The Tim Ferriss Show - #350: Dr. Andrew Weil — Optimal Health, Plant Medicine, and More

Starting point is 00:00:00 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by Audible. Audible provides an unbeatable selection of audiobooks,

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Starting point is 00:02:18 That's $6.95 a month. And that is also more than half off the regular price. So give yourself the gift of listening. And while you're at it, think about giving the gift of Audible to someone on your list. For more, go to audible.com forward slash Tim, T-I-M that is, audible.com forward slash Tim, or text Tim, T-I-M, to 500-500. I get asked all the time, if you could only use one supplement, what would it be? And my answer is inevitably Athletic Greens. It is your all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in the 4-Hour Body, did not get paid for that. And I travel with it to avoid getting sick. I take it in the mornings to ensure optimal performance. It just covers all my bases.

Starting point is 00:02:59 If I can't get what I need through whole food meals throughout the rest of the day. If you want to give Athletic Greens a try, they are offering a free 20-count travel pack for first-time users. I always travel with at least three or four of these. This represents a $100 value. So if you buy Athletic Greens, you get an extra $100 in free product. So check it out, athleticgreens.com forward slash Tim. Again, that's AthleticGreens.com forward slash Tim for your free travel pack with any purchase. Well, hello, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show where it is my job to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, life lessons, and so on from world-class performers of all different

Starting point is 00:03:46 stripes. And my guest today is Andrew Weil, MD, otherwise known as Dr. Weil. He is a world-renowned leader and pioneer in the field of integrative medicine. And we've had a chance to spend some time together over the last few years, and we dig into some very fun stories. Andrew was born in Philadelphia in 1942. He received a degree in biology slash botany from Harvard College in 1964 and an MD from Harvard Medical School in 1968. After completing a medical internship at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco, he worked a year with the National Institute of Mental Health, then wrote his first book, The Natural Mind. From 1971 to 75, as a fellow of the Institute of Current Health, then wrote his first book, The Natural Mind. From 1971 to 1975, as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, Dr. Weil traveled widely in North and South

Starting point is 00:04:31 America and Africa, collecting information on drug use in other cultures, medicinal plants, and alternative methods of treating disease. From 1971 to 1984, he was on the research staff of the Harvard Botanical Museum and conducted investigations of medicinal and psychoactive plants. We spent quite a bit of time talking about that. Dr. Weil is the founder and director of the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, where he also holds the Lovell Jones Endowed Chair in Integrative Rheumatology and is Clinical Professor of Medicine and Professor of Public Health. Through its fellowship and integrative medicine and residency curricula, the center is now training doctors and nurse practitioners around the world. Dr. Weil is

Starting point is 00:05:15 the Editorial Director of the popular website drweil.com, a regular guest on video programs on PBS, and the author of 15 books. My God, I've barely done five. I don't know how one can do 15. It's a lot. Including bestsellers such as Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, Spontaneous Happiness, Mind Over Meds, Fast Food, Good Food, and Healthy Aging.

Starting point is 00:05:41 He can be found on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash Dr. Weil and on Twitter at Dr. Weil. So without further ado, please enjoy a very wide-ranging and often hysterical conversation with Dr. Weil. Dr. Weil, welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm very happy to be here. I am thrilled to finally have you on the podcast because it gives us a chance to also catch up. I have not had the opportunity to hear your latest and greatest adventures in quite some time. And some of the memories that I have of the interactions we've had, and I have to thank Kevin Rose, I think initially for making that connection,

Starting point is 00:06:30 relate to your incredible gardens and plants. So I thought that a logical place to begin this conversation might be discussing your love affair with plants. Can you talk about how this started? I think it started with my mother when I was a kid. And she got that from her mother who had a real green thumb. So I grew up in a row house in Philadelphia, we had very little ground behind the house. But my mother and I used to plant all sorts of seeds, and I grew flowering bulbs indoors. So that started my interest. And then as an undergraduate at Harvard, I majored in botany, which was a very unusual major, very old-fashioned in those days. But I had the good fortune to have as a mentor Richard Schultes, the director of the Harvard Botanical Museum, who is considered the godfather of modern ethnobotany.

Starting point is 00:07:25 He had spent 14 years on the Amazon, and one of his interests was hallucinogenic plants. So studying with him got me interested in medicinal plants, and that really became a career interest. And I always dreamed of having big enough space to grow a real garden. And I now have that both in Tucson, where I live in the winter, and in British Columbia, where I am in the summer. So I grow a lot of my own food, I grow flowers, all that gives me a great deal of pleasure. Are there any particular go-to plants, let's just say in either of those places, perhaps they're different just based on the climates, that you use on an ongoing daily or weekly basis for food or for other health purposes? Well, in terms of foods, I just say

Starting point is 00:08:15 there's nothing like having fresh food from the garden. And I'm a very avid home cook. I like simple dishes that are easy to prepare. And many people who eat my food say they've never tasted such good food. Well, the secret is that it's fresh food. And I think many people have never tasted plants, plant foods that come right out of the garden. In terms of medicinal plants, probably one of my go-tos is garlic. I grow my own garlic. And garlic has many health benefits. It's a very powerful antibiotic.

Starting point is 00:08:45 It lowers cholesterol, blood pressure, many uses, and you got to use it fresh and raw. Anything you do to garlic lowers its medicinal properties. You mentioned Schultes a moment ago and give a snapshot of your history with plants. Can you put the following in sort of chronological order? The, the book doors of perception, nutmeg and cannabis in terms of, of your interest, what, what is the proper order of those three? Uh, doors of perception first that was written by Aldous Huxley. Um, I not exactly sure the date, but he came to MIT to give a series of lectures on states of consciousness, on visionary experience. And that, I remember, was in 1960. And I was a freshman at Harvard, and I listened to his lectures on radio.

Starting point is 00:09:42 And that really inspired me to take mescaline, which he had written about in Doors of Perception. So I wrote him and asked him, how do I get mescaline? And he wrote back and gave me the name of a lab in New York. I wrote to them, but they wanted all sorts of paperwork. And I found another company that would sell it, no questions asked. This was in the days before thalidomide, and the FDA did not require, there weren't many regulations on getting drugs for experimental use. Anyway, packages of mescaline arrived outside my dorm door delivered by UPS. And so in 1960,

Starting point is 00:10:16 never having smoked pot or really experimented with any psychedelics, I took mescaline. A number of friends and I did it several times. And I didn't really have a context in which to put it. You know, I didn't know people who were using psychedelics. Nonetheless, it showed me possibilities, which I wasn't really prepared to follow at that time. I think if I had, I would never have gone to medical school. So Aldous Huxley, Doors of Perception came first. Under Schultes, I opted to get an honors degree in botany, which is part of the biology department. I had to write a thesis for that.

Starting point is 00:10:53 So the thesis I wrote was on nutmeg as a narcotic. Nutmeg is a psychoactive drug if you take enough of it. And it was being used mostly by people who couldn't get better drugs, such as prisoners. You have to take a whole can of powdered nutmeg. I don't recommend that. Or you eat one or two whole nutmegs. It's pretty hard to choke it down. And you do get high on it. But I'd say it's a pretty third-rate high. At any rate, I wrote that paper. It got picked up by a lot of people, including tabloids, talking about people getting high on nutmeg. So that was really my first academic paper.

Starting point is 00:11:32 Then what was the third book that you asked about? Oh, no, it was the second, well, I suppose the third, if we count mescaline, third of the compounds or plants, which would be cannabis. So back in those days, in the early 1960s, I didn't know people who smoked cannabis. And I didn't really try it until 1964. When I was a senior in college, I didn't get any effect from it. Then I went to Harvard Medical School, and I began using it and having very enjoyable highs from it. It amazed me that as cannabis was getting a lot of attention and causing a lot of controversy, there had been no research done with it. Really nothing. Astonishing. There had been one series of one experiment done in 1937,

Starting point is 00:12:18 I think. But since then, nobody had given marijuana to human beings to see what it did. So as a senior in medical school, I devoted my elective time to research to try to do the first human-controlled double-blind studies with marijuana. I can't even begin to tell you what a challenge that was. Many people bet me that there was no way I'd get permission. It meant coordinating the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the Massachusetts state authorities, the universities. Nonetheless, I did it. I gave marijuana to human subjects and published this as a lead story in science in 1968. It was front page news on the New York Times. It concluded that marijuana was a relatively mild intoxicant. I showed that it did not dilate pupils. Cops were arresting people who had dilated eyes and said that was a probable cause for searching them for marijuana. I showed that it didn't lower

Starting point is 00:13:16 blood sugar, which was often invoked as the cause for the munchies. And that while in people who'd never had it before, you could demonstrate some impairment on basic psychological and psychomotor tests. If you gave it to people who were experienced with it, you couldn't really show anything like that. So the basic conclusion was relatively mild and toxic. And I thought that pot would be legal in five years. Boy, was I wrong. I thought it was just a matter of getting the right information out there. I quickly learned that people believe what they want to believe and don't believe what they don't want to believe. Now, this is a perfect segue in terms of belief and expectation. Because my understanding is that one of the, just in doing some homework for this,

