Joe Rogan Experience #1213 - Dr. Andrew Weil

Four, three, two—all the way from Tucson, Arizona. Dr. Wilde, how are you, sir?

I am good. Thanks for doing this, man. I appreciate it.

Pleasure. You come highly recommended by many human beings that I know well.

I'm glad to hear it. How do you—how do you get such a fine reputation?

Well, I've been doing the same things for a long time, just putting one foot ahead of the other and saying what I know to be true, and and pushing bachi. Everybody likes matcha. Who doesn't like matcha tea?

This is your stuff?

Yeah. But you know, a lot of people now have only tasted really bad matcha.

Okay, enlighten me.

Well, you know, it's powdered tea, and it's very, very finely powdered, and it's very labor-intensive to prepare. And it's got such a huge surface area that it oxidizes very quickly. So if it's not properly packed and stored, it loses its brilliant green color; it turns yellow-green or grey-green, it gets bitter and loses its taste. And I gotta say, most of the matcha that I see served in this country is of that sort, and many have never had the good stuff.

What's the benefits of matcha?

I know there's—first of all, it's beautiful. I mean, I've never seen a green color like that; it's just amazing. And the flavor is amazing. But it's the only preparation of tea in which the whole leaf is consumed, and and it's grown under special conditions. The leaves are shaded—deep shade—for the last three weeks before harvest. So in response, the leaves produce more chlorophyll, more antioxidants, more of the good stuff. So it's got, you know, much more of the things you want.

This has like a pop top, like Pringles?

Yeah. Is that so the matcha—it's got to stay fresh, and after you open it, you want to keep it in the freezer.

And yep, you got it. Freezing. You should sift it so it doesn't form lumps, and then you whisk it with that traditional bamboo whisk, or you buy a little electric whisker, and you can whisk it in hot water or cold water, and it's very yummy.

And what—what—what does it do for you? Like, what's the good?

Well, you've got—it's got caffeine, of course, so you get stimulated by it. But it's also got L-theanine, which is this relaxant compound that modifies the effect of caffeine and produces a state of relaxed alertness. So it doesn't have the jangling effect of coffee, right? And you're getting all of these antioxidant benefits that are well-documented—tea, anyway. I love it; it's a great thing. Anytime you get one of these little whisks, it's cool. It's like a real bamboo, made from one piece of bamboo; it's a miracle of Japanese craftsmanship. It's beautiful. And it's beautiful.

So how often do you drink this stuff?

I have a bowl of it every morning. And so, yeah, I'm—sometimes I have a glass of iced matcha later in the day, especially in warm weather.

You're just a matcha fiend.

I love it; it's a good thing. I first tasted it when I was 17. I was an exchange student in Japan in 1959. I lived with a family outside of Tokyo. We had no language in common, and on the second night I was there, the mother took me next door to her neighbors who practice tea ceremony, and they did this thing for me, and I was fascinated by that whisk and the color of the matcha, and I thought it was great. You know, I never thought I'd be able to get it over here.

Yeah. Well, so you—you import this stuff yourself?

I started a company called Matcha Curry. We've got the URL matcha.com. And I went to Uji, which is a little town outside of Kyoto, where—which is the center of the best tea production in Japan—and I sourced really good matcha. You know, there are many grades in matcha; the most—the highest are too expensive to use for everyday use.

It really is, yeah. I mean, phenomenally, like truffles or—

Yeah, yeah, really expensive. So you—I've tried to find the best matcha that is affordable and make it available to people here.

So like the highest level stuff—how much would it cost for a cup of tea?

Hard to estimate for a cup, you know. Possibly—there's a preparation called thick tea in Japan where they used three times the amount of powder.

Hmm. And probably one bowl of that stuff we just shared by several people. I don't know, it could be a hundred dollars a bowl.

Woah.

Yeah, really.

Yeah, tea.

Why—why did it catch on in Japan like that?

It's always been—you know, it has been in Japan for a very long time, and this powdered tea preparation was originally taken up by Zen monks to help them stay awake during long hours of meditation. It was also associated with samurai, and became the tea ceremony developed around that.

Is there anything that is similar to it? Is like your yerba mate or guarana or any other—

Well, these are all—they're all caffeine plants. But in my experience, tea—I think—primarily because of that L-theanine content—mmm—the effect is mellower—of caffeine. So you get stimulated, you get alert, but it doesn't have the jangling effect of a lot of these other caffeine beverages.

Mm-hmm.

Do you drink regular coffee as well?

No. I've never drunk coffee.

Wow.

I think I was turned off because my parents, when I was growing up, drank really strong black coffee with no sugar—cream. I couldn't imagine—what people—savages. Yeah, those people—there were different people.

Did you grow up in a northern climate?

I grew up in Philadelphia.

Yeah. See, it's—when it's cold outside enough, people—they drink that black coffee, huh? Makes you angry at the world. Yeah, dark, black, burnt coffee. I like bright green, shining matcha. Isn't it interesting that things that are good for you—many things that are good for you, like bell peppers or something like that—they have a beautiful color to them.

Well, you know, all these—the health benefits of fruits and vegetables—a lot of them have to do with these pigments, and the pigments the plants produce—they're part of their own defensive system, and they do good things in us. And one piece of advice that I often give people is you should try to eat across the color spectrum every day. Think about—you know, what did you eat today that was red? What was purple? What was green? What was—right? All of these have different benefits.

Is that a scientific perspective?

Absolutely. Really, yeah. These are categories of phytochemicals or protective phytonutrients, and a lot of are these pigments that give fruits and vegetables their bright colors.

Do you think the people should vary those colors and in a given day or—

I think—I think as much as you can—across any day—try to eat across the color spectrum. That's a good thing to aim for.

Okay. So just—just get as many of them as you can.

Ya. Yeah.

So do you take this approach with fruits—with—with all sorts of different things?

Yeah, yeah. Brightly colored stuff is good.

Do you eat meat or—

I'm down on fish and vegetables—just fish, essentially. Yeah. Now, when you—we did—one of the things I'm super concerned with, and I've been more concerned with the more I pay attention to it, is sustainability when it comes to fish.

Absolutely.

It seems like, especially ocean fish, we're—you know, human beings are just terrible monsters. You know, there's a famous—in this country—Sylvia Earle, who was the woman that held a record for the deepest dive, and she came up to me at a meeting once and pleaded with me not to recommend that people eat fish. She said there just aren't gonna be any in the future. And that's probably true. You know, probably the future is gonna be farmed fish, and that can be done in a responsible way. You know, you can get the good guides—one is put out by the Monterey Aquarium. You can get a wallet card that lists—that lists fish and shellfish and rates them both by toxicity and sustainability.

Mmm.

And that's a good guide to follow.

Yeah. Mollusks—

See, mollusks—I do, yeah. I eat—I like oysters and scallops. I eat them.

What—what—what's led you to not eat chicken or fish or beef, rather?

It's been a long time, and let's see—I was—I think 28, and I was interested in yoga, and people that I knew were doing yoga had become vegetarian, and there's a friend of mine that had become vegetarian. I thought, well, I'll just try it for a little while, and it agreed with me. I didn't eat fish for a number of years, and I found that made international travel very difficult, especially to Japan. And then I was reading about all the research and good stuff and fish, and I started eating fish. And that—that way of eating—reason with you really well.

Yeah, it is a thing—agree with you thing, right? Yeah, really dependent upon the person's—very individual. So, you know, it's hard to give blanket rules, except I have no problem telling people to stay away from refined, processed, and manufactured food. That's the bad stuff.

Yeah, that's a really good, clear thing that everybody can kind of apply in their life. But as far as like what is gonna work for you, there's a lot of trial and error involved.

Absolutely. You gotta do experiments, pay attention, and see what works for you, ya know? You practice—what would you—how would you call it? Integrative medicine?

Yeah. Well, how would you define that?

Well, it's the medicine of the future, and you know—and the short answer—in the future—short answer is it's the intelligent combination of conventional and alternative medicine. But really, it's—it's a system that focuses on the body's ability to heal itself; that looks at people as whole persons, not just physical bodies; that takes account of all aspects of lifestyle and understanding health and illness; values the practitioner-patient relationship; and makes use of all therapies, no matter where they come from, that show reasonable evidence of efficacy and are not going to hurt people.

Hmm. So I am absolutely convinced this is the way out of the healthcare crisis. I've been training doctors and other health professionals in it for many years now.

Now, when you say the body's ability to heal itself—how would you accentuate that?

With—to me, this is the thing that's most missing from medical education. I—I think the only time I heard the word healing used in medical school was in the—and wound healing, which—in my first-year course in histology. To me, the most marvelous thing about our bodies is that they have the capacity to heal themselves. You get a cut, you can watch it heal, and that happens throughout the body. You know, the DNA molecule—this is just a big molecule on the border of life and non-life—it has within it the ability to—in quotes—know when it's been injured—if a cosmic ray knocks a part of it out—instantly it begins to manufacture repair enzymes that—that duplicate the missing piece and paste it in. And you can see that same thing at any level of biological organization, and to me, that's where good medicine should start—that the body has within it the ability to maintain equilibrium—heal itself.

Now, knowing that the body has this ability—what—what do you do to accentuate that?

Well, if—when I listen to a patient and hear their story, at the back of my mind I'm thinking, why is healing not happening here? But what can I do from outside that can facilitate that? I can't put it into somebody, but I can help it along by either—of supplying energy, missing materials, remove obstacles to it. You know, like you have a wound that doesn't heal—maybe there's a foreign body in it—you remove that, and it heals.

Now, when you have people that come to you that have issues—like, say if someone comes to you and they have a back issue—

Yeah. I got a little bit of lower back pain.

Do you approach that from—in terms of like how they're eating, how they're living their lifestyle—first?

I would question them about lifestyle for sure. But you know, I'm a great follower of a man who died recently named John Sarno.

Know who?

Yeah, you know about his work?

Sure. He has some great books—*Mind Over Back Pain*, *Healing Back Pain*. And his main belief—which I totally agree with—is that the majority of back pain is muscle spasm which originates in the mind.

Hmm.

And it may localize at an area of physical injury, but the—the injury is not the cause of it. You can live with a slipped disc and have no pain. You look at x-rays of—how do you define slip, though? What does that mean?

Well, this—ging—yet multi-ended, bulging or herniated—that does not necessarily cause pain, and unless there's associated neurological symptoms, you don't want to do anything about that. It's—unless it's pressing on—

Exactly. Right. Now, John Sarno's idea was that it's a lot of stress and anxiety, and a lot of different psychological factors. Ryan—and his—he—I'm sure he was some kind of incredible healer—he required that people who came to him come to—to evening lectures that he gave. That's all—many people who did that lost their back pain forever—just listening to him.

So other people have had that happen just reading his book.

Yeah. I've read a little bit of it. You know, I've had like legitimate injuries. So whenever I hear someone say, oh, it's all in—you know—it—no, it's not all in your head. It's in your head and your—and your box—in your head and your muscles—and then the—this problem of muscle spasm which shuts off blood supply, and it's a vicious cycle that'll localize at an area you have had physical injury, but the pain is not coming from the injury; it's coming from muscle spasm, and that's controlled by—greatly influenced by the mind. So when you—when your back is like—it seizes up—that is a muscle spasm, and that's incredibly painful, and it's located in the area of the injury, so it confuses you in thinking it's the injury that's causing you pain.

What's—and that leads people into getting physical interventions that may not be necessary.

Yeah. I'm a big believer in waiting—especially with spinal—

Absolutely. Absolutely. Always want to fuse you and cut you. And you look at—here's another interesting thing—you can look at x-rays of people's spines that look so horrible—you can't imagine that they can move—and they have no—nothing—no symptoms. And you can look at other x-rays that look perfect, and people are disabled by pain. So there's a very low correlation between physical findings and subjective experience.

Now, what is Sarno recommend?

