#2195 - Andrew Huberman

25:25Ah! Yeah, baby! Let's go! Now imagine, if you had COVID. Wait, wait. Wait, hold on, I'm gonna just kind of experience that for a second. Yeah, take it in. I'm gonna have a little bit of a picture. Well, you know what's interesting. Or it wouldn't be fair. You know what's interesting? I'm touching. Oh. Oh. The fresh ones are so powerful. I feel it in my eye because the sinuses run. Oh, now would imagine if you had COVID, you could smell it over there, huh? I imagine if you had COVID and you lost your sense of smell, like this might be the key to getting it back. As long as it's not killing Ulfactory neurons.

26:01I don't think it's killing it. You could smell everything after it. I mean, that's true. I'm obviously biased. So because I like that thrill for whatever reason we haven't actually enjoyed that thank you We have been the green room of the mother you prompted me to take several new experiences No, we can talk about But one other thing before I forget I know I go down these like nerdy rabbit holes here But when I did those smelling salts a moment ago I I snipped with both nostrils But it came in mainly through my left nostril right and so I asked no the sobel what's the deal with this left nostril right nostril stuff if you know you have the yogis, the switching, the nostril things, here's what's wild.

26:39This is so wild. It turns out that every two hours or so, the dominant breathing nostril switches. Now, that could be interesting or that could not be interesting. There are a lot of things in biology that happen, but what is the meaning? Turns out it's a direct reflection of a shift in your so -called autonomic nervous system from parasympathetic dominant to sympathetic dominant, meaning from more relaxed to more alert. And this is happening periodically throughout the day like a sea saw, injuring sea. So this whole thing with the yogis of you know, breathe through one nostril or the other nostril, look, it's the olfactory bulbs, there's a lot of crossing over of information at later stages and even some early stages, once the information gets to the brain.

27:24So that whole thing is probably a little bit like weak sauce, but this idea that you're breathing easy or through one nostril or the other is reflecting an underlying brain state and body state. That is absolutely true. He tells me Wow, and the last thing is you said why would bears or bloodhounds have such better smell? Well in the case of a bear the size of the olfactory bulbs and the amount of brain real estate devoted to processing that information is much more So we have a huge visual cortex most of our brain frankly is devoted to vision and to movement Whereas, you know, the brain of, let me think of like a turtle.

28:01It's mostly movement. They have very low cerebral cortex. Maybe that's not the best example. But certainly in a centound, the olfactory bulbs are much bigger than they are in a sightound. And both of those have olfactory bulbs that are much, much bigger than Jamie's bulldog over there. Those guys sniff all the time, but they're mostly snorting trying to get sense in. Their smell, sense of smell, is much, much worse than marshals than your dog. Because Marshall's a retriever. Yeah. That makes sense because he can smell his ball. Like if I throw his ball and he misses it, he just starts doing a circle and then he finds it with his smell.

28:37Which is crazy. Smells his ball. You know? Yeah. I'm incredible. So what Nome is saying is not that humans have smell that is as good but that when you push the conditions you can reveal a heightened sense of smell that most people don't think humans have. Now as I say this, there are a lot of people out there and it's usually women who are like, oh no, I can smell everything. I can smell the subtlest difference. And so it may be something related to maternal behavior. It might be something related to estrogen. It might be something in the wide chromosome that suppresses that we don't know. But some people are very olfactory.

29:10They can smell when somebody's not feeling right or when they're not feeling right. But it's absolutely the case that we're constantly taking the chemicals off other people through shaking hands, through hugging, rubbing them on ourselves, analyzing our own smells unconsciously. I always say that I can smell bullshit. You probably can. But I don't know if I really can smell it, but when someone's lying, I feel like there's a smell. There could be the stress. It could be a certain... You know, we talk about stress as one thing, but stress is the dosing of different levels of cortisol. At panepheron, people, they're pathological liars.

29:41They can probably do it without evoking those things. Then you have things like pupil size, bigger the pupil's more rousal, right? The more stress somebody is. We know this, right? That's why I like if somebody takes a stimulant. There's a... People get huge. There's a thing that people do when they're full of shit or they're anticipating your response in a different way. Like when someone's telling the truth, like if you tell me the truth, you seem relaxed to my response. Like you're telling, even if it's something that you're not proud of, you're telling me the truth, this is the thing, when someone's lying, it's almost like they're waiting to see how you buy it.

30:18So that's like their defenses are up. They counter punch quick. Well, they're selling it, they say it, and they're like, does he buy it? Like you feel the does he buy it, and like, ooh, you're full of shit. Oh, interesting. So let me think about this. So you are able to sense the, their anticipation of your responses, like they've got queued up some counter, some evaluating where you're going, yes, no, or maybe. Yeah, but it's not reliable. Like I just speak to be completely honest, I've been bullshitted before, but I think I'm better at it than most and I think maybe that's because I've had more conversations with people than most people have But it's not a hundred percent sometimes people are full of shit and you don't you're not sure or you have your defenses down I mean, I've been badly badly manipulated before yeah happens.

31:09Yeah. Yeah, especially if you like someone You know, that's part of the problem. You don't want them to be full of shit Yeah, and some of the best manipulators certainly in my experience are people that have really figured out the combination lock of the things that like that I have felt deprived of and they come in and sure and Those tend to be unique things like that you can't get out anywhere, you know and boy Somebody said to me recently like there are certain categories of humans that I just I can't be seduced by I'm not talking about just Sexual seduction right right right right. Yeah. I'm saying it just can't be seduced by And then there some people are just are able to get past that force field and so I consider myself pretty good at threat sensing, except in that domain where like my threat sensing is like the equivalent of a stuffed animal.

31:56My friend Tony always says that erotic and psychotic are so close to each other that, you know, like it crosses over back and forth and I think there's something to that too that some of the craziest people are also some of the sexiest people for some weird reason like you want to be with even though you know they're dangerous, like they're crazy, like there's some weird thing going on there. Almost like you want wild kids, because wild kids could survive better. That's an interesting one. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I mean, I think that the, well, I'm listening to a really good book that a really smart person suggested to me, called Five Types of People that Were Roon Your Life.

32:37And I only wish I had read it years ago. And here's the main takeaway, that there are about 10 % of people out there. And it cuts across all the standard labels of like narcissists, and borderline, and all that. Like, they're, they include some of that, but they, they depart from that. And they just focus on what, is the guy whose psychologist, it's written by a guy, a psychologist, he's worked a lot on conflict resolution over the years, courtroom type stuff, et cetera. And he says, in this 10 % of people, they are high conflict people, but within, they like conflict, they feed off it. They like drama, they like conflict, like creating it.

33:13But within that category, it's pretty evenly divided. He claims between women and men. And then there's a further division where about half of them play passive and victim, but are highly manipulative. They use other people to try and basically harm. And then the other 5 % are very aggressive and abrasive. And so he has this great set of protocols, I love protocols that are essentially like don't move in with Mary or getting engaged to or have a child with somebody in the first year and this cuts in both directions Just don't make that agreement in your one as well as for any behavior that kind of cues those senses gets your Spidey senses up like you were describing ask yourself would 90 % or more of people do that behavior.

34:02And if it's a no, like you have to pause. In other words, what he's saying in this book is that most people are actually pretty healthy, but that most of the woes of the world are created by about 10 % of people, which he calls these high conflict people, but they don't always come out high conflict like screaming and yelling. They're often very tactical and manipulative and very vindictive. They'll leverage victimhood, they'll leverage a lot of different things. And again, and cuts across, man and women equally, he claims. And again, I don't know the data behind this book, but the book itself just feels like a very useful thing that everybody should know about.

34:35So I'm enjoying reading this book, going, oh my God, I wish I had this book years ago, plus, I'm realizing like, oh yeah. Like we always hear this, like most of our problems come from a very small set of people and things. Most of society's problems. And so who are these people? So we tend to call them narcissists or sociopaths or psycho, but those labels, while very useful in the clinic, I think have been overused in the general public and like we're not clinicians. We're not diagnosing anybody and so but Difficult people that can ruin your life a bound, but it turns out it's only about 10 percent So and it has some very specific protocols of how to deal with the people who are more outwardly aggressive versus play victim, etc Very useful book.

35:13I think it's yeah, it sucks that you have to think that way though I can't just enjoy someone enjoy their comfort if they're in the 90 percent. Yeah, but that's the problem But yeah, Zigg, when you should have zacked, you run into a 10 % or take a year. Yeah, but a year's a long time though. Yeah. Also, people can learn like what you tolerate and don't tolerate and hide certain types of behavior from you. Yes. Yeah. Which could be a real issue. Oh, I've definitely experienced that. And it's, and again, I think we are often, I mean, you mentioned that the relationship between erotic and manipulative and crazy, or just erotic and crazy.

35:49I think there's also that when we finally receive the sorts of out -of -love or affection, it's not always sex, it's not always sexual, right? Like somebody like, I don't like rubbing your feet or paying, you know, paying a little extra attention to what you say or something. For some people, that's intoxicating. It's a lot of it is paying attention to you. A lot of it is like listening to what you have to say or asking you questions about your thoughts and your feelings, which a lot of people are unaccustomed to, and that's intoxicating to people. Because a lot of people just want to talk about themselves.

36:18So when someone wants to talk about you and really is asking questions about your feelings, you know, that can kind of manipulate you in a weird way. Yeah, it almost feels like a parental type of care that we're probably wired to look for. I mean, I always marvel at this and also just kind of shake my head and go, why? Why did God design us this way? But, you know, the circuitry in our brain that creates infant child attachment is the same circuitry that is repurposed for all other relationships and adulthood. It's not like you get your childhood attachment stuff. And then you go, okay, well, you're like 15, 16, you're moving on in the world, you're hitting puberty, you're starting to date a bit, whatever.

36:57Now let's work with a different set of mechanics, a different set of algorithms. No, it's the same set of algorithms repurposed. We know this based on the studies of infant child, infant parent attachment, and on the basis this or infant caretaker and on the basis of studies of romantic love. It's the same circuitry. So you're using a set of algorithms and circuitry that were designed for one thing in a very different context. That's interesting and this probably makes sense why a lot of men with like very overbearing mothers seek overbearing wives. Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, I, I've learned so much recently about just how it is that, you know, we can lose our, our, our vision of like other people, right?

37:49Like we, and I think this, this thing that we hear like manipulation, it often sounds like, oh, it's like really like tactical someone's rubbing their hands. I think the really tricky part about is I do think that most people in the world are just like doing their best to feel safe to get, to get their needs I think there are very few evil people. But in this sort of pattern of repurposing childhood attachment patterns and then people bringing that forward into their adult attachment patterns, I think what ends up happening is that people coulda quote, trying to get their needs met oftentimes like the worst ones, sometimes called trauma bonding, but they kind of go lock and key, or somebody identify somebody that's really healthy and they're like them.

38:26I'm gonna latch onto them because like they're healthy and they can, and you say, well, the healthy person and should be able to spot all the landmines. But if somebody's able to really tap into something you didn't have or something that just feels like oxygen, goodness gracious, you could be the smartest, well acclimated person with the best parents or whatever upbringing which most people aren't, but some people do have that. And still fall into this fog that is like, gosh, you wanna be with this person, but it doesn't feel good, that mismatch. And I think the thing I've learned clearly is that when you feel that trepidation, run don't walk.

39:08Like the gray zone is actually the thing to just exit fast. Gray doesn't mean like hover and check it out and like run some experiments here. Taking bomb. Get out. Yeah, yeah. Run. Just run. Yeah. It's also I think there's some people that are very sheltered and they've been well taken care of and they're not accustomed to manipulative people and they're not accustomed to dangerous people. And so I've seen that before, both with people choosing the wrong friends and people choosing the wrong partners. Yeah, that certainly hasn't been my pattern, not that I had the hardest upbringing, but it was, I always say, easier than some harder than others, but I always had great friends, great friendships, but my threat sensing, it wasn't always great in romantic relationships for sure.

39:56I've also had some great relationships. I think what tends to happen is that if we're very busy, we have this tendency to be easily manipulated by certain things that are unusual, that we just really feel like extra oxygen to us or just feel so nourishing. Because I think people always, or often, default to sex. It's all about sex. Depending on who you are, sex is either more or less readily available to you. I think that for some people it's nurturing, like to a certain form of nurturing. And then there's also this thing of we know how to survive certain things so they don't feel as dangerous.

40:29So people who've had like very, you know, overbearing or complicated childhoods or abusive childhoods, sometimes they're set to perceive danger at way too high a threshold. Right. So their perception of what's dangerous is like way too high. And so they walk into even still dangerous situations, but they don't think of them as dangerous. And they're like, oh, I can navigate this. They're good at navigating difficult people or they're good at navigating, you know, borderline people or something like that. I think it's also exciting, which is part of the problem. The people like excitement. And if you have a boring life in a life that doesn't have a lot of stimulation in it, and then you find someone even if they're bad for you, but they're exciting.

41:13There's some conflicts, some something. There's fights and breakups and then make -ups, which are exciting. You know, and so then you get locked into this stimulation pattern, which is or I've seen that multiple times with people It's a real problem. Do you think it's more of a problem with people that Like excitement and adventure and are super curious, but like excitement and adventure. So I'm thinking comics I'm thinking people who like high intensity sports that they seek Relationships that are higher intensity because you know, I've received great advice from people like Rick who said you know your relationship should be a sanctuary, that should be where peace is.

41:54And actually, I don't pay a lot of attention to Instagram kinda little models and things, but someone sent me one that I was like, yes, that feels so true, which is that men eventually settle where they feel peace. Yeah, I think that's probably the healthiest way to do it, but I think people like, like I said, I think people like stimulation, and I don't think a lot of people are stimulated by their day -to -day existence. I think they're bored. I think a lot of people are just like trudging along every day. And then when someone comes along that makes you excited in your life, you know, someone who's just a little wilder, a little crazier, and maybe some lady's got a bunch of tattoos like, look at her, you know, like, whoa, you know, people get excited by people that are a little bit dangerous.

42:38Yeah, because the idea that anything could, like, like anything could happen, they could do anything. They're risky people, you know? Someone's got tattoos on their hands, like Jesus. What is she doing? Yeah, you and I both have a lot of tattoos, but keep I've kept it intentionally kept it off the hands and I thought I'd done my hands, but it's the face is a real problem like that's a little wacky But I have a lot of friends like jelly rolls good friend of mine. He's got tattoos all over his face Post Malone good friend of mine. I think it's got a bunch of written shit all over his face Yeah, I mean There's the nicest people the thing about like jelly roll and post is like once you talk to them Once you're talking to them, you don't see the tattoos anymore.

43:14You just see the human and it's just like they're wearing a shirt. It's like, no, it's nothing, it's normal. And things have changed a lot. Like I was born in 75, right? So I'm heading towards 50 quick. Back then, tattoos on the face was crazy. Oh, yeah. One of my childhood heroes and somehow by the grace of God, he's become a close friend of mine. Tim Armstrong, Lee Singer from Rancid, he has a tattoo of a spider web on his head. And a spider on his neck. And I remember seeing him when I was a kid at a show, and he'd be like, dude, scary. And Lars Regis and from Rancid says, skunks on his forehead.

43:45They're super nice guys. I mean, they're Travis Barker's super nice guys. Yeah, Tim. That's him and Travis through the transplant. Yeah. Tim and Travis do transplants and like, you see those guys, you're like, whoa, now I think it shifted a little bit. Yeah. But back then, I remember thinking like, that's, and Harley, that's a tough guy. Yeah. You know, and certainly Lars is a tough guy. And Tim too. But the, you know, I remember seeing it like you only saw it on bikers and like gnarly punk rockers. People that have checked out of society completely. Mohawk used to be you're not getting a job right yeah, I know it's one used to remember when a nose ring or I got a ring cover you go in a Starbucks and the person would have it covered up You know like because they weren't allowed to have it right right now I see medical students with with eyebrow rings and nose rings and stuff so things have definitely changed Yeah, we're a little bit more open -minded of decorations But it's it is a thing though that you're taking a giant ass chance by tattooing your hands Well, friend of mine who's admittedly as a psychologist said, you know, tattoos are largely an expression of what you feel on the inside, put to the outside.

44:47And I was like, that sounds good. Yeah, it's like a... Sort of. Yeah. I don't know. It's just art. I like art. I like art on my walls. I like art on my arms. I like art. There's some Rogan tattoos out there. I saw Lex Friedman face tattoo. There's a bunch of Lex Friedman face tattoos. That's so good. So good. You just had a very good... Oh, you did too. Happy birthday. Thank you very much and Lex happy birthday. Yeah, there's a lot of that's the weirdest one is tattoos of People's faces on your body forever and there's I don't know how many of them are me There's thousands of them that I mean I used to post them on Instagram all the time But then I thought I was encouraging people to get my face tattooed so that they can I put it up on my Instagram But it's kind of crazy there might be some reward loop circuitry going on there But 100 % but before I forget this can ask you this the people that are into this smelling salt stuff, their power lifters, and they take a big sniff of that stuff before they lift weights.

45:41Why would that help them? Adrenaline. Adrenaline. So, a couple more things about olfaction. And by the way, I love this stuff. This is so wild because it's the most primitive part of our brain and nervous system. We were chemical sensors before we were light sensors. Right? We were sensing chemical environments. Is this a safe chemical environment? And we evolved from that. Right. We know that for instance memories that are associated with smell, like the people say the smell of my grandmother's kitchen or somebody's hands, my grandfather's hands, that those memories stick with us longer than anything, because the olfactory bulb has a direct line to a couple of structures in the brain.

