Andrew Huberman - Neuroscience, Sleep Hacks and Mental Health Improvements | SRS #147

[Music] Dr Andrew huberman welcome to the show thanks I'm super happy to be here I'm a huge fan of your show have been from the beginning and um I'm just excited to get into it man thank you for saying that I've been following you for a long time and I also am a huge fan of everything you're doing and um we got a lot to dive into but but I wanted to I had a whole outline that I wanted To do and then um and then I found a little bit about your backstory and I

thought that's kind of what we do here it's backstories that's how it all started and and uh I didn't realize you have a a quite interesting quite the interesting backstory and and and uh it didn't sound like it was easy for you growing up so I'd like to kind of start there cuz I think that brings a lot of Hope to to to everybody but especially to kids that are growing up and and a in A in a tough environment and uh and then we'll get into a lot of the medical stuff but um everybody

starts off with an introduction so Andrew hubman PhD you are a neuroscientist and tenear professor in the Department of Neurology neurobiology and by courtesy Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford School of Medicine you have made numerous significant contributions to the fields of brain development brain function and Neuroplasticity which is the ability of our nervous system to rewire and learn new behavior skills and cognitive functioning you're the offer of the upcoming book protocols an operating manual for the human body when's that going to come out by that uh April of 25 that sounds incredible uh your

work from the huberman labs at Sanford school of medicine has been published in top journals including nature science and cell has been and has been featured in Time BBC Scientific American discover and other top media outlets in 2021 you launched the huberman Lab podcast frequently ranked in the top 10 of all podcasts globally you're probably the without a doubt in my opinion the most famous and and and most listened to neuroscientist ever and uh and something else I want to bring up is uh a a new found faith in Christianity I'm on that Journey right

along with you it sounds like um our buddy Eddie Penney Made a Major Impact in both of our lives and I just I love that guy he's an amazing human I love Eddie and I'm very grateful to him incredible human being and loved your episode with Eddie here thank you thank you but um next we just uh I have a patreon account I um they are top supporters they've been with us since the beginning and one thing that I do is uh I just I give them the opportunity to ask each guest a question we

had a ton of interesting questions uh For you but I narrowed it down to one I thought this was um really important uh a great question this is from Matt with the rise in suicide among the youth since the dawn of social media how can teens and young adults or anybody uh reset their chemical imbalances being overloaded with dopamine from all the social media sites video games fast food binge watching TV and other facilitators of instant Gratification great question critically important question um there has to be self-imposed discipline but it doesn't have to be in

every domain of one's life right people need to get their relationship to light sunlight and darkness correct this might sound silly but there is a beautiful study that substantiates what I'm about to say there's a study done on over 80,000 Subjects out of the UK the conclusion is essentially the following getting enough sunlight early in the day and yes even when it's cloudy out there's sunlight just compare how bright it is during the daytime to nighttime even on a cloudy day folks getting some sunlight in your eyes and bright light maybe also from artificial sources

throughout the day and then keeping it dark at night night it doesn't have to be pitch black but on Most nights between the hours of 11:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. unless you're doing shift work and we could talk about that you know thank you shift workers but keeping it dark at night and getting light in your eyes during the day has been shown additively to offset many of the negative effects of things like depression OCD ADHD bipolar disorder in other words just keeping your room darker at night when you're trying to sleep Has a positive

effect on mental health getting light in your eyes especially sunlight early in the day and throughout the day tremendously positive effect on mental health okay people will start negotiating can I do it through a window can I look at a video of a sunset no you go outside you get some sunlight in your eyes without sunglasses Eyeglasses and Contacts are fine you're setting your physiology right this circadian this 24-hour schedule that we're on is Dictated by light through the eyes at particular times of day and darkness other times of day eyelids closed the use of

phones and screens while fantastic right it's done amazing things for our progression as humans and communication is disrupting our circadian schedules and health in particular mental health it's not just the content people are receiving on these devices it's also the Light itself it's also the content but the light Itself so get that right it requires no cost and it sets things in the right direction this the second thing would be while getting that morning sunlight if you're not already exercising in in the morning you want to walk just walk in a circle if you have

to walk towards the sunlight okay the these aren't complicated things they don't take a lot of time they take no Financial cost okay no money then it would be wise to get some Exercise early in the day right joo's right on this one okay maybe you don't have to do it at 4:30 but being an early riser and getting some activity early in the day and and sunlight in your eyes does a bunch of things you have a pulse of cortisol every 20 24 hours a quote unquote stress hormone it's not a bad hormone it's

a great hormone but you need it released at its highest levels early in the day how do you do that sunlight in your eyes increases that Peak by about 50% if you're not doing that you start running into trouble exercising and getting sunlight in your eyes early in the day times that cortisol Peak we know from studies at Stanford School of Medicine by a guy named David Spiegel and the great Robert spolski that if that cortisol Peak is shifted later in the day you start getting symptoms of depression anxiety failure to sleep and the whole

thing Cascades so when I say discipline I Could list off 20 things that one could and should do but this Mental Health crisis has to be attacked at two different levels and two very disperate sides I'm describing the first one your phys you got to get your physiology right get that cortisol Peak early day sunlight will also promote dopamine epinephrine all of that get some activity early in the day get a rope or a jump rope and skip rope looking at the sun if you have to like it do some People say burpees then people

start arguing about burpees but some exercise and sunlight early in the day and of course then some hydration then at night most nights it's fine every once in a while to go out and have a good time but most nights you want to try and get it dark wear an eye mask if you need to throw a t-shirt over your eyes if you're like me if it's not not dark enough in the room you don't need anything fancy here and work on getting 6 to8 hours of Sleep some people can get away with five some

people can't can't sleep that much some people need more but get that right and when people do that for 3 4 days it's remarkable how much better they feel it is it is astounding you start making better choices about how often to be on your phone with social media you actually start limiting that time you start making better choices about what you eat about who who you interact with what you say and don't say what you do And don't do you start to explore whether or not you need dosages of stimulant that are as high

as the ones that you're currently taking and being prescribed or whether or not you could eventually taper off I'm not suggesting anyone go off medication they need right you start looking at alcohol differently because it disrupts your sleep you start looking at other practices like learning and reading okay so the getting your physiology right sets the ball in motion And then as we'll probably come up multiple times during today's episode you need some some tool to learn to calm your mind right your mind is going to school nobody has a mind that's calm all the

time and focused when they want it to be and falls asleep perfectly every night nobody gets gets that no human being gets that okay so you have to put some work into it that involves doing maybe it's 5 minutes of meditation a day I'm a big believer in prayer I think That combines a number if not all of the features of the things that we hear about like meditation and all these other things into a a practice that if you spend some time with it I think it can be very useful okay I'm not here

to push that I just know that to be true so get your physiology right and the rest will start falling into place and you know the online culture my podcast your podcast Rogan podcast and other podcasts Is replete with information about how to exercise right how to eat right how to do all these things building your social connections which are also vitally important but if you're not getting your physiology right the rest isn't going to work it's just not going to work you're going to have a very hard time sticking to anything so the Mental

Health crisis is going to be cured first by taking care of our core physiology starts with light sleep daytime behavior of course Then hydration nutrition exercise and all of that but it starts with getting those things right and then if you're inclined it makes sense to explore a spiritual leaning that can mean different things to different people but if you're willing to explore those two areas I'm willing to bet that within weeks if not months you can make substantial progress and people start to feel that sense of agency like whoa this is wild I'm sleeping

a little bit better And I'm feeling a lot better I'm sleeping a lot better and I'm feeling a lot better and all of a sudden you can make better choices trying to find one choice in the daytime that's going to change everything that's futile yeah you might as well be asking for one pill that's going to change everything yeah and if you don't think you can do this then the the physiology stuff then start on the prayer side and pray for it and then going that way whatever it takes to Try and explore this um

do it that's my message because it absolutely can be done man it doesn't sound like it takes much I mean it doesn't it's the consistency and people are accustomed to doing something that quote unquote works the first time and every time and there are certain practices that we'll discuss during today's discussion I'm sure that like can calm us down very quickly that work the first time and every time because they're grounded in physiology But these things like getting a good night's sleep getting sunlight it at first it's subtle and then pretty soon you start to

notice yeah I'm waking up and feeling more energized during the day I don't need quite as much caffeine or I don't need you know I'm finding that like yeah time on social media is great I mean I teach on social media and so of course I I I like social media and I like content on there including some silly content but you know do I really Need to spend that much time with this or like or this is kind of robbing me of of some key life do you know how much time you spend on

social so I have a new practice now where I have a phone with Instagram and x on it and that's it no one has the number and if I need to post I aird drop things on there and I post but by virtue of that I know exactly how much time I spend on there and it's about an hour and a half but I'm also posting quite a bit on there but that's An hour and a half where you know I know that you know one could be writing or you know building out business but

for me that's part of my business because I'm obviously in online culture and podcasting it's about an hour hour and a half that's really good you know and having a separate phone for it really helps because no when people send me things I can't look at it I have to send those on to my other phone so there's a barrier there but you know I'm not here To demonize onl culture I you know my profession is online culture but um or part of it but this Mental Health crisis starts with people understanding that they can

take control of their physiology and they can take control of their their mind and it sounds so complicated but it's actually not how long did it take you to how how fast did that work I've thought about doing this I've attempted a couple times and then it just falls off but I'm just curious When you did the too phones thing how long did that take to like go into effect was it oh yeah within a day or so because then i' look at my other phone and remember oh you know Instagram and and X aren't

on there but like this morning it's going to sound like I'm name dropping but his name will probably come up a bit because he's a close friend and he has a lot of wisdom that I I take the liberty of sharing you know like Rick Rubin sent me something from X And it went to the phone that he has and um I had to go look it up on X on my other phone there it was worthwhile he sent me something interesting so I looked at it most of the time if people send me things

I may or may not get around to seeing them yeah but I am pretty good now at communicating on text I actually found it more difficult before I couldn't keep up with all the text and I think it's because social media and text were kind of interwoven M And just kind of get lost in it someone sends you to social media then you're on social media then you're back to text I mean it's all all kind of a mess my mind's just not organized enough to be able to keep these things all in the same

place I don't think anybody's this I don't know I mean you you you like spec ops guys cuz I know a fair number people from your community you guys you guys are really squared away like I I need to really create Tunnels for myself To be able to do the work that I I need to do yeah and um because I also try and maintain a healthy you know personal life and and maintain friendships and things I really have to like create some separation so having social media separate is is key it's really key thank

you for saying that if you try it it'll probably probably only take a couple days I'm going to do it again because it's like a computer for social media and for people that can't Afford two phones I always say wait till you almost you know go to an old phone and just put on your old phone y y makes a lot of sense you can even take pictures with your new phone if you like that phone camera and then just aird drop them onto that phone and then post yeah you really start to see oh

I'm spending an hour a day or an hour and a half a day my team's been trying to get me to do this now Now's the Time but um well Andrew let's move into I'd like to Move into your backstory like I said it sounds um a little rough very interesting and I think it could uh really bring a lot of Hope into the world especially you know from where you went to where you are today is uh very profound and significant so where did you grow up yeah so to be clear my the early

part of my life was pretty darn easy far easier than for most so my dad's from Argentina he's a first generation immigrant to the US he came To the US on a naval scholarship he wanted to do physics there was no money to do physics in Argentina so he came to the United States to do graduate school he met my mom who lived in New York City my dad was living in Philly they paired up moved to California had me and my sister I've got an older sister three years older so from the time I

was born I was born in 75 until the time I was about 11 or 12 things were pretty awesome we had dinner together every Night as a family um neither of my parents have or had any substance abuse issues um it was a very peaceful loving home I mean we had our squabbles and our things but it was a really kind of magical upbringing I you know my dad's a physicist so he got me excited about science I was really interested in biology I also really like soccer swimming we grew up in a small town

which at that time there was no Silicon Valley I grew up in the South Bay what They used to call the peninsula so it was a place where you know there's big pack of boys in the neighborhood maybe 15 of us who all had most had older sisters that were my sister's age so it's kind of Perfect Right ride dirt bikes dirt Cloud Wars it was just fun you know it was it was really cool and um and then right about the time that um puberty rolled around so I puberty somewhere around 1314 around there

um my parents went through uh a very high Conflict divorce um back then divorce was a lot more rare I think I was one of only a couple of kids in my high school that um whose parents were divorced just didn't know that many kids with divorced parents back then they called us latch key kids remember that like you let yourself in at the end of the day after school that you were a latch key kid back then if your parents were divorced they called that a broken home you know this will be a foreign

concept to most People now but you know and I've seen a lot of people get divorced and um do just fine you know we have uh family members who are divorced and they managed that really well my parents unfortunately despite being well-meaning people it got really messy um you know there's a rule book when parents get divorced you don't bad talk to the other parent you don't let the kids get scared about the future uh you maintain oversight unfortunately those things Didn't happen and so um you know I was a 13 14 year old kid

I've always been I I wouldn't say like emotionally sensitive kid in the like um but I was tuned into to the world you know in a way that like things are intense for me if I like something I really loved it when I was a kid I love fish tanks I was like building fish tanks constantly spend all my time in an aquarium store then it was tropical birds then I hit puberty and then it was like skateboarding girls and You know whatever I'm into I'm like really into MH so right about the time I

hit puberty my parents split up they were fighting a ton um I developed a lot of ideas about which parent was at fault this whole thing and basically I stopped paying attention to school I was I was depressed I think I was anxious scared and depressed and my life at home was really complicated my mom had a really hard time dealing with that separation she was very family oriented and it was Just me and her at home and we got along but it was um I just remember as a honestly a really like dark time

I remember being super scared being super angry at my dad it just like livid at him um why did they get divorced if you don't mind me ask yeah I think it could you know the the classic irreconcilable differences um I don't I don't know I think that it was um they wanted different things you know these kinds of uh you know messages that you hear um I Think it was different values I think fundamentally different values so at 145 all the kids in my school I I went to a very academic Ally ambitious School

the school is gun high school with two ends it's also the school that's Infamous for having one of the highest suicide rates at one time really yeah so it's a very academically intense school I lived over the fence from pressure lot of pressure kids were killing themselves by standing in front of trains on the train tracks In pal Alto at a frequent enough basis that it was covered by national media wow fortunately this has been resolved as far as I understand when I went there it wasn't like that now there two schools in the town

where I grew up the other school tended to be children of kids that were a lot wealthier kids that went to my school tend to be the children of you know upper middle class or middle class aspiring Physicians and doctors people associated with the University nearby that kind of thing at 1415 I just remember being pretty depressed having a lot of frustration in me um and not feeling certain at all about my home life and just being very very sad confused and filled with hormones and all the things that go with being a young male

so pretty quickly what happened was I stopped paying attention to school I started um hanging out with a group of really good kids skate mostly Skateboarders this was in the early 990s skateboarding late 8 late 80s early 90s so ' 8990 991 skateboarding wasn't a cool sport back then like no one cared about skateboarding um and we started going going up to San Francisco there was this community of at that time mostly guys now there're a lot more girls and women skateboarding but it was bunch of young dudes at a place called Embarcadero the famed

embb which was a basically Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco and you could go there on a weekend and there'd be like hundreds of kids skateboarding drinking drugs fights and I want to emphasize this amazing skateboarding I mean I remember the young Rob Rob Deer dick coming through for one of the back to City contests my friend Lavar McBride amazing skateboarder there was young Mike Carroll Henry Sanchez these names are like legendary Chante Turner so I was exposed to some amazing skateboarding And I was exposed to and and very quickly found myself in a community

of kids that also we weren't parentless but we had no parental oversight and if we did have parents they couldn't control Us in fact I pretty quickly realized a lot of the kids were who were at Market Erol on the weekend were there all week long just didn't go to school and so I started getting into the truy thing I was like well just not going to go' and you know that kind of rebellion isn't Good because you start getting exposed to more and more things like drugs and fights and you're also not in school

there's some basic learning that the brain needs at that age and I was going to class putting my hoodie on going to sleep you know skateboarding I could tell you more about the curbs in the park lot parking lot of my high school at that time than I could about any class that I took I like the creative writing class but then little Ceramics Some autoshop um you know I I liked the science courses good biology class that kind of thing but I just wasn't focused and so year you know a year goes by and

you can fall pretty far behind yeah what also started happening is um I was lucky that that crew of kids that I skateboarded with were not into drugs and alcohol we really lucked out that wasn't my thing never really was but some of those kids got really good at Skateboarding really fast my friend Paul zanic was soon a pro skateboarder our friend Aaron Curry was a good skateboarder he eventually became graffiti artist unfortunately he passed but really good artist um and some of these other kids whose names I rattled off were had prom modles when

we were in high school I kept getting hurt I think I had hit puberty but my body wasn't strong yet so I kept breaking my foot my left foot and um it was super depressing And so over time like I'm you know I'm kind of like failing out in the skateboarding thing I'm not doing well in school my home life is really dark and depressing and I'm pretty intense kid and I'm like I'm starting to kind of spiral down and I didn't really see it and I don't know if anyone around me saw it but

somebody saw it because at one point they called me into the office at school kind sat me down they're talking to me this mind you this is all Pretherapy pre Goodwill Hunting comes out you know and I'm thinking like what is this and I'm just like you know and then pretty soon I realized that they're going to try and take me away I just got it like it's something clicked and I realized okay that guy in there they're going to try and take me away so they tried and failed at first first and then they

tried and succeeded they put me in a residential treatment program this was not juvenile hall okay but this is place Up on the peninsula and you're in there with a bunch of other kids and I remember what did they take you away for they so they they made it all about not being safe to my S kind of thing depressed you know I think I was that depressed I think I I think was that visible to me I didn't see it because the moment I was out of school and I was pushing on my skateboard

or taking the 7f bus up to San Francisco I was having the best time I mean kids Don't do this but you know I'm I was doing things like forging signatures to go off to the Reno Nationals I mean I was decent enough at skateboarding that I got to go to some contests and you know but when you're at a skateboard contest in the late 80s early 90s it's all dudes and so guys in their 20s who are also kind of from similar background as me right they're the adults you know we were staying in

hotels in Reno and partying and other guys are partying and You starting to get exposed to more and more right there's a lot going on there I didn't observe too many hard drugs but it was just wild we were a bunch of young kids basically trying to parent ourselves and that's not going to work skate camp at viia skate camp in the summer I remember thinking like why would I pay to go to skate camp I'm just going to go so we just found someone to drive us we just went and we just like crashed

in the you know now there's so There's a light and a dark part of all of it because first of all I had great friends in the skateboard Community I wasn't one of the super talented ones but I had a real community of people that cared about me a guy who now I'm friends with this will come back around in a moment guy named Jim Theo he is partial owner of a company called Deluxe which has anti-hero and spitfire wheels and Thunder Trucks he's been around for a long time he's a real um Power Player

In that industry I'll never forget he rolled up to me at Embarcadero one time and he sat down with me and he gave me a cup of coffee I was like 14 and he was like talking to me and he could tell I was you know like a lot of the guys there just unhappy kid and we talked about skateboarding a little bit he gave me some stickers and he goes you should write and I'm like what do you mean he's like you should just like Journal it Helps I was like okay and then he

had a couple of poetry books well he'll say bad poetry for me these were really important books he gave me two books one was called loose change the other one was called do the distance I still have loose change and I read th those journals it was like kind of like Punk poetry Journal stuff and I remember thinking like this is like a Lifeline for me I didn't realize that you could have all the stuff going on in your head And write about it and it could help somebody so I started journaling a lot back

then then what happened was yeah they got pulled out of school they took me away okay and what was the reason was it Depression was it that it's basically treny I wasn't going to school so it was either kind of just fall into some sort of foster system which they weren't going to do they weren't going to take me away because it was things weren't that bad at home right but I had a good Friend my friend Aaron Curry he eventually Aaron King changed his last name he was in he was a foster kid that

