Joe Rogan Experience #2195 - Andrew Huberman

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. All right, we're good. Mr. Huberman, how are you? So good to see you. Good to see you. So, what were you just saying about dog breeds? That, like, we're talking about Carl, like the little Bulldog breeds have more Mastiff than wolf? Yeah, so, so Mastiff is a different thing. Well, so don't they all come from wolves? Yeah, they all orig from wolves. But then dog selection has been twofold, mainly for phenotype, like morphology, the shape we call it, and then temperament, right? So there's this chart, how might be a little hard to find online, um, about the dosing of wolf versus Mastiff genetics, essentially. And there's a bunch of other things woven into dog genetics. First of all, cool point, dogs are among, I don't know if they are the most, maybe whales are the most, but they are among the greatest variation in body size within a given species. You think of Chihuahua and Great Dane. And it looks like it's dosing of the genes controlling IGF-1, which makes sense, growth hormone. But kind of wild, right? Like, we got some big humans and some smaller humans, but not like dogs. Not like dogs and Chihuahua. And then what are those enormous, uh, shepherd dogs? Those, um, what are those ones? Those insane dogs they used to fight off wolves? What the [ __ ] are those things called? Those gigantic, hairy things. You know what I'm talking about. We've talked about them before. They're terrifying looking dogs. Yeah, I mean, just the, what's it called? Oh my goodness. Oh, yeah. Those things. What the [ __ ] is that thing? What is that called again? Doesn't, I don't know. It doesn't say. It's just like, but we've, we've seen it before. Doesn't it say the name of the dog? I don't know why it's not saying it. Well, find the name of those dogs, 'cause there's, Brian Call knows all this [ __ ]. Right. So I have a colleague at Stanford, Sue McConnell. Who, Joo Joo dogs? No, that's not it. There's a name for them though. Oh, Tibetan Mastiff. Tibetan Mastiff. Yeah, they're really furry and they're like 250 pounds. Look at that puppy. That's seven weeks old. That's so crazy. Wonder how many they have in a litter. How could they have very many? Yeah, there got to be just a few. Poor, poor mama. So, I, this colleague at Stanford, Sue McConnell, she's one best in show at some of the big events for, uh, Py. Um, she breeds horses and she's into that whole, what's up? Py. The Puli are the ones that look like Rasta-dog. You know, their eyes are covered. They're, they're amazing. They're amazing. And, um, she had this chart on her door. I was going to meet with her about something. She handles a lot of undergraduate education at Stanford. And I see this chart. And the chart essentially shows the dosing of kind of the original wolf line genes versus more Mastiff heavy genetic background. And there are a lot of breeds on this chart. But essentially shows up in the following way: the dogs that are more sight and scent, right? And with longer snouts, like a Shepherd, like a Shepherd, have more heavy dosing of the wolf genes still in them. Then you get to the shorter snout, kind of snub nose, like the French Bulldog, the English Bulldog, and some Mastiff breeds, Pugs, right? And the amount of wolf in them is like nil to none. And then what's, but wait a minute. But they all start off as wolves. So they have some genes that relate to the wolf origin, origin lineage, right? But over time, they've been bred. For instance, the English Bulldog. Right. But, but all dogs originally come from wolves. All of them. That's my understanding as well. Even Mastiffs. That's right. That's my understanding. But then as they were cross-bred with different dogs, right? So for instance, like the English Bulldog, that line came from the crossing of essentially pug-like short snout, right? But with Mastiff, with Mastiffs or with dogs with heavy Mastiff genetic dosing. Why? Well, the idea was the short snout gives them a, a good lever for holding on to things, right? And the Mastiff genes lead to, and we know this for sure, both the the droopiness of the face. It also relates to less, uh, presence of pain receptors in the front of the body. Okay. So if you've ever had a bulldog, but you know their feet can be really sensitive, but their face, you can hold on to those jowls. My Bulldog, Costello, would go picking up stuff at the beach and he occasionally get a fish hook in his mouth and it looks super painful and he's like, you know, so not, not very many pain sensors in the face. They have a, they have a disruption and or mutation in the gene that controls the elasticity of skin. That's why they have the droopiness. And they are brachycephalic, short snout. That's why they're not very good breathers. And they essentially have sleep apnea. That's why they have a bunch of, they snore like a [ __ ]. They do. So they do snore a lot. I can attest. Like, girl, does it? It's crazy. And, and so what were dogs being selected for? Well, unless you're showing dogs, dogs were selected for the kind of work they were capable of doing, like sheep dogs or great herders, this kind of thing. But when people essentially designed, bred up, and cross-bred to get the English Bulldog or the Old English Bulldog, which doesn't have as much of an underbite. So I had an Old English Bulldog. So whereas the English Bulldog is elbows out, so inward rotation, the thing we're all supposed to not do, and underbite. The Old English Bulldog looks like this. It looks more like a pitbull. Looks more like a pit. And they were originally used for bull baiting, for grabbing onto the nose of the bull, getting the bull super aggressive, and then being able to let go and get called off and coming back to their, uh, to their protector. And then basically, then it was for, it was to rile up the bull, right? For bull fighting. So you can still find some of this stuff online. Um, you can find some old descriptions, in some cases, even some old videos. But of course, now bull baiting with dogs is not allowed. Right. Dog fighting, everybody looks down on. But then if you start asking about the toy breeds, what were the toy boy breeds, quote unquote, designed for or bred for? They were basically designed to sit next to you. Some of them will seek out, you know, like the terrier breeds will find vermin, right? They'll go find rats. They're, they're really good ratters, actually. Jack Russells are great. Jack Russells are great ratters. The, um, the West Highland Terriers, the Westies, um, the Cairn Terriers, they're always, they're really great hunters. Look for little things, right? And the amazing thing is that when you start looking at the different breeds, it was basically human selecting on the basis of mostly behavior and phenotype, shape, and thinking, oh, like I want a smaller dog that will just sit near me, or I want a small dog that will, that will like kill rats and sit near me. No, I want a big dog that's going to guard. So you start breeding for pain tolerance, start breeding for loyalty and aggression. And, um, a guy that I think was on your podcast a long time ago, uh, Sam Sheridan. Yeah, yeah. In a Fighter's Heart, there's a great chapter where he talks about, uh, I think it's dog fighting in the Philippines. And he talks about how brutal that sport is, which indeed it is. But he talks about the love between the owner and the dog can predict, and of course, the dog and the owner, it's reciprocal, one presumes, that the strength of that relationship predicts how hard the dog will fight for the owner. And he uses this as kind of a parallel construction for why, and you tell me if this is true or not, that many of the fatalities in boxing were the consequence of sure 15-round as opposed to 12-round fights. But also when the corner man or the coach was the parent. And so, and so it gets into this very complicated psychology. I actually think that's a really terrific book, um, because I think it, it speaks to a lot of really interesting aspects of bonding between humans, bonding in that case between animals and humans. Of course, dog fighting, like, I don't know if there are many things that people look down upon as much as they look down upon dog fighting. But he speaks to the relationship between the dog and the owner as a loving one, which was super surprising to me. Anyway, um, that's a bit of a tangent. But, um, I don't know, maybe it's possible to find that chart. I don't want to send you on a ridiculous expedition. But if you just say, so genes, simple, that's a simple one. Okay. Um, this one, the one I'm thinking about is a vertical one, um, uh, that was in Science magazine or Scientific American. Um, but it's wild. Um, again, I don't want to send you on an expedition that has us paused. But same thing. Yeah, sorry about that. Or, no worries. But it's just, we get a rough understanding of it all. Yeah. So, so now when I see, like, okay, like a Collie, like I see a Collie down there, I think long snout, so probably has a better nose than a, than a Mastiff breed. Um, are you can ask an owner how good is their vision? Are they a sight hound or a scent hound? And of course, they're, they're both. But some dogs, like I'm really interested now, in part because of you and Cam Haynes and others, about dogs that hunt or go on hunts. And like the [ __ ] hound breeds are amazing. I've always wanted a Redbone [ __ ] hound. Their ears waft up smell. That's why they're so long. Yeah, I didn't know that. Yeah, the reason why they have those long floppy ears is as they're running, their ears are wafting up smell, and it gives them a better sense of the, the, the chase. Oh, amazing. I, I read, um, this, uh, incredible description of why dog scent and sense of smell is so much better than ours. There's a guy named Gomer Soel, who's been on my podcast. He's over in Israel, who claims that human olfaction is just as good as dog olfaction. But how do they outdo us? The frequency of sniffs. And this is really cool. You know, those little notches on the side of the nose? Like our nostrils look more or less symmetric. They have those little notches. They create, they create little vortices for the dog so that the scents stick around. They're actually getting longer exposure to a scent. So when they, they're getting something like 10 or 20x the exposure to the scent in the olfactory bulb and are able to assess both directionality. They can do right nostril, left nostril. They can sense odor plumes to steer in one direction or another. But Gomer has done these crazy experiments when he was back at Berkeley where he had people, hands mitted, eyes covered, so they can't sense touch, they can't see, everything's covered. And they can follow a scent of chocolate buried seven inches below the ground. What? Yes. And you can see this, this, you can find if you say, uh, a tracking, sorry, Jamie, my goal wasn't to come here and send you on these. Do these people have a nose like Ari Shaffir? Uh, of what? [Laughter] Or Adrien Brody? Oh, oh, my. If you say, uh, kind of Berkeley chocolate, uh, tracking, Soel, or something like that, it should come up. So he would do these aerial views of these people tracking these scents on the ground. And it turns out people are really good at this. They can track a scent. Um, yeah. And if sniffers show that humans can track scents and that two nostrils are better than one. Okay. So if you, but if you go images, I think you probably sent through the grass. Yeah. If you go images, and then I'll lay off the track sense. So if you go to images, uh, damn it. And you just say, uh, Berkeley, just say, there it is. Right. So they compared the tracking of a scent hound, of a, of a Bloodhound to human tracking of a scent buried. Uh, in the case of the, the Bloodhound, it wasn't buried. So that person, what do they have a mask on? Yeah, they got a mask on. Their hands are covered with thick gloves. They can only use the only thing are their nostrils. And there, but that line, that yellow line is not a line with a bunch of chocolate on it. It's buried below the surface. I always thought it was above. And then when I talked to Gomer, he said, no, no, they buried the chocolate scent. And people were able to track it like a, like a hunting dog tracks. How do they bury it if it's grass? I think they cut a trench and then they covered it up. Oh, wow. So he insists that this thing that you see in all the textbooks, which is that humans have, you know, like one 1,000th or something of the number of olfactory receptors, that's that's total [ __ ]. Really? Total [ __ ]. In fact, our friend, who by the way, wanted me to say hello, Rick Rubin, turned to a good friend of mine, who's the chair of neurosurgery of a major department, medical school department, not Stanford, I promise. And said, what percentage of the things in medical textbooks, basic and advanced, do you think are false, based on your understanding of what we actually know now compared to when the textbooks were written? And he said, 50%. And then he, and then Rick said, and, yep. And then Rick said, and what is the extent of impact on treatment of patients, modern day? And his answer was one word: Incalculable. Oh my God. 50% WRONG. 50% in currently used medical textbooks. Meaning that the literature has been updated with new understanding, new scientific papers, but it has not yet been incorporated into the medical education. Let me, let me say something, 'cause I know that bears have insane senses of smell that are many times stronger than a Bloodhound. And, uh, famously can smell people from 100, 200 yards away. Like, there's got to be levels to it. And I just can't imagine that a Bloodhound doesn't have a better sense of smell than a person. Right. So they absolutely have a better sense of smell in, uh, under the definition that they use it. They use the same number of receptors differently. In other words, the resolution of your vision and a mouse's vision is dramatically different. The resolution of your vision is very sharp at the fovea, towards the center of your eye. And actually, towards the periphery, you could, anyone can just do this. You wiggle your fingers out here in the periphery and you can't see any detail, right? As you move that forward, you can see detail. Okay. And that's because the density of pixels, so to speak, in the retina is much, much higher near the fovea, near the center, than it is at the periphery. Okay. So what he's saying, what Gomer Soel's laboratory has found, and others have found, is that the number of pixels, the, the, the potential for olfactory resolution in humans and in Bloodhounds is essentially the same. This is his argument. But that Bloodhounds sniff much more. So it's the equivalent of having their eyes open much more, right? In the example, so to speak, they have these vortices that are created by the structure of their, of their nose and nostrils. So they have longer exposure. And in the case of the bear, for instance, I don't know how many olfactory receptors they have relative to a human or a Bloodhound. But that the, um, the bear is likely spending a lot more time and can pull more air, perhaps. We, I don't know, but is using the, the mechanical aspects of the olfactory system differently. In fact, and here's, uh, now I'm recalling the experiment that led to this conclusion that humans have exceptional olfaction, which is that there's a particular compound that when introduced to a swimming pool, people can detect a difference in the smell of the water at a dilution that is outrageously, uh, outrageously small. Like skunk spray. Like skunk spray. Um, forgive me, because I'm not remembering the name of the chemical. But he said, you can essentially add a drop of this to a, a swimming pool, and then people can smell the difference between the water. And so his argument is not that humans are walking around sensing all these smells consciously as well as a Bloodhound or as well as a bear. But that we have a tremendous capacity for olfaction that, you know, that the chocolate tracking experiment exemplifies. But it requires some removal of our most dominant sense, vision, and hearing, our second most dominant sense, and in that case, tactile, uh, orientation as well. And so the idea is that, you know, we have an amazing olfactory apparatus. In fact, he, he makes the argument, and there's evidence for the fact that as soon as people meet, and they've done these beautiful experiments, people meet, they shake hands, and you know, the next thing they do, they tend to, within about a minute, they wipe the scent of the other person on their face. Typically. I guess I wasn't paying attention. They don't realize it. People don't realize this, and they just do it subconsciously. Yeah. Mercaptan, I think. Mercaptan, also known as the, how do you say that? The thiol, where is it? Sulfur-containing organic compounds with a strong unpleasant odor. They are colorless, yellowish liquids. It can be flammable. Mercaptans are found in nature and in living organisms as a waste product of metabolism and in oil and gas. They're also present in certain foods, such as some nuts and cheese, and in decaying organic matter and marshes. Right. So we're probably sensitive to the odors that that matter, that can kill us. That can kill us. He also has this idea that I think is starting to take hold in real data, that we are constantly sensing our own odor plumes. That we, you know, that we, we smell ourselves a lot of times per day. That's actually very normal behavior. You know, there are all sorts of ways people do that that nobody talks about. Yeah. You check a sniff. People check their sniff. And it's an indication of hormone status, immune status. When you have babies or puppies, like, you know, you're looking at like, oh, is a good poop or a bad poop? You know, you're also paying, people, some people will smell the poop. I'm, I'm not a proponent of that. But we're constantly sensing the scent and taste of, for instance, our partner's saliva. Right. Actually, an ex-girlfriend of mine wrote to me recently. I don't know what this question represented, but she said, do you think that when you become unattracted to somebody, the, um, the taste of their mouth becomes bad to you? Or the other way around? When you become unattracted, attracted? I guess she might have been dating somebody and like maybe they had fallen out of favor and she was kind of not attracted. And she was sort of noting that, um, the taste of their mouth, no longer, like it tasted kind of aversive now as opposed to before. I bet that's in your mind. I bet you don't like them anymore. 