No problem. Total drinks per week. Per week. But if you're going to drink more than that, and I'm not, listen, I don't tell people what to do. I just say, you know, but know what you're

doing, right? If you're going to do that, then you probably want to make some effort to do other things right. For instance, I would hope that people are avoiding hard drugs like cocaine and amphetamine. Why? Because they lead to huge increases in dopamine that basically reward only one thing, cocaine and amphetamine. And over time, everything else feels a little weak in comparison, right? It's an extreme experience that you didn't really have to earn, right? There's nothing earned. And so you tend, then everything else seems a little bit weak. And so cocaine and amphetamine are very, very bad. And opioids are just really bad.

And the fentanyl thing now is super scary where young people, old people, they're just dying. So let's just like put those in heroin. Let's just put those in a category of like, let's not even entertain. There are people. Adderall's in that thing too? Well, Adderall, it's crazy. Whenever I come to New York, and whenever I run into the investment banker types, especially the young guys,

like Adderall is big out here. Oh, yeah. Big, big, big. New York City's Adderall culture. Like, you're not even just, it's any job at an office, you're probably doing Adderall. Yeah, it's prescription cocaine, basically.

Yeah, unless you have clinically diagnosed ADHD, I would steer clear of Adderall, Vyvanse, even Modafinil. Occasionally use some Modafinil, which was developed for narcolepsy and things like that. Maybe for certain reasons. Modafinil is very expensive, prohibitively expensive for most people. There are certain supplements that work not as well, but things like Alpha-GPC, which are safer, 300 milligrams of alpha-GPC. But listen, I have a colleague who won a Nobel Prize.

He's a professor at Columbia. Everyone in our business knows that he chews like five or six pieces of Nicorette a day because when he was a smoker, nicotine is an amazing nootropic. Love, love. But the delivery device will kill you. Vaping's not good for you. Smoking's not good for you. Dipping's not good for you. Snuffing's not good for you. In Scandinavia, they use the little Zin pouches. Look, I'm not going to push nicotine on people, but the reason I take AlphaGPC to work every once in a while is because it stimulates nicotine release and you can focus like a laser. And don't need it but i do enjoy it every once

in a while and it's safe-ish for me you know obviously people have to decide what's safe for them but you know nicotine is a focuses the brain in an incredible way um adderall you know the problem is is very addictive because there's nothing like that narrow tunnel of focus that you get from like the limitless drug i I took, actually, maybe I took a full at Burning Man. Yeah. But I didn't feel that as much, but I've heard if you got work to do, it's fucking, you're, it's done.

Yeah, you're in the tunnel. And so it becomes a used, so there's use, there's dependency, and then there's addiction, right? And addiction I define, and this is based on the biology of it, but we don't have to get into that right now because we've done long episodes of that.

Some of the episodes of my podcast are so long, they're like going to cure insomnia for sure. But addiction in my mind is, the biology says, it's a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. And it's also a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you the effect you want. It's like the fetish thing, right? Are you addicted to boots?

Boots is the other one, right? Like some people have a boot fetish. No, no. Take the boot off, sock off. Yeah. He likes the feet. You need the boot off of the, unless there's a little window, one toe showing. I like the Andrews there. But you know, if you need Adderall in order to focus, you're becoming dependent. Are you addicted? Well, I don't know. It depends. But yesterday I ran into a guy on the street and we were talking about this and he said, I don't know. It depends. But yesterday I ran into a guy on the street and we were talking about this and he said he's off Adderall now, but he has to go to AA and NA meetings in order to stay sober. So that tells me he's, you know, this is serious. And, you know, I think that the current estimate is that more than 80, 80, 80% of college students take Adderall, Vyvanse, or Ritalin at some point.

So it's amphetamine. And if people are struggling with it, one incentive to get off of it is that it's not good for your heart. It tends to push all the blood towards core organs. It's like stress response. Because when you're stressed, your pupils get big and your vision gets this narrow you know, this narrow.

That's why they put blinders on horses so that they don't look around and focus on other things. I mean, it'll shrink the penis, you know, not permanently, but it causes vasoconstriction, right? It's the opposite of things that cause vasovagulation. So you've never taken Adderall? I've never taken Adderall, never taken Vyvanse. I took- Oh, I know. I tried, I tried

armodafinil once. I got a prescription for armodafinil and I took it and I had to give a lecture that day and I couldn't stop lecturing. It was a problem for me anyway, but I just was just so in the tunnel. I didn't like it. It gave me a brutal headache. I don't think I'd ever do it again, but I like caffeine. I think healthy use, caffeine's tunnel. I didn't like it. It gave me a brutal headache. I don't think I'd ever do it again. But I like caffeine. I think healthy use. Caffeine's amazing. It's amazing that nicotine has its place for certain people. Nicotine is protective against Parkinson's.

Yeah, it has neuroprotective effects. But I don't think people should be smoking, dipping, vaping, and snuffing. And nobody snuffs anymore. Snuff, I think, is they literally put the tobacco up the nose. How much caffeine is too much caffeine? Is there an amount? Oh, I did too much. You know, if you spread it out, the amount that doesn't let you sleep, the timing counts there too.

And nowadays they put theanine in energy drinks because it takes the jitters off, which allows you to drink more rocks. You know, I'm not going to name brands, but more energy drink. That's not a bad thing, theanine in and of itself. No, theanine is great in and of itself. Yeah, theanine is great. And for sleep, magnesium threonate, theanine, epigenin, inositol, those things work well. I'd rather see people use supplements like that

than rely heavily on melatonin, Ambien, and any barbiturates. Okay, but you're drinking. You want to drink. So let me just ask you this. So in order to be happy at this stage of your life, how many drinks do you need per week? Beer, wine, or one cocktail each representing one? And just, you know.

Like, I didn't drink for 10 years. I don't need, like, when I was in Santa Barbara, I didn't drink. Yeah, so like. Wait, really? Yeah, I mean, I drank maybe like the first two years. By the time that was legal for me to drink, I didn't drink. Then you became a pothead in Europe.

Yeah. You might have been the one person in Alavista that didn't drink. I don't drink. When we first met, he didn't drink. He didn't smoke weed. He didn't do anything. Yeah. For years.

What were you into? Surfing and comedy. That's where you picked up comedy. Yeah, feet. No, no. Where did you do comedy? I did comedy in Santa Barbara for the first time. There's a restaurant there called Brick's Cafe that I was managing. Yeah, feet. Yeah, no, no. Where did you do comedy? I did comedy in Santa Barbara for the first time. But like where?

There was a restaurant there called Brick's Cafe that I was managing. Wow. And yeah, they had a comedy night and I just tried it out. And I did it when I got back. But yeah, so it's like I cannot drink very easily, though I do like drinking. And I think it's fun. I think it's cool. I think it's a nice, like it's a quick dissociation. I actually prefer weed, but I just get's a nice, like it's a quick dissociation. I actually

prefer weed, but I just get such a hangover front the next day. Like I get like really affected by it. It makes me like really insecure and anxious the next day. Well, cannabis. So just briefly, like cannabis is a mixture of THC and CBD. And then I did an episode on this and nowadays, you know, there's more THC in some of them and some CBD. And the cannabis can be of the sativa type or the indica type. Indica tends to be, in general, and the pot smokers always come after me about this, but in general, they call it like indica, like in the couch. Yeah, that's relaxed.

Yeah, right? It's like a mellows you and sativa is kind of more elevating. Depends. And then there's this whole world of terpenes, which are like the things that give it like a citrusy, tastish smell. Terpenes are plant-based compounds. And like now you get these, like, it's amazing how cannabis, people who love cannabis, they're like, no, you got to talk about the terpenes and you're not, you know, so you don't want to use blanket statements with cannabis because it does have its uses for

glaucoma. There's a pure CBD form of marijuana that is only available in Colorado called Charlotte's Web that parents actually move there if their kids have certain forms of psychosis and epilepsy. This doesn't get them high, but seems to help. So I'm not one of these people that says cannabis is bad. It has certain medical purposes. However, high THC cannabis that's vaped in particular, because it hits the bloodstream and brain so fast. And if that's used in young people, for young people that have a predisposition to bipolar or schizophrenia, it can trigger psychosis later in life. And then, you know, I put this out on the internet in a podcast and boy, did I get attacked. I was like, listen, I'm not saying

cannabis is bad, right? I'm basically a live and let live kind of type. As long as people aren't harming other people, for the most part. I'm not one to tell people what to do. I'm not a cop or a politician. But I think if people have tendencies toward bipolar, smoking very high THC cannabis is really risky. And that's just what we've seen over and over again. There's these huge data sets out of Canada that show this.

And again, I'm not trying to shut down the cannabis industry. I think it's really interesting what's happened. People always say, well, is cannabis safer than alcohol? And I always say, who cares? Like if you really want to do cannabis, you're going to do it, right? Let's just be realistic. Is it safer? Well, yeah, for driving, maybe. But if it's very high THC, maybe not. And so you kind of get into these arguments that don't really make sense. What is very high THC?

Sorry. It's the percentage. It's going to be the ratio of CBD. So when you start getting past like 50-50 ratios, and you can buy pure THC now. People are vaping pure THC. Oh, yeah. I mean, which is,

you know, and if you have a stable mental constitution, you're healthy in other ways, maybe it's fine. And with what frequency of vaping would it cause this? So that's interesting. That gets into the realm of what psychologists would call adaptive maladaptive behavior. So if you, for instance, can't

function in your work, it's too much. But there are people who are in creative endeavors or even programmers who do really well smoking two or three times a day. And so I'm not going to be the one who says, don't do it. The drugs we talked about before, cocaine, amphetamine, heroin, those you kind of put into a bin of bad. Yes. Just can't be good. No one thrives on those. Sure.