46:19So we have an olfactory bulb, which is the main thing for smell. Then there's something called the accessory olfactory bulb, and sort of divides into primitive smells that are like aversive getaway quick. those tend to go through a really fast line through the whole accessory olfactory bulb, takes us straight to the amygdala to the piriform cortex that says move your body and face away from that. Like I didn't sit there on the smelling saw, it's like boom, get away. It's like a reflex. It's like in fish, there's this thing called the maldener neuron where you touch on one side of the body, what does the fish do?

46:47Goes the opposite direction. Big, huge neuron, hardwired circuit. Well they have those lateral lines that detects sense sounds and things and vibrations in the water. They're sensing an electro sensing in a distance, and these maldener neurons are incredible. You touch, boom, the fish heads the opposite direction. It doesn't go like, oh, are you another friendly fish? You want to mate? They go, I'm outta here, oh, and then they check you out. Right? And so it's a reflex for safety. The olfactory system has these two pathways. The olfactory bulb for kind of like, oh, is this black rifle coffee?

47:17And then there's the smelling salt one that goes to the accessory olfactory bulb, straight to the amygdala, which is associated with threat detection and other things, straight to the pier form cortex, and then to a motor circuit. Boom, turn the head the other way, get out, exhale, don't inhale more. Aversive, okay? So the thing about smell is that, you know, it's got these very hardwired components, okay? And they're set up for either a petitive, like, hmm, let me explore more, and if in more versus a versus, as opposed to aversive behaviors, like get me the hell away. And these brain areas are among the more ancient brain areas.

47:54Now I say ancient people nowadays start picking apart. It's not just limbic and cortex. It cortex is part of limbic. That's all true. But if you look at our brains and you look at the brains of a turtle or even a snake, all the stuff we're talking about right here are all, they're not exactly the same, but they're all present. When you get to humans, what you really add is a lot of cerebral cortex for the thinking and association stuff. Like, you know, I've been here before, so I'm a little bit less, you know, like looking around as much as I did last time. like things that you know, context dependent learning, context dependent stuff, whereas all the highly reflexive stuff is going to be hardwired, circuitry you find in every animal, every person, and you need to divide things into three different responses in humans, okay, in order to survive.

48:39Yum, I'm going to move toward it, yuck, I'm going to move away, and meh. There's basically three motor responses to anything, yum, yuck, or meh. Now there's a matter of degrees like you might see somebody you really like, you want I don't know, Joey Diaz or something, you know? You see him, like, you wanna run over or see him, right? So there's an repetitive circuit moves you towards it. See something as a little odd, you might pause, I don't know what that is, or something aversive, like, something happens in the parking lot, and you're like, I'm getting the hell outta here. So the brain, as complex as it is, needs to divide things into one of three different motor responses, forward, pause or retreat.

49:12I was playing with Jamie's dog out there before. I was like, I couldn't get him to back up. So it's kinda cool about the bulldog. You charge him and he just goes, I'm like 20 times his size. He's just like, well, he's also never experienced anybody being mean to him. So, except a few dogs, apparently. But most of his experiences are play. Like he knows he can just run up to you and bite you and you'll play with him. Right. So, you said about why the smelly salt is in adrenaline. So, here's the deal. When we have this aversive response, the move away, the yuck response, get me away. There's a parallel response in the brain and body of the release of epinephrine adrenaline.

49:49It's the same thing, sorry for the dual naming. Epinephrine and adrenaline are the same thing. Same thing. Long, complicated, boring history as to why it's named two things. Nor adrenaline, nor epinephrine, same molecule. So let's just call it adrenaline for sake of simplicity. Adrenaline is released from the adrenals in the body and it's released from an area in the brain called the locus ceruleus, which sends out a bunch of little wires axons to sprinkler the brain with adrenaline. And both systems work in parallel. So when you smell something averse, if it goes, inhale, okay, okay, certain olfactory neurons cue that to the excess real factory bulb, bam, straight to the amygdala.

50:29Amygdala sends a signal, brah, down to the adrenaline's top, the kidneys. They release adrenaline. and sends a, believe it or not, a signal up to Locust Ceruleus. It sprinklers the brain with adrenaline, and you just had within a couple hundred milliseconds, you just got a parallel adrenaline response and brain embody that allows you to do what more easily, move. To move. Now you're ready for motion, you're ready for movement. In fact, I'm sure if you put that under the deepest sleepers nose, the middle of the night, they're gonna wake up like a gunshot one. They used to give it to boxers and they got hurt in the corner that give them smelling salts and wake them up.

51:07Yeah, because one of the best painkillers is adrenaline. Because you've been hit hard before. Isn't it amazing how little it hurts when it happens and how much it hurts later? Yeah, it's kind of crazy. It's crazy. That's the thing that's weird about fights, like while they're happening, your shins are getting battered, things are getting hurt and you don't really feel much adrenaline. Unless you get kicked hard to the body, the liver shots doesn't matter how much adrenaline and you have pump it and there's something about getting hit in the liver. When you get hit like right here, if you get kicked or punched right here, it's a crazy feeling.

51:41It just shuts everything off. It's real weird. Your body just shuts off. I've seen these images of somebody just like melt. It looks like they melt and it's not. And it looks like they take a few paces and they're like ready to counter punch or something and then it hits slowly. I don't know. Well some shots go away. So like some pain, like if you get punched in the gut and you're, you know, you're you're tidying up in anticipation. It still hurts. It hurts. But then you move a little bit and then you're okay again. But the liver is the opposite. The liver you get hit and then there's this like sharp pain and a delay and then everything just shuts off.

52:18It's very it's very hard to fake and that you're fine and move away. You see like telltale signs like one thing guys will do all the time when they get hit in the liver. They drop the right arm down and they pin it to their So maybe they're fighting like this, they're moving, they whacked and liver, and you see them do like that. And they're still moving, but they can't help it. They have their arm prepped, because they know one more shot there, and they're fucked. So they barely can keep a poker face and move around, but there's telltale signs that you see, that are just instinctive. You see them just drop their hand.

52:48And a lot of times guys will use that to set them up with a head kick. So like they'll hit you a bunch of, a good example that is Islam Makchew and Alexander Vokynowski. He hit him with a left kick to the body multiple times in that fight and then fired off one to the head and knocked him out So it's like that just hiding this is like slow You see the leg come up and it's very hard to reckon. There's a kick called a question mark kick And it's called a question mark kick because in Taekwondo He's called a fake front kick roundhouse kick and what it is is you're lifting the knee up as if you're kicking to the body in a straight line and then you whip it over and go like that and turn it to round us.

53:28Pull up a Glaube Fetosa. Glaube Fetosa was the best at it. So much so that a lot of people started calling it the Brazilian kick because this guy was a K1 champion who had the most flexible hips and the craziest question mark kick and he would literally bring it up and down over the guard. So your hands would be up this like you think your hands are protecting your head he would bring it up around like this and drop it down in your head and not people out. It's so wild because to this day I don't know anybody you can kick as good as him with that kick. To this day he has the best highlight. There's a lot of people that are really good at that kick but Glaube had a very unusual flexibility of his hips.

54:14Watch this. Look at this. Well, that's just a regular one, but he's got some of them that go over the distance some of his highlights. Look at that. See how it does that? See how it just goes up and around. It almost looks like his knee just kind of... Yeah, watch this. Watch this. He's gonna do it in slow motion. Watch the whip of it. Look at that. That's so crazy. So you don't even know it's... Look how he just whip it down. And it's just... There's a lot of people that are good with that, but he was the best at it. I mean the best it was just weird to see how he could do it. I'm always amazed how people can kick Standing so closely.

54:51Oh, yeah, well glob it was it's just flexibility of the hips It's leg dexterity, but the way he could do it man It's just he the finest question mark kick of all time. I mean here's knocking out semi -shilt to his seven feet tall with it I mean it was bizarre to watch that kind of flexibility and also bizarre that no one else seems to have really kind of captured that technique as well as he did. And Glaube used to fight, I mean, this was like, hey, well, there's Israel out of Sonya, I had a really good one too. It still has a really good one, look at this one. Wow, but that's a little bit more straightforward.

55:27I mean, that's like straight to the chin, and it's a beautiful kick, but the way Glaube used to do it, it would go over the top and down. See that? Like that is so crazy. I can't do that. I've been throwing kicks in my whole life. I can't throw it like that. I'm always watching their eyes and these fires eyes. It's amazing to me like years ago I saw a Mayweather fight and it was obviously on pay -per -view and He was just getting paid for sure right that was his thing, but It was always amazing me in the slow -mo like where he would slip punches by like centimeters They may think that like his depth perception and the depth perception of fighters must successful fighters must just be exquisite.

56:11Because I mean, like slipping at that distance would just touch in movement. That's one thing, but it's also a pattern recognition. You've been doing it so many times and you know, so really good fighters, one of the things that you see is they don't just charge out in the first round. The first round is like a feeling out process. So you're downloading a lot of data points, you're downloading foot movement and a lot of guys watch tape and they download it from that, but then you don't really know until you're in there with a person. So they're downloading positions, they're downloading what a guy does like if you if you pivot to the left, does he move forward?

56:47Does he move back? Does he throw the left hook? Does he throw the right hand? What does he do? And how good is he at closing distance? Does he try to fire from where he's at or does he skip forward in fire? Does he give any telltale signs? Does he telegraph? So there's a lot of things that a fighter it looks for, may whether it had some of the best counter punchers in the history of the fucking sport. He was so good at like staying in the pocket. So he was an elusive guy there. Yeah. Or is he slipping? Pattern recognition. Pattern recognition. So he knows that left foot is coming. And so look how straight he throws that right hand.

57:22See how straight he threw that? So Canelo is throwing these big wide punches. And Floyd is just cutting them off at the path. and then moving his head out of the line of those hooks that come his way. So do you think it's conscious? I'm obsessed with this notion of unconscious genius, like different domains of super high performance where the people don't exactly know how they do it, but they do it. Well, you know how you do it, but you've also done it so many times in the gym and in fights that it's second nature, so you're not thinking of it as you're doing it. One of the things about countering people is when I was in my prime when I was fighting all the time I would throw kicks and they would land before I even knew I was gonna do it because someone would do something And as they would do something I instinctively knew because of pattern recognition There's gonna be an opening like say if some guy lifts his left leg if he's standing with his left leg forward And he lifts his left leg and he's coming towards me with his left leg I know that he's balancing on that right leg and that the left leg is coming this way And if I spin and catch him I can catch him as his momentum is going this way And I'll catch him that way and it'll double the power of the punch or the kick Did somebody teach it to you because there there's like a conscious and awareness of how you do it I guess what I'm I think this notion pattern recognition It's interesting because earlier we were talking about pattern recognition for finding people are lying right you have this pattern recognition thing That you know you're not saying it's perfect but you can sense something.

58:54There's things. And so it's a combination of things that we aren't always aware of. That's the unconscious part of the unconscious genius thing that I'm referring to. And so there's this idea like our brains are pattern recognition prediction machines. And so do you think, like in other words, two questions. Do you think Mayweather was ever pulled aside and said, listen, pay attention to their left shoulder and keep your eye on his right eye? I'm just making you. 100 %. OK. And were you ever told, hey, if his left leg comes up, That means he's balancing on his right. So you need to prepare a counterattack or an attack.

59:25So that's where drills come in. OK. So you do drills and you do drills constantly. And one of the things that made me whether's father was a great fighter, made with his father, fought sugar, a Leonard back in the 1970s when sugar ray was in his prime and gave him a hell of a fight. And his brother, her uncle, rather, his uncle Roger was Roger Mayweather, the black momba. He was a great fighter. So he grew up as a child around some of the best boxers in the world And so he was constantly seeing the successful motions that they did and constantly seeing them exploit weaknesses in other fighters And then constantly sparring so in sparring You're not just sparring you're not just fighting when you're sparring But you're just sort of downloading data you're downloading data points for a real fight and then you're doing drills where a guy will, you know, some guys they'll do with mitts, well they'll throw a hand at you and they'll slip and counter.

1:00:21Here, let me show you this. This is Guy Ilya Toporia. And Ilya Toporia is one of the absolute best fighters in the world. He's the current UFC featherweight champion, and the dude is just fucking phenomenal. But when you, one of the things that's phenomenal about him is his technique. His technique is perfect. There's like no fat in his technique. There's no wasted movement. So when an opportunity presents itself, everything is so fast because the technique is so streamlined, but like look at how he hits the pads. And when you watch how he hits the pads and may whether is a great example that as well.

1:01:00Did I send it to you? No? Didn't go through? I totally sent it. Hold on.

1:01:10So does I sent it? No, yeah, it's on Instagram. I sent it to you though on a text message. Really? I sent it to you. You got it? Okay. Like I said, one of the best hands in the sport, current UFC featherweight champion, and knocked out Volkhenovsky, who was maybe the greatest of all time. Watch him hit the punches. Look at this. See how he's moving his head when the guy throws punches just slipping just slightly It's like total economy of movement and the speed man the fucking speed of that look at the hand look at the hand speed Fucking incredible I mean if you know how difficult that is to do and do it that fast give me that sound again.

1:01:55Let me hear this I mean, these are like five, six punches a second. It almost looks like it's sped up by one and a half times. But it's not. And just phenomenal technique.

1:02:13But see how those punches, like they're not even talking. So when he's throwing the mitts at his head to get him to duck, there's no communication. He just sees that hand coming towards him and he's ducking. He sees this hand coming towards him and he's ducking. It's all like slight slips away and it's slight motions, which is all you need to get away from a punch, right? You just, you don't want to move too far. You're wasting a lot of energy and you can't counterattack. One of the best things about Floyd and one of the most brilliant things about him, he's one of the most elusive fighters of all time, but he didn't move around.

1:02:45He stood right in front of you and you couldn't fucking hit him. That's true mastery of space and true mastery of technique. I mean, he was, in my opinion, he's the best boxer that's ever lived. Yeah, I mean, I'm not qualified to rank people, but I watched when he was making that ascent towards it ended up being 50, you know. He just fought last weekend, this weekend. Yeah, he fought a match against John Gotti's grandson, which is crazy. That's scary for a lot of reasons. Yeah, for a lot of reasons, right? But this is the second time they fought. The first time they fought, it ended in a brawl.

1:03:18Like, a bunch of people jumped in the ring, it was crazy because they stopped the fight because they were talking too much shit to each other and holding on to each other too much. So the referee stopped the fight for whatever reason. I don't know. And in this fight was even crazy too because the referee was, the first referee was terrible. And the referee called Floyd, said Floyd Mayer, whether it hit him behind the head, absolutely incorrect call, Floyd threw a right hand and it caught him on the side of the head and the referee claimed that it was behind the head. So Floyd fired the referee in the middle of the bout.

1:03:51He stops the bout. He's like, get the fuck out of here. Get out of here. Because he's the promoter also. Well, I guess, I mean, also it's Floyd Mayweather. Like, what's the referee gonna do? Fuck you. You know, I'm gonna stop the fight. Like, also they're in Mexico City. Like, you get killed. Like, just get out of the ring, buddy. So Floyd throws this punch and he's 100 % correct. The punch landed at the side of the head. It's a right hook. It's a perfect punch. And the referee was saying, watch the back of the head. He's like, what the fuck are you talking about? That wasn't the back of the head.

1:04:20And so he kicks the guy out, and they bring in a different referee, who finishes the fight. It was insanity. In Floyd 1. It was an exhibition. It's kind of a bullshit money grab, honestly. So this is, you see the punch? That's the punch right there. It's just a right hook. So he's saying back of the head. So Floyd's like, get the fuck out of here. Just get out of here. Fuck you, get out of here. He's like, get the fuck out of here. And if anybody's qualified to say, get out of here, It's fucking Floyd Mayweather the best box of all time. He's a hundred percent correct that referee made a giant stupid error He's like get out of here get out of here.

1:04:54He's like get out of the fucking ring. This is this is domain Yeah, it's and he's right everybody watching it is right. No one thinks it's a bad punch If you let's see it again, we can see it one more time. It's a counter right hand Let's do it and we can see it in slow motion. So he throws the punch boom. It's just a perfect right hook It's a perfect right hook. What it does is a punch that goes over the top of the guard and catches him in an exposed area of the head. It's a perfect punch. And for the referee to interfere there. And also it's like, it's literally like someone who probably doesn't know how to box at all, telling the greatest boxer of all time that what he's doing is wrong, which is just bananas.

1:05:31It's crazy. So he got rid of the guy in the middle of the fight. But he's still doing these bouts. At 46 years old, still boxing these young kids. again, this John Gotti III, who is a very good up -and -coming MMA fighter. So he has all the weapons, takedowns, submissions, kicks, all that jazz, but he's choosing to fight Floyd in a boxing fight just for money, just like Conor McGregor did. It's really a trick. He gets these people to box with them. They have no business boxing with them, and he's making millions and millions of dollars doing this way after his competitive career is over. Which is because he's earned that right.

1:06:07Hey man, he's a genius. He really is a genius. He's a genius in figuring out a way to keep making money. And one of the reasons why people watch him fight is not because he's like Mike Tyson just goes out and destroys people. They're like watching a fight because they hate him. Because he talks so much shit and he's like look at my million dollar watch. Look at my fucking jet. Look at my house. Look at this. He's like constantly showing you all these things that he has. Like he'll lay out watches in a hotel bed. Like this is a million dollars worth of watches. This watch goes for $2 million and they're like, this is my small watch that I take sometimes, but I want to show you, when I show up, I bring out the big boy and it brings out this watch that's covered in diamonds.