I knew and I remember him telling me before I left he was like he was like don't screw up in there because the next step is way way worse and he'd been through the whole system thing okay so um so I got there and I remember thinking this sucks you know a I'm separated from my skateboard and my friends the only two things that I cared About right and that I felt cared about me although I understood my parents cared about me like they were dealing with their own stuff couldn't get through to me and

all of a sudden you're in there with all these other kids and they had to sit down and they're like okay there was probably about 15 kids and they're like you're going to do group therapy and I'm like you know I'm like are you kidding I wasn't like a hard kid like like you and I know and You're probably one of them I don't know but like you and I know like actual tough guys like I've Got Friends now in life that are parts of different groups of life I don't want to mention it just

because it's not healthy to do but that are like actual tough guys that grew up really hard circumstances and they're tough and you and I both know that these are like the kindest most principled people that you'll ever meet because they know where and when to direct their Not niess right so I wasn't like a tough guy but I was a kid who was pretty like strapped up and I wasn't going to get into discussing my problems with these other people but then they start you start going around the circle and you start realizing like

oh there's a lot of commonality here some of the kids were already into drugs like LSD and harder drugs It Wasn't Me Right some of them had dealt with a lot of atome physical and sexual abuse that wasn't me so I Also got to see where I was doing better in life than a lot of people so I got to see that and hear it and like feel it cuz all you have to do is hear about that once as from somebody who's going through that and you go okay I got problems but like also

you know once when I was a kid I worked at a skateboard shop in downtown paloalto um there was a guy there who came at me like propositioned me I was like 14 I bleach bleach white hair and I don't Know maybe he just I don't know he maybe thought he read a signal that I was somehow less uh scary than to approach or something like that so he came at me and I and I exploded on him exploded yelled at him you know like stood up for myself so I I never had anyone like

violate me or anything I felt very lucky in fact I remember my mom caught word of that happening my biggest fear because she's from New Jersey is that she was going to go down there and kill Him so she said to me did something happen today you know because I and I was like no no it's all good and she's like really and I was like No And I was just like oh my God like I was really I was like I thought she'd kill him so anyway um she's tough lady protective you know I'm

grateful for that right I mean nobody got hurt in that situation so I'm grateful people probably have their ideas about what she should and shouldn't have done but like that's how It went down so I'm in this place and people are talking about stuff and I'm thinking like why am I here I don't even know why I'm here like I just didn't even I didn't understand and they started explaining like look you haven't been to class in ages when you do go you're not turning your homework I'm like and you know I was just kind

of like cocking kid and and I feel very lucky now looking back you know it the situation sucked cuz I'm like how do I Get out of this place it turns out one of the counselors there explained you get out by doing the program by participating and what I came to realize was I had problems for sure um but I didn't have the kind of problems that were um ins insurmountable and that I better get myself squared away or I was going to be in trouble like I needed to stop looking at my circumstances and

I needed to like start Taking some control of my life how old were you at this point I was 14 damn Donald Trump is officially the next president of the United States of America while millions of Americans are cele ing the victory thousands of others are still concerned about their savings the unfortunate truth is we still have a 35 trillion doll debt the interest on that debt could now be larger than our entire defense budget for the first time in history plus the wars that started During the Biden Administration are still raging across the globe

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got appointed to this this guy who fortunately was like within a half mile of my favorite skateboard spot the front five so people it's like five stairs Everyone would congregate there after school and we'd skate there so I could go to his office and um we sat down and we just started we would talk about stuff and he broke through right he broke through in the way that at least was going to make sense to me he was like well skateboarding seems important to you but you should probably have something where you don't get hurt

also so I started doing a little bit of like push-up and running and things like that Taking care of myself a little bit and he was like you should keep journaling right and you should understand that you know there isn't a lot of Parental oversight and home life for you right now but that like if you take care of yourself it'll eventually get better now the good thing is I had people like him and some other people that tried to reach out to me the bad news is there were a lot of other forces in

my life pulling me in another Direction so I'm Still in this big group of feral young males so I end up with you know a pregnant girlfriend I end up with you know a bunch of fights I end up with a bunch of problems basically that I brought on myself you had a pregnant girlfriend yeah at what age uh 16 yeah your your child yeah I'm sorry how old did you say I was 16 [ __ ] man and you know I couldn't blame anyone else for that I how did youal deal with that Particular

I didn't tell anyone we didn't tell anyone and um yeah this is the first time i' ever really talked about this um you know you're 16 you think you understand the world you know here's how I did deal with it I figured um I'll eventually need to take care of people I'll what am I good at okay by then I realized I wasn't good at skateboarding a lot of my friends in the skateboarding industry like Jim Theo Started companies he's a good skateboarder but he had the wisdom to start companies so I thought I could

start a company cuz I'm not gonna be a pro skateboarder that was clear um I remember my team manager at Thunder Spitfire that named Steve rugie shugie we called him um now he's sober back then he he smoked a lot of weed so I remember calling him from the residential program I got one call and I go shrew I'm locked up here and he goes Man you're the most normal guy I I know and he goes why are you calling me and I go sure I don't know what to do and he goes I can

barely take care of myself and um I'm like oh shrew what do I do and he goes I don't know man just like work the program don't piss anyone off or something like that but Steve was nice enough to put me on Thunder and spitfire out of sympathy okay but at one point I remember a Conversation with him that broke broke my heart it was on the phone I called him I was like Hey shrew I didn't get my package of wheels or this that and he goes listen man you're never going to be one

of the big guys and I remember like as a 15-year-old kid just being like Oh my God you I I thought my life was over this is the only thing I cared about was skateboarding it was the only thing that like I could kind of partially do and you know and looking back I'm like of Course I should have been in school like studying them and they they tell amazing thing about school is they tell you exactly what you need to know it's like so obvious but back then that's not where I was at so

you know so I had the you know the girlfriend thing the the fights then I started dabbling in some drugs what kind of fights fights like that guy is eyeballing me dumb fights like stupid stupid fights some of them were a little bit like less stupid like That person's not taking care of their dog so I'm going to ask if I can have their dog and they're going to say no and then just stupid knucklehead stuff just looking for it later there was a fight that was kind of the defining one that is a little

more complicated that we can get into but I don't know if I was looking for it I think what happened it was it was also incredible because I I'm like about 61 I was 61 then but I was about 150 PBS so I was like a skinny Kid skateboard kid right and I remember just thinking like I'm not a grown man I can't protect myself I'm not that good at fighting there's a guy uh people will laugh and he'll probably have a good chuckle there was a guy that we used to call the mayor of

embb James Kelch and this guy could fight and he get in fights all the time especially if he was drinking he's also a really great skateboarder now he's squared away I think he lives in Ohio with his family He's a good dude he was always cool to me but like if you rolled up there to in baradero and you showed a little too much attitude it didn't matter if you were a pro skateboarder from another city they'd beat you up there are some famous funny stories and not funny stories about that it was a rough

environment they'd also Rob tourists and like dude terrible [ __ ] you know but the people that did the bad stuff were not really the skateboarders they were the People that kind of hung around it so it's kind of like Washington Square Park had this that was kind of the basis of that movie kids which by the way I had a couple friends in you know Lavar McBride was in that movie right like no kidding oh yeah yeah when I saw the movie I haven't even heard that movie until I don't know how long when

I saw that movie I was like that's Lavar I think Nick lockman's in there too and I you know and Harold Hunter's in there um Harold's dead now sadly you know that's a weird movie for a lot of reasons it would never go be released by today's standards but um it was a window into just kind of feral Street kids right who weren't from the inner city right and who weren't in the military it was just kind of this like mishmash of late 80s early 90s so what happened was you know I was like what

am I going to do so I was I was like listen well I like running and I was secretly starting to Work out there was a football coach at our high School named Bob Peters who he liked me for some reason and I liked him and he was like big buff dude and he was like listen you're hurting yourself cuz you're weak I couldn't do one pullup I couldn't do anything and so he was like listen you know the cool thing about resistance training is you can get stronger so I started doing my pull-ups my

push-ups you know and I my body just changed like crazy I grew like crazy and I think also I was kind of the man of the house in my house my dad and I were trying to work things out with but we had a lot of conflict my mom and I were I was very protective of my mom and I just watched my my my whole body changed it was crazy I feel like I went through puberty like with like and then I went through like a complete physical transformation and um so I figured well

what can I do that I can use my like hardw work skills because I was always Like very intense and very hardworking when I applied myself to something and I like working out and I was like I'll be able firefighter Everyone likes firefighters cops people have mixed feelings about and by the way I have respect for police I do even though I was a skateboarder I have respect for police some of our friends like like he wasn't my close friend but Tim excuse me Jim's business partner Mickey Ray has went and became a cop he

was a Skateboard return cop I think now he has a bar or something up in Portland but um but I was become a firefighter so I started taking fire science courses at Mission College and I figured I'll be a firefighter you get to work out hang out with a bunch of guys mostly guys back then there were very few women in the fire department back then so was mostly guys and um people like them and respect them and cool I'll do that what happened then was the girlfriend went off to College she was a year

older than me and she was like my family at that point and so I started going down to visit her and I was literally living either in her dorm when they'd let me stay with her but her roommates would get kind of bummed or I was sleeping in my car in the dorm room parking lot and I was just hanging around there and I was also still getting into fights you know it's still getting into fights un did it get to the point where you enjoyed the fight You know I never really liked hitting people

and getting hit you know years later I boxed like when I was in my 30s Junior professor before getting tenure I boxed because I needed something to blow off some steam and I Spar on Wednesday nights every once in a while this when I lived in San Diego actually a lot of Team guys would come through that gym R jiujitsu and I remember boxing and I mean I was okay I got a Long Reach like I can move a little bit I'm not real Fast but you know I'd land a few but I remember once

like sinking a straight through a guy's guard and his head just snapping back and like my initial impulse would be like oh man you know I didn't have the anger in me anymore that's when I was in my 30s I I think you have to be kind of you have to be pissed and so when I was younger and I'd get in fights um I was always amazed at how little it Hurt to get hit in the moment and how much it hurt later that's adrenaline you know that kind of thing it's interesting you bring

that up cuz I was going to ask do you think that uh all the fighting got you addicted to Adrenaline I never liked it never sought it out um I think you know I needed something to sink my teeth into that was growth oriented that was generative I just needed that so badly and school didn't hook me when I was in high school so by This is kind of wild and and you know you talk about divine intervention um at the time time I was making the mistake in high school and this is a mistake

I don't think that young kids should do psychedelics I really don't they have their place for in healing the brain later they absolutely do and perhaps we'll get into that but um I was taking LSD half hit of LSD here half hit of LSD there when I was like 16 17 it came time to take the SAT and my mom woke me up I'll never forget that and she goes you you should go take the SAT it's today and I said no way I'd been up all night on a half half hit of acid I

was still a little bit like I was like no way and she goes just go you have to go so I went my home was through the the I had a trap door in my gate that would led into the the school so basically gun High School is there Georgia Avenue right over the gate and I could literally go through school Through just going through the gate my um now stepdad put a put a gate in the in the fence so I go in there I sit down and I remember thinking like I don't know

any of this stuff but they said even if you just fill out your name and information you get like I don't know a certain number of points I was like okay you know like just like fill that out and then and I swear on my life I just did art with the bubbles filling that out filling that Out I was just filling in the bubbles did you even read the question no you kidding me like I was just filling in the bubbles and I broke a thousand I know people are going to hear this and

going to be like no I broke a thousand I broke a thousand that's divine intervention or give me another reason that you know there isn't some other way that could happen broke a thousand applied to University I applied to two places maybe three didn't get Into those other two places got into the one where my girlfriend went and my entrance essay was the following here's my childhood I had a good childhood up until this point then I had a high comp I basically told the story and I said I want to be in the fire

service and I heard that if you get an advanced degree that you have more upward mobility in the fire service that's basically what I put for my entrance exam and I got in so someone on that committee read that and Went all right like here's a kid who I was just honest yeah I was just honest and so I got in and then so I went off to college and it was kind of funny I remember going off to college and everyone else is like their parents are dropping them off everyone's like bues and hugs

and Tears like my girlfriend who had already been there for a year we drove back down there together like I I wasn't part of the whole system you know and I grew up In this nice little town where you know it wasn't violent and so by that point I went to school when I was 17 I'm a fall baby so when school started I was 17 I realized I'm like I'm really like not part of this like normal trajectory that I should have been on and um I get to the university and everyone's parting a

ton and I'm thinking like this is kind of stupid I'd done a lot of that already but I didn't get squared away in terms of school either I was going out Drinking partying getting in a lot of fights so what happened in college is as soon as I got there there was all this knucklehead behavior from other people a guy stuck a a key through my cheek during a fight just I saw a guy dragging his dog behind his bike we got into a fight um the big one was after the first year in in

college I had lousy grades I've been kicked out of the dorms for doing stupid stuff okay so I'm like going nowhere right I'm in living in a I Was squatting in a in a house over the summer because everyone was like oh you you can rent a house I'm like all these houses are empty I'm a skateboarder like punk rocker I'm like I'm just crawling through the window I just there yeah the girlfriend had gone home so I was like yeah I'll just stay there the water worked the heat worked like someone was paying for

it like I'll just stay here why not it's a it's a little college town it was like not it's not dangerous So I was like why would I pay rent I was working working at this Bagels store called The Bagel Cafe delivering Bagels I didn't even know how to drive a stick shift but I taught myself how on the job I'll never forget the kid that worked there this awesome Mexican kid like he was teaching me how to do it he was terrified and we were just like trying to deliver bagels and I got it

pretty quick I was like okay cool like learn how to drive a stick on the job making Whatever you know garbage money but it was money and so but there was a there was a party that summer cuz there weren't many kids that stayed for the summer most went home and this is kind of a wild thing so my high school girlfriend was College roommates with at one point this this woman her name is Kim she was Jack Johnson Jack Johnson Jack Johnson's girlfriend she from Monteray great person and Jack went to school with us

back then he wasn't a Musician he played for fun but he was in um he was a pro Surfer and so like he was kind of like a like a rockar at that school cuz everyone was into surfing and stuff so there was this party that friends of of our had um where everyone would barbecue bring their stuff over and one day we went to go pick up staks um and we were coming back on Fourth of July and somebody's like hey those guys are robbing us there were some guys like I don't know stealing

surfboards and Skateboards or something they're like let's get them or something like that and I was like Hey like I'd been in enough scraps to like Hey listen this is not how it works you can't just like walk up to somebody and hit them first of all you don't know if they're doing what you think they're doing and second of all like this whole thing of pigeon chesting like that's not how you do it if you're going to hit a guy you just got to like hit him you know you that's How it goes so

what ended up happening is turns out they were robbing us and this is really bad it's weird I get this feeling in my body when I tell these stories I I want to be very clear like being getting in scraps is like the stupidest thing you can do right someone knife you shoot you whatever it's just terrible idea I don't want anyone to think this is a good idea but what happened was everyone I was with not Jack everyone I was with bolted and so I Get into it with a bunch of guys and people

are getting super violent right I used to always carry a knife back then like that stuff all came out Cops show up yeah yeah exactly cuz as you know like you don't have to be that skilled or unskilled to really hurt yourself or somebody else oh yeah with the knife super dangerous super dangerous people just don't understand how takes a split second to regret what you do or something like whole life goes away or Their life or both so please show up I'll never forget they they came over to me and they were like good

job and I remember thinking because you know these guys have been robbing us and they got those guys and I remember thinking myself like I've never felt worse in my life I just it was like I've never felt worse in my life so I don't know I think we probably had the barbecue that day um you know people Were like I got some cheers you know there's one like pretty lady in particular who actually I'm still friends with who who was like Hey that was great and I remember thinking like this is like I this

is the bottom wow so I remember going back to where I was staying and just thinking like this is it like I'm officially a loser getting in fights barely finished high school got into college on a divine intervention didn't flunk out but Certainly didn't do well just blew the first year girlfriend gone she didn't want anything to do with me she was smart and just thinking this it like what am I going to do I can't play music I got friends who are musicians but I suck I I I not a good skateboarder and so

I had to do a couple of days of just like deep introspection and I was always a reader and I remember I had yeah I'll get Emotional about this one cuz he's he's come around for me a bunch of times over the years feeo gave me those freaking books you know and I remember I was like man I've got this I've got writing I've got reading and I've got and there's something in it I think it's in do the distance and I have to be careful I don't well up too quick uh it's early in

the it's early in our discussion um there's there's one um there's one poem in there that Jim wrote he'll be Embarrassed if I say it it's just like real short kind of like hardcore like like man poetry called do the distance and I remember just thinking like okay like I'm not really good at anything but I have drive that I've got like I always knew this I I've got a lot of fire in me like I've got a lot of of um energy and if you if it's fish tanks or birds or skateboarding or working

out or unfortunately also fighting and being an Idiot like I'm going to go 11 out of 10 so I decided then I'm like I'm going to buckle down and I wrote my mom a letter promising that I still have the letter no kid I have the letters July 4th 1994 was when that fight happened the letter sometime right around I still have the letter and I said I'm I'm like it's uh whatever happened whatever happened in our family like it's not your fault you know and it's not my fault like I knew that much um

but I'm going to get my Life together and I moved home I took a leave of absence I didn't leave College I took a leave of absence went to the Community College moved back to where I grew up and by then things had gotten super dark because my friend who had been a pro skateboarder still a pro skateboarder but now him and a couple other guys are starting to do way harder drugs pills drinking and one of the guys who's a famous skateboarder who I never was close friends with him but he we Certainly knew

one another and he's kind of legendary in the skateboard Community guy named Phil sha who came up without a dad helped raise his younger siblings put himself through Berkeley he was going to inherit the editorship at Thrasher magazine unfortunately he died in a drunk driving accent so he's dead friends back home a lot of them are starting to they're still skateboarding and stuff but a lot of them not all of them but a lot of them our friend it's Funny I knew these guys with by different names right this kid Brandon I'll leave his last

name out but sometimes people try and check me on this stuff and be like fact check okay you want you want to I hope he's doing well now Brandon tyy not doing well okay our friend Johnny farer he killed himself in 2017 sadly but like a lot of guys not doing well drugs mental health issues severe issues couple guys went to prison there's a close there's a sad Story in skateboarding some good friends we had one of them ended up in a fight and a guy died and he did 20 years in prison got out

a few years ago he's been out talking about it and you know so I went home and was like whoa like that was that road going that way and I'm getting a second chance so I just [ __ ] hit the books I went to Community College as if it were to save my life how did you find your new passion I just decided at that Point I don't care what the subject is I'm going to get good at it they tell you what you need to know school is the most obvious path to success

for somebody like me right they tell you what you need to know you don't even need any physical skill it it's kind of like where I look at it from now it's like they tell you what's going to be on the exam there's nothing easier now there are subjects where it's hard and you're not going to Get straight A all the time but if you go to class and you listen you take notes you ask questions about what you don't understand and you get in there like you're going to do pretty well you're going to

at least pass and you're going to do pretty well and what I found was I could do pretty well so I took art history I took psychology I took biology I took physics I took basically had to go back and make up all these gaps from high school because there were a ton of Subjects in high school that I was just completely but just you know I read a lot but I mean I was just completely behind in everything so I did two quarters of Community College and by the way the community college system and

the I think they Som now maybe goes by a different name now but like these community colleges are incredible they tend to keep tuitions pretty low most of them have a direct path to a local state school and these community colleges get A bad RP they're kind of seen as like not the you know not as prestigious and they're not as prestigious the the challenge is that you're commuting there so there isn't a culture to keep you studying and keep you involved you're not going to go hang out with the other kids in the dorms

and prepare for finals you have to be really self-motivated so it pulls on the person or like pulls out the best of a of somebody who can find self-motivation and for people that Can't they stop taking units they work and make money instead so at that time I was living at home because I couldn't live anywhere else my mom was sort of in and out of the picture my sister had come home from college and that was really good you know to be care like I love my sister more than life itself you know I

would do anything for her you know and um I don't talk about her very much because like she really really stepped in as a parent for me really big Time and I stepped in as a parent for her but like our even our parents know it's kind of funny cuz every year around our birthdays we vacation in New York together like one of the best things about this podcast life is like I don't spend money but I was able to take my sister to New York and like this year and just be like let's go

see she likes plays I'm not really into plays but let's go see some plays get great tickets to plays or stay at a nice place Like for years though I would save up and we would go we both save up and we would go to Manhattan and um we'd stay in like the worst airbnbs it became almost like part of the story like just places where you're like oh my God these are like bad conditions but like we've really stuck together so he a great person so um and we disagree on a great many things

in life but like we we hold the our you know our family that core so you know she was home and I started Squaring away my life and I was like okay this school thing I can do this why and this is where kind of the hard stuff kind of pays off in a weird way I'm like this stuff is so much easier than skateboarding skateboarding you can get broke off you get as the kids say you can break your leg you can give yourself a concussion this studying thing I can study Until I Collapse

get up and keep doing it and I'm getting smarter like this is amazing and then I Was also competitive I'm not normally a competitive person by nature but I was like that kid in the front like wants to set the curve like uh-uh like that's mine that's mine I'm going to work so hard you know and you know I generally don't think that competition is the best way to fuel energy over time but man I fell in love with some of those subjects fell in love with Biology fell in love with psychology there wasn't even

a field of neuroscience at that time but Then I looked things up and I I was like all right well I either can go back to the school I was in cuz I had taken a leave of absence or I can take a different path and I I went back cuz it was a state school so I mean was a you know public institution you know University of California system is a very good system for those that are willing to put in the work in terms of the cost of tuition relative to the quality of

