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

Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. His research focuses on brain plasticity, vision, and the neural mechanisms underlying stress, sleep, and performance, earning him recognition through numerous peer-reviewed studies and awards like the McKnight Foundation Neuroscience Scholar Award. He is also the host of the Huberman Lab Podcast, where he shares neuroscience-based tools for improving mental and physical well-being. His episodes explore topics like sleep, focus, physical training, and emotional resilience, resonating with a global audience. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://meetfabric.com/shawn https://mypartriotsupply.com https://trueclassic.com/srs https://blackbuffalo.com https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner Andrew Huberman Links: Website - https://www.hubermanlab.com Pre-order Protocols Book - https://www.hubermanlab.com/protocols-book YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@hubermanlab Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/hubermanlab Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/hubermanlab X - https://x.com/hubermanlab TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@hubermanlab LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-huberman Threads - https://www.threads.net/@hubermanlab Premium Content with Andrew - https://www.hubermanlab.com/premium Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  On October 2nd.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Tom Cruise is.

• 0:10Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 0:16Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped moving? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:24Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not admitted without parent.

• 0:31Speaker 04

  This episode is brought to you by Tic Tac. Lace up and get your game on because the Tic Tac lineup just got a new teammate. Dr. Pepper Tic Tac. This new double threat puts two of your favorite flavors into one box of mints. And when two iconic flavors come together, the result can only be iconic. Score big. Try Dr. Pepper Tic Tac today.

• 0:59Shawn Ryan?

  Dr. Andrew Huberman, welcome to the show.

• 1:02Speaker 06

  Thanks. I'm super happy to be here. I'm a huge fan of your show. Have been from the beginning and I'm just excited to get into it.

• 1:09Shawn Ryan?

  Ben, 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 backstories. That's how it all started. And I didn't realize you have quite the interesting backstory. 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.

• 1:50Shawn Ryan?

  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 behaviors, skills, and cognitive functioning.

• 2:32Shawn Ryan?

  You're the author of the upcoming book, Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. When's that gonna come out, by the way?

• 2:39Speaker 06

  April of 25.

• 2:40Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 3:25Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 3:34Speaker 06

  I love Eddie, and I'm very grateful to him. Incredible human being. And loved your episode with Eddie here.

• 3:40Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you, thank you. But next, we just, I have a Patreon account. They're 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...

• 4:05Shawn Ryan?

  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?"

• 4:32Speaker 06

  Great question, critically important question.

• 4:39Speaker 06

  There has to be self-imposed discipline, but it doesn't have to be in every domain of one's life, right? People need to get their relationship to light, sunlight, and darkness, correct. This might sound silly, but there is a beautiful study that substantiates what I'm about to say. There's a study done on over 80,000 subjects out of the UK. The conclusion is essentially the following: Getting enough sunlight early in the day, and yes, even when it's cloudy out, there's sunlight. Just compare how bright it is during the daytime to nighttime, even on a cloudy day, folks. Getting some sunlight in your eyes, and bright light, maybe also from artificial sources throughout the day, and then keeping it dark at night.

• 5:24Speaker 06

  It doesn't have to be pitch black, but on most nights, between the hours of 11:00 PM and 4:00 AM, 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.

• 6:09Speaker 06

  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.

• 6:24Speaker 06

  The use of phones and screens, while fantastic, right? It's done amazing things for our progression as humans and communication. Is disrupting our circadian schedules and health, in particular, mental health. It's not just the content people are receiving on these devices. It's also the light itself. It's also the content, but the light itself. So get that right. It requires no cost and it sets things in the right direction. 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.

• 7:08Speaker 06

  Then it would be wise to get some exercise early in the day, right? Jaco's right on this one, okay? Maybe you don't have to do it 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 "stressed hormone." It's not a bad hormone, it's a great hormone, but you need it released at its highest levels early in the day. How do you do that? Sunlight in your eyes increases that peak by about 50%. If you're not doing that, you start running into trouble. Exercising and getting sunlight in your eyes early in the day times that cortisol peak. We know from studies at Stanford School of Medicine by a guy named David Spiegel and the great Robert Sapolsky that if that cortisol peak is shifted later in the day, you start

• 7:52Speaker 06

  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've got to get your physiology right. Get that cortisol peak. Early day, sunlight will also promote dopamine, epinephrine, all of that. Get some activity early in the day. Get a rope or a jump rope and skip rope looking at the sun if you have to. Like it do, some people say burpees, then people start arguing about burpees. But some exercise 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.

• 8:36Speaker 06

  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, 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, 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

• 9:21Speaker 06

  eventually taper off. I'm not suggesting anyone suddenly go off medication they need, right? You start looking at alcohol differently because it disrupts your sleep. You start looking at other practices like learning and reading. Okay, so 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, 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.

• 10:02Speaker 06

  I think that combines a number, if not all of the features of the things that we hear about, like meditation and all these other things into a, a practice that if you spend some time with it, I think it can be very useful. Okay, I'm not here to push that. I just know that to be true. So get your physiology right. And the rest will start falling into place. And you know, the online culture, my podcast, your podcast, Rogan podcast and other podcasts is replete with information about how to exercise right, how to eat right, how to do all these things, building your social connections, which are also vitally important. But if you're not getting your physiology right, the rest isn't gonna work. It's just not gonna work. You're gonna have a very hard time sticking to anything.

• 10:44Speaker 06

  So, the mental health crisis is going to be cured first by taking care of our core physiology. Starts with light sleep, daytime behavior, of course, then hydration, nutrition, exercise and all of that. But it starts with getting those things right. And then, if you're inclined, it makes sense to explore a spiritual leaning. That can mean different things to different people, but if you're willing to explore those two areas, I'm willing to bet that within weeks, if not months, you can make substantial progress and people start to feel that sense of agency, like, whoa, this is wild. I'm sleeping a little bit better and I'm feeling a lot better. I'm sleeping a lot better and I'm feeling a lot better. And all of a sudden, you can make better choices. Trying to find one choice in the daytime that's gonna change everything, that's futile.

• 11:29Speaker 06

  Yeah. You might as well be asking for one pill that's gonna change everything. Yeah. 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. I mean... It doesn't. It's the consistency. And people are accustomed to doing something that, quote-unquote, "works" the first time and every time. And there are certain practices that we'll discuss during today's discussion, I'm sure, that like can calm us down very quickly, that work the first time and every time, because they're grounded in physiology. But these things like getting a good night's sleep, getting sunlight, at first it's subtle. And then pretty soon you start to notice, yeah, I'm waking up and feeling more energized

• 12:13Speaker 06

  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 like, or this is kind of robbing me of some key life.

• 12:35Shawn Ryan?

  Do you know how much time you spend on social?

• 12:38Speaker 06

  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, you know, I know that, you know, one could be writing or, you know, building out business. But for me, that's part of my business, because I'm obviously in online culture and podcasting. So about an hour, hour and a half.

• 13:09Shawn Ryan?

  That's really good.

• 13:10Speaker 06

  You know, and having a separate phone for it really helps. Because no, when people send me things, I can't look at it. I have to send those on to my other phone. So there's a barrier there. But, you know, I'm not here to demonize online culture. I, you know, my profession is online culture, but, um, or part of it. But this mental health crisis starts with people understanding that they can take control of their physiology, and they can take control of their, their mind. And it sounds so complicated, but it's actually not.

• 13:39Shawn Ryan?

  How long did it take you to, how, 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 like go into effect? Was it immediate?

• 13:53Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, within a day or so. Because then I'd look at my other phone and remember, oh, you know, Instagram and, and X aren't on there. But like this morning, it's gonna sound like I'm name dropping, but his name will probably come up a bit because he's a close friend and he has a lot of wisdom that I, I take the liberty of sharing. You know, like Rick Rubin sent me something from X, and it went to the phone that he has. And, um, I had to go look it up on X on my other phone. There, it was worthwhile. He sent me something interesting, so I looked at it. Most of the time, if people send me things, I may or may not get around to seeing them.

• 14:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 14:27Speaker 06

  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 texts. And I think it's because social media and texts 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.

• 14:48Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think anybody's is.

• 14:49Speaker 06

  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. And because I also try and maintain a healthy, you know,

• 15:08Speaker 06

  personal life and maintain friendships and things. I really have to, like, create some separation. So having social media separate is key. It's really key.

• 15:16Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for saying that.

• 15:17Speaker 06

  If you try it, it'll probably only take a couple of days.

• 15:20Shawn Ryan?

  I'm gonna do it again.

• 15:21Speaker 06

  Because it's like a computer for social media. And for people that can't afford two phones, I always say, wait till you almost, you know, go to an old phone and just put on your old phone.

• 15:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Makes a lot of sense.

• 15:31Speaker 06

  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.

• 15:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 15:38Speaker 06

  You really start to see, oh, I'm spending an hour a day or an hour and a half a day.

• 15:41Shawn Ryan?

  My team's been trying to get me to do this. Now, now's the time. But, um, well, Andrew, let's move into, I'd like to move into your backstory. Like I said, it sounds 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?

• 16:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, so to be clear, my, the early part of my life was pretty darn easy, far easier than for most. So my dad's from Argentina. He's a first-generation immigrant to the US. He came to the US on 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 seventy five, until the time I was about eleven or twelve, things were pretty awesome. We had dinner together every night as a family. Neither of my parents have or had any substance abuse issues.

• 16:52Speaker 06

  It was a very peaceful, loving home. I mean, we had our squabbles and our things, but it was a really kind of magical upbringing. I, you know, my dad's a physicist, so he got me excited about science. I was really interested in biology. I also really 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 were a big pack of boys in the neighborhood, maybe fifteen of us, who all had, most had older sisters that were my sister's age. So it's kind of perfect, right? Ride dirt bikes, dirt clod wars. It was just fun. Nice. It was, it was really cool. And, um, and then right about the time that puberty rolled around,

• 17:35Speaker 06

  so I had puberty somewhere around thirteen, fourteen, 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 that, um, 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 meant 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. You know, we have, uh, I have family members who are divorced and they manage that really well.

• 18:21Speaker 06

  My parents, unfortunately, despite being well-meaning people, it got really messy. You know, there's a rulebook when parents get divorced. You don't bad talk the other parent. You don't let the kids get scared about the future. Uh, you maintain oversight. Unfortunately, those things didn't happen. And so, um, you know, I was a thirteen, fourteen year old kid. I've always been a, I wouldn't say like emotionally sensitive kid and like, um, but I was tuned in to the world, you know, in a way that like, things are intense for me. If I like something, I really loved it. When I was a kid, I loved fish tanks. I was like building fish tanks constantly, spent all my time in aquarium store. Then it was tropical birds.

• 19:04Speaker 06

  Then I hit puberty and then it was like skateboarding girls and you know, whatever I'm into, I'm like really into.

• 19:11Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:12Speaker 06

  So, right about the time I hit puberty, my parents split up. They were fighting a ton. Um, I developed a lot of ideas about which parent was at fault, this whole thing. And basically, I stopped paying attention to school. I was, I was depressed. I think I was anxious, scared and depressed. And my life at home was really complicated. My mom had a really hard time dealing with that separation. She was very family oriented and it was just me and her at home. And we got along, but it was, um, I just remember it as honestly a really like dark time. I remember being super scared, being super angry at my dad. I just like livid at him.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Tom Cruise is.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 20:11Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped brewing? You're stalled, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under seventeen, not a minute without parent.

• 20:24Speaker 07

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 20:26Speaker 08

  It's me, the.

• 20:27Speaker 07

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 20:30Speaker 08

  We don't need the jingle twice.

• 20:31Speaker 07

  What about a third time?

• 20:33Speaker 08

  Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights and rental cars.

• 20:39Speaker 07

  Seems like they just started.

• 20:41Speaker 08

  Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app.

• 20:46Speaker 07

  Time to read the timeline.

• 20:47Speaker 08

  Fine, no one deals more deals than.

• 20:49Speaker 07

  Priceline.

• 20:50Speaker 08

  Please stop.

• 20:51Speaker 07

  Priceline.

• 20:52Speaker 08

  Touche.

• 20:54Shawn Ryan?

  Why did they get divorced? If you don't mind me asking?

• 20:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think it could, you know, the, the classic irreconcilable differences.

• 21:04Speaker 06

  I don't, I don't know. I think that it was, um, they wanted different things, you know, these kinds of, uh, you know, messages that you hear. 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.

• 21:31Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 21:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, so it's a very academically intense school. I lived over the fence from my school.

• 21:36Shawn Ryan?

  That's a lot of pressure.

• 21:36Speaker 06

  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.

• 21:45Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 21:46Speaker 06

  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 tended 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.

• 22:11Speaker 06

  At 14, 15, I just remember being pretty depressed, having a lot of frustration in me, um, and not feeling certain at all about my home life and just being very, very sad, confused, and filled with hormones and all the things that go with being a young male. So, pretty quickly, what happened was I stopped paying attention to school. I started, um, hanging out with a group of really good kids, skate, mostly skateboarders. This was in the early 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.

• 22:54Speaker 06

  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 a, basically, Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco, and you could go there on a weekend and there'd be like hundreds of kids skateboarding, drinking, drugs, fights. And I want to emphasize this, amazing skateboarding. I mean, I remember the young Rob Dierdick coming through for one of the Back to the City contests. My friend LeVar McBride, 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

• 23:37Speaker 06

  parentless, but we had no parental oversight. And if we did have parents, they couldn't control us. In fact, I pretty quickly realized a lot of the kids who were at Market Era 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, just not going to go. And you know, that kind of rebellion isn't good because you start getting exposed to more and more things like drugs and fights. And you're also not in school. There's some basic learning that the brain needs at that age. And I was going to class, putting my hoodie on, going to sleep, you know, skateboarding. I could tell you more about the curbs in the 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.

