#1958 - Andrew Huberman

Butter's nice.

It was like a just a roll with a lot of butter on it, and people would eat that with coffee. Yeah, they don't have that for some strange reason, or in L.A. they don't have it either.

It was really gross. Um, but there was this chart of the countries in the world that pollute the ocean the most, and it's fucking stunning. Um, and if we stop using plastic straws, we're not going to put a fucking dent in it unless they do.

Like, we're not even close to number one, we're not even close to number six. Like the the leading countries that pollute the ocean, I think number one was Philippines.

And then they take that plastic and use it and recycle it and make like eyeglasses out of it and all sorts of other different things. Like, Okay? So number one is China.

You go all the way down. The United States is 0.30..

They take it and we're like, here, you deal with it. I've heard of that happening not to a gigantic extent like that, I don't know about, you know, right?

For waste management, right? Yeah, like they might have a company that handles that, perhaps.

I mean, but also they produce so many plastic things. I mean, think about the amount of things that are plastic that are produced in China, that's pretty extraordinary.

Then I was going on podcasts, now we have the podcast, right? But I'd stayed off Twitter largely until this last year, when I started putting a lot of stuff there. So you put stuff there, you start reading stuff there. Oh, no.

And then, well, what's been really interesting to me is I followed this whole lab leak thing, right? Because early in the pandemic, people in my field started chattering about that. I was very. I love exotic animals, not to own them, right? But I'm really interested in animal conservation, and so the pangolin is an amazing animal.

They pinned it on the Pangolin early on, right? And there were articles published in good journals, several of which I'm on the editorial board for. So early in the pandemic, there were papers coming out really fast about, you know, the sequence of the virus in pangolins, which were being sold in the Wuhan market, et cetera. And I was pretty disturbed by this, mostly because of the pictures of the Wuhan market. The exotic animal trade is just, it's horrible, right, okay?

Close confinement. You know, these are beautiful animals, that there's no justification for this stuff. But pangolin meat is sold at I forget what it is per pound, but it's a delicacy and it's considered very lucrative to get pangolin meat. Of all things. There's actually a female pangolin meat influencer on YouTube and saying, Oh yeah, no, it's like it starts to look like pangolin meat. ASMr. It's crazy and disgusting.

So they're kind of mixing, you know, sexy women with exotic meats from these rare animals. It's just awful. So I was going deep down this rabbit hole of trying to understand this exotic animal trade. And then there was chatter in my field about the fact that one of the members of the laboratory in Wuhan that was working with these, you know, very high restriction viruses had done. Her training in the United States, which is true, has a master's degree, but was running a laboratory, which is unusual, right? Typically, the head of a laboratory is someone with a P.h.D. M.D. or both.

Very rare for a so-called PI a principal investigator, but, like me, or, you know, uh, another Matt Walker, for instance, principal investigator, to have less than a P.h.D.

The fact that she ran a lab, or was important in running this lab as a master's with only a master's is unusual. And then there was a lot of chatter in my field about the the idea that it might have something to do with the fact that her significant other was a member of the Chinese Communist Party. And so, you know, that laboratory had deep ties to government and vice versa, and that's true of all laboratories in China, all laboratories. So the whole notion of the lab leak hypothesis was not foreign to scientists like me, who thought, Yeah, you know, my laboratory works with rabies viruses, adenoviruses, sinbis viruses.

None of these are are as biohazardous as something like the coronavirus. But you work with these viruses. And you have to use, you know, lab coats, gloves, bleach, sterilization. You're careful, you know, hoods of property, you know, but human error happens. So I'm not at all convinced, one way or the other, that it was a deliberate leak, but the idea that it would leak. From a laboratory to a scientist like me, who has what's called a wet lab, where you, you know, with solutions and beakers and things of that sort, things happen all the time, not in my laboratory, we're very careful and everyone's checked up on often. But the idea that human error could cause this is like it was an, of course, to all scientists.

All it takes is one loose thumb, and it's on a lab coat. All it takes is that lab coat going on a rack. All it takes is somebody leaving work, putting their lab coat on there and touching that lab coat. And it's out in the world, like, it's not that complicated.

So it doesn't have to be that somebody had a plan to let this out, it could be. I don't have any knowledge of that, but the idea that it would come from a lab. To me is far more plausible than the idea that it came from some Pangolin sequence in the Wuhan market. So I think we were going down the wrong path on this for a long time. And I thought, this is kind of bananas. And now everyone's so shocked. It's like, I think, to people who work in biomedical research, of course, this sort of thing could happen, of course, because human error is the cause of most of these kinds of things.

Interesting, but here's the problem. Sagar and Jetty was actually explaining this to me on Saturday night. He was like, there are. There's direct evidence of people being infected. That predates this establishment of this animal testing positive in that wet market.

So I guess people were eating that animal, was that the idea? But many months before that, people were sick from this like this is what was this in?

I believe it was in December of 2019.

Is that what they're saying? November or December of 2019.?

You don't have the option yet. CRISPR will allow this to put things back in that are missing. And so gain of function research is extremely common. But I mean, we do it. We're no longer working on animals to be clear.

We only do human studies now, but you're this is something that you're trained to do as a postdoc. Everyone learns loss of function, gain of function, you need to do both, you know, the the gain of function. Actually, there is that one CRISPR experiments being of interesting science out of China. A guy he actually was a postdoc at Stanford, um, worked for a guy named Steve Quake, and then separately, on his own, without permission or anything from Stanford. Went off and started his own laboratory in China. And stood up at a meeting a few years ago and said he had done CRISPR in human babies, this has been done.

But as the moment that the international community, I think rightfully so, said, this is horrible. You can't do this, there's no ethics committee, you need to think about what you're doing. Everyone was like, I had nothing to do with this guy.

I'd never had anything, and, you know, there was a deep excavation of emails and all sorts of. Everyone's like, I got nothing to do with this guy, so it was pretty interesting. Then China said, Oh, we're going to. We're going to punish him, but I'd be willing to bet both hands that he's his punishment. Consists of a jail cell that is pretty luxurious with a laboratory.