'Cause if you're really in love with someone, you don't even care if they have bad breath, you still want to kiss them. That's true. Because you just love them. You don't care. True. Yeah, that's true too. Yeah, you don't care if they smell. You don't care. You just, you love them. But if they're gross and then they smell, you're like, uh, right. You [ __ ] stinky [ __ ]. This is a mule deer skull. So, you know, this is, uh, not as extreme as an elk. But you get a look at the internal. If you look inside of that and you see, oh yeah, 'cause they can wind you from 100 yards away, easy. So see this spongy stuff? I don't know if they can see it on video. There's this spongy stuff there. That's something called the cribriform plate. The cribriform plate is a bunch of Swiss cheese-like thin bone. And the olfactory neurons, which basically sit right behind your, the back of your nostrils, they, uh, they send axons, their low-wire light connections back into the brain. And when somebody gets hit hard on the head, that cribriform plate shears it. And that's why people become anosmic, they lose their sense of smell. Yeah, look at that picture. Now, what's amazing about the olfactory neurons is that they are among the very few neurons in the human and other mammalian nervous system that regenerate throughout the lifespan. So there's a little area of your hippocampus where there's some neurons that everyone makes a big deal of that frankly don't do a lot to regenerate throughout the lifespan. So-called neurogenesis, new neurons. But the olfactory neurons, even though they're central nervous system neurons, just like your retinal neuron or your cerebral cortex, they can regenerate throughout the entire lifespan. And they do. Every time somebody takes a head hit or there's some, you know, shearing off of these axons, axon, excuse me, they regenerate. Now, under conditions like, uh, we saw this a lot, uh, during COVID, where people were complaining about loss of smell. We see this when people age. Some people are thinking that loss of smell may be a correlate, not the cause, but obviously, but a correlate of age-related cognitive decline, dementia, and Alzheimer's, things like that. There are a few things. Actually, I think I recommended it to a couple of friends of ours now. There's very little data on this. But I will say, and I'll catch heat for this, but these days I catch heat anyway, so I don't care. There are good data, in my opinion, small amount of data, but let's call it decent enough data to explore that alpha-lipoic acid at 600 milligrams per day during the time when you're starting to lose your smell might rescue some of that smell. Someone's getting COVID and they start to lose their sense of smell. What other viral infections cause a loss of sense of smell? Well, anything that clogs the sinuses, certainly. But, um, there are influenza viruses that do this. Now, I know as we're saying this, that some people say, in fact, Gomer Soel told me that he felt that the data about alpha-lipoic acid were kind of on the weak side. But when people are losing their sense of smell and taste, it's really scary. I mean, it's one of those things where you know, you kind of feel like so much of pleasure in life, unbeknownst to us, is, yeah, with food. Oh, I'll never forget when I got a viral infection and I took and I lost my sense of smell. And I ate a handful of blueberries, which I love, and it just tasted like bags of water. I was like, I was like, oh goodness, like I don't, there are worse things. COVID that you lost your smell with. It was, and I did the smell training, which has also been shown to work because these olfactory neurons, this is amazing, their survival is activity-dependent. They require electrical activity driven by sniffing and smelling. It is true that the behavioral tool of taking a lemon and really just like getting it close to that nostril and just really trying to get whatever little whiff of lemon you can, and then taking, you know, your coffee and getting that little whiff of coffee, whatever little remnants of smell that you can get in there, has been shown to improve the survival and eventually the durability of not just olfactory neurons, but scent. In other words, the behavioral training works. There are the alpha-lipoic acid thing is debated. The thing about alpha-lipoic acid is diabetics and people with blood sugar issues probably shouldn't take it. It can kind of reduce blood sugar a little bit. But when I had that happen, lost my sense of smell, I was like, listen, I don't, I want my smell back. So I took 600 milligrams of alpha-lipoic acid and I was doing the the scent training. I was like sniffing lemon, sniffing coffee, sniffing parmesan cheese, sniffing anything that was pungent that I could recognize. And my smell came back in a couple of days. But then again, I don't know 'cause I didn't run the control experiment, what whether or not it would have come back anyway. Is it only positive smells? Or what about if you use smelling salts or something really intense? Well, smelling salts, I've never used. But well, guess what? Do we have some? We've got some right here. I'd be willing to try. Are they legal? Before I do something illegal. All right. Yeah, these are totally legal. All right, I'll give it a shot. Uh, these are the one, this is, uh, Juju Mu'u, who is a real athletic freak. Who, who uses these. We don't know him, but, shout out to him because this is the strongest [ __ ] we have ever tried. I will just, this one's sealed too. So this, I'll just do a, I'll just try a little bit. Oh, you're going to get all up in there. Come on. This like the cold plume. This is, I got a funny story about the cold plume to tell you later, but, uh, uh, that relates to you. But we'll get to that. But you're about to get your mind blown here, son. So this stuff is so strong that it's sealed in this bag. Wait, wait. Is it going to kill my olfactory neurons? No, you'll be fine. It's, uh, so strong that even though it's sealed in this bag, like I have to rip this bag open. And, oh my God. Damn, my hands are slippery. Got a knife. Um, okay. It's so strong that I've broken the seal of this bag just slightly. Look, it's still kind of sealed. Look, you could smell through the bag. Try the, give a sniff. Oh, yeah, yeah, right. Okay, this bag is still sealed. I haven't even cut the bag yet. So, so as somebody who had a laboratory with chemicals in it for a long time, now we, we run clinical trials on humans. So no more chemicals in my lab. Okay. Now take a sniff. You learn to waft it. You learn to, the bottle. The bottle is, it's not even out of the thing. No. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The bottle's still sealed. Oh, this is just the beginning. You know when you go to a park and you go into a public bathroom at a park that has a pool? Nervous? Yeah, I'm getting nervous. You know, I'm no Elon Musk, but I saw what happens when people do substances on this. That was legal in the state of California. And I think everybody's getting a little out of hand. Yeah, you got in trouble. You're like, we're down here in Texas. So, okay, now again, this is totally legal. Now, what you're going to do here is take, isn't it amazing that the word legal when said fast sounds like illegal? Legal. And then you go, wait, what did you say? Legal. It's totally legal. And vice versa. Yeah. All right. So what do I do? Unscrew the cap. Look, it's my initials. Ah. Unscrew the cap. All right. Put it about six inches from your nose. Take a big sniff. Get in there. All right. Yeah, baby. Let's go. Now imagine if you had COVID. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Let me just kind of experience that for a second. Yeah, yeah. Take it in. I'm going to have, you know what? It wouldn't be fair. You know what's interesting? Oh, oh, the fresh ones are so powerful. I feel it in my eye because the sinuses run. Oh, now imagine if you had COVID. You can smell 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 olfactory neurons. I don't think it's killing it. You can smell everything after it. I mean, that's true. My own, I'm obviously biased, so 'cause I like that thrill for whatever reason we have in the, I actually enjoyed that. Thank you. We have in the green room of the mother. You prompted me. Did take several new experiences that we can talk about. Um, but one other thing before I forget. Um, I know I, I go down these like nerdy rabbit holes here. But when I did the smelling salts a moment ago, I, I sniffed with both nostrils, but it came in mainly through my left nostril, right? And so I asked Gomer Soel, what's the deal with this left nostril, right nostril stuff? You know, you have the, the yogis, the switching the nostril things. Here's what's wild. This is so wild. It turns out that every two hours or so, the dominant breathing nostril switches. Now, really? Now, that could be interesting or that could not be interesting, right? There are a lot of things in biology that happen. But like, what, 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 seesaw. During sleep. So this whole thing with the yogis of, you know, 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. So that whole thing is probably a little bit like weak sauce. But this idea that you're breathing easier through one nostril or the other is reflecting an underlying brain state and body state that is absolutely true. He tells me. W. And, um, 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, the brain of a, let me think of like a turtle, it's mostly movement. They have very low cerebral cortex. Maybe that's not the best example. But certainly in a scent hound, the olfactory bulbs are much bigger than they are in a sight hound. And both of those have olfactory bulbs that are much, much bigger than Jim's Bulldog over there. Those guys sniff all the time, but they're mostly snorting to try to get sense in their smell. Sense of smell is much, much worse than Marshall's, than your dog. Because Marshall's a retriever. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. 'Cause 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, which is crazy. Smells his ball, you know? Yeah, yeah. Incredible. So, so what he's 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 might be something related to maternal behavior. It might be something related to estrogen. It might be something in the Y chromosome that suppresses that. We don't know. But some people are very olfactory. They can smell when somebody's not feeling right, 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 [ __ ]. 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. Could be a certain, you know, we talk about stress as one thing, but stress is the dosing of different levels of cortisol, epinephrine. People that are pathological liars, they can probably do it without evoking those things. Then you have things like pupil size. Bigger the pupils, more arousal, right? The more stressed somebody is, right? We know this, right? That's why, like, if somebody takes a stimulant, pupils will get huge. There's a thing that people do when they're full [ __ ] where 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. So that it's like their defenses are up. They're counterpunch. They're, well, they're selling it. They, they say it and they're like, does he buy it? Like, you feel the, does he buy it? Like, oooh, you're full of [ __ ]. Oh, interesting. You know, let me think about this. So you are able to sense their anticipation of your response. It's like they've got, uh, queued up some counter, some, uh, evaluating where you're whether you're going yes, no, or maybe. Yeah. But it's not reliable. Like, I just, 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 100%. Sometimes people are full of [ __ ] and you don't, you're not sure. Or you have your defenses down. I mean, I've been badly, badly manipulated before. It happens. Yeah, especially if you like someone. You know, that's part of the problem. You don't want them to be full of [ __ ]. 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 those tend to be unique things that you can't get out anywhere. You know. And boy, uh, somebody said that 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? But, you know, you know what I'm saying? It just can't be seduced by. M. And then there are some people who 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, of a stuffed animal. My 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, you want to be with them 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, listening to a really good book that a really smart person suggested to me, called Five Types of People That Will Ruin Your Life. And, um, and 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 narcissist and borderline and all that. Like they include some of that, but they depart from that. And they just focus on what this is a guy who's a psychologist. It's written by a guy who's a psychologist. He's worked a lot on conflict resolution over the years, courtroom type stuff, etc. 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. They like creating it. But 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, you know, basically harm. And then the other 5% are very like aggressive and abrasive. And so he has this great set of protocols. I love protocols that are essentially like, don't move in with, marry, or get 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 year 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? And 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, screaming and yelling. They're often very tactical and manipulative and very vindictive. Um, they'll leverage victimhood. They'll leverage a lot of different things. And again, cuts across men 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. So 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. You know, 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 abound. But it turns out it's only about 10%. 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. I think sucks that you have to think that way though. Can you just enjoy someone? Enjoy their, if they're in the 90%? Yeah, but that's the problem. You could zig when you should have zagged and you run into a 10-percenter. Take a year. Yeah, a year is a long time though. Yeah. Also, people can learn 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 mentioned that the relationship between, uh, erotic and manipulative and crazy or just erotic and crazy. I think there's also that when we finally receive the sorts of, I don't know, love or affection, it's not always sex. It's not always sexual, right? Like somebody, I 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. So 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, 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 in adulthood. It's not like you get your, like your childhood attachment stuff and then you go, okay, well, you know, you're like 15, 16, you're moving on in the world, you're hitting puberty, you're starting to date a bit, whatever. Now let's like 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, or infant caretaker, and on the basis of studies of romantic love. It's the same circuitry. So you're using, uh, a set of algorithms and circuitry that were designed for one thing in a very different context. That's interesting. That's probably makes sense why a lot of men with like very overbearing mothers seek overbearing wives. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I, uh, I've learned so much recently about just how it is that, you know, we can, uh, lose our, our vision of, like, other people, right? We, and I think 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 it 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 met. I think there are very few evil people. Right? 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, you know, people, quote unquote, trying to get their needs met, often times, like the worst ones, sometimes it's called trauma bonding, but they kind of go lock and key. Or somebody identifies somebody that's really healthy and they're like, them, I'm going to latch on to them because like they're healthy. And, and they could, and you'd say, well, the healthy person should be able to spot all the landmines. But if somebody's able to really tap into, like, something you didn't have, or something that just feels like oxygen, right? Goodness gracious, like you could be the smartest, most, you know, well-acclimated person with the best parents or whatever upbringing, which most people aren't, but, you know, some people do have that and still fall kind of, you know, into this, uh, fog that is like, gosh, like you want to be with this person, but it's, but it doesn't feel good, you know, that that mishmash. And I think the thing I've learned clearly is that when you feel that trepidation, run, don't walk. Like, like, it's not like 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. Ticking bomb, get out. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Just run. Just run. 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 they don't know. I've seen that before, both with, uh, 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, uh, I always say easier than some, harder than others. But I always had great friends, great friendships. But my threat sensing, um, wasn't always great in romantic relationships, for sure. I've also had some great relationships. I think what tends to happen is that if we're very busy, we have this tendency to to be easily manipulated by certain things that are unusual that we just, that really feel like extra oxygen to us or just feel so nourishing. And 'cause I think people always or often default to sex. Like it's all about sex. Depending on who you are, like sex is either more or less readily available to you. Like I think that for some people, it's nurturing, like 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. So people who've had like very, you know, overbearing or or complicated childhoods or abusive childhoods, sometimes they're set to perceive danger at way too high a threshold. Right, 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. That people like excitement. And if you have a boring life and 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 excited. In there's some, some conflict, some something. There's, there's fights and breakups and then makeups, which are exciting, you know? And so then you get locked into this stimulation pattern, which is, 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, um, like excitement and adventure and are super curious? But like excitement and adventure, so I'm thinking comics, I'm thinking, um, 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've said, you know, your relationship should be a sanctuary. That should be where peace is, you know? And actually, I don't pay a lot of attention to Instagram kind of little motos and things, but someone sent me one that, uh, 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, where someone who's just a little wilder, a little crazier, maybe some lady's got a bunch of tattoos, like, look at her, you know? Like, wo! You know, people get excited by people that are a little bit dangerous. It's this 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 I've kept it intentionally kept it off the, the hands and neck on my hands. But it's, uh, the face is a real problem. Like, that's a little wacky. But I have a lot of friends like Jelly Roll, good friend of mine, he's got tattoos all over his face. Post Malone, good friend of mine, he's got a bunch of written [ __ ] all over his face. Yeah, I mean, they're 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. You just see the human. Yeah, you know, it's just like they're wearing a shirt. It's like, no, it's nothing, you know? 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, my, my one of my childhood heroes, and somehow by the grace of God, he's become a close friend of mine, Tim Armstrong, lead singer from Rancid, has a tattoo of a spiderweb on his head and a spider on his neck. And I remember seeing him when I was a kid at a show and be like, that dude's scary. And Lars Frederickson from Rancid says skunks on his forehead. They're super nice guys. I mean, they're Travis Barker's super nice guys. Tim and Travis do transplants. Yeah, Tim and Travis do transplants. And like, you see those guys, you're like, whoa. Now, I think it's shifted a little bit, but back then, I remember thinking like, that's garly. 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 checked out of society completely. A mohawk used to be, you're not getting a job, right? A nose ring used to, remember when a nose ring or an eyebrow ring, cover, you go into Starbucks and the person would have it covered up, you know? Like, because they weren't, they weren't allowed to have it, right? Right, right. Now, 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 to decorations. But it is a thing though, that you're taking a giant ass chance by tattooing your hands. Well, a friend of mine, who's admittedly is a psychologist, said, you know, tattoos are largely an expression of what you feel on the inside put to the outside. And I was like, that sounds good. Yeah, it's like, yeah, I don't know, just art. It's, 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 Freedman face tattoos. So good. So good. He just had a birthday. 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 tattoo of 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. Th, 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. 100%. Before I forget this, can I ask you this? The people that are into this, um, smelling salt stuff, they're powerlifters and they take a big sniff of that stuff before they lift weights. Why would that help them? Adrenaline. Adrenaline. Yeah. So, 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 would 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. We, so we have an olfactory bulb, which is the main thing for smell. Then there's something called the accessory olfactory bulb. It sort of divides into primitive smells that are like aversive, getaway, quick. Those tend to go through a really fast line through the old accessory olfactory bulb, takes us straight to the amygdala, to the piriform cortex that says, move your body and facing away from that. Like, I didn't sit there and on those smelling salts, like, boom, get away. It's, it's like a reflex. It's fish. This called M neuron where you touch on one side of the body, what does the fish do? Goes the opposite direction. Big huge neuron, hardwired circuit. Well, they have those lateral lines that detect sounds and things and vibrations in the water, the sensing electro sensing in a distance. And these M neurons are incredible. You touch, boom, the fish heads the opposite direction. Doesn't go like, oh, are you another friendly fish? You want to mate? They go, I'm out of here. Oh, and then they check you out, right? And it's 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? You know? And then there's the smelling salt one that goes through the, the accessory olfactory bulb, straight to the amygdala, which is associated with threat detection and other things, straight to the piriform 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 appetitive, like, hmm, let me explore more, sniff in more, versus a, as opposed to aversive behaviors, like, get me the hell away. And the, these brain areas are among the more ancient brain areas. Now, I say ancient, people nowadays start picking apart at like, well, it's not just limbic and cortex, the cortex is part of limbic, that's all true. But if you look at our brains and you look at the brains of like, 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, uh, like looking around as much as I did last time, like things, you know, not 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, three different responses in humans, okay? In order to survive. Yum, I'm going to move toward it. Yuck, I'm going to move away. And me. There's basically only three motor responses to anything. Yum, yuck, or me. Now, there's a, there's a matter of degrees. Like, you might see somebody you really like, you want to, I know Joey Diaz or something, you know, you see him, like, you want to run over see him, right? So there's an appetitive circuit moves you towards it. See something that's a little odd, you might pause. I don't know what that is. Or something aversive, like something happens in the, in the parking lot and you're like, I'm getting the hell out of here. So the brain, as complex as it is, needs to divide things into one of three different motor responses. Forward, pause, or retreat. Okay. I was playing with Jam's dog out there before. I was like, can't, I couldn't get him to back up. That's what's kind of cool about the bulldog, right? You charge him and he just goes, I'm like 20 times his size, but he's just like, but he's also never experienced anybody being mean to him. So every, 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 play with him, right? So you said about why the, the smelling salts and 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. It'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. Norepinephrine, noradrenaline, same, same molecule. So, 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 coeruleus, which sends out a bunch of little wires, axons to sprinkle the brain with adrenaline. And both systems work in parallel. So when you smell something aversive, it goes, inhale, okay, olfactory, certain olfactory neurons cue that to the accessory olfactory bulb, bam, straight to the amygdala. Amygdala sends a signal down to the, to the adrenals on top of the kidneys, they release adrenaline. Sends a, believe it or not, a signal up to locus coeruleus, it sprinkles the brain with adrenaline. And you just had, within a couple hundred milliseconds, you just got a parallel adrenaline response in brain and body 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 sleeper's nose in the middle of the night, they're going to wake up. Yeah, like, like a, you know, like a gunshot went off. They used to give it to boxers when they got hurt in the corner, they'd give them smelling salts and wake them up. Yeah, because one of the best, uh, uh, painkillers is adrenaline. Mmm. Well, 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, you don't, you don't really feel much. Adrenaline. Unless you get kicked hard to the body, liver shots, doesn't matter how much adrenaline you have pumping. There's something about getting hit in the liver. The liver, when you get hit like right here, if you get kicked or punched right here, it's a crazy feeling. It just, it just shuts everything off. It's real weird. Your body just shuts off. I've seen these, uh, images of like somebody just like melt. It looks like they melt 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 tensing 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 a, like a sharp pain and a delay, and then everything just shuts off. It's very weird. 