Starting point is 00:14:05 one of the challenges of the experimental design, and I don't know if it was the IRB or maybe a different acronym at the time, for putting this study into practice was working with naive subjects, people who had not had any exposure. Could you talk about why that was important to you? Because I wanted to see what marijuana did in people that had no expectations of what it would do. My intuition told me that what you expected of pot and all drugs and the setting in which you took it were as important as the drug itself. So this idea that drug effects are a combined effect of drug set and setting, I think, is basic to understanding how mind-altering drugs work. And with marijuana, where the physical effects are really relatively subtle, I think you really have to learn to get high on it. You have

Starting point is 00:14:58 to associate an altered state with it. So it was very important to me to use people who'd never had it. That became a great sticking point with the two universities, Boston University and Harvard, that had to give approval for this because their fear was that if you introduced people to this drug, they would soon be heroin addicts in the street. Anyway, finally got permission to do that. I'll tell you one funny story. The cops who were involved in this, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, this was the old Treasury Department cops, and the Massachusetts cops kept bugging me to come down to our lab and watch people smoke marijuana because they'd never seen anyone smoke marijuana. And I said, look,

Starting point is 00:15:38 we can't have you there because that would be a major disturbance of set and setting. But I said, if they were patient and we had time we'd do a demo for them at the end when the experiments were finished so one night we had two of my you know friends who were labeled chronic users of marijuana agreed to smoke it in our laboratory and this bunch of guys two from the federal bureau of narcotics i think they were two from massachusetts came um and these people they had to smoke two of these joints that we had rolled. It was relatively mild by today's standards. And they smoked them, and then we were giving them these tests. So the one cop sidles up to me and elbows me and says, you know, when is it going to happen? And I knew it was after I said, what do

Starting point is 00:16:19 you mean? He said, you know, when does it happen? And I said, what do you mean? He said, well, when did they get high? And I said, well, they are high. And he said, no, no. He said, you know, when does it happen? And I said, what do you mean? He said, well, when did they get high? And I said, well, they are high. And he said, no, no. He said, when did they get high? I don't know what his heck was, ripping off their clothes, running around screaming. But here were these two guys just sitting there, you know, doing their pursuit rotor tests and the numerical tests. And they weren't any different. That was a very sobering experience for these law enforcement agents. And at that time and since, many people would ask me,

Starting point is 00:16:51 how can you tell if a person is high? And I said that you really can't unless they volunteer that information. Maybe their whites or their eyes are red, but nothing else. That was very upsetting to many people. So after I published that study, I was in great demand as an expert on cannabis. This was in 1969, 1970, 1971. And I was asked to testify about it in front of Congress and be an expert witness in various things and give lectures. I made it a rule for myself that I would never do that unless I was stoned. So I would always smoke pot right before I had to testify. I should say, by the way, while I was a fairly serious user of pot in my 20s and 30s, I have not been much of a user of it later in life. But anyway, it was fun to do that and also to be in a position where I'd be lecturing or testifying and people would ask that question.

Starting point is 00:17:44 How can you tell if a person is high on pot? And I would say, you can't unless they volunteer that information. Of course, I did not volunteer that I was high on pot. All right. I have so many follow-up questions here. I want to rewind for a second because I think these two might be related. Can you describe your first mescaline experience? Was it a Huxley-like explosion of aesthetic? It was as far from it as you can imagine. I was in a dorm room at Harvard in this old dilapidated building, Claverley Hall. It was on a Saturday afternoon. And I and one other roommate of mine took it. We took half a gram of pure mesclun. And there was about seven people sitting around watching to see what

Starting point is 00:18:31 would happen before they decided whether they wanted to try it or not. So, you know, I after about I didn't feel anything for a long time. And after maybe an hour and a half, I began to feel some physical effects. You know, I just felt a little, I didn't know how to, the only drug experience I'd had up to that point was with alcohol. And so that was the only thing I could compare it to. So I felt a little different. At that moment, exactly, the phone rang and it was my mother calling Philadelphia. We never, we never talked except on Sundays we would call. I called my parents. So she called and said, what are you doing? And I said, well, I'm just sitting around with some friends.

Starting point is 00:19:12 And she said, why aren't you outside? And I said, well, I'm just sitting here. And she said, I hope you're not doing anything foolish like taking mescaline or anything like that. Now, I had mentioned the word mescaline at the dinner table, maybe three months before and said I was interested. I got such a reaction from my parents that I never said another word about it. There'd been an article in the newspaper about a kid who died supposedly from an overdose of it. So talk about, you know, mothers being psychic. I said, Oh, no, mother, of course, I wouldn't be doing anything like that. So that kind of affected my experience. But I really had no significant psychological change from that time. The second time I took it,

Starting point is 00:19:52 I did have a very profound altered state. It's hard to describe, but I have a real sense of oneness of everything and a much larger reality out there than I had been aware of. And I think I had to put that in a kind of box and tie it up because if I had followed that, I don't think I would have been able to stay in school and get a medical degree. So I just boxed that up until I had a chance to explore that. I think we will come back to the exploration. You mentioned one thing in passing that I wanted to just follow up on since I know people are probably wondering. You mentioned you used to be a heavy or consistent cannabis user, not so much so in your more recent years. Why has that changed?

Starting point is 00:20:41 I found that my experiences with it changed over time. And when I first was using it in my, I would say in my, you know, mid-20s, the highs that I had with it were light, bubbly, hysterical, a lot of laughing, you know, sitting around with people and sensual enjoyment of food and music and all that. After several years of that, I think the highs changed for me. I was using it more heavily, but the highs changed for me to be more introspective. And it was in that period that I think it really stimulated my imagination, it was great for writing. My first book, The Natural Mind, that I wrote in 1971, it was published in 72, about drugs and altered states. I think a lot of that felt channeled as a result of being in the states of consciousness that cannabis ushered me into. So there was a period of, think of it, then I was living in South America for a number of years.

Starting point is 00:21:48 I used pot pretty regularly. And during that time, I think the experiences changed more in the direction of being more sedative, and it would tend to make me groggy and not creative and imaginative. And that went on for a long time. And I finally just felt that didn't do much for me. So I weaned myself off it, which took some doing. And then I began to use it just occasionally with friends as a social thing. So now I just I personally don't like the effect of it very much. So I think my body has changed, my brain has changed. It was a real ally for me in the early part of my life.

Starting point is 00:22:31 Now I'm more interested in it for its medicinal uses. And, you know, of course, I'm delighted to see our society finally coming to some sensible terms with that plant. We are going to get to South America because I have certainly a number of questions about South America. But before we get to that, you mentioned set and setting. For people who don't know what that means, I think you described it in brief. Sure. Can you explain what that means? And can you also explain how you first came across that phrase? Because you were at Harvard at a very interesting time.

Starting point is 00:23:01 Yeah. Well, Timothy Leary was there and Richard Alpert. And one of my other mentors besides Schultes was a Freudian psychoanalyst named Norman Zinberg. We became very close friends. He was a colleague of mine in the marijuana research. We got high together. He was older than me, but it was a great connection. And I think Leary was one of the first people I heard use the phrase set and setting. And Zinberg wrote about this a lot in his academic writing. So set is a psychologist term for all of the expectational factors that a person brings to an experience. And so the effects of drugs are not just due to the drug. I mean,

Starting point is 00:23:48 one factor is the nature of the drug, the dose, but then there is what a person expects to happen when he takes that, he or she takes that dose. And then there is the setting, which is the environment, the physical and social environment in which the drug is taken. And my experience has been is that the combined effects of set and setting can in which the drug is taken. And my experience has been is that the combined effects of set and setting can actually reverse the pharmacological effect of drugs, that you can give a stimulant to a person in conditions of set and setting that cause the person to fall asleep. And you can give a sedative drug to somebody under conditions of set and setting that cause a person to become alert and stimulated. And this doesn't just apply to marijuana and drugs.

