The Gut Brain Connection

I speak with professor Ted Dinan who is an expert on the relationship between food and mental health Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  Shoo the croupy goose from the eunuchs jukebox, you droopy Q's X. Welcome to the Blind By Podcast. I am currently on an incredibly grueling tour of Australia and New Zealand. I'm recording this right now in Auckland, or Tamaki Makarau, as the indigenous Maori people would call it. The name literally means desirable location full of natural resources. I'm sure the Brits noticed that when they were colonizing it. However, I'm not. I'm not recording this podcast in a particularly desirable location right now. I'm in the fetal position. I'm in the fetal position in bed.

• 2:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  Covered by two quilts in complete darkness because my hotel room is tiled and the sound in my hotel room is atrocious. So the best way to get good sound on the road when I'm recording my podcast is underneath two quilts inside in a bed in the fetal position. And I know you're always saying to me, Blind Boy, you can miss a week. It's all right. You can take a week off if you're off on tour or whatever. And I appreciate that and thank you so much to the people who say that to me. But my personal role is if I can fucking put a podcast out, if, if I can do it, if I can find a way to do it and get a podcast out every week, I'm gonna do it.

• 3:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Simple as that. I'm gonna make it happen. A quality podcast. I'm not gonna record a podcast on an airplane or in the car between gigs. I'm not gonna do that. But if I can maintain standards and put it out, I'm gonna have fun making that happen. I'm gonna do it. Very simply because of, because of gratitude and humility. I genuinely love and adore making this podcast. And every single day I remind myself how lucky I am that the thing that I love doing is also my job. So that gives me a wonderful feeling of gratitude. And also I speak about failure a lot.

• 3:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  And about maybe 10 years ago, maybe 11, I think it was 2015, before this podcast on my books, I was in a musical act and we'd booked a tour of Australia and New Zealand. And so few tickets were sold, we had to cancel the fucking tour, which is not only you're not making a living from your tour, but it's costing you money because you've paid for fucking flights and hotels and everything and you don't get it back. So that was 10 years ago. That was fucking devastating at the time. Booking a tour halfway across the world and then having to cancel it because you didn't sell enough tickets is, anyone who's working in the music industry will tell you that it sends shivers down your spine. That's, that's one of the worst things that can happen.

• 4:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it would have really devastated me at the time. But 10 years later, here I am in fucking Auckland, underneath a dovey, still gigging, the sky didn't fall down and this tour sold out ages ago. So there's no such thing as fa- there's no such thing as failure on a long enough timescale and every single failure.

• 4:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is just a learning experience. And you know what I learned? Gratitude. Don't ever take anything for fucking granted. Focus on the work. And that's why, instead of taking the week off, even though it's difficult to record a podcast, I'm here, under a duvet, in a hotel in Auckland, delivering a podcast and you're listening to it. So I'm aware that I can take a week off and thank you for the people who remind me of that, but I'm choosing not to. I'm saying this too because if you're a long-term listener of this podcast, you will know, this is not the first. This is not the first crawled up in the fetal position underneath a duvet podcast. There's been a few. And every time I do those podcasts, I get concerned messages from people thinking I've

• 5:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  gone mad. I haven't gone mad. It's just... Hold on, listen to this.

• 5:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is this the podcast you want? Like this, in this room? Postman? Postman? Postman? You can't have a fucking podcast like this. No. You want this. You want this. This is what I want. This is the sound that I want. Postman. Postman. Postman. Postman. Postman. Postman is a, it's a wonderful word for, for checking the, the quality of a, a microphone or the quality of a room, because what you get? You get a P, an S, and a T. Those, those hard consonants, they're, they're like little darts. Sound.

• 6:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  I mean, sound, you can't fucking see sound, but it's vibrations of air that travel, you know? And different shapes, like a T or a P, they bounce, they bounce and create reflections or cause what's called plausives there on the microphone. And here under this duvet, I could say postman as much as I want. Postman. Postman. Postman, imagine. It's a fucking hotel now. Imagine. Well, one of the staff walks into the room and there's a, just a shape, a shape underneath the duvet on the bed, just saying the word postman over and over. Very, very strange sexual fetish. Reminds me of that story.

• 7:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Now, this could very well be a lie. This could be horseshit, or you could have heard a version of this story yourself. It was a story about... One of the lad's older brother's friends, okay, so he couldn't confirm it. But the story was, his name was Holly, that's what I remember. I don't know why he was called Holly, but his name was Holly. This fellow was about fourteen or fifteen. And it was the nineties, so pornography didn't really exist in Ireland in the nineties. It was actually illegal. Pornographic magazines or films, you couldn't buy them. They were illegal.

• 7:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  They existed, but they were smuggled in from Germany or England and sold under the counter in certain video shops, but they were illegal. And usually teenagers, if teenagers were to, to see porn, it was someone's dad, someone's dad had a V H S, had a video. So this fellow Holly, he had a friend who owned a, a V H, a porn video. He had a friend who owned a video of people having sex. So Holly would call to his friend's house and they would watch it on a video player. And Holly was like, can I have a loan of the porn video? Can I have a loan of it? And then his friend was like, no, it's my dad's, this is my dad's and I'm after sneaking it.

• 8:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  He doesn't even know we're watching this, he has it hidden, found it in his wardrobe. No, you can't have a loan of it. Now, in those days with V H S, you couldn't like, you couldn't like copy a video onto another video. You needed to have a special video recorder that had a double deck. No one had that. But what you could do, and if you're old enough to remember this, you'll know, you, you could go to the, the headphone output on the video player. And if you also had a Walkman, you could record just the audio. You could record the, the sound of the video onto a tape. So Holly says, can I record the sound of your porn video? Can I just record this? You wanna record the sound of the porn video? You wanna, you wanna hear people having sex?

• 9:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, it's the nineties, there's no internet. Yes, that's what I wanna do. I'm willing to record the sound of your porn video onto a cassette that I will listen to on my Walkman. So the buddy says, okay, work away. So he did it with his Walkman and he recorded just the sound of a porn video. The sound of people having sex. So anyway, Holly, who was about fourteen, went home and went up and, and laid down on his bed with the door closed. And he put his headphones on and closed his eyes and listened to the sound of people having sex while masturbating. And then when he finished,

• 10:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  when he finished,

• 10:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  there was biscuits and tea beside him.

• 10:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  So his ma had walked in, in the middle of his fucking, while he was listening to people having sex in his headphones with his eyes closed and his dick out. His ma had walked in and brought in, put tea and biscuits beside him and then left quickly. Now that might be bullshit. That might never have happened. You might have heard a version of that story yourself where you're from, but that was, that was a horror story. When we were teenagers, that was a fucking horror story. That was terrifying. That left, that really left you frightened. That left you scared. And I'm thinking of that now underneath this duvet, because what if the hotel manager just walks into the room, just walks and, and all they see is just a, a, a shape on the duvet.

• 10:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's someone underneath the duvet just saying, postman, postman, postman, postman. I'd nearly fart if I was wanking. You could explain that. What are you doing underneath the duvet, sir? I'm recording a podcast. What's it about? Wanking.

• 11:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm not lying, I wouldn't be lying. So, look, I'm not doing the entirety of this podcast in the fetal position underneath these duvets, that's not gonna happen. But I do have, I have a guest, I have a wonderful guest this week, this is pre-recorded, the guest isn't climbing in under the duvet with me. No, this week I'm speaking with a psychiatrist, an incredibly established psychiatrist by the name of Professor Ted Dinan from UCC in Cork. Ted is a world renowned expert in the relationship between the human gut and our mental health, the gut and

• 12:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  the brain connection. He's an expert on how the food that we eat influences our mental health. I've had Ted on the podcast as a guest about five years ago, but I wanted to bring him back because the field he's in is, it's a margin and it's utterly fascinating. And it's an area where 15, 20 years ago, I don't think it was taken seriously, this idea that food that we eat, our nutrition can actually have an impact on our mental health. He co-authored the book about it called The Psychobiotic Revolution, which is well worth checking out. So I'm gonna play this chat I had with Professor Ted Dinan, it was, it was a live

• 12:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  podcast down in Cork in the Opera House, and the audio is beautiful. God bless. You're a psychiatrist, but your area is in the relationship between the food that we eat and our mental health?

• 12:57Speaker 04

  That's correct. When I came back to Cork, which is, she was about 20 years ago now, most of my research up until then was pharmacology or drug-related research. So when I came to UCC, I kind of looked around the campus and thought, well, is there anything that's kind of world-class or approaching world-class here? And there were, there were a few things. And undoubtedly, food and microbiology in UCC.

