Dr. Andrew Weil

00:034 3 2 All the way from Tucson, Arizona, Dr. Weil. How are you, sir? I am good. Thanks for doing this, man. I appreciate it. Pleasure. You come highly recommended by many human beings that I know. Well, I'm glad to hear it. How do you How do you get such a fine reputation? Well, I've been doing the same things for a long time. Just putting one foot ahead of the other and saying what I know to be true. And and pushing matcha. Everybody likes matcha. Who doesn't like matcha tea? This is your stuff? Yeah, but you know, a lot of people don't have only tasted really bad matcha because Oh, okay. Enlighten me. What's Uh you know, it's powdered tea and it's very very finely powdered and it's very labor intensive to prepare. And it's got such a huge surface area that it oxidizes very quickly. So, if it's not properly packed and stored, it loses its brilliant green color. It turns

00:52yellow-green or gray-green. It gets bitter and loses its taste. And I got to say most of the matcha that I see served in this country is of that sort. And many people have never had the good stuff. What are the benefits of matcha? I know there's First of all, it's it's beautiful. I mean, I've never seen a green color like that. It's just amazing. And the flavor is amazing. But it's the only preparation of tea in which the whole leaf is consumed. Uh and and it it's grown under special conditions. The leaves are shaded deep shade for the last 3 weeks before harvest. So, they in response to that, the leaves produce more chlorophyll, more antioxidants, more of the good stuff. So, it's got you know, much more of the things you want. This has like a pop top like Pringles. Yeah. Right? Is that So, the matcha's in there? It's got to stay fresh. And after you open it, you want to keep it in the

01:38freezer and and yep. Freezer. You got to freeze it and you get So, you sift it so it doesn't form lumps and then you whisk it with that traditional bamboo whisk or you buy a little electric whisker. Ah. And you can whisk it in hot water or cold water and it's very yummy. And what What does it do for you? Like what's the good Well, you've got it's got caffeine, of course. So, you get stimulated by it, but it's also got L-theanine, which is this relaxing compound that modifies the effect of caffeine and produces a state of relaxed alertness. Mhm. So, it doesn't have the jangling effect of coffee. Right. And you're getting all of these antioxidant benefits that are well documented in tea. Anyway, I love it. It's a great thing. Anytime you get one of these little whisks. It's cool. It's like a real bamboo one. Made from one piece of bamboo. It's a miracle of Japanese craftsmanship. It's

02:26beautiful. It's beautiful. So, how often do you drink this stuff? I have a bowl of it every morning and sometimes Yeah, and sometimes I have a glass of iced matcha later in the day, especially in warm weather. You just a matcha fiend. I love it. It's a good thing. I first tasted it when I was 17. I was an exchange student in Japan in 1959. I lived with a family outside of Tokyo. We had no language in common. And on the second night I was there, the mother took me next door to her neighbors who practiced tea ceremony. And they did this thing for me and I was fascinated by that whisk and the color of the matcha and I thought it was great. You know, I never thought I'd be able to get it over here. Yeah. Well, so you you import this stuff yourself? Is that what you do? I started a company called Matcha Kari. We've got the URL matcha.com and I went to Japan

03:11to Uji, which is a little town outside of Kyoto, where which is the center of the best tea production in Japan. And I sourced really good matcha. You know, there are many grades of matcha. The most the highest are too expensive to use for everyday use. They're just Really? Yeah. I mean, phenomenal expensive. like truffles or Yeah, up in Yeah, really expensive. So, I tried to find the best matcha that is affordable and make it available to people here. So, like the highest level stuff, how much would it cost for a cup of tea? Hard to estimate for a cup. You know, it possibly There's a preparation called thick tea in Japan where they use three times the amount of powder and probably one bowl of that stuff which is shared by several people. I don't know. It could be $100 a bowl. Whoa. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Why Why did it catch on in Japan like that? It's always been. You know, it has been

04:02in Japan for a very long time and and this powdered tea preparation was originally taken up by Zen monks to help them stay awake during long hours of meditation. It was also associated with samurai and became the tea ceremony developed around that. Is there anything that is similar to it? Is it like yerba mate or guarana or any other kind of tea? They're all caffeine plants, but in my experience, tea, I think and it's primarily because of that L-theanine content, the effect is mellower of caffeine. So, you get stimulated, you get alert, but it doesn't have the jangling effect of a lot of these other caffeine beverages. Mhm. Do you drink regular coffee as well? No, I've never drunk coffee. Wow. I think I was turned off it because my parents when I was growing up drank really strong black coffee with no sugar or cream. I couldn't imagine why people would drink Savages. Yeah.

04:53Those people They were different people. Did you grow up in a northern climate? I grew up in Philadelphia. Yeah. See, it's when it's cold outside, people they drink that black coffee. Oof. Makes you angry at the world. Yeah. Dark black burnt coffee. I like bright green shining matcha. It Isn't it interesting that things that are good for you, many things that are good for you like bell peppers or something like that, they have a beautiful color to them. Well, you know, all these the health benefits of fruits and vegetables, a lot of them have to do with these pigments. And the pigments the plants produce, they're part of their own defensive system and they do good things in us. And one piece of advice that I often give people is you should try to eat across the color spectrum every day. Think about you know, what did you eat today that was red, what was purple,

05:41what was green, what was white. All of these have different benefits. Is that a scientific perspective Absolutely. Really? Yeah, yeah. These are categories of phytochemicals or protective phytonutrients and a lot of them are these pigments that give fruits and vegetables their bright colors. Do you think that people should vary those colors in any given day or as as much as you can across any day, try to eat across the color spectrum. That's a good thing to aim for. Okay. So, just just get as many of them as in as you can. Yeah. Yeah. So, do you you take this approach with fruits, with with all sorts of different things? Yeah. Yeah. Brightly colored stuff is good. Do you eat meat or chicken or fish? I'm I'm fish and vegetables. Just fish and vegetables. Yeah. Um now, when you One of the things that I'm super concerned with and I've been more concerned with the more I pay attention

06:29to it is sustainability when it comes to fish. Absolutely. It seems like especially ocean fish, we're you know, human beings are just terrible monsters. You know, there's a famous oceanographer in this country, Sylvia Earle, who was the woman that held the record for the deepest dive. And she came up to me at a meeting once and pleaded with me not to recommend that people eat fish. She said there just aren't going to be any in the future. And that's probably true. You know, probably the future is going to be farmed fish and that can be done in a responsible way. Yeah. You can get the good guides. One is put out by the Monterey Aquarium. You can get a wallet card that lists that lists fish and and shellfish and rates them both by toxicity and sustainability. And that's a good guide to follow. Yeah. Um mollusks? You mollusks? I do I eat the Yeah. I I eat

07:16I like oysters. Uh and scallops. I eat them. What is What has led you to not eat chicken or fish or or beef, rather? It's been a long time and let's see. I was I think 28 and I was interested in yoga and people that I knew who were doing yoga had become vegetarian. And I saw friends of mine that had become vegetarian. I thought, well, I'll just try it for a little while and it agreed with me. I didn't eat fish for a number of years and I found that made tra- international travel very difficult, especially to Japan. And and then I was reading about all the research on the good stuff in fish and I started eating fish and that that way of eating agrees with me real well. Yeah. It is a thing I agree with you thing, right? Yeah. It really depended upon the person's Very individual. So, you know, it's hard to give blanket rules except I have no problem telling people to stay

08:07away from refined processed and manufactured food. That's the bad stuff. Yeah, that's a really good clear thing that everybody can kind of apply in their life. But as far as like what is going to work for you, there's a lot of trial and error involved, isn't there? Absolutely. You got to do experiments, pay attention, see what works for you. Yeah. Now, you practice What would you How would you call it? Integrative medicine? Yeah. How would you define that? Well, it's medicine of the future. And you know, the short answer Short answer is it's the intelligent combination of conventional and alternative medicine. But really, it's it's a system that focuses on the body's ability to heal itself. That looks at people as whole persons, not just physical bodies. That takes account of all aspects of lifestyle and understanding health and illness. Values the practitioner-patient

08:52relationship and makes use of all therapies, no matter where they come from, that show reasonable evidence of efficacy and are not going to hurt people. So, I am absolutely convinced this is the way out of the health care crisis. I've been training doctors and other health professionals in it for many years now. Now, when you say the body's ability to heal itself, how would you accentuate that with This to me is the thing that's most missing from medical education. I I think the only time I heard the word healing used in medical school was in the in wound healing, which in my first year course in histology. Uh to me, the most marvelous thing about our bodies is that they have the capacity to heal themselves. You get a cut, you can watch it heal. And that that happens throughout the body. You know, the DNA molecule, this is just a big molecule on the border of life and non-life. It has

09:42within it the ability to know, in quotes, when it's been injured. If a cosmic ray knocks a part of it out, instantly it begins to manufacture repair enzymes that that duplicate the missing piece and paste it in. And you can see that same thing at any level of biological organization. And to me, that's where good medicine should start, that the body has within it the ability to maintain equilibrium, heal itself. Now, knowing that the body has this ability, what what do you do to accentuate that? Well, if I when I listen to a patient and hear their story, at the back of my mind I'm thinking, why is healing not happening here? What what can I do from outside that can facilitate that? I can't put it into somebody, but I can help it along by either supplying energy, missing remove obstacles to it. You know, like you have a wound that doesn't heal, maybe there's a foreign

10:30body in it. You remove that, heals. Now, um when you have people that come to you that have issues, like say if someone comes to you and they have a back issue. Yeah. I got a little bit of lower back pain. Do you approach that from in terms of like how they're eating, how they're living their lifestyle first? I would question them about lifestyle for sure, but you know, I'm a great follower of a a man who died recently named John Sarno, who was a Okay. You know about his work? Sure. Uh he has some great books, Mind Over Back Pain, Healing Back Pain. And his main belief, which I totally agree with, is that the vast majority of back pain is muscle spasm, which originates in the mind. Mhm. Uh and it may localize at an area of physical injury, but it the the injury is not the cause of it. You can live with a slipped disc and have no pain. Uh you look at x-rays of

11:21you define slipped though? What does that mean? Does it mean bulging, herniated? That does not necessarily cause pain. Uh and unless there's associated neurological symptoms, you don't want to do anything about that. Right. It's unless it's pressing on Exactly. Right. Now, um John Sarno's idea was that it's a lot of stress and anxiety and a lot of different psychological factors that are causing this pain. he I'm sure he was some kind of incredible healer. He he required that people who came to him come to two evening lectures that he gave. That's all. Many people who did that lost their back pain forever. Just listening to him. Some other people have had that happen just reading his book. Uh Yeah, I read a little bit of it. You know, I've had like legitimate injuries. So, whenever I hear someone say, "Oh, it's all in your head." no, it's not all in your head. It's in

