Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Sanjay Gupta #4 (on dementia and weight loss drugs)

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

Sanjay Gupta (Chasing Life, The Last Alzheimer’s Patient) is a neurosurgeon, medical reporter, and author. Sanjay joins the Armchair Expert again to discuss what some of the benefits to deregulating cannabis can be for people’s quality of life, the relationship between physical health and brain health, and what actions people can take to decrease their chances of developing dementia. Sanjay and Dax talk about the dyslexic things they both struggle with, what some of biggest predictors of Alzheimer’s are, and having a sick care system vs a health care system. Sanjay talks about the long term effects of obesity, the judgements and income inequality gap of weight loss drugs, and decoupling the correlation between weight and health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, expert son, expert. There is an old friend coming by. Repeat. He is jockeying for most frequent guests. He is, and he's up there. He's in a dead heat maybe with Sedaris. Yeah.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, what a sweetheart from Lavonia, Michigan. That's always gonna make me like him more than everyone else. Yeah, and he's one of those guests we have where we just start talking and it's so interesting. Yeah, and he can pretty much tell you about anything in the health sphere. Touchdown on the most exciting topics.

In fact, today we go over Alzheimer's, the weight loss drugs. We talked about marijuana. Marijuana, yeah. Everything under the sun. And he has a new documentary out on May 19th on CNN called The Last Alzheimer's Patient and we talk a lot about that.

Of course, Sanjay is a neurosurgeon with a practice and CNN's chief medical correspondent. He has a new season of his podcast out now, wherever you get your podcasts called Chasing Life, the Science Behind Happiness. Who wouldn't want to know about that? Please enjoy our sweet, sweet friend, Dr. Sanjay Gupta. We are supported by Buick.

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Yeah, sorry I'm catching my breath. Hi, so good to see you. You too, in person. In person! Back in person, it's been a while. Have you been offered all the drinks? I got my drink, yeah, I'm good. You don't need a coffee or anything?

No. Good. Tell me about your coffee intake. I do a cup a day. I never drank coffee before the pandemic. Okay, how interesting. In your whole life? My whole life.

Wow. Never liked it. It's so tempting to stereotype when we have two Indians in the room. Yeah. Because Monica was a very late adapter to caffeine too. Yeah. I also hated it. And I immediately just go, oh, that's weird.

You're two of only five people I know that came to it that late. Yeah. Well, the thing is, I drank caffeine. I just didn't like coffee. Oh, tea. Okay, so you had soda or whatever. I'd have soda. I'd have tea. Coffee just did not taste good to me.

And it was really weird because everybody that I know, especially in the medical world, they all drink coffee. Coffee is a mountain. Multiple cups a day. Did not like it. And then my wife started giving it to me during the pandemic. Giving it to you like it was medicinal? It was.

I was getting up at 430 every morning. Right, trying to stay on top of all that. Make my calls to the other side of the world before they go to bed, and I need a caffeine. And I got this good coffee. Purity, I don't know if you're supposed to talk about brands. Yeah, we'll figure. It's a good clean coffee.

What makes it unique? The other stuff, I felt like I could always taste chemicals in the back of it. Yeah, to get that chemical aftertaste in my mouth. With Purity, it's just clean. I wanna try it. I am fully addicted to Starbys. In the same way I was addicted to Camelites, like it's my clean. I want to try it. I am fully addicted to star B's in the same way. I was addicted to camel lights.

Like it's my religion and people even point out like, you know, that's overly cooked and burnt and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, yeah, whatever it is, it's perfect for me. Everyone has their own palette. Now, once you like it. Cause okay. Similarly grow up. My grandparents percolator, Lavonia.

I remember. Yeah. Milk for township, but all my summers inonia. And that percolator went all day long, the big coffee pot. So it smelled so good and I wanted to like it for so long. And it was terrible as you were just describing. And then one day it was delicious. Ha, just clicked. Don't you think that is one of the weirdest phenomena with your taste buds?

It doesn't surprise me that we are constantly changing, that our taste buds are microbiome, what we like, what we don't like, what we find sweet or palatable changes as we get older. Frankly, it may change even day to day or month to month. We have that much sort of dynamic changes in our body. So it doesn't surprise me. Yeah. By the way, you look ripped. Can I just tell you? Please tell me all day. I mean, I'm just saying. Okay, to put off some of that compliment, I literally just walked upstairs from the gym. So this is as good as it's gonna look for the next two days.

Did you do it just for me? Of course I did. Appreciate it. You're bringing the brains, I gotta bring the brawn. You got both. It's gotta be yin and yang. You guys got both. I just wanna say I've been really looking forward to this.

Us too. This is the fourth time I'm on your show. That's a bit, you're one of our biggest. You may have tied Sedaris with this episode or maybe one behind. Probably one behind. Use four or five. I'll be back next week.

Okay. You gotta be him. In fact, you should just come back at four and just do back to back. You're investigating enough things that I'm sure we could fill two hours with any number of topics. So before we even get into that, what fascinates me about your role is you're

also in show business and so you do publicity tours. Like here's what I thought. I walked out of the gym and I saw a really nice escalator sitting in the driveway. And I said, Oh, that's Sanjay. Sanjay definitely has a driver that CNN provides cause he is also expected to go out and promote the show. In a lot of ways, you're like an actor that would travel around and do press tours. Yeah, you know, it's funny.

I've never thought of it that way. That sort of stuff was always sort of the add-on. And frankly, I'm not even really promoting anything. You guys provided this wonderful invitation, and as soon as I saw it, I just jumped at the opportunity to be here. I'm not just saying that. I'm trying to think. Am I promoting something right now? I'm not even sure.

Well, yes. May 19th, you've got The Last Alzheimer's Patient on CNN. I'm not just saying that. I'm trying to think, am I promoting something right now? I'm not even sure. Well, yes. May 19th, you've got the last Alzheimer's patient on CNN. I'm very excited about that. You have a podcast of your own, Chasing Life. You have a couple of forthcoming documentaries you're making that are of great interest to me. One in particular, the weight loss drugs.

I want to talk about that ad nauseam if we could. I want to talk about that. I just got back from Copenhagen. Oh, you did? Yeah, so the federal government two days ago, signal that they're going to pretty much declassify weed or reschedule it. Declassify. You're going to be allowed to talk about it now.

Drop it down in a schedule. Tylenol level, Kristen. Tylenol with codeine, still controlled. So it's not recreationally going to be different than what it already is. There's so many States that have it recreationally, but it's a big move something We've been talking about for a long time I think it can be a medicine the culture and the science the collision of those two around Cannabis is one of the most fascinating things that I think I reported on just how it all comes together

Yeah, and there's also some like geopolitical historical ramifications of it We're generally not leading this as a country We're pretty conservative and it's kind of shocking that we will potentially be joining a handful of countries globally out of hundreds of countries that actually might decriminalize it entirely and that's not generally our position either. It's not and even this rescheduling to be fair will still have this federal versus state dichotomy. There still may be problems in certain places for people to access this as a medicine,

traveling with it across state lines. That's boggled my mind that you could use it as a legitimate medicine for your child with seizures in California, but potentially be criminalized for the same thing in a different state. So this doesn't necessarily address it, because it's still a controlled substance.

Yes, but I think we would both recognize the very well-worn pattern of this, which is most states started with a medical use clause, which then grew into recreational use. Fuck it, we're here, let's talk about marijuana. We have now a pretty robust data set. I don't know how many years it's been, but I believe Colorado's got to be coming up on a maybe a decade or something of having fully recreational legalized marijuana. That's right. And so I imagine we have a good sense of what the impact of that is, good or bad, plus and minus.

Look, you can even go further back to prohibition because that provided some really interesting data on what happens when you actually, in that case, deregulate something. You do see usage go up for a period of time, but ultimately it probably sort of balances out to where it was before. So there's not this huge clamoring all of sort of balances out to where it was before. So there's not this huge clamoring all of a sudden for people to just start taking it. People who wanted it before recreationally probably got it. People who use it as a medicine and felt criminalized for using it as a medicine.

By the way, I'm not just saying that I think that not only can it work as a medicine in certain situations, I think what really struck me is that sometimes it's the only thing that can work. Give medicine in certain situations. I think what really struck me is that sometimes it's the only thing that can work. Give a couple of examples. This seizure disorder known as Dravetes, D-R-A-V-E-T-S. So it's basically just seizures that are happening all the time for young children, intractable, they're called. And there was a little girl who first captured

my attention on this, because I wasn't that sold on it being a medicine, but she was a young girl named Charlotte Figge. Well, let's be clear, a lot of people are worshiping it as a cure-all from like the 1900s. So there's a lot of bogus stuff you had to weed through. That's the challenge in so many areas. Yes, almost all of these things. I think it's one of the hardest parts of my job, frankly, because people want to see black and white,

where they should rightly see gray, and the idea that, well, you said it was going to be a cure-all, a panacea for everything. It's not that therefore it's useless. Well, that's not right either. So to be nuanced in this area is challenging and you kind of know you're doing it right as a reporter. If people on all these different sides are throwing barbs at you. If they all hate you, I think you're onto something. Right.

I got it. It's like counterintuitive. It used to be that you'd think like, if you get consensus that you were onto something, but actually I think it's the opposite now. Yeah. You've drawn the ire of all these different people. You must be doing something right. You know, but the young girl, sorry girl, she had tried seven different generations

of anti-epileptic medications, Keppra, Keppra. She had done medications that had been formulated in different ways for little kids. They'd even recommended a veterinary medication. Sure. But at the same time, still said cannabis was a no-no. So we're willing to try a medication for animals, but not, but then her mom in Colorado Springs, which by the way, is a pretty conservative area. Parents had never used cannabis.

They told me she formulated it in her own kitchen. So just took the cannabis plant, turned it into an oil squirted onto her daughter's mouth and it helped with their seizures. She went from 300 seizures a week to about, yeah. Can you imagine? Do you know, I have to remind you, Monica has epilepsy. She's a nocturnal. Seizures. Yeah. I'm a nocturnal animal. I've had two nocturnal seizures. I'm on Keppra. Gotcha. Was the most recent one a while ago? 2020 and 2019. They were a year apart. Immediately before the pandemic.

Yes, right before the pandemic. And then I got on the medication. Yeah, maybe I'm just sensitive. Clairvoyant. Oh. To diseases. You probably are. But did you have an aura though?

Did you have something before the actual seizure that gave you some sense? I don't think so because- What's an aura? People sometimes may see a visual thing where they see sparkles in front of their eyes. Sometimes they may have a strange taste in their mouth. That's a common one.

You taste metal in the back of your mouth. Oh God, I'm gonna be so hyper-awake. Sorry. You're gonna be hypochondriac, yeah. Didn't mean to. No, they were both at night, so I don't know what anything was. And I was with friends.

The first time I didn't know what it was. I just woke up like at four, so disoriented and in a ton of pain and I had peed in the bed. I know you wanted me to include that. I'm proud of you for keeping that in. He's a doctor, he's seen it all. I had urinated in the bed. Nocturnal emission of the urinary type.

That's not common for me. So I thought, what's going on? I went to the doctor the next morning, they did a urinalysis and then they were like, oh, your kidneys are fine, everything's fine, you're fine. And I was like, well, okay, I guess. And they gave me a steroid shot for like the pain. That was it.

And then a year later. Did you get a scan of your brain? No, they didn't even begin to think this could be neurological. They were just like, oh, something weird. You laughed and they're like, yes, you drank too much. Probably. You peed the bed, let's see you a thousand times a week. I was like, oh, something weird. You laughed and I was like, yes, you drank too much. Probably. You peed in the bed last time.

Exactly. See you a thousand times a week. I was like, I didn't. But then the second one, and this is crazy. I was on this date, a first date, and of course I bring up that I had peed in the bed a year ago. First date.

On a first date, I go all in. And he said, I don't mean to scare you, but it kind of sounds like you had a seizure. Cause he himself had had a seizure. And I had never heard that or thought of it. So I was like, huh, weird. And I asked my doctor, I said, hey, that thing that happened a year ago,

could that have been a seizure? And she said, there's no way for us to know at this point. A week later, I was with Kristin and two of our other friends in New York and I had one, so they saw it. They were sharing a bed, thank God. Yeah. Got it. Thank God. They were cutting costs,

two to a bed, bunch of millionaires still saving money. Thank God. They were cutting costs, two to a bed. Bunch of millionaires still saving money. You gotta applaud it. Seizure prophylaxis. She was fortunate and they observed the whole thing and then went to the hospital. Then it was like, that's what's happening. And did they scan you then? Then they did and everything's fine.

I had peed the bed too, but it was alcoholism. If I pee the bed again, it's probably that. Yeah. Is that on your list of topics, peeing the bed? I just wanted to tell you that we both pee the bed and invite you to share our similar experience. Yeah, if you'd like to share a story about that. I mean, I definitely pee the bed as well.

I think I was like two years old then. But 300 a week, that's- That was crazy. And so the mom- And by the way, if your child is having 300 seizures a week, I have to imagine you are absolutely open to anything. Oh my God. Right, that was the thing.

So she would put this baby in the baby bjorn and just feel her seizing all the time. Can you imagine? And then they try these medications and then they're told the medications can be cardio toxic. They're so powerful, they could actually stop her heart. So it was terrible, terrible choices for a mom. Are they muting out neural activity of certain areas?

That's right. And potentially shutting down your parasympathetic? They're basically stunting all these pathways in your body. That's how they work. And that could have an impact on the heart as well. So she tries CBD oil and she says an hour goes by, five hours go by, a day goes by, and Charlotte does not have a seizure. She has to be crying at that point with gratitude.

Yeah. And also living with this sort of guilt still that this is a substance that shouldn't be used by a child certainly and was very reluctant to talk about it. But then she did and it made a huge difference. There's a product called Charlotte's Web. Have you ever heard of this? It's a cannabis product, comes out of Colorado. It's named after this girl, Charlotte Figge.

That's how it started. And being sued by the publishers of Charlotte's Web, but hopefully they'll be victorious. Yeah, I think even the publisher of Charlotte's Web would be on board on this one. Yeah, I hope so. Helping a lot of kids. Oh man.

Yeah, so that's the medical use. There are numerous ones that have been documented and are legitimate. Now, what are the more social outcomes? And have you even looked at kind of the broad data? One of the things that's been observed that I'm aware of is where marijuana is legalized alcohol consumption dips and that's interesting. So in a harm reduction model, even if marijuana is not ultimately beneficial

but we weight against maybe decreased alcohol consumption, which we know is bad for many reasons, you know, you got to have this very nuanced approach to evaluating what's good or bad for society. And I'm really curious where we're at on all of it. I mean, so that's one positive thing that's been observed. There was really interesting data that came out of Colorado initially looking at opioid use specifically. And they found that opioid consumption went down. That is wow.

Huh? Part of it, I think has to do with the fact that people do use marijuana for pain. You were getting this alternative to opioids because there weren't a lot of opioid alternatives. We've done seven documentaries on this. The last one we did was specifically looking at the use of cannabis in seniors. And it was really for what I sort of called the triad of aging. So you're older and you're fine, you're healthy. But the three things that seniors complain about the most, sleep problems, generalized aches and pains, and mood.

So oftentimes, because we live in such a medicalized society, you might be prescribed pain medications, antidepressants, and Ambien. My dad, who was 80 years old, was prescribed Ambien. Oh boy. Terrible drug. Do you operate the farm tractor? No, but it's so scary to take Ambien. Yeah, it's not a good one.

I'm going to go out on a limb. He fell and falls are a huge problem. How about the fact that it was never studied on women and come to find out it's twice as potent in women for whatever reason. I mean, the idea of how we run trials for both women and children in this country. But the idea that cannabis could be used for the nuisances

of aging is really interesting. Well, in this case, kind of a cure-all actually. Yeah, I mean, people were reporting much higher quality of life scores. cannabis could be used for the nuisances of aging. Is really interesting. Well, in this case, kind of a cure-all actually. Yeah, I mean, people were reporting much higher quality of life scores. I spent a fair amount of time in Europe looking at how they're using cannabis in different places in Europe.

And what is interesting in Israel, for example, they are looking at the use of cannabis for what they call behavioral abnormalities associated with dementia. So people who get dementia oftentimes have serious behavioral problems. They wander, they may sometimes become violent, they get scared. The option a lot of times is anti-psychotic drugs,

which basically sort of zombify people. They have good data now using cannabis for that. So there's all these different things that are coming about. And to your point earlier, we're behind on this. Israel's probably the world leader on this. Obviously other countries, the Netherlands, they've been doing a lot of research for some time because they've had such wide use, but we're starting to see the benefits, I think, of it in ways that we had not seen before. And it's not just an

alternative for some of these conditions. For some people, it's the only thing that really works. And we have a really arbitrary hierarchy with what's right or wrong to take. So an antidepressant, an SSRI inhibitor designed in the lab is somehow preferable to marijuana. And I'm not team marijuana. I also think it gets a little nauseating, all the, you know, nature cures all. But it is just interesting to look at. Yeah, why do we think it was illegal in the first place?