• 13:24Speaker 04

  As you see, are extremely strong. So I kind of, I suppose mutated the research I was doing, which was brain-related research, to look at bacteria within the intestine and look at how we feed those bacteria, which clearly we do. And, you know, so that's really how the research actually evolved. So you're right, nutrition and what we eat is very fundamental, but because it directly affects the brain. I mean, clearly some food gets into the brain and some food ends up feeding the microbes in our intestine.

• 14:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  And something, what I find fascinating about the research is, and the findings that you have is, so I'd say nearly thirty years ago, to say to somebody, the food that you eat may impact your mental health or your mood, this would have been considered like what we call holistic, or you wouldn't, it wouldn't sound very scientific.

• 14:26Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 14:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it'd be the type of thing that might be rubbish.

• 14:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, it would have been. I mean, when I was a medical student, and I went to med school here in Cork, when I was a medical student, we spoke about commensal bacteria in the intestine, and that meant that there were bacteria in our intestine. They didn't do us any harm, but they didn't do us any darn good either. And we have about a kilo and a half, so about three pounds of bacteria in our intestine, which is a lot of, it's a big volume of bacteria. It's about the same weight as the human brain. And, you know, that those bacteria should all, I mean, there was never a time when humans were sterile. We've never been animals that didn't have bacteria on board. So we've

• 15:13Speaker 04

  evolved with those bacteria. And clearly, those bacteria do us a lot of good, as we can talk about in a moment, and we in turn, of course, feed them. I mean, if we didn't eat, those bacteria wouldn't survive. You know, I always find it quite intriguing. I'm a psychiatrist, a general adult psychiatrist, and I would occasionally see people who have anorexia nervosa, for instance, it's it it's a nasty condition, to put it mildly, but it's interesting that in in anorexia nervosa, when people, when the sufferer takes in a certain amount of nutrition, it might be a very small amount because obviously they're anorexic,

• 15:56Speaker 04

  but the actual bacteria result in the absorption of far more calories than any of us here would absorb. So we end up absorbing more calories than in fact than the normal person does, presumably because the bacteria, I suppose, in some sense realise that if they don't take in what calories are there, they'll end up dying. I mean, if, you know, I mean, anorexia nervosa can be a, it can be a lethal or a fatal condition in some situations, you know.

• 16:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  And

• 16:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  what about like, the hard thing to understand is is how you're even proving the stuff you're looking at like there's a simple question I'd have is

• 16:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  are we eating food today that you can tell isn't helping our moods or our mental health?

• 16:51Speaker 04

  Oh, I think there is no doubt about that. I mean, you know, when you look at a Western diet, it consists of a lot of processed food. I mean, if you go into a fast food joint, you know, you're going to get highly processed foods. And highly processed foods have a very negative impact on the gut microbiota and they're not very nutritious. You know, if you consistently eat ultra-processed foods, the actual diversity of bacteria, as I said, there's a kilo and a half of bacteria in your intestine and they're very diverse. There are up to a thousand strain of different bacteria in your intestine.

• 17:33Speaker 04

  But the diversity of those bacteria shrinks enormously if you go on a diet of ultra-processed foods.

• 17:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  So it's like When you say biodiversity, I'm thinking of like biodiversity. So if we think of a forest.

• 17:51Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 17:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  If you throw a factory into the middle of that forest, you lose biodiversity.

• 17:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  So that's what eating very processed foods.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 18:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  And we need a diversity of natural bacteria in our guts.

• 18:04Speaker 04

  We do, we do. You know, it's interesting that, you know, when a baby is initially born, and if it was born per vagina, through the mum's birth canal, for the first two years of life, it has very limited bacteria in the intestine. There are lactobacillus and bifidobacteria. So there's no, there's no great diversity. Now, obviously, if the baby is born by cesarean section, it's a different situation. They end up with far more diversity than normal because they pick up bugs from the skin of the mum, the skin of the doctor, the skin of the nurse and so forth. So they end up with a very diverse microbiota.

• 18:42Speaker 04

  But when we're talking about healthy adults, as adults, we want to retain as much diversity as possible. A loss of diversity is a forerunner to ill health. And, and that's particularly true in elderly people. I mean elderly people, people, we all want to grow old. And, and the older I get, the more I want to grow old and age in a healthy way. But, you know, healthy aging is about maintaining diversity in the gut microbiota. There's wonderful data here from Cork, actually, which was in Nature, was on the front cover of Nature a few years ago, from Paul O'Toole's group,

• 19:26Speaker 04

  where he followed a large group of people in the community, some of whom ended up in nursing homes, some of whom didn't. But before they became frail, there was a loss of diversity. The, the, the normal diversity that you see in, in healthy young adults was lost. And that preceded the onset of frailty. So people became frail after they lost the diversity in the microbiota.

• 19:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  And if we're to look at a person who doesn't have this diversity of bacteria in their gut, right? What mental health issues does this person more at risk?

• 20:05Speaker 04

  Right, that's an interesting question. I certainly stress-related disorders are increased very dramatically. Now, there is increasing evidence emerging in neurology that maybe Parkinson's disease might be associated with disturbance of the gut microbiota as well. But in in healthy adults who lose diversity, the risk is that one develops stress-related disorders. Now, what do I mean by stress-related disorders? I mean, the anxiety disorders, there are a few different anxiety disorders, and depression. We did a study, we published a paper a few years ago, where we took a people who were

• 20:49Speaker 04

  attending my clinic at Cork University Hospital at the time, and they volunteered to give a sample of poo, basically feces, and we looked at the diversity of the microbiota, the bacteria within their feces. And we compared them to a group of healthy subjects. And what we essentially found was that the people who were depressed, now these would have been quite seriously depressed individuals, they had a definite decrease in diversity of microbes within the intestine. And interestingly enough, you know, when you when you take the feces from somebody

• 21:28Speaker 04

  who is depressed, and if you transplant it into an animal, a rat, let's say, or a mouse, and that's very easy because rodents tend to be coprophagic, they will eat feces, you know, so it's not very difficult to transplant the microbiota, you don't have to do anything horrible to them, they they just, they'll do that naturally. But if you transplant the microbiota of the depressed patient into a rat, and you have another group of rats in whom you transplant the microbiota from a normal, healthy individual. The actual behaviour of the animal who is the microbiota for a depressed patient radically changes.

• 22:09Speaker 04

  They become more depressed-like, they explore far less in their environment, their biochemistry alters, their immunology, I mean, there's a lot written and spoken about even in the late press now about immunology and how it can be disturbed and depression and other conditions. So, in various ways, their behaviour, immunology and biochemistry changes. And that's when they've had the transplant from a depressed patient. An animal who has a transplant from a healthy subject, so who is a humanized microbiota, but from a healthy subject, there is no change in behaviour or any aspect of biochemistry.

• 22:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's fucking unreal. What's coming up for me as I say that too is, I just couldn't, like, that's unbelievably fascinating. And that for me there is the, I love it when science reminds me a bit of art, and what I mean by that is the level of lateral thinking and absurdity required to do that.

• 23:13Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 23:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  And, we're gonna get a rat to eat shit. Like, let's be honest. But at the same time.

• 23:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, what's breaking my heart about it, right, is, in America at the moment, you're seeing, Trump in particular, is removing funding for a lot of, a lot of science is getting funding pulled.

• 23:32Speaker 04

  Absolutely, yeah, yeah.

• 23:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  And, they would take a study like that, they'd say, have you seen what they're doing in Cork? They're getting rats to eat shit. But, they had, I think Trump used the example where, they said that some scientists had taken several million, they were being funded several million to make mice transgender. And they used this as an example of, hey, isn't this mad? Look at these crazy scientists, let's stop giving them money.

• 24:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  But like, what you've just described there, that, that's absurd. It's like, what are you doing there? What are you actually doing, Ted? Well, we're getting a rat to eat human shit.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that's what it is. And it's silly and crazy, but what you've discovered there is... Fascinating and probably life changing for humans in the future.

• 24:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I suppose the

• 24:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's amazing.

• 24:27Speaker 04

  The life changing aspect will be when we have technical interventions that actually improve the management of mental health. And by that I mean, you know, I introduced a concept in the literature a few years ago called psychobiotics.