Really recommends going about your business—

Go—

Yeah, ignoring it—going about your business. And if possible, try to figure out, you know, what—what message, you know, your mind is sending down there. But basically, it's reassurance that it'll go away on its own.

So when he does these lectures and he has people cure themselves of it, is just—he just reassuring them that everything's—no—explaining this process of—he calls it tension myositis syndrome, and he explains the mechanism of how it works. One friend of mine—he was in his late 20s—I played about a basketball—had a very serious herniated disc. He was within hours of having neurological surgery—spinal surgery—and I yelled at him to read this book and see Sarno in New York, and he said, I don't believe any of that—that's all bullshit—and I said, go—go see him. So he went to Sarno—went to the evening lectures—thought this was nonsense—went home—was having dinner—and realized his back pain was gone—never had surgery.

Really?

No. I—there's got to be something to that, right? There's something—there's something to the placebo effect, all right? So if there—if that is a real thing—if you can convince your body that it's got the medicine that it needs and starts to heal, even though there's no medicine—there's got to be something that is working against you as well with the wrong mindset, right?

Look, it's funny to me to hear people rediscovering the placebo effect now. I wrote a book in 1983 called *Health and Healing*. I had two chapters—and they're on placebos—and what I wrote is that the—the greatest problem is that we—you know, when we talk about placebos, it's in phrases like, how do you know that's not just a placebo effect? The most interesting word there is *just*, right? Or, we have to rule out the placebo effect. We should be rolling it in, man. That's the meat of medicine—that's pure healing from within, mediated by belief—what mixed up with the direct effects of treatment—that's what you want to make happen more of the time. It just is a mindfuck for a lot of people because they're like, how am I tricking myself into getting better? Why can't I just do it? Because that must have something to do with the structure of the brain—that the part of the brain in which our will is—isn't—doesn't connect directly to the machinery of the body—to move the autonomic nervous system. So you have to find some way of getting around that. One way is to project the belief onto something external and then let it work for you.

Yeah. But that's so strange that the mind works that way. It would seem like—wouldn't it be an evolutionary advantage just to have it at access? You know, like—

Sure. That'd be nice. But that's the same thing—you know, it's a similar problem to—why can't you just get high without taking a drug? The high is in your brain—not in the drug. The drug is a trigger that releases it. Why can't we just sit down, say, well, I'm gonna be high for the next 10 minutes? It's the same thing—we don't have access to those controls.

It just seems like that one, though—healing—I'm getting better—that one seems like it's something that we should—as a culture—concentrate on.

Yeah, for sure. What we really concentrate on is actual medicine. But one way to concentrate that is by giving people greater confidence in their body's ability to do that. And doctors have great power to do that because patients project a lot of belief on them, right? I've had many patients over the years who said that the most important thing I did for them was that I was the only doctor who told them they could get better. I mean, astonishing.

Mmm.

Yeah. Is it because doctors are just seeing too many patients—and they're overwhelmed, and they got legal bills, and they have—

I think some—I've thought about this a lot, and I—yeah, there's also the negative side of this. I've seen what—there's something called medical hexing, in which doctors say things that actually interfere with healing or cause people to get worse. And I think a lot of this is done unconsciously. So here's one of my thoughts—in their training—doctors see a very skewed sample of sick people. They see very sick people in hospitals, and in that group—healing is less likely to happen. But if you look at the total spectrum of illness, the vast majority of things get better on their own. So I think, you know, observing in yourself—wound healing is a good one to start with—to get greater confidence in your body's ability to do things—that's really valuable.

So but this—obviously you're not talking about catastrophic injuries—you're just talking about general wellness.

I think even in the case of catastrophic injury, this stuff operates. I worked a lot with hypnotherapists over the years, and one of the—one of my colleagues did a lot of work in training paramedics to be really careful about what you say around unconscious people who have been massively injured. You know, when the—if a paramedic takes an automobile accident victim and they're putting them in—says this one's a goner—that is a bad thing. You know, the unconscious mind hears that. On and on the other hand, you say something opposite to a person—you can see cases where you can stop bleeding in unconscious people—severely injured—just by giving them suggestions.

Woah.

Yeah. So when you're saying someone's a goner, you trigger stress—or you trigger helplessness—like—what—have a medically trained person tell you that you're not gonna live—that's it—that's a curse.

Yeah. It's a reflex. How strange is it that sometimes your life is hanging on the border of you believing you're gonna be okay and you believe you're not gonna be—

Oh, so you want to be very careful about—you know, whose hands you place yourself in.

Yes. You never want to stay in treatment with a doctor who thinks you can't get better—a negative doctor.

Well, doctors are just like every other, right, occupation—there's people that are really good at it and are really concentrated and focused, and there's people that are half-assing it.

Well, the ones I train through our University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine—get it, you know. We're putting out—we've graduated about 1,600 physicians now from very intensive training. They're in practice all over the country—teaching other people—is a good thing.

Now, when you say integrative medicine—when they're in practice—are they essentially general practitioners?

No. We've trained people from all specialties—any specialty you can name—we've trained them. So orthopedic surgeons and neurologists—dermatologists—anything you can—whatever—does—yeah. And so you try to—tend to look at them—we teach them all the things they didn't get in medical school—nutrition, mind-body interactions, strengths and weaknesses of alternative medicine, herbal medicine—all that. Like, say someone comes to you and maybe they have a bad case of psoriasis—

Yeah.

Autoimmune issue like that—prime—prime target for mind-body medicine—for traditional Chinese medicine, which often works well. And in that—dietary changed—put people on an anti-inflammatory diet—use of natural products that reduce inflammation. So there's a wide range of things to choose from, and this does not reject conventional treatment. You know, we may use conventional medication, but if you do, I recommend using the lowest dose—to the least potent agent—start off with that, and you can ramp off if you need to. A lot of people—and me—I'm definitely guilty of this—they hear terms like holistic or Eastern medicine or Chinese medicine—to go bullshit—right?

Well, I have a good bullshit detector, too. And so I'm really careful about what I—you know, accept and what I don't. What—what do you not buy into—like when you see your bullshit detector—like—where you—

Alright, I'll give you an example. I've—you know, I've—I'm not—I can't see any basis for crystal healing, bro.

I got a crystal in my pocket right now.

Exactly.

Alright. Well, too bad. How about the colonic irrigation people?

Yeah. Tell you—tell you that they see, you know, watermelon seeds coming out and you haven't eaten a watermelon in months. That's bullshit. The—the lining of the GI tract—it sheds off and is regenerated every 24 hours. There's no way that things can get encrusted there.

Yeah, that's a weird one—the colonic thing—because your body has all this natural bacteria that you're supposed to keep in there, right?

Not only keeping there—we're finding out that that's like more and more a really important determinant of everything—of general health—of mental health, too.

Fascinating.

Now, whose idea was it to start doing those colonics? That must go way back. That's kind of like, you know, a key idea.

Yeah. Pump some water up there—yeah—see what's up. Yeah. And you have to stand there—now it gets—it's addictive, too. I see people get addicted to this.

Yes. Yeah. So one of—all the things I won't go further—adieu—my wife had done once. She was describing it to me—I'm like, yeah—I want to pass—some ladies looking at the two and telling you what's going on in there—like ladies look like bullshit—right? It started as early as 1500 BC—Ebers papyrus—an ancient Egyptian medical document—described the many benefits of colon cleansing in ancient times—the practice of cleansing the colon was administered in a river by using a hollow reed to induce water to flow into the rectum.

You don't want to drink downstream of that.

Yeah. And—and you know, there's no need to do this. What you want to do is make sure that things are going through in the right direction—yeah—regularly. And it cleans itself—that's not supposed to do it, right?

Yeah, yeah. Another big one—I hear all these people that talk about detox—detoxification—and sell all these products—the body has many natural methods of purifying itself—in getting rid of things it doesn't want—one is through sweating—one is through breathing—one is through urination—one is through colonic elimination. The liver has an incredible capacity to detoxify—it can take—you know, you put something into your body—the liver—within seconds of seeing a compound that has never seen before—can begin making a specific enzyme to take that apart and get—

Rid of it. Wow. And you can amputate half of the liver, and it can regenerate within 36 hours.

What? Yes. Liver is amazing.

36 hours. Yeah, it's so—I thought when you gave someone like half your liver, if there's like a liver transplant issue, that it took a long time. I know it regenerates really quickly. And there's insan—there's a natural product that you can take that most doctors don't learn about, called milk thistle.

Yeah, we heard of that. That revs up liver metabolism. So these are all simple ways to increase, but the first rule of detoxification, I'm sure you can guess, you stop putting toxic things in.

Uh-huh. Cut it off at the path and let it let the body get, you know, purifies.

Oh yeah. Well, what do you do when someone's a cigarette smoker? You tell them to set a date to quit. Set a date. That's the most important thing, because each attempt—it doesn't matter if you succeed—it's making the attempt to quit. It goes into a reservoir of motivation that one day will be full enough that it's easy. And this, by the way, happens with heroin addicts, happens with cigarette addicts. I've seen many people—lifelong cigarette addicts—struggle, give it up, came back. One day they wake up and they look at stained fingers or a dirty ashtray, and they don't want to do it anymore, and it's an easy—there's no struggle. Same thing with heroin addicts. So it's has to do with motivation. You can't put that into another person, and all you can do is arrange circumstances that maybe it'll happen. So the most important thing is to tell people to set a date to quit, and it doesn't matter if they—how long they stick—

But you're saying there's—there's actually some strength to be gained from failed attempts.

Yes. It's making the attempt that you get credit for, really.

Yeah, interesting. Yeah. So the more like—if you're a drunk and you keep falling off the wagon, if you just keep making these attempts—

Yes. No, can't really—so there's something ramps up in your mind.

Yeah. It makes it more feasible for you to quit.

Well, yes. And when it—when it happens, there's no struggle. It's not—it not—it's not an issue. Just you don't wanna do it anymore.

Now, what do you do when people come to you and they're on antidepressants?

Well, I have a book called Spontaneous Happiness, which is about emotional wellness. As a lot there about antidepressants. First of all, it don't work so well. You know that's very—sometimes they work, sometimes it's hard to distinguish them from placebos.

Right. You know the popular ones, the SSRIs.

Yeah. And now because they don't work so well, you know what doctors do? They add one. They added a psychotic drug.

Yeah, horrifying. These are like—for major mental illness. They're not things you just add on to make the other depressant work better. We've talked about that one ad nauseam on this podcast. Flood, because it turned out to be the most prescribed drug in America.

I can't believe it. That's just—family—well, the word is that 25 percent of women between 40 and 50 are on antidepressants, and 10 percent of adults in the—in the country.

Alright. No, here's another—that's a crazy number. Well, first of all, the pharmaceutical companies have done a great job of convincing people that ordinary states of sadness are problems of brain biochemistry that you have to be treated with a drug. We're not supposed to be happy all the time, right? Secondly, there's a big problem with a lot of the medications that we use, and antidepressants are a good example. Most of the medications we use are counteractive. You know, they oppose some process in the bar. So when you do that, the body pushes back against it. That's called homeostasis. You know, an easy example you can relate to is if you have a stuffed-up nose, you spray a drug in it that decongest you—miraculous, right? You can breathe. And depending on which drug you use—two hours, four hours at last—but when it wears off, you have rebound congestion that's worse. If you use another dose of the drug, then—very easy to slide in, Jamie. Very easy to slide into a state of dependence on it. Same thing happens with many of these drugs—antidepressants. They raise serotonin levels—neural Junction—neural Junction. So what is the body gonna do if you forced an increase in serotonin? It's gonna make less serotonin and drop serotonin receptors. So if you stay in one of these for any length of time, when you get off it, you're gonna be in worse shape than you were to begin with. And this is now has a medical name that's called tardive dispersion length at mood due to the drug. So the drug actually prolongs or intensifies the depression. You know, maybe okay for very short-term use of very severe depression, but these are not things you want to go on and stay on for a length of time.