• 24:19Speaker 06

  You know, I liked the science courses, a 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. Yeah. 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.

• 25:03Speaker 06

  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, like I'm, you know, I'm kind of like failing out in the skateboarding thing. I'm not doing well in school. My home life is really dark and depressing. And I'm a pretty intense kid and I'm like, I'm starting to just 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, you know, and I'm thinking like, what is this? And I'm just like, you know, and then pretty soon I realized that they're gonna try and take me away. I just got it. Like it's something clicked and I realized,

• 25:47Speaker 06

  okay, that guy in there, they're gonna 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? They, so they, they made it all about not being safe to myself, kinda thing, depressed, you know, 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 you know, I'm, I was doing things like forging signatures to go off to the Reno Nationals.

• 26:32Speaker 06

  I mean, I was decent enough at skateboarding that I got to go to some contests and, you know, but when you're at a skateboard contest in the late 80s, early 90s, it's all dudes. And so guys in their 20s who are also kind of from similar background as me, right? They're the adults. You know, we were staying in hotels in Reno and partying and other guys are partying and you'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 gonna 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 gonna go. So we just found someone to drive us and we just went and we just like crashed in the, you know, there's, so there's a light and

• 27:16Speaker 06

  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 Thebow. He is partial 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."

• 28:01Speaker 06

  I was like, "Okay." And then he had a couple of poetry books, well, he'll say is 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 tho- those journals. It was like, kinda 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, is I wasn't going to school? So it was either kinda just fall into some sort of foster system, which they weren't gonna do. They weren't gonna take me away, because it was, things weren't that bad at home, right?

• 28:44Speaker 06

  But I had a good friend, my friend Aaron Curry, eventually Aaron King, changed his last name. He was in, he was a foster kid that I knew. And I remember him telling me before I left, he was like, he was like, "Don't screw up in there, because the next step is way, way worse." And he'd been through the whole system thing, okay? Damn.

• 29:03Speaker 06

  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 fifteen kids. And they're like, you're gonna do group therapy. And I'm like, you know, are you kidding? I wasn't like a hard kid, like, like you and I know, and you're probably one of them, I don't know. But like, you and I know like actual tough guys. Like, I've got friends now in life that are parts of different groups of life. I don't wanna mention it just because it's not healthy to do. But that are like actual tough guys. They grew up really hard circumstances and they're tough.

• 29:46Speaker 06

  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 gonna 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. Cause all you have to do is hear about that once as from somebody who's going through that.

• 30:30Speaker 06

  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. Um, there was a guy there who came at me, like propositioned me. I was like fourteen, I had bleached, bleached 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, and I exploded on him, exploded. Yelled at him, you know, like stood up for myself. So I, I never had anyone like violate me or anything. I felt very lucky. In fact, I remember my mom caught word of that happening.

• 31:12Speaker 06

  My biggest fear, because she's from New Jersey, is that she was gonna go down there and kill him.

• 31:19Speaker 06

  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, um, she's a tough lady, protective, you know? I'm grateful for that, right? I mean, nobody got hurt in that situation, so I'm grateful. People probably have their ideas about what she should and shouldn't have done, but like, that's how it went down. So I'm in this place and people are talking about stuff. And I'm thinking like, why am I here? I don't even know why I'm here. Like, I just didn't even, I didn't understand. And they started explaining like, look, you haven't been to class in ages. When you do go, you're not turning your homework. I'm like, and? You know, I was just kinda like cocky kid.

• 32:00Speaker 06

  And, and I feel very lucky now, looking back, you know, it, the situation sucked. Cause I'm like, how do I get out of this place? It turns out, one of the counselors there explained, you get out by doing the program, by participating. And what I came to realize was, I had problems, for sure. But I didn't have the kind of problems that were insurmountable. And that I better get myself squared away, or I was gonna be in trouble. Like, I needed to stop looking at my circumstances. And I needed to, like, start taking some control of my life. How old were you at this point? I was fourteen. Damn. Okay, so I get, I get out of that place.

• 32:45Speaker 06

  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 like within a half mile of my favorite skateboard spot, the front five. So people, it's like a 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 just started, we would talk about stuff. And he broke through, right? He broke through in the way that at least was gonna 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?

• 33:28Speaker 06

  And you should understand that, you know, there isn't a lot of parental oversight and home life for you right now. But that like, if you take care of yourself, it'll eventually get better. Now, the good thing is I had people like him and some other people that tried to reach out to me. The bad news is there were a lot of other forces in my life pulling me in another direction. So, I'm still in this big group of feral, young males. So I end up with, you know,

• 33:58Speaker 06

  Pregnant girlfriend, I end up with, you know, a bunch of fights. I end up with a bunch of problems, basically, that I brought on myself. You had a pregnant girlfriend? Yeah. At what age? Uh, sixteen. Yeah. Your? Your child? Yeah. I'm sorry, how old did you say? I was sixteen. 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, um, this is the first time I've ever really talked about this.

• 34:35Speaker 06

  You know, you're sixteen, you think you understand the world. Mm-hmm. You know?

• 34:41Speaker 06

  Here's how I did deal with it. I figured, um, I'll eventually need to take care of people. I'll, what am I good at? Okay, by then I realized I wasn't good at skateboarding. A lot of my friends in the skateboarding industry, like GM Thiebaud, started companies. He was 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. Um, I remember my team manager at Thunder Spitfire, that name Steve Rugy, Shruggy we called him. Um, 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, "Shrug, I'm locked up here." And he goes, "Man, you're the most normal guy I know."

• 35:25Speaker 06

  And he goes, "Why are you calling me?" And I go, "Shrug, I don't know what to do." And he goes, "I can barely take care of myself." And, um, 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, Shrug, I didn't get my package of wheels or this and that." And he goes, "Listen, man, you're never gonna be one of the big guys." And I remember, like, as a fifteen-year-old kid, just being like, "Oh my God." I, I thought my life was over.

• 36:09Speaker 06

  This is the only thing I cared about, was skateboarding. It was the only thing that, like, I could kind of partially do. And, you know, and looking back, I'm like, of course I should have been in school like studying. I mean, they tell, the amazing thing about school is they tell you exactly what you need to know. It's like so obvious, but back then, that's not where I was at. So, you know, so I had the, you know, girlfriend thing, the, the fights. Then I started dabbling in some drugs. What kind of fights? Fights like that guy is eyeballing me, dumb fights, like stupid, stupid fights. Some of them were a little bit like less stupid, like that person's not taking care of their dog.

• 36:52Speaker 06

  So I'm gonna ask them if I can have their dog and they're gonna say no. And then this 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, it was also incredible because I was, I'm like about six one. I was six one then, but I was about a hundred and fifty 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, um, people will laugh and he'll probably have a good chuckle. There was a guy that we used to call the mayor of E M B, 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.

• 37:37Speaker 06

  He was always cool to me, but like if you rolled up there to embark an arrow and you showed a little too much attitude, it didn't matter if you were a pro skateboarder from another city, they'd beat you up. There are some famous funny stories and not funny stories about that. It was a rough environment. They'd also rob tourists and like do terrible shit, you know? But the people that did the bad stuff were not really the skateboarders. They were the people that kind of hung around it. So it's kind of like Washington Square Park had this. That was kind of the basis of that movie Kids. Which by the way, I had a couple of friends in, you know, LeVar McBride was in that movie, right? No kidding? Oh, yeah, yeah. When I saw the movie. I haven't even heard that movie in so long. When I saw that movie, I was like, that's LeVar. I think Nick Lockman's in there too. And I, you know, and Harold Hunter's in there.

• 38:23Speaker 06

  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 eighties, early nineties. So what happened was, you know, I was like, what am I gonna 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

• 39:06Speaker 06

  thing about resistance training is you can get stronger. So I started doing my pull ups, my push ups, you know, and I, my body just changed like crazy. I grew like crazy. And I think also, I was kind of the man of the house in my house. My dad and I were trying to work things out with, but we had a lot of conflict. My mom and I were, I was very protective of my mom and I just watched my, my whole body changed. It was crazy. I feel like I went through puberty like with, like, and then I went through like a complete physical transformation. And, um, and so I figure, well, what can I do that I can use my like hard work skills? Cause I was always like very intense and very hard working when I applied myself to something. And I like working out and I was like, I'll be a firefighter.

• 39:47Speaker 06

  Everyone likes firefighters. Cops, people have mixed feelings about. And by the way, I have respect for police. I do, even though I was a skateboarder, I have respect for police. Some of our friends, like, like, uh, he wasn't my close friend, but Tim, uh, excuse me, uh, Jim's business partner, Mickey Reyes, went and became a cop. He was a skateboarder turned cop. I think now he has a bar or something up in Portland, but, um, 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. 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, um, people like them and respect them. And cool, I'll do that. What happened then was the girlfriend went off to college. She was a year older

• 40:30Speaker 06

  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, still getting into fights.

• 40:54Shawn Ryan?

  Did it get to the point where you enjoyed the fight?

• 40:57Speaker 06

  You know, I never really liked hitting people and getting hit. You know, years later, I boxed, like when I was in my thirties, 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 you know, I'd land a few. But I remember once like sinking a straight through a guy's guard and his head just snapping back. And like my initial impulse would be like, oh, man. You know, I didn't have the anger in me anymore. That's when I was in my thirties. I think you have to be kind of, you have to be pissed.

• 41:39Speaker 06

  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.

• 41:51Shawn Ryan?

  It's interesting you bring that up because I was gonna ask, do you think that all the fighting got you addicted to adrenaline?

• 41:58Speaker 06

  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 by, this is kind of wild and, and you know, 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 for in healing the brain later. They absolutely do and perhaps we'll get into that.

• 42:39Speaker 06

  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 is, 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 trapdoor in my gate that would lead into the, the school. So basically Gunn High School was there, Georgia Avenue right over the gate. I could literally go to school through, just going through the gate. And I said, "Now stepdad put a, put a gate in the, in the fence."

• 43:23Speaker 06

  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." So I was like, "Okay." You know, like, just like, "Fill that out." And then, and I swear on my life, I just did art with the bubbles. Filling that out, filling that out. I was just filling in the bubbles. Did you even read the question? No. You kidding me? Like, I was just filling in the bubbles. And I broke a thousand. I know people are gonna hear this thing and be like, "Duh, duh, duh." No, I broke a thousand. I broke a thousand. That's divine intervention? Or give me another reason that, you know, there isn't some other way that could happen. Broke a thousand. Applied to university. I applied to two places, maybe three.

• 44:07Speaker 06

  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 wanna be in the fire service." And I heard that if you get an advanced degree, that you have more upward mobility in the fire service. That's basically what I put for my entrance exam, and I got in. So someone on that committee read that and went, "All right." Like, here's a kid who, I was just honest. Yeah. I was just honest. And so I got in, and then, so I went off to college. It was kinda funny, I remember going off to college and everyone else is like, their parents are dropping them off. Everyone's like, "Byes," and hugs, and tears.

• 44:50Speaker 06

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

• 45:33Speaker 06

  A guy stuck a, a key through my cheek during a fight. Just, I saw a guy dragging his dog behind his bike. We got into a fight. Um, the big one was after the first year in, in college. I had lousy grades. I'd been kicked out of the dorms for doing stupid stuff. Okay, so I'm like going nowhere, right? I'm in, living in a, I was squatting in a, in a house over the summer. Cause 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. Don't care. 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?

• 46:17Speaker 06

  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 even know how to drive a stick shift, but I taught myself how on the job. I'll never forget the kid that worked there. This awesome Mexican kid, like he was teaching me how to do it. He was terrified. And we were just like trying to deliver bagels and I got it pretty quick. I was like, okay, cool. Like learn how to drive a stick on the job, making whatever, you know, garbage money, but it was money. And so, but there was a, there was a party that summer. Cause there weren't many kids that stayed for the summer, most went home. And this is kind of a wild thing. So my high school girlfriend was college roommates with at one point.

• 47:00Speaker 06

  This this woman, her name's Kim, she was Jack Johnson, Jack Johnson, Jack Johnson's girlfriend. She's Monterey, great person. And Jack went to school with us. Back then, he wasn't a musician. He played for fun, but he was in, um, he was a pro surfer. And so like, he was kind of like a, like a rock star at that school, because everyone was into surfing and stuff. So there was this party that friends of ours had, um, where everyone would barbecue, bring their stuff over. And one day, we went to go pick up steaks, um, 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. They were 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.

• 47:45Speaker 06

  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 him. 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 want to be very clear, like, being, getting in scraps is like the stupidest thing you can do, right? Someone knife you, shoot you, whatever. It's just terrible idea. I don't want anyone to think this is a good idea. But what happened was, everyone I was with, not Jack, everyone I was with bolted. And so I get into it with a bunch of guys.

• 48:25Speaker 06

  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. Oh, yeah. With a knife. Super dangerous. Super dangerous. People just don't understand how Takes a split second to regret what you do or something like that. Your whole life goes away. Or their life, or both. So, police show up. I'll never forget, they, they came over to me and they were like, good job. And I remember thinking, because you know, these guys have been robbing us and they got those guys. And I remember thinking to myself like, I've never felt worse in my life. I just, it was like, I've never felt worse in my life.

• 49:09Speaker 06

  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, who was like, "Hey, that was great." And I remember thinking like, this is 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. Like, what am I gonna do?

