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

Last week was our first playoff game, and my plaque psoriasis was so itchy under all my gear. Sometimes just thinking about scratching could take me out of the moment.
And then, my doctor told me I could get clearer skin with a pill called O-Tesla. O-Tesla apremolast is a prescription medicine used to treat adult patients with plaque psoriasis, for whom phototherapy or systemic therapy is appropriate.
O-Tesla can help you get clearer skin after just four months.

Okay, ready for the next game.

Talking to my doctor about a pill was a total game changer.

Don't use Otesla if you're allergic to it.

Get medical help right away if you have trouble breathing or swallowing,

swelling of the face, lips, tongue, throat, or arms.

Severe diarrhea, nausea or vomiting, depression, suicidal thoughts, or weight loss can happen.

Tell your doctor if any of these occur and if you have a history of depression or suicidal thoughts. Live in the moment.
Ask your doctor about Otesla. Call 1-844-4OTESLA or visit otesla.com for prescribing info, info about cost, and more.
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible.

Financial geniuses.

Monetary magicians.

These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive

and save hundreds.

Visit Progressive.com to see if you could save.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates.

Potential savings will vary.

Not available in all states or situations.

Dr. Andrew Huberman, welcome to the show.
Thanks. I'm super happy to be here.
I'm a huge fan of your show. I've been from the beginning and 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 we got a lot to dive into, but I wanted to, I had a whole outline that I wanted to do and then I found a little bit about your backstory and I thought that's kind of what we do here is back stories.
That's how it all started. And, and I didn't realize you have a quite interesting, quite the interesting backstory and, and, and it didn't sound like it was easy for you growing up.
So I'd like to kind of start there because I think that brings a lot of hope to everybody, but especially to kids that are growing up in a tough environment. And then we'll get into a lot of the medical stuff.
But everybody starts off with an introduction. So Andrew Huberman, PhD, you're a neuroscientist and tenured 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 author of the upcoming book, Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body.
When's that going to come out by now? April of 25. That sounds incredible.
Your work from the Huberman Labs at Stanford School of Medicine has been published in top journals, including Nature, Science, and Cell, 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 most listened to neuroscientist ever. And something else I want to bring up is a new found faith in Christianity.
I'm on that journey right along with you. It sounds like our buddy, Eddie Penny, 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 next, we just, I have a Patreon account.
They are our top supporters. They've been with us since the beginning.
And one thing that I do is I just, I give them the opportunity to ask each guest a question. We had a ton of interesting questions for you, but I narrowed it down to one.
I thought this was really important. 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 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. 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's 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.
It doesn't have to be pitch black, but on most nights between the hours of 11 p.m. and 4 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, well, 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.
The second thing would be while getting that morning sunlight, if you're not already exercising in the morning, you want to walk. Just walk in a circle if you have to.
Walk towards the sunlight, okay? 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?

Jocko'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 sunlight in your eyes does a bunch of things.

You have a pulse of cortisol every 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%.

And 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 Sapolsky 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 disparate sides.
I'm describing the first one. 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.
Some people say burpees, then people start arguing about burpees. But some exercise in 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 dark enough in the room.
You don't need anything fancy here. And work on getting six to eight hours of sleep.
Some people can get away with five. Some people can't sleep that much.
Some people need more, but get that right. And when people do that for three, four days, it's remarkable how much better they feel.
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 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 stimulants 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 suddenly go off medication they need.
You start looking at alcohol differently because it disrupts your sleep. You start looking at other practices like learning and reading.
Okay, so getting your physiology right sets the ball in motion. And then as will probably come up multiple times during today's episode, you need some tool to learn to calm your mind, right? Your mind is going to spool.
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 that.
No human being gets that, okay? So you have to put some work into it. That involves doing, maybe it's five 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 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.
It 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. You might as well be asking for one pill that's going to change everything.
And if you don't think you can do this, then the physiology stuff, then start on the prayer side and pray for it and then go in that way. Whatever it takes to try and explore this, do it.
That's my message because it absolutely can be done. Man, it doesn't sound like it takes much.
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 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, 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 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 this is kind of robbing me of some silly content. But do I really need to spend that much time with this?

Or this is kind of robbing me 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 airdrop 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 I know that one could be writing or 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.
And having a separate phone for it really helps. Because 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 I'm not here to demonize online culture. My profession is online culture, 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 mind. And it sounds so complicated, but it's actually not.
How long did it take you to, how fast did that work? I've thought about doing this. I've attempted a couple of times and then it just falls off.
But I'm just curious, when you did the two phones thing, how long did that take to go into effect? Was it immediate? Oh yeah, within a day or so. Because then I'd look at my other phone and remember, oh, Instagram and X aren't on there.
But 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 take the liberty of sharing. Rick Rubin sent me something from X and it went to the phone that he has

and and he has a lot of wisdom that I take the liberty of sharing. Rick Rubin sent me something from X and it went to the phone that he has and 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. 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 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 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 is. I don't know.
I mean, you like spec ops guys, because I know a fair number of people from your community.

You guys are really squared away.

Like, I need to really create tunnels for myself to be able to do the work that I need

to do.

Yeah.

And because I also try and maintain a healthy, you know, personal life and maintain friendships

and things, I really have to, like, create some separation.

So having social media separate is key.

it's 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, go to an old phone and just put on your old phone.
Yeah, yeah. Makes a lot of sense.
You can even take pictures with your new phone if you like that phone camera and then just airdrop 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, well, Andrew, let's move into, I'd like to move into your backstory.
Like I said, it sounds a little rough, very interesting. And I think it could really bring a lot of hope into the world, especially, you know, from where you went to where you are today is very profound and significant.
So where did you grow up? Yeah, so to be clear, 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. Neither of my parents have or had any substance abuse issues.
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.
My dad's a physicist, so he got me excited about science. I was really interested in biology.
I also really liked 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 a 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 was kind of perfect, right?

Ride dirt bikes, dirt clod wars.

It was just fun. You know, it was really cool.

And then right about the time that puberty rolled around, so I had puberty somewhere around 13, 14, around there, my parents went through a very high conflict divorce. Back then, divorce was a lot more rare.
I think I was one of only a couple of kids in my high school whose parents were divorced.

Just didn't know that many kids with divorced parents.

Back then they called us latchkey kids.

Remember that?

Like you let yourself in at the end of the day after school.

That means you were a latchkey kid.

Back then, if your parents were divorced,

they called that a broken home.

This will be a foreign concept to most people now.

But, you know, and I've seen a lot of people get divorced and do just fine. We have family members who are divorced and they manage that really well.
My parents, unfortunately, despite being well-meaning people, it got really messy. There's a rule book when parents get divorced.
You don't bad talk to the other parent other parent you don't let the kids get scared about the future you maintain oversight unfortunately those things didn't happen and so you know I was a 13 14 year old kid I've always been a I wouldn't say like emotionally sensitive kid and like but I was tuned into the world in a way that things are intense for me.

If I like something, I really loved it.

When I was a kid, I loved fish tanks.

I was building fish tanks constantly,

spent all my time in an aquarium store.

Then it was tropical birds.

Then I hit puberty,

and then it was skateboarding girls.

Whatever I'm into, I'm really into. So right about the time I hit puberty, my parents split up.
They were fighting a ton. 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 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...
I just remember it was, honestly, a really, like, dark time. I remember being super scared, being super angry at my dad.
It just like livid at him. The second half of basketball season is here and the race to

the playoffs is heating up on PrizePix. With over 10 million members and billions of dollars in

awarded winnings, PrizePix has made daily fantasy sports more accessible than ever. It's simple,

get the app, pick two or more players across any sport, pick more or less on their projection, We'll see you next time. daily fantasy sports app available to play in more than 40 plus states, including California and Texas.
Download the PrizePix app today and use code SRS to get $50 in bonus promo funds instantly when you play $5. That's code SRS on PrizePix to get $50 in bonus promo funds instantly when you play $5.
Win or lose, you'll get 50 bucks bonus credit just for playing, guaranteed. PrizePix, run your game.
Must be present in certain states. Visit prizepix.com for restrictions and details.
When was the last time you checked on your home title? If you're like me, the answer is never. There's a growing real estate scam targeting American homeowners and their home equity.
Criminals forge your signature on one document, use a fake notary stamp, pay a small fee, and file with your county. Boom.
Your home title has been transferred out of your name. Then they take out loans using your equity or even sell your property.
You won't even know it's happened until you get a collection or a foreclosure notice. Stop what you're doing and find out today if you're already a victim.
Use promo code SRS at HomeTitleLock.com and you'll get a free title history report to find out if your title is still in your name. When you sign up, you'll also receive a free 14-day trial of their million-dollar Triple Lock Protection.
That's immediate 24-7 monitoring of your property's title, urgent alerts if there are ever any changes. And if fraud should happen, their US based restoration team will spend up to 1 million to fix the fraud and restore your title at no additional cost.
Your satisfaction is guaranteed and you can cancel at any time. Get peace of mind now at home title lock.com promo code SRS or click the link in the description.
Why did they get divorced? If you don't mind me asking. Yeah, I think it could, you know, the classic irreconcilable differences.
I don't, I don't know. I think that it was, they wanted different things, you know, these kinds of, you know, messages that you hear.
I think it was different values. I think fundamentally different values.
So at 14, 15, all the kids in my school, I went to a very academically ambitious school. The school is Gunn High School with two N's.
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 my school. That's a lot of pressure.
A lot of pressure. Kids were killing themselves by standing in front of trains on the train tracks in Palo 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 are 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 14, 15, I just remember being pretty depressed,

having a lot of... people associated with the university nearby, that kind of thing.
At 14, 15, I just remember being pretty depressed,