1:06:43It's like fucking $5 million. And so you hate him. People hate him. He creates envy. Yes, yeah, he creates envy and you want him to lose, but he's not gonna, he's too, he's so good. But the other thing is discipline, right? You don't, he's not just this cocky guy who's like really good at boxing. He also has incredible discipline. I've seen, doesn't part me. running in the middle of the night. He would go to a nightclub with everybody else, be drinking water, everybody's party and having a good time. Floyd would leave the nightclub at 2 a .m. have his bodyguards drive the car and he would run in front of the car for hours.

1:07:18Run home, two o 'clock in the morning, run five, six miles and did it all the time. Just always fit, always in shape, never got fat, never got lazy, always was ready and so never really experienced decline And then decided at a certain point in time like after the Conor Gregor fight. Okay, I'm done Done did it all beat everybody undefeated by And now he just has these these demonstration fights where there were little exhibitions where he just beating people up That have no business in the ring with them and one of them he was walking around with a fucking a card a ring card He took it from the ring card girl and he started dancing around so he's like under no threat whatsoever He's enjoying life.

1:08:02Well people like to be angry. I'm always calling to mind a study I'll keep this really brief but there's a famous study by a guy named Robert Heath Who is a neurosurgeon and he put a bunch of stimulating electrodes into the brain of some humans getting neurosurgery And he offered them the opportunity to stimulate any area they wanted and he's to me some areas and they'd feel happy or giddy or drunk or sexual rouse or whatever you know the one area that all There were only three subjects but for human neurosurgery that's not a terrible subject number the area that all three of them preferred vastly over the other areas to be stimulated evoked the sense of anger and frustration.

1:08:39Really? Yeah, people like to be angry. Which is why Twitter is so popular. Yeah. And to some extent, Instagram and I don't know. Sure, but Twitter is the one the most because it's mostly just talking. Mostly just text. Instagram is photographs and you can just, I don't comment on people's very, very rarely. I might have commented on photos 12 times in my life. You know, just a friend, like, that's awesome way to go. Something nice. But I don't even read comments, but I look at pictures. I go, oh, that's cool. Oh, look at that video. That's fucking crazy. I'll give you a little tap, double tap, give you a little heart, give you a little love, and they move on about my day.

1:09:15But in Twitter, I'm constantly just engaging with people's thoughts and arguments and debates. And that's why I think Twitter is the most addictive of all the social media platforms. In terms of engagement, but not as addictive as TikTok in terms of, it compels you to continue to watch. I wanna keep going with this, but I have to piece hope out. I did this on before we got here, and I drank 64 liters of water. So, or 64 ounces, brother. All right, we'll be right back. We were at people like to get angry, and you were saying that you had another urge to take another sniff of these smelling salts.

1:09:48So I'm observing something interesting about the smelling salts. Like it's definitely like, brach hits hard, and then feel really good afterwards, you can feel it in your body, you can feel it in my body. And then I noticed there's kind of a hunger for it. Like another hit. Yeah, like maybe in 20 minutes or so. Just like a cocaine thing. Oh, allegedly. I've never tried cohesion. Me neither, good for you. But that's what I hear. Yeah, I wonder, I doubt that hits the dopamine circuit, but the little valuable science tidbit, we hear so much about dopamine adrenaline. Look, there are three molecules, they're called the catacolomines, dopamine, epinephrine, adrenaline, and nor epinephrine, nor adrenaline and they are actually by some are biochemical derivatives of others and they are cousins.

1:10:30They work like a little, like a little clan of molecules to raise alertness and focus and drive. I think the great Robert Sapolsky said it best. He said dopamine is not about the pursuit of pleasure. It's about the pleasure of pursuit. That makes sense. That's why he's Robert Sapolsky. Yeah, it's all about the journey. It's right. So you combine motivation with adrenaline which gets your body in a position to move better and nor adrenaline, which kind of works in between those two. It's a little more complicated and not worth going into, but they work as kind of like a gang of three to raise alertness, directional motivation, and go.

1:11:06And so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a little bit of a dopamine -ergic aspect to those smelling salts. I have to look it up and see. But I certainly like it. It feels good. It feels good. Everybody likes it. That's weird. And I like you know, that's why I've never tried cocaine or amphetamine like I like upstates Yeah, as they call them me to same thing. I've never tried to add her all either, but I've attempted oh People tell me bomb like Jesus. I've never tried it Working eyes. I'm trying to think of that. There's some you know, there was a chart out on Twitter We were just talking about Twitter where all the different neutropics or Let's not call them smart drugs, but things that can enhance alertness things like alpha gpc as you know, 600 milligrams alpha GPC.

1:11:46I don't care who it is. That's like, where's the double blind a placebo controlled study that shows it raises alertness and focus. Look, as much as I believe in science, you don't need a double blind placebo controlled study to know the swift kick in the shin hurts and that 600 milligrams of alpha GPC is gonna make you more alert. Is it safe to double blind placebo controls to address your alpha brain? Right, right. And so they exist. And certainly that's one that I would put kind of high on the tier of things for if you want alertness and focus. it's certainly more benign than a lot of prescription drugs that create a lot of this.

1:12:15But theanine is also really effective for that too and I don't know how many studies there are on that. Not as many Theanine takes away the jitters, like 100 to 200 milligrams of Theanine will take away the jitters associated with stimulants, which is why it's now in a lot of energy drinks. So you'll see alpha, GPC, Theanine, sometimes L -tyrosine, which is a precursor to dopamine. But there were a couple of things on that list, including prescription drugs, like Modaphanil, for instance, which was originally designed for the treatment of narcolepsy. Was it designed for that or was it designed as a performance enhancing drug, but they needed a way to prescribe it?

1:12:50Both. Okay. Yeah. So for the treatment of narcolepsy, it also has been shown to improve alertness and cognitive function in sleep deprived individuals. So you can imagine military finding that very useful. That's new vigilant, provisional, right? Correct. I took that stuff for a while. I was taking it and you know what I would really like to take it, like say if I had a gig in San Diego and I was done with my gig at like 11 o 'clock I was like I want to go home. I don't want to stay in a hotel. Fuck it. Let me drive home. And if I would drive home, there'd be that risk of the sleep coming on because of the, there's a weird thing about being on the highway about those lines.

1:13:27They fucking hypnotize it. It's really weird. Oh yeah. And the room. Yeah. And so for anybody out here, listen to this because this is my manager told me this. It's really important. If you think you're going to fall asleep. There's a great way to mitigate it. That's pain free. Get a rag like a washcloth and some ice and some water and have like a little thing next to you with a cold wet rag and just wipe that rag on your face and then you're good for like five more minutes. Reach in there and start home. Man, I'm just going to sleep again. Wipe that rag on your face. You wake right up. This is a great one.

1:13:59This is a great one and it fits right in with what Matt Walker says to do the opposite to fall asleep. Will you wash your face with warm water, take a hot shower. I go to the sauna. Or go in the sauna, everyone says, well, you're heating up your body, you need to cool down to fall asleep, but you heat up the surface of your body and the medial pre -optic area of your hypothalamus, which is your brain's thermostat, says, hey, the surface of the body is heating up. What should I do? Cool down my core temperature and that puts you asleep. Would it be bad to do sauna and then cold plunge and then try to go to sleep?

1:14:26I do that if I'm late in the day and I'm tired, it's not a problem, but I end with kind of a warmish shower. If I want to be alert, I end on cold. If I want to go to sleep, I end with warm. Which is why I start the day with cold. To wake up. And when you get in the cold, the surface of the body gets cold. That's kind of a no -brainer. And the core body temperature goes up because the medial preoptic area, your brain's thermostat says, wait, the surface of the body is cooling down. I'm going to heat up. And waking up in the morning is largely the consequence of body temperature going up. So why do you wake up more quickly in the cold?

1:14:59Well, body temperature goes up more quickly. Also, big shot of adrenaline from cold water. Nobody escapes the adrenaline from cold water. Right. At least upon getting in, as long as it's cold enough, and last time you picked on me about how warm I'm keeping my eyes bath, can't even be called a nice bath. So my cold plunge is now set at mid 40s. That's better. Getting better. But I still go into the sauna at 210 -220. By the way, I don't know if I'm right. I'm probably wrong. My wife doesn't want, she wants to get a second cold plunge because she doesn't like how cold mine is. Because mine is ice in it.

1:15:31Yeah, you're probably in the thirties. Yeah, it's 34. It's fucking cold and shit. Space mode kind of I've got a new one that I got from Morocco for we have two So we have one here at the gym that's a blue cube that's this one's insane because you can crank it and You turn up the knob and it'll be like a flowing raging river. Oh well and the flow Breaks up the thermal layer on the outside your body when you're sitting in the cold plunge I always say those stoic things where people are in the cold plunge real still Look and tough, tell that person to sift their arms around, let that cold water getting your armpits.

1:16:02Well, what's happening is you're breaking up the thermal layer that keeps you a little bit warmer. This is why we huddle in there. Because it's not like you're making yourself, like it's not like you're wearing a jacket. If you move or if the water is moving, much more effective. It's painful for me to just check my watch, to see how much time I got left. Socks. Yeah, I have a system now. If I count slowly to 10 two times, so I count to 20. And I know exactly how long my breath is for it to be three minutes. I know how to do it So I do it now. That's awesome. It's a little cheating. You know what I do?

1:16:33Man, I can't believe I'm gonna admit this publicly. You know what I do? I got two little rubber duckies in there Once it's tough for looking rubber duckie and his name is Rogan. I'm not kidding. I shot a video of this I'll send it to you my producers are gonna kill me But then there's another one and that's you Roman and it's you basically teasing me about what a whoo I am. And I do that for the entire time I'm in the cold plunge. So I forget that I'm in the cold plunge. And then at the end you go, okay, you can get out now. And I'm like, okay. Well here's what it is. I don't know if the cold is any, if it's any better to be 34 degrees, or if it's any better to be 45 degrees, or 50 degrees.

1:17:08But what I do know is that I don't like 34 degrees. So that's why I do it. Because if I feel like I can get away with making it a little bit easier, I feel like a bitch. So that's why I do it as cold as it can get before it frees a solid. Which is easy to be 34 degrees now. Well, this gets to something that I know we've talked a little bit about before offline, not on microphone, which is doing hard things translates to an ability to do hard things, and probably translates provided doesn't kill you to a longer life. And you've explained that there's actually a part of your brain that grows. So there's a brain area that most neuroscientists aren't aware of, called the anterior mid -singulate cortex.

1:17:49Scientists who are in the know know about it. I teach your anatomy and medical students at Stanford. It's an area that we cover in passing, but there are a lot of brain areas. You gotta get, you know, can't get to everything. But in the last couple of years, there have been studies of this area, the anterior mid -singulate cortex that make it super important for everybody to know about, not just neuroscientists. And here's the deal. Colleague of Minot Stanford, Joe Parvizis, a neurosurgeon, he's in there stimulating different brain areas, including anterior mid -singulate cortex and areas near it.

1:18:16in human patients while they're awake, preparing them for neurosurgery for other reasons. Stimulates anti -rubin -singulate cortex, and what do all people who have their anti -rubin -singulate cortex report? They feel like there's something about to happen. Something's kind of looming, a challenge, a storm, some report it as a storm, or a physical challenge, but their overall sensation is one that they want to lean into it. They want to challenge it. Now, this area's subsequently been imaged and people who are successful dieters, it grows larger. And people that fail at a dieting or nutrition program, it gets smaller.

1:18:50People that embrace a new form of exercise, and here's the key point that they don't want to do, this area gets bigger. People that are just doing things that they enjoy doing does not change in shape or size. Now here's where it gets even more interesting. The anterior mid -singulate cortex is larger in volume in a group of people called super -agers. That's a bit of a misnomer because it implies the age faster. they actually age more slowly as it relates to cognitive decline. The slope of cognitive decline is not as steep in these people, meaning they're holding on to cognitive abilities longer than other people into older age.

1:19:23And the universal quality among these superagers is not just a larger enter mid -singulate cortex, but that they challenge themselves to do things that are challenging and they kind of don't want to do or really don't want to do. So when we hear, oh, you know, people should do crossword puzzles to maintain their memory, probably good to keep some cognitive flexibility going. But if you love crossword puzzles, you're not going to grow your enter mid -singulate cortex. If you love 45 degrees in the cold plunge after an hour long run in the hills, which I do, probably not going to do much to grow this area.

1:19:51If you really don't want to do something, and you do it, this area gets bigger. And it's got inputs and outputs from all of these different brain areas that make all of this make sense, like the dopamine system, like the learning and memory system, like the areas of the brain that say, no, I'm going to retreat from that. It's want to do, this area gets bigger. And the best part is it translates to an ability to do harder things elsewhere. This to me, I get obviously super excited about because it's nested in human data and animal data in real world examples of dieting and exercise and aging and longevity and all of that.

1:20:26And it speaks to much of what you've talked about on this podcast for years and years, which is do hard things. It will give you an ability to do other hard things. But if you love doing deadlifts, honestly, even sets to failure on those deadlifts, enjoy them, benefit from them, all the wonderful things that come with doing deadlifts, great. But you should probably also do something that you don't enjoy doing if you have an interest in the kind of benefits that we're talking about. Well, it completely makes sense that your brain would have to develop an ability to continue to do difficult things, and that ability to not hesitate and push through the ability to not procrastinate and go forward.

1:21:05And that thing is probably like all things. It's like cardiovascular endurance, muscular endurance. Like you develop an ability to do more of it because of that. Because your brain recognizes this is something that we're going to have to deal with. Let's figure out how to respond to this. Right. And movement itself, like physical movement or cognitive movement if you're learning new things like comedy, preparing new things or learning poetry or drawing. Like I used to draw a lot, start drawing again, carry around this notebook everywhere. I'm not going to show the drawings. They're just for me, but pushing myself to do something that I enjoy, but that like there's a barrier there.

1:21:37Are you any good? I mean, I do anatomical drawings. I'm gonna say what you got. I got a lot of them there. No, it's like super bad. I think here's my super bad. Sorry, these are just my favorite. These are my favorite stages of my journal book notes, but my, but I've actually, I used to post my drawings on Instagram. That's how I started. In 2019, I wasn't thinking about having a podcast. I was just posting pictures of the retina. Why did we meet? So 2019 I started posting on Instagram 2020 I came on this podcast for the first time But you were in LA at that time right and yeah, and then I went on Lex's podcast a little bit later And then he goes you should start podcasts.

1:22:12So I started January 21. Yeah, okay, so here's so many oh wow pretty They're not great. They're just for fun. They're just for fun. They're just for fun. Not bad at all I like to use them to teach so they're not listen. I'm no DaVinci but Dude, that's pretty fucking good, actually. But the point, I'm obsessed with this thing that somewhere between perfect accuracy and total representation of biology, like a brain or a set of cells, and at the other end of the continuum, like ball and stick, there's like a perfect sweet spot for teaching. And so what I'm doing there is what I do in the classroom.

1:22:45I go, okay, listen, we're gonna talk about how muscle releases a microRNA that helps you burn fat. And then I kind of remind people, like there's fat, there's a, you know, so I don't want too much detail, but I don't want too little detail. Dude, that's good. The anatomy of the hand is dead on. That's really good. So I'm trying. I'm trying. No, that's really good. And of course, that's not anatomically correct. Like the nerves don't spit out of the tip of the finger. Right. But when you're trying to teach. Dude, that's good eye. Yeah. That's really good. Yeah, like I'm just trying, yeah, I'm not, again, I'm not trying to be da Vinci.

1:23:14I just want people to learn the information. One of my daughters is insanely good. Oh yeah. Well, I wanted to be a conch -bo -hillstrator when I was young. And I always wonder like how much of talent gets passed on to kids. It's hard to separate nature and nurture there, but honestly I think there's something there. There's something there. There's something because there's certain people that like if their parent was a singer, like but then you go, well maybe they were singing around the house a lot when they were growing up. People are going to think I'm weird for saying this, but I don't care.

1:23:45I am weird, I'm going to say it anyway. the way he moves, like how live he is, as parents are like dancers and performers, right? Right. Also, he's a good boxer. Is he really? Yeah. Like just his movements are so atypical, and like he's like, it's like watching him is cool. Like he looks cool the way he moves. He's free. Yeah. And there's a skateboarder named Jimmy Wilkins who's like breaking every barrier on skateboarding, and he actually uses his knees to contact the board and move the board while his hands are free. And he's a smaller guy, real small, real lied, super loose ankles. And I said to him, like, what do your parents do?

1:24:25And he goes, my mom's a ballerina and my dad's an orchestra conductor. This guy's using his knees on the board. So like he does everything, not everything. He does a lot of things hands free at mock speed. For people in skateboarding, they probably just want to see flips and 900 variables. And that stuff's cool. But he makes everything look so good. I mean, Jimmy, for those that are in the know, Jimmy Wilkins is the next is like the next like Tony will say Tony Hawk everyone will say like watching Jimmy look See that the whole thing here is that Jimmy's skateboarding is like perfect Poetry like so the reason but so his back knee is often used to stabilize the board Because he's got that hip looseness that you were talking about earlier and and so his yeah, he's he's doing that's incredible He won X Games last year or not this year.

1:25:12This year he took third. So those guys get banged up though. Those guys get a lot of concussion. He's big on the nicotine. I'm trying to get him to quit the nicotine, so he loves the nicotine. But between... Why are you getting him to quit? I don't have a problem with people taking nicotine. Pouches? It's a vasoconstrictor, raises blood pressure. As long as you're healthy in other ways, I just think that I see people go from one pouch to a canister a day. Oh yeah. Yeah, it's just they ramp up the dosage to I like threes. Okay mild three milligrams, but I Lucy sent me some that are 12 Jesus, Louise's I can do like half a piece of Nicaragua put that the 12 in my mouth for like 30 seconds and my Body's like get it out of here.