12:10your head and your and your body. It's in your head and your muscles. And the this problem of muscle spasm, which shuts off blood supply, and it's a vicious cycle, that'll localize at an area you've had physical injury. But, the pain is not coming from the injury, it's coming from muscle spasm, and that's controlled by uh uh greatly influenced by the mind. So, when you when your back is like, "Ah!" and seizes up, that is a muscle spasm. And that's incredibly painful. And it's located in the area of the injury, so it can confuse you into thinking it's the injury that's causing you pain, when it's in fact And leads people into getting physical interventions that may not be necessary. Yeah, I'm a big believer in waiting, especially with spinal stuff. Absolutely. Absolutely. want to feed you and cut you and You look at Here's another interesting thing. You can look at x-rays of

13:00people's spines that look so horrible, you can't imagine that they can move, and they have no nothing, no symptoms. And you can look at other x-rays that look perfect, and people are disabled by pain. So, there's a very low correlation between physical findings and subjective experience. Now, what does Sarno recommend? I I never really thought going about your business. Going about your business. Yeah, ignoring it, going about your business, and if possible, try to figure out, you know, what what message, you know, your mind is sending down there. But, basically, it's reassurance that it'll go away on its own. So, when he does these lectures and he has people cures them of it, is just he's just reassuring them that everything's going to be okay this process of how he calls it tension myositis syndrome, and he explains the mechanism of how it works. One friend of

13:46mine, he was in his late 20s, played about a basketball, had, you know, very serious herniated discs. He was within hours of having neurological surgery, spinal surgery. And I yelled at him to read this book and see Sarno, who was in New York. And he said, "I don't believe any of that. It's all bullshit." And I said, "Go, go see him." So, he went to see him or went to the evening lectures, thought this was nonsense, went home, was having dinner, and realized his back pain was gone. Never had surgery. Jesus Christ. No, I There's There's got to be something to that, right? There's There's something to the placebo effect, right? So, if there if that is a real thing, if you can convince your body that it's got the medicine that it needs and it starts to heal, even though there's no medicine, there's got to be something that is working against you as well with the wrong mindset, right?

14:36Look, it's funny to me to hear people rediscovering the placebo effect now. I I wrote a book in 1983 called Health and Healing. I had two chapters in there on placebos. And what I wrote is that the the greatest problem is that we, you know, when we talk about placebos, it's in phrases like, "How do you know that's not just a placebo effect?" The most interesting word there is just. Right. Or we have to rule out the placebo effect. We should be ruling it in, man. That's the meat of medicine. That's pure healing from within, mediated by belief, unmixed up with the direct effects of treatment. That's what you want to make happen more of the time. It just is a mind for a lot of people, cuz they're like, "How am I tricking myself into getting better? And why can't I just do it?" Because that must have something to do with the structure of the brain, that

15:16the part of the brain in which our will is is doesn't connect directly to the machinery of the body, to the autonomic nervous system. So, you have to find some way of getting around that. One way is to project belief onto something external, and then let it work for you. Yeah. But, that's so strange that the mind works that way. It would seem like wouldn't it be an evolutionary advantage just have it at access? You know, like Sure, that'd be nice, but that's the same thing, you know, it's it's similar problem to why can't you just get high without taking a drug? The high is in your brain, not in the drug. The drug is a trigger that releases it. Why can't we just sit down and say, "Well, I'm going to be high for the next 10 minutes?" Mhm. The same thing. We don't have access to those controls. It just seems like that one though, healing, Yeah. and getting better, that one seems like

16:03it's something that we should as a culture concentrate on. Yeah, for sure. What we really concentrate on is actual medicine. But, one way to concentrate that is by giving people greater confidence in their body's ability to do that. And doctors have great power to do that, because patients project a lot of belief on them. Right. I've had many patients over the years who said that the most important thing I did for them was that I was the only doctor who told them they could get better. I mean, astonishing. Mhm. Yeah. Is it because doctors are just seeing too many patients and they're overwhelmed and they got legal bills and they have I think some I I've thought about this a lot, and I There's also the negative side of this. I've seen There's something called medical hexing, in which doctors say things that actually interfere with healing or cause people to get worse.

16:49And I think a lot of this is done unconsciously. Mhm. So, here's one of my thoughts. In their training, doctors see a very skewed sample of sick people. They see very sick people in hospitals. And in that group, healing is less likely to happen. But, if you look at the total spectrum of illness, the vast majority of things get better on their own. So, I think, you know, observing in yourself, wound healing is a good one to start with, to get greater confidence in your body's ability to do things. That's really valuable. So, but this obviously you're not talking about catastrophic injuries, you're just talking about general wellness. I think even in the case of of catastrophic injury, this stuff operates. I worked a lot with hypnotherapists over the years, and one of the one of my colleagues did a lot of work in training paramedics to be really careful about what you say around

17:41unconscious people who have been massively injured. Uh you know, when the if a if a paramedic takes an automobile accident victim and they're putting them in and says, "This one's a goner." That is a bad thing, you know, the unconscious mind hears that. On and on the other hand, you say something opposite to a person, you can see cases where you can stop bleeding in unconscious people, severely injured, just by giving them suggestions. Wow. Yeah. So, when you're saying someone's a goner, you trigger stress or you trigger helplessness? Like, what what is happening? medically trained person tell you that you're not going to live, that's that's a curse. Yeah. That's a medical hex. How strange is it that sometimes your life is hanging on the border of you believing you're going to be okay and you believing you're not going to be okay? So, you want to be very careful about,

18:31you know, whose hands you place yourself in. Yes. You never want to stay in treatment with a doctor who thinks you can't get better. A negative doctor. Yeah. Well, doctors are just like every other Right. occupation. There's people that are really good at it and are really concentrated and focused, and there's people that are half-assing it. Well, the ones I trained through our University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine get it. You know, we're putting out We've graduated about 1,600 physicians now from very intensive training. They're in practice all over the country, teaching other people. This is a good thing. Now, when you say integrative medicine, when they're in practice, are they essentially general practitioners? No. And We've trained people from all specialties. you can name, we've trained them. So, orthopedic surgeons, Neurologists,

19:10dermatologists, anything you can name. Yeah. And so, you try to tend to look at them We teach them all the things they didn't get in medical school, nutrition, mind-body interactions, strengths and weaknesses of alternative medicine, herbal medicine, all that. Like say someone comes to you, maybe they have a bad case of psoriasis or some autoimmune issue like that. Prime prime target for mind-body medicine, for traditional Chinese medicine, which often works well in in that, dietary change, put people on an anti-inflammatory diet, use of natural products that reduce inflammation. So, there's a wide range of things to choose from. And this does not reject conventional treatment. You know, we may use conventional medication, but if you do, I recommend using the lowest dose of the least potent agent. Start off with that and you can ramp up if you need to. Well, a lot of people and me, I'm

19:59definitely guilty of this. They hear terms like holistic or Eastern medicine or Chinese medicine and you go Right? Well, I have a good detector, too. And so I'm really careful about what I, you know, accept and what I don't. Um what what do you not buy into? Like when you see your detector, like what where are you All right, I'll give you an example. I've you know, I've I'm not I can't see any basis for crystal healing. Oh, bro, I got a crystal in my pocket right now. All right, well, too bad. It's damn. How about the colonic irrigation people tell you tell you that they see, you know, watermelon seeds coming out and you haven't eaten a watermelon in months. That's They the lining of the GI tract sloughed off and is regenerated every 24 hours. There's no way that things can get encrusted there. Yeah. That's a weird one, the colonic thing because your body has all this natural bacteria

20:55that you're supposed to keep in there, right? Not only keep in there, we're finding out that that's like more and more really important determinant of everything, of general health, of mental health, too. Fascinating. Yeah, whose idea was it to start doing those colonics? Uh that must go way back. That's kind of like you know, It's a wacky idea. Pump some water up there. See what's up. Yeah. And you have to stand there And it gets it's addictive, too. I see people get addicted to this. Yes. Jeez. Yeah, so Yeah, I won't go further into that. My wife had it done once and she was describing it to me. I'm like, yeah, I'm going to pass. Some lady's looking at the tube and telling you what's going on in there. Like what some people ladies like looking at your Right. It started as early as 1500 BC. Ebers papyrus, an ancient Egyptian medical document, described the many benefits of

21:42colon cleansing. In ancient times, the practice of cleansing the colon was administered in a river by using a hollow reed to induce water to flow into the rectum. want to drink downstream of that. Yeah. And and you know, there's no need to do this. What you want to do is make sure the things are going through in the right direction regularly and it cleans itself. That's how it's supposed to do it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Another big one I hear all these people that talk about detox, detoxification and sell all these products. The body has many natural methods of purifying itself and getting rid of things it doesn't want. One is through sweating. One is through breathing. One is through urination. One is through colonic elimination. The liver has an incredible capacity to detoxify. It can take, you know, you put something into your body, the liver within seconds of seeing a compound that

22:36has never seen before can begin making a specific enzyme to take that apart and get rid of it. Wow. And you can amputate half of the liver and it can regenerate within 36 hours. What? Yes, liver's amazing. 36 hours? So I thought when you gave someone like half your liver if there was like a liver transplant issue that it would take a long time. I didn't know it was 36 really quickly. And there's and there's a natural product that you can take that most doctors don't learn about called milk thistle. You've probably heard of that. That revs up liver metabolism. So you know, these are all simple ways to increase, but the first rule of detoxification, I'm sure you can guess, you stop putting toxic things in. Aha. Cut it off at the pass. And let it let the body get, you know, purify itself. Yeah. Well, what do you do when someone's a cigarette smoker? You tell them to set a date to quit. Set

23:29a date. That's the most important thing because each attempt to It doesn't matter if you succeed. It's making the attempt to quit goes into a reservoir of motivation that one day will be full enough that it's easy. Mhm. And this, by the way, happens with happens with heroin addicts, happens with cigarette addicts. I've seen many people, lifelong cigarette addicts, try Well, gave it up, came One day they wake up and they look at stained fingers or a dirty ashtray and they don't want to do it anymore and it's easy. There's no struggle. Same thing with heroin addicts. So it's has to do with motivation. You can't put that into another person. You know, all you can do is arrange circumstances that maybe it'll happen. So the most important thing is to tell people to set a date to quit. And it doesn't matter if they how long they stick with But you're saying there's there's

24:14actually some strength to be gained from failed attempts? Yes, it's making the attempt that you get credit for. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. Yeah. So the more like say if you're a drunk and you keep falling off the wagon, if you just keep making these attempts Yes. No kidding. Really? So there's something ramps up in your mind that that makes it more feasible for you to quit? Oh, yes. And when it when it happens, there's no struggle. It's not not it's not an issue. It just you don't want to do it anymore. Now, what do you do when people come to you and they're on antidepressants? Well, I have a book called spontaneous happiness, which is about emotional wellness. There's a lot there about antidepressants. First of all, they don't work so well. You know, that's very hard to Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. It's hard to distinguish them

24:57from placebos. You know, the popular ones, the SSRIs. And now because they don't work so well, you know what doctors do? They add a one. They add an antipsychotic drug. I horrifying. These are like for major mental illness. They're not things you just add on to make the antidepressant work better. We've talked about that one ad nauseam on this podcast because it turned out to be the most prescribed drug in America. I can't believe that. That's just astounding. Well, the the word is that 25% of women between 40 and 50 are on antidepressants and 10% of adults in the in the country. All right. Now, here's another That's a crazy number. Well, first of all, the the pharmaceutical companies have done a great job of convincing people that ordinary states of sadness are problems of brain biochemistry that need to be treated with a drug. We're not supposed to be happy all the time. Secondly,

