The Joe Rogan Experience - #1842 - Andrew Huberman

Episode Date: July 12, 2022

Andrew Huberman is a Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford University, and host of the "Huberman Lab" Podcast. www.hubermanlab.com

the Joe Rogan experience so we were just talking about Ari blacking out trying to keep up with Shane Gillis who is a superhuman drinker it's bizarre the volume he could put down. And you were saying, you were about to say something? Yeah. I mean, obviously there's a tolerance that's built up with drinking a lot, but I believe the number is approximately 8% of people have a mutation in a gene such that when they drink alcohol, it increases their dopamine levels very quickly and they get euphoric. They feel great. These are the people like that character in Mad Men, the Don Draper character,

like he would go out and just get plastered. And the next day, you know, he's all fresh and ready. And part of that is tolerance. But in certain Scandinavian countries, Northern European countries, this gene tends to be more prevalent. And these people are the people that can just keep drinking and drinking. They feel great when they drink, whereas most people, they feel disinhibited at the beginning. You know, you have a couple of drinks,

your forebrain shuts down a little bit because that's what it does. They start talking more, talking more, but if they keep drinking, they're blacking out. You know, they're stumbling, they're slurring their words. This 8% of people by way of this genetic mutation, alcohol affects them very differently. It offsets all that sedative property and they could just go and go and go. This is the

person who's doing a case a day or at the party and just shot for shot and just looking like they're improving in function. And obviously they're not, but you put one of those people against Ari Shaffir and that's what you get. Yeah. So even for those people, though, it still has a negative effect on your body, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, the toxicity of the alcohol is universal, but in terms of how it impacts brain function, and you see this across all these different categories of drugs too, right? You know, somebody takes Ritalin, Adderall, Modafinil, or Armodafinil. These are the common prescribed drugs now, and people use them recreationally for ADHD. In fact, in researching an episode for our podcast on ADHD, it turns out that more than

80% of college students will rely on ADHD meds, quote unquote, recreationally, not prescribed. They buy it from each other in order to study. 80%. And those drugs work mainly by increasing dopamine and increasing adrenaline. And they make your focus like this narrow and you're, you're in a trench and you can function. But a number of people take them and feel super distracted and lousy. But this is of course what they prescribe to kids with ADHD. Yeah. Now when you, modafinilafinil, that's provigil? Is that what that is? Yeah. Now, it's very expensive. It's like $1,000 a month in some cases. Really? That much? It was originally for narcolepsy, so to offset daytime sleepiness. That was the original

use of the drug. And then it also does work for enhancing focus, right? I mean, that has drawbacks. It's not perhaps as detrimental as like recreational drugs to increase focus. But most of the students out there and the tech workers, and this is big in the finance world too, are relying on Ritalin, Adderall, and things like Vyvanse. And to be clear, they have legitimate clinical uses. What is Vyvanse? It's another one of these drugs for ADHD. Here's the story around why these drugs initially came to be. If you look at kids or adults with ADHD, like true attention deficit

disorder or hyperactivity disorder, you don't always have the hyperactivity. What you find is they can focus really well if it's on something they like. So a kid with ADD or ADHD that loves video games, that kid will play video games with laser focus for three hours. That sounds like me. But then you put them in front of something they don't want to do and they just can't anchor their discipline. They just don't have the discipline. That also sounds like me. Although I doubt that. I don't know. Maybe it'll come up later, but your discipline for fitness and ice baths and training. I like those things. Right. Well, and later, but your discipline for fitness and ice baths and training. I like those things. Right. Well, well, and if you can arrange your life such that most of your stuff is around that.

Great. But these kids, if prove that if you like something, you can focus. And it comes as no surprise in that the drugs for ADHD universally increase dopamine because dopamine is this incredible molecule that enhances focus, motivation, and drive, and literally narrows the aperture of your visual attention. And we've all experienced that. And of course, drugs like cocaine, amphetamine do that to a hyper extent, and then there's a crash. But with these drugs, if prescribed in the right way, in the right situation, they're terrific. They teach the kid's brain how to focus. But nowadays, there is rampant adult ADHD and ADD.

Part of that is probably due to the phone. Part of that is probably just due to all sorts of things. But there is also a lot of recreational use of these prescription drugs, not illicit drugs like cocaine, amphetamine, but prescription drugs that increase dopamine and supplementation for increasing dopamine as well. I had read something about Modafinil, NuVigil, Provigil, whichever one it was that initially it was created as a performance enhancing drug, but they needed some sort of an ailment for it to be prescribed. And that was when they decided to prescribe it for narcolepsy. Had you heard anything like that?

I thought it was in the reverse, but I'm open to hear it. And listen, the course of a lot of these drugs and how they hit market is super interesting. I've been learning more and more about this because one of my colleagues who works on aggression and mating behavior, which fascinates me, has identified some peptides that can really reduce anxiety. They put these to the pharmaceutical industry. Pharmaceutical industry wasn't

interested in them at all, even though the safety margins are huge. So you say, why wouldn't they want this? Well, it turns out these same drugs failed in a schizophrenia trial a long time ago, so no one will go near it with a 10-foot pole. So the way the pharmaceutical industry generally approaches drugs is they love to remarket drugs for which there's already FDA approval, because then they don't have to go through all the safety stuff. And when they do that, they can renew the patent. This is crucial, right? Because if you can get the generic version now with things like GoodRx and these like little apps you can get, I mean, you can go into a pharmacy, hit GoodRx and it'll say, oh yeah,

we've got some stuff that's about to expire. This $300 a month drug is $10. I've had this happen. It's amazing. If they can keep it out of the generic market, that's huge. And the way to do that is to find a new clinical use. So I don't know which one came first, narcolepsy or these focusing ADHD uses, or as a performance enhancer, but if the pharmaceutical industry, the people that own the patent to that drug, can find a new legitimate use, they just bought themselves, I think, another 10 years on the patent. So this was originally prescribed for schizophrenia, and then they were going to use these peptides for mating?

Yeah. So in terms of the aggression, this is really interesting. This is the work of a guy at Caltech named David Anderson, and he works on mating and aggression and the relationship. Human beings. In, well, he has work related to humans and the neighboring lab works on humans, but in mice and in humans. But these areas of the brain are really conserved. This, this, we can talk about which brain area, but what he discovered is that. Conserved? Meaning, sorry, that in mice and in humans, these brain structures look identical. Okay. And that the same classes of neurons exist, that if you were to stimulate them, because neurosurgeons have done this, people go into a rage.

Or in animals, if you stimulate them, the animals go into a rage. In fact, there are these videos online. They're incredible, where this is Dayu Lin's work when she was in David Anders' lab. So you take two mice, a male mouse and a female mouse, and they're mating, right, as it were. And then they stimulate these neurons because they can do that now using light, believe it or not. And the male immediately tries to kill the female. You can even just put him in a cage alone with a glove filled with air. He's walking around. You stimulate these neurons, and he just goes into a rage, right, just trying trying to destroy this glove but here's what's super interesting and no one understands if you

put this animal into a cage alone and stimulate it looks pretty normal it doesn't do anything so it's not like it attacks itself and you know and every time there's this you know horrible news event like the school shooting thing or something like that i always think you know like what's going on in the there's a certain brain area it's called the ventromedial hypothalamus. And this is a brain area that's really interesting because it has a population of neurons that control mating. You stimulate them and animals will just start trying to copulate with basically whatever's around. If you give them a choice of their usual preference of, you know, females, if they're male, males, if they're female, because that's the way mice go, one or the other, they will just try

and start mating. You stimulate the other group of neurons and they will try and kill the other mouse. So these are like switches in the hypothalamus. Are these like very distinct? Like when we talk about like neurons and switches, like how do you distinguish between the one? Can you see them? Like what is the difference? Great question. So for many decades, it was known that if you stimulate this brain area, what is the difference? kind of with hair up, or you would stimulate a little bit more and they would do the predatory aggression. I'm probably doing this wrong, but like ears forward and you're the hunter. I'm still learning about animal behavior in this way. But what's really interesting is that for years, no one could understand why if you also stimulate this brain area and you used a different

pattern of stimulation, you get mating behavior. And it turns out that the neurons are mixed in there like salt and pepper. David Anderson's lab figured out that these are molecularly distinct neurons. And what makes them distinct is really interesting. If they stimulate only the neurons that have the estrogen receptor, they become aggressive. And this again goes back to this thing that we talked about a while ago, which is that testosterone aromatized, converted into estrogen, has these incredible effects on aggression and masculinization of the brain. And a lot of people think,

in fact, people heard me say that last time and said, oh, you're trying to say that estrogen is doing everything testosterone is doing. No, it's that things like testosterone and estrogen control gene expression. And so the fact that it's estrogen or testosterone, it doesn't really matter. It's the fact that these are molecularly distinct neurons. They can trigger these neurons and they can get very distinct outputs of behavior.

But what's crazy is you stop stimulating the animal just goes back to doing whatever. And then it goes, oh, yeah, I think I'll try and mate again. Now, eventually the females like, hey, this is getting confusing. But this it's clear that these sorts of things are also happening in humans. But normally, we have kind of a weighting of aggression versus mating behavior, right? Some people choose to combine those, right? There's kind of extremes of that. Rape, there's rough sex, there's all sorts of, you know, it's uncomfortable for people to think about, but there's a continuum between aggressive versus approach type behaviors. And for whatever reason,

this drove me to start looking at different mating behaviors of animals online. Like if you watch ferrets mating, it's like he's biting the back of her neck. She's squealing all over the place. Like this is uncomfortable for some people. See, some people probably like watching this stuff, but you look at animals mating and there's a kind of a balancing act between, you know, what looks it's not you wouldn't call it lovemaking. Let's put it that you'd call it mating. That's pretty aggressive. And that's very common in the animal kingdom. Is it common in the animal kingdom because in order to have strong genes that pass on, you need a strong animal.

genes that pass on. You need a strong animal. And so they express themselves in this aggressive way to prove to the female that they're strong enough to mate and procreate. Like, what is the reason for that sort of aggressive? Is there a reason? Well, it's a great question. So there's this theory called hydraulic pressure theory. This was developed by Conrad Lorenz, which is another Nobel Prize winner who studied animal behavior. And here's the idea is that all of these different populations of neurons are in the hypothalamus. This is a little tiny, tiny thing. I mean, it's the size of like a little gobstopper candy, like a little gumball. And you've got neurons for aggression, neurons for mating, neurons that turn on to make sure that animals don't try and mate with the wrong species. We take this for granted.

Like how come a cat doesn't try and mate with the dog? Now the dog might hump, but that's a different thing altogether. So it's all harbored in there. And this hydraulic theory is that all of these things are kind of weighted probabilities. So there's never zero probability that any of this will happen unless they're in sleep, but maybe it's 10% aggression, 80% mating while they're mating. Maybe another male enters the arena and now there's sort of like a confusion, like, am I going to have to fight or can I keep mating? These kinds of things, because oftentimes these animals are communal in some way. And so the way that Anderson explained this to me, and we had a conversation about this recently, is that the brain might actually get confused in certain moments that, you know, and there's also a kind

of opioid pain relief thing that gets released during sexual activity. Pain threshold goes way up. Right. And we were talking about this in the context of fetishes, because, you know, if you look at fetishes, they're not random. True fetishes are like can be pathologies where people actually require the presence of something in order to become aroused. And those things almost always, if you look at true fetishes, are things like feet, dead bodies, feces, animals, things that are all very infectious. Exactly. Your facial expression illustrates it perfectly. My facial expression for those listening is yuck. Exactly. So, you know, that's disgust and you have circuits in

your brain that are for disgust that are about getting you away from that thing because it's infectious, putrid, disgusting, and out of context. And then you think about sex and food appetite and all that. And it's, it's all a pedative as they call it. It's moving towards it. It's bringing in more of those molecules as opposed to trying to get away from like vomit or something. Right. But the feet thing, isn't it like guys like pretty feet? You know, we're very visual animals. And so it may cross over into visual perception. And what arouses people differs.

Obviously, people have their different proclivities. But true fetishes are a kind of a confusion of this circuitry, right, where people confuse or learn arousal associated with something that's actually quite dangerous. I mean, you take the extreme one like like dead body. It's like incredibly- Is that normal? No, no, no. Excuse me, not normal, common. Like the dead body one? Not common, not common. Common enough that you brought it up though.

Well, I've been reading up on this because I'm fascinated by the primitive in addition to the more evolved parts of the brain. So the way Anderson describes is, you'll see animals mating see animals mating and then all of a sudden, you know, he'll bite the back of her neck or sometimes she'll bite him. And the theory is that some of the neurons, and they've seen this in brain imaging in real time, because they can do that in animals. Some of the neurons that are responsible for aggression will just suddenly, you know, spike up there, right? And, and we'll kind of overtake the other behavior and then they'll go back to mating. Now, when you're talking about studies on animals and they're doing this, it's that there's these ethical questions. If you're going to do a study on humans, if you wanted to stimulate those same neurons and try to incite aggression or hostility or even arousal. But has anybody done it? They have. They have. They have.

So a good friend of mine, Eddie Chang, he's the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF. But has anybody done it? manipulation. And he's told me that he's been poking, you can't poke around at random, right? You can't, you know, every scientist would love to just do that experiment, just go in and kind of search. But there are sites where they'll stimulate thinking they might evoke a feeling of pleasantness or no feeling at all. And the person will go into a rage in the, in the OR, in the operating room, because they're wide awake. You know, you've probably seen these things of people with neurosurgery and they're playing the violin or things of that sort. Occasionally they'll hit an area where the person will say, I'm feeling super angry right now. And they'll say, let's back off a little bit from there. And they'll chart where they were in the brain. That is wild. So there's just like a spot. Yeah, there is. And we have switches, right? I mean, we have switches for

rage, switches for all these things. I mean, that's like the psychologist Carl Jung, you know, this idea that we have all things inside of us. I mean, people vary in their propensity for rage or for love or for anything. But at some level, we do have all things inside of us. We have the circuitry within us. And do you feel like that variation is neurochemical? I think it is neurochemical and I think it is learned as well. This peptide that we were talking about earlier becomes relevant in this context. So David's lab discovered there's a peptide called tachykinin.

It's related to another molecule that's involved in pain relief called substance P that we all make. Tachykinin has a bunch of different forms, but in humans, there's tachykinin one and tachykinin two. and has a bunch of different forms, but in humans there's tachykinin one and tachykinin two. In mice or humans that are socially isolated for a period of time, tachykinin levels go through the roof. This is very relevant to the recent past of around the pandemic, in my opinion.

It goes through the roof and what happens? It creates anxiety, anger, and in particular aggression. And so there are drugs that are tachykinin inhibitors. And I asked David, I said, well, why aren't we giving tachykinin inhibitors to people that are feeling anxious and aggressive and, you know, kind of tamp that down? And we just had yet another school shooting. And we can talk about what that's about, but or not. But and he said, this drug is actually approved. it's very safe when you stop what do you say what are you saying there's a drug that can

develop but you're saying what that's about but we're not oh sorry the the the tachykinin I mean is was it elevated and for instance the kid that went in and shot all those kids and how could they find that out post-mortem I think they could do what's called mRNA and C2 hybridization they could see how much of the gene for tachycardia was being made. I think they should do postmortem. I don't know how he was killed if his brain is still intact. I think like most people, there's very little concern about him and more concern about the victims as it should be. But just like with CT and football players, you want to know where the damage was and also whether or not there was a brain thing there. And if that brain thing was there, it doesn't mean necessarily

that he was born with a bad brain. He might've been born with a dysfunctional brain, but social isolation increases anxiety and aggression. There's no question. And actually I was in social isolation increases aggression. Absolutely. Really? Absolutely. Feelings of aggression and kind of friction with the world, Us, them kind of thinking. Oh, okay. I was in New York a few months back, and it was the most eerie experience because we were there recording some podcasts. And something came over the news that there was literally killer loose. And it was that guy in Brooklyn went into a subway, released some smoke bombs, and shot people.

They found him in the Lower East Side walking around. Someone found him. So like Killer on the Loose in New York became a real thing for the time we were there. And it was super weird because we're staying down near the Lower East Side. And they get the guy and what do they say? They say the same thing they always say about these guys.

He was a loner. He was really socially isolated. Then you find the angry posts, you find the things online, but it's never like, oh, this, okay, you've got crazies like the BTK killer and people who were like in their church and stuff, but we're so, you know, sociopathic killers on the, on the sly, but these kind of random act, what seemed like random acts of aggression, almost always these people were highly socially isolated, which, and I'm not evoking sympathy. I want to be very clear.

I know what you're saying. You know, I mean, nothing makes me more. I think everyone is furious and frustrated about this situation with the shooting. But I asked David about this. I was like, why aren't these drugs being used or prescribed? And he said, because years ago, there was a trial at a pharmaceutical company exploring the role of this drug in schizophrenia for reasons that aren't clear. And it didn't work. And it cost the company a ton of money. So now no companies want to go near it. clear and it didn't work and it cost the company a ton of money so now no companies want to go near it there's this kind of you know blacklisting of drugs that failed in trials and as a consequence there's probably dozens if not hundreds of very useful medications out there that are just not being explored hmm so when they do studies on people to try to find out what areas of the brain that you can ignite to get people hostile. How do they, how would they perform those studies? So unfortunately, I guess, fortunately for guys like Elon,

cause they have a company's based on this, but unfortunately for, for kind of the exploratory purposes, making this easier, they shave the head in a little spot. They drill it. They make a tiny little hole in the skull and they're lowering electrodes down there. And they're the way these electrodes are built. They're not just a single wire. It's actually pretty cool. It's like a barrel of wires and they're able to like put them to different depths. So, you know, you imagine a hundred or a thousand wires all at different depths and, you know, probing around and stimulating at different levels. So it's all happening very fast. And then they'll hit a spot where the person will say, I feel like I'm about to have a seizure or sometimes we'll have a full blown seizure and like and they go, okay, that's the spot.

And so in the- So we're kind of poking around the dark? They are. I mean, the brain, I'd love to tell you that we understand so much about how the brain works. I think we understand a lot. But most of what we know about how human brain structures work are from experiments like the one I just mentioned, which is clinically oriented, but then you're doing some experimentation along the way. Or case studies like the famous HM, they always give their initials, not their names, because to maintain anonymity. But we know more about human

memory from one guy who had both his hippocampi lesioned because he had epilepsy in his hippocampi. This is a memory encoding area. They kept him in the laboratory for years and studied him. And they learned things like, you might appreciate this. If you went in and you said, hey, I'm Joe. Nice to meet you. He'd say, hi, I'm, you know, whoever he was, HM, Henry, whatever. And you'd say, great.

And you'd walk out and come back in and say, hi, who are you? And you'd say, I'm Joe. I'm going to tell you a joke. They did this experiment. And you tell him a joke and he'd laugh, laugh. You leave, you come back, you tell him the same joke. He doesn't remember the joke, but he laughs a little bit less and the next time a little bit less. So something in his brain is familiar, right? This speaks to the importance of novelty and surprise and comedy, but he can't remember that he remembers. And so that starts to open up all sorts of

interesting questions about consciousness and novelty. Oh, wow, so he kind of sees it coming, but he doesn't know why he sees it coming. Yeah, he doesn't know why it's not as funny the second time. I mean, it's never as funny the second time, right? But are the people that are saying it, are they saying it with the same enthusiasm?

Is it the same person? They didn't control. I don't know that they use good comics or good jokes. Most of the jokes are pretty lame. They're kind of laboratory style jokes, which are always lame. But they always, my understanding is that a lot of the joke, the laughter evoking quality of a joke is the surprise. Although I have to say, when I saw you go do comedy at the Vulcan a few months ago, there's some bits, you call them? Yeah, bits.