There's no question that CRISPR is going on there. CRISPR is going on in certain regions of, you know of, you know, uh, other other locations on the globe where things aren't as regulated. Because, think about the potential payoff for being able to rescue a Huntington's mutation, right? A Huntington's Korea mutation. That has somebody at some point in their life, you know? But unable to control their arms hemiballismus of the arms. If, what is it, uh, Huntington's disease? It's a deterioration of the parts of the brain that control motor function.

The parts of the brain that control motor function have two main pathways. One is a go pathway, like reach for this coffee mug. The other one is a no-go pathway resisting movement, and the no-go pathway degenerate substantially. Other things, too.

And people with Huntington's Korea end up with these writhing, ballistic movements, and it's an inherited disease, so you know what gene? it's the Huntington gene. And if you can, if you know that your, for instance, parent has it, you can get tested for it. A lot of people don't want to get tested.

They don't want the answer because it's late onset. So you can be normal a certain portion of your life and then get it. It's a tragic disease. But if you test positive for this gene, you know you're going to get Huntington's. In which case, with CRISPR, you could just put the gene back in and rescue function.

And every time you have a crazy idea like, maybe I should jump off this bridge, why would I think that I'm not? That's a healthy operation of your brain. Saying I want to, cause I'm kind of curious, but I don't want to, so I'm not going to with Huntington's. What happens is just slow deterioration of those neurons, but there's a lot of deterioration of these neurons that control motor function. And eventually, what happens is the deeper neurons that control motor function start shutting down the autonomic functions like breathing, heart rate. And so eventually, people just succumb to some basic, um, you know, uh, we call them housekeeping functions, you know? So they'll, they'll have to be on a respirator, and they, they have to. Um, you know, they have to use a catheter tube, and you know, they have to defecate into a bag.

And, you know, at some point they just become a deteriorated, um, mess of neurons. So what's first to go there, however, is the control of motor function. And it goes first in the direction of too much activity because of all these brakes and accelerators that we have in the brain. Um, so, in any case, CRISPR gene manipulation of the sort that this guy did in this laboratory in China. Again, I think an ethics committee needs to tell the world, or decide for the world, what people should be allowed to do and not do. But you can imagine, for something like Huntington's, it would be tremendously advantageous.

Like, if you had a child who you knew was someday going to get Huntington's, you'd want to do a CRISPR mutation and put the healthy gene back.

We have receptors for anything that's kind of hot and spicy, um, and those are the same receptors that respond to hot, liquid, heat and spicy. Obviously, very, very closely linked in pain, all three of those reckless, whereas pain relief very closely related to menthol and cool, not just the taste, but the actual physical sensation of cool. So heat, pain and inflammation kind of are cousins in this in the sense, and cool, menthol and lack of inflammation are also cousins. In terms of receptors, neural circuits, this kind of thing.

I mean, I've talked a lot about inflammation and and here I, you know, I definite. Hat tip to Lane Norton, who we both know, and Andy Albin, who really, both really impressed upon me. The fact that if we were to measure somebody's blood pressure, inflammatory markers, heart rate and cortisol during a hard workout, and you didn't know they were doing a hard workout. I just handed you the data and your medical doctor, you'd say this person's dying, right? So, inflammation is robust during during a hard exercise. But I think what's so incredible about the human body is that the increase in blood pressure, inflammation, et cetera is what triggers the adaptation. So that blood pressure and inflammation, et cetera are all much lower. The other 23 hours of the day. And so there's something special about our system whereby, yeah, maybe if you had really hot peppers like, the most famous of these is the Carolina Reaper, but that's the Carolina Reaper.

Yeah, and then he's got two other ones, one of them with Habanero, and but there it is, those are the three. What happened?

Yeah, so if you like hot shit, I like it hot. This stuff is like, legit. So one of them is heirloom tomatoes, winter truffles and reapers. That's the half face blades cooperative. And then the other one is, I don't even know how to say that word. Chulacale, how do you say that?

Chulacale.

And I love them all, but I like really hot. Like, if you can't, if you're like, boy, this tabasco is rough, stay the fuck away from that stuff, cause the stuff I like is pretty rough.

It's sitting in fluid, everyone knows that, and then there's some thick dura stuff around it, there's thick, thick fibrous tissue, like you're a hunter.

So when you get, when you take the brain out, people think, Oh, you just kind of pop the brain out, you have to. You need a sharp razor, really sharp scissors to get through a sharp knife. The swelling of the meninges is what happened to this person. They got an unbelievable headache, and it's actually inflammation induced brain damage. Now that's only eating an extremely hot pepper in huge quantities.

Just eating one of those things like, you know, in the pepper sauce, my stuff, it's like the tiniest amount it'll wreck you.

We know that all of those pathways go to areas of the brain that are involved in, of course, like behavior, like if you touch something really hot, you taste something really hot. For most people, they're going to resist that. But also to the hypothalamus, which houses all these hormone control areas, et cetera. People who can tolerate stronger spice, men and women, we know it's correlated with higher levels of circulating testosterone.

That I think is interesting. What we're really talking about is higher PIN threshold, and we, you and I have talked before about. If there's one clear effect of testosterone, it's that it makes effort. Feel good, that that pain starts to have a little bit of a come hither kind of thing to it. It feels a little bit enticing. When testosterone levels are elevated, when testosterone levels are lower, or if people have lower levels of testosterone, effort feels more overwhelming.

How's that? And the other thing is that ingestion of spicy peppers resets your calibration for what's spicy. I think we know that too. And in a way that also adjusts people's pain threshold, so if people get better at eating hot peppers, they're better at dealing with all types of pain.

And I find this fascinating because I know you and I are both kind of obsessed with ice baths and cold punches. And I've been going deep into that literature around cold, and what's really known about cold thermogenesis and not known. And it seems like these acute adrenaline, acute pain pathways, they do exactly what exercise does, which is in the moment. If you were to measure somebody's inflammation, et cetera, you'd say this person is dying. They are in a terrible state. They might as well be getting, you know, open heart surgery with no anesthesia.

The way some people react to the ice bath, it's kind of silly to us. But for people that don't like the cold, they're like, you gotta be kidding me. I'd never go near it. They try and disparage it, they try and poke every hole in the data.