Education you guys very high So I went back and I moved into a studio apartment I lived alone and um people I used to hang out with were like oh when are you going to come out and party I was always the I mean I was I brought the skateboarding wildness of the 9s like we were so free all that stuff like jackass and all that that all was born out of skateboarding it all was those were skateboarders Spike Jones that was he had big brother magazine like that you Le shot photos for them and

you Owned a skateboard company I think it still does like we were wild and free so early so when I got back and and everyone was like are you going to fight you going to party with us I was like nope and I was just super squared away so it was workout study workout study workout study once a month I go out and tie one on and then over time I was like n this isn't even really working for me and so I graduated from University with honors my parents were like what the Hell happened

here with a professor that I worked for who had let me work in his lab a guy named Harry Carlile amazing guy um I liked him cuz he drank coffee and he smoked cigarettes he'd light them in the bunson burner and he'd smoke in the fum hood and they'd come down the hall and be like you can't smoke in here and he'd be like yeah and he would just old guy Navy guy Old Navy guy and um worked for him and um and I I finally got good at something I could learn I Could understand

stuff I have a good memory it turned out I um I love doing research I learned how to cut up brains and stain them and look at them under the microscope um and I I wasn't the smartest person but I you know had some intellect and I could outwork anybody I'm like I can get I can win by hard work and so by the time I graduated I was like wow like actually good something so I applied to two schools Princeton and Berkeley got into both It's like mind blown you know like me I wasn't

going to go to Princeton I'm not an East Coast ivy league guy I mean you just you know I'm just not I great respect for all that but that's not me I'm from California so went to Berkeley spent two years there I did a Ms there fell in love with circadian biology studied hormones and behavior circadian biology um had a good run there for reasons mostly related to topic of Interest I moved up to UC Davis uh worked for a woman named Barbara Chapman when I was there amazing lab she commuted two hours in each

Direction so she wasn't there very much so I had a ton of autonomy um she had a budget we had and I started studying brain development and I was like would work 15 16 hour days sometimes 20 hour days sleep on the floor under the bench I had a in a little apartment but we like why I go home I'd shower at the gym brush my teeth in the sink in the Morning and I remember someone coming up to me I was still a little cocky back then and because I was scared usually cocky is

scared scared of failure anyone that seees somebody cocky usually scared it's a way of comp compensating I remember somebody saying you better slow down you're going to burn out and I was like you never had a flame to go out like I was that guy yeah five o'clock would roll roll down everyone would leave put tin foil on the windows blast Rancid favorite band do experiments until 3:00 in the morning collapse get up next morning they're like you're still here and I'm like you left wow I was that so I was like an animal at

that and we published 10 papers or something not all in those four years but working with Barbara was the best and so anyway and on and on but eventually went and did a postto you know got a lab as a junior professor in San Diego eventually got reced back to Stanford with tenure And um you know along on the way I will say that um I mean what did that feel like to get recruited by Stanford it felt good I mean it I didn't want to go back to my hometown you know I had a

lot of there's this thing in Neuroscience called um condition Place aversion when something bad happens in a place you forever feel kind of not right when you're there there's also condition Place preference something good happens you just like the place you know so it Took me a little while to get over that you know I'm back in the town where I grew up and um but I'd been a postto at Stanford and that worked out really well um and Stanford's an amazing place I mean the amazing thing about Stanford is wherever you look there's somebody

that's like top 1% in their field and they're several of them and you're just like wow like it's not just the Nobel Prize winners you're like you could wander in the political science Department and you have amazing people there you it's also a very mixed Place politically people forget this you know coni rice is there you have Hoover institution you also have you've got left leaning people right leaning people everything in between people forget this it's got its own ZIP code it's got some great skate spots like the front five um uh it's you know

it's an amazing thing as you know from being in the SEAL Teams right to be surrounded by people that Are super high achieving the mean is so high it's so high that you're like whoa like you know and people talk about um imposter syndrome I was like no I worked hard to get here I was a postto here I understand I I know I'm not the smartest person in the room and I also know that I know a fair number of things that some other people here don't it's very specialty oriented no one expects you

to know everything about everything so you're rewarded for being really good at One thing and um but it was a it was a trip it was a trip but I will say this because I think that um in recalling all this you know years later I was actually in Hawaii visiting um a friend for there was a surf event I don't surf but there was surf event a friend named Brian Mackenzie who's a really talented high performance coach um he took me out there Brian's got unscared tattooed on his knuckles he's neck to Knuckles tattoos

he's a he's he's a tough guy um And we had become friends because he done some work with um East Coast SEAL Teams and we we have have some I don't want to create an image of of a deeper relationship than there actually is but have a lot of friends from the teams and done some some work uh with some people in that community and um Brian took me out to Hawaii for this thing we were talking about some of the stuff related to breathing and autonomic control and um and there's a guy out there

named Kai Garcia they call him kyborg he used to be an enforcer he's gnarly guy like be you know Hawaiian culture has got its own thing oh yeah and he's a really good guy sober he's family man um now and I'll never forget we were sitting in the son it and we were talking about like stories and this and that and he turns to me and he goes never forget no matter how far you drive you're always the same distance from the ditch and I remember thinking at the time like well that's Pretty dark and

I've been thinking a lot about that statement recently and he's absolutely right across those years where I was a graduate student postto and Junior faculty faculty member a couple of things happen that are worth highlighting first of all I have this weird Karma with advisers I had an amazing undergraduate adviser that I worked for in his lab my graduate adviser she was amazing and my postto Adviser he was amazing suicide cancer cancer so at 50 and six roughly 60 years old so I was like scientifically orphaned early I'm like what is this like am I

cursed or you know is the third one said before he died he goes you're the common denominator and I was like [ __ ] but you know with that with the parentless thing again and I have parents I want to be very clear I eventually patched up my relationship with both my parents I have no resent Towards my parents and get back to that in a minute but what I really realized was the fact that all three of my advisers died was tragic but then come 2020 end of 2021 when Lex fredman leans over to

me after recording a podcast and goes you should start a podcast I didn't think oh what will my scientific advisers think everyone in science knows that through the mentorship like what your advisers think and what they want for you powerfully shapes what's Available to you and what you feel safe to do all my advisers are dead I'm going to do what I feel is right which was to take health and science information public which at the time even my dad and other people were like oh that's not a good idea people aren't going to like

that how is Stanford going to feel how are people going to feel about that that's dumbing down things and I was like no this is information paid for by the taxpayers there's important Information that people need to know not only am I going to do it you couldn't stop me I couldn't stop me set up a camera in my apartment with Rob my producer now producer my Bulldog costella record put it out on the internet so there are these dark things that happen like suicides and Cancers of mentors there's girlfriends that leave there's fights and

then there's also the Light side of that there's all the you Know forgive me but sorry not sorry there's the there's the Dark there's like the dark side of life there's like real evil as you know and there's like the devil in all of us and in the world and then there's the light part of it where God in the universe pick yours I've picked mine come along and say no we're going to transmute all that energy into things that are good for you and for the world and so that's what happened and it kept

happening over And over again so 2017 you know three of my closest friends growing up Aaron Curry King because he was eventually adopted became a great graffiti artist by a graffiti named orphan he was in the SF Moma it was like a kid we grew up with who had had the [ __ ] kicked out of him literally from a time he was really young finally got adopted by a nice family so he went to our school and then he became a like a street artist graffiti artist made it As an artist died stomach cancer

Johnny farer suicide super sad that guy was just the ratest kid and there's something about kids named Johnny that are always a little wild so if you name your kid Johnny you know he had a fire in him and John melberry dead dead dead boom Phil sha dead look around skateboarding guys I used to know that I wasn't tight with addicts dead a lot of them a lot of them are soaring X game winning medals companies and a lot of Them aren't and so you look and I I just remember going like like that was

a close one but Kai was right you know I mean you're never that far from the ditch and I know this because I've had colleagues just this last year neuroscientists that were acting a little weird no one knew why oxy addict one just died one of the most famous developmental neurobiologists I know damn you know dead and you realize like No one's immune from this stuff like I'm not super anti- any kind of any one thing but you know these drugs that can grab onto the dopamine system they'll grab neuroscientists too right it's not just

those feral skateboard kids this is what we're seeing now and so what I realized was all that backstory all that stuff man I wouldn't change it for anything you know I I do get kind of like rattled when I talk about it because it's like I still feel a little Bit that way I've never really like ex I'm I'm over whatever trauma was there but I just feel like man I'm so lucky that guy came at me at work I remember he put his hand on top of my hand while he was trying to give

me my paycheck and I was like turn the desk over on him you know I'm not saying that was the right response I'm not saying that was the wrong response but I stood up for myself as a 14-year-old no one violated me okay so then you take that kind of energy and You put it in the right place right like School you put it towards great things happen you put towards fighting bad things happen and so I think that looking back I just you know maybe in telling the story if if you know I think

that what I needed to hear back then and what feo gave me in that freaking book I call it that because for me it means so much but he's always like oh no don't talk about the book because he's my friend now but what I needed was Somebody to say look you're a young guy with a lot of energy you need to learn to control that energy and you need to learn to put it into things that are going to grow you that are generative and I needed them to say this and I didn't say

this but someone I really respect said this they're basically two kinds of people in life they're winners and they're losers and the definition is this losers take things that happen to them and that they feel inside that Suck and they wallow and they use it for self or outward destruction winners take whatever feel they feel it it sucks and they transmute it into things that are good for themselves and for the world period end of story and so when I say it's like Devil God stuff it's actually that way that's how it works there's no

in between where you just kind of feel lousy and do a little bad and a little Good and I think for me what I said the reason I said the distance from the ditch thing is over the years I've had my struggles that have continued I want to make that clear well the last thing I ever want to do is make it sound like okay after one fight on July 4th 1994 I my whole life got squared away I've had times when I made huge mistakes about working too hard neglecting my personal health as a

post talk I was genuinely depressed they wanted to put me on Medication I took it for one day stared at my plate of noodles like a [ __ ] like a like excuse me like a like a zombie and was like I'm not taking this stuff got my relationship to sunlight squared away by talking to somebody who understood circadian biology then I'm sleeping better now I'm feeling better now I'm working better now I don't feel off-kilter so I learned how to take care of myself and then you know across the years Things would happen like

when my first adviser died that sucked when my graduate adviser who was like a mom to me died I spiraled my girlfriend at the time will tell you I I got into some really unhealthy behavior for my I was just self-destructive and I tried to take up boxing so I did that then I'm getting hit in the head I'm a neuroscientist not a good idea I was sparring too hard right not a good idea so you know I Learned to shut that off luckily came out of that fine I had my brain imaged I got

no white spots that to be concerned about I'm very lucky you know maybe have a thick skull or something but you know as the years have gone on I've realized yeah I have to be careful I have to still mind it you know I have to not overwork not not not take not take anything to excess and so anyway the the point is that those early years were super hard because they were scary and Confusing and what I can say is that any young person who is like what am I going to do find something

that's generative that you're passionate about and then all the hard stuff yes you will have to work through that but back then we didn't have a language of trauma anxiety stress or depression I kind of wish we did but I'm also grateful that it wasn't a place to spend all my time mhm M I think there's an immense value to continuing to be generative and do Things that are adaptive while trying to work your [ __ ] out basically how did you when you say keep yourself from overworking how do you do that because I

think that uh we may be very similar and and and I can tell you love what you do yeah and when you love what you do it doesn't feel like work no but but at the same time I 100% agree with you you have to have some type of a of a healthy personal life and and and me I've got a wife and kids and I love what I do I love it and it can it's a hard balance it's a really hard balance it is I also love being a dad and being a husband

and I love having a personal life but it just it can bleed together and for me personally I love to hear what you have to say because I really struggle with that I wish I had known the nval quote I only heard it recently like very recently um that home full of love piece is so key you know and one thing we know About the brain and stress and motivation and goals and all that is that it changes your perception into tunnel vision dopamine makes you tunnel vision I've never done cocaine I'm very proud to

say that but I I know that it's a highly dopaminergic drug and it makes people in a narrow band of pursuit mental Pursuit and it's all about future anticipation like I'm gon do this I'm gonna do this I'm gonna do this I'm gonna do That hard work is great but it puts you in that tunnel not to the same degree presumably as something like amphetamine or cocaine but um it changes your perception of time so that you're not thinking about the past that's one reason why it's so soothing to people that have stuff they don't

want to think about hard work Focus being amped up but it also doesn't let you see far enough into the future to understand how you're eventually going to come down from this Thing and you're going to want something to Nest into so I think that the short answer is the best solution is to have someone there who really understands you and understands that part of you and knows when to say hey like it's time to pump the breaks a bit um you know the girlfriend I had when I was a junior professor so this 2012

to about 2017 is when we were involved we're still good friends now she tried you know she showed up she saw the fire in me and um You know she's a red head she has got a lot of fire and she was like I can handle you and uh you know and um and she tried she tried to kind of like help me channel that a bit more and I just wasn't ready I wasn't ready and we understand that now we have a a story about our story where we both get it I wasn't ready

to to learn how to shut that off and in recent years I've learned how to shut it off um I don't work like I used to I mean when I was With her and she'll vouch I used to um type working on papers or grants until I'd collapse and then um wake up in the middle of the night and just keep going you know we went skiing together once we we I snowboard she skied she's a great SK that day I had the flu I had diarrhea and I'm on the toilet typing sorry for whoever

read that Grant I got that Grant I got the mcnight foundation Fellowship that was written with Diarrhea on the toilet um to make a deadline like I was just you know it's kind of like you want to you want to stop me got to kill me stuff I'll sleep when I'm dead kind of stuff not good I think once I got into a balance of realizing I want to do something for a very long time that really helped kind of dial it back and I think um I like to think that it slows with age

but it kind of doesn't in a way because you learn how to how to place Your shots better and better and it just feels better and better and um nowadays like with the podcast I take great pride in trying to make the solo episodes as as great as they can be the guest episodes as great as they can be and as accurate as they can be you know we were putting out so many podcasts in the first years and I prided us on the fact that we were really you know productive um but there were

a few things that crept through that I got called out on I Made a micron to millimeter mistake a math mistake I made this dumb joke about 120% cumulative probability that got clipped and put out on the internet which suggested I didn't understand probability and my lab has published cumula probability many times and that was horribly embarrassing and the joke at the end where I go and that's another thing altogether wasn't sufficient to show that like I understood that that was a joke then I Explain it correctly I had to put out an apology those

things hurt and they're so good because now we run every solo episode through another expert or two we run it through AI checks we recheck this morning right before putting out our episode on microplastics I went back and rechecked the the millimeter Micron conversion like you know those those painful mistakes they make you really sharpen your game and what you realize you have to slow down in order to really Really get things exactly right and so science teaches you that too I have a saying in science you go as fast as you carefully can when

people are like when are we going to do this when are we going to send the paper we go as fast as we carefully can any faster not good so I think learning to shut it down each day at the end of the day um I'm not married I don't have kids that's fully in the plan I know people be like you're 49 years old and whatever dude you've Been a bachelor n listen I got a plan and one thing I know about me is when I set my mind to something it happens it's just

a matter of timing and I think um and also savoring it like I'll be honest like I'm here I podcast a lot I'm talking to you I've been on other podcast I'm tripping out right now because I watch your podcast in these chairs and I'm like I never thought I'd be where I'm at today I listen to the Tim Ferris podcast Joe Rogan podcast let Fredman podcast I'm I'm like I feel like I'm on another planet like how did I get here I really do feel that way and so like I think it's also just

learning to savor those moments that's actually come to me in prayer a lot this year like like maybe like it came to me like you're allowed to savor what's happened not just what you're trying to make happen and I think every time before I I go into prayer or I go into like a breathing exercise I think I think about This a lot I think someday I'm going to draw in a breath and I'm going to know that's my last one unless I die in my sleep I'm like man that's scary but then I realized

I'm like if can get comfortable with that then I'm okay because I do think all addiction for instance is just fear of death are you comfortable with that fear of death or addiction fear of death um are you comfortable dying knowing that you're going to take your last Breath no knowing it might be yes and and I I really and I know people be like [ __ ] no it's true because of a couple things one is I already feel I've had an amazing life it's just kind of wild right it's just wild the science

thing making it to tenure at Stanford the podcast being here with you Rogan Lex to be part of an opportunity to teach science and health and like give give my heart I really like pour as much of my energy and my heart into what I do To be to know that I can't get it all right to take the the shots from traditional media to take that like yeah bring it like I don't want more of it but if you bring it like I my my stance is good like you know I I can hardly

believe it's all happened so I'm good with it from that perspective I still like to you know raise a family um I mean I had a bulldog it was like the best Bulldog I could ever imagine so I'm in like kind of Pinch Me moments about all of it I think the Death part is tricky only to the extent that I don't feel done um and I've had some close brushes I mean I had this stupid idea to do K exit great white shark diving to film The VR stuff for my lab on fear it

was a fun adventure team guy came out with us it was a lot of fun and left the cage and all that but I had an air failure at depth while in the cage on a hookah line Not on scuba and it was super scary and I was alone in the cage oh man you know my solution to that cuz frankly grew up skateboarder punk rocker was after that air failure go down again and do it on scuba and come back alive and no ptst and I and I don't even like to say I almost

drowned I like to think that the reaper came in and was like to give me a fist bump and I was like how about this Instead but we came out of that dive and made it back across the border and I remember thinking myself like no more risks with my life that was too close and listen I've had some real relationships that felt like great white shark Dives where I'm like that person's dangerous no more yeah no more like doesn't really matter to get into the details but that that person is way too dangerous I

never should have involved with that person in the first place and You know what you come to learn over time as I'm sure you know I'm just saying this to the you to the audience what all of us and to myself is that a little bit of placidity like I'm peace is the thing that we're all after and so now my prayers include prayers for for peace just internal peace not just to make it another day you know like yeah so yeah you said something downstairs when we talk about you know toxic people my wife

says this to me all The time don't mess around with people that don't have anything to lose those are the most dangerous and that's the key one for people who don't have anything to lose are the most dangerous people who have failed out in multiple things over and over again in life whether through their own Misfortune or through intention you know we had a guy on the podcast recently episode is in now have Bill Eddie is's a a lawyer and clinical psychologist he wrote five Types of people that can ruin your life and he um

he said you want to know who to avoid avoid the people who seem to have these failures in multiple domains of their life Andor who are blaming other people always got a blame story you know I will say whatever mistakes I've made I own them you know I might not own them the way that other people want me to own them but I own them right I'm not going to say that happened because they were bad no you get Involved with bad people bad things happen brings out the worst yeah I do again I think

our neural circuitry at a core level it's not divided into lyic non-limbic hypothalamus cortex no those are just brain areas and circuits but they're there's good and bad in Us in all of us Yung understood this we have all things inside of us and some people by virtue of great parenting and great upbringing they're buffered against some of the parts of themselves that are Otherwise going to express themselves so there's more goodness comes out of them other people need to work harder and are there truly bad people I don't know Christianity would say no that

even those people need help and and deserving are deserving of the belief that they can be good so I like that idea I'm an optimist um but I do believe that when we have agency and we have Choice over who we associate with and what we do with Ourselves that we should always be striving to do better and so any message that comes back about a way I've screwed up I try and improve it's just a little tricky because nowadays you get so much judgment whether not your public facing or not everyone's judging each other

and part of being a grown-up is Discerning when to say okay you're right I need to take a look at that and other times when you go go no that's you not Me I'm going to do my thing that's a tricky one as it's it's not always a clear picture when you started the podcast I mean how did uh how did Stanford react to that they've been immensely supportive they even ran a a feature in Stanford magazine and the whole thing I mean it was a bold move in the sense that um there wasn't a

precedent for it right professors write books popular books that's pretty much accepted we Have the great Robert spolski at Stanford Carol D growth mindset you know this is common to do research and then write a book and make a popular book and sell it the podcast um got great support in fact I'm giving a talk at Stanford this coming year as part of their lecture series I also still teach at Stanford there's some arguments on the internet that I don't I'm I've got a course that I'm designing for undergraduates I taught medical students Until recently