What's fascinating to me is—want to talk to people that are on them that want to talk to you like they're on some cancer medication or they're on, you know, something that cures polio.

Yeah, like they make it seem like you're insensitive to the possibility that there's other solutions.

Right. And there are many other solutions. We have really good evidence for the antidepressant effect of physical activity.

Yes, both to prevent and treat.

Yeah. We have very good evidence for supplemental fish oil for omega-3 fatty acids—to permit a suti DS—well—oh, and the microbiome looks like it's involved in our mental states as well. So, you know, there's so many different ways of—guess CBD for sure. So again, gets back to information, and it gets back to in an integrative approach and not just relying on a single thing like a pharmaceutical treatment.

Yeah. I've talked to intelligent people that are on SSRIs in one form or another, and even ones that have struggled—were on one for a while and it stopped working, and then they tried another one, and they're compounding ones, and they're on this weird sort of chemical rollercoaster, and they reject any possible notion that there's other alternatives, especially when you bring up the exercise one.

Right. I bring up the exercise one, they go, "All this [ __ ] meatheads exercise, we just stop." I'm like, "I'm telling you—" We did this thing with my friends called Sober October, and what we did is we—no alcohol, no anything for the month of October, but also we did this fitness challenge, and we got real carried away, and we're all competing against each other with this heart rate out. So we're working out three hours, four hours a day. It was crazy. But what was interesting about it to me was not just that your body sort of adapts when you force it to work out that many hours, but that your mood is phenomenal.

Yeah, I felt so good.

Yeah. And I was telling everybody, if you could take what—I like—I don't feel that good right now. I mean, I feel great, but I don't feel as good as I did during October, because I was working out four hours a day. It was—if you could get that in pill form, you would take it everyday if there was no side effects, because it literally removed anxiety—all the internal chatter, all the negative chatter—it was gone. Everything seemed amazing.

True. And there are side effects of physical activity are great. You know, it revs up immune function, improves digestion, sleep—all that you mentioned—anxiety—the—by far, in a way, the most effective treatment I found for anxiety is simple—a simple breathing technique—no—regulating the breath. I've seen this work for the most extreme forms of panic disorder. And the drugs that we use for anxiety are the worst—the benzodiazepines—highly addictive, mess with your mind.

Yeah. I have a good friend who has an issue with anxiety medication, and he takes it all the time, and when he does take it, apparently it has that rebound effect.

Exactly right. He gets horribly anxious.

Well, these are handed out like candy, and nobody warns people how addictive they are. It's a worse addiction than an opiate addiction.

It's sanic.

Really? Yeah. Yep. Why—I did not know that—harder to get off of than opioids. Wow.

Now, how do you feel about psychedelic interventions when it comes to addictions? Like it seems like we're hearing more about that. I know you have a background in that as well.

Well, we're especially hearing about iboga and ibogaine. This is the African psychedelic.

Yeah. And there are clinics and people using this that claim great success. I don't have firsthand experience. I only know what I've heard and what I've talked to people—mean—but sounds good. And I think most of the psychedelics are so non-toxic, so safe, and in the right hands, I think there's many possibilities for, you know, good outcomes.

Yeah. They've also had some pretty good results with cigarette cessation, right?

Yep. With not just at bogo, but even with psilocybin.

Yeah. Apparently they had—they did a study where they show the difference between someone taking psilocybin to try to quit smoking cigarettes and some really large number of people—I think it was in the neighborhood of 80% quit—and then over the course of X amount of years, they were still at 60%. That's only 20% of those people would come back. That's great. But with other methods, the—the—the number was much smaller—somewhere in the range of 20—oh, 15% after six years. A lot of them just went back to it.

Huh. What are you making the microdosing phenomenon? This is pretty astounding to see this. Why you want to medicate every day? No, I'm just joking around. I think I know people who have experienced some pretty severe benefits of it, especially people that weren't doing so good health-wise.

Yeah. And you know, we're just really kind of feeling down and depressed—Nelson—the outlook radically changed, particularly psilocybin microdosing. I know a lot of—you that we were doing that.

Yeah, same. I have a lot of hope that Oregon becomes the first state—sounds like it's close—yeah—to legalize psilocybin.

That'd be a big one.

It would be gigantic. And I think once we realized that no one's dying and a lot of people are getting helped and a lot of people that are terminal, you know, are having some really amazing alleviation of anxiety and an understanding that it's gonna be okay, and just—I think between friends and just that—just the camaraderie—it sort of—when you have these group experiences together, like there's some incredible benefits to that in terms of like reinforcing community and civilization—the way we feel about each other.

Now, aside from the psychological, emotional benefits, I think you would be fascinated by some of the things that I've observed and written about—of real physical benefits of psychedelics. And I'll just tell you a couple. I—when I was in my late 20s, I did a lot of experiments—was in the 70s—with LSD—mostly with LSD. I had a lifelong allergy to cats. If a cat got near me, my eyes would itch, my nose would run. If a cat licked me, I'd get highs—or it licked me. So I always, you know, avoided them—didn't me. So I took LSD with a group of friends on a spring day—Livia Virginia—fabulous, you know, I was outside running around having a lot of fun, and in the middle of the—cat jumped into my lap, and I had a moment of like trying to defend myself, and I thought, "This is silly," you know, and I relaxed, played with the cat, had no allergic reaction, and never did ever after.

Instant disappearance of an allergy that had been there all my life. What would be the physiological mechanism for something—well, this clearly—that's a very profound mind-body interaction. Now we know that allergies are influenced by that because you can show a person allergic to roses a plastic rose, and they'll have an allergy. So that's—so there's a learned component to allergy that can be unlearned. But instead of—yeah—interesting. Now, alright, this is even more dramatic. Maybe a year later, same thing—it was LSD in the spring. I had also grown up with very fair skin and was told I couldn't get tan. And we used to go down to the Jersey Shore—I can't remember—I remember innumerable times, you know, gets—getting second-degree burns, sheets of skin peeling off, Noxzema at night, you know, we didn't have sunscreen in those days, right? So I just accepted that. So I was, you know, "I can't get tan." So again, high on LSD, lying out naked in my great woods in my home in Virginia, and the Sun was up there, and I thought, "This is ridiculous," you know, "I should not be afraid of the Sun." The next day I got tan, and I have ever since.

Well, that's it—a little more—and I'm not quite sure the mechanism there, but it's pretty amazing when you're outside for though, because if you're a burn—I was out in good time, you know, I wouldn't normally have—yeah—at least I would have had my usual reaction, but my skin got tan—had never had in my life.

So what do you suggesting happened? Again, you know, there must be a way in which the nervous system influences melanocytes, which are the, you know, the cell—the pigment cells in the body that can either extend their, you know, projections with pigment granules. So the nervous system controls that—in the mind connects the nervous system—but what about someone who's like ridiculously fair? Like what about someone who lives in Scotland?

Well, see what I would do is—in—when doctor—while cycling clinic opens, I would have like an open—well, we'll see—the—there'll be an allergy program, right? You go in on the first day, you take a full dose of something, and you're exposed to the allergen, and you know—magic happens. And then you come in for ten sessions with a decreasing dose, and at some point you're not getting—you're just getting a placebo, and you don't know when that is, and people are trained to lose their allergies.

Oh hey, you do the same thing with Sun tanning—maybe not with people from Scotland because they've got fewer pigments though.

Yeah, but I wouldn't roll it out. I'll tell you one more. Okay. I'm also—from this period—I told you I was playing with yoga—there was one posture I couldn't do—the plow. Were you lying your back and try to touch your toes behind your head? Yeah. I got to where I could get my toes to a foot from the floor, and I had excruciating pain in my neck, and I—as much as I tried—that I made no progress. So I was on the verge of giving up. I thought I was too old—was 28. So again, on an LSD state, my body was feeling totally elastic. I thought to try that. So I'm lowering my feet—I thought I had a foot to go, and they touched the ground. I couldn't believe it. I've raised it—lowered—

Oh wow, fantastic.

The next day I tried to do it—I got within a foot of the ground—had excruciating pain in my neck, but now I knew it was possible. Before that I didn't know it was possible. So knowing it was possible, I was motivated to keep at it, and in a few weeks I was able to do it. If I had not had that experience, I would have given up. So I think this is the magic of these things—they can show you possibilities. They don't necessarily teach you how to—how to maintain them, but they can show you the things are possible.

You'd never believe—what doesn't even seem like it was just showing you a possibility—it was actually showing you capability.

Yes, you were capable of moving in a way that you didn't think you were—exactly—for right. And it was because of your own tension and worried—you probably learned patterns of tension that had built up on my life—and maybe some—because of the conscious or the psychedelic state rather—you're some alleviation of tension—my mind was out of the way, right?

Yeah. Hmm. Well, you do—you definitely sense that with marijuana, particularly edible marijuana—you can really get good stretching in with edible marijuana. It's almost like you—I mean, I hate to use certain terms to just like trigger people's [ __ ] alarms, but there's a—you—you can—you can feel more of the muscle—more of what's—what it's doing, right? Whereas, you know, I'm—I've been involved in martial arts and athletics—not my life—so I have a good awareness of my body, but it's way better when I—yeah—metal—edible marijuana—like I feel—I understand—like I can practice moves better—like a certain—like kicking techniques—I'm better if I'm more in tune with how everything's working together. Whereas sometimes I can do it if I'm sober, but it's—I'm almost like—there's a prophylactic between me and my body—there's a numbness to it that gets removed by edible marijuana.

One other—I'm fascinated by this—was with MDMA. I was—I lived in a ranch outside of Tucson, and I had pathways that had, you know, sort of large gravel, and I could not walk on that barefoot—it really hurt my feet—and you know, if I stood in them—yeah—might—you'd see Denton—my feet—on MDMA—I was able to like dance on those stones—no pain—but the interesting things there were no marks on my feet. So the pain is easy to figure out how that happens, but right—what's happening that, you know, you don't get a dent? I mean, it seems to me if your mind is out of the way, maybe little muscles there can—are free to press back with just the amount of force to neutralize the pressure.

Hmm. It's like if your mind is not interfering, I think the body has amazing capabilities.

Well, I definitely think you can mindfuck yourself, right? Now you can definitely think, "Oh god, this is—" You can start thinking it's worse than it is.

Yeah. And if you can relax—well, what—often times there's many situations where you relax and things aren't nearly as bad as you are making them—happy. So that could—yeah.

Yeah. Some—I'm with you on everything except at an experienced—that's one of those things—like Bigfoot—like when you just keep it to yourself—you see Bigfoot—you're supposed to just go—"I'm not gonna explain—" I'm not gonna keep that to myself because I want—you know—when I—when people tell me things that I have no experience of, I'm always willing to entertain the possibility, but then I got to experience it for myself. I'm willing to entertain it—depend upon who I'm talking to—right? Cuz there's some guy out there—and you will entertain—yes—ability after possibility—yes—if you die, you realize you have one big Dr. Seuss book, you know. So people are just crazy, you know. We have to accept that.

True. Yeah. There's—there's no doubt about it. But I—I am absolutely aware that there's some component—there's something about the mind and the way the mind interacts with matter and with life—yep—that has a profound effect on your body, and it would be really nice if we were all better at controlling that.

One of the insights that I've had in psychedelic states is that everything is conscious—that consciousness permeates everything—that you know—like I feel—whatever—and me—that my consciousness is also in rocks and in plants and animals—that there's some universal something out there, and it's—there are two, you know, really different ways of looking at reality. One is the materialist one—which—of the consciousness is a product of brain biochemistry and electricity—and that is dominant in science today. The other is that the brain is a receiving apparatus for consciousness, and that consciousness is primary—maybe existed before matter—may be organized matter into forms that are more and more able to experience themselves. I don't know. I don't think there's a way to prove one or the other. It's just that for me, the conscious as the primary one is more fun and makes life more interesting.