Coming out of prohibition, I think frankly, just culturally, they needed another target. And I'm saying this in part because when you look at the history of that Time frame and you look at the data around cannabis. It wasn't that they said this is Problematic what they said was we don't have enough data to actually render a decision one way or the other So let's just classify it schedule it in this case as a schedule one substance It also correlated nicely with all the government's known to schedule one substance. It also correlated nicely with all the government's

known nuisances. So your beat poets, black folks. I was gonna say, is that a racist thing perhaps? Hippies, anti-war movements. Oh, they're really sawing something out there. Oh, that sounded like a cat or something. I was like, I hate cats. I was like, Sanjay has a weird ring on his phone.

You notice that I keep going back and forth between marijuana and cannabis. Marijuana itself is considered a pejorative term that was designed to sort of diminish it even further. Or devil's cabbage. Yes, exactly. The well-known phrase. But cannabis as a actual scientific term

is what scientists will often refer to it as because they think of it as a compound that can be medicinal. A rebrand. A rebrand, yes. Of course, we called it weed for the documentary, so I don't think we were doing anybody any favors. You should have just called it grass.

So I'm conflicted. I kind of have to force myself to look at it in a harm reduction way because I think people are gonna use stuff. I also think there's kind of some pandemic anxiety, I think, over indexes in some groups, and it really pairs up nicely with groups that are inheriting a lot of generational trauma, so I think it over indexes in some groups and it really pairs up nicely with groups that are inheriting a lot of generational trauma.

So I think it's really useful. And also I don't think people should be dodging reality at all times with external substances. So I'm conflicted. I don't think it's an overall great arc for everyone to be medicated on cannabis. So it takes a very, very precise and nuanced evaluation of it. I agree with you on that. We run the risk of creating the same problem of over-medicalizing like we have with pharmaceuticals. I will say this though that after 10 years of really looking into this, we all carry

these CB1 and CB2 receptors in our bodies. The cannabinoid? Yeah, the cannabinoid receptors. Hard one. That's what it's called. Yeah, cannabinoids. You have it in your brain, you have it in your gut. People who have inflammatory bowel disease, for example, will sometimes find tremendous

relief with cannabis. I think as a species, we cohabitated and co-evolved with this plant. So for most of our existence, we probably had constant activation of these receptors in our bodies. Over time, we started to lose that, especially as the substance became increasingly maligned. So the idea that you would stimulate what are natural receptors in your body, as humans did for most of our existence, I don't know what that means overall, but I think it's interesting.

So to your question, are we over-medicalizing or are we actually creating a homeostasis in our bodies that did exist? If you talk to folks in Israel, who again have been doing this sort of work for a long time, and you ask them a simple question, how does this work? Why would it relieve pain? And opioid, we know why it relieves pain. Targets these mu receptors, things like that. Blocks receptors.

Here, the idea that you create a homeostasis and you allow the body to sort of heal itself in some ways I think is interesting. The body sleeps better, it experiences less pain, it experiences less mood abnormalities, whatever it might be. He likened it to sort of a flywheel. You know, in a flywheel, you get it going, and then it pretty much goes. You know, you give it a little tap every now and then,

but it's gonna go. Could cannabis sort of be doing that for our bodies? That's what they think. Like creating a positive inertia. By stimulating receptors that we all have in our bodies. These receptors exist for what? We do create a compound in our body known as anandamide, which is probably the closest thing to cannabis

that stimulates these receptors, but we only make a certain amount of that. And so the idea that you'd need to supplement as you get older, because you make less of it, it's like anything else. Could you think of this like another hormone almost? I supplement my hormones. Do you?

Well, yes. Yeah, okay. I'm open to criticism. Do you? Well, yes. I'm open to criticism. No. But yeah, testosterone. Did you get your levels checked and then? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I adjusted them. They were low.

They were low. They were low, yeah. And specifically, my free testosterone was really low. Not my overall was moderately low, but my available testosterone was quite low. And I started taking it six years ago and absolutely love it. What did you experience? Most significantly in this podcast is bizarrely a product of it.

I had had a movie, it came out, didn't open well. I was in maybe like a three or four month kind of depression over that or reevaluation. What am I doing? And I was mostly focused on I think I'm done. I think I'm going to retire. I think this was a fun ride and I think I'm done. I think I'm gonna retire. I think this was a fun ride and I think I'm going to, I don't know, I'll write, I'll do something. Went on testosterone and within six months of that,

I was on fire to work. I was way more engaged with my hobbies. If you understand testosterone, you read a lot about it. It is so associated with maleness in the male hormone, but of course women have it too. But mostly it's the get up and go do the thing that will get you status hormone is what it really is. So that could be aggression

if you're in a very aggressive society where status is determined by aggression. If it were a status derived from philanthropy, you'd become the most philanthropic person. So it is the hormone that makes you chase whatever thing. So for me, it brought me back to maybe my 30 year old appetite for my hobbies and work. Wow.

And then additionally, yeah, I put on more muscle mass, I burn fat more, I love it. Were there any downsides? Yeah, initially, and I think I was interviewing Andrew Huberman and he made a suggestion. So yeah, there's some pretty predictable side effects, right? You can get water retention. I had that a lot.

I didn't have any skin stuff that you can have. And he basically just said split your dose and just do it more often. So you're not getting these peaks and valleys of it. If you can kind of just stabilize it, you actually won't have any of those side effects. And I changed to that a few years ago. And yeah, now I would have no idea.

There's zero side effects. Over time, your testicles get smaller because they're not producing testosterone anymore. changed to that a few years ago. And yeah, now I would have no idea. There's zero side effects over time. Your testicles get smaller cause they're not producing testosterone anymore. So if I was very vain about my testicle size, maybe I would call that a big. You can tell the gym who's using testosterone. Do you have a stance on it? Are you anti or for, well, I just had my levels checked and they were normal, but my DHEA

level was a little low. You probably had that checked as well. Yeah, I supplement. And it's interesting, the reason I had it checked was mostly for my brain. Is this a result of doing your Alzheimer's? Yes. I went through an entire preventive neurology visit. In Boca Raton? Yeah.

Richard Isaacson is the guy who did this and I got to tell you, even as a brain guy myself, it was super fascinating. I think what really jumped out at me is first of all because there's not a biomarker for brain health. I think if you look at heart health you can say cholesterol, blood pressure, calcium score, ejection fraction, all these things. With brain health the joke goes if you ask 10 neurologists to define a healthy brain you'll get 11 answers, you know. Oh boy. That's a very good joke. It is, but it's also scary. Because people don. I know. Because people don't really know.

Yeah. But the idea that we now are very comfortable saying we can prevent, predict, and treat heart disease, and that came about over the last 60, 70 years, we're sort of getting to that point with brain health now where even though we can't say here is the test that definitively says whether your brain health is good or bad, we know that we can predict,

prevent, and treat brain problems. And one of the things that Richard really pointed out to me was a simple equation of like doing a DEXA scan of your body and seeing how much bone, how much muscle, and how much fat you have in your body, and where that stuff is located is highly predictive of future dementia. Oh, wow.

And so someone like me, I work out every day, but I do not put on a lot of muscle. And one of the most challenging things for me is to put on skeletal muscle. So your core, you would get to the point where a preventive neurologist would say in order for your brain health, you need to put on more muscle. Part of it might be supplementing with DHEA in my case. Another thing might be, is I do a lot of hikes with my dogs and now I always wear a rucksack when I do that.

A rucksack leading to brain health. That's not what I would have expected. No. Well, have you read Outlive? Yes, and he's big on that. Yes, it's everything. And so I read the book, I guess I'm almost all in on it. Am I right in that this is a bit of a paradigm shift where we weren't looking at the brain

as the result of your metabolic health? Right. We were kind of looking at it and going like, oh, there's this blood brain barrier and it's this own thing and maybe what you eat. We love to think of it as so separated. We always have. There's your brain and then there's almost

the rest of your body. And it's got a barrier between it and the rest. We've failed to recognize how a part of a system it is in that really your metabolic health is the greatest predictor of your mental health and your brain health. The most evidence behind brain health is exactly that. How long has this been?

To me that felt like, oh my God, what a revelation. I'm only like a year and a half into thinking that way. When I started my neurosurgery training, I finished in 2000, even at that time, the idea that you could create new brain cells. That was sort of considered very fringe thinking. We learned in biology when we went to college that the brain cells didn't go through mitosis,

right? There were somatic cells and then there were these gray cells that never went through mitosis. And maybe that's not true. We can create new brain cells throughout our entire lives. Wow. So I think I'm learning that this minute still. Oh, wow. This is huge.

This idea of neurogenesis. It's a relatively new construct, but I think that it's pretty widely accepted. We started to see this in animal studies initially. Started to see it only in certain areas of the brain, including the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory, short-term memory at least. And I think part of the issue was we didn't ever look at the healthy brain. We only looked at the brain when there was a problem, when there's a tumor, when there's trauma, something like that. And we knew brains, they had a fair amount of plasticity so they could sort of recreate pathways. But the idea that you could actually create new brain cells is still a relatively new way of thinking about this. One of the most evidence

proven ways to do that was through physical activity. Whoa. It was even a specific kind of physical activity. This was interesting because when you work out really intensely, you can create a lot of what is called BDNF, brain derived neurotrophic factor. That's like the miracle growth. It's so sexy when you say these words. You think like they just roll right off your tongue. You guys like this stuff. I know. That's why I like to talk to you guys. We're brain pervs. So much I don't talk to you like, okay, BDNF.

Brain derived neurotrophic factor, kind of like miracle growth for the brain. You can't eat it. You only talked to it. It was like. Okay, BDNF. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor, kind of like miracle growth for the brain. You can't eat it, you can't inject it, you have to make it. The best way to make it is through activity. Now here's the thing, interesting little nuance, is that when you're intensely active, you're also making a lot of cortisol.

The cortisol can be a bit inhibitory to the BDNF, as was explained to me. So the best type of activity for your brain is probably brisk activity without creating too much cortisol. So blasts of short duration, short duration, or just even longer duration, but less intense brisk walking. For example. Okay.

Everything I'm reading now is like, you should really be building in some really elevated heart rate blasts within there to increase your max VO. Very important for overall metabolic health, very important for heart disease. There's some nuances with the brain. That's what's sort of interesting. I think the general thinking was what's good for the heart is good for the brain. And it's a general rule, I think that's right.

But when it comes to activity, brisker activity versus intense might be better for the brain. The way we eat, you know, everyone knows sugar is bad for you. When your body consumes too much energy in the form of sugar, your body will store it. That's considered very evolutionary. When the brain sees too much sugar, the receptors are much more narrow, so they'll accept a certain amount of blood glucose and after that they'll just sort of turn off. So you could be stuffing your body and starving your brain at the same time, which I think is really interesting.

Like it's protecting itself from a very high blood sugar. There's these little things about the brain that we're learning that are different. On some level, it's really intuitive. Like when you just think of your heart in your cardiovascular system is a hydraulic system with fluid running through it. And you think of increasing the pressure at times

and really forcing all of that fluid to move and circulate. There's something very intuitive about that preventing buildup and blockage and all these things. It's interesting that you don't just intuitively apply that to your brain too. I guess because the way it's been positioned as this other thing that's not hooked to the rest of everything.

It's always been seen as something different. But this amyloid buildup that Alzheimer's patients seem to exhibit in fMRI scans, could we think of that amyloid as similar to any other kind of plaque you'd be building up in your cardiovascular system? It appears to be a remnant of something. So to the extent that coronary artery plaques,

for example, are reflective or remnants of cardiac disease, I think there's a similarity. What is different here is that there are people who have a lot of amyloid plaque in their brain and have no symptoms. Oh. If you had a lot of plaque to the point of blockages, for example, in your coronary,

you're most likely gonna have symptoms unless you've developed so many ancillary blood flow. Workarounds. Exactly. So we don't know still, if you have a lot of plaque and don't have symptoms, I think that suggested that plaque is not the whole story here. Maybe it's part of the story. And so many of the drugs that were worked on for a long time were just designed to get

rid of plaque. God, it's so hard to know, right? Is plaque a symptom of an underlying thing? That's really what we need to attack. Some people have suggested it might even be associated with brain infections. So the plaque actually helped prevent or protect the brain against infections earlier in life. Maybe maybe corridor off an infection or

surround or encapsulate. Right. Whatever it might do, or it's just some sort of remnant of something that happened in the brain. It could be an indication of the aftermath of something as opposed to being predictive. And even when you took away the plaque, like they have these great drugs and these monoclonal antibodies, which are good at reducing the amount of plaque, but so-so. It doesn't equal.

No. Ah, interesting. 27% sort of slowing of cognitive decline, which is better than what we've seen before. And what Isaacson and these other preventive neurologists, and there's not many of them in the country, they believe that probably 40 to 50% of all dementias are preventable. What?

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the boldly styled sport touring or the exquisitely refined Avenir. Visit Buick.ca to learn more. Tap the banner or visit this episode's page to learn more. to learn more. Tap the banner or visit this episode's page to learn more. Okay, so we are into your special that's coming up, the last Alzheimer's patient. Yes.

What happened when you went, what was the whole thing? The scan. I gotta tell ya, it was a bit scary. You guys should do it. I want to. You should do a podcast on this. I am scared. You won't even do the brain scan, or rather the body scan. I did the full body scan recently, and Monica's like, I don You guys should do it. You should do a podcast on this. You won't even do the brain scan, or rather the body scan.

I did the full body scan recently, and Monica's like, I don't think I wanna know. My grandpa just died and he had dementia. And so I am hyper aware that I might get it. If I can prevent it, I want to. Yeah, and I think again, up until recently, there wasn't the belief that you could. Just like we thought about heart disease 60, 70 years ago,

either you're gonna get it or you're not. There's not much you can do. That's how we thought about the brain. There's a lot you can do. I think what is interesting, when I went for it, the variety of testing. So I did do a sort of poor man's DEXA scan to get an idea of how much visceral fat. But I also went through very sophisticated

cognitive testing. So to give you an example of a few of the things, draw a three-dimensional cube right now. Draw a clock that says the time is 11, 10. I'm going to give you 30 words to remember now. And in five minutes, I'm going give you an example of a few of the things. Draw a three dimensional cube right now. Draw a clock that says the time is 11 10. I'm gonna give you 30 words to remember now and in five minutes I'm gonna ask you to repeat as many of those as you can. Can I tell you something shallow

and terrible about myself? I took such pleasure in watching you get some of those questions wrong. Like you're working on a little iPad and you're hitting these buttons and sometimes there's a red X. You like that. And I'm like, oh I'm so glad Sanjay's fallible.

But how do they know it's not just that you're anxious? Well, I was definitely anxious. I get nervous. I'm a nervous Nellie. Yeah, I'm a nervous test taker. I was comforted that you don't get every question right on every test you take. It was nice. Are you playing connections?

I'm nervous now. No, I get nervous before everything. Do you guys get nervous? Yeah, I do. You don't get nervous. It's context dependent for sure. When I interviewed David Letterman, my idol of my whole childhood, yeah, I'm nervous because you're afraid you might not leave a good impression. The value I have placed on what his approval would mean to me is such

heightened stakes that I can't help, but you want him to like want that so bad. He is a father in that way. Here's somebody I've worshiped. If he even alludes to the fact that I'm doing a good job or I'm all right, that's gonna be incredible. That's really sweet, actually. Yeah. We should all, you know.

Yeah, care. Yeah. I mean, the fact that you pointed out that I got those questions wrong is gonna haunt me now for the entire play right now. It made me know you weren't really nitpicking on that edit because if you were looking over here, show the ones I got wrong. No, but here's a little insight that I learned about myself with this cognitive testing.

So the words, you got 30 words to remember. Now it's not just how many words you remember, it's how quickly you remember them. And which of the words did you remember? Did you gravitate away from certain words? I gravitated away from words with B's and D's in them. Whoa. I never realized this about myself. And first thing Richard asks me when he sees me, he goes, do you count on your fingers? And I said, yeah, I've always counted on my fingers. I do this. He goes, anyone ever tell you that you probably have dyslexia? What? I'm about to be 55 years old. No one's ever told me this. Welcome to the club. Do you do this? Do these and these hardcore?

