The Joe Rogan Experience - #1213 - Dr. Andrew Weil

Episode Date: December 12, 2018

Dr. Andrew Weil is a physician, author, spokesperson, and broadly described "guru" of the alternative medical brands: holistic health and integrative medicine. https://matcha.com/pages/joerogan

4, 3, 2, all the way from Tucson, Arizona. Dr. Weil, how are you, sir? I am good. Thanks for doing this, man. I appreciate it. Pleasure. You come highly recommended by many human beings that I know. I'm glad to hear it. How do you get such a fine reputation?

Well, I've been doing the same things for a long time, just putting one foot ahead of the other and saying what I know to be true. And pushing matcha. Everybody likes matcha. Who doesn't like matcha tea? This is your stuff? Yeah, but a lot of people have only tasted really bad matcha. Oh, okay.

Enlighten me. What's the deal? It's powdered tea, and it's very, very finely powdered, and it's very labor-intensive to prepare. And it's got such a huge surface area that it oxidizes very quickly. So if it's not properly packed and stored, it loses its brilliant green color. It turns yellow green or gray green. It gets bitter and loses its taste. And I got to say most of the matcha that I see served in this country is of that sort. And many people have never had the good stuff. What's the benefits of matcha? I know there's cognitive benefits.

First of all, it's beautiful. I mean, I've never seen a green color like that. It's just amazing. And the flavor is amazing. But it's the only preparation of tea in which the whole leaf is consumed. And it's grown under special conditions. The leaves are shaded, deep shade for the last three weeks before harvest. So in response to that, the leaves produce more chlorophyll, more antioxidants, more of the good stuff.

So it's got much more of the things that you want. And this has like a pop top, like Pringles. Yeah. So the match is in there? It's got to stay fresh. And after you open it, you want to keep it in the freezer. Oh, okay. Yep.

Freezer. You got a freezer and you should sift it so it doesn't form lumps. And then you whisk it with that traditional bamboo whisk or you buy a little electric whisker. And you can whisk it in hot water or cold water. And it's very yummy. And what does it do for you? Like what's the good? Well, you've got, it's got caffeine, of course.

So you get stimulated by it. But it's also got L-theanine, which is this relaxant compound that modifies the effect of caffeine and produces a state of relaxed alertness. So it doesn't have the jangling effect of coffee. Right. And you're getting all of these antioxidant benefits that are well-documented in tea. Anyway, I love it. It's a great thing. Anytime you get one of these little whisks, it's cool.

It's like a real bamboo. Made from one piece of bamboo. It's a miracle of Japanese craftsmanship. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. So how often do you drink this stuff? I have a bowl of it every morning. Really?

Yeah, and sometimes I have a glass of iced matcha later in the day, especially in warm weather. You're just a matcha fiend. I love it. It's a good thing. I first tasted it when I was 17. I was an exchange student in Japan. In 1959, I lived with a family outside of Tokyo. We had no language in common. And on the second night I was there, the mother took me next door to her

neighbors who practiced tea ceremony. And they did this thing for me. And I was fascinated by that whisk and the color of the matcha. And I thought it was great. I never thought I'd be able to get it over here. Yeah. Well, so you import this stuff yourself? Is that what you do? I started a company called Machikari. We've got the URL machi.com. And I went to Japan to Uji, which is a little town outside of Kyoto, which is the center of the best tea production in Japan. And I sourced really good matcha. You know, there are many grades of matcha.

The most – the highest are too expensive to use for everyday use. Really? Yeah. I mean, phenomenally expensive. Like truffles or caviar or something like that? Yeah, really expensive. So I've tried to find the best matcha that is affordable and make it available to people here. So like the highest level stuff, how much would it cost for a cup of tea?

Hard to estimate for a cup. There's a preparation called thick tea in Japan where they use three times the amount of powder and probably one bowl of that stuff, which is shared by several people. I don't know. It could be a hundred dollars a bowl. Whoa. Really? Yeah. Tea. Yeah. Why did it catch on in Japan like that? It's always been, you know, it has been in Japan for a very long time. And this powdered tea preparation was originally taken up by Zen monks to help them stay awake during long hours of meditation. It was also associated with samurai and became the tea ceremony developed around that. Is there anything that is similar to it?

Is it like yerba mate or guarana or any other kind of stimulants? Well, these are all they're all caffeine plants but in my experience tea i think and it's primarily because of that l-theanine content the effect is mellower of caffeine so you get stimulated you get alert but it doesn't have the jangling effect of a lot of these other caffeine beverages do you drink regular coffee as well no i've never drunk coffee. Wow. I think I was turned off because my parents, when I was growing up, drank really strong black coffee with no sugar or cream. I couldn't imagine what people would drink. Savages. Yeah. Those people,

they were different people. Did you grow up in a northern climate? I grew up in Philadelphia. Yeah. See, when it's cold outside, the people, they drink that black coffee. Uh-huh. Oof. It makes you angry at the world. Yeah. Dark, black, burnt coffee. I like bright, green, shining matcha. Isn't it interesting that things that are good for you, many things that are good for you, like bell peppers or something like that, they have a beautiful color to them. Well, you know, all these, the health benefits of fruits and vegetables, a lot of them have to do with these pigments. And the pigments, the plants produce – they're part of their own defensive system and they do good things in us.

And one piece of advice that I often give people is you should try to eat across the color spectrum every day. Think about, you know, what did you eat today that was red? What was purple? What was green? What was white? All of these have different benefits. Is that a scientific perspective? Absolutely. Really? Yeah. it was red, what was purple, what was green, what was white. All of these have different benefits. Is that a scientific perspective?

Absolutely. Really? Yeah. These are categories of phytochemicals or protective phytonutrients. And a lot of them are these pigments that give fruits and vegetables their bright colors. Do you think that people should vary those colors on any given day? I think as much as you can across any day, try to eat across the color spectrum. That's a good thing to aim for.

Okay. So just get as many of them in as you can. Yeah. Yeah. So do you take this approach with fruits, with all sorts of different things? Yeah. Yeah. Brightly colored stuff is good.

Do you eat meat or chicken or fish? I don't. I'm fishing vegetables. Just fishing vegetables. Yeah. One of the things I'm super concerned with and I've been more concerned with the more I pay attention to it, is sustainability when it comes to fish. Absolutely. It seems like, especially ocean fish, human beings are just terrible monsters. You know, there's a famous oceanographer in this country, Sylvia Earle, who was the woman that held a record for the deepest dive.

And she came up to me at a meeting once and pleaded with me not to recommend that people eat fish. She said there just aren't going to be any in the future. And that's probably true. You know, probably the future is going to be farmed fish, and that can be done in a responsible way. You can get good guides. One is put out by the Monterey Aquarium. You can get a wallet card that lists fish and shellfish and rates them both by toxicity and sustainability. And that's a good guide to follow.

Yeah. Mollusks? You eat mollusks? I do. I eat, yeah. I like oysters and scallops. I eat them. What has led you to not eat chicken or fish or beef rather? It's been a long time. And let's see, I was, I think, 28. And I was interested in yoga and people that I knew who were doing yoga had become vegetarian. And I saw friends of mine that had become vegetarian. I thought, well, I'll just try it for a little while. And it agreed with me. I didn't eat fish for a number of years. And I found that made international travel very difficult, especially to Japan. And then I was reading about all the research on good stuff and fish.

And I started eating fish. And that way of eating agrees with me real well. Yeah. It is a thing, an agree with you thing, right? Yeah. It really depended upon the person's… Very individual. Yeah.

So, you know, it's hard to give blanket rules except i have no problem telling people to stay away from refined processed and manufactured food that's the bad stuff yeah that's a really good clear thing that everybody can kind of apply in their life but as far as like what is going to work for you there's a lot of trial and error involved absolutely you gotta do experiments pay attention see what works for you yeah now you practice what would, how would you call it? Integrative medicine? Integrative medicine. Yeah.

How would you define that? Well, it's medicine of the future. And the short answer- Jamie, we're in the future. Short answer is it's the intelligent combination of conventional and alternative medicine. But really, it's a system that focuses on the body's ability to heal itself, that looks at people as whole persons, not just physical bodies, that takes account of all aspects of lifestyle and understanding health and illness, values the practitioner-patient relationship, and makes use of all therapies, no matter where they

come from, that show reasonable evidence of efficacy and are not going to hurt people. So I am absolutely convinced this is the way out of the healthcare crisis. I've been training doctors and other health professionals in it for many years now. Now, when you say the body's ability to heal itself, how would you accentuate that? This to me is the thing that's most missing from medical education. I think the only time I heard the word healing used in medical school was in wound healing, which in my first year course in histology. To me, the most marvelous thing about our bodies is that they have the capacity to heal themselves.

You get a cut, you can watch it heal. And that happens throughout the body. The DNA molecule, this is just a big molecule on the border of life and non-life. It has within it the ability to know, in quotes, when it's been injured, if a cosmic ray knocks a part of it out, instantly it begins to manufacture repair enzymes that duplicate the missing piece and paste it in. And you can see that same thing at any level of biological organization. And to me, that's where good medicine should start, that the body has within it the ability

to maintain equilibrium, heal itself. Now, knowing that the body has this it the ability to maintain equilibrium, heal itself. Now, knowing that the body has this ability, what do you do to accentuate that? Well, when I listen to a patient and hear their story, at the back of my mind, I'm thinking, why is healing not happening here? What can I do from outside that can facilitate that? I can't put it into somebody, but I can help it along by either supplying energy, missing materials, remove obstacles to it. You know, like you have a wound that doesn't heal. Maybe there's a foreign body in it.

You remove that, it heals. Now, when you have people that come to you that have issues, like say if someone comes to you and they have a back issue. Yeah. Got a little bit of lower back pain. Do you approach that from in terms of like how they're eating, how they're living their lifestyle first? I would question them about lifestyle for sure. But, you know, I'm a great follower of a man who died recently named John Sarno. You know about his work?

Sure. He has some great books mined over back pain, healing back pain, and his main belief, which I totally agree with, is that the vast majority of back pain is muscle spasm, which originates in the mind. And it may localize at an area of physical injury, but the injury is not the cause of it. You can live with a slipped disc and have no pain. You look at x-rays of people. How do you define slipped, though? What does that mean?

Does it mean bulging? Does it mean herniated? Bulging or herniated. That does not necessarily cause pain. And unless there's associated neurological symptoms, you don't want to do anything about that. Unless it's pressing on. Exactly. Right.

Now, John Sarno's idea was that it's a lot of stress and anxiety and a lot of different psychological factors that are causing his back pain. And I'm sure he was some kind of incredible healer. He required that people who came to him come to two evening lectures that he gave. That's all. Many people who did that lost their back pain forever just listening to him. So other people have had that happen just reading his book. Yeah, I've read a little bit of it's you know i've had like legitimate injuries so whenever i hear someone say oh it's all in your head no it's not all in your head it's in your head and your body it's in your head and your muscles and the the this problem of muscle spasm

which shuts off blood supply and it's a vicious cycle that'll localize in an area you've had physical injury but the pain is not coming from the injury. It's coming from muscle spasm. And that's controlled by, greatly influenced by the mind. So when your back is like, ah, it seizes up, that is a muscle spasm. And it's incredibly painful. And it's located in the area of the injury. Correct.

So it can confuse you into thinking it's the injury that's causing you pain when it's in fact. And leads people into getting physical interventions that may not be necessary yeah i'm a big uh believer in waiting especially with spinal stuff absolutely absolutely they always want to fuse you and cut you and you look at here's another interesting thing you can look at x-rays of people's spines that look so horrible you can't imagine that they can move and they have no nothing no symptoms and you can look at other x-rays that look perfect and people are disabled by pain so there's a very low correlation between physical findings and subjective experience now what does sarno recommend i never really he recommends going about your business ignoring it going about your business and if, ignoring it, going about your business, and if possible, try to figure out what message your mind is sending down there.