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 their right arm down and they pin it to their body. So maybe they're fighting like this, they're moving, whack the liver, and you see them do like that, and they're still moving, but they can't help it. They have their arm pinned because they know one more shot there and they're [ __ ]. 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. And 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 Makhachev and Alexander Volkanovski. 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 they're just hiding this like slow. You see the leg come up and it's very hard to recognize. There's a kick called the question mark kick. And it's called a question mark kick because in Taekwondo, we used to call it 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 into a roundhouse kick. Pull up. Uh, Gloy Fosa 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 on your head and knock people out. It's so wild because to this day, I don't know anybody who can kick as good as him with that kick. Um, like to this day, he has the, the best highlight. There's a lot of people that are really good at that kick, but Gloy had a very unusual flexibility of his hips. Watch this. Look at this. Well, that's just a regular one, but he's got some of them that go over that. This is some of his highlights. Like, 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 going to 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 whips 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, I'm always amazed how people can kick standing so closely. Oh, yeah. Will Gloy was. It's just flexibility of the hips. It's leg dexterity. But the way he could do it, man, it's just, he's the finest question mark kick of all time. I mean, here's knocking out Semmy Schilt, who was 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 Gloy used to fight. I mean, this was like K1. There's Israel Adesanya had a really good one too. Still has a really good one. Look at this one. WAP. But that's a little bit more straightforward. I mean, that's like straight to the chin and it's a beautiful kick. But the way Gloy 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 my whole life. I can't throw it like that. I'm always watching their eyes. And, uh, these fighters' eyes. It's amazing to me. Like, uh, years ago, I saw, uh, Mayweather fight. And, um, it was obviously on pay-per-view. And, um, and he was just getting paid for sure, right? That was his thing. But, um, it was always amazing me in the slow-mo, like where he would slip punches by like centimeters. And they may think that like his depth perception and the depth perception of fighters, most successful fighters must just be exquisite. Because I mean, like slipping at that distance with just a chin movement, that's one thing. But it's also pattern recognition. You've been doing it so many times and you know. So, uh, 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, 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? Does 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 and fire? Does he give any telltale signs? Does he telegraph? So there's a lot of things that a fighter looks for. Mayweather had some of the best counterpunchers in the history of the [ __ ] sport. He was so good at like staying in the pocket. So he was an elusive guy. Yeah, slipping. Pattern recognition. Pattern recognition. So he knows that left hook is coming. And so look how straight he throws that right hand. See how straight he threw that? So Canelo is throwing these big wide punches, and Floyd is just cutting him off at the path and then moving his head out of the line of those hooks that come his way. So do you think, um, it's conscious? You know, I'm obsessed with this notion of unconscious genius. Like, you know, 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, and I used to, 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 going to do it because someone would do something and as they would do something, I instinctively knew because of pattern recognition, there's going to 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's like a conscious and awareness of how you do it. Guess what I'm, I think this notion of pattern recognition, it's interesting because earlier we were talking about pattern recognition for finding people who are lying. Right? You have this pattern recognition thing that you know, you're not saying it's perfect, but like you can sense something. There's things that, 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. Was 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 100% okay. 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? So, well, that's where drills come in, okay? So you do drills and you do drills constantly. And one of the things that Mayweather's father was a great fighter. Mayweather's father fought Sugar Ray Leonard back in the 1970s when Sugar Ray was in his prime and gave him a hell of a fight. And his brother, uh, or his uncle, rather, his uncle Roger was Roger Mayweather, the Black Mamba. 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 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 it with mitts. Well, they'll throw a hand at you and they'll slip and counter. Here, let me show you this. This is this guy Ilia Topuria. And Ilia Topuria is, uh, one of the absolute best fighters in the world. He's the current UFC, um, featherweight champion. And the dude is just [ __ ] phenomenal. But when you, and 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 Mayweather is a great example of that as well. Did I send it to you? No, didn't go through. I totally sent it. Hold on. Says I sent it. Is it on Instagram? No, I, yeah, it's on Instagram. I sent it to you though, uh, on a text message. Really? I sent it twice. You got it. Okay. Um, Ilia Topuria, like I said, um, one of some of the best hands in the sport. Current UFC featherweight champion and knocked out Volkanovski, 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 [ __ ] speed of that. Look at the hand. Look at the hand speed. [ __ ] incredible. I mean, if you know how difficult that is to do and do it that fast. Give me that sound again. Let me hear this. I mean, these are like five, six punches a second. Yeah, it almost sounds, it almost looks like it's sped up by one, one and a half times. And just phenomenal technique. But see how those punches, it's like they, they're not even talking. So when he's throwing the mitts at his head to get him to duck, there's no, 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. He stood right in front of you, and you couldn't [ __ ] hit him. That's true mastery of space and true mastery of technique. He's, he's in my opinion, he's the best boxer that's ever lived. Yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm not qualified to to rank people, but I, 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, um, 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? This is the second time they fought. The first time they fought, it ended in a brawl. Like, like a bunch of people jumped in the ring. It was crazy because they stopped the fight because they were talking too much [ __ ] 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, and this fight was even crazier too, because the referee was, the first referee was terrible. And the, the referee called Floyd, said Floyd Mayweather 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. He stops the bout. He's like, get the [ __ ] out of here. Get out of here. He's the promoter also. Well, I guess, I mean, also it's Floyd Mayweather, like, what's the referee gonna do? [ __ ] you, you know, I'm going to stop the fight. Like, also they're in Mexico City, like, you could 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, the referee was saying, watch the back of the head. He's like, what the [ __ ] are you talking about? That wasn't the back of the head. And so he kicks the guy out and they bring in a different referee who finishes the fight. Was it, it was insanity. And Floyd won. It was an exhibition. It's kind of a [ __ ] money grab, honestly. So this is, you see the punch. That's the punch right there. It's just a right hook. He's saying back of the head. Like, so Floyd's like, get the [ __ ] out of here. Just get out of here. [ __ ] you, get out of here. He's like, get the [ __ ] out of here. And if anybody's qualified to say, get out of here, it's [ __ ] Floyd Mayweather, the best boxer of all time. He's 100% correct. That referee made a giant stupid error. He's like, get out of here, get out of here. He's like, get out of the [ __ ] ring. This is his domain. Yeah, it's, and he's right. Everybody watching it is right. No one thinks it's a bad punch. If you let, let's see it again. We can see it one more time. It's a counter right hand. Let's do it. 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, a punch that goes over the top of the guard and catches him in an exposed area of the head is 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 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, uh, very good up-and-coming MMA fighter. So you know, 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 him, they have no business boxing with him, and he's making millions and millions of dollars doing this way after his competitive career is over, which is, I guess he's earned that right. Hey, 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 like watching him fight because they hate him. Because he talks so much [ __ ] and he's like, look at my million-dollar watch, look at my [ __ ] 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. It's like, [ __ ] $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 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 running in the middle of the night. Yeah, he would go to a nightclub with everybody else, be drinking water, everybody's partying, having a good time. Floyd would leave the nightclub at 2:00 AM, have his bodyguards drive the car, and he would run in front of the car for hours, run home, 2 o'clock in the morning, run five, six miles. And did it all the time, just always did it, 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 McGregor fight, okay, I'm done, done. Did it all, beat everybody, undefeated, bye. And now he just has these, these demonstration fights where they're, they're weird little exhibitions where he's just beating people up that have no business in the ring with them. And one of them, he was walking around with a [ __ ] a card, a ring card. He took it from the ring card girl and started dancing around. So he's like under no threat whatsoever. He's enjoying life. Well, people like to be angry. Um, 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, 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 stimulates some areas and they'd feel happy or giddy or drunk or sexual arousal 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. Really? 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's the one the most because it's mostly just talking or mostly just text. Instagram is photographs. And you could just, I don't comment on people's photos. 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, uh, I don't even read comments. But I look at pictures, I go, oh, that's cool. Oh, look at that video. That's [ __ ] crazy. Give a little tap, double tap, give you a little heart, give you a little love, and they move on about my day. But 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, um, it compels you to continue to watch. I want to keep going with this, but I have to pee so bad. I did the sauna before we got here and I drank 64 liters of water. So, or 64 ounces, rather. All right, we'll be right back. We were, uh, at people like to get angry. And you were saying that you had, uh, another urge to take another sniff of these smelling salts. So I'm observing something interesting about the smelling salts. Like, it's definitely like hits hard and then feels really good afterwards. You can feel it in your body. Feel it in my body. And then I noticed there's kind of a hunger for it, right? Like another hit. Yeah, like maybe in 20 minutes or so. Just like a cocaine thing. Oh, allegedly. I've never tried. Me neither. Good for you. Um, but that's what I hear. Yeah. Wonder, I doubt that hits the dopamine circuit. But a little valuable science tidbit. We hear so much about dopamine, adrenaline. Look, they're three molecules. They're called the catecholamines. Dopamine, epinephrine, adrenaline, and norepinephrine, noradrenaline. And they are actually bi, some are biochemical derivatives of others. And they are cousins. They 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 noradrenaline, which kind of works in between those two. It's a little more complicated, not worth going into. But they work as kind of like a, a gang of three to raise alertness, directional motivation, and go. And so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a little bit of a dopaminergic aspect to those smelling salts. I'd have to look it up and see. But I certainly like it. It feels good. It feels good. Everybody likes it. Weird. And I, and I, like, you know, that's why I've never tried cocaine or amphetamine. Like, I, I like up states, as they call them. Me too. Same thing. I've never tried Adderall either. But I've been tempted. Oh, people tell me about like, Jesus. I've never tried it. Um, organized. What 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, um, all the different nootropics, or let's not call them smart drugs, but things that can enhance alertness. Things like Alpha-GPC. As you know, 600 milligrams of Alpha-GPC. I don't care who it is, that's like, where's the double-blind 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 that a swift kick in the shin hurts. And that 600 milligrams of Alpha-GPC is going to make you more alert. Is it? We did double-blind placebo-controlled studies for Alpha Brain, right? Right. And so they exist. And, 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 alertness. 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 Modafinil, 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? Both. Okay. Yeah. So it, for the treatment of narcolepsy, it also has been shown to improve alertness and cognitive function in sleep-deprived individuals. So you can imagine the military finding that very useful. That's new Vigil and Provigil, right? Uh, 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 11:00, I was like, I want to go home. I don't want to stay in the hotel. [ __ ] it, let me drive home. And if I would drive home, there'd be that risk of the, the sleep coming on because of the, there's a weird thing about being on the highway. About those lines, they [ __ ] hypnotize you. Oh, yeah. It's really weird. Yeah. And the, yeah. And so for anybody out here listening to this, because this, 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. Start. Oh, man, I'm can't sleep again. Wipe that rag on your face. You wake right up. This is a great one. This 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 in 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 preoptic 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 to sleep. Would it be bad to do sauna and then cold plunge and then try to go to sleep? I 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? Well, body temperature goes up more quickly. Also, big shot of adrenaline from cold water. Nobody escapes the adrenaline from cold water, 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 ice bath. Can't even be called an ice bath. So my cold plunge is now set at mid-40s. That's better. Getting better. Uh, but I still go into the sauna at 210, 220. By the way, I don't know if I'm right. Uh, I'm probably wrong. Um, my wife doesn't want, she wants to get a second cold plunge because she doesn't like how cold mine is because mine has ice in it. Yeah, you're probably in the 30s. Yeah, it's 34. Yeah, it's [ __ ] cold as [ __ ]. Beast mode kind of. I've got a new one that I got from Morasco 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, uh, 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 of 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, looking tough. Tell that person to sift their arms around, let that cold water get in your armpits. Well, 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. 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. Sucks. 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. Cheating, man. I can't believe I'm going to admit this publicly. You know what I do? I got two little rubber duckies in there. One's a tougher-looking rubber ducky, and his name is Rogan. I'm not kidding. I shot a video of this. I'll send it to you. My producer's going to kill me. But then there's another one, and that's Huberman. And it's you basically teasing me about what a wuss 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, it's if it's any better to be 34 degrees or if it's any better to be 45 degrees or 50 degrees. But 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 [ __ ]. So that's why I do it as cold as it can get before it freezes solid, which is seems to be 34 degrees. Well, this gets to something that, uh, I know we've talked a little bit about before, uh, offline, not on microphone, which is doing hard things translates to an ability to do hard things. And probably translates, provided it doesn't kill you, to a longer life. And you've explained that there's actually a part of your brain that grows there. So there's a brain area that most neuroscientists aren't aware of called the anterior mid-cingulate cortex. Okay? Scientists who are in the know know about it. It's, you know, I teach anatomy, medical students at Stanford. It's an area that we cover in passing. But there are a lot of brain areas, you got to get, you can't get to everything. But in the last couple of years, there have been studies of this area, the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, that make it super important for everybody to know about, not just neuroscientists. And here's the deal. A colleague of mine at Stanford, Joe Parvis, he's a neurosurgeon. He's in there stimulating different brain areas, including anterior mid-cingulate cortex and areas near it in human patients while they're awake, preparing them for neurosurgery for other reasons. Stimulates anterior mid-cingulate cortex. And what do all people who have their anterior mid-cingulate cortex report? They feel like there's something about to happen. Something's kind of looming. A challenge, a storm. Somewhere reported 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 in people who are successful dieters. It grows larger. In people that fail at a dieting or or nutrition program, it gets smaller. People 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-cingulate cortex is larger in volume in a group of people called superagers. Okay? That's a bit of a misnomer because it implies they age faster.