They're just scared, right? They're just scared. We know this, but they are actually the people that benefit the most. Because that really acute adrenaline spike, that pain that you feel, creates a higher pain threshold later, higher threshold for work output, all of the things that most people seek. And so to me, it's always interesting that you have to look what's happening during, and you have to look at what's happening afterward. And for some reason, as humans, we like these creature comforts of massages, which are great.

Um, you know, the sauna, which is great, although if you crank it up really hot, it's work at some level.

What? 260? But I cover, but I cover my head. Why?

So it doesn't feel as stressful, but I'm doing it cause I like to, I like to sweat.

I know fighters do this in preparation, you know, dropping weight. You can get better by doing more sauna, you get to be a better sweater, which means that you can drop, you can cool more easily. Even in clothes. Or if you're out running or hunting or doing anything. So there's some advantage to being a better at sweating and sweating itself as a whole.

Interesting story. You actually have nerves that control the sweat glands that's actually controlled by by little nerve endings. And those pathways can grow very, very quickly in the presence of heat. So what I've been trying to do is learn how to dump heat better.

And if I don't use the, you know, the hat? What happened was I was getting up to 220 and I'd sit in there for like 45 minutes. I'm thinking, this is not doing anything for me anymore. I want to increase my sweating.

This is Dundalk. But so what I had the guy do, who had installed it for me? Um, is put the thermometer down low because it's a trigger, right? It's going to shut it off when it hits a certain temperature. So what I'm really trying to do is get, get it really, really hot down near the floor. Because then I, you know, when I stand up, when it's that hot, I'm just ready to pass out. No chance. But, you know, I think Laird, I don't want to, um, get this wrong on the numbers, but you know, I know. Laird. Brings his airdyne bike in there and oven mitts on.

So he's got, he's gotta be putting himself at at least 260, right?

I think his sauna set in the 200s, though I think it's like 215 or 220..

I did this.

And to do it in a real world context is even harder. So what she showed was that if people get 11 minutes of deliberate cold exposure per week. Total, this is divided up into sessions of one to three minutes or four minutes, even so, it's not 11 minutes all at once. They fundamentally change the amount of brown fat that they have, which means they fundamentally change the number of mitochondria in the brown fat. Which means they fundamentally change their thermogenic properties of their body, increase their metabolism. Now, the the people who don't like cold say, well, the increase in metabolism wasn't enough to offset more than a few bites of a bagel or something. But that's not the point, really.

What she also showed was that this increase in thermogenesis allowed people to be more comfortable in cold environments, even when they're not in the cold. And then people say, Well, who cares, right? I'll throw on a jacket, ah? But what she was able to show is that. The ability to be comfortable in the cold correlates with a bunch of other important immune functions and metabolic functions, and insulin sensitivity, which is a good thing.

And the inability to do that is likely to not be healthy for us. She also showed that 57 minutes per week is the threshold for sauna. So if people get 57 minutes per week of uncomfortably warm but safe sauna exposure, they can get very similar effects. And it, and then that gave rise to this question, I always said, Do you end with cold? or do you end with heat?

And she said, end with cold, because then your body's forced to warm itself back up. And that's what's now called the Soberg principle, which is when you end with cold, your body has to use its natural machinery to heat back up. In talking to her recently, I learned some really interesting things that I've been incorporating. First of all, I've always avoided putting my head under until the very end in the cold.

It turns out that if you put your face in the water right as you go in. You activate the mammalian dive reflex, and this reflex increases the so-called parasympathetic activity of the autonomic nervous system, which is nerd. Speak for. It lowers your heart rate, it makes you calmer, and it makes you better able to tolerate stress.

So try this next time go. You could even just put your face in before I go right under, you go right under it, so that's the right way to do my nose.

These are constriction right below a little bit, these are dilation above. They get headaches, they don't feel good, they heart rate is way too high.

Putting your face under anxiety, though.

If you will just get out right now and you got to go, shut the fuck up. But if you don't say shut the fuck up. Then that thing runs rampant through your brain, and that kicks your heart rate up, and that kicks your anxiety up. I really think it's psychological.

Clear and logical reason for that. After that, 20 or 30 seconds, the forebrain starts coming online again. That's your opportunity to start negotiating with yourself of, Oh, this is actually good for me, this, this is, I can handle this. I got through that.

So I can get through the next one. What I've been doing recently is trying to not go for time, but going for. The only way I can describe this would be walls, like, sometimes just getting in the thing that is a wall for me.

So I, okay, I got over one wall, just getting in the damn thing, then like, Oh God, here it comes, forebrain shutting down. I'm like, panic.

I'm going to get through this and then I'm watching for when I have the impulse to get out. And when I start to notice is that the the gaps between those walls start getting longer and longer.

I, I suppose it's probably in the low fifties.

We have the Morosco one, which is that one's really cold, and that one is you avoid that one. Sometimes like to go in the sauna.

That's where you're at. Yeah, you and Cam Haines, 34..

I did a workout with him, I went up there, I was sore for two weeks, those high rep weight workouts.

As you said, testosterone rewards that kind of effort. There's a big difference between that kind of stuff. And like, you know, he's a ultra marathon runner, he likes to push the mind, yeah.

Yeah, we'll get in the fucking cold, just do it.

Okay, I would have been done eight minutes ago.

It's like what it's set at and what it's actually at.

That evokes a dopamine, epinephrine and norepinephrine release. These three things together are called the catecholamines. Those normally would increase from. You know, uh, um, a cup of coffee in a in a heart sprint for, you know? 10 to 30 minutes, maybe an hour. When you do the cold exposure, the way you're doing it, or longer exposures at about 50 degrees or so, you're seeing increases in dopamine, norepinephrine and epinephrine. That are two to three x above baseline. This is huge.

Wow, this is huge. This is on the order of many drugs, but the difference is most drugs spike dopamine and then drop it below baseline. That increases in this case are lasting many hours, two to four to even six hours.

I'm staying at a place that actually has a plunge. I don't know the temperature, but it felt cold to me. So I did three minutes, three minutes, three minutes, and I had a hot tub. So I bounced back and forth for a minute in between. And you, as you know, you feel better much of the day, if not the entire day.