Starting point is 00:24:27 I think this has an awful lot to do with medicine and healing as well. I think that the way we present treatments to people and their effects also are very dependent on expectation and environment. And it's the expectation both of the giver of the treatment or the drug and the person who takes it. In the early days of LSD research, this is back in the late 50s, early 60s, there was very good research being done with it in terminal cancer patients, for example, showing that people near the end of life, if they had a structured LSD session and then follow up with a skilled person, had much less pain, required

Starting point is 00:25:07 far fewer opioids, had much more productive interactions with family and friends, and much easier deaths. People got excited about that research. And then other people who didn't understand that set setting drug interaction and thought the magic was just in the LSD, tried to reproduce that by giving LSD to people without paying attention to set and setting, and they didn't get the same results. And that's one of the reasons I think people backed off from doing research with it. How would you suggest people these days think about designing studies for researching these compounds because as you are certainly extremely aware there are some incredible challenges with studying let's just take uh whether

Starting point is 00:25:55 we want to call them psychedelics or hallucinogens as an example in terms of trying to placebo control and some people will use niacin or some type of lower dose as an active placebo there's's a great piece in the New York Times just in the last few weeks called What if the Placebo Effect Isn't a Trick? Looking at the biochemical basis. And it just gets the further down that rabbit hole you go, the more you realize how incredibly challenging it is to design a study that somehow isolates, if that's even the objective, the effects, particularly when you're... I don't know that that's worth doing, Tim. I think really what we're going for is how do you maximally increase the chance of producing a positive experience? I'm fascinated with the potential of these drugs for healing in medicine, not just psychological problems, but real things like autoimmune diseases, cancer. I think there's a tremendous potential for these psychedelics,

Starting point is 00:26:53 especially, to give people the experience that they can change whatever's going on in their body. I'll give you one example. I'll give you a couple that I've written about. Um, in, when I was about 28, right before I left for South America, I had started, was starting to practice yoga and I had problems with some poses. The one I had the most difficulty with is the plow where you lie on your back and try to touch your toes to the ground behind your head. I got, so I could get my toes about a foot from the ground, and I couldn't go any further. I had excruciating pain in my neck. So I was about to give up. I thought I was just too old to be doing this at 28. And one day, it was a spring day. I was living in Virginia. I took LSD with some friends outdoors. It was fabulous. It was in a fabulous state. My

Starting point is 00:27:42 body felt totally elastic. And I thought, gee, while I'm feeling this way, I ought to try to do that. So I lay on the ground, brought my toes down, and I thought I had about a foot to go, and they touched the ground. And I didn't have any pain. And I kept doing it over and over. I thought, this is fantastic. The next day I tried to do it, I could get my toes about a foot from the ground, and there was excruciating pain in my neck. But it was now different because I had seen it was possible. If I had not had that experience, I don't think I would have been motivated to continue to practice. But knowing that, I kept at it, and in a few weeks, I was able to do it. To me, that's a model of what these drugs can do. They can show you possibilities that you wouldn't have believed,

Starting point is 00:28:20 but then it's up to you to figure out how to have that more of the time. That's, I love that example because it's parallel with many experiences people would tend to put into the box of psychological or emotional in the sense that you have someone like Sam Harris, a very smart guy who came to meditation through seeing what was possible via certain psychedelic experiences. I came across your name very unexpectedly at a, the, at the home of a friend's parents. And I was browsing their bookshelf and I came across a book with the very

Starting point is 00:29:01 appealing title to me, at least of wizard of the Upper Amazon. And I was astonished I hadn't come across this book before. And you wrote, I don't recall if it was the foreword or the introduction to that book. And I became really engrossed in this, which was a bit of a problem because I was supposed to be at a party being social. But I ended up in the guest bedroom reading part of this book. Can you explain what drew you to South America? Why did you go? How long were you there?

Starting point is 00:29:34 What did you do when you were there? Well, Schultes sent me there. As I said, he had really lived there. He lived in the Amazon continuously from 1939 to 1953. And he had great connections, especially in Colombia. So he wanted me to go down there, and I was interested in studying coca leaves especially, but a whole range of plants. Why were you interested in coca specifically? Because he got me interested, and he said he had chewed it every day during the time he was in the Amazon, and he recommended that I go down there.

Starting point is 00:30:03 I just liked the name, and it seemed like something that was before cocaine was around up here. So I wrote The Natural Mind, sent it off to the publisher, and I got a fantastic fellowship from a group called the Institute of Current World Affairs that sent people far and wide. And all you have to do is write a monthly newsletter for them. Most people did this on political subjects. And I had proposed them writing about altered states of consciousness and psychoactive drugs and things like that. And they'd never done anything like that. And so I got this great fellowship that paid all my expenses. I had that for three and a half years. So I first went to Mexico, lived there for three months to learn Spanish, which I did, just by living with people and having to speak Spanish. And then I drove my Land Rover all the

Starting point is 00:30:56 way to Colombia. And that's an exciting trip for people. It was an exciting trip. Took a while. Anyway, and then I spent about three and a half years in South America, mostly in Colombia, which is a country I love, but also Ecuador, Peru, some in Brazil. I saw a lot of interesting things. I learned a lot about plant medicine. I spent time with shamans, some of whom were a very mixed bag. I mean, there were drunks who just wanted to be paid for giving people ayahuasca. I saw a few real genuine healers.

Starting point is 00:31:32 I saw a lot of interesting alternative medical stuff. Anyway, it was a very interesting period of time in my life, and I still retain that connection. I look forward to going back and spending more time in Colombia.. And I still retain that connection. I look forward to going back and spending more time in Colombia. So I learned a lot of stuff. But interestingly, I had been most interested in finding healers. And the when I at the end of that time, my car, I came back to the US, I was just going to be here briefly and go back down to Mexico. And the Land Rover agency that overhauled the car in Laguna Beach forgot to pack one of the wheels with grease and I drove through Tucson I was just going to get supplies and the wheel

Starting point is 00:32:12 bearing shattered and it took six weeks to get a replacement it was February of a very warm wet winter the desert was in full bloom I met people I liked and I I never left. And here I am 45 years later, still living in Tucson. It turned out that the most fascinating healer, the person I had most to learn from, was in Tucson and had been here all the time before I had gone down to South America. And there's something perfect about that, too, that, you know, going all this wandering and then right under your feet is what you're looking for. It was an old osteopathic physician named Robert Fulford, who was a master of cranial therapy and the best healer I've ever seen. I mean, he just put his hands on you and remarkable things happened. And he really made me aware of the healing power of nature. You know, he used to, it felt so good to be worked on by him

Starting point is 00:32:59 and people would say, when should I come back? And he'd say, you don't need to come back, you're fixed. And he would say, you know, all you have to do is make these little adjustments and let old Mother Nature do her work. He charged $35 for a visit, used no equipment. It was very inspirational to spend time with him. Did he have anything in common with the, as you mentioned, few genuine healers you came across in your travels in South America? Were there any commonalities? You know, I think Fulford used a modality, cranial therapy, which I think is terrific. I'm a big fan of osteopathic manipulation. It's wonderful. And it's unfortunately a very small percentage of osteopaths do that anymore, and fewer do

Starting point is 00:33:42 really good cranial therapy. I think Fulford was a healer, and if he'd been working in some other means, he would be as effective. So I think I've met people who are able to catalyze that in other people, maybe just by their own presence, by their own energy, people who are whole and healed themselves. That, by the way, goes back to your question about structuring research with psychedelics. I think the key thing is that the person running the show who's giving the drugs himself or herself has to be fully experienced. I mean, they have to be a shaman. This is what shamans are trained to do. And you can't just have research hacks trying to give these drugs in clinical settings and expecting to get wonderful results.

Starting point is 00:34:29 Yeah. Yeah. It's even within the clinical setting, of course, there's a have someone like Mary Cosimano at Johns Hopkins, who's incredible and has just a library of vast experience. You mentioned Schultes, a name I'm very fond of, and he put out a book, I believe it was maybe co-authored or just featured an an introduction with albert hoffman called plants of the gods yep which is a fantastic book you put out a book uh that as i understand it had i'm thinking of a senator in particular uh mixed mixed responses that i'd love for you to talk about a little bit called chocolate to morphphine, subtitled Understanding Mind Active Drugs. Why did you write this book?

Starting point is 00:35:28 Oh, yeah. Before I do that, let me ask you, did you ever see another book that Schulte spoke out, which is a real collector's item? You remember the Little Golden Guides? Yes, I do. Well, he did a Little Golden Guide of Hallucinogenic Plants. If you could find a copy of it, it's amazing. I mean, it's every hallucinogenic plant done in that same style of minerals and birds and plants. And it was on sale in museums and stuff like that. So see if you can find a copy. I'll have to do that before I publish this podcast. Anyway, I wrote a book with a co-author, Winifred Rosen, called From Chocolate to Morphine,

Starting point is 00:35:59 about mind-altering drugs. I think it's an excellent book. It's still in print. It's much loved. Many parents have given it to their kids. Many kids have given it to their parents. It came out in 1983, just when the war on drugs started, which was precipitated by the death of a basketball player, Len Bias. And that started the Reagans and a whole crusade. So that book caused a lot of controversy because it did not say no. It said, we're not going to tell you whether you should use drugs or not, but if you are, this is what you should know about them. And these are the precautions that you might take. And it went through all drugs, the legal ones, nicotine, all the forms of caffeine,

Starting point is 00:36:41 all the psychedelic stimulants down or so forth. So a senator, Republican senator from Florida, Paula Hawkins, who was a crony of Nancy Reagan's, made it a campaign to get the book banned. And she stood up on the floor of the Senate waving the book around. It was on national news, which got more publicity than the publisher got for it. And there then followed a campaign to ban that book from libraries. And there was a personal campaign to try to keep me from speaking in places that was organized by the White House. Very interesting times. Anyway, I'm still here. The book is still in print and very popular. And I recommend it. It's great.