1:25:56That's a lot. I mean it seems like you're good at keeping things in that Useful but not excessive domain. Yes. Well, I'm a control freak in that way I know I want to be in control I don't ever want to be out of control. Like I've never been addicted to a sub other than coffee, I guess. But I've taken time off of coffee too, just because I know that I like it too much. But coffee doesn't overwhelm me, right? So if I felt like coffee was overwhelming me or if it was difficult to acquire or illegal, I probably would quit coffee. I have a chuggle, but at the rate the world's going, it's probably going to be legal.

1:26:26Well, it's always good. The reason why coffee is legal and is the reason why they created math really, because it's good for productivity. Like coffee keeps you from getting tired. It's good for productivity. It's also enjoyable. People like a nice warm liquid. I love a, and since I really got into coffee from doing this podcast really, I drink it black. I like coffee. I like taste. I look forward to it. I have one every morning. I like it. But I love it in the afternoon. But if I thought it was fuck with my life, 100 % I would quit. Yeah. You know, I mean, I've had times when I was drinking too much.

1:26:59Mostly because of comedy. Because at nights, you're out with your boys. and everybody wants to drink. They're all drinking. My friends are all drunk. Like, like a good solid percentage. No, Whitney doesn't drink. Whitney does not drink. But a good solid percentage of my friends drink a lot. They drink all the time. They drink at clubs. I tried to get Bird to quit. Bird is not gonna quit. Well, he asked me to help him. Oh, wait, he doesn't mean that. Otherwise, I just wanted to talk to him. Just talk about Bird. That's what he wants. But that's what he wants. Let's talk about me. Let's talk about me about how I have to quit.

1:27:31Come on talk to me about me. Let's make it all about Bert. That's a Bert legs Well, he was doing better with his health and they posted that photo himself in the wetsuit Come on Bert like get with it. Did you get fat again? Well, do you send me a picture the other day? He's all skinny. Is he lying? No, he's looking more like a melted candle son of a bitch He got big at least to get jacked. He started lifting weights. I feel bad making fun of him But I'm not making I'm just worried about his health. Oh, yeah, that's not good I'm worried about your health. Well, the thing is Bert is on tour, right?

1:28:03He's got painted toenails too with the fuck you doing He he's on tour so he's on this Fully loaded tour. He's doing all these arenas with all his friends and they're doing activities constantly They go to water parks. I don't think I'll do water parks. You know shit like that Can you bring your kettlebell or something? Ah, they do that too But he gets drunk every night and it's not just like a little bit of beer It's a lot of beer. It's a lot of they have a vodka company now. That's not good now they have their own vodka So he's trying what's that saying everybody loves a young drunk But as time goes on it does not look pretty.

1:28:38Yes, but there's a curve when it comes back around again You see a 90 year old guy. It's hammered that guy's fun Oh, I like it then they're they're wild again, you know a 90 year old guy with like a fucking straw hat on and a gun and he's drunk. Yeah, I must say. Like, kinda rest time. So when he was before he died. Oh man, I must say I thoroughly enjoyed your, your live comedy. Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. Wash it three times. Thank you. So that one was another example of doing something that I didn't want to do. Cause they offered me to do it live. And I was like, fuck that. Like I want to be able to edit mistakes out.

1:29:13I want to have, you know, have four shows and pick the best one and do that. I want to do it, fucking live. That's who fucking needs that pressure? It was so good. I watched the first one of my girlfriend, we watched it as it was happening. Then I watched it with my friend Tim, when he was out on tour, like Green Day Rants, all these 90 bands, 90s bands, smashing pumpkins are out on tour, like stadiums with 90 ,000 people. That crazy. It's crazy. I went out because I've like, you know, big rancid fan and I like the other guys too, but I'm big, big rancid fan. I was like holy cow, like people love this stuff.

1:29:42Again, anyway, we watched it again there, and then I've watched it again. and I will say it felt very cathartic to me. I don't know how it felt for you, but it felt really cathartic. Oh, the subject matter? Yeah. The subject matter and also like the next day was pure, like delight and just baffled and shocked all at the same time when on Twitter, I see a clip taking completely out of context about a bit about taking things out of context. Just like life had like looped back on the cell. You were talking about things being taken out of context and they were taking it out of context. They had like cut it.

1:30:21And I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait. I remember that very differently. Because I remember things that I hear pretty well. And I was like, went back and I was like, wait, he's talking about things being taken out of context and I'm taking it out of context. Yeah, they don't care. But there's always some people that are just, they're not, this is not in good faith. Everything they're doing is just trying to find something wrong with everything you're doing. And it's usually people that life, their life is a mess. There's no one who does that who is a healthy accomplished person who has great relationships in their life and is doing really well at some skill or chosen profession that they enjoy very much.

1:30:56They're not fulfilled. People are trying to politicize something. Yeah. Or they're trying to get clicks off your name. There's a lot of that for sure. So there's a business in that. And then there's also people that are doing like MSNBC did this recently. And there's, this has gotten so popular that my fucking stepdad contacted me to tell me he's happy that I'm suing MSNBC. I'm like, I'm not suing MSNBC. But this is what MSNBC did. They took a clip of me talking about Tulsi Gabbard, and they edited it up and made it look like I was saying great things about Kamala Harris. Wait, what? Yeah. I mean, you and I have been mashed up on other stuff, and AI, and I don't want it, Like you said, we don't want to draw attention.

1:31:37They got taken off the internet, thank goodness, but it was bullshit. It was like, it was AI and mashup. They did that about politics. Yes, they did it about politics, but they didn't do it like AI. They just deceptively edited the things that I was saying, took a completely out of context where I was talking about, first of all, I was talking about Tulsi Gabbard, and then I was talking about that the media behind Kamala Harris, all this surge and all these people deciding that she's good, she could win. And they put the two of those together and made it seem like I was praising Kamala Harris and saying a bunch of things that aren't even true about her.

1:32:13Like I was talking about Tulsi Gabbard being a congresswoman for eight years and about how she served overseas, two deployments in medical units dealing with people who are blown up from the war. Like that's not something Kamala Harris did. It's something Tulsi Gabbard did. I was just saying things about her and they put it out there as a clip of me praising Kamala Harris, but they don't care about the truth. They just want a narrative to get out there amongst enough people, because most people are just surface readers, right? They read a headline, and I've been guilty about many times. You read a headline, oh, I know what that is, and they show your laptop.

1:32:50I got it now. I got the whole, so if you read an article that says, you know, Andrew Schultz is a liar, like, oh, he's a liar. I heard he's a liar. And then you just start repeating he's a liar. It doesn't have to be real. And so all they have to do with, like how many people are actually going to watch my Netflix special? Well, it's a lot, but compared to the amount of people in the country, not a lot, you know, small percentage. So all you have to do is take something out of context from someone who's never going to watch it in the first place, put it in front of them, like, oh, that piece of shit, can't believe he said that, even though I'm literally talking about things being taken out of context.

1:33:27The part about this is so frustrating to me is that, like at some point, especially Especially as a scientist, right? Like that's data selection, right? Like if you look at data and you look at scientific experimentation, starts with a question, you generate a hypothesis, you collect data, you publish the results, and you get to state your conclusions. Now let's talk about what you're talking about. In the world of science, you, I don't think there's a lot of outright data fraud, but a lot of experiments that don't work, people come up with excuses to eliminate those data. But there is some data fraud, right?

1:33:56Oh, there certainly is some data. The AMOLED plaques thing with... There's only some data fraud and there's a range of underlying reasons. One of the more common reasons that people don't talk about, which is something to really strongly inoculate in laboratories against, is when a laboratory is known for doing very, very good work, oftentimes the graduate students and post -docs that go there feel like they need to give the boss the result. So sometimes it's unbeknownst to the person running the lab. There have been a lot of cases in recent years of papers being discovered as having major issues and that's like what you do after the lab head or do you go after the person did it?

1:34:31Lab head is a responsible for everything in their lab. AI is helping with this because you can scan data and look at things. But ambition is a dangerous thing. If somebody puts ambition ahead of accuracy. So there's that kind of thing. And then there's outright data fraud. I mean, there was this nanotechnology guy from some years back, I think his last name was Shone, who had like 20 papers in science and nature in two years. and it turns out he wasn't even bothering to, he was fabricating data, the papers were all retracted, and I don't know what he's doing now, but the noise plots, the random noise plots in these papers were the way he got caught.

1:35:09What it turned out is that, I mean, I'm struggling because it's like he was so lazy, ambitious, but so lazy that he didn't even bother to use new random noise plots from one paper to the next. So somebody said, wait, random, random should be random, why is it the same in these two papers, boom, and then the whole thing unraveled. Eventually. So lazy. So he was particularly ambitious, lazy, and that was outright fraud. There are all sorts of other cases and things like that. And there's people who make this, they're sport to talk about. Most scientists are trying to get the correct answers. I do believe that.

1:35:40Most scientists have good faith. They're trying to get the answer. But it's hard, scientists are hard. Now what you're talking about, to me sounds like people deliberately grabbing from the palette of paints that is the words that are spoken by anybody on the internet, especially people with podcasts, you or me or anybody else, and then literally cutting and pasting things together to create a story which is fiction. Do you know what Pink Trip is? No. You know what Pink Trip? Pink Trip is hilarious. He's a guy on the internet who takes clips of podcasts and creates narratives of things that are totally not happening.

1:36:16Oh yeah, I've seen some of you. Does one recently me and Tucker Carlson are having an argument? I haven't seen that one. It's good. but somebody said to me, who the fuck is on it? Just here you can find it. I remember one of you and Elon, several perhaps. Yeah, so I know that. So, pingtrips? No, it's a dude. Oh, okay. His name is, you see here it is, pingtrip. So, it's visible. What? Space is real. Are you joking? You're a science denier. What? Stop. up the the bodies of science have bestowed the truth if you ignore it. I get another fucking lecture from you. I'm gonna go crazy.

1:37:00Shut the fuck up bitch. You're fucking idiot. Don't do that anymore. What are you gonna do about it? Bitch. What are you gonna do about it? You are literally powerless. Yeah. I'm just gonna do whatever I want. You could get your ass kicked. Are you threatening me? I think you are a far right white supremacist. I am racist. Respect for you. You're like my dog. Does it ever hurt you? You're like disgusting. Just like vulgar. I think if I were sort of narrowed down my bigotry since like people like you I just think you're disgusting So these are actual spoken words got clued together. Yeah, yeah about completely different things It's really masterful.

1:37:53Do you want to die watch if I take a nine millimeter router? 762 by 39 and shoot you Can you catch the bullet? You can't do that. What are you gonna do about it?

1:38:11Why would you hide that?

1:38:15Isn't that funny, but this is funny, right? He does that with a lot of stuff. People are pretending to be in love with me. He makes it like there's a romance which is so good. Me and different people. But that's funny. That's art. He's making a story that doesn't exist. It's really funny, right? But there's people that do it just to either, in this case, it was to promote Connolly Harris to get the, you know, the passive listener, the people that are, you know, the casual to go, oh, wow, Joe Rogan likes Kamala Harris. I heard you, I heard you're endorsing and not endorsing all sorts of people.

1:38:49Yeah, I can't say even say I like somebody without it being an endorsement in people getting mad, but I think the mega people are happy now that Robert F. Kennedy is now with Trump. So I think they've unified, they've unified the belts. Yeah, I think we're in a very weird time with the media and I think truth is super important. And I think someone that's willing to do something like that, that's a real offense. It's a real offense. It's not a small thing. It's a real lie. And it's a lie that changes other people's opinion. You take what's perceived to be an influential person and you distort their views in either a way to shame them, make them look bad or to promote someone else.

1:39:27Like, that's a real lie. That's a dangerous lie. It's a real offense. And I think that there's no laws against that right now. It's except libel law. I mean, he could take someone to court, I guess. But it's a real bad thing. It's a real gross lie. And it's used right now to manipulate public opinion. Yeah, completely out of context in the example you gave. Yeah. It's certainly I'm familiar with examples where context is completely cut off at the point where it leads to a false conclusion. Oh sure. Like where the story is completely different. The reason I gave the counter example of science is when you're trained as a scientist, you're trained to try and parse what's real and what's not real and give the best version of that that you can.

1:40:17And then you are allowed to state your conclusions. But I have a question. At what point do you think the general public will come to understand that this is the way that a lot of things that they see out there are constructed to some degree or another and stop actually believing it. It depends on who the public is. This is the issue right now with boomers, right? Old liberals in particular. All they do is watch the news and read the newspaper and whatever is printed, they believe. It's very difficult to get them to consider like, hey, maybe someone's lying. Maybe there's propaganda campaigns.

1:40:52Maybe there's like this widespread media narrative that they're pushing because corporations are behind it and advertising is behind it and they're figuring out a way to manipulate the public opinion on things. It's very hard to get old boomers to believe that because they're old, okay? So they're setting their ways. Their mind has formed around, you know, I am a liberal, I am a Democrat, I've been a Democrat my whole life. This is how I feel about these issues. This is this is my community. This is my tribe. These are my people and the news says this and I'm with them and oh great We're up in the polls now and for them It's like they're on a team it might it might as well be the dolphins versus the Raiders It's the same kind of mentality in their head and They don't want to be challenged.

1:41:39They that little part of their brain that exists when you challenge yourself and do things You don't want to do that bitch is shriveled up to almost nothing and they're real boring and their lives are are entirely excited by political discourse. Do you think it's all boomers? Yeah, it's mostly boomers. I think young people are way less likely to buy into bullshit now. There's young people that are ideologically captured, for sure. You see that both with right -wing people. Oh no, sorry, with left -wing people. Sorry, I mean, do you think that all boomers believe in the traditional media like this?

1:42:10Yes, it's mostly because they grew up with it. They're the ones. The kids today, they don't buy it at all. like Gen Z kids and whatever the fuck that what's the newest is this what's the latest Whatever these kids are these young kids coming up today like people in their 20s. They don't believe it at all Well, I'll tell you you know I'll non -relectantly tell you you know my Dad and I over the years like we had some early issues and we resolve them and we're good now But when some not so kind press came out about me They interviewed a lot of people, interviewed a lot of people from my high school class and friends and co -workers and then cherry picked for the story They wanted to create but they talked to my dad Okay, and I would not put my dad into the Political camp that you described or any camp really but he's the first generation immigrant moved here from Argentina It did is PhD under a scholarship from the from the Navy, you know, it's like a story of an immigrant who came here and became a scientist It was a dream.

1:43:10Yeah, it wasn't a lot of science to do in Argentina. There's not a lot of funding for it, right? So came here, I would say that when they reached out to him, he was like, oh yeah, the reporter was super nice. You know, they asked me all these questions. And then he called me. He was like, I'm shocked. I didn't say that. That was completely flipped and twisted. And I said, you know, and I said, you got to record those kind of conversations. And I said, it's okay. Yeah. You know, it's okay. In fact, and that changed his perception. I can't speak for him, but based on conversations we've had since.

1:43:39Yeah, I can't believe this that they would sort of leverage this for a false narrative. You're allowed to do it for whatever reason. You know, I have a friend who used to work at New York Times and said they were encouraged to do it. They were encouraged to just try to take someone down. Like that was the whole idea of a piece. Yeah. Well, that was made clear by the fact that many people reach out. I was like, yeah, the best conversation with this person or my former when I was a kid I grew up skateboarding and I wrote for this brand, you know, Thunder and Spitfire and my team manager was interviewed.

1:44:07and then he called me afterwards and he said, yeah, it was kind of weird. Like I kept telling him the story that, you know, that they had heard about you on podcasts over and over and they kept poking and probing, trying to get me and he said, that's what happened, Andrew called me that day and said, help me, I need to get out of this place, et cetera, et cetera. And he was like, I don't get it. And I was like, listen, Shruggy, like that's what we call him, Steve Ruggy. I go, listen, like thanks for talking to her, but you know, it's just the way it works. It's not about, like they weren't really interested in the truth, they were actually pulling out certain language and ex -girlfriend of mine said the same thing.

1:44:36Like I talked to her and I told her like what a great relationship we had and then like what she printed kind of alluded to something Kind of slightly different and I just said listen that you know that thanks for talking to me You know like the goal is to collect a bunch of data like this where I compare to science my domain compare it take a bunch of data Cherry pick only the things that Could work if those only were true and some of them are just outright lies and then publish that that is data fraud Like, so I agree with you. pharmaceutical studies. Like many, like many. And at the same time, you know, like we're enjoying the Cateen here or you are because I will say, I'm not in defense of the pharmaceutical industry.

1:45:14Nor am I on attack of them. But there are certain things that, you know, push through traditional science. You get great information about dosage and safety. Look at ozemic, right? I get asked about this all the time. I don't know how this became politicized. I will say, if you do things to offset the muscle loss For certain people, reducing their appetite with it might be a useful tool. It's expensive as their dependence. Those are important issues. But we learn one thing for sure from ozempikmanjaro, etc. The main cause of the obesity crisis is people eat too many calories. On average, about 3 ,500 calories per day, and they don't move enough.

1:45:51They don't exercise enough. And then we can get into what they eat, etc. You know, we'd have a discussion about seed oils if we really want to cause some friction. I don't like seed oils. I don't eat them. but I'm not aware of any randomized control trial that says that they're bad. I just don't like them. I like olive oil and butter, and I like cooking beef and beef fat. Tastes better, and I feel better. I feel better, and that's enough of a reason for me. Business and science about why they're bad for you? So there's this whole thing about ratios of omega -3s versus the omega -6s, and you get a lot of omega -6s with the seed oils, and I think olive oil is good for us.