I'm sure you're familiar with Rupert Sheldrake.

Oh yeah, he's a good friend—very, very interesting guy. He has an idea that everything has memory, right? He believes that—that this would be like the reason, I guess, why some people would not want to live in a haunted house—all right—they would think that if something was murdered in the house that it would retain some memory of these atrocities, and that you would somehow or another interact with that if you were in that house. So like spaces—my dad is not a very—he's not a woowoo kind of guy—

Yeah.

But he went to Gettysburg—

Uh-huh.

And he was telling me that when he was at Gettysburg that it just—he felt profound sadness—

Uh-huh.

He's like, "It just seems like it's just in the ground—like the whole area." He goes, "I don't know how to describe it, but I wanted to get the [ __ ] out of there."

Huh. Like just—just being around this area where this battle had taken place—so many people had died. I said, "You could feel it."

Ha. I don't know if I buy—I mean—but it's not the kind of guy that—know—right? But that's an example where you—somebody tells you something that is experienced—I'm willing to entertain it. I have to experience in less—yeah. But it also could be, you know, like—he—he got lucky and didn't get drafted during Vietnam, and that's probably in his head that if he did get drafted he might have died over there, and for what reason—he wouldn't experience this life—yeah, you know—why—what is the person then thinking about these young men that died in the same fashion for some war that didn't make any sense? Like why the [ __ ] are they even fighting it? Like who—why—why is that? And then having all these people die together in this one horrible battle in this one place, and he—you know, it could have been—he was playing a game on his mind.

But now, Joe, I want to talk to you about your language. Why the [ __ ] do you swear so much?

No—no—have you read anything about the science of swearing?

No.

Do you know that there is a science of swearing?

A science? Yes. It's pretty interesting stuff.

Oh, so the part of your brain that produces swear words is not the part of the brain that manages ordinary language.

Really interesting. You know, we have two language centers in our left frontal cortex. Mm-hmm. People that have strokes that damage them often lose language completely, but they can still swear. So swearing is coming from somewhere else. It may be coming from the right hemisphere, but it's also coming from deeper centers in the brain to connect to the limbic system and the amygdala, and that in connects to the involuntary nervous system. So here's a couple interesting facts. Okay. Swearing is associated with sweating—increased sweating. So you should be dripping with sweat. It's also interesting—swearing increases pain tolerance. And there's an interesting experiment—oh, the standard way they do pain tolerance—they have people stick their hand and a bucket of ice and water, and you see how long they can keep it there. The people who say "[ __ ] [ __ ]" can keep it there much longer than people who are not allowed to swear.

What about noises? What if they just go "ah"?

No. It was swearing specifically.

Hmm. So they've tried noises and swearing. Yeah. So it may be, you know, when you—if you're hammering a nail and hit your thumb—yeah—you should use one of those words.

That's a good strategy. That's interesting because I almost always do that. If I hurt something—especially a finger—like a slammed car door the other day—that's what that is. But that's—yeah—and that's interesting—it's coming—there's a different part of the brain that manages that—it has different emotional content.

Yeah. It flavors language. Yes. I like them. I'm a big fan of the squares. I'll leave you some papers about the science of swearing. It's interesting.

Yeah, it's very interesting. Now, what if—what would happen if they were no longer taboo? Would the same—they'd lose various—I think they'd lose their power.

Yeah, right. The same areas of the brain wouldn't know—I remember there was an episode of—I don't remember what television show—but it was on CBS—

Yeah.

And they have a line at the end of the show, and essentially they were saying "[ __ ] happens," and there was a big deal—I'll bet it was a big deal—that they wanted to be able to say "[ __ ] happen"—huh—and apparently they pulled this off and they got it through, and it was like a 10:00 p.m. show, so it was okay, and it was 11 o'clock by the time they said "[ __ ]," and I remember thinking like, "Well, what is strange"—sort of like—how many people were involved in this sort of dance—like how many lawyers and executives and who—like it's very strange—very strange that this one—

Word would trip everybody. Knows the word, right? It's not even that. So it's kind of a, you know, a kind of game we all—

Yeah. Yes. So but you're saying this game is facilitated by one specific part of the brain. And so that because like, I don't—swear words are taboo words. Here I have blue words, an often associated with things that we find offensive.

Mm-hmm. Or with bodily acts that freak people out. Yeah. So but so there's both—there's a psychological, social aspect to it, but there's also a neurological aspect to it. Now when the words like some—for some words, for some people, like I remember when I was a kid, I lived in Florida for a little bit, and I said "hell" once, and in Florida in the 1970s, "hell" was a swear—

Like yeah, I don't know. I mean, I came from New Jersey, you know, I was in San Francisco, and then also I was in Florida. I said "hell," and they're like, "Don't swear like that in this class." I was like, "Swear? The [ __ ] are you people talking about?" He said to me, that was like, "You guys have different swears."

Yeah. Now if you had a word that was not taboo to you,

Mm-hmm. would it be with that same area of your brain?

I know—no, this is—there has not been a lot of research. It hasn't been taken seriously, but that's all interesting questions.

Oh yeah, buddy. Because it some—I mean, if you're a really super conservative person, there's a lot of words that are off the table. Yeah, but if you are far more, you know, just loose with your language, you could [ __ ] this and—yes, "goddamn it," you know, that would be nothing like—"goddamn it" would be just like "shucks."

Yeah. Yeah. But to someone, "goddamn it" would be like a really—

Yeah. Really big deal. So like what—it would be different parts of the brain would be activated.

Mm-hmm. By that versus if you said it—it would be not that big a deal. But if someone was like super conservative and—

Saw even—

Yeah. More—

Yeah. Wow. Yeah, interesting. What do you think that that is a universal thing? I mean, it seems to be univer—seems to be universal. Another finding that came across is that people who learn a second language—that swearing in the second language does not have the same emotional impact that your first language does.

Oh, that makes sense. That's why they're so fun when you learn Spanish—swear—it's like you get a free ride.

Yeah. Yeah. That's that's interesting. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, and you can do them on television too, right? You can see a lot of Spanish swears in an English-speaking TV, and everybody just pleads ignorance. Do you—so and does every language—yes, they all have swears. Every language has swear words.

Wow. Universal. That is really interested in the Asian languages.

Yeah. P and languages, all of them. Huh. Wow. Huh. So that—that would, at least in my brain, seemed to indicate that there's like some use for that.

Yes. Well, that probably—many uses. One is this thing of modulating pain—what is a social bonding—you know, forming some community.

Yeah. That's how I kind of use it. Yeah, I think when I swear in front of people, I'm testing them out. Yeah, like, "You freaking out if I say [ __ ]?" "Yo, I can't talk to you, right? You too much work, right?" You know, you know exactly what—if you're talking to someone and every other word is like, "Wah, we're really wish you wouldn't use that language," well, you—there's so much work to do here, I can't—I know. Example: Japan, dance through this garden, right? Yeah, it's—um, it's to me also like—I hang around with a lot of people that swear a lot because I hang around with professional comedians and fighters, and there's a lot of swashbucklin', freewill and type of individuals involved in those pursuits. And now there seems that there's some study suggesting that swearing is becoming more frequent in our society, and I don't know—it's a trend. I'm not sure anybody knows why, but I mean, somebody would have been, you know, on the air like you are 20 years ago.

That's true. Yeah. Well, that is specifically because the internet civilization.

Yeah. Yeah. But even that—it's like it's—it's resisted in a lot of ways, like people are trying to figure out how to modulate this and how to handle it. And they'll never handle it.

No, it seems like the genie's out of the bottle, right?

Yeah. I think ultimately you find what you enjoy, and the best way to find with you what you enjoy is people actually doing what they want to do, and then you figure it out.

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that seems to be what's happening in the world of the internet and podcasting and stuff like that. It's also the the access, right? Like a person like you, you could just put together a podcast, and if people find it interesting, if it resonates, you could get a hundred thousand downloads out of nowhere—like a hundred thousand. If you have a radio show, a hundred thousand people listening—that's a lot of damn people. They'd be excited like, "Hey, Andrew, we got the monthlies in, and you're doing a great—you got a hundred thousand people a day." They'd be like, "Holy [ __ ]!" Successful business. But you could be doing that just from your office—just put together with a laptop and a microphone and no distribution—what's—in terms of like—no string of executives and gigantic corporation behind you. You don't have—and nobody telling you what you can say.

Yeah. Well, that's one thing you get out of today that you never got out of before, and you know, this is—I've been involved in show business for many years, but only this kind of stuff for nine—from doing this podcast. And what I've seen with this is like what's unusual—I think what resonates with people is that there isn't anybody else—there's no group of people that's saying, "Andrew, could you stop saying this, or let's—let's concentrate on that." And if the polls are showing that people like this, and you know, you have breaks in between what the commercials are playing, they come to you with notes, and they tell you things—all that stuff just seems to somehow or another ruin this natural interaction that we have with each other.

Yeah. Yeah. Now for a guy like you, the Internet is—I would think that with some of your more controversial ideas—like this is the way you could really air them out in long-form. Because if you—like a lot of doctors, they don't want to open their mind to anything outside of what their—what their practice—

Notice—

Yeah. It means—gotta be rough for you, right? But I've never censored what I say. I've always put it all out there.

Good for you. Yeah. I've done that all my life. But do you—don't you find that it's more—not just accepted, but people are more interested in it now because of the Internet?

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Because I've heard about you for many, many years, but it's sort of ramped up over the last, you know, decade or so, right?

Yeah. Because of the Internet, right? Because people have this—but you know, I've been around—it's funny when I look at this stuff like, you know, all the stuff about pot, and it's like—no explosive oohs—I was saying this stuff in the 1970s. You know, my first book, *The Natural Mind*, was published in 1972. It argued that everybody has an innate drive to alter their consciousness. Yeah, and that, you know, drugs are one way of doing it. I did the first human experiments with pot that were ever done under double-blind conditions.

What experiments did you do?

I gave marijuana to people in a laboratory in 1968. And would you test for—well, we were just seeing—people bet me you couldn't do it. Nobody had ever done this, you know, that all this marijuana was becoming such a big thing, and nobody—there were no experiments like—what—what—what kind of experiments? So I took—like I'm the most basic stuff. I just wanted to show that you could give it to human subjects in a lab and get away with it because people thought you wouldn't—you know, I mean, in terms of the FTC, in terms of law—lawsuits—everybody—you know, one of the things I wanted to—give it to people that never had it before to speak—so there'd be no expectations. Everyone said this is terrible—you know, they're gonna turn into heroin addicts from giving them—mmm—stuff like that. Anyway, I just wanted to see basic stuff like, does it dilate the pupils of the eyes? Because cops were busting people, you know, they'd say their eyes are dilated—yeah, must be high on marijuana—and they'd search—but marijuana doesn't—we—I should—we showed—doesn't dilate the pupils of the eyes. I took—tested blood sugar because people said the reason people get hungry is because blood sugar drops—has no effect on blood sugar. We showed that the—you know, people who had never had marijuana before in a lab—you could show slight decreases in performance and motor function and cognitive function, but people who were regular users of it—you couldn't show that that they had adapted to it.

Yeah. My take on that is that I think the people that are not regular users are freaking out. Yeah, and because they're—they're normal sensations, and then—I'll do it—yeah, and they just don't—they don't know how to relax, right?

Yeah. I mean, that's—it's the big one to me with—with physical movement, cuz young—they want to, you know, test drivers and also J—things for marijuana. I'm like, this is not alcohol, you're talking about a completely different thing. If I had a choice of being a passenger with these drivers, I'll tell you which one I would take: a person who had never used marijuana had just smoked; a person who was a user of marijuana and just smoked but it never driven high; a person who was a user—regular using marijuana and at practice driving high; and a person with any amount of alcohol in their system. I take the third as the best bet.

Yes, the third's the best, right?