• 24:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yes.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  And psychobiotics are bacteria which when we ingest them in adequate amounts have a positive mental health benefit. Now, we have worked on a number of different microbes, John Cryan and Harriet Chelikins and I and, you know, several others have worked on a variety of different bacteria. And most probiotic bacteria that you'll get in a health food store here in Cork or any, any town in Ireland, really, most of them don't have any impact on mental health. But what we found was having, you know, we identified a number of bacteria which clearly did have a positive benefit on mental health. There was one, it was a

• 25:24Speaker 04

  Biflongum, I think it was a strain seventeen fourteen. But we began, begun working with that a few years ago. And we found that when people took it, and we did, it was placebo controlled. So people didn't know whether they were taking this or they were taking a placebo. They were less stressed and they reported themselves as less stressed. Now, the, the stress hormone in humans, as I probably most of you know, is cortisol. And when we're very stressed, our cortisol levels are particularly high. And the best time of day for distinguishing somebody who's very depressed, stressed from somebody who's not stressed is first thing in the morning when somebody wakes up. So one of the ways in which we've been looking

• 26:07Speaker 04

  at cortisol is just simply to take saliva from people and look at their cortisol levels. And people who are stressed will have very high cortisol levels in their saliva. Now, interestingly enough, cortisol and saliva, the levels parallel those in the blood. So if they're up in the blood, they'll be up in the, in the, in the saliva. And what we showed was that People who reported themselves as less stressed on this particular psychobiotic, their cortisol levels were much lower. So they found themselves to be less stressed and their cortisol levels were much lower. And interestingly enough, and I, I, I think this is quite intriguing. We did very sophisticated electrophysiological analysis of the brain.

• 26:50Speaker 04

  And we found that ingesting these bacteria actually changed the EEG activity. So the electrical activity in the brain was altered following the administration of this particular bacteria. So, so I think, you know, I, I, I'm a big believer that for most of us, diet is the way to change bacteria. It isn't by taking capsules or supplements in any way. There are occasions where supplements are required, but I'm a big believer that diet is, is really the way forward. But having said that, we, we found that with this particular probiotic or psychobiotic, that there genuinely was an impact on stress. So I would like to see a situation evolve over the next few years.

• 27:35Speaker 04

  You know, most people who are depressed don't come to see psychiatrists like me. They might go to their GP, they might go to a psychologist, they might go to a counselor. You know, they don't end up seeing a psychiatrist, which is fine. So I see the tip of the iceberg. So people who are very, very severely ill. Now, if you look at people who have milder forms of illness, most of them don't want to take an antidepressant. Now, I'm not adverse to antidepressants. I prescribe them and I think they can be very, very useful. But most people who have milder forms of depression don't want to take an antidepressant. And I think over the next few years, and I, I would hope even within, within the next four or five years,

• 28:20Speaker 04

  you will see psychobiotic bacteria out there, which are probiotic, that can be taken, that will be beneficial in people who are mildly depressed. In fact, there are studies out there at the moment, there are studies where they're called meta-analysis. Meta-analysis where you combine a whole load of Studies and you draw conclusions not based on one study but on several studies. And those meta analysis do conclude that certain psychobiotics in fact have antidepressant effect. So I don't think that this is ever going to be a way for treating the very severe forms of depression that I might see at my clinic. But I do think that it will be the way forward with milder forms of depression in primary

• 29:02Speaker 04

  care or, you know, in a counselling or a psychotherapy sessions.

• 29:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  That sounds incredible and phenomenal, right? But the thing that comes up for me when I hear you speaking about this is, and I look at society, what I think of is issues around class and issues around poverty, right? So if you think of not so much in Ireland yet, right, but very much in America, if you're very poor in America, first off, you're under a huge amount of stress, your life is very stressful, but also cheap food tends to be processed. Getting your hands on fresh vegetables, fresh meat, whole foods is very, very expensive.

• 29:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  So people who are experiencing the trauma and stress of poverty are also finding themselves in a situation where the food that they can afford happens to also be processed. Like, how does that conversation start? Because obviously with this, the goal of this is that your research finds its way into government and into policy. And then if your research is saying it's a good idea for the general population, for their mental health, to be eating whole foods.

• 30:16Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 30:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  Then you have to have a conversation of, well, then everyone should be able to afford it in some way, and we're drifting away from that.

• 30:22Speaker 04

  That's a very, very important point. You know, a few years ago, I was part of a European consensus. We published a paper recommending an appropriate diet for people who suffer from depression or either currently depressed or suffer from depression. And we made a number of recommendations, and the recommendations essentially were that people who suffer from depression should eat a lot of fruit and vegetables, they should eat a lot of fermented food, and nuts are certainly a good part of the diet, and they should keep red meat particularly to a minimum. Now,

• 31:03Speaker 04

  That is, I think, you know, an optimal diet for somebody who's suffering or at risk of suffering from depression. The point you raise there is a very important point. But, you know, I would ask, you know, how much do carrots cost in Cork? How much do turnips cost? How much does a cabbage cost if you go into the English market? Not an awful lot. You know, during the summer, mackerel can be very plentiful. Mackerel, fish is a key component of a healthy diet. I know, you know, I, in my clinical practice, I have patients who come in to me and I say, do you eat fish? And they say, oh God, I wouldn't eat that. I hate the smell of it or whatever, you know?

• 31:47Speaker 04

  So I appreciate that there are some people who don't like eating fish. But we do, you don't have to eat expensive fish. You don't have to be eating oysters or flipping whatever. You know, mackerel during the summer months is very cheap. So I think, I think we have a big educational issue.

• 32:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 32:05Speaker 04

  You know, there isn't the money that, you know, I think money is important. I agree entirely. You know, you can spend a lot of money on a very good diet, but you can actually spend less money on a good diet than on a highly processed diet.

• 32:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  So information and education there is very important. Cause the last time I was chatting to you, you were talking about how brilliant it is, kimchi.

• 32:27Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 32:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Over the pandemic, I made fucking loads of kimchi. But kimchi is wonderful because it's just a fucking head of, of Napa cabbage that you get in Dons for like a euro. And then the rest is salt and as much chili as you like and some garlic.

• 32:45Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 32:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  But also just it's a very mindful thing to make. The process of making kimchi, keeping it in the jar. And then once you get the taste of it, it's a bit freaky because it's, it's cabbage that's fizzy. So if you've never tasted kimchi, it'll freak you out. But you were saying like kimchi that you make yourself can actually be fantastic for.

• 33:07Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, there are kefir, kombucha. I mean, there are so many different types of fermented food out.

• 33:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like even my ma makes kefir like.

• 33:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  She's in her eighties, like, you know what I mean?

• 33:16Speaker 04

  And she enjoys making it.

• 33:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  She makes it, yeah.

• 33:18Speaker 04

  Indeed. You know, I, I suppose certainly when I grew up in Cork, the only fermented food that was available at the time would be yogurt. But of course you go into any super value now or any shop at all and you'll find kombucha, kefir, you know, kimchi, you know. So you get, you get a wide variety of fermented foods and fermented foods are very, very good because, you know, they're obviously. You can go into a health food store and buy capsules with lactobacilli or bifidobacteria. But I believe, I think the most appropriate way of taking anything is in a good diet. You know, there's a very interesting, and I, I think it says a lot about, about medicine.

• 34:01Speaker 04

  In nineteen oh five, Eli Mechnikov, who was a Russian zoologist, won a Nobel Prize in Medicine. And he won a Nobel Prize, he travelled through Bulgaria. And when he travelled through Bulgaria, he noted that there were a lot of people who had reached a hundred years of age. Now, back in nineteen oh five, you know, not too many people would have reached a hundred. But he recognised the fact that the people who lived to very old age invariably were taking an enormous amount of fermented food in in their diet. So they were eating a lot of fermented food. He won the Nobel Prize in nineteen oh five.

• 34:41Speaker 04

  And it says a lot about medicine. For a hundred years, his work was largely ignored and forgotten about. And that happens in medicine, that something can be fashionable and Donald Trump or somebody comes along and, you know, castigates it and it disappears from, from, from vision. But, but certainly he found, and I think it is true, that eating fermented food and a variety of fermented food is exceedingly good. Now, if one doesn't like fermented food, maybe taking capsules is a reasonable alternative. But I, I do genuinely believe that there is no alternative to eating good food. Now, it's a bit like, you know, I've mentioned fish. Personally, I like eating fish. I, I, I enjoy fish.

• 35:24Speaker 04

  But some people don't. And, you know. Polyunsaturated fatty acids are the fatty acids that we get from fish. And there's a lot of omega three in particular in fish. Now, you can buy polyunsaturated fatty acids in capsules and any in boots or wherever. If one doesn't eat fish, I think it is reasonable to take in polyunsaturated fatty acids in a capsule. Because we don't make polyunsaturated fatty acids ourselves. I mean, you know, most, most things in our diet, we might be able to replicate by taking in some other food. Or we may manufacture it ourselves. But we do not manufacture polyunsaturated fatty acids.

