Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ANL4Nyd0js
[Music] all right here we go what's up man great to see you good to see you too so we were just talking about ari blacking out trying to keep up with uh shane gillis who is uh a superhuman drinker like it's bizarre the volume you could put down and you were you were saying you're about to say something yeah i mean obviously there's a tolerance that's built up with drinking a lot but i believe the number is approximately eight percent of people have a mutation in a gene such that when they drink alcohol it increases their dopamine levels very quickly and they get euphoric they feel great these are the people like that character in mad men the don draper character like he would go out and just get plastered and the next day you know he's all fresh and ready and pop part of that is tolerance but in certain scandinavian countries northern european countries this gene tends to be more prevalent and these people are the people that can just keep drinking and drinking they feel great when they drink whereas most people they feel disinhibited at the beginning you know you have a couple drinks the forebrain shuts down a little bit because that's what it does they start talking more talk more but if they keep drinking they're blacking out you know they're stumbling they're slurring their words this eight percent of people by way of this genetic mutation alcohol affects them very differently it offsets all that sedative property and they could just go and go and go this is the person who's doing a case a day or at the party and just shot for shot and just looking like they're improving in function obviously they're not but you put one of those people against uh our shafir and that's what you get yeah so even for those people though it still has a negative effect on your body right oh yeah i mean the toxicity of the alcohol is universal but in terms of how it impacts brain function and you see this across all these different categories of drugs too right you know somebody takes ritalin adderall modafinil or armadaphenyl these are the
common prescribed drugs now and people use them recreationally for adhd in fact in researching an episode for our podcast on adhd it turns out that more than eighty eight zero percent of college students will rely on adhd meds quote unquote recreationally not prescribed they buy it from each other in order to study 80 and those drugs work mainly by increasing dopamine and increasing adrenaline and they make your focus like this narrow and you're you're in a trench and you can't function but a number of people take them and feel super distracted and lousy but this is of course what they prescribe to kids with adhd yeah now when you modafinil is that that's pro vigil is that what that is yeah now there's some it's very expensive um it's like a thousand dollars a month in some cases really yeah it was originally for a narcolepsy so to offset daytime sleepiness that was the original use of the drug and then it also does work for enhancing focus right i mean that has drawbacks it's not perhaps as detrimental as like recreational drugs to um to increase focus but most of the students out there and the tech workers and this is big in the finance world too are relying on ritalin adderall and things like vivants and to be clear they have legitimate clinical uses it's another one of these drugs for adhd here's the the story around why these drugs initially came to be if you look at kids or adults with adhd like true attention deficit disorder or hyperactivity disorder you don't always have the hyperactivity what you find is they can focus really well if it's on something they like so a kid with add or adhd that loves video games that kid will play video games with laser focus for three hours that sounds like me but then you put them in front of something they don't want to do and they just can't anchor their discipline they just don't have the discipline that also sounds like me although i doubt that i don't know we uh maybe we'll come up later but you're disciplined for fitness and ice baths
and training costs i like those things right well and if you can arrange your life such that most of your stuff is around that great but uh these kids if prove that if you like something you can focus and right it comes as no surprise then that the drugs for adhd universally increase dopamine because dopamine is this incredible molecule that enhances focus motivation and drive and literally narrows the aperture of your visual attention and we've all experienced that and of course drugs like cocaine amphetamine do that to a hyper extent and then there's a crash but with these drugs if prescribed in the right way in the right situation they're terrific they teach the kid's brain how to focus but nowadays there is rampant adult adhd in add part of that is probably due to the phone probably part of that is probably just due to all sorts of things but there is also a lot of recreational use of these prescription drugs not illicit drugs like cocaine amphetamine but prescription drugs that increase dopamine and supplementation for increasing dopamine as well i had read something about modafinil new vigil pro vigil which whichever one it was that initially it was created as a performance-enhancing drug but they needed some sort of an ailment for it to you know to be prescribed and that was when they decided to prescribe it for narcolepsy had you heard anything like that i thought it was in the reverse but i'm open to hear um listen that the course of a lot of these drugs and how they hit market is super interesting i've been learning more and more about this because one of my colleagues who works on aggression and mating behavior which fascinates me has identified some peptides that can really reduce anxiety they put these to the pharmaceutical industry pharmaceutical wasn't interested in them at all even though the safety margins are huge so you say why why wouldn't they want this well turns out these same drugs failed in a schizophrenia trial a long time ago
so no one will go near it with a 10 foot pole so what the way the pharmaceutical industry generally approaches drugs is they love to re-market drugs for which there's already fda approval because then they don't have to go through all the safety stuff and when they do that they can renew the patent this is crucial right because if you can get the generic version now with things like good rx and these like little apps you can get them you can go into a pharmacy you hit good rx and it'll say oh yeah we've got some stuff that's about to expire this 300 a month drug is 10 i've had this happen it's you know amazing if they can keep it out of the generic market that's huge and the way to do that is to find a new clinical use so i don't know which one came first narcolepsy or these these focusing adhd uses but or as a performance enhancer but if the pharmaceutical industry the people that own the patent to that drug can find a new legitimate use they just bought themselves i think another 10 years on the on the patent so this was originally prescribed for schizophrenia and then they were going to use these peptides for mating yeah so here so in terms of the aggression this is really interesting this is the work of a guy at caltech named david anderson and he works on mating and aggression and the relationship human beings in well he has work related to humans and the neighboring lab works on humans but in mice and in humans but these areas of the brain are really conserved this this we can talk about which brain area but what he discovered is observed meaning um sorry that in mice and in humans these brain structures look identical and that the same classes of neurons exist that if you were to stimulate them because neurosurgeons have done this people go into a rage or in animals if you stimulate them the animals go into a rage in fact there are these videos online they're incredible where this is daiyu lin's work when she was in david anderson's lab so you take two mice a male mouse and female mouse and they're mating right as it were and then they stimulate these neurons because they can
do that now in a you know using light believe it or not and those and the male immediately tries to kill the female you can even just put him in a cage alone with a glove filled with air he's walking around you stimulate these neurons and he just goes into a rage right just just trying to destroy this glove but here's what's super interesting and no one understands if you put this animal into a cage alone and stimulate looks pretty normal it doesn't do anything so it's not like it attacks itself and you know and every time there's this you know horrible news event like the school shooting thing or something like that i always think you know like what's going on in the there's a certain brain here it's called the ventra hypothalamus this is a brain area that's really interesting because it has a population of neurons that control mating you stimulate them and animals will just start trying to copulate with basically whatever's around if you give them a choice of their usual preference of you know females if they're male males if they're female because that's the way my mice go one or the other they will just try and start mating you stimulate the other group of neurons and they will try and kill the other mouse is so these are like switches in the hypothalamus i mean are these like very distinct when you we talk about like neurons and switches like how do you distinguish between the why can you see them like what is the difference great question so for many decades it was known that if you stimulate this brain area you could get aggression this is actually nobel prize winning work of a guy named whose last name is hess and what they found was if you stimulate this brain area cats would go into either two kinds of of aggression it was either defensive aggression kind of with with you know hair up right or you would stimulate a little bit more and they would do the you know predatory aggression right i'm probably doing this wrong but you know like ears forward and you know you're you're the hunter last time i'm still learning about you know
animal behavior in this way but what's really interesting is that for years no one could understand why if you also stimulated this brain area and you used a different pattern of stimulation you get mating behavior and it turns out that the neurons are mixed in there like salt and pepper david anderson's lab figured out that these are molecularly distinct neurons and what makes them distinct is really interesting if they stimulate only the neurons that have the estrogen receptor they become aggressive and this again goes back to this thing that we talked about a while ago which is that testosterone aromatized converted into estrogen has these incredible effects on aggression and masculinization of the brain and a lot of people think in fact people heard me say that last time and said oh you're trying to say that estrogen is doing everything testosterone is doing no it's that things like testosterone and estrogen control gene expression and so the fact that it's estrogen or testosterone it doesn't really matter it's the fact that these are molecularly distinct neurons they can trigger these neurons and they can get very distinct outputs of behavior but what's crazy is you stop stimulating the animal just goes back to doing whatever and then goes oh yeah i think i'll try and mate again now eventually the female's like hey this is getting confusing but this it's clear that these sorts of things are also happening in humans but normally we have kind of a weighting of aggression versus mating behavior right some people choose to combine those right there's kind of extremes of that rape there's rough sex there's all sorts of you know it's it's uncomfortable for people to think about that but there's a continuum between a aggressive versus approach type behaviors and for whatever reason this drove me to start looking at different mating behaviors of animals online like if you watch ferrets mating it's like he's biting the back of her neck she's squealing all over the place like this is uncomfortable for some people see some people probably like watching this stuff but you look at animals mating and there's a
kind of a a balancing act between you know what looks it's not you wouldn't call it love making let's put it at that you'd call it mating that's pretty aggressive and that's very common in in the animal kingdom so is it coming in the animal kingdom because for in order to have strong genes that pass on you need a strong animal and so they express themselves in this aggressive way to prove to the female that they're strong enough to mate and and procreate like what is the reason for for that sort of aggressive is there a reason well it's a great question so there's this theory called hydraulic pressure theory this was developed by conrad lorenz which is another nobel prize winner who studied animal behavior and here's the idea is that all of these just different populations of neurons are in the hypothalamus this is a little tiny tiny thing i mean it's the size of like a little gobstopper candy like a little gumball and you've got neurons for aggression neurons for mating neurons that turn on to make sure that you that animals don't try and mate with the wrong species right we take this for granted like how come a cat doesn't try and mate with the dog no the dog might hump but that's a different thing altogether so it's all harbored in there and this hydraulic theory is that all of these things are kind of weighted probabilities so there's never zero probability that any of this will happen unless they're in sleep but maybe it's ten percent aggression eighty percent mating while they're mating maybe another male enters the arena and now they're sort of like the confusion like am i gonna have to fight or can i keep mating these kinds of things because oftentimes these animals are communal in some way and so the way that anderson explained this to me we had a conversation about this recently is that the brain might actually get confused in certain moments that you know and there's also a kind of opioid pain relief thing that gets released during sexual activity pain threshold goes way up right and we were talking about this in the context of fetishes
because you know if you look at fetishes they're not random true fetishes are like can be pathologies where people actually require the presence of something in order to become aroused and those things almost always if you look at true fetishes are things like feet dead bodies feces animals things that are all very infectious exactly your facial expression illustrates it perfectly my facial expression for those listening is yuck exactly so you know that's disgust and you have circuits in your brain that are for disgusted are about getting you away from that thing because it's infectious putrid disgusting and out of context and then you think about sex and food appetite and all that and it's it's all repetitive as they call it it's moving towards it it's bringing in more of those molecules as opposed to trying to get away from like vomit right but the feet thing isn't like guys like pretty feet it you know we're very visual animals and so it may cross over into visual perception and what arouses people differs obviously people have their different proclivities but true fetishes are a kind of a confusion of this circuitry right where people confuse or learn arousal associated with something that's actually quite dangerous i mean you take the extreme one like dead body it's like incredible is that normal no no no no no not common not common common enough that you brought it up though well i've been reading up on this because i'm i'm fascinated by the primitive as a in addition to the more evolved parts of the brain so the way anderson describes is you know you'll see animals mating and then all of a sudden you know he'll bite the back of her neck or sometimes she'll bite him and the theory is that some of the neurons and they've seen this in brain imaging in real time because they can do that in animals some of the neurons that are responsible for aggression will just suddenly you know spike up there right and and will kind of overtake the other behavior and then they'll go back to mating
now when you're talking about studies on animals and they're doing this it's kind that there there's these ethical questions if you're going to do a study on humans if you wanted to stimulate those same neurons and try to incite aggression or hostility or even arousal but has anybody done it they have they have they have so a good friend of mine eddie chang he's the chair of neurosurgery at ucsf he's spends his life and he makes his living probing around in the brain of people who have epilepsy looking for the site where if they stimulate the person will have a seizure so that they can burn that area out or make some other manipulation and he's told me that he's been poking you can't poke around at random right you can't you know every scientist would love to just do that experiment just go in and kind of search but there are sites where they'll stimulate thinking they might evoke a feeling of pleasantness or no feeling at all and the person will go into a rage in the in the or in the operating room because they're wide awake you've probably seen these things of people with neurosurgery and they're playing the violin or things of that sort occasionally they'll hit an area where the person will say i'm feeling super angry right now and they'll say let's back off a little bit from there and they'll chart where they were in the brain that is wild so there's just like a spot yeah there is and we have switches right i mean we have switches for rage switches for all these things i mean that's like the psychologist carl jung you know this idea that we have all things inside of us i mean people vary in their propensity for rage or for love or for anything but at some level we do have all things inside of us we have the circuitry within us and do you think that feel like that variation is neurochemical that there's i think it is neurochemical and i think it is learned as well this peptide that we were talking about earlier becomes relevant in in this context so david's lab discovered there's a peptide called tachykinin it's related to another molecule that's
involved in pain relief called substance p that we all make tachykinin has a bunch of different forms but in humans there's tachycardia one and tachycon in 2. in mice or humans that are socially isolated for a period of time tachykinin levels go through the roof this is very relevant to the recent past around the pandemic in my opinion it goes through the roof and what happens it creates anxiety anger and in particular aggression and so there are drugs that are tachycarnan inhibitors and i asked david i said well why aren't we giving tacican inhibitors to people that are feeling anxious and and aggressive and you know kind of tamp that down and we just had yet another school shooting and we could talk about what that's about but or not but and he said this drug is actually approved it's very safe when you stop what do you say what are you saying there's a drug that can understand but you're saying what that's about but we're not oh sorry the the the tachycarnan i mean is was it elevated in for instance the kid that went in and shot all those kids and how could they find that out post-mortem i think they could do what's called mrna and situ hybridization they could see how much of the gene for tachycardina was being made i think they should do postmortem i don't know how he was killed if his brain is still intact um i think like most people there's very little concern about him and more concerned about the victims as it should be but just like with cte and football players you you want to know where the damage was and also whether or not there was a brain thing there and if that brain thing was there it doesn't mean necessarily that he was born with a bad brain he might have been born with a dysfunctional brain but social isolation increases anxiety and aggression there's no question and actually i was in social isolation increases aggression absolutely really absolutely feelings of aggression and kind of friction with the world us them kind of thinking oh okay i was in new york uh this is a few months back and it was it was the most eerie experience because we were there recording some podcasts and
something came over the news that you know there was literally killer loose and it was like i in brooklyn went into a subway released some smoke bombs and shot people right right they found him in the lower east side walking around someone found so like killer on the loose in new york became a real thing for the time we were there it was super weird because we're staying down near the lower east side and they get the guy and what do they say they say the same thing they always say about these guys he was a loner he was really socially isolated then you find the angry posts you find the things online but it's never like oh this okay you've got crazies like the btk killer and people who are like in their church and stuff but we're so you know sociopathic killers on on the sly but these kind of random at what seemed like random acts of aggression almost always these people were highly socially isolated which and i'm not evoking sympathy i want to be very clear you know i mean nothing makes me more i think everyone is furious and frustrated about this situation with the shooting but i asked david about this i was like why aren't these drugs being used or prescribed and he said because years ago there was a trial at a pharmaceutical company exploring the role of this drug in schizophrenia for reasons that aren't clear and it didn't work and it cost the company a ton of money so now no companies want to go near it there's this kind of you know black listing of drugs that failed in trials and as a consequence there's probably dozens if not hundreds of very useful medications out there that are just not being explored so when they do studies on people to try to find out what areas of the brain that you can ignite to get people hostile how do they how would they perform those studies so unfortunately i guess fortunately for guys like elon because they have uh companies based on this but unfortunately for for kind of the exploratory purposes making this easier they shave the head in a little spot they drill it they make a tiny little hole in the skull and they're lowering electrodes down there and they're the way these electrodes are built they're
not just a single wire it's actually pretty cool it's like a a barrel of wires and they're able to like put them to different depths so you know you imagine a hundred or a thousand wires all at different depths and you know probing around and stimulating at different levels so it's all happening very fast and then they'll hit a spot where the person will say i feel like i'm about to have a seizure or sometimes we'll have a full-blown seizure like okay that's that's the spot wow and so and we're kind of poking around the dark they are i mean the brain i'd love to tell you that we understand so much about how the brain works i think we understand a lot but most of what we know about how human brain structures work are from experiments like the one i just mentioned which is clinically oriented but then you're doing some experimentation along the way or case studies like the famous hm they always give their initials not their names because to maintain anonymity but we know more about human memory from one guy who had both his hippocampi lesioned because he had epilepsy in his hippocampi this is a memory encoding area they kept them in the laboratory for years and studied them and they learned things like you might appreciate this if you went in and you said hey i'm joe nice to meet you he'd say i am you know whoever he was hm henry whatever and you'd say great you'd walk out and come back in and say hi who are you and you'd say i'm joe i'm gonna tell you a joke they did this experiment and you tell him a joke and he'd laugh laugh you leave you come back you tell him the same joke he doesn't remember the joke but he laughs a little bit less and the next time a little bit less so something in his brain is familiar right this speaks to the importance of novelty and surprise and comedy but he can't remember that he remembers and so that starts to open up all sorts of interesting questions about consciousness and wow so he likes kind of sees it coming but he doesn't know why he sees it coming yeah he doesn't know why it's it's not as funny the