• 49:54Speaker 06

  I can't play music, I got friends who are musicians, but I suck. I, I, I'm not a good skateboarder. And so I had to do a couple of days of just like, deep introspection. And I was always a reader. And I remember, I had, yeah, I'll get emotional about this one. Because he's, he's come around for me a bunch of times over the years. Phoebe gave me those frickin' books, you know? And I remember, I was like, man, I've got this, I've got writing, I've got reading, and I've got, and there's something in it, I think it's in Do the Distance. And I have to be careful, I don't well up too quick. Uh, it's early in the, it's early in our discussion.

• 50:36Speaker 06

  There's, there's one, um, there's one poem in there that Jim wrote. He'll be embarrassed if I say it. It's just like, real short, kinda like hardcore, like, like man poetry. Called Do the Distance. And I remember just thinking like, okay. Like, I'm not really good at anything, but I have drive. That I've got. Like, I always knew this, I, I've got a lot of fire in me. Like, I've got a lot of, of- Energy. And if you, if it's fish tanks, or birds, or skateboarding, or working out, or unfortunately,

• 51:16Speaker 06

  also fighting and being an idiot, like, I'm gonna go 11 out of 10. So, I decided then, I'm like, I'm gonna 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's sometime right around. Still have the letter. And I said, I'm, I'm, like, it's, uh, whatever happened, whatever happened in our family, like, it's not your fault. You know? And it's not my fault. Like, I knew that much. Um, but I'm gonna get my life together. And I moved home. I took a leave of absence. I didn't leave college. Took a leave of absence, went to the community college, moved back to where I grew up.

• 52:02Speaker 06

  And by then, things had gotten super dark. Because my friend who had been a pro skateboarder, still a pro skateboarder, but now him and a couple other guys are starting to do way harder drugs. Pills, drinking, and one of the guys who's a famous skateboarder, who, I never was close friends with him, but he, we certainly knew one another, and he's kind of legendary in the skateboard community, a guy named Phil Schau, who came up without a dad, helped raise his younger siblings, put himself through Berkeley, he was gonna 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,

• 52:45Speaker 06

  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, you wanna, I hope he's doing well now. Brendan Tierney, not doing well, okay? Our friend Johnny Farrer, he killed himself in 2017, sadly. But like, a lot of guys not doing well. Drugs, mental health issues, severe issues. Couple guys went to prison. There's a close, there's a... Sad story in skateboarding, some good friends we had, one of them ended up in a fight and a guy died and he did twenty years in prison, got out a few years ago, he's been out talking about it and, you know,

• 53:27Speaker 06

  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 gonna get good at it. They tell you what you need to know. School is the most obvious paths of 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 gonna be on the exam. There's nothing easier.

• 54:11Speaker 06

  Now, there are subjects where it's hard and you're not gonna 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 gonna do pretty well. You're gonna at least pass and you're gonna do pretty well. 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,

• 54:55Speaker 06

  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 gonna 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.

• 55:38Speaker 06

  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 than life itself. You know, I'd do anything for her, you know, and um, I don't talk about her very much because like she really, really stepped in as a parent for me. Really? Big time. And I stepped in as a parent for her. But like, even our parents know it's kind of funny because every year around our birthdays, we vacation in New York together. Like, one of the best things about this podcast life is like, I don't spend money, but I was able to take my sister to New York and like this year and just be like, let's go see, she likes plays. I'm not really into plays, but let's go see some plays,

• 56:21Speaker 06

  get great tickets to plays or stay at a nice place. Like for years though, I would save up and we would go, we both save up and we would go to Manhattan and um, we'd stay in like the worst Airbnb's. It became almost like part of the story, like just places where you're like, oh my God, this is like bad conditions, but like we really stuck together. So, she's a great person. So, um, and we disagree on a great many things in life, but like we, we hold our, you know, our family that core. So, you know, she was home and I started squaring away my life. And I was like, okay, this school thing, I can do this. Why? And this is where kind of the hard stuff kind of pays off in a weird way. Like this stuff is so much easier than skateboarding.

• 57:05Speaker 06

  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 gonna work so hard, you know? And, you know, I generally don't think that competition is the best way to fuel energy over time, but man, I fell in love with some of those subjects. Fell in love with biology, fell in love with psychology. There wasn't even a field of neuroscience at that time. But then I looked things up and I, I was like, all right, well, I either can go back

• 57:50Speaker 06

  to the school I was in because I had taken a leave of absence, or I can take a different path. And I, I went back because it was a state school. So, I mean, it was a, you know, public institution, you know, University of California system is a very good system for those that are willing to put in the work in terms of the cost of tuition relative to the quality of education. You guys are very high. So I went back and I moved into a studio apartment. I lived alone. And people I used to hang out with were like, oh, when are you gonna come out and party? I was always the, I mean, I was, I brought the skateboarding wildness of the nineties. Like, we were so free. All that stuff like Jackass and all that, that all was born out of skateboarding. It all was, those were skateboarders. Spike Jonze, that was, he had Big Brother magazine like that.

• 58:34Speaker 06

  You, 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 gonna fight? You gonna 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'd 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 Carlisle, 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 fuma hood. And they'd come down the hall and they'd be like, you can't smoke in here. And he'd be like, eh, yeah, yeah.

• 59:18Speaker 06

  And he was just the old guy, Navy guy, old Navy guy. And worked for him. And, and I, I finally got good at something. I could learn, I could understand stuff, I have a good memory, it turned out. I, I loved doing research. I learned how to cut up brains and stain them and look at them under the microscope. And I, I wasn't the smartest person, but I, you know, had some intellect and I could outwork anybody. I'm like, I can get, I can win by hard work. And so by the time I graduated, I was like, wow, I got 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.

• 1:00:03Speaker 06

  I wasn't gonna go to Princeton. I'm not a 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 masters 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.

• 1:00:42Speaker 06

  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, when I go home, I'd shower at the gym, brush my teeth in the sink in the morning. And I remember someone coming up to me, I was still a little cocky back then, and because I was scared. Usually cocky is scared. Scared of failure. Anyone that sees somebody cocky, usually scared. It's a way of compensating. I remember somebody saying, you better slow down, you're gonna burn out. And I was like, you never had a flame to go out. Like, I was that guy. Yeah. Five o'clock would roll down, everyone would leave, put tinfoil on the windows, blast, rancid, favorite band, do experiments until three in the morning, collapse, get

• 1:01:26Speaker 06

  up, next morning, they're like, you're still here? And I'm like, you left? Wow. I was, 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, you know, got a lab as a junior professor in San Diego, eventually got recruited back to Stanford with tenure. And, you know, along the way, I will say that- I mean, what did that feel like, to get recruited by Stanford?

• 1:01:57Speaker 06

  It felt good. I mean, I didn't want to go back to my hometown. You know, I had a lot of, there's this thing in neuroscience called them, conditioned place aversion. When something bad happens in a place, you forever feel kind of not right when you're there. There's also conditioned 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, 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, like, it's not just the Nobel Prize winners.

• 1:02:40Speaker 06

  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, you have 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.

• 1:03:03Speaker 06

  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. And, but it was, it was a trip, it was a trip. But I will say this, because I think that in recalling all this,

• 1:03:43Speaker 06

  you know, 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, he's neck-to-knuckles tattoos, he's, he's a tough guy. And we had become friends because he'd done some work with East Coast SEAL teams. And we have, I have some, 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.

• 1:04:20Speaker 09

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• 1:04:49Speaker 00

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  On October 2nd.

• 1:04:54Speaker 00

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  Tom Cruise is.

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:05:06Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:05:13Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.

• 1:05:20Speaker 06

  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 Kai Borg. He used to be an enforcer. This gnarly guy, like, you know, Hawaiian culture's 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 like stories and this and that. And he turns to me and he goes, "Never forget, no matter how far you drive, you're always the same distance from the ditch." And I remember thinking at the time, like, "Well, that's pretty dark." And I've been thinking a lot about that statement recently, and he's absolutely right.

• 1:06:04Speaker 06

  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 have 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 6, roughly 60 years old. So I was 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 of my parents. I have no resentment

• 1:06:48Speaker 06

  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 gonna 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 gonna like that. How is Stanford gonna feel?

• 1:07:30Speaker 06

  How are people gonna 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 gonna 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 dark, there's like the dark side of life. There's like real evil,

• 1:08:12Speaker 06

  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 gonna 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 graffiti named Orphan. He was in the SF MoMA. He 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 art school and then he became like a street artist, graffiti artist,

• 1:08:56Speaker 06

  made it as an artist, died, stomach cancer. Johnny Farah, 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, 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

• 1:09:40Speaker 06

  that were acting a little weird, no one knew why. Oxy addict, one just died. One of the most famous developmental neurobiologists I know. Damn. You know, dead. And you realize like, no one's immune from this stuff. Like, I'm not super anti any kind of any one thing, but you know, these drugs that can grab onto the dopamine system, they'll grab neuroscientists too. Right? It's not just those feral skateboard kids. This is what we're seeing now. And so what I realized was all that backstory, all that stuff. Man, I wouldn't change it for anything. You know, I, I do get kind of like rattled when I talk about it because it's like, I still feel a little bit that way. I've never really like, I'm, I'm over whatever trauma was there.

• 1:10:24Speaker 06

  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 it 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 Thiebaud gave me in that frickin' 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.

• 1:11:09Speaker 06

  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 gonna 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. There are winners, and there are 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.

• 1:11:49Speaker 06

  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 kinda 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 wanna make that clear. Well, the last thing I ever wanted to do is make it sound like, okay, after one fight on July 4th, 1994, I, my whole life got squared away. I've had times when I made huge mistakes about working too hard, neglecting my personal health. As a post-doc, I was genuinely depressed.

• 1:12:34Speaker 06

  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 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. For my, 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.

• 1:13:20Speaker 06

  Right? Not a good idea. So, you know, I learned to shut that off. Luckily, came out of that fine. I had my brain image. I got no white spots that to be concerned about. I'm very lucky. You know, maybe a thick skull or something, but, you know, as the years have gone on, I've realized, yeah, I have to be careful. I have to still mind it, you know, I have to not overwork. Not, not, not take, not take anything to excess. And so, anyway, the, the point is that those early years were super hard because they were scary and confusing. And what I can say is that any young person who is like, what am I gonna do? Find something that's generative, that you're passionate about.

• 1:14:04Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:14:30Shawn Ryan?

  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

• 1:14:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:14:39Shawn Ryan?

  And, and I can tell you love what you do.

• 1:14:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:14:44Shawn Ryan?

  And when you love what you do, it doesn't feel like work.

• 1:14:49Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:14:50Shawn Ryan?

  But, but at the same time, I a hundred percent agree with it. You have to have some type of a, of a healthy personal life. And, and, and me, I've got a wife and kids and I love what I do.

• 1:15:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:15:03Shawn Ryan?

  I love it. And it can, it's a hard balance. It's a really hard balance.

• 1:15:09Speaker 06

  It is.

• 1:15:09Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 1:15:23Speaker 06

  I wish I had known the Naval quote. I only heard it recently, like very recently. Um, that home full of love piece is so key. You know, and one thing we know about the brain and stress and motivation and goals and all that is that it changes your perception into tunnel vision. Dopamine makes you tunnel vision. I've never done cocaine. I'm very proud to say that. But I, I know that it's a highly dopaminergic drug and it makes people in a narrow band of pursuit, mental pursuit, and it's all about future anticipation. Like I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that.

• 1:16:03Speaker 06

  Hard work is great, but it puts you in that tunnel, not to the same degree presumably as something like amphetamine or cocaine, but um, it changes your perception of time so that you're not thinking about the past. That's one reason why it's so soothing to people that have stuff they don't want to think about. Hard work, focus, being amped up. But it also doesn't let you see far enough into the future to understand how you're eventually going to come down from this thing and you're going to want something to nest into. So I think that the short answer is the best solution is to have someone there who really understands you and understands that part of you and knows when to say, hey, like it's time to pump the brakes a bit.

• 1:16:45Speaker 06

  Um, 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 um, you know, she's a redhead, she has got a lot of fire and she was like, I can handle you. And uh, you know, and um, and she tried, she tried to kind of like, help me channel that a bit more. And I just wasn't ready. I wasn't ready. And we understand that now. We have a story about our story where we both get it. I wasn't ready to, to learn how to shut that off. And in recent years, I've learned how to shut it off.

• 1:17:31Speaker 06

  I don't work like I used to. I mean, when I was with her, and she'll vouch, I used to um, type, working on papers or grants until I'd collapse.

• 1:17:42Speaker 06

  And then um, wake up in the middle of the night and just keep going. That, you know, we went skiing together once, we, we, 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 um, to make a deadline. Like I was just, you know, it's kind of like you want to, you want to stop me, got to kill me stuff. I'll sleep when I'm dead kind of stuff. Not good. I think once I got into a balance of realizing I want to do something for a very long time, that really helped kind of dial it back. And I think um, I like to think that it slows with age, but it kind of doesn't in a way.

• 1:18:27Speaker 06

  Because you learn how to, how to place your shots better and better and it just feels better and better. And um, nowadays, like with the podcast, I take great pride in trying to make the solo episodes as, as great as they can be, the guest episodes as great as they can be and as accurate as they can be. You know, we were putting out so many podcasts in the first years and I've 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.

• 1:19:08Speaker 06

  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 like 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 then 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.

• 1:19:51Speaker 06

  I have a saying in science, you go as fast as you carefully can. When people are like, when are we gonna do this? When are we gonna 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.