having a lot of frustration in me,

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 hanging out with a group of really good kids, mostly skateboarders.
This was in the early 90s, skateboarding, late 80s, early 90s, so 89, 90, 91. Skateboarding wasn't a cool sport back then.
Like no one cared about skateboarding. And we started going up to San Francisco.
There was this community of, at that time, mostly guys. Now there are a lot more girls and women skateboarding.
But it was a bunch of young dudes at a place called Embarcadero, the famed EMB, which was 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 Dyrdek coming through for one of the Back to the City contests.
My friend LeVar McBride, an amazing skateboarder. There was young Mike Carroll, Henry Sanchez.
These names are like legendary. Wow.
Chavante Turner. So I was exposed to some amazing skateboarding and I was exposed to 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 that a lot of the kids who were at Market Arrow on the weekend were there all week long, just didn't go to school.
And so I started getting into the truancy thing. I was like, well, I'm just not going to go.
And 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, skateboarding. I could tell you more about the curbs in the parking lot of my high school at that time than I could about any class that I took.
I liked the creative writing class, but then a little ceramics, some auto shop. I liked the science courses, the good biology class, that kind of thing, but I just wasn't focused.
And so a year goes by and you can fall pretty far behind. What also started happening is 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 Zwanich was soon a pro skateboarder. Our friend Aaron Curry was a good skateboarder.
He eventually became a graffiti artist. Unfortunately, he passed, but really good artist.
And some of these other kids whose names I rattled off had pro models 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 it was super depressing. And so over time, 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 a 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, sat me down, they're talking to me.
Mind you, this is all pre-therapy, pre-goodwill hunting comes out. And I'm thinking like, what is this? And I'm just like, and then pretty soon I realized that they're going to try and take me away.
I just got it. Like 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 and then they tried

and succeeded. They put me in a residential treatment program.
This was

not juvenile hall, okay, but this is a 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?

So they made it all about not being safe to myself kind of thing, depressed. I think I was that depressed.
I think I 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 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.
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, they're the adults.
We were staying in hotels in Reno and partying and other guys are partying and you're 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 Visalia 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 and we just went and we just like crashed in the, you know, 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, a guy named Jim Thiebaud.
He is owner of a company called Deluxe, which has Antihero and Spitfire wheels and Thunder trucks. He's been around for a long time.
He's a real 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. So 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 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 this 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 truancy? 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 things weren't that bad at home.
Right. But I had a good friend, my friend, Aaron Curry, eventually Aaron King changed his last name.
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 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's probably about 15 kids. And they're like, you're going to do group therapy.
And I'm like, you know, are you kidding? I wasn't like a hard kid. 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 niceness. 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 at-home 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.
Because all you have to do is hear about that once from somebody 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 Palo Alto. There was a guy there who came at me, like propositioned me.
I was like 14. I had 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 scary than to approach or something like that. So he came at me and I exploded on him, exploded, yelled at him, you know, like stood up for myself.
So 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, cause 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, she's protective. I'm grateful for that, right? I mean, nobody got hurt in that situation.
I'm grateful. People probably have their ideas about what she should and shouldn't have done, but 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 cocky kid. And I feel very lucky now looking back.
You know, the situation sucked because I'm like, how do I get out of this place? And 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, but I didn't have the kind of problems that were insurmountable and that I better get myself squared away or I was going to be in trouble.
Like I need 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. Okay, so I get out of that place and there was one condition, which is that I go to regular therapy.
Again, there were no movies like Good Will Hunting. No one went to therapy back then.
But I got appointed to this guy who, fortunately, was within a half mile of my favorite skateboard spot, the front five. So it's like five stairs.
Everyone would congregate there after school, and we'd skate there. So I could go to his office, and we sat down, and 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 pushups and running and things like that, taking care of myself a little bit. And he was like, you should keep journaling, right? And that 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? 16.

Yeah.

Your?

Your child?

Yeah.

I'm sorry, how old did you say?

I was 16.

Shit, man.

And, you know, I couldn't blame anyone else for that.

How did you deal with that in particular?

I didn't tell anyone.

We didn't tell anyone.

And, yeah, this is the first time I've ever really talked about this.

You know, you're 16, you think you understand the world.

Here's how I did deal with it.

I figured I'll eventually need to take care of people.

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 Thiebaud, started companies.
He's a good skateboarder, but he had the wisdom to start companies. So I thought I could start a company because I'm not gonna be a pro skateboarder.
That was clear. I remember my team manager at Thunder, Spitfire, that name's Steve Ruge, Shroogie we called him.
Now he's sober. Back then, he smoked a lot of weed.
So I remember calling him from the residential program. I got one call and I go, Shroog, I'm locked up here.
And he goes, man, you're the most normal guy I know. And he goes, why are you calling me? And I go, Shroog, I don't know what to do.
And he goes, I can barely take care of myself. And I'm like, oh, Shrug, 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 my heart.

It was on the phone.

I called him.

I was like, hey, Shroo, I didn't get my package of wheels

or this and 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.

I thought my life was over.

This is the only thing I cared about was skateboarding. It was the only thing that I could kind of partially do.
And looking back, I'm like, of course I should have been in school studying. The amazing thing about school is they tell you exactly what you need to know.
It's so obvious. But back then, that's not where I was at.
So I you know, so I had the, you know, girlfriend thing, 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 them if I can have their dog, and they're going to say no, and then just stupid knucklehead stuff. Yeah, looking for it.
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 also incredible because I'm like about 6'1". I was 6'1 then, but I was about 150 pounds.
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, people will laugh and he'll probably have a good chuckle.
There was a guy that we used to call the mayor of EMB, James Kelch. And this guy could fight.
And he'd get in fights all the time, especially if he was drinking. He was 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 if you rolled up there to Embarcadero 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's some famous funny stories and not funny stories about that. It was a rough environment.
They'd also rob tourists and like, dude, terrible shit. 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 of friends in. LeVar McBride was in that movie, right? No kidding., yeah.
When I saw the movie Kids. I haven't even heard that movie until I don't know how long.
When I saw that movie, I was like, that's LeVar. I think Nick Lockman's in there too.
And Harold Hunter's in there. Harold's dead now, sadly.
You know, that's a weird movie for a lot of reasons. It would never be released by today's standards.
But 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 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.
He was like, big buff dude. And he was like, listen, you're hurting yourself because you're weak.
I couldn't do one pull up. 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 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, but we had a lot of conflict. My mom and I were, I was very protective of my mom.
And I just watched when 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 so I figured, well, what can I do that I can use my like hard 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 a 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 he wasn't my close friend, but Jim's business partner, Mickey Ray, went and became a cop.
He was a skateboarder turned cop. I think now he has a bar or something up in Portland.
But I was like, I'll 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 it was mostly guys. And 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, I was still getting into fights.

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'd spar on Wednesday nights every once in a while.

This was when I lived in San Diego. Actually, a lot of team guys would come through that gym, roll jujitsu.
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 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 thirties.
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, 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 because I was going to ask,

do you think that all the fighting

got you addicted to adrenaline?

I never liked it, never sought it out.

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 this is kind of wild. And you talk about divine intervention.
At the 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 in healing the brain later. They absolutely do, and perhaps we'll get into that.
But 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 should go take the SAT.
It's today. And I said, no way.
I'd been up all night on a half hit of acid. I was still a little bit like, eh.
I was like, no way. And she goes, just go.
You have to go. So I went, my home was through the, I had a trap door in my gate that would lead into the school.

So basically Gunn High School was there,

Georgia Avenue, right over the gate.

And I could literally go through school

through just going through the gate.

Now stepdad, put a gate 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.

Are you kidding me?

Like I was just filling in the bubbles.

And I broke a thousand.

I know people are going to hear this thing and be like, no, I broke 1,000. I broke 1,000.
That's divine intervention. Or give me another reason that, you know, there isn't some other way that could happen.
Broke 1,000. 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 conflict. 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. I got in.
So someone on that committee read that and went, all right, like here's a kid who, I was just honest. I was just honest.
And so I got in and then, so I went off to college. 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, bye's and hugs and tears.
Like my girlfriend who had already been there for a year, we drove back down there together. I wasn't part of the whole system.
And I grew up in this nice little town where 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 really not part of this like not part of this like normal trajectory that I should have been on. And I get to the university and everyone's partying a ton.
And I'm thinking like, this is kind of stupid. I had done a lot of that already, but I didn't get squared away in terms of school either.
I was going out, drinking and 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 key through my cheek during a fight. I saw a guy dragging his dog behind his bike.
We got into a fight. The big one was after the first year in college, I had lousy grades.
I'd been kicked out of the dorms for doing stupid stuff. Okay, so I'm like going nowhere, right? I'm living in a, I was squatting in a house over the summer because everyone was like, oh, 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 laid 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? So 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 at this bagel 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're 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 party that summer because there weren't many kids that stayed for the summer and 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's a Monterey, great person.
And Jack went to school with us back then. He wasn't't a musician.
He played for fun, but he was a pro surfer. And so he was kind of like a rock star at that school because everyone was into surfing and stuff.
So there was this party that friends of ours had where everyone would barbecue, bring their stuff over. And one day, we went to go pick up steaks.
And we were coming back on 4th 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. And 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 gonna hit a guy, you just gotta like hit them. You know, 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 wanna 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. Wow.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because as you know, like you don't have to be that skilled or unskilled to really hurt yourself or somebody else with a knife.
It's super dangerous. Super dangerous.
People just don't understand how dangerous it is. It takes a split second to regret what you do or something like that too.
Yeah, your whole life goes away or their life or both. So police show up.
I'll never forget. They came over to me and they were like, good job.
And I remember thinking, because these guys had been robbing us and they got those guys. And I remember thinking to myself, 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. You know, people were like, I got some cheers, you know.
There was one like pretty lady in particular who actually I'm still friends with who was like, hey, that was great. And I remember thinking like, 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 is it.
What am I going to do? I can't play music. I got friends who are musicians, but I suck.
I'm not a good skateboarder. And so I had to do a couple of days of just deep introspection.
And I was always a reader. And I remember I had,

yeah, I'll get emotional about this one because he's come around for me

a bunch of times over the years.