1:46:22I think I will conclude that. I think drinking less alcohol or no alcohol is good for you. I think I'm of the belief that high quality meat is good for you. I'm also the belief that fruits and vegetables can't feel like. I think all the data point to these things. I think that there isn't an abundance of data yet that's as seed oil is bad. And I think Lane Norton would support that statement and he's kind of my go to in terms of what the randomized control trials say. But in my experience, I feel better when I'm not eating them. So I choose personally not to eat them. And frankly, there may be something to it.

1:46:51Right? I mean, now we're hearing all about microplastics. We're hearing about all that. But when it comes to the JLP1 agonist, right? And I spent a lot of time on this on two podcasts or more, one with an expert, one solo, et cetera. You know, of all the peptides that broke through, you know, we've talked about peptides, we've talked about more. There's this one peptide, glucon -like peptide one, that when raised to levels about a thousand fold over normal levels leads to massive suppression of appetite and people lose weight, which for some people is an emergency situation. They're really fat and there's nothing they can do to lose the weight and they're getting sicker and sicker.

1:47:25My hope would just be that those people would also try and eat correctly and exercise. And so the debate has become, is it good for you? Is it bad? Well, there's muscle loss. So, offset the muscle loss. But let's be realistic. Most people won't offset the muscle loss. Right. If you could do both, it'd be better. Yeah. Or come off the ozemic mongerro eventually by replacing your behaviors. It's hard to move when you're, I've never been big and overweight. But the way that Goggins talks about it, or it's got to be uncomfortable. Like when you're feeling kind of just not great, like just to move you can get injured easily, I would say one of the best ways to get and stay in great shape your whole life is yes, exercise, eat, ride, et cetera, but also don't get badly hurt.

1:48:05Yes. That's a huge one that nobody talks about. Oh yeah. And the number one way in my opinion to get badly hurt is do a workout that a friend suggests without at 10 out of 10. Well, especially with heavy stuff. Right, or go to a low -end of these boot camp things. Like I want to sweat a lot. You go in, you do a bunch of circuit training for an hour and two days later your shoulders like a whole point. So you got to build up to that kind of stuff. So I think there are a lot of themes here but I'm not opposed to certain pharmaceuticals. I think certain people need drugs for ADHD a lot don't. And you know, dose response curves and lethal dose analysis and that kind of stuff is super valuable.

1:48:44What I don't like because I don't think it's necessary is when people default to the most expensive side effect risky kind of reflexive option because I think that the basics sunlight, exercise, you know, cardio and weight training. I mean, we're in a, like, these things work. They work so well. They've always worked well and they'll always work well. Yeah. And I also think there's great data emerging that they transform mental health. I mean, the data on resistance training two or three times a week and mental health is striking. I mean, you compare that to what people get from certain SSRIs and you're like, goodness sake, 45, 60 minutes a week, lift some heavy objects.

1:49:25You feel better. And it literally has better statistical results. Absolutely SSRIs. Absolutely. And I know you've talked about this recently and I'm kind of like hitting a bunch of things here, but I think a lot about this relationship between traditional science, FDA, NIH, I reviewed grants for the NIH for years until very recently I was a regular study section member. I understand the process, I understand the limitations and the benefits, and I also understand that like in the cases recently where the FDA decided to not approve MDMA for the treatment of PTSD, you go like, whoa, what's it going to take?

1:49:59I think, you know, I had a lot of feelings about that ruling. I think it's unfortunate given the really strong data that support the use of MDMA for the treatment of PTSD. I mean, more than 60 % successful in air quotes, plus some people just go into total remission. But the hazards are there, and if there aren't safe guards in place for the practitioner -patient relationship, which is one of the major concerns, if those aren't there, well then it's never gonna be legalized. So - What is the hazard of the participant with the person that's helping them? So there were two major issues, plus some others, but the ones that I'm most aware of is that lack of an adequate control group, people don't know if they got the drugs or they didn't.

1:50:44And then the other one is, during the course of the trials, there were some issues that came up about improprieties between practitioners and patients. That's all like sexual stuff? There were relationships. My understanding is that there were, that there were certain things may have arisen that kind of like, pricked up, you know, people's ears. But the major issue was this, is a person who's under the influence of MDMA, in a position to advocate for what they need during the course of the session, right? Like, are they in a, quote unquote, truly safe space? But the same thing could be said of psilocybin trials.

1:51:14So the solution there, my understanding, is that you have two therapists there. It's not one therapist, one patient, two therapists. That there are safeguards in place. The same way that, you know, when somebody, a brain surgeon does a brain surgery, there's an anesthesiologist there, and multiple nurses, and staff to get things, and hema stats, and, you know, so I think that there needs to be, I think a next phase evolution of the way that we think about things like MDMA assisted treatment for PTSD because I do think by my read of the data and I've looked closely at these data, despite a few retractions, there's still a body of data that really point to how powerfully helpful it can be for certain people under the right conditions.

1:51:52It's just striking. And there's a tremendous amount of anecdotal data, just people who haven't been in a study but talk about the benefits they've had from it and how much it's especially war veterans. with both psilocybin and MDMA. And I began the work of veteran solutions is doing with a guy at Stanford, Nolan Williams in our department of psychiatry. He's been doing brain imaging before and after I began with the veterans that are taking I began followed by DMT. And those are looking very, very interesting. So to me, it's also the kind of emotional loading of things like MDMA. When we call it MDMA, if I tell you, this is MDMA.

1:52:30This is a drug that raises serotonin dramatically, raises dopamine dramatically, opens neuroplasticity and allows people to rewire their brains if adequately supported, to feel relief if not remissioned from PTSD. You'd say, awesome. How do we move this forward safely? But if I start using words like ecstasy, I start using, now I call it what it really is, MDMA, methylene dioxy, methamphetamine. You hear methamphetamine, you hear ecstasy. You start hearing a bunch of stuff that starts shifting your brain towards, Okay, this is like a party drug. They went out and used it. Let same thing was said about cannabis.

1:53:05I've done multiple episodes about cannabis. I'm not anti -canibus. I think there's case studies where, excuse me, that's a specific thing inside. Use cases where, or examples where people with a propensity for psychosis should probably not be doing high -tech cannabis. I learned something really interesting, by the way, about this. We brought on an expert, brought on in part, but there was a little bit of a Twitter battle. I put out a solo episode about cannabis years ago. So no one had a problem with it, put a clip on X. Oh, people came at me like crazy, like crazy. So I invited one of the main academics in that area onto my podcast.

1:53:38He eventually agreed. What was his disagreement with? He didn't like a bunch of things I said, but mainly three statements. One was that I said that there was evidence because there is a published paper, I must say this, there is a published paper looking at the differences in subjective effects that people experience with sativa versus indica strains. And he said there's no evidence that there's a different experience from Sativa versus Indika strains That's just all bud tender lower. You shouldn't be saying this. He doesn't smoke weed I don't think that's just not true. Right. So I said wait.

1:54:11Here's the paper Here's the paper right then there were a couple other things one is I didn't agree once you read the paper He said he would like to see more evidence when he came on he was very gracious offered a lot of useful knowledge But he He really didn't counter with that much. There were some issues around CBD biology versus THC. What is his field of expertise? He works on animal models, but focuses on cannabis biology. He's very knowledgeable. I don't think he's anti -cannabis at all. He was checking me on some things that he felt that I... He was very nice guy. He was checking me on some things that he felt I had not gotten correctly or that weren't adequately supported So my response was I did this publicly come on the podcast right like I'm not afraid to talk science That's what I do like let's go and not in a combative way He agreed to come on the podcast.

1:55:01We had a great discussion and one of the things that he said was The whole idea that you know, there's so much more THC in weed now that's leading to all these problems. Like the weed of today is not the weed of yesterday. He said when people inhale, they take it by, you know, vape or they smoke it or whatever, there's his words, are that there's far fewer cases of people taking in more. They're able to reach that point that they wanna be at without going too far. However, even though it's higher potency, however, when people take it by edible, there are cases where people get to genuine freak out in psychotic episodes because they're taking in far too much too quickly because you can eat the edible quickly.

1:55:47You don't, they're not layering in until they hit that plane that they want to be. Well it's also the conversion to 11 high -droxy metabolite. It's five times more psychoactive than THC. I used to do a joke about it that, let's talk to dolphins. This is a true story about adibles and dolphin experience. So he was an anti -canibus. And in fact, I think it was a case where maybe this brings us back to Twitter where Twitter was a very valuable tool. So I put out something, I was going off the literature that I cited. He said, no, no, no, no, listen, there's some issues here. You should adjust this.

1:56:20We brought them on the podcast. He was reluctant to come on the podcast. He thought I was going to like set them up for a fall. We've never done that. He comes on the podcast. Got the information out there. And then it all just kind of went to like a quiet simmer or nothing. And in the end, I think that's the way that all of this stuff should be handled. Whether you're talking about one medical treatment or another is, and this is the way you've done it. And this is the example you've laid out for me and for others, right? Which is talk about both sides. Talk to vegans, talk to carnivores, talk to omnivores, talk to people who are pro cannabis anti and worried about psychosis and not.

1:56:51Talk to people that are really pro -MDMA for the treatment of PTSD, talk to people who are very reluctant. I think only there can we get the overlap in the Venn diagram about what the agreements are and what the disagreements are and move forward. And this is actually long form because then you get to understand how a person thinks about things, It's not just the subject at hand, but maybe other things. You get to hear their speech patterns and their thinking patterns. And I think direct experience is real. Yeah. You know, Cam Haines pointed this out recently and I'm not saying this to like focus, you know, the positive energy on us, but it will invariably do that or inevitably do that.

1:57:28Excuse me, which is he said, you know, it's kind of interesting that all of the top like really fit, you know, like all the people that are like really into their health, right? Like you and you know, there's there's David's out there like influencers. He was saying like there's there's a healthy a health component or a fitness component, not always, but I think most of them, I think he may have said all of them. He may have said many of them, but you know, Chris Williams and you know, Lex, like there's a tendency to merge kind of intellectual will discourse with physical. And I think that's a unique theme of podcasting also, at least of certain, let's just say what it is, like a lot of the top podcasts, that's like a pretty consistent theme for the female podcasters, too.

1:58:10Like Whitney works out, that's a podcast. Like there's a kind of merging of those things. And I think that when it comes to the discussion about anything about health, it also is beneficial if people are engaging in healthy behaviors, right? If they're, or if they've tried things, like they're trying to be fit, that I see Rhonda posting pictures of herself deadlifting now, right? You know, and like Peter's talking about his workouts, and he's a physician, he's an MD. Right. So I think it's not sufficient to just study something, right? To just look at the data and papers. I think it really helps if you're able to get close in close contact with the things that, you know, you're hearing about.

1:58:43What also it helps me to know whether or not you have any discipline. So there's people that think about a certain thing because it comforts their own thoughts about their decisions that they've made. And there's certain rationals that people make, they rationalize certain aspects of their life and certain things that are going on in society to sort of make up for the fact that they haven't done the work that they probably should have done in the first place. So when I see a guy that's built like Chris or Lex or someone who I know or yourself, that I know stays very physically fit and takes care of their health, then I have more respect for them because I go, okay, I have more respect for this person's opinion because this person is doing difficult things on a regular basis and confronting their own hesitations, their whatever procrastination, discipline issues, and the physical ability to put in work which requires mental strength.

1:59:42And for the longest time, for whatever strange reason, people have had this mutually exclusive notion that a person who is physically fit is probably stupid and a person who doesn't care about their body and only concentrates on the mind for some reason that is admired that this person has no ego at all and doesn't care. But that I think that person is a fool because you don't have as much energy to think because you're a physical body that you have, you've let decay to this terrible point where your I've had some unfortunate conversations with older intellectuals that don't take care themselves.

2:00:22And you realize that it's important that they've gotten lazy physically and they don't have the energy to engage. And so they sort of just sort of repeat things that they've said over and over and over again. And when you ask them to think on the spot, they almost don't have the will to do it anymore. You know, well, there sucks. Yeah, it does suck. And there's a direct correlation between this ability to continue moving your body and your intellectual ability. I mean, you have to still go and learn and read and acquire knowledge and try hard things. You just can't just work out, but I can think of a number of key examples that are historical.

2:00:54The greatest neurobiologist of all time, supernatural levels of ability was a guy named Romone Cahal, one of the Nobel Prize in 1906. He was the one who first defined the synapse, et cetera. He carried an iron umbrella to work. He lifted weights. All of her sacks, one of the greatest neurologists and writers of our time, passed away in 2015, had a 600 pound squat. Yeah, he had the state power, a state by powerlifting record at one point. Just a beast of a guy. He was also a neurologist and wrote all these beautiful books about how the mine works. The man who mistook his wife for a hat, he was behind the movie Awakening's, etc., etc.

2:01:28Don Kennedy, former president of Stanford, ran into his late 70s and then after that, had a hip replacement and then was doing other stuff. So Richard Axel was a Nobel Prize from Columbia University. The first person to find ways to introduce genes to novel genes to cells played rackable. I don't know if he's still playing rack well, you know, I'll name one more. These are incredible people like the guy who essentially defined the understanding of the visual system and neuroplasticity. My scientific great grandfather is David Hubell and Torrance and Riesel Torrance and just turned something like 95 or something, maybe it's 93.

2:02:01He still runs. He runs slowly, but he still goes and he is mentally sharp. So this is not an accident. This is not just a correlation. This is the anterior mid -singulate cortex in action. And of course cancer, a bus or, you know, a bullet can still take you out. But assuming you make it into your 67 -E's -80s, movement, movement, movement is the way to stay mentally strong and to continue to have the capacity to learn. I mean, just to kind of weave these two things. If we're talking about MDMA, psilocybin, or some other agent that raises is serotonin and dopamine. Or we're talking about movement.

2:02:34All we're really talking about are ways to increase these neuromodulators, like dopamine, acetylcholine, serotonin, epinephrine, and they create the opportunity for neuroplasticity. They don't create plasticity on their own. They create a milieu that's very much like the young brain, where it's like, okay, what's new here? This is why adrenaline is such a powerful tool for plasticity. Probably, I'm not gonna suggest people use smelling salts to try and do better on their exams. There are other ways to do better on their exams. I probably will take another one. Okay, I can tell you were thinking about it.

2:03:05All right, get in there, sir All right, take a step almost Yeah, they announced the right not that's cuz we alternated I don't remember which one was left before it's definitely right

2:03:21Make sure eyes water a little bit boy does shock your system. Wow Why is it a little adrenaline like a lift morning? Well, I told myself I wasn't gonna cry on this podcast because it was a cry on a podcast recently in mine. We kept it in, but like now I'm crying, but these are tears of late to the smell. Yeah, this is tears of chemical rotten your brain. Are you supposed to not do that more than twice a day, but we've done it many times. So it's just this thing, neuroplasticity, like that. Does it really? That's from your sinuses. I'm gonna, you have some skulls over here. The sinuses run from, you know, through to that.

2:03:53That's why when you get a science infection or you clear your yeah. Yeah. But neuroplasticity is the most impressive feature of the human brain. It can rewire itself. But when you're a kid, you rewire in response to a passive experience for better or worse as an adult. You can rewire your brain, but you have to create the milieu, the environment that the brain wants to rewire itself. So these neuromodulators like adrenaline or dopamine or serotonin, they need to be spiked and nicotine, what you're now taking in another one, is we know it does many things in the brain and body, but God, that stuff's strong.

2:04:32But there's a brain area called nucleus basalus, which sits in the base of the brain, and it can serve as a spotlight by releasing acetylcholine onto what? On to nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in certain circuits and provide focus. So that's what nicotine's doing, unless you take so much of it every day, that those, You're kind of baseline levels of acetylcholine either drop or become kind of regulated to the point where you're not getting that Spotlighting anymore, which is why people then are taking more and more But as our you know your former guest and my colleague Dr. Analemki has said the worst thing you can do when you're in a trough of dopamine Is trying boost dopamine again You just got to wait for it to come back So if people want nicotine to continue to work they should use it sporadically or when they feel like it's not working anymore Take a break.

2:05:18That's what McKenney's to say about cannabis us. McKenna, who would, Terence McKenna would freely admit that he had a problem with cannabis because he was like a daily cannabis user. But he said the real way to take it, he said is to take a long time off, a long time off so that your body's completely decentralized to it and then take as much as you can stand in like one dose. So like that's, I mean, he was interested in it as a psychedelic, you know, as an especially if you do that in edible form, it is, it is a very, very potent psychedelic, but there is that concern. And I think this is a very important thing to bring up.

2:06:00It's not benign and certainly not to everybody. Nicotine. Marijuana. Oh, everybody has a different reaction to it. And some people have a terrible reaction to it. Psychosis. Yes, and I don't understand it because I don't get it. It doesn't happen to me, but I Also know that it's real and to deny it as a zealot and to say oh marijuana's just great. Everybody should be high Like no, no, don't know. Everybody should need peanuts either You know some people have a weird reaction to things and there's a certain I mean our experience and wrote that book tell your Tell your parents or tell your children tell your children It's all about that.

2:06:37There needs to be some recognition, but there's a certain percentage of people that have a tendency towards schizophrenia or maybe psychotic breaks, and they can get triggered by high doses of cannabis. No. No question. So, no people that's happened to. Yeah, and I covered that in my solo episode on cannabis. Then this person, this researcher from Canada, who's, I don't think he's pro or anti -cannabis, but had differing views, came on my podcast. And then - What's his name? Matt Hill. And he's a respected researcher in this area. And I thought his stance was very, very nuanced. And then after he came on the podcast, other people, not Baronson necessarily, although I haven't checked my DMs that closely, contacted me and said, no, I have counters to that guy, which just told me everything I already know, which is that science is a field with people with differing opinions, right?