• 1:20:34Speaker 06

  I listen to the Tim Ferriss podcast, Joe Rogan podcast, Friedman podcast, and I'm like, I feel like I'm on another planet. Like, how did I get here? I really do feel that way. And so, like, I think it's also just learning to savor those moments. That's actually come to me in prayer a lot this year. Like, like, maybe, like, it came to me, like, you're allowed to savor what's happened, not just what you're trying to make happen. And I think every time before I go into prayer, or I go into like a breathing exercise, I think, I think about this a lot, I think, someday I'm gonna draw in a breath, and I'm gonna know that's my last one, unless I die in my sleep. I'm like, man, that's scary.

• 1:21:18Speaker 06

  But then I realize, 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.

• 1:21:28Shawn Ryan?

  Are you comfortable with that?

• 1:21:30Speaker 06

  Fear of death or addiction?

• 1:21:31Shawn Ryan?

  Fear of death.

• 1:21:35Shawn Ryan?

  Are you comfortable dying, knowing that you're gonna take your last breath, knowing it might be?

• 1:21:40Speaker 06

  Yes, and I know people will be like, bullshit. No, it's true because of a couple of things. One is, I already feel I've had an amazing life. It's just kinda wild, right? It's just wild. The science thing, making it to tenure at Stanford, the podcast, being here with you, Rogan, Lex, to be part of an opportunity to teach science and health and like, give my heart, I really like pour as much of my energy and my heart into what I do. To be, to know that I can't get it all right, to take the shots from traditional media, to take, like, yeah, bring it. Like, I don't want more of it, but if you bring it, like,

• 1:22:22Speaker 06

  my stance is good. Like, you know, I, I can hardly believe it's all happened, so I'm good with it from that perspective. I still like to, you know, raise a family.

• 1:22:38Speaker 06

  I mean, I had a bulldog. It was like the best bulldog I could ever imagine. So I'm in like kinda pinch me moments about all of it. I think the death part is tricky only to the extent that I don't feel done.

• 1:22:52Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:23:14Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 1:23:15Speaker 06

  You know, my solution to that, cause frankly, grew up skateboarder punk rocker, was after that air failure, go down again.

• 1:23:24Speaker 06

  And do it on scuba and come back alive and no PTSD. And I, and I don't even like to say I almost drowned. I like to think that the Reaper came in and was like, to give me a fist bump and I was like, how about this instead? But we came out of that dive and made it back across the border. And I remember thinking 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.

• 1:23:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:55Speaker 06

  No more. Like, doesn't really matter to get into the details, but that, that person is way too dangerous. I never should have been involved with that person in the first place. And, you know, what you come to learn over time, as I'm sure you know, I'm just saying this to the you, to the audience, what all of us and to myself, is that a little bit of placidity, like I'm, peace is the thing that we're all after. And so now my prayers include prayers for, for peace, just internal peace. Not just

• 1:24:27Speaker 06

  to make it another day, you know?

• 1:24:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:30Speaker 06

  So.

• 1:24:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you said something downstairs when we talk about, you know, toxic people. My wife says this to me all the time. Don't mess around with people that don't have anything to lose. Those are the most dangerous and.

• 1:24:43Speaker 06

  That's the key one for people who don't have anything to lose are the most dangerous. People who have failed out in multiple things over and over again in life. Whether through their own misfortune or through intention, you know? We had a guy on the podcast recently, episode is now, yeah, Bill Eddy is a lawyer and clinical psychologist. He wrote five types of people that can ruin your life. And he, um, he said, you wanna 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?

• 1:25:26Speaker 06

  I'm not gonna say that happened because they were bad. No, you get involved with bad people, bad things happen. It brings out the worst. Yeah. I do, 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, 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 gonna 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

• 1:26:10Speaker 06

  and deserving, 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 grown up is discerning when to say, okay, you're right, I need to take a look at that. And other times when you go, no, that's you, not me. I'm gonna do my thing. That's a tricky one.

• 1:26:55Speaker 06

  It's not always a clear picture. When you started the podcast, I mean, how did, 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

• 1:27:39Speaker 06

  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, 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

• 1:28:22Speaker 06

  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 of Abogaine for PTSD and addiction in veterans, so we can circle back to that. Interesting. We've supported Mike Eisenberg's lab, David Spiegel's lab, Ali Crumb's lab, you know, 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

• 1:29:07Speaker 06

  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, etc. So it's all been symbiotic. And I think that...

• 1:29:38Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:29:46Shawn Ryan?

  Man, it's been, you know, what, I'm glad we covered this because, because it just, like I said, it brings so many people hope and what you've been able to accomplish and, and in your life with, with, with your professional career as a, as a, as a doctor, as a neuroscientist and, and the podcast and, I mean, it's just, it's incredible. I mean, I think that you, single-handedly may have made health and wellness, the health and wellness subject, the most popular subject on podcast platforms. I mean, definitely a major part and, and I

• 1:30:29Shawn Ryan?

  also appreciate how seriously you take it. You know, I've, 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.

• 1:30:40Speaker 06

  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, 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 brush stroke you see, there's like 12 to 15 brush strokes inside of that brush stroke that you don't see. And there are people that just care that much about their craft to do that. And that's kind of how it is. I think people can feel if you put care into it and you love what you do.

• 1:31:18Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:19Speaker 06

  And we're not playing games here. That's what I think is so interesting. I, I've recently become interested in professional wrestling because of Rick Rubin's obsession with professional wrestling. He encouraged me to watch it and I was like, I'm not getting it. But then I watched this documentary about Vince McMahon and the WWE and all that. And I realized like everyone knows it's not real. That's why it works for that.

• 1:31:47Speaker 06

  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 SciCom, 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

• 1:32:29Speaker 06

  is not just that it's independent, it's that nobody podcasts well, or for long, or successfully, unless it's real, like they know the topic matter and they're genuinely curious about their guest or the subject, and they want the best for their audience. There's, there's no agenda of anything except trying to figure out the truth. And we're all limited in our ability to filter that out, right? So nothing is, 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,

• 1:33:10Speaker 06

  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. Is, am I fundamentally interested in microplastics and what we can do about them? Yes. And so I'm not saying that traditional media doesn't care about that. But if you look at the pace at which they move, and you look at the kind of top contour of their, of what they put out, and I'm gonna 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

• 1:33:54Speaker 06

  other truth, everybody. They're in competition with us.

• 1:33:59Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:34:19Speaker 06

  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 gonna 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 like, that people think that these are reports about podcasters.

• 1:35:02Speaker 06

  No, this is like, this is competition for clicks. But the thing is, podcasters, because they're just being themselves, it's like the opposite of professional wrestling. Everyone knows that's fake. With podcasting, it's real. Lex, kind of, his tweets about being tormented, about should he put this person on, or that person on, or it's painful to hear the... That's Lex. That's how he is off camera, that's how he is on camera. People say he doesn't push back hard enough. Yeah? How do you actually convince a guest to communicate what they really believe if you're constantly challenging them? That's not the way you communicate. You give them an opportunity to roll forward. He's doing intellectual jujitsu. Lex is a podcast genius. He's doing intellectual jujitsu. Joe's a podcast genius.

• 1:35:47Speaker 06

  He's blending all of his things, his drive, his interests, 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.

• 1:36:05Speaker 00

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:36:08Speaker 01

  On October 2nd.

• 1:36:10Speaker 00

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  Tom Cruise is.

• 1:36:16Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:36:22Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You're stalled, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 1:36:26Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:36:29Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:36:30Speaker 01

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.

• 1:36:35Speaker 07

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 1:36:37Speaker 08

  It's me, the.

• 1:36:38Speaker 07

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 1:36:41Speaker 08

  We don't need the jingle twice.

• 1:36:42Speaker 07

  What about a third time?

• 1:36:44Speaker 08

  Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights, and rental cars.

• 1:36:50Speaker 07

  Seems like you decided.

• 1:36:52Speaker 08

  Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app.

• 1:36:57Speaker 07

  Time to read the timeline.

• 1:36:58Speaker 08

  Fine. No one deals more deals than.

• 1:37:00Speaker 07

  Priceline.

• 1:37:01Speaker 08

  Please stop.

• 1:37:02Speaker 07

  Priceline.

• 1:37:03Speaker 08

  Touche.

• 1:37:04Speaker 07

  Priceline.

• 1:37:05Speaker 08

  Priceline.

• 1:37:06Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:37:18Shawn Ryan?

  It's a damn good way to put it. You know, it's, um, it's really, it's just fascinating to watch, like, these tables turn.

• 1:37:28Speaker 06

  And they've turned. I mean, I think in the last year or so. You know, 2021, things were blowing up for us. 2022, 23 was when I was like, whoa. Like, this is kind of wild. Like, I'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 they, 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, the way they try and rob power. That's what they're trying to do. They, and so they'll find some crack. They'll find some crack in a person or a system or a thing or something that was said, and they try and rob power. But I kind of want to, like, there is a part of me, because this is my nature,

• 1:38:09Speaker 06

  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, Pao Peralta, there were these big brands. Those all collapsed from the small companies. Then guys like Steve Rock and Rodney Mullin, these two wild renegade skateboarders, started up their own magazine, which eventually, Big Brother, which spawned Jackass.

• 1:38:53Speaker 06

  Jeff Tremaine and those guys, Spike Jones. 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, and more power to them. But what you start to realize is that independent media, independent music, independent action sports is what created punk rock music, which eventually became popular. We just saw Green Day, like, what, 70,000 people? I saw them when they were Berkeley Square, little band, but they, they didn't sell out. They, they showed people, this is what really good, in their case, pop punk.

• 1:39:38Speaker 06

  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, right? Danny Way, Colin McKay, Ken Block and those guys. Ken loved rally car driving. Fortunately, he passed away, Snowmobile accent, but he loved rally car driving. Turned it into a whole thing, right? Same thing with podcasting, same thing with anything that's real, hip hop music. Anything that's real can become something big. And traditional media covers other things because they're, they're not their own thing anymore. And also, they made a lot of mistakes. And their biggest mistake was not admitting their mistakes.

• 1:40:22Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:40:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:52Speaker 06

  We don't even think about it. People are like, did you see this article? Yeah, and no. Like they, 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're just kind of like, no one trusts them anymore.

• 1:41:07Shawn Ryan?

  They've lost the public trust and I don't think they're ever gonna get it back.

• 1:41:12Speaker 06

  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 even believe that. That's, you know, 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, um, 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. The, 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.

• 1:41:55Speaker 06

  It gets in the, in the, in the minerals, like structure of the teeth and really helps build strong teeth. But there's another mineral that's naturally occurring called 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, deepened down to the root. Absolutely. You do this by taking care of your oral microbiome and there are a few things that one, one can do. But brushing and flossing is important, right? But avoiding these alcohol-based mouthwashes. Um, and there, and there are a few other things we cover in the episode. Um, I can bring a link to that.

• 1:42:35Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I, I, go ahead.

• 1:42:37Speaker 06

  Well, I was just gonna say, but you know, so I made mention of that fluoride, right? Like, nothing sounds more hippie woo and conspiracy theorist 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, might impact thyroid hormone and neurodevelopmental issues, might. Okay, so I covered that a little bit. Whew, my Wikipedia slammed. I'm a fluoride denier. Suddenly, I'm a fluoride, I'm not a fluoride denier. Suddenly, they accuse me of being a fluoride denier. And I started catching a lot more heat from trad media. Gosh, same way I said mineral-based sunscreens seem great, zinc oxide, titanium dioxide,

• 1:43:21Speaker 06

  chemical-based sunscreens, they concern me a little bit. I made a bad joke. I said they concern me more than melanoma, which was not a good joke to make because that's what landed on my Wikipedia. Now I'm a sun, now they accuse me of not, like, believing in sunscreen. Okay. Anyway, now, after that, fast forward six months or so, there's two lawsuits in this country. One against a major city on the west coast to try and remove fluoride, one against a major city on the east coast to try and 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 opened up the internet the other day, and all of a sudden NIH, CDC are saying,

• 1:44:03Speaker 06

  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, take the knowledge into consideration. So where they're wrong is... Is that they've revealed themselves so many times to do this flip flop. Same thing about lab leak hypothesis. You said that at one stage of the pandemic, that it might have come from a lab and you lost your job.

• 1:44:48Speaker 06

  Tradmedia has now covered that and now it's a discussion that you're able to have. Yeah. So what they've lost is their 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? 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.

• 1:45:33Speaker 06

  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. Yeah. But that's great to hear. And that's spreading? I would say that the 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.

• 1:46:18Speaker 06

  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 his total rebrand, right?

• 1:47:00Speaker 06

  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 of creating new things is always going to be met with friction. I think in the landscape of media and politics, but especially media and podcasts, you know, I look to Rogan, who took it on the chin and hard over and over and over so that the rest of us could come in. I mean, he really, he

• 1:47:45Speaker 06

  really like 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's, I mean, he's belongs on the rushmore of podcasting.

• 1:48:04Shawn Ryan?

  He paved the way.

• 1:48:05Speaker 06

  He paved the way.

• 1:48:06Shawn Ryan?

  There is no doubt about that.

• 1:48:07Speaker 06

  He paved the way.

• 1:48:09Shawn Ryan?

  I didn't know there were people that were so tied to fluoride. What's the deal?

• 1:48:13Speaker 06

  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?

• 1:48:22Shawn Ryan?

  We filter it all out. We got a new, we got a new system at my house about a year ago.

• 1:48:26Speaker 06

  So reverse osmosis or just still?

