#2553 - Andrew Huberman

The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day. Hello Andrew. I just see you guys. What a thick ass book you wrote sir.

Yeah I figured it doubles as a doorstopper 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 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 eight years. The operating manual or an operating manual for the human body.

Just sitting down there in front of the computer thinking I'm going to 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, he's just a good dude, Rick Rubin, he's like do you like it?

He goes scrape it. I'm like what? And then he said, how many got myself in trouble? He said, scrape it man, what are you doing? And I said, I don't think he's like you have to love it.

And then he said they're going to push you to release this thing. And I said, I already said I was going to release it. 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 our friends 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 p.m. until 2.30 in the morning every single night and waking

up. And I was like, what's the next morning? Like this book has been, why do you want vacation? I 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's just like checked in.

He's like, it's there. Like he can just feel like a fucking weirdo. I mean, he's, 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 trying to help them.

Like he really spends most of his time looking out at the world and trying to help people with their, with their art, with their stuff. That's really him. If you know him, that's him 24 seven. 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 taste maker, 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 now 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 we 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 rich. There's a, you know, I didn't come here to plug this, but we should because it's going to 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. Yeah. So Jay Z 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.

It's weird good. Very weird dude. He is a rational to right. I mean his whole thing. I mean his whole thing is he says there are only three things.

It used to be two, but he updated it to three 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. He's not professional wrestling because he said he's like, everyone agrees it's made up. So it's the only thing that everyone agrees that 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, 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, and 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 this is the first time going and that athletes all adore him. Like everyone loves him. He's their front row.

Oh, yeah. He's a huge fan. I think he's a lifetime member and, and, like time member. And he really can extract truisms about human nature from watching wrestling. Oh yeah, there we go.

I'm going all my red glasses on at that point. Oh man. The red glasses. Well, it's wild is at one point. The guys are climbing the ladder.

They're going to grab the thing and they're both going 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 getting some sort of dope. I mean, he just goes, he's just there, experiencing it, that he's not like pulled into it. Yeah, I need to just 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 leak psychedelic chemicals all the time. Whatever plane of consciousness he's on.

I've always thought that about schizophrenics. I wonder if that's what's happening. I wonder if they have some dump of psychedelic chemicals that's constantly leaking into their brain. Because 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? So, the conclusion was auditory. Auditory. Auditory.

Yeah. And that's mostly what people deal with. Especially, paranoid because of pharynx. 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 called tardide dyskinesia, which is a suppression of the motor system.

And so you'll see people who are doing this like writhing like this. You'll see them on the street a lot. Sometimes that psychosis, a lot of times that's psychotic people who are taking their anti-psychotic medication. Yeah. But you know, it gives you some empathy.

It's not even the voices. It's not the voices. Shut the fuck up. I think some have auditory hallucinations, and most have auditory hallucinations. Sorry, some have visual, excuse me, some have visual hallucinations, but most have auditory hallucinations.

And you know, this sets in usually around mid-early 20s. And what's weird is years ago, I had a meal with a then director of the National Institute of Mental Health. His name was Bob Desmond. And he said, do you know why they're so little money for research on schizophrenia compared to say autism? I was like, why?

Because it's not because of 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, you know, doesn't run completely through families, oftentimes the parents of schizophrenia will have schizor pharynx or not. It's like they now call them schizor people. They'll have not typical thinking, right?

It doesn't mean they're crazy, but they're off. And so they're not bad people, but they're placed in society often doesn't position them. It's like sit down with a senator and say, hey, listen, you know, my kids got autism and we need more research on this. And so a lot of what 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 two monozygotic identical twins, right?

If one is paranoid schizophrenic, the other one will be paranoid schizophrenic isn't 100 percent, 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 stress.

Methamphetamine use. I mean, again, the stress. The stress. The stress. Also, methadids just seem fucking out of their mind anyway.

So, I mean, there's this meth strength thing that I've never seen proven, but you can find these videos of like meth that's carrying refrigerators down the street and they're not jacked. There's like carrying refrigerators down alleys and people talk 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 hyper-dopaminergic state, right?

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, viadmene. 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, Vivance, Modafino, Artemodafo, every single drug that can make you more alert and focused, I talk about the pros and cons. 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. Right, this is actually very relevant to the conversation about MDMA, methylenedioximethamphetamine, 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. How did it accidentally mix those two? I don't know what happened.

They did publish- Why are they having methamphetamine laying around the lab? Oh man, you should have come to my lab when I run a lab until a few years ago. I still teach, I shut my lab, but we had all sorts of goodies in there. Do you ever worry about your students taking it? No, because anytime you use a federally controlled drug, you have to account for every last micro leader of that.

Someone's coming and checking all the time. We also worked with viruses. My lab at one point was using cinbus viruses, modified rabies viruses, adenoviruses, and on and on. We had some labels on the wall like this, a lab that works with viruses, and we also had controlled substances, and that's just how it goes. This is only one way.

You've got to figure out what makes what happened in the human brain. 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.

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. But methamphetamine and MDMA are very different. MDMA, there is no evidence that it's neurotoxic.

You don't hear those stories about people who took MDMA that had holes in their brain? It probably wasn't MDMA, it probably was more methamphetamine, maybe mixed with a little bit of MDMA. The great of this was finally legal and produced in ways that were reliable and administered in safe ways and all that. But that trial that passed through the FDA failed for two reasons. This last round, it might go through the next round, but it failed for two 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 it wasn't a good placebo. Fair enough, although a lot of drugs deal with that issue. Otherwise, there was one, maybe two sexual improprieties of the therapists.

There was a couple therapists 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. And so if it's going to pass in the next few years, they're 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, can be dealt with after.

But the real issue is the therapist operating their best interest. And because the psychedelic community has always existed, and I'm a big fan of psychedelic so 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, the person's saying they have all this trauma in their feet and the therapist rubs their feet. 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 of the clinical trials of what the dosages might be, healthy dosages, how frequent, like two sessions with a booster, 80 milligrams in, and then a booster of say 50 milligrams halfway in or by body weight, space three weeks apart for psilocybin, maybe just once for an 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.

People 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 you know, these, you know, I have friends in the 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 like a huge amount of pain, do you encourage them to go into that pain and purge it? Or do you tell them, hey, listen, you know, 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. Yeah. And you know, and then, you know, I've been reading a lot about the history, the counterculture history and stuff.

I joined the board of Estolene, which is 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 like yoga classes and like, and it has that, but there's a serious focus on human potential there. And you know, in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and even in the 90s, all these somatic therapies came along, you know, in 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. It 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 and pathogens? Is touching people, is that normalized in the psychedelic community when they do this? Not necessarily.

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It's just that psychedelic assisted therapy sits in that constellation of like somatic therapies, talk therapies, breathing therapies, emotive therapies, 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. My hope is that as more techniques come along, different breath work practices, different supplements, different drugs, different peptides, that people will start to understand some of the principles of how things work to decide what's worthwhile or not. So for instance, for trauma, we know that it's basically four steps. It doesn't matter if you use getting through trauma.

