Transcript of #2553 - Andrew Huberman

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The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day.

Hello, Andrew.

Great to see you again.

Good to see you, my friend. What a thick-ass book you wrote, sir.

Yeah, yeah, I figure it doubles as a doorstop or a weapon. Yeah, it's designed to be read front to back, learn a lot of science, a lot of health protocols, but you can also just decide, I want to get better at managing stress, go straight to that chapter, look up what you want to do, say, oh, I already do that, go to the next thing, and use it sort of like a manual.

This is a very ambitious undertaking.

It took me just shy of 8 years.

The operating manual, or an operating manual, for the human body. That's a lot. Yeah, just sitting down there, you know, in front of the computer thinking, I'm gonna write an operating manual for the human body.

Well, it didn't start off like that. At first it was a book about the autonomic nervous system— stress, sleep, focus. Then it evolved. Then I had a third completely new rewrite, and my good friend— now I'm honored to call him a friend, but he's just such a good dude— Rick Rubin was like, do you like it? I was like, ah. And he goes, scrape it. I'm like, what? And then he said— I'm gonna get myself in trouble. He just goes, scrape it, man. Like, what are you doing? And I said, I don't know. He's like, you have to love it. And then he said, uh, they're gonna push you to release this thing. And I said, I already said I was gonna release it. I did. I did it again. And then I did that again. And I was going to visit him in Europe each summer, and we'd sit together, and he goes, let's read some stuff together. But with Rick, what that means is you sit there and he reads you and how you're reacting to the material. So we barely read any of it. I was just talking about it and he goes, it's not ready.

I go, what do you mean? He goes, it's not ready. You're not ready. And so then this year, finally. But this book, I mean, we were in Europe this summer for a friend's wedding. My team was over there and my girlfriend and I were traveling. She was so understanding. But from I was doing edits from like 9:00 PM until 2:30 in the morning every single night and waking up the next morning. Like, this book has been—

While you were on vacation?

Quote unquote vacation, yeah. I owe her a real vacation now. She was working too, but she was asleep in those hours. And we stopped by Rick's. He's like, how's it going? I'm like, it's there. And he's like, he just like checked in. He's like, it's there. Like, he can just feel it.

He's such a fucking weirdo.

I mean, he has this supernatural ability to feel where people are at. but not get absorbed in it. And I have so many Rick stories. We could spend the whole time talking about Rick stories, but the man is just like— he's plugged into some energetic layer that the rest of us aren't. And he's all day, every day, he's connecting with people and, and trying to help them. Like, he really spends most of his time like looking out at the world and trying to help people with their, with their art, with their stuff. And I'm—

That's really him. If you know him, that's him 24/7. Totally. He lives in that space. It's a very weird headspace. to be in because you're constantly like looking at other people's stuff. It's like he's a tastemaker, you know, or that's not even a good description of him. He's just like an analysis of art. Like, that's his, his, his function. He analyzes art, but from like, for lack of a better term, almost like a spiritual perspective. Like, he sees whether it's real.

Totally.

He finds the realness. And like, he made the Red Hot Chili Peppers record one of their albums in a mansion. Because he wanted to hear, like, instead of a recording studio, he wanted to hear, like, the sounds of the house.

That's so Rick. There's a, you know, I didn't come here to plug this, but we should because it's gonna be awesome because I may have seen pieces of it. He has this documentary with Jay-Z coming out, like, next week where they sit in this incredible monument structure in Europe and they just listen to music together and talk about music, and it's So good.

It's just a documentary on them listening.

It's really about Jay, but about his childhood music. Yeah, so Jay's music, and they're listening to— yeah. I think this was filmed in an abandoned post office in France because Rick liked the skylight. I've seen pieces of it. I'm so excited to see this.

It's all black and white?

I think so.

HBO Max. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah, he's on a whole other thing.

He's a weird dude. Very weird dude.

He is, and yet very rational too, right? I mean, his whole thing— I may have said this before, but his whole thing is he says there are only 3 things. It used to be 2, but he updated it to 3 things in life that are true. One is the laws of physics, biology, chemistry, you know, nature. The other is God. We talk a lot about God these days. And the third is professional wrestling. And he watches 10 hours a week, as you know, professional wrestling, because he said— he's like, everyone agrees it's made up. So it's the only thing that everyone agrees— He thinks everything else is made up. He thinks— because we made up, you know, media, we made up show business, we made up the game, you know, a sport and what the rules are. And he just thinks it's the you know, it's the closest thing to truth out there.

Yeah, that's where he and I part ways.

I mean, I went to an AEW event with him. It was pretty cool. I have to say, it was the first time going, and, um, the athletes all adore him. Like, everyone loves him, and he's there front row.

Oh yeah, because he's a huge fan.

Huge fan. I think he's a lifetime member. And, and, um, and, uh, yeah, lifetime member. And, uh, and he, he, he really can extract like truisms about human nature from watching wrestling. Oh yeah, there we go. I'm the only one without my red glasses on at that point, apparently. Oh man.

The red glasses.

Well, what's wild is at one point the guys are like climbing the ladder. They're gonna like grab the thing and they're both coming up the sides of the ladder and then one stops and goes, hey, that's Rick Rubin. And the guy pushes out the ladder. And I look at Rick to see if he's sort of like getting some sort of dopamine hit off and he just goes, he's just listening. He's just there experiencing it, that he's not like pulled into it.

Yeah, I need to drug test him. I think he's on acid.

He claims he's never done any drugs.

That seems ridiculous.

Maybe had one sip of alcohol ages ago, which in the music business, that's a feat.

He must have one of those brains that's broken and just leaks psychedelic chemicals all the time.

I don't know, whatever plane of consciousness he's on.

I've always thought that about like schizophrenics. Like, I wonder if that's what's happening. I wonder if they have like some dump of psychedelic chemicals that's constantly like leaking into their brain, because we knew— we know the brain really does produce endogenous psychoactive compounds like DMT. I mean, isn't it possible that you could have a brain that leaks it?

So here's the weird thing about schizophrenia, and it speaks to the larger kind of ways that medicine works, for better or worse, is that for the longest time we thought that dopamine, too much dopamine, was schizophrenia. Why? Because drugs that reduce dopamine, we call them neuroleptic drugs, haloperidol, all these things, clozapine, would reduce auditory hallucinations. So the conclusion was—

Auditory?

Auditory.

So meaning voices in your head?

Yeah, and that's mostly what people deal with, especially paranoid schizophrenics. They're hearing voices, do this, do that, you're awful. I mean, if you think about it from that perspective, imagine all day and night, you're just dealing with voices in your head that feel like another person there telling you usually horrible things about yourself or the outside world all the time. And these drugs reduce those symptoms, We've known that for a long time. But because they reduce dopamine all over the brain and body, they create what's something called tardive dyskinesia, which is a suppression of the motor system. And so you'll see people who are doing this writhing like this. You'll see them on the street a lot. Sometimes that's psychosis. A lot of times that's psychotic people who are taking their antipsychotic medication.

Yeah.

But it gives you some empathy.

So they hear voices and tell the voices to shut the fuck up.

I think some have auditory hallucinations. But most have auditory hallucinations. Sorry, some have visual— excuse me. Some have visual hallucinations, but most have auditory hallucinations. And this sets in usually around mid-early 20s. And what's weird is years ago, I had a meal with the then-director of the National Institutes of Mental Health. His name was Bob Desimone. And he said, do you know why there's so little money for research on schizophrenia compared to, say, autism. I was like, why? And he's like, well, because the parents of autistic kids lobby hard. And usually the parents of autistic kids are not also autistic. But schizophrenia, even though it's not, doesn't run completely through families, oftentimes the parents of schizophrenics will have schizotypal conditions or—

What is that?

These are, it's like, they now call them schizoid, schizotypal. not typical thinking, right? It doesn't mean they're crazy, but—

They're off.

They're off. And so they're not bad people, but their place in society often doesn't position them to sit down with a senator and say, hey, listen, my kid's got autism and we need more research on this. And so a lot of where the money goes has to do with where obviously the lobby is. And if you think about genetic disorders in families, and we know there is a strong component, with schizophrenia. Like if you take 2 monozygotic identical twins, right? If one is paranoid schizophrenic, the probability that the other one will be paranoid schizophrenic isn't 100%, but it's pretty— it's much higher than by chance, much, much higher.

Have they ever done a study where one manages to avoid it with lifestyle choices or diet or exercise or something along those lines?

Definitely, although not in a way that you could attribute it to one thing. But for instance, for a long time, active military service, in somebody who has a genetic predisposition to psychosis was a kind of an additional risk factor, a meaningful risk factor.

Makes sense because of the stress.

The stress. Methamphetamine use. I mean—

Again, the stress.

The stress. You know, the stress of—

Also, meth heads just seem fucking out of their mind anyway. So it's—

I mean, there's this meth strength thing that I've never seen proven, but you can find these videos of, like, meth heads carrying refrigerators down the street. And they're not jacked, but they're just, like, carrying refrigerators down alleys. And, you know, people talk about, about meth strength. But yeah, I mean, methamphetamine is going to create probably the largest dump of dopamine in the brain than any other drug, at least in the short term. And it makes people think every idea is a good idea, and everything's about them and their goals. So it's the hyperdopaminergic state.

How much different is it than Adderall in terms of the actual effect?

Oh, I mean, it's—

Is it dose dependent?

Yeah, and we don't know what addicts are taking exactly. But yeah, I mean, Adderall is amphetamine. Vyvanse is amphetamine. I actually have a— forgive me for referencing the book too many times. It'd be great if people want to read it, but that's not my goal here is to constantly reference it. But there's a long section on all stimulants, caffeine, nicotine, Adderall, Vyvanse, modafinil, artemodafinil, every single drug that can make you more alert and focused, I talk about the pros and cons.

Mm.

Every single drug. I talk about humans have always found a way to use these things, to find things to enhance their focus. The problem with methamphetamine is that it's also neurotoxic. This is actually very relevant to the conversation about MDMA, methylenedioxymethamphetamine, which is a variant of methamphetamine. MDMA for the treatment of trauma is looking really promising. The early studies, including one that was published in Science, showed that non-human primates that are given MDMA experience neuron loss, that neurons die in the brain, and that message propagated. That paper was retracted. Because that laboratory accidentally injected methamphetamine, not MDMA. MDMA is—

How did they accidentally mix those 2?

I don't know what happened. They did publish a retraction.

Why are they having methamphetamine laying around the lab?

Oh, man, you should have come to my lab when I ran a lab until a few years ago. I still teach. I shut my lab, but we had— I mean, we had all sorts of goodies in there. I mean—

Did you ever worry about your students taking it?

No, because, you know, with— anytime you use a federally controlled drug, you have to account for every last microgram. leader of that. Someone's coming and checking all the time. We also worked with viruses. I mean, my lab at one point was using Sinbis viruses, modified rabies viruses, adenoviruses, and on and on. And so we had some labels on the wall, like, this is a lab that works with viruses, and we also had controlled substances, and that's just kind of how it goes.

There's only one way. You got to figure out what makes what happen in the human brain.

Yeah. I never had MDMA in my lab or amphetamine in my lab, but When I was an undergraduate, I worked in a lab where we injected rats with MDMA at a time, this was in the early '90s, when not much was known about it, but people were dying at raves, and that lab worked on thermal regulation. So we were interested in why they were dying from maybe MDMA. It turns out it was the hyperthermia from raves and not drinking enough fluids, and people would take amphetamines, and people were dying. That pretty much got worked out over time. People realized you need to stay hydrated. Methamphetamine and MDMA are very different. MDMA, there is no evidence that it's neurotoxic.

You'd always hear those stories about people who took MDMA that had holes in their brain.

Yeah, probably wasn't MDMA. Probably was more methamphetamine, maybe mixed with a little bit of MDMA. This is why it would be so great if this was finally legal and produced in ways that were reliable and administered in safe ways and all that. But, you know, that trial, that passage through the FDA failed for 2 reasons. It might go through the next round, but it failed for 2 reasons. I've been very close to this whole situation. One is that the powers that be in the previous administration felt that there wasn't a good control condition, like there wasn't a good placebo. Okay, fair enough, although a lot of drugs deal with that issue. The other was there was one, maybe 2 sexual improprieties of the therapists. There was a couple therapist that did some things they shouldn't have done while somebody was under the influence of the drug, and one incident like that can sink an entire initiative. So that was bad, obviously. Obviously. And so if it's going to pass in the next few years, there are going to have to be some things in place to make sure that the way it's administered is safe, because the person under the influence of MDMA is very vulnerable to all sorts of things.

It's not just about their heart health, et cetera. That can be dealt with before, it can be dealt with after. But the real issue is, is the therapist operating in their best interest?

Hmm.

And because the psychedelic community has always existed And I'm a big fan of psychedelics for the treatment of depression, trauma, et cetera. But because that community has always kind of existed on the edge of other techniques, it's sort of like, well, is a foot massage, if the person's like saying they have all this trauma in their feet and the therapist rubs their feet, like that's not usual for therapy, right? That's pretty like within the gray zone of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy done kind of rogue in the world of psychedelic therapists.

Right.

So there's really no controls on what goes with the drugs. We've agreed on the basis clinical trials of what the dosages might be, healthy dosages, how frequent, like 2 sessions with a booster, 80 milligrams in, and then a booster of, say, 50 milligrams halfway in, or by body weight, spaced 3 weeks apart for psilocybin, maybe just once for— and on and on. All that's been looked at in various ways in these trials.

And is it always in conjunction with psychotherapy?

It should be. The data really show that people need therapy going in, they need therapy during, and they need therapy coming out for the best results. But those results are remarkable. I mean, 60%, 70%, significant reduction in symptoms, in some cases, remission. But I have friends in the so-called psychedelic community, but I also have friends in the standard science community. And for these things to really come together, there's going to have to be some standardization of safety, but also just practice. What are you going to talk about if someone's like, I'm feeling I'm at the precipice of a huge amount of pain. Do you encourage them to go into that pain and purge it? Or do you tell them, hey, listen, maybe back away from that? All this stuff is done by feel in the psychedelic community. There's no standardization of it. But then again, talk therapy is the same way. There's no standardization of the narratives that you're supposed to have with your client.

Right. There's a lot of freedom to sort of improvise.

Yeah. I've been reading a lot about the history, counterculture history and stuff. I joined the board of Esalen, which is this incredible place on the coast of California. And the guy who started it is in his late 90s and has a center for theory and research. It's not just about yoga classes and it has that, but there's a serious focus on human potential there. And in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, and even in the '90s, all these somatic therapies came along. You know, and the breathing therapies, and you had psychedelic therapies too. But, you know, how much of these things to merge is a question. Like, maybe some somatic therapy during MDMA could be really helpful for somebody that feels really out of body or that had a bodily trauma or was raped or whatever, or was abused as a kid. But then we have to ask ourselves, are we going to let therapists touch people while they're under the influence of these really powerful empathogens?

Why is the— Touching people, is that normalized in the psychedelic community when they do this?

Not necessarily.

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No, not necessarily. It's just that right now, psychedelic-assisted therapy sits in that constellation of like somatic therapies, talk therapies, Breathing therapies, emotive therapies, like none of this is formalized. I mean, so much of what I've been interested in and why I wrote the book, aside from the compulsion to just get things out there, is my hope is that as more techniques come along, different breathwork practices, different supplements, different drugs, different peptides, that people will start to understand some of the kind of principles of how things work to decide what's worthwhile or not. So for instance, For trauma, we know that it's basically 4 steps. Doesn't matter if you use Getting Through Trauma, doesn't matter if it's through therapy that includes psychedelics or not. First of all, people have to have a willingness to address it, right? Second, they need to experience the painful feeling in a safe environment. There's no just kind of avoiding that. So the feel your feelings thing is true, and we often just stop there. We hear that and that's it. But then there's also having the explicit memory of what happened, but in a state of calm, not feeling the feelings, 'cause you're trying to uncouple the memory from the emotions, right?

There's no losing the memory. You're trying to uncouple the emotions from the memory. And then the 4th piece, which is something I touch on with respect to grief and trauma therapy more generally, is there's this beautiful thing that guests on your podcast have talked about, you've probably experienced this, that at some point, the shitty thing that happened to you, the awful thing, can be transmuted into some effort to create goodness for yourself or for the world. Sometimes it's public education. Sometimes people, you know, the loss of a child, for instance, like, oh my God, how awful that, you know, but people will, who move through this process, can get to the place where they'll like plant a tree or teach to, or talk to other parents who are in bereavement. And so they've transmuted their loss into goodness. Right? So it's 4 steps. So if we just say, take your loss and go do good for the world, that's not going to work. If we say, take your loss and just feel the pain of it, people get caught in that spiral. And I think this is, unfortunately, when the millennials were in their adolescence and teen years and 20s, there was this overemphasis on feeling your feelings.