Right? And many people destroy their lives with them. But in terms of triggering psychosis, with what frequency from those Canadian studies? So you do see that the more high THC cannabis that people smoke, the higher probability they're going to have a psychotic episode later. Even if it was just a couple of times they smoked? That seems pretty unlikely. That seems pretty unlikely. That seems pretty unlikely. Now, methamphetamine only takes one or two uses to trigger a psychotic episode.

I have a friend from high school who was always a little weird. His whole family was kind of weird because these things run in families. And he did amphetamine. It wasn't meth. He did amphetamine one or two times. And he's still walking the streets of San Francisco. He's like a homeless guy who's crazy. He's crazy. Is there any way to fix that or reverse that?

Sometimes people can take these drugs, antipsychotics, but the problem is those antipsychotic drugs usually block dopamine and people don't like to have their dopamine blocked. In fact, if you ever see a homeless person who's on the street doing this kind of writhing thing, there are two versions of that. One is the, there's the meth addict version of that, the walk, right? The meth walk. And then there's the schizophrenics

who are taking their psychotic medication, excuse me, will get something called tardigidyskinesia. Parkinson's is loss of dopamine. When they take anti-psychotic medication, they're blocking dopamine. You get Parkinson's-like things dopamine when they take anti-psychotic medication they're blocking dopamine you get Parkinson's like things where movement gets messed up I think cannabis

again has its medical applications certainly stimulating appetite for cancer patients glaucoma in some cases if I had a magic wand I'd say, hey, kids, let your brain develop, and then explore if you're going to explore.

Same thing with psychedelics. MDMA is an interesting drug we could talk about. There are a lot of data on that. What about mushrooms? Yeah, I'm 38, and then I just found out weed is fun, and mushrooms sound fun too. Never touched it before. Either?

Never did anything. Or alcohol. I was a fucking dork. I've been buzzed twice. And then alcohol to me was always worse than weed. You don't even need the X's, the straight edge thing tattooed on your hands, right? No, bro, no. When I was growing up, it was like— Who gets tattoos?

That's sin. Yeah, tattoos, right. And it's more like, is it true now tattoos are not really in? Like, my generation, like, tattoos were. Yeah, it was more common to have a tattoo than not for our age group. And now what? The next one. You go to Bushwick, bro.

Kids are inked up. Yeah, everybody's got tattoos. It looks like a desk in detention, just, like, drawings everywhere. Desk in detention. There's something special about the art of the, like, tattoo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a bathroom stall. Yeah. Okay, but mushrooms, though. Mushrooms. Okay, so psilocybin. there's something special about the art of the like yeah yeah yeah bathroom stall yeah okay

mushrooms mushrooms okay so psilocybin so um there are clinical trials showing that macro dose psilocybin so we're talking massive dose that puts people into a highly hallucinogenic state how many grams is that um we're talking like two to anywhere like one to five grams you know yeah so it's interesting. They stimulate high release of serotonin, among other things. But there's work by Matthew Johnson at Johns Hopkins and work now at UCSF by Robin Carter Harris showing that psilocybin at the macro dose

used once or twice in a therapeutic setting can really help people move through depression and trauma and maybe even eating disorders and maybe some other things too. Wow. It seems to create some sort of opportunity for learning new relationships between things. Like if you're somebody who's always felt

like you were going to fail in life or you couldn't get over a loss or a death or a relationship, like it does allow people somehow to imagine new possibilities. In fact, 66% of people in those trials found lasting relief, years or more, from psilocybin. Now, that doesn't mean go crazy recreational psilocybin. Also, I'm just citing what Matthew Johnson, who's one of the leaders in this field, told me. I was like, what about microdosing? And he said, very little evidence.

Maybe it's because the studies aren't done yet, but at least to my knowledge, very little evidence. He said, macrodosing. So that was kind of surprising. That's surprising. I hear about people doing like 0.2 over the course of a couple week period to see some type of new flow.

Yeah. You know, psilocybin is a very, because it's very serotonergic, it tends to be kind of mossy, earthy, people hallucinate. It's kind of a mellow, people talk about ego dissolution, kind of allows you to see yourself through different perspectives, work through things. Then there's of course, MDMA. Now, psilocybin is generally considered safe for adults in the clinical setting. The safety profiles are very, very high, but this isn't the kind of thing you want to take and then go, you know, and then go for a drive,

obviously. You need some limits in place. And there was a case in Florida not that long ago where a guy walked up to a family sitting having lunch and killed them. And then he sat down on the ground and they found out, oh, he's high on psilocybin. Now, did he have violent tendencies before? Who knows? But, you know, and it happens and that's one case, right? And how many people did that on alcohol or didn't even require drugs? So you have to be careful with these examples. You probably need to be guided. Like I've heard there's a type of therapy where they will give you shrooms and the guy will guide you through it. Is that the way to do it? If people are going to explore this, I highly recommend doing it with a trained licensed clinician. And these are moving towards legalization. Currently they're still

illegal, right? But they are decriminalized in a lot of places, which is different than being legal. And then there's this question of like, how often, right? And there isn't a really good answer for that. But if you're macrodosing psilocybin, you can't really do it that often. I mean, you're booking the weekend.

And then there's the integration. Remember, what happens during the session is one thing, but that window of neuroplasticity, the ability to change your brain, goes on for weeks and weeks and weeks. So it may not be just about the experience. It's also about what happens in the wake of that experience. But there are very exciting drugs, frankly,

because, and psychiatrists who are progressive, and we have several of them at Stanford, are really interested in this. There's DMT, there's Ibogaine, and we could talk about it for hours. What about ayahuasca? What is actually happening? Oh, that's great. So that's a DMT experience.

So this is, I mean, it's amazing. Two plants that you have to combine in order to get this massive shift in space and time recognition. Massive shift in space and time recognition. Ayahuasca is a bit more of a complicated interpretation as to whether or not it's safe. It tends to bring up a lot of heavy issues. But what is happening actually in your brain? Oh, massive release of serotonin and DMT, dimethyltryptamine. Yeah.

So it's a very, I don't want, again, the psychonauts going to jump all over me for this but it has some very like LSD like qualities some very psilocybin like qualities tends to distort

your notions of space and time DMT itself is just is like a freight train only lasts about 15 minutes but what are these like gnomes

that people say that they see yeah the green men the green men yeah there's some things that people tend to see. But the same way that if people take LSD, you see tracers, right?

It disrupts your visual perception so your motion perception is off. That's because all these chemicals are used all over the brain. I'll be honest. I mean, I think that there are less data on ayahuasca. Psilocybin is being tested. And MDMA, the data on MDMA are incredible.

And MDMA is this massive increase in serotonin, but also dopamine. And the thing about MDMA is for years, it was thought that it is neurotoxic. And that's because a paper was published on this. It turns out they were using methamphetamine, not MDMA in these studies. The safety profiles of MDMA provided it's real MDMA. It's not cut with methamphetamine, are actually quite high. This was discussed by a guy named Nolan Williams, who's in our Department of Psychiatry at Stanford. He's one of these crazy triple board-certified psychiatrists twice over and neurologist. So I trust him. He's very, very conservative about this stuff.

Pure MDMA. Pure MDMA has been tested at minimal use, meaning just a couple of times, moderate use, which is I think like, you know, like five to 10 times or so. And then people have used a lot of it. And the safety profiles show that people tend to be cognitively normal despite those uses, but the sourcing matters. And what's interesting, you know who those studies were? How do you sign up to be one of these test subjects? You know who they did those studies on? And what's interesting, you know who those studies were? How do you sign up to be one of these test subjects? You know who they did those studies on?

If you think about what's the one group of people that don't do any drugs, don't drink alcohol, they did them on Mormons. Fucking brilliant. And then the Mormons told me that Mormon now, I'm supposed to say LDS, Church of Latter-day Saints. And I have some very close Mormon friends, and it's really interesting. So it turns out MDMA is not on the banned substance list for Mormons. Wow.

For LDS. And so they did these studies in Utah on people from LDS. This is what Nolan tells me. I looked at the study. Yeah, wild, right? What a great population. I mean, it makes sense. It makes it also fucking happy.

They also looked at kids. They've seen kids who have done MDMA. And so this is a smaller data set, but the safety profiles on the actual compounds are pretty impressive. The problem is the stuff off the street is cut with amphetamine. Amphetamine is neurotoxic. So when you see someone doing the meth walk down the street,

that is because they have brain degeneration at that point. And nobody wants that. I mean, meth is just a terrible drug, right? And so, you know, sourcing matters. And then MDMA, the one problem with MDMA is it makes you feel attached and bonded to anything. So if you're listening to music, it's like, you're like, I'm really into music. I have a friend, he decided he wanted to be a musician inside of the MDMA session. I'm like, that's what you got out of it? Yeah. He's still a terrible musician, you know? But so working with somebody to keep you, you know, who's licensed and can tell you, listen, like, let's focus back on your relationship to yourself or back on your relationship to whatever, this person. But the data are really impressive.

What about ketamine? Oh, this is the new drug, by the way. Yeah. So when we were at Burning Man, cocaine was almost non-existent. Thank goodness. Because of fentanyl. Everybody's terrified of getting a fentanyl spike.