Thebo gave me those fricking 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.

It's early in our discussion. 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 man poetry called Do the And I remember just thinking like, okay, like,

I'm gonna go 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've got a lot of fire in me.
Like I've got a lot of energy. And 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 kidding.
I have the letters. July 4th, 1994 was when that fight happened.
The letter is sometime right around. I still have the letter.
And I said, whatever happened in our family, it's not your fault. And it's not my fault.
I knew that much 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 we certainly knew one another.
And he's kind of legendary in the skateboard community, a guy named Phil Schau, 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 accident. 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 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 it? I hope he's doing well now.
Brandon Tierney, not doing well, okay? Our friend, Johnny Ferrer, he killed himself in 2017, sadly. But like a lot of guys not doing well.
Drugs, mental issues, severe issues. A couple of 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. 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 fucking 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'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's 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, like 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 somehow 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 rap.
They're kind of seen as like not the, you know, not as prestigious and they're not as prestigious. 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 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 like, I love my sister more in life itself.
You know, I would do anything for her, you know, and 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 because every year around our birthdays, we vacation in New York together.

One of the best things about this podcast life is I don't spend money,

but I was able to take my sister to New York 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.

For years though, I would save up

and we would go,

we would both save up

and we would go to Manhattan

and we'd stay in 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 really stuck together.
So she's a great person. So, and we disagree on a great many things in life, but like we hold 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 and 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.
And 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 was like, all right, well, I either can go back to the school I was in because I had taken a leave of absence or I can take a different path.
And I went back because it was a state school. So I mean, it was a 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 get is 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 90s 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, those were skateboarders.
Spike Jones, that was, he had Big Brother magazine. Like that, he shot photos for them and he owned a skateboard company.
I think he still does. Like we were wild and free so early.
So when I got back and everyone was like, are you going to fight? Are 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, nah, 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 Carlyle, amazing guy. I liked him because he drank coffee and he smoked cigarettes.
He'd light them in the Bunsen burner and he'd smoke in the fume hood and they'd come down the hall and they'd be like, you can't smoke in here. And he'd be like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And he was just the old guy, Navy guy, old Navy guy. And worked for him.
And I finally got good at something. I could learn, I could understand stuff.
I have a good memory, it turned out. I love doing research.
I learned how to cut up brains and stain them and look at them under the microscope. And I wasn't the smartest person, but I had some intellect and I could outwork anybody.
I'm like, I can win by hard work. And so by the time I graduated, I was like, wow, I actually good at 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 gonna go to Princeton.
I'm not an East Coast Ivy League guy. I mean, you just, you know, I'm just not.
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 master's there, fell in love with circadian biology, studied hormones and behavior, circadian biology.
Had a good run there for reasons mostly related to topic of interest. I moved up to UC Davis, 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. She had a budget.
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 little apartment, but like, why 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 cause I was scared.

Usually cocky is scared.

Scared of failure.

Anyone that sees somebody cocky, usually scared.

It's a way of 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.

Thank you. Somebody cocky, usually scared.
It's a way of 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. Five o'clock would roll down.
Everyone would leave, put tinfoil on the windows, blast rancid. Favorite band, do experiments until three in the morning.
Collapse, get up. Next morning, they're like, you're still here.
And I'm like, you left? Wow. So I was like an animal at that.
And we published 10 papers or something. not all in the morning, collapse, get up.
Next morning, they're like, you're still here. And I'm like, you left? Wow.
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 postdoc, got a lab as a junior professor in San Diego. Eventually got recruited back to Stanford with tenure.
And along the way, I will say that- I mean, what did that feel like

to get recruited by Stanford?

It felt good.

I mean, I didn't want to go back to my hometown.

I had a lot of,

there's this thing in neuroscience called

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, but I'd been a postdoc at Stanford and that worked out really well. 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 there are several of them.
And you're just like, wow. 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. It's also a very mixed place politically.
People forget this. You know, Condi 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. 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 imposter syndrome.

I was like, no, I worked hard to get here.

I was a postdoc here.

I understand.

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.
But it was a trip. It was a trip.
But I will say this because I think that in recalling all this, years later I was actually in Hawaii visiting a friend for, there was a surf event. I don't surf.
But there was a surf event, a friend named Brian McKenzie who's a really talented high performance coach. He took me out there.
Brian's got unscared tattooed on his knuckles, his neck to knuckles tattoos. He's a tough guy.
And we had become friends because he'd done some work with East Coast SEAL teams. I don't want to create an image of a deeper relationship than there actually is, but I have a lot of friends from the teams and done some work with some people in that community.
Part of the reason I do what I do is for my family. I want to leave them a better country than the one I was born into.
I also want to make sure they're taken care of financially, and that's why I make it a priority to help protect the money I've worked so hard to earn and save. And one of the ways I do that is by diversifying into gold and silver.
Precious metals have been a store of value for thousands of years, and they are known as a hedge against market risk and inflation. If you're interested in learning about how precious metals can help you, you should reach out to my partners at GoldCo.
They're an amazing company. They support this show and I trust them.
Right now, they're offering a free gold and silver kit. All you have to do is go to seanlikesgold.com.
You'll also learn about a special offer to get up to a 10% instant match and bonus silver for qualified orders. So go to seanlikesgold.com.
That's seanlikesgold.com. S-H-A-W-N likesgold.com.
Make sure you do everything in your power to help protect what's yours. You all know what speed dating is, right? Well, if you're the owner of a growing business, what if there was a feature like speed dating, but only for hiring? In other words, you could meet several interested, qualified candidates all at once.
Well, good news. There is.
It's Zip Intro from ZipRecruiter. You can post your job today and start talking to qualified candidates tomorrow.
And right now, you can try Zip Intro for free. It's ziprecruiter.com slash SRS.
Zip Intro gives you the power to quickly assess excellent candidates for your job via back-to-back video calls. You simply pick a time and Zip Intro does all the work of finding and scheduling qualified candidates for you.
Then you can choose who you want to talk to and meet with great people as soon as the next day. It's so easy.
Enjoy the benefits of speed hiring with new Zip Intro. Only from ZipRecruiter.
Rated the number one hiring site based on G2. Try Zip Intro for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash SRS.
Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash SRS. Zimp intro.
Post jobs today. Talk to qualified candidates tomorrow.
And Brian took me out to Hawaii for this thing. We were talking about some of the stuff related to breathing and autonomic control.
And there's a guy out there named Kai Garcia. They call him Kyborg.
He used to be an enforcer. He's a gnarly guy.

Hawaiian culture has got its own thing.

Oh, yeah.

And he's a really good guy.

Sober, he's a family man now.

And I'll never forget, we were sitting in the sauna

and we were talking about 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, postdoc, and junior faculty, faculty member, a couple of things happened that are worth highlighting.
First of all, I had this weird karma with advisors. I had an amazing undergraduate advisor that I worked for in his lab.
My graduate advisor, she was amazing. And my postdoc advisor, he was amazing.
Suicide, cancer, cancer. So at 50 and roughly 60 years old.
So I was like scientifically orphaned early. I'm like, what is this? Like, am I cursed? Or, you know, as the

third one said before he died, he goes, you're the common denominator. And I was like, shit.
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. I'll get back to that in a minute.
But what I realized was the fact that all three of my advisors died was tragic.

But then come 2020, end of 2021, when Lex Friedman leans over to me after recording a podcast and goes, you should start a podcast. I didn't think, oh, what will my scientific advisors think? Everyone in science knows that through the mentorship, like what your advisors think and what they want for you powerfully shapes what's available to you and what you feel safe to do.
All my advisors 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 Costello 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 the shit kicked out of him literally from a time when he was really young, finally got adopted by a nice family.
So he went to our school and then he became a street artist, graffiti artist, made it as an artist, died, stomach cancer, Johnny Ferrer, suicide, super sad. That guy was just the raddest 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 Eichelberry, dead, dead, dead. Boom.
Phil Schau, 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 Games, winning medals, companies, and a lot of them aren't. And so you look and 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.
Dead. And you realize 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 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, 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, you know, I think that what I needed to hear back then

and what Thebo gave me in that fricking 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. There are 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 they 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, 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 postdoc, 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 moron, like, excuse me, like a zombie. And it 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 advisor died, that sucked.
When my graduate advisor, who was like a mom to me died, I spiraled. My girlfriend at the time will tell you, I got into some really unhealthy behavior.
I was just self-destructive. And I tried to take up boxing, so I did that.
And 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 I learned to shut that off.
Luckily, came out of that fine. I

had my brain imaged. I got no white spots to be concerned about.
I'm very lucky. Maybe I have a

thick skull or something. But as the years have gone on, I've realized I have to be concerned about.
I'm very lucky. You know, maybe I have a thick skull or something.
But, you know, as the years have gone on, I've realized I have to be careful. I have to still mind it.
You know, I have to not overwork, not take anything to excess. And so, anyway, 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.
I think there's an immense value to continuing to be generative and do things that are adaptive while trying to work your shit out, basically. How did you, when you say keep yourself from overworking, how do you do that? Because I think that we may be very similar and I can tell you love what you do.
And when you love what you do, it doesn't feel like work. But at the same time, I 100% agree with you.
You have to have some type of a healthy personal life. 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. 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'd love to hear what you have to say because I really struggle with that. I wish I had known the Naval quote.
I only heard it recently, like very recently. That home full of love piece is so key.
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 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 going to do this, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this, I'm going to 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 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, it's time to pump the brakes a bit.
You know, the girlfriend I had when I was a junior professor, so this is 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, you know, she's a redhead.