Yeah. That guy's a wizard, I bet, right? That God drives high every day. Yes, so he's used to it. I'm not gonna show any effect on his performance. Yeah, it's the experience—is a novel experience, and—right—the—if you're accustomed to it, then it's like, "Here we go, this is my normal world." And for many people, you have to learn to get high. You have to learn to associate the subtle physical cues with the altered state. That's a common thing—people feel nothing the first time they try it.

Yeah, you do hear that, right? But I don't think they know what the [ __ ] they're talking about. Your eyes [ __ ] when you—when you did these experiments, what did you have to—clear these with the FDA? Would you—would not believe I'd have to do—I had to get permission from the FDA, which said that I couldn't do it unless I first got permission from—it was the old Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which was the Treasury guys—the Federal Bureau of Narcotics said, "We'll give you permission once the FDA gives you permission." So they played that off. Then I had to get permission from the state of Massachusetts from two agencies there, and there were two universities involved: Harvard University and Boston University. So coordinating all this stuff was unbelievable. And then once that—all the approvals came in, I had to get the pot, and there was no legal source of it. So I—Federal Bureau of Narcotics gave me confiscated pot that they had confiscated—some case in Texas. They brought it over—they had delayed us so long—I didn't even know who had time to do the experiments, cuz I was gonna graduate anyway. They brought this stuff on a Friday afternoon—it was [ __ ]—I mean, it was brown, dry—it looked like it'd been sitting in a warehouse for years, right? So the first thing I did was roll up a joint and smoke it—no effect—whatever. I called the—the agent that I dealt with, and I said, "This stuff is no good." He said, "How do you know? You haven't had time to run the experiment." So I said, "I looked at it under the microscope, and there was no resin on it." So they grumbled, and they gave me other stuff, which was passable. So but again—confiscated stuff. Yeah, because we always used to hear when we were kids about government—we'd—the government—we'd—was the good weed. I was—that was later—when that—well, when research got going, and the US—the government started a pot farm in Mississippi—my pot for research—which was much better. And there was only a handful of people that were under these experiments, correct? So they made it so difficult—mmm—to conduct research, as they have with psychedelics.

No, that's slowly changing now.

Yeah. Well, you know, Rick Strassman—

Sure.

Yeah. When he was doing that book, *DMT: The Spirit Molecule*, and he did all those tests with those people—that was really great breaking stuff because, you know, doing it at the University of New Mexico and doing our clinical conditions—they were able to document the similarities between all these peoples' psychedelic experiences and do this with government approval. Yeah, which I thought was really fascinating.

Fascinating. Yeah. And the fact that they did it and with the information's out, and then there's been like very little movement in that direction—it's kind of just like, "Okay, now we know, but look—everybody's fine. It's a lot of benefit. Do we—do we want to act on this?" Like, you know, it takes decades—reverent and flus—what research was done all along—it was from her to look for negative effects—ah—you know, nobody who wanted to look for positive effects got permission and funding.

That's interesting. So you have to kind of frame the proposal in a way that like, "We're—these kids are [ __ ] themselves up, and we're gonna prove it, sir." So that's changing, but you know, the big stumbling block now—we got to get cannabis out of that federal schedule.

Yeah, that's like causing a lot of problems.

Yeah. There's been some noise about de—decriminalizing it federally, which is like step one, I guess. That's a big stumbling block. I'll give you one example—I'm involved with a group called Maui Wellness Group. I'm the chief science officer—Maui, Hawaii. Yeah, we got the first dispensary license and growing operation over there.

Oh, nice. Very good. He's gonna go in Hawaii. How is it for medical—not—not for recreational—like how sick you have to be—you know, it's okay the way they're allowing you—but there's—their specified conditions—Hawaii's not—is more uptight than a lot of others—things happening—but our licenses for Maui County, which includes Maui, Molokai, and Lanai—so people from Molokai and Lanai can come to Maui to buy product and our dispensary, but they can't take it back because the waters between the islands are federal—when they throw it—still has to cross the water.

Oh, that's ridiculous. You know, that's the water—that federal—that's the kind of—that's the kind of ridiculous situation. So better to be in Maui and—not—better—when I got to go to Maui to get high.

Yeah. That's great. What is—you're really sick—like what if you have cancer or something like that?

Well, I live on Lanai.

Yeah. Well, you gotta violate the law. But if you have it in Lanai, you're okay. So can you grow it?

No. You can only grow it if you have a license, and the only licenses are for Maui.

Jesus Christ. Yeah, we gotta change this. California was really ridiculous when they were doing medical—look, you could just basically go in there—"I can't sleep," okay? Yeah, it's—nothing like—I had friends that had like long, elaborate excuses they planned out like, you know, "I was in a car accident while 6:00, and I go to bed at night, I have these horrible dreams—the only thing that helps me is marijuana, and I'm just trying to feed my family"—that they were gonna stop—stop—stop—"Okay, I'm righteous crypt—I just give it to you." Like there was no resistance—like if you—my joke was that if you can't get a license for marijuana, you should probably go to a hospital immediately. She had a real problem.

No, man, you need actual doctors, right? I'll tell you a story—this—this is something that bothers me—no, I'm not—I'm not a user of pot, and I was heavily in my earlier life—a friend of my doctor colleagues in San Francisco sent me some samples of stuff that had come from a medical dispensary in San Francisco, and he wanted me to try them. So one of them was a—some concentrated oil—it came in a little syringe and had a very elaborate, nicely printed brochure with it that described the use of this for pain and that said you should start with an amount the size of half a grain of rice, taking it orally.

So—why—it's—

Yeah. My friends had—take it at bedtime. So this is a teeny amount, and actually, I probably took somewhat less because I was afraid of getting too high. Um, I took it at bedtime, went to sleep, woke up about an hour later in full-blown delirium—I mean, visual hallucinations as strong as I've had on LSD. I couldn't get out of bed. I was—you know, I was in Mobile—I had burning thirst—I couldn't get up to get a glass of water. I am—friend's thing—a guest house—I couldn't call for help. I laid there, and it kept increasing—you kept—you know—over for hours—it got stronger and stronger, and when is it gonna end? Anyway, it lasted 12 hours. Yeah, and for about 24 hours after, my equilibrium was really—long. And this stuff is being—I mean, you know, this is—and it said—it said the directions said, "Start with this amount and work up from there." People—I'm thinking there's people—you know, driving on the streets—is out there—that scares me.

Yeah. There's people that'll squirt that whole thing in their gullet, right? I'm sure—you know—

Yeah. It's the edible world is a weird world because of the—the response of the body is so much different than the smoking—it's a different drug. Yeah. You know, the long length of time it takes—so the—you know, it's like lighting the firework, and the fuse is down, and you go back and try to light it again—and—

Yeah, I'm sure you've heard the recording of the police officers who stole the pot from the kids and then ate it and then called 911 themselves.

No, you never heard—it's wonderful—play it again—because we played it too many times in this podcast.

Okay, I'll look it up. But these poor cops—the—they ate pot brownies, and their call to 911—"I think—I think we're dying—time's moving real slowly—I think we're dead"—it's so stupid—it's—it's—it's—it's good for kids to hear because you realize like, "Oh, cops are just people."

Oh, all right. Okay. It just sounds like my brother if my brother got high, you know? It's just crazy people that get high—but it—the—the effect of the edible can be pretty—pretty [ __ ] profound in this area in particular—like Hollywood has some preposterous THC level—I don't imagine—

Yeah. I mean, they're under different regulations now that it's legal statewide instead of just medical. But when it was medical only, you could get these insane concoctions—"Stars of Death"—you ever heard of a Star of Death? What are those? Stars at like 1,200 milligrams—they range anywhere from like 200, 300, 400—each little star is hundreds of milligrams—and Joey would eat like three or four of them—

Eight—

Yeah, he just would—just throw them down—he's—he's got an insane tolerance. Yeah, he just—you guys—given all this stuff—however, I am delighted to see our society finally coming to better terms with—yes—plant—me—to cannabis. You know, the—the word cannabis is the same word as canvas.

Mm-hmm.

All canvas sails and rope used to be made from hemp. Yeah, the—and the species name *sativa* means useful—it's the useful hemp—it's really useful. You know, this is one plant that—that provides an edible seed and edible oil—of high-quality fiber, a medicine, and an intoxicant. That's a lot of ways for a plant to be useful. We have been very stupid in our relationship with that plant.

Yeah. The cannabis—it's the equivalent of the dog in the plant world. Dogs long ago made a decision to co-evolve with us; they threw their evolutionary lot in with humans. Cannabis did the same thing. You can't unravel the early botanical history of cannabis because as far back in history as you—we go, it's always associated with human settlements. So that plant wants nothing other than to be with us and to serve us, and we have been so stupid—we've let a billion-dollar industry and hemp textiles go to China; we've let a million-dollar industry and edible hemp products go to Canada; and we have ignored its potential for medicine.

Well, I'm really hoping that things are gonna change in terms of our cultivation of hemp—um, you know, I'm one of the owners of—on it—and we sell hemp protein—and one of the great—yeah, we used to get our hemp protein from Canada.

Yep.

We used to have to get it from Canada—we can then sell it in America—we couldn't grow it here—stupid.

Well, that's gonna change. I'm so hopeful it does change. It is—it's fascinating also how well the propaganda worked against it and how long—even in defiance of all the facts—now I have to tell you—when I did those pot experiments of 1968, I predicted that pot was going to be legal in five years—just a matter of getting the truthful information out there.

Well, it wasn't—you know, people believe what they want to believe, and they don't believe what they don't want to believe—in—it's rude—it's totally irrational.

Well, it's also an really excellent example of the contradictions in our society, you know, that the—the difference between something that's accurate and something that's perceived.

Yep.

And we have this perception of Maryland—and sometimes they have perceptions based on experiences—like you might meet some really lazy [ __ ]-up people who smoke pot all the time—you go, "This is what pot does to you." Also, it was the associations of—because then back then, you know, in the 50s, 60s, it was associated with Mexican migrant workers, with black jazz musicians in the South, and then with radicals and hippies—so all scary people to mainstream, you know, middle-class white society—and of course, all accentuated by William Randolph Hearst and Harry Anslinger and the *Reefer Madness* film. Those are great—there anybody hasn't seen those out there—it's amazing how something that was terrifying to someone back then—it's so silly today when you watch *Reefer Madness*—say it's really funny. And at the same time, we're living with the two most dangerous drugs that are out there—with alcohol—tobacco.

Well, how about fentanyl? That wants to wash it out of me—keep ramping that one up and looking it more and more potent.

Yes. The idea that opioids weren't killing people quick enough that we needed to make some ridiculously potent versions of it—and apparently now there's—they're proving something that's even more powerful.

Yeah. Like what—why would you do that? But you know, on a physiological level, opioids are not that bad for your body. The worst effect of being addicted to an opioid over time is chronic constipation. I mean, that's annoying, but that's not like cirrhosis of the liver—the generation of the nervous system—but overdoses—overdoses, of course, that kills you by stopping your respiration—bunion—but there are many examples of people who have been addicted to opioids who've been able to get legal supplies and use them sensibly—they're healthy.

I have heard about that when—in terms of regular heroin use—yep—that—I had a friend who was a longshoreman, and this is like when I was a kid—he was explaining to me how this guy that he worked with would get a bag of heroin every day at lunch, and he would shoot it in his car, and he would just sit in his car during lunch hour, and then when the time was up, he'd go back to work. I was like, "What?" He's like, "He would do that every day." But—she's gonna be dead in a week—no—no—he knows that—if he knows how to take care of himself—apparently he did—he would do it all the time, right? I guess—find a new vein and—and figure out how to do it and—and not—there's a famous historical example that's great—there was a man named William Halstead who was a surgeon at Johns Hopkins University in the early 1900s—he invented local anesthesia.