Okay. That you do where like like i'm thinking to myself oh no he's not going there is he is he really like you're leading us down this path and i'm thinking oh no he's not going to say that is he and then you go there and that's what's funny about it so i realized when watching that i took a mental note to myself i was like okay so jokes aren't always about getting hit with the surprise sometimes it's you know you're going down this path that is really, really uncomfortable. Well, it's very hard to describe what comedy is because you don't even know it unless you're doing it.

Like while you're doing it, you're trying to work out bits. It's almost like you're on instinct. You're trying to sort, you're almost like the way you're probing the brain in the dark, you're kind of doing that a little bit with comedy. Some of it's sneaky. Some of it you're sneaking things way you're probing the brain in the dark, you're kind of doing that a little bit with comedy. Some of it's sneaky.

Some of it, you're like sneaking things in on people. You're catching them before they like, cause like you're, the worst thing is when you know where someone's going and you see the setup and you, you anticipate the punchline, then the punchline comes and you don't think it's funny. Cause you're like,

ah, I thought that myself. I saw that coming. The best ones are when you think something's going to happen and then another thing happens instead and it's even funnier. Right. Or when you, you get, you recognize this thing that this person's saying that you didn't think other people recognized and you're like, yes. Right. You know, there's that too, but you don't know what you're doing while you're doing it sometimes. You know, there's that too, but you don't know what you're doing while you're doing it.

Sometimes I saw you do a question and answer part at the end. I was there with Lex and he turns to me. He's like, I can't believe he's going to do this. I'm like, why not? I was like, cause that's real time. I mean, I guess you're, you're fucking around. Yeah. Well, it was amazing.

I mean, I think that for us, we were just thinking like, wow, like you're for two scientists, like two super nerds to put yourself into a situation deliberately where you don't know what's going to happen. It's like the worst you're trying. Everything about science is trying to control variables. It's all about control, right? This is probably why Lex is still single. Just kidding, Lex. There's so many, there's so many women that want to marry. No, no, no, no. Oh God, he's going to kill me. He's the black belt in jujitsu. Not me. Oh, no, Lex, I'm so sorry. He's over in Russia right now.

I hope he comes back. He's not going to listen. He'll be so far behind on podcasts. He's not going to listen to this one. Don't worry about it. He'll probably come back with a wife. Maybe. Yeah.

Maybe that's his move. Find himself a nice lady over there. We'll understand him. Oh, goodness. There's so many things I want to say here, but I have to be very careful. Whoever Lex marries will be one lucky woman and vice versa. The only thing I would worry about with Lex is that he's so busy. I do not know if he has the time for a relationship.

We actually discussed that on a podcast I did with him on his podcast. It's going to be released soon. He was talking about whether or not he has time. You know, like he has time for a relationship. He's not sure if he does. Well, he's also going to have to start following a somewhat more normal schedule because this guy's basically nocturnal.

I get texts from him at like four in the morning. Yeah, but that's what he likes. Yeah. There's nothing wrong with it. You know, I think some people's minds work best at, I write my best material really late at night. What's really late? Two or three in the morning.

But you get up early, right? Yeah. Yeah, but it depends on the day. If I write until like three, four in the morning, I try not to get up before 10. That's smart. But on normal days, I'm getting up at seven or maybe even a little earlier. But when I come home from shows, oftentimes my mind is very excited. And that's when I like to, that's what I like to write.

Yeah. You know, there's a really cool phenomenon where early in the day or after, we should say after someone's been asleep for a while, for that first zero to nine hours of the day, I call this phase one, just because got to label everything with a name to make it clear. During that time, we know that dopamine, adrenaline, and cortisol, healthy levels of cortisol are highest in your system. In those first nine hours, you might not wake up quickly, but they're highest. And then those start to taper off. And molecules like serotonin start to predominate. And the way these molecules like dopamine, serotonin, they do a lot of different things. They're involved in

tons of things. But we can generally say that they modin, they do a lot of different things. They're involved in tons of things. But we can generally say that they modulate. They're called neuromodulators. They bias the probability that certain brain circuits and areas will be active and certain ones won't. So when dopamine and epinephrine are really churning around in your brain, you're really good at linear types of things like math, organization, working out sets and reps. This does this. This is we're going here. Itineraries where there's a right answer and you're just trying to plug and

chug. As serotonin and other molecules kick in, which is later in the day and at night, the brain becomes much better at these, I call this phase two of the day. They become, so it's like seven to 16 hours, sorry, 10 to 17 hours after waking. So zero to nine for phase one and 10 to 17 for phase two, your brain is much better at nonlinear thinking, creative thinking, brainstorming. Um, I don't know what the writing process comedy process is for you, but you know, if you're doing anything creative, you're organizing existing things into new ways. You're kind of playing with ideas and it, it actually can be beneficial to be slightly sedated. This is actually why so many great writers and musicians and maybe comics have used

a little bit of alcohol, a little bit of cannabis to put their brain into that kind of liminal state where you're not super lasered in. You're not looking for the right answer. The right answer just kind of comes to you. And for some people, they have a hard time accessing that when they're in this hyper drive mode. And jazz musicians, right, famous for abusing a lot of substances because jazz is all about the spontaneous incorporation of notes and et cetera. So I think that late night creativity makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Tim Dillon and I were just having this conversation because Tim is sober.

And, you know, Tim used a like a real problem with substances and he says he does his podcast really late at night like they don't even start filming until like after midnight is that why he's got the aviators yeah that's but it's also like that's sort of his drug you know like he's sleepy and he's kind of just like half out of it and you know when he puts the sunglasses on he just it's almost like he's sleepy and he's kind of just like half out of it. And, you know, when he puts the sunglasses on, he just, it's almost like he's in an altered state of consciousness, but without having to snort ketamine or whatever the fuck he was doing. Oh, goodness. You know, he's just. Definitely a healthier approach. That guy used to snort ketamine. I don't know.

Ketamine's not legal, but please, I can't imagine snorting ketamine is good. Ketamine is legal, though. You can get, you could do ketamine therapies, which are really weird. Like a lot of people are doing them for depression. Why? So here I've got colleagues who study ketamine. I've been spending a lot of time trying to understand how this drug works. It's a dissociative anesthetic. So it is, it's like PCP. It works by blocking something called the NMDA, N-methyldeaspartate receptor, if people want to look that up. It's very similar, right? Carl Hart was telling me that it's almost the same thing as PCP. Absolutely. This receptor is a receptor that becomes active only when you're hyper-focused

on something and it has the capacity to create brain change in a very dramatic way. They say, oh, your brain is different five minutes after this conversation than it was before. That's bullshit. Basically, your brain doesn't change unless it needs to. And that signal of need to comes from something being really intense, really stressful, really exciting, really novel. Right. Makes sense. Right.

Why reprogram the machine unless there's a need? And so you have a chemical signal. Ketamine basically was initially used to block memory formation after trauma. So people would come into the emergency room, let's just imagine like horrible scenario, right? And someone was just in the passenger seat and watched their closest loved one get impaled on a steering column.

That person is in a state of shock and they're never gonna forget what they see. So what do you do? You give them ketamine, you try and dampen the plasticity, the brain change that would occur to remember that incredibly traumatic event. Now it's being used as a way to bring people into the clinic,

or it seems like it is pretty rampant use now, and put people into this dissociative state so that they see themselves having an experience. In fact, I've talked to people who've gone through ketamine trials, and they describe it as watching themselves get out of their own car. They're like third person in themselves. This to me sounds like a horrible state to be in, but a lot of, I mean, I've been working my whole life to just be comfortable with the body I'm in. And I'd like to stay in it. Not because it's always comfortable to be there, but because, you know, getting good

at that seems to be the key to having a good life, being able to tolerate discomfort. This is about getting out of yourself. Yeah. But isn't the point for these people to try to figure out what they're doing wrong with their life so they can look at it objectively as a third party? Yeah. That makes sense to me that they would look at like, for instance, their suicidal depression and say, you know, like this, the new agey kind of thing is like, you are not your feelings. That's a tough one for people to incorporate because when I have really strong feelings, it certainly feels like it's happening inside me. So this is allowing them to get next to their feelings and see their feelings as an experience, not them. Yeah.

I mean, but even when you know that it's definitely happening to you, you know that you are also sometimes not burdened by those feelings. That's right. So it's some sort of an external factor, or even if it's an internal factor. Right. It's a thing other than the core of what you are. Right. It doesn't define you. Right.

It doesn't define you. I think that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to figure out, like, why are they so overwhelming to the point where they want to leap off of a cliff? Like, what is causing that? Yeah. And it seems to work quite well for intractable depression as it's called. What's really odd about the fact that it works, at least to me, is that if you look at the other new emerging, very effective treatment for severe

depression, it's the exact opposite. It's this incredible work that Matthew Johnson and colleagues are doing out at Johns Hopkins, giving people macro doses of psilocybin. I talked to him, we had him on the podcast and he, and I asked him, I'm like, what are your thoughts on micro dosing? And he was like, macro dose. And I thought like, whoa, this is an academic saying this. This isn't like some guy who's, you know, trying to push psychedelics for his own agenda. This is a guy who's studying these in like purely through the lens of science. Like, what are you talking about? What's critical about the macro dose of psilocybin? When you say macro, what kind of dose are you talking about?

I don't know how they dose these, but this would be like in the gram range. How many grams? One gram? I need to check with, we should check with Matt before people run off and start to take it. But certainly not micro, right? They're hallucinating, they're feeling a lot.

And I said, what's the key thing? You're seeing success after success after eating disorders, depression, late, you know. And he said, it seems to be, quote unquote, letting go. And I'm like, that's not science, right? What is letting go? Are you talking about heart rate 50% above baseline? Are you talking about breathing? crucial about the people in these trials experiencing what would normally give them a complete panic attack and being able to just let go and go into the experience without trying to

control it, without trying to tamp it down or ramp it up, just be in it. What kind of experience that would give them a panic attack? For some people, um, you know, he said there was one woman in who came in, I believe it was a woman who there was a painting on the wall and she thought she could jump through it. And so that, you know, they're holding her back, you know, yeah, they're holding her back. And, and they do give them tools to control their anxiety. So my lab works on a lot of breathing tools for real time, rapid control of anxiety. And we handed some of those off to Matt. So they give these to people as tools. They also have defibrillators in there. They have everything because it's a university setting just in case. And he said that the key

thing is that they kind of feel overwhelmed, but then they feel supported enough by the therapist to lean into whatever's happening and they stop trying to regulate it. And that's where apparently he thinks the breakthrough is. And so that reveals something very fundamental. It says that there's something powerful in terms of long-term depression relief that can be learned in those states that has to do with not regulating oneself or one's need to run for safety. And I find that fascinating because, you know, it raises all these questions. For instance, do you need to hallucinate? Maybe not. Maybe it has do you need to hallucinate? Maybe not. Maybe it has nothing to do with hallucinations.

Maybe it just has to do with getting the person into a state of like real fear and then allowing them to lean into it. I don't know. That's a speculation. But I think that what's interesting about all this work on psychedelics is it's clearly working in these clinical trials.

I mean, overwhelmingly, the data are more positive than negative. And yet no one knows exactly why it's working. No one knows what's being rewired in the brain. There's all this speculation like, oh, dendrites grow and there's plasticity. Sure. But like in what direction? I mean, trauma is plasticity too. So something powerful is happening under the control of these psychedelic drugs in these clinical settings that are teaching people something valuable they can export. And everyone has a different narrative, like, oh, I saw this face or the green gremlins or whatever, you know, a melting reality. But it seems to be the ability to let go of the attempt to control one's internal state.

One of the weird things they found out when they started studying people while they were under the influence of psilocybin was the lack of brain activity. Do you aware of that? Well, I know there's more. So the receptors for psilocybin are many, but one of the main ones is the serotonin 2C and 2A receptor. And those are in this layer of the cortex, the outer lining of the brain called layer five, which is extensively involved in lateral connections. And so it's absolutely true can imagine you reduce the total amount of activity in any one area. But my understanding is that these brain states are just so atypical. They're not like anything you see in sleep or dreaming, although they're similar. There was a guy at Harvard for years, Alan Hobson, a genius, a neuroscientist. And he was saying, dreams are reparative. They help people through trauma. It's part of the trauma release process,

blah, blah, blah. And psychedelics basically mimic that. And he may very well be right. He may very well be right. Isn't it like when the body processes it, isn't it something like 4-4-aloxy-N-N-dimethyltryptamine? Like there's some things that are happening while your body is processing it that mimic what is actual possible for your brain to produce. That's right. I mean, you have two component parts. One is made by the pineal and the other is naturally made by neurons, and those have to be brought together. I've never done an ayahuasca journey. Admittedly, I just haven't done it. Have you done mushrooms?

In my youth, you know. Back in the old days? Back in the old days and not responsibly. I kind of regret it because I mean, I was like a wild punk rock skateboarder kid. I was not this, you know, I wasn't a university professor. And honestly, I regret doing it at a time when my brain was so plastic. I wish if I'd done it, I would have done it in like clinical trial and gotten data and that kind of thing, but I'm a nerd. So, but you could always do it again. Sure. Yeah. I think that, um, have you thought about it? Well,

I was part of a clinical trial looking at, uh, this was originally intended to be three dose of MDMA. Um, I did the two and then I decided that was enough. This again, was part of a clinical study. I found it to be incredibly beneficial. I mean, I thought I was a nice guy before, but it made me not afraid to feel feelings. And I think before that I could feel from the neck up and from the waist down, but I had this block. And I remember taking MDMA, there's a physician there, they're talking to you. And all of a sudden I felt like, now I sound like a crazy person, but this is how it felt since from a sensation perspective, as if like my body had been in saran wrap before and it just kind of unzipped. And from that point on, I've been able to feel things body wide. And then I started

thinking about all sorts of things like, I have unusual number of deaths and losses in my life for somebody who wasn't in the military or didn't grow up in the inner city. It just had some bad luck, you know, like, you know, new people that had bad luck. And all of a sudden I was able to kind of digest that and think about it in a more reasonable way. I think before that I was just pack it away, just work, work, ignore it, or try and sub sublimate it or Trent, turn it into anger fuel, which, you know, it can be its own use as you know, but at some point I was like, you know, I think I need to actually spend some time on this. And yeah, I think, I think it made me a nicer person to myself.

Yeah. I think there's real benefit in those things, whether it's MDMA or psilocybin, I think there's real benefit in a lot of them. And I think there's definitely benefit in macro, but I think there's benefit in micro too. I know a lot of people that microdose and they just feel like an elevated mood all throughout the day. I don't think you're going to get these sort of transformative life-changing experiencesiences where you transcend? Whatever it means to be a person and get a chance to look at yourself and look at the way you interface with reality in A different way, but I think what it does do is it alleviates a certain amount of anxiety and tension for people And it allows them to have a more enjoyable experience just in like regular everyday life without being intoxicated That's the key. It's like it doesn't change the way you you your motor functions are doesn't change your

visual well it just actually improves your visual which is really weird um i forget who the the scientist was but he did a study on um being able to recognize whether or not... It was like edge detection and being able to recognize the changing in parallel lines. And he did it... See if we can find out who this scientist was, but he was a very straight lay scientist. He wasn't a whack job. And his joke was, it seems like you can detect reality better when you're high than when you're not high. Because people that were on psilocybin were able to detect. So if you have two parallel lines and

they move one slightly off parallel, the people on psilocybin were able to detect it quicker than the people that were sober. I believe that for a number of reasons. Well, first of all, psilocybin at a basic level, when we think of it as like a drug, but it's like, in many ways, it's a lot like the so-called SSRIs, like Prozac, Zoloft, and those things that they work on serotonin. It mainly increases serotonin, but different receptors than things like Prozac and Zoloft. call that a psychophysics experiment. They'd vary that ever so slightly as you described. The thresholds for that are going to be different for different people. But if anything that can more narrowly tune attention is really going to help. I was surprised to learn this. I'd be curious what your thoughts are. I'm not a cannabis smoker. I just never really liked it. But I had a guest on my podcast named Paul Conti. He mainly works, he's an MD, mainly works on trauma, incredible trauma therapist

and has written about trauma, wrote the book on trauma that I think is the one in my opinion. And then we got into a discussion about like different substances and do they have application? So we talked about ketamine, et cetera. I asked about alcohol just by way of comparison. And he said, there are basically zero therapeutic uses

for alcohol, right? Therapeutic. But then I asked about cannabis. Now this isn't something he does in his own clinic. He does talk therapy, not drug therapy. Although he's a psychiatrist, so he can prescribe things. And he said, cannabis is interesting and it may actually have some therapeutic potential, but the main effect of cannabis

is to narrow attention and focus. It actually can increase attention and focus. Now the problem is it's not a very good filter. So people can narrowly attend to just video games or just to their anxiety if they're already anxious. That's a problem. But when it comes to psilocybin, psilocybin seems to increase creative thinking,

kind of new rules and algorithms about what could be an answer. So I'm not aware of how it might directly impact visual perception unless it narrows focus. But most of the drugs that impact serotonin are going to increase focus to some degree or another. And that can be good if what you're focusing on is pleasant. It can be really bad if what you're focusing on is really unpleasant. I knew people, I'm sure you don't, who just smoke weed and they have a panic attack. Yeah. The smoke weed thing is a weird one because it just, it's like many things. It's completely dependent upon the individual, like their individual

genetics, their biology, whatever it is that they've had in their past. I know people that smoke marijuana and they're high functioning. And I know people that smoke marijuana and they don't get anything done. And I don't know if those two things are related. I think people who generally have drive and discipline, marijuana gives them a break. It gives them a nice little, just a little rest stop. And I think that's probably beneficial. And I also think it makes you a little kinder, a little more compassionate, a little rest stop and I think that's probably beneficial and I also think it makes you a little kinder a little more compassionate a little more sensitive which is probably very beneficial to someone who's hyper focused like people that are like type a personalities are trying to get things

done all the time you smoke a little pot you're like what am I doing let's fucking relax a little and then you get back to it you're all right I think it's it's that's there's a great benefit to that But I should also say that it's very popular in the jiu-jitsu world. Oh, yeah, I always thought that something to do with The kind of creativity part of it like that you you can't plan jiu-jitsu, right? You have to improvise. Yeah, there's like jazz In a lot of ways there's definitely that but it's also the focus thing that you're only thinking about that. Like while you're rolling, you're really only thinking about rolling. While you're smoking cannabis and then rolling, you're hyper focused on it. And physical strength, you feel fine, you don't tried that one. Yeah, I feel it. Like I feel it in the fibers. It's almost like I'm more aware of like what's going on. Instead of like this blunt sort of, you know, almost like distance from each individual muscle fiber, which I am normally.

Normally, I'm just trying to warm up. And then I warm up. And then I start getting going. Then I, you know, lift light first, and then I work my way up to what I normally use. But when I'm high, it's like I could feel like where it connects to the bone. I feel everything. It just makes you more sensitive about what you're actually doing. And for martial arts techniques, particularly for striking, I feel like I incorporate leverage better into things. I have better balance in terms of like not trying to execute a technique when I'm off position, you know, and it just makes me just more aware of like what's going on with my body.