That is not a coincidence. Your system is circulating much higher levels of the catecholamines, and this has shown in that paper, it's now been shown in a series of other papers. My colleague Craig Heller at Stanford has known this for a long time, and this is why, and for other reasons, the athletes at Stanford who use cold do it before their workouts. Everyone now knows that it blocks hypertrophy if you do it.

It doesn't do anything, I'm like, fuck you, it doesn't, you're just. You. Just don't like the fact that other people can do it every day, and you don't like the fact that you can't do it every day. You're talking to me specifically.

No, no, other people, not you, you do. But there's there's people out there that will complain about something and find an excuse why it's not beneficial. And the reason for that excuse is not that there's not data, the reason for that excuse is coming up with some sort of an excuse for themselves. That's what that is.

Okay, so you're doing comedy, you're out past 10 p.m. right? You're not going to wear sunglasses or something necessarily, but it'd be ridiculous, right?

Cardiovascular resistance training that's one of the beautiful things I think that's happened in the last couple of decades is that it's, you know, resistance. Training is no longer just considered the thing that football players and bodybuilders do. Everyone old, young, female, male, women no longer, I hope, are concerned about getting quote unquote too big from weightlifting or something, or turning into a bodybuilder.

So exercise, then nutrients, right? macronutrients, proteins, fats and carbohydrates. People now think about it, so you need all that stuff, vitamins, minerals and then the other stuff, and then I think in addition to that, sleep, right?

I think Matt Walker deserves a tremendous debt of gratitude from everybody. Because 10 years ago everyone was like, I'll sleep when I'm dead. Now, we know you're probably not going to dissolve into a puddle of your own tears from a couple of bad nights. Sleep every once in a while, but sleep makes you mentally, physically better, you perform better. And then the last one is this whole, um not notion, it's social connection, right?

You can't stay isolated constantly. Or did people lose their minds? Yeah, so when you look at people that get very depressed or they're suicidal, one or several of those five things is going to be diminished. And then what happens is people hear about deliberate cold exposure.

And if they don't like it, or they want to poke at it, they say, Oh, it blocks. Hypertrophy Okay, well, only if you do it in the four to six hours after a hypertrophy workout.

Generally, I do a really hard cardio workout and then I'll do the sauna for 25 minutes. And then I'll do the cold plunge, I'll end with the cold plunge.

You eat this, you become inflamed. Well, how long? And what's the hormetic effect? And so, in terms of, you know, deliberate cold exposure, people like to say, oh, it doesn't burn much fat, blocks hypertrophy. But if you look at the mental benefits of having your catecholamines, dopamine or epinephrine epinephrine systemically elevated to two to three. X for four to six hours after a 32nd to three minute protocol. You're not going to show me a drug or a form of exercise that can do that.

And when you wake up in the morning, you have a one to three degree increase in bodily temperature in the morning. That triggers a cortisol spike that triggers norepinephrine. And then you start waking up. So body temperature and the ability to fall asleep and stay asleep and wake up are very tightly correlated. Like your whole circadian rhythm is temperature driven. And so, for instance, you probably have a best time of day for you to work out where you feel best.

You probably if I were to have you train at, you know, 2 a.

M When you went to bed, you know, a couple hours before, you'd feel miserable. You're not going to perform as well. Grip strength. In the middle of the night, I wake you up.

I take your grip strength measurement, it's going to be strong, but not as strong as it would be at your peak time during the day. If we looked at your body temperature, we'd find that your your grip strength is weakest when your body temperature is lowest. So you'd say, Well, I'm asleep.

That's why, ah, but we? There's an easy experiment, this has been done. We just keep you awake for 24 hours, we measure your body temperature. It has a very regular circadian rhythm that persists.

And we measure grip strength. That's been done numerous times, people living in caves, they've done those experiments.

So your body goes, Oh shit, hypothalamus again, medial preoptic area gets a signal from it's a. I mean, if you think about how beautiful this mechanism is, I still like, get goosebumps and no pun intended when I think about it. You have receptors on your skin surface, that sense cold, send that to your hypothalamus, which says, Huh, it's cold out there. I'm going to generate heat. How do I generate heat?

Well, there are two things you can do. I can make you shiver which will generate heat, or I can make you move another. shivering is just another form of moving. Or I can activate this very specialized fat tissue which is not under the skin.

It's not subcutaneous fat, but it's around your critical organs, which is the brown fat. Activate the mitochondria there, and basically at that very core level, get electrons moving and you start, and the brown fat in term activates the thermogenic system and starts heating you up. It's so crazy and then what's beautiful is that the brown fat has a sort of memory of that experience.

So even after you get out, you're walking around right now. I did cold plunge this morning, you did cold plunge this morning, right? Okay? So your body temperature is about one to three degrees hotter, probably about one or two degrees hotter than it normally would be. Dopamine's getting cranked out.

And so all day long, you're, you're warmer at, let's say, cool ambient temperature. In fact, in Scandinavia, I learned this in researching the Soberg work. I went in and went deep into the this cold thermogenesis world over there. That they've been researching this really carefully. And they have a saying in Norway, I obviously don't know it in Norwegian. But it translates to essentially in the spring, as it's getting warmer in Texas. What you want to do is to put, they say, put on more layers. Why? So that you can prepare yourself for being able to cool yourself off easily. In the summer, when it's really hot, you'll be more comfortable in the heat of summer in Texas.

If you bundle up a bit more in the spring.

The top measurement, it's a pressure when it's not blood pumping through, and it's pressure when it's relaxed. Okay, so, um, the this system is can become very dynamic, it doesn't be. You don't want it rigid, especially given, you know what Atiyah tells us, and I believe him, is that the number one killer in the world is cardiovascular disease or cerebrovascular disease. You want the little micro capillaries of your body be very flexible, not rigid.

So when you go heat cold, you're basically going vasoconstriction, dilation, vasoconstriction.