Starting point is 00:37:21 What were the were there any particular actually, take a take a step back for people who are listening to that experience and looking back at some of the blowback that was experienced in the let's just call it the leery era and wondering if there are things that can be done to minimize the likelihood of or just mitigate excessive blowback to current research and attempts to reclassify things like MDMA, psilocybin, and so on for very legitimate medical applications. Did you have any thoughts on kind of best practices for people who are very enthusiastic? I'm just, you've been in this world for so much longer than most. I don't know if you have any particular thoughts on how to not unnecessarily jeopardize things, I guess is... Okay, first of all, don't be angry. because I see many people out there who talk about subjects and get tremendous blowback and think that people are reacting to the content of what they're saying, and it's not. It's the tone of what they're saying.

Starting point is 00:38:36 Right. I've gotten away with saying the most outrageous things because I'm not angry, and people listen listen and we can have actual dialogue. Secondly, I think it's very important to suggest possibilities for uses of these agents for which we don't have, that address problems for which we don't have solutions. For example, the opioid crisis is a fantastic opportunity at the moment, both for integrative medicine in general and for cannabis medicine. You know, doctors working in states where cannabis is legal say that it has tremendously improved the lives of patients who are dependent on opioids and tremendously improved their lives as practitioners who are faced with how to deal with chronic pain management. So that's one area that I think is very important.

Starting point is 00:39:26 So the demonstration that psilocybin, for example, can be used with obsessive-compulsive disorder, that MDMA produces these tremendous results with post-traumatic stress disorder, this is all helping greatly to legitimize the uses of these. And let's talk about, because this is something that we could talk about for hours and days and weeks probably, but just for the sake of definition, could you define for people integrative medicine, the combination of these two? Sure. First of all, I think this is medicine, the combination of these two?

Starting point is 00:40:06 Sure. First of all, I think this is medicine of the future. And the term integrative medicine is now totally accepted in academic discourse. There are textbooks of integrative medicine. All medical journals refer to it. So the short answer is it's the intelligent combination of conventional medicine and natural and preventive medicine and useful alternative therapies. The longer answer is that it's a system that emphasizes the natural healing power of the organism that looks at people not just as physical bodies, but also as mental, emotional beings, spiritual entities, community members, that's sometimes called whole person medicine, that places a great deal of emphasis on lifestyle and all of the lifestyle factors that influence health and illness,

Starting point is 00:40:53 that really values the practitioner-patient relationship and makes use of all available therapies that show reasonable evidence of efficacy and aren't going to cause harm. And we often butt heads against the evidence-based medicine people who say we're trying to advocate unscientific or anti-scientific ideas and practices. You know, my feeling has always been that a good way to use evidence, a good rule to follow is that the greater the potential of a treatment to cause harm, the stricter the standards of evidence it should be held to for efficacy. If we had followed that principle in standard medicine, we'd save ourselves a lot of trouble. I often teach patients, commonly teach patients breathing techniques. There hasn't been a lot of research on the health effects of breathing because nobody takes it seriously. It doesn't involve a drug or a device, but the chance of these breathing techniques causing harm is so

Starting point is 00:41:50 negligible that I'm not bothered by recommending them in the absence of a great deal of evidence for them. Anyway, integrative medicine is the future. I founded and direct a center of excellence at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, medicine the center for integrative medicine we're the world leader in educating physicians in this new system so we give two-year thousand-hour fellowships for mds and dos that teach nutrition mind-body interactions herbal medicine including uses of cannabis and psychedelics, the strengths and weaknesses of alternative medical systems, spirituality and medicine, all these things that are left out of conventional training. And we've now graduated about 1,600 physicians from that intensive fellowship. They're in practice all over the country and in many other countries. We have our curriculum in

Starting point is 00:42:41 80 residencies throughout the country. We teach medical students. We're about to open an integrative primary care clinic in Tucson. So we're really on a roll. And as I say, I think this is the future because the great promise of integrative medicine is that it can lower healthcare costs while maintaining or I think improving health outcomes. And I think it's the only way out of this mess that we have with healthcare in this country. So there's a lot to dig into here. And I'm looking forward to it. So you have, just for people who may have missed this earlier, but they must have been smoking something of their own if they missed it earlier. You do have experience with and familiarity with double-blind placebo-controlled studies.

Starting point is 00:43:33 And I don't think, and correct me if I'm wrong, that you would argue that there is no place for that and that it has a place, it is a source of information. It's one kind of information. Right. And it has its own limitations. I think there are other kinds of information that are valid. For example, the information that comes from your own experience. And I like to point out to people that in all languages derived from Latin, unfortunately not English, the word for experience and the word for experiment are the same. In Spanish, experimentar means both to experience and to experiment. So your own experience is a form of experimentation that produces useful information. You have to check it against other kinds of information. With double-blind studies, you know, this is held out as the gold standard, and many people think this is the only kind of information we should pay attention to. But here's an interesting thing. You can try this yourself, and it's an assignment that I give to medical students and doctors. Go into a medical library

Starting point is 00:44:30 and pull out any medical journal that reports results of placebo-controlled double-blind testing. Pick an article, turn to the back of the article where there's a summary that summarizing the table summarizing the results in the placebo group there will always be one or two or a small number of subjects who show all of the changes produced in the experimental group who got the drug that is fascinating i mean that means that any change that we can produce in the human organism by giving a pharmacological agent can be exactly mimicked in at least some people some of the time purely by a mind-mediated mechanism, the placebo response, if you want. Anyway, we should be trying to take advantage of that, find out how to make it happen more of the time. Also, I would just say that there are a great

Starting point is 00:45:22 many worthless and dangerous drugs on the market at the moment, and many of them have a lot of placebo-controlled randomized trials behind them supporting their use. So things can be structured in ways to produce results that people want. I want to spend some time on this because I find myself, and I think you probably, certainly, at Johns Hopkins, at many different institutions where I'm funding or helping to fund the types of studies that we're talking about. And then on the other hand, I experiment with a lot of what people would consider esoteric and probably just outright crazy stuff. Some of it below the border, not all of it below the border.

Starting point is 00:46:34 And I would love to hear, since you've spoken, I think quite a bit about some of the limitations of the types of studies we're talking about, among others we haven't even talked about, but these are not necessarily the first place to go if you're looking to generate hypotheses that are innovative for testing in the first place. But if we were to flip the coin and look at the other side, because you mentioned tone earlier and how a lot can be dismissed if you are angry and it's not a response to the content, but it's a response to the tone. Where do people in the integrative medicine field or in the complementary or alternative treatment realms make mistakes? Like, what are some of the ways in which they think they have all the answers or alienate themselves from people who might actually be open with a different

Starting point is 00:47:27 delivery to some of what they're experimenting with? Well, with the people that I come in contact with who come through our training programs, I always emphasize this, not being angry and to have some published data to support things that you're doing with patients so that somebody asks, you know, why are you giving this treatment? You can cite something. So I think, to me, that's most important. I don't see many people today, I mean, the common mistake is just to antagonize colleagues or to reject conventional medicine out of hand. You know, a primary, I don't like the term alternative medicine. It suggests that you're trying to replace conventional medicine out of hand. I don't like the term alternative medicine. It suggests that you're trying to replace conventional medicine, and that's not my goal. I want to make conventional medicine better. And knowing when and when not to use that system is extremely important.

Starting point is 00:48:20 I said earlier, drawing on your own experience for hypotheses, let me give you two personal experiences of mine that suggest possibilities that I would love to see tested in research settings. At about that same time that I had that experience with yoga and LSD, on another occasion, I took LSD also in a wonderful outdoor setting, feeling great. I had a lifelong allergy to cats. This is, again, when I was 28. If a cat came near me, my eyes would itch and my nose would run. And if a cat licked me, I'd get hives where it licked me. So I always tended to avoid them. So on this day, when I was high on LSD, feeling great, a cat came up and jumped in my lap. And I had moments like trying myself against it. And then I thought, this is silly. I'm just going to drop this. And I began petting the cat and enjoying it. I had no allergic reaction. And I never had one since. So instant disappearance of allergies. All right. So how

Starting point is 00:49:22 about you offer allergy treatment centers where people come in and on the first visit, they take a full dose of the substance and then over, say, 10 visits, you reduce the dose until at the end they're taking nothing and they've learned to unlearn the allergy. Also around the same time, another dramatic physical change in me, I grew up, I was told I had very fair skin. I could never get tan. And we used to go down to the Jersey shore in the summer and beaches. I can't tell you how many times, you know, sheets of skin peeling off, you know, horrible. And then I'd never, you know, never get tan. So that's, I just accepted that. So also around the same time when I was doing all this experimentation,