• 36:09Speaker 04

  So I would recommend that if somebody doesn't eat fish, doesn't like fish, that taking in polyunsaturated fatty acids is probably a bother.

• 36:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  If somebody is vegan and don't want to eat anything that comes from animals?

• 36:21Speaker 04

  There are, there are sources of polyunsaturated fatty acids that are vegan appropriate. So they don't come from fish. And so, so I would suggest, and you can get those in boots, you can get them in various pharmacies.

• 36:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  Flaxseed.

• 36:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Flaxseed would be, would be a good example. And of course, you know, you, you mentioned mental health and, and, and supplements a while ago. And of course, most people here will have heard of serotonin because, you know, various, I suppose, Eli Lilly and drug companies have rendered it popular by introducing drugs that impact on the serotonin system. And serotonin is manufactured from tryptophan. So tryptophan is an amino acid that gives rise. And a lot from Turkey. But we showed about 10 or 12 years ago that in fact, it used to be said, and it still is said in a lot of medical textbooks, that all the tryptophan comes from diet and Turkey is a very rich source of tryptophan.

• 37:20Speaker 04

  But we actually showed that in fact, microbes can produce tryptophan as well. And that particularly bifidobacteria actually manufacture tryptophan. So there's two sources of tryptophan. There's tryptophan from the diet and there's tryptophan from the bacteria in our intestine. And tryptophan crosses the blood brain barrier, gets into the brain and it's the building block of serotonin. Now, I sometimes regard it as simplistic, but psychiatrists are often, you know, sometimes can talk, in my opinion, in rather simplistic ways. I don't believe that depression is just

• 38:01Speaker 04

  simply a disorder of serotonin. I think that that's a gross oversimplification. But I do believe that serotonin does play a role in mood. And undoubtedly, tryptophan, which is the building block of serotonin, we need enough of it crossing the blood brain barrier in order to keep the serotonin levels normal. Because without adequate serotonin, you undoubtedly see a lowering of mood, you have problems with sleep, sleep undoubtedly becomes dysregulated, and appetite can become dysregulated as well.

• 38:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  Before we go for a break, something, so you also, you worked in pharmacology, you got a PhD in pharmacology. And when I listen to you, sometimes I feel like the things that you're saying are actually quite threatening to the pharmaceutical industry, because you're saying, you're not, what you're saying can't be turned into a pill. Well, it can be, but you're saying, actually, just go and eat better food. You're not saying we're going to get this and put it in a pill. Do you ever find pushback from pharmaceutical industry or anything?

• 39:09Speaker 04

  No. Well, my attitude is that the people who would come to see me, who are very severely depressed, undoubtedly, they need pharmacological and/or psychological intervention. So I think what I'm saying really is more applicable to milder forms of depression. I mean, you know, cognitive behavior therapy is a very useful form of psychological intervention. Antidepressants also have a role in treating depression. But I do think that it's, you know, when you look at milder forms of depression, the two key items, as far as I am concerned, are good diet and exercise. And I think that in general, people do not exercise enough.

• 39:51Speaker 04

  I mean, I always give people advice that they should exercise, and I have 23 or 24 year olds.

• 39:57Speaker 04

  Come into my clinic and they come in the following, maybe two or three weeks later. And they say, I've been exercising, I've been walking two or three miles a day. Now, for somebody at twenty three or twenty four years, two or three miles a day walking is a joke. I mean, you know, it needs to be vigorous exercise. And I think ultimately, optimally, it should be a combination of aerobic and anaerobic exercise. By that, I mean, you know, by aerobic exercise, I mean, I've always loved running. I, you know, I still run, I, I, I enjoy it, I get a lot of pleasure from it, I've been doing it since I was a kid. But anaerobic exercise would be lifting weights or sprinting or whatever, you know, because they're, they're, they're obvious.

• 40:40Speaker 04

  You run out of oxygen pretty quickly when you're doing those sort of things. But there's no doubt about it that when it comes to mental health, apart from diet, which is clearly very important. Exercise is absolutely fundamental and not just in relation to depression. Although, you know, if you run five or six miles or, you know, whatever, you, your mood lifts.

• 41:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 41:04Speaker 04

  Definitely, you know.

• 41:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Absolutely. Like, I mean, Jesus, we all noticed that over the pandemic. Like, if, if anyone here was exercising regularly, I was exercising. Like, running and going to the gym was the cornerstone of my mental health. And then when the pandemic hit, couldn't go to the gym anymore.

• 41:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Then because I couldn't go to the gym, I started running more. But it was like, my muscles wasted away and then I ended up injured and couldn't run at all.

• 41:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that's when my mental health difficulty started over the pandemic.

• 41:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  And one thing I would like to ask, ask you before we, we have a break is. When my, okay, if I'm experiencing anxiety and I'm depressed. I want to eat shit processed food, right?

• 41:47Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 41:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  But when I'm exercising frequently, going to the gym, feeling good. I don't crave processed food, I crave food that's homemade, that's, that's whole.

• 42:00Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 42:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  What's going on there? What, why is, why do I want shit when I'm, when I'm depressed and good food when I'm, when I'm?

• 42:08Speaker 04

  An interesting question. I mean, I'm fascinated by muscle and the proteins they produce. I mean, there are, the proteins that are produced by muscle are called myokines. And when we exercise, obviously, we produce a lot of myokines. One of the myokines is actually brain-derived neurotrophic factors. So it's actually very important from a brain perspective. But the other myokines are, are, are very important as well. And they have a big influence on our gut. They have a big influence on the microbes within our intestine. So I, I, I don't, I can't give a very specific answer to your question. But I do believe that generating myokines by vigorous aerobic exercise

• 42:52Speaker 04

  does tend to lead us towards good food choices. And poor food choices when we exercise badly, or when we don't exercise at all.

• 43:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  Or when you've got the fear from a hangover. Jesus Christ. But seriously, you know, when you get the fear from a hangover.

• 43:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

• 43:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  Depressed and anxiety. It's like, I battered sausages only, please. Nothing else. You know what I mean?

• 43:16Speaker 04

  That, that, that is true. I won't disagree, but.

• 43:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, we're going to take a break so you can have a little pint and a piss. And we'll be back out in about 15 minutes. All right. Welcome back to the duvet. I'm underneath the duvet. Welcome back. Um, let's, I hope you're enjoying the chat there with Professor Ted Dinan. Let's have a little Ocarina pause before we get back into the rest of the chat, all right? I did bring the Ocarina with me, the other side of the world. Of course I did. And I'm going to play it underneath the bed covers.

• 44:11Speaker 02

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• 44:42Speaker 05

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• 45:11Speaker 00

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• 45:47Speaker 00

  That was my best, Akarina.

• 45:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Hi, this is Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman. Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of the higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high-fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a Berry Chantilly Cake. Ready-to-cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings? And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 46:26Blindboy Boatclub?

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• 46:37Speaker 01

  All for $8. Ba da ba ba ba. Hey guys, it is Pablo Torre from Pablo Torre Finds Out. And as a journalist, I like to think I have the answers. But every holiday season, gifting makes me think otherwise. Getting it right feels impossible and can get quite stressful. But thankfully Sephora takes a lot of the pressure off. Whether you're shopping for a beauty expert, a skincare lover, or someone who is just hard to shop for. Sephora's got it all. The big assist comes from Sephora's expert beauty advisors, who remove the guesswork with personalized recommendations so you can find something thoughtful and useful for the people on your list. Beauty is a gift anyone can give. So this holiday season, shop gifts at Sephora and give something beautiful.

• 47:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  For any new listeners that might be, that's the people could just tune into the fucking podcast because they want to, they want to hear about the relationship between the brain and the gut. And now, all of a sudden, now all of a sudden I'm talking from underneath the dovey and playing an ocarina. There's a reason for that. It's that you didn't get startled by any advertisements. I don't like startling people with advertisements. They can be very loud and abrasive. So I play an ocarina to warn people. And that's a dog friendly ocarina. It's a bass ocarina. So it won't excite the ears of any nearby dogs who might be listening to this podcast. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If this podcast brings you mirth, merriment,

• 48:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  escapism, entertainment, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast, please consider supporting it directly where listener fund it. I adore making this podcast. I'm incredibly grateful that this podcast is my job. But it is my job and the reason that this is my full time job is because of direct funding from listeners via the Patreon page. This is how I pay my bills. It's how I rent out my office. Everything. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. And for that, you get four podcasts a month. But you know what? If you can't afford that, if you don't have the money, whatever, that's no problem at all.