it is true I closed my animal lab I did that because I just wasn't in a position I to Mentor students in postdocs anymore but all my people got placed in jobs that are good and some of them are professors and doing great and makes me happy um Stanford is like anything else it's a business it's its own city with a zip code has a lot of things it needs to manage and so you know to some extent we did a explicit non-explicit handshake You know I understand I'm an ambassador for the university in addition

to doing the podcast even though they are separate at a financial level and other levels um I I've brought on a great many colleagues from Stanford um the podcast also has a philanthropy arm where we've supported research at Stanford including um the work of Nolan Williams who's doing the research of ibigan uh for PTSD and addiction in veterans so we can Circle back to that interesting we've supported Mike eisenberg's lab um David Spiegel's lab uh Ali crum's lab you know and and Labs elsewhere outside of Stanford so I think they understand that this is a

new media venue and they've been very supportive um I think also they understand that as a private institution it's nice to have someone who's out there educating the public for zero cost this to me is the most Incredible thing about podcast whether or not it's your podcast or Lex or Joe or anyone people get the information for free advertisers have a relationship with the audience so that if people are interested in certain things they can get them as you know we only advertise things that we really believe in and love you're not forced to purchase

anything to listen to the podcast so you essentially get information for free some people will say well the ads do Come on yeah open up any media venue you need to survive you need to pay your production staff Etc so it's all been symbiotic and I think that um as an ed as a teacher I just like teaching and the podcast gives me an opportunity to do that and and I'm grateful to them and I like to think they're grateful to me too man it's been a you know what I'm glad we covered this because

because it just like I said it brings so many people hope and what what You've been able to accomplish and and in your life with with with your professional career as a as a as a as a doctor as a neuroscientist and in the podcast and I mean it's just it's incredible I mean I think that you single-handedly may have made health and wellness the health and wellness subject the most popular subject on podcast platforms I mean definitely a major part and and I also appreciate how Seriously you take it you know I've I've put

out [ __ ] that I'm not proud of on my podcast I feel horrible when I put out [ __ ] information and I correct it immediately I saw that the other day you corrected something I have to say thank you for the kind words I must say for both of us it's a labor love I know that there's a there's a a phrase that somebody uh said to me recently that feels so true I know to be true about your work and Joe's and Lex's and and There are others out there too of course

and then I know to be true about my podcast is like for every brush stroke you see there's like 12 to 15 Brush Strokes inside of that brush stroke That You Don't See and there are people that just care that much about their craft to do that and that's kind of how it is I think people can feel if you put care into it and you love what you do yeah and um we're not playing games here that's what I think is so interesting I I've recently become interested in professional wrestling because of Rick rubin's

obsession with professional wrestling he encouraged me to watch it and I was like I'm not getting it but then I watched this documentary about Vince McMahon and the WWE and all that and I realized like everyone knows it's not real that's why it works for that traditional media I grew up with national public radio in our home All the time the standard newspapers that you hear about stacked up there people reading them talking about them and I thought it was real I really did I thought it was real and don't get me wrong I think

that there's some great reporters and great journalists out there that try and get things right they're really committed to their craft and want to get it right but it wasn't until podcasting when effectively I became a media company I have scom which Is the hubman Lab podcast with Rob and we have some other members too that I understood I was like wait the thing that's so cool about podcasting is not just that it's independent it's that nobody podcasts well or for long or successfully unless it's real like they know the topic matter and they're genuinely

curious about their guest or the subject and they want the best for their audience there's there's no agenda Of anything except trying to figure out the truth and we're all limited in our ability to filter that out right so nothing's something can be accurate and not exhaustive right so it's not like I think I've covered everything about alcohol but the alcohol episode was my best effort as Rick would say my gift my offering to God not a gift my offering of what I have in me and my best of ability to do that I spent

months preparing that the microplastic episode That just came out I put months into preparing it is it perfect no is it perfect to the best of my abilities at that time yes is am I fundamentally interested in microplastics and what we can do about them yes and so I'm not saying that traditional media doesn't care about that but if you look at the pace at which they move and you look at the kind of top Contour of their of what they put out and I'm going to just be blunt and you look at what they're

Putting out a good percentage of it is just poached off of podcasts now so they're either poaching the reputations of people not just podcasters but us included now why cuz let's face it here's the other truth everybody they're in competition with us MH they're in competition with us we're not reporting on them because frankly we're not in competition with them I'm not thinking about what the New York Times health section puts out but I noticed that they Talk about superagers alcohol sleep hm this stuff looks a lot like my newsletters I come from science where

multiple people can publish the same thing and it's a good thing because it just reinforces the truth so I like it when they do that but I'm also amused because I come from a world called science where your goal is to try and parse nature parse the truth and do something that someone else hasn't done and I know There too if you go first you're going to catch heat because you can't do it perfectly because other people can spot mistakes in a way that's different if they're not the original Creator original creator meaning of the

art of the work right so to me it's rather amusing that like that people think the that these are reports about podcasters or no this is like this is competition for clicks but the thing is podcasters because they're just being themselves It's like the opposite of professional wrestling everyone knows that's fake with podcasting it's real Lex kind of his tweets about being tormented about should he put this person on or that person on or it's painful to hear the that's Lex that's how he is off camera that's how he is on camera people say he

doesn't push back hard enough yeah how do you actually convince a guest to communicate what they really believe if you're constantly challenging them That's not the way you communicate you give them an opportunity to roll forward he's doing intellectual jiujitsu Lex is is a podcast genius he's doing intellectual jiujitsu Joe's a podcast genius he's blending all of his his drive his interest his intense curiosity his comedy his ability to highlight things with his emotion in podcasting and you're doing the same by virtue of your work with government and special operations and your intense Curiosity podcasting

is real it's one it's as real as it gets and traditional media I think I sometimes look at it still but they're in competition with us we're not in competition with them it's a day of good way to put it you know it's um it's really it's just fascinating to watch like these tables turn and they've turned I mean I think in the last year or so you know 2021 things were blowing up for us 2022 23 was when I was like whoa like this is Kind of wild like I I've never done anything public

facing and this is kind of wild but we're just going to continue to do the best we can with the information and then you know I think it's kind of a right of passage now in podcasting that they Trad media comes and takes a shot at you some they've taken three shots or five shots it's just part of the the way they try and Rob power that's what they're trying to do they and so they'll find some crack They'll find some crack in a person or a system or a thing or something that was said

and they try and Rob power but I kind of want to like there is a part of me because this is my nature is I kind of want to like put my arms around them and say listen I know you're all underpaid I know it's super frustrating I know you have to answer to all these people you should go independent right it's like look at what Barry Weiss did go independent I saw This in skateboarding you know I saw a lot of these companies it was friends with cameras recording went out and recorded their own

stuff and put it out there were big structures prior to that prior to the early 90s Vision pal Peralta there were these big Brands those all collapsed from the small companies then guys like Steve Rocko and Rodney Mullen these two wild Renegade skateboarders started their own magazine which eventually Big Brother which Spawned jackass Jeff train and those guys Spike Jones it spawned all that then Thrasher magazine has always M been independent and the the industry leader they but it was always a bunch of little companies and people doing DIY real stuff and podcasting is the

exact same way and so sure some of them sell to Big podcast houses or they you know sure and more power to them but what you start to realize is that independent media independent music independent Action Sports is what created punk rock music which eventually became popular we just saw Green Day like what 70,000 people I saw them when they were Berkeley Square little band but they they they didn't sell out they they showed people this is what really good in their case pop punk not my favorite but people like it obviously um this is

what our version of good music looks like same thing happened with DC Shoes our friends started that right Danny Way Callin McKay Ken Block and those guys Ken loved rally car driving fortunately he passed away on snowmobile accent but he loved rally car driving turned it into a whole thing right same thing with podcasting same thing with anything that's real hip-hop music anything that's real can become something big and traditional media covers other things because they're they're not their own thing anymore and also they made a lot of mistakes and their biggest mistake was Not

admitting their mistakes their biggest mistake was having this like page two little thing of where a correction that really damaged somebody else's life when it happened but then to them they just kind of they literally hid it that's their biggest mistake is they won't turn the mirror on themselves and I want to put my arms around those folks and say listen I think you're well-intentioned um start your own channels or at least like play nice Because you know we're playing nice and in fact we don't even think about you yeah we don't even think about

it people are like did you see this article did you yeah and no like they it's all signal to noise as we say in the brain they they tried so hard to do the same thing over and over that they've just kind of like no one trusts them anymore they've lost the public trust and I don't think they're ever going to get it back no my own parents I mean I don't Know about one side of my family but I know about the other and they're just like you can believe that you know so they've

got to do a restart they got to figure out something and it starts with Integrity it starts with you know like one example that might be interesting to people is um like I covered drinking water in oral health turns out oral health is super important brush your teeth twice a day that's the key don't use alcohol-based mouthwashes Kills the oral microbiome makes you more vulnerable to infection a bunch of other things this is not woo biology the dentists told me this the dent by the way the dental Community are a great Community they're very open

very generous they also taught me that the reason there's fluoride in the drinking water is fluoride makes stronger teeth it gets in the in the in the minerals like structure of the teeth and really helps build strong teeth but there's Another mineral that's naturally occurring called hydroxy appetite which is the one that teeth normally use to remineralize I didn't know this either if you have a cavity it can remineralize if you provide the right things you can fill your own cavities as long as they're not deep deep into down to the RO absolutely you do

this by by taking care of your oral microbiome and there are a few things that one one can do but the brushing and flossing is important Right but avoiding these alcohol-based mouthwashes um and there and there are a few other things we cover in the episode um I can pretty bring a link to that man I I go ahead but I was just going to say but you know so I made mention of that fluoride right like nothing sounds more hippie woo and conspiracy theorist if you go if you say fluoride might not be healthy

but then I started looking and their data published on PubMed Library of Congress right that say that it might Might impact thyroid hormone and neurodevelopmental issues might okay so I covered that a little bit my Wikipedia slammed I'm a fluoride denier suddenly I'm a FL I'm not a fluoride denier suddenly they accuse me of being a fluoride denier and I started catching a lot more heat from Trad media gosh same way I said mineral-based sunscreens seem great zinc oxide titanium dioxide chemical based sunscreens they concern me a little bit I made a bad joke I

said they concern me more than melanoma which was not a good joke to make because that's what landed on my Wikipedia now I'm a sun now they accuse me of not like believing in sunscreen okay anyway now after that fast forward six months or so there's two lawsuits in this country one against a major city on the west coast to try and remove fluoride one against a major city on the east coast to try and increased the amount of fluoride because They claimed that there wasn't enough fluoride in there to protect the teeth of these

kids that were drinking the water but now I open up the internet the other day and all of a sudden NIH CDC are saying hey we might be concerned about new data and some old data about fluoride and neurodevelopmental issues suddenly it's covered by Trad media so now it's okay to talk about because they're talking about it but we were right before and we're right now I Didn't say don't drink water out of the tap I said get informed look up how much fluoride is in your water locally filter if you need to or not

take take the knowledge into consideration so where they're wrong is is that they've revealed themselves so many times to do this flip-flop same thing about lab leak hypothesis you said that at one stage of the pandemic that it might have come from a lab and you lost your job Trad media has now covered that and now it's A discussion that you're able to have so what they've lost is their is their title as gatekeeper and you asked earlier about Stanford and you asked about big institutions you know there has been a big push for academic

freedom at places like Stanford and that's beautiful that's important what does that mean academic freedom means you can you as long as you're not harming anyone you can research what you want and as long as the data are collected well and Stringent and you can work on what you want and you can talk about what you want I mean I I wasn't vocal during the pandemic about anything except anxiety and sleep Etc but you know it was a back and forth heated argument among even some faculty at our own University I mean I this is

not controversial I mean the head of the coronavirus task force was Scott atas from Stanford right then you had people at Stanford who disagreed ardently so with Scott so you Had petitions going people were angry but that's how it's supposed to work you're supposed to have people disagreeing and they let people disagree and that's beautiful that's super important man that's refreshing to hear I didn't know that happened anywhere anymore yeah but that's great to hear that and that's spreading I would say that the the culture of academic freedom has um certainly been maintained at Stanford

I've never felt any pressure that I could or couldn't work on any one thing um colleagues talk openly about what they're interested in you know always going to have more people who don't want to rock the boat than people who want to rock the boat and the people who rock the boat by going against the kind of um traditional views of things are always going to catch heat yeah um but you know I think because it's in Silicon Valley and because Silicon Valley has this History of Steve Jobs types and kind of Maverick culture of

um you know like Zuck and the building of Facebook was quite a high friction build you know if even half the stories are true so high friction building I mean he's like beloved now I mean if you look like people with Zuck with this total Rebrand right um but I think people realize that he built one of the most important things over the last 100 years whether or not you agree with every aspect of How it's played out or not I mean he's an important figure as is Elon as is any you know as was

jobs Steve Jobs had a reputation for screaming at people are we condoning that no you're saying the guy was a genius Creator inventor and so the spirit of of creating new things is always going to be met with friction I think in the landscape of media and politics but especially media and podcasts you know I look to Rogan who took it on the chin and hard over and Over and over so that the rest of us could come in I mean he really he really like hacked his way through the jungle and he took a

lot of along the way and it's not lost on me and it shouldn't be lost on every single guy or gal that starts a podcast now or 10 years from now I mean he I mean he's belongs on the Rushmore of podcasting because he pav the way he paved the way there is no doubt about that he paved the way I didn't know There were people that were so uh tied to fluorite what's the deal well it's in the drinking water and it does make teeth stronger the question is does it have ill effects if

people aren't filtering it out we filter it all out we got a new we got a new system in my house about a year ago so reverse osmosis or just still man I don't know I there's I looked at so many of them I can't remember but it goes through three filters and then it goes through this Thing called like a biod where we can give up trying to get them out of the environment they're everywhere but you can minim like drinking out of these metal cans is good I drink out of some plastic every

once in a while um a glass vessel is good Metal's good you know there are a few things out there like certain brands of of carbonated water that have been hit particularly hard with the analysis like they'll go do analysis of of sparkling Water like Topo Chico landed flat on its face with tons of these endocrine disruptors no are you ser oh yeah it's the worst by a long shot Coco that was in that was in roughly 2020 20 I love too Chico it's like 9 something parts per trillion but then Coca-Cola company who owns

them said that they were going to reduce that I think they've have that but in terms of the number of endocrine disruptor forever chemicals that are in there much much higher than in anything Else even though it's glass it's the water they may have cleaned that up somebody should do an analysis again um there's but then it goes the other way too so you may have heard like we ingested credit card worth of plastic every week that that study was refuted by another study that showed no that measurement was off by about a million fold

it's actually much lower um you can also phase two liver detox a lot of this stuff by you know eat Cru eat some Broccoli in cruciferous vegetables every once in a while there's sulphoraphane in in cruciferous vegetables will help with stage2 liver detoxification you're not by the way folks to be clear you're not detoxing your liver you're assisting your liver to detox things from your body when you use detox that's like the the um the Trad media loves to jump on that like you can't detox you can detox it you have toxins in your Body

you can you can sweat some of them out but not all of them your liver helps remove certain waste products sulphoraphane you you can take in supplement form you can get from cruciferous vegetables broccoli Sprouts Etc that'll help but trying to reduce the amount of microplastics especially for pregnant women and young kids Shaina Swan who's been on Rogan's podcast been on my podcast it hasn't come out yet has been talking about how I mean just to be direct that these endocrine disruptors during pregnancy are shortening the distance between the scrotum and the anus in boys

the the taint size literally is shrinking toward a more female pattern through with Progressive exposure to phalates and endocrine disruptors present in receipts present in glass uh excuse me plastic bottles um polycystic ovarian syndrome and egg count egg counts are going down in women At a given age polycystic ovarian um syndromes are going up Shaina who's a researcher for several decades now thinks this is related to the prevalence of endocrine disruptors in receips Forever chemicals um and so on so these have real implications reduced sperm counts you know she these are real effects testosterone rates

are going levels are going down sperm counts are going down and it correlates well with phalates and things in drinking water Not fluoride but other things endocrine disruptors what sparkling water do you drink I'll drink um the uh I no longer will drink Topo Chico I will drink um uh like a peligrino okay or any of the you know any Calistoga or pelino I do try and drink out of metal or or glass but I'll occasionally drink out of a plastic bottle even cans are bad because the lining of cans but most of them now

are BPA free I don't microwave things in plastic Even microwave safe plastic if I can avoid it but if I'm on a plane and the food's good I'll eat it I'm not a fanatic the idea is to limit your exposure not no one's going no exposure okay and you know they package some of the best meat in plastic so you have to you work with with reality but for pregnant women for young kids limiting the exposure to these things is turning out to be very very consequential and not limiting the is is potentially Consequential what

else is are drinking water um well a lot of hormon related stuff birth control stuff and urine containing hormones gets you know goes out there that might make it into drinking water I think it's just a good idea to filter your drinking water if possible and for people that can't afford a a fancy filtering system a a tabletop you know um pore type filtering system is pretty good as long as you change over the filters um you can what Else is in there well the bpas and the Bates and the mostly bpas and these forever

chemicals are very concerning these forever chemicals don't leave the body that's their concern um or the concern rather I think for me just trying to limit drinking out of plastic bottles has become important um if you buy things in plastic like fruits or vegetables which they do a lot now which I do I can't always make it to farmers markets you Know um putting it into a bowl rinsing it off is is key those little steps and not handling receipts is key if you do have to handle receipts for work you should wear um uh

nitrite gloves um they uh not nitrite excuse me you should wear um nital gloves nit nitrite would be something else uh nital gloves latex would be not as good but still better than handling a lot of receipts you know that Shaina has done this work where they go in and work with couples that Are trying to conceive and or have trouble conceiving and they remove a lot of the things from their life that I just described they take a lot and they see pretty impressive shift towards successful pregnancy not making any other changes wow which

is really impressive wow yeah I got a qu I got this may have been I may have been sold on this but when I when I was looking at all these different filtration systems I was Talking about that bodamer what the the the the company and the installer that came out was telling me that that if you take tap water and crystallize it it looks like a deformed nonsymmetrical snowflake H and he says if you put it through the bodamer then it will actually trick the water into thinking that it was like in a stream

or in nature or wherever and it will actually crystallize like it was from nature have you ever heard of this No but I'm guessing if if that's true it's probably because the water coming out of the tap has other particles in that the crystals form around and give you become more deformed crystals I mean there a lot of there's a lot of stuff coming through the tap and pipes and you know if you know I'm not typically lumped into the conspiracy theorist camp but what I am confident saying is that um well I'm 49 now

so I get to say things like I'm 49 now I also Get to say things like I remember when the lead thing became an issue right lead paint kids with neurologic defects from eating lead paint or for being exposed to lead asbestos warnings right asbestos is bad you don't want to be exposed to this stuff lead or asbestos I think fluoride has done more to strengthen teeth than is than damage it's done to most kids in most cities so I think they had to make a best case decision there kind of risk benefit Analysis there

but given that most people can probably afford a inexpensive filter for their water and what's been shown about fluoride is somewhat concerning probably best to filter it out now that we know remember trans fats were everywhere when I was growing up everyone thought margarine was a healthier thing to eat now we know that stuff is really good to avoid that's at the level of government microplastics I mean it was in 2015 I believe I'll get probably got the date wrong that they banned the use of these little micro beads in um in soaps remember the

micro beads like you know because those were getting out into the environment and causing some serious issues for uh marine animals and marine life generally and now we're starting to think about microplastics for humans we're talking about it for adults and everyone goes oh gosh this sounds like really woo guess what they were banned From sippy cups from kids and from drink bottles from kids because the government knows that we don't want that stuff going into babies so often times what same thing with chemical based sunscreens for for babies because their skin is much more

permeable so at what stage does your skin become so impermeable that it's safe to put these things on them well mineral-based sunscreens with zinc oxide are generally thought to be safe chemical based Sunscreens I catch a lot of heat for this people are like I can't believe he's saying this in Europe they allow okay fine that's fine but if it to me if it's even a remote possibility that why would why would you do it wear a hat or wear a long sleeve shirt like this is where why gamble on the um the on not

on what people don't know this is what makes sense to me especially given that I work with Scientists I I understand we know Certain things but we don't know everything and then what you find is if you look into any field like it was very interesting to cover sunscreen because the dermatologists feel one way about sunscreen every dermatologist including a Dermatology oncologist all right an expert in skin cancer taught me the following I didn't know this Stanford trained Harvard trained P published multiple research quality research papers and has a clinical practice he Said yes too