But basically, it's reassurance that it'll go away on its own. So when he does these lectures and he has people, cures them of it, he's just reassuring them that everything's going to be okay? No, he's explaining this process. He calls it tension myositis syndrome, and he explains the mechanism of how it works one friend of mine he was in his late 20s uh played a lot of basketball had a you know very serious herniated discs he was within uh hours of having neurological surgery spinal surgery and i yelled at him to read this book and see sarno he was in new york and he said i don't believe any of that's all bullshit and i said go go see him so he went to see him oh we went to the evening lectures thought this was nonsense uh went home was having dinner and realized his back pain was gone never had surgery

jesus yeah really no i there's got to be something to that right there's some there's something to the placebo effect right so if there if that is a real thing, if you can convince your body that it's got the medicine that it needs and it starts to heal, even though there's no medicine, there's got to be something that is working against you as well with the wrong mindset, right? Does that make sense? Look, it's funny to me to hear people rediscovering the placebo effect. Now, I wrote a book in 1983 called Health and Healing. I had two chapters in there on placebos. And what I wrote is that the greatest problem is that when we talk about placebos, it's in phrases like, how do you know that's not just a placebo effect?

The most interesting word there is just. Or we have to rule out the placebo effect. We should be ruling it in, man. That's the meat of medicine. That's pure healing from within, mediatedated by belief unmixed up with the direct effects of treatment that's what you want to make happen more of the time it just is a mind fuck for a lot of people because they're like how am i tricking myself into getting better why can i just do it because that must have something to do with the structure of the brain that the part

of the brain in which our will is isn't doesn't connect directly to the machinery of the body to the autonomic nervous system. So you have to find some way of getting around that. One way is to project belief onto something external and then let it work for you. Yeah. But that's so strange that the mind works that way. It would seem like, wouldn't it be an evolutionary advantage

just to have it at access? Sure, that'd be nice. But that's the same thing. It's a similar problem to why can't you just get high without taking a drug? The high is in your brain, not in the drug. The drug is a trigger that releases it. Why can't we just sit down and say, well, I'm going to be high for the next 10 minutes? It's the same thing.

We don't have access to those controls. It just seems like that one, though, healing and getting better, that one seems like it's something that we should as a culture concentrate on yeah for sure what we really concentrate on is actual medicine but one way to concentrate that is by giving people greater confidence in their body's ability to do that and doctors have great power to do that because patients project a lot of belief on them right i've had many patients over the years who said that the most important thing I did for them was that I was the only doctor who told them they could get better. I mean, astonishing. Yeah.

Is it because doctors are just seeing too many patients and they're overwhelmed and they got legal bills and they have – I think some – I've thought about this a lot. And there's also the negative side of this. I've seen – there's something called medical hexing in which doctors say things that actually interfere with healing or cause people to get worse. And I think a lot of this is done unconsciously. So here's one of my thoughts. In their training, doctors see a very skewed sample of sick people. They see very sick people in hospitals.

And in that group, healing is less likely to happen. very sick people in hospitals. And in that group, healing is less likely to happen. But if you look at the total spectrum of illness, the vast majority of things get better on their own. So I think observing in yourself, wound healing is a good one to start with, to get greater confidence in your body's ability to do things, that's really valuable. So, but this, obviously, you're not talking about catastrophic injuries. You're just talking about general wellness. I think even in the case of catastrophic injury, this stuff operates. I worked a lot with hypnotherapists over the years.

And one of my colleagues did a lot of work in training paramedics to be really careful about what you say around unconscious people who have been massively injured. careful about what you say around unconscious people who have been massively injured. You know, if a paramedic takes an automobile accident victim and they're putting them in and says, this one's a goner, that is a bad thing. You know, the unconscious mind hears that. And on the other hand, you say something opposite to a person. You can see cases where you can stop bleeding in unconscious people severely injured just by giving them suggestions. Whoa.

Yeah. So when you're saying someone's a goner, you trigger stress or you trigger helplessness? Like what is happening? Well, to have a medically trained person tell you that you're not going to live, that's a curse. Yeah. It's a medical hex. How strange is it that sometimes your life is hanging on the border of you believing you're going to be okay and you believing you're not going to be okay?

So you want to be very careful about whose hands you place yourself in. Yes. You never want to stay in treatment with a doctor who thinks you can't get better. A negative doctor. Well, doctors are just like every other occupation. There's people that are really good at it and are really concentrated and focused, and there's people that are half-assed in it. Well, the ones I train through our University of Arizona

Center for Integrative Medicine get it. We're putting out, we've graduated about 1,600 physicians now from very intensive training. They're in practice all over the country teaching other people. This is a good thing. Now, when you say integrative medicine, when they're in practice, are they essentially general practitioners? No, we've trained people from all specialties. specialty you can name we've trained them so orthopedic

surgeons neurologists dermatologists anything you can whatever it is yeah and so you try to tend to look at them we teach them all the things they didn't get in medical school nutrition mind-body interactions strengths and weaknesses of alternative medicine herbal medicine all that like say someone comes to you and maybe they have a bad case of psoriasis or some autoimmune issue like that. Prime target for mind-body medicine, for traditional Chinese medicine, which often works well in that, dietary change, put people on an anti-inflammatory diet, use of natural products that reduce inflammation. So there's a wide range of things to choose from. And this does not reject conventional treatment.

You know, we may use conventional medication, but if you do, I recommend using the lowest dose to the least potent agent. Start off with that and you can ramp up if you need to. Well, a lot of people and me, I'm definitely guilty of this. They hear terms like holistic or eastern medicine or chinese medicine you go bullshit right well i have a good bullshit detector too and uh so i'm really careful about what i you know accept and what i don't um what what do you not buy into like when you see your bullshit detector like what where are you all right i'll give you an example i've you know i've

i'm not i can't see any basis for crystal healing oh bro i got a crystal in my pocket right now exactly all right well too bad how about the colonic irrigation people oh yeah tell you tell you that they see uh you know watermelon seeds coming out and you haven't eaten a watermelon in months that's bullshit the the lining of the gi track sloughed off and is regenerated every 24 hours. There's no way that things can get encrusted there. That's a weird one, the colonic thing, because your body has all this natural bacteria that you're supposed to keep in there, right? Not only keep in there, we're finding out that that's like more and more really important determinant of everything, of general health, of mental health, too. Fascinating.

Whose idea was it to start doing those colonics? That must go way back. That's kind of like, you know. It's a wacky idea. Yeah. Pump some water up there. See what's up. Yeah.

And you have to stand there. And it gets, it's addictive, too. I see people get addicted to this. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Out of all the things. Yeah, I won't go further into it. My wife had it done once, and she was describing it to me.

I'm like, yeah, I'm going to pass. Some lady's looking at the tube and telling you what's going on in there. Some lady's looking at your shit. Right. It started as early as 1500 BC. Ebers Papyrus, an ancient Egyptian medical document, described the many benefits of colon cleansing. In ancient times, the practice of cleansing the colon was administered in a river by using a hollow reed to induce water to flow

into the rectum you don't want to drink downstream of that yeah and and uh you know there's no need to do this what you want to do is make sure that things are going through in the right direction yeah regularly and it cleans itself that's how it's supposed to do it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Another big one, I hear all these people that talk about detox, detoxification and sell all these products. The body has many natural methods of purifying itself and getting rid of things it doesn't want. One is through sweating.

One is through breathing. One is through urination. One is through colonic elimination uh the liver has an incredible capacity to detoxify it can take you know you put something into your body the liver within seconds of seeing a compound that has never seen before can begin making a specific enzyme to take that apart and get rid of it wow and you can amputate half of the liver, and it can regenerate within 36 hours. What?

Yes. Liver's amazing. 36 hours? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I thought when you gave someone half your liver, if there was a liver transplant issue, that it took a long time. No, liver can regenerate really quickly.

That's insane. And there's a natural product that you can take that most doctors don't learn about called milk thistle. You've probably heard of that. That revs up liver metabolism. So these are all simple ways to increase. But the first rule of detoxification, I'm sure you can guess, you stop putting toxic things in. Aha.

Cut it off at the pass. And let the body purify itself. Yeah. Well, what do you do when someone's a cigarette smoker? You tell them to set a date to quit. Set a date. That's the most important thing because each attempt to quit, it doesn't matter if you succeed. It's making the attempt to quit goes into a reservoir of motivation that one day will be full enough that it's easy.

And this, by the way, happens with heroin addicts, happens with cigarette addicts. I've seen many people, lifelong cigarette addicts, struggle, give it up, came back. One day they wake up and they look at stained fingers or a dirty ashtray and they don't want to do it anymore. And it's easy. There's no struggle. Same thing with heroin addicts. So it has to do with motivation. You can't put that into another person.

And all you can do is arrange circumstances that maybe it'll happen. So the most important thing is to help you to set a date to quit. And it doesn't matter how long they stick with it. But you're saying there's actually some strength to be gained from failed attempts? Yes. It's making the attempt that you get credit for. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Interesting. Yeah. So the more, like say if you're a drunk and you keep falling off the wagon, if you just keep making these attempts. Yes. No kidding. Really. So there's something ramps up in your mind that makes it more feasible for you to quit?

Yes. And when it happens, there's no struggle. It's not an issue. It's just you don't want to do it anymore. Now, what do you do when people come to you and they're on antidepressants? Now, what do you do when people come to you and they're on antidepressants? Well, I have a book called Spontaneous Happiness, which is about emotional wellness. There's a lot there about antidepressants.

First of all, they don't work so well. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. It's hard to distinguish them from placebos, the popular ones, the SSRIs. And now, because they don't work so well, you know what doctors do? They add one. They add an antipsychotic drug. Horrifying. These are like for major mental illness. They're not things you just add on to make the antidepressant work better. We've talked about that one ad nauseum on this podcast because

it turned out to be the most prescribed drug in America. I can't believe that. That's just astounding. Well, the word is that 25% of women between 40 and 50 are on antidepressants and 10% of adults in the country. All right. Now, here's another thing. That's a crazy number. Well, first of all, the pharmaceutical companies have done a great job of convincing people that ordinary states of sadness are problems of brain biochemistry that need to be treated with a drug. We're not supposed to be happy all the time. Secondly, there's a big problem with a lot of the medications that we use, and antidepressants are a good example.

Most of the medications we use are counteractive. They oppose some process in the body. So when you do that, the body pushes back against it. That's called homeostasis. An easy example you can relate to is if you have a stuffed up nose, you spray a drug in it that decongests you. Miraculous, right? You can breathe. And depending on which drug you use, two hours, four hours at last. But when it wears off, you have rebound congestion that's worse. If you use another dose of the drug then very easy to slide into how dare you jamie very easy to slide into a state of dependence on it same thing happens with many

of these drugs antidepressants they raise serotonin levels at neuro junction neural junction so what is the body going to do if you force an increase in serotonin it's going to make less serotonin and drop serotonin receptors. So if you stay on one of these for any length of time, when you get off it, you're going to be in worse shape than you were to begin with. And this now has a medical name. It's called tardive dysphoria, meaning lingering bad mood due to the drug. So the drug actually prolongs or intensifies the depression. It may be okay for very short-term use of very severe depression, but these are not things you want to go on and stay on for lengths of time. What's fascinating to me is when I talk to people that are on them that want to talk to you like

they're on some cancer medication or they're on, you know, something that cures polio. Like, they make it seem like you're insensitive to the possibility that there's other solutions. Right. And there are many other solutions. We have really good evidence for the antidepressant effect of physical activity. Yes. Both to prevent and treat. Yeah. We have very good evidence for supplemental fish oil, for omega-3 fatty acids to prevent and treat.