It 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. 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 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 because you're trying to uncouple the memory from the emotions. There's no losing the memory. You're trying to uncouple the emotions from the memory.

And then the fourth piece, which is something I touch on with respect to grief and trauma therapy more generally is there's this beautiful thing that, you know, I guess on your podcast that talked about you 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 if it's four steps, if we just say, you know, 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, you know, teen years and twenties, there was this overemphasis on like 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 like 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. One of the studies that maps is done with MDMA with soldiers and PTSD because that's been probably one of the most prominent things. Yeah.

Well, that Rick Dablin obviously is more qualified to get into the specifics, but I know of at least three clinical trials looking at MDMA at dosages that are by body weight, but they're not like outrageously high dosages that have people move through their PTSD within a matter of, you know, four to six weeks total. So with two 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, but 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, hey, I want to learn martial art and you're like, yeah, get into the octagon and get your ass kicked, you know, and that's going to, you know, 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 that needs to be talked about if we're going to get this legal. How many deaths? I'm aware of two.

And is this in those clinics or is this? Yes. And they have to report them. And is it a heart failure? Like, because I know that there's heart issues.

Heart and breathing. So they're linked obviously, you know, heart and breathing. And people are heart rate monitored. I know of many people and they're many of your friends like, and they've talked openly about this stuff. So DJ Shipley and the Capone, you know, Marcus Cone and others and many, many others who feel that they've benefited tremendously from these therapies.

They have other names that are 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 Ryan. 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's said he had gone through extracisms.

Is nobody saying that? I mean, I think if you think about my experience of psychedelics, I've not done I have a game, 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 think of demons or thinking of like, in their like drives that are a part of the human system? So I have a lot of thoughts about this. So neuro, 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. So the first thing that I think about 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 two. I mean, the seven deadly sins, right? Are all the hypothalamic structures like rage, envy, lost, et cetera. But the forebrain can be built up. You can learn things that the 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, rode in his diary. He's an ex-marine. This was many years ago and then killed his wife and his mother with a knife.

You know what 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's door.

I think a 15th guy's later. Yeah. So, but here's where it gets interesting, right? I mean, this is horrible, right? One woman was pregnant, so they counted that.

I think it was a total of 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 what we would call low level brain structures involved with 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 me 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 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?

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 to do a lot of combat, you've seen a lot of horrible things. Horrible, horrible things.

My good friend, Eddie Penny, he was also a tier one operator. Great name. Great name, great guy. He has a way to enjoy conversation. Another tier one 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. Like, you know, actually, church and I know you've been going to church has been interesting 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.

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. 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 Some 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 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've 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 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 math. 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, you know, thick black lines as, you know, I like to think of them.

Otherwise, you can't mix, 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's a shaman. Because it's, I think it's probably very real, some parts of the world.

And it's also probably a very much bullshit thing in America. It's like expert in America. Well, there's some real experts in America. There's probably more real experts in the real shamans. You know, the shaman thing is very weird.

A lot of it is 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 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 experience is 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. And you cannot win.

And it just overwhelms you and then your anxiety kicks in. What I have experienced 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, 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 that you probably have to do. And then something comes along like DMT or like Selicide or something, which just overwhelms the normal state of consciousness. If you were 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 and therapy, which is lifetime, you know, it works 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 you know, just basic experiences that I wish I had had. And it was incredibly sad in the moment. But then it opened, you know, after some period of time, like what kind of experiences? You know, listen, I had a better childhood than many, much better than many and harder than others were, you know, 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, you know, 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.

He was a friend of mine that succumbed to drugs or suicidal mental health issues. Now, mind you, the other two thirds did great. And some of them started companies like DC and, you know, like 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 was I have a good relationship with my dad now, like, 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 team, when I really needed structure and I really needed certain things that were just were not happening. And my home life was depressing. It was really empty. It was really depressing. And so when I 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 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 forge 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, I knew her daughters and neuroscientists. Like incredibly close to her. She had 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 two weeks after I'd 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 Bracko mutation, which is predisposed to cancer. And that one like devastated me. And then my postdoc advisor died of pancreatic cancer like a year into my faculty appointment and he had a heart attack sitting across from me, you know, 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, you know, but then what's wild is that, you know, 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 for after a back injury and he's dead. And no one talks about it. Like everyone's like, oh, yeah, yeah, he was a member of the National Academy. It'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 there's going to get depressing for a moment before it gets light. End of 2017, three friends of mine from childhood. There's a graffiti artist's name is he went by Orphan or a friend. This brilliant artist.

He did so much cool shit. His name was Aaron Curry dies of stomach cancer. My good friend, John, I go Barry from childhood and my different 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 podcast is like my science colleagues, they don't know how to manage their stress. They're they understand the science of stress, but they look like shit. Their kids are a mess. They have all these anxiety.

So where's my physician friends? I can count on one hand the number of them that are healthy of mind and body who have healthy kids. Like, you know, 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.

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 veteran 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 die to fentanyl anyway. We don't know. I mean, we need to- Both of the deaths are connected to fentanyl use?

My understanding is they had to use fentanyl prior to going to use Ibogaine. So maybe in this discussion, a few people will be sensitized to like that. It'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. And for all we know, they might have snuck fentanyl. We don't like to think that they might have, but who knows how closely they did it? But they're really hooked. Yeah.

I mean, it's more from your world of martial arts and stuff, but we know people who, we hear they go down to Mexico, they're going to do this treatment, they're going to come back there better and like a week later, they don't sound so much better. I pray for these people. I want the best. Like 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 transpire between those friends dying.

People will sometimes call me on bullshit. So Aaron Curry, John Michael Berry, Johnny Fair, best fucking kids I knew. Awesome graffiti artist. One of them was in the MoMA. Orphan went into the MoMA for his graffiti.

This is a bad ass graffiti artist. Stomach cancer got him. Like shit can happen. Stomach cancer didn't do anything wrong. They just one clearly had a mental issue or otherwise he wouldn't have taken his life.

The other two I cancer. So within 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 trans-cranial 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 in 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. He was a type one do like, fuck is right. Fuck is right. So what does it tell us?

I've had to, I tried to intellectualize these things too much, but what does it tell us? It tells us that knowledge is not sufficient to take care, to protect us. Like, I feel like the data are in bold conclusion. Banner across the sky, knowledge does not, 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 about, 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. 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? You know, if I, I don't want to make more of like what I did in the book or what I'm trying to do in the podcast or public education, but like, let's say the ice bath, for example, I've taken a lot of shit for the ice bath thing. You have to.

We both know they don't like the cold. That's why they're talking about this. But we know for certain, I go through the data finally, give it, putting yourself into a hydrenal in 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, you know, not young children, right? Why, you know, does increase metabolism, marginally does increase cortisol?

No, that's a bunch of horse shit 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 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, right? 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 a hundred benefits of that and probably a thousand things that go wrong when you don't get enough sleep chronically, a couple of 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?

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 two giant projects in his lab, two companies, managing a family, managing a life. I'm not going to claim he was a perfect human being, but like it's just like overwhelmed.