And so you know, great guy, he started using cocaine and injected himself—injected cocaine—and not a good thing. And his, you know, his behavior got really bad; everything not good. So at some point, his group of his colleagues kidnapped him and put him—took him—on a yacht for several weeks, and he came back supposedly cured. He had a long life as a very successful, productive surgeon, and only after his death was it revealed that what had happened on that trip was that they had gotten him off cocaine and onto intravenous morphine for the rest of his life. He was an intravenous morphine user. Did not in any way interfere with his health or productivity. I would assume that if you're doing that every day, you're gonna run into issues with your veins.

Well, yeah, presumably he, you know, he knew how to rotate around it, huh? I wouldn't want to do that, but there it is. Oh, but the point is that, you know, it's a whole different game from alcohol and tobacco. Yeah, a whole, whole different game, but problems—it's this—it's the social toxicity of it; it's that—that—that people are buying illegal, impure materials and overdosing and so forth. That's not the—the—Nate pharmacological nature of the drug.

What's been disturbing to me as a person, as an observer, is watching people who get injured get hooked on it. Yeah, it—particularly pills. Yeah, it seems that my good friend Brendan, he had his nose broken, and it got his nose fixed, and they put him on pills, and before he knew it, he was taking those pills every day for months and months and months. And his friends eventually just took him out of his medicine cabinet and they just made an intervention. So you know, this is, I think, the—the opioid crisis that we've got in this country is a fabulous opportunity for integrative medicine because the realization is that you cannot manage chronic pain solely with use of opioids.

Right. No, there has to be individualized integrative treatment that uses different modalities. Could be everything from acupuncture, yoga, mind-body stuff, diet, hmm. And that all—State of Oregon a couple years ago passed an integrative pain management—and saying that all pain—chronic pain management—had to be integrative, and they listed the different modalities. They left out mind-body medicine, which to me is one of the most important.

Yeah, the mind-body medicine though, on any sort of a report that seems like that's one like, okay, what kind of—but look, you know, I study—I'm with you. Yeah, I studied hypnosis. I, after I got out of my medical training, you know, one of the most interesting courses I ever took. There's a well-known demonstration in—in the literature on hypnosis: you can take a person, deeply hypnotized, got good trance capacity, touch them with a finger that you represent to be a piece of hot metal, and they get a blister. And you can take the same person and touch them on the piece of hot metal and tell them it's cold, and they don't get a blister.

Wait a minute. Yes. Well-known phenomenon. This is actually—have you ever seen this? Yes, in real life. Yes. So someone's taking a hot piece of metal? Yes. Convince someone that they're not gonna burn? Yeah, they don't burn. Yes. By the way, to the suntan stuff, how long do you touch him with it for? You know, enough in an ordinary person that it would burn. I call [ __ ] I call boy. So we'll try it. I just—let's try it. Okay. Under—put in and cook your hands. It's—it's like—it's hot. If it's hot, it's gonna [ __ ] you up. No. Well, I think if it's held there long enough, it—right. So look, like it's one of those things like the walking on coals—absolutely—which I've done a number of times. I'm sure, but if you—it's cold, you know this, then that coals are not a very good conductive heat, which is why you don't cook on [ __ ] because—yes.

I'll tell you what my experience was. I, the first time I tried it, I was with a group of maybe 40 people, and it was a standard length of the fire walk was about twelve feet. It was a hot fire; was mesquite; it was in my yard in Tucson. And the guy came in—it was early in the days of fire walking—and he had this long—for our thing to get people ready. I was not in the right mental state when I did it, and my experience was it felt [ __ ] hot, and I got to the end of it—the—it condensed down to like a number of points that really burned, and I had blisters the next day. And most people that have walked that night—it looked like they were not in the right mental state, but I saw a few people who strolled that—look, they were in some interesting altered state. So I wanted to try it again. Next time I did it, I shouldn't have done it. I was with a guy who was a real jerk who thought himself as, you know, he's a self-styled guru; small group; it was a much shorter, maybe eight-foot, cooler bed of coals, and I got significant burns from that. So like an annoying guru. So it really annoys—no idea—you're like this guy's a jerk off, and then you're getting annoyed, so you're out of your mind set, right? And I burned my feet, so I said I'm not gonna do this again. And then a friend of mine was doing some intensive workshop with Tony Robbins, and—oh Christ—and it was gonna end—the last day they were gonna do—try to set a record for the longest fire walk done in America, so he wanted me to come up, so I went up there. I thought I'm gonna watch; I'm not gonna do it. So it was a 40-foot bed of coals, and it was really odd, and—and he had like a troop of African drummers, and people are dancing and drumming. It was like midnight, and people were getting in line to walk, and I said I'm not gonna do this—not gonna be my family—self, you know, going up there, and I was right there, and he taps me on the shoulder, says you're ready. It felt like walking through crunchy croutons; there was no sensation of heat. I walked slowly; I kind of wiggled my feet in the things, and when I got to the end of it, I felt so high; it was like on acid. I had energy rushes through my body; I had nothing on my feet. So on a much shorter, cooler walk, those coals conducted just fine, and you know, on this one, it's a mind-body thing; it's not about the conductivity of the coal. Tony Robbins hitting you with some Fugazi coals, whatever. I mean, you could barely get at the edge of the thing, man; the heat was amazing. You know, the Tony Robbins one—it's what's really interesting is recently they've developed this issue with people trying to take selfies while they're walking across the coals—not bringing their feet up—it's become a like significant issue because it didn't happen until like within the last—I never heard of that.

Yeah, I think that would get you right out of the proper stage. Yeah, there was a big article about it. That's a big article about these people really [ __ ] their feet up. Well deserved. Yeah. You really think that you have the ability to mitigate the amount of effect that a fire and cold—hot—cold—okay, don't have any proof of this—in my intuition, I think what happens if your mind is out of the way—mm-hmm—you can take—you can absorb energy and let it flow through your body rather than getting blocked in the tissues—hmm—where it causes damage. And I've seen this in—in other situations as well, and I think the problem is ordinarily our mind is in the way of that and does not let the body freely do that. Ooh. And I think that applies to things like getting hit really hard—heat—getting hit really hard. Huh? What do you mean getting—letting someone hit you as hard as they can with something that would cause damage, and it doesn't? Oh, that's crazy. No, it's not. I've experienced it. Yeah, I'm sure you have, but there are other real scientific studies that show that—nobody studied it. I'd love to study—nobody studied firewalking. You know, the usual scientific explanations—it seems like we probably shouldn't talk about this until they do—do studies because it seems so simple to do these studies, and I'm not buying it for a second. I think if I hit somebody, they're gonna—it's gonna [ __ ] hurt, right? If you get a while there to punch you so much. Tony Robbins talks to the common—common experience—drunks involved in car accidents don't get injured. Okay, but do you know why? Because they're totally relaxed. Yes. But that has nothing to do with some altered state of consciousness. Noel's not allowing the injury to actually—get us out of the way, and their body is totally relaxed. That's the tension of falling—you—you hurt yourself because you're defending yourself here, right? Right. You—your body is better off giving in to the—on—saying it's the same thing with the fire, but it can't be—that's a different thing because you're not tense—it's on this surface of your skin which is causing the heat. No, I think you're intense in your nervous system, which is not—let it—not able to absorb that thermal energy. Us and Brown—we're gonna do some studies—burn you—it's just—I think there's certainly—you can mitigate the sensation of pain. I don't believe that you can do anything about the actual physiological change to a hot piece of metal interacting with the tissue of your skin. I just think they're like the steak—does not know it's being cooked—it's just getting cooked—you're gonna get cooked—you are meat. I just don't—I don't buy that. I'll show you some of these studies on hypnosis. There's doctors right now going—yes, you've challenged Joe Rogan—this is nonsense. Well, I believe hypnosis. I do believe that, but I absolutely believe you can achieve different states of mind where you feel things differently—you—or your concentration—your relaxation is in a different state—your mind set is in a different state. I do not believe that you can change the physiological nature of your body's ability to absorb punishment—like a punch—kick. I—I do—and I—the same thing of absorbing the Sun—that—set some studies up. Sorry. How do we make these tests? I don't know—off to figure it out—we'll talk. You've been doing this forever—how do you know this? Should be like—you should have these studies already done. I know, but this is a significant—I—conversation point is if it's proven now—this is really huge. And if you could really take a hot metal rod—but—right out of the fire and touch someone's skin—they're in the right state of mind—you don't burn them—that would be giant.