And that's super powerful. We had the nerd in me once said in neuroscience, they call that interoception. Like people vary tremendously in their awareness of their internal state. You can know if you have a high or low degree of interoception by trying to count your heartbeats without taking your pulse. Some people can just do that. It's a skill you can build up over time. This is great for some people, but some people are highly anxious. It sucks to have a lot of interoception. great for some people, but some people are highly anxious. It sucks to have a lot of interoception, but we know of course that the mind muscle connection is really powerful. And it's not just mind muscle connection as a, whatever they call it, bro science thing. The reality is that from peer reviewed studies, that if people focus on the contraction of a muscle during resistance training, as opposed to moving the weight, right? Something that's hard to measure if they're actually doing it, the strength and hypertrophy gains are much greater. I think it's like a 15%. I had Andy Galpin on the podcast

and he would know the exact number. But I always wonder about this, like in gyms where there are mirrors and people are watching themselves lift in the mirror. I mean, you're exterocepting. You're not focused as much as you could on the actual feeling. So, you know, there's always a weighting between exteroception to the out, everything beyond the confines of your skin and interoception. And if cannabis allows more interoception,

you can imagine that those workouts would be more effective in that way. But isn't there a benefit to observing yourself in a mirror because you make sure that you use the proper technique? Absolutely. I mean, right. I mean, you always see those people, like, their shoulders hunch, and they're making a mess of themselves, overworking their strong parts. And, you know, I mean, some people walk in the gym, and it's clear they've never actually looked at, like, you know, the lower half of the mirror, right? Yeah, that's the saddest thing.

That's so sad. It's so weird. The skip leg day thing is a cruel joke, but it's a cruel joke in the right direction because there's nothing worse than uh an imbalanced physique i mean where someone has done a lot of work to try and create something it's so bad for your body it's like having small legs and a large upper body is so unhealthy every you like for sure your lower back's going to be fucked well structurally and also just neurally you know again as acientist, you think the nerve to muscle connection

is what contracts fibers. And if you think about somebody who's, you know, big upper body, small legs, that person that the neurons in their brain that represent their body are also completely contorted. No, but what do you think about a person, like I bring him up all the time

because he's so odd, John Jones. Like John Jones has the smallest calves of any man I've ever seen who's an elite athlete. And obviously he's an elite athlete. He's one of the greatest fighters of all time. And even now while he's worked his way up to heavyweight, so he hasn't fought in two years because over that time he's been building himself up.

And now he's like a legit 255 pounds. He's fucking huge. Tiny calves. What's going on there? What's really interesting is if you look at elite sprinters. Is that real? Yeah. So look how short the muscle bellies are on his calves.

But if you look at elite sprinters, Olympic sprinters, they'll have big legs. But if you look at, and sometimes they'll have big bulging calves, but their calves are very short. That's actually going to lend itself to sprinting. You don't see many Pacquiao calves on sprinters. Interesting. Not good ones anyway. But he's not a sprinter. No, but he's got a lot of explosive power from what I understand. Oh yeah. I mean, I'm not a knowledgeable about MMA. Pretty much everything I know about MMA, I've learned from you and from Lex. So look at him there, Even at 255 pounds, I mean, he's— Yeah, he's got tweezers down there. These are very small calves, which is—it's really unusual for someone who's built the way he is.

But his explosiveness out of those calves is probably met by that short muscle belly. Well, he's not the fastest guy you know and his whole thing is he's the best at Controlling distance because he's very tall especially for light heavyweight not going to be as tall for a heavyweight But he's fantastic at controlling distance, and if you're a person who wants to maximize your Like you have a certain amount of weight you can be you could be 205 pounds And that's it if you want to beat championship weight. At 205 pounds, he's got the perfect physique because he's really long. Long arms and legs.

Long arms and legs. So you can't get close to him. And he's a fantastic striker. And he uses those arms and long legs in a great way with his wrestling and his submissions because he has fantastic leverage. He's really like the perfect build for fighting how tall do you say he was is it six plus i think yeah john is six three six four is he back in it i know he had a steroid pop but is he oh yeah no he's back that was a long time ago that that's the steroid pop is a weird one man you know he he kept six four four. That's skinny. Yeah. For six, four, 205 pounds.

Exactly. He kept, you know, I don't know what happened, but the story was that he got some tainted supplements, right? Which may or may not be true. The problem is he- I'm sorry. I just laughed when this happened. Last time we were talking about the Deca burrito the Olympic. Yeah, I mean Anyway, sorry go on. I just I couldn't help but chuckle what some guys do get tainted supplements. That's a real issue

you know, I know one of the ways I know it's a real issue is we didn't get a Steroid that We didn't get steroids that showed up in Steroid, what happened? We didn't get steroids that showed up on its supplements. But when we were initially starting out, we used this third-party company that would mix our ingredients. And they would mix ingredients for other supplement companies as well. It was a company that packaged stuff for you.

And so we did third-party tests on some of our stuff. And we'd find vitamins in there that weren't supposed to be in there. And then we just trace them out. So we realized, oh, they're getting it from the vats. Like these guys aren't cleaning the vats properly that they used for the previous supplement. Now, if you're getting a lot of cheap stuff, particularly if you're getting stuff that's made overseas, that's the same companies that are making steroids. So they're making, you know, wherever it is in China, what have you, they're allowed to do that or whatever. It's not regulated. So there's guys that are buying off-the-counter, real, normal supplements that are supposed to be steroid-free that have steroids in them.

Now, there's also unscrupulous companies that will add steroids to their products just to make them more beneficial, just to make them more functional. And that's true too. So there's a guy named Tim Means. He got busted with Tainted Supplements. And if you look at Tim, he does not at all look like a guy who takes steroids. I mean, not at all. And he was just taking some normal stuff that he bought from some health food store. And it turned out he popped for a very small trace amount of this stuff. Previous tests is nothing. And then this tiny small amount, which would indicate that, and this is what they said about John as well. The problem with what John did was like John tested negative and then he tested positive.

But the positive amount was so small that like it's almost like he's getting off of it so he would have to be on it for a long period of time like he'd have to be on it for weeks in order to reap any benefit but meanwhile it was less than that time ago he was negative and now he's got this trace amount in his system. So there's a lot of things that seem to lean towards the idea that he was accidentally dosed, that he took a tainted supplement. However, do you know More Plates, More Dates? Yeah, Derek. Derek.

Yeah, I like Derek a lot. I was really pleased to see him on here. Love that guy. Yeah, he's great. He's great. And I love his show. And he's super, super knowledgeable. And he calls bullshit.

But he calls bullshit on a lot of guys in the UFC. And he goes over their specific blood work. And what he was concerned with was more the testosterone to epitestosterone ratio. He said it was off, way off, and not normal. And also the amount of testosterone that John had, the free testosterone in his system, he also felt was so low that it seemed to indicate that he was coming off exogenous hormones and that there's maybe some masking going on or whatever. But it was enough to make John ban him.

He blocked him on social media. Oh, yeah. Which Derek goes, that seems to indicate I hit a sore spot. Yeah, the blocking move implies a worry at the very least. Yeah, Derek goes deep. Yeah. He goes really deep. He went over Polo Costa. There's quite a few guys that he, Polo is another guy who's built like a bodybuilder.

He's like a freak specimen. And he kind of calls bullshit on him too. He calls bullshit on a lot of these guys. Yeah, well, and the lines have become really blurry because there's, you know, it used to be if anyone was taking any exogenous androgens, they were quote unquote on steroids. But now, of course, there's TRT,

which is up to 200 milligrams per week. You can't do that in MMA. It's not legal. No, that's not allowed. I've looked over the list for, Duncan French sent me the list that they have for UFC athletes. It's interesting. I still want to sit down with Jeff Nowitzki sometime. Jeff's a very interesting guy. Yeah. I mean, he would definitely have a conversation with you about this. He's also a guy that is really honest about what they can and can't catch he's like there's a real and also honest about the list of banned supplements if you go to the usada website the amount of shit that you can't take because it's tainted it's crazy like it's like

hundreds of supplements yeah or because it works yes you know last time i was on here we talked about tonga ali right yes and there are now additional papers showing that, yeah, it raises testosterone and estrogen a little bit in parallel with that. It looks like it's not going to cause people to flag red in most leagues, but the increases are not what one sees with- What about terkesterone? Terkesterone? low dose oxandrolone, anivar, right? Which is DHT, dihydrotestosterone. It doesn't convert to estrogen. That's the stuff that makes your hair fall out. Exactly. And makes beards grow.

And it also hardens people up. It gives them that really dense look. And people will take it before workouts because it immediately makes you feel, or pretty quickly makes you feel kind of aggressive and like you want to train. Not angry aggressive, but you want to move your body. But then it also blunts,

and a lot of doctors prescribe it for this reason. It reduces sex hormone binding globulin, SHBG. There aren't a lot of things out there that can reduce SHBG. SHBG is what prevents testosterone from being free testosterone. And I asked a Tia, Peter Tia, like what's the healthy level of free testosterone that a normal person should have, normal male should have? And he said, it should be about 2% of your total testosterone. And there aren't a lot of tools to do that. So if someone has a testosterone of, you know, of a thousand and their free testosterone is five, that's bad, right? You'd expect it to, you know, be up in the twenties. So, you know, as the oxandrolone, Anovar can adjust that, but it also can crank up liver enzymes.

But it's very fast acting. So a lot of athletes, especially female athletes, will take this in the short run and then train with it, cut with it. That's how they get that. Like I have this theory, and again, this is just theory, that a lot of these female CrossFit athletes, they get those turtle shell abs. Some of them might have low body fat to begin with. But sometimes you'll see a look and you just have to you know you're projecting but it's it's like okay they're taking something um they don't look androgenized but they look like they're definitely taking something and well i could speak for the jujitsu world and especially

in competitions where they're not testing there's a lot of girls that are taking things um i have a friend who used to date a girl who's a competitor, and she started doing steroids, and he started getting weirded out. Well, clitoral enlargement's a real thing. She didn't get that yet, yet. This was quite a few years ago. But he was just weirded out that she was, like, taking testosterone and just to try to, you know, be better at strangling people. But it's really unregulated in a lot of ways.

Like, I mean, some jjitsu competitions test, but they kind of test in the realm of the old UFC testing where it's really just an IQ test. Because if you're smart, you know what to take and when to get off of it and when to cycle off before you weigh in. And, you know, it's not that big of an issue. But these in-between competitions is where they're making all their gains right so in between competitions what usada does is they do random drug tests throughout the year and even derek says even that like is you can get away with it he's he explained what they're testing for and why you can get away with it in multiple videos and i don't want to it up because the science of it i'm sure i'll butcher he's very skilled at all that. I mean, I think the testosterone replacement therapy part has

also contaminated the public discussion. Like I really appreciate that years ago, you just kind of outed with it. You're like, yeah, you know, TRT, but- Yeah, I've been telling people from the moment I started taking it, I'm not ashamed of it. No, why? Well, not only that, like I'm interested in all kinds of things that make my body function better. And I'm also interested in telling people. I would never take something and not tell people that I was taking it. If it was good, I'm like, if it was good, why wouldn't I tell you?

And if it wasn't good, why would I take it? So if I'm taking something and it doesn't work, I'll tell you that. I'll tell you it doesn't work. But if I'm taking something that works, I don't understand this fear of expressing what supplements you're on or what things you're taking. It's very bizarre to me. Yeah, I don't know what part of human psychology that reflects either. I mean, look, it's clear that testosterone, whether or not it's replacing or maxing out or whatever, I'm not maxing out like super physiological doses, but to raise testosterone through injection or whatever,

of cypionate and reasonable dosage with the doctor, you feel better. You effort feels good. You recover quicker, et cetera. There are limits to that, right? You can convert to estrogen. It has to be done properly, but that's very clear. Yeah. You don't want to have hyperphysical levels. No. Those are dangerous. No, you get people retain water. They get puffy. They get really emotional. They get gynecomastia. I mean, there's all sorts of issues. And then there is this issue that there's a preexisting prostate cancer. It can make it worse, but I don't think there's any evidence that it can cause prostate cancer. Actually, probably the opposite. If estrogen is too high and testosterone is too low,

that's actually worse for prostate health. I mean, young guys don't tend to get prostate cancer. They can, but it's pretty rare. But in general, as it relates to sports, it's tricky because, for instance, last time I kind of walked around this issue, but this time I'll just say it. I mean, I don't like basketball anyway, enough that I would worry that it'd be.

I know someone who's a professional basketball player and I asked him about steroids. And he said, well, if you get injured, you can take up to 200 mg a week, which is considered a TRT dose. But that's actually a pretty big dose. That's a one typical one mil injection. That's a significant difference.

That's going to put- Wait, wait, hold on. It's a one milliliter? So the typical dosage of testosterone is 200 milligrams per mil, per ml. So one cc is how many milligrams? One mil. One mil. So these guys are taking two?

No, they're taking one of those a week is what they're allowed to take. That's fucking huge. Right, because most people are either break it. We talked about this, I think, before, but breaking that up into some smaller injections amounts is probably better to just keep androgen levels more reasonable. What's a normal level that people take per week? A hundred to 200 milligrams per week is pretty typical, typically spread out. So that's like two tenths of a CC. So you, right. So if you're thinking CC is like someone might divide that into,

so half a CC on Monday, half a CC on Thursday, right? That's a, that's a reasonable thing, but that's still a lot. It's still a lot. I mean, half a cc on Thursday, right? That's a reasonable thing. But that's still a lot. It's still a lot. I mean- Half a cc? Yeah. I couldn't take that much. So five on a, yeah, you'd be raging. Yeah, exactly. Most typical now, people will take somewhere, it pays to think about it in milligrams. People will take somewhere between 10 and 40 milligrams every third day or so,

right? You just think about that. 10 and 40, really? Yeah. Somewhere between 10. Yeah, because some people came into it with their testosterone at 140 milligrams every third day or so right you just think about that so about 40 really yeah somewhere between yeah because some people you know came into it with their testosterone at 650 and when you talk about replacement you know nowadays people will prescribe 40 is so hot 40 milligrams every three or four days that's still 120 milligrams you know per week or so it seems 40 on monday 40 on wednesday 40 on friday i take 1.5 every four days 1.5 one yeah like like if you look at a one cc you take the little yeah a little tiny that's 30 that's 30 milligrams every four days yeah but you probably have 1.5 is 30 okay wait

we're talking is it 0.15 or 1.5 1.5 so like you know like if 1 cc is 10 so you're taking to 10 yeah it's like that big yeah but with it's 200 megs per mil so for every little notch on there every major notch on there not the little tiny ticks but every little that's going to be 20 milligrams that's what so even so what so if it reads one, that's 20 milligrams. So it goes 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, up to one if it's a one ML syringe, one cc. One cc. And so are you taking the whole syringe worth every four days? No, no, no, no, no. Then you're taking far less.

Just to the number one out of 10. The 0.1. Yeah. So you're doing the 0.1. Right. So if you look close. So you're taking- I'm taking 0.1 point- 0.1. It reads one, two, three you're taking, I'm taking 0.1 point, like it reads 1,

2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. When you get to 10, that's one cc. Correct. I take one and a half. Every, every four days. So you are taking, you're taking a very low dose. You're taking, if it's 200 mg per mil, which almost certainly it is in this country, testosterone cypionate, it's going to be, you are taking 30 milligrams every four days. So someone, did some people take up to four? We'll take, some people are taking essentially more than three times what you're taking is allowed according to this player, right? I don't want the NBA to come after me. They must be raging.

Either they're going to come after me to fix it. I'm looking into an article about it just to see what they were saying. This was on ESPN a couple years ago. It says like the little secret that nobody knows about, and they're talking about sleep deprivation. The whole article is about sleep deprivation, but testosterone is mentioned a bunch. What about sleep deprivation?

You know, I was reading something about that with sleep deprivation and jet lag. They were talking about a game that was played where the players flew in the day of and didn't have the best performance, and they were talking about it. That happened in a WNBA game recently. The players were complaining. Not WNBA. Oh, it was regular NBA. NBA, yeah.

I just know that that happened in a WNBA game like last week. They were complaining about that. But it does happen in the NBA too. It must be a factor. Like, you would never do that in a fight. Oh, huge last week. They were complaining about that. But it does happen in the NBA too. It must be a factor. Like you would never do that in a fight. Oh, huge. That's what they're talking about. It dropped these players down to like a 20-year-old

down to a guy that should have been in his 50s. Oh, so they did a test on their testosterone. Okay. So Hoyer and his staff consider their efforts to counter sleep loss like deep breathing exercise to optimize sleep to be all but a band-aid for a broken bone. By the 2014-2015 season, loss like deep breathing exercise to optimize sleep to be all but a band-aid for a broken bone.

By the 2014-2015 season, Royer and his staff had fully committed to their investigation of sleep deprivation, tracking 18 players over multiple teams in each conference. When the season began, those players' testosterone levels ranked on average in the 88th percentile compared to males their own age. After two months of NBA play and travel, their levels had fallen to the 70th percentile compared to males their own age. After two months of NBA play and travel, their levels had fallen to the 70th percentile. By March, the 32nd percentile, a 64% drop in just five months. So that's just being worn the fuck out.

Yeah, I mean, I get called a lot, do some work with military, do some work with any kind of high-performance teams that are dealing with this kind of thing. They want to know, how can we maintain hormone levels and performance. And you always start with get regular sleep as much as you can. It's everything. And how do you, you know, one night, no big deal, but two nights, three nights you're impaired. And a lot of these guys also are really disciplined, but some go out and party afterwards and that whole thing. So it's always maximize exposure to sunlight in the

first half of the day. Number one thing for just making sure that you sleep well that night and then limiting artificial light exposure by dimming lights from 10 PM to 4 AM. Very few people do those two things, but they have an outsized effect on sleep. And there's a really nice study out of Israel this last year that showed that if you had people, this was men and women, go outside for 20 minutes, three times a week and try and expose as much of their skin as they possibly could to sunlight while still being decent. All right. That it raised testosterone and estrogen significantly. Why? Because skin isn't just a organ to, you know, tattoo and protect our organs. skin isn't just a organ to tattoo and protect our organs. It's a organ that actually functions as an endocrine, as a hormone organ, like vitamin D, right?

This kind of thing. And there was this whole pathway they delineated in this study, really interesting, based on keratinocytes, which are these particular skin cells, and P53, which is a cell cycle molecule. Super interesting. It showed getting sunlight on your body, getting sunlight exposure to your eyes early in the day,

increases testosterone and estrogen, increases feelings of wellbeing, improves sleep, et cetera. It's like all the things we know, but people are finally catching onto this. And even though I kind of blab about this ad nauseum on my podcast, people always say, well, can't I just crank up my phone really bright in the morning and sit there?

There's always this kind of negotiating. You're not gonna out-negotiate the sun. And then people think, oh, the sun, that's really kind of woo technology. No, we evolved to get sunlight during the day and to avoid light at night. Have they done studies on people that live in like, say, the Pacific Northwest where they don't get a lot of sunlight and whether or not that affects their testosterone and estrogen? Yeah. So they definitely, it depends on where they start out because there's some genetic variation. I mean, the variation in testosterone levels is huge. Hence the huge reference range of like 300 nanograms per tesla year all the way up to, you know, 1200, right?

This is what makes TRT kind of a tricky topic, but more seasonal depression for sure. a tricky topic, but more seasonal depression for sure. Greater requirement for sunlight viewing, but in order to keep mood high and hormone levels high. But the good news is people that are very susceptible mood wise and hormone wise to lack of sunlight respond best when they start getting light. So there's this really nice study that looks at like night owls and people that don't get much sunlight during the day. If they start doing, getting some caffeine exercise and sunlight in the early part of the day, caffeine, just to ramp up their energy levels early on, get them outside, but also eating in the earlier part of the day, you know, just trying to bring their active schedule into the earlier part of the day. But doesn't caffeine just make you feel like you're not tired?

So this is a really cool mechanism. There's actually a trick to avoid the daytime, the afternoon crash. It's not a trick, it's biology. But caffeine is an adenosine antagonist. It basically, as the longer you're awake, adenosine, or Matt Walker would say adenosine, adenosine builds up in your bloodstream.