• 1:48:29Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I don't know. I there's, I looked at so many of them, I can't remember, but it goes through three filters and then it goes through this thing called like a.

• 1:48:37Speaker 06

  Biodynamizer or something like that. It probably is reverse osmosis and then re-mineralizes 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'll go do analysis of sparkling water. Like Topo Chico landed flat on its face with tons of these endocrine disruptors. No, are you serious? It's the worst by a long shot. Coca, that was in roughly 2020, 2021.

• 1:49:22Speaker 06

  I love Topo Chico. It's like nine point something parts per trillion. But then Coca-Cola, the 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, 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, you know, eat crucifer, eat some broccoli and cruciferous vegetables every once in a while.

• 1:50:07Speaker 06

  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 it, you have toxins in your body. You can, you can sweat some of them out, but not all of them. Your liver helps remove certain waste products. Sulforaphane, you can take in 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. Shawn Swan, who's been on Rogan's podcast, been on my podcast, it hasn't come out yet,

• 1:50:52Speaker 06

  has been talking about how, I mean, just to be direct, that these endocrine disruptors during pregnancy are shortening the distance between the scrotum and the anus in boys. The taint size, literally, is shrinking toward a more female pattern through, with progressive exposure to phthalates and endocrine disruptors, present in receipts, present in glass, uh, but, excuse me, plastic bottles, um, polycystic ovarian syndrome and egg count, egg counts are going down in women at a given age, polycystic ovarian syndromes are going up. Shawn, who's a researcher for several decades now, thinks this is related to the prevalence of endocrine disruptors in receipts, forever chemicals, um, and so on.

• 1:51:36Speaker 06

  So, these have real implications, reduced sperm counts, you know, she, these are real effects. Testosterone rates are go, or 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, um, the, uh, I no longer will drink Topo Chico. I will drink, um, uh, like a Pellegrino. Okay. Or any of the, you know, any Calistoga or Pellegrino. I do try and drink out of metal or, or glass. But I'll occasionally drink out of a plastic bottle. Even cans are bad because of the lining of cans, but most of them now are BPA free.

• 1:52:16Speaker 06

  I don't, microwave things in plastic, even microwave safe plastic, if I can avoid it. But if I'm on a plane and the food's good, I'll eat it. I'm not a fanatic. The idea is to limit your exposure, not to, no one's going no exposure. Okay. And, you know, they package some of the best meat in plastic, so you have to, you work with, with reality. But for pregnant women, for young kids, limiting the exposure to these things is turning out to be very, very consequential. And not limiting the, is, is potentially consequential. What else is in our drinking water? Um, well, a lot of hormone related stuff, birth control stuff, and urine containing hormones gets, you know, goes out there that might make it into drinking water. I think it's just a good idea to filter your drinking water if possible.

• 1:53:01Speaker 06

  And for people that can't afford a fancy filtering system, a tabletop, you know, um, pour type filtering system is pretty good, as long as you change over the filters. Um, you can, what else is in there? Well... The BPAs and the 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.

• 1:53:35Speaker 06

  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 farmer's markets. Putting it into a bowl, rinsing it off is key. Those little steps and not handling receipts is key. If you do have to handle receipts for work, you should wear nitrite gloves. They, not nitrite, excuse me, you should wear nitrile gloves. Nitri would be something else. Nitro gloves. Latex would be not as good, but still better than handling a lot of receipts. You know, Shawn has done this work where they go in and work with couples that are trying to conceive and are have trouble conceiving and they remove a lot of the things from their life that I just described.

• 1:54:18Speaker 06

  They take a lot and they see pretty impressive shift towards successful pregnancy, not making any other changes.

• 1:54:25Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:54:26Speaker 06

  Which is really impressive.

• 1:54:27Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:54:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:54:28Shawn Ryan?

  I get a question. I get, this may have been, I may have been sold on this, but when I was looking at all these different filtration systems, I was talking about that biodynamizer. The company and the installer that came out was telling me that, that if you take tap water and crystallize it, it looks like a deformed, 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?

• 1:55:11Speaker 06

  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 are a lot of, there's a lot of stuff coming through the tap and pipes and, you know, I'm not.

• 1:55:28Speaker 06

  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 for being exposed to lead. Asbestos warnings, right? Asbestos is bad, right? You don't want to be exposed to this stuff, lead or asbestos. I think fluoride has done more to strengthen teeth than is, than damage it's done to most kids in most cities. So I think they had to make a best case decision there, kind of risk benefit analysis there.

• 1:56:08Speaker 06

  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 get, probably got the date wrong, that they banned the use of these little microbeads in soaps. Remember the microbeads, like, you know? Because those were getting out into the environment and causing some serious issues for marine animals and marine life generally.

• 1:56:52Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:57:34Speaker 06

  But if it, to me, if it's even a remote possibility that they, then why would you do it? Wear a hat or wear a long sleeve shirt? Like, this is where, why gamble? On the, um, on not, 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, right? An expert in skin cancer, taught me the following. I didn't know this. Stanford trained, Harvard trained, published multiple research, quality research papers, and has a clinical practice.

• 1:58:17Speaker 06

  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 can test 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.

• 1:59:00Speaker 06

  The toxicologist and the dermatologist hate one another. Interesting. So this would be like, and I'm not saying this to be true, but this would be like if the 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 the, what we see out there, most commercial products are filtered through the path of least resistance. They'll put things out until they can't. And I place a lot of faith in good doctors. I'm not anti-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

• 1:59:44Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:00:27Speaker 06

  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 hydroxy appetite, 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, it turns out that if you brush your teeth in the morning and especially before you go to sleep at night, and you make sure to hydrate during the middle of the day, you don't give the cavity causing bacteria an opportunity of form. The bacteria that cause cav- sugar don't cause cavities. The bacteria that cause cavities, it's the streptococcus mutans bacteria, feed on sugar.

• 2:01:11Speaker 06

  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 hydroxy appetite, guess what? Your teeth can re-mineralize. 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. No kidding. What's that? They can? Absolutely. Four dentists told me that. Four dentists told me that.

• 2:01:53Speaker 06

  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 hydroxy appetite, here's how to give your kids really healthy teeth. The other way to give your kids really healthy teeth, encourage them to be nose breathers. This mouth breathing thing is really bad. A friend of mine who works with methamphetamine addicts, who works with methamphetamine addicts, do you know one of the reasons their teeth are so bad? Why? Because they mouth breathe.

• 2:02:24Speaker 06

  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 just, I'm now at the point where like I've seen behind the curtain and I go, okay, this is how media works. How do I know? Well, humbly, I have a really large media channel and I also read and I listen and I talk to doctors and you ask, you know, like with vet care, I, just another example, I, 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

• 2:03:07Speaker 06

  going to come after me. Puts his dog on testosterone. I was contacted by many vets and you know what they said? Thank you. Yeah. It turns out that they try and scare you that your male dog is going to get testicular cancer or mate with every dog in the neighborhood if you keep it intact. Turns out when you castrate a dog young, not only does their brain not develop normally, which I 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,

• 2:03:49Speaker 06

  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, 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,

• 2:04:29Speaker 06

  whether or not it's veterinary, or it's oral health, or it's skincare, like the derm oncologist thing, or cancer care where

• 2:04:39Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:04:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:47Speaker 06

  You're not free to do everything that would be most beneficial to everybody because there's a larger structure there.

• 2:04:54Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 2:05:05Speaker 06

  Great.

• 2:05:05Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect.

• 2:05:08Speaker 09

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• 2:05:38Shawn Ryan?

  I'd like to invite you to gain access to an exclusive experience on Vigilance Elite Patreon. Our patrons are the driving force behind the success of this show, and their support allows us to keep doing what we do. Depending on the tier you choose, you'll get access to benefits like behind-the-scenes footage before each interview, early access to episodes, end-of-the-month live Zoom calls with me, exclusive merch, and more. Join us and become a patron starting at just $5 a month by visiting patreon.com/vigilanceelite. That's patreon.com/vigilanceelite.

• 2:06:19Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 2:06:40Shawn Ryan?

  I know we just got back from the break. I know we're gonna talk about cannabis, but I've been dying to ask you about Neuralink, so I just wanna ask you these couple of 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?

• 2:06:57Speaker 06

  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, you know, where I could speak to the specific engineering, but a guy that came up through my lab, he worked actually at Stanford, but did a little bit of time in my lab. A guy named Matt McDougall, he's a medical doctor, neurosurgeon, he's the lead neurosurgeon at 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,

• 2:07:39Speaker 06

  then you could potentially put those same patterns of firing into a brain or an eye of a patient who is somehow suffering from not enough or not proper neural activity in that particular region. Okay, and they've got a bunch of other things they're doing that are really cool, like using robotics to get really precise and really fast about the implant of these chips, so that you don't have to do neurosurgery the way it's traditionally done. They're building a ton of amazing biomedical tools related to robotics and AI in addition. Okay, here's the part about blindness. There are a lot of different forms of blindness. There are forms of blindness caused by loss of the photoreceptive cells, that is, the cells that convert light into electrical signals that then are passed into the brain.

• 2:08:22Speaker 06

  Okay, so there are a number of diseases where photoreceptor loss occurs. There, you need to put back in a light sensing tissue or device. Okay, there are also forms of blindness, like for instance, glaucoma, which is a degeneration of neurons called retinoganglion 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.

• 2:08:55Speaker 06

  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. Chicholnisky at Stanford and others, who've 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?

• 2:09:40Speaker 06

  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

• 2:10:21Speaker 06

  healthy patterns of activity by simply replaying those patterns of activity at the right location along the visual pathway. Wow. Now, this is wild, because there have been very few instances, one in particular by a guy named Botan Roska and Karl Dyseroff, 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.

• 2:11:03Speaker 06

  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,

• 2:11:46Speaker 06

  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. 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, right? If you think about the little camera on a phone,

• 2:12:29Speaker 06

  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?

• 2:13:13Speaker 06

  The camera has perfectly good photoreception. Just make sure that it's translating the camera video image into the proper neural image.

• 2:13:19Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:13:19Speaker 06

  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,

• 2:14:04Speaker 06

  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, right? We don't know all the necessary inputs that are required to like create a memory of your grandmother.

• 2:14:47Speaker 06

  We just don't know what they are, right? But we do know all the necessary physical world components coming in. We know what needs to be encoded by the camera. That's easy to do with a camera. Cameras are very small now. How to feed that to a chip that then can translate it into the language of the nervous system, which is electrical signals driven by chemical release from neurons.

• 2:15:08Shawn Ryan?

  Does that mean that you could also?

• 2:15:12Shawn Ryan?

  Put in a signal of something that never happened that's complete fantasy.

• 2:15:17Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, in fact, there was an experiment that was done by two guys, Bill Newsom and Tony Mavshon and others, the following way. And they did this in a macaque monkey. You put a small micro-stimulator into an area of the brain that reads out what... Not the stimulator, this area of the brain pays attention to whether or not things are moving up, down, or to the side in the visual world. You have this area in your brain. If I were to put an electrode in there and record and move some things up, certain neurons would fire, others wouldn't. Certain neurons would fire to down, certain neurons to left, certain neurons to right. They've actually done the experiment where they trained this animal to view dots moving in a particular direction

• 2:16:00Speaker 06

  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

• 2:16:45Speaker 06

  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 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

• 2:17:27Speaker 06

  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 gonna 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 Parvizi, discovered, in the anterior mid-singulate cortex, that when stimulated, patients, all three of them,

• 2:18:10Speaker 06

  separately, these patients said, "When you stimulate there, I feel like there's a storm coming or some challenge, and I wanna lean into it." This area, the anterior mid-singulate cortex, is super interesting, because it's the brain area that grows, it actually gets larger in volume, increases its activity, when we do something challenging that is a little bit scary, that we don't want to do. And 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.

• 2:18:51Speaker 06

  So this area, the anterior mid-singulate cortex, seems to be one of the seats of will to push back on pressure in a positive way. It's related to willpower and tenacity, and it seems related to brain longevity and to body longevity. And I like to kind of expand on this a bit, and 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... 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 in certa,

• 2:19:35Speaker 06

  or the midthalamus, there are certain nuclei there where you can generate some pretty aggressive behavior, or I were to stimulate an area of the brain that's associated with depression, like the habenula, or an area of the brain that's associated with inhibiting the habenula. You could potentially remove some components of depression, encourage rage, discourage rage. All of this is possible because ultimately, all of our behavior and thought processes come through these little neural hubs in 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.

• 2:20:17Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, so you could, you could project 100% of a false reality into somebody's head? And, and they think that, that it is all actually happening?

• 2:20:28Speaker 06

  Definitely.

• 2:20:31Speaker 08

  It's me, the

• 2:20:35Speaker 08

  We don't need the jingle twice.

• 2:20:38Speaker 08

  Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights, and rental cars.

• 2:20:46Speaker 08

  Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app. Fine, no one deals more deals than Please stop. Touche. Priceline.

• 2:21:00Speaker 06

  You could do that two ways. You could either present it like through a VR-like experience, but the person probably knows it's VR. Or you could do it by stimulating the ensembles, the, the groups of neurons, in the right order within the brain to give you the idea that that thing is happening, even though nothing's happening out there.

• 2:21:17Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, that is, uh... That's mind control.

• 2:21:22Speaker 06

  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 McDougall will tell you this as a neurosurgeon. Joe Barvezzi 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 Hest 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, they'd feel a little drunk. Or they stimulate another area, they feel giddy.

• 2:22:06Speaker 06

  They stimulate another area, sexual arousal. You know the area they chose to stimulate the most? By choice. Generated feelings of mild frustration and anger.