2:07:26Which is good. Which is great. I mean, you don't have a field until you have differing opinions. You don't want to be the only person working on something. You want that. It's something that you can tell I get really impassioned, smelling salts or no, about this because somehow, in the media version of, is cannabis good, is cannabis bad, and honestly the political aspects to it, like I wasn't tracking the fact that cannabis was just about to be approved for more legalization, right about the time that that clip got amplified, but I wasn't saying it should or shouldn't. I'm just giving you the information.

2:07:59Same as I did for alcohol. We, I would love to put this to rest once and for all. Every couple of weeks or months, you're going to see media outlets say, some drinking is good for you. Others will say, some drinking, any drinking is bad for you. Here's the deal. Zero's better than any. A little bit is probably fine, especially if you do other things to offset the sleep loss and microbiome stuff. If you're going to drink, probably should be doing other healthy behaviors anyway. No one's saying it's terrible. I'll have a drink everyone's. I'm not an alcoholic. If you're a non -alcoholic adult, one or two, I love a good white tequila with soda and lime, so good.

2:08:35But I don't really like alcohol enough to be able to comment past that. But I haven't had drinking years. But the reality is that one study after another saying, moderate drinking is good for you. No drinking is better for you. Cancer is, this is never going to stop. It's a field. Now we have enough data. People can make their decision. Right. Right, right? Everyone who's sleep is important. There's no field to be had, except to how to figure out to get sleep better, in my opinion, okay? Sleep deprivation is bad, but you're not gonna get to measure a die from a couple bad night sleep. That's also true.

2:09:07So it's almost like the way things have split politically has become the way that health information has split. And I'm fighting tooth and nail, and I know you are, and other people are as well, to try and continue to shine light on the field that is psychedelics. The field that includes cannabis, the field that includes things like weight loss, but also exercise and all the other good things. And somehow, and maybe you can tell me, because I'm new to the media thing, newer than you, certainly, for some reason, people don't like that. It's like the brain needs like a black and white thing. It's like, they can't seem to just deal with the fact that like, look, you'll find evidence for it, evidence against it, you just gotta make the best decision for you.

2:09:49Well, there's also people that write articles with a specific narrative because the game of fine, the social media algorithms, their game of fine clickbait. So it's business. Game of fine clickbait is real. I mean, it's a, unfortunately, one of the things that happen to journalism is people stop buying newspapers. And when people stop buying newspapers, the only way someone can, you can get someone to go to your website and click on a link. So you have to have some sort of inflammatory headlines, something that excites you, something that angers you, something that like gives you some information, some secret information that wasn't available before.

2:10:21Oh, let me click on that. I didn't know that. But science to me is about facts and I totally agree. I just you know, I think that Rick Rubin I seem he seems to come to mind a lot to me But you know he once said to me where in discussion I discovered a bunch of lies in somebody's life and I was like oh my god And he just said very calmly said look it's all lies And I'm like what do you mean? I'm like that's the problem. I'm realizing it's all lies and he said listen it's all lies back to nature, that's the only truth. And I'm like, yeah, that's why I became a scientist. And then he said, oh, wait, and professional wrestling.

2:10:58Cause everyone knows that's made up. So it's real. And I actually went to the AW with Rick. He was wild. And my legs... Well, they're jumping around in the ring and they'll stop everyone's wild and look and go, hey, Rick Rubin, like it's wild. Like he's that much of a fixture. It's so great. He's there with his red light, with his red lens glasses and the whole thing. He does the sunlight, he's gotten much healthier. He looks great. He takes really great care of himself. But I think he's right. I think nature has a truth. It has an order to it. Sciences job is to try and unveil that truth to the best of our abilities.

2:11:28But wrestling admittedly, everyone agrees it's made up. So at least we agree on that. Whereas I think so much of what we've been talking about today is like the media, like at what point do we realize there are portions there true, there are portions that are made up? Well, they're making themselves obsolete. And this is what I believe. I believe that human beings should be able to differ on opinions, but I should know that you're being honest and you're telling the truth. So as soon as you write something that I know is biased and twisted and you've distorted things and taking things out of context, well, I know that you're not in the truth game.

2:12:01So your opinion is nonsense. Whatever you say is horseshit. I want to talk to someone that's trying to figure out what's right and what's wrong. Not someone is trying to win and everybody's trying to win. This is a real problem and it's a real problem with wind the discussion They they attach whatever the art whatever the discussion is whether it's weightlifting is more important than cardio Or you should be a vegan versus you should be a carnivore they attach whatever this argument is to their own sense of self Worth and it's very important to them that they counter your arguments and win this little chess match And that's what it is they're playing a little game I Play games so I don't like playing games when I talk to people I like playing pool.

2:12:41I like to the game is like making people laugh the game is Jiu Jitsu. How do I get your back like these are games? I like I like games So when I communicate I don't like games, but I recognize that especially earlier in my life before I Started recognizing patterns in podcasts like what don't I like when people are so I don't like when someone's bias I don't like when someone is talking over people I don't like what someone's miss representing someone's words or someone someone's trying to win rather than than considering what the other person's saying. So when someone's considering what the other person's saying and then you get this beautiful sort of sharing of ideas without ego.

2:13:20And the real problem is the ego, the ego getting attached to winning a conversation and being correct. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they get in this fucking frenzy where they can't even communicate anymore. And they're completely attached and married to their ideas. The best thing, the best advice I can get people on this Don't be attached to your ideas. They're just ideas. Examined why you believe them, there's many times in my life where someone has hit me with some facts And I thought about my, I go, you know why I believe that? This is why because I thought this and then I was I was saying well if you believe that then this has to be untrue And I don't want to say that so I so I've attached myself to this thing and now I've connected my eat and when I'm engaging with someone and I'm not just engaging in this pure intellectual sharing of ideas and a discussion of merit, a discussion of merit, I'm now in a win -lose situation.

2:14:17I'm trying to win. I could win by deception. And you see people do that all the time. And it's so gross when you catch people doing that on a podcast. When you realize, you're not even considering these other possibilities because you're just missing them without any consideration because you just want to achieve a goal of victory. You just want to play checkmate and that's all they're doing and that's that's why the media is going to make themselves obsolete because that's not happening in podcasts in the best podcast whether it's Chris Williamson whether it's Lex Frieden the best podcast or a true conversation And I want to know why you think the way you think and when I get that in my head I can consider it and then I get to well This is why I don't think that's true because I think this way.

2:14:59This is my my perspective. I might be wrong I might be right, who knows? But this is just how I feel. And it's, when you can do that and learn how to do that, it took me a while to learn how to do that. It makes all conversations better. It makes all friendships better. Like you get to really understand why a person, like maybe you and a buddy had a disagreement about something and you say, well, what did you think? You're like, I thought you were gonna do that. I'm like, I never said I was gonna do that. Why would I do that? Like, I thought you were gonna do that, but we didn't talk about that, did we?

2:15:29No. So you're mad at something that you didn't even talk to me about like you thought that I should have just known Like come on man. That's crazy Like you usually get attributing all these negative things to a person and then you can work things out You could talk about things and you could if the long as the person's not bullshitting you as soon as you got people in your life that are Bullshitting you it's like oh you're not even having real conversations You're playing a stupid game of tic -tac toe all day long with your friends when your friends can open up to you. And this is one of the reasons why people like sharing embarrassing information with friends, because they now can trust you.

2:16:01I could tell you this stupid fucking thing that I did. And you go, oh my God, I did that too. You're like, ah! And then you, no, but when a person goes, well, I would never fucking do that. I would have figured that out a long time ago. I wouldn't have done it that way. Like, oh, well that guy's dick. He's not willing to be vulnerable with me, because he always wants to be socially a step up. He wants his status to be in a position of, this is the guy that doesn't make those mistakes, which is crazy. That's crazy especially among friends. I've always been blessed that there's been very little if any hierarchy in my friends.

2:16:29We knew who was better at certain things than others. You know and this should never be we're just human beings. There are people that are way better at certain things than I am that I'm friends with and that's how it should be. There's people that I am friends with that are way smarter than me. You included and I'm not smart. It's just different form of intelligence. I will and I'm not just saying that you know with each passing year and I've looked forward to approaching 50 because I'm like, now I can say things like with each passing year or by this stage. But I also realized the other day, I lived a long period of my life where I didn't really have a sense of the fact that I would die.

2:17:04I'd watched the Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford where he talked, 2005 where he talks about this notion that we're gonna die is so critical and I couldn't get in touch with it. Recently I'm like, oh, like, time's gonna come up. Every time I go down from meditation, I do this like non -sleep deep rest, I'm gonna need your measure. I'd like to do a long exhale. And I'm like, someday it's gonna just be last exhale. And I'm not looking forward to dying. Lord knows I'm not looking forward to dying. But I realize I'm like, this is great. It's very freeing because I had this realization the other day in a meditation.

2:17:36No psychedelics involved in this one. And I was like, I can continue to just be curious and explore. And I think it's that ego detachment, a little slice of that. Like, this is bad, this is good. I'm learning from this, this was good, this was hard. I learned a lot from that. I learned what I needed to change from that. And just be moving forward. It's this removing this thing of like, like you said, like this game all day long of like, not that I was in that mode or I didn't think I was, but this need to win, right? It's sort of like being an explorer. I'm a brain explorer. I've been a brain explorer for a long time.

2:18:10I love biology, love animals. Like I'm an explorer. And I think the definition of curiosity to me is that you're not attached to the outcome. Right. You just want to know what's real. Right, but too many people are attached to the outcome. And I think that's a tremendous trap. And that's why I wanted to talk about it, because it's something that I had to learn, because I was always attached to winning an argument. If I got into discussion, I disagreed with someone. I was always attached to being the one who was correct. When did that fall away for you? And what, you're about 57. All right. So you're talking to me.

2:18:39It's, you know, I've gotten way better at it over time. I don't, I couldn't want to like sit and figure out when I figured it out. But I figured steps of it out along the way. You know, I remember being 21 and watching a comedian go on stage and I wanted him to bomb. And I realized there was a terrible weakness and I was embarrassed that I had that feeling. So interesting. I will say we know how we feel about people when we see them succeed. Because I think there's this natural reflex like when you hear like, Oh, that really shitty person that you knew in school, they got pancreatic cancer. Everyone just goes, oh, like that sucks.

2:19:19That sucks. But when you hear, hey, you know that person that you used to really dislike or that you had friction with, and like, they just like IPO'd, like they're doing great. You know, you know immediately, do I like that person or not? Because if you're happy for them, presumably you like them. Right. Yeah. Rarely is it neutral either. I mean, I can't think of anyone that I don't want to see succeed except maybe a few individuals I think are actually evil. but those are extremely rare. But I think it sounds like you're also a competitive person. I didn't do a lot of competitive sports. I'm very curious about this.

2:19:48Like I'm competitive with myself, but like you did combat sport. Yeah. Right. I did skateboarding, play a little soccer, did some swimming, running, weightlifting. You know, like your brain was weaned in fighting a lot of the time. Well, it was also how I developed as a child. I mean, I went from all my puberty years competing. So that like from 15 on that's literally what I did all day long and your goal is to knock the other guy out Yeah, it's a fucked up way to develop your mind if you do develop like this insane kind of hyper competitive Because it's the consequences are so grave You know, I would say about MMA that it's high -level problem solving with dire physical consequences And that's really what it is.

2:20:30It's high -level problem solving You're you're literally doing combat and handyhand combat with your body, with someone who's an expert at it, which is so crazy. Like so, you're fighting a black belt, is so crazy. This is a person who's dedicated their life to kicking people into the shadow realm, and you're deciding to try to kick them first before they kick you. It's just nuts, it's a nutty way to live. But the negative aspects of it, are you develop this hyper competitiveness, because you're also developing at an accelerated rate when you're a teenager, right? So when you're when I was a teenager I had no bills.

2:21:05I had no problems. I lived at home. I didn't have any real like an adult type stress, you know bills, a family to feed, dealing with the community, work problems. I had nothing. So my entire focus was just on this one thing, martial arts, and you can get way better when you're a kid. It's like this neuroplasticity involved. There's until 25 your brain is a plasticity machine. It's there to map according to your experience. I mean, like, Larry, come into the world, baby's flopping, like a little bug, move, move, move. Ronal connections are being removed by the thousands, tens of thousands by the day so that you get fine tune movement.

2:21:48It's like you're a plasticity machine. And then you're thinking and your notions about boys and girls and teachers and parents and good things and bad things and what that means and what that means and who's a hero and who's a villain. Like, the brain is just placing things into boxes and symbols. It's like, it's an unbelievable phenomenon. And it's happening when you're a teenager, then you throw hormones into the mix. People often don't talk about this. Then you add hormones. And now you're adding the drive that is hormones related to like really hardwired, evolutionarily selected things like reproduction.

2:22:20Fighting, right? We all have brain circuits for fighting. There's a brain area, David Anderson's laboratory at Caltech has studied this. I think we talked about before. You stimulate this little region of the Venture Medial Hypothelomis, the specific neurons and the animals will mate. The mount or the females will go into Lordosis, they'll arch their back to expose their genitals. You stimulate other neurons in that exact same area, ventramedial hypothalamus. You know what happens? They go into a rage, they wanna rip apart the other animal. Their videos are this online. You can put the mouse in there with a plastic glove filled with air, stimulate these neurons and the animal will just attack that thing.

2:22:57And then you stop the stimulation and then we'll just Wow, little robots. Our brains have these circuits. As Jung said, we have all things inside of us, the extent to which we learn to suppress or exacerbate depends on experience, its nature and nurture. But we come into this world hardwired with the capacity for most any of these behaviors to emerge. Your daughter fortunately got very good at drawing, right? That probably is handed off through some slight genetic bias handed on through you and and your partner, your wife, to create a slight bias towards looking at the world in a particular way, an artistic sense, something about aesthetics, pay attention to curved corners versus square corners, whatever it is.

2:23:40But what we do feeds back on that circuit. So if you draw more, you get better at drawing. This is the nature of day long. And she's been doing it. She was really little. But also, like, going back to Floyd Mayweather, Floyd Mayweather started boxing when he was a little kid. And there's a thing about striking and it's not a hard fast rule because there's some freaks out there There's some athletic freaks and there's some people that come from other sports that have incredible speed and Dexterity and an understanding over their body that allows them to pick up striking better than other But there's something about people that learn when they're young that are always better Yeah, then everybody no matter how good you are there's certain guys like Anderson silvo or there's certain fighters that learn at a young age and you just can't fuck with them.

2:24:25They're just too good. Their nervous system was shaped in fighting. The same way Tiger Woods' nervous system was shaped golfing. That's why when Floyd sees those punches coming, he knows all he has to do is this. And it's just gonna just barely touch his chin. And then he fires back. Like he knows he's been in those patterns for his whole life and his body evolved. It literally developed in those patterns. This is why when people say like, what should I do? I always think, like, I don't know what people should do and I took a formal education path eventually, but if we look back to the things that really delighted us and that we naturally oriented towards when we were young, there's often information there.

2:25:04For me, it was animals and fish tanks and biology. I wanted to understand things, right? And parse things through an understanding of some structure because the world just, that's what it pulled out of me. My dad's a scientist, so it's probably some genetic thing and probably some, you know, nurture stuff as well. I went up to, I'm a big track and field fan and went up to the Olympic track and field trials in Eugene, Oregon. I love the town of Eugene. I go to every trials I can for the last, gosh, four Olympic trials. And earlier that summer I ran into a guy named Cole Hawker. This is a shorter guy for a runner.

2:25:34He runs the 1500. So it's about a mile, right? And he took the first position there. So he went off to Paris and he came from, it's an amazing race. If you didn't watch the 1500 race at this year's Paris Olympics, it's kind of amazing. If you need, if anyone needs motivation, He should get it from the inside as my belief, but if you need to look outside, which we all occasionally do check out this race Cole comes from like fourth or fifth position against the world record holder He's shorter. He doesn't have the stride that these other guys have and they box him in and he goes out and around and Beat them all takes the bill.

2:26:06It's one of these like pre -fondane moments, right now Here's what's crazy and relates to what you're saying He's posting on Instagram afterwards. I happen to know him a little bit at Cam and I went and watched the trials together, which is a real pleasure. And Cam's like a legend, these Olympic gold medal winners were coming up to him. Ronnie, we got great seats, right? And I gifted him a seat, because I'm very grateful to Cam for, okay, here's Cole, right? Cole's a USA in fifth position, all right. I don't know where this is, and there's a fairly long race. So there he is going on the outside?

2:26:35No, so you might wanna just go a little further, because this is a lot, this is the guy with the man bun, because now he has the man with the man bun. But he's but he's man with it with a capital M and I'll tell you what you'll see Super nice guy too. So this guy from Norway Ingram. It's and he and his brothers have like a reality TV show They're like famous over there. He's world record hole also great run of a cocky. He's like talking a lot before so check this out so I don't know how far along we have to go before Damn, they're running fast. Okay, I'll talk for a mile. That's so crazy. Yeah, they get run at that speed.

2:27:09So this is right final lap so watch this so So he breaks from fifth position after they box him into win. Wow. I don't know if you caught that, but basically, he's fifth position. So he kicks it all at the end and takes it all at the end against the world record holder. Now, here's where it gets, even, here we go. So he's just skipped back. He was just way back there. Yeah, so he's way back and then they box him in later. And he wins. What do you mean by box? So he'll see how the box happens. So it seems like he's going on the outside now. No, right. So he wants, he knows he's got a great kick.