Now, once you put on clothes and head to your workout or head to work, what's going to happen is your body temperature is now going to increase more quickly. Normally would do that anyway. Early in the day, as you wake up, your body temperature goes up, up, up, up, up up. And then whenever you achieve a sort of a dip in energy in the afternoon, there's probably one time in the afternoon. Whether or not you need a nap or not, that you feel a little bit lethargic and then you kind of come back. That represents the peak in your body temperature for 24 hours. In fact, most people, if they want to figure out their sort of optimal bedtime, I know this gets pretty down in the weeds.

You just look at that number, so maybe it's three o'clock and you say about seven hours after that, plus or minus an hour. That's probably when somebody should go to sleep. How do I know that? Cause? That's when body temperature starts dropping by one to three degrees.

So doing cold early in the day makes total sense. doing cold deliberate cold exposure before a workout total sense. doing sauna before sleep, total sense.

I just do, like a lot of like, shadow boxing and maybe I'll skip a little rope to try to get my blood up. And then, once I've do that for a few minutes, then I have a series of a hundred pushups and a hundred body weight squats that I do every day. So I go through that and that's my warmup for everything else. Cause it's pretty low stress, low impact, very easy to do. And then by the time the hundred is, a hundred squats and a hundred pushups are done, I'm warm.

And then I start whatever workout I'm going to do, but god damn, I feel happy. Yeah, well, that's that is the people that are trying to avoid it. Because, oh, fucking you doesn't do anything and you shut up. Just just do it, stop your excuses and stop arguing about it.

You're only arguing about it because you don't want to experience discomfort. I know what you're doing, you know what you're doing, we all know what you're doing. Shut the fuck up.

Just get in there, just do it. It's great for everybody. And if you can't fucking handle it, don't talk about it. But don't pretend that it's not good for you. It's nonsense.

It's one of the most. If you could sell that shit in a pill, it'd be so valuable. I mean, how many people are on SSRIs? And they're like, I kind of feel better.

No, what's very clear is that when you're when you're suffering, or you're lazy, or you're procrastinating, doing something that's harder than the state that you're in bounces you back much faster. This is all based in the dynamics of dopamine. It's sort of crazy if you know how people are procrastinating to write something or just. And they start cleaning the house. It's something they normally don't want to do. Well, it's just something that's easier than the thing that you're supposed to do. It turns out, and I learned this from Ana. If you do something that's even harder than the thing that you're trying to avoid, all of a sudden you're able to do that, and you're like, Oh, okay.

Well, it's just psychology, right? No, it's not psychology alone, it's psychology, but it's. Once dopamine is deployed at that level, you're a different person, and I know this. Because if you take someone's dopamine and lower it, that makes them depressed. That gives them, if you lower it up, even more and give them movement disorder. Parkinson's.

If you give them their dopamine back, their focus increases. How do I know that? There's a reason there's an ADHD drug shortage right now? Ritalin Adderall They all tap into this system, the dopaminergic and adrenaline norepinephrine system. So one of the most prescribed and over-prescribed classes of drugs is a drug designed to try and get exactly this effect of cold plunges.

And so I completely agree if people would just take a very cold shower, or a very cold. Plungers a little bit longer at 50 degrees, but although I agree with you, that shorter, colder is better. What I didn't describe, and I'm not trying to rescue myself here, but I do that daily. But then on Tuesdays is the typical day where I do very, very hot and very, very cold back and forth for well over an hour back and forth.

That's how robust this system of surface temperature to body is, and so I don't think it's a good replacement. But now you're seeing people saying, Oh, you just have to put your face in a bowl of ice water.

It's also the place where, believe it or not, it goes. Normally, things go arteries, veins, capillaries, but in this case, you're missing one of those components. And what it is is that top of your face, the palms of your hands, radiators. You can heat passes out of your body very readily. This is why animals like bears, who are covered with hair, will stand in cold water to cool off.

It's very effective. It's also true that if you want to heat up, you do it through these portals. And so, um, Craig's lab did two really important experiments, the first one was heating people up. It turns out, when people come out of anesthesia, it's very slow.

And this is a problem for all sorts of critical reasons related to keeping people alive. And if you measure people's body temperature when they're coming out of anesthesia, it's very low, and as it that heats up, they wake up just like out of sleep. His laboratory developed these heating devices that would heat people's palms or the bottoms of their feet. And they found that they could bring them out of anesthesia much faster and recovery rates were much better. Super impressive result, not talked about often enough.

And the reason it's not talked out about often enough is all this stuff around thermogenic studies. Was really hot in like the 19th, no pun in the sorry, in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and then it was sort of considered kind of like, not lame, but it wasn't hot science. There I go again, I'm really trying, not trying to pun here.

Um, then what? What's happened in recent years is people who've gotten into these protocols and it's become more popular. His laboratory also showed that. One of the reasons why we fail on, like a set of dips or chins. Local muscular failure is due to heating of the muscle locally due to work. And then there's a enzyme called pyruvate kinase, which is very heat dependent. When your muscle gets too hot, Pyruvate kinase can't function and your muscle fails.

It's one of the reasons you fail on a set. So what they figured out was if you cool people's core body temperature, they can do more work now. It got a little confused. People say, Oh, I didn't double my bench press after cooling my hands. Well, that's not really the point.

The point is that, let's say you can do 10 sets of 10 at a given weight, with two minutes of rest in between. And that's all you can do. And you're hitting failure. Maybe you have to adjust the weight down on sets four, five, six, et cetera, classic 10 sets of 10. That I don't know if people do German volume training, or five sets of five. If you lower the core body temperature through the proper use of palmer cooling, as it's called, or through some other device. What you find is people can continue to get the same number of repetitions, provided they keep the rest the same. And they can double the amount or more of work that they're doing total.

So they can increase their volume, the interesting thing is, they preserve the training effect. So if you can go from doing, I don't know how many dips. I saw you do a bunch of pushups right there on a podcast recently. He's like, 75, right?

It has to be the right temperature so that you can continue to pass cool in. And that's why it requires a device to heat. Excuse me, to cool your palms, but not so cold that you vasoconstrict. And so there is the cool MIT device. To be honest, is it a very effective device? it? They've never been very effective at marketing that device, but they use athletes at Stanford use it.