His forebrain turned on him. Yeah, overwhelmed was real. Yeah. You can only redline your system for so much. I mean, you know people have done this.

I mean, you know people are not being friends with David Cho. 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 he's fucking awesome. And like a very smart guy. So smart.

He figured out how to keep it together. He did. 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, and you can just tell he's like, there's this understanding that comes from hard driving people that like, okay, I've not wanted to ever take my life. But like you can, I can relate to Nolan.

Just want out. You can't take 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 shoot. I think some people just go down that shoot.

And you know, David and I were talking about this because I know you guys have common friends and some who succumb to things and some who really like rose and 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 of the beauty of like all these amazing things in life. And 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 die. They some took their own life and the shit. And but there's, if I just keep doing really hard things, I'm going to 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 and 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 Strommer, one of my heroes from the clash, right?

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 like joy of like having made it over some bump or something and seeing goodness and having great relationship now with my parents is taking a lot of work, but we're really in a good place, appreciating all the gifts they gave me, seeing people leave. And like I have such love for Nolan and for all those people, I mentioned like, I just love them.

And understanding that the grief is just love is, man, I'll tell you like, and I probably could 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 and you go, whoa, like, there's so much goodness. So I don't know. I mean, if the psychedelics can help people with 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 song on the goal plunge.

Life just seems more beautiful. It really does because you're not overwhelmed with this 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 is like world wars and fucking financial collapses and there's so much shit going on and 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. 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. I've taken days off, three days off and then at the fourth 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. And I think there's a lot of people out there that are 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 four days. A state of 40 years of nothing, doing nothing and just letting your body just go, you know, you have dogs, right? You know, it's like when your dog doesn't get exercise, dogs fucking exercise. I knew one has, he's part of Bulldog but part pit too. And I'm keeping his nuts on this time.

Because my last dog, you know, I was like, in fact, I was like, in a TRT late in life and he felt so much better. This time I'm keeping strombers. I'm keeping strombers nuts on this dog. So much fucking energy. Yeah, you got to throw the ball.

You got to throw the ball. This dude. I have him running on the treadmill in the morning. Oh, wow. I take it from the wall.

I train him from the time he was nine weeks to run on the treadmill. Does he like it? He loves it. He'll haul ass it. Like right now he's up to five on a two incline and he's just like at the back of that thing.

He falls off. He jumps right back on people like don't want to earn his joints. I've raised Bulldog breeds before. I'm not going to blow out his joints. Okay.

He is so stoked. He will just run and run and run. And then I don't wait and I'll put the liver tree there and then when he gets that thing his ears flopping. He's going like and you can tell when he's done it's what you're describing. He's chill so peaceful.

Oh, I throw the ball from my dog and then we come in and sit down. He just lays on his back and rub his belly. He's just so happy. This is martial. You got another one right?

Charley. Charley or Kintral. Charley, he's amazing. He's a little love machine. All he wants to do is kiss you.

He's just kiss you constantly. The Charley or Kintral's 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 learn three things when you go meet these hundreds of different pure breeds.

First of all, people can 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 Otterhound and he's got a big beard. He looks just like friggin' around.

Well, Jean, Carl, are a fuckin' contradiction to that. That's true. That's true. It's a chimee compliment. That's true.

That's true. The other thing you learn is that the pure breeds, in addition to being shaped a certain way, like they have a certain demeanor. Like there's variation, but there's a demeanor. You know, and the bulldogs are kind of goofy, you know, and the sight hounds are like locked in and looking at. And I swear some dogs are smarter than others are like counting how many people are in the environment.

They're doing math, basically. Whereas, strummers just like, either lying upside down. The shepherd dogs. Yeah, they're doing math. They're counting all the time, counting for everything.

And then I leave there and I go, I turn to my girlfriend and we're like, which breeder we in? And I go, we're getting a bulldog mind. Like we're going right back to the one I already had. And she's like, all right, like, you know, she's pretty easy going about that. And I'm like, you have not experienced bulldog love because they're just, they're heatiness.

They just want love, comfort. They want to chase the ball. They have this much forebrain. And these are 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 just going, quote, dumb enough and just smart enough. Damn, I like the perfect life. Like, it depends on the breed. I mean, the Malano's are malady.

The Malano's are. Well, Belgian Malano's are. Malano's excuse me. Meat missiles. Yeah.

Those little fuckers. They can be great dogs. I know people that have them, but you have to be on them two hours a day. They need tasks. They need to make fights.

World champion. They can fucking leap over buildings. Like, you can't just have them lay in the yard. They'll go crazy. They don't potato.

No, they need things to do. 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 watch TV together. I just pet him. If I don't pet him, he looks at me and then I got to start petting him. Oh, man. This episode is brought to you by Visible.

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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. In terms of supply, see Visible.com for plan features and network management details. 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 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.

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.

Just for your overall health and life expectancy. You know the Andy Stumpf came on the podcast. I love him. 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 Wing suit, and that's a beautiful example of dogs helping someone at one point. I like took that dog and all sorts of crazy shit. That dog, Rogan was very devoted. Dogged it not only better.

That was life. You know what the dogs to talk to? Imagine you're that guy's dog. Like you just assume it's as normal. But the other piece there, like talk about dopamine and drive and you know life and death.

I feel like that movie was such a key insight into the relationship between drive when it's in love and love of craft, love of people, and then drive when it's competitive in an unhealthy way. Like how the Buddhist talk about ego and ego is great because it can drive us in certain pursuits, that can build things for us, family, society. But then how it can, 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 a full moon in the background.

It's still dangerous. But there was like this piece in him. And I think about this all the time because Rick talk, Ruben talks about this. When we're doing something out of like love of craft, even if we're 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.

But then when it's competitive for the wrong reasons, it, 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 Hanole coming up on his heels and Hanole was better than him, right? And he started getting competitive about this kid who was going to take away his legacy. He started making stupid mistakes.

He started getting hurt. He started getting angry. His mental health got much worse. I mean, Hanole's the last guy I would want coming up from my slot, right? Because 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. It doesn't seem to be there right now. At least not visibly, which was hyper competitive with the guys that he had grown up on. And he 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, it starts doing stupid shit. 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 that's like, yes. Then he's just doing things that he's like, just happy he didn't die. Two 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. 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. It was quite feral. This was until what age? Until 15, until 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 love the thing that I was doing so much, I found so much interest in it and so much passion in it. And 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, whether it's rounds on a 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.

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. I had to get disciplined later on in life when I stopped competing in particular because then there wasn't 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 zag 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 to discipline. I didn't develop discipline until after I stopped competing. And then I realized like, well, I should just work out because I should work out and I should eat well because it's good for you.

And I should lift weights because it's probably good to be strong. 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 it 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 going to be the kid with the perfect room and then I'm going to be the kid that washes my hands all the time. Then I'm going to be the kid that's just all about cleanliness. I think I do think that, you know, is obsessive compulsive disorder versus being passionate about something.