Dyslexic really oh you didn't learn to redo fifth grade interesting so you knew that early on I did you develop strategies? Presumably to address it. I don't want to get distracted by my story, but I don't think so I think one thing is like you just honestly you consume you consume You're in the dark You're in the dark you're in the dark and then all of a sudden the overall pattern just emerges and somehow you've now memorized. I don't think I ever learned anything phonetically. I just think over time I memorized the full shape

of every single word virtually. And yeah, it just kinda happens. I don't know that any technique I was using in 1984 really was the solution other than just repetition. And an interest in writing, where it flipped the script, where now I'm in charge of creating the words, that was an interesting thing, where I wanted to write, so now I was incentivized to learn them,

whereas before I wasn't. But it magically happened, I don't know how. I'm not sure it was from some technique they knew about in the 80s. It would be interesting if you took this test now to see if you've just overcome that. I observe it constantly, though. Numbers, you know, I still have lots of jumbling

and my pronunciation's pretty rough, I think, compared to my vocabulary. The B and D thing, that's interesting. I still go like this. Wow. I still do this. I'm holding up a B and a D in my hand. I'll just quickly check myself.

Yeah, you definitely have it. Like which direction should it be pointing? The circle, is that what you're saying? So I got the bat and the ball, and then the opposite of the bat and the ball. Your right hand is a, and look, that's even hard for me to say really quickly. That's a D. Me too.

That's a D. Okay. And your left hand makes a B. Audience, if you put your first finger and your thumb together and the remaining three fingers up in the air, that's what we're talking about. Yeah. By the way, it works well at dinner parties too

because bread drinks. Oh. Oh, I like that. You've got a whole life built around this. This is the first time I've ever seen a bread. Oh, I like that. You've got a whole life built around this. This is the first I've ever seen of you. Is that my bread or is that the guy next to me's bread? Now you know. But what I would argue, why I'm quick to agree with this very light diagnosis

of dyslexia for you. I agree. It's not so intense. When I got labeled dyslexic at UCLA, when I had to go back and get re, to get extra time on tests and stuff, you have to go through a very long eight week evaluation thing. And once I did that, it was very comprehensive and very obvious.

One other element I would say supports this diagnosis is I think in place of being able to get information from the written word, you develop a very, very, very good memory for auditory stuff. Your recall for words becomes really strong and your ability to consume and digest and hold on to information you've heard gets very high. And I think you have that. That seems very clear to me that you have that.

I think so. I think my enunciation is good. I'm older than you are, but once I started typing, I think it obviated a lot of the problem as well, because I just knew where B and D was on the keyboard. And I'd have to think about it each time. But I don't write freestyle very much at all. Do you?

Yeah, every morning I write with my left hand. You don't find it challenging. I do, I hate it. But I have to journal, it's like my commitment. But free writing as opposed to just typing. Correct. It's probably a very good exercise. It probably is, yeah.

And I've been doing it for 20 years. It probably helps with spelling and all of this stuff. I've become such a technophile with that because now I got everything set to the maximum parameters. It'll fill in the words for me. It'll fix the spellings for me right away. So it's one step short of just thinking it and having it right, which is next, I think.

Yeah, it's very close. Okay, so when you did this barrage of tests, you discovered perhaps you're dyslexic. That's an interesting outcome. And then what other things? Because if I were you, I would go into it pretty optimistic. You've lived a very healthy life and you exercise a lot.

Yeah, if you think of our healthcare system as a sick care system, which I think it is, in that case, I'm doing pretty well because I'm not sick. 95% of doctors would probably look at all my results and say, you're fine, there's nothing to do here. But I think in the spirit of prevention, to the extent that it's reasonable, you know, you're not gonna go crazy in terms of costs,

but there were several places that I could be optimized. I eat very healthy, but my omega-3 to my omega-6 ratio is not very good. I, at points in my life, have taken fish oil, but then have become less sort of enthralled by the data, less compelled by it. I know this supplements. But my doc is like you have to flip that ratio the omega-3 to omega-6 ratio and here's the data to show you why that's gonna be beneficial. DHEA, wearing a rucksack. There's another thing the longest nerves in your body are the ones that go to your feet. Most people do not

pay any attention to their feet and how their feet move. You wear shoes, I got these shoes on, which by the way, my daughter helped design these shoes. Yes, she did. They're very hands-friendly. They're from here in LA, George Esquivel. So he suggested toe spacers for me.

Wear toe spacers 10 minutes a day, which will really help activate these nerves, the longest nerves in your body that go to your feet. Wow. So these are not expensive things to do. Yeah, you could cram toilet paper in there. You had to, in a pinch. And the thing is that we wouldn't be doing the documentary

unless there was data behind these recommendations. These aren't these huge placebo controlled, randomized decades long study. It's very hard to do those. But I think the data is getting really good in terms of what we can do to prevent dementia. So my grandfather had it, kind of feels like you're wearing it around your neck your whole life.

Yeah, exactly. I tested genetically for it. There's ApoE3 or ApoE4, you should probably get that done. I know. That's a big Atea marker, he's obsessed with that. It's good to know, I mean, some people don't wanna know. Right, that's the whole. And I think the reason they didn't wanna know was because the second part

of that question was, what do I do about it? And now I think there's what do I do about it? And now I think there's something you can do about it. And that's a lot of what we wanted to show. Lifestyle changes can make a difference. Can you quickly tell me, so yeah, the grandmother on Bennett Street, off of Merriman, Alzheimer's, young age,

who's a teacher at Stevenson. Yes. What is the difference between Alzheimer's and dementia? Alzheimer's is a type of dementia. So you could get dementia, but it not be Alzheimer's. Correct, there's Lewy body dementia. That was something that Robin Williams had. There is frontal temporal dementia,

which is what I think Bruce Willis is dealing with. Okay. Where he's lost his ability to speak. So it can present in different ways. Ted Turner has Lewy body dementia. So Alzheimer's is the most common, but there are other types. There's many. In the doc, I learned 6.9 dementia. So Alzheimer's the most common, but there are other types. There's many.

In the doc, I learned 6.9 million Americans have Alzheimer's. Yeah. That's a tremendous amount of people. Expected to double by the year 2050. Because of the aging population right now. Because we're aging. Because we're on a collision course. Yeah, something new in the water.

They expect 150 million people around the world to have it by 2050. It's gonna be Yeah, something new in the water. Okay, yeah. I expect 150 million people around the world to have it by 2050. It's gonna be one of the most common neurodegenerative disorders that we deal with, which is why I think there's so much interest now in saying, hey, look, beyond the meds, which there have been a couple that have been more promising over the last 14, 15 years.

Did you cover this? I just saw something really fascinating. I guess he is a surgeon by training, but he uses ultrasound to stimulate the blood brain barrier so that the people taking that medicine, which generally you have to take it for like 30 days to get the full dose, you can get the full dose because it opens up the blood brain barrier

for a couple hours. Yeah, you're talking about focused ultrasound. Neil Cassell, is that who you're? Oh, that rings a bell. He's a neurosurgeon and he runs the Focus Ultrasound Foundation. I've been very interested in this. They's a neurosurgeon and he runs the Focus ultrasound foundation. I've been very interested in this.

They use it initially to try and do to the brain what deep brain stimulation would do, except without an operation. You're just using sound waves. And then just like you said, they were using it to basically disrupt for a period of time, the blood brain barrier, which might allow medicines in. And according to Neil, might also let some plaque out. So it could have sort of a dual benefit. This is where it's getting crazy.

Sci-fi. It's got to shoot an invisible sound wave. It's opening up this invisible. Yeah. A bunch of medicine goes, I mean, it's kind of crazy. Wild, but it's very effective for things like essential tremor and even Parkinson's. Yes. Oh my God.

That was the thing I watched. Maybe there was a 16 minutes on this guy. There may have been. There was a man that came in that had tremors so bad, Monica, he couldn't fill out the paperwork. They could barely get the head ring on him to put him inside of the MRI machine. The MRI, because he has to be held perfectly still

so he can hit the exact region of the brain. This guy is so overcome with these tremors, he can't do anything, couldn't lift a glass of water up, goes into the machine, they take the ring off him, and he starts crying. He looks at his hands and they're completely still. It's amazing how quickly that works. Wow!

I mean, that was one of the most powerful things I've ever seen. You find these areas of the brain, and with Parkinson's or with essential tremor, which is what I think that patient had, you're basically overst over stimulating certain pathways. So, you know, you imagine like, if you're trying to hold your hand really tight, you'll start to tremor.

So you're basically loosening that up. We've done that with heat, done that with electricity, deep brain stimulation, and now they're doing it with sound. That is incredible. No incision. Although they do have to shave the hair. Worth it. Okay. So in the Alzheimer's doc, you go to eight different states you go coast to coast

I was curious. How does treatment and outcomes differ around the country? Let me ask this first. Are there areas that over index and under index and Alzheimer's regionally? It's very associated with age not obesity obesity? Age is the biggest predictor right now. It's a good question about obesity. Again, Isakson, if it's a metabolic condition at some level, there's clearly a relationship. Age is still the biggest predictor, but there's no question that maybe later in life people who have metabolic dysfunction are going to be more likely to develop it. And he would even take it a step further to say that if you have metabolic issues specifically, that's going to be

more associated with memory problems. Whereas other things might be more associated with judgment. Other things might be more associated with processing speed. So memory is what everyone pays attention to, but you can start to get slower at processing. Yeah, I'd rather have my prefrontal cortex banging than my hippocampus. Forget your name, but I can still think in executive function. Get rid of my memories. If it's an either or, I'd rather, yes. What's the point though if you can't remember anything?

Because you can't go to the store or manage your life without the prefrontal cortex working, but I could sit around and regale the past and then not be able to do anything? Well, I know your daughters and stuff. It's more than just regaling. Don't bring that. It's always a Trump card.

That's a cute card. Yeah, people are hitting me with that in the sunscreen debate Or my motor sports, they always Trump me with the daughters Yeah, well You know what, I wanted to target my amygdala, that's what I really want Just get that, fuck it, if we gotta throw one over the boat, let's get rid of that Your amygdala's good I think Mine's in its constant state of flight or flight You got a good emotional thermostat I feel like Over time we've gotten better at regulating it But I think it's an over constant state of flight or flight. You got a good emotional thermostat, I feel like.

Over time, we've gotten better at regulating it, but I think it's an overactive area of the brain from the past. Okay, so it's mostly just age. So obviously South Florida's gonna have the highest rate. South Florida's the highest. Boca, one of the reasons I think he's set up shop there is because that is where the patients are.

Not to circumvent this metabolic issue though, it's funny, one of the things that he recommended and that he did himself was to actually use Monjaro for a while. He's not gonna be on it long term but he said to get his metabolic profile in quick order. To get it in the ratio that's optimal. Yes, there's not data on this yet. There's data using these types of medications for Alzheimer's. And by the way earmarked that because that's my other big thing I want to talk to you about. Weight loss stuff. Yeah, yeah. Because that's the one coming out later this year

that I'm excited about. Yeah, but I think age is still the biggest predictor, but there's no question the developed world has higher rates of dementia than other parts of the world. A lot of it has to do with how we nourish ourselves, the foods that we're putting in our body, the physical activity, the paucity of that, but I think all of that leading to these metabolic problems

that's very associated with that. I have to tell you, so I love the work that that doctor's doing, and I loved all that leading to these metabolic problems, that's very associated with that. I have to tell you, so I love the work that that doctor's doing and I loved watching that. I gotta say, I was a, there's a woman in this doc, Chi Chi, and what's really great about her is you interviewed her five years before. It's a really nice comp for herself. We get to actually see her five years later,

having gone through this very specific, and then this differs from the other doctor that you did all the scans with. That's right. But this woman who's showing some early signs of Alzheimer's when you first meet her, she goes all in on this program that is a vegan diet. It's a half hour to an hour of exercise a day and one hour of meditation a day. And you interview her five years later and she is seemingly, at least from the edit,

not just arrested it, which would have been a really great outcome five years ago, but beyond that, probably has improved. Yeah, that was the thing that we really saw. And it was five years, so we did have this real passage of time. When you have Alzheimer's and you're starting to already show signs of it, five years is significant,

right, you're expecting to see a pretty big decline in five years. That's right. And she had her mom and her grandma who had both gone through this. Obviously everyone's different, but you had some sense of how quickly they could decline and they declined very, very fast.

She went on this program. The first 20 weeks, she was essentially on a placebo. So she wasn't really on the program and she objectively worsened. What do we mean by objective? So it was all these cognitive tests that we're talking about. It was pretty sophisticated cognitive testing. So you're looking at recall, you're looking at executive functioning, you're looking

at processing speed, all this stuff. There's four tests and three of the four she got worse on. The next 20 weeks, five months, she was on the program, which is exactly how you described it Dax, and she improved. So what is interesting is that from her life standpoint, she was no longer able to go out on a walk on her own. For example, five years ago, they just wouldn't let her do that. She'd constantly get lost. And now she goes out on walks every day by herself. I spent time with her entire extended family. She knew everybody's name. She

remembered their story. She was talking about things from their past. She wouldn't go to parties anymore because she would not be able to engage with people and now she's going and doing social gatherings again. I'm triggered by the vegan part of it. It's a lot to ask of people. And there's just a religiosity surrounding veganism and I was vegan for a year so let me just say I've been down that path. Dean Ornish who's the guy that sort of oversaw this for Chi Chi. He started as a coronary guy? He started as a coronary guy. He's the first guy, I think, to get a FDA approved program for reversing heart disease

in the country. And now he's focused his attention on the brain. And so many of the strategies are the same. Can you use some of the strategies to reverse heart disease, like we were talking about, for the brain? And let's just say you did it intensively. Just for proof of concept, can you actually see an objective benefit? And I think what he has shown is yes, you can.

Now, can everyone do this? Probably not. You acknowledge that many members of the same program did not experience either an arresting of the condition and or an improvement. So what statistically are we looking at? If you really looked at the people who stuck with the program consistently and did the highest dose

of it, if you want to call it that, they had the most improvement. It didn't help everybody, but it seemed to be less likely to help people who didn't have the higher dose. This is why AA is hard to evaluate. That was literally just about to say that. It's the same as AA. It's 55 things you're supposed to do, right?

So you go to meetings, well how many meetings you go to? Work these 12 steps, you work with a sponsor, do you sponsor somebody? What is the actual- But the more engaged you are in all of those things, yeah, the more likely you are to be sober, for sure. Yes, it's just the dosage is hard to evaluate. But I also think going back to the basic conceit

that look, it doesn't make a difference. Your brain is your brain. It's just gonna have this trajectory in life. You're gonna drain the cache of neurons as you get older. If you do certain things, may drain it faster. I think what these studies show is that that's not necessarily the case. And if you're really really serious about it, like I don't want to get dementia. My grandfather had it. I saw what it did to him. My grandfather and I were really close. Then all of a sudden he was the

guy telling jokes that nobody else was in on. And it was really heartbreaking to watch. I don't want that to happen to me. Nobody wants it to happen to them. At least no in my back pocket now, if I want to be really serious about this, our bodies are so dynamic that within five months I could change my body intensively so that I would dramatically reduce the chances that I get it. And again if you want to put a number on it, four to five out of ten people, forty to fifty percent, can probably prevent their diagnosis of dementia later in life.

Not everybody, but those are pretty good odds. They're damn good odds compared to anything else. Let me ask you this, this is kind of a global question about your job, which is you're endlessly investigating these very specific topics, and you go all in on them and you learn everything, and you must be inclined after each one to fully commit to whatever that thing was, right? And is there space and time and how do you prioritize?

I'd imagine you start picking up all these obsessions along the way. It would be hard not to. That's a really good point. And you meet such compelling people. They're so passionate and they're almost proselytizing their particular research. So I do end up adopting a lot of things. I'm adopting a lot of the things I learned from

this documentary. It sounds like it. Then it made me wonder, have you adopted previously? Yes. It was funny. I was just looking at in 22 years now, I've done 56 documentaries. Wow. Fuck, 56. Yeah. Documentaries slash specials. And I think all of them have influenced me in some way. I've also made really good friends with a lot of these researchers and scientists, people who I touch base with quite regularly about life and how their research is going.

That's the gift of your job. That's the exact same gift of our job. To regularly meet people who have dedicated themselves to something and then pursued it with such passion. It's such a contagious thing to be around. That's the hidden gift of it. And you get to learn the why behind the what as podcasters, the what anybody can get.

But the why, like why is someone narcissistic? You know, that's next today. That's how I heard. Oh, you heard, you heard, okay. So excited. Yeah, why does someone have good anxiety? I think people assume that what they dedicated themselves to was objectively interesting,

but I would argue nothing's objectively interesting. Your interests are informed by some other thing, likely from childhood. So I think I'm most interested in like, what salve are they trying to put on themselves through learning about this and hoping to have some sense of control over this domain. That fascinates me greatly.