second time i mean it's never it was fine the second time right but are the people that are saying it are they saying it with the same enthusiasm is it the same person they didn't control they i don't know that they use good comics or good jokes most of the jokes are pretty lame right they're kind of laboratory style jokes which are always lame but they always my understanding is that a lot of the joke if the laughter evoking quality of a joke is the surprise although i have to say when i saw you go uh do comedy at the vulcan a few few months ago there are some bits you call them yeah yeah okay uh that you do where like i'm thinking myself oh no he's not going there is he is he really like you're leading us down this path and i'm thinking oh no he's not going to say that is he and then you go there and that's what's funny about it so i realized when watching that i took a mental note to myself i was like okay so jokes aren't always about getting hit with the surprise sometimes it's you know you're going down this path that is really really uncomfortable well com it's it's very hard to describe what comedy is because you don't even know it unless you're doing it like while you're doing it you're like you're trying to work out bits it's almost like you're on instinct you're trying to like sort you're almost like you're like the way you're probing the brain in the dark you're kind of doing that a little bit with comedy some of it's sneaky some of it you like sneaking things in on people you're catching them before they like because like you the worst thing is when you know where someone's going and you see the setup and you you anticipate the punchline then the punchline comes and you don't think it's funny because like i thought that myself i saw that coming the best ones are when you think something's going to happen and then another thing happens instead and it's even funnier right or when you you get you recognize this thing that this person's saying that you didn't think other people recognized and you're like yes right you know there's that too but you don't know what you're doing while
you're doing it sometimes i saw you do a uh question and answer part at the end yeah i was there with lex and he turns to me he's like i can't believe he's gonna do this i'm like why not it's like because that's real time i mean every i guess you're yeah you're [ __ ] around yeah well it was amazing i mean i think that for us we were just thinking like wow like you're first two scientists like two super nerds to put yourself into a situation deliberately where you don't know what's going to happen it's like the worst you're trying everything about science is trying to control variables it's all about control right right this is probably why lex is still single just kidding lex there's so many there's so many women that want to marry no no no no no god he's going to kill me he's the black belt in jiu jitsu not me oh no lex i'm so sorry um he's over in russia right now i hope he comes back he's not going to listen he'll be so far behind on podcasts he's not going to listen to this one don't worry he'll probably come back with a wife maybe yeah maybe that's his move find himself a nice lady over there we'll understand him oh goodness there's so many things i want to say here but i have to be very careful uh whoever lex marries will be one lucky uh woman and vice versa the only thing i would worry about with lex is that he's so busy i do not know if he has the time for a relationship we actually discussed that on a podcast i did with him on his podcast that's going to be really soon he was talking about whether or not he has time you know like he has time for a relationship he's not sure if he does well he's also gonna have to start following a somewhat more normal schedule because this guy's basically nocturnal i get texts from him like four in the morning yeah but that's what he likes yeah there's nothing wrong with it you know i think some people's minds work best at i write my best material really late at night what's really late two three in the morning but you get up early right yeah yeah but it depends on the day like if i i stay if i write till like 3 4 in the morning i try not to get up before 10. but on normal days i'm getting up at seven or maybe even a little earlier but
when i come home from shows oftentimes my mind is very excited and that's when i like to that's what i like to write yeah you know there's a really cool phenomenon where in early in the day or after we should say after someone's been asleep for a while for that first zero to nine hours of the day i call this phase one just because gotta label everything with a name to make it clear during that time we know that dopamine adrenaline and cortisol healthy levels of cortisol are highest in your system in those first nine hours you might not wake up quickly but they're highest and then those start to taper off and molecules like serotonin start to predominate and the way these molecules like dopamine serotonin they do a lot of different things they're involved in tons of things but we can generally say that they modulate they're called neuromodulators they bias the probability that certain brain circuits and areas will be active and certain ones won't so when dopamine and epinephrine are really churning around in your brain you're really good at linear types of things like math organization working out sets and reps this does this this is we're going here itineraries where there's a right answer and you're just trying to plug and chug as serotonin and other molecules kick in which is later in the day and at night the brain becomes much better at these i call this phase two of the day they become so it's like seven to sixteen hours uh sorry ten to seventeen hours after waking so zero to nine for phase one and ten to seventeen for phase two your brain is much better at non-linear thinking creative thinking brainstorming um i don't know what the writing process comedy process is for you but you know you're doing anything creative you're organizing existing things into new ways you're kind of playing with ideas and it it actually can be beneficial to be slightly sedated this is actually why so many um great writers and musicians and maybe comics have used a little bit of alcohol a little bit of cannabis to put their brain into that kind of liminal state where you're not you're not super lasered in you're not looking for the right answer the right
answer just kind of comes to you and for some people they have a hard time accessing that when they're in this hyperdrive mode and jazz musicians right famous for abusing a lot of substances because jazz is all about the spontaneous incorporation of notes and etc so i think that late night creativity makes a lot of sense yeah tim dillon and i were just having this conversation because tim is sober and you know tim used to have a like a real problem with substances and he says he does his podcast really late at night like they don't even start filming until like after midnight that's why he's got the aviator yeah that's probably but it's also like that's sort of his drug you know like he's sleepy and he's kind of just like half out of it and you know when he puts the sunglasses on he just it's almost like he's in an altered state of consciousness but without having to snort ketamine or whatever the [ __ ] he was doing okay you know he's just definitely a healthier approach that guy is just smart ketamine i don't know ketamine is not legal but please i can't imagine snorting ketones ketamine is legal though you can get you could do ketamine therapies which are really weird like a lot of people are doing them for depression why so here i've got colleagues who study ketamine i've been spending a lot of time trying to understand how this drug works it's a dissociative anesthetic so it is it's like pcp it works by blocking something called the nmda and methyldiaspartate receptor if people want to look that up this is very similar right carl hart was telling me that it's almost the same thing as pcp absolutely this receptor is a receptor that becomes active only when you're hyper focused on something and it ch and it has the capacity to create brain change in a very dramatic way sort of because your brain can they say oh your brain is different five minutes after this conversation than it was before that's that's [ __ ] basically your brain doesn't change unless it needs to and that signal of need to comes from something being really intense really stressful really exciting really novel right makes
sense right why reprogram the machine unless there's a need and so you have a chemical signal ketamine basically is was initially used to block memory formation after trauma so people would come into the into the emergency room let's just imagine a horrible scenario right and someone was just in the passenger seat and watch their closest loved one get impaled on a steering column that person is in a state of shock and they're never going to forget what they see so what do you do you give them ketamine you try and dampen the plasticity the brain change that would occur to remember that incredibly traumatic event now it's being used as a way to bring people into the clinic or it seems like it is pretty rampant use now and put people into this dissociative state so that they see themselves having an experience in fact i've talked to people who've gone through cut to mean trials and they describe it as watching themselves get out of their own car they're like third personing themselves this to me sounds like a horrible state to be in but a lot why is that i mean i've been working my whole life to just be comfortable with the body i'm in and i'd like to stay in it not because it's always comfortable to be there but because you know getting good at that seems to be the key to having a good life being able to tolerate discomfort this is about getting out of yourself yeah but isn't the point for these people to try to figure out what they're doing wrong with their life so they can look at it objectively as a third party yeah that makes sense to me that they would look at like for instance their suicidal depression and say yeah you know that like this the new ag kind of thing is like you are not your feelings that's a tough one for people to incorporate because when i have really strong feelings it certainly feels like it's happening inside me so this is allowing them to get next to their feelings and see their feelings as a experience not them yeah i mean but even when you know that you're it's definitely happening to you you know
that you are also sometimes not burdened by those feelings that's right so it's some sort of an external factor or even if it's an internal factor right it's a thing other than the core of what you are right it doesn't define you right it doesn't define you i think that's what they're trying to do they're trying to figure out like why are they so overwhelming to the point where they want to leap off of a cliff like what is causing that yeah and it seems to work quite well for intractable depression as it's called what's really odd about the fact that it works at least to me is that if you look at the other new emerging very effective treatment for severe depression it's the exact opposite it's this incredible work that matthew johnson and colleagues are doing at johns hopkins giving people macro doses of psilocybin i i talked to him we had him on the podcast and he and i asked him i'm like what are your thoughts on micro dosing and he was like macro dose and i thought like whoa this is an academic saying this this isn't like some guy who's you know trying to push psychedelics for his own agenda this is a guy who's studying these in like purely through the lens of science i mean what are you talking about what's critical about the macro doses when you don't see macro what kind of dose you're talking about i don't know how they dose these but this would be like in the gram range i need to check we should check with matt before people run off and start to take it but certainly not micro right they're hallucinating they're feeling a lot and i said what's the key thing you're seeing success after success after eating disorders depression late you know and he said it seems to be quote unquote letting go and i'm like that's not science right what is letting go are you talking about heart rate 50 above baseline are you talking about breathing you know and he said there does seem to be something crucial about the people in these trials experiencing what would normally give them a complete panic attack and being able to just let go and go into the experience without trying to control it without trying to tamp it down or ramp it up just be in it what kind of experience
that would give them a panic attack for some people um you know he said there was one woman in who came in i believe it was a woman who there was a painting on the wall and she thought she could jump through it and so you know they're holding your back you know yeah they're holding your back and um and they do give them tools to control their anxiety so my lab works on a lot of breathing tools for real-time rapid control of anxiety and we handed some of those off to matt so they give these to people as tools they also have defibrillators in there they have everything because it's a cl you know it's a university setting just in case and he said that the key thing is that they kind of feel overwhelmed but then they feel supported enough by the therapist to lean into whatever's happening and they stop trying to regulate it and that's where apparently he thinks the breakthrough is and so that reveals something very fundamental it says that there's something powerful in terms of long-term depression relief that can be learned in those states that has to do with not regulating one's self or one's need to run for safety and i find that fascinating because you know it raises all these questions for instance do you need to hallucinate maybe not maybe it has nothing to do with hallucinations maybe it just has to do with getting the person into a state of like real fear and then allowing them to lean into it i don't know that's a speculation but i think that what's interesting about all this work on psychedelics is it's clearly working in these clinical trials i mean overwhelmingly the data are more positive than negative and yet no one knows exactly why it's working right no one knows what's being rewired in the brain there's all the speculation like oh dendrites grow and there's plasticity sure but like in what direction i mean trauma is plasticity too so something powerful is happening under these under the control of these psychedelic drugs in these clinical settings that are teaching people something valuable they can export and it everyone has a different narrative
like oh i saw this face or the green gremlins or what whatever you know melting reality but it seems to be the the ability to let go of the attempt to control one's internal state the one of the weird things they found out when they started studying people while they were under the influence of psilocybin was the lack of brain activity do you aware that well i know there's more so that the receptors for psilocybin are many but one of the main ones is the serotonin 2c and 2a receptor and those are in this layer of the cortex the outer lining of the of the brain called layer 5 which is extensively involved in lateral connections and so it's absolutely true that you see more broad activation of the brain by any one stimulus you know show someone a picture it's very broad compared to when they're not on these drugs and when you broaden the amount of activity i could imagine you reduce the total amount of activity in one in any one area but my understanding is that these brain states are just so atypical they're not like anything you see in sleep or dreaming although they're similar right um there was a guy at harvard for years alan hobson the genius a neuroscientist he was saying dreams are reparative they help people through trauma it's part of the trauma release process blah blah blah and psychedelics basically mimic that and he may very well be right he may very well don't they they also mimic uh normal human neurochemistry right like the most potent ones like dmt and even psilocybin is some sort of relationship to dmt isn't it like like when it's um when the body processes it isn't it something like four four four loxes and and dimethyltryptamine like there's there's some things that are happening while your your body is processing it that mimic what it is actual possible for your brain to produce that's right i mean you have two component parts one is made by the pineal and the other is naturally made by neurons and those have to be brought together i've i've never done an ayahuasca journey admittedly i just
haven't done it have you done mushrooms um in my youth you know back in the old days back in the old days and not responsibly right i kind of regret it because i i mean i was i was like a wild punk rock skateboarder kid i was not this you know i wasn't a university professor and honestly i regret doing it at a time when my brain was so plastic i wish if i had done it i would have done in like clinical trial and gotten data and that kind of thing but i'm a nerd so but you could always do it again sure yeah i think that um have you thought about it well i was part of a clinical trial looking at uh this was originally intended to be three dose of mdma um i did the two and then i decided that was enough this again was part of a clinical study i found it to be incredibly beneficial i mean i i thought i was a nice guy before but it made me it made me not afraid to feel feelings and i think before that i could feel from the neck up and from the waist down but i had this block and i remember taking mdma there's a physician there they're talking to you and all of a sudden i felt like now i sound like a crazy person but this is how it felt since from a sensation perspective as if like my body had been in saran wrap before and it just kind of unzipped and from that point on i've been able to feel things body wide and then i started thinking about all sorts of things like wow i've unusual number of deaths and losses in my life for somebody who wasn't in the military or didn't grow up in the inner city it just had some bad luck you know like you know knew people that had bad luck um and all of a sudden i was able to kind of digest that and think about it in a more reasonable way i think before that i was just pack it away just work work ignore it yeah or try and um sub sublimate it or trans turn it into anger or fuel which you know it can be its own use as you know but at some point i was like you know i think i need to actually spend some time on this and yeah i think i think it made me a nicer person to myself yeah i think there's
real benefit in those things whether it's mdma or psilocybin i think it's real benefit in a lot of them and i think there's definitely benefit in macro but i think there's benefit in micro too i know a lot of people that micro dose and they just feel like an elevated mood all throughout the day i don't think you're going to get these sort of transformative life changing experiences where you transcend whatever it means to be a person and get a chance to look at yourself and look at the way you interface with reality in a different way but i think what it does do is it alleviates a certain amount of anxiety and tension for people and it allows them to have a more enjoyable experience just in like regular everyday life without being intoxicated that's the key it's like it doesn't change the way you you your motor functions are doesn't change your visual well it just actually improves your visual which is really weird i forget who the the scientist was but he did um study on um being able to recognize um whether or not it was like edge detection and being able to recognize the changing in parallel lines and he did it see if we can find out who this this scientist was but he was a very straight-laced scientist he wasn't a whack job and his joke was it seems like you can detect reality better when you're high than when you're not high it says people that were on psilocybin were able to detect so if you have two parallel lines then they will move one slightly off parallel the people on psilocybin were able to detect it quicker than the people that were sober i believe that um for a number of reasons well first of all psilocybin at a basic level when we think of it as like a drug but it's like in many ways it's a lot like the so-called ssris like prozac zoloft and those things that they they work on serotonin it mainly increases serotonin but different receptors than things like prozac and so loft the ability to that would be we call that a psychophysics experiment they'd vary
that ever so slightly as you you described the thresholds for that are are going to be different for different people but if anything that can more narrowly tune attention is really going to help i was surprised to learn this i'm curious what your thoughts are i'm not a cannabis smoker i just never really liked it but i had a guest on my podcast named paul conte mainly works he's an md mainly works on trauma incredible trauma therapist and work has written about trauma or the book on trauma that i think is the one in my opinion and then we got into a discussion about like different substances and do they have application so we talked about ketamine et cetera asked about alcohol just by way of comparison and he said there are basically zero therapeutic uses for alcohol right therapeutic right but then i asked about cannabis now this isn't something he does in his own clinic he does talk therapy not drug not drug therapy although he's a psychiatrist he can prescribe things but and he said you know cannabis is interesting and it may actually have some therapeutic potential but the main effect of cannabis is to narrow attention and focus it actually can increase attention and focus now the problem is it's not a very good filter so people can narrowly attend to just video games or just to their anxiety if they're already anxious that's a problem but when it comes to psilocybin psilocybin seems to increase creative thinking new kind of new rules and algorithms about what could be an answer so i'm not aware of how it might directly impact visual perception unless it narrows focus but most of the drugs that impact serotonin are going to increase focus to some degree or another and that can be good if what you're focusing on is pleasant and can be really bad if what you're focusing on is really unpleasant i knew people i'm sure you don't who just smoke weed and they have a panic attack yeah the the smoke weed thing is a weird one because it just it's it's like many things that's completely dependent upon the individual like the their individual genetics their
biology whatever it is that they've had in their past i know people that smoke marijuana and they're high functioning and i know people who smoke marijuana and they don't get anything done and i don't know if they're relate those two things are related i think people who generally have drive and discipline marijuana gives them uh a break it gives them a nice little just a little rest stop and i think that's probably beneficial and i also think it makes you a little kinder a little more compassionate a little more sensitive which is probably very beneficial to someone who's hyper focused like people that are like type a personalities are trying to get things done all the time you smoke a little pot you're like what am i doing let's [ __ ] relax a little and then you get back to it you're all right i think it's it's that's there's a great benefit to that but i should also say that it's very popular in the jiu jitsu world oh yeah i always thought that had something to do with um uh the kind of creativity part of it like that you you can't plan jiu-jitsu right you have to improvise yeah like jazz in a lot of ways there's definitely that but it's also the focus thing that you're only thinking about that like while you're rolling you're really only thinking about rolling while you're smoking cannabis and then rolling you're hyper focused on it and physical strength you feel fine you don't feel lethargic or anything no not at all i actually enjoy it i actually enjoy it when i lift weights too oh i haven't tried that yeah i feel it like i feel it in the fibers it's almost like i'm more aware of like what's going on instead of like this uh blunt sort of um you know you know almost like distance from each individual muscle fiber which i am normally normally i'm just trying to warm up and then i warm up and then i start getting going then i you know lift light first then i work my way up to what i normally use but when i'm high it's like i could feel like where it connects to the bone that's just i feel