• 48:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Listen for free. You can listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. So everybody gets the exact same podcast I get to earn a living. Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. Ideally, sign up on a desktop or the web browser on your phone. Don't sign up as a new patron, right? Using the Patreon app on the iPhone because Apple are greedy, greedy bastards and they take 30%. Okay, just a few upcoming gigs. I mean, I think I'm gonna have a quietish summer. Well, no, there's a big, huge fucking, a big tour.

• 49:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  But in Ireland on the 18th of May, I'm up in Cavan. Wonderful, beautiful Cavan. I can't wait. The Cavan Arts Festival, I think I gigged that last year or the year before. Beautiful, wonderful Cavan. There's, that's a very small gig. It's a tiny little gig that I wanna do because Cavan is beautiful. And I wanna have a day trip up to Cavan and do a little gig at an arts festival. So there's very little tickets for that. Come along to the Cavan Arts Festival, the 18th of May. And then I embark on my big giant tour of Scotland and England, which is starting in June.

• 50:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm in Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, York, London, Norwich, East Sussex and Bexhill. I'm doing a big tour for the wonderful cracking tans in the middle of summer. I'm really looking forward to it. There's very little tickets left for that tour. So come along, please. Come out, ye cracking tans. It's gonna be great crack. And also, any of those. Any of those places that I listed out, if you have suggestions for guests or people who you'd like me to speak to at these podcasts, give me a shout on Instagram, Blind by Boat

• 50:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Club on Instagram. Back to the chat with Ted Dinan, it's toasty underneath these, it's fucking hot outside and I'm underneath this duvet, back to cork in the past. We were chatting backstage about, when you're mentioning fermented food, right, and I was drinking a beer, and I'm like, well, beer is fermented, does that count?

• 51:15Speaker 04

  Well, I think it does. I mean, you know, beer.

• 51:23Speaker 04

  I wasn't drinking, I might quickly add, but anyway, the, no, beer and wine are natural products. I mean, I do see distillation as producing something which is highly processed. I mean, you know, one can make an argument for Irish whiskey or whatever, but it is, it is a process, a processing business. I mean, but when you, when you look at beer and wine, they occurred naturally, they weren't something that we suddenly evolved with. So they are, they are natural products of yeast fermentation.

• 52:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm gonna go on a small bit of a tangent now, right, but on that subject of distillations, something I'm fascinated about with your work is, I, I love mythology and I love folklore, right?

• 52:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because I think that mythology and folklore were things that human beings had before we had writing and before we had science.

• 52:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  So you can find a lot of knowledge in, in our stories. And even your mentioning there about distillation, distillation is something to be cautious about, and distillation also isn't natural. And you can see evidence that in that, in Irish folklore around distillation. Like, I was speaking to you backstage about, just on the subject of mental health, the changelings, we had changelings in Irish folklore. And you know about changelings, do you? So changelings were...

• 52:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  It wasn't just Irish folklore, you had it in a lot of European folklore too. But a changeling is, the fairies will come and they will harm someone that you love. And they will replace the person that you love with a changeling. And this was often used as an explanation for very, very sad things that we didn't understand. So one thing was, there was huge infant mortality. Infant mortality was massive, 200 years ago. And if a person went to their baby and the baby wasn't alive anymore, their way of rationalising it wasn't, "My baby has died, this is a changeling. What is before me is a changeling. This is like a little doll that the fairies have put here.

• 53:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  And they've taken my baby and that baby is away with the fairies." And it was also used as an explanation for people who might have been mentally ill. You know, if your brother or sister experienced psychotic symptoms or even dementia, they would say, "That's not your brother, that's not your sister, that's not your father, that's a changeling. The fairies have come and they have taken the person that you love. And they're away with the fairies, but what's been left behind is a changeling." And these were the stories that people told themselves to explain grief, something they didn't understand. But with Poochine makers, right? A very fascinating thing occurred within the folklore of Poochine makers.

• 54:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  And how I find this shit out is, there's a beautiful website called dukas.ie. And what dukas is, is it's our collection of national, national collection of folklore. In the 1930s, the government went to all of the children in Ireland, all the schoolkids. And the government wanted to create what's called the Schools' Collection. They went to all the kids in Ireland in the 30s and said, "Go up to the mountains, go and find some old people in your community, get them to tell you their stories and write it down." And this is the Schools' Collection. And when you go to dukas.ie, there's 700,000 documents. You can type in any word and you will read a story that a kid wrote down.

• 55:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  And they might have been talking to their great-grandparent or whatever, these old stories. And when I type in "Poochine", I find out about the folklore of Poochine makers. And pochine makers believed that they were susceptible to the fairies. To the point that if a pochine maker had a little kid, a little boy, boys in particular, they would dress the boy as a girl until that boy was about six or seven years of age, because they wanted to confuse the fairies. But the pochine makers believed that this process of getting fermented beer and then running it through a still was so unnatural and so strange, and this end result of this

• 55:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  spirit was so strange that they must be stealing it from the fairies, that this is somehow wrong. So they believed that when they were doing this, that what they'd do is you start fucking brewing pochine now, or you start distilling pochine, you're stealing magic from the other world and the fairies are gonna come and get you. And what they're gonna do is they're gonna come for your boy child, they're gonna make it into a changeling, so dress the boy as a girl to confuse the fairies. But also, they weren't writing recipes down, they weren't writing down the process of distillation, so they had the stories about how to do it. And the first bit of pochine that comes out from the still is known as the fairies' leavings. And they take it and they throw it over the shoulder for the fairies, but that first bit

• 56:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  that comes out, I don't know the name of it, it's whatever type of alcohol it is, it's the one that can blind you.

• 56:40Speaker 04

  Methanol.

• 56:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's the one, so methanol is the first one that comes out. These pochine makers didn't know what the fuck methanol was, but they knew that this is dangerous, so you give that one to the fairies. And what you have there is indigenous folk knowledge confirming what you're saying there. This is not natural, this thing that's being done. And the interesting thing about, just about the history of distillation, the Irish were the first to make whisky. We were the first ones to make what we would call whisky, right? And how we figured out how to make whisky was around the time 56th century. Patrick comes over, right? And what Patrick does is, he doesn't just introduce Christianity, he introduces the

• 57:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  new technology of writing, okay, to Ireland in the 5th century. And what the Irish monks were doing in the 5th century, Britain was collapsing, Europe was collapsing because the Roman Empire was collapsing, and Irish monks were preserving Latin, they were preserving the Latin language, and through trade... Irish monks were getting their hands on any piece of Latin script or Greek script that they could get their hands on and translating it into the illuminated manuscripts that we know. But what they also came across was the people who invented the process of distillation were the Arabs, okay? And the Greeks translated the Arab distillation process.

• 58:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  But when the Arabs were distilling, they weren't making alcohol, they were making perfumes. They were getting flowers and making essential oils. But then Irish monks were the ones to go, what had happened if we did that with beer? And that's how whiskey came about. That's why whiskey comes from Ireland. It was just drunk Irish monks, because beer was being made in monasteries, you know, this natural beer. And some monk just said, those Arabs there that were making perfume, let's chance that with beer. And then we end up with whiskey.

• 58:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, one of the points you've made there is, you know, the very essence of being human is to want explanation. And in recent times, I mean, obviously, science has provided some explanation. There's still loads of issues that we don't have scientific explanations for. But of course, you know, when you look back, people had different explanations, you know, you back to polytheistic times when people believed in multiple gods. I mean, look back at ancient Rome, they had numerous gods and they explained things based on the activity of the gods, you know.

• 59:20Speaker 04

  And obviously, in recent times, we've had monotheistic religions like Catholicism or Christianity, Judaism, Islam and so forth. And they do provide, as religions, they provide a certain explanation for things. Science, I suppose, has only been around for a relatively short period of time and it does provide a certain explanation. You know, it's interesting, when you look back at ancient Rome, one of the most famous physicians in ancient Rome was Galen. And Galen, he was actually Spanish, but he was regarded as a Roman.

• 1:00:00Speaker 04

  And he put together the first group of pharmacology compounds of drugs that were used for treating a variety of illnesses. And those, that pharmacopeia actually lasted for fifteen hundred years. And after fifteen hundred years was largely replaced. But it really does demonstrate that advances in science, we all like to think they're going to be major advances in science and a cure for cancer around the corner and a cure for this and that. But in fact, science moves very, very slowly. And the progress that's made over a, over a lifetime is actually very limited. I mean, we like to think that there are major advances being made at the moment, and there are, there are some advances being made.