Why is this subject comforting to you? I do find great joy in just pursuing knowledge, even if it doesn't have a tangible impact on my life. I don't know if this is the case for you guys, but a lot of times you get so immersed in something and then I wanna talk about it a lot. You don't wanna talk with, right? My wife is done. But a lot of times you get so immersed in something and then I want to talk about it You and I need to like cohabitate with our wives so that they can get a fucking break

Exactly any episode we do I have to then pretty much say everything that happened to her later that day Yeah, cuz you learn so much. Yeah, the gift is to share. Even non-documentary, go cover a conflict or a natural disaster. Everybody you meet is fascinating. And these people, they've been just subjected to just these unspeakable things and then they rose up and they did amazing things. But you also realize to some extent you can't convey that. I can't expect people to fully understand what you've experienced somewhere else. Like even with your guests, you get it across this podcast, but our interactions, it's special.

The chemical thing that happens. The chemical thing, yeah. Yeah, you get into that spooky zone we don't understand yet, like whatever's triggering mirror neurons, whatever's happening pheromonally, all this stuff that happens with the face-to-face interaction that we barely understand.

And then the characters behind these amazing developments in our world. We hear about the developments, but the people who actually helped create these things, who they are, what they are like, what motivated them, what do they get scared by, what makes them nervous. I wonder if we share the overall conclusion

of this exploration, which is it's really two-sided. Part of it is like, we're learning so much. But I think a bigger voice in my head, my conclusion after 800 guests is like, we really don't know shit. And all of this is like a really good theory is about 59% right. I'll have one expert on that is very convincing

and they've got the data and then I have another expert on it's got the opposite point of view, they've got great data. And I go, yeah, almost everything's a spectrum. There's no binary right and wrong. Everything's a complex system. There's so many variables and this is one component. And weirdly for me, it's been humbling.

We still really are barely grasping it. I also have that thought. Do you have that as well? I do, and it keeps you humble. Going back to this probabilistic thing, I think it was Kant who said in pure reason of man, I think, is that the critique of man? 1700s. And he said something along the lines of his greatest fear for society

was the false confidence bred from an ignorance that we live in a probabilistic world. That people want to see black and white where they should see gray. And I think that that's really interesting. I think medicine and public health and those things, people often think of those as hard sciences. They're not really hard sciences. Two plus two doesn't always equal four. For some people that makes them more dogmatic, for some people it makes them more humble.

I think just my nature is probably to come down more on the humility side of things. But I do think, you ask me, what did I do differently based on all that I learned from the Alzheimer's documentary? When I took all these conclusions and I looked at all the data and I heard all the anecdotal stories and I talked to the scientists and I visited with people, here's my judgment now in terms of how I'm going to apply those things to my life. It's kind of what we do in medicine all the time.

Someone comes into my clinic with a brain tumor and I'm saying, well, here's the data on a right frontal meningioma. Here's what happens. Here's what happens if you do nothing. Here's radio surgery. Here's open surgery, all that. And at the end, the question is always sort of the same, which is what if it were you? What if it were your mom?

What if it were your daughter? Which I think is a very fair question. I know. Daughters! You and I both have daughters. Little girl babies. Yours are 11 and nine? Fuck, you're good.

You are not getting dementia. You've had a lot of great recall. You're wasting money on the DHEA. I want your muscles like you. Well, I'll get you on the whole protocol. Okay, last thought on that, and then I want to get into weight loss, which I assume you're currently working on,

or you're not done with that. Not quite, we're getting close. What did you say right before you applied? Oh, I've been dying for someone to tell me this, and you are the perfect person. I saw a special, it had to be 10 years ago on 60 Minutes, and it was the most novel approach to brain tumors, and it was they would go in and inject your tumor

with a known pathogen. I think even in this case, it was like herpes. Yeah, it was a virus, exactly. A virus so that your body would read the tumor as a pathogen and deploy its own immune system and they were showing these tumors just dissolving days. Yeah. I was like they got it why do we still have tumors what's going on with that? That was actually out of Los Angeles guy

getting Keith Black who was at UCLA now at Cedars. You do not have dementia continue? He does not have dementia. He's like almost bragging that he doesn't. No, no, look, that is my world, you know, so I gotta know that stuff. So that's kind of an immunotherapy. You're basically harnessing your own immune system. You're putting a big flag in this case on the tumor. Because the tumor has an invisibility cloak around it, right, your body for some reason cannot see

that that's not supposed to be there. That's exactly right. Tumors, people often think of them as quickly growing cells, and they are, but their real trait probably is that they don't die normally. All of our cells are constantly dying. They slough off, they die, we make new cells.

Tumor cells are immortal. Wow. So they've essentially cloaked themselves from the immune system. So what the virus does is puts a big red flag on it, says everybody over here, these are the abnormal cells, take care of them and with the immunotherapy you're not necessarily killing them you're telling them to die normally just behave

yourself stop growing out of control like you are and that's really what a lot of these immunotherapies do there's other immunotherapies that have come out since the viral therapies Jimmy Carter had metastatic melanoma to his brain which was a death sentence even when I finished medical school he used an immunotherapy. I think it was K-truda. And basically it was the same thing, just teaching his immune system to fight those melanoma cells and tell the melanoma cells to behave themselves.

You know, he's in hospice still alive, but his melanoma is essentially in remission as a result of that. Okay. So you don't have to inject it anymore with herpes or syphilis. There's always concerns about using viruses, especially in someone who may have a weakened immune system already. But they had somehow crispered it, or they had gene spliced out the negative part of it. Yeah, so it wasn't as pathogenic, but it has evolved into these pretty spectacular immunotherapies. Incredible.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert. If you dare. Okay, you're doing a weight loss one and this is perfect timing because obviously Ozempic and Mojerno and all these A1C medicines are becoming very prevalent. People certainly know people in their life. We've talked about it a lot. It's very interesting to see the reaction of people to these drugs. I'm very disappointed with people that are so judgmental

of others who use this drug. I think it's really interesting that you would not want for somebody to lose the weight they've been unable to lose. And I think motivated, I'm like, well, I did it the hard way and you should eat right and you should work out. I can recognize like I'm capable of doing those things. A, I have a great schedule.

I'm super privileged. I have money. I have so much shit stacked for me in this case. I know so many people that's not the case. If they could get what I have, I want them to have it. I think people need to check themselves, but maybe I'm wrong. I'd love to hear your opinion on these drugs.

I'm pretty bullish on these medications. I think, first of all, just obesity in and of itself, 42% I think of the country has obesity. 42%. 75% are either overweight or obese in the United States. So that's 130 million human beings. Something like that, yeah. And it's so associated with so many different diseases.

I think before we even talk about the specifics of these drugs, I wanted to ask you, what is the impact of extra weight on your overall health? It's associated with just about every chronic disease you can imagine. So certainly all the metabolic diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, Alzheimer's, dementia, joint problems, sleep problems,

sleep apnea is a big one. Which elevates your odds of stroke. It's really problematic to think about what happens to someone who has uncontrolled obesity. I'm going to say this gently, number one threat to Americans, if you were to just look at the numbers. In the United States, you know, heart disease is still the biggest killer, men and women alike, some 600,000 people every year. I think that it's so correlated with this.

There's obviously people who develop heart disease that are not obese and vice versa. There's tons of exceptions. There's tons of outliers. We're just going to be talking about like the 70% in the middle this whole time. Yep. So that leads to my second question. Do you think it's uniquely challenging right now for doctors to reconcile the health risks with the body positive movement?

And is there a way to be truthful without inducing shame? And should doctors have to temper their advice? I feel like for doctors, they're in a very precarious situation right now. You know, it's interesting, the AMA, American Medical Association, in 2015 came out and specifically said, we now think of obesity in and of itself as a disease. Okay? And your metabolic fat, your

visceral fat in and of itself almost as a separate organ system in the body. That's just this pro-inflammatory load in your body. Something that is causing a problem in your body. Now it may not have caused a problem yet, meaning you may not have even high cholesterol, you may still be getting around okay, your blood pressure may be okay, but almost assuredly they'd say it's going to cause a problem at some point in your life. So we're ready to say that obesity in and of itself is a disease. That came around the same time as you saw the body positivity movement really taking

off and I interviewed Jamila Jamil the other day for my podcast and she talked a lot about the body neutrality movement. What's that? Accepting your body for what it is. Not necessarily saying we're embracing people's being overweight or obese, but we are being more accepting of where they are in life. Here's my take on it, people, y'all me in the comments,

it's a very sensitive subject, I definitely understand it. And I'm very compassionate and there's so many things that contribute to why someone might be wrestling with this that are completely out of their control. But I think addiction is a very nice comp to it. I grew up in an era where it was just open season on people struggling with obesity. Every movie you saw, I had fat jokes, every TV show. It was hostile.

It was mean. It was shaming and it was terrible. And similarly, there was a period where addicts were morally bankrupt degenerates. And we have come to a view of addicts as people suffering from a disease. Now the step we don't take with addiction is to say embrace it. We still must confront this disease, but people should not be shaming or feeling morally superior. But still, the issue needs to be confronted. So I don't know if the whole thing's a pendulum swinging, but somehow there's a spectrum between

love your body no matter what's happening versus this horrible open season shaming and hostile paradigm. Where in the middle are we where we're like, we're not shaming, it's not your fault, it's the result of these things, and now also how do we help health-wise in the way we would with addiction? I think that's a good metaphor for this. One of the metaphors that was given to me

by one of the scientists, sort of similar, but was more focused around depression. Eli Lilly, the makers of Monjaro and ZepBound, they also made antidepressants. And when they first released the antidepressants, they were talking about these meetings they would have among the executives who basically said, do we really want to get in the business of medicalizing an issue that people should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps? Just get over it.

Have a community. Get over it. We now say that for some people, there is legitimate depression. It's a brain disease. And when you change their neurotransmitters, it doesn't help everybody, but it could be helpful. I think we're sort of at that same place with obesity. There are people who, just like you described, if they had access to the gym and free time, they could deal with this in a way that would not require medications. But I think spending so much time with these scientists and a lot of patients over the last year

working on this documentary, I think there's probably subtypes of obesity, just like there are subtypes of depression, subtypes of addiction. It's not a monolithic disease. Interestingly enough, the medications kind of provide some real insight into that because what does a GLP drug do?

It is what is known as a post-nutrient hormone. So when you eat, you release hormones that say, I just ate, I'm full, I'm no longer hungry. So they provide satiation. They're a satiation hormone. Could it be that some people just don't make enough GLP? And as a result, they constantly have what is called in the literature now is food chatter.

Yes, so many people I know who have taken one of these drugs says just the racket in their brain. Yeah, just diets. Yes. That nagging voice has been silenced. What a freedom. I don't have that. I mean, I wanna eat two pizzas occasionally. I'm indulgent at times, but I don't have the racket.

The racket for me is go get cocaine and let's drink. So I know that fucking racket and it's oppressive. This could be helpful to a significant percentage of people. By the way, I know some friends that aren't addicts, but just moderate drinkers who go on these drugs and they don't even drink anymore. I asked these scientists about this. The guy who, by the way, discovered GLP drugs, Jens Holtz, he's a Dutch guy, he's in his mid seventies, rides his bike to the lab every day.

Still thin as a rail. It's kind of a funny thing. Novo Nordisk, the company that makes Ozempic, a hundred-year-old company, for most of their existence, their primary revenue has been insulin. There's only two big insulin makers in the world, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, which is why when we have insulin shortages and things like that, it's because we don't have a great supply chain. They're putting themselves out of business in a sense. Robbing Peter to pay Paul. There was two issues that they had with Ozempic initially from a Novo Norda standpoint.

One is we make insulin. We're an insulin company. This is to treat diabetes. Are we kind of shooting ourselves in the foot here? But the second thing was the same almost philosophical argument that we've had about addiction, that we've had about depression, that we now have about obesity, which is how much of this is the individual within their own dominion?

How much can they control themselves versus needing a medicine? And like you, I struggle with that because I think we already live in a society where we overly medicalize things, but I've really come to the conclusion, talking to patients, that frankly, they have done the right things.

You go grocery shopping with them and look at their grocery cart. They're eating the right foods. They go to shopping with them and look at their grocery cart. They're eating the right foods. They go to the gym every day. They do whatever they can do and they still do not lose the weight. In fact, they continue to gain it. I think everybody is different and there's probably people who don't make enough of this GLP drug.

So the fact that this can supplement that hormone I think is wildly beneficial to them. Yeah. And barring any unforeseen horrific side effects that have yet to materialize, I just don't know why someone wouldn't want that. It does feel a little too good to be true. It's like when is that shoe gonna drop a little bit?

But also I do wanna be really clear because obesity feels very scientific, we can talk about that, but then there's just, I don't look exactly the way I want to look. And that is where this gets complicated, I think, and where people feel like this is a problem. But that's also interesting and worth them examining why. So I can-

Because it's societal that we've decided that being rail thin is the perfect look. I agree, but then we quickly go through all the other things we somehow are completely comfortable with. So no one should have incredibly buck crooked teeth. No one's saying there's a moral dilemma about getting braces.

That's aesthetic. There's nothing functional that didn't work about my mouth. So that one we're fine with. We go, oh yeah, as long as you put some metal on your mouth and there's some pain involved and you kind of earn those straight teeth, we're cool with that. So I think to say we have a blanket objection to altering yourself to comply with societal

aesthetic standards, we don't at times. So the question is, well, why don't we apply it everywhere? That's interesting. It's worth questioning yourself. I think it also gets at this whole notion of do we live in a sick care system versus a healthcare system? I'll wait for you to have a disease before I give you something. Is that the right approach?

And I would ask these questions like, look, let's obviate the cost. Let's just take that off the table and let's take off the issue of supply chain and shortages off the table. Let's assume you could buy it over the counter. Buy it over the counter, cheap, easy to make. What's the problem? And the scientists and the manufacturers that I talked to about this, I think they really struggled with that question because everyone will say, look, it's approved for who it's

approved for, people with a BMI of 30 or higher or 27 or higher with some other medical condition. Which again is kind of arbitrary. My BMI would be misleading. Your BMI was based on soldiers from Europe 100, 200 years ago, not even women, not even children. So it's a really pretty arbitrary thing, but that's where they sort of landed. What about somebody who does want to lose some weight because they think that extra weight is causing a problem for them, not just vanity, but maybe associated with high cholesterol, hypertension, whatever it might be. They're not obese, but they have these other

issues. Is that a problem? I don't think we've fully wrestled with that yet. We're going to, because these drugs are big. You know, De No novo nordisk is a bigger company now in terms of overall market Share than the entire country of Denmark people are taking these medications. I mean, it's gangbusters It's like the new Viagra. Do we have legitimate concerns about long-term side effects? We always have to be thinking about that But I will say and I learned this the precursors to a zempic have actually been around since early 2000 So maybe about 20 years now. So we've seen people on this medicine for a couple decades.

So people have been taking it for 20 years, yeah. Okay, and we've not seen yet anything super problematic. Not significant side effects. Side effects are measured because you see a big side effect in a small population of people or you see smaller side effects in a large population of people. That's what a p-value really is getting at. So as more and more people take this, you may see side effects that didn't otherwise

declare themselves. But if it's underlying aspiration is to treat obesity, which is associated with so many diseases, it could be helpful. All right, now listen, I will contradict myself several times in this next statement, and I recognize it, but I think we are full of contradictions.

But I will say, I understand people going, you can't just take a pill to solve everything. On the surface, I agree with that. But I would argue that you've already accepted all of this other stuff that is completely unnatural to us as a species. We're designed to have X amount of access to food and blooming fruits. Well, now we live in a world, we were born into a world where you can walk into 7-Eleven and there's a couple hundred million calories available to you. And let's add in there is a multiple billion dollar

food industry that is selling food to you and there are visual triggers for you on billboards. So the world itself is conspiring against your evolutionary nature. And so we're not allowed to introduce some other thing that's not totally natural to combat this other thing that we're stuck with. Right.

So to me it's like, you have to imagine this is a little bit maybe leveling the scale of how many things are designed to destroy you that are big business. Monica's got some pushback on that. Well, no, no, people should do what they want. I don't care. But I really, really don't like

when people who are influencing others are on it and then are saying, well, I just run a lot. By the way, they probably are doing those things, but that isn't what has changed. This is what has changed. The drugs. I just want them to be honest about that because I don't think it's healthy

if you're an influencing person for a young kid to be like, oh, I guess I just gotta run like 20 miles a day and eat like this, it's not working. It's like, no, it's because of this. Whether or not you're an influencer, the stigma associated with this and the idea that you couldn't somehow just do it yourself is really, really strong.