Yes. Well, I—I'm telling you—you—I'll send you some literature on hypnosis that shows this—condom. I'm sure someone wrote some [ __ ] down. I'm sure. I want to see actual real studies. All right. I want to see—and I want it—I mean, in this day and age, there's no reason not to videotape it. But it's true. Yeah, true. Come on. All right. So my list—now a lot of stuff to do. See, this is a big one though. I mean, because this is something that—whoo-whoo people—healers—and you know—a lot of—a lot of people like to bring up, and when—when you press them on it, there's no evidence for it, and it's like—well, anecdotal evidence—well, I've heard—well, I work with a healer and he tells me—like—okay, okay. Do you know what the literal meaning of anecdote is? No. It means unpublished in Greek. It does not mean stupid. Not—we're not—any attention. So anecdotal evidence is often actually so—and it—and it inspires you to do the experiments. Okay. Will you go ahead and do that? All right. You good. I'll report that hot piece of metal on your—still report back. Yeah. And I'm gonna go look at that burn. I'll report back to you. Yeah. I mean, I'm not saying that anecdotal evidence is always inaccurate—it's most certainly accurate many times—sometimes—sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just as likelihood—it's not that it is—but nanoq total in of is what gives you hypotheses to test. Sure. But it's just not good enough to state—I—cracked—especially when something that doesn't make sense chemically. Yeah, physiologically it doesn't make sense, but I told you about my experience with Sun and suntan—that doesn't make sense. Do you know—you're tripping your balls off—and—yeah—and something happened in my body that would be interesting if that was—I'm sorry—change. Yeah, in your body's ability to produce melanin. Yeah, or what is it—melancholy? It's—how do you—how do you say—aniline aside—melanocytes—melanocytes. So you are—and they're controlled—you know, they're melanocytes are related to neurons, and they're—they're influenced by nerve connections, so it seems to be perfectly possible that mind—through the nervous system—changes the behavior of melanocytes—sort of like how your body can ramp up adrenaline and anxiety or any—there also can ramp up melanocytes. Yeah, that doesn't seem like outside the realm of possibility. That seems like—obviously—some people—when I first told it to you, you said it was outside the realm of possibility—not outside—but sounds crazy. Okay, definitely sounds crazy, but I mean, it seems like that would be something also that would really warrant study. Absolutely. Those poor pasty ass [ __ ] out there on the beach, okay, turning bright red like—oh man. I just gotta think about the right way, but you imagine if you just told people it was like a meditation and don't—and then you just get a nice tan. Yeah. Yeah, good thing. Yeah, it would be a good thing. Now, when it comes to what we were talking about—autoimmune issues—like I have—I have vitiligo—you see what's on my hands—where I don't get any pigment—you know how do I fix that? Huh? Fix that—my brain—you know, all I can tell you is that I would try to see if you—and influenced it through hypnosis or through guided imagery—just see if you can change it in any way. I don't know—hypnosis and guided imagery. Yeah, there are two mind-body techniques. I think any—it's worth trying. I did read once that there was this—I think it was a young man who had some awful—one of those awful wart diseases—and there was one called ichthyosis, which is like the holy lover—yes—calloused hard tissue—yes—and it went away—hypnosis. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Over time—I wrote that case too—they told him—they're like—his arm—that one arm was going to be cured—and it just like completely eliminated all the warts on that one—over that. Yeah. And they couldn't figure out how or why—and they couldn't recreate it. So the wart stuff—that's very well documented, you know, and—and what cures—there's so many different wart cures—some of them are quite funny. Yeah, you know, you have to—you have to cut a particular plant under the full moon and rub it and bury it—blah blah—and—but the wart falls off the next morning. And when you compare that to the way we deal with warts medically—we burn them off—freeze them off—cut them off—in most—the time we do that—they grow back in multiple clusters—when they get—when the mind gets rid of them through this method—they're gone. So we want to find out how to make that more—time. Yeah, that's real, right? I mean, this is—this is actual real documented science. Yeah. Yeah. That is what is so interesting to me about the placebo effect is that it is a real thing—yet your mind has this capability of healing itself in this very, very powerful way, but we don't exactly know how to turn it on or off, right? And it can do the opposite—there's a phenomenon called voodoo death—where in societies where there—witchdoctor—shamans—a malevolent witch doctor can curse a person, and the person goes home, lies in bed, stops eating, and over days or weeks—dies. Whoa. So what more could you ask for in the way of a—in my body effect? He put a curse on—what was the basketball team—they were talking [ __ ] about him—he put a curse on them, and they couldn't win a goddamn game. I had a few. Yeah, he's put a curse on a few different too—he's like a real—how would you say—spiritual—very positive—mostly like real love-oriented guy—but occasionally put a hex on a dude. Uh-huh. And when he puts a hex on you—got a real problem—on your heart—apparently it's been very effective—and people freak out when Lil B hex—ism—Lil B puts that hex on you—like damn it—and then he releases the hex—haha—he's lifted them—he lifts the—huh—and when he lifts them—everything goes back to normal. All right, this is weird, man. This is like a weird sock because everyone's aware when Lil B puts a curse on you. Uh-huh. And when he does—people are called—no, I can't believe this. Okay—like the idea of curses—like the—the, you know, a voodoo curse or a gypsy curse on you—that is a—well, that's the negative—cited—and as a name—it's called the nocebo effect—obnoxious rather than pleasing. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that is—that's a documented thing as well, right? The people that can believe that something is wrong with them, and then they start—mind—yeah—[ __ ] themselves into this terrible state. Yeah. And then they start screwing things up. Yeah. Yeah. Here it is—Kevin Durant says—I tried to listen to Lil B—my mind wouldn't let me do it—can't believe this guy's relevant. Okay—[ __ ] Kevin Durant will never win the title after he said Lil B is a wack rapper—the bass gods curse—hashtag—the bass God's curse on Durant—and then he always signs his tweets—Lil B—but it works—it works—Kevin Durant is sitting home right now thinking of the millions—a little bit—Mr. Cosby's on—what day is one now—it's—yeah—one now—but who could have bought a house with all their money—lost those years—a little be [ __ ] over in the corner—but that—I mean, I think the opposite is true too—so someone could put blessings on you—like there was a fighter that we had in here the other day—Deontay Wilder—he's the WBC heavyweight champion of the world—and he said that from the time he was a little boy—his grandmother had him convinced that he was like an anointed one—that he was special—and that she would always say that to his parents—like, you know, don't you hit him—like—this one's special—you know, he's gonna raise everybody up—and then he turned out to be like one of the great heavyweight champions ever—in terms of like his record—he's 40—you know—at 39 knockouts—and he's a phenomenally successful fighter—and in his mind—he believes that he has some like magic property—there's something to him—he's a ridiculous knockout artist—to me—obviously there's a lot of physiological aspects to that—he's a big—long—tall guy with crazy knockout power—you can't fake power—you either have it or you don't—but he's got it—and he's got this weird confidence too—and you gotta wonder how much of them actually is operating under this idea that his grandmother was right about him having some magical properties—and so he goes through life—his vision—yeah—powerful. Yeah. How you trick people into thinking that way—a whole nation—full—fathers—a nation full of—like—see that's why—that's why doctors are afraid of the placebo effect because they think it's tricking people—keeping them—yeah—and it's not—it's like—it's—you know—when—when you present a treatment to a patient—your belief in the treatment as a practitioner catalyzes the patient's believe—them—the best way I can do that is if I give a patient something that I've tried myself and I know from my own experience that it works—and then I can present it in a way with my confidence—and that increases the patient's confidence—and increases the likelihood of a favorable—even controversial therapies—yes—and even—you know—it can—example something—when we—when you give a pharmaceutical drug to a patient—I think there's—there's the direct effect of the drug—and then there's a halo of belief effect—and you know—an interesting phenomenon is that there's a famous saying in medicine that you should use a new remedy as much as possible before it loses the—to heal—and this is a common experience that drugs work best near the time of their introduction—that's also the case of diets as well.

Absolutely. And the longer they're around—you—what I think—what happens is—you know—people have faith in new things—mm-hmm—so there's a big halo—a placebo effect—yeah—over time—that shrinks—and it leaves the stuff on its own—which may not be very impressive. This is often the case when people take on a radical diet—like on opposite ends of the spectrum—whether it's a carnivore diet—aware that a lot of people swear it fixes anomalies—ails—or vegan diet—very similar effects—obviously very different diet. Exactly. Yeah. So it's the mind—the mind—the mind is where it's at. No. How do we—and the big problem in science and medicine is if we don't believe in the mind. No, that's what I was saying earlier when you were talking about—mind—it's not material—you know, it's not—that—this is the problem when you're talking about mind-body interactions or what cures—placebo effects—you're talking about a non-material cause of a physical event—and that is not allowed in the materialistic paradigm that dominates science. Yeah. When we observe a change in the physical system, the dogma is the cause has to be physical. When you talk about a non-physical cause of a physical event—scientists—too—now—well, that's really unfortunate because we know so much about how attitude does shape—yeah—the way your body reacts to things—going back to the Sarno stuff—you know—that—we're back pain—it's all that stuff—it's like—you know—that—that to me—that you can't separate the mind and body—there are two poles of the same thing. Well, if the placebo effect is real—it is documented—yeah, it's documented—so obviously something is going on with the way you feel about things and think about things—that's having an actual physiological effect—there's something happening to your body because the way you're thinking about it—right—happening to your body. Now, one of the things that has made this—you know—suddenly of interest in the medical world is that we now have these techniques like functional MRIs—yeah—PET scans—where we can observe living brains—and you can show that the placebo response is associated with particular activity in certain brain centers—that has made it real for people that otherwise didn't believe in it.

Mm. Yes. Right. Like there's a medically documented—there's something that you actually get a hook into. Yeah, you can—you could put it on a scale. Yes. Exactly. Yeah. What—what part of the brain is responsible for the placebo effect? Well, again, it's probably the—some of these deep brain centers—the same ones involved in sweat and swearing—you know—that—the same thing—it's coming from centers that connect to emotional—Reed—you know—to emotion—yeah—the ability to turn that on—off—consciously and willingly is tricky. Yeah. You know, another thing I looked at over the years was healing shrines in the world—like Lourdes—mm-hmm—the—there's two interesting facts about that—you know—the—over the years—the Catholic Church has accepted very few healings as genuine that are—have like full medical documentation—and some of them are quite spectacular—like miraculous disappearance of widely disseminated cancer. No native of Lourdes has ever been cured. And the chances that a person was going to be healed there—explained—Lourdes—this is a place—as a place in France where, you know, a—you know, a child saw visions of the Virgin Mary—and anyway—it's grown up into a—there's a grotto—and you know—it's now a major Catholic shrine—and it has a reputation for healing—and thousands and thousands of people over the years have gone there—so as I said—very—you know—there's relatively few reported healings that have been documented medically—but no native of Lourdes has ever been healed—and the—there's something called the Lourdes phenomenon—which is fascinating—that the chances that a person is going to be healed at Lourdes or a place like that is directly proportional to the length of the journey—travel to—yeah—I have heard that—so

The length of the journey is an investment of belief, right? So you're projecting belief onto the plate, place, and then you get it back. Yeah, that that seems like that could essentially work with any very, very difficult absolution quest type, absolute experience that you're going on. You're looking for something, and you'd have to earn it. Yeah, after your to be fully invested, there'll be something going on in the mind that has you convinced this is a real effect. But the power is not in the place; the power is in you know here. Hmm. And you're projecting it onto that. But man, wouldn't it be better if you didn't have to go all the way? Yeah, it's great. How do you get that going?

Like if someone said to you, okay, man, I don't want to go to Lourdes, but what should I do? Well, one is that you could imagine you're going to Lourdes, and that's taking advantage of this function of visualization. That's why these therapies like guided imagery seem to work. You can imagine something and have it become real. Guided imagery. Now, is there a specific, you know, if there's like transcendental medication, there's Buddha, you know, this is a formal, it's a formal system of therapy that people are trained in where you, you know, you sit with a practitioner and they help you explore your mental imagery and may give you specific kinds of images to work with, pending on the condition that you're dealing with.

I would think, knowing the fact that we, we have real evidence that the placebo effect works, why isn't there more study done to try, or more thought and more, more people that are trying to emphasize this ability of the terian? It's, we're up against this problem that in the dominant paradigm in science, in medicine, we don't believe in non-physical causation of physical events. But that doesn't jive with me because we do believe in the placebo effects. Like everybody says that, oh, it's just a placebo, right? You said that earlier, right? People always say that, but it still works, right? But, but we're not using it right. We should be using it; should be using them. It's the meat of medicine. We want to make it happen more at the time. It's just that we're so flawed in our approach.

It's really interesting, that's like the, the human body and the human mind is such an incredibly complicated biological entity, right? Our ability to consciously be aware of our, our life, our position in the world, our mortality, the, the insignificance of us in the greater scale, all those things are like, they're right now, all the time. But I don't have any user's manual, right? Exactly. We have this incredible machine that can invent nuclear bombs and satellites, and there's no user's manual; no user's manual for the mind, or the especially not in how to manage the body with the mind, nothing. Now they figured out this wide open if you're on your own. Yeah, few people have got, you got to like find these masters, right?

So if you think about the 300 and whatever million people we have in this country, how many of those people could guide you towards a proper integration of mind and body and a positive way of interfacing with reality that's beneficial to you physically, mentally, spiritually? Not many; there a dozen; not many. With all these human beings, and essentially most of them trying to improve in some way, nothing. People that fail on diets, boy, they'd like to get skinny. Even people that, you know, fail at school, why, I wish I was smart enough to graduate; I wish I had enough discipline. People, people want to do better, huh? So there's this vast need for coaching that would lead to improvement, yet almost, I mean, nothing to speak of, and certainly not nothing large-scale in any city that has this approach where, look, we are gonna teach you how to better engage with the, the material world around you and the, the better engage with reality itself that's gonna leave you more spiritually, physically, emotionally fulfilled, like that, that seems like that would be a big business. It would.

One way to teach this stuff is by example; that if a person exemplifies, you know, good mind-body functioning, they can inspire that in another person. That seems like maybe the only way; when one strategy that I, if I can do this, if I have a patient, if I can introduce that patient to someone who's had their condition, is now better, that is a very powerful way to up their belief in the possibility of getting better. Yeah, that makes sense, which is why people love user testimonials, right? But you, but better if you actually meet the person and show, hope, see for yourself. Yeah, but user testimonials are so huge for that reason. You know, I was skeptical at first, but then I tried it, boy, I call he was kept, it'll just like me. Yeah, it's to me, when I look at the giant number of people that are unhappy and displaced and just seem like they're left out of society, I was listening to, oh, it was Johann Hari on Sam Harris's podcast; they were talking about the number of people that are happy with what they do for a living. Mmm-hmm. Happy with what they do every day, and it was somewhere around 13%. Long, yeah. And then the number of people that were just like, it's okay, I just do it, like I don't hate it, but I don't love it, that was like in the 60%. And then the rest of the people [ __ ] hated what they did. So the vast majority, some ungodly number, you know, like 87% of people hate what they're doing. Oh, how sad. All right, if don't hate it, they don't want to be doing it, and they do it all the time. Yeah, that's crazy. You know, that, that has to have a profound effect on all aspects of your life, right? I like what I do; what you seem like you do. I do. You have a twinkle in your eye. We talked about it, but I mean, it's got to give you some satisfaction for sure, right?