everything it just makes you more sensitive about what you're actually doing and for um martial arts techniques particularly for striking i feel like i incorporate leverage better into things i'm i i have better balance in terms of like not trying to execute a technique when i'm off position you know and it just makes me uh just more aware of like what's going on with my body and that's super powerful we had the the nerd in me want to say the neuroscience they call that enteroception like people vary tremendously in their awareness of their internal state you can know if you have a high or low degree of interoception by trying to count your heartbeats without taking your pulse some people can just do that it's a skill you can build up over time this is great for some people but some people are highly anxious it sucks to have a lot of enteroception but we know of course that the mind muscle connection is really powerful and it's not just mind muscle connection as a whatever they call bro science thing the reality is that from peer-reviewed studies that if people focus on the contraction of a muscle during resistance training as opposed to moving the weight right something that's hard to measure if they're actually doing it the strength and hypertrophy gains are much greater i think it's like a 15 we need i had andy galpin on the podcast and he would know the exact number um but i always wonder about this like in gyms where their mirrors and people are watching themselves lift in the mirror i mean you're exterocepting you're not focused as much as you could on the actual feeling so you know there's always a waiting between extra reception to the out everything beyond the confines of your skin and interoception and if cannabis allows more interoception you can imagine that those workouts would be more effective in that way but isn't there benefit to observing yourself in a mirror because you make sure that you use the proper technique absolutely i mean it right i mean you always see those people like shoulders hunched and they're you know they're making a mess of themselves um
overworking their strong parts and you know i mean some people walk in the gym and it's clear they've never actually looked at like you know the lower half of the mirror right that's so sad that's weird the skip leg day thing is a cruel joke but it's a cruel joke in the right direction because there's nothing worse than an imbalanced physique i mean where someone has done a lot of work to try and create something it's just so bad for your body it's like having small legs on a large upper body is so unhealthy every you like for sure your lower back's going to be [ __ ] well structurally and also just neurally you know again as a neuroscientist you think the nerve to muscle connection is what contracts fibers and if you think about somebody who's you know big upper body small legs that person that the neurons in their brain that represent their body are also completely contorted now but what do you think about a person like i bring him up all the time because he's so odd jon jones like jon jones has the smallest calves of any man i've ever seen who's an elite athlete and obviously he's an elite athlete he's one of the greatest fighters of all time and even now while he's worked his way up to heavyweight so he's he hasn't fought in two years because over that time he's been building himself up and now he's like a legit 255 pounds he's [ __ ] huge tiny cavs well what's going on there what's really interesting is if you look at elite sprinters is that real yeah so look how short the the muscle bellies are on his calves but if you look at elite sprinters olympic sprinters they'll have big legs but if you look at and sometimes they'll have big bulging calves but their calves are very short that's actually going to lend itself to sprinting you don't see many pacquiao calves on sprinters interesting not good ones anyway but he's not a sprinter no but he's got a lot of explosive power from what i understand oh yeah i mean i'm not i'm not a knowledgeable about mma pretty much everything i know about mma i've learned from you and from lex so look at
him there even at 255 pounds i mean he's yeah he's got tweezers down there these are very small calves which is it's really unusual for someone who's built the way he is but his explosiveness out of those calves is probably uh met by that short muscle belly well he's not the fastest guy you know and his whole thing is he's the best at uh controlling distance because he's very tall especially for light heavyweight not going to be as tall for a heavyweight but he's fantastic at controlling distance and if you're a person who wants to maximize your you like you have a certain amount of weight you can be you could be 205 pounds and that's it if you want to be championship weight at 205 pounds he's got the perfect physique because he's really long long arms and legs long arms and legs so you can't get close to him and he's a fantastic striker and he uses those arms in long legs in a great way with his wrestling and his submissions because he has fantastic leverage he's really like the perfect build for fighting how tall do you say he was is it six plus i think yeah john is six three six four is he back in it i know he had a steroid pop but is he oh yeah no he's back that was a long time ago that that's the steroid pop is a weird one man you know he he kept six four that's so skinny yeah for six four 205 pounds exactly he kept um he you know i don't know what i don't know what happened but the the story was that he got some tainted supplements right which uh may or may not be true um the problem is i just laughed when this last time we were talking about the deca burrito the olympic yeah i mean like anyway sorry go on i just i couldn't help but chuckle but some guys do get tainted supplements that's a real issue you know i know one of the ways i know it's a real issue is we didn't get a um steroid that what happened we didn't get steroids that showed up in um and on its supplements but when we were initially starting out we used this third-party company that would uh mix our ingredients
and they would mix ingredients for other supplement companies as well you know as a company to package stuff for you and so we did third-party tests on some of our stuff and we'd find vitamins in there that weren't supposed to be in there and then we just trace them out so we realize oh they're getting it from the vats like these guys aren't cleaning the vats properly that they use for the previous supplement now if you're getting a lot of cheap stuff particularly if you're getting stuff that's made overseas that's the same companies that are making steroids so they're making you know wherever it is in china what have you they're allowed to do that or whatever it's not regulated so there's guys that are buying off the counter real normal supplements that are supposed to be steroid free that have steroids in them now there's also unscrupulous companies that will add steroids to their products just to make them more beneficial just to make them more functional and that that's that's true too so there's a guy named tim means he got busted with tainted supplements and if you look at tim he does not at all look like a guy who takes steroids i mean not at all and he was just taking some normal stuff that he bought from some health food store and it turned out he popped for a very small trace amount of this stuff previous test is nothing and then this tiny small amount which would indicate that and this is what they said about john as well the problem with what john did is like john tested negative and then he tested positive but the positive amount was so small that like it it's almost like he's getting off of it so he would have to be on it for a long period of time like he'd have to be on it for weeks in order to reap any benefit but meanwhile it was less than that time ago he was negative and now he's got this trace of mountainous system so there's a lot of things that seem to lean towards the idea that he was accidentally dosed that he took a tainted supplement however does do you know more plates more dates yeah derek derek yeah like derek lot i was really pleased to see him on here
love that guy he's great he's great and i love his show and he's super super knowledgeable um and he calls [ __ ] and he's but he calls [ __ ] on a lot of guys in in the ufc and he goes over their specific blood work and what he was concerned with was more the uh testosterone to epithet epi-testosterone ratio he said it was off way off and not normal and also the amount of testosterone that john had the free testosterone system he also felt was so low that it seemed to indicate that he was coming off exogenous hormones and that you know there's maybe some masking going on or whatever but it was enough to make john ban him uh he blocked him on social media yeah which derek goes that seems to indicate you know i hit a sore spot yeah the blocking uh the blocking move implies uh a worry at the very least goes deep yeah he goes really he went over paulo costa there's like quite a few guys that he who paul costa is another guy who's built like a bodybuilder he's like a freak specimen and he kind of calls [ __ ] on him too he called [ __ ] on a lot of these guys yeah well and the lines have become really blurry because there's you know it used to be if anyone was taking any exogenous androgens they were quote-unquote on steroids but now of course there's trt which is up to 200 milligrams per week you can't do that in mma it's not illegal no that's not allowed i've looked over the list for um duncan french send me the list that they have for ufc this is interesting i still want to sit down with jeff nowitzki sometime very interesting guy yeah i mean he would definitely have a conversation with you about this he's also um a guy that is really honest about what they can and can't catch he's like there's a real pro and also honest about the list of banned supplements if you go to the usada website the amount of [ __ ] that you can't take because it's tainted it's crazy like it's like hundreds of supplements yeah or because it works yes yeah last time i was on here we talked about tonga ali right yes and there are now additional papers showing that yeah it raises testosterone and estrogen a little bit in parallel with that it you know it looks like it's not going to
cause people that you know to flag red on in most leagues but but the increases are not what one sees with you know what about terkestron tercestrone hasn't really been looked at by it's not on the list that i saw but it's supposed to be pretty [ __ ] effective yeah it works through this estrogen blocking mechanism and it seems pretty effective derek sent me some i'm yet to take it yeah but there are things that are short acting that like for instance women uh in a lot of women's sports they'll use low-dose oxandralone anavar right which is dht dihydrotestosterone it doesn't convert estrogen that's the stuff that makes your hair fall out exactly and makes beards grow and it also hardens people up it gives them that really dense look and people will take it before workouts because it immediately makes you feel or pretty quickly makes you feel kind of aggressive and like you want to train not angry aggressive but you want to move your body but then it also blunts and a lot of doctors prescribe it for this reason it reduces sex hormone binding globulin shbg there aren't a lot of things out there that can reduce shbg shbg is what prevents testosterone from being free testosterone and i asked atia peter teo like what's the healthy level of free testosterone that a normal person should have normal male should have and he said it should be about two percent of your total testosterone and there aren't a lot of tools to do that so if someone has a testosterone of you know of a thousand and their free testosterone is five that's bad right you'd expect it to you know be up in the 20s so you know as the oxandralone anovar can adjust that but it also can crank up liver enzymes but it's very fast acting so a lot of athletes especially female athletes will take this in in the short run and then you know train with it cut with it that's how they get like i have this theory and again this is just theory a lot of these female crossfit athletes they get those turtle shell abs some of them might have low body fat to begin with but sometimes you'll see a
look and you just have to you know you're projecting but it's it's like okay they're taking something um they don't look androgenized but they look like they're definitely taking something in well i could speak for the jiu jitsu world and especially in competitions where they're not testing there's a lot of girls that are taking things um i have a friend who used to date a girl who's a competitor and she started doing steroids and he started getting weirded out well clitoral enlargement's a real thing she didn't get that yet yet uh this was quite a few years ago but he was just weirded out that she was like taking testosterone and just to try to you know be better at strangling people but it's really unregulated in a lot of ways like it means some jujitsu competitions test but they kind of test in the realm of the old ufc testing where it's really just an iq test because if you're smart you know what to take and when to get off of it when to cycle off before you weigh in and you know it's not that big of an issue but these in between competitions is where they're making all their gains right so in between competitions what usata does is they do random drug tests throughout the year and even derrick says even that like is you can get away with it he explained what they're testing for and why you can get away with it in multiple videos and i don't want to [ __ ] it up because the science of it i'm sure i'll butcher but he's very skilled at all that i mean i think the testosterone replacement therapy part has also contaminated the public discussion like i really appreciate that years ago you just kind of outed with you're like yeah you know trt but yeah i've been telling people from the moment i started taking it i'm not ashamed of it i don't know why well not only that like i i'm interested in all kinds of things that make my body function better and i'm also interested in telling people i would never take something and not tell people that i was taking it if it was good i'm like what if it was good why wouldn't i tell you and if if i if it wasn't good why would i take it like so if i'm taking something and it doesn't work i'll tell you that i'll tell you it doesn't work but if i'm taking something that works like i don't understand this
fear of expressing you know what supplements you're on or what what things you're taking it's very bizarre to me yeah i don't know what part of human psychology that reflects either i mean i think that i mean look it's clear that testosterone whether or not it's replacing or maxing out or whatever i'm not maxing out like super physiological doses but to raise testosterone through injection or whatever recipientate in reasonable dosage with the doctor you feel better you effort feels good you recover quicker etcetera there are limits to that right you can convert to estrogen it has to be done properly but that's very clear yeah i don't want to have hyperphysical levels no those are dangerous no you get people retain water they get puffy they get really emotional they get gynecomastia there's all sorts of issues and then there is this issue that if there's a pre-existing prostate cancer it can make it worse but i don't think there's any evidence that it can cause prostate cancer actually probably the opposite if estrogen is too high and testosterone is too low that's actually worse for prostate health i mean young guys don't tend to get prostate cancer they can but it's pretty rare but in general as it relates to sports it's tricky because like for instance last time i kind of walked around this issue but this time i'll just say it i mean i don't like basketball anyway enough that i would worry that way i know someone who's a professional basketball player and i asked him about steroids and he said well if you get injured you can take up to 200 migs a week which is considered a trt dose but that's a actually a pretty big dose that's a one typical one mil injection that's a that's a significant difference that's going to be hold on it's a one milliliter so what so the typical dosage of of testosterone is 200 milligrams per mill so one cc is how many milk one mil one mil so these guys are taking two no they're taking one one of those a week is what they're allowed to take [ __ ] years because most people are either breaking we talked about this i think before but breaking that up into some smaller injections amounts is probably better just keep androgen levels more
reasonable what's a normal level that people take per week 100 to 200 milligrams per week is pretty typical typically spread out like two tenths of a cc so you right so if you're thinking cc's like someone might divide that into so half a cc on monday half a cc on thursday right that's a that's a reasonable thing but it's still a lot it's still a lot i mean half a cc yeah i could so i couldn't take that much on a yeah you'd be radiant yeah exactly most typical now people will take somewhere it pays to think about it in milligrams people will take somewhere between you know 10 and 40 milligrams every third day or so right you just think about that so about 40 really yeah somewhere between yeah because some people you know came into it with their testosterone at 650. and when you talk about replacement you know nowadays people will prescribe 40 is so high 40 milligrams every three or four days that's still 120 milligrams you know per week or so 40 on monday 40 on wednesday 40 on friday i take 1.5 every four days 1.5 one yeah like like if you look at a one cc you take the little yeah a little time that's 30 amounts that's 30 milligrams every four days yeah but you probably have no 1.5 is 30. okay wait we're telling you is it 0.15 or 1.5 1.5 so like you know like if one cc is 10. so you're taking 10 yeah it's like that big yeah but with it's 200 migs per mil so for every little notch on there every major notch on there not the little tiny ticks but every little that's going to be 20 milligrams that's what so even so what so if it reads one that's 20 milligrams so that goes 0.1.2.3 up to one if it's a ml syringe one cc one season and so are you taking the whole syringe worth every four days no no no no no then you're taking far less just to the number one the point one yeah so you're doing the point one so if you look close so you're taking i'm taking point one point like point reach right reads one two three four five six it reads point one when you get to ten that's one cc correct i take one and a half every every four days so you are taking you're taking a very low dose you're taking if it's 200 mgs per ml which almost certainly it is in this country testosterone sipping it's going to be
you are taking 30 milligrams every four days so someone some people take up to four we'll take some people are taking essentially more than three times what you're taking is allowed according to this player right i don't want the nba to come after me you know either either they're going to come after me yeah looking into an article about just to see what they were saying this was on espn a couple years ago it says like the it's a little secret that nobody knows about and they're talking about sleep deprivation the whole article is about sleep deprivation but testosterone is mentioned a bunch what what about sleep deprivation you know i was reading something about that with sleep deprivation and jet lag they were talking about one of uh a game that was played where the players flew in the day of and didn't have the best performance and they were talking about a wnba game recently the players were complaining about wnbc it was regular nba yeah i just know that they happened in wnba game like last week they were complaining about that but it does happen they must it must be a factor like you would never do that in a fight oh huge that's they're talking about it dropped these players down to like a 20 year old down to a guy with that was like should have been in his 50s oh so they did a test the test on their testosterone okay so hoyer and his staff consider their efforts to counter sleep loss like deep breathing exercise to optimize sleep to be all but a band-aid for a broken bone by the 2014-2015 season royer and his staff had fully committed to their investigation of sleep deprivation tracking 18 players over multiple teams in each conference when the season began those players testosterone levels ranked on average in the 88th percentile compared to males their own age after two months of nba play and travel their levels had fallen to the 70th percentile by march the 32nd percentile a 64 drop in just five months so that's just being worn the [ __ ] out yeah i mean i get called a lot do some work with military do some work with any kind of high performance teams that are dealing with this kind of thing they want to know how can we maintain hormone levels and performance and you always start with
get regular sleep yeah as much as you can it's everything and how do you you know one night no big deal but two nights three nights you're impaired and a lot of these guys also are really disciplined but some go out and party afterwards and that whole thing so it's always maximize exposure to sunlight in the first half of the day number one thing for just making sure that you sleep well that night and then limiting artificial light exposure by dimming lights from 10 pm to 4 am very few people do those two things but they have an outsized effect on sleep and there's a really nice study out of israel this last year that showed that if you had people this was men and women go outside for 20 minutes three times a week and try and expose as much of their skin as they possibly could to sunlight while still being decent right that it raised testosterone and estrogen significantly why because skin isn't just an organ to you know tattoo and protect our organs it's a organ that actually functions as an endocrine as a hormone organ like vitamin d right this kind of thing and there was this whole pathway they delineated in the study really interesting based on keratinocytes which are these particular skin cells and p53 which is a cell cycle molecule super interesting it showed getting sunlight on your body getting sunlight exposure to your eyes early in the day increases testosterone and estrogen increases feelings of well-being improves sleep etc it's like all the things we know right but people are finally catching on to this and even though i kind of blab about this ad nauseam on my podcast people always say well can't i just crank up my phone really bright in the morning and sit there there's always this kind of negotiating like you're you're not gonna out negotiate the sun right right i mean and then people think oh the sun that's really kind of woo technology no we evolved to get sunlight during the day and to avoid light at night have they done studies on people that live in like say the pacific northwest where they don't get a lot of