CBD as well. All that. And the microbiome looks like it's involved in our mental states as well so you know there's so many different ways of yes cbd for sure so again go gets back to inflammation and it gets back to an integrative approach and not just relying on a single thing like a pharmaceutical treatment yeah i've talked to intelligent people that are on ssris in one form or another and even ones that have struggled were on one for a while and it stopped working and then they tried another one then they're combining ones and they're on this weird sort of uh chemical roller coaster and they reject any possible notion that there's other alternatives

especially when you bring up the exercise one right i bring up the exercise one they go oh this fucking meathead this exercise we just stop and I'm like I'm telling you We did this thing With my friends Called Sober October And what we did is We know alcohol Know anything For the month of October

But also we did This fitness challenge And we got real carried away And we're all competing Against each other With this heart rate app So we're working out Three hours

Four hours a day It was crazy But what was interesting About it to me Was not just that Your body sort of adapts When you force it to work out that many hours but that your mood is phenomenal yeah i felt so good yeah and i was telling everybody if you could take what i like i don't feel that good right now like i mean i feel great but i don't feel as good as i did

during october because i was working out four hours a day. It was, if you could get that in pill form, you would take it every day. If there was no side effects, because it literally removed anxiety, all the internal chatter, all the negative chatter. It was gone. Everything seemed amazing. True.

And there are side effects of physical activity are great. You know, it revs up immune function, improves digestion, improves sleep, all that. You mentioned anxiety. By far and away, the most effective treatment I've found for anxiety is a simple breathing technique, regulating the breath. I've seen this work for the most extreme forms of panic disorder. And the drugs that we use for anxiety are the worst, the benzodiazepines, highly addictive, mess with your mind your mind yeah i have a good friend who has an issue with anxiety medication and he takes it all the time and when he doesn't take it

apparently it has that rebound rebound exactly right he gets horribly anxious well these are handed out like candy and nobody warns people how addictive they are it's a worse addiction than an opiate addiction it's xanaanax? Yeah. Really? Yeah. I did not know that. Harder to get off of than opioids. Wow. Now, how do you feel about psychedelic interventions when it comes to addictions? It seems that we're hearing more and more about that. I know you have a background in

that as well. Well, we're especially hearing about Iboga and Ibogaine. This is the African psychedelic. And there are clinics and people using this that claim great success. I don't have firsthand experience. I only know what I've heard and what I've talked to people. Me too. But sounds good.

And I think that most of the psychedelics are so non-toxic, so safe, and in the right hands, I think there's many possibilities for good outcomes. Yeah. They've also had some pretty good results with cigarette cessation, right? Yep. With not just Iboga, but even with psilocybin. Yep. Apparently, they did a study where they show the difference between someone taking psilocybin to try to quit smoking cigarettes and some really large number of people, I think it was in the neighborhood of 80% quit.

And then over the course of X amount of years, they were still at 60%. So only 20% of those people would come back. That's great. But with other methods, the number was much smaller, somewhere in the range of 20 or 15% after six years. A lot of them just went back to it. What do you make of the microdosing phenomenon? I mean, this is pretty astounding to see this happening.

A bunch of pussies who are scared to jump all the way in. Just get it all in at one big scary dose, man. Why do you want to medicate every day? That's kind of how I feel. No, I'm just joking around. I think I know people Who have experienced Some pretty severe benefits of it Especially people that

Weren't doing so good health wise Yeah And you know We're just really kind of Feeling down and depressed And all of a sudden Their outlook radically changed Particularly psilocybin

Microdosing I know a lot of people Who are doing that Yeah, same I have a lot of hope That Oregon becomes The first state to Sounds like it's close Yeah To legalize psilocybin.

That would be a big one. It would be gigantic. And I think once we realize that no one's dying and a lot of people are getting helped, and a lot of people that are terminal are having some really amazing alleviation of anxiety and an understanding that it's going to be okay. and an understanding that it's going to be okay. And just I think between friends and just the camaraderie, sort of when you have these group experiences together,

like there's some incredible benefits to that in terms of like reinforcing community and civilization, the way we feel about each other. Now, aside from the psychological and emotional benefits, I think you would be fascinated by some of the things that I've observed and written about of real physical benefits of psychedelics. I'll just tell you a couple. When I was in my late 20s, I did a lot of experiments, was in the 70s with LSD, mostly with LSD. I had a lifelong allergy to cats. If a cat got near me, my eyes would itch. My nose would run.

If a cat licked me, I'd get highs where it licked me. So I always avoided them and didn't let them touch me. So I took LSD with a group of friends on a spring day. I was living in Virginia. Fabulous. I was outside running around having a lot of fun. And in the middle of this, a cat jumped into my lap. And I had a moment of trying to defend myself myself and then i thought this is silly you know and i relaxed played with the

cat had no allergic reaction and never did ever after instant disappearance of an allergy that had been there all my life what would be the physiological mechanism for some well clearly that's a very profound mind-body interaction. Now, we know that allergies are influenced by that because you can show a person allergic to roses a plastic rose, and they'll have an allergy. So there's a learned component to allergy that can be unlearned. I did not know that. Yeah, interesting. Now, all right, this is even more dramatic.

Maybe a year later, same thing. It was LSD in the spring. I had also grown up with very fair skin and was told I couldn't get tan. And we used to go down to the Jersey shore. I can't remember. I remember innumerable times, you know, gets getting second degree burn sheets of skin peeling off noxema at night. You know, we didn't have sunscreen in those days. So I just accepted that. So I was, you know, I can't get tan. So again, high on LSD, lying out naked in my great woods in my home in Virginia, and the sun was up there. And I thought, this is ridiculous.

I should not be afraid of the sun. The next day, I got tan, and I have ever since. Now, that's a little more – I'm not quite sure of the mechanism there, but it's pretty amazing. How long were you outside for, though? Because if you're outside long enough, you're going to get burnt. I was out a good time. An hour? I would have normally have – yeah, at least.

I would have had my usual reaction. But my skin got tan. It never had in my life. So what are you suggesting happened? Again, there must be a way in which the nervous system influences melanocytes, which are the pigment cells in the body that can either extend their projections with pigment granules. So the nervous system controls that and the mind connects the nervous system. But what about someone who's like ridiculously fair? Like what about someone who lives in Scotland or some shit?

Well, see, what I would do is when Dr. Weil's psychedelic clinic opens, I would have like – When's that going to open? Well, we'll see. But there will be an allergy program, right? You go in on the first day. You take a full dose of something and you're exposed to the allergen and magic happens. And then you come in for 10 sessions with a decreasing dose. And at some point, you're not getting – you're just getting a placebo and you don't know when that is.

And people are trained to lose their allergies. I think you do the same thing with uh suntanning maybe not with people from scotland because they've got fewer pigment cells but i wouldn't rule it out i'll tell you one more okay uh also from this period i told you i was playing with yoga there was one posture i couldn't do uh the plow where you lie on your back and try to touch your toes behind your head. I got to where I could get my toes to a foot from the floor and I had excruciating pain in my neck. And as much as I tried that, I made no progress.

So I was on the verge of giving up. I thought I was too old. I was 28. So again, in an LSD state, my body was feeling totally elastic. I thought, oh, I'm going to try that. So I'm lowering my feet. I thought I had a foot to go and they touched the ground. I couldn't believe it. I thought, oh, I'm going to try that. So I'm lowering my feet. I thought I had a foot to go, and they touched the ground. I couldn't believe it.

I raised it, lowered it. Oh, wow, fantastic. The next day, I tried to do it. I got within a foot of the ground. I had excruciating pain in my neck. But now I knew it was possible. Before that, I didn't know it was possible. So knowing it was possible, I was motivated to keep at it, and in a few weeks, I was able to do it.

If I had not had that experience, I would have given up. So I think this is the magic of these things. They can show you possibilities. They don't necessarily teach you how to maintain them. But they can show you the things are possible you'd never believe. Well, it didn't even seem like it was just showing you a possibility. It was actually showing you capability. Like you were capable of moving in a way that you didn't think you were moving before.

And it was because of your own tension and worry you probably learned patterns of tension that had built up on my life and maybe some because of the conscious or the psychedelic state rather there's some alleviation of tension my mind was out of the way right yeah hmm well you do you definitely sense that with marijuana, particularly edible marijuana, you can really get good stretching in with edible marijuana. It's almost like you, I mean, I hate to use certain terms to just like trigger people's bullshit alarms, but there's a, you, you can, you can feel more of the muscle you can feel more of what's what it's doing right whereas uh you know i'm i've been involved in martial arts and athletics most of my life so i i have a good awareness of my body but it's way better when i yeah metal edible marijuana like i feel i understand like i can practice moves better like like there's certain kicking techniques. I'm better if I'm more in tune with how everything's working together. Whereas sometimes I can do it if I'm sober, but I'm almost like there's a prophylactic between me and my body.

There's a numbness to it that gets removed by edible marijuana. One other I'm fascinated by, this was with MDMA. I lived in a ranch outside of Tucson and I had pathways that had sort of large gravel and I could not walk on that barefoot. It really hurt my feet. And if I stood on them, you could see dents in my feet. On MDMA, I was able to like dance on those stones, no pain. But the interesting thing is there were no marks on my feet.

So the pain is easy to figure out how that happens. But what's happening that, you know, you don't get a dent? I mean it seems to me if your mind is out of the way, maybe little muscles there are free to press back with just the amount of force to neutralize the pressure. It's like if your mind is not interfering, I think the body has amazing capabilities. Well, I definitely think you can mind fuck yourself, right? And you can definitely think, oh, God, this is – you can start thinking it's worse than it is. And if you can relax, oftentimes there's many situations where you relax and things aren't nearly as bad as you are making them out to be.

So that could be some. I'm with you on everything except the tanning. The tanning. It happened. I experienced it. That's one of those things like Bigfoot. Like when you just keep it to yourself. If you see Bigfoot, you're supposed to just go, I'm not going to explain.

I'm not going to keep that to myself because I want – when people tell me things that I have no experience of, I'm always willing to entertain the possibility. But then I got to experience it for myself. I'm willing to entertain it dependent upon who I'm talking to. Right. Because there's some kooky people out there and you will entertain possibility after possibility until you die and you realize you wrote one big Dr. Seuss book. Some people are just crazy. We we have to accept that true yeah there's there's no doubt about it but i i am absolutely aware that there's some component there's something about the mind and the way the mind interacts with matter and with life yeah that has a profound effect on your body

and it would be really nice if we were all better at controlling that one of the uh insights that i've had in psychedelic states is that everything is conscious that consciousness permeates everything that you know i i feel whatever in me that my consciousness is also in rocks and in plants and in animals, that there's some universal something out there. And there are two really different ways of looking at reality. One is the materialist one, which is that consciousness is a product of brain biochemistry and electricity, and that is dominant in science today. The other is that the brain is a receiving apparatus for consciousness and that

consciousness is primary. Maybe existed before matter, maybe organized matter into forms that are more and more able to experience themselves. I don't know. I don't think there's a way to prove one or the other. It's just that for me, the consciousness is the primary one is more fun and makes life more interesting. I'm sure you're familiar with Rupert Sheldrake. Oh, yeah. He's a good friend. Very interesting guy. He has an idea that everything has memory.

Right. He believes that this would be like the reason, I guess, why some people would not want to live in a haunted house. They would think that if someone was murdered in the house, that it would retain some memory of these atrocities. And that you would somehow or another interact with that if you were in that house. So, like, spaces. My dad is not a very, he's not a woo-woo kind of guy. But he went to Gettysburg. And he was telling me that when he was at Gettysburg, that he felt profound sadness.

He's like, it just seems like it's just in the ground, like the whole area. He goes, I don't know how to describe it, but I wanted to get the fuck out of there. Like, just being around

this area where this battle had taken place and so many people had died. He said, you could feel it. Huh. I don't know if I buy it. I mean, but he's not

the kind of guy that we... No, right. But that's an example where somebody tells you something like that. That's his experience. Right. I'm if I buy it. I mean, but he's not the kind of guy that we – No, right. But that's an example where somebody tells you something like that. That's his experience. Right. I'm willing to entertain it. I have to experience it myself.