Starting point is 00:50:00 and I think this is again with LSD, outdoors running around naked in the sun. And I think this is again with LSD, outdoors, running around naked in the sun. And I was lying down looking at the sun and I thought, this is silly. I mean, the sun is not my enemy. I got tanned the next day and I have ever since. Now, these kinds of changes I have not seen much written about. And to me, that's the stuff I would love to see tested. I'd love to see us figure out these potentials and how to allow more people to experience them. And this is why I say that when you're dealing with people with chronic illness, whether it's chronic pain or autoimmunity, where they don't see a possibility of changing it,

Starting point is 00:50:37 you can, I think, arrange conditions of set and setting with the right agent in which you can show people that it's possible to experience your body in a different way. Do you recall how many roughly micrograms you were consuming with the cat allergy experience? Oh, my guess is it was somewhere around maybe 200, something like that. Got it. And how would you, if you had to, how would you attempt to explain that? Like, do you have a hypothetical mechanism? The allergy thing is easier to explain than the tanning reaction. Because there's obviously a mind-body component of allergy. You can show, if a person has an allergy to roses, you can show

Starting point is 00:51:27 them a plastic rose and they'll have allergic symptoms, for example. I think many people with allergies can see that changing emotional states really affect the allergic expression. So that, to me, is more understandable, although the fact that it was a permanent change I find very interesting. With tanning, I mean, that's a little more complex, the physiology of that. So I haven't thought about that. I'm sure there is a physiological mechanism underlying it, but it again suggests that many aspects of our reaction to the sense that the the more something has the potential and a demonstrated potential for harm the greater the burden of proof should be uh and um you know hormone replacement therapy and so i mean there are

Starting point is 00:52:41 many examples that come to mind that seem to be a great idea at the time uh with certain populations which demonstrably could have been predicted to have known dangers uh the in the case of breathing right compared to benzos and all these other drugs that are available what is there a sample breathing technique you could describe for people who are looking to reduce anxiety? There's a breath that I teach, which I learned from Dr. Fulford that I call the 478 breath. And if people will just Google my name and 478 breath, you'll get demonstrations of me doing it. It's all over the place these days. But basically, it's a yoga technique. You let all the air out through your mouth and you breathe in quietly through your nose to a count of four, hold your breath for a count

Starting point is 00:53:31 of seven, blow air out your mouth forcibly to a count of eight, and you repeat that for four breath cycles. You got to do it at least twice a day. It's a practice. And by doing this, you change the tone of the autonomic nervous system. You decrease sympathetic tone, increase parasympathetic tone, the relaxation response. And after practicing this for several weeks, months, it becomes an amazing tool for all sorts of things. One is controlling anxiety, lowering blood pressure, heart rate, improving digestion, and so forth. And breath is really, it's the key to controlling involuntary functions. And breathing is the only thing you can do completely consciously or completely unconsciously. The theory is that by using your voluntary system to impose rhythms on the breath, gradually those are induced in the involuntary nervous system, which you can't get at directly.

Starting point is 00:54:30 So I've seen tremendous results of people doing this 478 breath practice. Just amazing things, stopping atrial fibrillation, having cold hands become warm, chronic digestive problems disappearing. But for anxiety, it is far and away the best method I've ever found that makes benzodiazepines look very pathetic by comparison. And I've seen even the most extreme cases of panic disorder respond to this breathing technique once people practiced it enough. You have a history of spotting and or popularizing concepts, terms, even fields of study long before they hit the mainstream. So right now we're edging into some territory

Starting point is 00:55:21 that might lead into this. For instance, and the question is going to be, what current accepted concepts or practices do you think are going to be obsolete in the near future or significantly revised? Because we have this Cartesian mind-body separation, which to me is hilarious also because it tends to overlap almost perfectly with people who have a sort of hyper-materialist view of brain equals mind. It's just very hard to reconcile since it's an organ. But the reason this came to mind for me is you mentioned autonomous nervous system, right? And these are things that I suppose most would assume you do not have any conscious control over.

Starting point is 00:56:06 And yet, I've spent time, as an example, and no, I haven't seen this studied in a clinical setting, because who the hell would actually do it and study it and who would want to put their career on hold for two to three years to do it. But there's a professor formerly from Stanford Medical School, lifelong meditator, uses neurofeedback very consistently, and he can do some very strange things. I've seen him do this multiple times where you can pick one of his eyes and he can hyper dilate his pupil in the eye that you choose. You can watch this happen. It is one of the strangest things I've seen. So that's a long-winded way of asking a question, but what are certain concepts or beliefs held to be true or things that are held in strong conviction now in medicine or tangentially related to it that you think are going to be significantly revised? Well, first, let me tell you two quick stories relevant to this. I grew up in Philadelphia,

Starting point is 00:57:13 late 1940s, 1950s. All shoe stores had fluoroscopes in them. These were big consoles to check the fit of shoes. So you went in as a kid, the salesman got you shoes, and then you would go to this fluoroscope, stick your feet under it. And there was a viewing thing you could look into. And you'd see the bones of your feet. It was a big glowing green screen. And the shoe salesman would point out to your parents how well the shoes fit. And as a kid, your job was to distract the shoe salesman and your parents so you could spend as much time under there as possible.

Starting point is 00:57:43 I mean, unbelievable fluoroscopes in shoe stores. What were they thinking? Going back a little earlier, when I was at Harvard Medical School, I found this old attic of medical curiosities. And one item in there, this was from about the turn of the early 1900s, was a belt with two pouches that held radium ore that was supposed to be worn around the waist. The pouches fit over the kidneys to deliver healthful radiation to your kidneys for several hours a day.

Starting point is 00:58:12 Now, whenever I see things like that, I wonder, what are we doing now that we're going to look back at 50 years from now and not believe that we did? I'll tell you, one area is dentistry. I think the whole idea of drilling cavities and filling them with foreign materials, I think that's, we will not believe that we were doing that. I really think that chemotherapy and radiation will be obsolete as cancer treatments, probably in not too distant future. And, you know, the problem with those is they just don't distinguish well enough between malignant cells and normal cells, unless you're dealing with a cancer that has a very rapid cell division rate,

Starting point is 00:58:49 which, you know, most of them don't. So, I think that'll be replaced by things like gene therapy and immunotherapy, anti-angiogenesis therapy, so forth. I think the whole field of regenerative medicine is right on the horizon. This recent research that was done in Japan of being able to take cells from skin and get them to reverse to an embryonic state where they can differentiate into any line. I mean, we're really close to being able to regenerate organs, spinal cord injuries, damaged hearts. I think that's all on the horizon and will replace a lot of the things that we have now. I think a lot of the diseases that we consider incurable, that's just a concept that we have. And once you see it's possible, then it's possible. And if it's possible in one individual, why shouldn't it be possible for everyone? You've talked about, certainly, I think it was through a quote, maybe it was

Starting point is 00:59:50 Fulford, am I getting that right? Fulford, yeah. Fulford, but related to the body healing itself, right? And for people who are interested, I just want to mention also, in the meantime, as it relates to cancer, there's some very interesting work being done looking at the impact of fasting when combined, typically pre-treatment, I can, I can certainly vouch for the protective effects of related to normal cells of fasting, uh, with a friend who was part of a cohort, this group of people who are going through these very intense treatments for a later stage cancer that he had. And those who did not fast in his group, they were, there were a few experimenting with fasting and sure you could explain this away in a number of different ways. But the people who did not fast were laid out for days afterwards, basically on the couch, not moving.

Starting point is 01:00:54 And he and a few others were going for five 10-mile training runs the next morning. It's really fascinating stuff. The dentistry that you mentioned, you talked about some of the potential replacements that are certainly being explored quite a bit now related to cancer. With dentistry, what would you see replacing the current approach to drilling and filling? One possibility is a vaccine that would inoculate you against the bacteria that cause decay. That's one thing. I think it's also a place for regenerative medicine that possibly being able to stimulate the growth of new teeth. I think that's all within the realm of possibility. And there are – this is probably not specifically intended to help people regenerate teeth, but there are services now, which may be outdated shortly, but for people who are curious, where you can take the baby teeth as they are, I suppose, discarded, I'm not sure what the proper word is, released from the mouth by your children and then have them immediately shipped for storage so that you can harvest

Starting point is 01:02:10 the pulp, the stem cell pulp, later for regenerative uses. Great. I didn't know about that. That's neat. It's pretty cool. Yeah, there are services that do that, so you don't necessarily have to drill into your kid's hip or whatever it might be, which is, of course, part of what makes the research in Japan and so on so exciting. The possibility of getting to the kind of embryonic starting point without having to use these really invasive procedures.

Starting point is 01:02:43 What else are you most excited about right now? Well, I have to say that the mainstreaming of integrative medicine thrills me. I've been writing and saying the same things about medical education, medicine, health for probably 45 years. In the early years, nobody paid attention to me. And then I got a larger and larger following in the general public, but none of my medical colleagues took me seriously. And that didn't change until the early 1990s. And it was then when the economics of healthcare began to go south, that institutions began to open to this. And one lesson I draw from that is that no amount of ideological argument moves anything.