Fentanyl is dangerous. Fentanyl killed cocaine. Yeah. Yeah. Killed a lot of people too. And people. But also the joy that cocaine brings us. No.

But, yes, so nobody's using cocaine, but ketamine was rampant. Everybody was on ketamine. Yeah. So what are your thoughts on ketamine? Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic. Yeah. It's PCP. Whoa.

We grew up hearing that PCP was the thing that was the reason why people were throwing punches at light poles, remember? Yeah. Superhuman strength, PCP. Both ketamine and, yeah, and PCP, they're the same thing, basically. You're a basehead, bro. Nah. You're a basehead. Well, it's so crazy because we were taught.

The media. And listen, I'm not a conspiracy. Everybody was doing that. Well, they used to say that marijuana, the devil's weed, right? I mean, they used to say that marijuana was going to make people psychotically violent. It can make people psychotic all of the way we talked about before. But, you know, I mean, the messaging around certain things is just crazy. I mean, it's just crazy.

I'm all for a real discussion. I mean, Joe's friend who he's had on the podcast, who's up at Columbia here, Carl Hart, he takes a very extreme stance. He wrote the book, Drug Use for Adults. I think I have the title right. He's the guy who was a regular user of – He talks a lot about the war on drugs and how that created these perceptions. He's kind of at the extreme end. I'm kind of middle –

Isn't he using heroin? Is that the guy? that created these perceptions. He's kind of at the extreme end. I'm kind of middle. Was he using heroin? Well, he talked about recreational use of it and how constipation is a major side effect. And I was like, you know, I, you know, listen, he's done far more research on this than I have. But I think that that's a very extreme stance that's not likely. I have to stop using heroin.

Yeah, not like shit. It's not likely to be adopted in the US anytime soon. I think that right now we're in a really exciting time to reevaluate these things for their clinical potential. But you think ketamine is... So ketamine is legal, right? It's being used as dissociative anesthetic and it tends to make people feel like they're in the third person. They're watching themselves go through an experience. Now here's what's wild. The data on psilocybin say that if people take large doses of psilocybin and work with a therapist and get to the point of letting go where they're willing to like let themselves almost panic and then break through the other

side, they experience long lasting relief. That we know is true. On the other end of the extreme, if people take ketamine and they talk about their depressive experiences and they work through them in a very dissociated, kind of like distanced way, they're able to work through it. So I thought, how can this be, right? Like they're just opposite effects. That's like saying being wide awake and being asleep are both good for the same thing. And it turns out it's true because the way it works is you have to go through this arc of getting really, really stressed about something and then breaking through to a sense of peace. The brain seems to need to learn

that it can think about a problem or sit next to an experience in any or all of those states. And so both ketamine and psilocybin separately, not in the same session, have been shown to be really effective for the treatment of depression. Now, the issue with ketamine is it often doesn't last, the effect doesn't last that long. And so people have to go back and get it every, you know, week, every two weeks or month. Whereas

the psilocybin, we're talking about one or two sessions, and more than two-thirds of people in those studies experience long-lasting relief from otherwise what they call intractable depression, which is incredible. And you know, look, five years ago, three years ago, I would have been afraid to have this conversation as an academic. Now we have labs at Stanford, Johns Hopkins, UCSF, University College London that are focusing on it. And the pharmaceutical industry is like jumping on this. Really? Yeah. Because these are some of the most effective treatments for depression than anyone's ever observed with minimal side effect potential, which is pretty fantastic. It's amazing. Is it depression primarily? Because a lot

of kids struggle with anxiety, whatever else they're going through. Well, anxiety is a tricky one because there are a lot of different sources. Sometimes there's anxiety weaved into depression and vice versa. You know, anxiety is, you know, you don't want people taking sedatives, but people need to learn how to work through their anxiety. And that's like a lot of what my lab works on, like tools, you know, double inhale through the nose till your lungs are full, then long exhale.

That's the fastest way we know to really quickly calm down. This isn't breath work. This is just a pattern of breathing that we know can really dispel stress quickly. So-called, it's like when you just dump all this carbon dioxide which is so some people frankly um a lot of people are really overweight or even mildly overweight who have sleep apnea have more anxiety because they're not getting rid of co2 yeah so they're literally suffocating in sleep and they're you'll see these people, they're mouth breathers. Not even necessarily just people who are overweight. So it's not good to be a mouth breather. You don't blow off enough CO2, anxiety goes up.

Yeah, I've heard you should sleep with like athletic tape on your mouth. So you train yourself to breathe through your nose, because apparently it's way better for you. Yeah, I'll do cardio. I do a long run once a week or some long cardio. I try and not mouth-breed the whole time. Can it also change face shape? Yeah, so there's a wild book called Jaws, a hidden epidemic by colleagues of mine at Stanford. And they have these twin studies. One kid grows up in a culture

where they eat a lot of soft food, drinking Capri Sun, eating applesauce, baby food. The other one got stuck in the jungle or wherever it is, and they're chewing on bones and chewing their food. And one kid, these are identical twins, has beautiful jaw structure and high cheekbones. And the eyes look nice and clear.

The other kid is like droopy. The teeth are there in their mouth breathing. They show this, there's one case of this young girl who just, she got a pet or a pet hamster, I think it was, got a allergy to the hamster and literally took this beautiful young girl and she just, her face just starts aging at a rapid rate. They get rid of the hamster. She goes back to nasal breathing. They do a little encouragement of nasal breathing using the mouth closure thing at night, do a little bit of medical tape. And like

these beautiful, almost like model-esque features come back in this girl. Jaw shape and the clear to the nasal passages. You know, really there's no reason why any of us should ever had had braces, but all your teeth should fit in your mouth, right? And you should be able to put your tongue on the roof of your mouth with your mouth closed. I can't quite do it. Your palate should be somewhat wide, you know? And so when we see, now there's the jawserciser is really big in Hollywood.

That and peptides are like taken over. Jawserciser? Yeah, these like things where like. Bouncy mouthpiece. Yeah. It looks, the only problem is it makes people drool. It's pretty gross. But you know, it's.

Those work? Exercise, they definitely work. They change your facial structure. They dilate the nasal passages. You look at somebody who keeps their facial muscles strong. And this is for women and men, their jaw muscles strong. We're not talking about the like, you know, like, I mean, there's certain people who are like genetic freaks,

like my friend Laird Hamilton. He's got, you know, he's like big old neck and like huge jaw. Like he looks like a, you know, an actor from the seventies or something. He's just naturally that way. But people who care about their facial structure, especially who don't want, a lot of people are concerned, like, what's going on with my skin? A lot of women and men are like putting all this stuff on and figure out how to get rid of the droopy eyes. It's actually a facial muscle issue. And where they just to do some jaw exercises and focus on not mouth breathing,

it completely changes the structure of the face in just two, three months. And there's, yeah, there's like skincare salons called like Face Gym and other places where they're literally giving your face a workout. And you'll notice that it's like a lymphatic type of massage. It'll change after one session. So I imagine just doing the training. Yeah. So when girls are getting like, maybe this doesn't work actually, when girls are getting filler to like put in, like they have the hollow space or whatever here or here, does that, does that? Well, I look at the plastic surgery thing now, and it's kind of crazy. I mean, maybe this just reflects my age and my generation,

but I see some people wearing so much dark eye makeup, plus they're getting the cheekbone inserts. They look like skeletons. Now, listen, everyone's got their taste, especially if they're really lean. But facial structure is something that can be modified. And so chewing your food, chewing hard foods is something we used to do a lot more. All this slurping down of food and calories we know isn't good from the obesity side, but it's also not good from the jaw structure, teeth structure, face structure.

And it's all related. So that book, Jaws, is amazing. People can just look it up online if they don't want to buy the book. Just do, you know, Jaws, mouth structure, face structure, and then just go images, and you'll see these pictures. And this was known in the 1800s. There was a book called Shut Your Mouth

by a British doctor who talked about the fact that people who snore, sleep like this, and then during the daytime, they become mouth breathers. He said they become less attractive than the people who are nose breathers. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. Yeah. It's really interesting. And this is like a zero cost thing, but it's not emphasized enough.

At all. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard about this. This is crazy. I mean, I saw random things on like maybe TikTok or Instagram of people who said, yeah, I started chewing this thing. Or maybe it was a hard gum. I thought, yeah, yeah, there was a hard gum.

And I thought that this was some like, I don't know, just some ploy, some like gimmick. Some TikTok trick. Yeah, to get some quick money out of people. But no, this is legit. Yeah. Yeah. And there's also for avoiding orthodontia. Yeah, and there's also for avoiding orthodontia.

Kids who chew hard food, who have to chew their food, eating real food and chewing their food, not just peanut butter, slurping down food all the time, using their jaw and their teeth, they have really nice teeth. In fact, the argument was made, and animals in the animal kingdom have beautiful teeth structure. You don't see the messed up teeth. They have beautiful teeth structure, and they don't wear braces,

but they're carrying flesh and they're doing their thing. We brought this up before. You look at like mummified people from like way back in the day, their teeth are always like pretty good. Yeah. And like, they're not,

they don't have all crazy, they're not eating sugar at the same rate, stuff like that. But those are the elites, bro. You know what I mean? Only the elites got mummified. Chewing on bones and things like that. Well, and if people think this sounds like kind of like- Actually, wait, that makes sense. They

were probably the ones eating the best food, the ones having to chew on meat because it was the rich people that are going to be able to get that meat. Because I don't think they were mummifying everybody, right? I mean like people like the bog man that like is in, you know, England that got frozen in like some bog. Oh, okay. Even he- Yeah, like their teeth are not in the way the American's teeth are now. So then why did humans start, like their teeth are not in the way the Americans' teeth are now. So then why did humans start losing their teeth? There's like the— This nice structure, you mean? Yeah, like you even look back at old presidents and stuff like that, like George Washington had all fake teeth.