She has got a lot of fire and she was like, I can handle you.

And, you know, 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 story about our story where we both get it. I wasn't ready to learn how to shut that off, and in recent years, I've learned how to shut it off.
I don't work like I used to. I mean, when I was with her and she'll vouch, I used to type working on papers or grants until I'd collapse and then wake up in the middle of the night and just keep going.
We went skiing together once. I snowboarded.
She skied. She's a great skier.
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 McKnight Foundation Fellowship. That was written with diarrhea on the toilet 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, I like to think that it slows with age, but it kind of doesn't in a way, because you learn how to place your shots better and better, and it just feels better and better. And nowadays, like with the podcast, I take great pride in trying to make the solo episodes 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. 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 cumulative 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 I understood that that was a joke, then I explained it correctly. But 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 rechecked this morning, right before putting out our episode on microplastics, I went back and rechecked the millimeter micron conversion. Like, you know, those painful mistakes, they make you really sharpen your game.
And what you realize is 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.
I'm not married. I don't have kids.
That's fully in the plan. I know people will be like, you're 49 years old and whatever, dude, you've been a bachelor.
No, 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, 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 podcasts. 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 listened to the Tim Ferriss podcast, Joe Rogan podcast, Liz Friedman podcast.
I feel like I'm on another planet. How did I get here? I really do feel that way.
And so I think it's also just learning to savor those moments. That's actually come to me in prayer a lot this year.
It 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 go into prayer or I go into like a breathing exercise, 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 I 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.

Are you comfortable dying? Knowing that you're going to take your last breath. Knowing it might be.
Yes. And I know people will be like, bullshit.

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 give my heart, I really pour as much of my energy and my heart into what I do, to know that I can't get it all right, to take the shots from traditional media, to take like the the the the the the the the the the the the the

the

the

the

the

the as much of my energy and my heart into what I do, to know that I can't get it all right, to take the shots from traditional media, to take, yeah, bring it. I don't want more of it, but if you bring it, my stance is good.
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.
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.
And I've had some close brushes. I mean, I had this stupid

idea to do cage 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.

My solution to that, because

Thank you. 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, because 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 PTSD.
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 to myself, like no more risks with my life.
That was too close. And listen, I've had some relationships that felt like great white shark dives where I'm like, that person's dangerous.
No more. No more.

Like doesn't really matter to get into the details,

but 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, to all of us and to myself is that a little bit of placidity, like peace is the thing that we're all after. And so now my prayers include prayers for peace, just internal peace, not just to make it another day.
Yeah, you said something downstairs when we talk about 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.
That's the key one. 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.

We had a guy on the podcast recently,

episode is an alia, Bill Eddy.

He's a lawyer and clinical psychologist.

He wrote five types of people that can ruin your life.

And he said, you want to know who to avoid?

Avoid the people who seem to have these failures

in multiple domains of their life

and or 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. It brings out the worst.
Again, I think our neural circuitry at a core level, it's not divided into limbic, non-limbic, hypothalamus, cortex. No, those are just brain areas and circuits, but there's good and bad in us, in all of us.
Jung 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 are deserving of the belief that they can be good. So I like that idea.
I'm an optimist. 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 or not you're public facing or not, everyone's judging each other.

And part of being a grownup is discerning when to say, okay, you're right.

I need to take a look at that.

And other times when you go, no, that's you, not me.

I'm going to do my thing.

That's a tricky one. It's not always a clear picture.
When you started the podcast, I mean, how did Stanford react to that? They've been immensely supportive. They even ran a feature in Stanford Magazine and the whole thing.
I mean, it was a bold move in the sense that there wasn't a precedent for it, right? Professors write books, popular books. That's pretty much accepted.
We have the great Robert Sapolsky at Stanford, Carol Dweck, 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 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 are some arguments on the internet that I don't.
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 to mentor students and 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.

Stanford is like anything else.

It's a business.

It's its own city with a zip code.

It 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. I brought on a great many colleagues from Stanford.
The podcast also has a philanthropy arm where we've supported research at Stanford, including the work of Nolan Williams, who's doing the research on Ibogaine for PTSD and addiction in veterans, so we can circle back to that. We've supported Mike Eisenberg's lab, David Spiegel's lab, Allie Crum's lab, and labs elsewhere outside of Stanford.
So I think they understand that this is a new media venue, and they've been very supportive. 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 podcasts, 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, come on, open up any media venue.
You need to survive, you need to pay your production staff, et cetera. So it's all been symbiotic.
And I think that as a teacher, I just like teaching and the podcast gives me an opportunity to do that. And I'm grateful to them.
And I like to think they're grateful to me too. Man, it's been, you know, what, I'm glad we covered this because it just, like I said said it brings so many people hope

and what you've been able to accomplish

in your life

with your

professional career as a

doctor

as a neuroscientist

and the podcast

I mean it's just

it's incredible

I mean

I think that you

Thank you. 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 I also appreciate how seriously you take it. You know, I've put out shit that I'm not proud of on my podcast.
I feel horrible when I put out shit 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 of love. I know that.
There's a phrase that somebody 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 brushstroke you see, there's like 12 to 15 brushstrokes inside of that brushstroke 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.
And we're not playing games here. That's what I think is so interesting.
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 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 in 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 SciComm, which is the Huberman 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 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 something can be accurate and not exhaustive,

for of anything except trying to figure out the truth. And we're all limited in our ability to filter that out, right? So 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 ability to do that.
I spent months preparing that. The microplastics 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.
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? Because let's face it, here's the other truth, everybody.
They're

in competition with us.

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 super agers,

alcohol, sleep. Hmm, 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 work, right? So, to me, it's rather amusing that people think that these are reports about podcasters. No, 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 that. 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

jujitsu. Lex

is a podcast genius.

He's doing intellectual jujitsu.

Joe's a podcast genius.

He's blending all of his things,

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, government and special operations, and your intense curiosity.
Podcasting is real. Rates have dropped and it's time to take advantage.
A lot of us are struggling to keep up with everyday bills and you're reaching for the credit cards to pay for all of it. But homeowners, listen up.
Interest rates have fallen into the fives. That's nearly a quarter of the average credit card rate.
American financing is helping homeowners like you save an average of $800 a month by tapping into your home's equity and wiping out high interest debt. And the best part is there are no upfront fees to get started.
Credit card rates are insane. And if you're carrying a balance every month, you're stuck in an endless cycle.
Break free today, call American Financing and see how much you can save. And if you start now, you may even delay the next two mortgage payments.
Call American Financing today at 866-781-8900. That's 866-781-8900 or go to AmericanFinancing.net slash SRS.
I'm always looking for ways to make sure I feel comfortable in what I wear through the whole day. That's even more important when the weather is changing from winter to spring and True Classic helps make it easy.
Their active wear is moisture wicking and quick drying. And for spring, they have short-sleeve comfort knit button-ups that look as good at the gym as they do in meetings.
True Classic makes premium clothes at an affordable price with shirts designed for your best features with a perfect fit. Their best-selling t-shirts and more come in three, six, and nine packs.
The more you bundle, the more you save. Plus, you get free shipping on all orders, a 100% perfect fit guarantee, and easy returns, so there's no risk.
Whether you're bundling up for the cold or getting ready for spring, level up your style with the clothes that actually fit right. Just go to my exclusive link at trueclassic.com slash SRS to save.
That's trueclassic.com slash SRS. Shop now and elevate your wardrobe today.
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 damn good way to put it.
You know, it's, 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, So,, 2021, things were blowing up for us. 2022, 23 was when I was like, whoa, like this is kind of wild.
Like 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 rite of passage now in podcasting that trad media comes and takes a shot at you.

Some cases they've taken three shots or five shots.

It's just part of the way they try and rob power.

That's what they're trying to do.

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 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 Rocco and Rodney Mullen, these two wild renegade skateboarders, started their own magazine, which eventually, Big Brother, which spawned Jackass.
Jeff Tremaine and those guys, Spike Jonze, it spawned all that. Then Thrasher Magazine has always been independent and the industry leader.
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, which saw Green Day, like what, 70,000 people? I saw them when they were

at Berkeley Square, a little band, but they didn't sell out. They showed people, this is what really good, in their case, pop punk, not my favorite, but people like it, obviously.
This is what our version of good music looks like. Same thing happened with DC Shoes.
Our friends started that, Danny Way, Colin McKay, Ken Block and those guys.

Ken loved rally car driving. version of good music looks like.
Same thing happened with DC Shoes. Our friends started that.

Danny Way, Colin McKay, Ken Block and those guys.

Ken loved rally car driving.

Fortunately, he passed away.

It's a snowmobile accent, but he loved rally car driving.

Turned it into a whole thing.

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 not their own

the that's real hip hop music, anything that's real can become something big. And traditional media covers other things because 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 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. 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.
We don't even think about it. people were 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? Yeah. And no.
Like, it's all signal the noise, as we say in the brain. 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't believe that. So they've got to do a restart.
They've 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, like I covered drinking water and 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.
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 minerals-like structure of the teeth and really helps build strong teeth.
But there's another mineral that's naturally occurring called hydroxyapatite, 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 down to the root.
No kidding? Absolutely. You do this by taking care of your oral microbiome.
And there are a few things that one can do. But brushing and flossing is important, right? But avoiding these alcohol-based mouthwashes.
And there are a few other things we cover in the episode. I can bring a link to that.
Man, I... Go ahead.
Well, 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 theorists if you say fluoride might not be healthy. But then I started looking, and there are data published on PubMed, Library of Congress, that say that it 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 not a fluoride denier.
Suddenly, they accused me of being a fluoride denier. And I'm a fluoride.
I'm not a fluoride denier. Suddenly they accused 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 concerned me a little bit.