sunlight and whether or not that affects their testosterone and estrogen yeah so they definitely it depends on where they start out because there's some genetic variation i mean the variation in testosterone levels is huge hence the huge reference range of like 300 nanograms per test leader all the way up to you know 1200 right this is what makes trt kind of a tricky topic but more seasonal depression for sure greater requirement for sunlight viewing but in order to keep mood high and hormone levels high but the good news is people that are very susceptible mood wise and hormone wise to lack of sunlight respond best when they start getting light so there's a really nice study that looks at like night owls and people that don't get much sunlight during the day if they start doing getting some caffeine exercise and sunlight in the early part of the day caffeine just to ramp up their energy levels early on get them outside but also eating in the earlier part of the day you know just trying to bring their active schedule into the earlier part of the day but doesn't caffeine just make you feel like you're not tired ah so this is a really cool mechanism there's actually a trick to avoid the daytime the afternoon crash it's not a trick it's biology but caffeine is an adenosine antagonist it basically as the longer you're awake adenosine or matt walker would say adenosine adenosine builds up in your bloodstream it's what makes you feel fatigued caffeine essentially blocks the adenosine receptor but then when caffeine wears off the adenosine that's still around binds to that receptor and you crash you feel really sleepy so one thing that you can do is when you wake up in the morning don't ingest caffeine for the first 90 minutes or so like really push that off so that the adenosine and adenosine receptor interactions can all take place and dissipate then you drink caffeine and what you'll find is that if normally you would crash around two or three in the afternoon you don't experience that crash anymore because the caffeine wears off but there
isn't a lot of adenosine there to bind the receptor the crash that i experienced from caffeine is lack of caffeine or caffeine and then getting off it is nothing compared to the carb crash oh carb crash for me like if i have a sandwich like if i go to like uh [ __ ] jimmy john's or something and have a big giant sandwich how often does that happen very rarely but when i do i'm like what's wrong with you they used to play a place called cavaretas in the valley that i used to go to and they would have these meatball subs they were [ __ ] sensational and sausage and pepper subs it's like an old time italian deli and uh every time i would eat one i would just go into a coma but you are mostly low-carb meat yes i i actually talked to uh paul saladino um a while back and he you guys now eat fruit as part of the carnivore diet right well i do yeah some people don't some people are just eating meat and that's it that's their whole life you know that's rough is it rough well i mean i love meat right i really do and uh but i love vegetables and fruit also mm-hmm but i do like a nice bowl of rice or oatmeal after i train i'm kind of old school that way yeah i eat butter and cheese and all that kind of i don't do it in huge amounts i mean i little bits of butter and little bits of cheese i try and limit it but i do love tortellini and pasta and pizza i try not to eat it but because i love it that's not the problem the problem is the way it makes my body feel it just it doesn't feel as good i feel like [ __ ] i feel like i ate glue yeah you know by the way though some pasta makes me feel less like that and i don't know what that is and you know i speculate on i know i don't know how much you've looked into glyphosate and how much of an impact glyphosate um contamination has on people because we looked at it the other day there was a study that showed how they they went over a bunch of different things uh different plants and produce and things and the amount of glyphosate they found was pretty stunning glyphosate which is roundup which is a very common pesticide or herbicide i guess is it a herbicide is that a pesticide well i forgot but
either way it's [ __ ] really bad for you yeah and there's many people that speculate that what a lot of people are calling gluten sensitivities is if really you're having a reaction to glyphosate i mean i should be clear i try and eat plain rice or oatmeal when i do eat clean carbs if there's such a thing i hear you i mean if i eat a lot of carbohydrates i crash do you know anything about glyphosate well i was going to say i was in copenhagen recently and give a talk about totally unrelated things but earlier in the week dr shayna swann was there i think she was on here this is the woman who wrote about shanna swan and she gave the talk about the phthalates yeah the world's most impossible to pronounce word it starts on the p for the alligates it's like ophthalmology um most they're ophthalmologists that can't spell ophthalmology i'm an ophthalmology department i see it misspelled all the time um her talk was amazing right and you asked about kind of regional differences and related to light in terms of testosterone but what i took away from her talk was that people who live in rural areas because of the use of pesticides that sperm counts and testosterone counts are way way down they're really suppressed in those areas stunningly and stunningly and i mean why that isn't front page news i don't know i mean maybe there's a political side to it maybe there's not this is also recent finding i mean i believe it was 2015 when they figured out the phthalate connection with people's dip in testosterone dip and sperm count and then also an uptick in women having miscarriages but i would think that would be from i don't know maybe it's just the way yeah i think the problem is there's no solution and so when there's no solution to something like that plus it could harm the economy like i think people panic and they don't know what to do about something like that if there's a thing and this thing has a solution like you know like oh don't drink this eat that because if you drink this this [ __ ] you up but if you eat that you're gonna be good you know there
that's something that they would talk about but when something like this when you find out that the average person eats a credit card size portion of plastic and microplastics every week one that's a little weird too right we tried to figure that out the other day that the calculation of that might be a little fagazi you guys actually did the did the math i love you no no i pulled something out there was an article that sort of described how they modeled it like how they came up with that uh credit card thing it's like clearly variable right like some people will have more some people have less but when they say the average person it's like it's a little but the point is that's a real issue and that's one phthalates or one thing roundup is another one this is this glyphosate thing is a real issue and apparently it's in a lot of foods yeah i don't eat many processed carbohydrates i mean i look more and more at what we eat at home and it's stuff not in packages but i don't know if you get away with it i see i think glyphosate is a commonly used thing and it's just on crops i don't know if like by eating clean you're getting away from glyphosate contamination so like if i rinse the organic strawberries i could still be ingested the problem is it's only legal it's legal here but that [ __ ] has been like eliminated from a lot of countries a lot of countries don't want people taking that in but in this country it's like widely used how many kind google how many countries allow glyphosate use or how many countries just google how many countries have outlawed glyphosate i mean i feel like you can do things to offset some of the damage like getting sunlight getting exercise trying to eat well but yeah not direct compensation look at this following the landmark case against monsanto which saw them being found liable for a forward groundskeeper 46 year old dwayne johnson's cancer 32 countries to date have banned the use of glyphosate the key ingredient in monsanto's roundup weed killer okay because so it's an herbicide yeah it's that's it's some scary [ __ ] that is scary i saw dwayne johnson i thought the
rock for a second different different different twain fairly common name but um that that but someone i was reading this whole thing about someone equating gluten sensitivities with glyphosate because they were saying that how many how much of wheat is contaminated with glyphosate and they were saying that may be what people are calling gluten sensitivities with some folks it might be actually that well her talk freaked me out and this freaks me out because i care a lot maybe i'm getting older because i care a lot about next generation i really do i mean i feel like i've kind of made it through the shoot you know if i get hit by a you know bullet cancer or something tomorrow like i've had a really good life i want to keep going but um i worry i think about the school shooting thing i worry about what that represents at a larger thing in terms of just people feeling that disenfranchised and then people feeling that scared and concerned all the time that things like that are gonna happen and if you can't trust the food you eat like what can you trust right right and i'm not a paranoid person but i like to think that we are emerging or have emerged from the last few years the whole pandemic bit with people more focused on what they can and need to do for their own health some people it seems that way but then again on social media you get a limited window but i i worry tremendously that people are still waiting for some large governing body to deliver the the school lunch that's going to make everybody healthy like i think it's very clear at this point that everybody has to take responsibility for their own health and that's two things that's learning information and then trying the things that are gonna you know accessing the things that are going to work and that's a huge part of what my life's about these days and this is this is why i i find that whether or not it's a discussion about carnivore diets or vegan diets i mean i look at the debates around that and i just have to chuckle
mostly about the way that debates are playing out because it's so theatrical like liver king on the one hand and then these like do we be vegan scientists many of whom i'm not talking about stanford colleagues of course but others that are just like so combative in different spheres and there's no there's no solution to come from that yeah the liver king thing drives me nuts because that guy's on steroids well just shut the [ __ ] up so he i know he's eating really healthy it's clear he's eating all these animal foods and you know he's eating organ meat which is very rich in nutrients well that's true but he's dodging the the main bullet well it's too late for him now because he said no yeah so if he is even on trt he's he should come out and just say it well look at him because yeah i mean just do you know how rare it is to have a physique like that and not be on steroids you would have to be in the zero zero zero zero zero point one percent of the human population just the rare genetic freaks i mean i don't care how much you lift weights like that is a freak physique like pull up a photo of that dude one of his main assertions and others have made this assertion is that when you eat an organ like a testicle or a liver that the nutrients in that organ are specifically channeled to the organ that it would most benefit is that real i mean i mean that's true i mean that might be that looks like i mean am i going to just if i were to just put that through my knowledge of hormones and biology and i would say trt oh that got yeah the photo but i'm saying what you just said oh so the direct no so there's no evidence that i am aware of that if you eat say liver that the nutrients are specifically directed towards your liver right there's no evidence no evidence there's some old old studies using radioactive labeling of of organs having animals ingest those organs and then slicing up the brain and body and looking and there was some small but interesting specific diversion of brain to brain but in my opinion if you're eating brain and it's diverted to your brain that's actually a concern not a benefit because of pre-op yeah so
i'll go on record saying to my knowledge there's no evidence that eating testicles for instance supports your testicles because it's directed to the testicles now there may be some bioactive may be some bioactive hormones in there that go and support testicular function in some other way but when things are brought into the gut they're broken down into their component parts and they go out into the bloodstream and then which organ gets that stuff depends on whether or not there's say a blood brain barrier which keeps a lot of stuff out of the brain or blood testes barrier or blood ovary barrier every organ like the spleen etc has a barrier so some things get in more readily than others but to my knowledge zero evidence that eating spleen helps your spleen right so but why do people say these things is this like old wives tales is this or is it just bro science well i think it's because i think it's because that there are nutrients for instance in liver like very high concentrations of choline precursor to acetylcholine it is true that liver is one of the most choline dense foods in the world far more than an egg far more than any vegetable or nut is going to give you and now i'm sure some some celery warrior will come after me something like that you know at the moment you know better than i the moment you say one thing categorically you know you're kind of inviting it but i've kind of learned to to enjoy that response i learned from it um and correct me if i'm wrong but liver incredibly high in choline so you could see how the the the lore would emerge that eating liver is really good for you because it is if you're interested in getting a lot of choline and vitamin d and or vitamin a and other things that sort but the idea that it would be diverted specifically to your liver that seems kind of crazy now there's also this idea i won't name names here but there were people on social media for a while saying well walnuts are really good for your brain because walnuts actually look like a brain and that's why and you know testicles look a lot like testicles too but the
point is that walnuts have certain things in them that are good for lots of cells not just for brain tissue but they have healthy fats right definitely i love walnuts especially the red red walnuts are amazing my girlfriend's obsessed with all this like hard to find like old-fashioned food like red walnuts and i don't even know what a red walnut they're red the skin on the on the walnut is red the nut isn't red but the skin on them is delicious i don't think the skin yeah the skin powder yeah you know like so once you crack them yeah once you crack so does it look brown and the thick oh they're so good okay and it looks like a brain okay i have seen those before they're delicious but i was thinking the outside shell was red no it's confused no they're delicious and um whether or not they're better for you than standard walnuts but walnuts are good for you walnuts are great for you i mean you know they're calor calorie dense but they're great for you so one of the things that paul saladino always wants to talk about is plant defense chemicals and about eating plants that plants don't want you to eat them and so when you eat them they're excreting these plant defense chemicals now my thing on that is and this is uh one of the things that rhonda patrick likes to talk about is that that may have a hormetic effect so there might be benefit to that just like there's benefit to cold therapy and hot therapy and that there's some foods that eating them even though they do have these defense chemicals those defense chemicals at least in certain doses might have a beneficial effect on your body makes good sense to me i'll say this i'm gonna try carnivore because i i told paul i would i'm gonna do blood work first and then after but i'm not giving up my athletic greens and i'm still gonna eat cucumbers which he says are fruit and so i'm home free told me i have to cut the skin off them too so i'm i'm going to try it and see what happens but i've also talked to rhonda and she's really big on this broccoli sprout thing and it all a lot of things that are incompatible in the instagram space make a lot of sense to me scientifically like eating some
greens but also eating some meat etc in terms of plants being bad for us i mean there are a lot of toxic components of plants typically the further out on the branch you go towards fruit the less toxic they become right eating the bark is generally more dangerous although berberine a commonly used substance for lowering blood glucose right like metformin so our poor man's metformin is made from tree bark basically aspirin is as well right aspirin derivatives things of that sort alkaloids there is something interesting about plants and i've talked to paul and other you know serious colleagues in the in you know amino acid science space so there is something called non-protein amino acids there used to be a guy at stanford who studied these and he's a world expert in non-protein amino acids many seeds and plants contain amino acids that can't be incorporated into proteins and may have some toxicity to them if they're they are ingested now there's never been a widespread systematic exploration of all the seeds in all the plants that people eat to see whether or not there are a lot of non-protein amino acids but these things act in a sort of prion like way when they get into the brain or they get into different tissues and so you know i don't want to spark fear that every you know sunflower seeds are going to give you prion prion like syndromes but it's conceivable that by eating certain plant compounds one could ingest these non-protein amino acids that they would get incorporated in to existing proteins or that they would look enough like protein amino acids that they could sneak their way in across the blood-brain barrier or into cells and cause certain kinds of dysfunction and this particular lab's focus was on figuring out whether or not neurodegeneration was a downstream effect of some non-protein amino acids really so in that sense what was their conclusion their conclusion was that a lot of plants and in particular a lot of types of seeds contain non-protein amino acids that if they were to be incorporated into mammalian tissues and cells that that would be very bad there's also like
low levels of certain chemicals that are in seeds that are really bad for you like uh apple seeds right don't ask yeah yeah and there was this idea years ago that um the marijuana plant could inhibit the reproduction of animals that want to eat it by way of increasing aromatization the conversion of testosterone to estrogen and then when i was in college there was this thing everyone would say don't smoke the seeds it'll make you sterile people used to say that but they were high that's funny that that was in college yeah i remember people saying don't smoke the seeds they'll make you sterile that's ridiculous yeah um i don't know that there's any how many children were accidentally birthed because during college someone smoked the seeds like don't worry baby are you smoking seeds yeah i guess we should say as a universal rule never use the argument that something lowers sperm count or testosterone as contraception yes right because i know a former pro bodybuilder who was juiced to the gills and told me that he conceived both of his children on his heaviest cycles ever really yeah somehow he maintained you know some function yeah well the whole you just need one sperm idea you know i guess either she was hyper fertile or he was hyper fertile or both but there are two kids that he claimed were conceived on everything from d baldocks andrealone to what do those kids look like they're actually great looking kids he's now he lost all most of that muscle he's now walking around like a normal human being did you uh hear about that child who uh is abnormally large at two years old because the father was taking testosterone cream and uh the the kids started showing pubic hair and an enormous penis at two years of age the conversion of testosterone a dht which causes penis growth will um well the question is will that kid thank or or punish his father lately well i don't know the question is are other people gonna try that now uh that would be terrible here's the boy two-year-old showed signs of puberty after he was exposed to his testosterone gel he developed pubic hair and his height was off the chart so he's like the size of a
five-year-old at two and then on top of that they talked about his sizable penis and his his uh raging erections how'd they say it was was the word god damn pop-up ads what would it say they talked about his something about his he's 26 pounds at the age of one putting over two pounds a month between the ages of 12 and 18 months he's had massive sustained erections well it's it's happened in the other direction women who were using a lot of evening primrose oil common in a lot of um lotions and things like that it's a very strong estrogen and there are exactly yeah there are examples of their male sons getting a premature or not even premature breast bud development from contact with their mom whoa so primrose is like a thing that women put on in lotions and that's an estrogen lotion has enough estrogen-like properties that certain that boys were showing estrogenization of some some of their features are women aware of that that that stuff has estrogen quality to it probably not i mean you know i've gone on and on social media and elsewhere about the fact that i am not a fan of melatonin you know low doses every once in a while for treatment of jet lag or something but melatonin has a specific role which is to suppress puberty during development in addition to all its effects on sleep etc and the idea that people are prescribing that to their kids i don't know that it screwed up their kids puberty trajectory but just the idea that you would take high doses of hormone look we're talking about low well-controlled doses of trt people freak out but then people pop melatonin like it was m m's and they give it to their kids when they're clearly better alternatives i mean it makes no sense i don't think they think of it melatonin in that way i don't take melatonin but i i don't think most people think of it as a hormone well now there's some evidence coming out that it may have other negative effects i mean i don't like to be the scare tactic guy but it just seems to me there are a lot of reasons to just avoid it unless you really need it yeah and occasional use but the stuff in kids is
really serious between the dr shayna swann stuff about phthalates and then you're talking about evening primrose oil or you're talking about i mean that this kid i have a confession as um that didn't happen to me but when i was a kid i had um when i was five or six i had hair growing on my adam's apple and my voice was the same as it is now they call me they call me froggy when i was a little kid i basically grew into my voice and so i had a genetic test recently and i actually have a mutation in an androgen receptor now that didn't make me super strong i wasn't a super impressive athlete or anything like that but the this particular mutation probably is what allowed me to work really long hours it relates to kind of cortisol production and things like that um and when you start exploring you find that yeah about 12 of young males have mutations in one or the other of these these hormone pathways that sort of shift you towards being able to friends like i can work very very long hours and it's not because i'm i'm no david goggins right it's just i can just like work a lot and there are other mutations that are more subtle like you seem to have i can't believe you can do four podcasts a week the mma thing and the comedy thing like to me doing one podcast a week is like it feels like a lot plus i run my lab but that just feels like a lot but i asked you a while ago if you you know your voice ever goes or you ever get super tired you're like no i think some people just naturally have more androgen receptor they make more androgen and then of course if they supplement androgen through trt or something then get away with lower dose because it just hits their system more efficiently for me with podcasts and mma and comedies it's all things i really enjoy though i think that but that's the big thing like people say you work really hard i'm like kinda i kind of don't work well that's how i feel too yeah i do a lot i put in a lot of effort there's a lot of effort involved in my life but uh there's very little work you know doing what you know what i have to work talk to jamie when i have to do ads that's [ __ ] work i'm like [ __ ] like i [ __ ] them up like [ __ ] [ __ ] i