But nowadays, what athletes mainly are doing? And I talked to pro basketball players, football players, tier one, military. They're doing cold before their training. Because it's just simpler and you don't need a device. Inter workout or intra workout. Cooling is really an interesting topic, but it hasn't been perfected at the level of devices. They're still kind of clunky. You got to go put your hand in the thing. No, no, knock on, cool man.

I mean, I think they're trying really hard. I actually got one for Cam that I still need to deliver to him.

Maybe at some point in the future, every state, they'll have stations in the gym where you kind of plug in. Yeah, um, and you can just do more work, it's all about the ability to do more work and recover and recover. And it's clear that the cold after training is. If your goal is to train again, well, then you want inflammation down. But if your goal is to improve as a consequence of that training session, you have to be careful how much you're blocking the inflammation.

Just what do you ask your body to do?

I don't think it was just that, I mean, I think it was, uh, he tested positive for something.

I don't know, I don't know how many. Quite a few podcasters.

It's not the people that I've talked to that understand this. I've had many conversations with virologists and, uh, evolutionary biologists, who explained to me why this is most likely a lab leak. No one has. They're not arguing with this, so when someone comes along with this and they're saying, Oh, we found it, like, No, you didn't.

No, you, you know, you didn't, you're you're writing this article because you're being influenced to do so. Like someone is telling them that this is a good thing to put out, someone is giving them information and saying, we, we believe this and you should print this. And it's. There's some. There's money behind that that doesn't reach independent journalism.

That's the difference, like the the amount of money behind an advertisement that goes to CNN or an advertisement that goes to the New York Times. It's a different thing. Then what goes to breaking points with Crystal and Sagar, then what goes to Matt Taibbi sub stack? There's none there, there's no influence there.

These people are influenced by gigantic corporations. That's why they put out articles that are not plausible. That's why people don't trust them anymore. That's why, you know, people think they're fucking shady.

Here's why they did that. This was the influence, here's where the money is. We have emails we can show you they were influenced.

If it wasn't for them, we would be fucked. And it's one of the beautiful things about the internet today. The internet today allows people like that to thrive. Because these mainstream media corporations are so corrupt, they're so obviously indebted to the companies that pay for their advertising.

And then you say, and I wrote and said, Hey, you know, this is factually incorrect, I didn't say this. First of all, I'm not a medical doctor. This you got the they, they swapped the names, either accidentally, and then I got this, oh well, you know, kind of response like, too late, you know?

And but when it's no retraction, but what? no. And when it's your neck on the line, you know, it's your name. I mean, in science, all we have is our reputation, in science or in anything that's all we have is our reputation. So it's a scary thing to hand that over to somebody.

So unless it's a particular few set of sources, I generally declined. Traditional media conversations. The other, and now that the fight isn't just for traditional, you know, over media, traditional or independent. You know, the universities too, right? We were asking, I have to say, and I'm not. This is not a to be, uh, you know, politically correct or incorrect.

Stanford has been very good about letting different faculty at Stanford voice their differing opinions on everything from Covid to politics. You know, there's a free speech, um, a right to free speech, uh, petition that's been going around the campus for a while, that you can find this online. Now. A lot of people also will hear things about, oh, I hear. On college campuses like Stanford, you're hearing getting a lot of pressure to do this, or a lot of pressure to do that. Yeah, there there are pressures from students and top down.

Listen, students are under pressure, administrators are under pressure, faculty under pressure. But Stanford has been very good about allowing people to have their own independent social media channels and talk to the public. The way they feel is best. That's excellent, and I and I have to say it's one of the things that makes me really proud to be there.

It's an amazing place, too. But if you and I'm not going to throw out names here because it's not my place. And they should probably just come on the podcast separately. But you've got people at every end of the of the major debates out there about public health and everything in between. On Twitter, fewer on Instagram, but on Twitter, voicing their opinion. And honestly, I think it's beautiful that they are allowed to do it.

He's given people their voice back.

From my standpoint anyway, which is, people now realize that medical doctors have a certain type of information that is extremely valuable. And they come in a range of flavors and qualities. Same with psychologists, same with scientists, same with public health officials, same with everything from your, your masseuse to your chiropractor. Like, there is a range of quality and expertise and orientation. And to silence any one of those, at the exclusion of the others, is is not only foolish, it's it's dangerous, and so I think there's no going back.

There's no going back. Now. People seek advice on multiple dimensions. You know, a few years ago, if you said supplements, people were like, Oh, that's expensive. Urine. Well, that's true if you're talking about vitamins and minerals, but how many people do I know who during the pandemic started taking vitamin D?

Getting some sunshine.

We know that's correlated with depression, anxiety, insomnia, which then has a cascade of negative effects. Things like creatine, not just for we think creatine muscles, and indeed, it brings water into the muscles and make you stronger. Most of the data clinical data on creatine are to enhance forebrain function. It's one cause.

It's a nootropic, post-concussion, post-surgery, postpartum depression, headache. I mean, fish oils. So there's this whole category of things that, in theory, you could get from food, but the volumes that you would have to eat. And the sourcing is just impractical. Uh, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, there's rhodiola rosea, which is, you know, reducing cortisol. There's interesting data on that.

And then there's the stuff we've talked about before, about hormone augmentation. But for the typical person out there nowadays, I think they're thinking about, well, what can I do, what can I eat? how can I take better care of myself? Am I magnesium deficient or not? Probably not, but we'll taking some additional magnesium.

Help me sleep? Yes, will it hurt me? No.

Or I guess they call it AG one now, things that are in such combinations of herbs and plant based compounds, you can't take them one by one. And then other things like magnesium is for sleep or inositol, and the date on depression or inositol, and insulin sensitivity. You know the number of people that are out there who are pre-diabetic or type two diabetes? Of course, they need to exercise and eat, right, but things like inositol can improve insulin.

Inositol is it's similar to a vitamin, but it works in a pathway that makes cells more insulin sensitive, which is good. So you can use the glucose and insulin that you make, so you're not overproducing insulin. Type two diabetes is essentially overproduction of insulin because your cells aren't able to use the insulin that's around, so you crank out more of it.