25:49there's a big problem with a lot of the medications that we use and antidepressants are a good example. Most of the medications we use are counteractive. You know, they oppose some process in the body. Right. So when you do that, the body pushes back against it. That's called homeostasis. You know, an easy example you can relate to is if you have a stuffed up nose, you spray a drug in it that decongests you. Miraculous, right? You can breathe and depending on which drug you use, 2 hours, 4 hours it lasts, but when it wears off, you have rebound congestion that's worse. If you use another dose of the drug then, very easy to slide into you, Jamie? Very easy to slide into a state of dependence on it. Same thing happens with many of these drugs. Antidepressants, they raise serotonin levels at neurojunction neural junction. So what is the body going to do if you

26:39force an increase in serotonin? It's going to make less serotonin and drop serotonin receptors. So if you stay on one of these for any length of time, when you get off it, you're going to be in worse shape than you were to begin with. And this now has a medical name. It's called tardive dysphoria, meaning lingering bad mood due to the drug. So the drug actually prolongs or intensifies the depression. You know, maybe okay for very short-term use of very severe depression, but these are not things you want to go on and stay on for lengths of time. What's fascinating to me is when I talk to people that are on them that want to talk to you like they're on some cancer medication or they're on, you know, something that cures polio. Yeah. Like you they they make it seem like you're insensitive to the possibility that there's other solutions. Right. And there are many

27:25other solutions. We have really good evidence for the antidepressant effect of physical activity. Yes. Both to prevent and treat. We have very good evidence for supplemental fish oil, for omega-3 fatty acids to prevent and treat. CBD as well. All that. And the microbiome looks like it's involved in our mental states as well. So you know, there's so many different ways of Yeah, CBD for short. So again, go gets back to inflammation. And it gets back to an an integrative approach and not just relying on a single thing like a pharmaceutical treatment. Yeah, I've talked to intelligent people that are on SSRIs in one form or another and even ones that have struggled were on one for a while and then it stopped working and then they tried another one and they're combining ones. And they're on this weird sort of uh chemical roller coaster and they reject any possible notion that there's other

28:15alternatives, especially when you bring up the exercise one. Right. I bring up the exercise one they go, oh, this meathead and this exercise. We just stop. And I'm like, I'm telling you. Um we did this thing with my friends called Sober October and what we did is we we no alcohol, no anything for the month of October, but also we did this fitness challenge. And we got real carried away. We're all competing against each other with this heart rate app. So we're working out 3 hours, 4 hours a day. It was crazy. But what was interesting about it to me was not just that your body sort of adapts when you force it to work out that many hours, but that your mood is phenomenal. I felt so good. Yeah. And I was telling everybody if you could take what I I like I don't feel that good right now. Like I mean I feel great, but I don't feel as good as I did during October because I was working out

29:004 hours a day. Right. It was it if you could get that in pill form, you would take it every day. If there was no side effects because it literally removed anxiety, all the internal chatter, all the negative chatter, it was gone. Everything seemed amazing. True. And there are side effects of physical activity are great. You know, it revs up immune function, improves digestion, improves sleep, all that. You mentioned anxiety. The by far and away the most effective treatment I found for anxiety is simple a simple breathing technique. You know, regulating the breath. I've seen this work for the most extreme forms of panic disorder. And the drugs that we use for anxiety are the worst, the benzodiazepines. Highly addictive, mess with your mind. Yeah, I have a good friend who has a issue with anxiety medication and he takes it all the time and when he doesn't take it, apparently

29:51it has that rebound effect. He gets horribly anxious. Well, these are handed out like candy and nobody warns people how addictive they are. It's a worse addiction than than opiate addiction. Xanax? Yeah. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What? I did not know that. Harder to get off of than opioids. Wow. Now, how do you feel about psychedelic interventions when it comes to addictions? Like it seems that we're hearing more and more about that. I know you have a background in that as well. Well, we're especially hearing about Iboga and Ibogaine. This is the African psychedelic and there are clinics and people using this that claim great success. I don't have first-hand experience. I only know what I've heard and what I've talked to people. Me too. But sounds good and I think that most of the psychedelics are so non-toxic, so safe and in the right hands I think

30:42there's many possibilities for you know good outcomes. Yeah, they've also had some pretty good results with cigarette cessation, right? Yep. Um with not just Iboga but even with psilocybin. Yep. Apparently they had they did a study where they showed the difference between someone taking psilocybin to try to quit smoking cigarettes and some really large number of people, I think it was in the neighborhood of 80% quit and then over the course of x amount of years they were still at 60%. So only 20% of those people had come back. But with other methods the the the number was much smaller, somewhere in the range of 20 or 15% after 6 years. A lot of them just went back to it. Huh. What do you make of the microdosing phenomenon? I mean this is pretty astounding to see this happening. who are scared to jump all the way in. Just get it all in in one big scary dose, man.

31:36Just why you want to medicate every day? That's That's kind of how I feel. Um no, I'm just joking around. I think I know people who have experienced some pretty severe benefits of it, especially people that weren't doing so good health-wise. Yeah. And you know, we're just really kind of feeling down and depressed and all of a sudden their outlook radically changed. Particularly psilocybin microdosing, I know a lot of people who are doing that. Yeah, same. I have a lot of hope that Oregon becomes the first state to Sounds like it's close. Yeah, to legalize psilocybin. That'd be a big one. It would be gigantic and I think once we realize that no one's dying and a lot of people are getting helped and a lot of people that are terminal are having some really amazing alleviation of anxiety and an understanding that it's going to be okay. And just I think between friends and

32:27just the just the the camaraderie it sort of when you have these group experiences together, like there's some incredible benefits to that in terms of like reinforcing community and civilization, the way we feel about each other. Now, aside from the psychological and emotional benefits, I think you would be fascinated by some of the things that I've observed and written about of real physical benefits of psychedelics. I'll just tell you a couple. Please. Uh I when I was in my late 20s I did a lot of experiments, it was in the 70s with LSD, mostly with LSD. Um I had a lifelong allergy to cats. If a cat got near me my eyes would itch, my nose would run, if a cat licked me I'd get hives where it licked me. So I always, you know, avoided them, didn't let them touch me. So I took LSD with a group of friends on a spring day, I was living in Virginia. Fabulous, you know,

33:18I was outside running around having a lot of fun and in the middle of this a cat jumped into my lap and I had a moment of like trying to defend myself and then I thought this is silly, you know, and I relaxed, played with the cat, had no allergic reaction and never did ever after. What? Instant disappearance of an allergy that had been there all my life. What would be the physiological mechanism for something like that? Well, that clearly that's a very profound mind-body interaction. Now, we know that allergies are influenced by that because you can show a person allergic to roses a plastic rose and they'll have an allergy. So there's So there's a learned component to allergy that can be unlearned but have it instantly. Yeah, interesting. Now, all right, this is even more dramatic. Maybe a year later, same thing, it was LSD in the spring. I had also grown up

34:05with very fair skin and was told I couldn't get tan. And we used to go down to the Jersey Shore. I can't remember I remember innumerable times, you know, gets getting second degree burns, sheets of skin peeling off, Noxzema at night. You know, we didn't have sunscreen in those days. Right. So I just accepted that's how I was, you know, I can't get tan. So again, high on LSD lying out naked in my great woods in my home in Virginia and the sun was up there and I thought this is ridiculous, you know, I should not be afraid of the sun. The next day I got tan and I have ever since. Now, that's a little more I'm not quite sure of the mechanism there but it's pretty amazing. you out? Time for though cuz if you're outside long enough you're going to get burned. I was out a good time. You know, I would have I would have normally have Yeah, at least. I would have had my usual

34:53reaction but the my skin got tan. It never had in my life. So what are you suggesting happened? Again, you know, there must be a way in which the nervous system influences melanocytes which are the you know, the cell the pigment cells in the body that can either extend their you know, projections with pigment granules. So the nervous system controls that and the mind connects to the nervous system. But what about someone who's like ridiculously fair? Like what about someone who lives in Scotland or something? what I would do is when Dr. Weil's psychedelic clinic opens I would have like you know going to open? Well, we'll see but there'll be an allergy program, right? You go in on the first day you take a full dose of something and you're exposed to the allergen and you know, magic happens and then you come in for 10 sessions with a decreasing dose and

35:39at some point you're not getting you're just getting a placebo and you don't know when that is and people are trained to lose their allergies. I think you can do the same thing with sun tanning. Maybe not with people from Scotland because they've got fewer pigment cells. But I wouldn't rule it out. I'll tell you one more. Okay. Uh also from this period. I told you I was playing with yoga. There was one posture I couldn't do. Uh the plow where you lie on your back and try to touch your toes behind your head. Yeah. I got to where I could get my toes to a foot from the floor and I had excruciating pain in my neck. And I as much as I tried that I made no progress. So I was on the verge of giving up. I thought I was too old, was 28. So again on an in an LSD state my body was feeling totally elastic. I thought I got to try that. So I'm lowering my feet. I thought I had a foot

36:25to go and they touched the ground. I couldn't believe it. I raised it, lowered it. Oh wow, fantastic. The next day I tried to do it. I got within a foot of the ground and had excruciating pain in my neck. But now I knew it was possible. Before that I didn't know it was possible. So knowing it was possible I was motivated to keep at it and then in a few weeks I was able to do it. If I had not had that experience I would have given up. So I think this is the magic of these things. They can show you possibilities. They don't necessarily teach you how to how to maintain them but they can show you the things are possible you'd never believe. Well, it doesn't even seem like it was just showing you a possibility, it was actually showing you capability. Like you were capable of moving in a way that you didn't think you were moving before and it was because of your own tension and worry.

37:08Yeah, probably learned patterns of tension that had built up all my life. And maybe some because of the conscious or the uh psychedelic state rather, there's some alleviation of tension. was out of the way. Right. Yeah. Hmm. Well, you do you definitely sense that with marijuana, particularly edible marijuana. You can really get good stretching in with edible marijuana. It's almost like you I mean I I hate to use certain terms to just like trigger people's alarms but there's a you can you can feel more of the muscle. You can feel more of what what it's doing. Right. Whereas you know, I'm I've been involved in martial arts and athletics most of my life so I have a good awareness of my body. But it's way better when I metal edible marijuana. Like I feel I understand like I can practice moves better. Like there's certain like kicking techniques I'm better if I'm more in tune with how

38:09everything's working together. Whereas sometimes I can do it if I'm sober but it's um I'm almost like there's a prophylactic between me and my body. There's a numbness to it that gets removed by edible marijuana. One other one I'm fascinated by, this was with MDMA. I was I lived in a ranch outside of Tucson and I had pathways that had you know, sort of large gravel and I could not walk on that barefoot. It really hurt my feet and if you know, if I stood on them you could see dents in my feet. On MDMA I was able to like dance on those stones, no pain. But the interesting thing is there were no marks on my feet. So the pain is easy to figure out how that happens. But what's happening that you know, you don't get a dent? I mean it seems to me if your mind is out of the way maybe little muscles there can are free to press back with just the amount of force to neutralize the pressure.