I made a bad joke.

I said they concerned me more than melanoma,

which was not a good joke to make

because that's what landed on my Wikipedia. Now they accuse me of not 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 increase the amount of fluoride because they claim 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 take the knowledge into consideration.
So where they're wrong 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 title is 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? It means you can, 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 wasn't vocal during the pandemic about anything except anxiety and sleep, et cetera.
But, you know, it was a back and forth heated argument among even some faculty at our own university. I mean, this is not controversial.
I mean, the head of the coronavirus task force was Scott Atlas 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, but that's great to hear. And that's spreading? I would say that the culture of academic freedom has certainly been maintained at Stanford.
I've never felt any pressure that I could or couldn't work on any one thing. Colleagues talk openly about what they're interested in.
You know, you're 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 traditional views of things are always going to catch heat.
Yeah. 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, you know, like Zuck and the building of Facebook was quite a high friction build.
You know, if even half the stories are true, it's a high friction build. And I mean, he's like beloved now.
I mean, if you look like people with Zuck with this total rebrand, right? But I think people realize that he built one of the most important things over the last hundred 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 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,

I looked 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 hacked his way through the jungle

and he took a lot of cuts 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 belongs on the Rushmore of podcasting.
He paved 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 tied to fluoride. 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 system in my house about a year ago.
So reverse osmosis or distilled? Man, I don't know. 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 biodynamizer or something like that.
It probably is reverse osmosis and then remineralizes the water, which you want. What I learned from researching microplastics is they're everywhere.
We can give up trying to get them out of the environment. They're everywhere.
But you can minimize, like drinking out of these metal cans is good. I drink out of some plastic every once in a while.
A glass vessel is good. Metal's good.
You know, there are a few things out there, like certain brands of carbonated water that have been hit particularly hard with the analysis. Like they go do analysis of sparkling water.
Topo Chico landed flat on its face with tons of these endocrine disruptors. No, are you serious? Yeah, it's the worst by a long shot.
That was in roughly 2020, 2021. I love Topo Chico.
It's like nine point something parts per trillion. But then Coca-Cola company who owns them said that they were going to reduce that.
I think they've halved 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.
But then it goes the other way too. So you may have heard, like we ingest a credit card's worth of plastic every week.

That study was refuted by another study that showed no, that measurement was off

by about a million fold.

It's actually much lower.

You can also phase two liver detox

a lot of this stuff by,

eat some broccoli and cruciferous vegetables

every once in a while.

There's sulforaphane in cruciferous vegetables will help with stage two 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 trad media loves to jump on that.
Like you can't detox. You can detox that you have toxins in your body.
You can sweat some of them out, but not all of them. Your liver helps remove certain waste products.
Sulforaphane, you can take a supplement form. You can get from cruciferous vegetables, broccoli sprouts, et cetera.
That'll help. But trying to reduce the amount of microplastics, especially for pregnant women and young kids.
Shana 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, that the taint size literally is shrinking toward a more female pattern through with progressive exposure to phthalates and endocrine disruptors present in receipts, present in plastic bottles, polycystic ovarian syndrome and egg count. Egg counts are going down in women at a given age.
Polycystic ovarian syndromes are going up. Shana, who's a researcher for several decades now, thinks this is related to the prevalence of endocrine disruptors in receipts, forever chemicals, and so on.
So these have real implications. Reduced sperm counts, you know, these are real effects.
Testosterone levels are going down, sperm counts are going down, and it correlates well with phthalates and things in drinking water. Not fluoride, but other things, endocrine disruptors.
What sparkling water do you drink? I'll drink the, I no longer will drink Topo Chico. I will drink like a Pellegrino.
Okay. Or any of the, you know, any Calistoga or Pellegrino.
I do try and drink out of metal or glass, but I'll occasionally drink out of a plastic bottle. Even cans are bad because of 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.
No one's one's going no exposure. Okay.
And, you know, they package some of the best meat in plastic. So you have to work 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 is potentially consequential.
What else is in our drinking water? Well, a lot of hormone-related stuff, birth control stuff, and urine-containing hormones 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 fancy filtering system, a tabletop pour-type filtering system is pretty good as long as you change over the filters.

What else is in there?

Well, the BPAs and the phthalates and the mostly BPAs

and these forever chemicals are very concerning.

These forever chemicals don't leave the body.

That's their concern, or the concern, rather.

I think, for me, just trying to limit drinking out of plastic bottles has become important. 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. Putting it into a bowl, rinsing it off is key.
Those little steps in not handling receipts is key. if you do have to handle receipts for work, you should wear nitrite gloves.
Not nitrite, excuse me. You should wear nitrile gloves.
Nitrile would be something else. Nitrile gloves.
Latex would be not as good, but still better than handling a lot of receipts. You know, Shana has done this work where they go in and work with couples that are trying to conceive and have trouble conceiving, and they remove a lot of the things from their life that I just described.
And they see pretty impressive shift towards successful pregnancy, not making any other changes. Wow.
Which is really impressive. Wow.
Yeah. I got a question.
I may have been sold on this, but when I was looking at all these different filtration systems, I was talking about that biodynamizer. And the company and the installer that came out was telling me that if you take tap water and crystallize it, it looks like a deformed, non-symmetrical snowflake.
And he says if you put it through the biodynamizer, 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 that's true, it's probably because the water coming out of the tap has other particles in there that the crystals form around and give you kind of more deformed crystals.
I mean, there's a lot of stuff coming through the tap and pipes. And, you know, I'm not typically lumped into the conspiracy theorist camp.

But what I am confident saying is that, 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 from 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 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 an 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 probably got the date wrong, that they banned the use of these little microbeads in soaps.
Remember the microbeads? Because those were getting out into the environment and causing some serious issues for 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 oftentimes what, same thing with chemicals based sunscreens 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 to me, if it's even a remote possibility, then why would you do it? Wear a hat or wear a long-sleeved shirt.
This is where, why gamble on what people don't know? This is what makes sense to me, especially given that I work with scientists. 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, an expert in skin cancer, taught me the following.
I didn't know this. Stanford trained, Harvard trained, published multiple 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 de novo, happen on de novo skin, meaning not where a mole 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 toxicologists and the dermatologists 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 Navy and the army hated one another, and I don't know because 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 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-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 fluoride and then suddenly they're called a 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 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'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 that has hydroxyapatite,

which is a great source of mineralizing teeth,

makes strong teeth,

especially if you're pulling fluoride from the water.

If they get cavities,

it turns out that if you brush your teeth in the morning

and especially before you go to sleep at night,

Thank you. especially if you're pulling fluoride from the water.
If they get cavities, 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 to form. The bacteria that cause cavities, sugar don't cause cavities.
The bacteria that cause cavities, it's the streptococcus 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 lot of sugary stuff lingering in your mouth, then the streptococcus mutans bacteria is nourished, proliferates, and can burrow into your teeth.
But if you deprive streptococcus mutans of the opportunity to flourish by brushing and flossing, ideally with a toothpaste that contains hydroxyapatite, guess what? Your teeth can remineralize. You can fill in those, you know, they go in at the dentist and they poke, poke, poke, poke, poke.
You got a pit there. Those pits can fill themselves back in.
They never told me that. I thought those pits.
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 it's Dr. Downstore Stacy with an I who's just, she's like, here's the truth on fluoride.
Here's the truth on hydroxyapatite. 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, who works 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 that's like so basic, but you know, and people might sound like, is he angry? I'm not angry at all.
I'm now at the point where 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 you ask, you know, like with vet care, just another example, 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, I talked about it on Rogan. I thought the vets are going to come after me.
The vets are just going to come after me. He puts his dog on testosterone.
I was contacted by many vets.

And you know what they said?

Thank you.

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 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 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 owners might use them as anabolic steroids. So we don't, we deprive animals 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 or not it's veterinary

or it's oral health or it's skin care,

like the derm oncologist 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, Doc, if you don't mind, let's take a break. And then when we come back, I want to pick your brain about some cannabis stuff and we'll get into psychedelics.
Great. Perfect.
Hillsdale College is offering more than 40 free online courses. That's right, more than 40 free online courses.
Learn about the works of C.S. Lewis, the stories in the book of Genesis, the meeting of the U.S.
Constitution, the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, or the history of the ancient Christian church with Hillsdale College's free online courses. I've talked pretty openly about my return to faith on the show, and Hillsdale offers some incredible courses to help discover the Bible's profound lessons about fatherhood, the nature of sin, and the consequences of sin on both a family and a nation.
Their online courses are self-paced so you can start whenever and wherever. Go right now to hillsdale.edu slash srs to enroll.
There's no cost and it's easy to get started. That's hillsdale.edu slash srs to enroll for free.
hillsdale.edu slash srs. I'd like to invite you to gain access to an exclusive experience on Vigilance.com slash vigilance elite.
That's patreon.com slash vigilance elite. Thank you for listening to The Sean Ryan Show.
If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes, and leave The Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through, and we really appreciate the support.
Thank you. Let's get back to the show.
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 Neuralink is going to help blind people see again. Is there any truth behind that? Yes, there is.
So this is an area I know a lot about. I've watched Neuralink develop what they're doing, not at a level of detail 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 Neuralink.
So here's what they're 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. 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 photoreceptive cells, that is the cells that convert light into electrical signals that then are passed into the brain.
So there are a number of diseases where photoreceptor loss occurs. There, you need to put back in a light-sensing tissue or device.
There are also forms of blindness like, for instance, glaucoma, which is a degeneration of neurons called retinal ganglion 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 cortex is 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, there have been researchers within the field of visual neuroscience,

like E.J. Chichlunski at Stanford and others,

who have 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, et cetera, 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 damage 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.
Wow. This is wild because there have been very few instances, one in particular by a guy named Botan Roska and Carl Deisseroth, one of whom is in Switzerland, the other at Stanford, of restoring light sensitivity to the photoreceptors 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 thalamus, 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 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 shit, yeah.