Starting point is 01:03:27 It's only when the pocketbooks of institutions get squeezed enough that they begin to open to change. But the change is quite remarkable. You know, there's a group called the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine, and now two-thirds of the medical schools in the U.S. have joined this. And this requires the dean or chancellor of an institution has to request membership, and the school has to show that they've got activity in two of the three areas of clinical medicine research and teaching. So it's quite wonderful to watch this happen. What's, I mean, we could talk for hours and hours and hours, and we definitely have to hang out again, and maybe we can go for a hike with our mutual friend. Certainly, you've known him long enough, Paul Stamets.

Starting point is 01:04:16 It would just be amazing. What books have you gifted the most to other people outside of your own books? Are there any books that you've the most to other people outside of your own books? Are there any books that you've gifted often to other people? Yes. One is a translation of Lao Tzu by a man named Witter Binner. It's called The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu. That's beautiful translations. And I find those verses, which was the sole output of this philosopher, to be remarkably right on.

Starting point is 01:04:51 Another book that I've given out a lot recently is We by Robert Johnson, a Jungian psychoanalyst that's subtitled The Psychology of Romantic Love, a very short, easily read book about the traps that people get themselves into in romantic relationships. That's one that I like very much. Geez, I have a whole bunch out there. What catalyzed or led you to gift We? Just because I see so many of my friends who are trapped in repetitive patterns with other people that are very unfulfilling. And, you know, we is all about how we project something onto another person, which really

Starting point is 01:05:33 is inside us. And that totally fits with my ideas about drug highs and healing, that these are all within us. And we sometimes need something external on which to project our belief in order to experience what we want to experience. On that note, I've heard you talk about the drive to experience, I don't want to use that. Other states of consciousness. Non-ordinary states of consciousness to be innate to human beings, right?

Starting point is 01:06:08 No, that was the premise of my first book, The Natural Mind, that we have an innate drive to alter consciousness, not necessarily with drugs. There's also ways of doing it. Children spinning, you mentioned. I talked about whirlings, yes, children spinning around and so forth. That also got me in a lot of trouble when that was first published. People didn't want to hear that. But I think this is absolutely the case, and it's in all societies. And I think the inability of our society to allow for that drive and to help channel it in good directions is one reason why we have the kind of drug problems we do today. So I think teaching people how to experience these states, how to get them in ways that are manageable and will hold up for you over time, we should be doing that. And the people who should be teaching that are people who have mastered that themselves, whether, you know, the equivalence of shamans in our society. When you look at periods in your life where you feel like you're in the zone, however you would define that, what are some of the daily or weekly practices that you spot,

Starting point is 01:07:24 just in terms of the pattern recognition? When you look back at these sweet spots, when you've just really been performing well and feeling good, are there any particular daily, weekly practices, morning habits, whatever comes to mind that you see as consistent? Well, I do have a sitting meditation practice, sometimes quite brief, but I do it when I first get up in the morning. And I've done that quite regularly for a long time. Part of that is my breathing work. Another is being physically active, and the forms of my physical activity have changed over my lifetime. In my 20s, I ran ran and I got signals from my knees that they didn't

Starting point is 01:08:06 like that. And I started biking instead. I always did a lot of walking and hiking. In later life, I've really gotten into swimming. I mean, that's my favorite physical activity at the moment. I've lived with dogs for most of my adult life. And I can't imagine life without dogs. And that has been a very important part of my emotional well-being, I would say. My connection with plants, which we started out talking about, brings me a great deal of fulfillment. But growing plants, using them as medicine, cooking, cooking and food preparation have always been very grounding for me. I've often said and written that for me, cooking is a meditation, chopping vegetables, also manifesting. I have a concept in my head, something that I want to prepare. I think cooking is great training in practical magic.

Starting point is 01:09:00 How do you manifest things? How do you take things from inside your head and make them real and physical reality as close to your imagination as possible? And to me, cooking is a great job for doing that. So that's been very important to me. And I love turning people on to new experiences, including experiences of food and plants. A lot of people over the years have said to me that in reading my books that I've put into words things that they always knew to be true but hadn't put words into words themselves, that makes me very happy. I have many people come up to me who say that reading my books or taking our training programs has really changed their lives for the better. That makes me very happy. It makes me feel I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. Do you, I don't know what your current troop looks like, but do you still have your, I want to say Rhodesian Ridgebacks? I have two Rhodesian Ridgebacks, a male and a female who are, this is my third generation of them. And they're stellar. They've also, you know, for me, living with them

Starting point is 01:10:05 has really taught me to be good at nonverbal communication. You know, we're really good at reading each other's needs and wants and intentions. And that's been remarkable training. There's been also some, you probably have seen some of this research on some of the positive interactions with dogs especially. One is that dogs are the only animal that hold our gaze, and most animals regard looking into the eyes as a threat. And dogs have evolved the ability to hold our gaze. And there's research showing that when a dog holds your gaze, there is oxytocin released both in the dog's brain and the human brain. And the longer the eye connection is, the greater the release of oxytocin,

Starting point is 01:10:47 which is the bonding hormone. There was also a paper that came out in this past year showing that when you exchange saliva with a dog, I won't go into how that happens, but it happens, that this does very good things for your microbiome. And in particular, it changes it in ways that seem to protect against obesity. I cannot wait to see the products that come out of that comment. The dog saliva

Starting point is 01:11:13 morning swish. The morning meditation, could you elaborate on that just a second in terms of the format? What does that look like in practice? Okay. Long, long ago, around the time that I was writing The Natural Mind, I became interested in meditation. I began reading about Zen. I met people who practice Zen. So that's what I first

Starting point is 01:11:37 tried of sitting down, counting breaths. Then I took some Vipassana training, uh, mindfulness meditation. And so what I do now is a kind of combination of that. I sit down, I first do my breathing. I do some, um, uh, bellows breath, breath of fire. And then I do that four, seven, my breath, on sensations in my body, on whatever's actual sensory signals in the room around me. And if I'm aware that my attention is in my thoughts or on images, I just try to bring it back to those things. So that's really all that I do. And, you know, a simple sitting. But to me, meditation is not about doing it just in a special time of sitting. It's carrying that experience and training into all aspects of your life. So whether it's driving, walking, chopping vegetables, you want to be as much in that state as possible. To me, that's the essence of mindfulness. And you mentioned Vipassana.

Starting point is 01:12:52 You may have other recommendations, which I'd love to hear. But for people who are curious about experimenting with Vipassana in a way that does not involve a ton of language that perhaps they don't speak natively, using the royal we. I mentioned Sam Harris earlier. His waking up app, I find, to be very, very good for this, particularly if people have previously had an allergy to how meditation can sometimes be presented.

Starting point is 01:13:29 I'm a great admirer of his work, and another one of the books that I have commonly given out to people is The End of Faith. You know, it's a very slim little volume. And the combination of being a neuroscientist, somebody who really questions religious dogma and also accepts the mystery of existence, I think that's a very unusual combination. It is. That is very unusual. in the last handful of years discovered cooking in the process of writing my third book and have often wondered why I find cooking so meditative, as you put it. And one theory that I have is that much like why I, it is for similar reasons that I find certain types of sports and physical training meditative,

Starting point is 01:14:26 and that is that there are actually some consequences built in. You have to pay attention if you're chopping, if you're finely dicing vegetables, or you have three things on different heats on the stovetop. I was kicked out of the kitchen growing up. My mother said, you know, I should be out playing. But I was always fascinated watching people do it. And I didn't I really got into it when I was in medical school. And I found, you know, in those days, you had to work really long shifts in hospitals and they were ghastly places. And when I came out of them, I was in such bad mental and emotional states. And I found that imagining something that I could cook for myself and getting the ingredients and then doing it, that this put my head back in a very good place.

Starting point is 01:15:15 So from a very early time, I discovered that power of cooking for me. And I've gotten to be a very good home cook. And over the years, many people said you ought to open a restaurant. And I never was interested in that because I knew I knew nothing about the restaurant business, and it looked like a very tough business. And then about 12 years ago, a mutual friend introduced me to a successful restaurateur here in Arizona, and I proposed him the concept of a restaurant that would serve delicious food that was also healthy. His immediate response was health food doesn't sell. I think he thought I was talking tofu and sprouts. I eventually asked him and his wife to come out to my place. I cooked dinner for them.

Starting point is 01:15:56 They liked the food, but he was very skeptical. But his wheels turned and he said he was willing to give this a try, but he was very doubtful. But he got a piece of real estate in Phoenix, which was a coffee shop, and we converted it and opened the first True Food Kitchen 11 years ago. It was from the moment it opened an immediate success. A lot of my recipes, my concept based on my anti-inflammatory diet, it's delicious, wonderful-looking food. It also happens to adhere to good nutritional guidelines. We now have 25 of these around the country. Very successful. We're going to open eight more this year. I'm still a minority owner and oversee the oversee the menu. And that's been great fun. And watching people eat the kind of food that I eat and loving it is great.