39:06It's like if your mind is not interfering I think the body has amazing capabilities. Well, I definitely think you can mind yourself, right? And you can definitely think oh God, this is you can start thinking it's worse than it is. And if you can relax a lot often times there's many situations where you relax and things aren't nearly as bad as you are making them out to be. So that could be some I'm with you on everything except the tanning. The tanning one I'm like It I experienced it. That's one of those things like Bigfoot. Like when you just keep it to yourself. If you see Bigfoot you're supposed to just go I'm not going to explain this. going to keep that to myself because I want I know when I when people tell me things that I have no experience of, I'm always willing to entertain the possibility, but then I got to experience it for myself. I'm willing to

39:53entertain it dependent upon who I'm talking to cuz there's some kooky people out there and you will entertain possibility after possibility until you you die and you realize you were one big Dr. Seuss book. You know, some people are just crazy. You know, we have to accept that. True. Yeah, there's there's no doubt about it, but I I am absolutely aware that there's some component. There's something about the mind and the way the mind interacts with matter and with life that has a profound effect on your body and it would be really nice if we were all better at controlling that. One of the insights that I've had in psychedelic states is that everything is conscious, that consciousness permeates everything, that you know, I I I feel what's ever in me, that my consciousness is also in rocks and in plants and in animals, that there's some universal something out there. And it's there are

40:48two, you know, really different ways of looking at reality. One is the materialist one, which is that consciousness is a product of brain biochemistry and electricity and that is dominant in science today. The other is that the brain is a receiving apparatus for consciousness and that consciousness is primary. Uh maybe existed before matter, maybe organized matter into forms that are more and more able to experience themselves. I don't know. I don't think there's a way to prove one or the other. It's just that for me, the conscious is the primary one is more fun and makes life more interesting. I'm sure you're familiar with Rupert Sheldrake. Oh yeah, he's a good friend. Very very interesting guy. He has an idea that everything has memory, right? He believes that that this would be like the reason I guess why some people would not want to live in a haunted house. Huh? Right? They

41:40would think that if someone was murdered in the house that it would retain some memory of these atrocities. And that you would somehow or another interact with that if you were in that house. So like spaces. Like my dad is not a very he's not a woo-woo kind of guy, but he went to Gettysburg and he was telling me that when he was at Gettysburg that it just he felt profound sadness. He's like it just seems like it's just in the ground. Like the whole area. He goes, "I don't know how to describe it, but I wanted to get the out of there. Like just just being around this area where this battle had taken place and so many people had died." He said, "You could feel it." Huh. I don't know if I buy it. I mean, but he's not the kind of guy that would No, right. But that's an example where you somebody tells you something that that's his experience. I'm willing to

42:28entertain it. I have to experience it myself. Yeah. But it also could be, you know, like he he got lucky and didn't get drafted during Vietnam and it's probably in his head that if he did get drafted, he might have died over there and for what reason he wouldn't have experienced this life. He wouldn't have, you know, why what is the and then thinking about these young men that died in the same fashion for some war that didn't make any sense. Like why the are they even fighting it? Like who who's why why is this a and then having all these people die together in this one horrible battle in this one place and he, you know, it could have been he was playing a game on his mind, but Now Joe, I want to talk to you about your language. Why the do you swear so much? I don't know. Have you read anything about the science of swearing? No. know that there is a science of swearing? A science?

43:16Yes, it's pretty interesting stuff. Oh. So the part of your brain that produces swear words is not the part of the brain that manages ordinary language. Oh. Really interesting. You know, we have two language centers in our left frontal cortex. Mhm. Uh people that have strokes that damage them often lose language completely, but they can still swear. Oh. So swearing is coming from somewhere else. It may be coming from the right hemisphere, but it's also coming from deeper centers in the brain that connect to the limbic system and the amygdala and that and connects to the involuntary nervous system. So here's a couple interesting facts. Okay. Uh swearing is associated with sweating, increased sweating. So you should be dripping with sweat. I don't sweat that much. I'm a comedian. Okay, secondly, it's also interesting. Swearing uh increases pain tolerance.

44:11Interesting. And there's an interesting experiment. You know, the standard way they do pain tolerance, they have people stick their hand in a bucket of ice and water and you see how long they can keep it there. The people who say "Fuck shit" can keep it there much longer than people who are not allowed to swear. What about noises? What if they just go No, it was swearing specifically. Mhm. So they've tried noises and swearing Yeah, so it may be, you know, when you if you're hammering a nail and hit your thumb, use one of those words, that's a good strategy. That's interesting because I almost always do that. If I hurt something, especially a finger. Like I slammed a finger in a car door the other day and I went, "Motherfucker." So that's what that is? But it's yeah, and it's interesting it's coming there's a different part of the brain that that manages that. It has different emotional

44:55content. Yeah, it flavors language. Yes. I I like them. I'm a big fan of the swearers. I'll leave you some papers about the science of swearing. It's interesting. Yeah, it's very interesting. Now, what it what would what would happen if they were no longer taboo? Would the same They'd lose their power. I think they lose their power cuz that yeah, right. The same areas of the brain wouldn't No. I remember there was an episode of I don't remember what television show, but it was on CBS. Yeah. And they had a line at the end of the show and essentially they were saying "Shit happens." And it was a big deal. I'll bet. a big deal that they wanted to be able to say "Shit happens." And apparently they pulled this off and they got it through and it was like a 10:00 p.m. show, so it was okay and it was 11:00 by the time they said "shit." And I remember thinking like, "Wow, what

45:41a strange sort of like how many people were involved in this sort of dance? Like how many lawyers and executives and who like it's very strange." Very strange. That this one word would Everybody knows the word. Right. It's not even that offensive. You know, a kind of game we all play. Yeah. Yes. So but you're saying this game is facilitated by one specific part of the brain and is that because like swear words are taboo words, right? They're taboo words and often associated with things that we find offensive or with bodily acts that freak people out. So but so there's both a there's a psychological social aspect to it, but there's also a neurological aspect to it. Now, when the words like some some words for some people like I remember when I was a kid, I lived in Florida for a little bit and I said "hell" once and in Florida in the 1970s, hell was a swear.

46:39Like uh Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I came from New Jersey and then I was in San Francisco and then all of a sudden I was in Florida and I said "hell" and they're like, "Don't swear like that in this class." I was like, "Swear? What the are you people talking about?" Like it didn't make any sense to me. And then I was like, "You guys have different swears." Yeah. Now, if you had a word that was not taboo to you, Mhm. would it be would that same area of your brain I don't know. This is There has not been a lot of research. It hasn't been taken seriously, but that's all interesting questions that should be studied. because it some I mean, if you're a really super conservative person, there's a lot of words that are off the table. Yeah. But if you are a far more, you know, just loose with your language, you could this and this Yeah. God damn it, you know, that would

47:27be nothing. Like God damn it would be just like ah shucks. Yeah. But to someone, God damn it would be like a really big deal. Really big deal. So like what it would be different parts of the brain would be activated Mhm. by that versus if you said it, it would be not that big a deal, but if someone was like super conservative and they said Probably even yeah, more. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, interesting. What do you do you think that that is a universal thing? I mean, it obviously language to be universal. Seems to be universal. Another finding that I came across is that people who learn a second language that swearing in the second language does not have the same emotional impact that your first language does. Oh, that makes sense. That's why they're so fun when you learn Spanish swears. It's like you get a free ride. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's interesting. Yeah.

48:14That makes sense. Yeah, and you can do them on television, too. Right? You can say a lot of Spanish swears on English speaking TV and everybody just pleads ignorance. Do you So does every language have Yes. They all have swears. Yeah, every language has taboo words, swear words. Wow. Yeah, it's universal. That is really interesting. Asian languages, European languages, all of them, huh? Wow. So that that that would at least to my brain seem to indicate that there's like some use for that. Yes. Well, probably many uses. One is this thing of modulating pain. One is a social bonding, you know, forming some community. Yeah, that's how I kind of use it. I think I think when I swear in front of people, I'm testing them out. Like you freaking out if I say "fuck"? Cuz if you are, I can't talk to you. Like you're too much work, you know? You know what I mean? I know exactly what you

49:08If you're talking to someone and every other word like, "I would really wish you wouldn't use that language." Well, okay. You There's so much work to do here. I can't I know exactly what you your hand, dance through this garden. Right. Yeah. The it's um it's to me also like I hang around with a lot of people that swear a lot cuz I hang around with professional comedians and fighters and there's a lot of swashbuckling freewheeling type of individuals involved in those pursuits and Now, there seems to there's some study suggesting that swearing is becoming more frequent in our society and more public. I don't know. It's a trend. I'm not sure anybody knows why. But, I mean, nobody would have been, you know, on the air like you are 20 years ago. That's true. Yeah. But, that is specifically because of the internet, cuz of the lack of regulation. Yeah. Yeah. But, even that, it's like it's

49:58it's resisted in a lot of ways. Like, people are trying to figure out how to modulate this and how to handle it. They'll never handle it. No. It seems like the genie's out of the bottle, right? Yeah. Um I think ultimately you find what you enjoy, and the best way to find what you what you enjoy is people actually doing what they want to do, and then you figure it out. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that seems to be what's happening in the world of the internet and podcasting and stuff like that. And it's also the the access. Right? Like, a person like you, you could just put together a podcast, and if people find it interesting, if it resonates, you could get 100,000 downloads Mhm. out of nowhere. Like, 100,000. If you have a radio show, 100,000 people listening, that's a lot of damn people. They'd be excited. They're like, "Hey, Andrew, we got the monthly's in, and

50:45you're doing great. You got 100,000 people a day." They'd be like, "Holy this is a successful business." But, you could be doing that just from your office. Just put together with a laptop and a microphone and no distribution whatsoever in terms of like no string of executives and gigantic corporation behind you. You don't have all all that. And nobody telling you what you can say and can't say. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's one thing you get out of today that you never got out of before. And, you know, this is I've been involved in show business for many years, but only this kind of stuff for nine. Mhm. From doing this podcast. And what I've seen with this is like what's unusual, I think what resonates with people, is that there isn't anybody else. There's no group of people that's saying, "Andrew, could you stop saying this? Or, let's let's concentrate on

51:34that." And the And the polls are showing that people like this, and you know, you have breaks in between where the commercials are playing, they come to you with notes, and they tell you things. All that stuff just seems to somehow or another ruin this natural interaction that we have with each other. Yeah. Yeah. Now, for a guy like you, the internet is I would think that with some of your more controversial ideas, like this is the way you could really air them out in long form. Because if you Like, a lot of doctors, they don't want to open their mind to anything outside of what they're what they're practicing. Yeah. I mean, it's got to be rough for you, right? But, I've never censored what I say. I've always put it all out there. Good for you. Yeah. I've done that all my life. But, do you don't you find that it's more not not just accepted, but people are

52:24more interested in it now because of the internet? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Absolutely. Because I've heard about you for many, many years. But, it's sort of ramped up over the last, you know, decade or so. Right. Yeah, because of the internet. Right. Because people have this But, you know, I've been around It's funny when I look at this stuff like, you know, all the stuff about pot, and it's like that with the placebos. I was saying this stuff in the 1970s. You know, my first book, The Natural Mind, was published in 1972. It argued that everybody has an innate drive to alter their consciousness. Yeah. And that, you know, drugs are one way of doing it. I did the first human experiments with pot that were ever done with under double-blind conditions. What experience did you do? I gave marijuana to people in a laboratory in 1968. And what did you test them for? Well, we

53:12were just saying People bet me you couldn't do it. Nobody had ever done this. You know, all this marijuana was becoming such a big thing, and nobody There were no experiments. Like, what what what kind of experiment or what were you testing? like the most basic stuff. I just wanted to show that you could give it to human subjects in a lab and get away with it, cuz people thought you couldn't. You know, You mean in terms of the FDA? In terms of law, lawsuits, everything. You know, one of the things I wanted to give it to people that never had it before, just because so there'd be no expectations. Everyone said, "This is terrible. You know, they're going to turn into heroin addicts from giving them Mhm. stuff like that." Anyway, I just wanted to see basic stuff like does it dilate the pupils of the eyes? Because cops were busting people, you know, they'd say their eyes are dilated.