Yeah. But it also could be, you know, like he got lucky and didn't get drafted during Vietnam, and that's probably in his head that if he did get drafted, he might have died over there. And for what reason? He wouldn't have experienced this life. He wouldn't have, you know, what is the problem? And then thinking about these young men that died in the same fashion for some war that didn't make any sense. Like, why the fuck are they even fighting it?

Like, who's, why is this a, and then having all these people die together in this one horrible battle in this one place. And he, you know, it could have been he was playing a game on his mind, but. Now, Joe, I want to talk to you about your language. Why the fuck do you swear so much? I don't know. Have you read anything about the science of swearing? No. Do you know that there is a science of swearing?

A science? Yes. It's pretty interesting stuff. Oh. So the part of your brain that produces swear words is not the part of the brain that manages ordinary language. Really interesting. You know, we have two language centers in our left frontal cortex. People that have strokes that damage them often lose language completely, but they can still swear. So swearing is coming from somewhere else. It may be coming from the right hemisphere, but it's also coming from deeper centers in the brain that connect to the limbic system and the amygdala.

And that connects to the involuntary nervous system. So here's a couple of interesting facts. Swearing is associated with sweating, increased sweating. So you should be dripping with sweat. I haven't sweated that much. I'm a comedian. I'm sure it's uncomfortable for you. Secondly, also interesting, swearing increases pain tolerance.

Interesting. And there's an interesting experiment. You know, the standard way they do pain tolerance, they have people stick their hand in a bucket of ice and water. And you see how long they can keep it there. The people who say, fuck, shit, can keep it there much longer than people who are not allowed to swear. What about noises? What if they just go, ah? No, it was swearing specifically.

So they've tried noises and swearing? Yeah, so it may be, you know, if you're hammering a nail and hit your thumb, use one of those words. That's a good strategy. That's interesting because I almost always do that. If I hurt something, especially a finger. You know, like I slammed a finger in a car door the other day and I went, motherfucker. So that's interesting because i almost always do that if i hurt something especially a finger you know like i slammed a car door the other day and i went so that's what that is but that's yeah and it's interesting it's coming there's a different part of the brain that that manages that it has different emotional content yeah it flavors language yes i like them

i'm a big fan of the swears i'll leave you some papers about the science of swearing it's interesting yeah it's very interesting. Now, what would happen if they were no longer taboo? Would the same areas- They'd lose their power. I think they'd lose their power. Yeah. Yeah, right.

The same areas of the brain wouldn't- No. I remember there was an episode of, I don't remember what television show, but it was on CBS. Yeah. And they had a line at the end of the show and essentially they were saying shit happens and it was a big deal i'll bet it was a big deal that they wanted to be able to say shit happens and apparently they pulled this off and they got it through and it was like a 10 p.m

show so it was okay and it was 11 o'clock by the time they said shit and uh i remember thinking like wow what a strange sort of like how many people were involved in this sort of dance? Like, how many lawyers and executives and who? Like, it's very strange. Very strange. That this one word, everybody knows the word. Right. It's not even that offensive.

So it's kind of a, you know, a kind of game we all play. Yes, yes. So, but you're saying this game is facilitated by one specific part of the brain. And is that because? Swear words are taboo words, right? They're taboo words and often associated with things that we find offensive or with bodily acts that freak people out. Yeah. But so there's both.

There's a psychological, social aspect to it, but there's also a neurological aspect to it. social aspect to it but there's also a neurological aspect to it now when the words like some some words for some people like i remember when i was a kid uh i lived in florida for a little bit and uh i said hell once and uh in florida in the 1970s hell was a swear like uh yeah i don't know i mean i came from new jersey and i was in san Francisco, and then also I was in Florida, and I said, hell. And they're like, don't swear like that in this class. I was like, swear? Who the fuck are you people talking about? It didn't make any sense to me.

And then I was like, you guys have different swears. Now, if you had a word that was not taboo to you, would that same area of your brain i don't know this is there has not been a lot of research it hasn't been taken seriously but that's all interesting questions that should be studied because it some i mean if you're a really super conservative person there's a lot of words that are off the table yeah but if you are a far more you know just loose with your language you could shit this and this. God damn it. That would be nothing.

God damn it would be just like, ah, shucks. Yeah. Yeah. But to someone, God damn it would be like a really big deal. Bad, bad. Yeah, really big deal. So what it would be different parts of the brain would be activated by that versus if you said it, it would be not that big a deal.

But if someone was like super conservative and they said it. Probably even, yeah, more. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Interesting. Do you think that that is a universal thing? I mean, it obviously is language wise.

It seems to be universal. Seems to be universal. Another finding that I came across is that people who learn a second language, that swearing in the second language does not have the same emotional impact that your first language does. Oh, that makes sense. That's why they're so fun when you learn Spanish swears. It's like you get a free ride.

Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. And you can do them on television too. Right?

You can say a lot of Spanish swears on English speaking TV and everybody just pleads ignorance. So does every language have? They all have swears on English-speaking TV, and everybody just pleads ignorance. So does every language have? They all have swears. Every language has taboo words, swear words. Wow. Yeah, it's universal. That is really interesting. Asian languages, European languages, all of them, huh?

Wow. Huh. So that would, at least to my brain, seem to indicate that there's some use for that. Yes. Well, there are probably many uses. One is this thing of modulating pain. One is a social bonding, forming some community. Yeah, that's how I kind of use it.

I think when I swear in front of people, I'm testing them out. Like, you freaking out if I say fuck? Because if you are, I can't talk to you. Like, you're too much work. You know you know what i mean i know exactly what if you're talking to someone in every other word like well i really wish you wouldn't use that language well okay you there's so much work to do here i can't i know exactly hold your hand dance through this garden right yeah it's um it's to me also like i hang around with a lot of people that swear a lot because I hang around with professional comedians and fighters and there's a lot of swashbuckling, freewheeling type of individuals involved in those pursuits. Now there seems to – there's some study suggesting that swearing is becoming more frequent in our society and more public.

I don't know. It's a trend i'm not sure anybody knows why but i mean nobody would have been you know on the air like you are 20 years ago that's true yeah well that is specifically because the internet because of a lack of regulation yeah yeah yeah but even that it's like it's it's resisted in a lot of ways like people are trying to figure out how to modulate this and how to handle it. They'll never handle it. No. It seems like the genie's out of the bottle, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

I think ultimately you find what you enjoy, and the best way to find what you enjoy is people actually doing what they want to do, and then you figure it out. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that seems to be what's happening in the world of the internet and podcasting and stuff like that. It's also the the access right like a person like you you could just put together a podcast and uh if people find it interesting if it resonates you could get a hundred thousand downloads out of nowhere like a hundred thousand if you have a radio show a hundred thousand people listening that's a lot of damn people they'd be excited

they're like hey andrew we got the uh monthlies in and you're doing great you got a hundred thousand people a day they'd be like holy shit this is a successful business but you could be doing that just from your office just put together with a laptop and a microphone and no distribution whatsoever in terms of like no string of executives and gigantic corporation behind you you don't have. And nobody telling you what you can say and can't say. Yeah. Well, that's one thing you get out of today that you never got out of before. And, you know, this is – I've been involved in show business for many years, but only this kind of stuff for nine from doing this podcast. And what I've seen with this is, like, what's unusual and I think what resonates with people is that there isn't anybody else.

There's no group of people that's saying, Andrew, can you stop saying this or let's concentrate on that. And the polls are showing that people like this and you have breaks in between where the commercials are playing. They come to you with notes and they tell you things. All that stuff just seems to somehow or another ruin this natural interaction that we have with each other yeah yeah now for a guy like you the internet is i would think that with some of your more controversial ideas like this is the way you could really air them out in long form because if you like a lot of doctors they don't want to open their mind to anything outside of what they're what they're practicing yeah i mean it's gotta be rough for you right but i've

never censored what i say i've always put it all out there good for you yeah i've done that all my life but do you don't you find that it's more uh not not just accepted but people are more interested in it now because of the internet. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Absolutely. Because I've heard about you for many, many years, but it's sort of ramped up over the last decade or so.

Right. Yeah, because of the internet. Right. Because people have this- But I've been around, it's funny when I look at this stuff like, you know, all the stuff about pot and psychedelics, placebos. I was saying this stuff in the 1970s. You know, my first book, The Natural Mind, was published in 1972. It argued that everybody has an innate drive to alter their consciousness and that drugs are one way of doing it.

I did the first human experiments with pot that were ever done under double-blonde conditions. What experiments did you do? I gave marijuana to people in a laboratory in 1968. And what did you test them for? Well, we were just seeing – people bet me you couldn't do it. Nobody had ever done this. All this marijuana was becoming such a big thing and nobody – there were no experiments. Like what kind of experiments?

I took like the most basic stuff. I just wanted to show that you could give it to human subjects in a lab and get away with it because people thought you couldn't. You mean in terms of the FTC? In terms of law, lawsuits, everything. One of the things I wanted to give it to people that never had it before so there'd be no expectations. Everyone said, this is terrible. They're going to turn it to heroin addicts from giving them stuff like that. Anyway, I just wanted to see basic stuff like like does it dilate the pupils of the eyes? Because cops were busting people.

They'd say their eyes are dilated. It must be high on marijuana, and they'd search. But marijuana doesn't – we showed it doesn't dilate the pupils of the eyes. I tested blood sugar because people said the reason people get hungry is because blood sugar drops has no effect on blood sugar uh we showed that uh you know people who had never had marijuana before in a lab you could show slight decreases in performance and motor function and cognitive function but people who were regular users of it you couldn't show that that they had adapted to it yeah my take on that is that i think the people that are not regular users are freaking out. Yeah.

And because they're nervous. It's novel sensations and they don't know what to do with it. Yeah. And they just don't know how to relax. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's the big one to me with physical movement because they want to test drivers and all sorts of other things for marijuana.

I'm like, this is not alcohol. You're talking about a completely different thing. If I had a choice of being a passenger with these drivers, I'll tell you which one I would take. A person who had never used marijuana and had just smoked. A person who was a user of marijuana and had just smoked but had never driven high. A person who was a regular user of marijuana and had practiced driving high. And driven high, a person who was a regular user of marijuana and had practiced driving high, and a person with any amount of alcohol in their system, I'd take the third as the best bet.

Yes, the third's the best bet. Yeah, that guy's a wizard, I bet. Right. That guy drives high every day. Yeah, so he's used to it. Not going to show any effect on his performance. Yeah, the experience is a novel experience. Right.

And if you're accustomed to it, then it's just like, here we go. This is my normal world. And for many people, you have to learn to get high. You have to learn to associate the subtle physical cues with the altered state. That's a common thing. People feel nothing the first time they try it. Yeah, you do hear that, right? But I don't think they know what the fuck they're talking about.

Bro, you're high as fuck. Now, when you did these experiments, did you have to clear these with the FDA? You would not believe. What did you have to do? I had to get permission from the FDA, which said that I couldn't do it unless I first got permission from, it was the old Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which was the Treasury guys. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics said, we'll give you permission once the FDA gives you permission. So they played that off. Then I had to get permission from the state of Massachusetts, from two agencies there.

And there were two universities involved, Harvard University and Boston University. So coordinating all this stuff was unbelievable. And then once all the approvals came in, I had to get the pot. And there was no legal source of it. So the Federal Bureau of Narcotics gave me confiscated pot that they had confiscated in some case in Texas. They brought it over. They had delayed us so long. I didn't even know if I had time to do the experiments because I was going to graduate.