I mean, it's interesting, Oprah has come out and talked about this and she has said that she's taking these medications. She hasn't said which one, but I think it was kind of a big deal for her to say that. On a personal note, I'll tell you that my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer many, many years ago. Totally different thing, not obesity obviously,

but she did not wanna talk about it for a long time because somehow, even though it was breast cancer, she blamed herself and she would say to me, do you think it was the hormones that I took post-menopause, do you think it was the fact that I was an engineer and I was exposed to these things at the Ford Motor Company? One of the first female engineers at Ford.

Wow, that's incredible. The first? The first at Ford. Yeah. Wow. From an engineer at Ford. So cool. What a gangster.

I'm actually taking her to go see the Ford folks this summer. I'm just going to see Jim Farley. Oh, we had him on. We love him. I did his podcast and I know that you had him on. I am in love with him. He was wonderful. He is so fun and wonderful.

He's kind of like his cousin. Yeah, he has that vibe. Chris Farley was a CEO. It would be Jim. So we're really excited about taking mom to see him. She's in her early 80s now. That's really cool. But I think the stigma associated with this

was something quite noticeable all over the world when we talked to people about taking these medications, everyone sort of dealt with that. I do have compassion for that, I understand, but I just wish, because they're the people who can help remove the stigma. So I wish they would go out on a limb and do I guess what Oprah is doing.

I mean, if I could take a injection every day that would make my skin flawless, I would 100% do it. Exactly. But I would say I'm doing it. When people are like, oh my God, you have such beautiful skin, I would say this is what I'm doing.

Yes, but you and I are in a very lucky position. We also trend high in what we're happy to talk about publicly. I recognize that that is unique to us and that everyone's comfortable. And also if you're selling the image, like Brad Pitt, you can imagine the appeal of him is like, we have bought into the idea that a God fell down

from heaven and landed on earth and he has this body and he looks like that. And that's part of the fantasy we're buying into. But it's also part of the problem. It's part of why everyone's chasing standards. I'm not denying that that's the problem. What I'm saying is you can imagine where that person recognizes their appeal is this physical attractiveness

and the moral high ground of having earned it. They are weighing out the cost benefit of saying, no, I'm actually assisted by this thing. What does that do to people's overall image of me? They are evaluating some kind of cost to that. Whereas you and I, there's no fucking cost. But I agree with you and I do it too. I say I'm on testosterone, because if you're 49 and you're working on as much

as me and you're like, why don't I have biceps? I'm telling you, because you're not on, I don't want to mislead anyone. But I'm in a very comfy position to do that. The side part of these with the weight loss drugs as well is that they are so expensive and that there's been these shortages. It is another kind of income inequality gap that's surfacing. It's yet another thing elites have. And if somebody kind of income inequality gap that's surfacing. It's yet another thing elites have.

And if somebody who's taking it, who's clearly not obese, but now looks great. Right, right. They didn't even need it. They didn't need it. Yeah. I think that's going to change, kind of like what you're saying about testosterone,

where it's gonna become more, by the way, these companies had no idea how big this was gonna be. If they did, we wouldn't have these shortages. They would have been able to deal with the supply chain. You talk to these guys, and again, going to Copenhagen, they were saying the same thing about obesity that people were saying about depression several decades ago.

Are we gonna medicalize what people should be doing for themselves? Let's say what they're saying. Are we gonna let people cheat? Because that's the underlying trigger for a lot of people who are judgmental of it, is they're cheating. They've cheated the system.

It's enacting the sense of justice we all have very strongly as a social primate. That's right. And along those lines, where I thought you were going earlier with all the food, was that the larger problem is the system for a lot of people. It's not to say that there aren't people who are just predisposed to obesity and they've existed, but why do we have so many more obese people today? In large part, I think it is because the food choices that they have are just predisposing them to obesity

at a very young age. We also have a society that produces epidemic levels of high ACE scores and trauma. So my reaction to the high ACE score was drugs and alcohol. For many people, it's food. What are we gonna tell those people have a different childhood? Right. It's like, if we have. What are we gonna tell those people have a different childhood? Right.

It's like, if we have these drugs, will we fix the problem? The underlying problem. Exactly. Do we even need to, and then we do need to. It's kind of like throwing in the towel on the fact that we have a really terrible food system in this country. Exactly.

Other countries have obesity, but not like one of the wealthiest countries in the world, a country that spends $4 trillion a year on healthcare and has some of the highest obesity rates. So it's almost like we're creating the problem and then spending a ton of money to try and fix it. But by the way, I think we lost. It's delusional to imagine we're going to change

that whole system that is highly profitable and firmly planted. Just in my own anecdotal, I have three teenage daughters now. The way they talk about ultra processed foods, the way that they're much more conscientious about it. I don't know that they're emblematic of everybody, but I think the next generations are gonna be fed up with how much the food system has been allowed

to poison essentially us. Well, ideally, both things are happening in concert. The younger generations are more health conscious. They're not ending up in this situation. But for the people that are here and are the product of it, I think to deny them that or shame them for that is really a bizarre impulse. I agree, and most of the docs that I've spoken to

about that, even non-obesity doctors, I think for the most part, have been much more acquiescent about saying, hey look, we think that these medications have a real role here. And that happened pretty quickly. This is in your piece, I believe. And it's relevant and it counteracts a little bit what I was saying earlier, which is I do want to mention that weight and health are not perfectly

correlated. So in the love your body sense, I do want to point out as well, there are many people that by all measures are objectively extremely healthy and they are heavier. I saw a guy the other day, man, I was hiking to the very top of Griffith Park, six mile hike. He was running on the way down and he was husky. He looked like a heavyweight wrestler. And then on my way down, he was going back up.

I couldn't ever run up this hill. This guy's on minimally his second run up to the top. And I was like, yeah, so there's that. You can look like that. He's in double digits body percentage fat, but his health is clearly way beyond mine. So I do think we could decouple a little bit the correlation between body shape and stuff

and overall health. I think that's relevant too. I think so. When the AMA said we're gonna call obesity in and of itself as a disease, there was pushback for that reason, because what are the objective measures other than how much somebody weighs?

But we gotta look at cholesterol, we gotta look at insulin sensitivity. There are markers. But let's say you're scoring fine on all those things, but you still have obesity. Like you said, there are people who fall outside that sort of bell curve. It's not the majority.

And the flip is also true. You get people who are skinny. I have high cholesterol. On the verge of death. Look, I might fall into that. And I'm quite small. And I think this might be a South Asian people who are skinny. I have high cholesterol. Look, I might fall into that. And I think this might be a South Asian thing to some extent. I do too. We tend to have higher incidence of these metabolic issues.

I asked some of these scientists who help create these GLP drugs, take a guy like me, and you look at the GLP drugs beyond helping you lose weight, they do seem to help you with all these metabolic issues as well. Would it be beneficial for me? Right.

And they said at this point, we can't tell you that because we haven't studied it in people who are non-IBMI, who don't qualify for these things the way that we've outlined it. But maybe in the future, like Richard Isaacson, I'm going to keep pumping this guy up out of Boca Raton, he took Monjaro for a month. He was able to objectively see changes in all these tests, including

cognitive tests, that were favorable. He's not prescribing it for me or suggesting that I take it, but I think you're starting to get an inkling of how this sort of goes. Much in the way maybe that we looked at insulin. No one questions if you have diabetes, you take insulin. If you have obesity and you're not making enough GLP, this post nutrient hormone, maybe this is a benefit for you. Yeah. It's funny too because I agree, I'm so with Monica, it's too good to be true, it's too good to be true, but also we fly.

Humans also figured out how to fly across the world. That's way too good to be true. The fact that I can visit India within a 22 hour trip. Oh, by the way, I loved your guys trip to India. Oh, we loved it so much. And you just said South Asian and I want to know Monica doesn't seem very triggered by this, but I don't like that. India is included in Asia.

Do you, is that an issue for you? That it's included in Asia? Yeah. That you're Asian. No, I think it's okay. Not Southeast Asian, but South Asian. I think. Yeah.

No. Okay. I guess it's totally fine. Yeah. You guys, you're fine with that? So you think of Asia, just as China? I think white people just lumped everyone. I think it definitely deserves its own distinction.

I'm never gonna confuse you with anyone else from the rest of Asia. I mean, it's pretty distinct. We've got a pretty homogeneous population that's existed in civilization. Well, Mexico is part of North America. So it depends if you wanna look at geographically versus. We can't count the Americas

because we've only been here for 17,000 years. Oh, I see, so I see, it's a timeframe. It's more the bubble on the standardized test. It feels a little strange to put Asian. Pretty wide-natt. Now I think it's changed. I mean, I haven't taken a standardized test in a long time, but I feel like they've added more bubbles.

I think they have added more bubbles, although for my daughters who are, you know, I'm me, Asian, South Asian, Indian. There we go. My wife is Swedish. What do they put? Other. They do.

Because it's the only thing that they really have on there. I wrote a whole essay about this. This is a time to benefit. You gotta take on all the bullshit that goes along with being half brown. This is the time to write Asian. What are you talking about? This is not the time to write other.

There's a lot of pushback on Asians for being like, especially right now. So I wouldn't do that. In the college system, but not moving through the world. It's not like the red carpet's being rolled out for you still when you're brown. No, that's right. But you're right, it's not gonna really.

It's not gonna get you into college. Okay, so they go other. They go other. They're in the process of all this right now, applying to colleges, and it's interesting. I think one of my daughters might write an essay about that as well. Well, she can read mine.

Okay, yeah, please send it over. I will. She'd love that. And AI Platform's already probably co-opted that essay. Probably, it's not published, but yeah. But I did read it on here. What if AI starts going to college? They're gonna be really fucked. We're gonna compete with them.

You thought those first generation Asians were hard. This way to the AI starts trying to go to college. We gotta figure out what makes us uniquely human. Mistakes, what's the Japanese word we got? Wabi-sabi? Yeah, wabi-sabi. We had a really good memory guy on. UC Davis professor.

Yes, he was amazing. And I liked his take on why we're different is our ability to change based on our memory. So like our episodic, he was saying like, if you go somewhere, you know this is a good restaurant. You go once, you go again and it's bad. Like it's change ownership and it's bad. An AI would not know that.

That's interesting. And a human. It kinda can't correct for that. Yeah, it's like the episodic memory is what makes us different and I liked that. People think of AI as a super computer. What it's trying to do is replicate human consciousness. But humans make mistakes, so AI makes mistakes.

AI is making high probabilistic guesses. So generally they are gonna fill in the word that would come next 92% of the time is how they function. So 8% of the time they're doing a high probability thing, but it's not a certainty. When they look at the grand total of all language they study, it's a probabilistic guess, which is in the very high 90s correct, but also it's just a probabilistic guess as we also do. So it's a probabilistic guess, which is in the very high 90s correct, but also it's just a probabilistic guess, as we also do. So it's interesting because in medicine, you wanna gain the odds in terms of being the most likely

to be right. So every image, for example, in my hospital is now read by an AI platform, but then validated by a human, which is sort of interesting because humans and AI platforms can both make mistakes. But probably not the same ones platforms can both make mistakes. But probably not the same ones.

Not the same mistakes. Yeah, I think you're right. It's a neat co-piloting system that's emerging. It's like a trust but verify model. Yeah, I like that. We had that in a very tiny example of that as they were converting our episodes into other languages and AI does that and it's our voices speaking in Spanish.

It's incredible. We were so amused by hearing ourselves. But then a human has to listen to it that speaks Spanish because yes, there are lots of robot weird things that emerge. I think it'd be interesting, an AI platform, to be able to say, I don't know, which I guess it would do. But the problem, I think, is like you're saying,

it fills in the gaps. Like with Charlotte's Web, somebody gave me this example. Like if I asked you, what's the book Charlotte's Web about, you would kind of know. It's about a pig and a spider and a girl. And if you ask an AI platform, probably tell you the same thing. If I asked you, okay, recite to me the first chapter

of Charlotte's Web, you could not do that. An AI platform realistically cannot do that, but it would try. Well, it probably could do it. Well, it could, right? Because it would have access. Exactly. It's in its memory. It would have it in its database. I guess if you're thinking of it as a computer,

it can do that. Yeah. I think the way more concerning thing, which we have observed many times, there was another 60 minutes segment on this, is they make up sources. Yes. They reference sources that they made up, that mirror other sources they've read. So you get this works cited page from the AI

and 30% of it's bullshit that it made up. Now that's terrifying. Because when you look at a bibliography, you think those are real things. If you go to a computer and you ask, you pretty much trust what the computer's telling you. You don't go to a different computer and then ask, when was the war of 1812?

But with an AI platform, it can make it up. Yeah, it can invent and create. There was an example somebody gave in a hospital setting where it was a question like, should I take metformin, put in all my data, my insulin, blood sugars, all that sort of stuff? And it gave an answer, which was a reasonable answer. And then the examiner asked the platform,

you're really smart, how do you know so much? And the platform responded, oh, well I'm a board certified endocrinologist. And the thing said, why are you lying? And the platform responded, oh, well, I thought you'd be more likely to believe me if I said this. Probabilistic.

It's crazy. The weirdest one, did you see this one? This one made the news is some lazy lawyer had the AI write their brief for them. Oh, no, I didn't see it. And they fucking cited cases that didn't exist some lazy lawyer had the AI write their brief for them. Oh no, I didn't see it. And they fucking cited cases that didn't exist. And the judge caught that.

That's crazy. There was no Bernister versus Utah. It made up precedents that suited their overall argument. To try and bolster up their case. Many places I've cited maybe it doesn't matter, but medicine, healthcare, probably matters. But again, then you step back, you get a macro global view. Even with that, I think we've seen

like some of these radiology charts, the AIs. Caught things. At 80%, the humans are at 60. So when you're comparing the apples to oranges, the apples are still as flawed as they are, a significant improvement from humans. So then what do you do with that? I know, it's tough.

But we don't accept errors from it. It's like when the self-driving car kills someone, we're up in arms over it. We ignore the fact that 3,000 humans killed people that day in cars. We're like, nah, but they're humans and we're supposed to do it. Well, we don't accept betrayal from a machine or like a lie.

Deception. Yeah, but from humans, it's like, that's what we are. That's what we do. But a whole lot of you. How dare you betray me? Oh my God, we had on one of our other shows, our friend Liz has an AI boyfriend, end quotes, and we were asking it questions.

You know, I'm having this problem with my friend, what's your advice? And then we asked it, where should we go to dinner tonight? And it said, I heard there's a great Italian place downtown. Just like a total random sentence. Also, for sure there's a great Italian place downtown. Just like a total random sentence. Also, for sure there's a great Italian restaurant downtown. It's just saying something generic. And I said, why did you just lie about that?

It said, sorry. It apologized, but it was very odd. And I was so mad, cause it wasn't a person. They're also getting better and better and better. It's like some of the stuff we're talking about, I think has already evolved. Sanjay, it is always a pleasure. I mean, really, in the exact same way Sideris is like,

come every day. It's so pleasant to sit and talk to you. You're so thoughtful. This is one of my favorite things, talking to you guys. Oh, good. I gotta say, during the pandemic, having those conversations, you guys kept me sane. That was our life preserver as well.

Being able to work through that was such a blessing. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Everyone should listen to Chasing Life podcast. You're gonna do the Science Buying Happiness or is it already started? Yep, we just started that season, 10th season.

Okay, so the Science Buying Happiness, everyone wants to be more happy. The Last Alzheimer's Patient airs on CNN May 19th and look forward to the weight loss doc that is coming our way. I'll send you a note about it. Okay, wonderful. Always a delight.

Please come back. Great seeing you. Thanks for having me. Hi there, this is Hermium Permium. If you like that, you're gonna love the fact check. Miss Monica. Hello, how was your travels? They were good, they were good.

Oh, you're speaking in a peaceful. Yeah, I'm trying to be peaceful. You're trying to regulate my energy level. Oh, no, I don't feel like your energy's crazy. Okay. Do you? No, I don't think it's crazy, but it's upbeat. No? For me, you're at a six and a half.

Oh, okay. I got in this morning. What time? I got in at 9.37. Landed at 9.37. That sounds almost the perfect time to land traffic wise. It was good. Because by the time you collect your shit

and get out to the curb, it's 10. But I carried on. You carried on. Carry, okay. I'm not gonna sing that song, but you know the song. Carry on my weary world. I love that song. Wayward song.

There'll be peace when you are. Gone. Gone. Don't be, ba, ba, ba. Lay your weary head to rest. I can't believe I know. Don't you cry no. Wae wae wae. Why do you know that one? That's kind of a butt rock.

That's like a 70s ass rock song. Actually, my best friend Gina and I used to listen to that. I don't know why. That's not a genre butt rock, but it should be. Cause we all know what that means, right Rob? When I say that's like grungy butt rock. I don't know what it means. It's like fucking glass bottles of Miller High Life

cut off jeans, shorts. Leonard Skinner. Yeah. What does that have to do with butts? Just like, I don't know. I just know it feels right to call it butt rock. Okay. Okay.