53:52Yeah. Must be high on marijuana, and they'd search. But, marijuana doesn't I should We showed it doesn't dilate the pupils of the eyes. I took tested blood sugar, cuz people said the reason people get hungry is because blood sugar drops. Has no effect on blood sugar. We showed that you know, people who had never had marijuana before in a lab, you could show slight decreases in performance in motor function and cognitive function. But, people who were regular users of it, you couldn't show that. That they had adapted to it. Yeah, my take on that is that I think the people that are not regular users are freaking out. Yeah. And because they're they're nervous. sensations, and they don't know what to do with it. Yeah. And they just don't They don't know how to relax. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's It's the big one to me with with physical movement. Yeah. They want to, you know, test drivers and

54:42all sorts of other things for marijuana. I'm like, this is not alcohol. You're talking about a completely different thing. If I had a choice of being a passenger with these drivers, I'll tell you which one I would take. A person who had never used marijuana and had just smoked. A person who was a user of marijuana and had just smoked, but had never driven high. A person who was a user, regular user of marijuana, and had practiced driving high. And a person with any amount of alcohol in their system. I'd take the third as the best bet. Yes, the third's the best bet. Yeah, that guy's a wizard, I bet. Right. That guy drives high every day. Yeah, so he's used to it. It's not going to show any effect on his performance. Yeah, it's the experience is a novel experience. And that the if you're accustomed to it, then it's just like, here we go. This is my normal world.

55:27And for many people, you have to learn to get high. You have to learn to associate the subtle physical cues with the altered state. That's a common thing. People can feel nothing the first time they try it. Yeah, you do hear that, right? But, I don't think they know what the they're talking about. Like, bro, you're high as Now, when you when you did these experiments, what did you have to clear these with the FDA? You would not believe. you have to do? I had to get permission from the FDA, which said that that I couldn't do it unless I first got permission from It was the old Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which was the Treasury guys. Oh. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics said, "We'll give you permission once the FDA gives you permission." So, Oh. played that off. Then, I had to get permission from the state of Massachusetts, from two agencies there. And there were two

56:10universities involved, Harvard University and Boston University. So, coordinating all this stuff was unbelievable. And then, once the all the approvals came in, I had to get the pot, and there was no legal source of it. So, I I the Federal Bureau of Narcotics gave me confiscated pot that they had confiscated from case in Texas. They brought it over They had delayed us so long, I didn't even know if I had time to do the experiments, cuz I was going to graduate. Anyway, they brought this stuff on a Friday afternoon. It was I mean, it was brown, dry. Looked like it'd been sitting in a warehouse for years. Right. So, the first thing I did was roll up a joint and smoke it. No effect whatever. I called the the agent that I'd dealt with, and I said, "This stuff is no good." He said, "How do you know? You haven't had time to run any experiments." And I said, "I looked at

56:51it under the microscope, and there was no resin on it." So, they grumbled, and they gave me other stuff, which was passable. So, but again, confiscated stuff. Yeah. Because we always used to hear, when we were kids, about government weed. The government weed was the good weed. That was later. That was Oh, okay. later when the when when research got going, and the US the government started a pot farm in Mississippi to provide pot for research, which was much better. And there was only a handful of people that were under these experiments, correct? It was so They made it so difficult to conduct research, as they have with psychedelics. Now, that's slowly changing now. Yeah. Well, you know Rick Strassman? Sure. Yeah. When he was doing that book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, and he did all those tests with those people, that was really groundbreaking stuff, because you know,

57:39doing it out of University of New Mexico, and doing it under clinical conditions, they were able to document the similarities between all these people's psychedelic experiences, and do this with government approval. Yeah. Which I thought was really fascinating. Fascinating. Yeah. And the fact that they did it, and with the information's out, and then there's been like very little movement in that direction. It's kind of just like, okay, now we know. But, look, everybody's fine. It's a lot of benefit. Do you Do you want to act on this? Like, you know, it takes decades. Takes forever. plus, what research was done all along, it was primarily to look for negative effects. Ah. You know, no nobody who wanted to look for positive effects got permission and funding. That's interesting. So, you have to kind of frame the proposal in a way that like, we're these kids are themselves

58:27up, and we're going to prove it, sir. So, that's changing. But, you know, the big stumbling block now, we got to get cannabis out of that federal schedule. Yes. Causing a lot of problems. Yeah. There's been some noise about decriminalizing decriminalizing it federally, which is like step one, I guess. That's the big stumbling block. I'll give you one one example. I'm involved with a a group called Maui Wellness Group. I'm the chief science officer. Maui, Hawaii? Yeah, we got the first dispensary license and growing operation over there. Oh, nice. Very good. Is it legal in Hawaii? How's it For for medical. Not not for recreational. Like, how sick you have to be? You know, it's okay. They're They're, you know, allowing it. But, there's there's specified conditions. Hawaii is not is more uptight than a lot of other states, but it's happening. But, our license is for Maui County, which

59:17includes Maui, Molokai, and Lanai. So, people from Molokai and Lanai can come to Maui to buy product in our dispensary, but they can't take it back, because the waters between the island are federal. What if they throw it? Still has to cross the water. Oh, it's not legal. But that's ridiculous. You know, that's the kind of that's the that's the kind of that's the kind of ridiculous situation. Better to be on Maui and not go to Lanai. You got to go to Maui to get high. That's great. What if you're really sick? Like what if you have cancer or something like that? Well, you live on Lanai. You got to violate the law. But if you have it in Lanai, you're okay. So, can you grow it? Uh no. You can only grow it if you have a license and the only license is for Maui. We got to change this. We got to change this. California was really ridiculous when they were doing medical.

60:03Like you could just basically go in there and go, "I can't sleep." Then they go, "Okay." There was nothing. Like I had friends that had like long elaborate excuses they had planned out. Like, "You know, I was I was in a car accident while sick and when I go to bed at night, I have these horrible dreams and the only thing that helps me is marijuana and I'm just trying to feed my family." Then they would go, "Stop. Stop. Stop." "Yeah, okay. I'll write you a script." They'd just give it to you. Like there was no resistance. Like if you My joke was that if you can't get a license for marijuana, you should probably go to a hospital immediately cuz you got a real problem. They're like, "No, man. You need actual doctors." I'll tell you a story. This this is something that bothers me. Though, I'm not I'm not a user of pot. Now, I was heavily in my earlier life. A friend of

60:45mine, doctor colleagues uh in San Francisco, sent me some samples of stuff that had come from a medical dispensary in San Francisco and he wanted me to try them. So, one of them was a some concentrated oil. It came in a a little syringe and it and had a very elaborate nicely printed brochure with it that described the use of this for pain and it said you should start with an amount the size of half a grain of rice. Uh take it at orally. So, yeah. My friend said take it at bedtime. So, this is a teeny amount. Actually, I probably took somewhat less because I was afraid of getting too high on it. So, I took it at bedtime, went to sleep, woke up about an hour later in full blown delirium. I mean, visual hallucinations as strong as I've had on LSD. I couldn't get out of bed. I was I you know, I was immobile. I had burning thirst. I couldn't get up to get a glass of water.

61:34I had a friend staying in a guest house. I couldn't call for help. I lay there and it kept increasing. You know, kept you know, over 4 hours it got stronger and stronger and I when is it going to end? Anyway, it lasted 12 hours and uh for about 24 hours after my equilibrium was really off. And this stuff is being I mean, you know, this is and it said it said the direction said start with this amount and work up from there. And there's people I'm thinking there's people, you know, driving on the streets. This stuff is out there. That scares me. Yeah, there's people that will squirt that whole thing in their gullet. Right. I'm sure you know some. Yeah, I know a lot of them. Yeah. It's uh the edible world is a weird world because of the the the the response of the body is so much different than the smoking is. It's a different drug. And a lot of people are fooled by the you know, the long

62:25length of time it takes. So, you know, it's like lighting the firework and the fuse is down and you go back and try to light it again and you know. I'm sure you've heard the recording of the police officers who stole the pot from the kids and then ate it and then called 911 on themselves. You never heard it? Oh, it's wonderful. I won't play it again cuz we played it too many times in this podcast. But these poor cops they they ate pot brownies and they're calling 911. They're like, "I think I think we're dying. Time's moving real slowly. I think we're dead." It's so stupid. It's so stupid. You It's like it's it's good for kids to hear because you realize like, "Oh, cops are just people." Oh, all right. Okay. It's just It sounds like my brother. If my brother got high, you know, it's just crazy people that get high. But it the the effect of the edible can be pretty pretty

63:12profound. And this area in particular, like Hollywood has some preposterous THC level edibles. I mean, they're they're they're under different regulations now that it's legal statewide instead of just medical. But when it was medical only, you could get these insane concoctions. Stars of death. You ever heard of a star of death? No. You're going to hang out with Joey Diaz. He'll hit you with a star of death. What are those stars like 1,200 milligrams? They range anywhere from like 200 to 3 400 each each little star. So, yeah. Each little star is hundreds of milligrams and Joey would eat like three or four of them. He just would just throw them down. He's he's got an insane tolerance. Yeah. He's just one of those guys. Given all this stuff, however, I I am delighted to see our society finally coming to better terms with this plant. Cannabis, you know, the the the word cannabis is

64:09the same word as canvas. All canvas sails and rope used to be made from hemp. The and the species name sativa means useful. It's the useful hemp. It's really useful. You know, this is one plant that provides an edible seed, an edible oil, of high quality fiber, a medicine and an intoxicant. That's a lot of ways for a plant to be useful. We have been very stupid in our relationship with that plant. Cannabis, it's it's the equivalent of the dog in the plant world. Dogs long ago made a decision to co-evolve with us. They threw their evolutionary lot in with humans. Cannabis did the same thing. You can't unravel the early botanical history of cannabis cuz as far back in history as you we go, it's always associated with human settlements. So, that plant wants nothing other than to be with us and to serve us. And we have been so stupid. We've let a billion dollar industry in