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.

The universal quality among these superagers is not just a larger anteromedial cingulate 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 anteromedial cingulate cortex. If you love 45° 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. If 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 aversive." But you push yourself to do something that you don't 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. And 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 you, that that ability to not hesitate and push through, the ability to not procrastinate and go forward. And that that thing is probably, like all things, it's like cardiovascular endurance, muscular endurance, like develop an ability to do more of it because of that, right? 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. Started 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. "Are you any good?" I mean, I do anatomical drawings. "Let me see what you got. You got a lot of dicks in there." Is like, super bad. I think here, super. These are just my one, my favorite. This is my, my journal book notes. But my, um, I, but I've actually, um, I used to post my drawings on Instagram. That's how I started, really. In 2019, I wasn't thinking about having a podcast. I was just posting pictures of the retina, talking about the... When did we meet? So 2019, I started posting on Instagram. 2020, I came on this podcast for the first time. Okay. But you were in LA at that time, right? Right. And, um, yeah. And then I went on Lex's podcast a little bit later, and then he goes, "You should start a podcast." So I started January '21. Yeah. Okay. So here's some. Oh, wow. Pretty good. They're not great. They're just for fun. They're just for fun. They're just for fun. Not bad at all. But I, I like to use them to teach. So they're not... Listen, I'm no Da Vinci, but dude, that's pretty [ __ ] good. Actually.

But the point is, 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. I go, "Okay, listen, we're going to talk about how muscle releases a micro RNA 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. That's good. Like the, 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, eye, dude, that's good. Eye. Yeah, that's really good. You like, I'm just trying. I'm not, again, I'm not trying to be Da Vinci. I just want people to learn the information.

So one of my daughters is insanely good. Oh, yeah. Well, I wanted to be a comic book illustrator when I was young. And I, 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 because there's certain people that like, uh, 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. I am weird. I'm going to say it anyway. Sches, the way he moves, like how lithe he is. And his parents are like dancers and performers, right? Right. Right. Also, he's a good boxer. Is he really? Yeah. Yeah. Like, just his movements are so atypical. And like, he's, he's like, it's like watching him is is cool. Like he looks cool, the way he moves. He's free. Yeah.

And there's skateboarder named Jimmy Wilkins who's like breaking every barrier on skateboarding. And his, 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 light, super loose ankles. And I said to him, like, "What do your parents do?" And he goes, "My mom's a ballerina and my dad's an orchestra conductor." Oh, this guy's using his knees on the board. So like, he does everything, not everything, but he does a lot of things hands-free at mock speed. For people in skateboarding, they probably just want to see flips and 900 varials 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, the the whole thing here is that Jimmy's skateboarding is like perfect poetry. So the reason, but so his back knee is often used to stabilize the board. Mhm. Cuz 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. Not this year. This year he took third. So those guys get banged up though. Those guys get a lot of concussions. Yeah. He's big on the the nicotine. I'm trying to get him to quit the nicotine. So he, uh, cuz he loves the nicotine. But between, why are you getting him to quit? Um, like I don't have a problem with people taking nicotine pouches. But it is, 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 like one pouch to a canister a day. Oh, yeah. They, they ramp up the dosage. To I like threes, like mild, three milligram. But I, Lucy sent me some that are twelves. Jesus. Lucy, I can do like half a piece of Nicorette. I put that the 12 in my mouth for like 30 seconds. And my body's like, "Get it out of here." That'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, I want to be in control. I don't ever want to be out of control. Like I've never been addicted to a substance other than coffee, I guess. But I've, I've taken time off of coffee too, just cuz 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'll chuggle. But at the rate the world is going, it's probably going to be illegal. Well, it's, it's always good. The reason why coffee is legal and is the reason why they created meth, 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 warm liquid. I love. And and since I really got into coffee from doing this podcast, really, um, I drink it black. I like coffee. I like the taste. I look forward to it. I have one every morning. I look, I, I like it. But I love it in the afternoon. But if I thought it was [ __ ] with my life, 100%, I would quit. Yeah. You know what I mean?