It's what makes you feel fatigued. Caffeine essentially blocks the adenosine receptor, but then when caffeine wears off, the adenosine that's still around binds to that receptor and you crash, you feel really sleepy. So one thing that you can do is when you wake up in the morning, don't ingest caffeine for the first 90 minutes or so,

like really push that off so that the adenosine and adenosine receptor interactions can all take place and dissipate. Then you drink caffeine. And what you'll find is that if normally you would crash around two or three in the afternoon, you don't experience that crash anymore because the caffeine wears off, but there isn't a lot of adenosine there to bind the receptor. The crash that I experienced from caffeine is lack of caffeine or caffeine. And then getting off it is nothing compared to the carb crash oh carb crash for me like if i have a sandwich like if i go to like uh fucking jimmy johns or something and have a big giant sandwich how often does that happen very rarely but when i do i'm like what's wrong with you they used to play a place called uh cavarettas in uh the valley that

i used to go to and they would have these meatball subs. They were fucking sensational. And sausage and pepper subs is like an old time Italian deli. And every time I would eat one, I would just go into a coma. But you are mostly low carb meat. Yes. I actually talked to Paul Saladino a while back and he's, you guys now eat fruit as part of the carnivore diet, right? Well, I do. Yeah. Some people don't, some people are just eating meat and that's it that's their whole life you know that's rough is it rough well i mean i love meat right i i really do and uh but i love vegetables and fruit also but i do like a nice bowl of rice or oatmeal after i train i'm kind of old school that way yeah no but i eat butter and cheese and all that kind of stuff. I don't do it in huge amounts. I mean, little bits of butter and little bits of cheese.

I try and limit it, but I do love tortellini and pasta and pizza. I try not to eat it, but- Listen, I love it. That's not the problem. The problem is the way it makes my body feel. It just doesn't feel as good. I feel like shit.

I feel like I ate glue. Yeah. You know, by the way, though, some pasta makes me feel less like that, and I don't know what that is. And I speculate on, I don't know how much you've looked into glyphosate and how much of an impact glyphosate contamination has on people. Because we looked at it the other day, there was a study that showed they went over a bunch of different things, different plants and produce and things, and the amount of glyphosate they

found was pretty stunning. Glyphosate, which is Roundup, which is a very common pesticide, or herbicide, I guess. Is it herbicide? Is it a pesticide? I forget. But either way, it's fucking really bad for you. And there's many people that speculate that what a lot of people are calling gluten sensitivities is if really you're having a reaction to glyphosate I mean I should be clear

I try and eat plain rice or oatmeal when I do eat the clean carbs if there is such a thing I hear you. I mean if I eat a lot of carbohydrates I crash and you know anything about glyphosate Well, I was gonna say I was in Copenhagen recently and gave a talk about totally unrelated things. But earlier in the week, Dr. Shana Swan was there. I think she was on here. This is the woman who wrote that book. Shana Swan. Shana Swan, excuse me.

Countdown. And she gave a talk about the phthalates, the world's most impossible to pronounce word. Starts with a P. Phthalates. It's like ophthalmology. They're ophthalmologists that can't spell ophthalmology. I'm an ophthalmology department. I see it misspelled all the time. Her talk was amazing, right? And you asked about kind of regional differences and relate to light in terms of testosterone. But what I took away from her

talk was that people who live in rural areas because of the use of pesticides, that sperm counts and testosterone counts are way, way down. They're really suppressed in those areas. Stunningly. Stunningly. And, I mean, why that isn't front page news, I don't know. I mean, maybe there's a political side to it. Maybe there's not. This is also a recent finding. I mean, I believe it was 2015 when they figured out the phthalate connection with people's dip in testosterone, dip in sperm count, and then also an uptick in women having miscarriages.

But I would think that would be from, I don't know, maybe it's just the way my... I think the problem is there's no solution. And so when there's no solution to something like that, plus it could harm the economy. Like, I think people panic. And they don't know what to do about something like that. If there's a thing and this thing has a solution, like, oh, don't drink this, eat that. Because if you drink this, this fucks you up. But if you eat that, you're going to be good.

That's something that they would talk about. But something like this, when you find out that the average person eats a credit card sized portion of plastic and microplastics every week When that's a little weird too, right? We try to figure that out the other day that did the calculation that might be a little fugazi You guys actually did that did the math? I love no no Something now there was an article that sort of described how they modeled it like how they came up with that Credit card thing. It's like Clearly variable right like some people will have more some people have less but when credit card thing. It's like clearly variable, right? Like some people will have more, some people have less.

But when they say the average person, it's like, it's a little. But the point is, that's a real issue. And that's one, phthalates are one thing. Roundup is another one. This glyphosate thing is a real issue. And apparently it's in a lot of foods. Yeah, I don't eat many processed carbohydrates. I mean, I look more and more at what we eat at home, and it's stuff not in packages.

I don't know if you get away with it. See, I think glyphosate is a commonly used thing just on crops. I don't know if, like, by eating clean, you're getting away from glyphosate contamination. So, like, if I rinse the organic strawberries, I could still be ing from glyphosate contamination so like if i rinse the organic strawberries i could still be ingesting i don't know i mean the problem is it's only legal it's legal here but that shit has been like eliminated from a lot of countries a lot of countries don't want people taking that in but in this country it's like widely used. Google how many countries allow glyphosate use? Or how many countries, just Google how many countries have outlawed glyphosate?

I mean, I feel like you can do things to offset some of the damage, like getting sunlight, getting exercise, trying to eat well, but yeah, not direct compensation. Look at this. Following the landmark case against Monsanto, which saw them being found liable for a former groundskeeper, 46-year-old Dwayne Johnson's cancer, 32 countries to date have banned the use of glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup weed killer. Okay, so it's an herbicide.

Yeah. It's some scary shit. It is scary. I saw Dwayne Johnson. I thought The Rock for a second. It is scary. I saw Dwayne Johnson I thought the rock yeah, different to a different different way. It's a fairly common name but That the but someone I was reading this whole thing about someone equating gluten sensitivities with glyphosate

Because they were saying that how many how much of wheat is contaminated with glyphosate. And they were saying that may be what people are calling gluten sensitivities with some folks. It might be actually that. Well, her talk freaked me out. And this freaks me out because I care a lot. Maybe I'm getting older because I care a lot about next generation. I really do. I mean, I feel like I've kind of made it through the shoot. You know, if I get hit by a bullet cancer or something tomorrow, like I've had a really good

life, I want to keep going. But I worry, I think about the school shooting thing. I worry about what that represents at a larger thing in terms of just people feeling that disenfranchised and then people feeling that scared and concerned all the time that things like that are going to happen. And if you can't trust the food you eat, I'm like, what can you trust? Right. And I'm not a paranoid person, but I like to think that we are emerging or have emerged from the last few years, the whole pandemic bit with people more focused on what they can and need to do for their own health. Some people. It seems that way. But then again, on social media, you get a limited window. But I worry tremendously that people are still waiting for some large governing body to deliver the school lunch that's going to make everybody healthy. I think it's very clear

at this point that everybody has to take responsibility for their own health. And that's two things. That's learning information and then trying the things that are going to, you know, accessing the things that are going to work. I mean, that's a huge part of what my life's about these days. And this is why I find that whether or not it's a discussion about carnivore diets or vegan diets, I mean, I look at the debates around that and I just have to chuckle mostly about the way that debates are playing out because it's so theatrical, like liver king on the one hand, and then these like, do we be vegan scientists? Many of whom i'm not talking about stanford colleagues of course but others that are just like so combative in different

spheres and there's no there's no solution to come from that yeah the liver king thing drives me nuts because that guy's on steroids well just shut the fuck up so he i know he's eating really healthy it's clear he's eating all these animal foods and you know, he's eating organ meat, which is very rich in nutrients Well, that's true, but he's dodging the main bullet. It's too late for him now because he said no Yeah, so if he is even on TRT he's he should come out and just say it Well look at because yeah I mean just do you know how rare it is to have a physique like that and not be on steroids? You would have to be in the zero zero 0, 0, 0, 0.1% of the human population.

Just the rare genetic freaks. I mean, I don't care how much you lift weights. Like that is a freak physique. Like pull up a liver, that the nutrients in that organ are specifically channeled to the organ that it would most benefit from. Is that real? I mean, is that true? I mean, that might be, that looks like, I mean, if, am I going to just, if I were to just put that through my knowledge of hormones and biology and I would say TRT. Oh, that got, Yeah, the photo. But I'm saying what you just said. Oh, so the direct, no.

So there's no evidence that I am aware of that if you eat, say liver, that the nutrients are specifically directed towards your liver. Right. There's no evidence. No evidence. There's some old, old studies

using radioactive labeling of organs, having animals ingest those organs and then slicing up the brain and body and looking. And there was some small but interesting specific diversion of brain to brain. But in my opinion, if you're eating brain and it's diverted to your brain, that's actually a concern, not a benefit because of prions. You do prions, yeah. You do prions, yeah. So I'll go on record saying, to my knowledge,

there's no evidence that eating testicles, for instance, supports your testicles because it's directed to the testicles. Now, there may be some bioactive, may be some bioactive hormones in there that go and support testicular function in some other way. But when things are brought into the gut, they're broken down into their component parts and they go out into the bloodstream. And then which organ gets that stuff depends on whether

or not there's say a blood brain barrier, which keeps a lot of stuff out of the brain or blood testes barrier or blood ovary barrier. Every organ like the spleen, et cetera, has a barrier. So some things get in more readily than others. But to my knowledge, zero evidence that eating spleen helps your spleen. Right. So, but why do people say these things? Is this like old wives tales? Is this, or is it just bro science? Well, I think it's because, I think it's because that there are nutrients, for instance, in liver, like very high concentrations of choline precursor to acetylcholine.

It is true that liver is one of the most choline dense foods in the world, far more than an egg, far more than any vegetable or nut is going to give you. And now I'm sure some, some celery warrior will come after me or something like that. You know, at the moment, as you know, better than I, the moment you say one thing, categorically, you know, you're kind of inviting it, but I've kind of learned to, to, to enjoy that response. I learned from it. Um, and correct me if I'm wrong, but liver incredibly kind of learned to enjoy that response. I learned from it and correct me if I'm wrong, but liver incredibly high in choline. So you could see how the lore would emerge that eating liver is really good for you because it is, if you're interested in getting a lot of choline and vitamin D or vitamin A and other things of that sort. But the idea that it would be diverted

specifically to your liver, that seems kind of crazy. Now there's also this idea, I won't name names here, but there were people on social media for a while saying, well, walnuts are really good for your brain because walnuts actually look like a brain. And that's why, and you know, testicles look a lot like testicles too. But the point is that walnuts have certain things in them that are good for lots of cells, not just for brain tissue. But they have healthy fats, right? Definitely definitely i love walnuts especially the red red walnuts are amazing my my girlfriend's obsessed with all this like hard to find like old-fashioned food like red walnuts and i don't even know what a red walnut they're red they the skin on the on the walnut is red the nut isn't red but the the skin on them is delicious i don't think the skin yeah the skin outer skin outer. Yeah. You know, like once you crack them. Yeah. Once you crack. So does it look brown in the, Oh, they're so good. And it looks like a

brain. Okay. I have seen those before. They're delicious. I was thinking the outside shell was red. I was confused. No, they're delicious. And, um, whether or not they're better for you than standard walnuts. But walnuts are good for you. Walnuts are great for you. I mean, you know, they're caloric calorie dense, but they're great for you. So one of the things that Paul Saladino always wants to talk about is plant defense chemicals and about eating plants that plants don't want you to eat them. And so when you eat them, they're excreting these plant defense chemicals. Now, my thing on that is, and this is one of the things that Rhonda Patrick likes to talk about, is that that may have a hormetic effect. So there might be benefit to that, just like there's benefit to cold therapy and hot therapy,

and that there's some foods that eating them, even though they do have these defense chemicals, those defense chemicals, at least in certain doses, might have a beneficial effect on your body. Makes good sense to me. I'll say this. I'm going to try carnivore because I told Paul I would. I'm going to do blood work first and then after, but I'm not giving up my athletic greens and I'm still going to eat cucumbers, which he says are a fruit. And so I'm home free. He told me I have to cut the skin off them too. So I'm going to try it and see what happens. But I've also talked to Rhonda and she's really big on this broccoli sprout thing. And a lot of things that are incompatible in the Instagram space make a lot of sense to me scientifically, like eating some greens,

but also eating some meat, et cetera. In terms of plants being bad for us, I mean, there are a lot of toxic components of plants. Typically, the further out on the branch you go towards fruit, the less toxic they become, right? Eating the bark is generally more dangerous, although berberine, a commonly used substance for lowering blood glucose, right? Like metformin, sort of poor man's metformin is made from tree bark, basically. And aspirin is as glucose, right? Like metformin. So a poor man's metformin is made from tree bark, basically. And aspirin is as well, right? Aspirin derivatives, things of that sort, alkaloids. There is something interesting about plants.

And I've talked to Paul and other serious colleagues in amino acid science space. So there is something called non-protein amino acids. There used to be a guy at Stanford who'd studied these. And he's a world expert in non-protein amino acids. Many seeds and plants contain amino acids. There used to be a guy at Stanford who'd studied these and he's a world expert in non-protein amino acids. Many seeds and plants contain amino acids that can't be incorporated into proteins and may have some toxicity to them if they are ingested. Now, there's never been a widespread systematic exploration of all the seeds and all the plants that people eat to see whether

or not there are a lot of non-protein amino acids. But these things act in a sort of prion-like way when they get into the brain, or they get into different tissues. And so, you know, I don't want to spark fear that every, you know, sunflower seeds are going to give you prion-like syndromes, but it's conceivable that by eating certain plant compounds, one could ingest these non-protein amino acids that they would get incorporated into existing proteins or that they would look enough like protein amino acids that they could sneak their way in across the blood-brain barrier or into cells and cause certain kinds of dysfunction. And this particular lab's focus was on figuring out whether or not neurodegeneration was a downstream effect of some non-protein amino acids. So in that sense—

What was their conclusion? Their conclusion was that a lot of plants, and in particular a lot of types of seeds, contain non-protein amino acids that if they were to be incorporated into mammalian tissues and cells, that that would be very bad. There's also low levels of certain chemicals that are in seeds that are really bad for you like uh apple seeds right don't sign it yeah yeah and and there was this idea years ago that um the marijuana plant could inhibit the reproduction of animals that want to eat it by way of increasing aromatization the conversion of testosterone to estrogen and then when i was in college there was this thing

everyone would say don't smoke the seeds it'll make you sterile people used to say that but they were high that's funny that I was in college yeah I remember people saying don't smoke the seeds they'll make you sterile that's ridiculous yeah um I don't know that there's any how many children were accidentally birthed because during college someone smoked the seeds like don't worry baby I'm smoking seeds yeah I guess we should say as a universal rule, never use the argument that something lowers sperm count or testosterone as contraception. Yes. Right? Because I know a former pro bodybuilder who was juiced to the gills and told me that he conceived both of his children on his heaviest cycles ever.

Really? Yeah, somehow he maintained, you know. Some function. Yeah, well, the whole you just need one sperm idea. I guess, yeah. Either she was hyperfertile or he was hyperfertile or both. But there are two kids that he claimed were conceived on everything from D. Baldock, Sandra Lone to— What do those kids look like?

They're actually great-looking kids. He's now—he lost most of that muscle. He's now walking around like a normal human being. Did you hear about that child who is abnormally large at two years old because the father was taking testosterone cream and the kid started showing pubic hair and an enormous penis at two years of age? The conversion of testosterone to DHT, which causes penis growth, will— well, the question is, will that kid thank or punish his father later? Well, I don't know.

The question is, are other people going to try that now? That would be terrible. So here's the boy. Two-year-old showed signs of puberty after he was exposed to his dad's testosterone gel. He developed pubic hair and his height was off the chart.

So he's like the size of a five-year-old at two. And then on top of that, they talked about his sizable penis and his raging erections. How'd they say it? What was the word? Goddamn pop-up ads. What did it say?

They talked about his, something about his, he's 26 pounds at the age of one, put on over two pounds a month between the ages of 12 and 18 months. He's had massive sustained erections. it's it's happened in the other direction women who were using a lot of evening primrose oil common in a lot of um lotions and things like that it's a very strong estrogen and there were really yeah there were examples of their male sons getting a premature or not even premature breast bud development from contact with their mom. Whoa. So primrose is like a thing that women put on in lotions and that's an estrogen lotion has enough estrogen like properties that certain that boys were showing estrogenization

of some, some of their features. Are women aware of that, that, that, that stuff has estrogen quality to it? Probably not. I mean, you know, I've gone on and on social media and elsewhere about the fact that I am not a fan of melatonin, you know, low doses every once in a while for treatment of jet lag or something. in addition to all its effects on sleep, et cetera. And the idea that people are prescribing that to their kids, I don't know that it's screwed up their kid's puberty trajectory, but just the idea that you would take high doses of a hormone. Look, we're talking about low, well-controlled doses of TRT. People freak out.

But then people can pop melatonin like it was M&Ms and they give it to their kids when they're clearly better alternatives. I mean, it makes no sense at all. I don't think they think of melatonin in that way. I don't take melatonin, but I don't think most people think of it as a hormone. Well, now there's some evidence coming out that it may have other negative effects. I mean, I don't like to be the scare tactic guy, but it just seems to me there are a lot of reasons to just avoid it unless you really need it and occasional use. But the stuff in kids is really

serious between the Dr. Shana Swan stuff about phthalates. And then you're talking about evening primrose oil or you're talking about, I mean, this kid, I have a confession as that didn't happen to me. But when I was a kid, I had, when I was five or six, I had hair growing on my Adam's apple and my voice was the same as it is now. They call me froggy when I was a little kid. I basically grew into my voice.

And so I had a genetic test recently and I actually have a mutation in an androgen receptor. Now that didn't make me super strong. I wasn't a super impressive athlete or anything like that. But this particular mutation probably is what allowed me to work really long hours. It relates to kind of cortisol production and things like that. and things like that. And when you start exploring, you find that, yeah, about 12% of young males have mutations in one or the other of these hormone pathways that sort of shift you towards being able to, for instance,

like I can work very, very long hours and it's not because I'm no David Goggins, right? It's just, I can just like work a lot. And there are other mutations that are more subtle. Like you seem to have, I can't believe you can do four podcasts a week, the MMA thing and the comedy thing. Like to me, doing one podcast a week

is like, it feels like a lot. Plus I run my lab, but that just feels like a lot. But I asked you a while ago, if you, you know, your voice ever goes or you ever get super tired and you're like, no, I think some people just naturally have more androgen receptor or they make more androgen. And then of course, if they supplement androgen through TRT or something, they can get away with lower dose because it just hits their system more efficiently. For me, with podcasts and MMA and comedies, it's all things I really enjoy, though. Definitely helps. But that's the big thing. People say you work really hard.

I'm like, kind of. I kind of don't work. No, that's how I feel, too. Yeah, I do a lot. I put in a lot of effort. There's a lot of effort involved in my life. But there of don't work. That's how I feel, too. I put in a lot of effort. There's a lot of effort involved in my life. But there's very little work. You know when I have to work?

Talk to Jamie when I have to do ads. That's fucking work. I'm like, fuck. I fuck him up. I'm like, fucking cocksucker. I suck at this. I read well. I'm fucking terrible at it.

I have to do them three or four times. Jamie knows the truth. It's still not that long, though. It's still easy. It's still easy. It's still not that long, though. It's still easy. It's still easy. It's still easy. It's not like working in a coal mine. Yeah, it's not like a fucking laborer in the hot sun all day.