65:03hemp textiles go to China. We've let a million dollar industry in edible hemp products go to Canada and we have ignored its potential for medicine. Well, I'm really hoping that things are going to change in terms of our cultivation of hemp. You know, I'm one of the owners of Onnit and we sell hemp protein and one of the we used to get our hemp protein from Canada. We used to have to get it from Canada and then sell it in America. We couldn't grow it here. Stupid. Well, that's going to change. I'm so hopeful that it does change. It is it's fascinating also how well the propaganda worked against it and how long even in defiance of all the facts. Now, I have to tell you when I did those pot experiments in 1968, I predicted that pot was going to be legal in 5 years. Oh, boy was I wrong. I mean, I all I thought I thought it was just a matter of getting the truthful

65:56information out there. Well, it wasn't. You know, people believe what they want to believe and they don't believe what they don't want to believe and it's rude. It's totally irrational. Well, it's also an a really excellent example of the contradictions in our society. And the difference between something that's accurate and something that's perceived. And we have this perception of marijuana and and sometimes that perception is based on experiences. Like you might meet some really lazy up people who smoke pot all the time and you go, "Oh, this is what pot does to you." Also, it was the associations of pot because in back then, you know, in the '50s and '60s, it was associated with Mexican migrant workers, with black jazz musicians in the south and then with radicals and hippies. So, all scary people to mainstream, you know, middle class white society. And of course all

66:46accentuated by William Randolph Hearst and Harry Anslinger and the Reefer Madness films. Those are great. If anybody hasn't seen those, they're it's amazing how something that was terrifying to someone back then is so silly today. When you watch Reefer Madness today, it's really funny. And at the same time, we're living with the two most dangerous drugs that are out there with alcohol and tobacco. Well, how about fentanyl? That that one scares the out of me. They just keep ramping that one up and making it more and more potent. The idea that opioids weren't killing people quick enough that we needed to make some ridiculously potent versions of it. And apparently now there's they're approving something that's even more powerful than fentanyl. Like what why would you do that? But you know, on a physiological level, opioids are not that bad for your body. The

67:37worst effect of being addicted to an opioid over time is chronic constipation. I mean, that's annoying, but that's not like cirrhosis of the liver, degeneration of the nervous system. But overdoses Overdoses, of course, that kills you by stopping your respiration. But but there are many examples of people who have been addicted to opioids who've been able to get legal supplies and use them sensibly, they're healthy. I have heard about that when in terms of regular heroin use. That I had a friend who was a longshoreman and this is like when I was a kid, he was explaining to me how this guy that he worked with would get a bag of heroin every day at lunch and he would shoot it in his car. And he would just sit in his car during lunch hour and then when the time was up, he'd go back to work. I was like, "What?" He's like he would do that every day. I'm

68:24like, "He's going to be dead in a week." But no. If he knows how if he knows how to take care of himself. Apparently, he did. Apparently, he would do it all the time. I guess find a new vein and and figure out how to do it and and not give himself gangrene. There's a famous historical example that's great. There was a man named William Halsted who was a surgeon at Johns Hopkins University in the early 1900s. He invented local anesthesia. And so, you know, great guy. He started using cocaine and injected self-injected cocaine. And not a good thing and his you know, his behavior got really bad. Every not good. So, at some point his group of his colleagues kidnapped him and put him took him on a yacht for several weeks and he came back supposedly cured. Had a long life as a very successful productive surgeon. And only after his death was it revealed that what had

69:14happened on that trip was that they had gotten him off cocaine and onto intravenous morphine. And for the rest of his life, he was an intravenous morphine user. Did not in any way interfere with with health or productivity. I would assume that if you're doing that every day, you're you're going to run into issues with your veins. Well, yeah, presumably, you know, he knew how to rotate around and do that. I wouldn't want to do that, but there it is. Oh. But the point is that, you know, it's a whole different game from alcohol and and tobacco. Yeah, a whole a whole different game, but also is it's the it's the social toxicity of it. It's that it that people are buying illegal, impure materials and overdosing and so forth. It's not the the pharmacological nature of the drug. What's been disturbing to me as a person as an observer is watching people who get injured get hooked on it.

70:05Yeah. Like it particularly pills. Yeah. It seems that my my good friend Brendan, he had his nose broken and he got his nose fixed and they put him on pills and before he knew it he was taking those pills every day for months and months and months and his friends eventually just took them out of his medicine cabinet and they they just made an intervention. So, you know, this is I think the the opioid crisis that we've got in this country is a fabulous opportunity for integrative medicine because the realization is that you cannot manage chronic pain solely with use of opioids. Right. You know, there has to be individualized integrative treatment that use uses different modalities. It could be everything from acupuncture, yoga, mind-body stuff, diet. Mhm. Um and that all has to be state of Oregon a couple years ago passed an integrative pain management initiative

70:52saying that all pain chronic pain management had to be integrative and they listed the different modalities. They left out mind-body medicine which to me is one of the most important. Yeah, mind-body medicine no on any sort of a report. That seems like that's one like, okay, what kind of But look, you know, I studied I'm with you. Yeah, I studied hypnosis after I got out of my medical training. One of the most interesting courses I ever took. There's a well-known demonstration in in the literature on hypnosis. You can take a person deeply hypnotized who's got good trance capacity. Touch them with a finger that you represent to be a piece of hot metal and they get a blister. And you can take the same person and touch them with a piece of hot metal and tell them it's cold and they don't get a blister. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Yes. Well-known phenomenon. Okay, this is

71:39actually Have you ever seen this Yes. in real life? Yes. So, someone's taken a hot piece of metal and convinced someone that they're not going to burn and then they don't burn. Yes, that's that's close, by the way, to the suntan stuff. How long do you touch them with it for? You know, enough in an ordinary person that it would burn them. I call I call But we'll try it. I just Let's try it. I'll put you under. Put you under and cook your hand. It's It's like it's hot. If it's hot, it's going to you up. No? Well, I think if it's held there long enough it will. Right. So, like it's one of those things like the walking on coals then. Absolutely, which I've done a number of times. I'm sure, but if you with coal you know this then that coals are not a very good conductor of heat, which is why you don't cook on coals. You cook on metal. because Yes, I'll tell you why that's

72:20My experience was I the first time I tried it, I was with a group of maybe 40 people and it was a the standard length of the firewalk was about 12 ft. It was a hot fire. It was mesquite. It was in my yard in Tucson and and the guy came in it was early in the days of firewalking and he had this long 4-hour thing to get people ready. Uh I was not in the right mental state when I did it and my experience was it felt hot and and when I got to the end of it, the it condensed down to like a number of points that really burned and I had blisters the next day. And most people that had walked that night it looked like they were not in the right mental state, but I saw a few people who strolled across it that looked they were in some interesting altered state. So, I wanted to try it again. Next time I did it, I shouldn't have done it. I was with a guy who was a

73:12real jerk who thought himself as a you know, he's a self-styled guru. Small group. It was a shorter, maybe 8-ft cooler bed of coals and I got significant burns from that. So, like an annoying guru so he was Yeah, really annoying. He had no idea what he was doing. No idea what he was spiritual stuff and you're like, this and then you're getting annoyed so you're out of your mindset. Right, and I burned my feet. So, I said I'm not going to do this again. And then a friend of mine was doing some intensive workshop with Tony Robbins in Phoenix. Oh, Christ. And it was going to end the last day they were going to do try to set a record for the longest firewalk done in America. So, he wanted me to come up. So, I went up there. I thought I'm I'm going to watch. I'm not going to do it. So, it was a 40-ft BED OF COALS AND IT WAS really hot and and he had like a troop of African drummers and

73:57people were dancing and drumming. It was like midnight and people were getting in line to walk and I said I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do it, but I find myself, you know, going up there and then I was right there and he taps me on the shoulder and says, "You're ready?" It felt like walking through crunchy croutons. There was no sensation of heat. I walked slowly. I kind of wiggled my feet in the things and when I got to the end of it, I felt so high. It was like on acid. I had energy rushes through my body. I had nothing on my feet. So, on a much shorter, cooler walk, those coals conducted just fine. And you know, on this one, it's a mind-body thing. It's not about conductivity of the coals. Tony Robbins hitting you with some fugazi coals. That's what it is. It was hot. I mean, you could barely at the edge of the thing, man, the heat was amazing.

74:43Do you know that Tony Robbins one, it's what's really interesting is recently they've developed this issue with people trying to take selfies while they're walking across the coals and burning their feet. It's become a like significant issue because it didn't happen till like within the last few years. of that. I think that would get you right out of the proper state. Yeah, there was a big article about it. There's a big article about these people really their feet up. Well deserved. Yeah, I So, you really think that you have the ability to mitigate the amount of effect that fire and coal hot coals have this is I don't have any proof of this. It's my intuition. I think what happens if your mind is out of the way, you can take you can absorb energy and let it flow through your body rather than getting blocked in the tissues. Uh where it causes damage and I've seen

75:32this in in other situations as well. And I think the problem is ordinarily our mind is in the way of that and and does not let the body freely do that. Ooh. And I think that applies to things like getting hit really hard, heat. Getting hit really hard, how What do you mean? Getting letting someone hit you as hard as they can with something that would cause damage and it doesn't. Oh, that's crazy. No, it's not. I've experienced it. Yeah, I'm sure you have, but are there are there real scientific studies that show that? Nobody studied it. I'd love to study it. Nobody studied firewalking. You know, the usual scientific explanation is that we probably shouldn't talk about this until they do do studies cuz it seems so simple to do these studies. And I'm not buying it for a second. I think if I hit somebody they're going to it's going to hurt. Right? If you get Deontay Wilder to punch you, I

76:20don't give a how much Tony Robbins talks you into the zone. experience. Uh drunks involved in car accidents don't get injured. Okay, but do you know why? Because they're totally relaxed. Yes, but that has nothing to do with some altered state of consciousness that's not allowing the injury to actually manifest itself. is out of the way and their body is totally relaxed and so it does the tension of falling you hurt yourself. Because you're defending yourself. You're Right. Right. You your body is better off giving in to the impact. saying it's the same thing with the fire. That's But it can't be. That's a different thing cuz you're not tense on the surface of your skin, which is causing the heat to burn your flesh. tense in your nervous system, which is not letting not able to absorb that thermal energy. Listen, bro, we're going to do some studies. I'm going to burn you.