Yeah, help all these people, absolutely. And also to see a lot of the things that I've, you know, believed for so long becoming more mainstream, it's good. Yeah, yeah. And much more so now than ever before; much more so than ever before. Yeah, when you were doing those studies in the 1960s and you thought that marijuana is gonna be legal in five years, how could you have ever, first of all, how could you have ever thought of the Internet, right? That's the big, right? The distribution of information. Sure, yeah. That's, that's really the big one, the decentralized distribution of information, and that's, that by the way, in medicine has real, it's one of the things that's most leveled the playing field between doctors and patients. Mhm. You know, it sort of ended the authoritarian, paternalistic kind of medicine that was when I grew up. Well, it is a problem, right? A patient comes, they think they know everything. Yeah, but I have seen, I have seen many, many patients who have gotten exactly the information they needed and were able to take it to the doctor who didn't know about it. I mean, I think on the whole, it's a really good thing. Oh yeah, for sure. No, no, for sure. I'm saying just like, I get how doctors be worn out by it all, right? You know, listen to me, I went to school, this is what it is. Well, it's good for, to have to let go of that. Yeah, well, I, there's no way you could know everything. True. I mean, especially doctors, they must know that they have a specialty for a reason, because the human body's so insanely complicated, there's no way anybody is a general specialist of every single aspect of medicine. But we need more generalists. One of the problems, we got too many specialists, and there's, yeah. So someone like, would you think of a generalist as someone who sort of guides you towards various specialists? I'm a general practitioner; I'm very proud of it. There's good data showing that states that have a higher number of prime of primary care physicians, family doctors, have better medical outcomes than patients with a high percentage of specialists. There are some specialties pay more, so we should be changing that; we should be providing financial incentives for people to go into general medicine.

Yeah, it also makes sense to, that by the time you get to a specialist, usually you're really messed up, you know, right? If you're going to a back specialist, you might have like a real situation, it's been bothering you for a long time, very, whereas you go, know a general practitioner for a check-up, this is my, you know, by annual checkup, you just kind of give you the once-over, making sure everything's okay, how you sleep and I eat and drinking, smoking cigarettes, what's going on, just give, get a sense of you. But they do, they have enough time, it's not a big issue. How much time do you spend when you, when you work with patients? I take an hour, and in our clinics, we do 90 minutes on the first session. That's got to be nice. 90 minutes, you can get to know some. Yeah, but if you're getting in and out of that office in 10 minutes, he's just, here's a prescription, get out of here, you know, next, you know, the, there's been studies on the amount of time in a medical encounter when a patient starts to talk, how soon the doctor interrupts the patient. You have any guess what that is now? 13 seconds. You're right. Really? Yeah, 13 seconds. I use the same number of people that are happy with what they do. Ah, there you go. That's pretty good. 13 seconds. Wow. Well, oh, my foot hurts, and I've been, wow, okay, here you go, shut the [ __ ] up, take this opium. Yeah, it's, have you ever eaten in a true Food Kitchen? What does that mean? It's a restaurant, True Food Kitchen. No, I don't know what that is. Well, it's a restaurant that I started; I was now 25 of them. No kidding. Got to in 2A now, LA, and where are they? One in Pasadena, where I'm gonna go after the show, and oh, I'm in Pasadena tonight. All right, you want to go to the comedy club? All right, what time? I'll be there for dinner if you want to come over there, True Food Kitchen. Yeah, it's great. It's my LA, you know, it's delicious, healthy food. It's a wonderful food that conforms the good nutritional principles; it's an anti-inflammatory diet, and there's something for everyone. There's like meat, there's vegan options, vegetarian, gluten-free. It's very delicious food, True Food Kitchen. It's become an incredibly successful restaurant concept.

Well, that's a great idea, to be able to serve people things that you know for a fact they're going to be healthy and nutritious, and not just taste good, but good for you. But primarily, it's food that looks great and tastes great; it happens to conform to good nutritional science. Yeah, that is possible, and that's a lot of people think you have to eat fried chicken and, right. Well, come in there, enjoy it. I would love to try it. All right, definitely. How do you eat for the most part? You said you eat fish, and you eat through the, I try to grow a lot of my own food. I love fresh stuff out of the garden. I like to cook, and I invent recipes, which is, you know, a lot of the recipes from the restaurant are mine. Oh, great. So I, I like simple, um, you know, simple quick preparations that are really good. Do you fast at all? I have been experimenting with intermittent fasting, and I haven't found the regimen that works exactly right for me, but I'm fascinated by it. I do a teen, or a 16 and 8. And how often do you do that? I try to do it four days a week. Uh-huh. You know, it's sometimes it's difficult when I travel. Yeah, but even then, I'm more accustomed to it than ever before. So if, you know, I eat dinner at eight o'clock at night, it's, it's not hard to wait. Okay, yeah, sound hard. My body's just really used to it now. How long you been doing it? About a year or so, maybe a little bit more than that. Yeah, I think, you know, that makes a lot of sense. And yeah, then you do experiment. What I haven't done that I really have been thinking a lot about doing is doing a multiple day fast, just a water fast. I've done that, where the longest I've done it for is three days. Yeah, how was that? The first day was difficult, or actually the second day was difficult; the third day, fabulous. You know, I know, energized, high, my mind working very clear. The problem that I have is how do you come off it? No, because it's like very easy to slide into eating, you know, to pizza, Krispy Kremes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think there's protocols in terms of like small amounts of fruit, right? Like, right when you're coming out. Yeah, blueberries, which, that's to me, that was to me was the tricky part was transitioning off it. Yeah, I get it, especially you feel like you earned it. I didn't eat for three days, you want that pizza, right? One of the things I found when I was doing it, having a bowl of matcha, I, I'm normally my pattern is I want to eat as soon as I get up, so that those morning hours are hard for me. But if I have, you know, have my matcha, that helps. Do you exercise? I do. I swim mostly. I walk every day. I find that once my body got used to fasted exercise, you know, it became much, much easier. Uh-huh. Yeah, what, in it became like, before I would almost have anxiety attached to it, like I can't work out without food. I have to eat. Uh-huh. And then when I started doing the intermittent fast, and then I started doing fasted exercise, I think it was, I'm sure I prefer, if you probably measured me in terms of like, you did a bunch of like weightlifting exercises and measured my output, I probably would be able to lift more weights if I had some fruit first. Uh-huh. I'm pretty sure I'd have a little bit more energy measurable, but it's not difficult to have a vigorous workout in the morning when your fasted; you just got to get used to it. Mm-hmm. You know, I often do either hot yoga or run the first thing in the morning. Weightlifting seems to be a bit of an issue; weight, weightlifting, I don't like, I like to eat something before I lift weights. Well, yeah, but swimming, about you, it was fast, it swing. Yeah, I have, I thought that's fine. Yeah, a problem with it now. Why did you get off the pot? You know, it changed for me in, I really used it regularly in my 20s and 30s, and when I first started using it was great. I mean, I was like, hilarious highs, laughing, you know, right, a lot of, then, then it turned after several years, more introspective, you know, and an interesting, like creative, my writing for helping, writing stuff like that. And then gradually it transitioned into making me groggy and not doing much for me, and for, you know, it took me a while to separate myself from it, but in the last year's of it, it was groggy and sedated. I think I changed; my body changed. That's interesting. Have you ever tried different strains? I have. First, I don't like the smoke because, you know, I'm really into breathing, and I just, given smoke in the way long, right? I've tried vaping; I don't, I just don't like the effect of it these days. Vaping. Yeah, I just like the effect, you know, I don't like oral feels, you know, it's too strong for me. Yeah, well, when you're talking about that half of a half a grain of sand, yeah, putting you on Pluto, I imagine that that would be like acid. Yeah, it was, felt like acid. Yeah, well, boy, I'll tell you, for me, the most profound and intense experience I ever have in the sensory deprivation tank are edible marijuana. Mmm, edible marijuana in that tank; that combination is just whoa, huh? A real strong dose, because have you done the tank at all? Yeah, but not with, not with pot, not with psychedelics. And that's long time ago. Yeah, well, even sober, you have some pretty out-trippy experiences while you're in there. But there's something about the, what I experienced with edible marijuana is that when you close your eyes, you get a lot of really cool visuals. Like I've had it before when I take pot and then get on a plane, like I'll eat, right, right when I park my car at the airport or when I'm leaving the house, then it kicks in when you're on the plane, like, right, closing your eyes, something about closing your eyes, the, you have like really brightly covered, colored visuals oftentimes, and I get that a lot inside the tank, huh, with, with marijuana, huh? I had that with that real strong stuff, I definitely a lot of visual stuff. Yeah, that's what's weird about it, right? It's like, it does become a psychedelic. Yes, especially at high dose, in, why are they making that stuff so strong? Catarina trice, unnecessary weight. How many milligrams did they say it was? I don't, we, this ever wasn't much because they've got these damn Chiba chooses, they're like 500 milligrams for one little cake, one little thing like that, back 500 milligrams, like, why do you need that? Because you started out with 10 and worked your way up to 500. I guess there's a tolerance issue with a lot of folks, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you, um, do you regularly meditate, or? I do. Yeah, every morning. What kind of meditation? I first practice Zen, and then I took some of the pasta training, and now I, you know, I get up, I sit down, I do my breathing routine, and then I just try to focus on body sensations and sounds in the room, and when I'm caught up in my thoughts, I just bring my attention back to my breathing. Mm-hmm. But, you know, for me, I think that the sitting, sitting meditation, that's fine, but I think the goal is to be able to carry that state in all of your activities, right? So for me, cooking is meditative, you know, chopping vegetables, working with knives, and that's very meditative for me. So when do you think that when you're having this meditation, whether it's Zen or whatever, that you're, you're resetting the way you're gonna go through life for the rest of the day? Hopefully. I mean, goals, not just a, know the guys to carry that state throughout the day. Well, you kind of have a responsibility, don't you agree? Like you're a guy who's teaching people how to live a more productive, healthier life, you kind of have a responsibility to live your own productive, healthy. Yeah, I better, right? Yeah, I wouldn't feel right doing that if I didn't practice it. It's slippery, right? Yeah, but I don't tell people to do things that I don't do myself. Do you, when you have some thoughts about things like something like iboga, would you be interested in trying it yourself, or? Yeah, yeah. I haven't had an opportunity to do it. It's supposed to be ruthlessly introspective. Uh-huh. I've never done it either, but I've had, I've had friends who had pill problems, so you know, who did it and cured them, but they said the ride is just 24 hours of like, what in the [ __ ] am I doing? And then once it's over, you have zero desire. No, the way that it's used traditionally in Africa, the route, it's these tribes, the user that's hunters take it, and they remain motionless for many hours on it. Mmm, animals come close. I mean, I'd always fascinated me. Hmm. Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah, I wonder if taking it from the root, I wonder if they have a, if it's, they're getting the exact same experiences they're getting in these clinics. I don't know. Yeah, it's just to me, in terms of efficacy, if you look at the recidivism, the rates of relapse, rather, yeah, I mean, their survival, yeah, it's crazy, right? How successful that stuff is. It, yeah, and yet, you know, nobody wants to talk about that. These are all these clinics, like, it's crazy how many rehab clinics there are; they, we need you for six months. Yeah, really? Mexico says they kill it all in three days. I'd go down there and get into an iboga clinic. Yeah, I want to find out more about it. Yeah, on my list. But listen, man, thanks for being here. Thanks, thanks for the information that you've shared over the years. I want you to do studies; I'm burning yourself. Well, and getting punched. I will report back to Will and tell people how they can find out about you. What is your website, social medias? My website is dr.wild.com, dr.w-e-i-l.com, and also check out integrativemedicinearizona.edu, which is my academic website, see the range of that, and matcha.com for high-quality matcha, and we have a special offer for your fans if you go to matcha.com/pages/mediabox to [Music]