Right. But none of what I do is work. That's how I feel. I love podcasting and I love- You love science. And I love science. I mean, I have like scientific Tourette's, right? I just want to learn, learn, learn and share, share, share.

There's like a real lesson in that for people. If you can find a thing that you really truly enjoy. I mean, people have said that throughout time, find a thing you love and you never work a day in your life. Do that thing that you love. That's, that's how I feel. I don't feel like I'm, I work a lot. Yeah. I mean, I'm, when I was six or seven, I'd spend the weekend reading about medieval weapons or like frog biology or something. And then I'd come into class on Monday and I'd just ask if I could give a lecture. Now I just, they took me to a psychiatrist and they're like, yeah, my parents were like, is he okay? And they're like, he just, I used to go, this is so embarrassing. You know, those carnivals where you used to throw a ping

pong ball into the thing and win a goldfish. Well, I loved aquarium goldfish, but I knew that most of those fish were going to die because people weren't dechlorinating the water. So I used to go buy dechlor and go to these carnivals. My mom used to take me when I was little and I would give, I'd give you free dechlor for the fish if you want it, but you had to listen to me lecture about the dechlorinization process. Oh my God. How old were you?

I was like six or seven and I didn't charge for it. And I felt so good just knowing like these fish are going to survive. They're going to have a great fish. Like I just love, but mostly I just wanted to tell them about D Chlor. Wow, and now I do it like on a podcast That's hilarious. I feel six or seven. I was just I never stopped talking Being a fucking carny with three teeth on meth and some fucking kid comes up wants to talk to you about chlorine the goldfish This is I got shit for this the other day because I won't say where we're living at all,

but a certain neighbor has some very high-level security next to them, right? Not a super fancy neighbor. It just so happens that, I'll just say it, the Secret Service are parked near me now. And so I got to be friendly with them walking back and forth to the mailbox and kind of learning things. And they're real friendly people, real hardworking. They work super long hours. Shout out to the Secret Service. Yeah. Then they don't

choose who they protect. What do you say? You elect him, we protect him. And I said, careful, you decide who elected who, but I'm independent. But the fact of the matter is that they're really nice, but we've gotten into discussions around sleep because they're on these crazy sleep cycles and how to regulate sleep and fitness stuff. And this one real nice secret service agent, she said to me, are you always like this? And I said, what do you mean? And she said, every time you walk by here, you end up giving us a 30 minute lecture. And then you give us a supplement. I do that to people too. What's funny, like I'll have a conversation with someone at dinner or

something like that. And they'll ask me a question. I'll say, well, actually I had a guest on my podcast that explained this. And then I'll like have this Like I can retain information if it's very fascinating to me if it's something that I'm really interested in and I can say what? You know the studies were and what what the you know and these conversations. I've had with people They're like oh, so you're like podcast mode. I'm like That's just how I am those are one of the reasons why the podcast works is because I would be like that anyway. Right. Because like,

just like you were saying, like it's hard doing a podcast a week. It's just talking to people. Yeah. I like talking to people. Well, I do these solo episodes. Those are hard. That's a lot harder.

Yeah, the interviews are fun, but these solo episodes are long. Right. And also you're going over very specific data and you have like a whole thing that you want to get out. Yeah, it's fun. But I love it.

I love that it's hard. And then, and as I kind of ratchet through it and kind of go through the various rhythms, also I'm learning and I love it so much. And of course, if I make any mistake, I mean, my goodness, the internet is harsh. They're the best. It's amazing. I love the critique. I do. I love it. At first I was like, oh, this is rough. And now I've learned to just so embrace it. Like even the people who have dedicated their entire lives to finding my mistakes, I'm grateful. I just spend time going, okay, fantastic. Yeah, there's a lot of miserable fucks out there. But they can be beneficial because they can find some things that maybe you missed.

Oh, absolutely. And I'm certainly grateful for them. I do worry about them, though, because some of these people are like presumably have other things they're trying to pursue. And they don't realize that they're kind of circling the drain slowly by focusing so much on other people oh yeah but look everyone makes choices in life i mean i've decided to try and like you make new things and be a creator but you know it was lex that said you should he told me you should start a podcast and then he said uh whatever you do though just make sure it's not just you blabbing and so that's basically what i did that's hilarious but that's sure it's not just you blabbing. And so that's basically what I did.

That's hilarious. But that's not, he's not correct though. Because like some of my favorite podcasts, like Bill Burr's podcast is just Bill blabbing. Tim Dillon, just Tim blabbing. Giannis Papas, just Giannis blabbing. You know, like some of my favorite podcasts are these interesting people that just start talking shit. Yeah.

You know, they're really interesting guys. And in your case, you're talking about, like, really important things to a lot of people. And the way to get it out is really to do it the way you do it. And I'm curious about it. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, we've done episodes on grief and on eating disorders. I thought when I did one on eating disorders, especially anorexia,

they were going to be like, oh, you know, this white guy with a shaved head who lifts weights, what does he know about eating disorders? And the feedback was wonderful. People were like, you know, I didn't know, for instance, that the frequency of anorexia is not going up. It's been constant since the 1600s and maybe even earlier. This is a, it's also the most deadly psychiatric disorder.

Wow. So, you know, all this idea that social media is impairing body image. Yeah, that's probably true. But true anorexia, people getting an aversive relationship to eating. That's, you know, I learned about that. And then the therapies that you can point people to. So on and on. But like you mentioned, Rhonda, like I'm obsessed these days with deliberate heat and deliberate cold.

Yeah. We've been talking about this. I'm freezing right now because I just did the cold plunge. How long? I have one right here. Three minutes right before I come here. How many days a week are you in? I'm in it almost every day now.

Amazing. Yeah. I break it up, though, because I read that you have to wait two hours after lifting. Like, so to get the benefits of hypertrophy. That's right. Struggle with that one. You need about two hours post-workout before you plunge. But I get in the sauna immediately after every workout.

That's great. Sauna is almost every day. And then cold plunge is at least five days a week, maybe four days a week. That's a lot. And with good reason. So there's a scientist out of Scandinavia. Her name is Dr. Susanna Soberg, S-O-E-B-E-R-G. And she showed up on social media a few, you know, six months ago and then published this really amazing paper in humans.

What they showed was that they figured out the thresholds for how much deliberate cold exposure you need and how much sauna for it to really start having beneficial effects. how much sauna for it to really start having beneficial effects. Now all the nutrition PT people, which seem to me some of the more frustrated human beings on the planet, I don't know why, but online, so like nutrition and physical therapy are where like there's a lot of contention. I don't know why.

Neuroscientists are nice people. Contention in what way? They love to nitpick. And so, and I respect that they know a lot about what they do, but there seems to be a lot of infighting around nutrition and around physical therapy. I don't know why. It probably relates to some childhood feelings

of powerlessness. I don't know. But what's very clear is that from Susanna's work is that if you put people into deliberate cold up to the neck, like uncomfortable cold, people always say, how cold? It should be, I want to get the hell out, but you can stay in safely.

And that's going to vary person to person, even day to day. But if you get people into that for 11 minutes total per week, so not one session, but they're doing three minutes, three minutes, three minutes, whatever, get to 11 minutes at that 11 minutes per week threshold, they observe legitimate increases in brown fat, the good kind of fat thermogenesis, like the oil in the candle goes up, people become more comfortable at cold temperatures and metabolism increases. The increases in metabolism aren't huge. And the PTs and nutrition folks have really been like, those increases in metabolism are like a cracker or something. But that's just one of the effects. The big effect of the cold

is that you get this 2.5X increase in dopamine that lasts many hours after the cold exposure. I mean, it really puts your brain into an antidepressant state and to a more alert, motivated state. And norepinephrine as well? Yep. So norepinephrine, epinephrine, and dopamine are called the catecholamines. Those three catecholamines all increase substantially. And that can be from a very brief exposure to very cold. So like one minute or three minutes really cold.

Or in the study that was published in the European Journal of Physiology where this initially was first shown, they put people into 60 degree Fahrenheit water up to their neck for like 45 minutes or an hour, which isn't super annoying. They had them on lawn chairs with weights. So they're just sitting there.

Oh God. But you can do a much shorter exposure. ronda was telling me you can even do like 45 seconds really really cold and still get that blast effect which makes sense what would be really really cold well for for you or for cam haynes like you'd probably have to go to almost dangerous levels like i've seen some of the cold he's he like, like I saw a post with Kim and he's like grabbing ice and like putting on himself. He's making it tougher, you know? Oh, the cold plunge? Yeah, the cold plunge. Yeah, he has the same one I have, the Morosco. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That thing's really nice. I mean, they're getting beautiful now. There's the plunge, the Morosco and then

the blue cube or whatever. Yeah, the blue cube is what we have here. I like, you know, the interesting of that, the blue cube, the water is like circulating, like you're in a stream. Well, that's where, so the circulation actually is key. So if you get into cold water and you're completely still, like you're super stoic, you're building a thermal layer that's keeping you a little bit warmer. So if you really want to make it tougher, you can sift your, your body a bit because you break up that thermal layer. So the Morosco is 34, 33, 34 degrees. And this one's 37. That's not distinguishable, the difference, but this one moves. Yeah. So it's cool. The water, it's fucking sucks. Yeah. You're breaking up that thermal layer. You can't, and you can't,

if you try not to huddle or you go hands in feet in. Yeah, no, I go up to my chin. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's, it is an antidepressant effect that again, the metabolism increase probably isn't super big, but it's still there. And then there's, but it's mostly this neurochemical effect and the resilience and the inflammation control. But then with sauna, it's really interesting. It seems like the threshold total for the week. I mean, you can do more, but is it fit, believe it or not, 57 minutes per week. Yeah, there we go. This is yours. This is her information. Yeah, she's terrific. PhD scientist.

Pull it up so we can see her. Okay, Susanna. Oh, I follow her because of you. Susanna Soberg. She actually posted something on something that I posted, and then I saw that you were quoting her, so I went to her. She's terrific. Terrific scientist, terrific person.

I met her in person when I was over there in Scandinavia. We didn't cold plunge, but- Is she in Scandinavia? Yeah. Yeah, she's in Denmark. 57 minutes a week has healthy benefits. Heat increase, heat shock protein. Heat shock proteins are important for cell communication. Heat shock proteins repair damaged cells. Heat prevents nerve, nope, that's it, they're damaging diseases potentially. Oh, interesting. Heat prevents nerve damaging diseases, potentially Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and scroll it. No, right there, but on the big thing. Okay.

Now there's some growing evidence. There's a, she hashtags sober principle. So there's this thing in science where if you name something after yourself, then you're a narcissist, but you can name things after other people. So I named this sober principle is if you really want to get the maximum metabolic effect when you, and if you're, and you're doing heat and cold end with cold. Yeah. Because then you have to warm yourself back up. Yeah. Cam told me about that. Now I've been doing it.

It sucks. Drink water before, if possible during. Why would I drink during? I thought the whole idea is to like make your body cool itself off. I don't drink during unless I'm really fucked. I don't know what that's about. Maybe that's related to sauna. Do you drink water in the sauna? Yeah, but that's what it is. But if I do drink in the sauna, I have to be fucked. I have to have made a mistake where I'm like, I'm really tired and I'm really struggling. And

then I always go back in after I drink the water. And you're going hot. I recall we were texting back and forth about this at one point. I mean, typically it's going to be about 184 to about 210 is a good range, Fahrenheit. And that's hot. Although, you know, I mentioned that, I think, on a social post. I said, you know, that's really warm approach with caution. And all the Eastern Europeans, the Finns and the Russians, where they were, like, making fun of me. They're like, you're a wimp. We do it at 2.30. 2.30?

That's a brisket. But they start it when they're little kids. I mean, they— Yeah. Or if you ever go to a banya, these Russian banyas, and they hit you with the leaves and the— Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I've done more than 200 before I was doing 220 for a while because Laird Hamilton was doing that but I was

actually burning my throat like I was I was my voice was and it was and I was realizing you fucking idiot you're cooking your mouth well he's a nut in the best sense laird goes in the barrel sauna with the airdyne bike yeah and pedals with oven mitts on he wears oven mitts because the metal gets so hot you can't touch it so he's in there air dining oven mitts on he's a savage but it's also why it i believe he's 56 55 56 he maintains incredible athleticism he's still like one of the top, you know, big wave riders, surfers on earth. It's like, it's crazy the amount of work that he puts into it, but clearly there's benefit to it. But I look forward to it. I really do. I look forward to the suffering of these sessions because I'm like kind of addicted to the benefits that I get

afterwards. That dopamine rise is real. A woman you had on your podcast, Dr. Anna Lemke, Dopamine Nation. She talked about a patient who was getting off of cocaine. He was feeling low. So he started using ice bath as a way to wean himself off. You can't argue with a 2.5x increase in dopamine that's long lasting. Big spikes in dopamine that crash, that's bad. Because it's like up and then down. But this two, three, four hour increases in dopamine,

epinephrine and norepinephrine, you're alert, you feel better. Your RPM are set higher. Is there any benefit to reemerging yourself in the cold? Like once it starts to wear off, like doing it more than once a day? Well, you eventually become cold adapted and you need to start doing things to make sure that it's still a stress stimulus because that stress stimulus is what sets that all in motion. So if you get really comfy, then you're going to have to start making the water colder, sifting the water around. I mean, you can only make it so cold before you eventually have tissue damage, but that's a wide window. That's why heat is great. But the upper threshold for, as you mentioned, like your throat starts hurting, you're actually burning tissue is bad. There's an amazing finding on burn that I can't help

myself but share. There's a paper that came out that showed, well, there's based on observation, burn victims show dramatic fat loss, not burned by the fire or the burn. So for many years, they become leaner and leaner and leaner. And no one ever understood why this was. But it turns out that burn and local heat application can set in motion a whole bunch of biological cascades that burn up body fat. Wait a minute. So that means those belly fat things are real? Well, they're now using local heating. And people really need to be careful with heat because you know burning yourself to burn body fat is just dumb and dangerous but using they have this UCP device excuse me but in the laboratory but what they're doing is they're using a laser that

heats up locally the tissue and they're seeing a systemic increase in body fat utilization you remember those cold sculpting things they used used to do to people, but apparently it fucked people up? Do you know what I'm talking about? Well, I remember the belts. I don't remember the cold sculpting. No, they were doing a thing where they were like cool sculpting, where they were saying that they're going to like blow cold air all over your fat area and it was going to make

your fat. People like calling bullshit on it i'm calling bullshit on it because i think that it's probably some general systemic effect of being cold and metabolism going up right and and of course we should say this if you're eating more food than you're burning off total you're you're not going to lose fat right i mean i mean that the rules of the laws of thermodynamics still apply because sometimes people hear you can do anything and still lose fat, and that's not true. But those body waste belts that people put on,

are those legit? Because they do heat up that area. You know, there may be some truth to this. Really? But it's not going to be spot reduction. This is where it gets misleading. Even though it's applied locally, it's not spot reduction. They're talking about heat causing a systemic increase

in body fat utilization again on a backdrop of caloric deficit more body fat burn that's the argument so why do people wear those big rubber neoprene things that go around their waist those belly fat trainers you know what i'm talking about yeah well i have a theory about the same reason women wear corsets although there are other reasons for that too which is that they like the way that it makes them feel and look there's a kind of the other reasons that women too, which is that they like the way that it makes them feel and look. There's a kind of- What's the other reasons? That women wear corsets? Yeah.

Because they potentially look hot in them. If you like corsets- Right, but the way they feel and look. But they were originally designed to bring the waist in. Corsets were like to cinch it in, to give them hourglass shape, to accentuate the features that they want to accentuate. Right, of course.

I thought there was something else. No, no, no. I just was thinking about corsets for a second. Oh, okay. they want to accentuate. Right, of course. I thought there was something else. No, no, no. I just was thinking about corsets for a second.

Oh, okay. But I think this is actually characteristic of a lot of things in the health space. So for instance, I get asked a lot about sauna and people go, what about infrared sauna? In my opinion, most infrared saunas don't get hot enough. Right. And I got really interested in infrared light.

It's like, what's going on with infrared light? Does it have real uses, right? Turns out there was a Nobel Prize given, I believe it was in 1908. I might have the date wrong. Maybe it was 1916, but there was a Nobel Prize given for phototherapy, for the use of light to treat lupus, for instance.

So this is not a new idea, but I think a lot of people like red light because of how they look in the red light sauna. It gives that really smooth look to the skin. It's kind of like that nightclub sexy feel. So people are like, ooh, infrared sauna. I think that's also the name infrared. It sounds high tech. It sounds high tech. And yet there are legitimate uses of infrared light. For instance, viewing infrared light, as long as it's not too intense in the early part of the day, if you're over 40, there's amazing data out of University College London,

my friend Glen Jeffries' lab showing that can help improve mitochondrial function in photoreceptors and offset age-related macular degeneration and visual loss can be offset. What about like those Juve lights? So there's Juve, there's Cozy, there are a bunch of these brands now. And there are three main areas

where they've shown some real efficacy in good studies. One is for wound healing and acne. There really does seem to be some therapeutic repair of tissue. The other is the eye stuff. So exposure to red light and near infrared light, as long as it's not too intense and you have to be over 40 to see the effect, et cetera. But there are real improvements in vision in animal models and humans. That's been shown. So wound healing, huh? Yeah, wound healing. It sets in, you know, red light is different than other light because it's long wavelength and that means it can pass through tissues. Short wavelength doesn't go as deep into tissues.

So that's why the red part is important, not just that it looks cool. The, when it passes through the upper layers of the dermis, it appears that it can go in and trigger some activation of things in the so-called stem cell niche that creates new hair cells, new skin cells. So they're using it for hair growth. I doubt it has a massive effect on hair regrowth. Yeah. I saw a thing the other day where the guy, this guy had a helmet on and he was talking to some sort of a laser helmet and the helmet was making him regrow hair.

Probably would assist in maybe augment some existing therapies for for hair um for increasing hair and then there's a growing population of people that are interested in using it to increase testosterone by putting the red light on their hey on their on their testicles um and of course they're the they're the the um the anus sun viewing people. Oh, yeah. That's Whitney Cummings. Really?

Yeah, she does that. She does that. She'll go to her Instagram. There's a picture of her with her feet up in the air. With her dogs. She might just be being funny. Well, I think the result that's relevant there, which is a real result, is the one we talked about earlier, which is getting sunlight exposure on your skin, provided you don't burn. Obviously, people wear sunscreen if you need it, but sunscreen is an interesting conversation too. But getting sunlight onto your skin can increase testosterone and estrogen, feelings of well-being, et cetera.

It's not just about viewing it with your eyes. Right, but red light has different effects than just sunlight, right? Right, but you've got red wavelengths in sunlight. Right. And you've got – but the near-inf near infrared wavelength combined with red is what's used in these acne treatments, scar healing. And there is one study

in rats showing that red light exposure to- There she is. There's my girl. Look at her. She's so great. She's just being funny though.

I mean, she probably is doing that for real, but she's also being funny. I love her post because she seems to really be enjoying life. Look at what it says here.

Self-care, perineum, perinium sunning day. Next up, 42 cold plunges, nine saunas, five hours of throwing a tire down a hill, and then four sticks of butter and one espresso. I love it. And probably 10 new pit bulls. The number of dogs that she accumulates is amazing. I know, she's a dog mom. But those red light things like the juve, don't they also, do they do something about collagen in your skin or something too? The idea is they can trigger skin repair through the skin cell niche. What are you showing me, Jim? The same doctor from before has a whole post on infrared therapy and everything you just said. Oh, Susanna Soberg.