77:08I'm going to burn you and I'm going to kick you. Anytime Anytime we'll try it. I just don't buy it. It just I think there's certainly you can mitigate the sensation of pain. I don't believe that you can do anything about the actual physiological change to a hot piece of metal interacting with the tissue of your skin. I just think that like the steak does not know it's being cooked. It's just getting cooked. You're going to get cooked. You are meat. I just don't I don't buy that. I'll show you some of these studies on hypnosis. There's doctors right now going, "Yes, you tell them, Joe Rogan. This is nonsense." Well, I believe hypnosis. I do believe that, but I I I absolutely believe you can achieve different states of mind where you feel things differently. Your your concentration, your relaxation is in a different state. Your mindset is in a different state. I do not believe that

77:58you can change the physiological nature of your body's ability to absorb punishment like a punch or a kick. I I do. And I same thing absorbing the sun. That's set some studies up, sir. What are we going to do? We got to test it. How do we got to make these tests? know. We'll have to figure it out. We'll talk after. been doing this forever. How do you not know? This should be like you should have these studies already done. You want to talk about these things? things to do. I know, but this is a significant I conversation point. Cuz if it's proven, this is really huge. I mean, if you could really take a hot metal rod that right out of the fire and touch someone's skin, they're in the right state of mind, you don't burn them. That would be giant. Yes, well, I I'm telling you you I'll send you some some literature on hypnosis that shows this kind of stuff. I'm sure someone

78:44wrote some down. I'm sure. I want to see actual real studies. I want to see and I want to I mean, in this day and age there's no reason not to videotape it as well. True. Yeah. True. Come on, Doug. All right, it's on my list. I got a lot of stuff to do. This is This is a big one though. I mean, because this is something that woo-woo people, right, healers and you know, a lot of a lot of people like to bring up. And when when you press them on it, there's no evidence for it. And it's like, well, anecdotal evidence. Well, I've heard. Well, I work with a healer and he tells me like, okay. Okay. Do you know what the literal meaning of anecdote is? No. It means unpublished in Greek. Huh. It does not mean stupid, not worth paying attention to. So And it and it inspires you to do the experiments. You go ahead and do that. right. You go ahead. I'll report. Put that hot

79:34piece of metal on your skin. report back to you. Yeah, and I'm going to go, hmm, look at that, burn. I'll report back to you. Yeah. I mean, I'm not saying that anecdotal evidence is always inaccurate. It's most certainly accurate many times. Sometimes. Sometimes. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's just as likelihood that it's not that it is. But anecdotal evidence is what what gives you hypotheses to test. Sure. But it's just not good enough to state as fact, especially when something that doesn't make sense chemically and physiologically. All right, it doesn't make sense. But I told you about my experience with sun and sun suntan. That doesn't make sense to you. Seems like you're tripping your balls off and Yeah, and something happened in my body. That would be interesting if there was some sort of change in your body's ability to produce melanin. Or what is it? Melanocytes? How

80:18do How do you say it? Melanocytes. Melanocytes. Melanocytes. So, you're And they're controlled, you know, they're melanocytes are related to neurons and they're they're influenced by nerve connections. So, it seems to be perfectly possible that mine through the nervous system changes the behavior of melanocytes. Sort of like how your body can ramp up adrenaline or anxiety or any they're also can ramp up melanocytes. Yeah. That doesn't seem like outside the realm of possibility. That seems like obviously some people it to you, you said it was outside the realm of possibility. Not outside, but sounds crazy. Okay. Definitely sounds crazy. All right. But I mean, it seems like that would be something also that would really warrant study. Absolutely. Especially those poor pasty ass mother out there on the beach get turning bright red. Like, no, man, you just got to think about it the right

81:08way. You imagine if you just told people that it was like a meditation and then and then you just get a nice tan? Yeah. Yeah. A good thing. Yeah. It would be a good thing. Now, um when it comes to like we were talking about autoimmune issues. Like I have I have vitiligo. You see what that is? Like I have spots on my hands where I don't get any pigment. How do I fix that? How do I fix that with my brain? You know, all I can tell you is that I would try to see if you can influence it through hypnosis or through guided imagery to see if you can change it in any way. I don't know. Hypnosis and guided imagery, huh? They're two mind body techniques. I think any it's worth trying. I did read once that there was this I think it was a young man who had some awful one of those awful wart diseases. And they one called ichthyosis, which is like the whole tree gets covered with

81:59this calloused hard tissue. Yes. And it went away through hypnosis. Over time, I learned that case, too. They told him that like his arm that one arm was going to be cured and it just like completely eliminated all the warts on that one arm. Yeah, and they couldn't figure out how or why and they couldn't recreate it. So, the warts stuff, that's very well documented, you know, and and wart cures, there's so many different wart cures. Some of them are quite funny. Yeah. Uh you know, you have to you have to uh uh cut a particular plant under the full moon and rub it and bury it blah blah and but the wart falls off the next morning. And when you compare that to the way we deal with warts medically, we burn them off, freeze them off, cut them off. And most of the time we do that, they grow back in multiple clusters. When they get when the mind gets rid of them through this method,

82:51they're gone. So, we want to find out how to make that happen more time. Yeah, that's real, right? I mean, this is this is actual real documented science. And that is what is so interesting to me about the placebo effect is that it is a real thing that your mind has this capability of healing itself in this very, very powerful way, but we don't exactly know how to turn it on or off. Right. And it can do the opposite, too. There's a phenomenon called voodoo death where in societies where there witch doctor shamans, a malevolent witch doctor can curse a person and the person goes home, lies in bed, stops eating and over days or weeks dies. Whoa. So, what more could you ask of in the way of a in mind body effect? Uh he put a curse on What was the basketball team? They were talking about him. He put a curse on them and they couldn't win a goddamn game, huh? That's happened a few

83:43times. Yeah, he's put a curse on him a few different He's like a real How would you say? Spiritual, very positive, mostly like real love oriented guy, but occasionally he'll put a hex on a dude. Aha. And when he puts a hex on, you got a real problem on your hands. And apparently it's been very effective and people freak out when Lil B hexes them. Lil B puts that hex on, you're like, damn it. And then he releases the hex. He's lifted them. He lifts them. And when he lifts them, everything goes back to normal. All right. This is weird, man. This is like weird cuz everyone's aware when Lil B puts a curse on you. Aha. And when when he does, people are like, oh, no, I can't believe this. Like the idea of curses, like the the you know, a voodoo curse or a gypsy curse on you. That is a Well, that's the negative side. In fact, it has a name. It's called the nocebo effect. From

84:34noxious rather than pleasing. Yes. Yeah. That is um that's a documented thing as well, right? That people can believe that something is wrong with them and then they start mind Yeah. themselves into this terrible state. Yeah. And then they start screwing things up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, this is hot started. Here it is. Kevin Durant says, I tried to listen to Lil B. My mind wouldn't let me do it. Can't believe this guy is relevant. And Lil B was like, okay, Kevin Durant will never win the title after he said Lil B is a whack rapper. The Based God's curse. #thebasedgodscurse on Durant. And then he always signs his his tweets Lil B. That's pretty funny. But it works. Aha. It works. Kevin Durant is sitting home right now thinking of the millions Lil B must have cost him. He's what Yeah, he's won now. Yeah, he's won now, but he could have bought a house with all that money he lost.

85:28Those years Lil B had him over in the corner. But that I mean, I think the opposite is true, too. So, someone could put blessings on you. Like there was a a fighter that we had in here the other day, Deontay Wilder. He's the WBC heavyweight champion of the world. And he said that from the time he was a little boy, his grandmother had him convinced that he was like an anointed one, that he was special. Mhm. And that she would always say that to his parents, like, you know, don't you hit him? Like this one's special. You know, he's going to raise everybody up. And then he turned out to be like one of the great heavyweight champions ever in terms of like his record. He's 40 and 0 with 39 knockouts. He means a phenomenally successful fighter. And in his mind he believes that he has some like magic property or that there's something to him. He's a ridiculous

86:17knockout artist, too. I mean, obviously there's a lot of physiological aspects to that. I mean, he's a big, long, tall guy with crazy knockout power. You can't fake power. You either have it or you don't. But he's got it and he's got this weird confidence, too. And you got to wonder how much of him actually is operating under this idea that his grandmother was right about him having some magical properties. And so, he goes through life with this vision. Yeah. Powerful. Yeah. How you trick people into thinking that way? When you got a whole nation full of uh Deontay Wilders. Nation full of like super See, that's why that's why doctors are afraid of the placebo effect cuz they think it's tricking people. It's duping them. Yeah. And it's not. It's like it's you know, when when you present a treatment to a patient, your belief in the treatment as a as a practitioner catalyzes the patient's

87:07belief. The The best way I can do that is if I give a patient something that I've tried myself and I know from my own experience that it works. And then I can present it in a way with my confidence and that increases the patient's confidence and increases the likelihood of a favorable outcome. Even controversial therapies? Yes, and even you know, what an example of something you don't know. when you give a pharmaceutical drug to a patient, I think there's there's the direct effect of the drug and then there's a halo of belief effect. And you know, an interesting phenomenon is that there's a famous saying in medicine that you should use a new remedy as much as possible before it loses the power to heal. And this is a common experience that drugs work best near the time of their introduction. That's also the case with diets as well, right? Absolutely. And the longer they're around, what I

87:54think what happens is you know, people have faith in new things. Mhm. So, there's a big halo of placebo effect. And over time, that shrinks and it leaves the stuff on its own, which may not be very impressive. This is often the case when people take on a radical diet, like on opposite ends of the spectrum, whether it's a carnivore diet. You wear that. A lot of people swear it fixes them all these ills or a vegan diet. Very similar effects. Obviously very different diet. Exactly. So, it's the mind. The mind. The mind is where it's at. I don't know. How do we How do we And the big problem in science and medicine is that we don't believe in the mind. Yeah, that's what I was saying earlier when you were talking about mind body. material, you know, it's not This is the problem. When you're talking about mind body interactions or wart cures, placebo effects, you're talking about a a

88:43non-material cause of a physical event. And that is not allowed in the materialistic paradigm in that dominates science. Yeah. When we observe a change in a physical system, the dogma is the cause has to be physical. When you talk about a non-physical cause of a physical event, scientists tune out. Well, that's really unfortunate because we know so much about how attitude does shape the way your body reacts to things. Going back to the Sarno stuff, you know, that with back pain. It's It's It's all that stuff. It's like you know, that that to me that you can't separate the mind and body. They're two poles of the same thing. Well, if the placebo effect is real and it's documented. Yeah, it's documented. So, obviously something is going on with the way you feel about things and think about things that it's having an actual physiological effect. There's something

89:32happening to your body because the way you're thinking about it happening to your body. Now, one of the things that has made this you know suddenly of interest in the medical world is that we now have these techniques like functional MRIs Yeah. PET scans where we can observe living brains and you can show that the placebo response is associated with particular activity in certain brain centers. That has made it real for people that otherwise didn't believe in it. Yes, right. Like there's a medically documented There's something they can get a hook into. Yeah, you can you can put it on a scale. You can see Yeah. What what part of the brain is responsible for the placebo effect? Well, again, it's probably some of these deep brain centers that same ones in swearing. You know, that the same thing. It's coming from centers that connect to emotional you know to emotion.