I've had times in my life where I was drinking too much, where mostly because of comedy, cuz at nights you're out with your boys and everybody wants to drink. They're all drinking. My my friends are all drunks. Like a good solid, doesn't drink. No, Whitney does not drink. But a good solid percentage of my friends drink a lot. They, they drink all the time. They drink at clubs. Like, get Bert to quit. Bert is not going to quit. Well, he asked me to help him. He doesn't, he just wants you to talk to him. Just talk about Bert. That's what he wants. Let's talk about me. Let's talk about me about how I have to quit. Come on, talk to me about me. Let's make it all about Bert. That's what Bert likes. He's not going to quit. Well, he was doing better with his health. And then he posted that photo of himself in the wetsuit. Mhm. Come on, Bert. Like, get with it. Did he get fat again? He, he sent me a picture the other day. He was all skinny. Is he lying? No, he's looking more like a melted candle. Son of a [ __ ]. He, he got big. At least he got jacked. He started lifting weights. I feel bad making fun of him, but I'm not making fun of him. I'm just worried. You're talking about, I'm just worried about his health. Oh, yeah. That's not good. Bert, I'm worried about your health.

Well, the thing is, Bert is, uh, on tour, right? He's got painted toenails too. What the [ __ ] are you doing? He, uh, he's on tour. So he's on this, uh, fully loaded tour. He's doing all these arenas with all these friends and they're doing activities constantly. They go to water parks. I don't know if they go to water parks. You know, [ __ ] like that or something. 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 drinking. Everybody loves a young drunk. But as time goes on, it does not look pretty. Yes. But there's a curve when it comes back around again. You see a 90-year-old guy that's hammered. That guy's fun. Oh, like then they're they're wild again. You know, a 90-year-old guy with like a [ __ ] straw hat on and a gun. He's drunk. Yeah. I must say, like Hunter S. Thompson when he was before he died. Oh, man. I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed your, uh, com, your live comedy on X. Thank you very much. Watched it three times. Thank you.

That's another. So that one was another example of doing something I didn't want to do because, uh, they offered me to do it live. And I was like, "[ __ ] that." Like, I want to be able to edit mistakes out. I want to have, you know, have four shows and pick the best one and do that. I don't want to do it [ __ ] live. That's [ __ ]. Who [ __ ] needs that pressure? It was so good. I watched the first one with my girlfriend. We watched it as it was happening. Then I watched it with my friend Tim. Out when he was out. He's out on tour, um, like Green Day, Rancid, all these '90s band, SM, '90s bands. Smashing Pumpkins are out on tour, like stadiums with 90,000 people. C. It's crazy. It's crazy. I went out because I like, you know, big Rancid fan. And I like the other guys too. But I'm a big, big Rancid fan. I was like, "Holy cow." Like, people love this stuff again. Anyway, we watched it again there. And then I've watched it again. Uh, 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. 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 taken completely out of context about a bit about taking things out of context. It's like life had like looped back on itself. You were talking about things being taken out of context, and they were taking it out of context. They had like cut it. And I was like, "Wait, wait, wait. I remember that very differently." Cuz I remember things 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 they're taking it out of context." Yeah.

They don't care. But there's always some people that 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, right? They're not fulfilled. People are trying to politicize something or 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, uh, there's, this has gotten so popular that my [ __ ] 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. They, I mean, you and I have been mashed up on other stuff and AI, and I don't want to, like you said, we don't want to draw attention that that they got taken off the internet, thank goodness. But it was [ __ ]. It was like it was AI and 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 it 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. Like 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. Cuz most people are just surface readers, right? They read a headline and I'd be guilty of that many times. You read a headline, "Oh, I know what that is." And then you shut your laptop. "I got it now. I got 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, so like, how many people are actually going to watch my Netflix special? Well, it was 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 [ __ ]. Can't believe he said that." Even though I'm literally talking about things being taken out of context.

The part about this is so frustrating to me is that like, at some point, especially as a scientist, right? Like that's data selection, right? Like if you look at data and like, 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, 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. But there is some data fraud, right? Oh, there certainly is some data fraud. A framed plaques thing with there, there's certainly some data fraud. And and there's a range of of underlying reasons. One of the more common reasons that people don't talk about, which is something to really strongly inoculate in laboratory against, is when a laboratory is known for doing very, very good work, often times the graduate students and postdocs that get there, 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 it's like, well, do you go after the lab head or do you go after the person who did it? Lab heads are responsible for everything in their lab. AI is helping with this because you can scan data and look at things. But, you know, ambition is a dangerous thing. You know, if somebody puts ambition ahead of accuracy. Okay, so there's that kind of thing. And then there's outright data fraud. I mean, there was this nanotechnologist guy from some years back, I think his last name was Shown, um, who had like 20 papers in Science and Nature in two years. And it turns out he wasn't even bothering to, um, 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, way he got caught. What it turned out is that, I mean, I'm juggling, cuz 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. Oh, wow. Eventually. Lazy. So he was particular, he was particularly ambitious, lazy. And that was outright fraud. There are all sorts of other cases and things like that. And and, you know, there's people who make this their sport to to talk about. Most scientists are trying to get the correct answers. I do believe that most scientists have good faith. They're trying to get the answers. But it's hard. Science is hard.

Now, what you're talking about to me sounds like people deliberately grabbing from the pallet of paints that is the words that are spoken by anybody on the internet, yeah, especially 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 who PingTrip is? No. You know, PingTrip? PingTrip is hilarious. He's a guy on, uh, the internet who takes clips of podcasts and creates narratives of things that are totally not happening. Oh, yeah. I've seen this one recently. Me and Tucker Carlson are having an argument. Haven't seen that one. It's, it's good. Uh, somebody sent it to me. Who [ __ ] sent it? See if you can find it. I remember one of you and Elon. Several, perhaps. Um, yeah. So I know that PingTrip. No, it's a dude. Okay. His name is P. So here it is. PingTrip. So it's...

[ __ ] space is real. Are you joking? You're a science denier. What? Stop. The bodies of science have bestowed the truth. If you ignore it, I get another [ __ ] lecture from you. I'm going to go crazy. When did you start having this opinion? Shut the [ __ ] up. [ __ ]. You're a [ __ ] idiot. Don't do that anymore. What are you going to do about it? [ __ ]. What are you going to do about it? You are literally powerless. Yeah, I'm just going to do whatever I want. What are you going to do about it? You could get your ass kicked. Are you threatening me? Yeah, I think you are. A far-right white supremacist racist. I have no respect for you. You're like my dog. Does it ever occur to you that you're like disgusting? Just like vulgar. It's like a pig. If I were sort of narrow down my bigotries, it's like people like you. I just think you're disgusting. I'm so...

These are actual spoken words, glued together. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. About completely different things. It's really masterful. Do you want to die? Watch. If I take a 9mm, R762x39, and shoot you, can you catch the bullet? You can't do that. What are you going to do about it? I got a bigger one. Why would you hide that? Wrong. Fair. Isn't that funny? But this is funny, right? He does that with a lot of stuff. Like people pretending to be in love with. He makes it like there's a romance between me and different people. But it's, that's funny. He's doing that. That's art, right? 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 Kamala Harris, to get the, the, you know, the passive listener, the people that are, you know, the casual to go, "Oh, wow, Joe Rogan likes Kamala." I've heard you. I heard you're endorsing and not endorsing all sorts of people. I can't say even say I like somebody without it being an endorsement and people getting mad. But I think the MAGA 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 opinions. You take what's perceived to be an influential person and you distort their views in either way to shame them, make them look bad, or to promote someone else. Like that's a real lie. That's a dangerous lie. It's a, it's a real offense. And I think that there's no laws against that right now. It's except libel law. I mean, you can take someone to court, I guess. What? But there's, 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 in the example you gave. And 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 of science is, you know, 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, you know, version of that that you can. And then you are allowed to state your conclusions.

But I have, 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. That 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. And it's very difficult for to get them to consider like, "Hey, maybe someone's lying. Maybe there's propaganda campaigns. Maybe 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, right? Because they're old. Okay, okay. So they're set in 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 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. That little part of their brain that exists when you challenge yourself and do things you don't want to do, that [ __ ] is shriveled up to almost nothing. And they're real boring. And their lives 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 [ __ ] now. There's young people that are ideologically captured for sure. You see that both with right-wing people and with left-wing people. Sorry. I mean, do you think that all Boomers believe in the traditional media like this? 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 [ __ ] they, what's the newest? Is this what's the latest? Yeah, Gen Z, 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, um, I'll non-reluctantly tell you, you know, my, uh, dad and I, uh, over the years, like we had some early issues and we resolved them and we're, we're good now. But when some not-so-kind press came out about me, they interviewed a lot of people. They 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, uh, political camp that, um, described or any camp, really. But he's a first-generation immigrant. Moved here from Argentina. Did his PhD under a scholarship from the from the Navy. You know, it's like story of an immigrant who came here and became a scientist dream. Yeah. There wasn't a lot of science to do in, uh, 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, 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 that, you know, and I said, "You got to record those kind of conversations." I said, "It's okay. 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, changed his perception. He was like, "I can't believe this. That they would sort of leverage this for a false narrative."

You're you're allowed to do it for whatever reason. You know, I have a friend who used to work at New York Times that 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 reached out. Like I had the best conversation with this person. Or my former, when I was a kid, I grew up skateboarding and I rode for this, this brand, you know, Thunder and Spitfire. And my team manager was interviewed. And then he called me afterwards. 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,' etc., etc." And he was like, "I don't get it." And I was like, "Listen, Shuggie," like that's what we call him, Steve Ruggie. 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 interested in pulling out certain language." An ex-girlfriend of mine said the same thing. Like, 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, you know, thanks for talking to you." Like, "The goal is to collect a bunch of data." Like, "This is why I compare it 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.

So I age pharmaceutical studies like many, like many. And at the same time, you know, like we're enjoying nicotine here, or you are, because I will say, I'm not in defense of of the pharmaceutical industry, nor 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 Ozempic, 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. Is there depend? Those are important issues. But we learned one thing for sure from Ozempic, Mounjaro, 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. They don't exercise enough. And then we can get into what they eat, etc. You know, we could have a discussion about seed oils if we really want to cause some 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. Taste better and I feel better. I feel better. And that's enough of a reason for some 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. I think I, 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 of the belief that fruits and vegetables are good for you. Like I think all the data point to these things. I think that the, there isn't an abundance of data yet that says seed oils are bad. And I think Layne Norton would support that statement. And he's kind of my go-to in terms of what the randomized control trials say, right? 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, right? I mean, now we're hearing all about microplastics. We're hearing about all that.

But I, when it comes to the the GLP-1 agonists, right? I spent a lot of time on this. Done two podcasts or more, one with an expert, one solo, etc. You know, of all the peptides that broke through, you know, we've talked about peptides, we talked about more. There's this one peptide, glucagon-like peptide 1, that when raised to levels about a thousandfold 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. My 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 Ozempic, Mounjaro eventually by replacing your behaviors. You know, it's hard to move when you're, I've never been big and overweight, but, you know, the way that Goggins talks about it, or, you know, it's got to be uncomfortable like when you're feeling kind of just not great, 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 right, etc. But also don't get badly hurt. Yes. 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, without at a 10 out of 10. Well, especially with heavy stuff, right? Or go to one 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 shoulder is like, "Oh boy." You got to build up to that kind of stuff.

So, you know, 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, um, lethal dose analysis and that kind of stuff is super valuable. What 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, um, reflexive option. Because I think that the basics, sunlight, exercise, you know, uh, 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, "For goodness sake, 45, 60 minutes a week, lift some heavy objects." Yeah, you feel better. And it literally has better statistical results absolutely than SSRIs, which is pretty nuts. And I know you've talked about this recently. And I'm, you know, 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?" I think, you know, I had a lot of feelings about that ruling. Um, 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% you know, successful in air quotes, plus some people just go into total remission. But the hazards are there. And if there aren't safeguards in place for the practitioner-patient relationship, which is one of the major concerns, if those aren't there, well, then it's never going to be legalized.

So what, what is the hazard of the participant with the the person that's helping them? So, 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 drug or they didn't. And then the other one is during the course of of the trials, there were some issues that came up about, um, improprieties between practitioners and and, um, patients that like sexual stuff. There were Rel, my understanding is that there were that there 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 Gooby said of psilocybin trials. So the solution there is, my understanding is that you have two therapists there. It's not one therapist, one patient. You have 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 hemostats 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, um, 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. It'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, right? With both, uh, psilocybin and MDMA, and ibogaine. The work that 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 ibogaine with the veterans that are taking ibogaine followed by DMT. And those are looking very, very interesting. Mhm.

You know, so to me, if it's also the, the kind of emotional loading of things like MDMA, you know, when we call it MDMA, if I tell you this is MDMA, this 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 remission from PTSD, you'd say, "I'm awesome. How do, how do we move this forward safely?" But if I start using words like ecstasy, start using, now I call it what it really is, MDMA, methylene dioxy methamphetamine. You hear meth, 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 want it. But same thing was said about cannabis.