It's kind of like listed there that has increases and all that stuff. Interesting. Yeah, so stabilize. Okay. Stay until you feel uncomfortable, but safe. So this is infrared only. Correct. Okay. So different kinds of sauna. So maybe there's just a different

thing. Maybe it doesn't get as hot, but it does something else. It says benefits blood vessels and activates nerve receptors in the skin. You sweat more at a lower temperature, a good alternative to traditional sauna. Traditional sauna, more efficient, more stressful with increase of heart rate. So that's exactly what we're just saying, right?

It's something to supplement with. Stabilizes the heart. PVC, two early contractions in the heart. Increase elastin and collagen in the skin, improve recovery after training. So elastin and collagen in the skin, how would an infrared sauna increase the collagen in your skin? I'm not aware of any peer review data, but you get your infrared devotees. I'm only aware of the eye stuff and the wound and acne stuff. For infrared saunas? Just for infrared light. stuff and the wound and acne stuff. For infrared saunas?

Just for infrared light. I don't think there's anything unique about combining heat and infrared. Oh, okay. And so Juve and Cozy Light and these other companies, yeah, the big panels. So that is technically infrared. It's red light therapy, but it's infrared. That's right. Usually it's got a panel where it's a red light and then it's like near infrared. So you can stare at those.

You can actually look at those red lights and it's not damaging for your eyes. You don't want to get too close. I mean, how close? So a good rule of thumb is if you feel like you need to close your eyes because it's painful, it's too bright. Right. So you want to be at a distance that it's comfortable to look at. You don't ever want to be, you know, tearing up or squinting, you know, these natural mechanisms that are built into us to protect our eyes and I would trust those. This is a place that I went to that has a more robust bed and they have like these goggles and they tell you with this red light therapy that you should put goggles on. Yeah if you're going to hit your skin really hard with red light or what's called NIR near infrared light you then you wear those little little they look like little suction cups that go over your eyes.

Because it's really bright, just like a tanning bed or something. So the kind that a juve has is not the same as a commercial light? The juve and the cozies get pretty bright, so you want to stand far enough back that you're comfortable. But not as bright as those high-tech commercial units. Correct. And also, it depends on where you hang it. If it's on a wall and it's coming right into your eyes like flashlight to your eyes it's very different than if it's on your body and you're getting it indirectly to your eyes right right but as a rule

of thumb you know getting healthy amounts of sunlight as long as you don't your skin doesn't burn and getting it that to your eyes and your skin is is good if you've ever had a cut you'll notice it heals much quicker if it gets sunlight interesting yeah oh absolutely and that's because of the way that these long wavelength lights trigger the stem cell niche that controls skin and the keratinocytes and repair. Here's a weird one. This is a mystery, but I heard this the other day and I'm totally obsessed by this. If you have a cut somewhere on your body, a wound of any kind, it takes a little while to heal.

If you bite your cheek, it heals almost perfectly like newborn skin. Nobody knows why. And you have tons of bacteria coming in through this whole eating stuff. Like there's a, you know, your dog hair. But doesn't saliva contain healing properties? It does. And so there's a group at Stanford actually, and elsewhere also, of course, that are studying, why is it that the environment of the mouth is so effective at healing itself. I mean, it's crazy. I mean, I've got scars from, you know, 20 years ago, but I've bitten through this cheek a bunch of times. It's painful, but then it's perfectly fine. Yeah. Like the next day, the next day. So, so there's interesting biology there and people are starting to think about that

sunscreen. Yeah. So, so there are two areas, aside from nutrition, that I feel like are really hot-button issues. Like, the moment we talk about this, we're going to catch a lot for this. But I'm getting used to that nowadays. You've got to stop reading comments. Well, it's— Sounds like you're affected by them. The comments and hate mail and death threats, the whole thing. You're getting death threats?

Yeah. You know, I think, uh, you know, there's some, what are people mad at you for? Um, more so there's, there's kind of this idea that because we cover topics like trauma and some mental health issues, there's more of the idea that, that we contain answers there. And, you know, people aren't, their thinking isn't always so correct. No, no one has said, I'm this upset with you about something you said about butter or something that I, that I want to kill you. Although some people might feel that way. No, no one has said I'm this upset with you about something you said about butter or something that I want to kill you, although some people might feel that way. And for that reason, I now live in New Zealand and you're welcome to look for me there. So is it like the mitigation of mental health issues or something like that? people thinking that, you know, that there's some secret message in what's coming through.

So sometimes it's really that way. But I would say 99.9% of things that come back have been supportive or critical in a way that's rational. Sunscreen and EMFs are like the two third rail topics. So glad you brought that up. Yeah. Here's what we know. There are compounds that exist in commercial products, not just sunscreen, that can cross the blood brain barrier and that are bad for neurons, period. No, that is indisputable. Some of those compounds have been shown to be in abundance in certain sunscreens and other cosmetics. So I'm not saying that all sunscreen are bad. I'm saying that there are some sunscreens that contain some things that were they to get

across the blood brain barrier would be bad. One of those things? These are small molecules that can cross the blood barrier into neurons and that can cause neurodegenerative-like conditions. What things? Well, these are typically associated with triclosans and some of the other things that are shown to be in certain detergents and soaps. Detergents and soaps are now off market because they contain some of these very small molecules related to triclosans and related products. But there are healthy, there are safe sunscreens. There's no question. What's a good safe sunscreen? So there we get into brand names. I, that's a tricky one. I don't want to get too outside

my wheelhouse. I'm researching this for a future episode. This is really a place where I want to, I want to tread carefully. Here's what I think is important for people to know. Not all sunscreens are safe. Not all cosmetic lotions are safe. Not all cosmetics are safe. I think we're probably going to arrive in a place, not that different from the silicone breast implant kind of landscape where it turns out depended on what implant and how long they were in and you know what they were packaged in like so many things like tryptophan the amino acid that was people used to enhance sleep now you get it readily but it was banned for a long time because a few people actually took tryptophan that had contaminated binders. It was the stuff that was in there with it and they got very sick and there were some fatalities even. And so it was

taken off market for years for all the wrong reasons. I mean, taken off for good reason, but it was the binders, not the tryptophan. With sunscreen, there are many things that are good about sunscreen, like avoiding skin cancer, but many sunscreens are bringing in the triclosans and other small, if a molecule is small enough, it'll cross into the blood brain barrier. And we don't know what the long-term effects of those are, but I think it's worth paying attention to. Similarly, and I used to teach this in a big undergraduate course, if you look at the data on EMFs and you look at the data on cell phones, you will find animal studies that show that if you put a cell phone under a rat's cage or a litter of rat's cage and two separate studies, you'll find dramatic decreases in testosterone in some studies and you'll find subtle increases in testosterone in others. I don't know what the effect is or how it's working, but clearly there needs to be an exploration of this.

And clearly it's going to be a really inconvenient thing to do that. Right. I mean, I use the earbuds, I use the earbuds, but nowadays I sort of wonder, should I maybe use the wire things more? I've been using the wired ones more.

Yeah. Yeah. Because I'm chicken shit. I'm hearing things, but I don't know what's real. People like start freaking out about EMFs. I'm not sure if they're right or if they're tinfoil hat net. Yeah. And And I'm in the same boat. And I'm sure that some of my colleagues, you know, the moment we say, you know, EMFs and sunscreen, people are going to freak out. And yet I will go

on record saying that some of the very scientists who say, oh, like, don't even worry about this. They're some of the most unhealthy looking people I've ever seen, you know? So they're not really incentivized to get it right, nor am I a conspiracy theorist. But here's my wish is that we look at everything and we look at it objectively and that we take into account that there are some animal data that point to the fact that getting these EMFs in close proximity all the time might not be the best idea. There's certainly some kind of an effect. It depends on the individual and the dose and a lot of stuff. But what you're saying about scientists is an issue as well. There are certain people that they're talking about things that affect your health and they're clearly unhealthy. It's like, boy, that's a hard pill to swallow coming from you.

Well, and I think, you know, we go back to Liver King and some of the other more colorful aspects of online nutrition and health information. People wonder, I actually saw some, I made the human mistake of going onto Twitter in the last couple of years. I never really was on Twitter and it's such a weird landscape as you know, but one of the things I discovered was that a lot of the people in the science and medical community are there kind of poking fun at online health and nutrition. And they wonder why they're so like, how is it that this person has millions of followers and so on. And the reason is actually because they're doing such a poor job of communicating health information in a meaningful, clear, and like actionable way. And so it provides this enormous opportunity for someone to just show up and kind

of just say whatever and grab a huge,. But let me push back against that because they're just, how would someone who's a legitimate professor make some kind of an impact online? Come on my podcast. But that's maybe the only way. You'd have to find an established portal or create your own. And that's a long, laborious task of building up an audience and providing them with good content and hopefully getting on a podcast where people building up an audience and providing them with good content and hopefully getting on a podcast where people like have a large audience and an appetite for that kind of

a thing. Or, I mean, or more realistically go on your podcast. I mean, that's what I was saying. I mean, yeah. I mean, I think that what, you know, what you do and to some extent what I do, what Lex does, and then of course there are others is, you know, try and provide a venue for people that would otherwise be locked away in their laboratories or locked away in their clients to get information out there and to have someone across the table for them like this, you know, kind of pushing and, you know, saying, but tell me more. Like, what exactly? What do we know? What don't we know? Mice are humans.

You know, like how many people? This kind of thing. Because in the absence of that, I really think that people are just left to kind of, there's a kind of gravitational pull towards the thing that's most sensational. So they go, oh, like maybe just eating testicles is like the key to a good life, or maybe just eating plants is the only way to live and be healthy. And I think that there are, I mean, there's incredible science and incredible medicine. And I think most, at least my experience has been that most scientists want to share what they know. We've never had someone tell us no. And we've had Howard Hughes

investigators. We've had, you know, we've got a few future Nobel prize winners and Nobel prize winners coming. You've had dozens more than we ever have. I've learned so much from Shana, from, I found out about, you know, Atiyah, I mean, Matt Walker, David Sinclair. I mean, it goes on and on, you know, I mean, you can list it off. I think that scientists want to be heard I think they really do they just they need the opportunity yeah but I mean but saying that they've done a poor job I don't think it's because they've done a poor job it's because that's not what they do I mean that the quibbling on social media oh yeah that's I think a lot of that is just frustration because if someone does spend their time researching and writing papers and you know you'll see papers online with like a thousand views, two thousand views.

And these, you know, how many people are looking at these peer reviewed papers? Yeah, they're not reading them. Right. I mean, those of us in the game of science, I still run a lab, so I'm familiar with this. It's the number of people that will actually read a paper start to finish who are qualified to parse what's in there is you can count on one hand, maybe two. And for really, you know, blockbuster papers that have a huge impact, that number might get into the hundreds or thousands. Right. So when someone starts talking about like, how does this person have millions of followers? Well, it's because people have an appetite for these things. And if you

don't like that, that person has millions of followers and you's because people have an appetite for these things and if you don't like that that person has millions of followers and you wish you had more it doesn't just magically come to you you have to put in effort it's like it's like someone wanting to be a touring comedian they go that person sucks why are they selling out everywhere why why aren't i well because you're not even on the road you fucking idiot like this is the same kind of conversation You're having with these scientists Yeah Like if someone's upset at you and the thing about the social media the the bickering that I do see The one thing that it does do is make me know that you are an extremely flawed person this person who is like

Concentrating whether it's nutrition or whatever it is which which I agree with you, there is this weird sort of... I don't know what that's about. It's wanting attention. It's not feeling you're getting enough attention for your own research and then finding whatever one thing that you think someone's doing wrong and going after them and attacking them. And then there's also people that are legitimately upset that people are pushing out fake information and bullshit. Like, Lane Norton's great for that.

Oh, yeah. He's always got, like, someone's pissing him off. Oh, yeah. We've exchanged a few notes online. He actually, I saw him on, I think it was a Tia's podcast, and he did a masterful job of explaining nutrition. Actually, his persona on podcasts is very different than his social media presence. Yeah, he's a little extreme on social media, but he's a great guy.

Yeah, he's very smart. Yeah, very smart guy. And he actually, we align on this thing about eating organs directs those nutrients to specific organs. He doesn't believe that either. And he actually used to work on amino acid labeling of proteins and things like that. No, he's a good example of where somebody can straddle both sides. But he likes to mock a lot of charlatans because there's quite a few. Sure.

I mean, and he does a really good job at finding those people and pointing those things out. But that's the thing is that there's this appetite for information. So when someone comes along and says something that's counter to what everyone's been told, it reinforces this desire to have like, oh, there's some secret information out there that I didn't know about. All I have to do is eat testicles, and I'll have more testicle power. Like, that kind of shit is, like, for whatever reason, very attractive to people. Yeah. So it's very important that someone in his...

I'm not talking about him when I'm talking about bickering, really. I'm talking about some, like, very bizarre characters that haven't developed these online followings, but try really hard to get them. And I also think there's probably a bunch of like social issues that these people have as well. But, you know, he's, he does a great job of mocking these folks and, and like a good counter to some of these more preposterous claims that you do see very, very prevalent, particularly in the alternative health space. You know,

you see it from a lot of these like vegan people and all these alternative health people? It's like, there's so much horseshit going on. There's so much weird nonsense that these people push and that's how they make their, you know, that's how they get attention. Yeah. Well, and Lane has done, for instance, a pretty good job of using kind of more sensational like content to combat sensational content. So he does these like, Oh, and these, you know, that's not the style that I use. Although I will say he called me out on something that's worth mentioning. Cause I think I was grateful that he did. I mentioned in a tweet that there, there is evidence that alcohol can increase the aromatization of testosterone, estrogen. And he pointed out quite correctly that it depends on

dose and there might be some individual variation. So that's where like someone saying, wait a second, hold on, that's not the whole story, allowed me to see data that I wasn't aware of and made it more clear. So that to me is a great example of the use of social media to bring a more nuanced conversation about. And I actually wrote to him and thanked him. And don't, well, you're great about that. I've seen you do that before when, but that's also science right science is like you have a certain amount of data and you discuss that data and then someone else who has a deeper understanding of it can maybe point to

some other study that maybe you weren't aware of and you add that to it as long as it everyone's not dogmatic but when you get into the heavy-duty carnivore space and you get into the heavy-divore space and you get into the heavy duty vegan space my problem with a lot of that is it's very dogmatic and a lot of people claim that they have all the answers to all the things like you know paul saladino likes to do is this bullshit like you ever see that yeah there's like little yeah it's the bullshit thing yeah well he does no he does these things on social media like olive oil is olive oil throws it yeah well he talks about this is what's wrong with this the

defense chemicals the this the that the that this he's very committed to like a complete animal based diet the guy looks great he does look to be in great shape and i asked him straight up i just said listen are you on trt of any kind and he said nope and he's in his 40s and he said he looks really healthy yeah he looks very healthy he He's also, but very active, constantly working out. Yeah, I mean, moved to Costa Rica just so he could surf every day, you know, and like live in the jungle and eat like organic papayas and shit. Doing really well. You know, he's obviously, whatever he's doing, one thing he's not doing, he's not poisoning

his body with junk food. He's not eating bullshit and processed sugar and nonsense. And he's very physically active and he's getting a lot of sun exposure. So all those things that we know to be absolutely without a doubt beneficial, he's incorporating all those into his life. So he's got all that. Now, would he be just as healthy if he ate a salad every day? I don't know. I mean, I don't think you would be unhealthy. I don't think salads are bad for you. No, I love them. I think pesticides are bad. Herbicides are bad. I don't think salads are bad for you. No, I love them.

I think pesticides are bad. Herbicides are bad. And I think if you get that shit in your salad, that could be an issue. Well, one of the things that I believe, and this is really hybridizing, as we say, nerdy speak for crossing over two separate things. I think that people that have a lot of different kinds of friends can look at any conversation about politics or about guns or about nutrition in a more nuanced way. I've always enjoyed, I believe this is you as well, speculating here, but this is what I see is that, I've got friends who are hippies, punk rockers,

Republicans, Democrats, libertarians, gun owners, gun haters, all of it. By being friends with a lot of different kinds of people, you just kind of get, you just come to understand, as you put it once to me, and I really internalized this, like it's about people, right? What the dogmatic stuff is when you, you know, 99% of your friends are of one orientation or another, your worldview just shrinks to the size of an atom. There's also a problem with people wanting to be right, you know, and they want, they want to win. to be right, you know, and they want to win. Like if you believe that the Democratic Party is the only way forward for a rational, peaceful society, and you have this confirmation bias that

only the Democrats have the answers to this, to that, the other things, or if you're a person that believes in God and the Republicans and we need the First and Second Amendment and this and that. And you're so committed. People get so committed to these ideas that they're not willing to entertain any other idea and then they fight rigorously. They fight as if you're defending your own life, your own soul. You don't fight. You don't discuss these things on the merits of their, whether or not this is a good concept or that's a good concept. You're literally almost arguing

for your very existence being valid. And it's very strange because people equate themselves, they attach themselves to ideas. And when their idea gets challenged, they get emotional. They get excited. They get angry. They get aggressive. And it's so sad to watch, especially as people get older. When I see like a 60-year-old man who gets hyper aggressive and starts yelling at people about ideas, it's like, God damn it. Calling people morons, calling people assholes.

It's like, just talk about the idea. Just don't, God damn it. Calling people morons, calling people assholes. It's like, just talk about the idea. Just don't attach yourself to it. Talk about the idea. You'll look far better. You'll appear far more intelligent. It's a far more evolved way to communicate about things. But so many people are just completely incapable of it. When they're challenged on their ideas, they can never say, I'm wrong. They can never say, oh, I was incorrect. I thought this. They don't have, they literally don't have the ability to do that. They will find some way to try to pretend that they were wrong or that they weren't wrong.

It's very bizarre. It is bizarre. I mean, I immediately think of like neuroplasticity is robust early in life and it tapers off, right? And they're, you know, brilliant people like Richard Feynman, the great theoretical physicist. I mean, he was known for doing crazy things, bongo drumming naked on the roof of Caltech, but also decided to become an artist, not a great one, but an artist late in life. Or he also wrote a lot of theorems and did his work in strip bars in Pasadena. He loved being among different types of people. And he believed, and he wrote a lot about this, that remaining curious, genuinely curious,

and I define curiosity as being interested in something without being attached to the outcome. You legitimately want to find out what's on the other side. That that maintains this youthfulness and this plasticity. And I think when one approaches a conversation of any kind from the stance of I don't want to find out, I want to be shown to be right. Curiosity is dead. And that, I mean, I think that's tragic.

It's just very difficult to get people to sit down and have civil conversations when they have hot-button topics that they're opposed to. Like if one person is a hardcore right-wing and one person's a hardcore left-wing, to have them sit down and have calm, rational conversations is incredibly difficult because everybody wants to win. Everybody wants to, because you're literally defending yourself. You're defending, it's not just an idea. Like say, if you want to talk about the first amendment and whether or not freedom of speech should be, uh, like the first amendment protection should be, um, extended to social media or whether or not social media should be thought like things the First Amendment protection should be extended to social media, or whether or not social media should be thought, like, things like Twitter,

which is it the town square, or is it a private company? Like, these kind of discussions, like, people will get fucking emotional and furious and angry and ad hominems. And they lose jobs. I mean, grown adults throw themselves on the stake. It's so wild. It's crazy. It's wild, but it's also indicative of what we are as a human species. Like, we have this incredibly strong desire for validation, an incredibly strong desire to have our ideas reinforced.