said well i'm [ __ ] terrible at it i have to do them three or four times jamie knows the truth it's still not that long though it's still easy it's still easy it's still easy it's not like working in a coal mine yeah it's not it's not like a [ __ ] laborer in the hot sun all day right but none of what i do is work that's how i feel i love podcasting and i love you love science and i love science i mean i have a i have like scientific tourette's right i just want to learn and learn and share share share there's a method there's a like a real lesson in that for people if you can find a thing that you really truly enjoy i mean people have said that throughout time find a thing you love and you never work a day in your life do that thing that you love that's that's how i feel i don't feel like i'm i work a lot yeah i mean i'm base when i was six or seven i'd spend the weekend reading about medieval weapons or like frog biology or something and then i come into class on monday and i just asked if i could give a lecture no i just i went there they took me a psychiatrist and they're like yeah my parents were like is he okay and they're like he just i used to go this is so embarrassing you know those carnivals are um used to throw a ping pong ball into the thing and win a goldfish yeah well i loved aquarium goldfish but i knew that most of those fish were going to die because people weren't dechlorinating the water so i used to go buy declure and go to these carnivals my mom used to take me when i was little and i would give up i'd give you free declure for the fish if you want it but you had to listen to me lecture about the dechlorination oh my god how old were you like six or seven and i didn't charge for it and i felt so good just knowing like these fish are going to survive they're going to have a great fish like i just love but mostly i just wanted to tell them about declure wow and now i do it like on a podcast that's hilarious i feel like six or seven i was just i never stopped talking to a match yeah being a [ __ ] carny with three teeth on meth and some [ __ ] kid comes up wants to talk to you about chlorine the goldfish i got uh [ __ ] for this the other day because i
won't say where we're living but uh at all but a certain neighbor has some very high level security next to them right not a super fancy neighbor it just so happens that i'll just say they'll say had the secret service or park near me now and so i got to be friendly with them walking back and forth to the mailbox and you know kind of learning thing and they're real friendly people real hard working they work super long hours shout out to the secret service yeah then they don't choose who they protect what do you say uh you elect them we protect him and i said careful you decide who elected who but um i'm independent but the fact of the matter is that they're really nice but we've gotten into discussions around sleep because they're on these crazy sleep cycles and how to regulate sleep and fitness stuff and this one real uh nice secret service agent she said to me um are you always like this and i said what do you mean she said every time you walk by here you end up giving us a 30 minute lecture about biology and then you give us a supplement i do that to people too it's funny like i'll have a conversation with someone at dinner or something like that and they'll ask me a question i'll say well actually i had a guest on my podcast that explained this and then i'll like have this like i can retain information if it's very fascinating to me if it's something i'm really interested in and i can say what you know the studies were and what what the you know and these conversations i've had with people they're like so you're in like podcast mode i'm like that's just how i am one of the reasons why the podcast works is because i would be like that anyway right because like just like you were saying like it's hard doing a podcast a week it's just talking to people yeah i like talking to people i do these solo episodes those are harder that's a lot harder yeah the interviews are fun but these solo episodes are long right three hours going over very specific data and you have like a whole thing that you want to get out yeah it's what but i love it i love that it's hard and then it and as i kind of ratchet through
it and kind of go through the various rhythms also i'm learning and i love it so much and of course if i make any mistake i mean my goodness the internet is harsh these are the best it's a it's amazing i love the critique yeah i do i love it at first i was like oh this is rough and now i've learned to just so embrace it like even the people have dedicated their entire lives to finding my mistakes i'm grateful i just spend time going okay fantastic yeah there's a lot of miserable [ __ ] out there but they're they can be beneficial because they can find some things that maybe you missed oh absolutely and and i'm certainly grateful for them i do worry about them though because some of these people are like presumably have other things they're trying to pursue and they don't realize that they're kind of circling the drain slowly by focusing so much on other people but look everyone makes choices in life i mean i've decided to try and like you make new things and be a creator but you know it was lex that said you should he told me you should start a podcast and then he said uh whatever you do though just make sure it's not just you blabbing so that's basically what i do that's the layer but that's not he's not correct though cause like some of my favorite podcasts like bill burr's podcast is just bill blabbing tim dillon just tim blabbing giannis pappas just giannis blabbing you know like some of my favorite podcasts are these interesting people that just start talking [ __ ] yeah you know they're really interesting guys and and in your case you're you're you're talking about like really important things to a lot of people and the way to get it out is really to do it the way you do it and i'm curious about it and thank you yeah i mean i i've we've done episodes on grief and about eating disorders i thought when i did one on eating disorders especially anorexia they were going to be like oh you know this white guy was shaved head who lifts weights what does he know about eating disorders and the feedback was wonderful people were like you know i didn't know for instance that the frequency of anorexia is not going up it's been constant since the 1600s and maybe even earlier wow this is a it's
also the most deadly psychiatric disorder wow so you know all this idea that social media is impairing body image yeah that's probably true but true anorexia people be getting an aversive relationship to eating that's you know i learned about that and then the therapies that you can point people to so on and on but but like the you mentioned rhonda like i'm obsessed these days with deliberate heat and deliberate cold yeah we've been talking about i'm freezing right now because i just did the cold plunge how long i have one right here three minutes right before i come here how many days a week are you in i'm in it almost every day now amazing yeah but when i break it up though because i've read that you have to wait two hours after lifting like so uh to get the benefits of hyper hypertrophy that's right struggle with that one you need about two hours post workout before you plunge but i get in the sauna immediately after every workout that's great sauna is almost every day and then cold plunge is at least five days a week maybe four days a week that's a lot and and and with good reason so there's a scientist out of scandinavia her name is dr susanna soberg um s-o-e-b-e-r-g and she showed up on social media a few you know six months ago and then published this really amazing paper in humans what they showed was that they figured out the thresholds for how much deliberate cold exposure you need and how much sauna for it to really start having beneficial effects now the all the nutrition pt people which seem to me some of the more frustrated human beings on the planet i don't know why but online so like nutrition and physical therapy are where like there's a lot of contention i don't know why neuroscientists are nice people contention they love to nitpick and and so and i respect that they know a lot about what they do but there seems to be a lot of infighting in neutra around nutrition and around physical therapy i don't know why it probably relates to some childhood feelings of powerlessness i
don't know the the but what's very clear is that from susanna's work is that if you put people into deliberate cold up to the neck like uncomfortable cold people always say how cold it should be i want to get the hell out but you can stay in safely and that's going to vary but person to person even day to day but if you get people into that for 11 minutes total per week so not one session but they're doing three minutes three minutes three minutes whatever get to 11 minutes at that 11 minutes per week threshold they observe legitimate increases in brown fat the good kind of fat thermogenesis like the oil in the candle goes up people become more comfortable at cold temperatures and metabolism increases the increases in metabolism aren't huge and the pts and nutrition folks have really been like those increases in metabolism are like a cracker or something but that's just one of the effects one the big effect of the cold is that you get this 2.5 x increase in dopamine that lasts many hours after the cold exposure i mean it really puts your brain into an anti-depressed state into a more alert motivated state and norepinephrine as well yep so norepinephrine epinephrine and dopamine are called the catecholamines the those three catecholamines all increase substantially and that can be from a very brief exposure to very cold so like one minute or three minutes really cold or in the study that was published in the european journal physiology where this initially was first shown they put people into 60 degree fahrenheit water up to their neck for like 45 minutes or an hour which is it seems annoying super annoying they had them on lawn chairs with weights so they're just sitting there oh god but you can do a much shorter exposure rondo was telling me you can even do like 45 seconds really really cold and still get that blast effect which makes sense what would be really really cold well for for you or for cam haynes you'd probably have to go to almost dangerous levels like i've seen some of the cold he's and he's like like i saw a post with kim and he's like grabbing ice and like putting on himself he's making
it tougher you know oh the coal plants yeah they're cold yeah he has the same one i have the morosco yeah yeah yeah that thing is really nice i mean they're getting beautiful now there's the the plunge the morozco and then the blue cube or whatever yeah the blue cube is what we have here i like you know the interesting of that the blue cube the water is like circulating like you're in a stream well that's where so the circulation actually is key so if you get into cold water and you're completely still like you're super stoic you're building a thermal layer that's keeping you a little bit warmer so if you really want to make it tougher you can sift your your body a bit because you break up that thermal layer so the morosco is 34 33 34 degrees and this one's 37. that's not distinguishable the difference but this one moves yeah so it's cool the water it [ __ ] sucks yeah you're breaking up that thermal layer you can't and you can't and if you try not to huddle or you go hands in feet in yeah no i go up to my chin that's great yeah yeah it's i mean it's it is an antidepressant effect again the metabolism increase probably isn't super big but it's still there and then there's but it's mostly this neurochemical effect and the resilience and the inflammation control but then with sauna it's really interesting it seems like the threshold total for the week i mean you can do more but is it fit believe it or not 57 minutes per week um this year yeah there we go this is yours uh this is her information yeah she's terrific phd scientist okay susannah oh oh i follow her because of you susanna soberg um she actually posted something on something that i posted and so and then i saw that you were quoting her so i went to her she's terrific terrific scientist terrific person i met her in person when i was over there in scandinavia we didn't cold plunge but is she in scandinavia yep yeah she's in denmark seven minutes a week has healthy benefits heat increase heat shock protein heat shock proteins are important for cell communication heat shock proteins repair damaged cells heat prevents nerve nope that's they're
damaging diseases potentially oh interesting heat prevents nerve damaging diseases potentially alzheimer's disease parkinson's disease and no right there but on the the big thing okay now there's some growing evidence there's a she hashtag sober principle so there's this thing in science where if you name something after yourself then you're a narcissist but you can name things after other people so i named this sobert principle is if you really want to get the maximum metabolic effect when you and if you're and you're doing heat and cold end with cold yeah because then you have to warm yourself back up yeah cam told me about that now i've been doing it it sucks drink water before if possible during why would i drink during i thought the whole idea is to like make your body cool itself off i don't drink during i don't know what that's about maybe that's [ __ ] maybe that's really the sauna do you drink water in the sauna yeah that's what it is but if i do drink in the sauna i have to be [ __ ] i have to have made a mistake where i'm like i'm really tired and i'm i'm really struggling and then i always go back in after i drink the water and you're going hot i recall we were texting back and forth about this at one point i mean typically it's going to be about 184 to about 210 um is a good range fahrenheit um and that's hot although you know i mentioned that i think on a social post i said you know that's really warm approached with caution and all the eastern europeans the finns and the russians where they were like making fun of me they're like you're a wimp we do it at 2 30. 2 30. i guess like they started when they're when they're little kids i mean they yeah or if you ever go to a banya these russian banyas and they hit you with the leaves and the yeah yeah i'd yeah i've done more than 200 before i was doing 220 for a while because larry hamilton was doing that but i was actually burning my throat like i was i was my voice was and it was and i was realizing you [ __ ] idiot you're cooking your mouth well he's a nut in the best sense laird goes in the barrel sauna with the airdyne bike yeah
and pedals with oven mitts on he wears oven mitts because the metal gets so hot you can't touch it so he's in there air dining oven mitts on he's a savage but it's also why it i believe he's 56 55 56 he maintains incredible athleticism he's still like one of the top you know big wave riders surfers on earth it's like it's crazy the amount of work that he puts into it but clearly his benefit to it but i look forward to it i really do i look forward to the suffering of these sessions because i'm like kind of addicted to the benefits that i get afterwards that dopamine rise is real um a woman you had on your podcast dr anna lemke dopamine nation she talked about a patient who was in getting off of cocaine he was feeling low so he started using ice bath as a way to wean himself off and you know it you can't argue with a 2.5 x increase in dopamine that's long lasting big spikes in dopamine that crash that's bad because it's like up and then down but this you know two three four hour increases in dopamine epinephrine and norepinephrine you're alert you feel better you're kind of your rpm are set higher is there any benefit to re-emerging yourself in the cold like once it starts to wear off like doing it more than once a day well you eventually become cold adapted and you need to start doing things to make sure that it's still a stress stimulus because that stress stimulus is what sets that all in motion so if you get really comfy then you're gonna have to start making the water colder sifting the water around i mean you can only make it so cold before you eventually have tissue damage but that's a wide window that's why heat is great but the upper threshold for as you mentioned like your throat starts hurting you're actually burning tissue is bad there's an amazing finding on burn that i can't help myself but share there's a paper that came out that showed well there's based on observation burn victims show dramatic fat loss not burned by the fire or the burn so for many years they've become leaner and leaner and leaner and no one ever understood why this was it turns out that burn and local heat application can set in motion
a whole bunch of biological cascades that burn up body uh body fat wait a minute so that means those belly fat things are real well they're now using um local heating and these are they're people people really need to be careful with heat because you know burning yourself to burn body fat is just dumb and dangerous but using uh they have a this ucp device excuse me but in the laboratory but what they're doing is they're using a laser that heats up locally the tissue and they're seeing a systemic increase in body fat utilization do you remember those cold sculpting things that they used to do to people but apparently it [ __ ] people up do you know what i'm talking about i remember the belts i don't remember the cold sculpting no they were doing a thing where they were like cool sculpting where they were saying that they're gonna like blow cold air all over your fat area and it was gonna make your fat people like call them [ __ ] on it i'm calling [ __ ] on it because i think that it's probably some general systemic effect of being cold and metabolism going up right and and of course we should say this be uh if you're eating more food than you're burning off total you're you're not going to lose fat right i mean i mean that the rules of the of thermodynamics still apply because sometimes people hear you can do anything and still lose fat but that's true body waste belts that people put on those legit because they do heat up that area you know there may be some truth to this you know but it's not going to be spot reduction this is where it gets misleading even though it's applied locally it's not spot reduction they're talking about heat causing a systemic increase in body fat utilization again on a backdrop of caloric deficit more body fat burned that's the argument why do people wear those big rubber neoprene things that go around their waist those belly fat trainers you know what i'm talking about yeah i have a theory about the same reason women wear corsets although there are other reasons for that too which is that they like the way that it makes them feel and look there's
the other reasons that women wear corsets yeah because they potentially look hot in them if you like corsets right the way they feel and look but they also they were originally designed to bring the waste in corsets were like right to cinch it in to give them hourglass shape to accentuate the you know the features that they want to accentuate right of course i thought there was something else no no i just was thinking about corsets for a second the um but the the i think this is actually characteristic of a lot of things in the health space so for instance i get asked a lot about sauna and people go what about infrared sauna in my opinion most infrared saunas don't get hot enough right and i got really interested in infrared light it's like what's going on with infrared light does it have real uses right um turns out there was a nobel prize given i believe it was in 1908 i might have the date wrong maybe it was 1916 but there was a nobel prize given for phototherapy for the use of light to treat lupus for instance so this is not a new idea but i think a lot of people like red light because of how they look in the red light sauna it gives that really smooth look to the skin it's kind of like that nightclub sexy feel so people like ooh infrared sauna the name infrared it sounds high-tech it sounds high-tech and yet there are legitimate uses of infrared light for instance viewing infrared light as long as it's not too intense in the early part of the day if you're over 40 there's amazing data out of university college london my friend glenn jeffrey's lab showing that can help improve mitochondrial function in photoreceptors and offset age-related macular degeneration and and visual loss can be offset what about like those juve lights so there's juve there's cozy there are a bunch of these brands now and i've they're three main areas where they've shown some real efficacy in good studies one is for wound healing and acne there really does seem to be some therapeutic repair of tissue the other is the eye stuff so exposure to red light and
near-infrared light as long as it's not too intense and you have to be over 40 to see the effect et cetera but there are real improvements in vision in animal models and humans that's been changing wound healing yep wound healing it sets in you know red light is different than other light because it's long wavelength and that means it can pass through tissues short wavelength doesn't go as deep into tissues so that's why the red part is important not just that it looks cool the when it passes through the upper layers of the dermis it appears that it can go in and trigger some activation of things that in the so-called stem cell niche that creates new hair cells new skin cells so they're using it for hair growth i doubt it has a massive effect on hair regrowth yeah i saw a thing the other day where they got this guy had a helmet on and he was talking some sort of a laser helmet and the helmet was making him regrow hair probably would assist and maybe augment some existing therapies for her hair for increasing hair and then there's a growing population of people that are interested in using it to increase testosterone by putting the red light on their hey on their on their testicles um and of course they're the they're the the um the anus sun viewing oh yeah that's whitney cummings really yeah she does that she does that she should take it she'll go to her instagram there's a picture of her with her feet up in the air with her job she might just be being funny well i think the result that's relevant there which is a real result is the one we talked about earlier which is getting sunlight exposure on your skin provided you don't burn obviously people wear sunscreen if you need it but sunscreen is interesting conversation too if but getting sunlight onto your skin can increase testosterone and estrogen feelings of well-being etc it's not just about viewing it with your right red light has different effects than just protect just sunlight right but you've got red wavelengths in sunlight right and you've got but the near infrared wavelength