Ah, so here I can, 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 hand washing thing, they're like, oh, I have something on my hands and go and wash it and it just makes them want to wash more and more and more. And you know, 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 Rappaport, 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 to basically have an accelerator and a break on action. The basal ganglia have these, you know, it looks a lot like a gear system in a car when you really don't just draw it out. The people who have true clinical grade OCD have an enlargement for whatever reason of sub-regions of the 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, you know, getting infections out and getting dirt away is adaptive when it's done in a healthy way. You know, there are all these people and there's actually a paper, I hate this paper, but it's a real paper that like watching ziploc popping, like stimulates dopamine.

This is why people do this. I can't watch these things. It's like, you know what people like? Shout out to Dr. Pimplepumper.

Someone sent me this paper. I'm like, I got this and I'm like, I'll be like, and I look at it. I'm like, I'm like, this is a paper. Someone actually ran the study and now this explains a lot of the internet, this internet. There's a component in all of our brains that get some sort of satisfaction from the removal of infection, right?

From relief from infection. And so this feeds into these basal ganglia circuits. For some people, it's compulsive water drinking. I mean, on a Lemke of dopamineation talks about a patient of hers that was basically addicted to water, compulsive water drinking, because they actually die. It's very, very sad.

Like in all seriousness, like over-ingestion of water in this woman's head. Yeah, it does kill people. I remember I hope there was a lady who was doing a contest for the radio to get like an Xbox for her son, like how you can drink the most water. I think it's called hyper-natremia or something like that. Could have that wrong.

But the, you know, people who have OCD about germs, often germs are bad, but you know, 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. You know, some people they just, for reasons we don't understand, they have overactive areas of the brain. It's a positive tale that you might like because it has to do with Jiu Jitsu, of which I do know. But I have a close childhood friend whose 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 seven.

And he's like, and it's 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. And I go, what are you going to do?

And he goes, well, he's got a tumor and he's really into Jiu Jitsu. And he really admires Joe and Chaco. And would you think he'd come up? I was like, yeah, just to get to see my childhood friend do brain surgery. So I go there.

I meet this guy. This guy has a tumor that needs removing from the frontal lobe. So 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 look awake. Oh, wait, excuse me. They definitely keep them alive.

I love that you don't edit the show. So you're like, this proves why he speaks on it. He's definitely alive going in and coming out. He's alive today. I spoke to Eddie this morning.

And they basically remove, you know, they 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, you know, 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 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. OK, 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.

He's putting into a plate, goes off to biopsy. But this guy is awake the entire time. Incredible. 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.

This has been written up in the news in a patient poncho who, at least 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 bioengineering. Of course, he created ways that this patient can now speak. And the first thing poncho ever said was, hello. And you say, how are you doing? And the AI is learning his speech patterns.

It's taken what would normally be sent to the fairings and larynx, right? Because after all, speech is just an exhale that's controlled by the fairings and larynx in the tongue. And the AI gets better at understanding what this person wants to say. And now he's got patients literally. There's still wheelchairs, right?

Wielding 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 UCS 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 his 60s. From what I understand, he's serious. He rolls five or six days a week. He's like, really into this. And he's now rolling Jiu-Jitsu.

This tumor, which would have killed him, is out. He's alive. He's thriving. And 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 Blanken 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, 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, nearly? 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. And, 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 a 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, like, maybe never need his help. In fact, there's one of our public facing health colleagues. I'll tell you this, because 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 a egg shaped, egg sized infection there.

Okay, so the surgery had gone awry, got an infection. And he was paralyzed, and they said that we're going 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 Eddie that did the surgery, but it was someone in his department that removed this egg sized infection.

And Eddie called me from the surgery, okay? 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 were bacteria that exist in other places that were 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. Oh. They screwed up some, someone screwed up along the way, okay?

And this, 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. The injection help?

Oh, I don't know. So I asked, you know, so what, what, what was it that allowed you guys to do this, that, you know, another clinic might not have been able to do, you know, because I like you and very interested in what makes for good doctors versus so-so doctors versus lousy doctors versus superb doctors. He said it's two 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 you know, 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 three dimensions, it's a completely different picture. Like you're, 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 a vessel into other brain structures. We have to go after that stuff. And I said, what are the margins of error?

He said, you know, less than a millimeter in some cases. But and you're by hand, they're picking out tumor little by little by little, too, trying to 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, you know, the person's bolted in, basically, they got a stereo text bolted to the table, literally, can't move your head. I can speak, but he can't move his head.

But they're 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 the whole thing. The patient, the patient has been very willing to do this.

This guy is a true medical science stud. He's a, and he's an awesome family man and friend and he's just a, he's a hero of science, in my opinion. So what are they using like tiny little scalpel? So here actually is the technology he's using to record from and stimulate the brain. If you put in, Jamie, if you go to, well, what is that?

So inside the head that is 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 an ancho paralyzed eddy Chang. I did. I got the story here from New York. 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. Because Eddie came up through a lab by a guy by the name of Mike Merznick. And I actually talked 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. And then basically three guys.

It was Mike Merznick, a guy named Michael Kilgard, who's down in Dallas, or maybe it's Houston. He's here in Texas. And a guy named Greg Recanzone, who is this brilliant scientist, they did these studies at 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 drums got bumps on it like Braille. Okay. And the 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.

And they're like 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. 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, if they press, if 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. For 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. 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. But if you're trying to do this, I don't know martial arts. I'm into a little bit of a tie box and I was younger. I boxed in my 30s, which was really dumb by the way.

I was a neuroscience professor at Spa on Wednesday nights in San Diego. We got all these Marines and all these team guys. I was so dumb. I'd come home like all busted up. My girlfriend was like, what are you doing?

I was like, I like it. She's like, you don't get paid to do this. You know? But it was a lot of fun. I wish it wasn't bad for your brain.

I 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. That's not like you develop a closeness with the people that you spar with respect. And I wasn't fast enough.

I don't think my timing was really good. I eventually learned that I got the 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. Most people get good at striking. Striking in particular. They start out very young. 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're probably never reset level. It was like me with a perfect example. And he's else. There's something about him. He's 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 young. And he had a dad who was a world class boxer and an uncle who was a world champion boxer. He was around it from the time he was young. So there's pathways that they develop and their body develops and grows while striking. And there's something about the maturation process of the...

This is 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 are maturing they were learning it. And it seems like there's a fucking... There's something that they have that you don't get later in life. You can get really good if you're a good athlete.

You're never going to get the best of ever world champion status. You have to have a super long journey. 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 fainting and how people react and how to map out potential reactions from certain mood, how to lure them into things. It's too much.

I learned a lot boxing and at least three things. One is that landing, like sinking like a one-two combination feels really good. It feels really good. It's hard to do. It's hard to do.

I also learned that there's this thing called a really good counter puncher where you land a jab and you eat four. And the world's just spinning. You're seeing stars. I also realized that six-pack abs don't mean shit. You're down near the Mexican border.

The gym I trained out was pretty far south in San Diego. And some guys would roll in and you wouldn't think much of them. Everyone would spar on Wednesday. They'd try and match people up by weight. You see guys that didn't look in shape who could move and you just get battered.