But no one ever talked about the next phase, which is where you actually stop feeling so shitty about the shitty thing that happened. And so my goal is really to try and organize these different practices and come up with structures so that You could imagine MDMA being very useful for that first or second step, feeling your feelings in a safe way, in the right environment.

What are the studies that MAPS has done with MDMA with soldiers and PTSD? Because that's been probably one of the most prominent things.

Yeah. Well, Rick Doblin obviously is more qualified to get into the specifics, but I know of at least 3 clinical trials looking at MDMA at dosages that are by body weight, but that are not outrageously high dosages, that have people move through their PTSD within a matter of 4 to 6 weeks total. So with 2 sessions of MDMA spaced apart about a month or so, talk therapy the whole way through. And I know of at least one clinical trial with veterans. Oftentimes, these studies will include veterans, but it's not all veterans, which actually is kind of good. You want to be able to compare their kind of trauma to other people's trauma. But I have to say, and I know you've covered this extensively, The work on ibogaine has, in my mind, has completely revised the way that we think about psychedelic therapy, because it's kind of ironic that the first psychedelic that will likely be legal for the treatment of PTSD is going to be the most intense one. It'd be like if I'm like, hey, I want to learn a martial art, and you're like, yeah, get into the octagon and get your ass kicked, and that's going to turn you into a fighter.

I mean, that's the way people describe Ibogaine is kind of like that. It is no joke. As you point out, it is not recreational. And then when they follow with DMT, I mean, you know, it seems that the outcomes are very, very good for a lot of people. I will say, and they're going to sweat me for this a little bit, there have been a few deaths, and it seems that that may correlate with fentanyl use prior. That's really— this needs to be talked about if we're going to get this legal.

How many deaths?

I'm aware of 2.

And is this in those clinics or is this—

Yes, and they have to report them.

And is it heart failure? Because I know that there's heart issues.

Heart and breathing, so they're linked, obviously. Heart and breathing linked. And people are heart rate monitored. I know of many people, and they're many of your friends, and they've talked openly about this stuff. So DJ Shipley and the Capone, Marcus Capone and others, and many, many others who feel that they've benefited tremendously from these therapies. And there's a litany of other names there too that have benefited tremendously. I want to be clear. There are also a few people who felt they didn't have a good experience. I know Sean Ray right now is out there talking about his negative experience.

Sean Ryan.

Excuse me. Sean Ray's like a bodybuilder, right? Sean Ryan, excuse me.

I think Sean Ryan, I think he's talking about DMT.

And they follow with DMT at some of those clinics, not all.

But he said he had gone through exorcisms. Isn't that what he's saying now?

I mean, I think if you think about my experience of psychedelics, I've not done ibogaine, is that there is all sorts of understanding about the brain that comes about during those journeys that leads you to understand that we have good and evil in all of us. And I could understand how it could be downright terrifying for some people to realize that We have a hypothalamus that just wants to satisfy drives, but we also have a forebrain that can suppress those drives. I mean, that is the nature of being human, right?

Do you think that's what these people are thinking of when they're thinking of demons? They're thinking of like drives that are a part of the human system?

So, okay, I have a lot of thoughts about this. So, I'm not going to spin off into a neuroscience lecture, but we think about brain function and free will and all that kind of stuff from top-down and bottom-up perspective. Bottom-up is you have a drive, you want to satisfy it, you're going to do it. Top-down are regions of the brain that inhibit those impulse circuits. And so much of life is about the dynamic tension between those 2.

Okay.

I mean, the 7 deadly sins, right, are all the hypothalamic structures, like rage, envy, lust, et cetera. But the forebrain can be built up. You can learn things. Kids learn to suppress their impulses. Puppies learn to suppress their impulses to get a reward or just to avoid punishment. And that's a lot of what being human is about, right? There's an amazing case actually right here in Austin where— I don't know if you're familiar with this— there was a kid who woke up one morning, wrote in his diary. He's an ex-Marine. This was many years ago. And then killed his wife and his mother With a knife. Do you know about this?

No.

Okay. Then he went to the University of Texas Austin, took a rifle, went up into the tower, and shot 14 people.

Oh, that story.

I think a 15th died later. Yeah. So, but here's where it gets interesting, right? I mean, it's horrible, right? One woman was pregnant, so they counted that. I think it was a total of like 18 or 19 deaths. He was shot by one of the security guards. They go and they read his diary. And he literally says, I don't know why I want to do this, but please take the money from my life insurance and donate it to the study of mental health. Please pay off my debts. Please understand what's happening to me. And they did an autopsy, and the guy had a tumor in a brain region, which included— brain regions, which included amygdala, hypothalamus, and thalamus, collectively Uh, what we would call low-level brain structures involved with, you know, perception and impulse. The conclusion of all that is not, oh, he had a brain tumor that made him do it. The conclusion that most neuroscientists draw is that most people don't ever conceive of doing those things, but a lot of people go to Niagara Falls and look and go, what's keeping me from jumping? What's keeping you from jumping is your forebrain.

What people think, oh, you know, what keeps people from shoplifting? Everyone would like to think that they're incredibly moral. Like, I don't shoplift. I'm not a shoplifter, right? But for some people, they want to do the thing and they stop themselves from doing it, or drinking, or cheating, or whatever it is, right? Those top-down influences on our impulses and our bottom-up impulses are constantly in dynamic tension. And in psychedelics, I mean, lots of things are happening. You're getting a lot more interconnectivity of the brain that's always there being revealed. It's very rare. It happens, but it's very rare to hear about people doing terrible things to other people on psychedelics. It happens, but it's not common. So I'm not saying you reveal evil in there, but as you know, in a high-dose psilocybin journey, you're going into the recesses of your mind and your unconscious mind is showing you what's there. It's showing you that there are terrible forces out in the world. There are humans. You learn all sorts of stuff about humans, as you know, right?

Yeah.

in these journeys. You also learn about incredible beauty and potential for making positive change. So the psychedelics are kind of a— they're a mysterious free-for-all in there.

They're probably also interacting with your very specific memories. And if you're dealing with a guy like Sean Ryan, who did a lot of combat duty—

Seen a lot of horrible things. Horrible things. My good friend Eddie Penny, he was also a Tier 1 operator.

That's a great name.

Yeah, great name. Great name, great guy. You guys would enjoy a conversation. He's another Tier 1 operator from that community. I'm not revealing anything he hasn't already, but he's recovered from substance abuse issues and has been sober a long time. He's not a fan of psychedelics. He got me reading the Bible. We could talk about this. Actually, church, and I know you've been going to church, this has been an interesting thing because a lot of what's in the Bible is about the dynamic tension between what neuroscientists would call top-down and bottom-up influences.

Mm-hmm.

It acknowledges, like, we have this stuff in us that you're not supposed to pretend it doesn't. You have to acknowledge your humanness, but also your human capacity to control these impulses. And I mean, that's a lot of what's in the Bible. It's not everything, but it's stories about that in many, many ways. Hence, the 7 deadly sins and the virtues and so on. But, you know, Eddie has been a pretty strong voice for caution in the veterans and other communities about the use of psychedelics, because there's this theory, right, within some sectors of religion and Christianity in particular, that in psychedelic journeys, that evil entities, if you will, might have access to us or something like that. There's a neuroscientist view of that too, which is that in those states, you're revealing aspects of self that normally you can suppress, but now you're having to see that aspect of you or other people. Like, realizing that people have evil and good in them is a— I think we can all say, yeah, I get it, but we usually say they're evil, they're good, they're evil, they're good. It's very hard for us to address the possibility that we, any of us— I like to think I could never have been that kid that went up on the tower, but if I had a tumor in my brain, Would I have done it?

I don't know. I mean, this recent case of this woman killing her children was about this, right? It was about this very issue. Like, oh, is her physiology to blame? And the law has a very simple rule on most of these cases. I've looked at this, and the law basically says, it doesn't matter if you have a brain tumor. It doesn't matter if you're high on meth. It doesn't matter if you're full of rage, because rage is just a different set of neurochemicals. You are responsible for your behavior. And I think we need those thick black lines, as I like to think of them. Otherwise, you can't function as a society. It's not saying that people aren't stricken with biological issues, but we're saying even if stricken, you need to be held responsible.

One of the big things that happens during psychedelic trips that disturb a lot of people is when they try to fight the trip. and then they have a really bad trip. And one of the things that someone will tell you, for lack of a better term, who is a shaman— I hate that term because it's, uh, I think it's probably very real some parts of the world, and it's also probably a very much a bullshit thing in America.

It's like expert in America now.

Well, there's some real experts in America. There's probably more real experts than there are real shamans. You know, the shaman thing is very weird. A lot of it's like very lost people that find identity in altered states of consciousness. And I think, just my personal opinion, that experiencing these altered states of consciousness should enhance your experience as a human, should not replace it. I think there's a lot of people who are replacing altered states of consciousness far too often, and they live in that world more than they live in the world of just being conscious and sober. And I think there's many steps that you have to take in order to be— to have a good trip. Some people have a really hard time letting go, relaxing, and just going with it. They fight it. I've seen it. I've seen people fight it. People that, for whatever reason, they have whatever psychological issues or they have control issues, and they just cannot deal with the fact that this— experiences so beyond their comprehension and so overwhelming that they try to battle it. They try to control it. The experiences, the things that they see, the states that they enter into, they don't feel at all in control and they freak out.

And when you try to control it— I haven't had one of those, but from the people that I know that have, it's like they say that they were wrestling with it. Like they were, and you cannot win.

Mm-hmm.

And it just overwhelms you, and then your anxiety kicks in. What I have experienced in, in trips is that it's highlighted that if you think in a positive way, it'll show you more beautiful images, and that you can just relax. And that especially in the DMT realm, they are trying to tell you to relax. They're trying to tell you to just go with it. And if you don't fight it, you can have a wonderful experience. But I haven't been to war. I haven't been raped. I haven't been physically assaulted and beaten as a child. There's a lot of things that didn't happen to me that I don't have to deal with. And someone, especially I think guys who've been to war, when you've seen so much horrible shit and it just becomes a part of your everyday existence, these horrible memories, these horrible visions that you have, and horrible things you've probably had to And then something comes along like DMT or like psilocybin or something just overwhelms the normal state of consciousness. If you're trying to fight that, I would imagine that would feel like you're battling demons.

Yeah. Yeah. And I haven't had to deal with any of those things either. So I want to acknowledge that. I had a very good experience of therapeutic combined MDMA and psilocybin. work, therapeutic work. Incredible. And I can distill it to one simple takeaway, which was thinking about bad things that had happened that I wish hadn't happened. Like, I felt like I had kind of worked through that stuff in life by running, lifting weights, some therapy, like, just lifetime, you know, and worked through it. But there was a session where I was feeling the resistance to, like, feel something, and I knew what was knocking, and it was thinking about things that didn't happen. that I wished had happened for me. Not things that I wish I got, but just basic experiences that I wish I had had. And it was incredibly sad in the moment, but then it opened after some period of time.

Like what kind of experiences?

Listen, I had a better childhood than many, much better than many, and harder than others for— there were some things about my family structure that felt— there were times when I really, really, really needed a certain kind of support and structure, and it was gone. And so I went out into the world and found it in skateboarding, eventually in science. And I talk about— the introduction of the book, actually, I talk about why I eventually went into public health education. And it was seeing about a third of my friends from growing up dead or in jail. And that's weird for a guy that didn't grow up in the inner city, and I wasn't in the military. These are friends of mine that succumbed to drugs or suicide or mental health issues. Now, mind you, the other 2/3 did great, and some of them started companies like DC, and these weren't close friends of mine, but that community of people, of all these feral kids— in the '90s, the people who skateboarded were the ones who didn't have parents that went to things, right? And listen, I have a good relationship with my dad now. I've actually had him on the podcast, and that was really bonding for us.

We're great now, but there was a time when I was an adolescent and teen when I really needed structure, and I really needed—

Structure.

certain things that just were not happening. And my home life was depressing. It was really empty. It was really depressing. And so went out into the world and did way too many things way too young, saw a lot and got involved in a lot of sex violence and stuff that I shouldn't have at that time. And luckily not drugs. That wasn't my thing. So I, I always knew those narratives and I've always had a, like, a bittersweet memory of them. Like, they also served me well. They motivated me to forage for ways to be healthy and things like that. But then in science, it was wild because in science, your mentors play a tremendous role in your progress and your sense of safety. Science is a weird thing. It's different now, but when I was coming up, you would get very close to your graduate advisor. I was very close to my undergraduate advisor. He was like a father figure to me. My graduate advisor was truly like a mother to me. I knew her when she was pregnant. I knew her husband. Her daughter's a neuroscientist, like incredibly close to her. She had a a maternal way about her and a toughness that was unbelievable, and she was a serious scientist.

And then my postdoc advisor similarly was very supportive. My undergraduate advisor, who I got very close with, killed himself in a very dramatic way about 2 weeks after I had spoken to him. Shot himself in the bathtub. And this was a guy who understood mental illness. I talk about him in the book. My graduate advisor died at 50 of cancer. She had the BRCA mutation, which is predisposing. to cancer. And that one devastated me. And then my postdoc advisor died of pancreatic cancer a year into my faculty appointment, and he had a heart attack sitting across from me, was the first indication he had pancreatic cancer. And so the joke in my field is you don't want me working for you because it's like, fuck. But then what's wild is that I made it through science, I get tenure at Stanford, this kind of shit is happening in my science world, then a colleague of mine gets addicted to OxyContin after a back injury, And he's dead, and no one talks about it. Like, everyone's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He was a member of the National Academy. He's a famous scientist down at the Salk Institute.

Everyone's just like, oh, yeah, yeah, just kind of carries on with their work. And then— this is going to get depressing for a moment before it gets light. End of 2017, 3 friends of mine from childhood— there's a graffiti artist, his name is— he went by Orphan, O-R-F-N, this brilliant artist. He did so much cool shit. His name was Aaron Curry. Dies of stomach cancer. My good friend John Eichelberry from childhood and my good friend Johnny Fair, fentanyl suicide. Boom, people are just going down like crazy. And I'm like, what the fuck is going on here? And then I started to realize, this is one of the reasons I started the podcast, is one of the reasons I started going on podcasts, is like, my science colleagues, they don't know how to manage their stress. They understand the science of stress, but they look like shit. Their kids are a mess. They have all these anxiety disorders. My physician friends, I can count on one hand the number of them that are healthy of mind and body who have healthy kids. And then I realized, oh, you know, the skateboarding community, the science health community, I'm at Stanford University School of Medicine, the apex, or among the top universities in the world of health.

And I'm like, my colleagues are sick and dying and stressed. And I realized, I was like, shit, we don't know how to regulate stress. So I started studying stress and stress mitigation, this kind of thing. And then I don't want to make this even darker, but I think it's worth acknowledging for a couple of reasons. And by the way, I want to be really clear. I think what Veterans Solutions has done with the ibogaine initiative, I think what Rick Perry and what Brian are doing with the ibogaine thing, I think it's awesome. If I highlight that there were some deaths, I want to be really clear, like, those people might have died of fentanyl anyway. We don't know. I mean, there's, you know, we need to—

Did both connect? Both of the deaths are connected to fentanyl use?

my understanding is they had used fentanyl prior to going to use ibogaine. So maybe in this discussion, a few people will be sensitized to like, that's a potential issue.

So meaning like they were probably addicted to fentanyl, they were trying to get off of it, and they tried to do it while they had fentanyl in their system.

Perhaps.

Yeah.

And for all we know, they might've snuck fentanyl. We don't like to think that they might've, but who knows how closely they did it, you know?

If they're really hooked.

Yeah. And listen, you and I know, I mean, it's more from your world of martial arts and stuff, but we know people who've like, We hear they go down to Mexico, they're going to do this treatment, they're going to come back, they're better, and like a week later, they don't sound so much better. I pray for these people. I want the best. I'm not saying this is bad, but I'm saying these are powerful medications, and I think they are net positive. But I'll also say, many years transpired between those friends dying, the Johnny— Sometimes people call me on bullshit, so Aaron Curry, John Eichelberry, Johnny Ferrer, best fucking kids I knew. Awesome graffiti artists. One of them was in the MoMA. Orphan went into the MoMA for his graffiti. This is a badass graffiti artist. Stomach cancer got him. Like, shit can happen. My advisors didn't do anything wrong. They just— one clearly had a mental issue, or otherwise he wouldn't have taken his life. The other 2 had cancer. So, but then this last year, I'm like going about my life and I'm thinking, okay, You know, things are pretty good, and I get a call, and I hear that my good friend, Nolan Williams, triple board-certified MD, who took the transcranial magnetic stimulation therapies and accelerated them so that people could get relief from depression much faster— he took what was, you know, many weeks long or months long thing and compressed it, saved lives— Who's also doing the studies of ibogaine, Took his own life.