• 2:22:16Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 2:22:17Speaker 06

  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 does not say everyone should fight, but these circuits exist within us.

• 2:22:38Shawn Ryan?

  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 fighting cancer or is dying of cancer, knows somebody that died of cancer.

• 2:23:22Shawn Ryan?

  And, you know, now that I have two little guys, you know, 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 Iba gain treatment. Then I had, I had a whole slew of surgeries that I've 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.

• 2:23:49Shawn Ryan?

  Lack of sleep might be just as bad as you vaping. And so, uh, so I kinda went back, but I do, I wanna quit, so let's talk about cannabis.

• 2:23:59Speaker 06

  Okay, so neither cannabis nor nicotine will give you cancer, but smoking, vaping, dipping and snuffing can increase your risk of cancer.

• 2:24:10Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:24:11Speaker 06

  So the delivery route matters. Okay, so nicotine is actually protective, it's thought, against Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Did you know that?

• 2:24:19Shawn Ryan?

  I, no, I didn't know that.

• 2:24:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, but it's highly addictive and most people smoke, vape, dip or snuff it, which is carcinogenic. Okay, so the route of entry is, uh, or the route of administration, excuse me, is important. So let's talk about cannabis. So who should not do cannabis at all? Let's just kinda 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.

• 2:25:01Speaker 06

  If they do high THC cannabis, can exacerbate or maybe even trigger psychosis. Uh, 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. There's, you see data on both sides. It's clear to me, based on my read of the literature, that anyone that has a predisposition to psychosis, schizophrenia or related things, bipolar, et cetera, 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.

• 2:25:42Shawn Ryan?

  What is high THC concerned?

• 2:25:43Speaker 06

  Well, so this gets tricky. So for these individuals, the genetic predisposition is such that if they smoke cannabis, um, you know, they'll vape it or, or whatever for 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 wanna say best done, but let's just say for people that smoke or vape, most people are able to smoke or vape to a, if they've done it before, to a point where they know that they're in that plane of effect that they're seeking, and then stop. Good. Okay? We had an expert on my podcast who really drilled this home.

• 2:26:28Speaker 06

  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 wanna be in. So if, and I'm not encouraging people to do this, but if people are going to use cannabis and they're gonna 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 vaping, people generally will, you know, inhale, get some sort of effect, wait, maybe, maybe do it again, and then they kinda know, I'm good, and they'll stop there. Whereas with an edible, it's in your system, you're off for the, for the ride, whatever that ride is. Yeah.

• 2:27:12Speaker 06

  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, the key thing is, why not take a small amount through an edible, as opposed to vaping, and then you eliminate essentially any carcinogenic aspect? Like you're not, you can get rid of the cancer-causing aspect. Cause vaping, it's true, is not as bad as smoking,

• 2:27:55Speaker 06

  but vaping can still cause lung damage, especially if it's done a lot. Vaping is actually better than smoking? It is. Okay. Um, for nicotine and for cannabis, it is safer for the lungs, but that does not mean it's completely safe. Okay. Um, yeah, sort of like, and here I apparently like to open up big cans of worms today. Um, so like the, like kratom is probably safer than a prescription opioid, but that doesn't mean kratom is completely safe. But I, there's a kratom community, kratom I think it's called, that gets really upset when I say that, but I'm not saying that something is good or bad. I'm saying these are relative harms and then you have to weigh it against the potential benefits somebody's seeking.

• 2:28:38Speaker 06

  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? Then you just have to decide if you want to continue to use cannabis. I agree with your wife that not sleeping is very dangerous, very dangerous for your heart health, very dangerous for everything. Um, I would also ask, why is it that you're not sleeping? Is it rumination or you just don't feel tired enough to fall asleep?

• 2:29:19Shawn Ryan?

  It is, it's the wheels, man. They just always turn. It's always innovating. It's always business. It's always what can I be, it's, it's just, it's looking at the future.

• 2:29:33Speaker 06

  Yeah. And, and this is common among operator, former operators and operators. I mean, like I said, we have enough common friends in the community that just have a really hard time shutting it off. And you guys are just so effective and I mean, you were selected in part on, in BUDs on the basis of being able to continue to think and move and communicate, uh, without sleep. So there's kind of a selection process here. There are a few things and here I, you know, I'm getting into new territory, but there are a few, um, non-prescription approaches that people have used to improve sleep that have certainly been beneficial for me.

• 2:30:10Speaker 06

  I mean, there's the whole supplement route of magnesium 3 and 8, etc. That can help for a lot of people. I can suggest some of that. I've talked about these magnesium 3 and 8, 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.

• 2:30:31Shawn Ryan?

  Why not? Why don't you want to do long term?

• 2:30:33Speaker 06

  Um, there, it can have some crossover impact onto other hormone systems. The, the thing that's pretty exciting right now is a, is a peptide that can be prescribed by a doctor. It's very inexpensive. It's currently available, um, called 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.

• 2:31:10Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:31:11Speaker 06

  But there, there's a, a really good doctor that was on my podcast, Craig Conover, who's an M D. He's in South Carolina. I can put you in touch with. And there are some other really good peptide doc M Ds, Ways to Well, which is down in Austin. I think those folks, um, 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, um, he could chat with you about it, that it might be able to help regenerate, um, 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.

• 2:31:54Speaker 06

  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,

• 2:32:10Speaker 06

  um, 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 that people, if there are any physicians listening, they're gonna be like, how can you be talking about this thing that's a peptide? Well, GLP-1 agonist, like Ozempic and Monjaro, those are peptides. Insulin, that's a peptide. Peptide is just a small protein. Okay. But pinealine has, I've observed with a number of people who had real trouble sleeping. This isn't something you 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. Wow.

• 2:32:53Speaker 06

  Because the problem with cannabis and alcohol before sleep is it can help you get to sleep, but it's gonna 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 remove the cancer risk. Cause you're not smoking or vaping, dipping or snuffing. To my knowledge, there's no cancer risk of cannabis, cannabis per se. It's the root of injury. Okay. Okay. And then maybe you try prescribed by a doctor, of course. You try a little bit of pinealine glycine cocktail. Um, it's a little injection. Try that a few times, see if that works. I will say, I've never seen it not work. Meaning every single time someone calls me the next day, they're like, I slept for the first time.

• 2:33:38Speaker 06

  I woke up once or I didn't sleep, wake up at all. And I'm like, I know, kinda 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, but so that's, that's the deal with cannabis. For most people, they're smoking cannabis because they like the fact that it removes their anxiety. And there seems to be a lot of individual variation on this. Some people become very apathetic and don't work much.

• 2:34:23Speaker 06

  You got a lot of young males these days smoking a lot of weed. Not doing much with themselves and that's not good. Then you also have some really hard driving people who use cannabis to calm down and relax. And the argument is always alcohol is worse. People go, well, alcohol is worse. Yeah, I would probably agree, except for those that fall into the potential psychosis camp. Right? At the same time, alcohol isn't a great comparison because telling you that, you know, shooting yourself in the foot isn't as bad as shooting yourself in the upper arm. That 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.

• 2:35:03Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, there are some observations I have, you know, like I don't dream. I do not dream.

• 2:35:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's the cannabis. When you come off that, you're gonna dream like crazy.

• 2:35:12Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 2:35:20Speaker 06

  I'll, um, be very curious to see how pineal and glycine works. You could get it out here in a day, have one consult and do that. And, um, these are not powerful drugs of the sort like Xanax or of a, there's a new sleep med called Quivivac, which works a little bit differently than the other ones, um, that are out there in that it decreases the wakefulness system, that rumination and thinking that you're talking about, as opposed to making you sleepier. You have multiple systems, one to make you awake, one to make you sleepy. It kind of pushes down on the 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.

• 2:36:04Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:36:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:16Speaker 06

  But among the prescription drugs for sleep, it's certainly headed in the right direction, but the cost is still too high. But I'm a big believer in using light during the day, darkness at night, limiting alcohol at night, limiting caffeine in the afternoon, although that's a tough one for me because I love coffee in the afternoon. And just trying, the red lens glasses can really help you wind down. And then maybe this glycine, um, 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 fifteen year old kid or sixteen year old kid who can't sleep, I would not go to cannabis.

• 2:36:57Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:36:57Speaker 06

  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 that those folks are out there.

• 2:37:29Shawn Ryan?

  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, is there anything I can do to replenish my lungs from doing that?

• 2:37:43Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:37:51Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:37:52Speaker 06

  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 seventy-five minutes. So on the shorter end, full disclosure. Middle of the week, I'll go out for a thirty 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 thirty, like, hard clip run. Like, you're pushing, you're breathing hard, but you're not maxed out.

• 2:38:24Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:38:24Speaker 06

  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 twenty seconds, thirty seconds hard, walk or just cruise for ten, fifteen seconds. Twenty, thirty seconds hard, you know, pseudo Tabata-type workout. You'll be done in ten 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

• 2:39:09Speaker 06

  that kind of stuff, really training their lungs like a freediver 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 freedivers 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. Twenty seconds or less is pretty weak.

• 2:39:54Speaker 06

  That means you don't have great mechanical control of the diaphragm through the phrenic nerve. Twenty-five to forty-five, maybe sixty seconds is pretty good. Sixty 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, holds, exhale, holds, done for about five minutes. So you say, how long should the sides of the box be?

• 2:40:38Speaker 06

  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 twenty 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,

• 2:41:20Speaker 06

  and they try and do a box breathing with seven second inhale, seven second hold, seven second exhale, seven second hold, it's gonna be tough. You can do it for a couple of minutes and then you're gonna be like feeling pretty jittery. Your adrenaline's gonna 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. freedivers, and the freediving 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 gonna get me on the technical details here. They're gonna 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.

• 2:42:04Speaker 06

  If you wanna 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 freedivers, there's a whole art to it. And I always say it's probably the most dangerous sport out there because it's all good till lights out and then you die. So I don't recommend it. But what they figured out how to do is to slowly exhale so they don't trigger the gasp reflex. People think they pack their lungs with air. It doesn't really work like that. When you exhale a lot, this is why it's very dangerous, what I'm about to say, it's very dangerous to do hyperventilation and then go into water. Why?

• 2:42:49Speaker 06

  Because you blow out a lot of carbon dioxide and then you can hold your breath longer. But guess what? Your brain senses carbon dioxide levels to trigger the gasp reflex, which sends you up to the surface to get a breath of air. If your carbon dioxide's low, you don't get the gasp reflex and guess what? You just blackout 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 sick, what we call in the lab cyclic hyperventilation. Any heavy exhales followed by a breath hold near water is potentially lethally dangerous. But you asked, how can you get your breath, your lung capacity better? Do the cardio work I mentioned, especially the max heart rate work, but then do five minutes a week.

• 2:43:34Speaker 06

  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 freedivers that can literally do 20 second inhale, 20 second hold, 20 second exhale. Wow. It sounds easy, but it's, it's not trivial. And that's because they've just really learned how to control in a conscious way their diaphragm. I mean, I'll say this, you know, your brain has two centers for controlling breathing, but the breathing centers are amazing. They're right at the bridge between the conscious and the unconscious mind. You're breathing all the time without having to control these, but at any moment you can

• 2:44:15Speaker 06

  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, decide to increase your heart rate. These, breathing is the bridge into controlling your, your inner state. And so that's why things like yoga, meditation, there's nothing really mysterious about it. It's using breath to control your level of arousal. Exhales, slow the heart rate, respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Inhales, increase your heart rate, also respiratory sinus arrhythmia for the, for those that want to look it up. So doing box breathing in a very controlled way, you're balancing that, that heart rate, you're staying nice and even by not letting your heart rate get high, not letting it get

• 2:45:00Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:45:18Shawn Ryan?

  When you're saying to breathe out, are you just... Are you breathing out as slow as you possibly can?

• 2:45:26Speaker 06

  During the carbon dioxide discard test.

• 2:45:29Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:45:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, you're breathing out as slow as you possibly can until your lungs are empty and then you stop the stopwatch.

• 2:45:35Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:45:35Speaker 06

  Now, in...

• 2:45:37Shawn Ryan?

  So you can't cheat?

• 2:45:39Speaker 06

  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 intercostals and the diaphragm, but then we tend to passively exhale. We just kind of let it fall out. When you make it a point to actively exhale, that's how you slow the heart rate down.

• 2:46:06Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:46:06Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:46:50Speaker 06

  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 breather kid. And I, it's a little bit of an extreme, but um being able to fit your tongue on the roof of your mouth with your, with your, with your teeth closed. I can't do this because I actually had orthodontia, so my 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

• 2:47:35Speaker 06

  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 and or for basically for heart attack. I mean, being deprived of oxygen for, you know, mildly deprived of oxygen for long periods of time during sleep or wake is just not good.

• 2:47:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:59Speaker 06

  I heard some story from, stories from the teams. I don't know if this is true. I don't know if we want to open this up, but that there, the thing I said earlier about not hyperventilating and holding one's breath is so serious that um it's actually been, they actually, I think, I don't know if this is true, that they actively tell guys who are in, doing their dive work, or going into the bell, like in the tower, that they can't do hyperventilation before because you can just blackout quickly and die. So it's, it's not something to be messed with.

• 2:48:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:30Speaker 06

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

• 2:48:34Shawn Ryan?

  You just pass out for a minute?

• 2:48:35Speaker 06

  I mean, I'm not, I'm not into that, but uh, you know, um, but I do think learning to breathe properly is pretty key.

• 2:48:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:44Speaker 06

  And, and you, 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're like, you feel like you have a superpower.