I've done multiple episodes about cannabis. I'm not anti-cannabis. I think there's case studies where, excuse me, that's a specific thing in science. Use cases where, or examples where people with a propensity for psychosis should probably not be doing high THC cannabis. I learned something really interesting, by the way, about this. We brought on an expert. Brought on in part where there was a little bit of a Twitter battle. I put out a solo episode about cannabis years ago. 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 on to my podcast. He 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, must say this, there is a published paper looking at the differences in subjective effects that people experienced with sativa versus indica strains. And he said, "There's no evidence that there's a different experience from sativa versus indica strains. That's just all budtender lore. You shouldn't be saying this." He doesn't smoke weed. That's just not true, right? So, so I said, "Wait, here's the paper. Here's the paper." Then there were a couple of other things. One is I did, "Do you agree?" Once he read the paper, uh, 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, um, he really didn't counter with that much. There were some issues around CB, uh, about, um, CBD biology versus THC. But what, what is his field of expertise? Um, he's a, he's a works on animal models, but focuses on cannabis biology. So he's very knowledgeable. And I don't think he's anti-weed at all. But he just was, he was checking me on some things that he felt. Yeah. From Canada. He, he's a very nice guy. He, 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. We 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, um, 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 or they smoke it or whatever. There's, his words are that there's far fewer, um, cases of people taking in more. They're able to reach that point that they want to be at without going too far." However, even though it's higher potency, however, when people take it by edible, right, 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. You don't, they're not layering in until they hit that plane that they want to be in. Well, it's also the conversion to 11-hydroxy metabolite. It's five times more psychoactive than THC. I used to do a joke about it that it lets you talk to dolphins. This bit, I, this is a true story about edibles and a dolphin experience.

So he was an anti-cannabis. 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, um, adjust this." We brought him on the podcast. He was reluctant to come on the podcast. He thought I was going to like set him up for a fall. We've never done that. 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 or not 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 talk to people that are really pro-MDMA for the treatment of PTSD. Talk to people who are very reluctant. Yeah. 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 especially long form because then you get to understand how a person thinks about things, just the subject at hand, but maybe other things. You get to hear their speech patterns, their thinking patterns. And I think direct experience is real. Yeah.

You know, Cam H pointed this out recently. And I'm, I'm not saying this to like, uh, focus.

You know, the positive energy on us, um, but it, it will, uh, invariably do that, um, or inevitably do that, excuse me. Which is, he said, you know, it's kind of interesting that all of the top podcasters, 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, a health component or a fitness component. Not always, but, 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, there's a tendency to merge kind of intellectual discourse with physical. And I think that's a, that's a unique, uh, theme of podcasting also, at least of certain, let's just say what it is. Like, a lot of the top podcasts, that's, that's like a consistent theme.

Um, for the female podcasters too, like Whitney works out, she does her 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. I see Rhonda posting pictures of herself deadlifting now, right? You know, and like Peter is 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 in papers. I think it really helps if you're able to get in close contact with the things that you know, you're hearing about. But 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, it comforts their own thoughts about the decisions that they've made. And there's certain rationales 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, the physical ability to put in work, which requires mental strength.

And for the longest time, for whatever strange reason, people have had this, uh, 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. That I think that person's a fool. Because you don't have as much energy to think because your physical body that you have, you've let decay to this terrible point where your posture's down. Like I've had some unfortunate conversations with older intellectuals that don't take care of themselves. And you realize that at a certain point, 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, the will to, to do it anymore.

Yeah, you know, it 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. The greatest neurobiologist of all time, supernatural levels of ability, was a guy named Ramon y Cajal. Won the Nobel Prize in 1906. He was the one who first defined the synapse, etc. He carried an iron umbrella to work. He lifted weights. Oliver Sacks, one of the greatest neurologists and writers of our of our time, passed away in 2015. Had a 600-pound squat. Okay, Jesus. Yeah. He had the state powerlifting record at one point. Just a beast of a guy who was also a neurologist and wrote all these beautiful books about how the mind works. The man who Mok his wife for a hat. He was behind the movie Awakenings, etc., etc.

Uh, Don 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, a Nobel Prize from Columbia University, the first person to find ways to introduce genes to novel genes to cells, played racquetball. I don't know if he's still playing racquetball. You know, uh, I'll name one more. These are incredible people. Like the guy who essentially defined the, uh, understanding of the visual system and neuroplasticity. My scientific great-grandfather. There's, uh, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel. Torsten just turned something like 95 or something, maybe it's 93. He still runs. He runs slowly, but he still goes. And he is mentally sharp. So this is not, not an accident. This is not just a correlation. This is the anterior mid-cingulate 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 60s, 70s, 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 serotonin and dopamine, or we're talking about movement, all 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 going to 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. I can tell you were thinking about it. All get in there, sir. All right. I almost, yeah. There you go. Now it's to the right nostril. Let's go. 'Cause we alternated, remember? Alter. Let me see if I alternated. I don't remember which one got me the first time. It was left before. It's definitely right. God. Oh, man. Makes your eyes water a little bit, but boy, it does shock your system. Wow. A little adrenaline. Now you can lift more. Well, I told myself I wasn't going to cry on this podcast 'cause I cried on a podcast recently of mine. We kept in, but like now I'm crying. But these are tears of related to the smell. Yeah, this is tears. Just chemicals rot in your brain. You're supposed to not do that more than twice a day, but we've done it many times. So it's just the, this thing, neuroplasticity, like that. Does it really? That's from your sinuses? My, I'm, you have some skulls around here, like the sinuses run from, you know, here and through to the. That's why when you, you get a sinus infection or clear ear. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, 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 comes in. Does many things in the brain and body. But God, that stuff's strong. But it, there's a brain area called nucleus specialis, which sits in the base of the brain. And it can serve as a spotlight by releasing acetylcholine onto what? Onto 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 your kind of baseline levels of of acetylcholine either drop or become kind of, um, 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, uh, your former guest and my colleague, uh, Dr. Anna Lembke, has said, the worst thing you can do when you're in a trough of dopamine is try and 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. That's what McKenna used to say about cannabis. McKenna, uh, who would, Terrence 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, long time off so that your body's completely desensitized to it. And then take as much as you can stand in like one dose. Like that's, he was interested in it as a psychedelic. Yeah, you know, especially if you do that in edible form, it just, 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. It'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 is just great, everybody should be high." Like, "No, no, no. Everybody shouldn't eat peanuts either, you know? Some people have a weird reaction to things." And there's a certain, I mean, Alex Baron wrote that book, uh, "Tell Your Tell Your Parents" or "Tell Your Children." "Tell Your Children." That's all about about that. About that. There needs to be some recognition about 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, for sure. No question. I know people that's happened to. Yeah. And I covered that in my solo episode on cannabis. Then this person, um, 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? Um, Matt Hill. And, and I, he's a respected researcher in this area. And I thought his stance was was very, very nuanced. And then after he came on the podcast, other people, um, not Baronson necessarily, although I haven't checked my DMs that closely, contacted me. He 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. And which 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 person working, the only person working on something. You want that, it's, it's something that, you know.

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, and honestly, the, the political aspects to it. Like, I wasn't tracking the fact that cannabis was just about to be approved for more, more legalization, right? About the time that that clip got, you know, amplified. But I wasn't saying it should or shouldn't. I'm just giving you the information. Same as I did for alcohol, right? We, I, I would love to put this to rest once and for all. Every couple of weeks, months, you're going to see media outlets say, "Some drinking is good for you." Others will say, "Any drinking is bad for you." Here's the deal: zero is better than any. A little bit's probably fine, especially if you do other things to offset the sleep loss and microbiome stuff. If you're going to drink, you probably should be doing other healthy behaviors anyway. No one's saying it's terrible. I'll have a drink every once in a while. I'm not an alcoholic. If you're not, if you're a non-alcoholic adult, one or two. I, I love a like a good, um, uh, white tequila with with soda and lime. So good. But, you know, I don't really like alcohol enough to be to be able to comment past that. But, and I haven't had a drink in years. But the reality is that one study after another saying moderate drinking is good for you, no drinking is better for you. Cancer risk. This is never going to stop. It's a field now. We have enough data. People can make their decision. Right, right. Everyone knows sleep is important. There's no field to be had except how to figure out to get sleep better, in my opinion. Okay, sleep deprivation is bad. But you're not going to get dementia or die from a couple bad nights' sleep. That's all so true. So 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 to shine light on the field that is psychedelics, the field that includes cannabis, the field that includes things like weight loss and OIC, but also exercise and all the other good things. And somehow, and maybe you can tell me because I'm new to the more to the media thing, newer than you, certainly, for some reason, people don't like that. It's like, it's like the brain needs like a black and white thing. It, it's like they can't seem to just deal with the fact that like, look, you'll find evidence for and evidence against. You just got to make it the best decision for you.

Well, there's also people that write articles with a specific narrative because they're gamifying the social media algorithms. They're gamifying clickbait. So it's business. Gamifying clickbait is real. I mean, it's a, unfortunately, one of the things that happened in journalism is people stopped 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 a some sort of inflammatory headline, something that excites you, something that angers you, something that like gives you some information, some secret information that wasn't available before. "Oh, 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 about, uh, Rick Rubin. He seems to come to mind a lot to me. But, you know, he once said to me, we were 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, he 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. Because everyone knows that's made up. So it's real." And I actually went to the AEW with Rick. It was wild. And by loves that [ __ ] well, they're jumping around in the ring. And they'll stop every once in a while 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. Science's job is to try and unveil that truth to the best of our abilities. But 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 that are 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 taken things out of context, well, I know that you're not in the truth game. So your, 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 that's trying to win. And everybody's trying to win. This is a real problem. And it's a real problem with, win the discussion. They, they attach whatever the ar, whatever the discussion is, whether it's, uh, 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. I 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 recognized that, especially earlier in my life, before I started recognizing patterns in podcasts, like, what don't I like? When people are, I don't like when someone's biased. I don't like when someone is talking over people. I don't like when someone's misrepresenting someone's words, or someone, someone's trying to win rather than considering what the other person's saying. So when someone's considering what the other person's saying and then re, then you get this beautiful sort of sharing of ideas without ego. And the real problem is the ego. The ego getting attached to winning a conversation and being correct.

Well, and they get in this [ __ ] 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 give people on this is, don't be attached to your ideas. They're just ideas. Examine 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, "Oh, 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, but I don't want to say that. So I, so I've attached myself to this thing. And now I've connected my. And when I'm engaging with someone, I'm not just engaging in this pure intellectual sharing of ideas and a discussion of merit, discussion of merit. I'm now in a win-lose situation. I'm trying to win. And 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 like, you're not even considering these other possibilities because you're, you're dismissing them without any consideration because you just want to achieve a goal of victory. 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 podcasts, whether it's Chris Williamson, whether it's Lex Fridman, the best podcasts are 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 can say, "Well, this is why I don't think that's true because I think this way. This 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, and 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 thinks. Like maybe you and a buddy had a disagreement about something. You say, "Well, what did you think?" Like, "I thought you were going to do that." "Like, I never said I was going to do that. Why would I do that?" "Like, I thought you were going to do that." "But we didn't talk about that, did we?" "No." So you're mad at something that you didn't even talk to me about. Like, and you thought that I should have just known. Like, come on, man. That's crazy. Like, you're just like attributing all these negative things to a person. And then you could work things out. You could talk about things. And you could, as 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 I know I can trust you. I could tell you the stupid [ __ ] thing that I did. And you go, "Oh my God, I did that too." Like, "Ah." And then, you know. But when a person goes, "Well, I would never [ __ ] do that. I'd have figured that out long ago. I wouldn't have done it that way." Like, "Oh, well, that guy's a dick." You know? Like, he's not, not he's not willing to be vulnerable with me because he always wants to be like, 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 of my friends. We 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, I'm friends with that are way smarter than me, you included. And it's, 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 like approaching 50 because I'm like, "Now I can say things." Like, with each passing year, or by this stage, um, 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. I'd watch the Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford where he'll, 2005, where he talks about this notion that we're going to die is so critical. And I couldn't get in touch with it. Recently, I'm like, "Oh, like, time's going to come up." Every time I go down for a meditation, I do this like non-sleep deep rest yoga nidra med, I like go do a long exhale. And like, someday it's going to just be the last exhale. And I'm, 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, no psychedelics involved in this one. And I realized like, I can continue to just be curious and explore. And like, 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, that 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, I'm a brain explorer. I've been a brain explorer for a long time. I 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, a disagreement with someone, I was always attached to being the one who is correct.