Not challenged, because we attach our idea to our own self-value and our own self-worth. I've done my very best to distance myself from that as much as possible. And as I've gotten older and had more of these kinds of conversations, I've gotten better and better at it. You seem like you straddle multiple viewpoints

on a number of things or willing to have that. I was curious, has anyone ever walked out of here like it felt so confronted that they just would? No, I'm nice. If I don't get along with somebody, there's been people that I wanted to attack, believe me. Or that you wanted to walk out of here. Well, no, some people that I've just,

I'm like, God, you're so sloppy and lazy. Like these thoughts are just so weak. And then I will see them, you know, talk about the experience on Twitter. And I'm like, oh my God, you're just so lucky I didn't go after you. Because it's like there's so many people that have these sloppy, lazy ideas and they exist in these echo chambers. Well, this is one place where I think a scientific training is useful, independent of whether or not one decides to become a career scientist. When you take your so-called oral defense examination, you get up there and there's five or six different faculty and you're qualifying exam.

And they ask you questions until you say, I don't know. The idea is to find where your cliff is. Right, right. Like the moment that you start wondering and stumbling, that's when you actually know you're doing a good job. I mean, you don't want to do that too early, but they'll ask crazy questions, hard questions that are unrelated to anything you think you should have have to prepare. And I sit on these committees now. I sit on the other side of the fence. Social media for me has actually become a good kind of repeat of my qualifying exam because occasionally something comes in that I go, wow, I'd never thought about it that way. You're

absolutely right. But the moment you say, I don't know, that's when you are allowed to pass up to the next level in science. It's not when you know, it's when you are willing to admit that you don't know that they say now you can go pursue a dissertation. Then you do a dissertation and then you have to defend it. And everyone thinks, oh, you have to defend it by showing it's watertight. You actually defend it. But a really good defense committee, we all meet beforehand and we're like, how are we going to beat this guy or this gal up? But a really good defense committee, we all meet beforehand and we're like, how are we going to beat this guy or this gal up? And we decide we're going to find where the leaks are and get them to admit that their study is wonderful, perhaps, but not perfect.

And then you become a doctor of science. Then you trust them. That's right. Because you trust that they're only interested in information that's factual. They're only interested in the facts. They're not interested in just getting their ideas reinforced. That's right. interested in the facts. They're not interested in just getting their ideas reinforced. That's right.

But it's a complicated dance that human beings do because your ego is involved and your reputation is involved. And for a lot of people, that's a lot of who they are. A lot of who they are is how other people see them. There's a lot of folks out there that day to day, their life depends. I mean, I'm sure you've met people that got offended by something that doesn't seem logical to be offended by. I attempted to raise the story, but I'm not going to because I don't want to draw fire again. But no, I once credited a colleague who was an amazing colleague. And someone picked up on something in the article about them that was totally unrelated and was of the times. And it was like suddenly the conversation has shifted completely. And then you realize it's all about them. It actually has nothing to do about the topic. And that's where I think

things can get really diverted. I mean, I tend to not respond to comments too often. Occasionally, you know, thanks for your interest in science and like give people, cue people to an episode. I do not get into online debates. I'm happy to do it on a podcast, but I don't do it in comment section. It's too hard. It's a shitty way to communicate too. You know, if you sit down across from someone, you look them eye to eye and have a conversation, people tend to be more civil. They tend to be more kind. It's so easy to be shitty with text over Twitter. It's just so easy. And so many people engage in it. I was watching a friend of mine who's a comedian arguing with people engage in it. I was watching a friend of mine as a comedian Arguing with people back and forth. I was gonna reach out to him and I was gonna go in what the fuck are you doing?

Don't do that so bad for you, too And I'm looking at his timeline and it's like this is taking place over many hours in his day I'm like bro that hour those hours You're never gonna get back and that day's gone that case that day's toast and you're arguing with people about some shit that has very little to do with you it's more to do with your ideological position like you're standing in this whatever group you're in right or left yeah and as a creator the goal is always to create new and better what it works and so it really does seem like a a true time sink well it is a time, and it's also like your time is fucking valuable. You're giving your time to something, and that's robbing you of effort.

It's robbing you of whatever you could be doing to increase your proficiency in something, increase your knowledge and your enjoyment doing things you enjoy. You don't fucking enjoy arguing with people on Twitter that you don't even know. That crazy yeah i didn't become a lawyer for a reason i don't really you know i actually have rules for my engagement on social media and the podcast i always try and put out information that's really about the audience i want them to benefit it's not about me like you know occasionally that can get murky because you'll say you know i you know i learned this thing and it can seem like it's about you. But it's really about them getting something that I think will be useful to them.

And the other one is I know I don't generally get angry anyway. There are things in life that make me angry, but I never bring that to the table. That's very important. Now, when you're talking about all these things for optimizing health and fitness and performance, how much of obviously you're very fit and you work out a lot, but how much of your own body and your own experiences do you use, like do you experiment on these things so that you could have more data or you could have at least anecdotal data? Absolutely, I mean I try and do as many things.

So I'm right, I mean just at a top contour, I'm lift every other day, run on the days I don't lift. That's kind of like lift run. And what about your recovery stuff? I do. I get into the cold. I hit that 11 minute threshold per week by getting in three or four, three minute sessions in the cold. I do have a barrel sauna. So I'll try and get in there for an hour total per week or more. Yeah. So you have to go get ice. No, no. I have a, I have a different one. I have a plunge. I don't have any like commercial relationship, but the plunge, it makes it look like a bathtub, porcelain tub. So I use a cold plunge. There's no ice actually floating in there. So I'll get in there. So I do the cold, I do the heat. I lift every other day for about

45 minutes or an hour. How cold is your cold thing? It goes to, I said it about 45. I'm not as tough as you and Cam and I'll catch up. It's not a tough thing. You can do it. You just get used to it. You know, so I'll do that. So you do that for 11 minutes a week? Yeah. And I eat, you know, between 11 a.m. and 8 p.m. I know right now intermittent fasting became really controversial recently because there was a study showing that there's no additional benefit of fasting for weight loss as compared to caloric restriction.

Right. But that's weight loss. There's other benefits. Yeah, clearly. And that set off a storm. And it was a storm I was happy to sidestep and enjoy, watch, go by. Because it was really interesting that the headline in the New York Times was, frankly, was terrible because it said, study shows no benefit to intermittent fasting. But what the actual finding was is that the study showed no additional benefit to fasting over caloric restriction for obesity. For law. Right. Fox News got it right in this case.

And I have no bias. I don't subscribe to any of these things. So canceled all my subscriptions. The New York Times got it. Fox News got it right. And then that sort of science. How did Fox News got it right and then that sort of science but how did Fox News label it they said no additional benefit I believe or something like that

to fasting over caloric restriction for weight loss or something like that something very true to the concluding arguments of the paper the other ones were really designed to like say fasting bad and you know like here you've got millions and millions of people have now figured out a way to control their appetite because they're better at eating nothing for certain periods of day than eating like half the muffin. Because there's all these neural mechanisms. When you start ingesting food, there's this desire to eat more food. And for some people, not eating for a period is better than eating.

And then some of the smaller news sites got it somewhere in the middle. But so I do. I'll eat my first meal somewhere around 11 a.m. But occasionally I'll have like a protein drink at nine if I'm really starving when I wake up. But I do those things. I do the red light therapy. I stand in front of the red light to get the eye benefits.

And I don't, I'm not trying to heal acne or anything, but I just kind of do it all over my body anyway, early in the day, a few times a week. I definitely have a, what I call non-sleep deep rest protocol. So instead of naps and meditation, I'll listen to like a yoga nidra script, or I'll do some sort of hypnosis script

three or four times a week to just do what I call deliberate decompression, to just take my mind into a space, not unlike the one you were describing for cannabis for some people, where I'm just like not thinking about anything. In order to reset, there's an amazing study out of Scandinavia, a hospital in Denmark

did this study in humans showing that with positron emission tomography imaging, so brain imaging in humans showed that a 30-minute yoga nidra, so just lying down and listening to this deep relaxation script, increased dopamine resting levels in an area of the brain called the striatum by 65%, basically putting people into a state where they're ready for action again, when they come out of it, I find it incredibly rejuvenating. The CEO of Google has written about NSDR, non-sleep deep rest. That's an acronym I coined because I didn't like the words yoga, Nidra and meditation

all sounds kind of magic carpety and acts as a barrier for people. So I'll do NSDR almost every day, 10 to 30 minutes. What else do I do? I dim the lights at night. I make sure I get sunlight in the morning. I try and eat well, good, minimally processed or unprocessed foods. What else? I try and do some stretching.

I try and stretch and do that sort of thing. And I'm also really trying to avoid toxic people in interactions. That helps a lot. Helps a lot. That's real. It's huge. And I think one of the probably the biggest surprise in researching the podcast over the last 18 months, because that's, we did it for Thanksgiving. I thought, okay, it's going to be thanking people and things. It turns out that if you look at the research on gratitude, first of all, the increases in dopamine and serotonin and feelings of subjective well-being from people that have a regular effective gratitude practice, we'll talk about what that is, is immense. It's immense. These are skyrocket effects. These are skyrocket effects. What is the most effective gratitude practice?

It turns out it's not sitting there and being thankful. It's receiving gratitude or observing someone else receiving gratitude. I thought that gratitude was all about being grateful. It's actually receiving gratitude or observing some instance in which somebody is receiving genuine gratitude. Totally surprised me. But and so this means give gratitude, right? Give thanks, but also be in a position to receive thanks. And so these kind of nuanced things might seem small, but one thing I try and do is, you know, I try and since I can't walk around

asking for gratitude and that's not my style, I like to think my ego is at least slightly more in check than that. I try and really let people that I care about and I'm grateful to know that, but I do that for them, not for me. And so that's something I pay a lot of attention to. It feels kind of weak sauce. It's kind of like people go, oh, that's kind of like weenie stuff, like gratitude.

The data show that gratitude and avoiding toxic people and focusing on good quality social interactions, physical contact with animals, kids, and loved ones, like, you know, the huge increases in serotonin, oxytocin. These are no longer the kinds of things that are just talked about at the end of a yoga class, right? This is real science with brain imaging and measurements of chemicals from the brain and blood.

And so I've tried to incorporate more of that stuff that isn't as kind of forward center of mass, you know, like, oh, get after it kind of stuff. I do't as kind of forward center of mass, you know, like get after it kind of stuff. I do that stuff, but I also try and, you know, have a good life and surround myself with good people. Well, just think about the way it makes you feel when you're around good people and you enjoy your time. You feel better while you're doing it. That's got to be good for you when you're depressed and things are bad and you're lonely and you feel shitty. Like that doesn't feel good.

Like that has to have some sort of effect on your physiology. depressed and things are bad and you're lonely and you feel shitty, like that doesn't feel good. Like that has to have some sort of a effect on your physiology. Well, I think of it, it absolutely does. And I think of it as not just good in the present, but it's also buffering me and everyone who does these sorts of things against the inevitable, right? I mean, shit happens and people die and terrible things happen. And, and so in order to be in the best position to really see that stuff and react to it in the best possible way and also continue to move forward and do what's important to me in life, I feel like all the stuff I'm doing is great in the day to day. But it's also about the long term arc. I mean, my parents are getting to the age. Look, I hope they live to be another 20 years more. But chances are they're going to go in the next 20 years.

I hope they live to be another 20 years more, but chances are they're going to go in the next 20 years. I want to be in the best position to support them. And I want to be able to be the best position to support me, frankly, as well. So I think that doing all this stuff positions us to be, you know, like leaders and supporters of ourselves and of other people. And I know that all sound kind of like, you know, word mumbo jumbo, but it's the day you've talked about this before. It's the daily rituals.

Like none of the things I described are something that you can just take and it's all done. And of course I do take supplements. So, you know, we advertise these. So sure. But I take omegas and I take athletic greens and I take some Tonga Ali and I do as many of the things as I possibly can. I actually really enjoy that stuff. And I think they're good data on all of it. If you're one is willing to look and be open-minded, but even if you don't have access to those things, there's so much that you can do with sunlight, exercise, gratitude, hydration, yoga, nidra, 90% of the really effective things don't cost anything except time. It's just time and discipline. But when we're talking about there's another there's a benefit to what we're talking about

with intermittent fasting is that you give yourself structure. And that's very important for people, even for people that are disciplined. I find myself, when I have a full day off and I don't have to do anything, I find myself putting off my workout until later and later in the day. And then I kind of lazily get through my workout and I go, oh my God, I'm better off when I'm busy. Because when I'm busy, I have a structure. And I think there's a thing about like, I used to think that, or I do still think that about like sober October. Like when we do sober October, I'm not drinking or doing anything for one month. And that structure helps me, you know? And I think when you say,

oh, I'm going to cut back on my drinking, what does that even mean? Everybody I know that says that. Because I'm not a drinker. Although these days I'm hearing a lot about all these delicious whiskeys in Texas. And I don't have a problem with alcohols. I'm always willing to try. Yeah, well, they're not really delicious. They're delicious in comparison to whiskey. Kool-Aid tastes way better.

What alcohol do you actually enjoy? I enjoy whiskey, but I wouldn't say it's delicious. Then why drink it? Because of the way it makes you feel? I like the way it makes me feel. I like a little bit of the flavor. I do. It's a different thing. It's a smooth weirdness to a whiskey. But steak is delicious. Steak is delicious. There's a difference. I wouldn't say a whiskey is delicious, even if it's great whiskey.

And I don't smoke, but I have to say I used to smoke the occasional cigarette when I was in graduate school. And gosh, I miss nicotine. Nicotine's great. I love the taste of tobacco. You ever try a vape pen? No, I'm afraid to do that. Why? Because I think I'll just attach that thing surgically to my mouth.

I mean, I know where that line is for me. It's clarity of mind, clarity and energy, adrenaline, nicotine. Those are vices for me. Cigarettes give you a wild head rush. I like that head rush. But I've found that there's some really good vape pens that give you that head rush, and I don't feel like they're going to fuck your lungs up as bad. But kids are vaping like crazy now, and that's got to be bad.

It's not good. Well, they're also doing it all day long, and some of them are doing it with those lunchbox ones, those gigantic, those big vape boxes. You ever seen them? They're huge. Some of these vape pens, they're not pens. I call them vape pens.

They're as big as a cell phone but thicker. Wow. And they have this big robot dick hanging off off of it and they're sucking on this thing and blowing giant clouds of vape smoke a lot of things can be overdone right but that's also the case with fast food if you want to eat fast food all day good luck you're gonna have a fucking heart attack it's gonna be terrible for you i don't think i've had a fast food in ages i think i watched your election night episode and there were and there was like all the comments coming through where about there, there might've been a fast food hamburger on the table. No, filet of fishes. We had a couple of filet. I love filet of fishes.

McDonald's filet of fish. Oh, they're delicious. Terrible for you. But it was one of those things was like, I don't do that every day. I don't even do that every week. I don't even do that every month. No, clearly you take good care of yourself. I mean, for me, the vices that are, you know, like croissants, pizza. Oh, yeah. Back to that. Oh, yeah. But the first drag off a freshly rolled cigarette is like nothing else. It's crazy, right?

It's unbelievable. The clarity of mind and the taste and, you know, cigarettes smell disgusting. Why don't you just only have a first drag? Impossible. Impossible. You might have a problem. It's like first drag of a cigarette drag? Impossible. Impossible. You might have a problem. It's like first drag of a cigarette, one tattoo, you know,

it's like, come on, you know, it's impossible. Impossible. You can't have one Lay's chips, right? Yeah, one Pringle or whatever it is. What vices do you have? Do you have vices? Adrenaline used to be a vice.

You know, I used to... Do risky behaviors adrenaline used to be a vice you know i i used to do risky behaviors not risky in the you know in the uh illegal sense but stuff yeah i mean i went kjx shark dive and loved every second of it great white sharks and you know until i had an air failure down there what happened i had to call over another diver and do the share air thing and holy i was alone in the cage oh my god i went with my buddy my buddy Michael Muller who's this fantastic photographer like celebrity photographer, but he also Takes pictures of sharks. We were studying fear. So we decided to go to VR of Great Whites of Guadalupe I went the first year stayed in the cage didn't exit. We got my scuba certification second year

this is 2017 went out bunch of a bunch of friends, Brian McKenzie, who's kind of a performance guy and former SEAL team guy. Anyway, we're out there. I'm in the cage. Three divers leave to do the cage exit thing with their film, the VR. And I was just, I'm on the hookah line. And then at some point. What's a hookah line? It's like a, it's a line up to the surface that you're breathing oxygen oh but i was alone in the cage i've been there the year before so the sharks are

coming in all over the place and they're huge i mean the girth is insane but i'm in the cage and they're out of the cage and then all of a sudden and i got no air i'm like jesus christ so i look up and the the hose had kind of boa constricted up on itself. So I was like, oh, should I pop up? Remember no scuba on me, cause I'm just in the cage. And the things like concrete, clink, clink, clink. And you're down 40 feet below the surface. So like, oh God.

So I dropped down to the corner. There's a spare tank down there. Open it up, nothing, nothing comes out. It's empty? It's empty. So I go to the other reserve tank, open it up, nothing. Okay. So now I'm, I'm screwed. So I'm getting real. I haven't had any air in a little bit, but probably only 10, 15 seconds, but freaking out. So I get up on top of the cage.

I've got a weight belt on and I'm like, okay, I guess I shoot for the surface because I can see the boat up there. Cause if I stay down here, I'm clearly going to die. And then I'm thinking, okay, well, shooting for the surface is exactly what they like. Are they going to eat? You know, you're just kind of, I started to kind of panic a bit. Oh, Jesus. And at that point, one of the divers, yeah.

Oh, yeah, that's me there. That's while I'm in the cage. See, they're big. They're big animals. And how are they attracting these fish? You're not allowed to chum so um they just come in they're super as i mean uh so yeah well you film that from the cage so that was meat though yeah so you can you can keep tuna up on the surface but we're down in the

deep cage there's a surface cage in a deep cage so then what happened yeah muller shot that for our vr in the lab so then what happened was this guy, Brock, who's one of the divers, that's Mueller. Mueller wears a yellow suit to look more like a tuna so they come closer. Oh, fuck. Yeah, yeah, he's a, you guys would get along. He's a longtime Hollywood guy who's a kind of a photographer

who does these adventures. So then one of the divers saw me and I was like, you know, like I need air and he kind of looked at me, but, and so he kicked his way back over, but that was a long wait. And then we did the share air thing, but now two divers are out and we're there sharing air. And there's only so much air before you eventually run out and there's nothing in the reserves. Eventually they came back and then we, we pulled the rope and got out and it was, yeah, it was enough of a scary experience for me that I was like, Oh God. So we, and actually I got out and a guy from the SEAL teams came over to me, super calm,

typical of those guys. He was like, so what do you take away from that experience? And I was like, check the safety tanks. He was like, check the safeties. But I will say this, I'm not tough. Like this is not to kind of, you know, inflate myself. But the next day I woke up and I was seriously freaked out. And so I actually went down the next day again and I cage exited. And the reason I did it is because, first of all, when I cage exited, I was on scuba. So I felt totally contained. I knew I wasn't going to die of an air failure. And the other reason is everything we know about trauma and the treatment of trauma is that if you live with that bug in your brain about quote unquote,

almost dying, in fact, I don't even like to say that, that's stuck in you. So I went down there in the cage and then I cage exited. And- Well, you keep saying cage exited. Swam out of the cage with the sharks. Turns out when they're swimming at you, if you swim toward them, they bank off.

If you don't, if you shoot for the surface or something, they go, oh, you're prey and they can go after you but if you just swim toward them then they bank off pretty early So, how do you get to the surface? Well, you get back in the cage to get back up so you get into the cage at the top They lower it in crane right then you all go out on scuba Mm-hmm, and then you're swimming around getting video the sharks come at you you go at them and then you're swimming around getting video. The sharks come at you. You go at them, and then they bank off. Okay, so you're saying you cage exited, meaning you swam around with them with the scuba deer,

not you went to the surface. Correct. The next day I woke up, and I was just so distraught about what had happened the day before, I decided there's only one way to deal with this, and that's to cage exit, to go down there, but this time leave the cage, and this time leave it on scuba. And then it felt like a victory, right? I'm here.