• 2:48:56Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 2:48:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:48:58Shawn Ryan?

  I'll definitely be doing that. Thank you.

• 2:49:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:49:00Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. Let's move into psychedelics. So I had a profound experience, haven't had, did I began, did five M E O D M T.

• 2:49:11Speaker 06

  As part of Veteran Solutions?

• 2:49:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:49:14Shawn Ryan?

  And.

• 2:49:14Speaker 06

  What a great organization.

• 2:49:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:49:17Shawn Ryan?

  And uh, I mean, so many positive things came out of that for me. I mean, I haven't drank alcohol on this February.

• 2:49:24Speaker 06

  Was it scary going through it? Sorry to interrupt. I'm just so curious.

• 2:49:30Shawn Ryan?

  No. I was more scared. I wasn't scared to do the Iba game.

• 2:49:38Shawn Ryan?

  I just had too many guys come in here and, uh, and, and tell me about their experience and how it, how it, how it improved their, their life, their personal life, their family life, their work life, just all around. What really scared the hell out of me was the five M A O D M T when I found out it was a death experience. I think I was like, wait a minute.

• 2:49:59Speaker 06

  I have a friend.

• 2:50:00Shawn Ryan?

  We're gonna die?

• 2:50:01Speaker 06

  Oh, man. I had a friend who was in the teams. I'm not laughing because I haven't done it, so I, I, although I might, um, someday, who, former team guy who told me that it was like being, his words, strapped to the shockwave of an atom bomb.

• 2:50:18Speaker 06

  And I thought, that's a big statement.

• 2:50:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. I wouldn't call it that, but, uh, but everybody, you know, everybody's different, but, uh, for me, it was just.

• 2:50:32Shawn Ryan?

  A hundred and. You are a hundred percent certain you are dying.

• 2:50:39Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 2:50:39Shawn Ryan?

  Like, that's it. You are. You are dying.

• 2:50:43Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 2:50:43Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh.

• 2:50:44Speaker 06

  But scary, it's scary.

• 2:50:46Shawn Ryan?

  It's the most fear, most anxiety I've ever felt through anything, all my time in the teams, all my time at. Contracted for CIA, like, I just, I was, and I've had times where I thought I was gonna die, but this was actually, I mean, you felt you were a hundred percent sure in your brain that you are, this is it, you're dead. Like, you're actively dying and you're grasping for anything you can possibly hold on to, to, to. And at that time, I had my son and my wife, and I was like, holy, I cannot fucking leave them. And then, uh, but you're dying, you can't control it. And then you die and.

• 2:51:30Shawn Ryan?

  And then, and then it takes you into a whole nother realm, but, uh, but, um.

• 2:51:37Shawn Ryan?

  But it's that's 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, you know, and now, as you know, I am a believer. But, but I think the, I think the, the real effects that have, that have really lasted for almost three years now are the, 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, and I'm curious, you know, I'm just curious, what, where is psychedelic medicine today?

• 2:52:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I'm 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 psyched, 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, with the ibogaine.

• 2:53:06Speaker 06

  You may ask why I'm not putting LSD in that category. You know why there aren't very many studies of LSD? Even though LSD has a very serotonergic, dopaminergic type of fact that are similar to psilocybin, but a little bit different as well. Do you know the reason they don't study LSD?

• 2:53:21Shawn Ryan?

  Because of the Nixon administration?

• 2:53:23Speaker 06

  Uh, no, it's a great, great answer, but no, it turns out that the, the trips are just too long. No one will stay in the laboratory that long to study the person.

• 2:53:33Shawn Ryan?

  How long are they?

• 2:53:34Speaker 06

  They're like 11 or 12 hours or more.

• 2:53:36Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:53:36Speaker 06

  Any 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 like hardworking. They'll stay after hours. In the US and in other countries, they're like, oh, you know, 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.

• 2:54:21Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:54:33Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 2:54:33Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:54:48Speaker 06

  Psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD, and to some extent ibogaine, which is very, 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 an epi-phenomenon where people think they learned something there, but actually, there's a bunch of brain rewiring

• 2:55:31Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:56:17Speaker 06

  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 may be 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

• 2:57:01Speaker 06

  or the actions that occurred within that picture. Was that accurate?

• 2:57:07Shawn Ryan?

  My experience was two lines of TV screens, and it was just seemed like thousands of memories, every memory.

• 2:57:20Speaker 06

  Real memories?

• 2:57:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yes.

• 2:57:22Speaker 06

  Okay, this is essential.

• 2:57:23Shawn Ryan?

  Real events that have happened.

• 2:57:24Speaker 06

  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 our professor, he's a triple-board certified neurologist psychiatrist. He's like one of these phenoms. I was talking to 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,

• 2:58:08Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:58:53Speaker 06

  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 for major depression, severe depression brought to major relief from a lot of the depressive symptoms, as measured by improved sleep, improved outlook on 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,

• 2:59:38Speaker 06

  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

• 3:00:23Speaker 06

  because of the addiction relief that people experience. The challenge is you have to be heart rate monitored. You're heart monitored. It's not for everybody. And the reason I ask is it's scary is that some people feel like it takes a certain amount of boldness to lean into this. That is certainly a five 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 the US and then people are being scanned in the US, like in Nolan's lab, Robin Carter at Harris's lab and other labs. The FDA approval has hinged largely on this thing with MDMA.

• 3:01:08Speaker 06

  MDMA, so-called ecstasy, right, is methylene-dioxy-methamphetamine. Methylene-dioxy-methamphetamine. 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.

• 3:01:53Speaker 06

  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. Whereas 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 is the block? Why did the FDA not approve MDMA this last year? Okay, this gets into some kind of darker territory, but I'm just going to tell you what I am aware of and where I'm wrong, and I'm sure I'll be corrected.

• 3:02:36Speaker 06

  The MAPS group, 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 and it increases heart rate, so people with some heart issues might not be able to take it. It's dopaminergic, you know, it gets people pretty ramped up, et cetera. 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

• 3:03:21Speaker 06

  got the drug or they didn't, because if you didn't get it, you know, like, not much is happening, and if you did get it, you're... You're, you know, either a noodle, you know, feeling like a noodle. I've participated in one of these experiments, right? 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've got, you need days off, like the IbaGain 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

• 3:04:06Speaker 06

  during the sessions with patient. That's a clear, clear barrier for the FDA to just run along and say, okay, right? That 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?

• 3:04:51Speaker 06

  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 in the, covering real research science, that yellow number five, I forget the technical name, when spread on the bellies of these mice, made their bellies... Transparent to light. You can literally see their organs. People can look this up. This is crazy. This is mainstream media and yeah, it's wild. What does that end? What is that? Oh, can't cheat. If I call out a brand, I'll get in trouble. Cheese puff, anything bright orange

• 3:05:35Speaker 06

  or yellow, candy, snack foods, chips. So it's a dye? It's a dye. And it makes skin transparent to sunlight. Now, what is the net effect of that? We don't know. Toxicity is obviously low enough that it's not killing people right off the bat. But, you know, earlier we were talking about water and then, you know, there's this thing that has made its way into the internet lore of like atrazine in the frogs, you know, in their reproductive organs. That's the work of Tyrone Hayes at UC Berkeley. Yes, it is true that certain things in water that were like atrazine were causing endocrine disruption in frogs that was leading those frogs, the development of the reproductive organs was perturbed and their sexual behavior was altered.

• 3:06:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's true. I mean, that, that, there's nothing, there's nothing conspiracy about that. I took classes from Tyrone when I was at Berkeley. He does great work. Like, like, no one can test that. But in any event, things like atrazine in the drinking water are of concern or in delta water, certain deltas in the 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

• 3:07:05Speaker 06

  these really impressive data, in my opinion, is because they said, okay, not enough studies.

• 3:07:12Speaker 06

  Not a great control group to, and there were these reported sexual improprieties. I don't know, I haven't read those cases. So what's gonna 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.

• 3:07:56Speaker 06

  So I think IbaGame 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, I don't want to get 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 Veteran Solutions event, a fundraiser, where I gave a talk, and Rick Perry and a Democrat are up there together, trying to raise money to lobby for the approval of psychedelics

• 3:08:40Speaker 06

  for the treatment of PTSD in veterans. That, to me, at least growing up, when I grew up, that's how this country's supposed to work. Yeah. 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 of 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 IbaGame 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, won. But that's always a possibility with any treatment.

• 3:09:25Speaker 06

  But the vast majority of people that come back, I've talked to so many operators come back, you know, 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 the people who work on addiction

• 3:10:09Speaker 06

  are saying, look, I think there's probably something here.

• 3:10:12Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it wasn't just booze, man. It was booze, it was Adderall, it was Xanax, it was Ambien, it was all that shit.

• 3:10:20Speaker 06

  And you're done with all of it?

• 3:10:20Shawn Ryan?

  Went away. All of it, I mean, just like that. Not an effort, not like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna really do it, make it work this time. It just, I 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, knew it, it was, this shit is poison. Stay away from it.

• 3:10:49Speaker 06

  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. You know, and it restores it in the contexts that matter, which is not when you're at the retreat or in the recovery center, that's important too, but when you get home, when things are stressful, when things are good. I mean, I've got friends that relapsed when things were great. I have a friend, 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.

• 3:11:34Speaker 06

  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. And, or, or just implode.

• 3:11:53Speaker 06

  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 in to 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 gonna get sober. And I was like, alright, 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. Yeah. He's been sober ever since. Man, that's awesome.

• 3:12:36Speaker 06

  And the happiest he's ever been, and the kids are thriving, his relationship is thriving, and his work, his professional life, like, his demeanor, like, everything is thriving. And when he went in there, I thought to myself, oh, boy, like, 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.

• 3:13:20Speaker 06

  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...

• 3:13:48Speaker 06

  I've seen people do it with Ibogaine and I've seen people combine the two like you. It sounds like you have. I think, you know, I don't know if there's just one solution. I, I have to say, the pandemic was a really tough time for a lot of addicts who depended on 12-step meetings.

• 3:14:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:03Speaker 06

  To stay off drugs and alcohol. A really tough time. And there were people that managed to stay in communication and taking care of one another and.

• 3:14:10Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I never even thought about that.

• 3:14:12Speaker 06

  Oh, what we, the, 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, the challenges around socialization that kids were having.

• 3:14:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:32Speaker 06

  I, you know, um, and, but then the drug alcohol relapse rate, or people that discovered addiction under those conditions, is just astounding. And I think we're, I think we're still paying the price for it. And it's, and I, and I have to tip my hat to the veterans community and Veteran Solutions. And again, I'm not partisan, but these politicians, or former politicians, I should say, who are basically, 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.

• 3:15:12Shawn Ryan?

  I, I gotta ask a question. Does FDA approval mean anything to you?

• 3:15:19Speaker 06

  I mean, it can keep doctors out of jail.

• 3:15:22Shawn Ryan?

  When you look, when you're looking at supplements or food or any of this, or, or new drugs that are coming out, does, does FDA approval, does that, does that mean anything to you?

• 3:15:34Speaker 06

  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 to 50% of populations 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.

• 3:16:19Speaker 06

  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 dropped 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. Okay. So we have to acknowledge the important work they do. That said, I have a friend, a neuroscientist up in Canada, who recently was hearing this whole thing about 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.

• 3:17:04Speaker 06

  And then in Canada, they don't. They use like carrot juice or something. And she said, I'm gonna 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 Fruit 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, 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.

• 3:17:47Speaker 06

  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 supposed to buying by weight, right? In addition to that, it changes the way that food can be traded on as a commodity. Because it it changes the perishability or the shelf life of those food products. So in this country, we have allowed a lot of foods to, we have allowed a lot of preservatives and things of that sort to be introduced to foods that make the foods less healthy, but are good for the food industry.

• 3:18:28Speaker 06

  So that's true. Then people will say, well, that brings food costs down and, you know, food is cheap in this country compared to other countries. Calories are cheap in this country, not healthy calories, but food is cheap. And then people say, well, that's the obesity problem. Not to weave too many themes here, but if 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? Is it seed? By the way, I don't like seed oils. They taste terrible to me. So I like olive oil, butter and that kind of thing. But I doubt the seed oils are what's making people fat. It's probably that they're eating too many calories and a lot of calories in seed oils. So this kind of thing. So we we love the idea that it's one thing, but it's one behavior. Too many calories relative to too little activity. People don't burn as much energy as they used to.

• 3:19:13Speaker 06

  People consume about 3,500 calories a day, and that's a lot of calories for people that aren't active. Okay. So Ozempic taught us that. Do I think Ozempic 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 Ozempic? 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

• 3:19:56Speaker 06

  for PTSD, they're going to need FDA approval or else they are doing this with the potential of being You know, of getting charged with a with an offense. Okay. 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.

• 3:20:38Speaker 06

  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 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.

• 3:21:20Speaker 06

  Sunlight, sleep, exercise, these are proven ways to live longer and healthier. And we tend to be far too lax at the at the governmental or level in terms of allowing the stuff that doesn't kill you right away, but that can mess you up kind of slowly over time, like particular diets 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.

• 3:22:05Speaker 06

  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 at all 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, I'm not an expert in that, but, well, type 3 diabetes is sometimes called for certain forms of dementia. It might help, it's a brain metabolite, is it gonna cure Alzheimer's? Probably not. So, when doctors are asking me these questions about things outside their field, it immediately

• 3:22:50Speaker 06

  tells me, that guy or gal can tell me about the heart, and nothing else. And just because somebody has an M.D. does not mean that they know what they're talking about, about most things. Then again, in fairness, just because someone has a PhD doesn't mean they know what they're talking about in terms of most things. One of the reasons I love doing the podcast is I get what I think are some of the best experts in the world filtered through my studio, and I can ask them directly.