much sun exposure can give you skin cancer but it doesn't give you the most deadly skin cancers those can show up anyway what's the takeaway even if you limit your sun exposure you need to check your body for growths not just moles that have changed most deadly melanomas are denovo happen on denovo skin meaning not where a mo is placed no one ever told me that I was always just so worried about sunburns I stopped getting sunburns so then I stopped Worrying about it he said mineral-based sunscreens no one no one contests in his community

chemical-based sunscreens he's very wary of I got attacked so I asked someone attacking me what's the deal here he's a dermatologist you're not turns out they're a toxicologist the toxicologist and the dermatologist hate one another interesting so this would be like and I'm not saying this to be true but this would be like if the the Navy and the Army hated one another and I Don't know cuz I'm a civilian and I'm talking to one group and then the other one's saying well they're full of it and so what you start to find out when

you look into science and health is that most of the what we see out there most commercial products are filtered through the path of least resistance they'll put things out until they can't and I place a lot of faith in good doctors I'm not anti-m medicine I know doctors who are incredible Physicians I try and host Those people on my podcast I know great scientists I also know scientists that are crazy and whose entire career they've been publishing stuff that No One Believes because the data aren't very good not because their ideas are so right

and no one will listen to them if you have a really good idea in science and you get good solid data the scientific Community will come around the problem is that what we tend to hear is somebody will call out floride and Then suddenly they're called the conspiracy theorist and then it's all over for them when in fact now we're hearing from Trad media and a few other of us that we're talking about a little while ago fluoride may have its issues so if you have a young kid maybe filter the water but but make

sure that kid brushes their teeth I'm not saying don't let their teeth fall out so what's lost is the kind of the nuance and this tendency to think it's like an us them And I I've tried to make it the mission of the podcast to really explore all angles of these things but your kids should brush their teeth with a toothpaste if you that has hydroxy appetite which is a great source of mineralizing teeth Mak strong teeth especially if you're pulling fluoride from the water if they get cavities it turns out it turns out that

if you brush your teeth in the morning and especially before you go to sleep at night and you Make sure to hydrate during the middle of the day you don't give the cavity causing bacteria an opportunity of form the the the bacteria that cause C sugar don't cause cavities the bacteria that cause cavities it's the strep to cacus mutans bacteria feed on sugar so if you have sugary stuff stuck in your teeth that's how that whole thing got that idea came forward and it's true if you have a of sugary stuff lingering in your mouth

then the strep tacus mutans Bacteria is nourished proliferates and can burrow into your teeth but if you deprive streptococus mutants of the opportunity to flourish by brushing and flossing ideally with a toothpaste that contains hydroxy appetite guess what your teeth can remineralize you can fill in those Li you know they go in at the dentist and they poke poke poke po poke poke you got a pit there those pits can fill themselves back in they never told me that I thought those What's that they can absolutely four dentists told me that four dentists told me

that these are board-certified dentists including a pediatric dentist there's a dentist on Instagram and um it's Dr downcore Stacy with an i who's just she's like here's the truth on fluoride here's the truth on hydroxy appetite here's how to give your kids really healthy teeth the other way to give your kids really healthy teeth encourage them to be nose breathers this Mouth breathing thing is really bad a friend of mine who works with Methamphetamine addicts with Methamphetamine addicts do you know one of the reasons their teeth are so bad why because they mouth breathe so

there's this stuff is like so basic but you know and I'm people might sound like I'm is he angry I'm not angry at all I'm just I'm now at the point where like I've seen behind the curtain and I go okay this is how media Works How do I know well humbly I have a really large media channel and I also read and I listen and I talk to doctors and and you ask you know like with vet care I just another example I um I fixed Costello and later in life he was really aching

and hurting so I started giving him a low dose of testosterone and he was like thank you and I thought to myself oh boy um I talked about on Rogan I thought the Vets are going to come after me the Vets are Just going to come after me puts his dog on testosterone I was contacted by many vets and you know what they said thank you yeah it turns out that they try and scare you that your male dog is going to get testicular cancer or mate with every dog in the neighborhood if you keep

it intact turns out when you castrate a dog young not only does their brain not develop normally which I know should have known because I used to work on the relationship between brain development And hormones but they have all sorts of health problems Costello's shedding stopped his nails stopped growing so fast he was much happier but I said why don't you tell people this why don't or at least just give them testosterone for their dogs this might not seem like a major health problem but I said why half the dogs are are fixed and they

said oh the reason is we know that if you give cough medicine to dog owners for kennel cough the dogs will feel better but People might abuse the cough syrup and if you give testosterone to pet owners they might take them as anabolic their their owners might use them as anabolic steroids so we don't we deprive animals of this of this potentially beneficial treatment to avoid a problem but it's great that you did this and we're grateful that you talked about it publicly I have not had one now I'll get one but I've not had

one vet tell me listen that was irresponsible of you to Go on there and talk about giving your dog testosterone so what you start to realize is there are things within each medical community whether not it's Veterinary or it's uh oral health or it's skin care like the Derm monologist thing or Cancer Care where you know these are smart people who are a bit constrained by their culture the culture they exist in and I'm sure in the military there's the same thing too you're not free to do everything that Would be most beneficial to everybody

because there's a larger structure there yeah like psychedelics but um but doc if you don't mind let's take a break and then uh when we come back I want to pick your brain about some cannabis stuff and we'll get into psychedelics great perfect we're all feeling pretty good about where the country's headed right now but I still have some concerns cuz every time we seem to let our guard down that's when bad things start to happen And that's why I always prepare for emergencies no matter how comfortable life gets and the only brand that I

rely on for my security and safety in an emergency is my Patriot Supply emergency food kits solar power generators or water treatment systems you name it they're the best in the business and right now you can get their 4-we emergency food kit for $50 off their 4-we emergency food kit includes some of my favorite meals like creamy alfredo Pasta and snacks like sweet banana chips with warehouses located across America my Patriot Supply can send your four-week emergency food kit in as little as one day go to mypatriotsupply.com to get your four-week emergency food kit right

now but don't wait emergencies can happen anytime that's mypatriotsupply.com to get your 4-we emergency food kit now I know everybody out out there has to Be just as frustrated as I am when it comes to the BS and the rhetoric that the mainstream media continuously tries to force feed us and I also know how frustrating it can be to try to find some type of a reliable news source it's getting really hard to find the truth and what's going on in the country and in the world and so one thing we've done here at sha

Ryan Show is we are developing our newsletter and the first cont Contributor to the newsletter that we have is a woman former CIA targeter some of you may know her as Sarah Adams call sign super bad she's made two different appearances here on the Shawn Ryan Show and some of the stuff that she has uncovered and broke on this show is just absolutely mindblowing and so I've asked her if she would contribute to the newsletter and give us a weekly intelligence brief so it's going to be all things terrorists How terrorists are coming up through

the southern border how they're entering the country how they're traveling what these different terrorist organizations throughout the world are up to and here's the best part the newsletter is actually free we're not going to spam you it's about one newsletter a week maybe two if we release two shows the only other thing that's going to be in there besides the Intel brief is if we have a new product or something like That but like I said it's a free free CIA intelligence brief sign up links in the description or in the comments we'll see in

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jeans and joggers the holidays are here and true Classics Ultra comfortable perfect fitting Essentials make for the perfect gift so if you're ready to upgrade your Closet shop now and unlock big savings during their huge holiday sale just go to my exclusive Link at true classic.com SRS to save that's true classic.com SRS please support our show and tell them we sent you end the year with holiday cheer thanks to True classic I know we just got back from the break I know we're going to talk about cannabis but I've been dying to ask you about

neuralink so I just want to ask you these couple questions I just read That it looks like it's possible that neurolink is going to help blind people see again is that is there any truth behind that yes there is so this is an area I know a lot about um I've watched neural link develop what they're doing not at a level of detail you know where I could speak to the specific engineering but a guy that came up through my lab he worked actually at Stanford but did a little bit of time in my lab

a guy named Matt McDougall he's a Medical doctor neurosurgeon he's the lead neurosurgeon at neurolink um so here's what doing there they're using small implantable devices to stimulate neurons and or record from neurons this is really powerful because if you can record from neurons and get a sense of what their patterns of firing are in a healthy individual then you could potentially put those same patterns of firing into a brain or an eye of a patient who is somehow suffering from Not enough or not proper neural activity in that particular region okay and they've got

a bunch of other things they're doing that are really cool like using robotics to get really precise and really fast about the implant of these chips so that you don't have to do neurosurgery the way it's traditionally done they're building a ton of amazing biomedical tools related to Robotics and AI in addition okay here's the part about blindness there Are a lot of different forms of blindness there are forms of blindness caused by loss of the photo receptive cells that is the cells that convert light into electrical signals that then are passed into the brain

okay so there there are a number of diseases where photo receptor loss occurs there you need to put back in a light sensing tissue or device okay there are also forms of blindness like for instance glaucoma which is a degeneration of Neurons called retinal gangan cells they line the back of your eye these are actually brain neurons they're central nervous system neurons and they send these little connections that we call axons which are like little wires into the brain to allow transmission of visual images so you can see visual perception and of course there are

forms of blindness that occur because the visual cortexes damaged the area deep within The brain so what neuralink is doing quite rationally is they're figuring out hey we have little implantable devices that can stimulate and simulate the patterns of neural activity that occur in normal healthy neurons that allow normal healthy people to see so they've been recording these patterns of activity and mind you they've been researchers within the field of visual Neuroscience like EJ chisi at Stamford and others whove been doing this for a Long time but neuralink is gaining really good ground on this

problem of measuring what are the patterns of firing in these neurons that normally occur when light comes into the eye and what sorts of patterns of activity are transmitted deeper into the brain by these retinal ganglion cells what sorts of patterns of activity occur within the brain when that activity comes in that gives rise to say the perception of my hand moving in front of my face which is What I'm doing now for anyone just listening so what they're doing is they're taking perceptual events like motion color face recognition Etc figuring out what patterns of

neural activity are required and then going into the broken visual system of a human who perhaps lacks retinal ganglion cells or perhaps has damaged in a particular region of their visual cortex and introducing the healthy patterns of activity by simply replaying those Patterns of activity at the right location along the visual pathway W now this is wild because there have been very few instances one in particular by a guy named Boton Rosa and Carl daero one of whom is in Switzerland the other at Stanford of restoring light sensitivity to the photo receptors and allowing a

blind patient this was done in one patient a blind patient to be able to See crude light and dark object formations within their visual environment so this is not restoration of precise Vision okay okay what neuralink is trying to do as far as I understand is something far more precise to figure out the exact patterns of activity that are required to create visual scenes to create motion perception to create face perception and then put a tiny implantable device at The location in the brain where it's needed most could be within the eye but more technically

it's going to be done within the deeper brain okay areas like the phalus the visual cortex for those that want to know and essentially allow then a device within the eye because this can be done right even if someone's lacking eye tissue to see the visual world right because a a camera can see the visual world and then give that information to the device which then can Translate the digital image into a neural signal that then can speak to the rest of the neurons in the visual system holy [ __ ] so the reason I

say yes they are very likely to succeed in doing this and I think they got FDA approval I know they got FDA approval at least for the first pass at this first pass attempt in humans is that all the components that you need are there you know what the visual scene is you can put a camera where the eye is you can even have ey Glasses with just a camera little wire going in through the temporal bone right just little glasses little wire right there maybe even a contact lens with a little wire this is

now possible then that wire takes the visual image that's received digitally like an image on a phone right if you think about the little camera on a phone it's not much bigger than an eyeball um circumference and then provide the electrical signals the digital signals That is to the chip that they can provide the electrical signals to the neurons that then create the proper neural signals they've essentially decoded visual processing and they can introduce whatever component happens to be missing in that patient so if the patient has photo receptors and gangling cells but is lacking

a patch of neurons in the visual system because of damage or what have you a stroke they could replace the signals that would have Originated from those neurons if they're lacking gangling cells they can replace those signals if they're lacking photo receptors that's a little bit trickier but you could use a camera that views the outside world right the camera has perfectly good photo reception just make sure that it's translating the camera video image into the proper neural image wow so they are pursuing this it makes very good sense as to why this would be

the first thing that neur neuralink Should pursue in terms of brain augmentation and restoration of function because the visual system has this important property which is that you know what the inputs are that you want to deliver to the chip compare that for instance to like um a memory right I'll walk out of here after this recording I'll have a memory of it let's say I had brain damage and I lost my memories what neural signals would you give the brain in order to recreate This experience you don't know with visual images you know all

the statistics of the visual scene right how light or dark something is the spatial frequency meaning just the spacing between things right you know how high contrasty or low contrasty it is and you can basically get all that through a quality Digital Image and then just feed it to the chip the job of the neuralink implant device that's challenging but I think they're going to overcome is to Create a chip that can take all of that information lots of and lots and lots of information and translate it into neural signals dynamically in real time because

people don't just look at their hand moving in front of their face for 10 minutes they're looking at that then they're putting down then they're walking this way there's optic flow there's stuff going by but I'm confident they're going to succeed in doing this because all the necessary components are Known that's critical right we don't know all the necessary inputs that are required to like create a memory of your grandmother we just don't know what they are right but we do know all the necessary physical world components coming in we know what needs to be

encoded by the camera that's easy to do with a camera cameras are very small now how to feed that to a chip that then can translate it into the language of the nervous system which is electrical Signals driven by chemical release from neurons does that mean that you could also put in a signal of something that never happened that's complete fantasy oh yeah yeah in fact there was an experiment that was done by uh two guys Bill Nome and Tony Maan and others the following way and they did this in a maak monkey you put

a small micro stimulator into an area of the brain that reads out what not the stimulator this area of the Brain pays attention to whether or not things are moving up down or to the side in the visual world you have this area in your brain if I were to put an electrode in there and record and move some things up certain neurons would fire others wouldn't certain neurons would fire to down certain neurons to to to left certain neurons to right they've actually done the experiment where they train this animal to view dots moving

in a particular direction and then to Basically correspond with a lever press or a joystick to say which which direction that it's moving and if you reward animals for getting the answer right pretty soon they learn how to do this they did an experiment many years ago now where they put a little micro stimulation in this brain area where they had the monkey see dots going down and the monkey pulls the joystick down saying the dots are going down then they decide to stimulate the neurons that Were active during the dots going down perceptual decision

of the monkey while the dots are going up so they move dots up and the monkey thinks that the dots are going down okay they basically are tinkering with the activity in the brain so that even though the animal can perceive what's happening in the environment it thinks that the opposite is happening right so dots are going up but they're stimulating the neurons in the Brain that have led in the past to the perceptual decision that the dots are moving down and the monkey only does this and the neurons only fire when the dots are

moving so they know it's not just the monkey anticipating this or something so dots are going up now and the monkey goes they're going down they're going down why does it think they're going down because they're stimulating the neurons in the brain that they make it think that the dots Are going down now it seems profound but on the face of it it kind of had to be that way because for instance if a neurosurgeon and this has been done many times actually goes in and stimulates looking for the sight of epilepsy This Is How

They probe for the sight of epilepsy my friend Eddie changen who's the chair of neuros surgery at UCSF I mentioned because I love these stories I'll ask him tell me a story about outrageous brain Stimulation he said oh yeah I was down in the medial Thalamus and stimulating looking for this area to stimulate epilepsy so I can treat the epilepsy burn out those small patch of neurons and they'll stumble upon neurons they'll stimulate and the person will be like I'm ready to go into a rage and sometimes they'll feel like they're going to go into

a rage this is actually an opportunity to share something very useful there's an area of the brain that A neurosurgeon in at Stanford Joe parvey discovered in the anterior mid singulate cortex that when stimulated patients all three of them separately these patients said when you stimulate there I feel like there's a storm coming or some Challenge and I want to lean into it this is area the enter mid singulate cortex is super interesting because it's the brain area that grows it actually gets larger in volume increases its activity when we do Something challenging that is

a little bit scary that we don't want to do and it this brain area grows in people that are successful exercisers and dieters it shrinks in size in people that fail to reach their goals it's also the area that maintains size in what are called superagers it's a misnomer these are people that don't show the normal pattern of cognitive decline with aging as as much as others so this area the enter mid singulate cortex seems to be One of the seats of will to push back on pressure in a positive way it's related to willpower

and tenacity and it seems related to brain longevity and to body longevity and I like to kind of expand on this a bit and seems like it's related to the the will to live it's the desire to push back on challenges and so these things of stimulating different brain areas you know we get to this because when you stimulate a brain area doesn't really matter what's happening In the outside world this is why neuralink is so interesting exciting and a little bit scary for us to think about it which is that if I put a

little chip into the area of your brain that causes rage like a little patch of Zona inserta or the mid Thalamus there's certain nuclei there where you can generate some pretty aggressive behavior or I were to stimulate an area of the brain that's associated with depression like the habenula or an area of the brain that's Associated with inhibiting the habenula you could potentially remove some components of depression encourage rage disc courage rage all of this is possible because ultimately all of our behavior and thought processes come through these little neural hubs and these neural circuits

so what neuralink is doing is developing ways to get in there and push on specific types of perceptions and behaviors emotions and memories in ways that are completely Unprecedented but it is 100% possible and it is 100% happening first in the visual system wow so you could you could project 100% of a false false reality into somebody's head and and they think that that it is all actually happening definitely you could do that two ways you could either present it like through a vr- like experience but the person probably knows it's VR or you could

do it by stimulating the ensembles the the groups of neurons in the right order Within the brain to give you the idea that that thing is happening even though nothing's happening out there wow that is uh that's mind control it is mind control it's it's mind control through neural circuit control and this has been demonstrated in animal models over and over again and in a few cases where people have had to have neurosurgery You observe this in the neurosurgery Clinic Eddie Chang will tell you this as a Neurosurgeon Matt McDougall will tell you this as

a neurosurgeon Joe parves will tell you this as a neurosurgeon and this is what they write into these papers where you can learn really interesting things like of you know that of all the brain areas that people can stimulate if they have a choice the studies were done uh by a guy Robert Heath in the 1960s very controversial guy um but he had electrodes embedded into these people's brains and they had The option to stimulate wherever they wanted and so they would stimulate they'd feel a little drunk or they stimulate another area they feel giddy

they stimulate another area sexual arousal you know the area they chose to stimulate the most by choice generated feelings of mild frustration and anger are you serious it's a highly rewarded circuit it's woven into the dopamine circuit it has its own rewarding property and actually animals certain Animals in particular uh and certain members of certain species will actually work hard to get the opportunity to fight it is a hardwired circuit which is not to say everyone should fight but these circuits exist within us interesting very interesting well let's move into cannabis I've done the psychedelics

changed my life helped my sleeping for a little bit uh but I I cannot not go to sleep without some type of cannabis and vaping is my thing so I Try the the I just it's just I like the immediate you know the immediate effects and so but Cancer's On The Rise it's like every day every day I hear somebody else that's that's fighting cancer or is dying of cancer knows somebody that died of cancer and you know now that I have two little guys you know little kids then I I I take it a

lot more seriously so I talked to my wife about this I've tried to quit I quit for like 6 months After my Iain treatment then I had uh I had a whole slew of surgeries that I kind of put into one thing and I quit for a month and a half then still couldn't sleep and my wife kind of was like look lack of sleep might be just as bad as you vaping and so uh so I kind of went back but I do I want to quit so let's talk about cannabis okay so neither

cannabis nor nicotine will Give you cancer but smoking vaping dipping and snuffing can increase your risk of cancer so the delivery route matters okay so nicotine is actually protective it's thought against Parkinson's and Alzheimer's did you know that I no I didn't know that yeah but it's highly addictive and most people smoke Vape Dipper snit which is carcinogenic okay so the rout of Entry is uh or the route of administration Excuse me is important so let's talk about cannabis so who should not do cannabis at all let's just kind of get that out of the

way there is a growing body of research supporting the fact that some people especially young males with a pred disposition genetic predisposition to bipolar disorder or schizophrenia or other forms of psychosis if they do high THC cannabis Can exacerbate or maybe even trigger Psy psychosis okay uh I got myself into some let's just say uh friction territory by putting that out there but after getting attacked for saying that there was another group of researchers that came in and supported that there's you see data on both sides it's clear to me based on my read of

the literature that anyone that has a predisposition to psychosis schizophrenia or related things bipolar Etc should avoid high THC cannabis especially young males that does not mean young females can do it without a problem but some people will just trigger psychotic episodes what is high THC concern well so this gets tricky so for these individuals the genetic predisposition is such that if they smoke cannabis um you know they'll Vape it or or whatever for um a couple of years sometimes they can induce a permanent psychosis later Now dosing of cannabis for most people I have