Like what did he start ingesting that's getting rid of— Well, I think back then the problem was that there was no—I mean, dental care is still a good idea. Yeah. In fact, bacteria in the teeth and not, I'm terrible about flossing. Maybe sugar too. Sugar and also people not flossing. I mean, flossing and, you know, flossing and tooth care actually improves heart health. This is not pseudoscience. Yeah, I've heard that. Because if you have bacteria living in your mouth, right, and starting to take residence in your mouth and they get into your system, it can cause issues for the rest of your body.

I mean, we, of course, operate as a whole system. I'm pretty bad about flossing. I was one of these kids that had tons of cavities. It was just, and I took decent, I brush twice a day. I don't know. Are any of you three times a day brushers? You get those people. I try to be, but I can't do it.

Those people, they always impress me. They're brushing their teeth after lunch. Yeah, it's not me either. No, flossing and brushing, definitely good to keep bacteria out. But it's amazing what chewing your food really well will do for a facial structure. And I want to use the bathroom real quick, but I want to get back. Can we go over a few small things like this? Maybe like the five or ten tiny things

that you can do, they'll have. Yeah, almost like this. The biggest of the past. Yeah, I read that both your parents had a dancing ability. Yeah, well, my mom and my dad learned, for sure. And you have dancing ability. I don't know about that.

I mean, you know, obviously, I'm the best dancer on this podcast. He can get sturdy somehow. He can get sturdy every now and again. It's not even close. Do you want to have another competition? Pick your dance.

What's the dance? Sturdy. Get sturdy. Wow. Let's get sturdy. Let's go. At a party. If music comes on,

you're fired up to stand up and dance. I love dancing. Yeah, dance is the best. Yeah. We're supposed to dance. Yeah. I mean, listen, I think dance is amazing.

You know, it's also linked to verbal ability. Really? A guest on the podcast, he's amazing. He's here. His name is Eric Jarvis. I mean, here in New York. He's a professor at the Rockefeller. Okay.

He was invited to, although turned down legitimately, I checked this, to be in Alvin Ailey Dance Company. Wow. Became a neuroscientist. He studies speech, language, and dance. It turns out that species of non-human species that have language, like birds, the types of birds that can mimic and can speak, dance. You know, you see the thing in the cockatoos?

They can really dance. You don't see elaborate language in species, including humans, that can't dance. And he thinks that song and dance actually evolved before the kind of speech that we're doing right now. I completely believe that. Yeah. He's an incredible human being. Amazing story.

Grew up in Harlem. His story and the story of his family is incredible. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And he's running a lab here at the Rockefeller, which is also an incredible guy. But dance is a form of communication. That makes perfect sense. Probably the original form of communication. Yeah, I was talking to Jordan Peterson the other day, and he even brought that up.

We were just talking about the importance of play. And play allows you to enter these somewhat dangerous or fearful zones in a very safe way. And dance is a version of that. If you go dance with a girl, you can flirt with her. You can get very close to her. You can do all these things that would be incredibly dangerous and terrifying for her if you're just on the subway. But because of this safe little scenario, you guys can be almost very sexual through this game that you're playing. So, of course, you would want to learn that sexual through this game that you're playing.

So, of course, you would want to learn that, especially if you couldn't say anything to people. We're talking about millions of years ago. We don't have language figured out yet. I mean, shit, probably when we were younger, most of the girls that we hooked up with, we didn't even talk to yet. Right? Like, you're at a nightclub. You're dancing. You guys make out.

Then you find out their name. That's the most primal way to hook up. And they might even tell you their real name. Wow. Dude, that's interesting. Yeah, you know, and in dance, there's also the power dynamics, who's leading and allowing oneself to be led. So again, we're back to this thing about, again,

when people think power, they always think power over. But what I'm talking about is a consensual exchange of power. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, the Jarvis lab is doing amazing work on this. There are a few other labs too. Yeah, that's interesting. The dance is the most primitive, but also a very sophisticated form of communication. Also, the hands are a form of communication.

And the representation of the hands in the brain is right next to the speech area. Try and do your job. Try and do what you do with keeping your hands still. Very, very hard. Yeah. And I'm guessing

when you do comedy on stage, I haven't paid specific attention to your hands, but now I feel like I need to go back and watch. Oh, absolutely.

And so I'm guessing that facial expressions and hands, it's a huge part of it. I notice as much as I pick up speech patterns from friends, I'll pick up, sometimes I'll find myself moving my hands like Andrew. I'm like, what the fuck? What am I it, right? I notice how much as I pick up speech patterns from friends, I'll pick up like, sometimes I'll find

myself moving my hands like Andrew, I'm like, what the fuck? What am I doing? Yeah, I think that's normal. You can tell a lot about someone's energy. I used to, I love animals and so I used to study people from like what animals they represent. And you know, see some women for instance, and men, but oftentimes like I had a friend and

she just moved like a cat. And I was like, what is it to move like a cat? And what would happen is the part of the limb closest to the body, in nerd speak, we call it the distal limb, would move before the, sorry, the proximal limb before the distal limb. Distal is far away. I said it backwards.

Twice today I said things backwards. So when she would reach for something, she wouldn't go like this, like I would, like a primate, right? She would go, it was like very feline. It was like the arm would move first closest to the body and then she would reach. And every one of her movements was amazing. I once watched her unwrap a birthday gift and it was like a piece of art. She was just like, I still remember it in my mind.

Some people are more crude. They're like, you know, it's like all body, you know, that the limbs are all moving together. Very primate. Some people were very feline. Some people move smoothly. Some people, when they talk, it's very staccato. And some people like their, their limb movements are very smooth and it has a lot to do with their kind of demeanor and what they're saying. And when people are angry, the other day we were walking down the street in New York and, you know, it's always great to see some of the things you see. And you look and clearly there was a couple, she'd either caught him cheating or she was pissed. And I don't know what she said, but her hand movement said it all. And like, I was like, this guy's going to get knocked out with her words. But her hands were moving at a

mile a minute, way up in his face. Very different than if somebody is very demure. Very, very interesting the way the body and language sync up. Yeah, and you mentioned music. Yeah, so with music, I mean, our ability to create. Keep going, I'm going to just fix this. Oh, thank you. You're good. I feel so well cared for here.

He's a very nurturing group of men, by the way. Thank you. It's a very nurturing group of men, you know, by the way. Thank you. You know, music and song was probably the original form of communication. Let's go back to this aversive, appetitive thing. When you smell something that you hate, you go, ah, you tend to exhale. You don't want to ingest the molecules. When you smell something or someone that you really like, it's, mmm.

It's like, bring that into my system. Right. And you think about certain language, which is like, they call it the plosive words. They're like, get this away from me. Swearing. Yeah. Right. It's like, you know, like imagine your four layer words, whatever one is explosive, you're sending things out. Whereas like love is a softer word. Not just if you say it that way. Now you can say, I hate you. You can say, I love you in a hate you way, or you can say, I hate you in an I love you way, but that gets into some of the, you know, the finer, finer nuance. But in reality, the structure of our language, whether or not we're doing a th or a puh tends to associate with the strength of the word and what it means in the same way that when we do a mm or a ah, right? So language is built up from these primitive forms of breathing, right?

Language is just controlling the air as it leaves. It was amazing, right? You're just taking a breath, you're exhaling, and you're controlling the exhales. Wild. But music, like let's say you loved somebody, you would probably tell them in the way that you would vocalize, independent of the words.

And if you hate somebody, you're going to tell them in the way that you, you know, like I'm going to kill you is probably going to be like. Yeah. It's not going to be. Even the word kill, like that hard, sharp sound. Yeah, absolutely. So there's a lot there. Listen, we're basically, we are evolved from very primitive structures, right?

Yeah. And you cannot do away with that primitive stuff. So you ask, can you evolve this away? You can make decisions about how to control your behavior. Someone can really make you angry. You decide not to hurt them or you might decide to hurt them later in a very specific way, right?

Like that's like, almost feels diabolical, but you could say, okay, now's not the right context. I could get hurt if I do it that way. I'm going to wait, take my time, dart them later through this other interaction. And whether or not people resort to violent interactions or more

diabolical types of things, or whether or not you could decide you really like somebody, so you're going to ignore them and you're going to wait until not everyone in the room is hitting on them and you're going to, you know, approach them differently than everybody approaches them, et cetera, et cetera. We have a lot of control, but the basic drives, right? Make more of our species, take great care of our young, nurture that thing about kindness,

nurture the person we're with. We like to be nurtured too. Gestures of affection and things like that. That's all pretty, that's been around a long, long time. I'm curious your thoughts on story. I was watching your show. I've noticed it from just telling stories on stage and just watching other comedians tell stories. I've noticed the way that I react when I see stories.

I noticed the way that like when you're with a group of people and one person begins a story, the group just shuts the fuck up. Now, if the story sucks, eventually people will move on. But everybody's given a few seconds if the story is set up right. Is there something biologically wired in our brains to pay attention to this, to react in a way? Even with the cuttlefish story you told, did you notice the energy shift in the room? I mean, at that moment, I'm just in it. As you know, it was like on stage, like a... I felt the shift, man. Yeah. I mean, people got, I mean, I love that experience. Like we're still learning things, but we're learning it through story, which is like, I think it's a more impactful way. Yeah. Yeah. So without question, story is the most powerful way to communicate information.