Type one diabetes Lack of insulin from the pancreas, that's why people have to inject it. Who have type one diabetes. So things like inositol, I mean, and the list just goes on and on, you know? And so to me, I think the view is changing, I hope that.

You know, the idea previously was that before the pandemic, frankly, was that supplements are just kind of like nootropic. That, or, you know, it's kind of you don't need it. I'm not saying you need it, but they are a powerful argument. To good sleep, good nutrition, good training, good social connection, yeah.

Supplements are very beneficial.

What did you take vitamins? And there was zero going on with him. He goes on walks occasionally.

I mean, there were sheets, fucking junk food. He wasn't taking vitamins, you know? He told me that, uh, some internist told him to, uh, take a vitamin D, so he took that for a while. I'm like, for a while.

Yeah.

Yeah, but this is like a strange website, I'll be honest with you. Oh, is it? I clicked quick because it said two weeks ago.

Original.

Newsbreak.

Com Hmm.

Yeah, yeah, I think they're selling something.

There's, there's really only three top tier journals Nature, Cell and Science. He said, Very. And I asked him once, I said, what? What determines whether or not one paper is accepted or not? And he said, Well, we get to determine. Obviously, the reviewers have to give it thumbs up at some point, but we get to determine the direction that the journal wants to go. So during the pandemic, there was an enormous incentive for publishing papers in these journals that provided some either hope or fear, or whatever. It was exciting at the time because people were buying up these journals like crazy.

I mean, they have to pay their staff too, so it's a business like anything else. Unfortunately, there is aside from the federal research budget, which isn't, frankly, we're over. We have a much greater budget than in other countries for research, relative to the total amount available. But it's still very low compared to what we need. Uh, but money is what drives research, I mean, it's not going to. The more money you have, the more margin for error you can have in terms of the people in your lab. Like, if you only have a million dollar a year operating budget, like it's a business, you can have two or three really good people.

And if someone's not so good, that's bad. If you have a giant budget, you can have 20 people and 10 of them can suck. That's rare to see that usually it's a mixture of competent to talented. The occasional bad apple and those bad apples are very, very dangerous.

And the bad apples I'm talking about are not the kind of people that necessarily, uh, go around creating data out of nowhere. These are the people who slice off and make experiments that didn't work, kind of disappear. Oh, there was something wrong with that now. That is a serious problem in science, far more than fabrication of data.

There are, there are incentives through things like companies, and a lot of professors now have companies and we can talk about that. And that's complicated. Sometimes they're not complicated, but the point is that they want it.

Heads of labs want to make fundamental discoveries, they want to be true. The the. The three biggest fears for a real scientist are to get something wrong and not, and to get it wrong for the wrong reasons. The wrong reasons would be someone comes to your laboratory and sees an opportunity to please the PI. This is, I think, one of the major sources of error in science.

Someone you're get publishing papers as a postdoc is what gets you a job, so I've known over the years postdocs and there's a lot of discussion about. This is inside ball of science, where someone gets there and realizes that the head of this lab has a pet hypothesis. That's really exciting to them. Why is it exciting?

Cause it's exciting. They like the idea, but also it would allow them to renew their funding. Yes, definitely, money's involved. And then that person goes and does experiments and shows the PI the experiments that work and doesn't show them the experiments that don't work. And then tells themselves those experiments didn't work. Because, you know, the centrifuge was off, or the mouse was sick, or something, you know, gives themselves reasons why it was okay to remove data that occurs.

I think I'm going to guess here, I don't know, but I'm based on my observation. That's probably about 10 to 15 of the top tier published papers, I think don't last, meaning in the years following, they don't replicate and they go nowhere. And I don't think it's because people made up data quote unquote.

I think it's because they threw out bad data or data that, excuse me, they threw out data that didn't fit their hypothesis and labeled it no good. That is very common now, people who quote unquote fudge data make up data. I would say that's 2%.

Now we have to be clear that plaques and tangles do accumulate in the brains of people with Alzheimer's, and mice that have mutations that make them kind of like. Good models for Alzheimer's. But early on in the research on Alzheimer's. So, dating back well over a decade now, there was basically a data fraud, fudging of data, we call it. Where someone essentially said that that there was a label for a particular plaque or tangle of protein that represented something that it didn't. And then what this has cascaded into over many, many years is an entire set of theories about which drugs ought to be beneficial for the treatment of Alzheimer's. And I would say now, trillions of dollars put into research along those particular lines of inquiry. So what we're basically saying is one mistake can cascade into a series of thousands or tens of thousands of mistakes. That can take a field really far astray. And that's what's happened now.

They realized that there was a problem with the early data. Now the thing that's kind of baffling is how the field continued down this path for so long without actually considering alternative hypotheses with any seriousness. Why somebody didn't say, Hey, let's go back and test the initial premise of all of this? And part of that has to do with, if you know, biotech is neither good nor bad, nor evil, nor anything. It's just, but it's a business. And there's a pretty quick runway from a big landmark discovery to a couple of verifications, to people founding companies, to big dollars coming in through investments. And then, I mean, how many times have we been told blockbuster finding in mice?

And then when, and then people with Alzheimer's say, Well, when is there going to be treatment? 10 years, how long? about 10 years? This 10 years thing has been kicked down the road for 50 years. I mean, I've been in the research game, 30 years close to it, you know, and so many things have just been kicked down the road.

Now there are kind of maverick folks within science who test very alternative hypotheses, and they are really the heroes of science in my opinion. Because they're saying, that's all fine and good, or maybe it's all false, I don't know, I'm going to go a different direction and explore. But in the sociology of science and science funding, it is very, very hard to impossible to get funding from the federal government to do truly high risk pioneering science.

You might say, like, how could that be? In general, when you get funded by the government, my lab has been funded by the government for many years. You get funded for work that is already completed, you show it to them in a grant, you say, this is what I want to do.

You get the money and wow, the paper comes out like the same year, how did that happen? And then you use the money to fund the next thing. Every, every card carrying laboratory head knows this. Why?

Because when you put in a grant that says this is a really exciting idea, they're not going to fund that. So this is why philanthropy and private money comes into science and is very exciting and enticing to scientists. Because they can start testing things that the federal government funding bodies are just too conservative to test.