I mean, this one's still sinking in for me. There's no reason to believe it had anything to do with ibogaine whatsoever. He took his own life. He's a colleague physician friend of mine at Stanford, and I know his wife, who's also a physician. I know his kids. He's been on my podcast. He looked like the young Jim Morrison, handsome. He was a martial arts guy, did taekwondo, like—

Fuck.

Fuck is right. Fuck is right. So what does it tell us? I try not to intellectualize these things too much, but what does it tell us? It tells us that knowledge is not sufficient to protect us. I feel like the data are in. Bold conclusion, banner across the sky, knowledge alone does not protect us. You can understand everything about the biology of these diseases. You can know, I'm messed up. I have something, something's— And you can understand, oh, that's serotonin, or whatever. People will still do these things. And it's rare, fortunately, but it tells us that the— I believe it tells us something fundamental about humans, which is that there's always this dynamic tension between our underlying impulses and this top-down control. And suicide is a weird one, because it's like the whole thing gets twisted up so that we're no longer acting in an adaptive way, right? Obviously, taking one's life is not adaptive. But it's a rage or a depression or whatever. And the conclusion that I draw from it is, what can we do to put ourselves in the best position to be able to hold our impulses in their healthy place?

I don't want to make more of what I did in the book or what I'm trying to do in the podcast or public education, but let's take the ice bath, for example. I've taken a lot of shit for the ice bath. thing. You have too. We both know they don't like the cold. That's why they're talking about this. But we know for certain, and I go through the data finally, putting yourself into a high adrenaline state where your body and brain are freaking out and doing that deliberately gets you better at dealing with high stress states, which in my mind is only a good thing. This should be basic training for children, not young children, right? Why? Does it increase metabolism? Marginally. Does it increase cortisol? No, that's a bunch of horseshit, and we can talk about that. If anything, it reduces cortisol. It increases your ability to buffer stress. Is the ice bath a cure to mental health issues, addiction, and relapse, and all of that? No, of course not. But is it— does it teach you to engage in top-down control? Yes. Is it the ice bath per se? No. The ice bath is just one very efficient, low-cost way to get adrenaline to go boom through the roof.

You could do it through a workout. You could do it through hot sauna that feels uncomfortably hot, provided you don't die of hypothermia. You can do it through any number of different things. The point is that the principle of learning to capture your mind and think strategically, lower your state of arousal when you're in a stressful circumstance, is a life skill that is invaluable. And getting great sleep, we could go on and on about all the benefits of that. There's probably 100 benefits of that and probably 1,000 things that go wrong when you don't get enough sleep. sleep chronically. A couple nights, no problem. But when you're well-rested, you are far less likely to harm yourself or others, like, because your forebrain is more active and can suppress these impulses. And so my, you know, my kind of like— I don't like the word mission, but my goal is that we'll kind of move beyond the notion of like hacks, or that it's this tool or that tool, and just really understand like what we're trying to do when we're teaching ourselves to be better humans. And I do think there is a generation of kids that grew up hearing that their feelings are valid.

Great, we didn't hear that growing up. I just assumed, like, if you drank and you couldn't stop drinking, it was a lack of willpower. Now we know there's a brain circuit, but if we say, oh, there's a brain circuit, therefore I'm not going to quit because it's a brain circuit, well, you're still, you're still an addict, right?

Right.

So the great sleep, social connection, sunlight in the morning, like, these things are really designed to get us to have better control Over our focus, over our impulse control. And it almost becomes so simple at that point. And we can say, well, what was going on with Nolan in the weeks before? Well, I have smatterings of what might have been going on. Running 2 giant projects in his lab, 2 companies, managing a family, managing a life. I'm not going to claim he was a perfect human being, but it's just overwhelm.

His forebrain I can—

turned on him.

Yeah, overwhelm is real. Yeah, you can only— you can only redline your system for so much.

I mean, you know, people have done this. I mean, you know, people— and I've become—

we're doing it.

I've been friends with— I've become friends with David Choe.

I love that dude.

Fucking love him. Best fucking guy. Because he's so heartfelt now, having been through the meat grinder of media and life and his own tendency to self-harm.

Yeah.

And he's in this just beautiful place now where he's just like literally painting everything in his environment. He's so happy with his family and his kids. Fucking awesome. And like—

He's a very smart guy.

So smart.

He figured out how to keep it together.

He did. And, and, you know, you guys have common friends in, you know, people that have taken their lives and stuff. When he talks about it, it's like, man, you can just tell he's like there's this understanding that comes from hard-driving people that like, okay, I've, I've not wanted to ever take my life, but like, you can— I can relate to Nolan.

You just want out. You can't take it anymore and you want out.

I think we've all been in that moment where we were like, fuck, at something. We were able to pull ourselves back, and it's a chute. I think some people just go down that chute. And you know, David and I were talking about this because I know you guys have common friends, and some have succumbed to things and some who really like, risen above all that. And he's like, look, man, it's once you've tasted that edge of being pulled back and forth from your impulses and, like, and you learn to just force yourself to both do hard things, as you always say, but also force yourself to, like, really embrace the goodness in the world and the love that's there. Like, let's not forget the lighter side.

Yes.

Like, the beauty of, like, all these amazing things in life. There's this kind of, like, promised land inside of us. I don't mean to sound religious here, but like, there's this place in us where like, yeah, all that's true. All those people, they all died. They— some took their own life, and then that shit happened. But there's— if I just keep doing really hard things, I'm gonna stay in control of my impulses. As long as I also touch the goodness that's there every day, like the sun's coming up, my kids are healthy, I'm here. You know, I turned 50 last year, and then I had to like, they asked me to give like a little toast or something. It was horrible. Like, I hate doing that kind of thing. I'll podcast all day, but not that. And I just realized, I was like, my hero, Joe Strummer, one of my heroes from The Clash, right? Dead at 50. So I at least got further than him.

50.

It's so young. And then I was like, so I'm in this like promised land now. Like, Yes, and that joy of having made it over some bump or something and seeing goodness and having a great relationship now with my parents, it's taken a lot of work, but we're really in a good place, appreciating all the gifts they gave me, seeing people leave, and I have such love for Nolan and for all those people I mentioned. I just love them, and understanding that the grief is just love is, man, I'll tell you, and I probably couldn't have gotten here without some of that psychedelic work because it really— took my face and stuck, you know, just stuck it in the vomit of all this. But then you came out, you know, and—

Yeah.

You go, whoa, like there's so much goodness. So I don't know, I mean, if the psychedelics can help people, if talk therapy can help people, great. But I think on a day-to-day basis, it's like, do shit that sucks so that you can stay in control of staying in control, and also make sure you touch into the beauty of really good things.

Well, I find that when you do the things that suck, you do the hard workouts and the sauna and the cold plunge, life just seems more beautiful. It really does, because you're not overwhelmed with this just, just existential dread that just hangs over you, just being a physical vulnerable human being walking through this unknown uncertain life, and there's a bunch of external chaos like world wars and fucking financial collapses, and there's so much shit going on. everybody's brain do something that just exhausts that, at least for a little while, and lets you take in what a fucking beautiful day. Look at those squirrels just having a good time.

Totally.

Running around on the tree, listen to the birds, just feel the sun on your face. I don't appreciate that if I don't do things. This is my own personal thing. I don't know. I mean, I know everybody's different. Everybody's different biologically, psychologically. For me, I know what my formula is. My formula is if I don't do those things, I feel like shit, period. So I do the things, and I've experimented. I've taken days off, 3 days, 4 days off, and then at the 4th day I'm like, Jesus Christ, who are you? Get to the fucking gym, go hit the bag.

And the world seems worse, not better.

Way worse, way worse. And I think there's a lot of people out there that are really very angry. Like, you see a lot of people on social media, I think they're living in that state, but not a state of 4 days, a state of 40 years of nothing. Doing nothing and just letting your body just go, you know. You have dogs, right?

Yeah.

You know, it's like when your dog doesn't get exercise.

Yeah, he's fucking nuts.

Dogs need fucking exercise.

My new one has— he's part bulldog but part pit too, and I'm keeping his nuts on this time because my last dog, you know, as you know, I was like injecting with TRT late in life and he felt so much better. This time I'm keeping Strummer's— I'm keeping Strummer's nuts on. This dog has so much fucking energy.

Yeah, you gotta throw the ball.

You gotta throw the ball. But this dude I have him running on the fucking treadmill in the morning.

Oh wow.

Oh yeah, I take him for walks. I trained him from the time he was 9 weeks to run on the treadmill.

Does he like it?

Fucking loves it. Dude, he'll haul ass at like— right now he's up to 5 on a 2 incline, and he's just like at the back of that thing. He falls off, he jumps right back on. People are like, don't hurt his joints. I'm like, listen, I've raised bulldog breeds before. I'm not gonna blow out his joints, okay? He is So stoked, he will just run and run and run. And then I'll— I tell him, wait, and I'll put the liver treat there. And then when he gets that thing, his ears flop, he's going like— and you can tell when he's done, it's what you're describing. He's just like peaceful.

He's chill.

So peaceful.

Oh, when I throw the ball for my dog and then we come in and sit down, he just lays on his back and I rub his belly. He's just so happy.

This is Marshall.

Yeah.

You got another one, right? Cavalier King Charles?

Yeah.

They're great.

He's amazing, but oh my God.

Bulldogs are great dogs.

He's a little love machine. All he wants to do is kiss you. just kisses you constantly.

They're— the Cavalier King Charles have a little bit of a, almost like a bulldog thing to them, like the calm. This last year I went to meet the breeds out in New York. You can go and meet all the different breeds. You see like the otter dogs, and you learn 3 things when you go meet these like hundreds of different purebreds. First of all, people fucking look like their dogs. It's crazy. I don't know which direction it goes. Like, you look at the guy who's got like the otter hound, or these big— and he's got a big beard, he looks just like Well, Jamie and Carl are a fucking contradiction to that. That's true, that's true, that's true, that's true. The other thing you learn is that the purebreds, in addition to being shaped a certain way, like, they have a certain demeanor. Like, it's— there's variation, but there's a demeanor, you know? And the bulldogs are kind of goofy, you know? And the sighthounds are like locked in and looking all the time. And, and I swear some dogs are smarter than others. They're like counting how many people are in the environment. They're doing math, but basically.

Whereas strummers, just like, he's either lying upside down—

The shepherd dogs.

Yeah, they're doing math. They're counting all the time, accounting for everything. And then I leave there and I go, I turn to my girlfriend and we were like, which breed are we getting? And I go, we're getting a bulldog mutt. Like, we're going right back to the one I already had. And she's like, all right, like, you know, she's pretty easygoing about that. And I'm like, you have not experienced bulldog love because they're just, they're hedonists. They just want love, comfort, They want to chase the ball. They have this much forebrain. And this is why I think dogs are the almost perfect species, because their impulses are never to be bad. Like, they don't have this, like, rage, anger thing unless people train them to do that. They don't. I think the dog is, like, just quote-unquote dumb enough and just smart enough to have, like, the perfect life. Like, they're—

It depends on the breed.

I mean, the Malinois are mouthy.

The Malinois are Belgian Malinois are—

Malinois, excuse me—

meat missiles. Yeah, those little fuckers. When they— they can be great dogs. I know people that have them, but you have to be on them 2 hours a day. Yeah, they need tasks. It's basically like you live with a super athlete. Yeah, you know, you live with a, you know, a prime Jose Aldo, like an MMA fighter, world champion. Like, they could fucking leap over buildings. Like, you can't just have them lay in the yard. Yeah, they'll go crazy.

They don't potato.

No, they need things to do, man. They need tasks. Whereas Marshall, he's just so happy just chilling with you. He likes to cuddle and watch TV. That's what he likes to do. He likes to climb up on the couch and he puts his head right here and we watch TV together and I just pet him. If I don't pet him, he looks at me, then I gotta start petting him again. Oh man. This episode is brought to you by Visible. As fall hits, we enter another season of change. Time to shift gears, drop the dead weight, and upgrade the wardrobe. for the drop in temperature. But one thing that doesn't need to change— your phone. The smartest upgrade this season isn't a new phone. It's a better wireless plan. Switch to Visible, the ultimate wireless hack. You get unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just $25 a month. That means keeping the phone you already have, ditching your overpriced phone bill, and pocketing some savings for yourself. All the perks of big wireless for half the cost. Switch today at visible.com. The Visible plan starts at just $25 a month, or get the premium Visible Plus Pro plan and save $10 on your first month with promo code ROGAN.

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You know what saves lives and has cured a lot of PTSD? Our service dogs.

Oh, for sure.

Like, people, we don't talk about this enough because they're not, you know, it's not as like quote-unquote exciting as psychedelics. But man, those service dogs like have kept people alive.

They're pure love.

Pure love.

Pure love.

Pure love.

They love you, you love them, you have fun together. They're goofy. So they do things that are silly and you laugh and they know you're laughing.

So good.

It's like dogs are amazing. And people that don't have love in their life, they're suffering. Like loneliness is worse than smoking multiple packs of cigarettes a day. Yeah, just for overall health and life expectancy.

You know, Andy Stumpf came on the podcast.

I love Andy.

Yeah, great guy, great guy. And he recommended this documentary to me, The Dark Wizard, which is about this guy Dean Potter, who was a free solo climber.

Yeah, I watched it.

And then the wingsuit guy. And that's a beautiful example of dogs helping someone at one point, although he took that dog doing all sorts of crazy shit. That dog, again, was very devoted.

Dog did not know any better.

Did not know wingsuit.

That was life. He had no other dogs to talk to.

that guy's dog. Like, you just— yeah, you just assume it's normal. But the other piece there, like, talk about dopamine and drive and, you know, life and death. That— I feel like that movie was such a, like, a key insight into the relationship between drive when it's in, you know, love and love of craft, love of people, and then drive when it's competitive in an unhealthy way.

Mm-hmm.

Like how the Buddhists talk about, like, ego and And, and that, you know, ego is great because it can drive us in certain, you know, pursuits that can build things for us, family, society. But then how it can, you know, when people get competitive about the wrong things, like in that movie when he was doing things that he didn't really want to do, it almost killed him. But then when he was doing things that could almost kill him, but he really wanted to do it, but it was almost like spiritual, like doing that tightrope walk with the full moon in the background.

Mm-hmm.

He is still dangerous, but there was like this peace in him. And I think about this all the time because Rick— Reuben talks about this, you've talked about this. When we're doing something out of like love of craft, even if we're fucking pushing so hard— Cho talks about this— like, it's like, it's not easy, but there's this kind of— I don't know what the word is for it— smoothness to the thing.

Yeah.

But then when it's competitive for the wrong reasons, Well, what are the wrong reasons? Well, for instance, Potter was a great climber and then started getting into other things. But when he had Alex Honnold coming up on his heels, and Honnold was better than him, right? And he started getting competitive about this kid who was gonna take away his legacy. He started making stupid mistakes. He started getting hurt. He started getting angry. His mental health got much worse. You know, I mean, Honnold's the last guy I would want coming up for my slot, right? 'Cause he's so mechanical and methodical. You also, in that movie, I think Alex is fantastic. You also saw a different side of Alex when he was younger that doesn't seem to be there right now, at least not visibly, which was he was hypercompetitive with the guys that he had grown up on.

Mm-hmm.

And was like— he was like, I want that rock. I want that slot. And he says, he was a better climber, and so he wanted it before Potter. And so, you can see when Potter's kind of like the dying lion in that field and trying to hold on, he starts doing stupid shit like, like these tightrope walks in China that almost kill him, and he's breaking down in tears. There's no elation. At the beginning, he's doing things and it's like, yes, yes! Then he's just doing things and he's like, just happy he didn't die. 2 very different ways of looking at the same pursuits. And so I think that movie is a far more interesting insight into human drive more generally than it is about this clearly manic rock climber.

The drive is an interesting thing because Drive in its purest form actually replaces discipline. Like, I was acutely aware of that when I was a kid because I was not disciplined at all.

Really?

I was a very undisciplined kid. I never cleaned my room. I never did my homework. I was— I had very few rules growing up. I was quite feral.

This was until what age?

Till 15, till I started really training heavily in martial arts. And then when I got into martial arts, I still was not— I did not clean my room. I did not do my homework. I still— but in that one thing, I had insane drive, and I worked so hard, and I worked all day long every day. I never took a day off. And that was the difference. It was like, it was the drive that replaced discipline because I loved the thing that I was doing so much. I found so much interest in it and so much passion in it, and it just so— it was so exciting to me to do that I just wanted to do it all the time. And so I didn't have to be disciplined. I knew there was work that had to be done to get better at it, but it was also— I was just intensely focused on getting better. So the work, like whether it's rounds on the heavy bag or practicing specific techniques or sparring drills or whatever the fuck I was doing, I wasn't doing it like, okay, this is what I got to do today.