They know how to move properly. So that was a good teaching. Then the last thing that I really took away and I think about this on the internet too is there's always one guy in the gym who moves really well on the bag who's like speed back and heavy bag just looks so crisp, super in shape and they never spar and they sit 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, because in skateboarding I wasn't that good of a skateboard but I'd be like, like, come on, like, drop in, like, let's go. Like, have fun.

Like, skateboard's a very inviting sport. It's not like surfing or like guarding the waves, right? And I was like, come on in. I was like, oh no, I'm I'm sure. 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. 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'd be careful, you have to be careful with that one because the guy could have gone and they're taking my head off. But I was realized I was like, there are a lot of people that hang out on the skirt. Like hang out on the skirt and just give advice all day.

Like, don't court screw your jab, court screw it. I'm like, who are these people? You know, like, so it's kind of nice actually to get that experience. I mean, it was late in life. I mean, I talk 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 fighting is 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 on those lines and boxing 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 Hammer 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.

By doing it full clip, because if he catches you, like he gets your arm, you just tap and then you go again. As long as you're going 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 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 with only does a point karate sparring and you're just touching each other and they stop touching you and then you're in some wild melee in a bar where someone 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 a hold 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 if you're going to really learn how to fight like striking, you're going to get hit and you're going to get hit a lot and you're going to be hitting people a lot and you're going to 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 really serious injury is greatly mitigated by tapping and good training partners. I need to get into it. It's such a fun thing to learn too. It's why we talk about boxing.

I think combat, to some people, it just feels good. There's a circuit there. There's actually a friend of mine who's got a lab 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. We always hear like, oh, they just want pleasure and no pain.

Male mice have a circuit and they will work their asses off, figuring out puzzles that were perplexed 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 never 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 all they love fighting. That's crazy. They never knew that.

Oh yeah. They'll work hard and the reward is they get to fight a mouse. I mean, the mouse fight another mouse. 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. 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 was a boy school.

It was all dudes. They all had to box. Everyone had to box and they 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, but you don't work on each other.

The idea was you were supposed to, you know, both learn the gentlemanly aspects about, you know, touch gloves and things afterwards. You have to like, you know, so there's that and 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 and beat you up. He's just value in it and his value and 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 going to experience pain and severe discomfort and a very perplexing puzzle trying to figure out it, 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 you're doing. It's a very difficult thing to do.

And those very difficult things do make the rest of your life easier. It's like we're talking about getting shit for cold punches. I don't know if I get shit for talking about cold punches, but anybody who doesn't think you should cold punch hasn't cold punched. People that do it and the people that say don't do it, they're coming up with excuses because it's fucking terrifying. Nobody likes it.

It sucks. Well, what I was going to 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 punch, your life's going to be better.

And I think a thing like martial arts, particularly jujitsu, 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 we did a sober October challenge where we did 15 days of yoga in a month. Yeah, 90 minute sessions. Was burnt doing this too?

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 become the nicest person on earth. And the rest of your day is so much easier than that last 15 minutes of struggle. Sweating 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 going to suffer. There's a balancing act that you have to acknowledge. It's interesting how the two things that really seem to catch fire out there where the idea that cold plunges, block hypertrophy and strength adaptations, if done in the six hours after weight training, but you can do it before. It's tremendous.

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, court is all bad, court is all bad. I mean, the entire book could be summarized as get your morning, court is all high and your nighttime court is all low and your life's going to be a hundred 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. So all these people are like chronically stressed, the state of the world, not 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, right?

Just uncomfortably cold, then get out exercise of some sort that's high intensity interval training or lifts them weights that are heavy for them. That kind of thing for 45 minutes to an hour for the weights, maybe just 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 blunt. 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. They're like, oh, I can't sleep. I'm stressed. And this and that will you 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 it 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 will be so much better off. And everyone's like, oh, I already am too stressed and cortisol's gonna make me retain fat. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, excuse.

People love excuses. Excuses why not take action or that's one of the greatest things that people indulge in. People love excuses, the, we didn't close the hatch on the neuroplastic. 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 allow the circuits to change. I wish I'd been told this in the third 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 is the first gate of learning opening. And right on the other side of that is that 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 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.

It doesn't make sense. That's neuroplastic. Particularly in martial arts, the kids, when you see kids, the kids get really frustrated when they don't learn, and they get really frustrated, and they get really upset if they get tapped, they usually wind up getting really good. Interesting. Yeah, the more.

The ones are very emotionally attached, as long as they can control it. But there has to be, you can't go, wow, you got me. It's got to be fuck. Right. Fuck.

And then harnessing it. And then pulling back, and then going to this next one, and this is just. Right. It's day calm, but that fuck, even if you don't express it outright, that fuck thought in your head is always going to be theirs. 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.

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 very unique drug. It increases dopamine and serotonin together. Normally they're on a bit of a seesaw, but they 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? Well, dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, norepinephrine, epinephrine also called adrenaline. Okay, well that's a big list of molecules.

The key discovery of those guys, Merzinek, Repenzone, and Kilgarde 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. It's not specific to one neuromodulator. And if you give somebody perprenololol, a drug that blocks the receptors that adrenaline binds to after learning, they won't learn as well. They 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 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 McGaugh have people want to look at a beautiful little drink and they cite studies that 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. Yeah.

So nicotine, for instance, people think is 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, 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, you're fun. 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 try to let it nicotine zen.

I'm not. I have a lot of nicotine. That's probably my favorite, like the threes because it's mild. Yeah. I'm not going to take them for a time and I take them before shows.

I like to suck on them before going stage. But my one application 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 have horrible cravings.

They can't tolerate it. They go nuts. They just need, they need nicotine. And I'm sitting there like on day two, like wait 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, 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 a shit ton of caffeine. I mean, I got a picture of my half-argentine. So there's a picture of me on my grandfather's lap drinking mattee from a gourd when I'm like three years old and my Spiderman pajamas, you know, people on the internet, they go, 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 like, oh man, I don't know if I'm addicted in the classic sense, like I'm not going to go rob old ladies to get caffeine.

I'm not, I'm not, you know, I'm not going to harm myself with it. If anything shows that it can offset dementia, I mean, the new data basically say up to about 400 milligrams per day, caffeine is 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 acetyl calling. 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 eutropics that might have an effect on it, but I didn't bring any with me when I was on vacation.

Amazing. I just brought vitamins. No cigars. Nope. No cigars.

No, no vacation was good. It was fun. Yeah. I enjoyed it. Yeah.

Family vacation. Nice. I mean, I was waiting for this thing that everybody told me was coming and it never showed up at all. It was a zero. I mean, it wasn't hard.

It wasn't a thing. It was just not to do, right? And I do sometimes during the day, like, oh, wake up in the morning and say, I'm not going to eat them today. I'm not going to take any nicotine. But I always wonder, like, is it just I got lucky?

Like some people, they literally cannot drink alcoholism is in their genetics. Like their 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 could describe 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 without alcohol. I don't drink, but I could without problems. You know, you're sort of on off now, right? Yeah, I don't get drunk anymore. I'll have a drink or two, but I don't get drunk anymore.