Yeah. Just no question. Why? I wish I knew. Here, you know, it's not often I'm lost for words, but this is one of those cases. I don't,

we can't point to a specific biological mechanism. Yeah. I wish I could tell you it's because of this, that, and the other thing. But here's a couple of hard biological findings

that are really cool. If we were to each listen to the same story in separate rooms, and we start the story at different times, maybe even on different days, and I track your heart rate, your heart rate, my heart rate, and his heart rate, and then we were to look, your baseline heart rate would be different than everyone else's and vice versa. But the adjustments- But the adjustments map almost perfectly. This is a study that was published in Cell Reports last year.

That's it. And I love this because, and we're coming up on the holidays here, and you never want to timestamp a podcast this way or time capsule it this way. But when we read story and we hear story together, we synchronize our physiology. That's it. This is one of the coolest studies ever. And so there's something about sharing the same physiological response. And look, it doesn't all boil back down to sex, but as long as we have an opportunity to talk about sex in a healthy context, what is sex? Okay. Sex is reproduction in some contexts, not others. Sex is a form of, but you're taking your physiologies and you're saying, to some extent,

I'm going to let you control my physiology and I'm going to control your physiology in a consensual way, right? That's consensual sex. And when we listen to story, whether or not, let's say I listen to a story, you know, Eastern European time, 9 p.m. and you're listening to it at 8 a.m.

and then we're totally out of sync, but our heart rates map onto the same contour. So that's the best answer I've got for you. This is awesome. That's in terms of data. And that paper is one of my favorite papers. Let's work on this because I'm really excited about this. As I've started to do bigger venues, you know, when we're on tour, we've been doing, it starts at, you're doing comedy clubs, 300 seats. Then you're doing 1,000, 2,000, radio cities, 6,000. And I started to go, okay, the way that we hold attention in bigger spaces has to be different. And I don't think that everything has to be story. I think that you need to, like, mix things up.

But I have noticed, it's so funny that you said that, but I have noticed that story can wrap up a room of many more people. When it's 30, 40 people, we can do premises, quick ideas, pot shot jokes, misdirection, that kind of stuff. But holding 10,000, 10,000s, you need everybody to have similar reactions at similar times. And I've been thinking about this for a fucking year straight going, how do I do 20,000? How do I hold 20,000 and have everybody waiting for that moment for the laugh to happen? And you tell me right now that when people listen to the story, they all have the same reaction in those same moments, opposed to like just giving an opinion or like stating a premise. Some people might disagree. They might get turned off. They might be upset.

Some people might find it hilarious. But a story, even if it upsets you, you're still reacting with all those other people. That's right. That's shared reaction. It's like waves on the ocean. We're all going up and down together on the same boat. And before he started doing movies with The Rock, who was the biggest touring comic in decades? Yeah, Kevin Hart.

Kevin Hart. Kevin Hart's doing fucking The Link in Philadelphia. That's how you fill that space. And that's how you get everybody in the same thing because you're doing a football scene. I mean, you look at Chappelle. He's been able to do these massive venues. He's an incredible storyteller. Oh, yeah, in that last special,

he's talking about his friend from San Francisco weaves that through. And when you talk about dance, I mean, we used to gather and, you know, people would hunt together, people would cook together, people would sing together, people would dance together. Storytelling, I mean, it's been said we're the storytelling species. No, it seems like a, I mean, it seems like a cheat code almost, to be honest, to like convey information.

I mean, I even look at like, you know, sometimes when I'm trying to get inspiration, I do it outside of comedy. Like, I'll even look at like politicians who are very charismatic. I'm like, why are they charismatic? What are they doing? And like, I was watching an old Bill Clinton interview. Regardless of what you think about fucking Bill Clinton, he's undeniably charismatic, right?

And that's why he was able to be president of the United fucking States, right? Despite all the shit. And get away with what he got away with. Exactly. Despite all the shit that had gone on. People forget, just as a point, I'm still amazed. And politics aside, I know people that still love him, despite the fact that he got caught lying.

And they're just like, they kind of forgave him almost because he forgave himself. It seemed like he forgave himself, and so people forgave him. I mean, there was wilder shit he was accused of. Let's put it that way. Cheating is the least of his issues. Yeah, I'm very, and I'm not playing Dodge here, but I'm very naive when it comes to politics. You're happier because of it. Because it just confuses me because I feel like there's no data. It's worse than alcohol for recovery. But the point is, I was watching him on one of these late night shows,

and he was asked a question about the climate or something like that. And he didn't just give a data answer. He told a story. He's like, you know what? When I was in South Carolina, I remember once, and there was this guy, and he came up to me, and he talked to me. And everybody just gets immediately wrapped into this story about, and he somehow proves that it's affecting coal miners or something like that. I'm not exactly sure. proves that it's affecting coal miners or something like that. I'm not exactly sure.

But through the story, and it had like a little funny punchline at the end, and I'm like, wow, that's the greatest answer I've ever heard on this. It was absolutely amazing. I'm like, this is a superpower. Learning how to use that. But the fact that everybody's reacting in the same moment, that's how you fill those spaces. That was so helpful. That's so helpful. I'll pass you the study. Please. Because you have a degree in psychology from our alma mater. That's true. You and I are almost the same when you think about it. Exactly.

I'm just not as funny as you are. There we go. That's the only difference. Or as tall, or as good a dancer. The only difference. Or as good a dancer. Or as obsessed with feet. Or as obsessed with dick.

Or as obsessed with feet. Or as obsessed with feet. But in any case, it's a really interesting study. Wow. Because it's the really interesting study. Wow. Because it's the first one that I'm aware of that really sees, you know,

different rooms, different times of day, different subjects, same story. And of course, you're going to get people to have greater and lesser reactions

to a story. Some of you will like it more or less. Some of you have different attention. But they lay out the curves and they just map onto one another. You go,

oh my goodness. You know, I saw this when I saw- It's also why we want to watch shows together. I mean this like every Sunday there would be the HBO show that comes on at 9 o'clock, whether it was Game of Thrones or, excuse me, it doesn't matter whether it was AMC with Mad Men, it didn't

matter, but we do want that group experience. We do want to watch a show. The movie theaters. The movie theaters. Being in there with all these people. And a movie is the story, yeah, for an hour and a half. We're all just in the same place. We want to feel that. We want to have those reactions.

We want to be scared and have everybody go, ah, together. Yeah, the story is the thing that, wow, I didn't think about it like that. A story is something that creates, what did you say, shared physiological experience? Yeah, we could think about it as resonance. It's like a feeling that we're kind of one and the same. We felt the same about the same things. Even if we don't know, it's somewhat subconscious. I remember I saw Joe Rogan, no last name needed, but Joe Rogan,

do comedy at the Vulcan Club down, he does that some midweek sometimes in Austin. And he's got this bit, I won't even try and repeat what it is, but it's hilarious. But he's leading you down this path and you're thinking, oh no, he's not going there, but you kind of know where he's going, but you're not sure. And it was amazing because I was like, wow, I'm not sure if it's leading to a surprise or a confirmation of where I think he's going. And then I realized like, it doesn't matter. We are all on that ship with him. And then of course the end is great and i don't even want to cue people to it because if you haven't heard for the first time it's it's

amazing it's amazing the third time because i've seen it three times um but his ability to spool out the narrative because you have to keep people on board yep because we all know that guy or that girl who starts a story and then you're like like oh my god where's this going like this is going you know that that's. But that's often because there's no information gap. Like there's nothing that we want to know. That's right. Creating that information gap, our curiosity spikes and we're like, all right, well, take me there.

Like, it's the horror movie, right? You're like, what's down the hallway? Right. Is somebody following her? Is somebody outside? You got to create that. And I think that people that don't tell the stories well, they just create no information gap. They give you all the information.

That's right. And great courtroom drama is really about bringing the – I mean, I have friends who are lawyers who do criminal court and civil court where a ton is on the line. And they create a narrative about the other person. They use the person actually to fill in words to create the narrative they want. So they create this argument using other people's words. I mean, lawyers are masterful. The really good ones are masterful at getting a narrative into the jury's mind. We should watch some of that.

That'd be great. Just seeing how they build narrative, build curiosity. Alex used to work in the court system. Yeah, I would see it. And the best lawyers were the best storytellers. Like everyone's just like, we're just like engaged and it's like, yeah. Really?

So notable difference when there was someone who was really good. Oh, yeah. And then the bad ones are the ones that are just giving you the info. They're just like, ah, this thing happened at this time. This is why, you know, I'm in the health and something. You got to sell me on it. And would you see someone who you thought

might have been guilty? Would you see like, wow, the reaction from people change? Yeah, and that's why having a good lawyer is so important. Because it's like even if the person is innocent or guilty, if the other lawyer can convey it better, it's like you can get that person off. This might be a reach, but is that why the media is so powerful? Because they write the story.

And once they craft the narrative and get everybody into it, it's set. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think about, I used to, I try and avoid like serial killer crime stuff because it's dark and it's out there. And like, I don't want to focus on that now. But I was living in Davis when there was a whole Scott Peterson, Lacey Peterson murder.

And she was pregnant. It was really around me. At one point they discovered body parts in this canister not far from where my lab was at that time. And it turned out that was a guy working at the coroner's office who was taking his work home, but he wasn't involved in the murders. It wasn't her body.