2:27:41So it's like calculating when to go 100%. So Ingrid Britson went out really fast in this race, fast pace. So now he's trying to come around, right? So now watch this. So now he's trying, this is the box and you'll see. He's trying to take the inside track. And these two guys don't want him to do that. Exactly. He actually touches Ingrid Britson. He actually touches them on his back hip with the outside of his arm. It's weird to say there is no rule. There it is. He sees if there's space. Ingrid Britson's not going to let him in and so he goes, you know what? How about this instead? How about I come out?

2:28:13He doesn't come sorry. He stayed inside track and he breaks through So it's just like they try to keep you from the kind of fit two people in the lane and they try to keep you They boxed him in they boxed him in so Here's what's wild so afterwards is a bunch of posting on Instagram then they show a picture of Cole Hawker when he's like like eight years old, holding a medal. Where he was running the 1500 and he's doing like four minutes in change. That's a mile. He's a mileer as a kid running four in some change as a little kid. That's crazy. So this brings it back to your point. Which is like nowadays we're seeing the selection of people who are probably have a genetic bias towards something, a love of it like running, right?

2:28:55Plus immense amounts of experience. And their nervous system, I'm like, he was shaped miling. That's a nervous system that miles. I'll tell you, you can also walk and talk and eat, because I've met him, but that's a nervous system that was shaped around running the 1500 mile. Right. So when you see it, they're like the top, top, top, top to one percent, it's so different than my field where you can't go to graduate school to get a training in neuroscience until you're in your 20s unless you're a phenon. So you can't go to school for this. And so I think when people look at what they naturally oriented to when they were young and they stayed with that.

2:29:30That's the thing that you had a, maybe a genetic, probably a genetic leaning toward. Do you think there'll be maybe a shift today because there's so much more material that's available to young people, if somebody has an interest in science, you're a science today? Absolutely. I think because of the online learning platforms, I think of, because of, I even like the sport that I grew up, unfortunately wasn't very good at or maybe fortunately, who knows, I was skateboarding, right? So many of my friends went on to write, start companies, became pro skateboarders, a lot of them didn't, but I didn't have a propensity for it, kept getting hurt, broke my foot three times.

2:30:03I was like so frustrated, it was unbelievable. So I went in different direction, I went in the science direction, turned out to be my thing. But now, the little kids, literally, little kids, boys and girls, like this girl, Riesenelson, she skates with power on vert, not like a little kid going, oh, she's got power and technical, and guys like Tony Hawk are like, whoa, It's because they have all this exposure to 900s and tricks and ramps And there's just way more people feeding the pool of potential Professional skateboarders, right? So when you look at the Olympics or the X games now You're getting a much greater selection of the huge pool bigger sample size feeding into it You're getting the genetic gifts her mom travels with her everywhere.

2:30:45She dedicates near 100 % of her time to this So it's a lot of what you were saying like we're selecting earlier We're pulling from a larger pool so you're gonna get the genetic freaks that pole vault or guy keeps Winning world records are beating his own world record I saw him get the at the world set Eugene last about two years ago Broke the world record he keeps beating the world record this guy's been pole vaulting his whole life It's a little kid so the earlier you get them the more the nervous system can can be shaped Well, this is a problem that I see in combat sports because in combat sports You have guys who have a championship mentality like they could have been a champion but they didn't start early enough.

2:31:23And even though they have this extraordinary mind, so do the people that started when they were four. Like this idea that you're tough or you see the only one that's tough, that's an egocentric idea that a lot of men have. And it's a very bizarre conversation to have with these men. I don't think he's tough. I think if they go and get something. You're never gonna find out that going gets tough because he's gonna fuck you up. Like he's not even gonna be hard for him. You don't even understand what you're saying. Like there's the mind, the ego plays this like cruel trick on you that doesn't allow you to accurately assess your abilities.

2:31:54So you have this bizarre notion that you are exceptional for no reason whatsoever. And there's a lot of men have that. A lot of men have that bizarre thing. The problem with if you have an incredible drive, an incredible discipline, but you didn't start striking into your 26. If you have a Thai boxing fight against like a guy like, there's a guy right now who's one of the best in the world's name is Tawan Chai and he has this insane left kick. He's like so left kick dominant. Like most of his game is his left kick, but it's so goddamn good. He just slams into the guy's arm, slams into the guy's legs, and he has this snake -like movement of his ability to just slide out of the way and then counter and then slam you with a hard left low kick.

2:32:42He's terrifying. And I don't care how tough you are. You don't have that ability. And you probably are never gonna get there like the margins the differences of Tents of a second hundreds of a second here and there he's so good You're not gonna catch him so even if you're the baddest fucking dude in the world in your mind This is Talon Chai. Let me hear some of this But go for the beginning go to the beginning so you can hear the volume of him hitting the pads This is not what we're looking for exactly. This was like a highlight real yeah but it's fine, like go to the beginning where he hits the path.

2:33:19Oh, it's just good. Is gonna music over it? Oh, okay. It's just music over. But this guy is fucking nasty, but he's all left kick. Like, it's like 80 % of his game, man. It's crazy how much of his game. I mean, he can do everything. The guy does everything. But his left kick is so fucking powerful that every time it hits you, your power bar goes down. If he hits your arms, if he hits your body, It's like all left kick bang bang bang and it's so smooth He's so good man. He's so good. So if you're a guy and you're some badass Navy SEAL dude and you're 30 years old And you make it to the Molytide gym and you decide hey, I'm only 30.

2:33:58I'm gonna fight pro You know enough time there's not enough time in the world for you to get to where he's got and he's gonna get better quicker Yeah, that guy's brain has a circuit. I'm willing to wage my entire career on this That is a left kick circuit like he's the same way that you know a tool like a like a bow is designed for a specific thing That circuit is like left kick Leslie how to saying that don't fear a man who knows 10 ,000 kicks fear man who's practiced one kick 10 ,000 times And that's the that there's a thing about a guy who's got this one thing that's something like Ryan Garcia has this nasty left hook.

2:34:35It's the super fast. Yeah, it's a crazy left hook It's so goddamn good. It's so much better than most peoples that everybody who fights him doesn't understand what he can do until he does to you. Just whips. Fast, powerful. Fast, powerful, distance management, angles that it comes from, it comes up, it comes around, it just hits you faster than you know it's supposed to get there. It's so much quicker and has so much pop on it. It's so dangerous. And he fought Devin Haney, who is one of the best pure boxers in the sport. He's so good. But he just didn't have the understanding yet that a guy can whip that left hook so fast and catch him and fuck him up in these weird angles.

2:35:23It's, I don't want to say anything. Watch this dude's left first. Yes, I'm a little bit sorry here. There's this liver shot. That's it. Melted. He melts a lot of guys, that liver shot. See if you could just see, Give me a highlight of Ryan Garcia's knockouts. I'm sure there's some of those online, but it's all left hook. He's got a right hand, but so left hook dominant, and it's so much better than most weapons. It's got a nasty left jab too, but it's just, he's got distance management and timing and just the ability to just uncork a shot, like right there. Ooh, fade away left hook. He can have a time in.

2:36:00Oh, it's just, well, he's speed is just different and other guys so you don't know that he can like look at that. My goodness. Look, it's a fade away left hook. It's so perfect. And when he connects everybody goes night night, it's really extraordinary. And it's extraordinary because it's that one weapon that's so good. And when he fought Devon Haney, he was like Devon Haney is like, he's only a left hook. But whatever. It's like saying to Tolon Chai only has a left kick. It's so good. You got it. The only left hook that wins. A left hook that's so much better than everybody else is. He's got a right hand too, but that left hook is just freakish.

2:36:35It's freakish. Bank right there. So if we look at this through the lens of nervous systems, you know, I know that there have been conversations that you've had here in elsewhere like, would crocodile versus a gorilla, these kind of crazy things. We don't need to reignite that. But I think when we're at the discussion around true peak performance, like somebody grew throughout running miles, who grew up throwing left hooks, who grew up slipping punches. Right. Yes, they're both homo sapiens. They're both humans, but you're talking about two different animals. When you're talking about the person that got into in their 20s and 30s versus the person that started off young, you're talking about two different nervous systems.

2:37:15Yes. If we were to look at their brains under magnetic resonance imaging, you'd see a lot of things that are similar, the breathing centers, the stuff that controls the heart rate, everything's mostly in the same place, but I'd be willing to bet everything that you look at Ryan Garcia's brain, you go, that left hook, if you were able to throw the left hook in the thing, you see it light up, you'd be like, wow, either more efficient, maybe more space allocated to it, maybe less space, but the speed of transmission is just faster. You're talking about a different nervous system, which is just a different way of saying a different person, but it's more meaningful in my view, because what you're talking about is cars with extra cylinders.

2:37:52You're talking about a race between two different vehicles. And so I think if somebody is very educated in the fight game or is educated in any domain They're able to see that difference and give people really good advice whereas what the person themselves they can't see that It's like we look the same. Hey, they each rains eye trains eye train harder. I'm driven. It's like no Right. It's not the same and I think that's why to me something like a Cole Hawker win over a world record holder is in Prett as is the other stuff we were just watching incredibly impressive because you say we's in fifth position and And he's got a shorter stride, and the other guys got all this world record stuff under his belt, and he's done great as well.

2:38:29I think he won the 5 ,000, Inger Britson won the 5 ,000. But Colts just like pulls something out. Like they're very close in terms of their abilities. They're roughly the same species, right? In the context that we're talking about. And then somehow through sheer will is he able to out kick him. Sure will, numbers, there's a lot of things going on. like what kind of conditioning he went through as opposed to the other guy? Like what edge he got? And he's from Kentucky. I've never been to, oh, I've been to Louisville once, but someone told me, I don't know if this is true or not, but there are more, if you looked at the number of metals from people from Kentucky, it's almost like in a complete country.

2:39:06Really? I don't know what's going on in Kentucky. Was there a great program there? No, not just in track and field, like across the summer Olympics. If you look at the number of like American versus Chinese metals, it's like tears out, but then you go like, Kentucky was a pretty good quote unquote country. Well, it wasn't Muhammad Ali from Louisville. Yeah, yeah, there you go. There's somebody about people from Kentucky are doing very well in the in the How are they in neuroscience? I have a friend who just retired as chair of the of the neuro biology department It's actually neuroanatomy there my friend Bill Guido At a university of Louisville Isn't it unfortunate though that like Kentucky's not associated with intellectual prowess not so much But it's a great department But no Bill Guido is a great he ran a great department there I'm sure someone a great chicken great friend I'm more in Macaulde as great vision research there.

2:39:50So one of the great things about being a scientist was, my lab now is run much smaller scale. But for years, I just traveled the country these places I would never think to go to. I had a great Argentine meal in Louisville. I went to St. Louis, I had one of the best meals of my life. I don't think I'd ever go to St. Louis, but I was visiting Washu. And then there are certain cities that you hear terrible things about and they're true. One of the greatest food players in the history of the world came from Paduca, Kentucky. Okay, guys name is Buddy Hall, the rifleman. Like to this day, one of the all time grades.

2:40:21And great horses. Oh yeah, great horses. Yeah, great horses. Like I've been learning more about horses because it's like dog selection and horse selection. Is it, I mean, the genetic breeding and the selection of horses for particular traits, like this whole warm blood thing. I don't know much about it, not enough to comment on it. But these people have been around horses their whole lives. They know horses worth millions of dollars, right? And they know that that fault, that's the one. And they put tons of money on it. Like they have this unconscious genius based on all this life experience. Right, so it's almost like they're selecting the same way like someone, if you wanted to build a Floyd Mayweather, you would select, you know, great father was a great boxer, uncle's a great boxer, boxing's the family, starts up young, he's got great genetics, the whole deal.

2:41:03Where the Williams sisters, like that movie, like the King James movie, it's Tiger Woods. Yeah, Tiger Woods. Yeah. Where the kids that I grew up with, skateboarding like there's this kid, you know, Guy Mariano, like, when I knew him when he was a little kid, he would waddle. The board felt like look bigger than him, and now grown up, he's so good. He's kind of in my generation, so he's kind of like in the late 40s, he's still just kills. Because he developed, he grew up with it. Went through all the trials and tribulations, and this has been public, you know, had his issues, then got sober, and came back to skateboarding, and just skateboarded the year for Thrash, which is a huge deal.

2:41:39You just see like the young Danny White Tony Hawk grew up skateboarding his body, his nervous system is skateboarding. And I love this aspect to people in sport because we see it. But I think I remember listening to hearing conversations like this and thinking, yeah, but if you're not into that, where is it? And this is where, man, I just keep thinking about all the time, but forgive me. Rick has always said, the key to being really great at something is to just be you. And I'm like, that sounds like about as mystical wrapped in a riddle as it possibly is. I could hear it in his voice, but he said it.

2:42:12But what he's saying is, what he's saying, and I finally got it, it's like, what are the things that really pull that energy out of you? What did that when you were young? And if you're fortunate enough to get into something young, that's a beautiful thing. And you know, Rick's superpower is his ability to close to things, people, music, et cetera, and feel it. He can feel that thing, and he encourages them to do more of that thing as opposed to the thing they think they should do. And then what's also remarkable about him is, he's able to disengage and just be Rick again. Like he has this empathy, but it doesn't like take him over.

2:42:45It's so wild, the guy that grew up in music and did all the things he did for music. You know, he's never had a sip of alcohol or done a drug. How many people who hang around musicians and pull that off? Well, he's just a fascinating guy, period. But I think what he's locked on to is getting out of your own way. Yeah. And there's a lot of self -chatter that comes in whenever you're creating something where you're instead of engaging with the idea You're thinking about how can I make this better for me? What would people like more? What would get a better response? And you lose the magic. The magic is in the individual thought.

2:43:21100 % and this is, all right, so I've been spent on, I go over there to spend time with him. He's out of the US right now. And it was the weirdest visit ever. I go over to visit Rick and we tread water in the morning and we listen to this podcast, a history of 100 songs, 100 Rock and Roll songs by Andrew Hickey. It's sort of like Cuban lab podcasts, but Rock and Roll like super nerdy longs, like you know, drawn out. There are a few podcasts like that, like founders podcasts I love that one, mine that's like super nerdy, right? About a given topic. So we do that and then we would just like sit around and I'm like, what are you gonna do?

2:43:53He's like, well, it's just like sit. And we would just sit with eyes closed. And I was like, all right, then we have lunch and then he was like, well, it's just sit. And then at one point, I'm like, Rick, what are we doing? And he's like, well, when you keep your body still, and your mind is really active, amazing ideas come forward. And that's when I was like, oh my goodness, because my first guest on my podcast was a guy named Carl Dysroth. He's a world's best bioengineer. He's a psychiatrist. He raised five kids. He's a phenom. He'll probably win a Nobel Prize. And he told me his practice of coming up with ideas is after his kids are asleep at night, sits down and he keeps his body completely still.

2:44:31and he forces himself to think in complete sentences. Keep his mind super active. And I was like, wow, and it turns out that if you look historically, a number of scientists have talked about this, a number of creatives have talked about this. And then I don't have any studies to support this, but then I realize what is the state of our brain or time when the brain is very active in our body is still and our mind is coming up with all sorts of ideas, it's rapid eye movement sleep. We're paralyzed during rapid eye movement sleep. We have sleep atonia. And everybody knows, based on dream studies and studies of creativity, that during rapid eye movement sleep is two things happen.

2:45:07There's a removal of some of the emotional load of previous day's experiences, which is why rapid eye movement sleep is so critical for emotion regulation afterwards and for the regulating depression and things like that. But also we come up with new configurations. And so Karl Dyseroth Einstein, the reports of this, of him walking and then closing his and stopping and describing his mind moving forward while his body was still, very kind of subjective. Rick has this practice. And I thought to myself, like, wow, so I started trying to do a sort of meditation where I forced myself to be very bodily still with my mind very active.

2:45:43I can't, you know, to start at this. Kind of interesting in light of creativity. But the other thing, and this goes to what you were saying before, you know, Rick came up through punk rock, punk rock and hip hop, right? I love punk rock music grew up on it. that era in their 80s punk rock in New York is amazing. But the whole thing like BC Boys, he was close with the Ramones, Joe Strummer, all this, and then hip hop, what he understands, and I can't speak for him, but what he understands is that there's this energy in an early field, let's say, of music, where they're not thinking about making money doing it.

2:46:15Like, NWA, those guys were just being themselves when they were making music, right? I watch that movie on the Defiant Ones, with about Dre and I think it's Jimmy Iveen about Beats. But it's really about the energy of hip early hip hop. And then they talk about M &M and a bunch of other things. Are you watching Rick and I at night, we'd watch Ramones documentaries or clash documentaries. And it's like, it's the energy of something that's new where people are just being themselves and they're not thinking about making a ton of money on a record. A really great producer comes in and captures that energy and rolls it forward.

2:46:51And usually what ends up happening is then and the general public falls in love with it. And then a bunch of things happen to those people and then whatever just function exists in their world gets amplified and then we hear about it. There's kind of a consistent theme over and over. But it's like, and then one of the things that came up when I was visiting Rick, because I was like, you know, I feel like, like I came up through skateboarding, punk rock music, I'm not a musician, that incredible energy. I don't know much about hip hop. I was like, science had that when I first got into neuroscience.

2:47:17Like no one talked about neuroscience. It didn't even have a name. We're just like brain explorers, cutting up brains, figuring out what to do, trying to figure out what these structures did and all this stuff, and then podcasting. It's like, I really feel like the podcasters, at least some of us, right? It's like punk rock, it's like hip -hop, because we're not thinking about, I wasn't sitting down and start my podcast, but I'm going to start the Kewermyn lab podcast. I was like, I've just got all this stuff in me that I want to tell people, because I think it's super cool, and a lot of it I think might also be really useful to them.