I was like, yeah, drink, drink, no, no, no, no, no. When I took the eight months off, I didn't even miss alcohol. But then I went to dinner, had a margarita. I was like, oh, 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 affecting my workout.

So I said, this is stupid. Yeah. 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, OK, 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. Take a lot of glutes, I own, mitigate whatever you're doing to your body by actually consuming alcohol. And more likely you don't need as much as you're going to drink. That's the problem.

But to have a good time, a couple drinks, you have a good time. Five, six 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'd 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 Cratum. We had a guy who came into the podcast and someone had sent us some Cratum, one of our guests, like a Cratum company and I'm like, and it was just laying around the kitchen and he goes, you're not taking that. I go, no, I don't know. Some kind of 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. And 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 it 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 like severe alcohol use disorder. What we, you and I know as alcoholism, there are people who take their first drink, as I mentioned before, just like this completes me, right? And those people usually have a certain genetic background. You know, I want to talk about this, but there's a genetic background.

They probably have high levels of the enzyme that that can digest alcohol, right? You know, can break down alcohol because it is a poison, but if you're breaking 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 varies by age two. You know, two glasses of wine at 60 feels very different. Two glasses of wine at like, you know, 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 this environmental circumstances around the wire. They drink it 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, a woman, she was named went to a salad. And you go, Hey, you know, my dad's got some, I think it was like wine cooler or something. And we were, and we drank them and we got, you know, we got drunk and I wasn't bad kid, but we got drunk and the earlier you drank, the more susceptible yard 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 Vivance. We can talk about stimulants 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 my Daffenol?

I don't. I took one more Daffenol come to sleep for two days. I'm very, very sensitive to these things. There is a drug that's approved for excessive day time sleepiness that I took on a trip where I was under slept and and I needed to work. I'm called Sunozi.

It's a that's now in phase three 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 was much gentler and felt better than then Modafone or Armada. For me, the best thing that I've ever discovered for mitigating that feeling of being groggy with sleep deprivation is creatine. 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. It is definitely.

It's a fuel with a phosphor creatine system for the forebrain, the part of your brain that's involved in strategy setting, et cetera. I would say about half and these are broad numbers. Right? You know, these are, you know, from one study, the real expert on all this, by the way, is my colleague Keith Humphries at Stanford. We could talk about some of the interesting things that he's found, but the about half the population seems to like sedatives.

They like Vicodin. They like opioids. I had a tooth surgery a long time ago that gave me Vicodin. I took half of one. I never wanted that experience again.

You know, but I know people who are like Vicodin. They love Vicodin. They love being 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.

I think people generally been into these categories. You asked about Cratum. So the world expert on this is 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 Cratum is very split. If you put out something about Cratum, 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?

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 bio prospecting.

Pepides are a different story and we can talk about that. But bio prospecting 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 cocoa 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 cratum because I know there's another way to pronounce it, but I just feel weird saying it like crut home or something like that.

But you know, the cratum leaf, he said when people shoot the cratum leaf, but the leaf, they feel a calm, but also energized. It's how you and I would think of like a strong coffee or a year. Right. But what's happened in this country is that companies have synthesized pure cratum. They've taken one of the compounds in the cratum leaf and they've isolated and now they've made it synthetically and that leads to a very different experience and addiction potential.

And it's so 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 this. And they use the cocaine they get from it for medical and can use that it is it is cocaine is approved. It's not scheduled one that's right.

It's scheduled to as a as an anesthetic. That's right. So Chris really nails it. Like so many things in science and medicine were saying, create them good, create them bad. Turns out it's the synthetic, create them product that is bad, highly addictive.

So when you have those drinks, like, what does it live free? Aren't those is that is that the cratum synthetic or is that the plant? I think it's the plant derived isolated, which is somewhere in between the two. But this is but if you and I would go 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 talk about this is like, it could be an interesting stimulant compound for people. People love it.

But people love it. It's the same thing with THC. You know, like people will say, oh, you know, 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? Right? When you and I were growing up, like, I mean, where I grew up, everyone learned how to smoke a joint and take a bong wrap. I'm not actually anyone do this, but you knew if you could handle one or half, you learned the hard way.

Exactly. You learned 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 now it is there's 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 should talk to someone. 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 they'll say the leaf products are very different than the isolated. The isolated are very different than the isolated synthetic products. And that 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 away, there's these incredible compounds and plants that we want. Well, there's a parallel and refined sugar, right? 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 really like the taste of it. Right. Let's make it in a way that never is in nature, unattached to fiber, unattached to nutrients. Right. Usually if you get sugar in nature, it's in an orange.

That's right. It's good for you. It's like a trek to get to eat the orange. It's business and it's diabolical. And then we always end up about five or six years down the road and go, oh, we got all these problems.

But what's interesting is, you know, is I didn't realize that pharma companies buy a prospect from the jungle. They still send people to the jungle. We always think of the jungle is like this place that only shamans go, right? You know, 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. Abudbakari, 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 is 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, twofold, fourfold, you can see some relief from type two diabetes, some, but not much weight loss.

That'd been happening for a decade. But when you increase it a thousandfold, wow, people don't want to eat. People don't think, okay, we can talk about the ramifications of that. 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 pineal on which allocationally taken you get three hours of REM sleep that night and on subsequent nights your REM sleep is enriched.

Interesting. You know, we know GLPs obviously PC157 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 KISS peptin, which is involved in resetting the reproductive system. It's involved in puberty, but it's 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 chipped 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.

This is BPC 157 stuff going to work. And I 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 the studying and 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, it's very gas lighting.

They're bullshitting you that all these anecdotal stories aren't significant that all these professional athletes using it are they're using it with great benefit. Don't know what they're talking about. It's threatening to them. I mean, they did. I mean, it's my, I feel like I'm quoting my dad.

It's threatening because of compound pharmacies and it's threatening because these a lot of these physicians are going to lose their standing in the field as these people. There's something to important to understand about physicians. And again, there are many excellent ones I referenced a few today, right? Many excellent ones, but they there's a guarding of knowledge that existed in the science community up until a few years ago in podcast hit wasn't just me, you know, 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. It's been in sometimes that's legitimate criticism, although not in Bob's case in 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 going, Oh, did you see this podcast with someone talking about this thing in anthropology on Rogan and they're like, Oh my God, like that's my field like, you know, and they're they it's a self worth issue. They're not like, Oh, anthropology is 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.

I've got patients coming to me and saying, I have this friend that took this thing and it really helped. Could I explore that? And I don't do that and they go elsewhere. Words spreads fast nowadays. So I like scientists and physicians.

I also understand scientists and physicians. I could 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 they're like dying. They're 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, Chachi PT bad. They're saying it's bad because patients are coming in and they're like, Hey, Chachi PT 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 two, it's two 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 Abud says, you know that the lethal dose is like super high. No one's even close to achieving. 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 podcast, thanks to the Internet and it can go awry certainly, but I had a shoulder thing a week ago.