• 1:00:45Speaker 04

  And undoubtedly, things like artificial intelligence will, will, will help move the process forward. Because if you have, let's say, a receptor that you think blocking it might be useful in treating a cancer, you can now look at a library of thousands of molecules and come up with one or two molecules that block that receptor. And you can do that in maybe ten or fifteen minutes, whereas before it might take months of manual, manually going through the various compounds. So I think, you know, science does move. It moves rather slowly. It moves erratically. In other words, there are, you get paradigm shifts where you get a shift in a paradigm and then things remain static for a very long period of time.

• 1:01:30Speaker 04

  But I, I do think, to get back to the point you really of what you were saying, is that there are, in, there is the fundamental issue that humans like predictability. And humans like to be able to explain things, even if the explanation we might regard as inadequate or inappropriate. I think as humans, we do like to have explanations.

• 1:01:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  And a story if we can.

• 1:01:56Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:01:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Just another one that you love as psychiatrist. Have you ever heard of Glanagalt down in Kerry?

• 1:02:04Speaker 04

  I've heard the name, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  It means valley of, the valley of madness. And it's, so there's this, near the Shliev Misch Mountains down in Kerry, right? There's a holy well down here. And we call it a holy well, but before it was a Christian well, it was definitely a pagan well. And in the mythology of this particular well, in this area of Kerry, it's associated with madness. Like, there's one story about mad King Sweeney, and this story could be thousands of years old. And it's about a king called King Sweeney. He kept hearing bells in his ears, and then he convinced himself that he was a bird. And this man, this particular king, sounds like someone who was experiencing quite severe psychosis, you know? And it's there in the

• 1:02:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  stories. And at the end of this story, the only place where he could find peace was by this sacred well in Glanagalt, the valley of madness. And for years and years in Irish folklore, people who were experiencing severe depression, psychosis, would travel to this valley, and they'd eat watercress, and they'd drink from the well. And this is there in the folklore. And then, a few years ago, a team of scientists went down and tested the well. And you know what they found?

• 1:03:22Speaker 04

  Lithium.

• 1:03:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Lithium.

• 1:03:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  Isn't that fucking amazing?

• 1:03:26Speaker 04

  No, a lot of these holy wells in Ireland have a high level of lithium, and this is true across Europe in general. And there are papers, there was a paper in The Lancet there a few years ago, showing that people who were living around these wells, who were drinking water with high levels of lithium, had far less mental illness in general than populations that were living far away. And we still use lithium for treating manic depression, or bipolar illness, as it's now called. And I, I think it's an underused treatment. I'm not saying it's for everyone, but I think for some people, it really can be miraculous in its impact. I mean, I've seen people who've had

• 1:04:08Speaker 04

  Bad manic depressive illness and have went on it and lithium and have been well for thirty years and remain well, you know, over a very extended period of time. And I I'll tell you a story of a someone who came in to see me a few years ago. And this particular gentleman had had a diagnosis of bipolar illness. And he'd been on lithium for about thirty years and he had been perfectly well for the thirty years. And the G P said to him, look, go and see Dan and maybe he might recommend that you come off the lithium. So I thought, look, thirty years, he's going to be fairly okay if I take him off the lithium. So I suggested he'd come off the lithium very slowly over

• 1:04:53Speaker 04

  the next week or two. He comes off the lithium over two weeks. I went on a Monday morning. He's admitted on the Sunday night, having went bananas really over the weekend, having stopped the lithium. So lithium is really, it can be a very, very useful element. I mean, it's it's an element. It's not a drug in the traditional sense of the word. And and it's use has died out a lot, a lot of younger doctors, and particularly if I lecture in America, I find that American psychiatrists are very loathe to prescribe lithium nowadays. But I think there is a a need for it and and some people benefit enormously. But the point you raise about these holy wells and the fact that they have high levels

• 1:05:38Speaker 04

  of lithium, I think is intriguing to say the least, that people are ingesting levels of lithium that are, you know, not too toxic, not too high, because that's one of the problems with lithium is a very high level can be quite toxic. But obviously, these holy wells have have a level of lithium that seems to be protective against the emergence of particularly mood disorders.

• 1:06:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  And before we had the science, it's just you've got stories about people with different types of madness or irrationality, and that's attached to these certain wells. So we're holding the knowledge. We might not know what it means, but the knowledge is there for a reason.

• 1:06:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  And another thing I'd love to ask you about is.

• 1:06:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, are there any, like, if I think of the Hindu religion and certain parts of Buddhism, there's a thing called the Aio Vaidic diet, I believe it's called.

• 1:06:30Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:06:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  So, Hare Krishnas, if you go to any Hare Krishna restaurant, Govindas is one, they're very specific about the type of foods, when you should eat them, eating very mindfully, not to wolf the food down.

• 1:06:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:06:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's no garlic present for some reason. They have this, no, seriously, there's no garlic or onions. They have another thing called asa fatida, I'm not sure what it is, but it tastes like garlic. But you have these, like, the Aio Vaidic diet is, I think it could be 5,000 years old, right?

• 1:07:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  You have these people practicing their religion and this strict diet works for them. Similarly, you have in Christianity right now is Lent, you had people fasting.

• 1:07:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ramadan, people fasting. These things are working for people for a long, long time. Do you ever look at that and think, maybe some of the research that you're doing now is just confirming through science what some people understood, just in a different way?

• 1:07:30Speaker 04

  Oh, I think that may very well be the case. I have no doubt, I mean, the most widely studied diet is the Mediterranean diet. And there's lots of good evidence that from a mental health perspective, it's excellent. But of course, as you rightly point out, there are many other diets that haven't really been studied to any significant extent. I mean, I regard the large intestine as a bit like a big fermenter. It's fermenting the food we take in and it's producing hundreds of molecules, if not thousands of molecules, that can travel to our brain and to other organs in the body as well. Now, you know, I'm sure most of you have heard of neurotransmitters, you know, they're

• 1:08:12Speaker 04

  the way in which one neuron in the brain communicates with another neuron. And there are neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine and noradrenaline and so forth. And all of the common neurotransmitters can be produced by microbes within the All of them. Now, I'm not suggesting that they go to the brain directly, because if even if they could get to the brain, they wouldn't cross the blood-brain barrier anyway. But what they do is, they they can influence the brain in a variety of ways. Because you you might, I mean, I suppose the question is, if what I'm saying is true, and if it's not a whole load of BS, the question really is, how do microbes within the gut actually

• 1:08:55Speaker 04

  talk to the brain? I mean, how do they actually get about talking to the brain? And they do that in a variety of ways. And the the microbes can produce molecules that travel to the brain, like short-chain fatty acids, or we spoke about tryptophan earlier on, they can produce tryptophan, and that can travel to the brain. Of course, there's that long meandering nerve that connects the brain and the gut, which is the vagus nerve. And a lot of impulses from microbes go through the vagus nerve. We showed a few years ago that if you cut the vagus nerve, that microbes couldn't, certain microbes couldn't communicate with the brain. They needed this vagus nerve, or they didn't function. Now, it's interesting

• 1:09:38Speaker 04

  that, I mean, I remember, and most of you are far too young to remember this, but I remember when I was a medical student, one of the things they frequently did when people had peptic ulcer disease, is they would cut the vagus nerve. That was, every general surgeon had in his toolkit, the technique of cutting the vagus nerve, and they would snip the vagus nerve, and it would certainly improve people's peptic ulcers. It probably had other effects as well, but it but it certainly did improve people's ulcers. So the vagus nerve is another route of communication. So there are many ways in which these microbes from the gut do talk to the brain, and they do talk to the brain in a variety of ways.

• 1:10:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  And just around the vagus nerve there, because that's another one that I I hear it mentioned a lot, and sometimes when I hear it brought up, it's treated as... Not pseudoscience, but something which isn't generally accepted yet. Like, one thing I'm thinking of is, have you heard of the polyvagal theory?

• 1:10:37Speaker 04

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:10:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, can you tell us about, do you know anything about that?

• 1:10:41Speaker 04

  Well, you know, the the vagus nerve is, has a bidirectional role in men. What do I mean by that? I mean that it sends signals up to the brain and it sends signals from the brain down to the gut as well. So ninety-five percent of them go up, about five percent of them actually come down in the opposite direction. Now, a lot of people believe that if you can control your vagus nerve, you can control anxiety. And there are a variety of techniques for, for, some of them, most of them are breathing techniques.