But there were all these things happening. And then he died. Remember, then Scott Pearson dyed his hair, ran for Mexico. He had this thing with this woman who was his massage therapist. And they literally had footage of him saying, oh yeah, I'm here in Paris under the Eiffelel tower and there he was at the vigil for his dead wife you know the media did a masterful job of piecing together all these things that basically set him up and i from what i understand he's guilty right i don't know it wasn't there but i wasn't there but the

but the you know they piece together this thing of like all these behaviors, create the story of this guy who was a liar, a cheater, a guy who would try and disguise himself and leave, but they never actually got him directly to confess or anything like that. So they create this narrative that you go like, this guy killed his wife and his unborn child and he should go to prison forever.

Maybe he got the death penalty. I can't remember. I think they reversed on it. Anyway, the point is that like the media created a narrative about him. Well, right now, Liz Holmes is going to get sentenced in a few days, right? Theranos, company with all these blood tests and the fabricated stuff. She's been found guilty. I watched, what is it? Bad Blood, I think is the, you know, the story around her is so powerful that, you know, and it's going to be really interesting to see what happens. So I'm really curious to see what happens.

But the media lives on this. Information gap. They live on the story. And yeah, it's like, why haven't they sentenced her yet? Like, let's get the show on the road. She's had two kids while she's been out on bail. Now she's a mother, an expecting mother with a kid. So now there's a sympathy weave.

And like, you know, and so, listen, I don't know who did what, but the media is masterful at doing this. Politicians on the other hand, at least as far as I can tell, are just trying to navigate the next 12 hours of the news cycle and make someone else look bad so that the lens is off them. I think this is why really good people don't run for, for office. There are a few good ones out there. Like I've, I'm a fan of a few of them, but most of it's just kind of like protect oneself and point fingers at everyone else for 12 hours, 12 hours, 12 hours. It's pretty ugly.

It's a survival game and then just. Yeah, no visionaries. Like, I mean, right now I think we're really, you know, we need visionaries and we need people who can get out there and tell stories. But also it's like, who would do it, right? Like you think about what you go through, like the scrutiny, like even our friends, what they've gone through,

like Joe being in his position and having so much power and influence and then just putting his name behind a candidate and then immediately the next day having an onslaught of media narratives. Doesn't matter if you supported Bernie. So imagine that's you. Imagine you're already a billionaire. I look at all these guys who are independently wealthy and they're like, well, why doesn't Jeff Bezos run for president?

It's like, why would they? Because he loves his life. Exactly. It makes your life horrible. They're going to look at what your kids do. They're going to do everything they possibly can to make you radioactive and just destroy any semblance of happiness you have. We have a system where it actually behooves you

to already be a piece of shit before you run. I think everyone who runs for office should make their second speech all the things that they did wrong that they can remember. And then ask whether or not people still want them to run. Yeah. And let people post to that list. Yeah. Let's not waste the time. Yeah.

So it's just like, here's all the terrible stuff I can remember. This is the 8 mile, like M&M, that's what you need. Just hop a freestyle. I think everyone would be better off. Yeah. I think everyone, we do need good people. I really hope that somebody listening to this is like going to like bite the bullet and just, you know, run. Let's hope.

Maybe you. Yeah, no, never going to happen. I think you have more influence in culture. Like, I don't know, I like being a part of culture. I don't want to be a part of politics. I don't want to be a part of politics. I don't want to be a part of telling people what to do. I want to be a part of reflecting on what people do and what we love. And to me, that's way more fun than making rules.

You know what I mean? No, I mean, it doesn't appeal to me at all. I ran for office in the seventh grade. I lost. I started skateboarding. So much more fun, right? Basically, quick team sports after that and just, yeah, no, I'm like, do my own thing. And science is fun because there are definitely rules,

but there are rules around trying to figure things out. And no one becomes and stays a scientist if they don't really want the truth. Because in the end, there's no real incentive for figuring out stuff that's not true. Every once in a while, you hear of these people. It turns out that 90% of the time when people commit scientific fraud, they're medical doctors who get into science. They're not pure scientists. And guess what?

They get caught, and they do it again. They get rehired, and they do it again. I have a friend who knows this area like sport, and he's brilliant. He loves telling stories about all these people who get caught doing terrible things, like falsifying, and they do it again and again and again. Why do you think that is? I think it's a compulsion. I think it's like the people who they're just delusional. I think the game for them becomes trying to get one over on people. It's not really about-

And why are medical doctors more prone? Egos. Doctors come in two forms. And I think there are many, many excellent doctors who have incredible bedside and really care about their patients. And then there are a lot of them that would like to be well-known and famous. And it's very hard to be well-known and famous in that profession. And doctors who go into science oftentimes get a little bit of a boost because their training is unique and special. And yeah, for whatever reason, when you look at data fabrication, more often it's medical doctors turn scientists than pure scientists. Wow.

But I do want to say that, again, not for political reasons, but most doctors, probably 99% of doctors, are very well-intentioned. And very, you know, just trying to help in whatever field they can. Oftentimes very unhealthy themselves. I see that a lot. I look at some of the doctors. You know, Stanford is different. To be fair, people pay more attention to their health, I think. But sometimes I see, I've seen dentists with bad teeth. So it's weird, right? And people always go, it doesn't compute. But anyway, who

knows? While we're on medical, I really want to know about peptides. Because that seems like the Hollywood secret. Yeah. So a peptide just means a chain of amino acids. But let's just get this out because there's a lot of interest in this now. You need to sleep, exercise, good nutrition, good social interactions. You need to do all that stuff. You're never going to optimize testosterone, muscle, fat loss, et cetera, if you're not doing those things. Everyone needs to do that.

Then there's the question of like supplementation. And there are some good supplements that are legal, things like Tonga, Ali, Fidojio, they can boost testosterone somewhat and that people get benefit from. And don't shut down your own testosterone production or growth hormone production. Then there are drugs, prescription drugs, like growth hormone, testosterone that people use for testosterone replacement therapy, and then just all out steroids, like Anadrol, Oxandrolone, where like you see the guys, you know the look, right? I mean, you know, yeah. You know, and that can be abused, et cetera. Any of those things could be abused, but there's this new kind of wedge in between supplements

and prescription drugs that are called peptides. And they're a bunch of different kinds. And the ones that are most popular right now in health and fitness for use in both males and females are, for instance, things that stimulate the release of growth hormone. They're called secretagogues. It sounds like synagogue, but it's secretagogue.

Things like sermorelin, tesamorelin, ipomorelin. They all, you take it as an injection. They can be bought without a prescription or with a prescription. We can talk about what's better. And they're taken before sleep. If you haven't eaten anything for a couple of hours, they stimulate massive growth hormone release,

IGF-1, et cetera. They help you recover faster, fat loss, muscle repair. They also stimulate libido pretty substantially. Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is a miracle. Yeah. What is this? Cermorelin. Why are we not on? How can we- Well, okay. A couple of reasons. One, to get it, really good Cermorelin in your prescription, but there are a lot of doctors that will prescribe it. You can work on that? Yeah. What if I'm trying to have a baby? Does it

fuck that up? It does not disrupt. So testosterone will disrupt sperm production. You can offset that. So let's say you were to take testosterone. It would shut down your own sperm production. Testicles shrink. Some people more than others. But some people will take HCG, human chorionic gonadotropin.

That can stimulate the testes to continue to make sperm. HCG, incidentally, used to be, now they make it in a laboratory and you inject it, used to be collected from pregnant women's urine. So in the bodybuilding community, people used to literally try and drink pregnant women's urine. There was a black market for it. Yeah, I knew that. I figured that story was going to widen some eyes. But did you notice I went in?

Yes. Exactly. So people can maintain fertility on testosterone, but sermorelin will not disrupt fertility. Why wouldn't you take it? Okay, well, there is this issue that, first of all, you need a prescription to get it clean. There are sources online where you can just buy it without a prescription. It's a little sketchy.

You go to these sites and they say Venmo me, but Venmo me under this name. So it's kind of gray market. The problem with those is you don't know about the purity. You don't know if you're getting what you think you're getting. Let's assume that we have some connections we can get. Sure, MDs will prescribe Sermorellin. Yeah, I've used Sermorellin before.

I actually still, listen, I'm really open about this because I never want to be like a natty or not video on me. I'll just say like not. I mean not meaning I take Sermoremorelin about three or five nights a week. Um, helps me get into really deep sleep quickly. You get a bit of a IGF one boost. It's great. You recover fat. I never recovered very quickly from exercise. I didn't start until I was 45. Um, you look great now. You look like what I thought Lance Armstrong would look like with the steroids. You look like what he should look like.

I could ride a bicycle, but not like him. There's another joke there, but I'm not going to make it. What is that? No, no, no. The bulge? No, no, no. Are we talking about the bulge? I have to be careful. I never met Lance.

I'm sure he's a nice guy. There's a guy who eventually came clean about his – and people still seem to like him, I think. They don't wear the wristband, though. It took a while, but – Wristband's gone. Yeah, we came around on him. Yeah, instead of live strong, it's sort of like live honest by not wearing the wristband.

Sorry, Lance. So, turmeric is – We should all get on this. What is the bad? Okay, the downside is it causes growth of all things, right? So if you have, for instance, a small cancer growing on your pancreas, it will accelerate growth of that cancer now. So you tend to want to cycle these things doing in frequent use, you know, five nights a week or three nights a week or occasional use, you know, look, I'll tell you right now, a lot

of the bodies you see in Hollywood films are on peptides. Have to be. Because right now the look isn't really super huge, like 80s professional wrestling. Yeah. The look is, you know, the women are a little bit leaner and stronger than in past years. The men are sort of in that middle range. You know, it's more about definition and, you know, okay. Cermorellum.