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 eyeglasses with just a camera, little wire going in through the temporal bone, right? Just 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. If you think about the little camera on a phone, it's not much bigger than an eyeball 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 photoreceptors and ganglion 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 ganglion cells, they can replace those signals.
If they're lacking photoreceptors, that's a little bit trickier, but you could use a camera that views the outside world, right? The camera has perfectly good photoreception. 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 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 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 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 it 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.
We don't know all the necessary inputs that are required to create a memory of your grandmother. We just don't know what they are.
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 two guys, Bill Newsome and Tony Movshan and others, the following way. And they did this in a macaque monkey.
You put a small microstimulator 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 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 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 site of epilepsy, this is how they probe for the site of epilepsy. My friend Eddie Chang, who's the chair of neurosurgery 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 he'll stumble upon neurons, he'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 at Stanford, Joe Parvise, discovered in the anterior mid-cingulate 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 area, the anterior mid-cingulate 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 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 super agers. It's a misnomer.
These are people that don't show the normal pattern of cognitive decline with aging as much as others. So this area, the anterior mid-cingulate 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.
It seems like it's related to 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, it 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 habanula, or an area of the brain that's associated with inhibiting the habanula, you could potentially remove some components of depression.
Encourage rage, discourage 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 project 100% of a false reality into somebody's head and they think that it is all actually happening.
Definitely. Going online without ExpressVPN is like not having a passcode on your phone.
You're just making it insanely easy for anybody who steals your phone to also steal your whole digital life. Every time you connect to an unencrypted network, like in a hotel, your online data is not secure and hackers on the same network can try to steal your personal data like your passwords.
Express VPN stops hackers from stealing your data by creating a secure tunnel between your device and the internet. Express VPN is so easy to use and super secure, you just need to fire up the app and click one button to get protected.
And it works on all devices, your phones, laptops, tablets, and more. I know for me, helping to protect myself from hackers is a top priority and I really like that ExpressVPN can be used and trusted when I'm on the go or in the studio.
Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com.srs. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com.srs to find out how you can get up to four extra months for free.
ExpressVPN.com. SRS.
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 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's mind control. It is mind control.
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 McDougal will tell you this as a neurosurgeon. Joe Parvizzi will tell you this as a neurosurgeon.
And this is what they write into these papers where you can learn really interesting things like, you know, of all the brain areas that people can stimulate if they have a choice. Studies were done by a guy named Robert Heath in the 1960s, very controversial guy.
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 and they'd feel a little drunk or they'd stimulate another area, they'd feel giddy.
They'd 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 properties.
And actually animals, certain animals in particular, 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, but I cannot go to sleep without some type of cannabis and vaping is my thing.
So I try 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 now that I have two little guys, little kids, then I take it a lot more seriously.
So I talked to my wife about this. I've tried to quit.
I quit for like six months after my Ibogaine treatment. Then 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 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?

No, I didn't know.

Yeah, but it's highly addictive.

And most people smoke, vape, dip, or snuff it, which is carcinogenic.

Okay, so the route of administration 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 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 predisposition,

genetic predisposition to bipolar disorder

or schizophrenia or other forms of psychosis,

if they do high THC cannabis, can exacerbate or maybe even trigger psychosis.

I got myself into some, let's just say, 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. 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 cannabis, especially young males. That does not mean young females can do it without

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, you know, they'll vape it or whatever for a couple of years, sometimes they can induce a permanent psychosis later.

Now, dosing of cannabis, you know, they'll vape it or whatever for 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

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.
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 effect that you're seeking. Okay.
With smoking and, people generally will inhale, get some sort of effect, wait, 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 ride, whatever that ride is.
And for some people, it can be really scary. So in your case, because your concern 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. You're highly functional in all domains of your life, as far as I can tell.
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 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. Vaping is actually better than smoking.
It is. Okay.
For nicotine and for cannabis, it is safer for the lungs, but that does not mean it's completely safe. Okay.
Yeah, sort of like, and here I apparently like to open up big cans of worms today. So like kratom is probably safer than a prescription opioid, but that doesn't mean kratom is completely safe.
But there's a kratom community, kratom I think it's called, that gets really upset when I say that. But I'm not saying it's something that's good or bad.
I'm saying these are relative harms, and then you have to wait against the potential benefits somebody's 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 meantime, 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.

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 just, it's looking at the future. Yeah.
And this is common among 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 in BUDS on the basis of being able to continue to think and move and communicate without sleep.
So there's kind of a selection process here. There are a few things, and here I'm getting into new territory, but there are a few non-prescription approaches that people have used to improve sleep that have certainly been beneficial for me.
I mean, there's the whole supplement route of magnesium threonate, et cetera. That can help for a lot of people.
I can suggest some of that. I've talked about these magnesium th and eight spelled T-H-R-E-O-N-A-T-E before sleep.
For some people, a very low dose of melatonin, but you don't want to do that long-term, maybe a half a milligram or a milligram, tiny amount. Why not? Why don't you want to do long-term? It can have some crossover impact onto other hormone systems.
The thing that's pretty exciting right now is a peptide that can be prescribed by a doctor. It's very inexpensive.
It's currently available called pinealine, and people will compound it with a glycine. I don't recommend people go out and buy gray market or black market peptides because they're not clean of something called lipopolysaccharide, 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.
But there's 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. And there are some other really good peptide doc MDs, Ways to Well, which is down in Austin.
I think those folks make some of this stuff. But pinealine 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 he could chat with you about it, that it might be able to help regenerate the pineal sites of the pineal gland and lead to more regular secretion of melatonin.
So get sunlight early in the day and throughout the day, limit your exposure to dark at night. We should probably get you some red lens glasses because 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 pinealine, it's like a little insect pin thing. It hurts less than a California mosquito bite, so not at all, that means.
A little bit of pinealine 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 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, GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic and Monjaro, those are peptides. Insulin, that's a peptide.
Peptide is just a small protein. But pinealine has, I've observed with a number of people who had real trouble sleeping.
This isn't something to take regularly. This is something to get you back on track.
You take it about a half hour before sleep. It can cause up to a doubling of rapid eye movement sleep, 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. 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 low-dose edible.
So you can move the cancer risk because you're not smoking or vaping, dipping or snuffing. To my knowledge, there's no cancer risk of cannabis per se.
It's the root of entry. Okay.
Okay. And then maybe you try prescribed by a doctor.
Of course, you try a little bit of pineal and glycine cocktail. 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. They do not feel rested when they wake up.
And for a lot of things, Xanax in particular, it can be very badly habit forming or downright addictive. I'm lucky that I never liked 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 sensitive to those things. So that's the deal with cannabis.
For most people, they're smoking cannabis because they like the fact that it removes their anxiety. And there seems to be a lot of individual variation on this.
Some people become very apathetic and don't work much. You've 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 isn't 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'll be very curious to see how pinealine glycine works.
You could get it out here in a day. You have one consult and do that.
And these are not powerful drugs of the sort like Xanax. There's a new sleep med called Quivivic, which works a little bit differently than the other ones 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 waking 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 pineal and peptide. And if that all still doesn't work, I'd say, well, then you seem to have found a pretty good solution for you.
But for a 15-year-old kid or a 16-year-old kid who can't sleep, I would not go to cannabis. I would say, you know, take it because the brain's still developing.
And sure, there are, I should say, there are valid medical uses for cannabis, right? Chemotherapy, glaucoma. Some people can do it no problem.
And some people, it bends their life 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're like, you know, 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

I can do

to

replenish my lungs from doing that? Well, you do cardio exercise, right? Cardiovascular exercise. I would include at least one HIIT workout per week, so 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, you look to be in great shape, but 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 wanted to practice, you could get someone like, and I can put you in touch with Brian McKenzie, who's really, I mean, he's a master at this stuff of teaching people to really do diaphragmatic breathing, of really learning how to like really use their diaphragm 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. 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 McKenzie'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 don't have great mechanical control of the diaphragm through the phrenic 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, build that lung capacity.

So you've heard of box breathing, inhale, hold, exhale, hold.

Okay.

So equal duration, inhale, hold, exhale, hold.

It's done for about five minutes.

So you say, how long should the sides of the box be?

Is it inhale for three seconds, hold for three seconds, exhale for three seconds, hold for three 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 five minutes with three second sides of the box. If your carbon dioxide discard rate is somewhere between 25 and let's say 55 seconds, you can probably manage doing box breathing with a five to seven 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 seven second inhale, seven second hold, seven second exhale, seven second hold, it's going to be tough.
You can do it for a couple of 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 have a carbon dioxide discard rate of 60 seconds or longer, you can do box breathing with probably an eight 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, I respect them, but they're a little bit like the triathlon community.
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 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 30 second carbon dioxide discard rate to a 90 second 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 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 gas reflex,

which sends you up to the surface to get a breath of air. If your carbon dioxide is 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 Hof type or Tummo type breathing or what we call in the lab cyclic hyperventilation. Any heavy exhales followed by a breath hold near water

is potentially lethally dangerous.