combined with red is what's used in these acne treatments scar healing and there is one study in rats showing that red light exposure to there she is there's my girl look at her she's so great she's just being funny though i mean she probably is doing that for real but she's also being funny i love her post because she seems to really be enjoying it it says here self-care premium premium sunning day next up 42 cold plunges nine saunas five hours of throwing a tire down a hill and then four sticks of butter and one espresso and probably and ten new pit bulls the number of dogs that yeah she's a dog mom yeah um but those red light things like the juve don't they also do they do something about collagen in your skin or something too the idea is they can trigger skin repair through the through the skin cell niche the and what are you showing me yeah the same doctor from before has a whole post on infrared therapy and everything you just said oh susannah that has increases and all that's interesting yeah so stabilize okay stay until you feel uncomfortable but save the benefit so this is infrared only correct okay so different kinds of sauna so they have maybe there's just a different thing maybe it doesn't get as hot but it does something else it says benefits blood vessels and activates neurosept nerve receptors in the skin you sweat more at a lower temperature a good alternative to traditional sauna traditional sauna more efficient more stressful with increase of heart rate so that's exactly what we're just saying right it's something to supplement with stabilizes the heart pvc to early contractions in the heart increase elastin and collagen in the skin improve recovery after training so elastin and collagen in the skin how would a infrared sauna increase the collagen in your skin i'm not aware of any peer review data but you know you get your infrared devotees i'm only aware of the eye stuff in the wound wound and acne stuff and then infrared sounds just for infrared light i don't think there's anything unique about combining heat and infrared okay so
these are and so juve and cozy light and these other companies that yeah big panels so that is technically infrared it's red light therapy but it's infrared that's right it's usually it's got a panel where it's a red light and then it's a like near infrared so you can stare at those like you can actually look at those red lights and it's not damaging for your eyes you don't want to get too close i mean how close so a good rule of thumb is if you feel like you need to close your eyes because it's painful it's too bright right so you want to be at a distance that it's comfortable to look at you don't ever want to be you know tearing up or squinting you know these natural mechanisms that are built into us to protect our eyes and i would trust those well this is a place that i went to that has a more robust bed and they have like these goggles and they tell you with this red light therapy that you should put goggles on yeah if you're going to hit your skin really hard with red light or near what's called nir near infrared light um you then you wear those little uh um uh little they look like little suction cups that go over here right because you because it's really bright just like a tanning bed so the kind that like a juve has is not the same as like a commercial light those get the juve and the cozies get pretty bright so you want to stand far enough back that you're comfortable but not as bright as those like high-tech like commercial units correct and it also you know it depends on where you hang it if it's on a wall that's coming right into your eyes like flashlight to your eyes it's very different than if it's on your body and you're getting it indirectly to your eyes right right but as a rule of thumb you know getting healthy amounts of sunlight as long as you don't your skin doesn't burn and getting it that to your eyes and your skin is is good if you've ever had a cut you'll notice it heals much quicker if it gets sunlight interesting yeah oh absolutely and that's because of the way that these long wavelength lights trigger the stem cell niche that controls skin and the keratinocytes and repair here's a weird one this is a mystery but i heard this the other day and i'm totally
obsessed by this if you have a cut somewhere on your body a wound of any kind it takes a little while to heal if you bite your cheek yeah it heals almost perfectly like newborn skin nobody knows why and you have tons of bacteria coming in through this hole you're eating stuff like there's you know dogs contain healing properties it does and so there's a group at stanford actually and elsewhere also of course that are studying why is it that the environment of the mouth is so effective at healing itself i mean it's crazy i mean i've got scars from you know 20 years ago right but i've bitten through this cheek a bunch of times it's painful but then it's it's perfectly fine yeah like the next day the next day so there's interesting biology there and people are starting to think about that sunscreen yeah so so there are two areas aside from nutrition that feel i feel like are really hot button issues like the moment we talk about this we're we're going to catch a lot for this but um i'm getting used to that nowadays do you got to stop reading comments well it's it sounds like you're affected by the comments and hate mail and death threats the whole thing so you're getting death threats uh yeah you know i think uh you know there's something what are people mad at you for um more so there's there's kind of this idea that because we cover topics like trauma and some mental health issues there's more the idea that that we contain answers there and you know people aren't they're thinking isn't all always so correct no no one has said i'm this upset with you about something you said about butter or something that i want to kill you although some people might feel that way and um for that reason i now live in new zealand and you're welcome to look for me there so is it like the mitigation of mental health issues yeah something like that yeah sort of fixation stuff or people or people thinking that um you know that there's some secret message in what's coming through so sometimes it's really that way okay but um but i would say 99.9 of things that come back have been supportive or critical in
a way that's that's rational um sunscreen and emfs are like the two third rail topics yeah so glad you brought that up yeah here's what we know there are compounds that exist in commercial products not just sunscreen that can cross the blood-brain barrier and that are bad for neurons period no that is indisputable some of those compounds have been shown to be in abundance in certain sunscreens and other cosmetics so i'm not saying that all sunscreen are bad i'm saying that there are some sunscreens that contain some things that were they to get across the blood-brain barrier would be bad in one of those things um these are these are small molecules that can cross the blood barrier into neurons and that can cause neurodegenerative like conditions um well these are typically associated with triclosans and some of the other things that are shown to be in certain detergents and soaps like they're they're detergents and soaps they're now off market because they contain some of these very small molecules related to triglycerides triclosans and related products but there are healthy there are safe sunscreens there's no question like what's a good safe sunscreen uh so there we go into brand names i that's a tricky one i don't want to get too outside my wheelhouse i'm researching this for a future episode this is really a place where i want to i want to tread carefully here's what i think is important for people know not all sunscreens are safe not all cosmetic lotions are safe not all cosmetics are safe i think we're probably going to arrive in a place not that different from the silicone breast implant kind of landscape where it turns out depending on what implant and how long they were in and you know what they were packaged in like so many things like tryptophan the amino acid that was people used to enhance sleep now you get it readily but it was banned for a long time because a few people actually took tryptophan that had contaminated binders it was the stuff that was in there with it and they got very sick and there were some fatalities even and so it was taken off market for years for
all the wrong reasons i mean taken off for good reason but it was the binders not the tryptophan with sunscreen there are many things that are good about sunscreen like avoiding skin cancer but many sunscreens are bringing in the triclosans and other small even if a molecule is small enough it'll cross into the blood-brain barrier and we don't know what the long-term effects of those are but i think it's worth paying attention to similarly i used to teach this in a big undergraduate course if you look at the data on emfs and you look at the data on cell phones you will find animal studies that show that if you put a cell phone under a rat's cage or a litter of rats cages and two separate studies you'll find dramatic decreases in testosterone in some studies and you'll find subtle increases in testosterone and others i don't know what the effect is or how it's working but clearly there needs to be an exploration of this and clearly it's going to be a really inconvenient thing to do that right i mean i use the earbuds i i use the earbuds but nowadays i sort of wonder should i maybe use the wire things more you know i've been using the wired ones more yeah yeah because i i'm chicken [ __ ] i'm hearing things well but i don't know what's real people like start freaking out about emfs i'm not sure if they're right or if they're tin foil hat in it yeah and i'm in the same boat and i'm sure that some of my colleagues you know the moment we say you know ems and sunscreen people are going to freak out and yet i will go on record saying that some of the very scientists who say oh like don't even worry about this they're some of the most unhealthy looking people i've ever seen you know so they're not really incentivized to get it right nor am i a conspiracy theorist but here's my wish is that we look at everything and we look at it objectively and that we take into account that there are some animal data that point to the fact that getting these emfs in close proximity all the time might might not be the best idea there's certainly some kind of an effect it depends on the individual and the dose and a lot of stuff but
that what you're saying about scientists is an issue as well there are certain people that they're talking about things that affect your health and they're clearly unhealthy it's like boy that's a hard pill to swallow coming from you well and i think you know we go back to liver king and some of the other more colorful aspects of online nutrition and health information people wonder i actually saw some i made the huge mistake of going onto twitter in the last couple years i never really was on twitter and it's such a weird landscape as you know but one of the things i discovered was that a lot of the people in the science and medical community are there kind of poking fun at online health and nutrition and they wonder why they're so like how is it that this person has millions of followers and so on and the reason is actually because they're doing such a poor job of communicating health information in a meaningful clear and like actionable way and so it provides this enormous opportunity for someone to just show up and kind of just say whatever and grab a huge audience but let me push back against that because they're just how would someone who's a legitimate professor make some kind of an impact online come on my podcast but that's maybe the only way like you'd have to find an established portal sure or create your own and that's a long laborious task of building up an audience and providing them with good content and hopefully getting on a podcast where people like have a large audience and an appetite for that kind of a thing or i mean or more realistically go on your podcast i mean that's what i was saying i mean yeah i mean i think that what you know what you do and to some extent what i do what lex does and then of course there are others is you know try and provide a venue for people that would otherwise be locked away in their laboratories or locked away in their clients to get information out there and to have someone across the table for them like this you know kind of pushing and you know saying but tell me more like what exactly what do we know what don't we know mice or humans you know like how many people this kind of thing
because in the absence of that i really think that people are just left to kind of there's a kind of gravitational pull towards the thing that's most sensational so they go oh like maybe just eating testicles is like the key to a good life or maybe just eating plants is the only way to live and be healthy and i think that there are i mean there's incredible science and incredible medicine and i think most at least my experience has been that most scientists want to share what they know we've never had someone tell us no and we've had howard hughes investigators we've had you know we've got a few future nobel prize winners and nobel prize winners coming you've had dozens more than we ever have i have learned so much from shayna from i found out about you know atiya i mean matt walker david sinclair i mean it goes on and on you know i mean you can list it off i think that scientists want to be heard i think they really do they just they need the opportunity yeah but i mean but saying that they've done a poor job i don't think it's because they've done a poor job because that's not what they do i mean that the quibbling on social media oh yeah well that's i think a lot of that is just frustration because if someone does spend their time researching and writing papers and you know you'll see papers online with like a thousand views two thousand views and these you know like how many people are looking at these peer-reviewed papers yeah they're not reading them with oh right i mean those of us in the game of science i still run a lab so i'm familiar with this it's the number of people that will actually read a paper start to finish who are qualified to parse what's in there yeah is you can count on one hand maybe two and for really you know blockbuster papers that have a huge impact that number might get into the hundreds or thousands right so when someone starts talking about like how does this person have millions of followers well it's because people have an appetite for these things and if you don't like that that person has millions of followers and you wish you had more it doesn't just magically come to you you have to put an effort it's like it's
like someone wanting to be a touring comedian they go that person sucks why are they selling out everywhere why why aren't i well because you're not even on the road you [ __ ] idiot like this is the same kind of conversation you're having with these scientists yeah like if someone's upset at you and the thing about the social media the the bickering that i do see the one thing that it does do is make me know that you're an extremely flawed person this person who is like concentrating whether it's nutrition or whatever it is which which i agree with you there is this weird sort of i don't know what that's about it's wanting attention it's not not feeling you're getting enough attention for your own research and then finding whatever one thing that you think someone's doing wrong and going after them and attacking them and then there's also people that are legitimately upset that people are pushing out fake information [ __ ] like lane norton's great for that oh yeah he's always got someone's pissing him off oh yeah he uh we've exchanged a few notes online he actually uh i saw him on i think it was a tia's podcast and he did a masterful job of explaining nutrition actually his persona on podcast is very different than his social media yeah he's a little extreme on social media but he's a great guy yeah he's very smart yeah very smart and he actually uh we align on this thing about eating organs directs those nutrients to specific organs he doesn't believe that either and he actually used to work on amino acid labeling of proteins and things like that um no he's a good example of of where somebody can straddle both sides but he likes to mock a lot of charlatans because there's quite a few sure i mean and he does a really good job at finding those people and pointing those things out but that's the thing is that there's this appetite for information so when someone comes along and says something that's counter to what everyone's been told it reinforces this desire to have like oh there's some secret information out there that i didn't know about all i have to do is eat testicles and i'll have more testicle power like that kind of [ __ ] is like for whatever reason very attractive to people yeah so it's very
important that someone in his i'm not talking about him when i'm talking about bickering really i'm talking about some like very bizarre characters that haven't developed these online followings but try really hard to get them and i also think there's probably a bunch of like social issues that these people have as well but you know he's he does a great job of mocking these folks and and like a good counter to some of these more preposterous claims that you do see very very prevalent particularly in the alternative health space you know you see it from a lot of these like vegan people and all these alternative health people it's like there's so much horse [ __ ] going on there's so much weird nonsense that these people push and that's how they make their you know that's how they get attention yeah well and lane has done it for instance a pretty good job of using kind of more sensational like content to combat sensational content so he does these like ohs and these you know that's not the style that i use although i will say he um called me out on something that's worth mentioning because i think i was grateful that he did i mentioned in a tweet that there there is evidence that alcohol can increase the aromatization of testosterone estrogen and he pointed out quite correctly that it depends on dose and there might be some individual variation so that's where like someone's saying wait a second hold on that's not the whole story allowed me to see data that i wasn't aware of and made it more clear so that to me is a is a great example of the use of social media to bring a more nuanced conversation about and i actually wrote to him and thanked him no well you're great about that i've seen you do that before when but that's also science right science is like you have a certain amount of data and you discuss that data and then someone else who has a deeper understanding of it can maybe point to some other study that maybe you weren't aware of and you add that to it as long as everyone's not dogmatic but when you get into the heavy duty carnivore space when you get into the heavy duty vegan space my problem with a lot of that is it's very dogmatic and a lot of people claim that they have all the answers to
all the things like you know paul saladino likes to do is this [ __ ] like you ever see that yeah his like little yeah he hits the [ __ ] thing yeah well he does a whole no he does these things on social media like olive oil is olive oil yeah well he talks about this is what's wrong with this the defense chemicals the this that that this he's very committed to like a complete animal-based diet the guy looks great he does look to be in great shape and i asked him straight up i just said listen are you on trt of any kind and he said nope he's in his 40s and he's he he looks really healthy yeah he looks very healthy he's also but very active constantly yeah i mean moved to costa rica just so he could surf every day you know and like live in the jungle and eat like organic papayas and [ __ ] doing really well you know he's obviously whatever he's doing one thing he's not doing he's not poisoning his body with junk food he's not eating [ __ ] and processed sugar and nonsense and he's very physically active and he's getting a lot of sun exposure so all those things that we know to be absolutely without a doubt beneficial he's incorporating all those into his life so he's got all that yeah now would he be just as healthy if he ate a salad every day i don't know i mean i don't think he would be unhealthy i don't think salads are bad for you no i love it i think pesticides are bad herbicides are bad and i think if you get that [ __ ] in your salad that could be an issue well one of the things that i believe and this is really hybridizing as we say nerdy speak for crossing over two separate things i think that people have a lot of different kinds of friends can look at any conversation about politics or about guns or about nutrition in a more nuanced way i've always enjoyed i i believe this is you as well i'm speculating here but what i see is that you know i've got friends who are hippies punk rockers republicans democrats libertarians gun owners gun haters all of it by being friends with a lot of different kinds of people you just kind of get you just come to understand as you put it once to me and i really internalize this like it's about people right what the dogmatic
stuff is when you you know 99 of your friends are of one orientation or another your world view just shrinks to the size of an atom there's also a problem with people wanting to be right you know and they want they want to win like if you believe that the democratic party is the only way forward for a rational peaceful society and you have this confirmation bias that only the democrats have the answers to this to that the other things or if you're a person that believes in god and the republicans and we need the first and second amendment and this and you're so committed people get so committed to these ideas that they're not willing to entertain any other idea and then they fight rigorously rigorously they fight as if you're defending your own life your own your own soul you don't fight you don't discuss these things on the merits of their you know what whether or not this is a good concept or that's a good concept you you're literally almost arguing for your very existence being valid and it's very strange because people equate themselves they attach themselves to ideas and when their idea gets challenged they get emotional they get excited they get angry they get aggressive and it's so sad to watch it really especially as people get older when i see like a 60 year old man who gets hyper aggressive and starts yelling at people about ideas it's like god damn calling people morons calling people [ __ ] it's like just talk about the idea just just don't attach yourself to it talk about the idea you'll look far better you'll see appear far more intelligent it's a far more evolved way to communicate about things but so many people are just completely incapable of it when they're challenged on their ideas they can never say i'm wrong they can never say oh i was incorrect i thought this like they don't have they literally don't have the ability to do that they will find some way to try to pretend that they were wrong or that they weren't wrong it's very bizarre it is bizarre i mean i immediately think of like neuroplasticity is robust early in life and it tapers off right
and they're you know brilliant people like richard feynman the great theoretical physicist i mean he was known for doing crazy things bongo drumming naked on the roof of caltech but also deciding to become an artist not a great one but an artist late in life or he also wrote a lot of theorems and did his work in strip bars in pasadena he loved being among different types of people and he believed he wrote a lot about this that remaining curious genuinely curious and i define curiosity as being interested in something without being attached to the outcome right you you legitimately want to find out what's on the other side that that maintains this youthfulness and this plasticity and i think when one approaches a conversation of any kind from the stance of i don't want to find out i want to be shown to be right yeah curiosity is dead right and and that i mean i think that's tragic it's just very difficult to get people to sit down and have civil conversations when they have hot button hot button topics that they're opposed to like if one person is hardcore right wing and one person's hardcore left wing to have them sit down and have calm rational conversations is incredibly difficult because everybody wants to win everybody wants to because you're literally defending yourself you're defending it's not just an idea like say if you want to talk about the first amendment and whether or not freedom of speech should be uh like the first amendment protection should be um extended to social media or whether or not social media should be thought like things like twitter which is it the town square or is it a private company like these kind of discussions like people will get [ __ ] emotional and furious and angry and ad hominems and they they lose jobs i mean grown grown adults throw themselves on the stake it's so wild it's crazy it's wild but it's also it's indicative of what we are as a human as a human species like we have this incredibly strong desire for validation an incredibly strong desire to have our ideas reinforced not challenged because