And so, but when you go up to the surface, do you go back in the cage to go back up to the surface? Yes. Yes. Because you don't want to just swim up to the top because they might bite your legs off. Correct. But in the culture of cage exit, great white shark diving, there's an interesting twist. For years, guys have been going out to Guadalupe and doing this stuff. It's a real kind of machismo culture. Who can get closest? Who can get the camera almost into the shark's mouth, et cetera? And for years, there was a lot of kind of one-upping and posting things online.

And then a couple of years ago, out of what seemed like nowhere, Ocean Ramsey, this female free diver shark expert, shows on BBC video her swimming with no scuba with the biggest great white shark anyone's ever seen. I think they call it big blue and she's holding on to the fins. So all these guys, like all this testosterone of like, I cage exited and I got this close and that close. And here comes this lady and she just demolishes the scene. Like no one has done what she's done. This shark is so big. This is, this is her. This is insane.

Her husband shot this footage from what I understand. Oh my God. Imagine your wife doing this and you're going, baby, what are you doing? So she doesn't even have fucking scuba gear on. She's holding on to this shark. So,

you know, it doesn't seem to mind either. I mean, when I look at this, I get nervous. It's also beautiful. But what I love about it is there was so much pigeon chesting around. She looks like a fish too. I would eat her.

If I was a shark, even the way her legs are with that outfit on, she looks delicious. Look at the size of that thing. Biggest one ever seen on record. Really? Yeah. How big is it? I don't know. I mean, a 10 or 12,

oh, there's someone else. A 10 or 12 foot shark is a big shark because the girth is what's freaky, right? That's probably a 16 foot shark. I'm probably going to get this wrong. I'm sure the sharkanistas will come after me. Fuck all that. Look at this.

She's petting it or he's petting it. Yeah, these people are out of their fucking mind. Yeah, they're out of their minds the um You're just lucky. It's not hungry right and There are a lot of tuna out there So Guadalupe is an amazing place It's just a big rock jutting up out of the ocean and I wanted to learn the history of this place turns out that if this is true what I was told by one of the local officials is that some politics playing with them, those dolphins are fucking with them. Some politician in Mexico, his wife had an affair with some guy and apparently they put the guy out there on the island. But the island is known. Maybe that's just lore. But people were spearfishing out there and getting eaten.

They were putting the bloody fish on their hip and getting munched. And so they realized this is filled with great whites. And when you drop anchor there, it's like, I remember every time going out there, I've been there twice now. I was thinking, oh, we're not going to see any sharks. You drop anchor, a shark breaches. They're just, they're everywhere. It's just shark suit.

Is it just because of the high amount of tuna? Tuna, and I think they probably breed near there. There's something called Shark Cafe, which is not far from there that oceanographers like to study. Anyway. Anyway. So that's one of your adrenaline things. Yeah, that's right. So you asked me.

Yeah. So I used to do stuff like that, which is frankly stupid, right? Because I make my living on land and I'd like to someday have a family and all that kind of stuff. And that's not productive for that sort of thing. So yeah, that sort of thing is the kind of thing that I should avoid if I'm going to have a long life. Jamie, who are you telling me that someone got their hand bitten

off? One of them jackass guys? Yeah, you didn't want to watch the video, but yeah. And jackass. Like the promo during Shark Week. Got it bitten off? Not off. Not off. It got... Mangled? Bitten, I guess. and it was fucked up, and he had to have surgery, and I believe he still has his hand.

Those guys are crazy, shooting themselves out of cannons. That kind of thing never appealed to me, but I'm not a fighter. I got in fights when I was a kid. I loved the clarity of mind that came from the adrenaline. It was boxing in ring, so it's fun. But I think as a 46-year- know and where my you know that my brain is my living this kind Yeah, not good to get hit in the head. What are your vices?

Yeah, I do like junk food occasionally. I do like to drink Probably more than I should enjoy the problem is I do shows all the time there are nightclubs and You know we have a couple cocktails. And then next thing you know, a couple is three or four. And then we do podcasts. And podcasts a lot of times would be drinking. If it's anything that I should do less of, it's definitely booze.

But I'm around a very boozy culture. You know, a lot of my friends drink and drink pretty hard. And when it comes to how many of them are actually healthy, it's a fucking small number. I always worry about the number of suicides among comedians or early deaths like the Belushi thing. Now, granted, I'm not really aware or Richard Pryor or things like that. It seems like stuff hits early in that community. Well, the Belushi thing and the Pryor thing are probably both related to drugs. You know, I was around Pryor in his dying days, unfortunately,

because when he was doing really poorly, he decided to go back on stage. And I think it's like, you know, to try to recapture his lost love. You know, his body was failing him. And so the thing that excited him or got him at least to give him some sort of sense of purpose was to go back at the comedy store and I worked with him for about five maybe six weeks where he was going up all the time and I was always going on after him so it'd be Richard Pryor than me um and so I got to see him uh they had to carry him to the stage and then they had to carry him to the stage and then they

had to put him in the chair and then they had to crank up the sound like like to you he was really loud because his voice was you know he had no energy and I remember thinking like he's not old enough for this like whatever this neural neurologically degenerative disease that he has, like whether that happened because he was, you know, had a genetic propensity, predisposition for this, or whether it's because of a lot of cocaine. Because I know a lot of people, I don't know if they're related,

but I know a lot of people that did a lot of cocaine in the 70s and the 80s, and they developed some serious neurological problems as they got older. Sure. And what it's mixed in with. I mean, one thing we know for sure is that amphetamines kill neurons. Yeah. There's no question. Wouldn't cocaine have a similar effect?

It seems likely. Seems very likely. I mean, the early studies of MDMA and whether or not it was neurotoxic actually had one of them had to be retracted because they accidentally used a amphetamine and cocaine like substance instead. Accidentally in these monkeys and they showed neurodegeneration. How did they accidentally confuse MDMA with that? Laboratories are, you know, human error is a big thing. You mean COVID-19? Is that what you're saying?

You're saying the Wuhan lab? You're saying that. That's another discussion. Although, you know, I mean, look, my lab works with pseudorabies virus, with different herpes viruses, with different adenoviruses. Humans pipette those viruses. Their reason you have biosafety protocols. It's because people make errors and protocols prevent error. So these people accidentally gave these animals an amphetamine.

Right. And then later they discovered that what they had given them was not what they thought. And so they quite responsibly retracted that paper. There is evidence that high doses of any highly dopaminergic drugs, cocaine, amphetamine, things of that sort, can be neurotoxic. If you make neurons really, really active, exceedingly active, they will die, right? They're electrical cells. They're electrically active cells. They can die. Excitotoxicity. Excitotoxicity. There's also neurotoxicity. I mean, there's all sorts of ways that this can happen. And yeah, I'm not saying that Michael J. Fox has Parkinson's because he was a cocaine user. I mean, I saw the movie Bright Lights, Big City. I don't know if he was actually a cocaine user or not. He was in that movie, but we've seen, I mean, amazing talent. Like I'm a huge Joe Strummer fan, Clashman. Strummer was an amazing, you know, died so young of a heart attack, known amphetamine user, right? Sadly. Michael J. Fox and Parkinson's. Is that related to recreational drug abuse?

I don't know if he did anything. I don't know. I always think family ties. So I think of like this really conservative kid. So I'm not saying he did. But Pryor or John Candy, I don't know if Candy was. Candy was enormous. It was so obese.

That doesn't help. And John Belushi died of a speedball. He died of mixing cocaine and heroin, the same thing the River Phoenix died from. Yeah. I mean, there's a susceptibility. Guys I grew up with, and these names won't mean anything to people, but guys that were kind of famous in the San Francisco skateboarding, punk rock scene, a lot of them that died young died of heart attacks five or six years after they stopped doing a lot of cocaine. Because their body was still fucked.

heart attacks five or six years after they stopped doing a lot of cocaine. Because their body was still fucked. I think it can, I think there is evidence that it can adjust the function of calcium channels on the heart. And then later, you know, it takes a smaller insult to put them under. Anyway, that's, it's sad. I mean, it's not, as we were talking about with hormones and all the other things and light, et cetera, it's not just about the effect it has in the short term. Right.

It's the long arc. And the long arc can be negative, like we're talking about, or the long arc can be positive. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm almost 55. I'll be 55 in August. And I'm very happy that I can still use my body the way I can. Because I always assumed that when someone got to be 55, they were done. Like, your body's going to fall apart. No, it turns out the measures, and I know Atiyah talks about this in a much more sophisticated way than I can, but one's ability to get up off the ground without assistance, one's ability to jump and land, one's ability to hang from a bar for a minute. measures not unlike blood pressure and heart rate resting heart rate and things of that sort about how well your nervous system can communicate to your musculature and whether or not your musculature and ligaments and bones can handle all that and so i think being the one thing we know is that being physically active is superb at extending your life and improving your life yeah improving

your life is i mean i don't know how much you can really extend. Here's the deal. It's like we really don't have a lot of data on people that started working out when they were like in their early teens and kept going, supplementing their hormones, supplementing vitamins, supplementing, and then got into their 50s and 60s and 70s. We don't have a lot of those people. We don't. Because first of all, people don't put in that kind of effort because it's not mandatory. Right. If you're a professional athlete, you don't put in that effort because you're not going to be a professional athlete when you're 60 and 70 years old. You're just not. So a lot of times in people that are professional athletes, they get to the point where they retire.

One of the things they do is they get fat and they stop. I mean, it's really kind of bizarre. Well, this is the old thing that they used to say. You stop lifting weights, you'll, quote, unquote, turn to fat turn to fat, which is impossible because people kept eating and they stopped training. My role model in all this is actually very perhaps surprising to some people. Recently, I had Ido Pertal, you know, on the podcast. You know who my my hero is his mother. He has a video of his mother when she's in her 60s, started training at 58. And this was like seven years ago, doing pull-ups for reps, doing backbends, doing all the kind of stuff that, you know, Edo-ish stuff. But in her 60s, which means that now she's in her early 70s. And he told me that she's still doing five sets of five pull-ups, dips. That's crazy.

Like legitimate work. dips. That's crazy. Like legitimate work. And so to me, if I can do that, if I'm dipping and I'm doing pull-ups and I'm running, then I'll consider myself a winner at that age. I'm going to send you something, Jamie, my friend, Jessie. She's a stunt woman and she does Ninja Warrior. I'm going to send you her, go to Jessie Graff, G-R-A-F-F-P-W-R. She does a lot of wild shit. But you can find videos of her mom and her working out. So her mom does these ninja warrior workouts, and her mom is doing chin-ups and all kinds of wild stuff. Her mom is super, super impressive.

Like, this is her mother. Oh, look, Ocean Ramsey commented, the shark person. Ah, there you go. So they're all in a club of badasses. So I met Jessie at Taron Tactical where she was working on her gun skills. But look at her mom. Amazing. Like, swinging and catching chin-up bars and doing all this wild stuff.

And Jessie, she does those Ninja Warrior competitions and, like I said, a lot of stunt work as well. She's, like, super physically fit. But there's a bunch of videos of her mom and her going through these, like, incredible workouts together. And her mom is just amazingly fit. That's awesome. It's, like, just keep going. The thing is, like, to keep using your body. If you stop, it's very difficult to regain that kind of mobility and physical strength and coordination and your VO2 max and all that stuff. But if you don't stop and you just continue, as long as you're smart about it and you don't push yourself too hard, you don't injure yourself.

Injuries are a big problem because injuries require a long time where you're going to have to at least be semi-sedentary and let your body relax. At the very least, you're not going to be able to go full bore, which I think you kind of have to do. Your body has to know, hey, this crazy fuck wants to do this stuff all the time. We need to have that kind of mobility, that kind of physical strength, that kind of joint function. Well, I think that the transition from unfit to fit is where people see the most traumatic effects. Yes. And that should be encouraging. I have a colleague. Her name is Wendy Suzuki.

For years, she studied memory. She's at NYU. Now she's the incoming dean of students at NYU. The reason I'm so happy about that is that she's talked about and published really good scientific studies on 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise early in the day. And now she's a 10 minute cold shower person because she lives in New York, harder to get access to ice tubs and things.

Improving focus, stress resilience, cognitive function. I mean, finally, there are data to point to the fact that doing cardiovascular or weight training exercise, if it's intense enough and it comes early in the day, especially, but also if you do it late in the day, they've also shown that people's cognitive function actually goes up. This was all correlative before. It was like, well, you exercise, your heart, your cardiovascular system is better. Therefore, your brain is better. Therefore, there's this indirect effect on mood and performance. But now they know everything from grip strength to attention capacity to task switching. There are all these measures like the Stroop Stroop test of all these things of cognitive flexibility and all of that improved by physical exercise categorically over and over. It doesn't matter if it's boys, girls, men, women, what age. And so now we no longer have to speculate as to whether or not exercise is good

for the brain also. It absolutely is. And her work is now being transferred into basically curriculum for students. Her goal is that students are going to go through college, not just getting their grades, but coming out healthier than they came in. And hopefully that'll wick out to everybody, not just people in college, obviously, but we'll wick out to everybody. So they're going to be running studies, getting data from these kids. I think it's really important because I think that everything is kind of murky and kind of indirect up to a point. And now they're actually really solid data. Well, there's also this prejudice, unfortunately, that anything physical is not an intellectual pursuit, that it's almost the opposite. It's a vanity pursuit.

That's ridiculous. But that is a prejudice that many really intelligent people otherwise intelligent people have yeah, well a Colleague at Columbia has a Nobel Prize Richard Axel Play squash like multiple times per week. He used to play basketball though. He says not very well Eric Kendall Nobel Prize in first research on memory, swam a mile three times a week, now it's half a mile because he's in the late 90s, he still does it. Torsten Wiesel, Nobel Prize for vision,

my scientific great grandparents, 96 years old, still jogs every morning, 45 minutes. And still mentally sharp, right? So the smartest people, most accomplished scientists I know, all extremely physically active for decades. So whatever smart people think that physical activity is just for meatheads and jocks, they're obviously not smart enough to know how it really works. It's not that they're not smart.

It's just this unfortunate prejudice that people adopt and then have a very difficult time shedding. very difficult time shedding. You know, I think they associate physical fitness and physical activity with being a pursuit of people that are kind of like clod hoppers. Yeah, I think you're right. I think there's also a little bit of the tone that came back to me early on, like, you know, some colleagues have been really interested in like, oh, I'm really excited about, you know, eating more omegas or eating more fish or, you know, whatever, taking athletic greens, et cetera. And then some of them like, oh, it's all pills and powder kind of stuff.

They see it as over there when they don't realize that, sure, you don't need those things, but a general theme of taking care of oneself physically can translate, does translate to taking care of oneself mentally. The reverse is not true, right? Plenty of intellectual smart people who look like melted candles

Right and who function like melting it they sleep with their mouth open they have sleep apnea I mean They're they're a wreck and that wreck shows up somewhere in their 60s and I see this all the time because I've attended no fewer Than ten funerals for brilliant people you know and those funerals with one or two exceptions We're all because they took terrible care of themselves. Well, I, in my world, in the comedy world, uh, obviously I see that because most of my friends don't take care of themselves. You know, it was a good percentage of people in that world when they get to a certain age, like there's friends that are my age and they look like they're my dad. Do you, I almost wonder whether or not they somehow pair the idea that their talent and

their ability is linked to their being unhealthy Oh, yeah, there's man. She's crazy, but it's just an excuse. It's just an excuse. It really is it's like a thing I used to think that I shouldn't meditate and I Because meditation and any sort of enlightenment would fuck with my comedy Because it would somehow or another make me more peaceful and kind and that wouldn't wouldn't be good for you'd lose your edge yeah but it's really just an excuse it's just an excuse comedy is a totally different thing it's an art form it's not gonna fuck your art form up but i you know when you're young and insecure you don't really understand why you're funny at all

so you're like what if i fuck it up what if i lose it you know that's it's a fleeting thing as it is i'm only funny like five out of six times right now what you know but if you look at the top people I say you or you look at a Chappelle you look like the people that are like I talked about no like three Nobel Prize winners that their work will carry on for health and science for thousands of years if we exist that long yeah so in that top tier they get it in the lower tier I don't know but in the middle tier is where I see a lot of the the unfortunate behavior of not preserving oneself. So do you if Chappelle, Chappelle smokes and he drinks, but my God, he, he focuses on his craft. Like he really cares about comedy and he cares a lot about, and he's a really interesting, thoughtful person. He spends a lot

of time thinking, you know, he's not flippant in his perceptions and his thoughts. That's the most important thing. That's the most important thing. Focus on your craft. You know, there is a great benefit to being healthy. Great benefit in many, many, many ways. In emotional stability and your ability to have energy to keep going. And that's one of the things that I try to relay to young people that aren't that healthy but are young comics. I say, don't think of it as like, I don't want to be an athlete. I want to be a comic. Think of it as your vehicle for doing anything is your physical body. That's all you have. When you're tired, like you do two shows a night, you know, like two shows a night

is weird because like, it's not just you're doing two hours of comedy. You're doing two hours. It's like I have a seven o'clock show and maybe a nine 30 show. Right. So that means not only I'm doing an hour, but then I have to wait two and a half hours to do another hour. And then, you know, if you're not smart, I eat fruit in between. I make sure that I'm, you know, well hydrated. But I think of these things because I'm an athlete, whereas other guys, they're fucking off and they're just drinking and the second show rolls around and they're drunk and they're tired.

I've been there before and I've had bad shows because of that. It's very embarrassing. And so you have to really be careful when you're looking at your body. Don't look at it as just life. I'm just living life. No, there's a specific thing you're going to need. You're going to need to have a certain amount of energy. You're going to need to have a certain amount of tension,

and you're going to need that in about two hours. So prepare wisely. I'm just thinking about two shows a night. We did some live shows recently and, uh, related to the podcast and it was, it was draining. Oh my goodness. I much prefer to be on the microphone. It's draining if you're not accustomed to it, but if you're accustomed to it, it becomes invigorating. So like when I get home from a show, I'm not drained. I'm usually excited. I mean, I enjoyed it. It was nice to interact with people because podcasting is a little bit like shouting into a tunnel, especially the solo episodes. It's nice to know

the people out there listening. You see them. Definitely. It was nice. And to get questions in person felt really good. And it's a lot like the classroom that I came up in, you know, lecturing as the little kid at the carnivals. You know, the carnivals. It makes it sound like I was a carny, but I wasn't a carny. But as a-

You're just telling people about chlorine? Oh my goodness. Dechlor. I could tell you more about Aquaria and fish tanks than you ever want to know. I always say, if nothing else, I'm going to cure insomnia, you know? Well, listen, man, I appreciate you very much.

And I appreciate your podcast and all the information that you put out there. You very, very much helped me. And I think people like you are a really valuable research and a resource rather. And I'm really glad that you're not just contained to classrooms and that putting out that podcast and making it accessible to so many people, it's really, really valuable. So thank you. Thank you. My pleasure. Yeah. You've been a huge inspiration. You and Lex and a few others have really paved this road, and I'm very grateful. I do believe that people should have access to information and education, and so I'm just trying to do it.

We're super fortunate that we have these kind of platforms, that this exists, because this has never been a thing in history before. And it's a thing now. We're very lucky. And now they can't put the lid back on. Now they're fucked. All right. Thank you, brother. Thank you.

Bye, everybody.