Never have the shoulder thing and I like put two 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. I don't understand that argument of putting saline. Does that a common thing where people have a severe shoulder or no, sorry, just running a control experiment. I could have put it in like, I've heard people say that.

That's why I've heard people say that an argument, you know, oftentimes people have similar benefits in jeting saline. I'm like, where, who's done that? Why aren't why aren't people injecting saline? So they get in cortisone shots and their shoulders. I mean, that's how they talked about creatine.

That's how they talked about TRT. This is how they talked about women's hormone therapies. Right. It's very interesting, you know, because because for legitimate, you know, they're 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 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, you know, like in their colonies or something. That's not TRT really. That's not TRT. That's really just doing juice.

Yeah, they're just doing juice. The, 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 they'll 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. It's also now people aren't afraid of needles. The GLP industry was so genius in taking this thing. Needles are needle phobia needles.

What am I going to do? And they made a pen to tick tick tick tick still needle. The pens have gotten rid of everyone's needle phobia. So now my sister people are like, Oh, what about peptides? You have to inject it and go, Well, do they have the little needles with the pen?

Yeah. Cool. No one's afraid of a pen even if I was a needle on the end, but no one likes to touch. It was the swinge that scared people. Plunger 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're like, it might. I can tell you it's 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 just going to 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 control of the information. It's and it's generally men. It's general.

Yeah, let me think. I mean, I think it's probably is a bunch of women that do it too, but it's a very masculine behavior. Well, it's interesting. I put out a tweet the other day and I got I only half regret doing it. I said, you know, people contact me all the time saying that physician friends with people coming in who identify 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 in other communities like dog piled me. Like, this is terrible. This is terrible. You know who didn't dog pile me where 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. So it's 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 what do you make of this?

I haven't dog piled by members of my community in a little while. Right. I'm not neurosurgeon, but this is interesting. And they said the ones I spoke to said in 20 months, this is going to be standard practice for people to just get whole body MRI. So what was the resistance?

They don't want people freaking out because they see like 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. They I'll go toe to toe with any of these people and just say, I understand that only neurosurgeons can do neurosurgery. Absolutely.

Those are the 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 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 it's safe. Now, some people say the MRIs aren't safe. Okay. That's a separate matter. I think providing 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 want to, the smart answer is some people say yes, some people say no, but you should be able to choose.

It's the gatekeeping on this is 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. You know, Stanford, like an 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 like 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 we're attacking you, there is it just them or people arguing with them? The people that joins them. Yeah. And when this happens, I try and listen, right?

I called, I didn't call friends in that community looking for validation. I was like, did I screw up? And like, listen, there are a lot of neurosurgeons and other physicians who are including heart surgeons that are worried that patients are just going to be getting a lot of data back saying, listen, you've got this, you know, flip on the radar here, you should be concerned and that they're going to 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. Like if anything, they'd want more of this, right?

It 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 of and that their response kind of educated me on that the, you know, 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. Two 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 in the world and saying, see, see, but you know, that's that's one case. So when these things happen, I try and just think like, 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, you know, hey, like this medication combination you gave me and like the internet says is dangerous. 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. Well, especially in light of the fact that what what's medical malpractice? Is it like the third leading cause of death in this country? Oh, I mean, what it like, what is what 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 like a contraindicated medication goes up exponentially. A great sleep doctor at Stanford is lasting with dementia, all things. Yeah. He 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, you know, if you go to the emergency room at three 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 to the shift or, you know, because 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 they're also how they train them when they're going through residence. It's a part of the hazing process.

Yeah. It's a part of the hazing. What can you look put that into perplexity and see what leading cause of death? So there's no practice. Say third.

So that's malpractice. But what about medical error? Medical error. Whoa. That's crazy.

I mean, the airlines understand this. Do you understand how insane that is? Imagine if there was pop tarts. It says a widely repeated claim comes from 2016 BMJ analysis by John Hopkins extrapolated from several hospital studies and estimated roughly 251,000 deaths per year associated with medical error. If that estimate treated, we're treated like a conventional cause of death.

It would have ranked third behind heart disease and cancer ahead of chronic lower respiratory disease in the 2013 comparison used by authors. Wow. 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, you know, 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. But the patients and I wish that people to 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 stuff. The scope 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 five years, largely due to the pandemic and public health education and AI and everything just kind of being out there and 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 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. We're saying like, oh, yeah, would low dose tersepartite help me with chronic fatigue?

Would, um, should I be taking BPC? You know, people ask these questions. Something, well, if these people are asking the question, that means people around them are asking it, starting to become okay, as should I have these conversations? And then they're going back to their doctor and saying, you know, can I take like a tenth of the dose? Doctors will not are not going to say, yeah, great ticket, tenth of the dose and the drug companies definitely don't want that.

They're going to make a tenth of the money. So as you and I know the peptide community is a real threat, not just because of the peptides that are people are taking or that the peptides they're replacing from pharma, but because of the way that people are taking the peptides, like red at your tide is going to come out from Lily, make them billions of not trillions of dollars. They're working hard to protect that patent, but you can bet people who are getting prescribed real red at your tide from Lily 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 micro doses.

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 got to laugh at one of these folks who were trained 30, 40 years ago, trying to hold on to this thing.

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

And it was like, yeah, I want that music because that's the parental advisory morons. But they just don't get it. It's like, you know, we talk about plasticity at any age, but apparently they got cement in there because 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 is to impress everybody. Now it only impresses certain people. And for a lot of people, it's a turn off. And the same thing for scientists. I mean, I deal with this.

You know, I'm a kind of a different kind of scientist because I've been in different communities and I've been in public education and I'll talk to most anyone who's willing to have a reasonable conversation and I'd love to explore. But a lot of people just like authority, you know, medical authority, like 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 as the dissolvement of all the reference for experts because everyone's going to have all the information.

You memorized it. Great. I just got the information in three seconds. It's a 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 gay language, which was when the early, you know, physicians who did, but you 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. It was great.

There's a great book. It's very dense, but it's called the Prince of Medicine. And 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, like, 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. That's dissolving.

So what's literally happening is people are being these authorities are being brought down to other people's level, right? It's almost like this was borrowed from other, you know, other aspects of life, of course, politics and even religion, this kind of thing. You know, 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, you know, I'm not the only one, of course, but like for people to 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 on a Lemke. 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 people. And that it builds up their authority.

This is what people need to understand. Build 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 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 that. The bright lights are guys like David Faganbaum who cured his own castle man's disease by taking, he was dying. He was 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 every cure, 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 meditations. I mean, he, 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 through them through AI. 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. That would, 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, red or true tie, huge profit margin that they're facing. But if people are taking anybody bits of red or true tie, and to be fair, if people who didn't do all the preclinical work are selling it and making profits, I understand that siphon's profit away from Lily. They have a reason to be pissed and scared. Like this is their big blockbuster drug. 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. When you think about just the wealth of knowledge that's available to the average person, most people are much more aware 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 insomnia. They can't focus. They can't stop watching video games or playing video games. 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 absorbing all your attention for like two 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 a while 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 that mean that we vastly over-medicated kids with these stimulants? Absolutely.