Well, you get it by publishing papers in really great journals and with your name first. So what does that lead to? It leads to really high ambition, people working very, very hard, and science is hard. A lot of experiments fail.

And some people will just figure out that if they can just give the lab director the figure out their pet hypothesis. Like, figure out what mommy and daddy like, what mommy or daddy like most, and give them those results. Those people get promoted very quickly now in the long run, they don't do well. Or what you'll find is they often just switch to an entire area, new area of science. When they start their lab, they kind of get there.

And then years later, or even a year later, you go, whatever happened to that result. Well, if you ask people in the laboratory, postdocs and graduate students, it's sort of, I think, probably like any, any career path. They know the truth. So if you ask them, what do you think of that paper? and they're like, Yeah, I don't know.

That means it's bullshit.

And then they're like, that's when people attack each other, kill people's grants, kill people's papers. Science is a it's not a cutthroat game, but it's a very human game. And now I also want to highlight cause I feel like as an ambassador for my field. I do want to say that there are excellent scientists who care so very much about the truth and who go through every detail of every paper. Their families suffer, they everybody suffers as a consequence of their neurotic tendency. But those people are the heroes of science. Because they won't let something go to publication unless they know is absolutely watertight.

But listen, the bigger the labs, the more, the higher the probability of a bad apple. Yeah, and it happens all the time.

We're all incredible people and scientists in different ways. I was very, very blessed. But the first one killed himself, he had a bad depression, killed himself. second one cancer at 50, third one had a heart attack across the desk from me.

First day of work at Stanford, he was my postdoc advisor. Uh, eventually died of pancreatic cancer. So the joke in my field is, you don't want me to work for you, right? Like, it's like a death sentence. Now they're all dead. But the good, you know, is a terrible thing to be orphaned in science because promotions, things like that. Other people stepped in and helped me, and I'm very grateful to those people. But one of the blessings, the hidden blessings, the silver lining in all this is like, I didn't have to please anybody. And so when it came time to do a podcast or to look at data or review a paper, I was not worried about pleasing anyone. But but prior to that, I'll tell you, I've been asked to write letters for people's tenure.

You know, can this person have a job for life or not you? They get 10 to 12 letters and I've had people say, Hey, listen, we're having a really hard time getting letters for this person. And you know, this person really needs tenure and they got a family. And you know, and you look at the work, and you know. And you want to say no, and you can't because you don't want that person to review your paper and give an Ax your next paper. Now I've been very lucky because I don't. First of all, I just I think it's maybe just the way I'm wired.

I just don't care about that aspect of human, you know, I'm one of these people. I'm sort of like my bulldog. Costello was like, I'm going to go along with things until you try and push me. And then like, I'm like, I just have kind of a resistance thing. It's some developmental error or something, who knows, but probably.

They'll, they'll really go after the. I think it's great.

Whole companies were founded, investor money. Where are those companies? Where are those drugs?

Wasn't it in the 1960s?

However, I think there there is a link there. This is more Atiyah's territory than mine. But but even the the the markers that, like, he's really highlighted are so key. Things like APOB, he's a big, big on, like your APOB level is is a critical determinant of your longevity. But what?

Cause that requires other people's perceptions, and just being rich doesn't make you necessarily respected by certain people. Yes, by certain people no.

So he understood that very wealthy people will feel more important and can derive more sense of self-respect when they're surrounded by brilliant people. And he was very good at bringing truly brilliant people into that mix. People like Murray Gell-mann, who discovered the quark, right? He's a particle physicist, I mean, head of the Santa Fe Institute, Nobel Prize.

I mean, he's Gell-mann used to pick on Richard Feynman. He was one of the few people who could maybe not verbally joust with him, but at a scientific level, could pin that guy. So they were on more or less equal tier. But, you know, Gell-mann was right up there, so Epstein understood, like, bring around the Gell-manns, bring around the top genetic researchers from Harvard. By doing that, he made these rich people feel like they were in the company of interesting, important people.

Scientists will show up to dinners that normally they'd rather be in their labs, or writing grants, or with their families. Frankly, if there's the possibility of money being given to their laboratory, because then they can hire more people and do more science. Money alone doesn't drive good science, but the more money you have, the bigger margin of error you have. So if Epstein offers offered laboratories, you know, a million dollars a year for four years to a guy of that wealth as trivial to a laboratory. That is, four national Institutes of Health grants per year, and the workload to maintain those four grants is immense. So they'd show up with the possibility of getting money.

That's where they were hanging out with a dirt bag like him. And they. They had blinders on, either they knew or they didn't know what he was up to. But they had blinders on because they weren't thinking about the implications.

It's not really their thing, what they like to do is work on their pet projects. They're they're a little bit like comedians in the sense that they have a craft they want to be working on. They're only going to do things like go out and get money if they have to get money, and they do a lot to get money.

Right, and the only people that they look up to are tier one special operators. You tell a pro N.BA player like, Oh, in the NFL they do this, they're like, whatever you tell them that, you know. This will increase your your output by 10%.

They're like, whatever, they don't care, they want to play video games. They do not care, they want to hang out with their girlfriend or their four girlfriends, whatever it is.

You tell them tier one operators who do high-risk, high-consequence work and are on deployment schedules. That would dissolve you into a puddle of your own tears, cause it's a vampire schedule, you don't get to sleep when you want to, and you get you potentially die.

You potentially all die, and their running times are faster, their recovery times are faster. Their shooting accuracy is far better than your shooting accuracy, and that's where the gun and getting shot at.

And they go, Okay, I'll listen. They look up to tier one operators, that's a fact, and so if you want them to listen, you understand that fact, you look at what tier one operators are doing.

That's what professional sports teams are trying to glean, that information.

Billionaires, they have different interests, obviously. They some race yachts, some, what you know, want to start new projects. But they want to be around really innovative, interesting people. And in academia, there are very small subset of those running big laboratories. And Epstein just got that down to the detail, and then he understood. I think with politicians they can. Their reputations are everything, and so he gave them a vaulted world where they could behave how they wanted.

I mean he in some sense, I mean he. His story is one of of multiple psychologies, not just his.