But you don't have can you get your lung capacity better? Do the cardio work I've mentioned, 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 of 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 not trivial. And that's because they've just really learned how to control in a conscious way their diaphragm.
I mean, I'll say this, 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 like digestion or pupil size. You can't just decide to digest faster or decide to increase your heart rate.
Breathing is the bridge into controlling 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 arousal. Exhales, slow the heart rate, respiratory sinus arrhythmia.
Inhales, increase your heart rate, also respiratory sinus arrhythmia for those that want to look it up. So doing box breathing in a very controlled way, you're balancing 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 you're saying to breathe out, are you just, are you breathing out as slow as you possibly can? During the carbon dioxide discard test. Okay.
Yeah, you're breathing out as slow as you possibly can until your lungs are empty, and then you stop the stopwatch. Okay.
Now, in this... 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 between the ribs, the intracostals 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 heart rate down.
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 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 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.
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 Ehrlich and Sandra Kahn.
They're these twins. One is a mouth breather, one is a nose breather.
And the mouth breather kid is like really weird facial structure compared to the nose breathe their kid. And it's a little bit of an extreme, but being able to fit your tongue on the roof of your mouth with your teeth closed, I can't do this because I actually had orthodontia.
So my palate 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 airflow during sleep, breathing through the mouth during sleep, these are high, high risk for cardiovascular disease or basically for heart attack. I mean, being deprived of oxygen, mildly deprived of oxygen for long periods of time during sleep or wake is just not good.
I heard some 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 the thing I said earlier about not hyperventilating and holding one's breath is so serious that 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 not something to be messed with.

Yeah.

But if you're above ground, you're not driving or operating machinery.

You just pass out for a minute.

I mean, I'm not into that, but, you know. But I do think learning to breathe properly is pretty key.
Yeah. And the cool thing is the box breathing, making the sides of the box longer, it has a really nice crossover effect with cardiovascular training where you go back to do those HIIT workouts, and you feel like you have a superpower.
Nice. Yeah.
I'll definitely be doing that. Thank you.

Let's move into psychedelics. So I had a profound experience.
Did Ibogaine, did 5-MeO-DMT.

As part of Veteran Solutions? Yep.

What a great organization.

yeah yeah

and

I mean

so many

positive things

came out of that

for me

I mean

I haven't drank

alcohol

in a

life

I haven't

drank

alcohol

in a

life

I haven't

drank

alcohol

in a

life

I haven't

drank

alcohol

in a

life

I haven't

drank

alcohol

in a

life

I haven't

drank

alcohol

in a

life

I haven't

drank

alcohol

in a

life

I haven't

drank

alcohol

in a

life

I haven't

drank

alcohol

in a

life I haven't drank I haven't drank alcohol in this February. Was it scary going through it? Sorry to interrupt.
I'm just so curious. No.
I was more scared. I wasn't scared to do the Ibogaine.
I just had too many guys come in here and tell me about their experience and how it improved 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 experiment.
I think I was like, wait a minute.

I have a friend who was in the team.

So I'm not laughing because I haven't done it.

So I, although I might someday,

who, former team guy who told me that it was like being,

his words, strapped to the shockwave of an atom bomb.

And I thought, that's a big statement.

Yeah, yeah.

I wouldn't call it that, but everybody, you know, everybody's different.

But for me, it was just a hundred and...

You are a hundred percent certain you are dying. Wow.
Like, that's it. You are dying.
Okay. But scary.
It's scary. It's the most fear, most anxiety I've ever felt through anything.
All my time in the teams, all my time 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.
When at that time, I my son and my wife and I was like, I cannot fucking leave them. And then, but you're dying.
You can't control it. And then you die.
And then it takes you into a whole nother realm. But that put me in the moment.
That changed my perspective on God for a while. And then, but at the same time, it also proved to me that there was something after death.
and now as you know I am a believer but

I think the real

effects and now as you know, I am a believer. But I think the real effects that have really lasted for almost three years now are from the Ibogaine.
And I know you've done a lot of studies with this, have been a part of a lot of studies and I'm curious, you know, I'm just curious, where is psychedelic medicine today? Yeah. So, super excited that we're talking about this because it's a really important time for all of this.
There are several aspects. 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, 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, ibogaine. I don't know much about 5-MeO, but they seem to couple it with the ibogaine.
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 effects that are similar to psilocybin, but a little bit different as well.
Do you know the reason they don't study LSD? I didn't know this. Because of the Nixon administration? No, it's a great, great answer.
But no, it turns out that 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.
Depending on the dose. So I know it's a funny one, right? So in Switzerland, there's some labs that study it because the Swiss are very hardworking.
They'll stay after hours. In the US and in other countries, they're like, oh, four to six hours is about as much time as 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, Sachin Panda,

who initiated those studies

at the Salk Institute in San Diego,

he had a graduate student whose girlfriend

who was running those studies 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 eight 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.

So just giving you a sense of kind of how science is done,

not haphazardly, 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 ibogaine,

which impacts the serotonin system,

the major physiological effect, and my colleague Nolan Williams at Stanford is the one really pioneering these studies on ibogaine, 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 epiphenomenon 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, et cetera. 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 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 Ibogaine, and I haven't done Ibogaine, is that people get basically a very clear picture of previous life events.
They talk about it kind of Rolodexing through, and they talk about it Rolodexing through, and that the person on Ibogaine 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 and it was just, seemed like thousands of memories, every memory.
Real memories. Yes.
Okay. This is essential.
Real events that have happened. Yeah.
That's unusual among the psychedelics. Typically, it's not real memories that people experience.
With Ibogaine, it seems to be real memories. In discussions with Nolan Williams, who I just saw recently, 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 Ibogaine followed by DMT.
They published a beautiful paper earlier this year showing that post-Ibogaine 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 brain area that has kind of an internal body feel representation, 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 decision-making. So you can perhaps make better decisions about alcohol or better decisions about how you feel about certain things and even feel differently about certain things that happened while still understanding they happened and they happened 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, improved outlook life, et cetera.
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 brain modification.
That's what they do. And by extension, the SSRIs 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 ibogaine as well, but psilocybin for the treatment of major depression. Now, this is not some self-appointed shaman doing this.
These are clinical studies. The ibogaine is particularly interesting because of the addiction relief that people experience.
The challenge is you have to be heart rate monitored. You're 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 a 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 Cardhart-Harris' lab, and other labs. The FDA approval has hinged largely on this thing with MDMA.
MDMA, so-called ecstasy, right, is methylene-dioxymethamphetamine. Methylene-dioxymethamphetamine.
It is methamphetamine, but it's modified from methamphetamine. And 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.
It's people in the eye mask or talking to a therapist. Okay, this all sounds great, right?

So where's 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.
The MAPS group has run by Rick Doblin, who's a well-meaning person 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, 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

either a noodle, feeling like a noodle.

I participated in

one of these experiments. I've taken

pure MDMA as part of a clinical

experience and you're not doing anything else that day or the next day, I'll tell you that. 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 need days off, like the Ibogaine 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 sexual improprieties

during the sessions with patient.

That's a clear, clear barrier

for the FDA to just run along and say,

okay, right? The 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 my memory serves me correct, former president of Stanford, but also 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 MDMA.
Yep, there is a higher bar for drugs 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 covering real research science. The 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 a mainstream media idea.

It's wild.

What is that in?

What would that be in?

If I call out a brand, I'll get in trouble.

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 earlier we were talking about water and then there's this thing that has made its way into the internet lore of atrazine in the frogs 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. Yeah, it's true.
I mean, there's nothing conspiracy about that. I took classes from Tyrone when I was at Berkeley.
He does great work. Like no one contests that.
But in any event, things like atrazine in the drinking water of concern or in Delta water, certain Deltas in California, I think had them. I think this 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 a serious, serious issue, which also tends to correlate with certain socioeconomic status. And so it gets pretty messy.
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, and there were these reported sexual improprieties. I don't know.
I haven't read those cases. So what's going to need to happen is more studies, and obviously can't have any situations like that, but it 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 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 during the course of the ramp up to that potential approval. So I think Ibogaine 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, I'll 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 into partisan politics, but he's been one of the biggest proponents for psychedelic medicine.
And he's done the across-the-aisle reach. I was at a Veterans 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 in veterans. That, to me, at least growing up when I grew up, that's how this country is supposed to work.
Both sides, 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 Ibogaine DMT thing that didn't do well afterwards. Was it caused by that? Unclear.
We don't know. They're now fortunately fine.

They couldn't tack it 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 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 biggest skeptics, and it is important to be skeptical, even the biggest skeptics about psychedelics are stepping back and going, okay, even 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 Adderall. It was Xanax.
It was Ambien.

It was all that shit.

And you're done with all of it?

Went away.

All of it, I mean.

Just like that.

Not an effort.

Not like, I'm going to really make it work this time.

It just, I just didn't want it.

It was like, I quit sugar for probably three months.

And, I mean, it was like, it gave me like this intuition that was, hey, all this, even though I already knew it, it was this shit is poison, stay away from it. It's almost like a logical circuit gets reinstated, right? 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, two plus two equals five for them.

And then something like what you described comes in

and it restores the math.

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'll see you next time. 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, 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 seven 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 was pretty much ready to either get sober or kill himself 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 Penny 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, I mean, he was just fully Christed up.
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

Thank you. 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, his demeanor, everything is thriving.

And when he went in there, I thought to myself,

oh, boy, he's been to multiple rehabs.

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. Absolutely.
Or he cleaned it up for him through that. And like, 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 it with Ibogaine and I've seen people combine the two, like it sounds like you have. I think, you know, I don't know if there's just one solution.
I have to say the pandemic was a really tough time for a lot of addicts who depended on 12-step meetings 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. Man, I never even thought about that.
Oh, what we, the implications of the lockdowns on, I mean, there's the stuff that is 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 challenges around socialization that kids were having. Yeah.
You know, but then the drug alcohol relapse rate or people that discovered addiction under those conditions is just astounding. And I think we're still paying the price for it.
And I have to tip my hat to the veterans community and veteran solutions. And again, I'm not partisan, but these politicians or former politicians, I should say, who are basically risking their reputation

in order to try and make sure that these solutions

like Ibogaine and psilocybin and MDMA

done safely in the right clinical context,

that those eventually make it to FDA approval.