Anyway, they brought this stuff on a Friday afternoon. It was shit. I mean, it was brown, dry. It looked like you've been sitting in a warehouse for years. So the first thing I did was roll up a joint and smoke it. No effect, whatever. I called the agent that I dealt with and and i said this stuff is no good and he said how do you know you haven't had time to run any experiments and i said i looked at it under

the microscope and there was no resin on it so they grumbled and they gave me other stuff which was passable so but again confiscated stuff yeah because we always used to hear when we were kids about government weed the government weed was the good weed that was later that was later when that when research got going and the u.s the government started a pot farm in mississippi to provide pot for research which was much better and there was only a handful of people that were under these experiments correct it was so they made it so difficult to conduct research as they have with psychedelics. Now that's slowly changing now.

Yeah. Well, you know Rick Strassman? Sure. Yeah. When he was doing that book, DMT, The Spirit Molecule, and he did all those tests with those people, that was really groundbreaking stuff because doing it at the University of New Mexico and doing it under clinical conditions, they were able to document the similarities between all these people's psychedelic experiences and do this with government approval, which I thought was really fascinating. Fascinating. Yeah. And the fact that they did it and the information's out and then there's been like very little movement in that direction.

It's kind of just like, okay, now we know. But look, everybody's fine. It's a lot of benefit do we do want to act on this like you know it takes decades right and forever and plus what research was done all along it was for her to look for negative effects ah you know nobody who wanted to look for positive effects got permission and funding that's interesting so you have to kind of frame the proposal in a way that like, these kids are fucking themselves up and we're going to prove it, sir. So that's

changing. But you know, the big stumbling block now, we got to get cannabis out of that federal schedule one. That's like causing a lot of problems. Yeah. There's been some noise about decriminalizing it federally, which is like step one, I guess. That's the big stumbling block. I'll give you one example. I'm involved with a group called Maui Wellness Group. I'm the chief science officer. Maui, Hawaii?

Yeah, we got the first dispensary license and growing operation over there. Oh, nice. It's very good. Is it legal in Hawaii? How does it work? For medical, not for recreational. Like how sick you have to be? It's okay. They're allowing it.

But there's specified conditions. Hawaii is more uptight than a lot of other states, but it's happening. But our license is for Maui County, which includes Maui, Molokai, and Lanai. So people from Molokai and Lanai can come to Maui to buy product in our dispensary, but they can't take it back because the waters between the island are federal. What if they throw it? Still has to cross the water. Oh, it's no good. But that's ridiculous.

The waters are federal. That's hilarious. That's the kind of ridiculous situation. So better to be in Maui and not go to Lanai. You got to go to Maui to get high. Yeah. That's great. What if you're really sick?

What if you have cancer or something like that? Well, obviously. And you live on Lai. Yeah, well. You've got to violate the law. Yeah, we have to violate the law. But if you have it in Lai, you're okay. So can you grow it?

No. You can only grow it if you have a license, and the only license is for Maui. Jesus Christ. Yeah. We've got to change this. California was really ridiculous when they were doing medical. Like, you could just basically go in there and go, I can't sleep. They'd go, okay.

There was nothing. I had friends that had long, elaborate excuses they had planned out. Like, I was in a car accident while I was six, and I go to bed at night, I have these horrible dreams, and the only thing that helps me is marijuana, and I'm just trying to feed my family. And they would go, stop, stop, stop. Yeah, okay. I'm righteous crypt. They'd just give And they would go, stop, stop, stop. Yeah, okay. I'll write you a script.

And they'd just give it to you. Like, there was no resistance. Like, if you – my joke was that if you can't get a license for marijuana, you should probably go to a hospital immediately because you've got a real problem. They're like, no, man. You need actual doctors. I'll tell you a story. This is something that bothers me, though. I'm not a user of pot.

No, I was heavily in my earlier life. This is something that bothers me. I'm not a user of pot. I was heavily in my earlier life. A friend of my doctor colleagues in San Francisco sent me some samples of stuff that had come from a medical dispensary in San Francisco. And he wanted me to try them. So one of them was some concentrated oil. It came in a little syringe and had a very elaborate, nicely printed brochure with it that described the use of this for pain. And it said you should start with an amount the size of half a grain of rice.

Take it orally. What? Yeah, my friend said take it at bedtime. So this is a teeny amount. And actually, I probably took somewhat less because I was afraid of getting too high on it. So I took it at bedtime, went to sleep, woke up about an hour later in full-blown delirium. I mean, visual hallucinations as strong as I've had on LSD. I couldn't get out of bed.

I was immobile. I had burning thirst. I couldn't get up to get a glass of water. I had a friend staying in a guest house. I couldn't call for help. I lay there, and it kept increasing. It kept, you know, over four hours, it got stronger and stronger. And when is it going to end?

Anyway, it lasted 12 hours. Yeah. And for about 24 hours after, my equilibrium was really off. And this stuff is being, I mean, you know, and it said, it said, the direction said, start with this amount and work up from there. That's hilarious. And there's people, I'm thinking there's people, you

know, driving on the streets. This stuff is out there. That scares me. Yeah, there's people that'll squirt that whole thing in their gullet. Right. I'm sure you know some. Yeah, I know a lot of them. Yeah. The edible world is a weird world because of the response of the body is so much different than the smoking.

It's a different drug. Yeah. And a lot of people are fooled by, you you know the long length of time it takes so you know it's like lighting the firework and the fuse is down and you go back and try to light it again and yeah i'm sure you've heard the recording of the police officers who stole the pot from the kids and then ate it and then called 9-1-1 on themselves no you never heard it oh it's wonderful i won't play it again because we played it too many times in this podcast okay i'll look it up but these poor cops they they ate pot brownies and they're calling 9-1-1 they're like i think i think we're dying time's moving real slowly i

think we're dead it's so stupid it's so stupid you it's like it's it's good for kids to hear because you realize like oh cops are just people oh all right okay it's just it sounds like my brother if my brother got high you know it's just crazy people that get high but the the effect of the edible uh can be pretty pretty fucking profound and this area in particular like hollywood has some pre-posturous thc level i can imagine yeah i mean they're under different regulations now that it's legal statewide instead of just medical. But when it was medical only, you could get these insane concoctions. Stars of death. You ever heard of a star of death?

No, I have not heard of a star of death. You're going to hang out with Joey Diaz. He'll hit you with a star of death. What do those stars do? Like 1,200 milligrams? They range anywhere from like 200 to 300, 400. Each little star. Each little star is hundreds of milligrams, and Joey would eat like three or four of them.

Eight, I don't know. Yeah, he would just throw them down. He's got an insane tolerance. Yeah, he's just one of those guys. Given all this stuff, however, I am delighted to see our society finally coming to better terms with this plant. Me too. Cannabis, the word cannabis is the same word as canvas. All canvas sails and rope used to be made from hemp.

And the species name sativa means useful. It's the useful hemp. It's really useful. This is one plant that provides an edible seed, an edible oil, a high quality fiber, a medicine, and an intoxicant. That's a lot of ways for a plant to be useful. We have been very stupid in our relationship with that plant. The cannabis, it's the equivalent of the dog in the plant world. Dogs long ago made a decision to co-evolve with us. They threw their evolutionary lot in with humans. Cannabis did the same thing.

You can't unravel the early botanical history of cannabis because as far back in history as we go, it's always associated with human settlements. So that plant wants nothing other than to be with us and to serve us. And we have been so stupid. We've let a billion-dollar industry in hemp textiles go to China. We've let a billion-dollar industry in hemp textiles go to China. We've let a million-dollar industry in edible hemp products go to Canada. And we have ignored its potential for medicine. Well, I'm really hoping that things are going to change in terms of our cultivation of hemp. I'm one of the owners of Onnit, and we sell hemp protein.

Great, yeah. We used to get our hemp protein from Canada. Yep. We used to have to get it from Canada and then sell it in America. We couldn't grow it here. Stupid. Well, that's going to change. I'm so hopeful that it does change.

It's fascinating also how well the propaganda worked against it and how long, even in defiance of all the facts. Now, I have to tell you, when I did those pot experiments in 1968, I predicted that pot was going to be legal in five years. Boy, was I wrong. I mean, all I thought, I thought it was just a matter of getting the truthful information out there. Well, it wasn't. You know, people believe what they want to believe and they don't believe what they don't want to believe and it's rude.

It's totally irrational. Well, it's also a really excellent example of the contradictions in our society and that the the difference between something that's accurate and something that's perceived yep and we have this perception of marijuana and and sometimes that perception is based on experiences like you might meet some right really lazy fucked up people who smoke pot all the time. You go, oh, this is what pot does to you. Also, it was the associations of pot because back then, you know, in the 50s, 60s, it was associated with Mexican migrant workers, with black jazz musicians in the South, and then with radicals and hippies. So all scary people to mainstream, you know, middle class white society. And, of course, all accentuated by William Randolph Hearst and Harry Anslinger. all scary people to mainstream middle-class white society.

And, of course, all accentuated by William Randolph Hearst and Harry Anslinger and the Reefer Madness films. Those are great. They're great. If anybody hasn't seen those, it's amazing how something that was terrifying to someone back then is so silly today. When you watch Reefer Madness today, it's really funny. And at the same time we're living with the two most dangerous drugs that are out there with alcohol and tobacco well how about

fentanyl that one scares the shit out of me they just keep ramping that one up and making it more and more potent yeah the idea that opioids weren't killing people quick enough that we needed to make some ridiculously potent versions of it and apparently apparently now they're approving something that's even more powerful than Fentanyl. Yeah, I remember that, yeah. Like, why would you do that? But you know, on a physiological level, opioids are not that bad for your body. The worst effect of being addicted to an opioid over time is chronic constipation. I mean, that's annoying, but that's not like cirrhosis of

the liver, degeneration of the nervous system. But overdoses. Overdoses, of course, that kills you by stopping your respiration. But there are many examples of people who have been addicted to opioids who've been able to get legal supplies and use them sensibly. They're healthy. I've heard about that in terms of regular heroin use. Yep. I had a friend who was a longshoreman, and this is like when I was a kid, he was explaining to me how this guy that he worked with would get a bag of heroin every day at lunch, and he would shoot it in his car, and he would just sit in his car during lunch hour, and

then when the time was up, he'd go back to work. I was like, what? He would do that every day. I'm like, he's going to be dead in a week. No, if he knows how to take care of himself. Apparently he did. Apparently he would do it all the time. Right.

I guess find a new vein and figure out how to do it and not give himself gangrene. There's a famous historical example that's great. There was a man named William Halstead who was a surgeon at Johns Hopkins University in the early 1900s. He invented local anesthesia. And so, you know, great guy. Halstead, who was a surgeon at Johns Hopkins University in the early 1900s, he invented local anesthesia. And so, you know, great guy. He started using cocaine and injected, self-injected cocaine and not a good thing. And his, you know, his behavior got really bad, not good.

So at some point, a group of his colleagues kidnapped him and took him on a yacht for several weeks. And he came back supposedly cured, had a long life as a very successful, productive surgeon. And only after his death was it revealed that what had happened on that trip was that they had gotten him off cocaine and on to intravenous morphine. And for the rest of his life, he was an intravenous morphine user, did not in any way interfere with his health or productivity. I would assume that if you're doing that every day, you're going to run into issues with your veins. Well, yeah. Presumably, he knew how to rotate around and do that. I wouldn't want to do that, but there it is.

But the point is that it's a whole different game from alcohol and tobacco. Yeah, a whole different game. The problem is. Yeah, a whole different game. The problem is it's the social toxicity of it. It's that people are buying illegal, impure materials and overdosing and so forth. It's not the pharmacological nature of the drug. What's been disturbing to me as a person, as an observer, is watching people who get injured get hooked on it. Yeah.

Particularly pills. Yeah. It seems that my good friend Brendan, he had his nose broken and he got his nose fixed and they put him on pills. And before he knew it, he was taking those pills every day for months and months and months. And his friends eventually just took him out of his medicine cabinet and they just made an intervention.