we attach our idea to our own self value and our own self-worth i've done my very best to distance myself from that as much as possible and as i've gotten older and had more of these kind of conversations i've gotten better and better at it but you seem like you straddle multiple viewpoints on a number of things or willing to have that i was curious has anyone ever walked out of here like it would felt so confronted that they no i'm nice when if i don't get along with somebody there's been people that i wanted to attack believed or that you wanted to walk out of it well there's no some people that i've just like my god you're so sloppy and lazy like these thoughts are just so weak and then i will see them you know talk about the experience on twitter and i'm like oh my god you're just so lucky i didn't go after you because it's like there's so many people that have these sloppy lazy ideas and they exist in these echo chambers well this is one place where i think a scientific training is useful independent of whether or not one decides to become a career scientist when you take your so-called oral defense examination you get up there and there's five or six different faculty and your qualifying exam and they they ask you questions until you say i don't know the idea is to find where your cliff is right right like at the moment that you start wondering and stumbling that's when you actually know you're doing a good job i mean you don't want to do that too early but they'll ask crazy questions hard questions that are unrelated to anything you think you should have have to prepare and i sit on these committees now i sit on the other side of the fence social media for me has actually become a good kind of repeat of my qualifying exam because occasionally something comes in that oh wow like i never thought about it that way you're absolutely right but the moment you say i don't know that's when you are allowed to pass up to the next level in science it's not when you know it's when you are willing to admit that you don't know that they say now you can go pursue a dissertation then you do a dissertation and then you have to defend it and everyone thinks so you have to defend it by showing it it's
watertight you actually defend it but a really good defense committee we all meet beforehand and we're like how are we going to beat this guy or this gal up and we decide we're going to find where the leaks are and get them to admit that their study is wonderful perhaps but not perfect and then you become a doctor of science then you trust them that's right because you trust that they're only interested in information that's factual they're only interested in the facts they're not interested in just getting their ideas reinforced that's right but it's it's a complicated dance that human beings do because your ego is involved and your reputation is involved and that for a lot of people that's a lot of who they are a lot of who they are is how other people see them you know there's a lot of folks out there that you know day to day their life depends i mean i'm sure you've met people that got offended by something that doesn't seem logical to be offended by i i tempted to raise the story but i'm not going to because i don't want to draw fire again but no i i once credited a colleague who was an amazing colleague and someone picked up on something in the article about them that was totally unrelated and was of of the times and what and it was like suddenly the conversation had shifted completely and then you realize it's all about them it actually has nothing to do about the topic yeah and that's where i think things can get really diverted i mean i tend to not respond to comments too often occasionally you know thanks for your interest in science and like give people cue people to an episode i do not get into online debates i'm happy to do it on a podcast but i don't do it in comment section it's too hard it's too hard it's a shitty way to communicate too you know if you sit down across from someone you look them eye to eye and have a conversation people tend to be more civil they tend to be more kind it's so easy to be shitty with text over twitter it's just so easy and so many people engage in it i was watching a friend of mine who's a comedian arguing with people back and forth i was going to reach out to him and i was going to say what the [ __ ] are you doing
don't do that waste of time so bad for you too and i'm looking at his timeline and it's like this is taking place over many hours in his day i'm like bro that hour those hours you're never going to get back that day's gone that case that day's toast and you're arguing with people about some [ __ ] that has very little to do with you it's more to do with your ideological position like you're standing in this whatever group you're in right or left yeah and as a creator the goal is always to create new and better yeah what it works and so it really does seem like a a true time sync well it is at times thinking it's also like your time is [ __ ] valuable you're giving your time to something and that's robbing you of effort it's robbing you of whatever you could be doing to increase your proficiency in something increase your knowledge and your enjoyment doing things you enjoy you don't [ __ ] enjoy arguing with people on twitter you don't even know that's crazy yeah i didn't become a lawyer for a reason i don't really you know i actually have rules for my engagement on social media and the podcast i always try and put out information that's really about the audience i want them to benefit it's not about me like you know occasionally that can get murky because you'll say you know i you know i learned this thing and it can seem like it's about you but it's really about them getting something that i think will be useful to them and the other one is i ne i don't generally get angry anyway there are things in life that make me angry but i never bring that to the to the table that's very important now when you're talking about all these things for optimizing health and fitness and performance how much of obviously you're very fit and you work out a lot but how much of your own body and your own experiences do you use like do you experiment on these things so that you could have more data or you could have at least anecdotal data absolutely i mean i try and do as many things so i'm right i mean just at a top contour i lift every other day run on the days i don't lift that's kind of like lift run and what about your recovery stuff i do i get into the cold
i hit that 11 minute threshold per week by getting in three or four three-minute sessions in the cold i do have a barrel sauna so i'll try and get in there for an hour total per week or more oh yeah so you have to go get ice no no i have a i have a different one i have a plunge i don't have any like commercial relationship with the plunge it makes it look like a bathtub porcelain tub so i use a cold plunge there's no ice actually floating in there so i'll get in there so i do the cold i do the heat i lift every other day for about 45 minutes or an hour how cold is your cold thing it goes to i said it about 45. i'm not as tough as you and cam and he's i'll catch up it's not a tough thing yeah i get used to it you know so i'll do that i mean we do that for 11 years a week yeah and i i eat you know between 11 a.m and 8 p.m i know right now intermittent fasting became really controversial recently because there was a study showing that there's no additional benefit of fasting for weight loss as compared to caloric restriction but right but that's weight loss there's other benefits clearly and that set off a storm and it was a storm i was happy to sidestep and enjoy watch go by because it was really interesting that the headline in the new york times was frankly was terrible because it said study shows no benefit to intermittent fasting but what the actual finding was is that the study showed no additional benefit to fasting over caloric restriction for the tr for obesity right fox news got it right in this case and i have no bias i don't subscribe to any of these things so um canceled all my subscriptions the new york times got it blah fox news got it right and then the sort of science book how did fox news label it they said no additional benefit i believe or something like that to fasting over caloric restriction for weight loss or something like that something very true to the concluding arguments of the paper um the other ones were really designed to like say fasting bad and you know like here you've got millions and millions of people have now figured out a way to control their appetite because
they're better at eating nothing for certain periods of day than eating like half the muffin because there's all these neural mechanisms when you start ingesting food there's this desire to eat more food and for some people not eating for a period is better than eating and and then some of the smaller new sites got it somewhere in the middle but so i do i'll eat my first meal somewhere around 11 a.m but occasionally i'll have like a protein drink at nine if i'm really starving when i wake up but i do those things i do the red light therapy i stand in front of the red light to get the eye benefits and i don't i'm not trying to heal acne or anything but i just kind of do it all over my body anyway early in the day a few times a week i definitely have a what i call non-sleep deep rest protocol so instead of naps and meditation i'll listen to like a yoga nidra script or i'll do some sort of hypnosis script three or four times a week to just do what i call deliberate decompression to just take my mind into a space not unlike the one you were describing for cannabis for some people where i'm just like not thinking about anything to in order to reset there's an amazing study out of scandinavia uh a hospital in denmark did this study in human showing that with positron emission tomography imaging so brain imaging in humans showed that a 30-minute yoga nidra so just lying down and listening to this deep relaxation script increased dopamine resting levels in the area of the brain called the striatum by 65 basically putting people into a state where they're ready for action again when they come out of it i find it incredibly rejuvenating the the ceo of google has written about nsdr non-sleep deep breast that's a acronym i coined because i didn't like the words yoga nidra and meditation all sounds kind of magic carpety and acts as a barrier for people so i'll do nsdr almost every day um 10 to 30 minutes what else do i do i dim the lights at night i make sure i get sunlight in the morning i'm i try and eat well good middle minimally excuse me processed or
unprocessed foods um what else i try and do some stretching i try and stretch and do that sort of thing and i'm also really trying to avoid toxic people in interactions um that helps a lot helps a lot that's real it's huge and i think one of the probably the biggest surprise in researching the podcast over the last 18 months because that's when we started was the ep we decided to do an episode on gratitude i thought okay gratitude we did it for thanksgiving i thought okay it's going to be thanking people and things turns out that if you look at the research on gratitude first of all the increases in dopamine and serotonin and feelings of subjective well-being from people that have a regular effective gratitude practice we'll talk about what that is is immense it's immense these are these are skyrocket effects what is the most effective gratitude practice it turns out it's not sitting there and being thankful it's receiving gratitude or observing someone else receiving gratitude i thought the gratitude was all about being grateful it's actually receiving gratitude or observing some instance in which somebody is receiving genuine gratitude totally surprised me but and so this means give gratitude right give thanks but also be in a position to receive thanks and so it's these kind of nuanced things might seem small but one thing i try and do is you know i try and since i can't walk around asking for gratitude that's not my style i like to think my ego is really slightly more in check than that i try and really let people that i care about and i'm grateful to know that but i do that for them not for me and so that's that's something i pay a lot of attention to it feels kind of weak sauce it's kind of like people go that's kind of like weenie stuff like gratitude the data showed that gratitude and avoiding toxic people and focusing on good quality social interactions physical contact with animals kids and loved ones like you know that huge increases in serotonin oxytocin these are not these are no longer the
kinds of things that are just talked about at the end of a yoga class right this is real science with brain imaging and measurements of chemicals from the brain and blood and so i've tried to incorporate more of that stuff that isn't as kind of forward center of mass you know like i'll get after it kind of stuff i do that stuff but i also try and you know have a good life and surround myself with good people well just think about the way it makes you feel when you're around good people and you enjoy your time you feel better while you're doing it that's got to be good for you when you're depressed and things are bad and you're lonely and you feel shitty like that doesn't feel good like that has to have some sort of a effect on your physiology well i think of it it absolutely does and i think of it as not just good in the present but it's also buffering me and everyone who does these sorts of things against the inevitable right i mean [ __ ] happens and people die and terrible things happen and and so in order to be in the best position to really see that stuff and react to it in the best possible way and also continue to move forward and do what's important to me in life i feel like all the stuff i'm doing is great in the day-to-day but it's also about the long-term arc i mean my parents are getting you the age look i hope they live to be another 20 you know 20 years more but chances are they're going to go in the next 20 years i want to be in the best position to support them and i want to be able to the best position to support me frankly as well so i think that doing all this stuff positions us to be you know like leaders and supporters of ourselves and of other people and i know that can all sound kind of like you know word jumbo but it's the date you've talked about this before it's the daily rituals like none of the things i described are something that you can just take and it's all done and of course i do take supplements so you know we advertise these so sure but i take omegas and i take athletic greens and i take some tonga ali and i do as many of the things as i
possibly can i actually really enjoy that stuff and i think they're good data on all of it if you're one is willing to look and be open-minded but even if you don't have access to those things there's so much that you can do with sunlight exercise gratitude hydration yoga nidra 90 of the really effective things don't cost anything except time it's just time and discipline when we're talking about there's another there's a benefit to what we're talking about with intermittent fasting is that you give yourself structure and that's very important for people even for people that are disciplined like i find myself when i have a full day off and i have to do anything i find myself putting off my workout until later and later in the day and then i kind of like lazily get through my workout and i go oh my god like i'm better off when i'm busy because i'm busy i have a structure and i think there's a thing about like telling like i used to think that i i do still think that about like sober october like when we do sober october i'm not drinking or doing anything for one month and that structure helps me you know and i think when you say oh i'm going to cut back on my drinking what does that even mean everybody i know that says that because i'm not a drinker although these days i'm hearing a lot about all these delicious whiskeys in texas and i don't have a problem with alcohols i'm always willing to try yeah well they're not really delicious they're delicious in comparison to whiskey the kool-aid tastes way better what alcohol do you actually enjoy i've enjoyed whiskey but i wouldn't say it's delicious then why drink it because of the way it makes it i like the way it makes me feel i like a little bit of the flavor i do it's din it's a different thing it's like a it's a smooth weirdness to like a whiskey you know there's a but it's not a steak is delicious steak is delicious there's a difference like i wouldn't say a whiskey's delicious even if it's great whiskey yeah and i don't smoke but i have to say i i used to smoke the occasional cigarette when i was in graduate school and gosh i miss nicotine nicotine is great i love i love the taste of tobacco a vape pen no i'm
afraid to do that why because i think i'll just attach that thing surgically to my mouth i mean i know where where i know where that line is for me it's a adrenal clarity of mind clarity and energy adrenaline nicotine like those those are vices for me cigarettes give you a wild head rush i like that head rush but i've found that there's some really good vape pens that give you that head rush and i don't feel like they're gonna [ __ ] your lungs up as bad but but kids are vaping like crazy now and that's gotta be bad it's not good well they're also doing it all day long and some of them are doing it with those lunchbox ones those gigantic those big vape boxes you ever seen them they're huge some of these vape pens they're not pens call them vape pens they're as big as a cell phone but thicker wow and they have like this big robot dick hanging off of it and they're sucking on this thing and blowing giant clouds of vape smoke a lot of things can be overdone right but that's also the case with fast food if you want to eat fast food all day good luck you're gonna have a [ __ ] heart attack it's gonna be terrible for you i don't think i've had a fast food in ages i think i watched your election night episode and there were and there was like all the comments coming through where about there were there might have been a fast food hamburger on the table no fillet of fishes we had a couple of fillets i love fillet of fishes are they donald's fillet fish oh they're delicious terrible for you but it was one of those things was like i don't do that every day i don't even do that every week i don't even do that every month no clearly you take good care of yourselves i i mean for me the vices that are you know like croissants pizza oh yeah oh yeah but the but the the first drag off a freshly rolled cigarette it's like nothing else crazy right it's unbelievable the clarity of mine and the taste and you know cigarettes smell disgusting why don't you just only have a first drag impossible impossible you might have a problem it's
like first dragging a cigarette one tattoo you know it's like come on you know it's impossible impossible you can't have one lay's chips right in that yeah one one uh yeah one uh pringle or whatever what what vices do you have do you have vices adrenaline used to be a vice you know i i used to do risky behaviors not risky in the you know in the uh illegal sense sports stuff yeah i mean i went cagex shark dive and loved every second of it great white sharks and you know until i had an air failure down there what happened i had to call over another diver and do the share air thing and holy [ __ ] i was alone in the cage oh my god i went with my buddy michael muller who's this fantastic photographer like celebrity photographer but he also takes pictures of sharks we were studying fear so we decided to go to vr of great whites of guadalupe i went the first year stayed in the cage didn't exit we got my scuba certification second year this is 2017 went out a bunch of friends brian mckenzie who's kind of a like performance guy and former seal team guy and anyway we're out there i'm in the cage three divers leave to do the cage exit thing with their film the vr and i was just i'm on the hookah line and then at some point what's a hookah it's like a it's a line up to the surface that you're breathing oxygen oh but i was alone in the cage and i've been there the year before so the sharks are coming in all over the place and they're huge i mean the girth is insane but i'm in the cage and they're out of the cage and then all of a sudden i got no air i'm like jesus christ so i look up and the the hose had kind of boa constricted up on itself so i was like oh so i pop up remember no scuba on me because i'm just in the cage and the thing's like concrete cling cling clink and you're down 40 feet below the surface it's like oh god so i dropped down to the corner there's a spare tank down there open it up nothing nothing comes out it's empty it's empty so i go to the other reserve tank open it up nothing okay so now i'm i'm screwed so i'm getting real i haven't had any air in a
little bit but probably only 10-15 seconds but freaking out so i get up on top of the cage i've got a weight belt on and i'm like okay i guess i shoot for the surface because i can see the boat up there because if i stay down here i'm clearly gonna die and then i'm thinking okay well shooting for the surf is exactly what they like are they going to eat you know you're just kind of i started to kind of panic about oh jesus and at that point one of the divers yeah oh yeah that's me there that's why i'm in the cage um see they're big they're they're big animals so how are they uh attracting these fish you're not allowed to chum so um they just come in they're super it doesn't mean uh so yeah well you film that from the cage so that was meat though yeah so you can you can keep tune up on the surface but we're down in the deep cage there's a surface cage in a deep cage so then what happened yeah mueller shot that for our vr in the lab so then what happened was this guy brock who's one of the divers that's mueller mueller wears a yellow suit to look more like a tuna so they come closer oh [ __ ] yeah yeah he's a you guys would get along he's he's a longtime hollywood guy who's the kind of uh photographer who does these adventures um so then one of the divers saw me and i was like you know like i need aaron he kind of looked at me but and so he kicked his way back over but that was a long wait and then we did the share error thing but now two divers are out and we're there sharing air and there's only so much air before you eventually run out and there's nothing in the reserves eventually they came back and then we we pulled the rope and got out and it was yeah it was enough of a scary experience for me that i was like oh god so we and actually i got out a guy from the seal teams came over to me super calm like typical of those guys he was like so what do you take away from that experience and i was like check the safety tanks he was like check the safeties but i will say this i'm not tough like this is not to kind of you know inflate myself but the next day i
woke up and i was seriously freaked out and so i actually went down the next day again and i cage exited and the reason i did it is because first of all this when i cage exit i was on scuba so i felt totally contained i knew i wasn't going to die of an air failure and the other reason is everything we know about trauma and the treatment of trauma is that if you live with that bug in your brain about quote unquote almost dying in fact i don't even like to say that that's stuck in you so i went down there in the cage and then i cage exited and you keep saying cage swam out of the cage with the sharks turns out when they're swimming at you if you swim toward them they bank off if you don't if you shoot for the surface or something they go oh your prey and they can go after you but if you just swim toward them then they bank off pretty early so how do you get to the surface well you get back in the cage to get back up so that you get into the cage at the top they lower it in crane right then you all go out on scuba and then you're swimming around getting video the sharks come at you you go at them and then they bang so you're saying you cage exited meaning you swam around with them with the scuba deer not you went to the surface correct i we the next day i woke up and and i was just so distraught about what happened the day before i decided there's only one way to deal with this and that's to cage exit to go down there but this time leave the cage and this time leave it on scuba and then it felt like a victory right i'm here so but when you go up to the surface do you go back in the cage to go back up to the surface yes yes because you don't want to just swim up to the top because you might bite your legs correct but in the culture of cage exit great white shark diving there's a interesting twist for years guys have been going out to guadalupe and doing this stuff it's a real kind of machismo culture who can get closest who can get the camera almost into the shark's mouth etc and for years there was a lot of kind of one-upping and posting things online and then a couple years ago out of what seemed like nowhere ocean ramsay this female free diver shark expert