Starting point is 01:16:52 There's a location here in Austin, True Food Kitchen, about a few blocks from where I'm sitting and recording. And I was actually there two nights ago having dinner for those people who might be interested that the seasonal ingredient salad with chicken added to it. And with Dan Engel, who is also a previous guest on the podcast. So I'm a fan. Why do you think given the fatality rate, and not just the fatality rate, but like the infant mortality rate of restaurants and new concepts. To what do you attribute it being successful from the get-go? Did you guys do a lot of testing beforehand?

Starting point is 01:17:33 No, we didn't. No, we didn't. I think my partner, Sam Fox, his taste and mine couldn't be more different. He likes cheeseburgers and steaks. And we butted heads over a lot of things. But he knows the restaurant business, so in our compromises, I think we worked out a formula that worked. One reason for the success is we have something for everyone, something for meat eaters, vegetarians, vegans, gluten-free people. And we're willing to modify recipes to whatever diners want.

Starting point is 01:18:05 The restaurant has created its own culture that's very distinctive, and it draws people to work there who live the lifestyle. The servers, the cooks really all follow the kind of lifestyle that I preach, and that's visible when you go into one of these places. I just can't tell you. A lot of people tell me that people eat there four and five times a week. Some of our dishes like the kale salad have become so popular, we created a shortage of organic kale on the West Coast some years ago.

Starting point is 01:18:39 And I've had parents come up with kids and say their kids' favorite dish is the kale salad, and they have to make it for them at home. I mean, who would have ever thought that American kids would be eating kale salad? So I think that there's this culture that's apparent when you go into the restaurant. We've had really no successful competition, and the food speaks for itself. It's beautiful. It's delicious. Flavors come through, and the fact that it makes you feel good when you leave, I think, is what draws people back. So I was just thinking, as you mentioned, the kale shortage.

Starting point is 01:19:13 I was thinking for all the hedge fund managers listening to this, they should try to get inside information on pending menu additions so they can go along, whatever that is or look at the secondary and tertiary effects of whatever the shortage will be, which is a real thing. I remember almonds in California. In any case, so you mentioned True Food Kitchen. This is a good opportunity for me to ask you about investments. I mean, you've thought about investing in many different ways, and I'd like to talk about investments, not of money, but time, energy, and so on. Can you think of one of or any of the best or most worthwhile investments you've ever made? It could be money. It could be money in the sense that I've had people on the podcast like Amelia Boone, who is an attorney, but paid for her first competitor ticket to world's toughest mutter. She ended up being a four-time world champion and it really changed her life. So it could be money, but not in the strict

Starting point is 01:20:21 sense of investment into a stock or a company, if that makes sense? Well, one of them has to be True Food Kitchen. I did invest money in it, but I invested a great deal of time. And the reward that I've gotten back has been many fold. I've created a private foundation, the Weill Foundation, which funds integrative medicine, education and research in this country and other countries, and been able to give away $7 million in the past few years since that was created. That's been very fulfilling to me. In terms of time investments, I guess, you know, I've invested an awful lot of time in writing, and that's not the easiest occupation, as you know. But that has also been incredibly

Starting point is 01:21:08 rewarding to me. You know, publishing is a very uncertain business these days. And I was fortunate enough to be in it at a time when, you know, it worked and to reap the benefits of that. And that's been very satisfying. But that's been a major part of my life. What about on the convert? If we look at the, the other end of the spectrum, uh, can you think of any failures or apparent failures that set you up for later success? Do you have any favorite failures? Think about that. Um, or just things you've viewed as catastrophes or real awful occurrences that turned out to be blessings in disguise. Well, you know, for a lot of years, the kind of medicine that I advocated, people thought I was nuts. And, you know, no, as I said, none of my medical colleagues took me seriously. They thought I'd gone off the deep end. So, you know, I knew that I was on the right path, I think I developed the ability to just hold

Starting point is 01:22:27 true to what I knew to be right and keep following my footsteps. Are there any positions or opinions in the last few years, or it could be way back, it doesn't have to be in the last few years, that you've changed substantially, where you've shifted your position or completely changed my position all the time and uh you know i think that's uh that's one thing that people respect about my work i'm quite willing to say that i was wrong about something or to as new information comes out you mentioned though i do have a very good ability to spot trends and to pick up on things that may take the mainstream culture years to come around to. And for example, I was warning people about trans fats probably 15 years before people saw

Starting point is 01:23:16 how dangerous they were and there was any attempt to ban them from food. So I'm just really good at stuff like that. How did that come about? Do you mind giving us a little bit of background on how – A lot of information comes across my desk. And now that I have all of these students out there that I've trained, they constantly send me things. I don't have great patience to read whole articles, but I'm very good at getting the gist of things very quickly and putting together with other information that I know. And so, you know, with the anti-inflammatory diet, I saw this, you know, it must be, again, 15, 18 years ago, but there was this hypothesis out there that chronic low-level inflammation may be the root cause of many diseases that we had thought were unrelated,

Starting point is 01:24:07 like heart disease and Alzheimer's disease and cancer. And I picked up on that idea very early, and that led me to develop this anti-inflammatory eating plan. There's now a tremendous amount of validation of that. So all I can tell you is I'm very intuitive about that. I pick up on things, I see the connections to other things, and I'm willing to start advocating them before the evidence is all there. But most of the time, the evidence comes in. And there are certain things you've done for a long time. Like you mentioned, the cooking, really beginning in, if I'm remembering correctly, medical school. Yep. in, if I'm remembering correctly, medical school. In recent memory, it could be the last few years,

Starting point is 01:24:49 last five years, are there any new beliefs or behaviors or habits that have really improved the quality of your life that come to mind? Well, I'm fascinated by the stuff that's been out there on intermittent fasting. That's something that I've been experimenting with. I think the biochemistry of it is fascinating. I think there are all different ways of doing it. I haven't figured out exactly what's right for me, but I'm sure there's something there that's valuable, and I will continue to experiment with that. What else? Are there any resources or particular people who led you to look into that closely?

Starting point is 01:25:25 I can't think of one person. I think it's been hearing that from a variety of sources and reading the medical literature about it. So I have maybe a strange question to ask you, but I feel like I want to ask nonetheless. It's not a scary question, but it might be odd, which is, when is the last time you remember crying tears of joy? And this is a question that was used as an opener at a group dinner once, and I thought it was going to completely fall flat and could be a catastrophe. Michael Hebb, I want to give him credit, and it opened the portal to such a incredible conversation among strangers that I jotted it down. I don't know that I've actually cried tears

Starting point is 01:26:09 of joys, but I feel myself welling up in certain circumstances. And I think a number of times when people have written me or told me in person that something that I wrote or said had really saved their life, literally.

Starting point is 01:26:32 And, you know, I just have a very strong emotional response to that. Is there anything that you, besides looking into intermittent fasting, is there anything in particular that you are working on these days? Do you do anything like New Year's resolutions, or do you have any rituals around the New Year? No, first of all, I don't believe in the New Year. I think it's just an artificial concept on the calendar. If there is a, you know, I was always fascinated by the fact that the Jewish New Year is at the time of the autumn equinox, and it's not in the first month of the Jewish calendar. So that's odd that the New Year begins not in the first month.

Starting point is 01:27:14 And in some ways, it's calling attention to the importance of the autumn equinox, and I think that image, the symbolism that I have there is that if you plant root crops at that time, they develop in the dark. They put roots down. You don't see any sign of them. And then in the spring, shoots come up. And the result of all that work in mental patterns, the life patterns that you set may manifest when spring comes around. So sometimes at that time of year, I think about what I want to do. But since I'm mostly doing what I want to do, I don't have to change too much. Is the first, say, 60 minutes or 90 minutes of your day fairly scripted at this point? If so, when do you wake up? What does it look like? I wake up pretty consistently at 4 a.m.,

Starting point is 01:28:18 although it changes through the... I tend to wake up when it gets light, but my pattern now is I wake up at 4 and I usually go to bed at 9, so I like to get seven hours of sleep. And I sleep with my dogs, and if I don't wake up at 4, the female dog wakes me up exactly at 4 by licking my head very vigorously. Anyway, so I get up, I brush my teeth, and then I sit down and do my meditation, however long that takes. And then I go in and I usually feed the dogs. I may feed myself. And then as soon as it gets light, I take the dogs out. There's a pretty wild wash near my home where they run off-leash fairly early in the morning.