So, you know, this is, I think the opioid crisis that we've got in this country is a fabulous opportunity for integrative medicine because the realization is that you cannot manage chronic pain solely with use of opioids. Right. There has to be individualized integrative treatment that uses different modalities. It could be everything from acupuncture, yoga, mind-body stuff, diet. And that all has to be – State of Oregon a couple of years ago passed an integrative pain management initiative saying that all pain – chronic pain management had to be

integrative and they listed the different modalities. They left out mind-body medicine, which to me is one of the most important. Yeah. Mind-body medicine though on any sort of a report, that seems like that's one like, okay, what kind of... But look, you know, I studied... I'm with you. Yeah, I studied hypnosis after I got out of my medical training, one of the most interesting courses they ever took. There's a well-known demonstration in the literature on hypnosis. You can take a person deeply hypnotized who's got good trance capacity, touch them with a finger that you represent to be a piece of hot metal, and they get a blister. And you can take the same person and touch them with a piece of hot metal and tell them it's cold and they don't get a blister.

Wait a minute. Yes. Well-known phenomenon. This is actually – have you ever seen this in real life? Yes. So someone's taking a hot piece of metal and convince someone that they're not going to burn and they don't burn yes that's close to by the way to the suntan stuff how long do you touch them with it for you know enough in an ordinary person that it would burn i call bullshit i call bullshit but we'll try it i just let's try it i'll put you under

put you under and cook your hand it's like it's hot if it's hot it's gonna fuck you up no well i think if it's held there long enough it right so like like it's one of those things like the walking on coals thing absolutely which i've done a number of times i'm sure but if you as long as cold you know this then that coals are not a very good conductive heat which is why you don't cook on that's bullshit because yes i'll tell you why that's bullshit my experience was the first time I tried it, I was with a group of maybe 40 people. And it was a – the standard length of the firework was about 12 feet. It was a hot fire. It was mesquite.

It was in my yard in Tucson. And the guy came in. It was early in the days of firewalking. And he had this long four-hour thing to get people ready. I was not in the right mental state when I did it. And my experience was it felt fucking hot. And when I got to the end of it, it condensed down to like a number of points that really burned. And I had blisters the next day.

And most people that have walked that night, it looked like they were not in the right mental state. But I saw a few people who strolled across it that looked they were in some interesting altered state. So I wanted to try it again. Next time I did it, I shouldn't have done it. I was with a guy who was a real jerk who thought himself as a self-styled guru. Small group. It was a shorter, maybe eight-foot, cooler bed of coals. And I got significant burns from that.

So like an annoying guru? Yeah, really annoying. He had no idea what spiritual stuff and you're like this guy's a jerk off and then you're getting annoyed so you're out of your mindset right and i burned my feet so i said i'm not going to do this again and then a friend of mine was doing some intensive workshop with tony robbins in phoenix oh christ and it was going to end the last day they were going to do try to set a record for the longest fire walk done in America. So he wanted me to come up. So I went up there.

I thought, I'm going to watch. I'm not going to do it. So it was a 40-foot bed of coals. And it was really hot. And he had like a troop of African drummers. And people were dancing and drumming. It was like midnight. And people were getting in line to walk.

And I said, I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do it. But I found myself going up there. And I was right there. And he taps me on the shoulder and says, you're ready. It felt like walking through crunchy croutons. There was no sensation of heat. I walked slowly.

I kind of wiggled my feet in the things. And when I got to the end of it, I felt so high. It was like on acid. I had energy rushes through my body. I had nothing on my feet. So on a much shorter, cooler walk, those coals conducted just fine. And on this one, it's a mind-body thing. It's not about the conductivity of the coals. Tony Robbins hitting you with some Fugazi coals. That's what that is. It was hot. I mean, you could barely get at the edge of the thing,

man. The heat was amazing. Do you know the Tony Robbins one? It's what's really interesting is recently they've developed this issue with people trying to take selfies while they're walking across the coals and burning their feet. It's become a significant issue because it didn't happen until within the last few years. I never heard of that. I think that would get you right out of the proper state. Yeah, there was a big article about it. There was a big article about these people really fucking their feet up. Well-deserved.

So you really think that you have the ability to mitigate the amount of effect that fire and hot coals have on your skin? I don't have any proof of this in my intuition. I think what happens if your mind is out of the way, you can absorb energy and let it flow through your body rather than getting blocked in the tissues where it causes damage. And I've seen this in other situations as well. And I think the problem is ordinarily our mind is in the way of that and does not let the body freely do that. And I think that applies to things like getting hit really hard Heat Getting hit really hard what do you mean Getting

Letting someone hit you as hard as they can With something that would cause damage and it doesn't Oh that's crazy No it's not I've experienced it Yeah I'm sure you have but are there real scientific Studies that show that Nobody studied it I'd love to study it Nobody studied firewalking.

You know, the usual scientific explanation is that- It seems like we probably shouldn't talk about this until they do do studies, because it seems so simple to do these studies. And I'm not buying it for a second. I think if I hit somebody, it's going to fucking hurt, right? If you get Deontay Wilder to punch you, I don't give a fuck how much Tony Robbins talks you into the zone. Common experience.

Drunks involved in car accidents don't give a fuck how much Tony Robbins talks you into the zone. Common experience. Drunks involved in car accidents don't get injured. Okay, but do you know why? Because they're totally relaxed. Yes, but that has nothing to do with some altered state of consciousness that's not allowing the injury to actually manifest itself. Well, I think their mind is out of the way and their body is totally relaxed. But it's the tension of

falling. You hurt yourself. Because you're defending yourself. Right. Right. Your body is better off giving in to the impact. Well, I'm saying it's the same thing with the fire. But it can't be. That's a different thing.

Because you're not tense on the surface of your skin, which is causing the heat to burn your flesh. No, I think you're tense in your nervous system, which is not able to absorb that thermal energy. Listen, bro, we're going to do some studies. All right. I'm going to burn you. I'm going to burn you and I'm going to kick you. Anytime. Anytime.

We'll try it. I just don't buy it. I think certainly you can mitigate the sensation of pain. I don't believe that you can do anything about the actual physiological change to a hot piece of metal interacting with the tissue of your skin. I just think the steak does not know it's being cooked. It's just getting cooked. You're going to get cooked.

You are meat. I just don't buy that. I'll show you some of these studies on hypnosis. There's doctors right now going, yes, you tell them, Joe Rogan. This is nonsense. Well, I believe hypnosis. I do believe that, but I absolutely believe you can achieve different states of mind where You tell him, Joe Rogan. This is nonsense. Well, I believe hypnosis. I do believe that.

But I absolutely believe you can achieve different states of mind where you feel things differently. Your concentration, your relaxation is in a different state. Your mindset is in a different state. I do not believe that you can change the physiological nature of your body's ability to absorb punishment, like a punch or a kick. I do. And same thing of absorbing the sun let's set some studies up sir i agree i'm all for it i'm all for it how do we gotta make these tests i don't know we'll have to figure it out we'll talk but you've been doing this forever how do you not know well this should be like you should have these studies already done you want to talk about these things to do i know but this is a significant conversation point because if it's proven but this is a significant conversation point.

Because if it's proven, this is really huge. If you could really take a hot metal rod right out of the fire and touch someone's skin, they're in the right state of mind, you don't burn them, that would be giant. Yes. Well, I'm telling you, I'll send you some literature on hypnosis that shows this kind of stuff. I'm sure someone wrote some shit down. I'm sure. I want to see actual real studies.

All right. I want to see. And I want to, I mean, in this day and age, there's no reason not to videotape it as well. True. Yeah. True. Come on, dog. All right.

It's on my list. I got a lot of stuff to do. This is a big one, though. I mean, because this is something that woo-woo people, right? Healers and a lot of people like to bring up. And when you press them on it, there's no evidence for it. And it's like, well, anecdotal evidence. Well, I've heard.

Well, I work with a healer and he tells me like, okay. Okay. Do you know what the literal meaning of anecdote is? No. It means unpublished in Greek. It does not mean stupid, not worth paying attention to. No, anecdotal evidence is often accurate. And it inspires you to do the experiments. It means unpublished in Greek. It does not mean stupid, not worth paying attention to. No, anecdotal evidence is often accurate.

And it inspires you to do the experiments. Okay, well, you go ahead and do that. All right. You go ahead and put that hot piece of metal on your skin. I will report back to you. Yeah, and I'm going to go, hmm, look at that, burn. I'll report back to you. Yeah. I mean, I'm not saying that anecdotal evidence is always inaccurate.

It's most certainly accurate many times. Sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just as likelihood that it's not that it is. But anecdotal evidence is what gives you hypotheses to test. Sure. But it's just not good enough to state as fact.

I agree. Especially when something that doesn't make sense chemically and physiologically. It doesn't make sense. But I told you about my experience with sun and suntan. That doesn't make sense to you. It seems like you're tripping your balls off. Yeah, and something happened in my body. That would be interesting.

That would be very interesting. If there was some sort of a change in your body's ability to produce melanin. Yeah. Or what is it? Melancholites? How do you say it? Melanocytes. Melanocytes.

Melanocytes. So you're – And they're controlled. You know, they're – melanocytes are related to neurons and they're influenced by nerve connections. So it seems to be perfectly possible that mind through the nervous system changes the behavior of melanocytes. Sort of like how your body can ramp up adrenaline or anxiety or also can ramp up melanocytes. Yeah. That doesn't seem like outside the realm of possibility that seems like obviously some people when i first told it to you

you said it was outside the realm of possibility not outside but sounds crazy okay definitely sounds crazy but i mean it seems like that would be something also that would really warrant study absolutely especially those poor pasty ass motherfuckers out there on the beach turning bright red Like no man you just gotta think about it the right way You imagine if you just told people It was like a meditation And then you just get a nice tan

Yeah Yeah Good thing Yeah It would be a good thing Now when it comes to Like we were talking about autoimmune issues Like I have vitiligo

You see what that is? I do I see it I have spots on my hands where I don't get any pigment. You see what that is? I do. I see it. I have spots on my hands where I don't get any pigment. How do I fix that? How do I fix that with my brain? All I can tell you is that I would try to see if you're influenced through hypnosis or through guided imagery to see if you can change it in any way. I don't know.

Hypnosis and guided imagery. Yeah. There are two mind-body techniques. I think it's worth trying. Yeah. There are two mind-body techniques. I think any – it's worth trying. I did read once that there was this – I think it was a young man who had some awful – one of those awful wart diseases.

And they – There was one called ichthyosis, which is like the whole skin gets covered with this calloused, tarred tissue. Yes. And it went away through hypnosis. Yes. Yeah. Over time, I learned that case too. They told him that like his arm, that one arm was going to be cured. And it just like completely eliminated all the warts on that one arm.

I remember that. Yeah. And they couldn't figure out how or why and they couldn't recreate it. So the wart stuff, that's very well documented. And wart cures, there's so many different wart cures. Some of them are quite funny. Uh, you know, you have to, you have to, uh, uh, cut a particular plant under the full moon and rub it and bury it, blah, blah. And, but the wart falls off the next morning. And when you compare that to the way we deal with

warts medically, we burn them off, freeze them off, cut them off. And most of the time when we do that, they grow back in multiple clusters. When the mind gets rid of them through this method, they're gone. So we want to find out how to make that happen more in time. Yeah. That's real, right? I mean this is a real thing that your mind has this capability of healing itself in this very, very powerful way. But we don't exactly know how to turn it on or off. Right.

And it can do the opposite too. There's a phenomenon called voodoo death where in societies where there are witch doctor shamans, a malevolent witch doctor can curse a person. And the person goes home, lies in bed, stops eating, and over days or weeks dies. Whoa. So what more could you ask of in the way of a mind-body effect? Do you know about the curse of Lil B? No. You don't know?