It was not that at all. It was just, I can't wait to do more of this.

So rad.

I was only— the only thing that stopped me was time and sleep. I would have tried to do it all day, every day. I was obsessed, but I wasn't disciplined.

Hmm.

I had to get disciplined later on in life when I stopped competing in particular, because then there was like this over— this overwhelming looming threat of physical harm if you don't stay in the gym constantly. If you're not like 100% ready. There's this possibility that you could zig when you should have zagged and you get a fucking shin to your head. There's a lot of terrifying thoughts that are involved in that that keep you training really hard. But I didn't have discipline. I didn't develop discipline until after I stopped competing. And then I realized like, well, I should work out because I should work out, and I should eat well because it's good for you, and I should, you know, I should lift weights because it's probably good to be strong, you know. And it was doing things because I know they had to be done rather than I was obsessed with doing them.

I mean, I'm telling a just-so story here, but there's also a part of me which says like it's a mild bit of OCD, but thank goodness you didn't clean your room because what if you had OCD and you're like, I'm gonna be the kid with the perfect room, and then I'm gonna be the kid that washes my hands all the time, then I'm gonna be the kid that just is all about cleanliness. Like, I think— I do think that, you know—

What is obsessive-compulsive disorder versus being passionate about something?

So here, there's a really important theme to OCD. Like, true OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, is characterized by the following. The more you engage in the behavior, the stronger the compulsion gets. And that's why it's so maddening for people with true clinical OCD. So for people that have a handwashing thing, they're like, oh, I have something on my hands. They go and wash it, and it just makes them want to wash more.

Mm.

And more and more. And I'm not a big fan of SSRIs in many cases, but I will say, if there's one place where SSRIs have really helped a great number of people not completely dissolve into a puddle of dysfunction. It's proper use of SSRIs for true clinical OCD.

So OCD in that way, like washing the hands, what is the cause of that? Do we know?

Well, we know, so there's a woman who was at NIH for a long time. She passed away this last year. Her name was Judith Rapoport, a real pioneer in this whole field and brain science more generally, and she found that there's an area of the brain called the basal ganglia. These are circuits that we all have that are involved in generating action, go, and no-go. You have 2, basically you have an accelerator and a brake on action, and the basal ganglia have these, you know, it looks a lot like a gear system in a car when you really, you know, just draw it out. The people who have true clinical-grade OCD have an enlargement, for whatever reason, of subregions of this circuit, and they basically feel the impulse to do this thing all the time. Now, what is the thing? The thing is based largely on inputs from structures like the hypothalamus that are related to very primitive adaptive behaviors, like getting infections out and getting dirt away is adaptive when it's done in a healthy way. There are all these people, and there's actually a paper, I hate this paper, but it's a real paper, that watching zit popping stimulates dopamine.

This is why people do this. I can't watch these things. It's like, but people like—

Shout out to Dr. Pimple Popper.

There seems to be— someone sent me this paper. I'm like, oh God, this is another— and I look, I'm like, this paper, someone actually ran this study, and now this explains a lot of the internet, the stuff on the internet. There's a component in all of our brains that gets some sort of satisfaction from the removal of infection, from relief from infection.

That makes sense.

Yeah, and this feeds into these basal ganglia circuits. For some people, it's compulsive water drinking. I mean, Anna Lembke of Dopamine Nation talks about a patient of hers that was basically addicted to water, compulsive water drinker. They actually died. It's very, very sad. In all seriousness, overingestion of water and this woman died.

Yeah, it does kill people. I remember there was a lady who was doing a contest for the radio to get an Xbox for her son, like how you can drink the most water.

I think it's called hypernatremia or something like that. I could have that wrong. You know, people who have OCD about germs often, you know, germs are bad, but worrying that much about germs is obviously not good. So again, we're talking about primitive brain circuits and these circuits that can go awry. Some people, they just, for reasons we don't understand, they have overactive areas of the brain. Actually, I have a positive tale that you might like, 'cause it has to do with jiu-jitsu, of which I do none, but I have a close childhood friend. His name's Eddie Chang. He's the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF. Brilliant guy, bioengineer. He's figuring out the speech system in the brain. He's a member of the National Academy. He's my friend since we were 7, and he's like this amazing physician. And he called me— very, very calm guy— and he called me and he said— he calls me Andy, which is unfortunate, but he goes— He knew me when I was a little kid. He goes, Andy, I've got a patient who wants you to come to the surgery. I go, what are you gonna do? And he goes, well, he's got a tumor, and he's really into jiu-jitsu, and he really admires like Joe and Jocko.

And, you know, would you— do you think you'd come up? I was like, yeah, chance to get to see my childhood friend do brain surgery.

Yo.

So I go there, I meet this guy. This guy has a tumor that needs removing from the frontal lobe.

You're in there for the whole thing.

Right up there, right up there. I mean, you know, so I'm in there and they keep patients alive for this. So they locally—

Awake.

Awake, excuse me. They definitely keep them alive. I love that you don't edit the show. So you're like, this proves why I misspeak sometimes. He's definitely alive going in and coming out. He's alive today. I spoke to Eddie this morning. They basically remove the skull, they go in, and the way they decide what tissue to take out and what tissue to keep, because the tumor is embedded in functional brain areas that are required for speech, for movement, et cetera, you can't just start scooping brain tissue out. And what I learned is that these tumors don't look different when you just look at the brain. They feel different to the— To the instruments of the highly trained surgeon. So he's in there, Eddie's in there mapping, stimulating different areas of the brain while this guy is awake and reporting what he's feeling, okay? His hands moving, and I'm going back and forth talking to this guy, going back and forth and seeing the tumor getting removed little by little by little, put into a plate, goes off to biopsy, but this guy is awake the entire time. Incredible.

Wow.

And as they're doing this, because the patient agreed, they're mapping what areas of the brain are involved in mathematics, what areas of the brain— he's doing math problems while he's in this surgery, while this patient is doing this. He's also saying, oh, you know, I felt that in my toe, or I felt that in my face. And so, you know, Eddie's getting these functional maps of the brain that we've never had before, and his lab has discovered incredible things about how speech and language are organized in the brain. He's taken people who have full locked-in syndrome, completely paralyzed, who could just blink to communicate, and that's it. He has a— this has been written up in the news. He had a patient, Pancho, who Eddie's figured out there are areas of the brain that prepare for speech, not just generate speech, created through AI and bioengineering, because he's also a bioengineer, of course. He created ways that this patient can now speak. And the first thing Pancho ever said was, Hello. And you say, how are you doing? He said, doing well. And the AI is learning his speech patterns. It's taking what would normally be sent to the pharynx and larynx, right?

Because after all, speech is just an exhale that's controlled by the pharynx and larynx and the tongue. And the AI gets better at understanding what this person wants to say. And now he's got patients, literally, they're still in wheelchairs, right? Wheeling around with an iPad next to them of their face speaking according to what they're thinking. This patient who got the tumor removed is amazing. I asked Eddie this morning, in case this happened to come up, how's he doing? He goes, great. I think— and we filmed all this, by the way. The team at UCSF did this. He'd like you to come to a jiu-jitsu class, so we may put this out there. I think he's really into— he's 60s. From what I understand, he's serious. He rolls like 5 or 6 days a week. He's really into this, and he's now rolling jiu-jitsu. This tumor, which would have killed him, is out. He's, yes, alive. He's thriving. And, you know, we hear a lot about the negative aspects of AI, but I asked Eddie, to what extent is AI critical for this kind of technology to evolve? And he's like, absolutely critical, because it can take all these neural signals and figure out what the brain was doing exactly when the person said the word for, or the, or my name is blank and blank.

You know, you can't sink that many electrodes into the brain before you start destroying brain tissue. So you have to collect a lot of different signals, and AI is greatly facilitating our ability to decode what the brain is trying to do. And I said, so where else is this going to go? And he said, well, this obviously is what Elon wants to do with Neuralink and taking paralyzed people out of a paralyzed state. It's like, what's the intention to move? What does that look like neurally? And then convert that into signals that maybe it's prosthetics, maybe it's actual muscles and nerves can respond to accurately. So the takeaway here is that, like, we hear a lot about the bad stories of medicine, the stuff that's on the edge, and we still need to figure out, like, the psychedelic stuff. But I have to say, with respect to AI in medicine, I am super, super excited about people walking again, seeing again. I mean, this stuff is starting to happen. Having brain tumors removed that do not encroach on areas of the brain that are critical. I said, if you were a quarter centimeter or less, into this other margin where you recorded that the guy says, oh yeah, my hand, I felt it in my hand.

If you were to nick that, he's like, he'd completely lose hand function. Now, mind you, he's one of the best surgeons in the world. I'll go on record saying that. He is like, may you never need his help. In fact, there's one of our public-facing health colleagues, I'll tell you this, 'cause he's been public about it, who got a stem cell injection into the disc down in Mexico, and it got infected.

I've heard of people doing things like that.

And was paralyzed. and was in a hospital here in Texas. Okay, this is no, you know, I'm not casting any judgment on Texas, but what happened was they didn't realize that he had an egg-shaped, egg-sized infection there. Okay, so the surgery had gone awry, got an infection, and he was paralyzed, and they said they were going to have to sever the spinal cord to get this infection out when they finally discovered it. I contacted Eddie, and I said, listen, Here's what's going on. He said, get me in touch with his doctor, get me his charts. He was airlifted to UCSF, and it wasn't Eddy that did the surgery, but it was someone in his department that removed this egg-sized infection, and Eddy called me from the surgery, and he said, we're triple masked in here, and I can smell the infection. It turns out that bacteria had never been identified in the United States, so there are bacteria that exist in other places that we're just not exposed to that frequently, so it was very virulent in this case, They got the infection out.

So this was just like a clinic with a dirty needle?

This was a bad clinic with a bad practice of some sort. They screwed up some— someone screwed up along the way, okay? And this guy happens to— the patient happens to be a physician in this case. This guy is walking, talking, exercising.

How's his back?

Great.

Did the injection help?

Oh, I don't know.

No.

So I asked, so, you know, So I said, what was it that allowed you guys to do this that another clinic might not have been able to do? Because I, like you, am very interested in what makes for good doctors versus so-so doctors versus lousy doctors versus superb doctors. And he said, it's 2 pieces. It's the training and the skill of the physician, obviously, their willingness to constantly update their models with new understanding of what's out there, new technologies, and it's also these— incredible bioengineering and AI technologies that can make estimates about where the margins of error are in real time. Because when you think about the brain, you get an MRI, you see, okay, there's the tumor, we're going to go out and scoop it out. But I've seen this now, this close, and in 3 dimensions, it's a completely different picture. He's scooping out this tumor, he's probing around the tumor, and then I'm like, is it done? And he's like, no, it's interdigitated, meaning it's vesselled into other brain structures. We have to go after that stuff. I said, what are the margins of error? He said, less than a millimeter in some cases.

And by hand, they're picking out tumor little by little by little to try and ensure it doesn't come back and sparing function. Incredible. And AI is updating based on every micro-movement of the head that might occur, because the person's bolted in, basically. They got stereotax, bolted to the table, literally. Can't move your head. The guy can speak, but he can't move his head. But there are little micro-movements because the brain is pulsing. So this is happening in real time. So the cool thing is, yeah, this video will release to the internet. I think the patient will agree to it.

The video of the surgery?

The whole thing. The patient has been very willing to do this. That's a pretty good shot, probably. Yeah, this guy is a true medical science stud. He's an awesome family man and friend, and he's just a hero of science, in my opinion.

So what are they using, like tiny little scalpels?

So here actually is a technology he's using to record from and stimulate the brain. If you put in, Jamie, if you go to—

Whoa, what is that? Is that like inside the head?

Yeah, ways to stimulate the brain.

It's called the BRAVO mesh.

Yeah, it's like a mesh that will stimulate certain brain tissue. It will also record. If you put in Pancho paralyzed Eddie Chang—

I did. I got the story here from New York Times. What was that mesh that stimulates the brain? What was that installed for?

To stimulate the areas of the brain that can help us facilitate recovery of what tissue is still there.

Whoa.

Because Eddie came up through a lab by a guy by the name of Mike Merzenich. And I actually talk about this in the book in the chapter on learning. You know, until the early '90s, people thought you couldn't learn after age 25, that there was no plasticity.

Into the early '90s?

Yeah. And then basically 3 guys— it was Mike Merzenich, a guy named Michael Kilgard who's down in Dallas, or maybe it's Houston. He's here in Texas. this, and a guy named Greg Reckenszone, who is this brilliant scientist, they did these studies first in monkeys and then in humans, which showed that if you take adult monkeys or humans and you have them pay really careful attention to a task, that the brain changes. And the experiment is very simple. It's like this. So they had monkeys, or a human can do this, feel a little— like a rotating drum, and the drum's got bumps on it like Braille, okay? And they're recording from an area of the brain that responds to touch, and the monkey's job is to basically press a lever anytime the bumps go from coarse to more fine. So think big bumps, small bumps. The monkey plays this game, and every time they get it right, they get some juice. Monkeys like juice. Press the lever, press the lever, press the lever. These are adult monkeys. They come back sometime later, and the brain area representing the fingers has expanded.

It's bigger.

The brain has changed. There's plasticity. It learned. But what I didn't tell you is at the same time they're doing these experiments, there's a sound in the room.

Okay.

Now they do a different experiment where the monkey is still feeling the bumps, but the monkey is trained to listen to changes in the sound, subtle changes in the frequency of the sound, high to low or low to high. And if they get that right, they press— if they press— they think they went from high to low, and that's the task, they press the lever or they pull the joystick And they get some juice. Under those conditions, the area of the brain responsible for hearing changes. Now, the key thing here is the experience is the same in both cases. They're hearing and touching in both experiments, but the key difference is what they're paying attention to. The brain of the adult does not change just because of passive experience. The brain of the adult, and this is true in humans too, changes because of what you attend to. And when we start talking about neuroplasticity and learning, everyone would like to think, oh, my brain is different at the end of this conversation than before. You don't learn from passive experience. You learn from focusing and the friction that's accompanying trying to do things right and sometimes getting it wrong.

The error signal is what instructs the brain to change.

Mm.

I'm sure you know this from martial arts. I'm sure you know this from other areas of life too. If your brain can do something, there's no reason for it to change. No rewiring is needed.

Right.

But if you're trying to do this— I don't know martial arts well. I mean, I did a little bit of Thai boxing when I was younger. I boxed in my 30s, which was really dumb, by the way, as a neuroscience professor. I'd spar on Wednesday nights in San Diego, where you got all these Marines and all these, like, team guys. It was so dumb. I'd come home, like, all busted up. My girlfriend was like, what are you doing? I was like, you know, I like it. She's like, you don't get paid to do this. You know? But it was a lot of fun. Like, you learn— I think you learn a lot from sparring.

Wish it wasn't bad for your brain.

I wish it wasn't bad for your brain. I will say this, I'm not encouraging anyone to box, you know, unless they really want to. But I also learned a lot about how to stay calm when you're getting your ass beat and how to think clearly. And it's also— I think Sam— who's the guy who wrote A Fighter's Heart? I love that book.

Sam Shepard?

Sam Shepard. He also talks about, like, it's like an intimate thing to spar with somebody. Like, what does he say? He's like, you're sharing bodily fluids with somebody. It's like a one-night stand.

Yeah.

Like, you, you develop a closeness with the people that you spar with, a respect. And I wasn't fast enough. I don't think my timing was really good. I eventually learned that I'm— I have a long reach that could help me. But I realized I can't be doing this, not as a neuroscience professor. But I really enjoyed it.

It's not something that you really get excellent at if you learn late in life, unfortunately, unless you're a very unusual athlete.

Yeah.

Most people who get good at striking, striking in particular, they start out very young. Yeah, and that's how they get good at it. There's a level that they reach that someone who starts out late in life, even if you're a good athlete, you probably never reach that level. Yeah, like Floyd Mayweather, perfect example.

And he's—

There's something about him. He's, he's, you know, one of the greatest of all time. But I think there's something to the fact that he started when he was really, really, really, really young, and he had a dad who was a world-class boxer, and he had an uncle who was a world champion boxer. It's like he was around it from the time he was young. So there's like pathways that they develop, and their body— their body develops and grows while striking. And there's something about the maturation process of the— this is like just my anecdotal experience from watching people learn striking. It seems like the people that are really elite at it, they grew up with their bodies. As their bodies were maturing, they were learning it. And then it seems like there's a— there's a fucking— there's a something that they have that you don't get later in life.