It's so critical.

I got to ask a question.

Does FDA approval mean anything to you?

I mean, it can keep doctors out of jail. When you're looking at supplements or food or any of this or new drugs that are coming out, does FDA approval, 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 run the LD50 studies, you know, at what dose do 50% of the population die, et cetera, 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 ophthalmology 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'd have a lot of problems out there. People with glaucoma going and getting treatments that could potentially make them go blind faster.
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 Fruit Loops.
How come you've seen the labels that are out there now? How come the Fruit 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, 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 lax.
Now, is it the big food lobby? I don't know. What we do know is that the commodization 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 strawberries in 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 if you think about it, it's pretty clever and it's supposed to be buying by weight, right? In addition to that, it changes the way that food can be traded on as a commodity because 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 preservatives 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 costs down and 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 Ozempic taught us anything,

it's that people in this country are obese

because they eat too many calories.

Remember people debating, is it this?

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 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 3,500 calories a day, and that's a lot of calories for people that aren't active.

So, Zempic taught us that.

Do I think Zempic is the cure to 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 microdose Zempic?

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 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 getting charged with an offense or losing their license.
So 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? And 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, it 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 five 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 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 governmental 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 dyes in food, potentially things like fluoride, although you heard my stance earlier is a bit more mixed on that.
Just so there's this 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 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.
They're like, hey, what do you think of the ketogenic diet for Alzheimer's? Asking me, I'm like, I'm not an expert in that, but well, type, it's sometimes called for certain forms of dementia. It might help.
It's a brain metabolism. 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.
And 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 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, it's not just kids, in highly processed foods, the microplastics, the phthalates, 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 tinfoil hat on here for just another minute. When you're talking about, when we're talking about FDA approval on psychedelics, 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 ibogaine or ayahuasca 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 pharmacy to get it? Right, so I'll give you my belief about this, is that MDMA as methylene-dioxymethamphetamine developed in the early 1900s, by the way, and then rediscovered by Sasha Shulgin, who was like this kind of renegade chemist in Berkeley that he and his wife used to mix up all these different drugs.
And then 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. There's a great book called PIKAL, P-I-K-A-L.
I think it stands for phenylethylamines I've known and loved. It's like the worst book title ever.
And I probably mispronounced the first letter in the acronym. In any case, I think as a drug that is synthetically made, MDMA stands the highest chance of being developed as a prescription pharmaceutical.
Whereas, as you pointed out, you're not seeing cannabis, 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 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 a high degree of accuracy for what has worked in trials.

It can be pill or capsule packaged.

And that makes for a great drug for sale in the pharmaceutical industry.

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, typically the studies of depression, as I recall, people took somewhere between two. They did dose response, of course, or they had different dosage conditions.
But microdosing was, I believe, three milligrams. And I believe the clinically effective dose was somewhere around two to three grams.
Someone should check. But that wasn't two to three grams of mushrooms.
That was two to three grams of psilocybin. And depending on the strain of mushroom or species of mushroom, then people know.
So to be blunt, MDMA can be turned into 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.
Whereas with something like, we talked about LSD, it's a little bit separate because LSD from ergot is kind of naturally occurring, but 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 formulas are out there.

But a pharma company

could likely

work with that, work with LSD

and make a drug, just like

they explored in these studies over in Switzerland. Swiss like their pharmaceutical companies.
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, psilocybin, 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 answers your question.
I think there's more financial incentive. And also I think the FDA is probably more comfortable with something that's synthetic than something that's naturally occurring.
Because it's more what used to working with. Okay.
It's just kind of what they do. They deal with compounds.
They're chemists. They're groups of chemists and doctors and toxicologists who look at chemical structures.
And psilocybin has a chemical structure. Actually looks a lot like serotonin.
But it's just not really their typical domain. Now, ibogaine is even more in the kind of like, how would you create a pharmaceutical? But there, because most people aren't growing or finding their own ibogaine, it's hard to imagine that people could get a hold of it if there wasn't 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 universities and vice versa. It just enrages me that this stuff is working so much 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 fucking killing themselves every day waiting for this shit to be legalized i have more friends that have died from suicide than i have in combat and that's a fucking shame yeah that that never should have, not once. And common friends in the community, your community, I mean, 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. 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, 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.
And it's striking to see so many people go down to do the Ibogaine treatment, come back, and like, I'm good. It's just, it's mind-blowing.
Really, it is. And actually, I've had, because of Veteran Solutions and these fundraisers that I've spoken at, 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 do these things.
I just want to make clear because people are always like, what's the incentive? The incentive is, 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 have killed themselves show up to these things.
Those are the ones that really like, when you hear them speak or their kids are there and they're just like, please, please, please, please. And I think, you know, just understand that there's a, you know, they wish they had access to this solution.
And so I think, I'm glad we're talking about this. Because first, it's always going to be first in the veterans community and then eventually wick out to the larger community of people.
I mean, suicides are at an incredible rate. You know, one thing I'm increasingly concerned about is 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 elsewhere. 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 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 gonna 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 Goded 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 message is just kept coming through again and again and again in prayer. And, you know, yeah, we still disagree about things.
And I also like, I can like look at him and hear him and be 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. 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 I may, I brought this, I've been reading this book that was suggested to me by another team guy.
What is with you guys? That is a really, it's somewhat of a controversial book, but if I could, the book is called Iron John. Have you read that book by Robert Bly? 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 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. Can I just read it? It's a very brief quote.
So Bly 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.

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 road, so-so not good road, okay road, pretty good, and best road.
That 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, Jocko.
I look at figures like Goggins, Andy Stumpf, right? There seem to be a lot of team guys in the mix, but there are others too, right? Chad Wright, Rich Roll, right? Jay Shetty. I don't want to like paint this picture that it's just one kind of archetype, right? And what I see is a lot of, certainly female audience, mine is certainly very much 50-50, 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 look 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 amazing dads,

amazing kids to boys and girls who are now.

And I guess 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 as 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 drift.

And that to me is where the higher power piece

and relationship to God

and looking to and asking for guidance there

can sometimes support that as well.

Because I mean, I'm not trying to turn this into a sermon. This is just my experience.
AND WE NEED TO BE ABLE TO BE ABLE TO BE ABLE TO BE ABLE TO BE ABLE TO brotherhood and family and friends, but 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 boxes of all these toys nowadays are like this warrior walking out from all this destruction behind him.
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 toys.
And it's true. There isn't a picture of being in community or being with family.
We've created this model of this lone wolf and triumph thing. Interesting.
I think she's on to something. I don't think it's the full picture.
But I have to say, what you have, marriage, kids, thriving business, you've got your history in the teams and history at 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 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 are 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 Thebo 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 Ferrer,

or drug overdoses,

it's like, this is preventable.

It is preventable at the level of,

sure, government institutions,

but I'm saying, I'm putting the call out now. I think we've got to crew up and take care of each other because time's going by.
It's good to hear you say that. I think, I feel like it's making a comeback.
I think that the rain's got mixed up and lost for quite a while there. And I think that the reins got mixed up and lost, you know, for quite a while there.
And 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 fucking direction. 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'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 I know you have to get it. I get it all the time when

I go out in public of thank you for what you're doing, that you saved my life. You changed the

trajectory of my life. You fixed my family.
Just listening to you, I was able to fix my family life.

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

but 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 earlier on in your life with kegs. It looked like a hell of a good time.
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 yeah, it made national news.
But you're just, this wave is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And it's, I mean, he's working through your life.
He's working through my life. I mean, about a year and a half ago is when I came to faith.
And it sounds like you're about on the same timeline. and it was Eddie Penny that kind of sparked that.

But, I mean, I got a lot of, yeah,

we are in some very confusing and dark times right now,

but I think when we come out of this thing,

we're going to be back on track.

And, I mean, you have to think like that.

But I can see it happening, and it sounds like you can too.

Yeah, I like that. But I can see it happening.
And it sounds like you can, too. Yeah, I love it because you're a man of data.
You see it happening, it's happening, right? I mean, it really is happening. And I think that one thing that I feel kind of obligated to say is that, you know, you talked about the 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 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 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 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 who are lean and thin are not.
There are different versions of people and different phenotypes and archetypes. And it's all good.
I'm also talking about more real acceptance. 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 where I have friends of every background, every background.
And they're actual friends that I communicate with. And I would like to see for people that do the virtue signaling thing, how much what's on their masthead 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'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 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 Robert Blais' book, and again, I realize it's not a perfect book. It's got its outdated aspects, et cetera, 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 or 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, et cetera.
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 fall 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 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 learned 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. I think it's instinct.
I think it's instinct. There's some core aspects of our psychology and biology that are non-negotiable.
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. 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 try and contort the way culture is and expect everyone to end up okay. This idea of everyone having a path to having a generative life, I believe that's possible, but it requires us first 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 archetypes.
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 fairly hardwired. We've been trying to do that since the beginning of time.
And 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 I just want to say thank you so much for coming to Franklin, Tennessee 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 even have you sitting across from me. And I hope we meet again.
And I wish you the best of luck. Thank you.
I'm 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 public facing side by side in an effort to make the world a better place. If there's one thing that's absolutely clear is that you're trying to do that and you're doing that.

And yeah, there aren't enough words to express

how grateful I am, but 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.

Cheers. expert entrepreneur ed my let is on a mission to max out your life i exist here weekly so that you can make your dreams come true become the man or woman you're capable of

and then pay it forward it's time to get laser focused on peak performance clarity equals focus

and focus equals success that's what i'm here to do every week with you max out the add my let show

follow and listen on your favorite platform