When did that fall away for you? And what you're, you're about, uh, 57. All right. So you're years old than me. Um, it's, you know, I've gotten way better at it over time. I don't, I, I wouldn't want to like sit and figure out when I figured it out. But I, I, I figured steps of it out along the way, you know? Um, I remember, uh, being 21 and watching a comedian, uh, go on stage. And I wanted him to bomb. And I realized that there was a terrible weakness. And I was embarrassed that I had that feeling. So interesting. I will say, um, 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 like that really shitty person that you knew in school, like they got pancreatic cancer." Everyone just goes, "Oh, like that sucks. That 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 IPOed, like they're doing great." You know, you immediately do I like that person or not, right? Because if you're happy for them, presumably you like them, right? You know, rarely is it neutral either. I mean, I can't think of anyone that I'm like, "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. Like, I'm, I'm competitive with myself. But like, you did combat sport. Yeah, right. I did skateboarding, played a little soccer, did some swimming, running, weightlifting. You know, like, you, 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 [ __ ] up way to develop your mind. If you do develop like this insane kind of hyper-competitive, because it's so, the consequences are so grave. You know, I always say about MMA that it's high-level problem solving with dire physical consequences. And that's really what it is. It's high-level problem solving. You're, you're, you're literally doing combat, hand-to-hand 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. Which is just nuts. It's a nutty way to live. But the negative aspects of it are, you develop this hyper-competitiveness because you're, 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. I had no problems. I lived at home. Uh, I didn't have any real, like, adult type stress, you know, bills, family to feed, uh, 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 all there neuroplasticity involved. There's until 25, your brain is a plasticity machine. It's there to to map according to your experience. I mean, like literally come into the world, baby flopping, like, you know, like little bug, move, move, move, move. Neuronal connections are being removed by the thousands, tens of thousands, by the day. So that you get fine-tuned movement. It's like you're a plasticity machine. And then you're thinking and your notions about 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, fighting. 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've talked about before. You stimulate this little region, the ventromedial hypothalamus, the specific neurons, and the animals will mate. They'll mount, or they, females will go into lordosis, they'll arch their back to expose their genitals. You stimulate other neurons in that exact same area, ventromedial hypothalamus. You know what happens? They go into a rage. They want to rip apart the other animal. There are videos of 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. And then you stop the stimulation, and the animal just stops. 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 your partner, your, 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. But what we do feeds back on that circuit. So if you draw more, you get better at drawing. This is, this is, that's a big thing. She draws all day long. And she's been doing it since 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 others. But there's something about people that learn when they're young that are always better than everybody. No matter how good you are, there's certain guys like Anderson Silva, or there's certain fighters that learn at a young age. And you just can't [ __ ] with them. They're just too good. Their nervous system was shaped in, in fighting. The same way Tiger Woods' nervous system was shaped golfing. That's why when Floyd sees those punches coming, he knows, knows all he has to do is this, and it's just going to 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, you know, 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. For me, it was animal and fish tanks and biology. I want 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. Um, 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, uh, earlier that summer, I ran into a guy named Cole Hawker. He's shorter guy for a runner. He runs the 1500. So it's about a mile, right? And he took the first position there. So he got, 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 [ __ ] amazing. If you need mo, if anyone needs motivation, you should get it from the inside, is 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 beats them all. Takes the gold. It's one of these like Prefontaine moments, right? Now, here's what's crazy. It relates to what you're saying. He's posting on Instagram afterwards. I happen to know him a little bit. Cam and I went to watch the trials together, which is a real pleasure. And Cam's like a legend. These Olympic gold medal winners were coming up to him. Running. We were, we got great seats, right? And I gifted him because I'm very grateful to Cam for, okay, here's Cole. Right. Cole's a USA in fifth position. All right. Um, I don't know where this is in. There's a fairly long race, so so there he is going on the outside. Uh, no, so you might want to just, uh, go a little further because this is a long, this is the guy with the man bun, 'cause he's the man with the man bun. He, but he's man with a with a capital man. I'll tell you what, you'll see, um, super nice guy too. So this guy from Norway, Ingebrigtsen, he and his brothers have like a reality TV show. They're like famous over there. He's world record, also great runner, but cocky. He's like talking a lot before us. So check this out. So, um, I don't know how far along we have to go before, damn, they're running fast. [ __ ] for a mile. That's so crazy that they could run at that speed. This is right, final lap. So watch this. So, so he breaks from fifth position after they box him in to win. Wow. I don't know if you caught that, but basically they're, he's fifth position, so he kicks at the end and takes it all at the end against the world record holder. Now, here's where it gets even, oh, here we go. I 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. How, what do you mean by boxing? Oh, you'll see what happens. So it seems like he's going on the, the outside now. No, right. So he wants, he knows he's got a great kick. So it's like calculating when to go. 100%. So Ingebrigtsen went out really fast in this race, fast-paced. So now he's trying to come around, right? So now watch this. So, so now he's trying to, this is the boxing, you'll see. He's trying to take the inside track. And these two guys don't want him to do that, right? Exactly. He actually touches Ingebrigtsen. He actually touches him on his back hip with the outside of his arm. There it is. He sees if there's space. In, Brit's not going to let him in. And so he goes, "You know what? How about this instead? How about I come out?" He doesn't come. Sorry. He stayed inside track and he breaks through. So it's just like they try to keep you from. You kind of fit two people in the lane and they try to keep you from. They boxed him in. They boxed him in. So here's what's wild. So afterwards, there's a bunch of posting on Instagram. Then they show a picture of Cole Hawker when he's like 8 years old, holding a medal where he was running the 1500. And he's doing like four minutes and change. That's a mile. He's a mile 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, plus immense amounts of experience. And their nervous system, like he was shaped. Ming, that's a nervous system that miles. I'll tell you, you can also walk and talk and eat 'cause I've met him. But that's a nervous system that was shaped around running the 1500 mile. So when you see it like the top, top, top 1%, it's so different than like 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 phenom. 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, that's the thing that you had a, a maybe a genetic, probably a genetic leaning.

Do you think there would be maybe a shift today because there's so much more material that's available to young people? Like if somebody has an interest in science? Oh, absolutely. Neuroscience today, absolutely. I think because of the online learning platforms, I think of, uh, because of, um, I even like the sport that I grew up, which unfortunately wasn't very good at, or maybe fortunately, who knows? I was, 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. I was like, so frustrated. It was unbelievable. So I went in a different direction. 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, Rhyan Nelson, she skates with power on vert. Not like a little kid going. 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. 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. She dedicates near 100% of her time to this. So it's a lot of what you were saying, like, we're, we're selecting earlier. We're pulling from a larger pool. So you're going to get the genetic freaks. The pole vault guy keeps winning world records or beating his own world record. I saw him get the at the Worlds at Eugene last, uh, about two years ago, broke the world record. He keeps beating the world record. This guy's been pole vaulting his whole life. He's been playing that, 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. And even though they have this extraordinary mind. So do the people that started when they were four. Like this idea that you're tough, so you're the only one that's tough. That, that's an eccentric 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 the going gets, you're never going to find out if the going gets tough. He's going to [ __ ] you up. Like it's not even going to be hard for him. You don't even understand what you're saying. Like there's, but there's the mind. The ego plays this like cruel trick on you that doesn't allow you to accurately assess your abilities. So you have this bizarre notion that you are exceptional for no reason whatsoever. And know, 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 tie boxing fight against like a guy like, there's a guy right now who's one of the best in the world, name is Tawanchai. And he has this insane left kick. His, 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 it into the guy's arms, 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. He's terrifying. And I don't care how tough you are. You don't have that ability. And you probably are never going to get there. Like the margins, the differences of tenths of a second, hundreds of a second here and there. He's so good. You're not going to catch him. So even if you're the baddest [ __ ] dude in the world in your mind. This is Tawanchai. Let me hear some of this. But go to the beginning. Go to the beginning so you can hear the volume of him hitting the pads. This is not, it's not what you were looking for, exactly. This was like a highlight reel. Yeah, but it's fine. Like, go to the beginning where he hits the pads. Oh, it's just get a music over it. Oh, okay. It's just music over. But this guy is [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] powerful that every time it hits you, your power bar goes down. If he hits your arms, if he hits your body, it's just 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 Muay Thai gym and you decide, "Hey, I'm only 30, I'm going to fight pro." You don't have enough time. There's not enough time in the world for you to get to where he's at. And he's going to 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. Bruce Lee had a saying that, "Don't fear a man who knows 10,000 kicks. Fear a man who's practiced one kick 10,000 times." That's the, there's a thing about a guy who's got this one thing that's so, like Ryan Garcia has this nasty left hook. It's the, yeah, it's a crazy left hook. It's so goddamn good. It's so much better than most people's. That everybody who fights him doesn't understand what he can do until he does. Fast, powerful, fast, powerful, distance management, angles that it comes from. It comes up, it comes around. It, 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 every, like, 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 [ __ ] him up in these weird angles. It's, uh, I don't want to watch this. This dude's left liver shot right here. There's his liver shot. That's it. Melted. He melts a lot of guys. That liver shot. See if you could just see, give, give me a highlight of Ryan Garcia's knockouts. He's got one of, 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. He'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. Woo. Fade away left hook. Well, his speed is just different than 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's like, he's only a left hook." Whatever. That's like saying, "Towan Shai only has a left kick." It's, it's so good. You got only a left hook that always, that wins. A left hook that's so much better than everybody else's. He's got a right hand too, but that left hook is just, just freakish. It's freakish, [ __ ] right there.

So, so if we look at this through the lens of, uh, nervous systems, you know, I know that there's been conversations that, uh, you've had here and elsewhere, like, would, uh, crocodile versus a gorilla, these kind of, 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 up 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 it in their 20s and 30s versus the person that comes, started off young, you're talking about two different nervous systems. You look, 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 is 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, more, maybe more space allocated to it, maybe less space, but, you know, 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 an extra, extra cylinders. You're talk, you'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, 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. He trains, I train. I train harder. I'm driven." It's like, "No, it's not the same."

And I think that's why to me, something like a, a Cole Hawker win over a world record, uh, holder, is impress, as is the other stuff we were just watching, incredibly impressive. Because you say he's in fifth position and, you know, he's got a shorter stride and the other guy's got all this world record stuff under his belt, and he's done great as well. I think he won, he won the 5,000. Inger Brinson won the 5,000. But Cole's just like, pulls something out. Like they're very close in terms of, of their abilities. They're the same, roughly the same species, right? You know, in the context that we're talking about. And then somehow through sheer will, is able to outkick him. Sheer 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, I've been to Louisville once. But someone told me, I don't know if this is true or not, but they're more, if you looked at the number of medals from, from people from Kentucky, it's almost like in a complete country, really. I don't know what's going on in Kenty. They a great program there or something?

No, not just in track and field, like across the Summer Olympics. If you look at the number of, like, American versus Chinese medals, it like tears out. But you go like, "Kentucky was a pretty good, quote unquote, country." Well, wasn't Muhammad Ali from Louisville? Yeah, yeah. There you go. There's something about people from Kentucky are doing very well in the, in the, uh, how are they in neuroscience? Uh, I have a friend who just retired as chair of the, uh, of the neurobiology department. It's actually neuroanatomy there. My friend Bill Geo, um, at University of Louisville. Isn't it unfortunate though, that like, Kenty's not associated with intellectual prowess? Not so much. But it's a great department. You're trying to defend? No, no, no. Bill Gu is a great, he ran a great department there. I'm sure someone else is. McCall does great vision research there. So, I, I, one of the great things about being a scientist was, you know, my lab now has run much smaller scale and, you know, but for years, I just traveled the country these places I would never think to go to, right? I had a great Argentine meal in Louisville. I went to, in, uh, St. Louis, had one of the best meals in my life. I don't think I'd ever go to St. Louis, but I was visiting Wu, you know. And then, and then there are certain cities that you hear terrible things about, and they're true.

One of the greatest players in the history of the world came from Paducah, Kentucky. Okay. Guy's name was Buddy Hall, "The Rifleman." Like to this day, one of the all-time greats. And great horses. Oh, yeah. Horse races. Yeah, great horses. Like I've been learning more about horses because, you know, it's like dog selection and horse selection. Is that, I mean, the, the genetic breeding and the selection of horses for particular traits, like this whole warm-blood thing, you know? I don't know much about it, not enough to comment on it. But these people have been around horses their whole lives. Stud horses are worth millions of dollars, right? They know that that F, that's the one. And they put tons of money on it. Like they, 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 in the family, starts up young, he's got great genetics, the whole deal. Yeah. Where the William S, like that movie, The King James movie. MH. Tiger Woods. Yeah. Or Tiger Woods. Or the, or the kids that I grew up with skateboarding. Like there's this kid, you know, Guy Mariano. Like grew up when he, I knew him when he was a little kid. He would waddle. The board felt like, looked bigger than him. And now grown up, he, he's so good. He's, he's kind of in my generation. So he's kind of like in the late 40s thing. He still just kills because he developed his, devel, he grew up with it, went through all the trials and tribulations. And this has been public, you know, got, you know, had his issues, then got sober and came back to skateboarding and just skateboarder of the year for Thrasher, which is a huge deal. You just see like the young Danny Way, Tony Hawk, grew up skateboarding. His body, his nervous system, is skateboarding.

Yeah. And I love this aspect to people, um, in sport because we see it. But it's, you know, I think I remember listening to, like, and hearing conversations like this and thinking, "Yeah, but like, 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, great at something is to just be you." And I'm like, "That sounds like about as mystical, wrapped in a riddle, as possibly I can hear it in his voice when he says it." But 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, uh, is his ability to get close to things, people, music, etc., and feel it. He can feel that thing. And, 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, like empathy, but it doesn't, like, take him over, right? It'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 hang around musicians to 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. 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. 100%.