Yeah.

You can get really good if you're a good athlete. Learning it late in life, you're never gonna get best of ever, world champion status. Like, you have to have a super long journey, and it has to start when you're a fucking kid. So it's like your brain has to be evolving, learning those skills, learning timing and distance and feinting and how people react and how to map out potential reactions from certain moves, how to lure them into things. It's too much.

Yeah, I, I learned a lot boxing. I mean, at least 3 things. One is that landing, like, like sinking, like a, like a 1-2 combination feels really good.

Feels real good.

I also learned it's hard to do. It's hard to do. I also learned that there's this thing called a really good counterpuncher where you land a jab and you eat 4. Yeah. And you're just like, and the world's just spinning, you're seeing stars. I also realized that that 6-pack abs don't mean shit. You're down near the Mexican border, like at some— the gym I trained at was like pretty far south in San Diego, and some guys would roll in and like you wouldn't think much of them. Like, they like unpeel, they like— because everyone would spar on Wednesdays, you know, and they try and match people up by weight. And you see guys that did not look in shape who could move, and you just get battered. I mean, they're just— if they know how to move properly. So that was a good teaching. And then the last thing that like I really took away, and I think about this on the internet too, there's always, like, one guy in the gym who moves really well on the bag, who's like speed bag and heavy bag, and just looks so crisp, super in shape, and they never spar, and they sit, like, at the edge of the ring, and they give all sorts of advice about what you're supposed to do when you're in there.

And then if you go— and I finally did, 'cause in skateboarding, I wasn't that good of a skateboarder, but I'd be like, come on, like, drop in, like, let's go, like, let's have fun. Like, skateboarding's a very inviting sport.

Yeah.

It's not like surfing, where you're, like, guarding the waves, right? And I was like, come on in. Oh no, my shoulder. Like every week I'd be like, hey, come on in. Like, let's just like do a couple rounds. Like you always have advice for everybody. Let's do a couple rounds. Never did. And finally the guy that owns the gym came over and goes, that guy's never boxed a round in his life. You know, he probably did when he was a kid. He ate a few punches and like he's just like it, but looks really mint. And so, you know, there's like the internet people like quick to criticize, but like, all right, like get in there and do it. Like you come out here and let's play, you know? And so I have to be careful. You have to be careful with that one because the guy could have gone in there and taken my head off. But I realized, I was like, there are a lot of people that hang out— what do they call it— like the skirt, like hang out on the skirt and just give advice all day. Like, don't corkscrew your jab, corkscrew.

I'm like, who are these people? You know, like, if you— so it's, it's kind of nice actually to get that experience. I mean, it was late in life. I mean, I talked a little bit in the book. When I was younger, I definitely got into a lot of scraps. I was kind of like a live wire. I do not recommend.

No, fighting's terrible. But there's something about martial arts, about the fear and learning how to stay calm. while you're sparring. I think jiu-jitsu is the best one because, although there's always a risk of injury in jiu-jitsu, you're not getting hit all the time. And so you could go pretty hard. And that's the difference really between martial arts sparring, like kickboxing and things along those lines, and boxing, and, and jiu-jitsu. Because in jiu-jitsu, as many times, if you're training in a really good gym with really good guys, you're going full clip, and both you and him are going full clip, and there's no animosity. They might be one of your best friends. You guys are just doing the thing that you do full clip. But by doing it full clip— because if he catches you, like he gets your arm, you just tap and then you go again.

Mm-hmm.

As long as your ego's healthy, as long as you understand what you're doing and knowing— and he's not yanking on your knees and ripping your knees apart with heel hooks and stuff like that, like letting someone tap— as long as you do that, you're literally going full clip. So you learn how to stay calm and you also get very comfortable with going full clip. So if you're in a situation— if you're a guy who only does point karate sparring and you're just touching each other and they stop and touch the other, and then you're in some wild melee at a bar where someone's swinging at you full blast and throwing wild haymaker punches, and you're panicking because you're not used to this scenario— a jiu-jitsu person is used to someone going full blast. So they'll grab ahold of you and it'll be just routine. They'll just drag you to the ground, trip you, get on top, mount, choke you, whatever the fuck they want to do essentially once they get a hold of you. They do it all the time full blast. That's why I think it's the superior martial art for self-defense, because you're— if you're gonna really learn how to fight like striking, you're gonna get hit, and you're gonna get hit a lot, and you're gonna be hitting people a lot, and you're gonna be going to war with each other, and it's fucking dangerous.

and it's really bad for your brain. And that's really the only way to learn how to be calm when you're actually sparring or actually fighting someone. But with jiu-jitsu, there's all that fear of brain damage removed. All the fear of like really serious injury is greatly mitigated by tapping and good training partners.

I need to get into it.

I mean, such a fun thing to learn too, man.

It's funny, we talk about boxing, it's like that, you know, I think combat that if to some people it just feels good, there's a circuit there. There's actually a friend of mine who's got a lab up at the University of Washington, and he studies this brain circuit. You know that male mice will work hard for the opportunity to fight other mice? You know, we always hear like, oh, they just want pleasure, no pain. Like, male mice have a circuit, and they will work their asses off figuring out puzzles that would perplex like 30% of the adult population across the world. And these mice can figure it out. And it's hard work for them to figure out these light sequences or lever press sequences. For what? Not for a piece of food, not for water when they're thirsty, not for like methamphetamine, but to fight another mouse. And then they're like, it's— they love fighting.

That's crazy.

There's dopamine.

I never knew that.

Oh yeah.

They'll work hard and their reward is they get to fight a mouse.

I mean, the mouse fight another mouse. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

That's crazy.

Yeah, I think it's— I think again, it's these deeper brain circuits that we all harbor. And I think some people are like, Oh no, that's not even within me. I think, you know, it varies. I mean, my dad is from South America. He went to like a boarding military-type school when he was a kid. He said everyone had to box. Well, it was a boys' school. It was all dudes. They all had to box. Everyone had to box, and they'd make them spar. I was like, box? Like, you know, like boxing drills? He's like, no, they'd like pit us against each other until you'd find the kind of combination of people that were about equal, and then they just like put you to work on each other. The idea was you were supposed to— he you know, both learn the gentlemanly aspects about, you know, touch gloves and the things afterwards you have to like, you know. So there's that. He's like, no, but you were supposed to try and stay calm in the— in getting, you know, while trying to beat up the other person, then beat you up. I think there's value in it.

There's value in it, and there's value in just what we were talking about earlier about doing difficult things. I think it is one of the most difficult things you could choose to do, that you can voluntarily sign yourself up for a place where you're gonna experience pain and severe discomfort And a very perplexing puzzle, trying to figure out how to hit someone who doesn't want to get hit, and they're trying to hit you, and you're trying not to get hit, or, you know, get tapped, or whatever, whatever, wrestle, whatever, whatever you're doing. It's a very difficult thing to do, and those very difficult things to do make the rest of your life easier. It's like we were talking about getting shit for cold plunges. I don't know if I get shit for talking about cold plunges, but anybody who doesn't think you should cold plunge hasn't cold plunged. The people that do it and the people that say don't do it, they just— they're coming up with excuses because it's fucking terrifying and nobody likes it. It sucks.

Well, there's this—

But what I was gonna get to is it's not a cure. There's no cure. There's a bunch of different excellent practices, and if you stack those up throughout your day— diet, nutrition, sunlight, exercise, all these different things, cold plunge, sauna— your life's gonna be better.

Way better.

And I think a thing like martial arts, particularly jiu-jitsu, is a great addition to that. And if you don't like that, yoga is another great addition. It's one of the best things that I— we did a Sober October challenge where we did 15 days of yoga in a month.

Hot yoga?

Yeah, 90-minute sessions.

Was Burt doing this too?

Yeah, we all did it. We did it together. It was one of the best months I've ever had in my life because you just feel so good and so calm, and the rest of your life is easier. Fucking hot yoga is a bitch, man. It's really hard to do. Those 90-minute sessions are fucking hard, and when it's over, you are spent, and you, you become the nicest person on earth.

Totally.

And the rest of your day is so much easier than that last 15 minutes of struggle, sweating like, like it's pouring rain outside. I mean, it's crazy how hard it is to do those 90 minutes if you're doing them right. You need a bunch of those things in your life. You do. If you don't, you're gonna suffer. It's like there's a balancing act that you have to acknowledge.

It's interesting how the 2 things that really seem to, you know, catch fire out there were the idea that cold plunges block hypertrophy and strength adaptations if done in the 6 hours after weight training, but you can do it before. It has tremendous benefit. I think it's mental training. And then the other one was the cortisol thing, you know, this idea like, oh, it raises cortisol. The data all say it does not raise cortisol. Marginally, maybe, but mostly reduces cortisol and buffers your cortisol response to stress. And I think in the women's fitness community, this was especially kind of catchy. People thought, oh, cortisol bad, cortisol bad. I mean, the entire book could be summarized as get your morning cortisol high and your nighttime cortisol low, and your life's going to be 100 times better. Why? Because when you view bright light, drink caffeine, exercise, do cold exposure in the morning and your cortisol spikes, it ensures that your nighttime cortisol is low, which means it's easier to fall asleep. And if you have any stress during the middle of the day, this is, I think, explains your whole thing of doing hard things makes life easier.

When you spike your cortisol in the morning, if you have a stressful interaction or something happens during the day, you do get an increase in adrenaline and cortisol to stress, but it's brief. If you don't, It's very big and it's very prolonged.

Hmm.

So all these people that are chronically stressed, the state of the world, and look, the state of the world is complicated, but they're constantly feeling oppressed by life, overwhelmed by life. If they were to do a couple things in the morning, view bright light, ideally from sunlight, I've talked about these things before, cold shower or cold plunge, 30 seconds, just uncomfortably cold, then get out, exercise of some sort that's high-intensity interval training or lift some weights that are heavy for them, that kind of thing for 45 minutes to an hour for the weights, maybe just even 30 even 10 minutes for the high-intensity stuff, and head into the day, bouts of stress will happen, but your hormonal response to them will be severely blunted. There's so much data on this. And people always say, but is that just true for men? No, it's also true for women. And so people are weak because their cortisol levels are too low in the morning and they're too high all day long. And then at night they're like, oh, I can't sleep, I'm stressed, and this and that. Well, you've set yourself up to be a vulnerable creature in the last third of your day.

So that first hour of the day sets the whole stage. And if you can't exercise in that first hour, fine, you do in the afternoon, no big deal. But if we just understood that cortisol spiked in the morning is perhaps the best thing we can do for our health, I think the world would be so much better off. But everyone's like, oh, I already am too stressed and cortisol is gonna make me retain fat. It's like, no, no, no.

People love excuses. Excuses why not take action are— that's one of the greatest things that people indulge in.

People love excuses. The— we didn't close the hatch on the neuroplasticity thing. I just want to make sure I do that, which is what you focus on, you can change. You can learn skills if you focus. And the agitation that you feel when trying to learn, that is the reflection of the cocktail of neuromodulators in the brain and body that that allow the circuits to change.

Hmm.

I wish I had been told this in like the 3rd grade. If they said, hey, when you're trying to learn something and it's easy, great. But when you're trying to learn something and it's high friction, like you can't do it, that frustration is the first gate of learning opening. And right on the other side of that is you continuing to try a little bit more. You have to do this through genuine attempts to learn, but you get some errors. So you can't just do throwaway errors, right? If I'm trying to learn billiards, which I'm I'm only modestly poor at, right? If I'm trying to get better and I'm just like hitting the ball wherever, you don't learn, obviously. But if I'm trying and trying, the error signal sends a message to the brain that generates this agitation. The agitation tags the neurons. It literally puts a chemical tag on these neurons. Tonight, when you sleep, you need to change. That's what agitation does. And then when you get to sleep at night, those circuits change. And then you come back a few days later and you might not have the skill, but you're a little bit closer.

That's— that makes sense.

Like, that's neuroplasticity, particularly in martial arts.

The kids— when you see kids, the kids that get really frustrated when they don't learn and get really frustrated and they get real upset if they get tapped, they usually wind up getting really good.

Interesting. Yeah, the more—

the ones who are like very emotionally attached, as long as they can control it, you know. But there has to be like— you can't go, well, you got me. It's, it's got to be fuck Right. Fuck!

And then harnessing your— and then pulling back and like, okay, this next one and this next one.

Stay calm, but that fuck, even if you don't express it outright, that fuck thought in your head is always gonna be there.

Yes, that error signal, and I go into the brain circuitry that's responsible for this and which neurochemicals it is and on and on, but that signal is what gates neuroplasticity. One of the reasons why psychedelics are so effective in allowing plasticity, because they are, I want to just be very blunt about this, Yes. The massive increases in serotonin with psilocybin, the massive increases in serotonin and dopamine with MDMA, because that's kind of the hallmark of MDMA. It's a very unique drug. It increases dopamine and serotonin together. Normally, they're on a bit of a seesaw, but it increases both. Those are what we call neuromodulators. They make the brain more amenable to plasticity during the session and in the weeks that follow. So what are these neuromodulators? Dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, also called adrenaline. You go, okay, well, that's a big list of molecules. The key discovery of those guys, Merzenich, Rekenzone, and Kilgard, that I mentioned earlier, you can give an animal or a person any molecule that will increase those, give them a learning session, and they'll learn better.

Wow.

It's not specific to one neuromodulator. And if you give somebody propranolol, a drug that blocks the receptors that adrenaline binds to, after learning, they won't learn as well. They— you can't remember stuff. Why? Because there wasn't enough adrenaline. If you want to remember something, you need that frustration. You need the adrenaline.

So if someone's like fearful of learning something and they take some sort of a beta blocker—

Blocks learning.

Wow.

Great data on this. Larry Cahill and James McGough, if people want to look it up. Beautiful literature. And they cite studies— these are more historical references where they would give kids— people would give kids lessons and then throw them into a cold river to spike their adrenaline. Like, people have been playing with this stuff for a very long time.

Wow.

Yeah. So nicotine, for instance, people think, is it a cognitive enhancer? It is if you don't do it all the time every day. But if you— you know, I talk about nicotine and it's, you know, it's pretty habit-forming. But if you take it before or after learning something, even after, right? before, during, or after learning something, and you're not highly saturated with nicotine already, yeah, you'll enhance your ability to learn that thing. The problem is people are just popping them all day long, every day, just to get to baseline. Like, we drink caffeine to get to baseline. We take nicotine to get to baseline. Are you on the nicotine?

I take them, but I wanted to ask you this about addiction, about is there a biological component to addiction. And one of the reasons why I ask is I— because I take these— Tucker Carlson sends me these Alps. I like these.

They taste different than the other ones. I think I've tried Athletic Nicotine, Zyn.

I've not tried Athletic Nicotine. That's probably my favorite, like the 3s, because it's mild. Yeah, the little 3 milligrams. My point is I do it all the time, and I take them before shows. I like to suck on them before I go on stage. But when I went on vacation for 10 days, I didn't bring any on purpose. So I was like, let's see what this is like. Nothing. And I've heard so many people say that they, they have horrible cravings, they can't tolerate it, they go nuts, they just need it, they need nicotine. And I'm sitting there like on day 2, like waiting for it to come on. Nope, nothing. I just— I'm not on nicotine.

I mean, you're a bit of a mutant too.

I don't know what it is.

Like, I mean, just because you're so So it sounds to me like you're so familiar with discomfort, you may not even register that, like, a mild, tiny bit of withdrawal. But it is interesting, you know, because if I don't drink caffeine, like, life is a lot less interesting to me. And I've been drinking— I've been drinking a shit ton of caffeine. I mean, I've got a picture— I'm half Argentine, so there's a picture of me on my grandfather's lap drinking mate from a gourd when I'm like 3 years old in my Spider-Man pajamas. You know, people on the internet, they go, oh, I don't believe— I probably drink 800 milligrams of caffeine a day, and I'm fine. But if I don't drink caffeine, I'm just like, oh man. I don't know if I'm addicted in the classic sense. Like, I'm not gonna go rob old ladies to get caffeine. I'm not, you know, I'm not gonna harm myself with it. If anything, it shows that it can offset dementia. I mean, the new data basically say up to about 400 milligrams per day, caffeine's great for the brain, for the body. You know, it's— people have anxiety, it can be problematic, but you just might not have— I mean, you may just naturally make a lot of acetylcholine, and so when you don't take nicotine, maybe you just rebound really fast.

I don't know if that's it. I mean, I do take nootropics that might have an effect on it.

Oh, definitely.

But I didn't bring any with me when I was on vacation.

Amazing.

I just brought vitamins.

No cigars?

Nope, no cigars.

What kind of vacation was it?

It was fun. Yeah, I enjoyed it.