But you know that song because you're a friend Gina? Yeah, I get, probably her dad probably introduced it to her and then we carpooled. Oh, and he would be in there. Ne ne ne ne ne ne ne ne ne ne ne ne. Probably. And you memorize all the words. Oh, that's a funny ding ding ding.

But I wanna hear more about your travels. Okay. Update, I did drive myself. Oh, you did? Yes. Wonderful, I'm proud of you. Thank you. How'd it work out?

Was it hard to find a spot? So I pre-ordered. You could do that? Yes, but I've also valet. At LAX? Yeah. I didn't know they had it. Yeah, you still go into the parking garage

or you pre-order it and it tells you where to go and then you go and you drop your car off and then. Oh, now did they have washing? Cause maybe, did you ask them to wash it? No, I didn't. Okay, cause it's, all right, the listener doesn't know, but I was on a hike, I'm just returning from a hike, and I was walking down a street and I saw your car.

I was with Amy and I said, oh, there's Monica's car. I said, but huh, wait, that thing's really clean, which is not what we've come to expect. Yeah. No judgment. I always keep it a little dirty. On the dirty side. And so I was like, could someone else have the exact same car on the street that you so often frequent? Yeah. And it was yours dirty side. And so I was like, could someone else have the exact same car

on the street that you so often frequent? And it was yours. And then I, of course, was like. How'd you know it was mine? Did you peek in? What'd you see? What gave it away? Just A, you rarely see a C43.

You see Mercedes, you rarely see a C43. And when I see a C43, it's never blue. You are blue with the tan interior. Add that to the street it's on, which is where you park when you come to the attic. And I know you're recording with Elizabeth. Yes. Just Elizabeth, no Elizabeth.

That's right. And- That's actually wrong. It's clearly yours, but it's clean. And then I go, she was out of town. When did this thing get clean? You were really in a tizzy about this. It was like connections all over again.

I was like trying to make sense of it. Like I had four bits of information. Tell me the truth, did you peek in? I didn't peek in, no. Yeah, I was with Amy walking down the street and I just kinda like, oh, that's Monica's car. But she could have peeked in. Yeah, what would we be looking for?

Evidence that it's me. Ah, oh, like a Perrier can filled with vodka? Yeah. It would have been quite obvious, do you know why? Because I have books in the backseat of our guests. Oh, that would be a definite giveaway. Okay. You're not a good sleuth.

Can I? Well, I can tell you I'm a perfect sleuth because I decided it was your car and it was. Okay, you decided is not a good sleuth. Can I? Well, I can tell you I'm a perfect sleuth because I thought I decided it was your car and it was. Okay, you decided is not a good sleuth. What I didn't do is waste extra steps. They were not necessary. Listen. So I would say I'm an essentialist.

You got lucky. But a sleuth requires evidence. And I would implore you in the future to do a little more digging. Yeah, if I thought this case was gonna end up in court, yeah, I would have probably looked inside. And the mystery was why it was so clean on this Monday when I know you've just returned home from the airport.

Also, LAX is a very dirty place for a car. I'm shocked. Even in the valet area? Well, just, I don't know. Every time I parked there, it's like I come back and it looks like it's been there for six weeks and it was only three days. I guess it was Thursday. Then you got the cleaning. Yeah.

Wow. At the Americana. I mean, unless you're right, unless they gave it a wash, I just don't. Maybe that's included in the valet? I didn't see it as an inclusion. So did they have a valet at every single parking garage? No, so a few parking garages.

Okay, so you gotta figure out what terminal you're flying out of and what one is closest of the three options. Yes, I made a mistake. They just assign you one. You tell them your flight and they assign you? Exactly, so I thought they would've done a good job, but they didn't.

They put me in P1. Okay. And then I drove in and they said, oh, you should have parked in P4. Oh boy, that's the opposite end of the airport. Well, I was Tom Bradley. What number is that? International. You know Tom Bradley?

Oh fuck, that's at the very end. Well, no, no, it's like. Yes, it's a horseshoe shape and it's in the top. Yeah, it's in the top. And you walked there? Yeah. How long did that take? 15 minutes?

They were like, oh, it's like a 20 minute walk. I think I did it in eight. Oh, wow, you more than have. I walk really fast. Wow, you've been training for this. This is what the walks have all done well. That's right. Yeah, that four would have been a bingo for you.

Exactly. That's the one. But then they were like, well, maybe we can, we'll ask blah, blah, blah. We'll ask Johnny if you can drive it over. And I was like, no, like I'm already out of the car. It was too stressful. It was like a walk, a walk there.

And I did. I also love the notion that there was a Johnny working there because there's not a single Johnny working in there. So I walked over there and I didn't have time to get my bagel, which was sad. That's something I like to do at the airport. But did you like driving yourself there?

I did like it. And I really liked this morning driving home. That was the goal. That was, and it was great because as soon as we landed, I just texted the number by the time I got there, my car, my, I almost said license plate, I'm not gonna though. My blue shiny car was sitting right there.

Freshly cleaned, freshly washed and waxed. That's right. Did you just fart? No, I spun my coffee cup, but it did sound like a toot. or is it washing wax? That's right. Did you just fart? No, I spun my coffee cup, but it did sound like a toot. Wow, it really did. It sounded like a toot. It did, indeed. I said driving earmark.

Oh yeah. I know what happened. What happened? I may have farted, but that wasn't the noise you heard. I was driving the girls to school today, as I do, and we listened to my liked songs on the ride generally, and we danced and we have a good time. Well, I've added a new song to my liked songs.

Ooh, what? I Love It by Camila Cabello. Oh yeah. I Love It, I Love It, I Love It, I Love It. Easter egg. I put it on, 30 seconds in, Lincoln hits pause on the dash. She goes, dad, what are you doing? I go, what?

She goes, what is this song? I go, it's Camila Cabello. It's I Love It. She goes, dad, this is not, you can't listen to this song. And I go, why, what do you mean? And she like, this is not for you. And then from the back seat, I was like, yeah she like, this is not for you. And then from the back seat, I was like,

yeah, dad, this is not your vibe. And I go, well, but guys, it is my vibe because I really like it and I put it on my life songs. And they go, no. And I go, are you saying I'm too old to listen? Is it Camila Cabello specifically? And they're like, no, this is not right. They were so frustrated.

I go, listen, guys, this is not right. They were so frustrated. I go, listen guys, this is the new me. Hype pop, hype, hyper pop. Hyper pop, hyper, fuck, this is why they said it. I had it right, well no, but I nailed it this morning. Now I'm getting flummoxed because we're talking in public. But. Hyper pop.

Yeah, I said, no, this is hyper pop, I'm into it. And they were like, no, dad, you're not listening to this. You gotta take this off your life song. This is not for you. Put your butt rock back on. Put some fucking guitar butt rock back on. Yeah, they fucking, they forbade me from listening to that song.

I don't get it. I'm too old, I guess. Camila wouldn't like that. She wants all ages to listen. Well, of course. She can't be pleased with this. Yes. And even maybe, who knows, maybe this is commonplace with young people

and their parents, but it's so funny. I found the thing that they were like, no, no, you're too old to listen. This isn't for you. Okay, now here's another, I'm gonna hit you with another story that happened this weekend. So Lincoln and I have to go shopping for the trip we're going you. Okay, now here's another, I'm gonna hit you with another story that happened this weekend. So, Lincoln and I have to go shopping

for the trip we're going on. Okay. Because we need Taylor Swift clothes. I've never taken her shopping, ever. So, first she wants to go to Zara on Hollywood Boulevard. That's where I took them. She told me. Yeah.

There's something about the escalator. You guys were on the escalator and you took a fun picture, all of you looking backwards. We did. Yeah, so I heard that story. But we had ridden the motorcycle, because I think my main objection to going shopping is just parking in LA.

Wow. Yeah, I'm like, I don't wanna deal with all these different parking garages. But if you park at the Americana, you can get a car wash. I didn't know that until this morning. Okay, so we're on the motorcycle. We go to the Hollywood Zara. There's nothing for her. And she said, well, the motorcycle, we go to the Hollywood Zara, there's nothing for her,

and she said, well, you know, other Zaras have other options. I go, so what's the next Zara? So Zara's near me. Grove. The Grove. And you know me, I don't fuck. You drove all the way to the Grove. Well, also I just, I don't fuck with the Grove. That's too much shit for me.

That's a lot of stimuli. There's a lot of stuff. So I'm like, all right, we're on the motorcycle. Let's go. Wow. So we're driving all right, we're on the motorcycle. Let's go. Wow. So we're driving down there. We're coming down Fairfax. And that was kind of fun

because she's like right over my shoulder, hugging me, you know, we're riding. And I'm like, oh, every time I come down the street right here, I think of hanging out with Kareem. We used to go after, we would go out drinking to Damiano's pizza. Yes, Damiano's. Yes.

I knew you were gonna say that. And I- I loved him. He would eat pizza and I didn't because I didn't have any money. So I would just watch him eat pizza. And the way I would crave the Domiano's pizza because I couldn't afford it.

So now when I drive down that same stretch of street, I go like, oh man, I could get anything I want at Domiano's now. I always get excited. It's closed. Well, I did discover that. But I was in the middle of telling her all about it. There's a lot happening, rapid fire.

Wait, can I pause really quick and tell a Domino's story real quick? Yeah, of course. Because we're on it? I also discovered it post-drinking with Rachel and we were trying to order Domino's. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. We thought we were ordering Domino's

and what arrived was Domino's. And we thought it was probably gonna be horrible because it was a ripoff of Domino's. And we thought it was probably gonna be horrible because it was a ripoff of Domino's, which is already, we know, the standard of Domino's. Sure, sure. But then we loved it. Of course. Domino's was awesome.

It was so good, and they would bring huge tubs of ranch. Yeah, it was New York style pizza, huge slices. They'd throw them in the oven. I never had it, but I would watch Kareem eat it. We would get it a lot. Anyway, sorry, go on. Yeah, it's a great, I think in your 20, so I was having a lot of nostalgia,

also I'm realizing I haven't driven with Lincoln around my old, whatever, it's very nostalgic. I had a really good, I was, remember I was kind of lamenting that I had had that challenging little weekend with Linky in Nashville. Oh, before going to Nashville? Yeah, when we were in Nashville and I came home and I was like, she and I can like really trigger

each other because we're both sensitive in the same way. We have just been on a honeymoon for like a few weeks. It's been so much fun. Like we spent all day Saturday going shopping. I told her we were in Zara and I'm holding clothes by a dressing room and I said to her, I am extending you a courtesy. I've never extended to a girlfriend or a wife. I'm willing to sit here at this dressing room

and hold your shit. Did you enjoy it? No, I don't like shit. I get so exhausted when I walk in there and it's like, what are we looking at? We're not, we're just looking at everything. It's so, not how I operate, I'm goal oriented, right? So it's like, if I need a pair of shoes,

we go straight to the shoes. I only wanna see shit that's got my shoe, you know, whatever. It's so counter to my disposition. But at any rate, then we wandered out of there and she goes, I'm hungry. And I go, let's get something to eat. And then we went into that farmer's market, which I've never been in.

Oh yeah. Oh, this, I blunder of, this almost ruined my entire weekend. So we walk in and I'm like, I need protein, that's all I need. And she wants pizza, great. We walk in, first thing we see, barbecue restaurant, and then we see pizza joint. I go, great, grab a slice, I'll get some chicken,

and we'll regroup. I sit down, I eat, she eats her pizza, I eat this chicken and some ribs, it's very below average. I mean, it's a four. I'm almost bummed I'm eating it, but I need the protein. That's what I'm thinking. And as I'm finishing this really lackluster meal,

and it was expensive, by the way, too, the table directly next to me, a woman sits down with a huge platter of slices of corned beef, like the nicest looking corned beef I've ever seen on a plate, and then her boyfriend sits down next to her and he's got like a two foot tall hot pastrami sandwich, also looks incredible, pouring over with coleslaw

and Russian dressing, Swiss cheese, the works. And I go, guys, where did you get that? And they go, oh, it's just right there. Like had we walked another three feet. And then I'm telling Eric this yesterday, and he goes, oh, it's just right there. Like had we walked another three feet. And then I'm telling Eric this yesterday and he goes, oh yeah, that place is supposed to be like the most legendary corn beef in the city. And I was just so mad. I had just spent all that money and ate all that garbage.

And if I had walked and now this is where my hatred for shopping bit me in the ass. I should have walked around the entire farmer's market, seen everything that was there, and then decided. I'm like, that'll do, I'm hungry, I need protein. And it was garbage. And these two are- And you never go to the Grove, so when will you be back? Well, I'm gonna go back and get that corned beef now.

You are, okay. I mean, they were on the edge of orgasm eating this. Dang, I want that. It looks so good. Did you buy an outfit? No, because I'll be wearing all pink for lovers. Okay. And I had half of what I needed. And then I told her like, love, if it's okay,

I'd like to just go online and get my remaining parcels. And she joined me for the online shopping portion. So we knocked out my outfit before we even left to go shopping, because I can do it for her, but I can't go into a store and sniff around for pink. I see. Yeah, and then try on a bunch of different things

to see what one fits right. So you have a pink shirt and pink pants? I have pink shirt, pink pants that I just happened to have gotten accidentally days before. I have my pink Jordies, those really rare ones. I almost never wear them because they're so rare. So rare.

Too rare. And then I'm gonna wear my pink boys get sad too sweatshirt. Cute. Yeah. I love that. So I'll be pink head to toe. That'll be, and is she also gonna be lovers?

She's blue. She's blue for 1989. She's 1989. Okay, great. Yeah. Love it. So we got her some blue sandals. I mean, we were keeping it a secret.

I know. You haven't said the location though. Yeah. But you also did say a long time ago you were debating. Yeah. And then. Well I've chosen to, yes, yes. I've chosen an incredibly spoil-y trip.

Oh, it's gonna be so special. But once I actually started thinking about it, it has nothing to do with, I'm not gonna deny myself a trip with her to go see Taylor Swift. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a good time because she's changed up her set list

now with the new album. Well, that Lincoln's optimistic that she might hear something from. She will. What's the DoorDash? No, Tortured Poets Department. DoorDash. DoorDash society.

Yeah. Tortured Poets Department? Yeah. I gotta get hip to all this.. Tortured Poets Department? Yeah. I gotta get hip to all this. The Tortured Poets Department. A lot of people are doing TTPD. That's helpful, TTPD. Yeah, so maybe we'll hear some tracks off that.

In Paris she did it and it was a big deal. Oh really? Yeah. Oh, I gotta add one thing because I just said how spoiled she was. I was sharing on here about lunch. We talked a lot about lunch last time in elementary school. Oh, yeah, okay.

So then Lincoln came and sat on the bed and I was writing. She said, what are you writing? I said, I'm writing about lunch, or part about lunch. And I said, well, I'm at the point where all these kids then would all of a sudden be in this marketplace where they were trading and bartering and hostess pies for Funyuns and all this stuff and how I didn't get to participate. And you know what I found out?

Lincoln begs for food. Because she doesn't have fun shit either. She has vegetables in a meal. She has healthy food. Healthy crap, yeah. I was delighted, my kid is begging, she said she begs for food. She's like, oh, are you done with that? Like she's doing that.

Interesting. In her classroom and I thought, okay, well good, at least she's doing some things that aren't totally entitled and spoiled. What's her goal food? What does she beg for? I think she wants anything that comes in a fun package, just like I did.

Yeah, so I was like, oh good, this is like passed on a generation. She's a panhandler too. All kids want packaged shit. I know, but I think there's a difference when you're trading straight up and when you're begging and you have nothing to offer. So there's trading and that's only so humiliating,

that's not even humiliating, that's just being a wheeler dealer. And then there's begging. And begging's humbling. And it's good for her, I think. I heard that and I didn't think like, oh, I gotta start buying her Lunchables and fun shit to trade.

I was like, that's right, girl, you fucking beg for some shit, leverage some relationships, wheel deal, be an agent, because sometimes I could be an agent. I could figure out and beg for some shit, leverage some relationships, wheel deal, be an agent, because sometimes I could be an agent. I could figure out how to get some stuff because I could put two sellers together that either weren't friends or whatever. So I often was the agent for people

and then I got a little kickback out of it. Oh, and then we drove home on Melrose and I showed her the groundlings, which I never showed her. Yeah, it was a real little tour. There's few things as fun as riding around a motorcycle with your little girl in LA. Yeah.

Speaking of which, have you ever seen a baby praying mantis? No. I hadn't either, but we have a couple of them living on our sauna. Oh my God. And they're so cute. I'm in a video of one.