• 3:23:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:23:14Speaker 06

  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.

• 3:23:57Shawn Ryan?

  Definitely. I'm gonna keep the tinfoil hat on here for just another minute. When it comes, when you're talking about, when we're talking about FDA approval on psychedelics, why, why was the chemical, why was MDMA the first one to get put up? Why wasn't it more of a natural medicine like psilocybin, or ibogaine, or ayahuasca, or, or any of these other ones? Why does it have to be a chemical? Why can't it be something that somebody can grow in their house? Why do they have to go to a pharmacy to get it?

• 3:24:27Speaker 06

  Right, so, I'll give you my, my belief about this, is that MDMA as methylene-dioxymethamphetamine.

• 3:24:38Speaker 06

  Developed in the early 1900s, by the way, and then rediscovered by Sascha 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 Phenyl-ethylamine. It means I've known and loved. It's like the worst book title ever. And I probably mispronounced the first letter in the acronym.

• 3:25:15Speaker 06

  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, like, 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

• 3:25:59Speaker 06

  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, but...

• 3:26:42Speaker 06

  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. Oh, good. Right. 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. Oh, good.

• 3:27:27Speaker 06

  Whereas with something like, we talked about LSD, it's a little bit separate, because LSD from ergot is kind of naturally occurring, but it's, most people aren't going to make it. So, it could, even though the formulas are out there someplace, I don't know, I don't go on the dark web, but 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. The Swiss like their pharmaceutical companies. And, and so if you think about what is going to be most effective

• 3:28:09Speaker 06

  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, that answers your question. I think there's more financial incentive. And also, I think the FDA is probably more comfortable

• 3:28:53Speaker 06

  with something that's synthetic than something that's naturally occurring, because it's more what they're used to working with. Okay. It's just kind of what they do, they deal with compounds. They're chemists, they're groups of chemists and doctors and toxicologists who like, look at chemical structures, and psilocybin has a chemical structure, actually looks a lot like serotonin, but it's just, 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 Abogaine, it's hard to imagine that people could get a hold of it

• 3:29:35Speaker 06

  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.

• 3:29:49Shawn Ryan?

  It just enrages me that this stuff is working so much and 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.

• 3:30:15Speaker 06

  That never should have happened, 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,

• 3:30:57Speaker 06

  it's kind of black and white at that point. They're either gonna 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.

• 3:31:19Speaker 06

  So many people go down to do the Ibegane treatment, come back and like, I'm good. Yeah. It's, it's just, uh, it's, it's mind blowing. Really, it is. And actually, I'm, I've had, because of Veteran Solutions and these fundraisers that I've spoken at, I've, um, and I don't get a kickback. They don't pay me. I take time off from work where I make money to go to these things, like to help raise money for Nolan's Lab or to, you know, to do these things. I just want to make clear because people are always like, why, what's the incentive? The incentive is, like, as you said, people are dying who don't need to die. Yeah. 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

• 3:32:00Speaker 06

  that, that have killed themselves, show up to these things. Those are the ones that really like, like, when you hear them speak or like, or their kids are there and they're just like, Yeah. Please, please, please, please. And I think, you know, just understand that there's a solu-, you know, they wish they had access to this solution. And so I, I think, um, I'm glad we're talking about this. Yeah. Because first, it's always going to be first in the veterans community and then eventually wick out to the larger community of people. I mean, suicides are at an incredible rate. You know, one thing I'm increasingly concerned about, since the experience I know, I'm concerned about mental health for everybody, frankly, but I'm very concerned about the suicide

• 3:32:43Speaker 06

  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.

• 3:33:26Speaker 06

  On his 80th birthday, I reassured him, we are good. He's actually coming on my podcast. That's amazing. I mean, I, I love my mom, I love my dad, I love my sister to the end and back. And like my dad and I have had our differences, but I mean, you know, and some of my family members are 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 gotted up, shoring up the areas of my life where I wasn't really squared away. And really hearing the message that to get right with my dad was super important,

• 3:34:09Speaker 06

  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 just kept coming through again and again and again in prayer. And, um, you know, yeah, we still disagree about things. And I also like, I can like, look at him and hear him and 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, you know? Yeah, there are things I wish he had done that he didn't do. And I'm sure when I'm a father, my son will feel the same way. But actually, if, if I may, I, I brought this, I've been reading this book that was suggested to me.

• 3:34:53Speaker 06

  Another team guy, what is with you guys? That is a really, it's somewhat of a controversial book, but if, if I could, the book is, 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, you know, home where my dad lived separately and this whole thing, I think, you know, it really struck a chord with me. But, you know, there's this, there's one passage, um, can I just read it? 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.

• 3:35:37Speaker 06

  But he said, "The hole of the remote father leaves a gap in the boy's life that demons can enter through."

• 3:35:45Speaker 06

  And that just hit me like square everywhere. And I was like, that's right. Like for every bad thing that's come to me, through me, out of me, that I regret, that I wish I had done differently, the challenges that I wish I had chosen differently. I'm not blaming my dad. That's not what this is about. But I think that we are in a point now in the evolution of this country. Let's, I do believe it's an evolution, not a devolution. I do, I'm an optimist. Where we don't know who to look to. There's a lack of either an internal or an external paternal model

• 3:36:29Speaker 06

  that helps us discern between really not good road, so, so not good road, okay road, pretty good, and best road. That we, we learn that in part through trial and error, but we also learn that in part by being told what to do at key moments. And I look out on the landscape of podcasts, right? You, Joe, Lex, Jaco. 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, 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,

• 3:37:12Speaker 06

  mine is certainly very, very much 50/50. But, but I hear from these young guys, and even guys my own age or older, like we've sort of drifted away from this idea that there's a standard kind of set of protocols, dare I say, to follow, to get yourself through the wickets, to becoming a solid person inside and out.

• 3:37:36Speaker 06

  And there's no excuse making, right? But if I look at the mental health crisis among men in this country and women, but here we're focusing on men. I think that we've had, even in homes where fathers were there, sometimes they were absent because of substance abuse. I think sometimes they were absent because they were absent. And I think sometimes they were there and are really terrific fathers. And I got friends like this with 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.

• 3:38:21Speaker 06

  That's part of being a grown man. But I do believe that quote. I think when we're young, when we're five, 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

• 3:38:51Speaker 06

  looking to and asking for guidance there can sometimes support that as well. Because I mean, I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to turn this into a sermon. I've, this is just my experience. And we need something outside ourselves that we can look to when we're troubled to help us, help steer us right. And that can be brotherhood and family and friends, but we need more, 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,

• 3:39:34Speaker 06

  "and the like boxes of all these toys nowadays are like this warrior walking out from all this destruction behind him. Like he won and he's alone." And I go, "Really?" She goes, "Yeah, go look." So I was like, "All right, I'll go look." And I looked up some, and it's true. There isn't a picture of like being in community or being with family or it's that we've created this model of like this, of this like 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, you know, marriage, kids, thriving business, you got your history in the teams and history of CIA, you're transmuting any pain that you have, as far as I can tell, into goodness for the world.

• 3:40:18Speaker 06

  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 gonna 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,

• 3:41:02Speaker 06

  but that Jim Thebow guy pulled me out multiple times on other things later, helped me. He didn't pull me out. He held me accountable. Rick Rubin held me accountable. Sometimes through tough love, sometimes just through like good old friendship and love of that kind. But I'm very lucky. I have these people in my life, and I've tried to do it for other people too. But when I hear about people putting guns in their mouths, hanging themselves, like my friend Johnny Farah, or like, or drug overdoses, and like, it's like, this is preventable. It is preventable. It's at the level of, sure, government institutions, but like, I'm saying like, I'm putting the call out now, like, I think we gotta like, crew up and take care of each other. Because time's going by.

• 3:41:46Shawn Ryan?

  It's good to hear you say that. I think, um, I feel like it's making a comeback. I think that, uh, the reins got mixed up and lost, you know, for quite a while there. And, um, I think that...

• 3:42:03Shawn Ryan?

  Because essentially, we're kinda 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, 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.

• 3:42:46Shawn Ryan?

  And luckily, I think we've, we've got a, even though we don't all know each other, I think we have an amazing crew that's extremely well-rounded. And, um, and I, I know you have to get it, I get it all the time when I go out 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, like, just listening to you, I was able to fix my family life, I took accountability." And I, 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, in the, in, in, in the same way that we're talking about this,

• 3:43:29Shawn Ryan?

  I also see this with God making a comeback, you know? And, and you see it everywhere. You see it, was it Georgia, they had that, they had that, did you see this? It was, I think it was Georgia, it might not be, but it was a, it was a, it was a, it was a, I think it was Georgia University, they had a tailgating party. And it looked like what you were describing, you were hanging out with, uh, earlier on in your life, with kegs, it looked like a, it looked like a hell of a good time. And it, and I'm sure it was. What it actually was, was thousands and thousands of kids, college students, getting baptized in the back of trucks. So amazing.

• 3:44:12Shawn Ryan?

  And it, and, um, yeah, made, made national news, but you're just, this wave is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And, uh, it's, I mean, he's working through your life, he's working through my life, I mean, I...

• 3:44:30Shawn Ryan?

  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, you know, 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 gonna 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.

• 3:45:02Speaker 06

  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 obligated to say is that, you know, you talked about these podcasters and some other people there. You know, growing up, I was lucky. I had this PE coach help me get my body strong, right? I had professors, male and female professors, help 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, and who helped me and a lot of other people get strong and help people get sober and really call people out.

• 3:45:45Speaker 06

  One thing that I make very clear, I think, when people hear men like us, with media channels like us, talking about this, there's a group that gets really scared. And I want to be really clear what we're not talking about. I'm not trying to appease these people, but I want to just make very clear what we're not talking about. We're not talking about a group of men trying to reduce the accountability of other men. We're actually talking about the opposite. We're also not talking about perfect people being perfect. I am not perfect. I've said for years, and I said it intentionally, I'm replete with flaws like anyone, right? That's the whole reason to have a relationship to God and to have a community that you're

• 3:46:27Speaker 06

  working with that helps you be the best version of yourself, right? We're not talking about any of us being perfect. We're talking about, if I screw up, I want you to call me out. I want Joe to call me out, or Lex to call me out. And then I want to know how I can do better and improve it, just like I would do for any of them. Okay? So what we're not talking about is a bunch of guys banding together to be bad. We're talking about men banding together to be better versions of themselves and teach other people how to do that. And I, it's kind of a duh if you're already on board this thing. But if you're not, people go, oh my goodness, guys gathering together, they think about misuse of power. They think about people not holding each other accountable. That is not what we're talking about. We're talking about the opposite of that.

• 3:47:11Speaker 06

  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 also not talking about forcing anything on anybody. So this is really important because I, I feel like I've heard about the bro-science thing. Listen, my bro-science friends, some of them know a lot more about health than some of my physician friends about how to actually be healthy. You know, not all of them. And I'm not saying guys with big muscles are healthy and guys with, who are, who are lean and, and thin are not. There, there are different versions of, of people and different phenotypes and archetypes and it's all good.

• 3:47:54Speaker 06

  I'm also talking about more real acceptance. I'm, 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 like, I have friends of every background, every background. And I, they're actual friends that I communicate with. And I would like to see for people that do the virtue signaling thing, how much

• 3:48:31Speaker 06

  The 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 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 Bly's book, and again, I realize it's

• 3:49:15Speaker 06

  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 where 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 grew up and they have fewer siblings now, birth rates are lower, et cetera.

• 3:49:57Speaker 06

  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

• 3:50:41Speaker 06

  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.

• 3:50:54Shawn Ryan?

  Where do you think, I know we're wrapping this up, but... Where do you think that this movement's coming from? This need?

• 3:51:03Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 3:51:06Speaker 06

  I think that, um...

• 3:51:09Shawn Ryan?

  I think it's instinct.

• 3:51:10Speaker 06

  I think it's instinct. There are 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. I'm not... There's enough of that in the world, Lord knows. I'm talking about...

• 3:51:30Speaker 06

  You can't take who we are as biological organisms as psychological organisms and try and, you know, contort the way culture is so that... and expect everyone to end up okay. This idea of everyone having a path to be having a generative life, I believe that's possible. But it requires us first, like, looking at ourselves and going, "Okay, where am I strong? Where am I weak?" I still do this. Where am I strong? Where am I weak? Where can I glean knowledge that's gonna 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, and I just want to acknowledge it over the last 20, 30 years,

• 3:52:13Speaker 06

  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 hard-wired. We've been trying to do that since the beginning of time. And, you know, I'm not one to comment on what it's like to be a woman, because I've never been one. But I can comment on what it's like to be a young male, a teen, a young adult, and an adult of my age. I can't tell you what it's like to be 75 or 80, which is why I'm going out of my way and gone out of my way to restore my relationship with my dad. And I'm learning from him. And I think that's the way it's supposed to work.

• 3:52:55Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 3:53:20Speaker 06

  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, you know, public facing, you know, side by side in an effort to make the world a better place. You know, if there's one thing that's absolutely clear is that you're trying to do that and you're doing that. And yeah, there aren't enough words to express how grateful I am, but I'm just excited to keep going. So, thank you.

• 3:53:49Shawn Ryan?

  You are doing a hell of a job, my brother.

• 3:53:51Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 3:53:51Shawn Ryan?

  Right back at you.

• 3:53:52Speaker 06

  Cheers.