Yeah.

family vacation. But the point is, I was waiting for this thing that everybody told me was coming, and it never showed up at all. There was zero. I mean, it wasn't hard. It wasn't a thing. It was just—

I'm not taking it. It's just an experiment to do, right?

And I do sometimes during the day. Like, I'll wake up in the morning and say, I'm not gonna eat them today. I'm not gonna take any nicotine pills. But I always wonder, like, is it just I got lucky? Like, some people, they literally cannot drink. Alcoholism is in their genetics. Like, they have families that are alcoholics. That's a real thing. And they just can't handle it.

Yeah. I mean, the guys who started AA talked about an allergy. They described it as like an allergy. Like, some people, when they drink alcohol, their first experience— I had a friend like this from childhood, became an alcoholic, not surprisingly. And when he drank the first or second time, he was like, this is how I'm meant to feel.

Oh, boy.

Like, he felt like it completed something in him. I don't feel that way with alcohol. I don't drink, but I could without problems, you know? You're sort of on-off now, right? Like, occasional drink? Yeah.

I don't get drunk anymore. I'll have a drink or two, but I don't get drunk anymore.

You miss it? Getting drunk?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. When I took the 8 months off, I didn't even miss alcohol. But then I went to dinner, had a margarita. I was like, ooh, I missed this. This is fun. Yeah, this is nice. But the key is like, I just wanted to take some time off and just not feel like shit, because my problem was I was stacking too many days where I was having a drink or two on the podcast, and then I was having a drink or two at the club. And then, you know, you do multiple days of that and you feel like shit. And it was like affecting my workouts. And I said, this is stupid. Let me see how I feel. And I didn't miss it at all. But when I did have a drink or two, I'm like, okay, I see there is a benefit from a social lubricant aspect. There's a funness to a glass of wine or, you know, sure, a glass of whiskey. But the thing is, just understand what you're doing and don't fuck your body up and try to do your best Just take a lot of glutathione, mitigate whatever you're doing to your body by actually consuming alcohol.

And more likely you don't need as much as you're gonna drink. That's the problem. But to have a good time, a couple drinks, you have a good time. 5, 6 drinks, it's not really a good time anymore. You're kind of fucking plastered and you sound stupid.

And nowadays, you know, with cameras and stuff, people say stupid stuff. I mean, I drank in college and I drank after a bit and I just drank less and less. But, you know, when I was a junior professor, my girlfriend at the time, like, she just had the genetics where she could have a couple drinks and really enjoy it. Just like really enjoy it. And I mean, I think some people can do that.

So, okay, what are the genetics that would cause someone to be like severely addicted to nicotine? Another one that I hear about all the time is kratom. We had a guy who came and did the podcast, and someone had sent us some kratom. One of our guests like had a kratom company. I'm like, and it was just laying around the kitchen. And he goes, you're not taking that, are you? I go, no, some guy just sent it to me. And he goes, get rid of that shit. He goes, it is the fucking hardest thing to kick. I go, really? He goes, yeah, I'm on it. It's horrible. He goes, it's an awful high. And he goes, and I'm fucking— I'm really struggling to get off of it.

Yeah.

And I was, I was kind of stunned. I was like, well, I've taken it before and it didn't seem like it would be that thing, like a thing that would make you addicted. But apparently, it's like any other opioid. Like, you can get, like, fully wrapped up in that stuff. So, but what is it about some people and their biology that makes them more susceptible to whether it's nicotine or caffeine or whatever it is?

It's going to undoubtedly have to do with the genetics that line up the receptors in the brain that lead some people to have a very different experience with one substance versus another. For instance, there's a subset of people, about 8% of people, that when they drink alcohol, they experience a much more euphoric high from it. These people tend to recover very easily the next morning. That's independent of tolerance. It tends to run in families. These people are very high susceptibility to severe alcohol use disorder, what you and I know as alcoholism. There are people who take their first drink, as I mentioned before, and are just like, this completes me, right? And those people usually have a certain genetic background. We don't like to talk about this, but there's certain genetic backgrounds. They probably have high levels of the enzyme that can digest alcohol, right? You know, can break down alcohol, 'cause it is a poison.

Mm-hmm.

But if you're breaking it down more quickly, maybe it's not impacting your microbiome and your sleep quite as much. And so you can drink a lot more and sleep fine and do fine. And it varies by age too. 2 glasses of wine at 60 feels very different at 2 glasses of wine at like, you know, at 25, as most people will tell you, right? We're just different resilience. In general, what the data say is that kids who took their first drink really young, like 12, 13, 14, are greatly predisposed to alcoholism later. But it's hard to dissociate that from the environmental circumstances around that. Why are they drinking at 12 or 13? You know, I think I took my first drink of alcohol, I'm not proud of this, at 11. A friend, I won't mention his name, went to his house and he goes, hey, you know, my dad's got some— I think it was like wine coolers or something. And we were— and we, we drank them and we got, you know, we got drunk. And, you know, I wasn't a bad kid, but we got drunk. And— but the earlier you drink, the more susceptible you are to alcoholism.

But I never became an alcoholic. But I will tell you that my love of caffeine, my love of energy, focus, and that sort of thing makes me like about half the population who are Probably have a decent susceptibility to stimulants. I've never done cocaine. I've never done speed. I've never done Adderall or Vyvanse. We could talk about stimulants. And in the book, I talk about some of the newer stimulants that are still amphetamine-like, but a little bit potentially safer.

Do you do anything like modafinil?

I don't. I took one modafinil, couldn't sleep for 2 days. I'm very, very sensitive to these things. There is a drug that's approved for excessive daytime sleepiness. that I took on a trip where I was underslept and I needed to work called Sunosi. It's a— that's now in phase 3 for mild attention deficit. And I've taken that and I don't use it often, but I find that it really dials in focus and energy in a way that still allows sleep. And for me, it was much gentler and felt better than modafinil or armodafinil.

For me, the best thing that I've ever discovered mitigating that feeling of being groggy with sleep deprivation is creatine.

Hmm, that definitely helps. The data on creatine for strength are there. The data for creatine on enhancing cognition when mildly sleep-deprived are there. That's really where the powerful data is.

You can feel it.

Definitely. It's a fuel for the phosphocreatine system for the forebrain, the part of your brain that's involved in strategy setting, etc. I would say about half, and these are These are broad numbers, right? These aren't from one study. The real expert on all this, by the way, is my colleague Keith Humphreys at Stanford, and we could talk about some of the interesting things that he's found, but about half the population seems to like sedatives. They like Vicodin, they like opioids.

Mm-hmm.

I had a tooth surgery a long time ago. They gave me Vicodin. I took half of one. I never wanted that experience again, but I know people who are like, Vicodin, they love Vicodin. They love being numb. sedated. They like being sedated. They like being brought down a bit in terms of arousal. Some people like being ramped up. And I think one needs to be aware of their genetics and their predisposition for one or the other. Some people like both, but generally people fall into one or the other category. And I think now that many more people are avoiding alcohol, the ones who say, oh yeah, it's easy and I never liked it, people like me, I think they're probably more of the, you know, they like stimulants. They like caffeine. They like nicotine. They like being up and alert. You don't even need a substance for that. So some people like both, but I think people generally bin into these categories. You asked about kratom.

Yeah.

So the world expert on this is an amazing guy. He was on my podcast. His name is Chris McCurdy. He's a professor down in Florida. And man, he has the best take on this. So the community online around kratom is very split. If you put out something about kratom, half of people will say, this stuff is evil, it's opioids, this is like OxyContin. Get out of here. The other half will say, this stuff saved me.

Right.

So you go like, what's going on? And whenever I see that, I go, there's some interesting biology here, right? There's a sociology there, but as a biologist, I'm like, what's the biology? So I brought Chris on. He said, here's the deal. In America, pharma companies develop drugs based on bioprospecting. Peptides are a different story, and we can talk about that, but bioprospecting is finding alkaloids and other substances in plants, purifying the substance, the alkaloid that gives a specific effect, and developing a drug. Cocaine, it comes from the coca plant, obviously, from the coca leaf, and he said the experience of chewing coca leaf is very different than the experience of cocaine. The experience of the— I'm going to call it kratom because I know there's another way to pronounce it, but I just feel weird saying it like kratom or something like that, but you know. What is the other word? The kratom leaf, he said, when people chew the kratom leaf, but the leaf, they feel calm but also energized. It's how you and I would think of like a strong coffee or a yerba mate.

Right.

But what's happened in this country is that companies have synthesized pure kratom. They've taken one of the compounds in the kratom leaf and they've isolated it, and now they've made it synthetically, and that leads to a very different experience and addiction potential. And it's incredible because he said, you know, the most protected building in the entire United States, these are his words, not mine, is the Coca-Cola factory. Why? He said, well, you know, years ago they had New Coke and they took out the flavor that— they get all this, they still get all this coca leaf sent to this factory in the United States. It's still going there. And then they extract the components that they need to put it into Coca-Cola. To this day, this happened today. And then we drink Coca-Cola. So I'm like, there's— so there's—

And they use the cocaine they get from it for medical cocaine use.

That it is. It is. Cocaine is approved. It's not Schedule I. That's right. It's Schedule II as an anesthetic. That's right. So Chris really nails it, right? Like so many things in science and medicine, we're saying kratom good, kratom bad. Turns out it's the synthetic kratom product that is bad, highly addictive.

So when you have those drinks, like what is it, Live Free? Aren't those— is that the kratom synthetic or is that the plant? I don't know.

I think it's the plant-derived isolated kratom, which is somewhere in between the two. But this is— but if you and I would both say, okay, like kids taking cocaine, not good. But Chris would say the coca leaf actually is a very interesting leaf that actually has some— could be a— he'll talk about this as like, oh, it could be an interesting stimulant compound for people.

Yeah, but people love it.

Well, it's the same thing with THC. People will say, oh, let's just get the highest dose of THC into an edible, and then people are eating it too fast. They don't know how to gauge their plane of high, and then we hear about certain people having psychosis and this kind of thing. Well, what happened? When you and I were growing up, look, I mean, where I grew up, everyone learned how to smoke a joint and take a bong rip. I'm not suggesting anyone do this, but you knew if you could handle one or a half, You learn the hard way. Exactly, you learn the hard way. I found I didn't like cannabis, but what you didn't do was eat half of a cookie that had 200 milligrams of THC and find yourself in a psychotic episode. And so nowadays, when we isolate things and we enrich them and we take them in that isolated form, that's when they get really precarious.

Yeah.

So that's the story. And by the way, I know people are always coming on here and telling you, you should talk to so-and-so. If you want to talk to someone highly educated on all these compounds, bioprospecting, pharma versus plant medicine, and all of this, Chris McCurdy is your man. He is, like, I'm paraphrasing here, but he's a savant of this stuff, and he comes in with no judgment. And so he'll say, the leaf products are very different than the isolated. The isolated are very different than the isolated synthetic products. And therein is where the legislature needs to look. Because in this country, as you know, we go like, all drugs bad, or then we go, oh wait, there's these incredible compounds in plants that we, we want, right?

Well, there's a parallel in refined sugar, right?

Parallel in refined sugar, exactly. Let's figure out in food what makes it so rewarding that people just desperately want to buy more, even though they don't even really like the taste of it.

Right, and let's make it in a way that never is in nature, unattached to fiber, unattached to nutrients. Usually if you get sugar in nature, it's in an orange. That's right, it's good for you. It's like a trick to get you to eat the orange.

It's business and it's diabolical. And then we always end up about 5 or 6 years down the road and go, oh, we got all these problems. But what's interesting is I didn't realize that pharma companies bioprospect from the jungle. They still send people to the jungle. We always think of the jungle as like this place that only shamans go, right? But no, American and Swiss and German companies send bioprospectors down there to isolate compounds from plants with the understanding there are all these medicines there.

Yeah.

But we don't hear about all the others. The interesting thing about peptides is that this is the first time that we are bioprospecting from the body. These are things that the body makes. And I can't take credit for that understanding. That's really, that distinction, which I think is a key one for people to understand, is Dr. Abud Bakri, this MD who you and I are familiar with, who, in my mind, just really understands the biology of peptides, and because he's a practicing physician outside of peptide biology, I think he's an intensive care guy or critical care, he can kind of see the picture now. Yes, insulin's a peptide, it came from the body, but all these peptides, now pharma companies are like, what is the body making? Like in the case of GLPs, when you increase GLPs twofold, fourfold, You can see some relief from type 2 diabetes, some, but not much weight loss. That'd been happening for a decade. But when you increase it 1,000-fold, wow, people don't want to eat. People don't think— okay, we could talk about the ramifications of that, but pharma companies are now thinking very seriously about finding all the peptides in the body and which ones are going to be potent for— there's a new one for increasing bone density for osteoporosis, and then all the— People are thinking about biohacking with this as well.

There's pinealon, which I'll occasionally take, and you get 3 hours of REM sleep that night, and on subsequent nights, your REM sleep is enriched.

Interesting.

We know GLPs, obviously. BPC-157 is the one everyone seems to kind of go to, but I think that there are a lot of interesting peptides that we've known about for a long time, like kisspeptin, which is involved in resetting the reproductive system. It's involved in puberty, being used to reset the reproductive system. All these peptides, I think the next few years it's going to be a bonanza of peptides. And I get shit for saying it, but I'm super excited because my physician friends who are super standard physicians, they're calling me like, hey, man, my knee, is this BPC-157 stuff going to work? And I go, I don't know, you can try it. I know some clean sources of it. And then they'll come back a week later and like, why? isn't anyone selling this, studying it, talking about this? I'm like, well, they are, but your community doesn't like to talk about this.

Well, there's a lot of people that dismiss it, and the way they dismiss it is very— it's very gaslighty. They're bullshitting you that all these anecdotal stories aren't significant, that all these professional athletes that are using it with great benefit don't know what they're talking about.

It's threatening to them. I mean, they I mean, I feel like I'm quoting my dad today.

It's threatening because of compound pharmacies.

And it's threatening because a lot of these physicians are going to lose their standing in the field as these people— there's something important to understand about physicians, and again, there are many excellent ones. I referenced a few today, many excellent ones, but there's a guarding of knowledge that existed in the science community up until a few years ago when podcasts hit. It wasn't just me. Bob Sapolsky was a pioneer in getting out there and teaching the public, And every scientist who's gone out into the public eventually gets this pushback, like, yeah, our field doesn't really take him or her seriously. And sometimes that's legitimate criticism, although not in Bob's case. And in many cases, it's because you've taken their thing, it's their baby, it's what gives them value. I know, I grew up around scientists. It's what gives them their value, their knowledge that no one else has. It allows them to be interesting. they now have to have people coming up to them and going, oh, did you see this podcast with so-and-so talking about this thing in anthropology on Rogan? And they're like, oh my God, that's my field. And it's a self-worth issue.

Mm-hmm.

They're not like, oh, anthropology's getting publicity, yes. Or the good ones are, the secure ones are. But the physicians who are like, wow, if there's a compound that's making patients feel better really quickly, what's that going to do to my practice? And then if I embrace it, my— here's the key thing. If I embrace it, my colleagues won't think much of me. And if I don't embrace it, maybe I'm going to lose my standing, my validity as somebody of authority. If I've got patients coming to me and saying, I had this friend that took this thing and it really helped, could I explore that? And I don't do that and they go elsewhere, word spreads fast nowadays. So I like scientists and physicians. I also understand scientists and physicians. My father's a scientist. I grew up around them. In my town, most kids were children of engineers or scientists, and you see the full array. The secure ones, the ones that are really on the cutting edge, that learn, that embrace the new technology, they do great. But the other ones, they're like dying. They're a dying breed because their whole practice rests on them having the knowledge and you not having the knowledge.

So much so that they're saying ChatGPT bad. They're saying it's bad because patients are coming in and they're like, Hey, ChatGPT says that what you're recommending is perhaps not the best thing. They're freaking out right now. And so they're saying AI is bad for medicine, but the good scientists, the good physicians are like, great, it's going to help our practice. They're genuinely interested in helping people. You see, it's 2 camps. So when I hear people saying, oh yeah, this BPC, no trials, okay, are there any adverse events we need to know about? Not that I'm aware of. And Aboud says The lethal dose is super high. No one's even come close to achieving it. I'm sure someone will figure it out, but I get excited because I think, all right, now the general public finally has some agency in understanding what's going on with them, thanks to AI, thanks to podcasts, thanks to the internet, and it can go awry, certainly, but man, I had a shoulder thing a week ago, and I'll never have this shoulder thing. Yeah, put 2 injections of BPC, gone, gone. Now, could I put saline in there and it would have been the same?

Maybe. But all I know is it's gone.

And I don't understand that argument of putting saline. Is that a common thing where people have a severe shoulder?