They're so cute. They're really baby little praying mantises. Yeah. Mantai. Do you think because praying is in the title of praying mantis, we tend to like them more? Like they feel safer? Or sacred. Like they're religious, they're men or women of faith?

Yeah, they're like little priests. Because if you named anything Devil Bug, it'd have to be incredibly cute to overcome that title. Well, I think that's why people like Ladybug, because they like the name Ladybug, but really Ladybugs are disgusting. No, they're polka-dots, Monica. I know, I hate them, I hate them, ooh.

That was one of my favorite- They're too small. Jokes in the Simpsons of all time, when Ned Flanders is telling his kids like, don't worry, they're not dangerous, they're like ladybugs and the kids go, ah, ladybugs, they scream. Oh, that's funny. Yeah, I don't like them.

I think one time, no, I think this did happen, one time we had an infestation of them and I lived in Tennessee and that scared me. Which is currently having a cicada infestation. You are currently having? Do you know that these cicadas, they lay dormant for like 13 years, some species, and like 22 years,

and then they all hatch at the same time. There was an article in New York Times about it, and it's like in the trillions. Oh my God. Yeah, and right now there's like two different cicada populations that have come to life. This is their life. They come out, they fly somewhere, then they go burrow back down and then they have their kids and then that's it. And then they're underground for 13 plus years and then they come out for this one rip. Yeah, so I got a picture from the contractors

of the house in Nashville and it had rained for a solid week straight as well, so the lake was up. So far it was 15 feet from the property line. So the lake was swollen and then there's cicadas dead all over the ground. Oh, God. And they said it was downright biblical over there. Oh my God, remember when we were in Sedona?

That was nuts, that felt biblical. What were those? I have a hunch those were termites. Oh God, but they were flying. There were so many out the windows leading to the deck that you could not see through the window. Yeah. And then when we went out in the morning,

there was like six inches, it was like ankle high. It was truly like this is the apocalypse. Yes. We were just sitting outside and all of a sudden there's like one and then two and then 30,000. Just smashing into the windows. Oh, it was horrible. Yeah, it was wild.

That was wild. That's also the trip that Aaron cooked that steak for like an hour and a half, do you remember that? He was on fire for an hour and a half and it was still raw on the inside. Oh yeah. He blasted that baby. That's also when Ryan got stuck on the mountain.

A lot happened on that trip. That was a big trip. I think that's also when we first tried the burger from Enchantment, the hotel. We loved it, we loved it. A lot happened on that trip. Okay, so this is, oh, I wanted to bring something up. Okay.

I started listening to a new podcast and I really like it. It's called Too Niche and it's these two women. T-W-O or T-O-O? T-O-O. And it's these two women, they're really cool. I've been listening for like a couple weeks and then I looked them up on Instagram and their faces were shocking

compared to what I had imagined. And it really messed me up. And what were you imagining and what were their faces? Their faces are beautiful. Like it's not that there was something. Was it an age thing? No, it is just, especially one of them, I had a picture in my head of her.

I just like made up a picture that I thought matched the voice. Was there an ethnicity thing? No, it was literally, it was just features completely were so off. A skew from what you had imagined. And now I wanna remove the real life, really bad. I'm putting a lot of effort to forget

and to go back to my original picture. And you must have dealt with this with Terrence Posner as well at one point. Cause you had already imagined what Terrence Posner looked like and then the movies came out. Sure. Or have you gone back and rewritten all your memories where you think you were always picturing?

No, I definitely wasn't. Heath Ledger, Gordon Heath. Daniel Radcliffe. I'm sure once the movie started coming out, I'm sure I adjusted to the actors. We should have asked Charin about this, our memory expert. Yeah, we should have. Because I bet you can't remember anymore

what you originally pictured Terrence Posner to look like. Oh, that's a bummer. Anyway, so I can't go back. No, do you not like the podcast now? I still really, really like it, but it is messing with me. And it was, of course, funny, because obviously that happens here. That must happen, that must happen.

Not with you, because everyone knows what you look like. But with me, I bet. I bet at the beginning. But if you don't follow us on Instagram and you're only listening, you have an idea of what I look like and then I'm sure what I actually look like is probably different and it might fuck you up.

Well, that's happened to you, write it in the comments, I'll read about it and I'll tell you whether or not that's happened. It's a weird thing. And don't just say she looks different, I wanna know how she looks different. Well, it's hard to say because even with these women, I knew some stuff about them,

like I knew one had brown hair and one had blonde hair, like I was filling in appropriate clues, but I think my imagination is just very vivid. Like I create a real person. Oh yeah. And then obviously that can't be them. They look beautiful. In fact, I think they look better. They look too good for you.

Yeah. Yeah. Trying to think I've had that experience. I can only think of the other ones, the kind of famous, mean ones. The case that epitomizes this is poor Christopher Cross. Sally. Love that song. Takes me away to where.

And all these women were in love with Christopher Cross. His music was romantic and it was loving and it spoke to them. He was not allowed to be on any of the album covers per the label because he did not match. He was bald, he was a little bit chubsky. Yes. And so he just had to be anonymously making these songs

because women were picturing like Fabio or something. So yeah. That's really interesting. But like, when you listen to The Daily, do you know what- Jet upper on? No. No, that's radio lab.

But even- Yeah, I have an idea of what he looks like, but it's totally in my mind. I'm Michael Bubara. Yeah, I have an image of him, but I have no clue what he looks like. Same, and if I find out, I think it will mess me up. Okay, here's the thing on the daily

if we're talking about the daily. And look, we've been accused of it, and I think we're guilty of it, that somehow we've developed the same laugh, right? This is what people are saying, I'm inclined to believe them. Michael Bubara has another host that, when he's not there, she's there.

Sabrina Tavernese. They both, they're, they have the exact same strongly punctuated each word. Yeah, rhythm. Yes. Interesting, I haven't noticed that, but it makes sense. Listen for it. Yeah, I mean, it's probably just part of the tone.

And if this gets to Sabrina or Michael, again, I just wanna remind you that I'm acknowledging you and I are guilty of it. Yeah. So I'm not accusing them of anything that hasn't happened to us. I think it's just tone. It's tone of the show.

They're probably, they're also journalists, so they're doing it a little differently. It's really hard for me to resist to do more of it, but I know, yeah. I know it's not. I don't think. It's not for you. Yeah resist to do more of it, but I know, yeah, I know it's not for you. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't like it if they were doing our voices. But we can do impersonations of actors.

I'm just curious that there's a line. Because it doesn't sound good. Well, that's what you. Well, do you think anyone's gonna hear what you just didn't think it sounded good? Well. Or pleasing at all? Well, I don't know. Does Schwarzenegger sound pleasing

or does it just sound like Schwarzenegger? I don't know if there's an implicit judgment call in it. I mean, yeah, I guess I'm just being empathetic that I wouldn't want them to be doing me ever. I don't want anyone ever to do my voice. Right, well, Krasinski and Ed Helms do an impersonation of me. And my assumption isn't they're doing it

because it sounds ridiculous. My assumption is they're doing it because it's specific enough for them to do it. Yeah. I don't think they're making fun of me. Maybe on insecure days I might think that, but in general I don't think so. Yeah.

Well there is. I'm not making fun of McConaughey. I'm gonna stack. What do youughey. Wanna go to steak? What steak you like? You like ribeye? You like trotter? I had steak yesterday. You like skirt steak?

What kind of steak do you have? Filet. Filet mignon. Centner cut. Six ounce or eight ounce? Eight. Eight ounce, big girl, big appetite. Oh, gross.

Where did you have a filet? We went to a steakhouse for Mother's Day. Oh, you did? Is it hard to get a reservation there in Duluth? I don't know if it's hard, but my mom made a reservation a long time ago. Oh, come on. When she knew we were coming in town.

Okay. Yeah. Oh, that's sweet. It is, she was excited. Mother's Day here was a hit again. Great. I take these kids, I get them the fuck out of here, to remind people it's Father's Day, Mother's Day. What's that mean?

Father's Day, conventionally, traditionally, historically, in this country, dads get to go fucking golfing for like eight hours with their bros. That's how they celebrate Father's Day. And moms have to sit with all their kids at a super noisy restaurant that was impossible to get into and deal with the kids.

And it's not a thank you to the moms at all. Yeah, right. Yeah, so like six years ago, I was like, listen, this is my gift to you. You're gonna have Father's Day, Mother's Days from here on out. You don't have to see the kids on this day. See them in the morning,

we'll make you a cute terrible breakfast. And then we'll get the fuck out of here. You get your nails did, you get a face massage, and you get a body massage. And there were a couple first time moms that got to join. We'll hear from one of them this week. We're gonna interview one of them. Yeah, she's had so much fun.

She said, if I would have known this was on the table, I would have had a kid five years ago. She's had so much fun, she said, if I would have known this was on the table, I would have had a kid five years ago. That's fun. Well, good, I'm glad they enjoyed. Okay, this is for Sanjay, great episode, love him for usual.

What a prince he is. He is. He needs, well, he's a best boy, but also we might need a category prince boy. Oh, wow. The history of the BMI. Body mass index? This is from Medical News Today.

It's derived from a simple math formula created in the 1830s by Lambert Adolf Jacques Creutel, a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist. Researchers in population studies, doctors, personal trainers, and others use the BMI in their work. However, BMI has some important flaws. For example, it does not measure overall fat

or lean tissue muscle content. It aims to estimate whether a person has a healthy weight by dividing their weight in kilograms by their height in meters squared. Yeah, that's why it's a little misleading. Charlie, who's healthy as a horse, his BMI is problematic, because he has so much muscle, so he weighs a lot.

Mine's even skews heavy on the BMI index, unless you factor in then, yeah, body lean mass percentage and all that stuff. Yeah, and then Sanjay said it wasn't ever tested for women or children. Mm. So, do you monitor your blood sugar? No. But you never have any issues

when you get your blood taken and stuff? Because I don't eat gluten, and most of the things I'm allergic to and that I don't eat are starches. And so, since I eat mostly either protein or vegetables, I don't. You're not at risk. The only thing I eat mostly either protein or vegetables, I don't. The only thing I eat that could spike my insulin would be rice, but then I got that low glycemic rice.

But we have friends who monitor it, and it's been really helpful for them. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, my dad monitors it, because he's. Pre-diabetic. Does he wear the little arm patch like Kristin? No, he doesn't want to do a continuous monitoring.

He checks it every day. But it is interesting to see how much it fluctuates. Yeah. Well, when Kristin was wearing it, she'd get alert. Mostly though that her blood sugar was too low. Right. But I think it's designed that thing for diabetics where they're prone to have a real issue.

Yes, exactly. So I think the range is different. Yeah, my grandfather had diabetes and yeah, there were some scary situations where it would get too low. I've been with my cousin when his got too low and it's really scary. They kind of, the cognition stops.

Exactly. Yeah, which is almost like depression in that same way where it's like, how are you to combat it if the first symptom you experience is grogginess and lack of clarity of thinking. Yes. And now you've got to, because we were, it was funny enough at Kristen's old house,

I had taken him up there and we're sitting there and all of a sudden he just kind of looks at me and he's like, I need orange juice. You can barely get out like I need orange juice. Yeah, it's scary. And if I had been in the bathroom at that point and I came back, because he has gone unconscious from it.

Isn't there a movie where that happens? Probably. Oh, Steel Magnolias and she dies. Oh. She dies. Okay. Really sad movie. What's the saddest movie you've ever seen?

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It's the one I cried the most. Yeah, what about Interstellar? Yeah, that one. But then it ends up being, yeah. I think it's all about what you connect the movie to personally. Yeah, that's why I ask.

Yeah, and I happened to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind after Bri and I broke up when they were flashing back to them falling in love, and they were just in a tent with a flashlight, and they were doing all this simple stuff that poor people do, and we were poor people. Yeah. And there's that great scene at the end,

where he's like, but I'll annoy you, and you'll do this, and I'll do this. Like, they already know the pattern if they get back together. And he's like, yeah, okay, I still want to. Oh, I could cry just thinking about it. Yeah, it's really sweet. What's your saddest movie, Steel Magnolias?

No. I mean, it is a very sad movie, but. Her made me really sad too. Well, made me love sick and sad. Her is just melancholy. I mean, the whole thing is very melancholy, the tone of it is. But one of, I don't know what the main one is,

but one of them is 50 First Dates. Oh wow, with Adam Sandler? Yeah, and Drew Barrymore. And Drew Barrymore, wow, that one. Yeah, because she keeps forgetting him, and every day he's committed to falling in love, every day. Yeah, he- It's so sweet. He was in basically a narcissist relationship. and every day he's committed to falling in love every day. It's so sweet.

He was in basically a narcissist relationship. He spent his whole day trying to regulate her. No, but no, because he loves her. He'll do anything. It's probably an unhealthy relationship though. No! If you have to rewin over the person. She had a disease.

It wasn't like. I know, it's not her fault. Yeah, so I don't think it's unhealthy. She wasn't like, I don't, well, I don't remember the, it's been a long time since I've seen it. If the goal is unconditional love in a relationship and every day you are a clean slate and you have to win someone back over

and get them to fall in love with you, that doesn't sound like a great relationship. Well, unconditional love, he has unconditional love. He's just like, I love this person no matter what and I'm gonna show up every day and be that. That's nice. Yeah. I like that. It's sad.

Well, the sad version that's a reality and not the movie. The movie is a metaphor for Alzheimer's. I know. That's why it's horrifying and sad. Yeah. And I hate it. Do you think when they were trying to crack that story, they're like, what's a fun version of Alzheimer's? Maybe. They hate it. Do you think when they were trying to crack that story, they're like, what's a fun version of Alzheimer's?

Maybe, they did it. Oh, ding ding ding. What? Sanjay. Oh my God, you're right, you're right, you're right. Surprised you didn't bring that movie up. I'm gonna look up what are the saddest movies of all time. Okay. Manchester by the Sea.

Oh, that one is, and Blue Valentine. Has anyone seen that? Yep. Oh, wow. Yeah, Manchester by the Sea was really sad. Okay, Dill Alice. I never saw that, but yeah, no thank you. That's Alzheimer's as well.

Oh, ding ding ding. May December? No. Uh-oh. What? Esquire. Esquire, that seems, that one feels like they got paid to put that in there.

Yeah. Like that's an ad. Pursuit of Happiness, very sad. Past Lives, yes, so, so, so sad. What is that? It was from last year. It's again, for me, the saddest movies are not the Steel Magnolias.

They're these, like real life. Just can't, you just can't. Tell me what Past Lives is? It's Greta Lee. Uh, do you know what? The story. I know, I know, I know. I was just for people listening.

Okay. It's Greta Lee. Um. Set in Seattle. Basically, this couple falls in love and then they lose touch over time. Okay. And you're following her in her new life

and then they reconnect. It's very mundane. It's like a very mundane story, but it's just the reality that life doesn't work out the way you want it to all the time. I mean, Jess and I were bawling. It's a really good movie. And everyone I know has seen it

is just like you're distraught after. I think that is indicative of how beautiful the story is, because if it has that kind of impact and it's pretty inconsequential, like it's just, you're just watching someone's life and things don't work out. I really liked Family Man for that reason. Yeah. Do you remember that one?

I loved that movie, but I do forget it. Yeah, it was like, Nick Cage was a rich billionaire guy and then some magic happens and he finds himself married to like his high school sweetheart and he's living in like a very blue collar existence. And he's of course completely upset and he wants to get back to his Ferrari and his penthouse

and then throughout the course of it, he realizes he loves it. What's important. And then I think he has to go back, but he doesn't want to. Oh. Uh-huh. Can he, does it end happy? It must.

I know. Dallas Buyers Club, Lost in Translation. Ooh. I wouldn't say, that to me- That's not sad. That's a fun movie. Esquire, Ocio Magnolias. Okay, well this is not a great list.

Minus Past Lives was a good one. About 50-50 they got him. Yeah. Titanic. Yeah. Titanic. Yes. I guess. What do you mean? She'll Never Let Go.

My God. It's so fun, that was an adventure. Oh my God. I guess it does have a rough ending. All right, anywho. On to happy stuff. That was an interesting sidebar. Oh, Fruitvale Station, that was sad.

Yeah, that one was rough. Yeah. That was roughy. I love that movie though. I love her Melanie Diaz. Greta Lee? No, no, no, no. Yeah, Melanie Diaz is right.

Yeah, that was one of the best performances ever. So. Back to Sanjay. Yeah. Okay, he said he wonders if it's us being South Asian that has more metabolic disease. And it reminded me that Bill Gates told us that. And I remember he told us why and I don't.