Starting point is 01:29:04 What are your default breakfasts if you do have breakfast? You know, I love Japanese breakfast. And I know you and I are both Japanophiles. I hated breakfast growing up as a kid. There was nothing I was served that I liked. And I went to Japan when I was 17. This was in 1959. I was there with a student exchange group. I lived with Japanese families outside of Tokyo and in Kobe. And I suddenly discovered this is what I want to eat for breakfast, you know, that a piece of broiled fish and miso soup and steamed rice and some seaweed and pickles and green tea, that just suits me fine. And if i can i have things like that for breakfast it's got to be the best breakfast on the planet i've tried so many breakfasts and that's my favorite it's just

Starting point is 01:29:53 so good breakfast make me feel horrible and when i'm on the road that's the meal i have most difficulty with uh by the way let me also tell you another story. When I was first in Japan, I arrived in, I think it was November 1st of 1959, was with this family outside of Tokyo in Urawa City, and there was no language in common. None of them spoke English. I didn't speak Japanese, so there was a lot of gesturing. But on the second night that I was there, the mother of the household took me next door to her neighbor who was a practitioner of Chanoyu tea ceremony. And I experienced a tea ceremony for the first time and was served matcha. And two things about it fascinated me. One was the color of the powdered tea. I had never seen a more beautiful green powder. And the other was the chasen, this whisk

Starting point is 01:30:46 that's made from, you know, one piece of carved bamboo that's just a miracle of carving. And something about the shape of that just fascinated me that was used to whisk the tea into a froth. So, as you can imagine, when I came back to the States in 1960, you know, nobody knew about Japanese food. Every city had one Japanese restaurant that was named Ginza or Sakura, and they had miso soup and clear soup. They had some tempura and some kind of broiled salmon. I mean, the idea of eating raw fish would never be there at all. And if anybody had told me that Americans would be eating sushi the way they are now, I would never have believed it. So anyway, I became a

Starting point is 01:31:29 fan of matcha from that time. And that's another example of something that I came across and turned people on to many, many years before it became popular. And in recent years, I found a sourced really good matcha in Japan from Uji, which is the town outside of Kyoto where most of the tea growing goes on. And I've been making this available to – I helped start a company called Matchakari. The website is matcha.com. And it's just amazing to me to watch matcha suddenly being discovered here. And I've seen it on – there was a recent episode of Madam Secretary where a daughter is preparing a bowl of matcha for somebody. I mean, that's amazing. So I was, I think, 40 or 50 years ahead of that one. And matcha, for those people wondering on the

Starting point is 01:32:15 spelling, is M-A-T-C-H-A. Matcha.com, that's a hell of a URL. I know, not bad. And matcha, it literally means powdered tea. And this is the only form of tea in which the whole leaf is consumed. So you're getting all of the nutrients, phytochemicals there. And it's a labor-intensive process of making it, but matcha regularly. I have some at home. And you can use the whisk if you want to be sacrilegious but really efficient. You can also use one of those battery-powered frothers. I like iced matcha also, especially in warm weather. And I just put the matcha in cold water and use one of the electric whisks to whisk it and then add ice to it. I don't sweeten it. And it's, again, beautiful green and a wonderful drink. Yeah, green is my favorite color. And if people were to ask me what shade of green,

Starting point is 01:33:09 I used to know the exact Pantone number, which is pretty nerdy. But it is, they're one and the same, really. It's the color of maple leaves in July on eastern Long Island or when the sunlight hits the backside or matcha green tea right yeah i like it that's so beautiful uh let me ask just a few more questions and then maybe we'll do a round two sometime but okay i'd love to to break bread in person uh in the meantime at some point but uh if you could have actually no i'll start with a different one. I'm going to ask you my usual, what would you put on a billboard question? But we'll get to that.

Starting point is 01:33:52 In terms of small purchases, are there any purchases of, say, $100 or less that have positively impacted your life in recent memory? Anything, and it's specific. People always love specifics, but is there any sort of little thing? Yeah. Well, one of them I'm holding in my hand right now, and my daughter turned me on to these. She's now 28. Computer glasses, which I got on Amazon.

Starting point is 01:34:18 I don't know, they were less than $20. But these are yellow tinted glasses that enlarge things slightly. That has totally changed my comfort in sitting in front of a screen you know it cancels out the blue light and uh it just that's been a great thing to have in my life perfect so we're going from the micro to the macro so we have the the computer glasses and then something that probably wouldn't require glasses which is a gigantic billboard this is more of a metaphorical question, but if you could get a message out to millions or billions of people, it could be a word, could be a sentence, could be a

Starting point is 01:34:52 quote, could be anything non-commercial. What might you put on such a billboard? I think it's all the good stuff is inside you. I mean, that was the main point of the natural mind is that the highs that you get from drugs are inside you. They're in the nervous system. The drugs act as a releaser. Healing is a potential inside you. Various treatments or people can activate that or release it. But it's that everything really is within. conclusion. If you read the article that I mentioned, I'll put it in the show notes for everybody as well, on the placebo effect, on how the placebo effect varies culturally, on how it's become stronger in the United States, on looking at the outliers in the

Starting point is 01:35:54 control groups, these placebo groups, like you mentioned, if you're looking at the tables of studies, it's so exciting to explore. And I am so excited to see how it is further studied and utilized in medicine. Tim, this is another one that I think I was on to long before people got into it. I don't know if you've read my book called Health and Healing. It came out shortly after From Chocolate to Morphine. It was the first book that I wrote on medicine and medical philosophy. There are two chapters in that on placebos. And I would recommend go back and read them because it's all this stuff that we've been talking about. Medical Nostradamus strikes again.

Starting point is 01:36:41 You know, Andrew, people can find you at drweil.com medicine.arizona.edu you're on twitter at dr weil that's w-e-i-l do you have any other uh or any final asks or requests or suggestions for people listening to the podcast just in the process of uh of, of, of finishing up? No, I think, you know, my work is out there. It's easily, uh, accessed and, um, I think it's relevant to many people today. And, um, I really enjoy talking to you. I, uh, it's been a while since we worked together in person. I hope we can remedy that. Yes, definitely. Well, I guess, you know, there might be more locations. I won't. True Food Kitchen popping up in the very near future and not necessarily too far away from either of us. So perhaps we can rendezvous at one of those. Or even better, if I could sample some more produce from eagles, which was also something I had never seen before, while we're after it. That would be really wonderful.

Starting point is 01:37:50 But I really appreciate you taking the time. I've been wanting to have you on the podcast for quite a while, so it's nice to finally reconnect and certainly hope it's not the last time anytime soon. Good, thanks for having me. So thank you. And for everybody listening, everything we talked about, the books, the various websites, the matcha, you name it, all of those will be available in the show notes, as always, at Tim.blog forward slash podcast.

Starting point is 01:38:19 So you can find links and extended links to everything, studies and so on. And, Andrew, thank you again. Thank you. To everybody listening, be safe. Experiment and experience widely. Use your brains. Pay attention to your body. And until next time, thank you for listening.

Starting point is 01:38:40 Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the, the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my

Starting point is 01:39:20 close friends, for instance, and it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. I get asked all the time, if you could only use one supplement, what would it be?

Starting point is 01:39:45 And my answer is inevitably Athletic Greens. It is your all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in the 4-Hour Body, did not get paid for that, and I travel with it to avoid getting sick. I take it in the mornings to ensure optimal performance. It just covers all my bases. If I can't get what I need through whole food meals

Starting point is 01:40:03 throughout the rest of the day. If you want to give Athletic Greens a try, they are offering a free 20-count travel pack for first-time users. I always travel with at least three or four of these. This represents a $100 value. So if you buy Athletic Greens, you get an extra $100 in free product. So check it out, athleticgreens.com forward slash Tim. Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash Tim for your free travel pack with any purchase. This episode is brought to you by Audible. Audible provides an unbeatable selection of audiobooks including bestsellers, how-to, mysteries, thrillers, memoirs, and more. I've used Audible for many years and I have a few audiobooks to recommend right off the bat.

Starting point is 01:40:44 Number one, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. So listen to the book that caught the attention of Spielberg enough to get made into a major film. The writing is fantastic. Tau Seneca by Seneca the Younger. This is a collection of letters, my favorite compilation of letters of all time that I've recommended the most of all the books I've ever read. And The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. This is the fiction book that I use to convert nonfiction purists into fiction lovers. I like the version that Neil reads himself, but that's just me. He has a hypnotic voice.

Starting point is 01:41:18 I also recently enjoyed Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg, which was recommended to me by bestselling author Neil Strauss. Make sure to get the audiobook version, and you will recognize it by the peace sign on the cover. And as an Audible subscriber, you can choose three titles every month, one audiobook and two Audible originals you can't hear anywhere else. And there's some really, really cool stuff among the Audible originals. You can listen on any device, anytime, anywhere, at home, at the gym, while you're cooking, on your commute, or wherever. I often listen to audiobooks when I'm walking my pooch, or on the way to the gym, so on and so forth.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #350: Dr. Andrew Weil — Optimal Health, Plant Medicine, and More

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #350: Dr. Andrew Weil — Optimal Health, Plant Medicine, and More

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.