shows on bbc video her swimming with no scuba with the biggest great white shark anyone's ever seen i think they call it big blue and she's holding on to the fins so all these guys like all his testosterone of like why cage exited and i got this close and that close and here comes this lady and she just demolishes the scene like no one has done what she's done this shark is so big this is this is her this is insane her husband shot this footage from what i understand oh my god imagine your wife doing this you're going baby what are you doing so she doesn't even have [ __ ] scuba diving she's holding on to this shark so you don't seem to mind either i mean when i look at this i mean i get nervous it's also beautiful but what i love about it is you know there was so much pigeon chesting around she looks like a fish too i would eat her if i was a shark like doesn't like her like even the way her legs are with that uh outfit on she looks delicious look at the size of that thing biggest one ever seen on record really yeah how big is it oh i don't know i mean a 10 or 12 oh there's someone else a 10 or 12 foot shark is a big shark because the girth is what's freaky right that's probably a 16 foot shark i'm probably gonna get this wrong i'm sure yeah the the sharkiness will come out all that look at this she's petting it or he's petting it yeah these people are out of their [ __ ] minds the um you're just lucky it's not hungry right and there are a lot of tuna out there so guadalupe is an amazing place it's just a big rock jutting up out of the ocean and i wanted to learn the history of this place turns out that if this is true what i was told by one of the local officials is that some politicians playing with them these dolphins are [ __ ] with them some politician in mexico his wife had an affair with some guy and apparently they put the guy out there on the island
but the island is known maybe that's just lore but people were spearfishing out there and getting eaten they were putting the you know bloody fish on their hip and getting munched and so they realized this is filled with great whites and when you when you drop anchor there it's like i remember every time going out there and we've been there twice now i was thinking oh we're not going to see any sharks you drop anchor a shark breaches they're just they're everywhere it's just shark suit is it just because of the high pro amount of tuna tuna and i think they probably breed near there there's something called shark cafe which is not far from there that oceanographers like to study anyway anyway uh so that's one of your adrenaline things yeah that's right so you asked me yeah so i used to do stuff like that which is frankly stupid right because i make my living on land and i'd like to someday have a family and all that kind of stuff and that's not productive for that sort of thing so yeah that sort of thing is the kind of thing that i should avoid if i'm going to have a long life jamie who are you telling me that someone got their hand bitten off one of them jackass guys yeah you didn't want to watch the video but yeah and jackass like the promo during shark week yeah got it no not off not off it got mangled bitten i guess and it was [ __ ] up and he had to have surgery and i believe he still has his hands those guys are crazy shooting themselves out of cannons that kind of thing never appealed to me but um you know i'm not a fighter i've gotten fights when i was a kid i loved the clarity of mine that came from the adrenaline it was boxing in ring so you know it's fun i mean but i think as a 46 year old you know and where my you know my brain is my living this kind of yeah not good to get hit in the head what are your vices my life um yeah i do i do like junk food occasionally i do like to drink probably more than i should i enjoy i promise i do shows all the time they're in nightclubs and you know we have a couple cocktails
and then next thing you know a couple is three or four and then we do podcasts and podcasts a lot of times we'll be drinking if it's anything that i should do less of it's definitely booze but i'm around a very boozy culture you know a lot of my friends drink and drink pretty hard and when it comes to how many of them are actually healthy oh it's a [ __ ] small number i always worry about the number of like suicides among comedians or early deaths like the belushi thing now granted i'm i'm not really aware or um richard pryor or things like that it seems like stuff hits early in that community well the belushi thing and the prior thing are probably both related to drugs you know i was around prior in his dying days unfortunately because he was when he was doing really poorly he decided to go back on stage and i think it's like you know try to to try to recapture his lost love you know his body was failing him and so the thing that excited him or got him at least to give him some sort of sense of purpose was to go back at the comedy store and i worked with him for about five maybe six weeks where he was going up all the time and i was always going on after him so it'd be richer prior than me and so i got to see him [Music] he had to carry him to the stage and then they had to put him in the chair and then they had to crank up the sound like like he was really loud because his voice was you know he had no energy and i remember thinking like he's not old enough for this like whatever this neural neurologically degenerative disease that he has like whether that happened because uh he was you know had a genetic propensity predisposition for this or whether it's because of a lot of cocaine because i know a lot of people i don't know if there's they're related but i know a lot of people that did a lot of cocaine in the 70s and the 80s and they developed like some serious neurological problems as they got older sure and what it's mixed in with i mean one thing we know for sure
is that amphetamines kill neurons yeah there's no question wouldn't cocaine have a similar effect it seems likely seems very likely i mean the early studies of mdma and whether or not it was neurotoxic actually had one of them had to be retracted because they accidentally used a amphetamine and cocaine-like substance instead accidentally in these monkeys and they showed nerve degeneration how do they accidentally confuse mdma with that laboratories are you know human human error is a big thing you mean coven 19 is that what you're saying you're saying the wuhan lab you're saying that that's that's another that's another discussion although you know i mean look my lab works with pseudo-rabies virus with different herpes viruses with different adenoviruses humans pipette those viruses it it's their reason you have biosafety protocols it's because people make errors and protocols prevent error so these people accidentally gave these animals uh an amphetamine right and then later they discovered that what they had given them was not what they thought and so they quite responsibly retracted that paper there is evidence that high doses of any highly dopaminergic drug so cocaine amphetamine things of that sort can be neurotoxic um if you make neurons really really active exceedingly active they will die right their electrical cells they electrically active cells they can they can die excitotoxicity excito toxicity there's also neurotoxicity and there's all sorts of ways that this can happen and yeah i'm not saying that michael j fox has parkinson's because he was a cocaine user i mean i saw the movie bright lights big city i don't know if he was actually a cocaine user or not he was in that movie but we've seen i mean amazing talent like i'm a huge joe strummer fan clash and that strummer was an inmate you know he died so young of a heart attack known amphetamine user right sadly um michael j fox and parkinson's is that related to recreational drugs i don't know if he did anything i don't know i always think family ties so i think of like this really conservative kid so i'm not saying he did um
but prior or prior candy i don't know if candy was candy was enormous it was so that doesn't help and um john belushi died of a speed ball he died of mixing cocaine and heroin the same thing the river phoenix died from yeah i mean there's a susceptibility guys i grew up with these names won't mean anything to people but guys that were kind of famous in the san francisco skateboarding punk rock scene a lot of them that died young died of heart attacks five or six years after they stopped doing a lot of cocaine because their body was still [ __ ] i think it it can i think there is evidence that it can adjust um the function of calcium channels on the heart and then later you know it takes a smaller insult to to put them under anyway that makes sense it's sad i mean it's it's not as we were talking about with hormones and all the other things and light etc it's not just about the effect it has in the short term right it's the long arc and the long arc can be negative like we're talking about or the long arc can be positive yeah well i mean i'm almost 55 i'll be 55 in august and uh i'm very happy that i can still use my body the way i can because uh i always assume that when someone got to be 55 they were done like your body's going to fall apart no it turns out the measures and i know a tia talks about this a much more in a much more sophisticated way than i can but one's ability to get up off the ground without assistance one ability to jump and land one's ability to hang from a bar for a minute these are measures not unlike blood pressure and heart rate resting heart rate and things of that sort about how well your nervous system can communicate to your musculature and whether or not your musculature and ligaments and bones can handle all that and so i think being the one thing we know is that being physically active is superb at extending your life and improving your life yeah improving your life is i mean i don't know how much you can really extend here's the deals like we really don't have a lot of data on people that started working out when they were like in their early teens and kept going supplementing their hormones supplementing vitamins supplement and
then got into their 50s and 60s and 70s we don't have a lot of those people because first of all people don't put in that kind of effort because it's not mandatory right if you're a professional athlete you don't put in that effort because you're not going to be a professional athlete when you're 60 and 70 years old you're just not so a lot of times when people that are professional athletes they get to the point where they retire one of the things they do is they get fat when they stop i mean it's really kind of bizarre well this is the old thing about um that they used to say you know you stop lifting weights you'll quote unquote turn to fat which is impossible was because people kept eating and they stopped training my role model in all this is actually you know very perhaps surprising to some people um recently i had idol portal you know on the podcast you know who my my hero is his mother he has a video of his mother when she's in her 60s she started training at 58 and this was like seven years ago doing pull-ups for reps doing back bends doing all the kind of stuff that you know edo-ish stuff but in her 60s which means that now she's in her early 70s and he told me that she's still doing five sets of five pull-ups dips like legitimate work and so to me if i can do that if i'm dipping and i'm doing pull-ups and i'm running then i'll consider myself a winner at that age i'm gonna send you something jamie um my friend jessie uh she's a uh stunt woman and she does ninja warrior i'm gonna i'll send you her go to jessie graff g-r-a-f-f-p-w-r she does a lot of wild [ __ ] but you can find videos of her mom and her working out so her mom does these ninja warrior workouts and her mom is doing chin ups and all kinds of wild stuff her mom is super super impressive like this is her mother oh look ocean ramsay commented the the shark purse ah there you go so they're all in a club of badasses so i met jesse at uh taran tactical where she was uh working on her gun skills but look at look at her mom amazing like swinging and catching uh chin up bars and doing all this wild stuff and and jessie she does those ninja warrior competitions and
like i said a lot of stunt work as well she's like super physically fit but there's a bunch of videos of her mom and her going through these like incredible workouts together and her mom is just amazingly fit that's awesome but it's like just keep going the thing is like to keep using your body if you stop it's very difficult to sort of regain that kind of mobility and physical strength and coordination and your vo2 max and all that stuff but if you don't stop and you just continue as long as you're smart about it and you don't push yourself too hard you don't injure yourself and injuries are a big problem right because injuries require a long time where you're not you're going to have to at least be semi-sedentary and let your body relax at the very least you're not going to be able to go full full bore which i think you kind of have to do your body has to know hey this crazy [ __ ] wants to do this stuff all the time we need to have that kind of mobility that kind of physical strength that kind of joint function well i think that the transition from unfit to fit is where people see the most dramatic effects yeah and that should be encouraging uh i have a colleague her name is wendy suzuki for years she studied memory she's at nyu now she's the incoming dean of students at nyu the reason i'm so happy about that is that she's talked about and published really good scientific studies on 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise early in the day and now she's a 10-minute cold shower person because she lives in new york harder to get access to ice tubs and things improving focus stress resilience cognitive function i mean finally there are data to point to the fact that doing cardiovascular or weight training exercise if it's intense enough and it comes early in the day especially but also if you do it late in the day they've also shown that people's cognitive function actually goes up this was all correlative before it was like well you exercise your heart your cardiovascular system is better therefore your brain is better therefore there's this indirect effect on mood and performance but now they know everything from grip strength to attention capacity
to task switching they're all these measures like the stroop test of all these things of cognitive flexibility and the all of that improved by physical exercise categorically over and over it doesn't matter if it's boys girls men women what age and so now we no longer have to speculate as to whether or not exercise is good for the brain also it absolutely is and her work is now being transferred into basically curriculum for students her goal is that students are going to go through college not just getting their grades but coming out healthier than they came in and hopefully that'll wick out to everybody not just people in college obviously but will wick out to everybody so they're going to be running studies getting data from these kids i think it's really important because i think that everything is kind of murky and kind of indirect up to a point and now they're actually really solid data well there's also this prejudice unfortunately that uh anything physical is not an intellectual pursuit that it's almost the opposite it's a vanity pursuit that's ridiculous but that is a prejudice that many really intelligent people otherwise intelligent people have yeah well um a colleague at columbia has a nobel prize richard axel um plays squash like multiple times per week he used to play basketball though he says not very well um eric kendell nobel prize in uh for research on memory swam a mile three times a week now it's half a mile because he's in the late 90s he still does it 20 weasel nobel prize revision my scientific great grandparents 96 years old still jogs every morning 45 minutes wow and still mentally sharp right so the smartest people most accomplished scientists i know all extremely physically active for decades so i whatever smart people think that physical activity is just for me heads and jocks they're obviously not smart enough to know how it really works it's just like it's not that they're not smart it's just this unfortunate prejudice that people adopt and then have a very difficult time shedding you know i think they associate um physical fitness and physical activity with being a pursuit of people that are
kind of like clod hoppers yeah i think you're right i think there's also a little bit of the tone that came back to me early on you know some colleagues have been really interested in like oh i'm really excited about you know eating more omegas or eating more fish or you know whatever taking athletic greens etc and then some of them like oh it's all pills and powder kind of stuff they don't they see it as over there and when they don't realize that sure you don't need those things but a general theme of taking care of oneself physically can translate does translate to taking care of oneself mentally the reverse is not true right plenty of intellectual smart people who look like melted candles right and who function like melting it they sleep with their mouth open they have sleep apnea i mean they're they're a wreck and that wreck shows up somewhere in their 60s and i see this all the time because i've attended no fewer than 10 funerals for brilliant people no and those funerals with one or two exceptions were all because they took terrible care of themselves well i in my world in the comedy world uh obviously i see that because most of my friends don't take care of themselves you know there's a good percentage of people in that world when they get to a certain age like there's friends that are my age and they look like they're my dad do you i almost wonder whether or not they somehow pair the idea that their talent and their ability is linked to their being unhealthy oh yeah there's just crazy but it's just an excuse it's just an excuse it really is it's like a thing i used to think that uh i shouldn't meditate and i uh because meditation and any sort of enlightenment would [ __ ] with my comedy because it would somehow or another make me more peaceful and kind and that would wouldn't be good for you lose your edge yeah but it's really just an excuse it's just an excuse comedy is a totally different thing it's an art form it's not gonna [ __ ] your art form up but i you know when you're young and insecure you don't really understand why you're funny at all so you're like what if i [ __ ] it up what if i lose it you know that's it's a fleeting thing as it is i'm only funny like five out of six times right now
but you know but if you look at the top people i say that you or you look at a chappelle or you look like the people that are like i talked about no like three nobel prize winners that their work will carry on for health and science for thousands of years if we exist that long so in that top tier they get it in the lower tier i don't know but in the middle tier is where i see a lot of the the unfortunate behavior of not preserving oneself so do you if you look at like the best of the best do you see good self-care there the most important thing is focus on your craft that's the most important thing there's a lot of great guys that don't they're not taking care of themselves but like like chappelle chappelle smokes and he drinks but my god he he focuses on his craft like he really cares about comedy and he cares a lot about he's a really interesting thoughtful person he spends a lot of time thinking you know he's not flipping in his perceptions and his thoughts that's the most important thing that's the most important thing focus on your craft you know there is a great benefit to being healthy great benefit in in many many many ways in in emotional stability and your ability to have energy to keep going and that's one of the things that i try to relate to young people that aren't that healthy but are young comics i say don't think of it as like i don't want to be an athlete i want to be a comic think of it as you your vehicle for doing anything is your physical body that's all you have when you're tired like you do two shows a night you know like two shows a night is weird because like it's not just you're doing two hours of comedy you're doing two hours it's like i have a seven o'clock show and maybe a 9 30 show right so that means not only i'm doing an hour but then i have to wait two and a half hours to do another hour and then you know if you're not smart with i eat fruit in between i make sure that i'm you know well hydrated but i think of these things because i'm an athlete whereas other guys they're [ __ ] off and they're just drinking and the second show rolls around and they're drunk and they're tired i've been there before and i've had bad shows because of that it's
very embarrassing and so you have to really be careful like when you're you know you're looking at your body don't look at it as just it's just life i'm just living life like no no there's a specific thing you're going to need out here you're going to need to have a certain amount of energy you're going to need to have a certain amount of tension and you're going to need that in about two hours so prepare prepare wisely i'm just thinking about two shows a night we did some live shows recently and uh related to the podcast and it was it was draining oh my goodness i much prefer to be on the microphone well it's draining if you're not accustomed to it but if you're accustomed to it it becomes invigorating yeah like when i get home from a show i'm not drained i'm usually excited i mean i enjoyed it it was nice to interact with people because podcasting a little bit like shouting into a tunnel especially the solo episodes it's nice to know the people out there listening yeah you see them definitely it was it was nice and to get questions in person felt really good and it's a lot like the classroom that i came up in you know lecturing as the little kid at the carnivals and then you know the carnivals make it sound like i was like carney but it wasn't a carny but as telling people about chlorine oh my goodness declare i could tell you more about aquaria and fish tanks than everyone know i always say if nothing else i'm gonna cure insomnia you know well listen man i appreciate you very much and i appreciate your podcast and all the information that you put out there you very very much helped me and uh i think people like you are a really valuable research and i'm a resource rather and i'm really glad that you're not just contained to classrooms and that putting out that podcast and making it accessible to so many people it's really really valuable so thank you thank you my pleasure yeah you've been a huge inspiration you and lex and a few others have really paved this road and i'm very grateful i do believe that people have should have access to information and education and so just trying to do it we're super fortunate that we have these kind of platforms that this exists because this has never
been a thing in history before and it's a thing now we're very lucky and now they can't put the lid back on now they're [ __ ] [Laughter] all right thank you brother thank you bye everybody [Applause] [Music]