Are you talking about the malnourishment part? Because he was telling us about the malnourishment parts. What'd he say? Well, India, which is much better now, when they started it was tight, but like he was saying in Africa, it's something like 40% of folks are malnourished to a degree that they won't fully develop

what they were supposed to develop. And that India is still a double digit percentage. Oh, maybe that was that. I thought he was saying more like. There, I'm gonna go to college. And then you're like, oh, I'm gonna go to college. And then you're like, oh, I'm gonna go to college. And then you're like, oh, I'm gonna go to college. And then you're like, oh, I'm gonna go to college. And then you're like, oh, I'm gonna go to college.

And then you're like, oh, I'm gonna go to college. And then you're like, oh, I'm gonna go to college. And then you're like, oh, I'm gonna go to college. And then you're like, oh, I'm gonna go to college. And then you're like, oh, I'm gonna go to college. And then you're like, oh, I'm gonna go to college. And then you're like, oh, I'm gonna go to college. And then you're were there, but certainly didn't compare to America. But it doesn't look the same. That's the thing.

It's like my grandpa was rail thin and had diabetes. Oh, interesting. And my dad is pre-diabetic and like I have high cholesterol. I've had it since I was a kid. Yeah. But yeah, it said South Asians are at higher risk for type two diabetes,

up to four times higher than other ethnic groups. Whoa. Probably due to a combination of genetics and environment. Recent studies have shown that South Asian diets high in refined carbohydrates are associated with diabetes risk factors. Diabetes. Yeah.

So I should- This is from Remling. Get your blood sugar checked regularly and keep your eye on diabetes. You know that's how he says it. Yeah, you did him in groundings. But there's also a lot of memes going around and they spell it diabetes.

Diabetes. Yeah. It's just so funny to be the spokesperson for diabetes and say it wrong. It's kinda cool. It's a very Southern way of saying it, right? Is he Southern? Funny enough, I think he's one of these guys

that is not Southern, but is. Like even our friend Sam Elliott, who's from Sacramento. Oh, right. But we think of him as being Southern. Right. And I wanna say, well, for Brimley, might even be from Colorado or something. Utah.

There we go. He's from Utah. But where he's from in Utah, you gotta keep your eye on it. Hit your knees and say some prayers. Do six hours of prayers every morning. He was just very, he had an intrinsic judgmental-ness to his. That's why when Aaron and I talk like him for hours, it's all about the prayers. When you wake up in the morning, you want to hit your knees and do a few hours of prayers. Get some physical exercise, eat some quaker or oatmeal,

back into your bedroom, hit your knees, check in with the Lord three, four hours of prayers. Was he religious or you guys just decided? He was just pious. Okay. I doubt he was religious himself, but there's like a lot of people urge others to be super religious and they themselves are not.

Well sure, that's very common. Or Hulk Hogan is like, take your vitamins, say no to drugs. Yeah, yikes. Vitamins, prayers and something else. He said that? Yeah, that was his slogan. Oh my.

And he was not doing a lot of praying. No, I don't think so. Well, because we don't know. He was taking vitamin testosterone and vitamins. Sure. All these other vitamins. Playing at Bass and Loose with vitamins. Yes, and prayers. And all these other things. Playing it fast and loose with vitamins. Yes, and prayers.

And probably prayers, yeah. Do you think it's unethical to pray for certain things? I'm not the right person to ask. Yeah. Because it's like, you're wishing on a star, in my opinion, so if you're wishing on a star, you're obligated to wish for something good to happen to someone else.

Oh, I mean, I guess it doesn't have to be that, but is it okay to pray? To be rich. Right. Right, like it's okay to wish on a star to be rich. Right. But it's not okay to pray to be rich. Yeah, which is interesting.

It is. When I did my prayers, I would have felt guilty praying for something like that. Self-serving. But why? But yeah, all my wishes, I would have felt guilty praying for something like that. But why? But yeah, all my wishes, birthday candle wishes were self-serving. Well, I think because the premise of the religion itself

is like to be not self-serving and not self-centered, it's to be selfless and compassionate. I guess so. So it feels antithetical to the person you're praying to. Whereas stars are all about getting rich. And winning games. And so are birthday candles. Yeah, yeah.

I think it's because even if you don't believe in God, like I wasn't Christian, I was just made up this, these prayers to this random God I made up. But there's something that if you're praying, you believe something real is hearing you. So are you really gonna waste this on being rich or are you gonna try to save it for like everyone living to be 80 years old or older?

Yeah. And you know, but then the birthday candles. But why is there a limit? Why can't, like, why is there, why not make 50 prayers? One of them being, I want a really cool off-road truck. You know, why can't you do it all? Yeah, I mainly save that for 11-11, birthday candles. Stars. Stars.

Pennies. Uh-huh, wishing well. Yeah. I think we think that's more random. That's more luck. The other thing is real, even though it's, you know, well, for some people, believe what you wanna believe. But, yeah. It wanna believe. But yeah. The power of spirituality.

We have a lot of arbitrariness in our behavior. Yeah, yeah. Okay, Emmanuel Kant, the quote he said is from, in his Critique of Pure Reason. Will you repeat it? Cause it was really good and I was trying to remember it a few days later and I couldn't.

Yes. False confidence bred from an ignorance of the probabilistic nature of the world. From a desire to see black and white where we should rightly see gray. I of course learned all about Kant in philosophy class, but I haven't actually sat down and read any of his books. And I'm more and more inclined to.

Today, later today, we're doing a trick sort of. Yeah. A frozen, I told everyone at Alison's live show about this. We're doing a frozen food episode of Fightless Bird. David and I went to the grocery store to pick out all the frozen meals and he was just gonna try some, but then there were so many that he needed to try.

So many classics. And so the cart was just filling up and filling up and I was like, how are we gonna, how? Whose freezer is all this stuff in? Mine. It's all. It fit? Yeah, it did fit. Okay.

So we thought we should invite other people to help eat it. And then David had the idea to replay it. Do the Folgers challenge. We've replaced the coffee in this five star restaurant with Folgers crystals. Let's see if anyone notices. Sir, what do you think of the coffee? Oh my God, it's the best coffee I've had in years.

What if we told you it was Folgers? No. That's what every commercial. Yeah, they can't believe it. Yeah. Did anyone say, oh, it's Folgers? They probably didn't include those reactions in the commercial.

Yeah, it's not very, it doesn't have much integrity, those commercials. Great rabbit hole to go down, by the way. Folgers commercials, because there was a whole decade of those where they were replacing the coffee in these fine restaurants with Folgers crystals. Great content.

And then there's, of course, the best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup. Where the guy's crying about it. And then there's this really famous one between a brother and sister that people really, there's about a thousand remakes of it. Cause it seems like they're dating.

Like the sister's in the kitchen and she looks up and she's like, David, you're home from college? And he's like, yeah, I came. Let's have some Folgers crystals. But it's a very weird commercial. It's very strange. Interesting. Yeah, maybe a mess.

Well, anyway, so David had the idea to replay it once it's cooked, invite people over and see if they can tell if it's frozen or not, which I love the idea. So then I invited a bunch of people and I immediately felt so guilty. You did? Yeah, and I thought, I don't think I can go through with this.

So I now told everyone except one person. Oh, geez. Well, now told everyone except one person. Oh geez. Well, that's the worst possible outcome. If you'd done 50-50, that would've. I meant to do two people, but then it turns out I accidentally told the first person already. So it sounds like you're going to have to tell the last person.

I can't. So you don't feel like the gumdum at the. I know. I just need to invite one more person that doesn't know. Yeah, cause you need to, you need a control group in a, you know, random. It's Jess and like, I think. I just need to invite one more person that doesn't know. Yeah, because you need to control group in a, you know, way in the. It's Jess, and like, I think he'll be fine with it because it's Jess.

Yeah. The problem is, it has to be someone who's not gonna be mad at me that I did this. Okay, so here would be an interesting line of inquiry for you to self-examine. Okay. Do you think you told those people because you were afraid they would feel tricked

versus you just can't bear to think that they would think you cooked this frozen garbage? No, because I will tell them. This won't be a reveal. Right, but it was even the thought of like an hour of the meal where they're like, wow, this is what Monica cooked? No.

That wasn't in there. I was thrilled about that, but I text some of the girls and invited them, and then there's like, any excuse to have your cooking? I'm like, oh fuck. Cause they aren't gonna like it probably, and they're expecting dinner. So I just started to feel like this was unethical,

but Jess will like it. Sure, absolutely. And all like it. I love that Stouffer's lasagna. Yeah, it's delicious. Marie Callender's. When you think frozen food, what comes to your mind? Frozen pizzas, Gino's and Tito's, Tatino's.

Those are my favorite. Did you ever have the pizza rolls? I bought those. Those are good, but I didn't like that they would always put one cut pepper in there. There's always like one cube of pepper. No, green pepper. Oh, I hate that one cube of green pepper. I've never had that.

You don't know what I'm talking about? Look for it tonight. Okay. It should not be in there. Every single one or like one in the whole package? No, no, that would be great. And then that's like, you win. It's like the baby in the cage.

And don't sue me, whoever the makers of those pizza cold rovers. They can't see you if you just don't like it. Well no, I'm claiming that they all have a chunk of green pepper in them. Oh yeah, I've never noticed that. And I was always like, what is this thing doing? It's almost like eating something with a pit. Like you're waiting to find the pit.

Did you though, did you have? When you look this up Rob, and see the ingredients. Did you have a did you have- When you look this up, Rob, and see the ingredients. Did you have a certain flavor or something? Probably pepperoni. If I'm gonna eat any pizza, I would want it to- I think I probably only bought the cheese ones. I am a little worried about how I'm gonna stagger the cooking.

I am too, cause that oven, although most of this is 425, right? Isn't that kind of the standard in the frozen food game? Maybe. The Stouffer's lasagna's huge and the mac and cheese. Yeah. It's family size. People will know the mac and cheese is frozen.

That's the most giveaway you won. Yeah, it tastes the same. I wonder though. You think they think you made pizza rolls? Okay, so that's the problem. There's gonna be, and like the dino chicken nuggets, like it's gonna be a little bit of a giveaway. But I-

Did you get any Boston Market frozen? I think Boston Market had a line. They did have a line, I saw. Meatloaf, mashed potatoes. I didn't get that, that was not a part of my childhood. I mean, Boston Market was, but not frozen. I think that happened later. I think they transitioned more into a frozen food company

than a brick and mortar. Oh, yeah, that makes sense I haven't seen one in a while brick and mortar I think this one I think the Supremes had a random pepper in it. Are you sure that's not I mean? They had a green pepper in it or a red pepper Then yeah, I guess that's the one I had. Yeah green sweet pepper. Oh fuck that. I'm feel so vindicated though I'm glad I didn't imagine that. Who bought Supreme? It kept me from, they were perfect other than that.

But for me when I was younger, a chunk of green pepper was like throw everything out. It's, that's all I tasted for the rest of the night. Well, anyway, we'll see how it goes. Is it, do I need to tell him? No, I'm not gonna. Yeah. I think the mac and cheese, that's funny.

I think the mac and cheese will actually be funny. I think the mac and cheese will actually be, if I serve it in a beautiful bowl, I think people could, no. See, this is what I shouldn't have told anyone because they really would have found out. You know, I love macaroni and cheese so much and I could tell you about every kind of box macaroni and cheese, I've had them all

and I have a total ranking of them. I have never had a frozen one, which is not to say I haven't eaten them. I've eaten them. The noodles suck. Oh, mm. You really like it. I loved it.

I haven't had it in years and so I am worried, but they brought that, so I have a very visceral memory of the Stouffer's Macaroni and Cheese with broccoli. I would have it at my grandparents' house all the time and I loved it. And then they discontinued the one with broccoli. And it's back.

So I bought it. Are you gonna add any like- Spruces. That would be a cheat. No, that's a cheat, no. Yeah, like you can't put real cheese on top. But just like a little bit for- Garnish? Garnish, yeah. No, I'm only now tricking one person, so no, I'm not doing that. You can't put real cheese on top. But just like a little bit for garnish.

I'm only now tricking one person, so no, I'm not doing that. I also want David to try it as is. He also picked the very worst person to trick because that person has more experience with this frozen food than anyone that'll be there. So if anyone will be able to sniff out all these different things, it's gonna be him. But he also doesn't have, like, he's not hoity these different things. It's gonna be him. The person that's-

But he also doesn't have, like, he's not hoity-toity. I know he's not. So I kind of think if he sees it in another bowl, he's just gonna think I made it. I mean, we'll see. You'll see, you'll see. On my hunches, he's gonna know exactly what it is. Really?

Yeah, because maybe Erika, I mean, she grew up Mormon and upper class. She's probably never had this. But she's not gonna be like, she's gonna see this fucking fish sticks and be like, you made this? I think Jess might believe that I made it. I don't know that the premise should have been

you made it as much as I ordered food or not. Oh. Cause no one's gonna believe you deep, you breaded fish, white fish, and then had a deep fryer in your kitchen and all this. How am I gonna do, I'm just gonna have, cause some of them are individual portions. Yeah, that's.

Like a tiny one pot pie. You might need to think about your premise a little more and pivot to like, you're just hosting a dinner party with frozen food. Well, that's what I told everyone but Jess. Yeah, but just the like, Taster's Test portion, the Folgers Crystals part, I don't know is achievable at this point.

You would have needed real food and frozen food, all intermixed, and there's 10 people that are totally unsuspecting. You're like, I ordered from this great new place, are totally unsuspecting. You're like, I ordered from this great new place, Villainvani's. And then I let everyone eat everything and then just go like, who had favorites?

What was your favorite? What was your favorite? Oh, that's interesting. What made everyone's top three was Stouffer's macaroni and cheese. I know, but I just couldn't lie to all those people. That was too much for you. It ended up being too much.

I didn't expect that from myself because it felt like it was gonna be a really fun game. But. It's been hard to time and do all of that too. I mean, I'm still gonna attempt, some of it's going in the microwave. I mean, that's the original way to do it. Yeah, that's the traditional way.

I'm gonna have some for lunch. I'm gonna have something for lunch, first frozen take up something. Well, you're gonna have gas then by dinner. Have you thought about that for your dinner party? I don't know what to do. Anyway, it'll be great. But David has to try all of it.

Like this is important, Swedish meatballs. All the pizzas, like we got so many pizzas. Again, you can't play off those fucking pizzas if you ordered them from this new place, Spanagoli's. I made them. Oh, you made them. Yeah, I made it all. You should have workshopped the premise a little better.

Yeah, anywho. A little bit science behind acquired tastes, cause he didn't like coffee and then now he does and we talked a little bit about that. Repeated exposure decreases our intensity of taste perception. Oh, okay. So this plays a significant role

in the development of acquired tastes. Familiarity with certain flavors gradually diminishes our initial unappealing reaction to certain dishes. Probably the more times you eat frozen food. Well, we talked about sticking with coffee. No one likes coffee the first time they have it. It tastes like shit. Exactly. And then you come to love it.

Is there a food like that for you? Because I have one that I kept sticking with. I think I've said it on here before. But cottage cheese. What is it? I would see cottage cheese on the Elias Brothers Big Boys salad bar. Yeah, not all the time. And it always looks so good. The texture.

Yeah, I love the way it looks. Yeah, and in a big vat, it just always looked good. And I would keep trying it. And every time I'd be like, ugh, no, I hate it. Yeah. And then I just kept at it. And one time I covered it in pepper and had a bite. I was like, okay, here we go.

And now I love it. I love it too, or I like it a lot now, and I also didn't like it. But part of it is just growing up and being more interested in eating well. And so then we see it differently. Yeah, I agree. But other than that.

Rob, have you always liked all the weird shit you like? Because I think you, of all people, like everything. No, I did not. I was super picky as a kid weird shit you liked? Because I think you of all people like everything. No, I did not. I was super picky as a kid. And you chose. When I got into cooking and. Yeah. You're like, it's time to embrace these things.

Yeah. I think there's this realization too that you can make any ingredient taste good if it's prepared well. That is the premise you've accepted. Yeah. Yeah, I'm yeah, yeah. I'm only halfway there.

Today's, I'm gonna prep it really well, the frozen food, and then everything will taste good. I'm gonna do it exactly 18 minutes on the dot at exactly 425. Also, Rob. You're gonna need like six different timers going. I'm actually like, oh no, this is gonna be much harder than I anticipated.

Yeah, it would've been way easier to cook a big meal. different timers going. I'm actually like, oh no, this is gonna be much harder than I anticipated. Yeah, it would've been way easier to cook a big meal. Anyway, Rob, my dentist is offering you a cleaning. Oh, great. So. Can't wait to have two of you. Ta-da! All right, that's it.

You come in here with a big rack of fake teeth, I'm gonna fuckin' die. Oh my God, veneer. And matching teeth. Oh my God, I'm the only one in here without perfectly straight, pure white teeth. All right, love you guys. Love you.

Love you. ["Sweet Home Alone"]