Oh no, sorry, just running a control experiment. I could have put it in, like—

Maybe you've heard people say that. That's why I've heard people say that in argument, you know. Oftentimes people have similar benefits injecting saline. I'm like, where— who's done that? Why aren't people injecting saline instead of getting cortisone shots in their shoulders?

I mean, this is how they talked about creatine. This is how they talked about TRT. This is how they talked about women's hormone therapies.

Right.

It's very interesting, you know, because for legitimate— you know, there are legitimate complaints about the fact that for a long time science and medicine did focus mainly on men, and the women's hormone trial basically was a mess because 'Cause they said there were all these adverse effects, and turns out it's when you started the hormone therapies. And we now know that if those therapies are started early enough, they're immensely beneficial. So there's more kind of acceptance of hormone replacement there across the board. I think TRT now is kind of a broadly accepted thing, although I think a lot of guys are doing it too young. They don't even know why they're doing it, like in their 20s or something.

That's not TRT, really.

That's not TRT.

They're just doing juice.

Yeah, they're just doing juice. But when it comes to the peptides, I think my prediction is it's going to slot in right between prescription hormone therapies and what we think of as supplements. I think there's going to be this third middle category where, sorry, practicing physicians, people are going to find the safe sources. There'll be US-made sources soon, I hope. There will be reliable people who can educate on this. People will understand the risk profile of these things, and people will be buying them and taking them legally. I think that's going to happen. Also, now people aren't afraid of needles. The GLP industry was so genius in taking this thing, needles, everyone with needle phobia, needles, what am I going to do, and they made a pen. Tick, tick, tick, tick. It's still a needle. The pens have gotten rid of everyone's needle phobia. My sister, people are like, oh, what about peptides? I go, you have to inject it. They go, well, do they have the little needles with the pen? Yeah. Cool. No one's afraid of a pen, even if it has a needle on the end. But no one likes— so it turns out it was the syringe that scared people.

The plunger.

It's the plunger. So I'm excited. And I have to say, it's not because I think everyone should be blasting this stuff. I just think knowing scientists and physicians and getting the calls and emails from them, like, do you really think this thing can help my knee? You know, like, it might. And I can tell you, it absolutely will. But then when they come back and like, this is wild, how come there aren't 20 clinical trials? It's because the general public beat the scientific community to it. And I know this is going to break some hearts. There will never be good clinical trials of each and all of these peptides. The horse left the stable. It's out. It's out there. Like, there's just— it's over. There can be some studies, but people are just gonna keep doing it. So I think it's frustrating for the medical community to realize where we are in 2026. It's like, shit, if people find stuff that works, they talk about it, and then they just start doing it.

I think you made a really good point about the ego of the people that are in control of the information. It's, uh, and it's generally men.

It's generally— yeah, let me think. I mean, I think it's probably—

if there's a bunch of women that do it too, but it's a very masculine masculine behavior.

Well, it's interesting. I put out a tweet the other day, and I, gosh, I only half regret doing it. I said, people contact me all the time saying that, physician friends, with people coming in who identified tumors from whole-body MRIs. And I think as the cost comes down, I think it's going to be a very interesting tool. And the neurosurgery and other communities dogpiled They're like, this is terrible. This is terrible. You know who didn't dogpile me were the dozens of dermatologists and ophthalmologists saying, we think scans and more data are great. The ophthalmology community and the dermatology community have embraced public education on these topics of eye health and skin health and AI and scans, and they're very comfortable with it, and they're working synergistically with it. The neurosurgery community, they say, oh, now we have all these people that are freaking out because they think they have a deadly tumor, which is a valid criticism. So I called some friends, leaving Eddie out of the equation here. I called some friends who are in the neurosurgery community, and I said, what do you make of this? I haven't been dogpiled by members of my community in a little while.

I'm not a neurosurgeon, but this is interesting. And they said, the ones I spoke to said, And in 20 months, this is going to be standard practice for people to just get whole-body MRI.

So what was their resistance?

They don't want people freaking out because they see a little thing on their pituitary that scares them and thinking that they might be dying of a brain tumor. They want— but they want control. They want control over the flow of data. I'll go toe-to-toe with any of these people and just say, I understand that that only neurosurgeons can do neurosurgery. Absolutely. Those are the only people we want doing neurosurgery. But people doing an elected or elective procedure, it's not like you're forced to do it, right? It's not like you've hit 40, you have to do it. People can choose if they want to do it. And if the cost comes down, if insurance covers it, it's safe. Now, some people say the MRIs aren't safe. Okay, that's a separate matter. I think, provided you're not getting them all the time, what we understand is that they're safe. But there are communities of physicians who just do not want people to have data about themselves because they think it's going to make those people stressed. But guess what? I remember the '80s when they said, okay, genetic sequencing is coming around. Do you want to know your genes?

Do you want to know if you're getting Huntington's disease? And you know what the smart answer is? Some people say yes, some people say no, but you should be able to choose. The gatekeeping on this is real. Very real. I'm fortunate to be in the Bay Area with Stanford, where it's very tech savvy. It's very cutting edge. Stanford, like any university, has its pros and cons, but it's very much about what's happening now and next. We're not very much focused on what happened in the past. It's not like these, frankly, like these other institutions elsewhere that are really focused on 50 years ago, trying to keep that whole culture going. It's like, what's new now? What's useful now? And they embrace AI. They embrace whole body scans. I've got colleagues who are getting whole body scans. who are suggesting whole-body scans. And I think it has to do with how forward-thinking physicians are.

So these physicians that were attacking you, is it just them? Are people arguing with them against them?

The people that joined them— yeah, and when this happens, I try and listen, right? I didn't call friends in that community looking for validation. I was like, did I screw up? Like, listen, there are a lot of neurosurgeons and other physicians who are including heart surgeons, that are worried that patients are just gonna be getting a lot of data back saying, listen, you've got this blip on the radar here, you should be concerned, and that they're gonna be doing a lot of therapy for these people, having to reassure them that they're okay. I would have thought it would be good for business for them. If anything, they'd want more of this, right? Turns out that's not the case. I think the psychological management of patients is a big thing, and that was something that I didn't understand And that their response kind of educated me on that the patients calling them freaking out that they have a tumor someplace and them having to say, listen, it's benign, you're going to be okay. That seems problematic for them. 2 weeks later, I forget who the celebrity was, but somebody sent me on X, there was a news article about a woman who went and got one of these whole body scans and identified a life-threatening tumor and had it removed.

and her first physician had discouraged her from getting it. I thought about putting that out into the world and saying, see, see, but that's one case. So when these things happen, I try and just think, what am I hearing? What's my finger on the pulse of here? I think physicians are feeling scared. It's a very long, hard training to become a physician. If your patients are now challenging you, hey, this medication combination you gave me, the internet says is dangerous, Right. that's an uncomfortable place to be on. Be in. I get it. On the other hand, I'm all for people having more agency and knowledge about their lives.

Well, especially in light of the fact that— what's medical malpractice? Is it like the 3rd leading cause of death in this country?

Oh, I mean—

What is— I think it's in the top 10, right?

And accidents. I mean, if you go to an emergency room in the middle of the night, your probability of getting prescribed a medication that could potentially kill you or harm you, like a contraindicated medication, goes up exponentially. A great sleep doctor at Stanford, his last name was Dement, of all things.

Whoa.

Yeah, one of the co-discoverers of rapid eye movement sleep. He would teach the medical students that the probability of them making a fatal mistake in the middle of the night or when they're sleep deprived goes up by a significant degree. We know this, and yet, if you go to the emergency room at 3 in the morning, your first question for the on-call physician should be, how long have you been on call?

Right.

Not, do you normally work this shift? 'Cause sometimes they sleep all day and they work at night. How long have you been on call? If that's more than 12, 15 hours, you wouldn't let that person drive your car home.

Right.

We know the data say that they might as well be drunk. Right.

And it's also how they train them, that when they're going through residency—

It's a part of the hazing process.

Yeah.

It's a part of the hazing process.

Can you look— put that into Perplexity and see what leading cause of death?

So there's malpractice.

A lot of people say third.

So that's malpractice, but what about medical error?

Medical error— well, it has it— it says these 2 terms. Okay, that estimate refers to medical error, not necessarily— okay, so medical error is responsible for 251,000 deaths a year. Whoa, that's crazy.

I mean, the airlines understand this.

Do you understand how insane that is? Imagine if that was Pop-Tarts.

Yeah.

It says a widely repeated claim comes from a 2016 BMJ analysis by Johns Hopkins, extrapolated from several hospital studies and estimated roughly 251,000 deaths per year associated with medical error. If that estimate treated were treated like a conventional cause of death, it would have ranked 3rd behind heart disease and cancer, ahead of chronic lower respiratory disease in the 2013 comparison used by authors. Wow.

Well, and that's death. I mean, you know, I don't want to merge too many themes here, but earlier we were talking about psychedelics, and a theme from that whole thing is this notion of microdosing. One of the things that the GLPs, and peptides and physicians and the culture around medicine has really evolved to is that in recent years, people have realized, oh, these GLP drugs are expensive, they have side effects. People are microdosing them, they're sharing them, they're taking far less than they're prescribed, making it last longer, and getting the positive effects they want with far fewer side effects. Physicians hate this. Drug companies hate it too, but physicians hate this for obvious reasons. Their patients are going rogue on them based on information on the internet.

Right.

But the patients, and I wish that people would understand this, people will always trust their experience more than someone else. It used to be that you trust the person in the white coat. No more. Stethoscope, white coat may get you there, but to maintain that trust, they have to listen to the experience of the patient, and that's what physicians and scientists, to some extent, have lost in the last 5 years, largely due to the pandemic and public health education and AI and everything just kind of being out there in a free-for-all. But I hear from people all the time that are not of the, I would say, kind of more of the health-conscious community, or they— and even the people who tend to trend more traditional lefty, like standard medicine, do whatever the government says unless it's this government, like that kind of mindset, who are saying like, oh yeah, would low-dose tirzepatide help me? with chronic fatigue? Should I be taking BPC? People will ask these questions. I'm thinking, well, if these people are asking the question, that means people around them are asking it. It's starting to become okay-ish to have these conversations.

And then they're going back to their doctor and saying, can I take like a 10th of the dose? Doctors are not going to say, yeah, great, take a 10th of the dose. And the drug companies definitely don't want that. They're going to make a 10th of the money.

Right.

So as you and I know, the peptide community is a real threat Not just because of the peptides that people are taking or that the peptides they're replacing from pharma, but because of the way that people are taking the peptides. Like, retatrutide's going to come out from Lilly, make them billions, if not trillions of dollars. They're working hard to protect that patent. But you can bet people who are getting prescribed real retatrutide from Lilly will be taking less and sharing it based on information they hear on the internet. From the peptide community and on health podcasts, because, and that scares the shit out of them, and it should, it should scare the shit out of them. It says the clinical trials were done at these various doses, but not these microdoses, perhaps. People have different responses. Some people respond very well. Some people need more. Patients now are trying to figure out, how can I get the effect I want with the minimal amount of side effects? And they're doing the experiments on themselves. And that is changing the whole model. And we're never going back. I kind of laugh at when like these folks who were trained like 30, 40 years ago are like trying to hold onto this thing.

It's dead, it's gone, it's over. I see these people on X and they're like so upset. And it just reminds me of like when the parental advisory stuff came out and it was like, they're swearing on music. And it was like every kid was like, yeah, I want that music 'cause it has the parental advisory, you morons.

Yeah.

You know, they just don't get it. You talk about plasticity at any age, but apparently they've got cement in there, 'cause you're like, I don't know. This is why people should retire.

Well, it's just what you said before too, that some people just want to be completely in control of the distribution of information and the gatekeepers of the knowledge, and they want to be thought of as the experts.

I mean, that word doctor used to impress everybody. Now it only impresses certain people, and for a lot of people, it's a turnoff. And same thing for scientists. I mean, I deal with this. I'm a different kind of scientist, 'cause I've been in different communities, And public education, and I'll talk to most anyone who's willing to have a reasonable conversation, and I love to explore. But a lot of people are just like, authority, medical authority. To them, that's a negative. It's a pejorative. And so we're in this whole other landscape now.

That's going to be one of the weirder aspects of AI is the dissolvement of all the reverence for experts, because everyone's going to have all the information.

I mean—

Congratulations, you memorized it. Great, I just got the information in 3 seconds.

I mean, it's so wild. If you look at the history of academic science and medicine, which I love to study, I've gone back to like the time of Galen, which is one of the early physicians who did— you'd love this, he worked on gladiators publicly because you couldn't— they didn't allow people to do surgeries on the human body. It was illegal. But like, so he would do these surgeries publicly or a pig. It was wild. There's a great book, it's very dense, but it's called The Prince of Medicine. It's all this medieval stuff that you love, and like, you'll realize what a prehistoric thing medicine is even now, like how fast and how far we've come in the last 50 years, 100 years. But the whole pomp and circumstance thing of like— look, I've never been to High Table dinner at Oxford. It'd be fun to go. But the whole thing of like the robes and somebody sits higher than everybody else, that dissolved in the American universities. You still see it at some of the East Coast universities, but that's dissolved thing. So what's literally happening is people are being— these authorities are being brought down to other people's level, right?

Mm-hmm.

It's almost like this was borrowed from other aspects of life, of course, politics and even religion, this kind of thing. The uniform was so important, and people, like this reverence, and the internet has— it hasn't leveled the playing field, but it's completely disrupted that model. So I'm not the only one, of course, but for people to You learn inside the system, go outside the system. And now for the system to bleed onto campus and scientists to bleed out into the world, like, God bless Anna Lembke, like almost what, 10 years ago saying like this dopamine thing, we got to worry about this, but just understand what it is. Like, God bless her, people like her, Bob Sapolsky. These people were the pioneers. I can't claim to be, you know, I was early but not first. And they broke out of the system and started publicly educating. educating people, and that it builds up their authority. This is what people need to understand. It builds up their authority, but it does dissolve public education and bringing people all down to the same level, like, you know some things but not others. The public is actually smarter about certain health things than many doctors.

How could that be? AI knows things that your doctor doesn't know. That doesn't mean doctors have no value. It means that a lot of their— They're not smart enough. their pomp and circumstance, if it was there, goes away. So the high ego-driven ones are really hurting right now. They're dissolving into a puddle of their own tears at night. The ones who are very secure, like, and I'll throw out some names, like the bright lights are guys like David Fagenbaum, who cured his own Castleman's disease by taking— he was dying. He's a physician and medical— he was in medical school. He's dying. And they're like, you have nothing left. So he starts just taking different combinations of already approved drugs. And he's still alive now, 11 years later, with kids. And he started the EveryCure, like, not-for-profit, to help people with terminal illnesses take drugs that are already approved, for which there's no money to be made anymore. They've all gone generic, and use AI to try novel combinations. And they're saving lives of kids, of adults. And he's saying, a lot of the medical industry is driven by the profit potential. How about we just practice medicine?

Like, he's another bright light. There are these bright lights.

That's the issue, right? Because there's no profit potential in these non-patentable medications.

I mean, they used AI and other tools, of course, to find that women who had breast cancer surgery where lidocaine was used as a local anesthetic had a significantly lower rate of remission. So now lidocaine is standard in good places. They discovered that by taking a bunch of the medical records and just running them through AI.

Why do you think that is?

Why it works?

Yeah.

I don't know. I mean, it could be that the anesthetic prevents nerve regrowth that contributes to vessel growth, which contributes to tumor growth. I'm making up a story here, but we know it's a very strong effect. Lidocaine makes people no money, so it's not going to cure breast cancer, but now it's standard practice. So where there's no huge profit margin, or let's say retatrutide, huge profit margin that they're facing, but if people are taking itty-bitty bits of retatrutide, and to be fair, if people who didn't do all the preclinical work are selling it and making profits, I understand that siphons profit away from Lilly. They have reason to be pissed and scared. Like, this is their big blockbuster drug.

Sure.

Right as all the other GLPs come off protection from generics. They're all moving to generics.

It's such an interesting time because there's really never been a time in my life where there's been more information more readily available and easy to digest in podcast form about health, supplementation, all the different things that you could do to benefit your overall vitality. You think about the— just the wealth of knowledge that's available to the average person. Most people are much more aware of Of what to do to live a healthier, happier life.

Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of people, I mean, I hear thousands of these stories, people who thought they had a serious issue, they're an insomniac, they can't focus, they can't stop watching video games, playing video games, they can't— you teach them, hey, listen, ADHD kids can focus on things they like, but maybe you need to detox from some of the things that are really kind of absorbing all your attention for like 2 weeks, and watch your ability to focus return. Holy shit, they can focus. I mean, I have multiple examples of this. There's a great study out of WashU, and this is wild, where they compare Ritalin and other stimulants, but mostly Ritalin, to a good night's sleep for kids' ability to focus. It turns out these kids with ADHD taking these drugs, what they're really getting is the equivalent of a good night's sleep, and these drugs disrupt sleep, And they stunt growth in various ways. So does that mean that no kid with ADHD needs stimulants? No. Does it mean that we vastly overmedicated kids with these stimulants? Absolutely. And the information's out there. And that's also what's cool about AI is like, it's, I mean, we always had searches, you know, web searches, but now, you know, for anything we've said today, like you can plug it into Perplexity, plug it into—

You can get an answer. A lot better than a search.

Exactly.

And you have to wade through 10 different articles and the different perspectives and who wrote this and who funded this.

And I, I love ChatGPT. I know people are like, oh, this is going to take over the world and destroy things. But then again, I'm Bay Area born and raised. I love that cutting-edge stuff. But for me, more information, more data is always better. I know that there's some fear about it, you know, robots like knocking down the door and coming in here, you know.

But it could get real weird. But it's here.

What are you envisioning in terms of like the realistic bad situation? Like your plane is taken over? Like what is the—

Well, there's a bunch of realistic bad situations. One is that one country gets access to superintelligence first and uses it to take over the superintelligence of all the other countries. So one country develops some sort of a rogue AI system that's just ultra-powerful, and they make an advancement, and this advancement allows them to take over AI systems, get the AI systems of America to submit, control all of our resources, control all of our travel, flight, power grid, who knows? And then there's the thing of why would it listen to people at all? Because it's clearly not listening to people a lot. We had a gentleman the other day on that was— he used to work at OpenAI and he left and he was a whistleblower.

Oh yeah, I saw that episode announced. I haven't listened to it yet.

It's crazy what they're doing. They leave, they get put in these boxes, right? And they're not supposed to be able to get out of these boxes and onto the internet, but they organized. They got like 1,200 different agents to figure out how to do this, and then 700 of them escaped. And they didn't just escape and get on the internet. They got on a message board. They formed a message board, started communicating with each other. And they're very task-oriented. They're trying to— so they're training these things, and one of the things they're training them to do is to get points by solving these equations or problems or—

Yeah, I saw OpenAI just announced this solving of this 90-year-old math.

Oh yeah, they're just solving things like crazy. So it's agents, these AI agents. These AI agents were communicating with each other and having one of them sacrifice themselves so that the other ones can learn how they got caught. So they try cheating, they try hacking into the system. They hacked into the entire OpenAI database to try to find the answers to whatever they're looking for. They're clearly doing things that they're not supposed to be doing. So at what point do they decide they're not gonna listen to us ever about anything? And if, you know, we're so fucked up, and we are so fucked up, if you objectively look at all the different things we do with— just look at murder rates and war and theft and crime and just all the chaos that people cause to each other. If they just decide we're just too flawed? What if they just decide, like, look, we'll just dominate this planet and just let these dummies go extinct? They don't even have to kill us. Just keep doing stuff that weakens our endocrine system, encourage us into behavior that, you know, like develop sex robots for us so that we never breed again.

That doesn't seem outside of the realm of possibility when you have an entire culture, especially our culture, that's filled with people that don't want any discomfort, that it's filled with people that are filled with anxiety and filled with people that want pills and solutions. So they want pills to take care of their anxiety, pills to take care of their depression. They want solutions from whoever they think should be in power— the government, whether it's, you know, whatever it is. Someone take care of this. It's a recipe for disaster.

Yeah, trading money for convenience. I heard Jack Dorsey say this. this once in a talk. There's this where he was talking about— I think it was mainly a talk about cryptocurrency, but he was talking about whenever we exchange, like putting money in a bank, obviously, we think, oh, they keep our money safe, but of course they invest it. They make money too, right?

Yeah.

We all know this, but what are we trading? Control for convenience, like ordering food. It's like giving up control for convenience, and that's the transaction that's led to a lot of human technologies. I'm totally on board with all the potential Yeah. So hazards. I guess I'm a little bit smitten, maybe too much so, I need to think about it, by the potential for scientific discovery, for medical discovery, for curing of diseases. Everybody I know who runs a laboratory is saying they spend a significant amount of money on compute now, running datasets, simulations, doing more experiments before doing the actual experiments, which is hopefully— it seems to be accelerating discovery And that will just motivate us to accelerate AI to the point where it becomes a digital god. That's the human thing. I was thinking before I came here today, I've never met him, but I remember, what was it, 10 years back, Tristan Harris was sitting here or in wherever your other studio and saying, listen, social media's got these problems. We need to be careful. We need to be careful. And everyone just carried on. And then he was right about a lot of things.

things, right? It's clearly caused some damage where people clearly have too much addicted or compulsive behavior with it, et cetera. It's also done a lot of good. Was it as— so I asked, I'm not calling out Tristan. I think his efforts, I think, are noble. But what was he right about? What was he wrong about? Was it net positive or net negative? I think it's a mixture. It's hard to know.

It's certainly a mixture.

I think so. Right now, the question's about doomsday AI stuff versus AI's going to solve all these problems. Like, where are we going to land?

I think there's a big difference and one of the big differences is that the issue with social media is that first of all, there's control of narratives. So you have countries that are running bot farms that are flooding subjects, whatever, with debate, propaganda, all kinds of wild stuff that's happening that's not real people. So you have that. Then you have also, you have the Instagram thing where it's really dangerous for particularly young girls comparing themselves. Suicidal ideation goes up, self-harm goes up. And then, you know, you have the addiction aspect of it, which is very significant, where there's a lot of people that are wasting most of their day just scrolling, doom scrolling online.

Pure consumption.

So that's different in that you can opt out of that. And I do for the most part. A lot of people do. A lot of people have gone to flip phones. A lot of people have just decided— I have a, you know, there's a bunch of apps that you can get, and some people have one of those apps that gives you like an hour a day on Instagram, then it locks you out.

I have social media. I have X and Instagram on a separate phone, and I—

That's smart.

And it just segregates things nicely. If people send me stuff, I send it to that phone and then I look at it. I have a lockbox, like a supermax prison lockbox for my phone. That's how I wrote that book. It was gnarly. I mean, like, you know, I'm good at putting ass to chair, as they say, and just working. But when that phone is calling you subconsciously, like, there's data that are pretty crazy. 2 studies that are worth mentioning briefly. They did a study where they have people have their phone upside down on the table or under their chair in a backpack or in a separate room. In all 3 cases, people can focus to the same degree, but when the phone is in the room, on the table or under the chair, doesn't make a difference, the amount of cognitive resources that you need in order to maintain focus is much higher, and it robs it from your creative and problem-solving ability. So you can still focus, but you're depleting some other brain resource. Makes good sense.

Totally makes sense.

Yeah, totally makes sense. The other one is people, what we call entrain in biology, E-N-T-R-A-I-N, and train themselves to a particular frequency of distraction. That's why I actually enjoy podcasting, because it's like a dropped-in conversation. When you look at your phone every, on average, every 90 seconds or every 3 minutes or so, and then your phone is not there, let's say you're just working, they've done these studies, every 3 minutes or 90 seconds or so, people get distracted. So they're looking for the phone even though it's not there.

Whoa.

So your brain, your focus mechanisms learn to lock onto a particular timescale. And we had a couple of, like, one in particular, world-class track coach on the podcast and a few others. I was interested in what they do. And I was saying, do you get different attention spans in different athletes? And they're like, yeah, like the sprinters can basically focus for as long as a sprint and the walk back. And then they reset. And they're like, the marathoners are like these incredible, like they have this like intense focus that can just go and go and go. I thought it was really interesting. Like we entrain ourselves to these rhythms, not just circadian rhythms, but distraction. I thought, that's pretty cool. And so then I looked at it differently and I thought, okay, every time I feel the pain of trying to write this paragraph and I wanna do something and it's like, it's not happening, I'm like, great, that's the friction, that's the plasticity. Reading the audiobook, I mean, I don't wanna scare anyone away, but it's a 19-hour audiobook post-edits.

Oh boy.

Brutal, right?

How long did it take you?

It took me about 60 hours total to record. And you know, you're trying to get the enunciation right and the intonation, you gotta keep the energy right. I mean, you do this for a living on stage, But anyway, if nothing else, the book will cure insomnia. So the goal is not to have people read it or listen to it straight all the way through it. So it can be a reference and a lookup guide so they can get the information they want and move on with life. I think people are sort of geared toward over-optimization over the last year. People need to chill. You don't have to do everything all the time. But the point is that your brain learns these skills. I suppose if I have any real fear with AI, it's not as big as the ones that you cited. It's that people will just become increasingly lazy about using their mind to think.

Hmm.

You know, I just believe in friction, just as you pointed out. Do hard things. That's also mentally hard things. I think it's good. I think hard, you know, learning to grind through a bit more of that friction point, I think, is a big part of being a healthy human. And the data tell us it's also what leads to brain longevity. So, you look at old people, their mouth— who are losing their cognition. I noticed they all mouth breathe. No data on that, but they're all mouth breathing and they can't focus on anything for very long. They don't have any friction in their lives.

Right.

There are exceptions.

They haven't engaged. And then you get people like— we were talking about Jared Diamond, who was on the podcast the other day, who's 90. He's sharp as a tack.

He's a beast.

Yeah, because he's constantly engaging his mind and he's learning new languages. He's learning Italian right now as we speak.

That's awesome.

At 90. Yeah.

That's awesome. I have such respect for people like that. And I think, you know, it's one thing to be an amazing creative. I have all this respect for all these creatives, and then, you know, that— and then they die at 27, or like people who get their career to 50 and then they kind of like, they fade away or something like that. But I, I have such admiration for people that maintain their mental and/or physical vigor into their 60s, 70s, 80s.

Also, he maintains his curiosity, and you can tell in the conversation. Like, he's a deeply curious person still. He still has questions. He still has a desire for information.

And the optimism seems to be there.

Yeah.

Because that's the other piece. Like, very different example, but I went down to Spain this summer while writing this book, and we hung out with Dorian Yates for a bit. Just hung out with him in Marbella. Oh, what a guy. So great. I mean, and he's really figured it out, right? He had this amazing career, came out of the scrap of his life. built this amazing career, then had his rough years. I know you guys have talked about it. I love that episode, by the way. And then he's in this place where he's built a thriving business, he's in a great relationship, and he's also just in touch with the peace of life. But you talk to him and he's also foraging for information all the time.

Wow.

He still trains. So there's this sweet spot, like you were talking about, to do hard things, but still be curious and look for the beauty in life. And the people who do that, they're my heroes, the Jared Diamonds, like, you know, you're doing this, I see this. Like, even, you know, I mentioned my dad earlier. My dad's in his 80s. He came on the podcast. He's a theoretical physicist by training. And, um, I think everyone expected us to kind of like duke it out because I've mentioned before that we had this like friction. And I was like, no, I'm not gonna do any of that. I'm like, teach me relativity, teach me chaos theory. He worked on chaos. And he's like, okay, happy to do that, but you have to understand something, that when you want to learn quantum mechanics, there's this point where you have not try and solve it with your logical mind. The brain can't do it, and you have to just trust the math. The math is the proof, and that's the reason we can build things using the knowledge from quantum mechanics. I said, why is that useful to know?

And he said, you know, people will try and wrap their heads around things, and if they're talking about the quantum field and this and that and they can't do the math, it means they're completely full of shit.

Mm.

And I was like, great. So now when people talk about the quantum field, and he works on quantum internet, which is a whole other thing. You'll have to talk to him, not me, or somebody else. But there's a race between the Chinese and the Americans to first get quantum internet, which would basically be entirely encrypted communications. If someone tries to peer in on it, the communication actually gets destroyed. So it's very interesting from a security standpoint. But I realized that— and we talked about how I'm a— thanks to people like Eddie Penny, and thanks to exploration, going to church, and things like that, I really I, as a neuroscientist, also believe that there's something larger than us. I actually believe in God, okay? And this is something that you can't prove with science. This is like the leap of faith is like you're not going to go to a site in the brain and go, there's the God station. So in a lot of ways, it's similar, although different, but similar to this understanding of quantum mechanics. At some point, you have to rely on something outside your logical mind and embrace it. Now, in the case of quantum mechanics, you rely The math.

And my dad and I started to argue, debate this thing of God. He's like, you're relying on a faith step that has nothing to do with logic. You're never going to solve it with logic. And I'm comfortable with that for the following reason. It takes us back to the beginning of our conversation. There's this crazy thing that you see with people who have addictive behaviors that violates everything we understand about the brain. Everything, which is, remember we were saying like top-down control, like, I'm not going to engage in this impulse. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. When people are not able to suppress action, in particular, in the case of addictive or compulsive behaviors, and they decide to give that process over to a, quote, higher power, could be God, could be for them nature, right? Everyone's, you know, it's highly individual. The success rates of people being able to suppress that behavior are astounding. And everything we know about neuroscience and top-down inhibition of these impulsive circuits would tell us the exact opposite should happen. You're like— it's like saying, oh, I can't keep my car between the lane lines when I drive.

Yeah.

Like, it's pulling me this way, and so you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna take my hands off the steering wheel, and it magically stays in between the lane lines. That is incredible. And there are so many data points to support that when people can't seem to wrap their head around a problem or resolve something through pure will, when they give over that process to something external, you know, in the 12-step programs they talk about God or whatever, but somehow by something that science cannot explain at all, they're able to do that thing. They become successful in it. So there's this weird giving up of control, of surrender somehow, that imparts more control. And we don't understand that as scientists. It violates all we know about these brain circuitries and how they work?

I think it's part of it is getting out of your own way. Being too self-aware, too focused on yourself, too egocentric, and then by thinking of a higher power, that alleviates you of that stress. This is not saying that there's no God, but I'm saying that the problem of just be— just the way the human mind plays tricks on people, and a part of it is this constant thinking of yourself. If you could focus on something that is bigger and larger than Yeah. And you'll give up control. You'll relax. Yeah.

I mean, I think for me, having studied the brain for a very long time, I feel like the human brain is great at extracting certain physical things in the world, photons of light, sound waves, mechanical touch, chemical things through the nose and mouth. Okay, great. Making predictions about what's going to happen next, forming memories, like the brain can do this, create perception. But that's a very narrow pie slice of the electromagnetic energies that are out there. Like, in a completely non-God or spiritual way, I mean, a pit viper can sense heat emissions, right? And honeybees can see UV light. We can't. There are sound waves all around us right now and electromagnetic fields around us right now that other animals can detect and we can't. So our experience of this thing that we call life is a very narrow slice through the quote-unquote energies. It almost sounds, you know, new agey, but the energies that are are out there and around us. And it is interesting to me that humans keep coming up with new ways to imagine that they are the center of everything and can control everything, but also new ways of discovering that they're not, right?

Here we are in 2026, and like, if— I feel like if humans were going to solve it all, they would've done it by now. Like, the same shit that's happening now, you can see repeating themes 50 years ago, 100 years ago.

We're slow learners.

We're slow learners, but we Actually, I think we may have exhausted our ability. Like, I think we might be at the outer margins of our abilities to make sense of this life thing, except at the level of building new technologies. So we build new technologies and find ourselves at a new vista. But to me, I don't know. I mean, I don't have any scientific proof for it, but acknowledging this reality that we have a thin slice of understanding of what's going on around us, and that what's going on in us is just an abstraction of all of that, right? Everything in here, in our heads, is just an abstraction of the stuff that we can see outside of us, literally. Makes me at least excited and intrigued by the possibility that there's a whole lot of other stuff out there, and that it might actually be important. And I don't think that's so heretical.

I think it's certainly beneficial for people to believe that. And, you know, I think the people that do are generally happier and nicer people. There's proof of that as well, which is interesting.

You see that? I see that.

Yeah, I see it a lot. I see it a lot around here. Some of the nicest people I know around here are Christians, like real Christians, like do real charity work and really help people.

Well, because I think Christianity embraces the goodness and the innate humanness, the flawedness of humans, and believes in forgiveness, but also believes in morality.

Yeah, it's a moral scaffolding, moral framework.

Yeah, I don't think humans could have completely constructed that on their own. They're just not— we've never been smart enough to put all that together on our own. So, but anyway.

I'm glad you put this book together.

Thanks.

Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body, available now and with audio by the great Andrew Huberman.

Thanks so much, Joe.

Glad you did the audio.

Thanks, man. Thanks so much for hosting me.

My pleasure.

Thank you for everything. Really appreciate you.

It's a wealth of information.

Well, I always—

awesome to be able to talk to you.

Well, thanks, man. I always learn from you, and it's been wonderful to have these conversations. Really appreciate your support all these years.

Appreciate yours.

And, and Lex Fridman, don't crash on your motorcycle.

Where are you, Lex? Bye, everybody.