• 1:11:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:18Speaker 04

  They're, you know, it might involve deep breathing or whatever. Indeed. So, so you control the vagus nerve and you control anxiety. Now, I, I remember a few years ago, we published a paper, and we did so with some neurosurgeons in Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, where they implanted a stimulator in the vagus nerve in people who were very severely depressed. Now, these were, these were not people who were anxious, they were really very severely depressed. And they'd been treated with all sorts of drugs and psychotherapy, and none of the treatments worked. But they had these stimulators implanted in the vagus nerve, and the impact on some of these patients was quite dramatic.

• 1:12:01Speaker 04

  So there's no doubt about it that, you know, you can improve mental health or depression by stimulating the vagus nerve. My problem really is that a lot of this current social media suggests simple ways of stimulating the vagus nerve. And I'm not sure that half of these ways, manner, or techniques actually work. I, I do believe that stimulating the vagus nerve would be good if we had a reliable way of doing it. But I'm not sure that, you know, I do believe that deep breathing is useful, Hank. I mean, if we're stressed, it's a good thing to do. But really stimulating the vagus nerve, I'm not sure that we have the technology or the techniques right at, right now for doing that.

• 1:12:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, just around the

• 1:12:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Let's just say the stomach and the experience of emotions, right?

• 1:12:52Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:12:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  If I, if I have anxiety, I feel it in my tummy.

• 1:12:58Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:12:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  If I have panic attacks over a long enough period of time, I don't wanna eat anymore. And I'm getting indigestion and I'm noticing anxiety as a tummy type of thing.

• 1:13:09Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:13:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  Similarly, oh God, if you get really sad, upsetting news, again, it's, it's not the heart. It's just somewhere there on the tummy.

• 1:13:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  And there's something about the understanding of my stomach and how I experience the physicality of emotions, is that in any way related to what you're doing and what's going on there?

• 1:13:30Speaker 04

  Well, I think that, you know, when one gets a lot of adrenaline in the bloodstream and, and that is a key component of panic attacks. I mean, panic attacks are horrible. You know, I, I always take the view that, you know, if somebody comes to see me with a panic attack and they're maybe they're having four panic attacks a day or whatever. I don't really think it's particularly reasonable to say, oh, well, you were four when you saw me last time, bring it down to two. I mean, you really want to hit this thing on the head because it, it's a horrible event. And the more panic attacks you have, the more likely to have.

• 1:14:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:07Speaker 04

  You know, so.

• 1:14:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's the worst crack.

• 1:14:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:11Speaker 04

  But it, but it is.

• 1:14:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Or, or for me, when I was getting them, I'd be like, oh, I got a panic attacks in a, in a supermarket, better not go to the supermarkets anymore until I can't leave my room.

• 1:14:20Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 1:14:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:21Speaker 04

  Well, agoraphobia, which is what you're describing, I mean, occurs, I, I, I've, I've seen people with all sorts of agoraphobia over the years, but panic attacks lead to that and it's a horrible, horrible condition. I, you know, what, what, what you do see in panic attacks is you see a large or a big volume of adrenaline coming from the adrenal glands being pumped into the bloodstream. And then of course it causes the palpitations and it causes the sensations in the stomach and so forth. I probably vagal nerve overactivation is probably involved as well. It's, it's too simplistic to just put it down to one hormone, but it, but it is a horrible condition, there's no question about it.

• 1:15:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  And so when I.

• 1:15:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  When I first started getting panic attacks, I was about nineteen. The worst part was I didn't know what they were, right? That was for me was.

• 1:15:15Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:15:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  As, to be honest with you, as soon as, the first person I went to see was a psychiatrist because I believed that. I didn't know what the fuck they were. It's just like, oh, yesterday I thought I was in the process of dying. Do you know what I mean? I was like, I, I was dying yesterday for no reason. I was, I was in the process of actually, I'm gonna die. And that's what it felt like, ten out of ten anxiety. And even when I just went to the, to the psychiatrist and he said, oh, there's a name for that and that's called a panic attack and lots of people get them. Like that alone was fifty percent of my anxiety is gone.

• 1:15:50Speaker 04

  Indeed.

• 1:15:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  But then the other thing was, and it was a beautiful thing, cause I was, I was, I was only nineteen. And this psychiatrist said to me, I could, I could give you these pills here, these, I think there was Xanax. I could give you them if, if, if you want, but for the crack instead. Get this book and the book, all it was was simple breathing meditation. It was called the Calm Technique. And he said, the medication's here if you want it, but try this first and come back to me in maybe six weeks, right? And I just got this book and all it was was a very, very simple mindfulness breathing meditation where I'm counting my breaths. And I did that in the morning and in the evening and I became mindful of my breathing and diaphragmatic breathing.

• 1:16:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Throughout my day, I was breathing from my stomach and then after about two weeks, like I didn't even need to go back to the psychiatrist.

• 1:16:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like what happened there? Cause that's, I, I really, I'd been agoraphobic. I couldn't leave my house. It was really, really bad. And what sorted me was breathing initially and then after the breathing, then I was able to do CBT.

• 1:17:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Cause I wasn't in fight or flight all the time.

• 1:17:03Speaker 04

  Indeed.

• 1:17:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  I was in a position to start looking at my own thoughts, looking at my beliefs around my anxiety. But I needed to get the anxiety down first and breathing was, that did it. I didn't need medication. What's happening in my body and brain?

• 1:17:17Speaker 04

  You know, I, what you described there reminds me of a patient I saw a few years ago when I was in London. And he was a PhD student in Imperial College, he was doing maths, and he was a very bright guy, he was from Nigeria originally. And he came to see me, and he described that when he was five years old, he was walking across the schoolyard in Lagos. And he had what clearly was a panic attack as he walked across the schoolyard. And he, from then on, thought he was the only person in the world suffering from this disorder. He didn't, he had never heard of panic disorder, and he was, he was somebody who couldn't walk across an open space.

• 1:18:00Speaker 04

  So he could never, he could never go to the seaside or go, he was living near Victoria Park. He couldn't walk across Victoria Park because he would get a panic attack in the park. And sometimes he would be late coming to my clinic because he knew every alleyway and laneway between where he was living and my clinic. And he couldn't walk across a wide street because he would get a panic attack. But the bizarre thing was that here was somebody who was a smart, intelligent person. But from the age of five until when he came to see me, I think it was about twenty five or twenty six. He literally thought he was the only person in the world suffering from these panic attacks, he had never heard the term before.

• 1:18:42Speaker 04

  So we know that centrally, there's a nucleus in the brain called the nucleus locus cerullus, and it's a noradrenergic nucleus. It's in the pons, which is kind of, I suppose, roughly speaking, between both one's ears. And that seems to have played a pivotal role. Now, I have no doubt that the breathing techniques that you used were able to regulate that particular neuronal network. That neuronal network does control the periphery as well. I mentioned the fact that, you know, you get high levels of adrenaline when you have a panic attack. But in fact, the central regulator of that adrenaline system is this noradrenergic.

• 1:19:27Speaker 04

  Nucleus locus rulius in the ponds in in the brain. So one can learn, one can take a drug, as you mentioned, alprazolam or Xanax can can can do that. But of course, it's short-lived and and it it it wears off. But i- in your case, you were able to use a breathing technique to bring this particular nucleus under control. Because what it was doing really was just simply firing sporadically in a in a chaotic manner and resulting in in overt panic attacks.

• 1:19:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mm hmm. Um. Have you anything to say about mushrooms? Like, not even, I don't even mean magic ones. But again, we're just seeing over the past ten years in particular, this attention being put towards mycelium mushrooms fungus as being something that we've overlooked.

• 1:20:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, I I mean, there's been a lot, I I I'm no expert on the subject, that's for sure. But there has been a lot written about the nutritional value of mushrooms and various mushrooms have have have various nutritional components. And I, you know, it's interesting, you know, we've spoken about bacteria in the intestine. But of course, you have fungi in intestine as well, you know, they they there are a variety of fungi in the human intestine. They they're not as plentiful as, let's say, bacteria. But I do think that from a nutritional perspective, rather than I don't know precisely what they do to gut microbes or anything else, I do believe that that that mushrooms are a very good source of nutrients, no question about it.

• 1:21:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, if the teacher came to you tomorrow and said,

• 1:21:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  recommend a diet for the whole country, right? And I'm I'm gonna make sure this happens.

• 1:21:16Speaker 04

  If I was to say, what would be the best diet? I think that on the basis of science right now, you would have to say the Mediterranean diet is the best diet. You know, and if you look at, let's say, people who are who are centenarians, who reach a hundred. Now, a lot has been written about centenarians in Japan and Okinawa because there were a lot. Of centenarians in Akanawa, but the Spanish have a big increase in centenarians in recent years. And of course, there are people who tend to, first of all, eat a Mediterranean diet, and they tend to be very active into old age. They tend to walk up steps and, you know, a lot of villages, I suppose, in Spain tend to be rather hilly, particularly down

• 1:22:00Speaker 04

  in Andalucia, and they'll walk up and down in their nineties or even when they reach a hundred. So I would, I think, you know, if I was talking to the Thesic, I would say education is absolutely essential. The diet would undoubtedly be a Mediterranean type diet, and I would advocate exercise. Exercise should be for everyone.