And this is all, right? So I've been spending a lot, I go over there to spend time with him. He's, he's out of the US right now. And we, it was the weirdest visit ever. I go over to visit Rick and we, we try to 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 the Cumber Lab podcast, but rock and roll, like super nerdy, long, like, you know, drawn out. There are a few podcasts like that. Like Founders podcast, I love that one. M is like super nerdy, right? About a given topic. So we'd do that. And then we would just like sit around. And I'm like, "What are you going to do?" He's like, "Let's just like sit." And we would just sit with eyes closed. And I was like, "All right." And we have lunch. And then he was like, "What a freak. Let's just sit." And then at one point, I'm like, "Rick, what are we doing?" And he's like, and he's like, "Well, when you keep your body still and your mind is really active, amazing ideas come forward." And I, and that's when I was like, "Oh my goodness." Because my first guest on my podcast was a guy named Carl DiRoch. He's the 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 and he forces himself to think and 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 it, 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 and 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, there's two things that happen. There's a removal of some of the emotional load of previous days' experiences, why, 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 Carl DiRoch, Einstein, there are reports of this of him walking and then closing his eyes and stopping and describing his mind moving forward while his body was still. Very kind of subjective. Rick has this, this practice. And I thought to myself, like, "Wow." So I've started trying to do a sort of meditation where I force myself to be very bodily still with my mind very active. I can't, you know, just started this kind of interesting in, in light of creativity.

But the other thing, and, and this goes to what you were saying before, you know, Rick came up through punk rock, punk rock and hip-hop, right? And I, I love punk rock music. Grew up on it. That era in the '80s, punk rock and in New York is amazing. Like, but the whole thing, like Beastie Boys, he was close with the Ramones, Joe Strummer, all this. And then pop, 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. Like NWA, those guys were just being themselves when they were making music, right? I watched that movie, um, "The Defiant Ones," um, about Dre and, uh, I think it's Jimmy Iovine, about, uh, Beats, but it's really about the energy of hi, early hip-hop. And then they talk about Eminem and a bunch of other things. Or you watch 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. And usually, what ends up happening is then the general public falls in love with it. And then a bunch of things happen to those people. And then whatever dysfunction exists in their world gets amplified. And then we hear about it. This 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 is 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. Like 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, it's like punk rock. It's like hip-hop. Because we're not thinking about, I wasn't, didn't sit down and like start my podcast and be like, "I'm going to start the Cumber 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, right? And you're just being you. So when Rick or Lex is just being Lex, or or Chris Williamson is just being Chris Williamson, or Whitney Cummings is just being Whitney Cummings. So when, 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 back, the comments, whatever, the hit pieces, 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, it's a real thing. It's a real discussion. Like there's no script. We didn't talk about what we're going to talk about before. Whereas when you go out there and you, and you see these like highly overproduced or like media-infused podcasts, it's not like real. It's not real. It's like got an angle. They have a story they want to tell. It's not independent anymore. Became produced.

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. It'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 hip-hop, it's like a sport, it's like an art. Like if you watch the movie, one of my favorite movies, the Basquiat movie, right? With Benicio Del Toro and Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken and David Bowie. Like, why was he so amazing? Is because Jean-Michel Basquiat 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, some, if people haven't seen it, they should just look up on YouTube, like, "How long does it take to get famous?" From the movie Basquiat. And it's Benicio Del Toro who plays the young Vincent Gallo 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, uh, popular. And it destroys the whole thing.

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. He 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 guru. Then step back. And but the message he just has keeps saying, and most of our conversations end with him just saying like, "Yeah, man, just continue to be you. You, curious, adventurous, 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 mess, like, we all have some little spark or gift or genetic bias towards something. Yeah. And if you feed that, like, and it's a benevolent thing, you become that. It's like, it stays real. You also show a path to other people, right? Right. When you can actually just be yourself, people realize, "Maybe I can be myself too." Right? You know, like, and people love that. Like, I, again, I don't know hip-hop that well. But like, you don't have to see Eminem very many times or watch "8 Mile" more than a couple of times or listen to his music to 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. You know who that guy was? Yeah, yeah.

Well, like, I'm a huge Joe Strummer fan. And I remember asking Rick, I was like, "Hey, like, what do you think it was about Strummer?" The Clash were only around for like five years. Come and gone, right? And he said, very Rick, he goes, "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 it 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, right? He wasn't trying to impress you or look punk or not look punk. He 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, like they're, they're. And so there's something so beautiful about the energy of something really pure, like a Ryan Garcia left hook. It's the, or early Beastie Boys, right? Or later Beastie, whatever. Or, uh, 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 why he's down in the dumps too. Telling him, "You're taking in too much negativity, bro." I know. And that, but that, but I feel like if he didn't do that, it would be as weird as him not wearing that, that suit. Maybe maybe it's, you know, if he didn't drink, he wouldn't be Mike. You know? Maybe maybe Mike shouldn't be drinking every day. You know what I mean? It's like, they're destructive aspects. I mean, it can go too far, right? It can, like, there's a, there's a great quote in the Oliver Sacks book. They said he said he had a teacher that said, "Oliver, you will go far, provided you do not go too far." And I saw that. I read that, right? About the point that I recently saw the documentary "Roadrunner" about Bourdain. And I actually had a chance to sit down and talk to Morgan Neville, who made that movie. And I didn't know much about him. But like, I, what I saw there was just like an adventurer, like a super curious person, an adventurer, and a punk rocker. Like he was from that era of like Ron, like it was like. And, um, and it was just a spectacular. Like, I, I don't know why I didn't know more about him. I should have because we have, there's 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. I'm a few years behind there. But I was like, "Wow." Like I just saw like a con, like, cur, like genuine curiosity in people and things. And I realized like the food part was kind of incidental. It was like the person. It was just being him. And that's why I think so many people loved him is because he was just being him.

And I, I don't, I don't know, um, 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, 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. He did not love being famous, though. Man, that, that guy got [ __ ] 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, there's this desire to, um, appease those and please those who love you, maybe at, uh, at the expense of your own self-esteem and your own perspective. Because you, 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, uh, painfully self-aware that you, you lose your ability to just be yourself. What Rick's talking about, to 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 I, 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 [ __ ] time. I'm voluntarily uncomfortable most of the day. So regular uncomfortable, it's like, "Yeah, whatever." It's not 196 for 25 minutes. That's, I did that this morning before I got here. That [ __ ]'s hard. That's really hard. That's like, "You're going to die." Hard. "You're going to 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 going to die of heat 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, and you're good. And cardio is really important for that. Cardio is one of the very few things for alleviating anxiety. And I know there's a lot of studies that have been done on weightlifting and about, uh, strength resistance training and alleviating anxiety. And I, 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 is a different kind of cardio. It's like the, it, you, if you can swim into the point where, you know, you do laps in the pool, and you do laps to the pool where you're like, "I don't know if I'm going to make it to the end of that [ __ ] 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, they're engaging in maybe Zone 2 type cardio, which is a walk, which is very good for you. Very good for you, by the way. I do Zone 2 cardio. I, I will put, I will get on the assault bike and not go very fast, 50 minutes, watch television, you know, I will do that. But I also do TATA sprints on that [ __ ] where I do 20 minutes sprinting, 10 second rest, excuse me, 20 second sprinting, 10 second PR, 20 seconds. And I do that in sets of four, four reps, so eight reps, four times. Okay. It's only like 20 minutes. I do something similar. I do [ __ ] horrendous. I like to, I like to walk or hike. I, I use one of these vests. I don't have any relationship to them, but ORO makes these ones that are really like close to the body. Yeah. And, uh, so I use that because you can really move easily in that. I don't like, like a heavily loaded military vest. It doesn't, doesn't feel right to me. And if I load from the back, like a ruck, I feel pitched forward. So I like that, like how, how smooth, yeah, nice smooth, uh, um, feel. And then I'll, 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, um, 20 second rest, do that eight times. That's my Friday morning HIIT workout. And I feel like I want to 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, they 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 I've had challenges with drugs and alcohol, and they've gone the way of just weightlifting, and they've been like multiple relapsers. Now, that's not a knock against weightlifting. I 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. Right? 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, I did a 5K once. My friend C, well, Cam, you know, Cam. Cam had a 5K, uh, once in Vegas. And it was, I had zero training. I didn't run at all. And I did, I was like, "Wow, this is hard." And 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, uh, what is it? 3.1 miles. Yeah. He's a sicko. He's got a broken foot right now. Uh-huh. And he's still running on it. Uh-huh. And yeah, he's got to get surgery. But he can't have surgery right now because he has Lunic season coming up. He was on his way to Alaska when I last texted him. He sent me some, uh, some some meat, which I'm very grateful for. It's delicious. He, um, told me that, I said, "You know, what's the pain level in that foot?" Because he showed the X-ray. It's still very broken. Yeah. And he, I said, "You know, 10 out of 10 being max pain, like excruciating, cannot stand it." He's 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 Sonic C punch. I love it when people just spontaneously come and stay. Lex has come and stayed. And I wake up and this is literally, we did a post about it, but literally how it happened was, I woke up in the morning. I hadn't yet started work. So that was added later to the post. And Cam Hanes 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 bull's eyes the whole way through, just to rub it in. It's just bizarre that he's running on that foot. He knows he's going to have to get it fixed. But if they get it fixed, he'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 all animal data. But so many people will report feeling better. It's very hard to get. But he's got a gap in that broken foot. Yeah. That he needs to mend that thing. Yeah. They need to put some screws in that [ __ ]. But he would run on stumps. Guys like him and Goggins will run on stumps. Goggins got another knee surgery recently. Yeah. He's had a B, I mean, his, 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 distorts and grows weird. So what does he do? Does he stop? Does he get a fake knee? Nope. He gets it cut flat and P, he gets a wedge cut in the bone and shifts it down so 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 Navy 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 going to shape his nervous system by putting in endless hours." So yeah, in his 20s. His 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. You know, I saw a poster where he was where he couldn't move his legs for whatever reason, maybe just had surgery. So he's was running on his hands on the treadmill. Yeah. You know, with his feet positioned kind of like plank position. Yeah. He's a ridiculous person. It's amazing. Super inspiring. He's, he's like a noun and a verb, you know, and an adjective. 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. Like, you know, you take out a little flap of skull, you replace it with titanium, it's a lot stronger. You know what I mean? You mean titanium knees? Is that what you're suggesting? Yeah. Or other, or other, other biomaterials. I think they're close. They're real close. There's been some studies recently that regenerate cartilage, you know. 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. BPC-157, while only animal data, it's very clear, you know, has the propensity to encourage fibroblasts, which these cells that, you know, make up things like, you know, tendon and cartilage, etc., and can really repair tissues. I mean, I mean, you know, and I certainly have experienced it can help repair things. Yeah. It's legit. It's legit. And unfortunately, the FDA is 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 to go to Washington. But 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 pineal, which can help with regeneration of the pineal sites, are incredible for sleep, potentially. Like we need these things explored. And everyone for a while was like, "Peptides. Oh, it sounds really kind of gray market, weird." And it can be. But let's face it, GLP-1 agonist, Ozempic, that's a peptide that existed for years in the fitness 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. BPC-157 can be made by virtually any laboratory. And it's probably going to cut back on orthopedic surgeries. Right? And that's the gross, 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 [ __ ] up because the healthcare system, the business of healthcare is really set up not looking at people as like, "What's the best way and the most efficient way and the the most cost-effective way in terms of for the, 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 on back health and strengthening the back and back pain. We had Stu Mill on and it was wild. I've never received emails and stuff like that like people or more saying, "The Mill Big Three helped me so much. Might stabilize my back." This, it's like a, you know, he's got his three movements. You can look it up on YouTube. They're easy to find. But they're all about, and he's in great shape in his late 60s, incredible, incredible shape. Um, chops wood. He's up in Canada. So, um, 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, pseudo-science." And then everyone telling me how much benefit they got out of Mill's Big Three. And then the war among the physios. Like the physios, that's an ugly field, I'll tell you. And I asked someone, "Why is this field of, you know, exercise physiology so brutal?" I asked Andy Galpin. I asked. And 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, uh, livelihood. Right? So, to say nothing of the pain treatment world. We had a guy on our podcast named Shawn Mackey. He's an MD, PhD. He runs our pain clinic at Stanford. And he talks about the biopsychosocial 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. He's very holistic, um, 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, might not be addictive." But they're not ever talking about strengthening the systems that gave way in the first. So I totally agree with you. People, 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. I appreciate you very much. I'm really glad you have your own podcast and that it's so popular. And I love it. I listen to it all the time. And, uh, you put out a lot of great information, man. I really appreciate you.

Well, thank you. I really appreciate you. You've been a great, 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 mean, smelling salts, all of it. You know, I might be wrong about the cold. I don't know.

No, but really, right back at you. You know, 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. So, really appreciate you.

My pleasure. I appreciate you too. All right, bye everybody.

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