to be careful with my language here is I don't want to say best done but let's just say for people that smoke or vape most people are able to smoke or vape to a if they've done it before to a point where they know that they're in that plane of effect that they're seeking and then stop okay okay we had an expert on my podcast who really drilled this home Edibles on the other hand people will often ingest Too much too quickly and then they'll get beyond that zone they'll be in the paranoia zone or

they'll be in some other Zone they don't want to be in so if and I'm not encouraging people to do this but if people are going to use cannabis and they're going to do Edibles you shouldn't assume that you know half is not enough or too much or whatever you need to you know ease into it until you hit that plane of of effect that you're Seeking okay with smoking and vaping people generally will you know inhale get some sort of effect wait maybe maybe do it again and then they kind of know I'm good

and they'll stop there whereas with an edible it's in your system you're off for the for the ride whatever that ride is and for some people it can be really scary so in your case because your concerned is cancer you're not concerned about psychosis it's obvious that you can do a small amount of Cannabis for you it helps your sleep we'll talk about that but it seems to help your sleep and you don't have psychotic issues or psychosis at all that's very apparent and you're highly functional in all all domains of your life as far

as I can tell the the key thing is why not take a small amount through an edible as opposed to vaping and then you eliminate essentially any carcinogenic aspect like you're not you can get rid of the cancer causing aspect Because vaping it's true is not as bad as smoking but vaping can still cause lung damage especially if it's done a lot so vaping is actually better than smoking it is okay um for nicotine and for cannabis it is safer for the lungs but that does not mean it's completely safe okay um yeah sort of

like and here I apparently like to open up big cans of worms today um so like the like Crum is probably safer than a prescription opioid but that Doesn't mean katum is completely safe but I there's a katum community katum I think it's called that gets uh really upset when I say that but I'm not saying that something is good or bad I'm saying these are relative harms and then you have to wait against the potential benefits somebody seeking so in your case a small amount of cannabis Vaped seems to help you with your sleep

it's probably robbing you of some slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep that Would be beneficial but I'll mention an alternative that you could try but in the time why not use a small amount of edible and then you essentially remove the cancer risk and then you just have to decide if you want to continue to use cannabis I agree with your wife that not sleeping is very dangerous very dangerous for your heart health very dangerous for everything um I would also ask why is it that you're not sleeping is it rumination or You

just don't feel tired enough to fall asleep it is it's the wheels man they just always turn it's always innovating it's always business it's always what can I be it's it's just it's looking at the future yeah and and this is common among oper former operators and operators I mean like I said we have enough common friends in the community that just have a really hard time shutting it off and you guys are just so effective and I mean you were selected In part on in buds on the basis of being able to continue to

think and move and communicate uh without sleep so there's kind of a selection process here there are a few things and here you know I'm getting into new territory but there are a few um non-prescription approaches that people have used to improve sleep that have certainly been beneficial for me um I mean there's the whole supplement route Of magnesium 3 and8 Etc that can help for a lot of people I can suggest some of I've talked about these magnesium 3 and8 spelled t h r e o n a t before sleep um for some people

a very low dose of Melatonin but you don't want to do that long term uh maybe half a milligram or a milligram tiny amount why not why don't you want to do longterm um there it can have some crossover impact onto other hormone systems the the thing that's pretty exciting right now is a is A peptide that can be prescribed by a doctor it's very inexpensive it's currently available um called pinealon and people will compound it with a glycine I don't recommend people go out and buy gry Market or black market peptides because they're not

clean of something called Lippy polysaccharide which can really cause a massive immune response and there are a lot of people out there buying peptides that are literally labeled not for human or Animal use for research purposes only but they're sold on the internet and those are in my opinion are pretty dangerous okay but there there's a a really good doctor that was on my podcast Craig Conover who's an MD he's in South Carolina I can put you in touch with um and there some other really good peptide doc MDS ways to well which is down

in Austin I think those folks um make some of this stuff but pineline is an interesting peptide because there's Some data keep in mind there aren't a lot of human research data but there are clinical data out there conover's talked about this and um he could chat with you about it that it might be able to help regenerate um the pinealocytes of the pineal gland and lead to more regular secretion of melatonin so get sunlight early in the day throughout the day limit your exposure to dark at night we should probably get you some red

lens glasses Cuz some people are very susceptible to light at night that can help you transition to a calmer State these aren't traditional blue blockers but these kinds of things but a small injection of pinin it's like a little insect pin thing um it hurts less than a California mosquito bite so not at all that means um a little bit of pinin compounded with glycine in my experience can really improve your sleep even when you don't Take it it seems to improve functioning of the pineal and the people if there are any Physicians listening they're

going to be like how can you be talking about this thing that's a peptide well glp1 Agonist like OIC and monjaro those are peptides insulin that's a peptide peptide is just a small protein okay but pinin has I've observed with a number of people who had real trouble sleeping this isn't something you take regularly this something to get you back on track You take it about half hour before sleep it can cause up to a doubling of rapid eye movement sleep s which is fantastic because the problem with cannabis and alcohol before sleep is it

can help you get to sleep but it's going to rob you of that rapid eye movement sleep okay so I would say short answer would be if cannabis is working for you and you don't have psychosis issues which you don't then maybe move to a lowd dose edible so you remove the cancer risk Because you're not smoking or vaping dipping or snuffing to my knowledge there's no cancer risk of canab cannabis per se it's the root of Entry okay okay and then maybe you try I prescribed by a doctor of course you try a little

bit of Pine and glycine cocktail um it's a little injection try that a few times see if that works I will say I've never seen it not work meaning every single time someone calls me the next day they're like I slept for The first time I woke up once or I didn't sleep wake up at all and I'm like I know kind of wild because the things like Xanax Propranolol that whole route of prescription drugs while it can work for some people for a lot of people it gives them zombie sleep do not feel rested

when they wake up and for a lot of things xana ax in particular it can be very badly habit forming or downright addictive I'm lucky that I never like those things I once took a quarter of a Xanax to try and sleep I felt like garbage for like a day and a half so I'm very um sensitive to those things but so that's that's the deal with cannabis for most people they're smoking cannabis because they like the fact that it removes their anxiety um and there seems to be a lot of individual variation on this

some people become very aath pathetic and don't work much you got a lot of young males these days smoking a lot of weed Not doing much with themselves and that's not good then you also have some really hard driving people who use cannabis to calm down and relax and the argument is always alcohol is worse people go well alcohol is worse yeah I would probably agree except for those that fall into the potential psychosis Camp right at the same time alcohol isn't a great comparison because telling you that you know shooting yourself in the foot

is n as bad as shooting Yourself in the upper arm doesn't really work for me it's not a very good medical scientific argument but it seems to be working for you without too much issue well I mean there are some observations I have you know like I don't dream I do not dream yeah that's the Cannabis when you come off that you're going to dream like crazy very Vivid when I do sleep when I come off of it yeah I have very vivid dreams but yeah as soon as I'm back on they're gone the dreams

are gone I I'll um be very curious to see how Pinel and glycine works you could get it out here in a day you have one consult and do that and um these are not powerful drugs of the sort like Xanax or of a there's a new sleep Med called qu Vivic which works a little bit differently than the other ones um that are out there in that it decreases the wakefulness system that rumination and thinking that you're talking about as opposed to making you sleepier you have Multiple systems one to make you awake one

to make you sleepy it kind of pushes down on the awaking system without touching that sleepy system it is pretty effective in maintaining normal sleep architecture normal slow wave sleep rapid eye movement sleep so it doesn't give you that zombie sleep the problem is it's exceedingly expensive so if any drug companies are listening to this it's like $25 a pill it's out I mean it's prohibitively expensive for most People yeah but among the prescription drugs for sleep it's certainly headed in the right direction but the cost is still too high but I'm a big believer

in using light during the day darkness at night limiting alcohol at night limiting caffeine in the afternoon although that's a tough one for me because I love coffee in the afternoon and just trying the red lens glasses can really help you wind down and then maybe this glycine um pineline uh peptide and if that all Still doesn't work I'd say and you seem to have found a pretty good solution for you but for a 15-year-old kid or 16-year-old kid who can't sleep I would not go to cannabis okay I would say you know take it

because the brain's still developing and sure there there are I should say there are valid medical uses for cannabis right chemotherapy glaucoma um some people can do it no problem and some people it it bends Their life in a in a in the wrong direction maybe not a bad Direction but it makes them kind of a little bit lazy and then I know people who Vape a big bag of weed and work like a demon and they like you know that those folks are out there I just do it at night I just do it

at night to wind down so I could sleep but you know is there anything uh is there anything I can do to replenish my my lungs from doing that um well you do cardio exercise right Cardiovascular exercise I would include at least one hit workout per week so ma One max heart rate workout per week okay so A good rule to follow if you don't have I mean I don't know your look to be in great shape but the in terms of training is I try and get one long slow run per week or Ruck

an hour or two somewhere between an hour and two hours usually it ends up being 75 minutes so on the shorter end full disclosure middle of the week I'll go out for a 30 Minute run you could do this on a treadmill or you could swim or you could bike whatever doesn't get you injured basically a 30 like hard clip run like you're you're pushing you're breathing hard but you're not maxed out okay and then one day a week very brief hop on the assault bike or find something where you can get max heart rate

so you're going like 20 seconds 30 seconds hard walk or just cruise for 10 15 seconds 20 30 seconds hard you know pseudo Tabata Type workout you'll be done in 10 minutes that Max heart rate thing plus the other stuff your lung capacity is going to be pretty strong if you really want to prac practice you could get someone like um I can put you in touch with Brian McKenzie who's really uh I mean he's a master at this stuff of teaching people to really um do diaphragmatic breathing of really learning how to like really

use their diaphragm to to breathe out with the Belly going out and then that kind of stuff really training their lungs like a free diver would there's a cool test actually I've never presented this on a podcast so it's kind of fun there's a test called the carbon dioxide tolerance test that free divers do where this is modified Brian's done Brian MacKenzie's really developed this where you do three or four just normal breaths then you inhale really deep really fill your lungs and then you slowly discard Your air as slowly as possible and you time

that discard and when you hit lungs empty take note of the time okay so you're not seeing how long you can hold your breath you're just seeing how slowly you can control that exhale slow controlled exhale you can do it through the nose or through the mouth 20 seconds or less is pretty weak that means you you don't have great mechanical control of the diaphragm through the frenic Nerve 25 to 45 maybe 60 seconds it's pretty good 60 seconds or longer you've got good mechanical control of your lungs and you're not going to be an

over breather which is not good for your brain and body nor are you going to be under breathing you want that balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen to be right when at rest when you're just like hanging out now and talking and moving and exercising too there's a way that You can get better at it um build that lung capacity so you've heard of box breathing inhale hold exhale hold okay so equal duration inhale holds exhale holds done for about five minutes so you say how long should the sides of the Box be is it

inhale for 3 seconds hold for 3 seconds exhale for 3 seconds hold for 3 seconds or is it eight well if you do the carbon dioxide tolerance test and your discard rate is 20 seconds or less you probably can only manage box Breathing for about 5 minutes with 3 second sides of the box if your carbo dioxide discard rate is somewhere between 25 and let's say 55 seconds you can probably manage doing box breathing with a five to 7 second inhale hold exhale hold ratio for five minutes continuously this is harder than it sounds when

people really get to it like if somebody doesn't have good mechanical control of their lungs and their diaphragm and they try and do a box Breathing with 7c inhale 7c hold 7c exhale 7c hold it's going to be tough you can do it for a couple minutes and then you're going to be like feeling pretty jittery your adrenaline is going to be going up the idea is to be able to do this calmly and then if you can if you if you have a carbon dioxide discard rate of 60 seconds or longer you can do

box breathing with probably an 8 to 10 second sides of the Box free divers and the free diving Community is a little Nutty they're a little bit like the uh um I I respect them but they're a little bit like the triathlon Community they they're going to get me on the technical details here they're going to be like no okay listen done this with enough people through my lab when we were doing this with humans with Brian McKenzie and others and um if you want to get better at lung capacity just get longer and longer

sides of that box on box breathing for five minutes a day and Then test yourself on the carbon dioxide tolerance test and you'll notice that you can go from a 30C carbon dioxide discard rate to a 90c discard rate now if you think about free divers there's a whole art to it and I always say it's probably the most dangerous sport out there because it's all good till lights out and then you die so I don't recommend it but what they figured out how to do is to slowly exhale so they don't trigger the gasp

reflex people Think they pack their lungs with air it doesn't really work like that when you exhale a lot this is why it's very dangerous what I'm about to say it's very dangerous to do hyperventilation and then go into water why because you blow out a lot of carbon dioxide and then you can hold your breath longer but guess what your brain senses carbon dioxide levels to trigger the gasp reflex which sends you up to the surface to get a breath of air if your carbon Dioxide's low you don't get the gas reflex and guess

what you just black out and die so this is why there's been a lot of controversy suggesting that people should not do Wim Hoff type or Tumo type breathing or Si what we call in the lab cylic hyperventilation any heavy exhales followed by a breathhold near water is potentially lethally dangerous but you asked how can you get your breath your lung capacity better do the cardio work I mentioned um especially the max heart rate work but then do five minutes a week it's just five minutes a week of box breathing and determine how long to

make the sides of the Box by doing a carbon dioxide tolerance test first and then just retest every couple weeks pretty soon you'll be doing you know 10 minute sides of the box if you're not already and I've seen and I've met some free divers that can literally do 20 Second inhale 20 second hold 20 second exhale 20 second hold it sounds easy but it's it's not trivial and that's because they've just really learned how to control in a conscious way the their diaphragm me I'll say this you know your brain has two centers for

controlling breathing but the breathing centers are amazing they're right at the bridge between the conscious and the unconscious mind you're breathing all the time without having to control these But at any moment you can just grab a hold of the neural control of breathing which is unlike any other autonomic function digestion or pupil size you can't just decide to digest faster decide to increase your heart rate these breathing is the bridge into controlling your your inner State and so that's why things like yoga meditation there's nothing really mysterious about it it's using breath to control

your level of of arousal exhales slow the heart rate Respiratory sinus arhythmia inhales increase your heart rate also respiratory sinus arhythmia for for those that want to look it up so doing box breathing in a very controlled way you're balancing that in that heart rate you're staying nice and even by not letting your heart rate get high not letting it get low and you're using your breathing as a way to do that and the diaphragm works so it should be when you inhale belly goes out and when you Exhale again nothing mystical about this it's

actually all very mechanical it's all gas exchange interesting when when um when you're saying to breathe out are are you just are you breathing out as slow as you possibly can during the carbon dioxide discard test okay yeah you're you're breathing out as slow as you possibly can until your lungs are empty and then you stop the stopwatch okay now inh this um so you can't cheat you can't Cheat and this is interesting so animals like lizards they have active exhales passive inhales so they actively exhale and they passively inhale humans are the opposite we

actively inhale using the muscles of between the ribs the intercostals and the diaphragm but then we tend to passively Exhale we just kind of let it fall out when you make it a point to actively exhale that's how you slow the the heart rate down okay you engage a neural circuit through the Sino And then eventually the sinoatrial node and then you slow the heart rate down it's a it's a really beautiful mechanism actually and I think not enough has been said about the relationship between breathing and brain State I mean it's an incredible thing

that you can control your breathing with your brain and you can control your brain state with your breathing so you know you seem like a very calm guy most operators are pretty calm they're just trained to like not Waste energy so you sit in a really nice even plane most of the time is my guess and you know how to flip a switch when you need to be super in the zone most people don't know how to do that and so they live their life kind of blown around by caffeine and alcohol and stress and

social media and and I will say that for most people paying a little bit of attention to how one breathes focusing mainly on nasal breathing unless you're exercising eating or Speaking which is also good for your teeth um and and facial structure too I don't know if you've ever seen the pictures of these kids in this book Jaws by my colleagues at Stanford Paul erlick and Sandra Khan they're these twins one is a mouth breather one is a nose breather and the mouth breather kit is like really weird facial structure compared to the nose breather

kit and I that's a little bit of an extreme but um being able to fit your tongue on the Roof of your mouth with your with your with your teeth closed I can't do this because I actually had orthodontia so my palet is a little too confined and just being able to breathe through your nose while you're jogging or just walking along that's the right way to breathe to have the proper Airway and during sleep sleep apnea blockage of proper air flow during sleep breathing through the mouth during sleep these are high high risk for

cardiovascular disease and or for C Basically for heart attack I mean being deprived of oxygen for you know mildly deprived of oxygen for long periods of time during sleep or awake is just not good yeah I heard some story from stories from the teams I don't know if this is true I don't know if we want to open this up but that there the thing I said earlier about not hyperventilating and holding one's breath is so serious that um it's actually been they actually I think I don't know if this is true That they actively

tell guys who are doing their dive work or going into the Bell like in the tower that they can't do hyperventilation before because you can just black out quickly and die so it's it's not something to be messed with yeah but if you're above ground and you're not driving or operating Machinery like you just pass out for a minute I mean I'm not I'm not into that but uh you know um but I do think Learning To Breathe properly is pretty Key yeah and and you the cool thing is the Box breathing making sides of

the Box longer it has a really nice crossover effect with cardiovascular training where you go back to do those hit workouts and you're like you feel like you have a superpower nice yeah I'll definitely be doing that thank you thank you let's move into uh psychedelics so I had a profound experience haven't had did Iain did 5 Meo DMT um as part of Veteran Solutions yep yeah and what a great organization yeah yeah and uh I mean so many positive things came came out of that for me I mean I haven't drank alcohol in this

February was it scary going through it sorry to interrupt I'm just so curious uh no it I was more scared I wasn't scared to do the Iva gain um I just had too many guys come in here and uh and and tell me about their experience and how it how it how it Improved their their Li their personal life their family life their work life just all around what really scared the hell out of me was the 5 Meo DMT when I found out it was a death exper I think I was like wait a

minute I have a friend who we're GNA die oh man I had a friend who was in the teams I'm not laughing because I haven't done it so I I although I might um someday who former team guy who told me that it was like being St his words strapped to the shock Wave of an atom bomb and I thought that's a big statement yeah yeah I wouldn't call it that but uh but everybody you know everybody's different but uh for me it was just 10 you are 100% certain you are dying wow like that's

it you are you are dying okay and uh but scary it's scary while you're in it's the most fear most anxiety I've ever felt through anything Thing all my time in the teams all my time at Contracting for CIA like I just I was and I've had times where I thought I was going to die but this was actually I mean you felt you were 100% sure in your brain that you are this is it you're dead like you're actively dying and you're grasping for anything you can possibly hold on to to to I me

at that time I had my son and my wife and I was like holy I cannot [ __ ] leave them and then uh but you're dying you can't Control it and then you die and and then and then it takes you into a whole another realm but uh but um but it's that's that put me in the moment that changed my perspective on God for a a while and then but it at the same time it also proved to me that there was something after death and uh you know and now as you know

I am a uh a Believer but but I think the I think the the real effects that that have really lasted uh For almost three years now are the are from the Iain mhm and I know you've done a lot of studies with this have been a part of a lot of studies and and I'm curious you know I'm just curious what where is pelic medicine today yeah so um super excited that we're talking about this because it's a really important time for all of this there several aspects uh I'll say one piece first and

these always sound like disclaimers but I don't say them to Protect myself I say them to protect anyone listening I don't think young kids should do psych I don't think kids or teenagers should do psychedelics and I did them as a teenager so been there don't recommend it I think there's a therapeutic potential for sure for psilocybin MDMA ibigan I don't know much about 5 Meo but they seem to couple it with the uh with Ibigan um you may ask why I'm not putting LSD in that category you know why there aren't very many studies

of LSD even though LSD has a very serotonergic dopaminergic type of facts that are similar to psilocybin but a little bit different as well do you know the reason they don't study LS I didn't because of the Nix Administration uh no it's a great great answer but no it turns out that the the trips are just too long no one will stay In the laboratory that long to study the person how long are they they're like 11 or 12 hours or more wow on the do so I know it's a funny one right so in