No. He doesn't know about Lil B? Lil B's a rapper. Yeah. And he put a curse on – what was the basketball team? They were talking shit about him. He put a curse curse on them and they couldn't win a goddamn game I've had a few times. Yeah, he's put a curse on a few different. He's like a real How would you say spiritual very positive mostly like real love oriented guy? But occasionally you put a hex on a dude. Ah, and when he puts a hex on you got a real problem on your house

Yeah hex on a dude. Uh-huh. And when he puts a hex on you, you got a real problem on your hands. Okay. Apparently, it's been very effective. And people freak out when Lil B hexes them. Lil B puts that hex on you like, damn it. And then he releases the hex. He's lifted them. He lifts them. Uh-huh. And when he lifts them, everything goes back to normal.

All right. This is weird, man. This is like a weird cycle. Because everyone's aware when Lil B puts a curse on you. And when he does, people are like, oh, no, I can't believe this. Like the idea of curses, like a voodoo curse or a gypsy curse on you. That is a – Well, that's the negative side.

In fact, it has a name. It's called the nocebo effect from noxious rather than pleasing. Yes, yeah. That is – that's a documented thing as well right that people can believe that something is wrong with them and then they start mind yeah fucking themselves into this terrible state yeah and then they start screwing things up yeah yeah yeah this is hot started here it is kevin durant says i tried to listen to little b my mind wouldn't let me do it can't believe this guy's relevant. And Lil

B was like, okay, bitch. Kevin Durant will never win the title after he said Lil B is a whack rapper. The bass god's curse. Hashtag the bass god's curse on Durant. And then he always signs his tweets, Lil B.

That's pretty funny. But it works. It works. Kevin Durant is sitting at home right now thinking of the millions that Lil B must That's pretty funny. But it works. It works. Kevin Durant is sitting home right now thinking of the millions that Lil B must have cost him. Yeah, he's one now. Yeah, he's one now,

but he could have bought a house with all that money he lost for those years that Lil B had him fucked over in the corner. But that, I mean, I think the opposite is true too. Someone could put blessings on you.

Like there was a fighter that we had in here the other day, Deontay Wilder. He's the WBC heavyweight champion of the world. And he said that from the time he was a little boy, his grandmother had him convinced that he was like an anointed one, that he was special. And that she would always say that to his parents, like, you know, don't you hit him. Like this one's special. You know, he's going to raise everybody up, and then he turned out to be, like, one of the great heavyweight champions ever in terms of, like, his record. He's 40-0 with 39 knockouts.

I mean, he's a phenomenally successful fighter, and in his mind, he believes that he has some, like, magic property, or that there's something to him. He's a ridiculous knockout artist, too. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of physiological aspects to that he's a big long tall guy with crazy knockout power you can't fake power you either have it or you don't but he's got it and he's got this weird confidence too and you got to wonder how much of them actually is operating under this idea that his grandmother was right about him having some magical properties. And so he goes through life with this vision. Yeah.

Powerful. Yeah. How do you trick people into thinking that way? We need a whole nation full of Deontay Wilders, a nation full of super convinced. See, that's why doctors are afraid of the placebo effect because they think it's tricking people. It's duping them. Yeah. And it's not.

of the placebo effect because they think it's tricking people, it's duping them. And it's not. It's like it's, you know, when you present a treatment to a patient, your belief in the treatment as a practitioner catalyzes the patient's belief. The best way I can do that is if I give a patient something that I've tried myself and I know from my own experience that it works, and then I can present it in a way with my confidence, and that increases the patient's confidence and increases the likelihood of a favorable outcome. Even controversial therapies? Yes. And even, you know, when you give a pharmaceutical drug to a patient, I think

there's the direct effect of the drug, and then there's a halo of belief effect. And, you know, an interesting phenomenon is that there's a famous saying in medicine that you should use a new remedy as much as possible before it loses the power to heal. And this is a common experience, that drugs work best near the time of their introduction. That's also the case with diets as well, right? Absolutely. And the longer they're around, I think what happens is people have faith in new things. So there's a big halo of placebo effect yeah over time that shrinks and it leaves the stuff on its own which

may not be very impressive this is often the case when people take on a radical diet like on opposite ends of the spectrum whether it's a carnivore diet you wear that a lot of people swear it fixes them all these ales or a vegan diet. Very similar effects. Obviously, very different diet. Exactly. So it's the mind. The mind. The mind is where it's at. How do we –

And the big problem in science and medicine is that we don't believe in the mind. That's what I was saying earlier when you were talking about mind-body. It's not material. It's not – this is the problem. It's immaterial. You know, it's not – this is the problem. When you're talking about mind-body interactions or wart cures, placebo effects, you're talking about a non-material cause of a physical event. And that is not allowed in the materialistic paradigm that dominates science.

When we observe a change in a physical system, the dogma is the cause has to be physical. When you talk about a non-physical cause of a physical event, scientists tune out. Well, that's really unfortunate because we know so much about how attitude does shape the way your body reacts to things. Going back to the Sarno stuff, you know, with back pain. It's all that stuff. It's like, you know, to me that you can't separate the mind and body. They're two poles of the same thing. Well, if the placebo effect is real and it's documented.

Yeah. It's documented. So obviously something is going on with the way you feel about things and think about things that it's having an actual physiological effect. There's something happening to your body because the way you're thinking about it happening to your body. because of the way you're thinking about it happening to your body. Now, one of the things that has made this suddenly of interest in the medical world is that we now have these techniques like functional MRIs and PET scans where we can observe living brains. And you can show that the placebo response is associated with particular activity

in certain brain centers. That has made it real for people that otherwise didn't believe in it. Yes, right? Like there's a medically documented reaction. centers that has made it real for people that otherwise didn't believe in it yes right like there's a medically documented there's something they can get a hook into yeah you can you could put it on a scale yeah exactly yeah what what part of the brain is responsible for the placebo effect well again it's probably some of these deep brain centers that the same ones involved in swearing you know that the same thing it It's coming from centers that connect to emotional – you know, to emotion. Yeah.

The ability to turn that on and off consciously and willingly is tricky. Yeah. You know, another thing I looked at over the years was healing shrines in the world like Lourdes. There's two interesting facts about that. Over the years, the Catholic Church has accepted very few healings as genuine that have like full medical documentation. And some of them are quite spectacular like miraculous disappearance of widely disseminated cancer. No native of Lourdes has ever been cured. And the chances that a person is going to be healed there –

Explain Lord. This is a place in France where a child saw visions of the Virgin Mary and anyway, it's grown up into a – there's a grotto and it's now a major Catholic shrine and it has a reputation for healing and thousands and thousands of people over the years have gone there. So as I said, there's relatively few reported healings that have been fully documented medically. But no native of Lourdes has ever been healed. And there's something called the Lourdes phenomenon, which is fascinating, that the chances that a person is going to be healed at Lourdes or a place like that is directly proportional to the length of the journey traveled to get there.

Yeah, I have heard that. So the length of the journey is an investment of belief, right? So you're projecting belief onto the place and then you get it back. Yeah, that seems like that could essentially work with any very, very difficult vision quest type experience that you're going on. You're looking for something and you have to earn it. Yeah. You have to be fully invested. There has to be something going on in the mind that has you convinced this is a real effect.

But the power is not in the place. The power is in here and you're projecting it onto that. But, man, wouldn't it be better if you didn't have to go all the way to France? Yeah, it would be great. And how do you get that going? Like if someone said to you, okay, man, I don't want to go to Lourdes, but what should I do? Well, one is that you could imagine you're going to Lourdes, and that's taking advantage of this function of visualization. That's why these therapies like guided imagery seem to work, that you can imagine something and have it become real.

Guided imagery. Now, is there a specific – like there's like transcendental medication, there's Buddhist meditation. seem to work, that you can imagine something and have it become real. Guided imagery. Now, is there a specific – you know, like there's like transcendental medication, there's Buddhist meditation. Yeah, no, this is a formal – it's a formal system of therapy that people are trained in where you sit with a practitioner and they help you explore your mental imagery and may give you specific kinds of images to work with depending on the condition that you're dealing with. you specific kinds of images to work with depending on the condition that you're dealing with i would think knowing the fact that we we have real evidence that placebo effect works why isn't

there more study done to try or more thought and more more people that are trying to emphasize this ability of the i'm telling it's we're up against this problem that in the dominant paradigm in science and medicine, we don't believe in non-physical causation of physical events. But that doesn't jive with me because we do believe in the placebo effect. Everybody says that, oh, it's just a placebo, right? You said that earlier. Right.

People always say that, but it still works. Right, but we're not using it. Right. We should be using it. We should be using it. We should be using it. It's the meat of medicine. We want to make it happen more of the time. God damn it.

It's just that we're so flawed in our approach. It's really interesting. It's like the human body and the human mind is such an incredibly complicated biological entity, right? complicated biological entity right our ability to consciously be aware of our our our life our position in the world our mortality the the insignificance of us in the greater scale all those things are like there right now all the time but we don't have any user's manual right exactly like we have this incredible machine that can invent nuclear bombs and satellites. There's no user's manual. No user's manual for the mind or the body.

Especially not in how to manage the body with the mind. Nothing. Nothing. Figure it out, bitch. Wide open field. You're on your own. A few people have got it. You've got to find these masters, right? So if you think about the 300 and whatever million people we have in this country, how many of those people could guide you towards a proper integration of mind and body

and a positive way of interfacing with reality that's beneficial to you physically, mentally, spiritually? Yeah, not many. How many people? Not many. Is there a dozen? Not many. Isn't it interesting? Yeah, it's very interesting.

With all these human beings and essentially most of them trying to improve in some way. Even people that fail on diets, boy, they'd like to get skinny. Even people that fail at school, well, I wish I was smart enough to graduate. I wish I had enough discipline. People want to do better. So there's this vast need for coaching that would lead to improvement, yet almost, I mean, nothing to speak of, and certainly nothing large scale in any city that has this approach where,

look, we are going to teach you how to better engage with the material world around you and better engage with reality itself that's going to leave you more spiritually physically emotionally fulfilled like that seems like that would be a big business it would now one way to teach this stuff is by example that if a person exemplifies you know good mind body functioning they can inspire that in another person that seems like maybe the only way when one strategy that if I can do this, if I have a patient, if I can introduce that patient to someone who's had their condition is now better, that is a very powerful way to up their belief in the possibility of getting better.

Yeah, that makes sense, which is why people love user testimonials. Right. But better if you actually meet the person and sure see for yourself yeah but user testimonials are so huge for that reason you know i was skeptical at first but then i tried it and boy he was skeptical just like me yeah it's uh it to me when i look at the giant number of people that are unhappy and displaced and just seem like they're left out of society i was listening to oh it was uh johan harry on sam harris's podcast they were talking about the number of people that are uh happy with what they do for a living happy with what they do every day and it was somewhere around 13 yeah and then the number

of people that were just like it's okay i just do it like i don't hate it but i don't love it that was like in the 60 and then the rest of the people fucking hated what they did so the vast majority some ungodly number you know like% of people hate what they're doing. Oh, how sad. Or if they don't hate it, they don't want to be doing it, and they do it all the time. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah.

That has to have a profound effect on all aspects of your life, right? I like what I do. Yeah. Well, you seem like you do. I do. You have a twinkle in your eye when you talk about it. But I mean, it's got to give you some satisfaction for sure, right? Yeah. Well, you seem like you do. I do. You have a twinkle in your eye when you talk about it. But, I mean, it's got to give you some satisfaction for sure, right? Yeah.

Help all these people. Absolutely. And also to see a lot of the things that I've believed for so long becoming more mainstream. It's good. Yeah. And much more so now than ever before, right? Much more so now than ever before. Yeah.