Then there's also something called BPC-157, which is actually based on a gastric peptide. Turns out that there's a gastric peptide that we all make that can promote healing of tissues. And I've talked to Joe a lot about this. There's not a lot of data on this, whereas there are a lot of data on Cermorellin. But BPC, like I had an L5 compression

and I was always like in pain standing up from a dumb thing. I don't deadlift anymore. I just made a dumb mistake in terms of form. And massage, heat therapy, electric therapy, the whole thing, two injections of BPC-157. Look, if it was placebo, okay, I'll take it. Gone. Gone. And the BPC-157 is remarkable.

A few years ago, a guy tore his Achilles right before the Olympics, came back. BBC 157 was implicated in that. So again, you want to get good, clean sources. There are physicians that will prescribe these. Again, these aren't going to shut down fertility or testosterone production. Could it make my kids wonky or anything like that? Not that we are aware of. Not that we're aware of.

Your kids are going to be okay. I'll just come. Your kids are just going to have so much fire in them. You know what? I need to take something so I have something to blame it on

when my kid comes out that way no matter what. You guys are like a beautiful couple. You have all this energy. You lived in New York. You're going to raise them in New York.

It was the pep time. You're going to raise them in New York, I hope. I don't know. I don't know. We'll see. I think it was the late Philip Seymour Hoff going to raise them in New York, I hope. I don't know. I don't know. We'll see. I think it was the late Philip Seymour Hoffman that said in his will that his kids wouldn't get any money if they lived outside of New York or Chicago or London because he wanted their brain to develop in a sensory rich environment. Is that where he grew up?

Because I'm going to raise my kids in a different place. I'm sorry. He unfortunately tapped out through unfortunate circumstances but I think there is something to having that intensity kids who aren't from New York they come here and they hear a siren go by and they're like my niece grows up in a big city

and she's totally comfortable in noise and chaos she's super calm I see the kids here, they're just like, whatever they just can cope you take a kid like that, you put them california and they're gonna run the company yeah because it's just they have so much energy and so much force yeah you know and everyone else is like dissolving into a puddle of tears because it's too much we're staying here babe sorry um so okay so there's bp there's sir morellon there's bpc 157 there's and then there's this whole landscape now of like TB500, et cetera. There's a lot of kind of cocktails of peptides.

I know less about that. And there are far less data on that. Now, as long as we're having this discussion, because of this audience, I have to assume, has heard of TRT and testosterone replacement. There's a lot evolving there. I am hearing about guys going on really young. I really worry about that because it will shut down your sperm

production unless you won't be able to conceive kids, unless you're doing something to offset that, like taking HCG. And that should always be done with a doctor. The new way of doing this is not to get one shot every two weeks of massive testosterone, but taking smaller doses every third or fourth day, dividing that up and then doing the HCG as well. That's very common. But TRT, you know, the R is replacement therapy. And the range of testosterone is really broad. And what I think guys should do is, I started weight training when I was 16.

I was running and weight training. And then when I got to Santa Barbara, I was more like weight training and hanging out a bit. And then I got serious about studies. But the point is that you want to train on your own hormones, learn good sleep, good nutrition, good habits, and also live your life, right? You're not going to like not have a beer or two

every once in a while at age 22, just because you might not recover as well. Like, okay, if you have a tendency towards alcoholism, be careful, but you know, let's live your life is my stance. But once you have all those things in place, let's say you already have kids and people are feeling tired and more sluggish,

then testosterone replacement therapy can make sense for some people. The problem is a lot of people think if a little is good, more is better. And that's not good. And also it's what you do with that. You still have to run, eat well, you know, preserve your cardiovascular health.

Yeah, it doesn't replace those things. Yeah, you still need blood work to make sure your prostate antigens aren't going crazy and stuff like that. I hear about young guys who are just like, they're slamming Viagra and testosterone. It's like, listen, that's not going to play out very well over time. See what you can do naturally with hard work and dedication and balance. And then over time, you can explore things. But the peptides are interesting. They're kind of a, you know, middle ground where you're not risking as much in terms of long-term fertility issues. They're not going to, they're not going to give you a ton of acne or something, or, you know, make someone look crazy like they could if they

abuse steroids. And women are using them a lot more now because they're milder. They don't have these so-called androgenic effects. They're not going to deepen the voice. They're not going to create facial hair for women, that kind of thing. But yeah, they certainly work. They're banned in sports for a reason. Oh, we're doing it.

Although last night, listen, I don't want to get beat up by any of the MMA crowd, but I can look at some, I mean, some of the athletes are either genetic freaks or they're using in the off-seas. I mean, I think I've seen some photos of Conor McGregor now. I mean, some of the athletes are either genetic freaks or they're using in the off-seas. I mean, I think I've seen some photos of Conor McGregor now. I mean, he's massive. And he's big.

Yeah. He's big. So either he has ridiculous genetics. Yeah. Or he's on something. And listen, no shame in that. I mean, it's his life. He can do what he wants.

Yeah. You know, there's a runner who ran for Stanford, I think still holds the American record for marathon, for fastest U.S. marathon, Ryan Hall. He was like a stick. Finished running, got out, started lifting weights. still holds the American record for marathon, for fastest US marathon, Ryan Hall. He was like a stick, finished running, got out, started lifting weights. He's a beast. Looks like something out of a Marvel movie. Really?

Mostly because he's just eating and deadlifting and squatting now. He still runs a little bit, but he's not running a gazillion miles a week. Yeah. Yeah. Dude. Yeah. So the peptides are interesting,

but make sure you get a clean source. There's some good sources like TaylorMade. You need a prescription. It's a good pharmacy for peptides. These are clean because you don't want to get— And go to the guy you get yours from. Yeah. I mean, I can definitely—

You've got to connect. I mean, I can give up—I mean, listen, there is a physician who's doing this kind of work online. Well, keep it on the low. Let us get cute before everybody else gets cute. And it's not illicit. You know, I mean, he'll make you do blood work and that kind of work online. We'll keep it on the low. Let us get cute before everybody else gets cute. And it's not illicit. You know, I mean, he'll make you do blood work and that kind of thing. Yeah.

But I do take Sermorell in about three to four nights a week. You can't take it every night because it has less of an effect. Right. Now, and then there's this whole landscape of gray market. In the old days- We're not doing that shit. Yeah, in the old days, it was the big drug out here

in the club scene was GHB, gamma hydroxybutyrate, which increased growth hormone. That's what River Phoenix. That's the date rape drug, right? That's Rohypnol. Rohypnol. Isn't that GHB? GHB, no.

GHB stimulates growth hormone release. It's a hypnotic, and it was big in the club scene, and then it became big in the kind of sex club scene. And then when River Phoenix died, it became implicated in that, and they actually used to be able to buy it at GNC. Get the fuck out of here. Yeah, but not anymore. But it turns out River Phoenix, you know, sadly had heroin, cocaine, marijuana, alcohol, and GHB in his system, which is obviously, you know, very— Wait, is that poppers?

What's poppers? Poppers, I think, were something of, I don't know. You know what? The two drugs that have totally disappeared are quaaludes and poppers. Yeah, quaaludes are gone. Quaaludes. I don't even know what a quaalude is. Me neither, but it looked fun in that movie.

Very sad. I heard it was like a horse tranquilizer. Yeah. Bad idea. Bad idea. Actual finite supply from Wolf of Wall Street, which I rewatched recently. Great movie. But they're gone because people just took them all.

And it was supposed to, I think, help you sleep or something. But then they found out if you stayed awake past a certain point, you got super high and it got fun. That sounds like GHB. And remember, ketamine used to be a recreational drug, right? Still is. Cat. Yeah, all these drugs. Listen, if people are going to exploit it with a medical doctor, I'm Still is. Cat. Yeah, all these drugs, listen, if people are going to exploit it with a medical doctor,

I'm not saying that to protect me. I'm saying that to protect you, being in the audience. Like, you have to, these are not things you want a cowboy, especially with all the fentanyl stuff happening now. It's so crazy. I mean, you just die the first time. That just, because I remember growing up, they said if you smoke crack once,

you're going to be addicted for life. Remember, that die the first time. Yeah, it's nuts. Because I remember growing up, they said, if you smoke crack once, you're going to be addicted for life. Remember, that was the public message. It does seem like you can die from fentanyl first time. Yeah. Sorry to go dark there. No, it's happened to a bunch of comedians. Yeah. Yeah.

Really? Yeah. Is it true that comedians, that cocaine is common in the comedy scene? I think it was. Huge in the 80 in the comedy scene. I think it was. Huge in the 80s. Yeah, and I think it's still a little bit more in L.A. and stuff like that. I think cocaine is just like, or was before this fentanyl stuff. It was just a recreational drug.

I was surprised. I mean, I'll be honest. Especially younger people, how often they were using it. It was just like every weekend, it was like smoking weed, drinking alcohol, do some coke. I feel like when I went to college, there was some people smoked some pot, maybe some psilocybin use, but it was really just alcohol. Yeah, it wasn't. For Santa Barbara, it wasn't a big cocaine scene or heroin scene. I'm sure there were pockets of that, but I was never exposed to that.