• 1:22:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  And something, like, I love fucking exercising. What I always say to people, for myself, right, I exercise for the process of exercising. So if I go to the gym, I'm not really going to the gym to look a certain way.

• 1:22:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:22:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  I love being at the gym. Now, also, something I've learned, because I told you backstage, I'm autistic, and the thing with me and my autism is, I actually love being around people. What I don't like is having to do loads and loads of small talk with lots of people.

• 1:22:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:22:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  And the gym, for me, as an autistic person, is actually fantastic, because I'm in this space where I'm surrounded by people. And if you try and talk to someone, it's actually rude. So I get to be by myself, surrounded by people, headphones on all the time, and small talk is shunned. So that's why I go to the gym. But like, I go to the gym and I run, not for results, but for the love and process. I run because I love running.

• 1:23:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  You know?

• 1:23:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  I don't try and, I want to do 11K. You can if you want, if you want to do that. But if, like, for me, it's just, I'm doing this because I love doing it. It's the process, and this makes me feel a certain way, and that's why I do it. And if I don't have it in my life, I feel like fucking shit. And when I feel like shit, I make the wrong food choices, and

• 1:23:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  it just all spirals. And then, eventually, then after that, I'm, the way that I speak to myself internally is quite negative. So I can see holistically, like, even their mention The the capacity to cook. When I was in college, the first thing that gave me a real proper panic attack was actually witnessing my friend making a stew. I swear to fuck. I I because I went to first year in college and I went to my buddy's apartment and he was like eighteen nineteen as well. And he was making a fucking full Irish stew and I got this mad panic attack and I had no idea.

• 1:24:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  And only after a bit of psychotherapy that I come to realise that the stew represented adult autonomy. I was terrified of being an adult and standing on my own two feet.

• 1:24:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:24:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I didn't know, not only did I not know how to make a stew, the idea of going into a supermarket and buying carrots and buying meat. Just it it might as well have been trying to get a mortgage, you know what I mean? And I I conquered my anxiety through learning to cook. Like my therapist said to me, here's a little go into Dun's and pick out carrots and pick out meat. And mindfully pick these things out and then go home and make a stew. And I did.

• 1:24:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:24:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it it basically through the change in behaviour, it showed me, oh, your anxiety is actually a lot of bullshit. It's a belief that you had. I believed that I was incapable. I believed that I couldn't, but now I've shown myself that I can. So I then wanted to learn how to cook everything.

• 1:25:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I fell in love with the with cooking and I cook because I love the process of cooking. I love doing it, you know what I mean?

• 1:25:24Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:25:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  And my attitude towards my mental health, it's always holistic. It's it has to be exercise, diet and then how I speak to myself, that the and meditation and mindfulness.

• 1:25:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, I I think you've put your finger on all the key ingredients really to be in a good in a good place.

• 1:25:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  It keeps me away then from needing to knock on the door of someone like you.

• 1:25:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  You know what I mean? I don't, I still obviously I'll get a little bit of anxiety, a little bit of depression, but I would consider them, this is healthy. This is a response to the stress that arises in my life.

• 1:25:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  But I don't think I end up. Mentally unwell anymore, you know.

• 1:26:03Speaker 04

  Well, you see, I think a lot of people, if they're suffering from undue anxiety because of problems at work or whatever, they may decide to go down a good road and to go to the gym regularly or go running and to eat more appropriately. But as soon as the stress is off and they're back to normal again, they kind of revert back to their, their old ways and they stop exercising and, you know. I, I, I always think that I, I, I enjoy running, you know, whether it is 10 miles or a half, half marathon or whatever. But I, I always think that, you know, it's easy to get into the habit of doing things and it's, it's easier to fall out of the habit as well, really, isn't it, you know?

• 1:26:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  But the vibe I'm getting as well, Ted, is that a lot of what you're saying is it's a proactive thing rather than a reactive thing. It, it's a good idea that people should just be doing these things anyway to proactively.

• 1:26:55Speaker 04

  Absolutely, I think so. You know, one doesn't need to develop mental health to start exercising or to start going on a good diet. I think, you know, and a good diet and exercise is not just for mental health, it's for one's overall wellbeing. You know, there's no doubt whether you're talking about cardiovascular health or the health of your intestine or any other organ in your body, exercise and a proper diet is good for all organs in the body, not just the brain.

• 1:27:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mm hmm. And it is 20 minutes past 10. E people have homes to go to. Professor Ted Dinan, thank you so much. Yes. All right. What a magnificent chat there with Professor Ted Dinan. If you want to get his book, The Psychobiotic Revolution, please do. A bidgy farewell. I'm gonna have to record next week's podcast. I'll be recording it in Melbourne, I believe, so. Let's see what happens with that. I might do a little walk and talk. Sometimes I like to do a walking tour podcast, so I'm gonna have that in, in the back of my head. Actually,

• 1:28:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  people of Melbourne are Narm, as it is known by the Indigenous Wurundjeri people, from Narm. And again, I believe Narm means a rich and abundant area of natural resources. I'm gonna be chatting with Tyson Yunkaporta when I'm in Melbourne, and I'm looking forward to that. He's an Aboriginal scholar and critic that loads of people have asked me to speak to, so I'm looking forward to chatting to him. But anyway, listen, if next week I might do a walk and talk podcast around, around Melbourne, around Narm. So if you have any interest in local history or an area that you think I might like to walk around and tell the history of this area, or just investigate and make a podcast out of it, give me a shout

• 1:28:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  on Instagram, @linebyballclub, and tell me some interesting local stories. And Jesus, I could fucking hell. I've definitely told you this one before, but I remember I gigged in Melbourne, I'd say it was 2011, a long time ago. And anytime I go anywhere on tour, as a result of the autism, I'm just continually on Wikipedia all the time, trying to learn about everywhere where I am. And I remember I was staying in Queen Street in Melbourne in a hotel. I remember whipping out my laptop, looking at the maps and going, oh, I wonder, I wonder what happened here. I wonder what happened. I wonder what the name Queen Street

• 1:29:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  means. So I start going on Wikipedia, trying to figure out the exact location where I am. And I'm at the location of a thing called the Queen Street massacre. It was a horrendous mass shooting that occurred in, in 1987 in Queen Street in Melbourne on, in a post office, I believe. But I remember like 11 years ago, I was there Googling it, and as I'm reading about it, I realise, not only am I on the building where the massacre occurred, but I'm on the floor where it occurred, and my bed was Was where people were hiding during the shooting. Uh, before the hotel was a hotel and when it was a post office. That was a very strange experience. That was a strange experience.

• 1:30:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I always remember that from Melbourne. I believe it's where the term going postal came from. It came from that particular mass shooting in, in Melbourne in nineteen eighty seven. Australia has a dark enough history with mass shootings. Quite similar to, to America, but when mass shootings occurred in Australia, Australia tightened its gun laws. And what happened? There was less mass shootings, something that America could definitely learn from. Whenever they say that it's not guns, it's people. Well, in, in Australia, I'm sure it was people, but taking the guns away definitely helped. All right, dog bless. I'll catch you next week.

• 1:31:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  Where I'm gonna be in Melbourne. I don't know what's gonna happen. Having a clue, having a clue. What happened in Melbourne once as well? I was walking around the hipster area. I can't, this again, this about ten years ago, maybe fifteen years ago. I was walking around the hipster area in Melbourne and it was really, really hot, pure sunny. And I'm, I'm just walking down the road and that band, the XX, remember them? They were just there skateboarding in all black. Big heavy coats, all black. Fucking roasting. I was wearing shorts and sandals. Gagging to take my top off and go bare chest. And there's the fucking XX. Dressed like, like the cure. Anyway, I'm looking forward to Narm, all right?

• 1:31:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  In the meantime, wink at a coca bar, genuflect to a wallaby and show some respect to the echidna. Dog bless.

• 1:32:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Continental quilt kisses.

• 1:32:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  Don't wanna get, I don't, imagine that. That's when you don't want the fucking hotel manager walking in. What the fuck are you doing under that duvet, sir? Blown kisses, blown kisses to a million people.

• 1:32:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mind your own business.

• 1:32:38Blindboy Boatclub?

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• 1:33:17Speaker 05

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