When you were doing those studies in the 1960s and you thought that marijuana was going to be legal in five years, how could you have ever – first of all, how could you have ever thought of the internet, right? That's the big one. The distribution of information. Sure. Yeah. That's really the big one, the decentralized distribution of information. And that, by the way, in medicine has really – it's one of the things that's most leveled the playing field between doctors and patients.

Medicine has really – it's one of the things that's most leveled the playing field between doctors and patients. You know, it sort of ended the authoritarian paternalistic kind of medicine that was when I grew up. Well, it is a problem, right? Patient comes. They think they know everything. Yeah, but I have seen many, many patients who have gotten exactly the information they needed and were able to take it to the doctor who didn't know about it. I i think on the whole it's a really good thing oh yeah for sure no no for sure i'm saying just like i get how doctors be worn out by it all the time you know listen to me i went to school this is what it is well it's good for them to have to let go of that yeah well there's no way you

could know everything true i mean especially doctors they must know that they have a specialty for a reason because the human body is so insanely complicated. There's no way anybody is a general specialist of every single aspect of medicine. But we need more generalists. One of the problems is we've got too many specialists. Really? Yeah. So someone like, would you think of a generalist as someone who sort of guides you towards

various specialists? I'm a general practitioner. I'm very proud of it. you towards various specialists? I'm a general practitioner. I'm very proud of it. There's good data showing that states that have a higher number of primary care physicians, family doctors, have better medical outcomes than patients with a higher percentage of specialists. But the problem is specialties pay more. So we should be changing that. We should be providing financial incentives for people to go into general medicine. Yeah, it would also make sense, too, that by the time you get to a specialist, usually you're

really messed up. If you're going to a back specialist, you might have a real situation that's been bothering you for a long time, whereas you go to a general practitioner for a checkup. This is my biannual checkup. He's just kind of giving you the once over, making sure everything's okay. How are you sleeping?

How are you eating? Drinking? Smoking cigarettes? What's going on? Just get a sense of you. But do they have enough time? Isn't that a big issue? Yes, a huge amount of time. How much time do you spend when you're working with patients? I take an hour and in our clinics we do 90 minutes on

a first session. That's got to be nice. 90 minutes you can get to know somebody. But if you're getting in and out of that office in 10 minutes, he's just, here's a prescription. Get out of here. Yep. Next. Next.

You know, there's been studies on the amount of time in a medical encounter when a patient starts to talk, how soon a doctor interrupts the patient. Oh. Do you have any guess what that is now? 13 seconds. You're right. Really? Yeah, 13 seconds.

I use the same number of people that are happy with what they do. Ha, there you go. That's pretty good. 13 seconds. Wow. Yeah. Well, my foot hurts and I've been- Okay, here you go.

Exactly. Shut the fuck up. Take this. Take this opium. Yeah. Have you ever eaten in a true food kitchen? What does that mean? It's a restaurant, true food kitchen. No, I don't know what that is. Well, it's a restaurant that I started and there's now 25 of them. No kidding. We got two in LA and one in Pasadena where I'm

going to go after the show and eat. Oh, I'm in Pasadena tonight. All right. I'm at the Ice House Comedy Club. All right. I'll be there for dinner if you want to come over there. True food kitchen. Yeah it's great. It's my you know it's delicious healthy food. It's wonderful food that

conforms to good nutritional principles. It's anti-inflammatory diet and there's something for everyone. There's like meat. There's vegan options vegetarian gluten free.

It's very delicious food. True food kitchen. And it's become an incredibly successful restaurant concept. Well, that's a great idea to be able to serve people things that you know for a fact are going to be healthy and nutritious, not just taste good, but good for you. But primarily, it's food that looks great and tastes great. It happens to conform to good nutritional science. Yeah, that is possible.

And a lot of people think you have to eat fried chicken. Right. Well, come in there and try it. I would love to try it. All right. Great. How do you eat for the most part? You said you eat fish and you eat through the full spectrum.

First of all, I try to grow a lot of my own food. I love fresh stuff out of the garden. I like to cook and I invent recipes, which is a lot of the recipes in the restaurant are mine. Oh, great. So I like simple, quick preparations that are really good. Do you fast at all? I've experimented with intermittent fasting, and I haven't found a regimen that works exactly right for me, but I'm fascinated by it.

I do 16 and 8. And how often do you do that? I try to do it four days a week. Sometimes it's difficult when I travel. Yeah. And how often do you do that? I try to do it four days a week Uh huh You know It's Sometimes it's difficult When I travel Yeah But

Even then I'm more accustomed to it Than ever before So if you know I eat dinner At eight o'clock at night It's It's not hard

To wait until noon To push it back Okay Yeah It's not hard My body's just really used to it now How long have you been doing it? About a year or so

Maybe a little bit more than that. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense and I will continue to experiment with it. What I haven't done that I really have been thinking a lot about doing is doing a multiple day fast, just a water fast for three or four days. The longest I've done it for is three days. Yeah, how was that? The first day was difficult or actually the second day was difficult the third day fabulous you know i felt energized high my mind working very clear the problem that i have is how do you come off it because it's like very easy to slide into eating

you know pizza crispy cream yeah exactly yeah i think um there's protocols in terms of like small amounts of fruit. Right. Like right when you're coming out. Yeah. Blueberries or something like that. But that to me was the tricky part was transitioning off it. Yeah. Too fast.

Fucking bell. Exactly. The buzzer rang. Yeah. School's out for summer. Yeah. I get it. I mean, especially if you feel like you earned it.

Yeah. You didn't eat for three days. You want that pizza. Right. One of the things I found when I was doing it, having a bowl of matcha. Normally, my pattern is I want to eat as soon as I get up. So those morning hours are hard for me. But if I have my matcha, that helps.

Do you exercise? I do. I swim mostly. Swim and walk. Every day. I find that once my body got used to fasted exercise, it became much, much easier. Yeah. It became like before I would almost have anxiety attached to it.

Like, God, I can't work out without food. I have to eat. And then when I started doing the intermittent fasting and then I started doing fasted exercise, I think it was. I think it was – I'm sure if you probably measured me in terms of like you did a bunch of weightlifting exercises and measured my output, I probably would be able to lift more weights if I had some fruit first. I'm pretty sure I'd have a little bit more energy, probably measurable. But it's not difficult to have a vigorous workout in the morning when you're fasted. You just got to get used to it. I often do either hot yoga or run first thing in the morning. Weightlifting seems to be a bit of an issue. Weightlifting, I don't like. I like to eat something before I lift weights. Yeah. But swimming, what about you? You ever fasted swim? Yeah, I have. It's fine.

No problem with it. Now, why did you get off the pot you know it changed for me in in uh i i really used it regularly in my 20s and uh 30s and when i first started using it uh it was great i mean i was like hilarious highs laughing you know right a lot of then then it turned after several years more introspective, you know, and interesting, like creative, my writing for helping writing, stuff like that. And then gradually it transitioned into making me groggy and not doing much for me. And for, you know, it took me a while to separate myself from it. But in the last years of it, it was groggy and sedated.

And I think I changed. My body changed. That's interesting. Have you ever tried different strains? First of all, I don't like the smoke because I'm really into breathing and I just can't put smoke into my lungs. I've tried vaping. I just don't like the effect of it these days. Vaping? Yeah.

I just don't like the effect. I don't like oral feels. It's too strong for me? Yeah. I just don't like the effect. I don't like oral feels. It's too strong for me. Yeah. Well, when you're talking about that half of a half a grain of sand putting you on Pluto for 12 hours. Half a grain of rice. Half a grain of rice. Yeah, a grain of sand.

That'd be funny. Imagine that. That would be like acid. Yeah. It was felt like acid. Yeah. Well, boy, I'll tell you, for me, the most profound and intense experience I ever have in the sensory deprivation tank are edible marijuana. Edible marijuana in that tank, that combination is just, whoa, a real strong dose.

Because have you done the tank at all? Yeah, but not with pot, not with psychedelics. Nothing? That was a long time ago, yeah. Well, even sober, you have some pretty trippy experiences while you're in there. But there's something about the – what I experienced with edible marijuana is that when you close your eyes, you get a lot of really cool visuals. Like I've had it before when I take pot and then get on a plane. Like I'll eat right when I park my car at the airport or when I'm leaving the house.

Then it kicks in when you're on the plane. You're like, yikes. Closing your eyes. Something about closing your eyes. You have like really brightly colored visuals oftentimes. And I get that a lot inside the tank with marijuana. I had that with that real strong stuff. I definitely had a lot of visual stuff. Yeah, that's what's what's weird about it right it's like it does become a psychedelic yes especially

at high doses yeah why are they making that stuff so strong we're half a grain of rice unnecessary how many milligrams did they say it was i don't remember it wasn't much because they've got these damn chiba chews they're like 500 milligrams for one little cake. One little thing like that, like 500 milligrams. Why do you need that? Because you started out with 10 and then you worked your way up to 500. I guess there's a tolerance issue with a lot of folks, right? Yeah.

Huh. Do you regularly meditate? I do. I do. Yeah. Do you regularly meditate? I do. I do. Yeah, every morning when I get up. What kind of meditation? I first practiced Zen and then I took some Vipassana training and now I get up, I sit down, I do my breathing routine and then I just try to focus on body sensations and sounds in the room and when I'm caught up in my thoughts, I just bring my attention back to my breathing. But for me, I think that the sitting meditation, that's fine, but I think the goal is to be able to carry that state in all of your activities right uh so for me cooking is

meditative you know chopping vegetables working with knives and uh that's very meditative for me so when do you think that when you're having this meditation whether it's zen or whatever that you're you're resetting the way you're gonna go through life for the rest of the day? Hopefully. I mean, that's the goal is to carry that state. So it's not just in that moment. No, the goal is to carry that state throughout the day. Well, you kind of have a responsibility, don't you agree?

Like you're a guy who's teaching people how to live a more productive, healthier life. You kind of have a responsibility to live your own productive, healthy life. Yeah, I better. Right. I wouldn't feel right doing that if I didn't practice it it's slippery right yeah but i don't tell people to do things i don't do myself do you when you have some thoughts about things like something like a boga would you be interested in trying it yourself sure yeah yeah i haven't had an opportunity to do it it's supposed to be ruthlessly introspective uh-huh i've never done it either

but i've had i've had friends who had uh pill problems who who did it and cured them but they said the ride is just 24 hours of like what in the fuck am i doing and then once it's over you have zero desire you know the way that it's used traditionally in africa the root uh it's these tribes that use it, it's hunters take it, and they remain motionless for many hours on it. And animals come close. I mean, that always fascinated me. That is fascinating. Yeah.

I wonder if taking it from the root, I wonder if they're getting the exact same experience as they're getting in these clinics. I don't know. Yeah. if they're getting the exact same experience as they're getting in these clinics. I don't know. Yeah. It's just, to me, in terms of efficacy, if you look at the rates of relapse, rather, I mean, they're so low. Very, very high.

Yeah. It's crazy, right? Yeah. How successful that stuff is. Yeah. And yet, nobody wants to talk about that. All these clinics. Like, it's crazy How many rehab clinics

There are We need you for six months Really Mexico says they Kill it all in three days I could go down there And get into An Iboga clinic

Yep I want to find out More about it It's on my list But listen man Thanks for being here Thanks for All the information

That you've shared Over the years I want you to do studies I'm burning yourself I will And getting. I will. And getting punched. I will. Report back to me.

I will. And tell people how they can find out about you. What is your website, social media stuff? My website is drweil.com, D-R-W-E-I-L.com. And also check out integrativemedicine.arizona.edu, which is my academic website. See the range of that. And matcha.com for high-quality matcha. And we have a special offer for your fans.

If you go to matcha.com forward slash pages forward slash Joe Rogan, your listeners will get a special discount code. And matcha is M-A-T-C-H-A, ladies and gentlemen. All right. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. Good to talk and gentlemen. All right. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. Good to talk to you. Good to talk to you, too.