Well, yeah, I think that the peptides thing is interesting. I'm interested in the peptides. Mark, what were you going to say? I'm curious, your question before, what are five or six things that you implement into your daily or weekly routine that you do that you think more people should do? Okay.

And then we got to wrap this one up, I think. Okay. I want to ask one question. I'm not known for being succinct. No, no. I'm so sorry. You don't have to. I love this podcast.

I listen to it. So for me, I came here to listen to you guys and then I end up talking the whole time. We came here to listen to you. So you did the exact right thing. I'll have to come back and be an audience member. That would be a thrill. So, okay, foundational things. Get sunlight

in your eyes in the morning, especially on cloudy days, as many days of your life as you can. And make it a pleasurable thing. Just get up and get outside, get out on a porch, get outside, you know, take sunglasses, just do it. Right. Um, uh, most days, if not every day, try and get your sleep right. Now, younger people with different schedules, like don't give up a social life, but you know, try and get a good amount of sleep. Get good at that. Some people are great sleepers. Some people aren't. Very good idea.

If you want to be healthy to do three days a week of weight training, we're talking about 10 minutes of warmup and 50 to 60 minutes of working out. If you want, we have a schedule that encompasses all this. It's on hubermanlab.com. You get it free. There's nothing to sell here. It's just like a fitness toolkit.com. You get it free. There's nothing to sell here. It's just like a fitness toolkit. We have a sleep toolkit, all that zero cost.

You just download it as a PDF, three-pagers, so you don't have to listen to me talk. Then I would say three days a week of resistance training and train your legs. Guys, come on. Come on. And, yeah. And three days a week of some cardiovascular work.

People might say, well, listen, I'm in my 20s or 30s. Like I'm not worried about it. It's not about being worried about a heart attack. It's about maintaining blood flow to everything. What is some cardiovascular work? Okay, so I think one day a week, you take a long, slow jog or pedal on the bike or treadmill or swim, whatever your favorite thing is.

If you want to make it social and you're out with somebody, you could literally get one, like wear a weight vest for a hike if you want to make it harder, but you could skip rope, whatever. The other cardio day, sprint. It's real easy. Find a patch of land, sprint for 30 seconds to 45 seconds, then walk back for a minute to 90 seconds, sprint again, do that five to 10 times. By the end, you will have increased your speed, your VO2 max, your output. And then another day, do something fun. I got a friend, he's a musician. I won't name his name. He's a well-known musician. He's really into Pilates right now, probably for a bunch of reasons. Loves Pilates. He's like, yo, I'm loving Pilates. And then he's Pilates. Some other cardiovascular thing that's kind of fun. It could be basketball.

It could be skateboarding. Like something that you enjoy at least three days a week. And the other day is weight training. It's not complicated. And then one day a week, just take off as a recovery day. And the way to organize this so that your legs recover in time for the sprint day and your sprints are kind of double as a leg day, we have an episode on this called Toolkit for Fitness.

You don't have to watch it. We'll just have our fitness toolkit lays out the schedule, exercise selection, rest sets, all that super easy. It's minimal time commitment. And listen, there are reasons to do it for aesthetic reasons. There are reasons to do it for heart health reasons. This is key. Okay. So sunlight that I think have some tool to be able to control your stress. Some people are super mellow, but some non-pharmaceutical tool, the double inhale through the nose, the physiological size, so big, deep inhale through the nose, then sneak in a little bit more air, then dump all your air with your mouth. That's the fastest way to calm down. If you're scared of public speaking, if you, you know, you're tense about some interaction and listen, if I can't bring you on board with that

way, listen, I'll just be very direct. You want to can't bring you on board with that way, I'll just be very direct. You want to delay orgasm. It works for that too. Because remember, orgasm is an increase in what we call the sympathetic tone of the nervous. It's actually kind of like the stress response. And then comes the relaxation afterwards. So, you know, it's sort of like if you need like an incentive. Well, and in the tantric community, they talk about using this type of breathing for couples to be able to have sex for long periods of time to be able to explore the different forms of sensual connection. So there you go. Like physiological side effects. I have a joke about that.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's crazy. Well, there is something called retrograde. You know about the retrograde ejaculation thing, right? No. Well, this is crazy. And I have a story that you have to be careful with this, not to get too wild with this.

So there is this thing about, there's a lot on the internet about semen retention and chi, right? Yeah. After orgasm, and here we're talking about males and females, but in males after ejaculation, there's an increase in the hormone prolactin, which makes you very mellow. And that sets the refractory period. And during that time, you're not getting another erection, you're not having sex again. This is why drugs that increase dopamine sometimes are kind of pro-sexual drugs. But if people take too much of them, then they're just like all gas pedal,

but they're not relaxed enough to actually get an erection, right? This is the cocaine thing, right? So, you know, sex is a dance between arousal and relaxation. Tantra, excuse me, understands that and they try and bring people into kind of a mellow plane where they are controlling all that rise and fall of arousal over and over again. That's the idea. So there is this notion of, from in Asian, certain Asian cultures have talked about retaining chi by instead of allowing semen to leave the body during orgasm, there's a practice of pulling it back in by inhaling and clamping essentially the muscles around the prostate. So I have a friend who got really into experimenting with this. His wife happened to be in the kind of Qigong community,

was really into Qigong, and he did this, but he developed terrible prostitis. So you have to be really careful. But he was walking around feeling like he had twice as much energy as he ever did before. So right before he's about to bust, he sucks it back in. Yeah. And again, you can mess yourself up with this. That's crazy. It's crazy. It's crazy. That seems like the worst idea. It seems like, yeah, exactly. For some people, it's going to be the worst idea. For other people, you know, I'm not promoting this, but there is this notion of retrograde ejaculation.

Do you ever let it out? Do I personally? Yes. No, no, no. When you retrograde, do you ever actually ejaculate? They do. They recommend they do it like once a week or something like that. I mean, yeah, as long as we're on this topic,

if you do want to get your partner pregnant, stay out of hot tubs and saunas in the 60 days preceding that. Oh, 60. 60 days sperm. But you can put an ice pack between your legs if you want to keep your testicles cool. There's a reason why the scrotum moves. Yeah.

Yeah, because you keep the sperm at a certain temperature. Hot tub, saunas. Yeah, 60 days before trying to conceive. Yeah, and it's not a good form of birth control either because I think plenty of people have been conceived in hot tubs and saunas. Yeah. I don't know the exact number, but let's assume.

So we got sunlight. Somehow we got into retrograde ejaculation. We got sunlight, exercise, stress control through physiological, the double inhale, long exhale through the mouth, try and be a nose breather and not a mouth breather. Listen, I also think it's a really good idea in addition to seeking good social connection, et cetera. I think it's good to have some practice

that makes you more resilient. And I'm a big fan of cold showers and ice baths and cold. They have great banyas here in New York. And put yourself into uncomfortable cold three or five days a week. It's not about the metabolism increase as much as is the mental training of doing something that sucks.

I mean, David Goggins has this right. And actually this brings us back to the importance of story. I mean, David is a guy who just keeps pushing himself and pushing himself to do the hard thing. But I think the reason he's so effective as a communicator is because we understand that he had to go through a journey that was incredible from being this 300 plus pound guy to that. And he's still doing it. So we're like in his story, he's still going. And so I think all of us would do well to, yeah, to push ourselves

to be uncomfortable. And then when the cold, what's beautiful is after you get out of the cold, and I like to end on warm shower, you do a minute or three minutes of a cold or get in the ice bath or whatever it is, you get this huge long lasting surge in dopamine that sets your mood and your positivity for hours and hours. This has been shown by data. And so I think it's a wonderful tool.

And listen, these are basically zero cost tools. They take time. I wish I had developed these tools in my 20s. I built them gradually. I've been working out a long time and little things here and there, but if you start them early, they stay with you. And I always think the best way to outperform everybody in your business, or at least keep up in very competitive business, and Joe Rogan is a beautiful example of this, is to take excellent care of your health. I mean, think about three or four four-hour podcasts a week, plus the comedy

thing, but it's superhuman. Plus UFC. You're doing this. People who are really good at their craft invest in taking really good care of themselves. And then, of course, that includes avoid toxic relationships. Just avoid them. They ruin people's lives. They'll ruin your life. Just do your best to be in healthy relationships,

and then everything's good. And I don't say that lightly. That's a big one. I've seen so many people who were doing great, but because they got caught up in some drama, they just nosedived the whole thing. So those would be the recommendations.

There are a bunch of others, and I'll keep spouting them out on the internet. Dr. Motherfucking Cuban, man. Just saved your life, okay? You could do all that stuff, or you could just go get peptides like the rest of us.

Because we're not going to give a fuck. We're going to do psilocybin. We're going to smoke weed. We're going to not do fentanyl, but we're going to definitely do, what is it? What was the other one? Salmonella. Salmonella. No, no, not salmonella. Cermorellin. All that shit. Salmonella. Cermorellin.

R2D2. Retrograde. The retrograde. We're retrograded. We're not nutting anymore. It's no nut. November, December, January, February. It's all no nuts. You're nutting inside. A lot of prostate doctors making money in November. We're coming to you, prostate doctors, literally.

Okay, so I want you to make sure that you go check out Huberman's podcast. Make sure you check out his website, the Huberman Labs as well. Get all that information right there. And follow him on all platforms. And go see him live. And go check out the live show. Thanks for coming out.

Absolutely. We love the live show. That was great. And remember, he wears the same outfit every time, so you get to see that junk.

Dr. Human, everybody. Thank you so much.