Switzerland there's some Labs that study it because the Swiss are very like hardworking they'll stay after hours in the US and in other countries they're like oh you know 4 to 6 hours is about much time you can spend with somebody and I know it's almost funny but I point this out because this is also how Science works and it illustrates a really important point and as a tangential but related point the so-called eight hour feeding window for intermittent fasting you know why most of the studies are eight hours because the guy my friend sain

panda who initiated those studies at the Sal Institute in San Diego he had a graduate student whose girlfriend who was running those study said I need you home by a certain time so he could be in the Laboratory for 10 hours a day but not longer so they made the feeding window that they studied 8 hours so almost all the data on intermittent fasting at least the bulk of it is about eight hour feeding Windows because of this graduate student's girlfriend wow so just giving you a sense of of kind of how science is done

not halfhazard but it exists in these practical constraints okay psychedelics in my opinion should not be done in the developing Brain psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD and to some extent ibigan which is very impacts the serotonin system the the major physiological effect and my colleague Nolan Williams at Stanford is the one really pioneering these studies on ibigan it increases serotonin and it seems to mimic serotonin and act through specific serotonin receptors and increase communication between certain brain areas both during the Psychedelic journey and afterwards we have to Distinguish between those because right now there's a

crucial question in this field which is does the Psychedelic Journey matter or is the Psychedelic Journey just a kind of a epip phenomenon where people think they learned something there but actually there's a bunch of brain rewiring that happens simply because of the chemical of the drug drug companies are very interested in taking psychedelics I'll tell you and removing the Psychedelic experience from Them and finding just the brain plasticity part that allows them to help depression Etc but for the time being it seems that these psychedelics seem to do at least two things from a

subjective standpoint they kind of recede the waterline on the conscious to unconscious mind you get to see your unconscious mind I've done high dose psilocybin high dose would be between four and five grams I've done that four different times and every Single time I can attest you you start to see the structure of your thinking but it happens with real emotion and in real time and you get a lot of reps so rather than thinking about something you are experiencing something and you get to see the structure of how you're dealing with that difficult thing

or that great thing you can think about family and feel all the things you feel about your family Max emotional state maybe ramped Up to level 11 out of 10 and it's on repeat over and over and over my understanding of ibag gain and I haven't done ibaan is that people get basically a very clear picture of previous life events they talk about it kind of Rolodex in few through excuse me and they talk about it Rolodex thing through and that the person on ibigan seems to feel a certain sense of agency and they can

kind of modify either the understanding of or the actions that Occurred within that picture was that accurate my experience was two lines of TV screens M and it was just seemed like thousands of memories every every memories real memories yes okay real have happened yeah that's unusual among the psychedelics typically it's not real memories that people experience with ibigan it seems to be real memories in discussions with Nolan Williams who I just saw recently he's Our professor he's a triple board certified neurologist psychiatrist he's like one of these phenoms I was having my colleagues at

Stanford right he's the one doing the brain Imaging and the transcranial magnetic stimulation of people veterans who take abigan followed by DMT they published a beautiful paper earlier uh this year showing that post abigan treatment there is this pretty tremendous Improvement in PTSD symptoms and in remission from addiction of Different kinds this is wild not just alcohol but other forms of addiction behavioral and chemical and there seems to be increased brain communication between areas like the insula which is a a brain area that has kind of an internal body feel representation a but also the

circuits between the insula and other brain areas involved in memory so now you're thinking about how memories make you feel right as well as areas of the brain that are involved in context Dependent decisionmaking so you can perhaps make a better decisions about alcohol or better decisions about how you feel about certain things and even feel differently about certain things that happen while still understanding they happened and they happen in this exact way so you're not erasing memories you're modifying the emotional experience and the response to those incredible couple that with the data on depression

so-called major depression That comes from the psilocybin studies and while not all of the studies show the same magnitude of effect you can see people going into remission from major depression severe depression brought to Major relief from a lot of the depressive symptoms as measured by improved sleep improv outlook on life Etc it's very impressive especially when one compares to the traditional SSRI type treatments which can have their place especially for things like OCD but We know that they've had their issues as well so when we talk about psychedelics it's very important to understand that

we're talking about brain plasticity people get a little freaked out and they start thinking okay this is like a drug that really makes you go crazy no these are drugs that help people work through prior issues or the way that they process issues and they increase plasticity they allow for for brain modification that's what they do and by Extension the ssris you know are interesting because it's not thought that depression is lack of Serotonin no one ever really thought that in the psychiatric Community it's thought that ssris can tap into brain plasticity therapy is supposed

to tap into brain plasticity but now every psychiatrist I've spoken to says they're pretty excited about the potential for psilocybin potentially ibigan as well but psilocybin for the treatment of Major depression now this is not some self-appointed Shaman doing this these are Clin studies the Iain is particularly interesting because of the addiction relief that people experience the challenges you have to be heart rate monitored you heart monitored you know it's not for everybody and the reason I asked is it scary is that some people feel like it takes a certain amount of boldness to lean

into this that is certainly the 5 Meo where are we at with This okay in terms of FDA approval it hasn't happened yet and in order to understand where things are at right now we need to understand you've got groups like veteran solutions that are doing amazing work trying to get FDA approval this stuff is happening out of country out of us and then people are being scanned in the US like in Nolan's lab Robin card Harris's lab and other labs the FDA approval has hinged largely on this thing with MDMA MDMA so-called Ecstasy right

is methylene dioxy methamphetamine Mex methylene dioxy methamphetamine it is methamphetamine but but it's modified from methamphetamine and it the net effect is to dramatically increase serotonin and dopamine methamphetamine Street methamphetamine is mostly dopamine and noradrenaline or adrenaline so what do we got here we got a drug MDMA that assuming it's pure and assuming it's applied in a clinical Study has been shown multiple times now to lead to not just Improvement but remission of post-traumatic stress disorder remission it's an empathogen not a hallucinogen or hallucinogenic psychedelic it's not a traditional one so it's an empathogen so-called

heart medicine it allows people to feel their feelings to feel safe feeling their feelings even about very traumatic events and working with a therapist to work through that with them so we're not Talking about raving or something this isn't like that kind of thing there's people in the eye mask or talking to a therapist okay this all sounds great right so where is the block why did the FDA not approve MDMA this last year okay this gets into some kind of Darker territory but I'm just going to tell you what I am aware of and

where I'm wrong I'm sure I'll be corrected um the maps group has run by Rick doblin who's a well-meaning person And and certainly has done an enormous amount of work to try and get MDMA to the point of FDA approval they've been doing research studies and they continue to has gotten these amazing results right I mean these remission rates are really high there are risks with MDMA given that it contains an amphetamine it increases heart rate so people with some heart issues might not be able to take it it's dopaminergic you know it gets people

pretty ramped up Etc I could have Predicted that the FDA wasn't going to approve it this round why I don't think there are enough studies yet that's number one two they had this issue with the control group which was that people knew if they got the drug or they didn't because if you didn't get it you're like not much is happening and if you did get it you're you're you know either a noodle you know feeling like a noodle I've i' I've participated in one of these Experiments right I've taken pure MDMA as part of

a clinical um experience and you're not doing anything else that day or the next day I'll tell you that um so it's not the kind of thing that you know people could just do at home or with their therapist and go back and pick up the kids at school it's not going to work like that you you got you need days off like the iag treatment there was also sadly during the course of those trials because they were working with Therapists in a certain Community there were a couple of reports of of sexual improprieties during

the um sessions with patient that's a clear clear barrier for the FDA to just run along and say okay right that the FDA FDA and I understand this because I used to review grants for the NIH I'm not worked at the FDA but I have friends that have right a family friend growing up was Don Kennedy who if I my memory serves me correct former President of Stanford but also uh worked for the FDA for a long time if I'm not mistaken he directed the FDA but if I'm mistaken I apologize but he was at

the FDA the FDA is a very conservative organization now you might say wait hold on they'll put yellow number five in our food and we can talk about yellow number five they won't do that in Europe or Canada but they won't approve dma yep there there is a higher bar for drugs um to become FDA prescription approved Drugs in this country than there is for stuff to make it into the food supply this is the reality now they aren't going to allow poison into the food supply that will kill you that day but stuff makes

it through I'll just mention yellow number five was shown in a recent study this was covered by Science magazine one of the Premier magazines in the uh covering real research science that yellow number five I forget the technical name when spread on the Bellies of these mice made their bellies transparent to light you can literally see their organs people can look this up this is this is in main mainstream media it's wild what does that in what is that what what that Che I if I call out a brand I'll get in cheese puff anything

bright orange or yellow candy snack foods chips so it's a Dye it's a dye and it makes skin transparent to sunlight now what is the net effect of that we don't know toxicity is obviously low Enough that it's not killing people right off the bat but you know earlier we were talking about water and then you know there's this thing that has made its way into the internet lore of like atrazine in the frogs um you know in their reproductive organs that's the work of Tyrone Hayes at UC Berkeley yes it is true that certain

things in water that were like atrazine were causing endocrine disruption in frogs that was leading those frogs the Development of the reproductive organs was perturbed and their sexual behavior was altered hm yeah it's true I mean that that there's nothing there's nothing conspiracy about that I took classes from Tyrone when I was at Berkeley U he does great work like like no one contests that um but in any event things like atrazine in the drinking water of concern or in Delta water certain Deltas in the California I think had them I think was in the

Central Valley pesticides are a major cause of endocrine disruptors so people in rural communities are much more prone to cancer causing and endocrine disrupting pesticides this is Ser serious serious issue which also tends to correlate with certain socioeconomic status and so it gets pretty messy um but when it comes to psychedelics one of the major reasons why the FDA didn't approve MDMA for the treatment of PTSD despite these really Impressive data in my opinion is because they said okay not enough studies not a great control group to and there were these reported sexual improprieties I

don't know I haven't read those cas cases so what's going to need to happen is more studies and obviously can't have any situations like that but it call called attention to something which is that people are very vulnerable when they're under the influence of these things they don't Have agency to make the best decisions and so there has to be some something in place multiple therapists there checks and balances you need something in place to make sure that no one's harming themselves or others and sadly some things didn't get handled properly or were handled outright

improperly um during the course of of the ramp up to that potential approval so I think Iain is likely to make it through in the next couple of years in part because it's so Closely tied to the veterans community and because just say thanks to the really incredible advocacy of Veteran Solutions and former Governor Rick Perry who you know it's really interesting like I don't want to get into partisan politics but he's like been one of the biggest proponents for psychedelic medicine and he's done the across the aisle reach I was at a veteran Solutions

event a fundraiser where I gave a talk and Rick Perry and a Democrat are up There together trying to raise money to lobby for the approval of psychedelics for the treatment of PTSD and veterans that to me at least growing up when I grew up that's how this country is supposed to work yeah both both s they I I don't know if those guys like each other hate each other doesn't matter they saw a place where this could really be a benefit and the veterans community is really you know spearheading this whole thing going in

and trying these Treatments that other people haven't tried and I think the bulk of data show that it's immensely beneficial I know of one person who came back from the iag DMT thing that didn't do well afterwards would it was it caused by that unclear we don't know they're now fortunately fine they couldn't tack specifically to that experience but you know one but that's always a possibility with any treatment but the vast majority of people that come back I've talked to so Many operators come back you know it's and I think there's a documentary coming

out about this soon and all of this that Amber and Marcus have put together it just says that and more importantly for my job as a as a scientist my colleague Nolan Williams is saying it's just an incredible thing to see the brain plasticity to see the behavioral change to see the psychological change and this is a one sometimes two but this is really a one treatment kind of endeavor So I think we are at the point now where it's like okay there are enough data that even the the biggest Skeptics and it is important

to be skeptical even the biggest Skeptics about psychedelics are stepping back and going okay even if people who work on addiction are saying look I think there's probably something here I mean was it just booze man it was booze it was Aderall it was Xanax it was ambient it was all all that [ __ ] you're done with all run away all of it man Just like that not not an effort not like I'm going to I'm going to really do make it work this time it just I just I just didn't want it it

was like it I Quit Sugar for probably 3 months and uh I mean it it it was like it gave me like this intuition that was hey all this even though I already knew knew it it was this [ __ ] is poison stay away from it it's almost like a logical circuit gets reinstated right I I've I've probably not talked About it enough on my podcast but like addiction is this incredible thing where a person can be completely sane and rational in every other way but in one way 2 plus 2 equals 5 for

them and then something like what you described comes in and it restores the math you know and it restores it in the contexts that matter which is not when you're at the retreat or in the recovery center that's important too but when you get home when things are stressful when things are Good I mean I've Got Friends that relapsed when things were great I have a friend I it's worth mentioning that I have a friend who was such a bad drug and alcohol addict that his wife basically gave him an ultimatum like he had wrapped

the truck around the car at 700 in the morning he did that one he did the leaving the pills out and kids were endangered he did every single thing and he was trying so hard I mean he he was pretty much ready to either Get sober or kill himself and or or just implode and the way he got sober and he's still sober now I'll just say it I mean this is one of the first things the second being the Eddie Penney conversations that got me really tuned into the higher power relationship is he went

to this place in La that when he told me he was going there after having gone to multiple rehabs he's like I'm going there and I'm going to get sober and I was like all right whatever like We've heard this one before he went there he came out fully got it up and I thought back then I thought oh boy you know MH I mean he was just fully christed up yeah he's been sober ever since man that's awesome and the happiest he's ever been and the kids are thriving his relationship is thriving and his

work his professional life like his demeanor like everything is thriving and when he went in there I thought to myself Point like you he's been to Multiple rehabs it nothing worked and that relationship worked wow and continues to work I heard from him this morning that's amazing and I was like Wow and then we know guys like Eddie penny so I don't think this who you know have similar stories in the sense that you know Eddie had his issues he talked about on this podcast and you know the relationship to God and Jesus cleaned it

up for him or he cleaned it up for him through that and look I'm a Scientist so I don't know the explanation there what I do know is those are two incredible data points that I've observed because those are two people that were I didn't know Eddie when he was in it but were struggling the other guy definitely saw him struggle and just make near lethal mistake near lethal mistake near lethal mistake after near lethal mistake and boom he flipped the switch And I've seen people do with Iain and I've seen people combine the two

like you sounds like you have I think you know I don't know if there's just one solution I I have to say the pandemic was a really tough time for a lot of addicts who depended on 12-step meetings yeah to stay off drugs and alcohol a really tough time and there were people that managed to stay in communication and taking care of one another and man I never even thought about that oh what We the the implications of the lockdowns on I mean there's the stuff that it's kind of lighter like bad decisions about who

to pair up with bad decisions about who to break up with you saw that too the the challenges around socialization that kids were having yeah I you know um and but then the drug alcohol relapse rate or people that discovered addiction under those conditions is just astounding and I think we're I think we're still paying The price for it and it's and I and I have to tip my hat to the veterans community and and Veteran Solutions and again I'm not partisan but these politicians or former politicians I should say who are basic basically risking

their reputation in order to try and make sure that these Solutions like iig and soul ibin and MDMA done safely in the right clinical context that those eventually make it to FDA approval it it's so Critical I I got to ask a question does FDA approval mean anything to you I mean it can keep doctors out of jail um when you look when you're looking at supplements or food or any of this or new drugs that are coming out does does FDA approval does that does that mean anything to you yeah so on the one

hand the FDA in this country is among the more stringent regulatory bodies in the world in the sense that for a drug to Make it to Market it has to pass very stringent toxicology sort of like they on the ld50 studies you know at what dose to 50% of the population die Etc of of laboratory animals I mean a lot of work is done to prevent the kind of can get anything at any pharmacy type model that is good stem cells for instance I think stem cells are incredibly exciting as a potential therapy I also

know there's a stem cell Clinic down in Florida that Was injecting stem cells into the eyes of patients with macular degeneration a field that I know a thing or two about from my Opthalmology role those people went blind so the FDA made sure that stem cell therapies were not just allowed to go to market because some stem cell therapies maybe into the knee or into a shoulder or something might be beneficial well in this case stem cell injections into the eye were making people blind and had they not come in And drop the gavel you

can have lot of problems out there people with glaucoma going and getting treatments that could potentially make them go blind faster okay so we have to acknowledge the important work they do that said I have a friend a neuroscientist up in Canada who recently was hearing this whole thing about Froot Loops how come you've seen the labels that are out there now how come the the Froot Loops in the US have all these things like Yellow number five maybe it does maybe it doesn't but all these food dyes that no one can pronounce and then

in Canada they don't they use like carrot juice or something and she said I'm going to go look like is this actually true so she goes into a Canadian Supermarket she lives in Canada it's Montreal I believe and takes the Froot Loops box off the shelf and sure enough it's lacking all of these chemicals that apparently are allowed here so I do think that this Country has a has a there's an asymmetry of stringency sounds like technical language where certain things it's very stringent to get to Market other things far too lack now is it

the big food Lobby I don't know what we do know is that the commod commodation commodation of food the ability to make food not just an apple but to actually make it a product that can last on the Shelf you know the packaging of of strawberries and plastic for instance it's not just About more plastic it's also that's one unit now you have to buy one unit so it if you think about it's pretty cever and supposed to buying by weight right in addition to that it changes the way that food can be traded on

as a commodity because it it changes the perishability or the shelf life of those food products so in this country we have allowed a lot of foods to we have allowed a lot of preservative And things of that sort to be introduced to foods that make the foods less healthy but are good for the food industry so that's true then people will say well that brings food cost down and you know food is cheap in this country compared to other countries calories are cheap in this country not healthy calories but food is cheap and then

people say well that's the Obesity problem not to weave too many themes here but if OIC taught us anything it's That people in this country are obese because they eat too many calories remember people debating is it this is it SE by the way I don't like seed oils they taste terrible to me so I like olive oil and butter and that kind of thing but I doubt the seed oils are what's making people fat it's probably that they're eating too many calories and a lot of calories in seed oils so this kind of thing

so we we love the idea that it's one thing but it's one Behavior too many calories relative to too little activity people don't burn as much energy as they used to people consume about 3500 calories a day and that's a lot of calories for people that aren't active okay so OIC taught us that do I think OIC is the Cur of obesity no I think the muscle loss is a problem people still need to exercise weight train do I think some people can benefit from it yeah probably is it way too expensive for most people

yeah is that Going to work out well for the drug companies absolutely can people micro do OIC people are now starting to do that and get most of the effect somebody's not going to like that I say this it seems like people are doing that now okay so it I'm neither here nor there with this what I would like to do as a scientist who does public education is say listen the FDA isn't going anywhere so to me FDA approval does matter because if doctors want to prescribe Things like MDMA for PTSD they're going to

need FDA approval or else they are doing this with the potential of being you know of getting charged with a with an offense or losing their license so I I don't want to riff too long on this but to say do I love the FDA I mean I don't really have an emotion toward them I would like them to do what they continue to do which is to look at things and be really thoughtful about what gets put into people's bodies I Wish they would extend the same kind of stringency to the kinds of foods

that go into adults as they have for kids or you know no micro no plastic sippy cups okay well what about adolescents who are going through puberty why are we just making this for kids up to three I think in this country we tend to have the following reaction if something is new like gene therapy was new a kid died in a gene therapy trial was delayed 10 years stem cells they're New it's they had this issue of stem cells going into people's eyes and them going blind it delayed stem cell therapies likely at least