And the information's out there. And that's also what's cool about AIs. I mean, we always had searches, you know, web searches. But now, you know, for anything we've said today, like you plug it into the perplexity of your age. You got better than a search.

Exactly. You have to wait through ten different articles and the different perspectives and who wrote this and who funded this? I love Chachie PT. 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. 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. It could get real weird, but it's here. What are you envisioning in terms of like a 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 super intelligence first and uses it to take over the super intelligence of all the other countries. So one country develops some sort of a rogue AI system that's 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, you know, 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. You know, 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 and 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 1200 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... 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, we're 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 going to listen to us ever about anything? And if... You know, we're so fucked up and we are so fucked up, objectively look at all the different things we do. Just like it... 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, we'll just dominate this planet and let these dummies go extinct? They don't even have to kill us. Just keep doing stuff that we can say into the ecosystem, encourage us into behavior that develops 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 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 once in a talk, where he was talking about, I think it was mainly talk about cryptocurrency, but he was talking about whenever we exchange, putting money in a bank, obviously, we think, oh, they keep our money safe. Of course they invested, they make money too. We all know this. But what are we trading? Control for convenience, ordering food.

It's giving up control for convenience. That's the transaction that's led a lot of human technologies. I'm truly on board with all the potential 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, like everybody I know who runs a laboratory is saying they spend a significant amount of money on compute now, running data sets, simulations, doing more experiments before doing the actual experiments, which is hopefully it seems to be accelerating discovery in the process. And that will just motivate us to accelerate AI to the point where it becomes a digital God.

That's the human, and that's the human thing. I was thinking before I came here today, like I've never met him, but I remember what was it, 10 years back, Tristan Harris was sitting here or wherever your other studio and saying, listen, like social media has got these problems. We need to be careful. We need to be careful. And then he was right about a lot of things.

It's clearly caused some damage where people are clearly have too much addictive or compulsive behavior with it, etc. He's also done a lot of good. Was it, so I asked, I'm not calling out Tristan as 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 no. Right now the question is about doomsday AI stuff versus AI is gonna solve all these problems. Where are we gonna land? I think there is a big difference, and one of the big differences is that the issue with 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 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 on the 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 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 that it locks you out. I have social media, I have X on Instagram on a separate phone. And I own 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 lock box, like a super max prison lock box for my phone. That's how I wrote that book. It isn't gnarly. I mean, I'm gonna put an ask to chair as they say I'm just working, but when that phone is calling you subconsciously, like these data that are pretty crazy, two 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 three 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 in-train in biology, E-N-T-R-A-I-N, and train themselves to a particular frequency of distraction. So I actually enjoy podcasting because it's like a drop-in conversation. When you look at your phone every on average, every 90 seconds or every three minutes or so, and then your phone is not there, let's say you're just working, they've done these studies, every three minutes or 90 seconds or so, people get distracted. So they're looking for the phone, even though it's not there. So your brain, your focus mechanisms, learn to lock onto a particular time scale.

And we had a couple of, one in particular world-class track coach on the podcast and a few others, this is interesting in what they do. And I was saying, you get different attention spans and 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 then like the marathoners are like, these incredible, like they have this intense focus, they can just go and go and go. And it's really interesting, like you're, we entrain ourselves to these rhythms, not just circadian rhythms, but distraction.

That's pretty cool. And so I then, I looked at it differently, and I thought, okay, every time I feel the pain of trying to write this paragraph, and I'm like, oh, and it's like, it's not happening. Like, great, that's the friction, that's the plasticity. Reading the audio book, I mean, I wanna scare anyone away, but it's 19-hour audio book, post edits. Oh boy.

Brutal, right? So it took me about 60 hours total to record. And you know, you're trying to get the enunciation right, and there you go, keep the energy right. I mean, you do this for a living on stage, but the, anyway, if nothing else, the book will cure insomnia. So you know that the goal is to not tell people or listen to it straight all the way through it.

So it can be a reference and a look up 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, like people need to like chill. Like you don't have to do everything all the time. But the point is that your brain learns these skills. And so 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.

You know, I just believe in friction, it says you point 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 the brain longevity.

So you know, you look at old people, they're 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. They're exceptions.

And then you get people like, we were talking about Jared Diamond, who was on the podcast, who's not just as sharp as a text. Because he's constantly engaging his mind. Learning new languages, learning Italian right now as we speak. And then you get a lot of 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, and then they diet 27 or like people get their career to 50. And then they kind of like, they fade away or something like that. But 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 Marba. 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, then 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 a piece of life. But he talked to him. And he's also foraging for information all the time. He still trains. So there's this like sweet spot.

Like you were talking about the do hard things, but still be curious and look for the beauty in life. And the people who do that, they're my heroes. You know, 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 I think everyone expected us to kind of like do get out because I've mentioned before that we had this like friction. And I was like, no, I'm not going to do any of that. I'm like, teach me relativity.

Teach me chaos theory. He worked on chaos. And he's like, OK, 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 to 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, people will try and wrap their heads around things. And if they're talking about the quantum field in this and that, and they can't do the math, it means they're completely full of shit. 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 have to talk to him, not me or somebody else. But it's a race between the Chinese and the Americans to get first get quantum internet, which would basically entirely encrypt it, communications.

If someone tries to peer in on it, it gets destroyed. So it's very interesting from a security standpoint. But I realized that, you know, and we talked about how, you know, thanks to people like Eddie Penny, and thanks to Exploration, going to church, and things like that. Like, I really, I as a neuroscientist also believe that there's something larger than us. I actually believe in God.

OK. And this is something that you can't prove with science. This is like the leap of faith. It's like, you're not going to go to a site in the brain and go, there's the God station. You know, 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 on the math. And my dad and I starts 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, 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, we're 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 the entirely 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 was to 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. Like, it's pulling me this way. And so you know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to 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, in the 12-step programs that are by 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 circuities 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 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 you, 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 gonna happen next, forming memories, the brain can do this, create perceptions.

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, fiber, consent, 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, the 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 and all sounds, you know, new agey, but the energies that 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, I feel like if humans were gonna solve it all, they would have 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 in 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 I think the people that do are generally happier and nicer people just prove for that as well, which is interesting.

You see that? Yeah, I see it a lot. I see it a lot around here. That's some of the nicest people I know around here are Christians, like real Christians, like real charity work and really help people. Well, because I think Christianity embraces the goodness and the humanness, the flawedness of humans and believes in forgiveness, but also believes in morality, right?

It's a moral scaffolding framework. I don't think humans could have completely constructed that on their own. We've never been smart enough to put all that together on our own. But anyway. I'm glad you put this book together.

Thanks. Protocols and operating manual for the human body available now and with audio by the great Andrew Hubermann. Thanks so much. I did the audio. Thanks so much for hosting me.

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate you. Wealth of information, man. I want to be able to talk to you. 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 Lexarimen, don't crash on your motorcycle. Where are you, Lex?

Bye, everybody.