2:47:44And you're just being used. So when Rick or Lex is just being Lex, and Chris Williams is just being Chris Williams, and their Whitney Cummings is just being Whitney Cummings. So when a podcast works, I think it's because you're just being you. And it seems so obvious, it's kind of almost trite, but Rick is like exactly. And the biggest mistake is to take the feedback, the comments, whatever, the hit piece, whatever, and to change who you are. Now, there is sometimes useful information that comes back to us in ways we could do better in life. And certainly I am doing that. But the point is at its essence, It's like the things that, the thing that makes podcasting beautiful to me is that I think we're right now, thanks in large part to you and some of the other early, early, you know, entrance guys, guys that paved the way, is that it's a real thing.

2:48:32It's a real discussion. Like, I was just going to scrape, we didn't talk about what we were going to talk about before. Whereas when you go out there and you see these like highly overproduced or like a media infused podcast, like it's not like real. It's not real. It's like I got an angle. They have a story they want to tell. It's not independent anymore. I can't produce. Right. And let's be real honest if you look. You are consistently this podcast is consistently miles and miles ahead of everybody else in terms of the amount of consumption of it. Why? Because it's a place where people immediately and consistently go, oh, it's like Joe's just being Joe.

2:49:07It's just like a real thing. And when I say a real thing, this is what Rick means. Like people just being themselves. which like your loves the things that bother you like and so I think that podcasting to me it's like skateboarding it's like punk rock it's like a pop it's like a sport it's like an art like if you watch the movie one of my favorite movies the buskeye movie right with Ben Yostanov the El Toro and Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walker and David Bowie like why was he so amazing is because Jamish O 'Bosca was just being himself until the fame got to him an article got written about how he was you know warhol's lap dog they called him or something like that and you can see him obsessing about it and there's this amazing riff I uh...

2:49:48some if people haven't seen it they should just look up on you tube like uh... how long does it take to get famous from the movie basket and it's peninsula del Toro who plays the young vinson gallow telling him here's what happens when you get famous and it's an amazing clip because it explains the arc of fame and people becoming famous for being themselves And then doing the things that they think they should do to stay Popular and it destroys the whole thing. Mm -hmm. And so Rick's message is like Rick's talent is to like feel real energy He can tell what's real and what's fake. That's why he likes wrestling.

2:50:22He knows it's fake Right and then feel that and encourage somebody to do more of that less of other stuff He's a creativity guru. He's a creativity girl then step back and but the message she just keeps saying. And most of our conversations end with him just saying like, yeah, man, just continue to be you, you curious adventure, whatever makes Andrew Andrew, I know what those things are. It's not about me. This is really about hopefully if like people hear it like Rick is saying in that book and in all his messages like we all have some little spark or gift or genetic bias towards something. Yeah.

2:50:58And if you feed that like in it's a benevolent thing, You become that it's like it stays real the moment you also show a path to other people right right right when you can actually just be yourself People realize I'm maybe I can be myself too, right? You know like and they love that it People love that like I again, I don't know hip -hop that well But like you don't have to see M &M very many times or watch eight mile more than a couple of times or listen to his Meeting understand like there's an energy there. It's not manufactured that's him people love that they love authenticity That's why they love old dirty bastard.

2:51:31You know who that guy was? Yeah. Well, like I'm a huge show strumber fan. And I remember asking Rick, I was like, hey, like, what do you think it was about strumber? The clash only around for like five years. He was like, come and go on, right? And he said, very rich. He was, you know, there's something about Joe where everything he said, he brought his entire life experience to that. And I'm like, well, that's about as mystical as he gets. Like, what do you mean? and he's like, he just was purely himself that day with no concern about how you would perceive him. He wasn't trying to impress you or look punk or not look punk.

2:52:07He just, you know, like, he just was. Strummer fell in love with hip hop. He'd bring out hip hop artists and the punks would boo, which is when he realized punks aren't even punk, you know? Like, like, they're, and so there's something so beautiful about the energy of something really pure. Like a Ryan Garcia left hook. It's this or early BC voice right or later BC or whatever or Podcasting my and my my work now is so much about like you said like don't read the comments shut out the noise You know like Lex wants to go into the darkness and the light. He like wants it. He needs it Yeah, but that's always wise down the dumps too But you're taking in too much negativity, bro.

2:52:47I know and not but I feel like if he didn't do that It would be as weird as him not wearing that that suit maybe maybe, maybe, if he didn't drink, he wouldn't be Mike, maybe. Maybe Mike shouldn't be drinking every day. You know what I mean? It's like, they're destructive aspects. Yeah, I mean, it can go too far. Like there's a great quote in the Oliver Sacks book. They said he said, he had a teacher that said, Oliver will go far provided he does not go too far. And I read that right about the point that I recently saw the documentary Road Runner about Bourdain. And I actually had a chance to sit down and talk to Morgan Neville who made that movie.

2:53:24And I didn't know much about him. But like what I saw there was just like an adventure, like a super curious person, an adventure, and a punk rocker. Like he was from that era of like romance. And it was just a spectacular, like I don't know why I didn't know more about him I should of because we have this kind of overlap in interest sets around like the, you know, New York punk rock that that era that I've always been fascinated by a few years behind there, but I was like, wow, like I just saw like a cont like genuine curiosity in people and things. And I realized like the food part was kind of incidental.

2:53:58It was like the person. It's just being him. And that's why I think so many people loved him is because he was just being him. And I don't I don't know I any more about it. But like I feel like people just being themselves is like the ultimate in personal development. Yeah, he was also brilliant as a writer and he would write all of his own narratives all the all the narration was all his writing and he was just so good at it So good at expressing his Joy for different cultures and trying out their cuisine and what he admired about them as human beings and about their spirit and he loved people He loved people he loved being around people.

2:54:36He did not love being famous though, man That guy got fucked up by fame. He did not like it. It was very uncomfortable. And that thing that you were talking about, Basquiat, experienced, I think everybody experiences. You get, there's a temptation towards audience capture. There's a desire to appease those and please those who love you. Maybe at the expense of your own self -esteem and your own perspective. because you see things through others eyes and how they perceive you to be rather than who you actually are and you're so aware and so painfully self -aware that you lose your ability to just be yourself.

2:55:18What Rick's talking about is just to be you and that happens to most people because it is a complicated drug which is why it's a terrible drug to give to young people. Fame is a terrible drug to give to young people and one of the ways that I mitigate all this stuff is through voluntary adversity, voluntary physical adversity, and then mental adversity, doing difficult things. And the more difficult things that I do, the easier this weird state that I find myself in is. And I think one of the reasons why I'm so comfortable with it, because I'm uncomfortable all the fucking time, I'm voluntarily uncomfortable most of the day.

2:55:58So regular uncomfortable is like, yeah, whatever. It's not 196 degrees for 25 minutes. That's what I did that this morning before I got here. That shit's hard. That's really hard. That's like you're gonna die hard. You're gonna die hard is so much harder than, oh, somebody doesn't like me. Oh, somebody took my clip and took it out of context. Because you're gonna die if he is a real thing. This is what Rick says like nature is a truth. Like you heat up too much too long. You can die. And you're playing with that a little bit. It's playing and it's hard and you do it correctly in your game. And cardio is really important for that.

2:56:32Cardio is one of the very best things for alleviating anxiety. And I know there's a lot of studies that have been done on weightlifting and about resistance training and alleviating anxiety. And I think that's a fact. I think that's true as well. But there's something about I might die cardio. I might die cardio as a different kind of cardio. It's like if you can swim into the point where, you know, you do laps in the pool, and you do laps in the pool where you're like, I don't know if I'm gonna make it to the end of that fucking pool and when you do get out of that pool Regular life is way easier period full stop no discussion I think when people are talking about cardio.

2:57:10They're engaging in maybe zone two type cardio Which is a walk which is very good for you very good for you by the way I do zone two cardio. I will put I will get on the assault bike and not go very fast And wait that's the minutes and watch television, you know, I will do that But I also do to bought a sprints on that motherfucker where I do 20 minutes sprinting 10 seconds to excuse me 20 seconds sprinting 10 second rest 20 seconds and I do that in Sets of four four eight reps. So eight reps four times. Okay. It's only like 20 minutes. Yeah, I do something similar I do I do I like to I like to walk or hike I use one of these vests I don't have any relationship to them but a morpho makes these ones that are really like close to the body Yeah, and so I use that because you can really move easily in that I don't like a heavily loaded military vest.

2:57:57It doesn't feel right to me. And if I load from the back like a rock, I feel pitched forward. So I like how it goes and more, yeah, nice smooth fit feel. And then I'll walk far that way, but then I'll do the same thing. Except I do a little different. I'll go 10 second sprint, 20 second rest, do that eight times. That's my Friday morning hit workout. And I feel like I wanna die by the last one. But I think that I have an observation that's not backed by any formal science. I'd like your thoughts on it. I've known a lot of people who are kind of compulsive anxious or even outright addicts who then get really into running or any kind of cardio long distance endurance type sport and they seem to Again, not a scientific study.

2:58:40They seem to get and stay sober. Yeah, whereas I find that while weightlifting is really healthy and I really enjoy it I've observed that it can create a kind of like tension in the body that doesn't like release completely Maybe even builds energy into the nervous system, so to speak. And I do know a number of people who have had challenges with drugs and alcohol, I'm grateful that I haven't had those challenges, but have had the challenges with drugs and alcohol. And they've gone the way of just weightlifting. And they've been like multiple relapses. Now, that is not a knock against weightlifting.

2:59:11I think people should do resistance training and cardio. But it is kind of remarkable that people that do a lot of cardio seem to successfully beat their addictions. And maybe it's just the time involved. Who knows? It's a lot of time involved. It's also overwhelming. So it takes over your mind, your body. I think if you're doing a marathon, you're just You're grinding for hours. You're doing three hours if you're really fast. What's the longest distance you've ever run in a single bout? I don't really run so the longest distance I've ever run is only a few miles I did a 5k once my friend came well camhain's you know cam cam had a 5k once in Vegas and it was, I had zero training.

2:59:51I didn't run at all and I did, I was like, wow, it was hard. At the end of it, I was like, that's a lot harder than I thought. I thought I was in pretty good shape. I'd be able to run. What is it, three point, something miles? Yeah, he's a sicko. He's got a broken foot right now. And he's still running on it. Uh huh. And he's got to get surgery, but you can't have surgery right now because he has a alkanic season coming up. He was on his way to Alaska when I last sent him. He sent me some meat, which I'm very grateful for, it's delicious. He told me that I said, you know, what's the pain level in that foot?

3:00:23Cause he showed the X -ray, it's still very broken. Yeah. And he said, you know, 10 out of 10 being max pain, like excruciating cannot stand it. He was like, I don't know, maybe a four or five. But he's running. He's like, yeah. He came and stayed recently. He stayed at my house a few times and I've set up some archery in the backyard. And I like, he can use my son in a colplonge. when people just spontaneously come and stay, Lexus come and stay. And I wake up and this literally, we didn't post about it, literally how it happened was I woke up in the morning, hadn't yet started work, so that was added later to the post.

3:00:53And Cam Hance is on my roof shooting arrows at my targets, which he's moved beyond the fence line. And so the neighbors are like, who's this guy? This is Los Angeles, right? You know, so he's a wild man. I love him. Hitting bulls eyes the whole way through just to rub it in. I just bizarre that he's running on that foot. He knows he's gonna have to get fixed, But if they get it fixed, it's probably going to have to be off of it for like six weeks or something. I know and I keep trying him to get him to do some of the what I know to be very useful things like BPC 157 etc Which yes, there isn't any clinical data for it's a landable data But so many people report feeling better.

3:01:28It's very hard to get out He's got a gap in that broken. Yeah, that he needs to mend that thing. Yeah, they need to put some screws in that bitch But he will run out of stumps guys like him and Goggins will run on stumps and he's got another knee surgery recently Yeah, he's had a bone. I mean, he's bone on bone and he's essentially getting surgeries to shape his bone. So his bone on bone is flatter because you know, when you have bone on bone, it just starts and grows weird. So what does he do? Does he stop? Does he get a fake knee? Nope. He gets it cut flat and put, he gets a wedge cut in the bone and shifts it down.

3:02:02So it's flat. So bone on bone, at least it has the correct geometry. Like what? He's a phenom. Well, there's a guy where in his whatever it was late 20s took a look at his childhood was like well I wasn't you know being you know my nervous system shaped to be a great athlete or an avi seal etc Looked at everything he had become and he basically said a big hard no He's like whatever it was that happened before then he was gonna shape his nervous system by putting in endless hours So his 20s it's 20s right so it runs it runs counter to everything that we talked about earlier which is that one has to start early, but he's making up the time and then some.

3:02:40I saw a poster where he couldn't move his legs for whatever reason, maybe just had surgery. So he's running on his hands on the treadmill. With his feet positioned kind of like plank position. Yeah, he's a ridiculous person. Amazing. Super inspiring. I just wish. I just wish. And a verb. I just wish that there was stem cell technology and regenerative technology available now to help his joints stay healthy. Because the problem is that will, that mind, that power is eventually going to break down his body and mechanically it's not going to work anymore. Titanium is pretty good. This is what the neurosurgeons understand.

3:03:16You take out a little flap of skull, you replace it with titanium. It's a lot stronger. You know, I mean - You mean titanium knees? Is that where you're suggesting? Yeah, or other - Yeah, but other bio materials, right? They're close. They're real close. There's been some studies recently that regenerate cartilage. And so I think they're real close. I think if you could just hang in there for a few more years, they're probably going to be able to fix things. Yeah, exosomes are exciting. BPC157, while only animal data, it's very clear. It has the propensity to encourage fiber blasts to its cells that make up things like tendon and cartilage, et cetera, and can really repair tissues.

3:03:53I mean, I mean, you know, and I certainly have experience. It can help repair things. Yeah, it's legit. It's legit, and unfortunately the FDA's trying to get rid of it. There's a lot of things that are really good for you that unfortunately are not regulated correctly. Yeah, sucks. Well, my wish, I mean, I have no plans to go to Washington, but my wish is that things like BBC 157, some very interesting, I would say, not cutting edge, but even further out, like bleeding edge, things like pinealin, which can help with regeneration of the pineal sites are incredible for sleep potentially. Like, we need these things explored.

3:04:25And everyone, for a while, was like, pep, pep ties. Oh, it sounds really kind of gray market weird, and it can be, but let's face it, GLP1 Agonist, it was the same pick one jar. That's a peptide that existed for years in the FITS and Bodybuilding industry. Now it's probably approaching a trillion dollar industry someday. That has a tremendous windfall in terms of the amount of money you can generate from it. BPC157 could be made by virtually any laboratory, and it's probably going to cut back on orthopedic surgeries. And that's the gross reality of a lot of this stuff. A lot of this stuff is going to cost companies money because people won't be taking pain medication, they won't be taking anti -inflammatory medication, they won't be getting as many surgeries, and that's where it gets fucked up.

3:05:05Because the healthcare system, the business of healthcare, is really set up not looking at people, it's like what's the best way and the most efficient way, and the most cost effective way in terms of for the actual patient to treat them. No, it's how do I make the most money from this person? Well, we did an episode on back health and strengthening the back and back pain, and we had Stu McGill on and it was wild. I've never received emails and stuff like that. Like half of the people or more saying, the McGill Big Three helped me so much, might stabilize my back. It's not like a, you know, he's got his three movements.

3:05:41He can look it up on YouTube. They're easy to find there. But it's all about, and he's in great shape in his late 60s, incredible, incredible shape. Chop's word, he's up in Canada. So he basically is giving behavioral tools to stabilize and strengthen the spine and deal with back pain. And then the other half, we're like, what is this? You can't treat back pain. There's a pseudo science. And then everyone's telling me how much benefit they got out of McGill's Big Three. And then the war among the physios, like the physios. That's an ugly field, I'll tell you. And I ask someone, why is this field of exercise physiology so brutal?

3:06:14I ask Andy Gallup, and I ask that. And it turns out, it's because it's very hard to get a lot of clients. And the moment that somebody comes out with knowledge that's very useful for a lot of people, they're potentially taking away their livelihood. So, you know, to say nothing of the pain treatment world, we had a guy on our podcast named Sean Mackey's, an MDPHG runs our pain clinic at Stanford, and he talks about the biosecule social model of pain. And he's very open -minded, meds work in some cases. So does your emotional or cognitive interpretation of the pain? What does it mean? So do things like meditation, like he's basically trying to incorporate all these different things.

3:06:47He's very holistic for lack of a better word. But if you look at most pain docs, they're not that evolved. They're just like, okay, this is what you use. It might be addictive, it might not be addictive. But they're not ever talking about strengthening the systems that gave away in the first place. So I totally agree with you. Like there is no replacement for self -care. There's just no replacement, no pill, no potion, no injection, no nothing. There are things that can help, but there's nothing that can replace behaviors. Because our nervous system was evolved for these behaviors. Yeah. Yeah, listen, man, it's always a fascinating conversation with you.

3:07:21I appreciate you very much. I'm really glad you have your own podcast and did it so popular, and I love it. I was doing it all the time. And you put out a lot of great information, man. Really appreciate you. Well, thank you. I really appreciate you. You've been a great friend to me and a great source of support through a bunch of different aspects of podcasting and supporting the discussions about health and exercise and forcing me to make my cold plunge a little colder. I'm a sniff -smelling salt. All of it. I might be wrong about the cold. I don't know. No, but really, right back at you. There are very few places in the world where you can have a real discussion about real things from all the angles and know that the person sitting across from you is being truly open -minded about it.

3:07:58So, really appreciate you. My pleasure. I appreciate you too. Alright, bye everybody.