5 years hopefully that will come around and they will be safe soon so on the one hand we tend to have this very like you know third rail kind of response to to things that are new if something really bad happens on the other hand we tend to be way too LAX in my opinion about not encouraging or even requiring healthy Behaviors in our youth and adults sunlight sleep exercise these are proven ways to live longer and healthier and we tend to be far too LAX at the at the governmental or level in terms of

allowing the stuff that doesn't kill you right away but that can mess you up kind of slowly over time like particular dies in food potentially things like fluoride although you heard my stance earlier is a bit more mixed on that just so there's Hyper stringency third rail approach to things that have really bad effects okay we're not going near that for a very very long time and then but we're okay with a lot of things trickling through for a very long time and I'll just go on record saying this I have some colleagues at Stanford

and elsewhere who are terrifically healthy robust people I also know doctors and scientists all over the US who are some of the most unhealthy people I know with bad Behavioral addiction substance abuse issues psychological issues their kids are like oh my goodness their kids are struggling because of lack of Health in the home home of at of all levels so being a scientist or a physician doesn't give you health it gives you the right to talk about health in a particular domain of specialty I get calls from cardiologists that're like hey what do you think

of the ketogenic diet for Alzheimer's asking me I'm like I'm not I'm not an expert in that but well type 3 diabetes it's sometimes called for certain forms of dementia it might help it's a brain metabolis is it going to cure Alzheimer's probably not so when doctors are asking me these questions about things outside their field it immediately tells me that guy or gal can tell me about the heart and nothing else and just because somebody has an MD does not mean that they know what they're talking about about most things then Again In fairness

just because someone has a PHD doesn't mean they know what they're talking about in terms of most things one of the reasons I love doing the podcast is I get what I think are some of the best experts in the world filtered through my studio and I can ask them directly yeah yeah so I'm sorry to give such a a Meandering answer I think there's always the Temptation on the part of audiences to like get do you hate the FDA or do you love the FDA the FDA is here to stay and we should push

on them to do the right thing just to protect us and the stuff that's in kids in it's not just kids in in Pro highly processed foods the microplastics that states the bpas all we have to do is look to our Canadian neighbors as they say they're not allowing it are they that much healthier than we are I don't know but they're not allowing it in Europe they don't allow it and I would argue that our food supply is Really dreadfully dreadfully contaminated with things that are of real concern to me and now there are

more people starting to talk about this definitely I'm going to keep the uh tin foil hat on here for just a just another minute when it comes when you're talking about uh when we're talking about FDA approval and psychedelics why why was the chemical why was MDMA the first one to get put up why wasn't it more of a natural medicine Like psilocybin or ibigan or iasa or or or any of these other ones why does it have to be a chemical why can't it be something that somebody can grow in their house why do

they have to go to a farmacy to get it right so um I'll give you my uh my belief about this um is that MDMA as methylene dioxy methamphetamine um developed in the early 1900s by the way and then rediscovered by Sasha shulan who was like this kind of renegade chemist in in Berkeley that he and his wife used to mix up all these different drugs and then that the therapy community in the Bay Area used to take them and then have conversations about what worked or didn't work and they were like oh this is

a real strong empathogen improves feelings of love and self acceptance and all this stuff that's how it came to be um the uh there's a great book called peall p i k a l i think it stands for phenol ethylamines I've known and loved It's like the worst book title ever and I probably mispronounced the the first uh letter in the acronym in any case um I think as a drug that can that is synthetically made MDMA stands the highest chance of being developed as a prescription pharmaceutical whereas as you pointed out like you're not

seeing cannabis which can which is a plant right you're not seeing prescription cannabis now There's commercial cannabis now because it's legal in a number of places or decriminalized in a number of places but uh I think you do have your finger on the right button here which is that it can be dosed at the level of milligrams to high degree of accuracy for what has worked in Trials it can be pill or capsule packaged and um that makes for a great drug for sale in the pharmaceutical industry oh Okay whereas with psilocybin you have a

naturally occurring alternative there's also synthetic psilocybin which is often what's used in these studies of psilocybin okay but people have figured out how many grams of mushrooms translates to how many grams of psilocybin so when people say they took you know four grams heroic dose or two grams or typically the the studies of depression as I recall people took somewhere between two they did dose Response of course but um or they had different dosage conditions but Micro doing was three I believe 3 milligrams and I believe the clinically effective dose was somewhere around 2 to

three gram someone should check but that wasn't 2 to three grams of mushrooms that was two to three grams of psilocybin and depending on the the uh strain of mushroom or species of mushroom then people know oh God right so to be blunt MDMA can be turned into a A prescription drug sold by a pharmaceutical company so can psilocybin there could be synthetic psilocybin but there's a naturally occurring alternative out there that would be hard for them to compete with based on cost very hard to compete with based on cost okay whereas with something like

we talked about LSD it's a little bit separate um because LSD from Urgot is kind of naturally occurring but it it's most people aren't Going to make it so it could even though the formulas are out there someplace I don't know I don't go on the dark web but um formulas are out there um but a p but a Pharma company could likely um work with that work with LSD and make a drug just like they explored in these studies over in in Switzerland you know Swiss likeed their pharmaceutical companies um and and so if

you think about what is going to be most effective as a drug brought to Market MDMA makes the most sense it is interesting though because major depression is very very common I think it's 10% of the population will have a major depressive episode at some point in their life and some people have recurring major depression so you think well cocin right like that's the one that you would imagine would be the biggest Market but then you have this naturally occurring alternative whereas with MDMA and PTSD Yeah PTSD is very common in the veterans community it's

very common in other communities but is it as rampant as depression no no so that um that answers your question I think there's more financial incentive and also I think the FDA is is probably more comfortable with something that's synthetic than something that's naturally occurring because it it's more what they're used to working with okay it's just kind of what they do they deal with compounds They're chemists they they're groups of chemists and doctors and toxicologists who like look at chemical structures and silin has a chemical structure actually looks a lot like serotonin but it's

just uh it's just not really their their typical domain now ibigan is even more in the kind of like how would you create a pharmaceutical but they because most people aren't growing or finding their own ibigan it's hard to Imagine that people could get a hold of it if there wasn't a a really valid source that was packaging it and so forth I mean the veterans community has benefited so much from the fact that you've got this clinic in Mexico I believe that is willing to work with American University cities and vice versa it just

enrages me that this stuff is working so much and uh for so many people and we have to leave the country to get it and meanwhile while the FDA Takes their sweet ass time to do whatever they need to do to legalize it there's people [ __ ] killing themselves every day waiting for this [ __ ] to be legalized I have more friends that have died from suicide than I have in combat and that's a [ __ ] shame yeah that that never should have happened not once and um common friends in the community

your your community I mean um they'll tell you like got a call from so and so Say he's got a gun he's ready to put in his mouth these are real stories as you know I like and I only know about them because I have this kind of portal into that community and people have trusted me enough to say okay so and so like isn't sleeping at all who do you know who can help them get help with their anxiety and you know I've got some tools and I've done episodes and I can point people

things but when people go past a certain line of that downward Spiral um it's kind of black and white at that point they're either going to kill themselves or they're not and the ones that don't seem to manage to get out of that spiral by Outsourcing their Optics to a couple of close friends and basically acknowledging that they're not in control of their own perceptions about themselves or the world mhm and it's striking to see so many people go down to do the Iain Treatment come back and like I'm good yeah it's it's just uh

it's it's mindblowing really it is and actually I'm I've um had because of Veteran Solutions and these fundraisers that I've spoken at I've um and I don't get a kickback they don't pay me I take time off from work where I make money to go to these things like to help raise money for Nolan's lab or to you know to do these things I just want to make clear because people always like what's the Incentive the incentive is like as you said people are dying who don't need to die and sometimes what will happen and

this has happened a few times I won't name names because In fairness to them they like their privacy but the wives of some of the guys that that have killed themselves show up to these things those are the ones that really like like when you hear them speak or they or their kids are there and they're just like yeah please please please please and I Think you know just understand that a Sol you know they wish they had had access to this solution and so I I think um I'm glad we're talking about this yeah

because first it's always going to be first in the veterans community and then eventually Wick out to the larger community of of people I mean suicides at an incredible rate you know one thing I'm increasingly concerned about because it's the experience I know I'm concerned about mental health for everybody Frankly but I'm very concerned about the suicide rates and depression rates of young men in the United States and else where but we have a serious serious crisis of identity that people are starting to talk about but even the mere mention of it it sounds like

oh no they're all going to Rally together and do bad things no these young guys are so confused about whether or not they have any worth in the world or how to express Their generative Drive in positive ways I think most of it starts with lack of I'm just going to say it of a strong in the right sense of the word paternal figure I think we've seen you know I feel very lucky I have a really good relationship with my dad now took a lot of work over the years to repair on his 80th

birthday I reassured him we are good he's actually coming on my podcast that's amazing I mean I I love my mom I love my dad I love my sister to the end And back and like my dad and I have had our differences but I mean you know and some of my family members are going to probably be like oh goodness I can't believe he's talking this way but I'll say it was actually through my relationship with getting to know Eddie getting to praying regularly getting really gotted up Shoring up the areas of my life

where I wasn't really squared away and really hearing the message that to Get right with my dad was super important not just for me and for him but for the mission that I'm on to try and help people that for me was like a messages just kept coming through again and again and again in prayer and um you know yeah we still disagree about things and I also like I can like look at him and hear him and like he's a man who was trying his best with what he had and he gave me so

many great gifts I mean a love of science a love of Learning you know um yeah there are things I wish he had done that he didn't do and I'm sure when I'm a father my son will feel the same way but actually if if I may I I I brought this I've been reading this book that was suggested to me by another team guy what is with you guys um is a really it's it's somewhat of a controversial book but if if I could um the book is is called iron John have you read

that book by Robert blly very Powerful book about boys and men's relationships to themselves and it's a little outdated on certain Dimensions but having grown up in a you know home where my dad lived separately and this whole thing I think you know it really struck a chord with me but you know there's this there's one passage um can I just read it's a very brief quot abely so BL said and I don't know if he's saying it for himself or if he's quoting someone else but he said the Whole of the remote father leaves

a gap in the boy's life that demons can enter through and that just hit me like Square everywhere and I was like that's right like for every bad thing that's come to me through me out of me that I regret that I wish I had done differently the challenges that I wish I had chosen differently I'm not blaming my dad that's not what this is about but I think that we are in a point now in the Evolution of this country let's I do believe it's an evolution not a Devolution I do I'm an optimist

where we don't know who to look to there's a lack of either an internal or an external paternal model that helps us discern between really not good roads so so not good road okay Road pretty good and best road that we we learn that in part through trial and error but we also learn that in part by being told what to Do at Key moments and I look out on the landscape of podcasts right you Joe Lex Joo I look at figures like gogin Andy stump right there seem to be a lot of Team guys

in the mix but there are others too right Chad Wright uh Rich Roll right Jay Shetty I I don't want to like paint this picture that it's just one kind of uh archetype right and what I see is a lot of certainly female audience mine is certainly very very much 50/50 but but I hear from these young guys and even guys my own age or older like we've sort of drifted away from this idea that there's a standard kind of set of protocols dare I say to follow to get yourself through the wickets to becoming

a solid person inside and out and there's no excuse making right but if I look at the Mental Health crisis among men in this country and women but here we're focusing on men I think that we've had even in homes where fathers Were there sometimes they were absent because of substance abuse I think sometimes they were absent because they were absent and I think sometimes they were there and are really terrific fathers and I got friends like this with were amazing dads amazing kids um to boys and girls who are now and I guess what

I what I'm trying to say is I am very grateful for my experiences and I'm very grateful to have shored things up with my dad and I Think that whatever mistakes I've made I own is my own that's part of being a grown man but I do believe that quote I think when we're young when we're 5 10 15 years old 20 years old if there isn't somebody there to like set us straight or that we haven't internalized the message of what's the right thing to do that we we drift and that to me is

where the higher power peace and relationship to God and looking to and asking for guidance There can sometimes support that as well because I I mean I'm not trying to I'm not trying to turn this into a sermon I've this is just my experience and we need something outside ourselves that we can look to when we're troubled to help us help steer us right and that can be Brotherhood and family and friends but we need more PE we need more men supporting other men on how to be a good man and not just looking to

the examples of How they've succeeded in business or this and that actually a friend of mine who I consider very very wise a woman who's a mother she said it's kind of weird you look at all the toys in a toy store she has a son and the the like boxes of all these toys nowadays are like this Warrior walking out from all this destruction behind him like he won and he's alone and I go really she goes yeah go look so I was like all right I'll go look and I looked up some and

It's true there isn't a picture of like being in community or being with family or it's a we' created this model of like this of this like Lone Wolf and Triumph thing interesting that um I think she's on to something I don't think it's the full picture but I have to say what you have you know marriage kids thriving business you got your history and the teams and history of CIA you're transmuting any pain that you have as far as I can tell into goodness for the World like thank you I mean you're you're you're

playing a fatherly role to millions of people and I do believe that whether or not it's intentional or inadvertent I think that's what a lot of the podcast community and inventors like Elon and you know Zuck did his version of it you know here I'm talking about men and yeah I know there women that do this too I get that from Silicon Valley I get it they do amazing work too but here we're talking about examples of men For other men and boys and I think this lone Warrior thing is I don't think it's going

to work and I'm just lucky that the Brotherhood I was in included enough healthy people to help pull me through I mean there's no need to get into it but that Jim Theo guy pulled me out multiple times on other things later helped me he didn't pull me out he held me accountable Rick Rubin held me accountable sometimes through Tough Love Sometimes just through like good old friendship and love of that kind but I'm very lucky I have these people in my life and I've tried to do it for other people too but when I

hear about people putting guns in their mouths hanging themselves like my friend Johnny Farah or like or drug overdoses the like it's like this is preventable it is preventable at the level of sure government institutions but like I I'm saying like I'm putting the call out now Like I think we got to like crew up and take care of each other because time's going by it's good to hear you say that I think um I feel like it's making a comeback I think that uh the Reigns got mixed up and lost you know for for

quite a while there and um I think that because essentially we're kind of talking about masculinity right and structure yeah and it didn't go well it didn't go well and that's why people Like you and Joe and me and Lex and Jordan Peterson and there's all walks of life here I mean you got a scientist an MMA guy a seal a philosopher I mean people are gravitating to this because they're looking for some [ __ ] Direction and and they're getting it it's just from a new source a way better Source than what's been there

for the last what 20 years you know it's not Hollywood anymore it's not media it's us and Luckily I think we we've got a even though we don't all know each other I think we have an amazing crew that's extremely well-rounded and um and I I know you have to get it I get it all the time when I go out and public of thank you for what you're doing that you saved my life you changed the trajectory of my life you fixed my like just listening to you I was able to fix my family

life I took accountability and and I I see it and hear it everywhere I go yeah and It's really it's cool man I mean there's something's changing in the in the in in in the same way that we're talking about this I also see this with god making a comeback you know and and you see it everywhere you see it was it Georgia they had that they had that did you see this it was I think it was Georgia it might not be but it was a it was a it was a it was a

I think it was Georgia University they had a tailgating party and it looked like what you were Describing you were hanging out with uh earlier on in your life with kegs it looked like a it looked like a hell of a good time and it and I'm sure it was what it actually was was thousands and thousands of kids college students getting baptized in the back of trucks oh amazing and it and um yeah made made national news but you're just this wave is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and uh it's I mean he's

working through your life he's Working through my life I mean I about a year and a half ago is when I came to Faith and and uh it sounds like you're about on the same timeline and it was you know Eddie that Eddie penny that kind of sparked that but I mean I got a lot of yeah we are in some very confusing and and and dark times right now now but I I think when we come out of this thing uh we're going to be back on track and I mean you have to think

like that But I I I I can see it happening and uh it sounds like you can too yeah I love it because you're a man of data you see it happening it's it's happening right I mean it's uh it really is happening and I think that one thing that I I feel kind of obligated to say is that you know you talked about the you know podcasters and some other people there you know growing up I was lucky I had this PE coach helped me get my body strong right I had professors male and

Female professors helped me get my mind strong right I had you know friends within the skateboard Community Music Community who really were healthy individuals kind of like islands of Health in the and who helped me and a lot of other people get strong and help people get sober and really call people out one thing that I make very clear I think when people hear men like us with media channels like us talking about This there's a group that gets really scared and I want to be really clear what we're not talking about I'm not trying

to appease these people but I want to just make very clear what we're not talking about we're not talking about a group of men trying to reduce the accountability of other men we're actually talking about the opposite we're also not talking about perfect people being perfect I am not perfect I've said for years and I said it Intentionally I'm replete with flaws like anyone right that's the whole reason to have a relationship to God and to have a community that you're working with that helps you be the best version of yourself right we're not talking

about any of us being perfect we're talking about if I screw up I want you to call me out I want Joe to call me out or Lex to call me out and then I want to know how I can do better and improve it just like I would do for any of them Okay so what we're not talking about is a bunch of guys banding together to be bad we're talking about men banding together to be better versions of themselves and teach other people how to do that and I it's kind of a duh

if you're already on board this thing but if you're not people go oh my goodness guys gathering together they think about misuse of power they think about people not holding each other accountable that is not what we're talking about we're Talking about the opposite of that we're talking about men who are inherently flawed like any human being who are trying to be the best version of themselves and teach other people how to do that if they choose we're not also not talking about forcing anything on anybody so this is really important because I I feel

like I've heard about the Bro Science thing Listen My Bro Science friends some of them know a lot more about health than some of my Physician friends about how to actually be healthy you know not all of them and I'm not saying guys with big muscles are healthy and guys with who are who are lean and and thin are not but there are different versions of of people and different phenotypes and archetypes and that's all good I'm also talking about more real acceptance I I've gotten pretty tired of hearing about tolerance and diversity when it's

Actually wrapped in a lot of intolerance and lack of diversity I grew up in a little town where there wasn't a ton of diversity I entered a community Through Skateboarding and music and through the other communities I was involved in we're like I have friends of every background every background and I they're actual friends that I communicate with and I would like to see for people that do the virtue signaling thing how Much the what's on their Mast head about what they believe in matches who they actually talk to on a weekly basis how much

actual diversity of thought of real background is actually in your community of friends and people that you communicate with and I bet if we looked at your listenership we'd see far more diversity than you know people could possibly imagine so I I'm kind of tired of these buzzwords that don't match with the reality and at the same Time I want to make very clear what you're talking about really excites me because I feel like I'm just still trying to learn I'm 49 years old with my story and what I know from my experience I'm still

trying to learn and grow forward and I think one of the central themes of of Robert bl's book and again I realize it's not a perfect book it's got its outdated aspects Etc but it has some real gems in there is that boys and men used to learn from other boys and Men around them and older than them would guide them along and we've really lost that over the years in this country we've lost this idea that we can mentor each other and it is bidirectional right and so there needs to be some sort of

restoration of that and of course this makes sense as moving out of agricultural type arrangements or people lived on small farms where they worked with their dads and you know worked with their grandfathers and you know it makes Sense like people move away from where they grow up and they have fewer siblings now birth rates are lower Etc I'm not trying to flip the way that life is going but we can't get away from the core functions of the human brain right which are to belong to make positive contributions to be ideally reasonable right A

League of reasonable people would be really nice that don't into either extreme I could go on but the point is that what we're not talking About here is collection and coagulation and misuse of power we're talking about trying to heal our own and I I know one experience and that's to be male and so I have a thing or two to say about my experience and to pair that with other people's experiences in ways that I hope can help people both by doing certain things that I found beneficial and avoiding things that I found to

be particularly detrimental mistakes I've made learn From my mistakes so you don't make them I certainly learn from other people's mistakes and I'm going to continue to strive where do you think I know we're wrapping this up but where do you think that this movement's coming from this need oh I think that um I think it's Instinct I think I think it's Instinct that there there's some core aspects of our psychology and biology that are non-negotiable You you can't suppress certain aspects of people's psyche and I'm not talking about the bad stuff I'm not talking

about letting your Shadow out I'm not there's enough of that in the world Lord knows I'm talking about you can't take who we are as biological organisms as psychological organisms and and try and you know contort the way culture is so that and expect everyone to end up okay th this idea of everyone having a path to be Having a generative life I believe believe that's possible but it requires us first like looking at ourselves and going okay where am I strong where am I weak I still do this where am I strong where am

I weak where can I glean knowledge that's going to make me strong where I'm weak from my peers from people older than me through a relationship with God through a relationship to the community we no longer can look to like one model and go that way and so there Has been important work done I just want to acknowledge it over the last 20 30 years of giving more space for people that don't fit into the standard archetype but that doesn't mean that we don't have needs as a community of people and here we're talking about

men trying to figure out how to be in the world be the best version of themselves yeah I think a lot of that is is fairly hardwired we've been trying to do that since the Beginning of time and you know I'm not one to comment on what it's like to be a woman because I've never been one but I can comment on what it's like to be a young male a teen a young adult and an adult of my age I can't tell you what it's like to be 75 or 80 which is why I'm

going out of my way and gone out of my way to restore my relationship with my dad and I'm learning from him and I think that's the way it's supposed to work me too me Too well Andrew it was an honor to have this discussion and and uh I just want to say thank you so much for coming to coming to Franklin Tennessee and and sitting down to have a conversation with me and like I said I've been following you a long time and this is actually very surreal for me to to even have you

sitting across from me and and uh I hope we meet again and I wish you the best of luck thank you I uh a huge fan so this is very surreal for me as well and I Just feel very honored to be here and also to be out you know public facing you know side by side in uh in an effort to make the world a better place you know if there's one thing that's absolutely clear is that you're trying to do that and you're doing that and um yeah there there aren't enough words to

express how grateful I am but um I'm just excited to keep going so thank you you are doing a hell of a job my brother thank you right back at you cheers [Music] cheers no matter where you're watching Shan Ryan Show from if you get anything out of this please like comment subscribe and most importantly share this everywhere you possibly can and if you're feeling extra generous please leave us review on Apple and Spotify podcasts