90:24Yeah, the ability to turn that on and off consciously and willingly is is tricky. Yeah. You know, another thing I looked at over the years was um healing shrines in the world like Lourdes. Mhm. The There's two interesting facts about that. You know, over the years the Catholic Church has accepted very few healings as genuine that have like full medical documentation and some of them are quite spectacular like miraculous disappearance of widely disseminated cancer. No native of Lourdes has ever been cured. And the chances that a person is going to be healed there Explain Lourdes. This is a place place in France where you know a you know a child saw visions of the Virgin Mary and anyway, it's grown up into a There's a grotto and you know, it's now a major Catholic shrine and it has a reputation for healing and thousands and thousands of people over the years have gone there. So, as I

91:18said, very you know there's relatively few reported healings that have been doc fully documented medically, but no native of Lourdes has ever been healed. And the There's something called the Lourdes phenomenon which is fascinating that the chances that a person is going to be healed at Lourdes or a place like that is directly proportional to the length of the journey traveled to get there. Mhm. Yeah, I have heard that. So, the length of the journey is is an investment of belief, right? So, you're projecting belief onto the place place and then you get it back. Yeah, that that seems like that could essentially work with any very very difficult vision quest type experience that you're going on. You're looking for something and you have to earn it. Yeah. You have to you're to be fully invested. There's to be something going on in the mind that has you convinced this is a real effect.

92:06But the power is not in the place. The power is in you know in here. Mhm. And you're projecting it onto that. But man, wouldn't it be better if you didn't have to go all the way Yeah, it'd be great. And how do you how do you get that going? Like if someone said to you, "Okay, man, I don't want to go to Lourdes, but what what should I do?" Well, one is that you could imagine you're going to Lourdes and that's taking advantage of this function of visualization. That's why these therapies like guided imagery seem to work that you can imagine something and have it become real. Guided imagery. Now, is there a specific you know like there's like transcendental meditation, there's Buddhist meditation. formal it's a formal system of therapy that people are trained in where you you know, you sit with a practitioner and they help you explore your mental imagery and may give you specific kinds

92:54of images to work with depending on the condition that you're dealing with. I would think knowing the fact that we where we have real evidence the placebo effect works, why isn't there more study done to try or more thought and more more people that are trying to emphasize this ability of the placebo effect? we're up against this problem that in the dominant paradigm in science and medicine, we don't believe in non-physical causation of physical events. But that doesn't jive with me because we do believe in the placebo effect. Like everybody says that, "Oh, it's just a placebo, right?" You said that earlier. Right. People always say that, but it still works. Right, but but we're not using it. Right. We should be using it. It's the It's the meat of medicine. We want to make it happen more of the time. God dammit. It's just so we're so flawed in our approach. It's really interesting. It's

93:49like the the human body and the human mind is such an incredibly complicated biological entity, right? Our ability to consciously be aware of our our our life, our position in the world, our mortality, the insignificance of us in the greater scale. All those things are like there right now all the time, but we don't have any users manual. Right, exactly. we have this incredible machine that can invent nuclear bombs and satellites and there's no users manual. No users manual for the mind or the body. Especially not in how to manage the body with the mind. Nothing. Nothing. Figure it out, Wide open field. your own. Yeah. Few people have got You got to like find these masters, right? So, if you think about the 300 and whatever million people we have in this country, how many of those people could guide you towards a proper integration of mind and body and a positive way of interfacing with

94:47reality that's beneficial to you physically, mentally, spiritually. How many people? Is there a dozen? Not many. Isn't it interesting with all these human beings and essentially most of them trying to improve in some way. Even people that fail on diets, boy, they'd like to get skinny. Even people that you know, fail at school, "Oh, I wish I was smart enough to graduate. I wish I had enough discipline." People people want to do better. So, there's this vast need for coaching that would lead to improvement yet almost I mean, nothing to speak of and certainly not nothing large scale in any city that has this approach where look, we are going to teach you how to better engage with the the material world around you and the the better engage with reality itself that's going to leave you more spiritually, physically, emotionally fulfilled. Like that seems like that would be a big business.

95:44It would. Now, one way to teach this stuff is by example that if a person exemplifies you know, good mind-body functioning, they can inspire that in another person. That seems like maybe the only way. Well, one strategy that I if I can do this, if I have a patient, if I can introduce that patient to someone who's had their condition is now better, that is a very powerful way to up their belief in the possibility of getting better. Yeah, that makes sense which is why people love user testimonials. Right. But you but better if you actually meet the person and go see for yourself. Yeah, but user testimonials are so huge for that reason. You know, I was skeptical at first, but then I tried it and boy, I got he was skeptical just like me. Yeah, it's it I to me when I look at the giant number of people that are unhappy and displaced and just seem like they're left out of society, I was

96:41listening to oh, it was Johann Hari on Sam Harris's podcast and they were talking about the number of people that are happy with what they do for a living. Happy with what they do every day and it was somewhere around 13%. Yeah, and then the number of people that were just like, "It's okay. I just do it." Like I don't hate it, but I don't love it. That was like in the 60% and then the rest of the people hated what they did. So, the vast majority some ungodly number, you know, like 87% of people hate what they're doing. Oh, how sad. Or if not hate it, they don't want to be doing it and they do it all the time. Yeah. That's crazy. That that has to have profound effect on all aspects of your life, right? I like what I do. Yeah, well, you seem like you do. I do. You have a twinkle in your eye when you talk about it. But I mean, it's got to give you some satisfaction for sure, right? Help all

97:43these people? Absolutely. And also to see a lot of the things that I've you know, believed for so long becoming more mainstream. It's good. Yeah. Yeah. And much more so now than ever before, right? Much more so now than ever before. Yeah, when you were doing those studies in the 1960s and you thought that marijuana was going to be legal in 5 years, how could you have ever First of all, how could you have ever thought of the internet, right? That's the big one. The distribution of information. Yeah, that's that's the really the big one. The decentralized distribution of information. And that's that by the way in medicine has really It's one of the things that's most leveled the playing field between doctors and patients. You know, it sort of ended the authoritarian paternalistic kind of medicine that was when I grew up. Well, it's it is a problem, right? A

98:27patient comes, they think they know everything. Yeah, but I I have seen I have seen many many patients who have gotten exactly the information they needed and were able to take it to the doctor who didn't know about it. I mean, I think on the whole it's a really good thing. Oh, yeah, for sure. No, no, for sure. I'm saying just like I get how doctors be worn out by it all You know, listen to me. I went to school. This is what it is. Well, it's good for them to have to let go of that. Yeah, well, I there's no way you could know everything. True. especially doctors, they must know that they have a specialty for a reason cuz the human body is so insanely complicated. There's no way anybody is a general specialist of every single aspect of medicine. But we need more generalists. One of the problems is we got too many specialists and there's Yeah. So, someone like Would you think

99:11of a generalist as someone who sort of guides you towards various specialists? I'm a general practitioner and I'm very proud of it. There's a good data showing that states that have a higher number of prime of primary care physicians, family doctors, have better medical outcomes than patients with a high percentage of specialists. But the problem is specialties pay more. So, we should be changing that. We should be providing financial incentives for people to go into general medicine. Yeah, it would also make sense too that by the time you get to a specialist, usually you're really messed up. Right? If you're going to a back specialist, you might have like a real situation that's been bothering you for a long time. Whereas you go to a general practitioner for a checkup. This is my, you know, biannual checkup. He's kind of giving you the once over, making sure everything's

99:56okay. How you sleeping? How you eating? Drinking? Smoking cigarettes? What's going on? Just give get a sense of you. But they do they have enough time? Isn't that a big issue? Like how much time do you spend? I mean much time do you spend when you when you work with patients? I take an hour and in our clinics, we do 90 minutes on a first session. That's got to be nice. 90 minutes you can get to know somebody. But if you're getting in and out of that office in 10 minutes, he's just here's a prescription. Get out of here. Next. You know the there's been studies on the amount of time in a medical encounter when a patient starts to talk, how soon a doctor interrupts the patient. Ah. Do you have any guess what that is now? 13 seconds. You're right. Really? Yeah, 13 seconds. I use the the same number of people that are happy with what they do. Ha. There you go. That's pretty good.

100:4513 seconds. Wow. Yeah. Well, my my foot hurts and I've been Okay, here you go. Yeah, exactly. Shut the up. Take this. This is pain. Take this opium. Yeah, it's Have you ever eaten in a True Food Kitchen? What does that mean? It's a restaurant, True Food Kitchen. No, I don't know what that is. Well, it's a restaurant that I started and there's now 25 of them. We got two in two in in LA and Where are they? One in Pasadena where I'm going to go after the show and eat. Oh, I'm in Pasadena tonight. All right, you want to go? I'm at the Ice House Comedy Club. All right. What time if you I'll be there for dinner if you want to come over there. True Food Kitchen. Yeah, it's great. It's my you know, it's delicious healthy food. It's the wonderful food that conforms to good nutritional principles. It's anti-inflammatory diet and there's something for everyone. There's like

101:32meat, there's vegan options, vegetarian, gluten-free. It's very delicious food. True Food Kitchen. And it's become an incredibly successful restaurant concept. Well, that's a great idea to be able to serve people things that you know for a fact are going to be healthy and nutritious, not just taste good but good for you. But primarily it's food that looks great and tastes great. It happens to conform to good nutritional science. Yeah, that is possible and that's a lot of people think you have to eat fried chicken and Right. Well, come in there and try it. I would love to try it. Definitely. Um how do you eat for the most part? You said you eat fish and you eat through the full spectrum try to grow a lot of my own food. I love food you know, fresh stuff out of the garden. I like to cook and I invent recipes which is you know, a lot of the recipes in the restaurant are mine.

102:15Oh, great. So, I I like simple you know, simple quick preparations that are really good. Do you fast at all? I have been I've experimented with intermittent fasting and I haven't found the regimen that works exactly right for me but I'm fascinated by it. I do 18 or 16 and 8. And how often do you do that? I try to do it 4 days a week. Um you know, it's sometimes it's difficult when I travel but even then I'm more accustomed to it than ever before. So, if you know, I eat dinner at 8:00 at night. It's it's not hard to wait until noon. back. Okay. Yeah, it's not hard. My body's just really used to it now. How long you've been doing it? About a year or so, maybe a little bit more than that. Yeah, I think you know, that makes a lot of sense and uh I will continue to experiment with it. What I haven't done that I really have been thinking a lot about doing is doing

103:08a multiple day fast, just a water fast with the I've done that. The longest I've done it for is 3 days. Yeah, how was that? The first day was difficult. Or actually the second day was difficult. The third day, fabulous. You know, I felt energized, high, my mind working very clear. The problem that I have is how do you come off it? Mhm. Cuz it's like very easy to slide into eating, you know, pizza. Krispy Kreme donuts. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I I think there's protocols in terms of like small amounts of fruit Right. Like right when you're coming out, blueberries or something like that. that to me was the tricky part was transitioning off it. Yeah, it's the bell. The buzzer rang. School's out for summer. Yeah, I I get it. I mean it's especially if you feel like you earned it, right? Didn't eat for 3 days, you want that pizza. Right. One of the things I found when I

103:57was doing it, having a bowl of matcha I I normally my my pattern is I want to eat as soon as I get up. So, that those morning hours are hard for me but if I have you know, have my matcha that helps. Do you exercise? I do. I swim mostly. Swim and walk. Um Every day. I find that once my body got used to fasted exercise, it became much much easier. Uh-huh. Yeah, and it became like before I would almost have anxiety attached to it. Like I can't work out without food. Huh. to eat. Uh-huh. And then when I started doing the intermittent fasting and then I started doing fasted exercise, I I think it was I'm sure I if you probably measured me in terms of like you did a bunch of like weightlifting exercises and measured my output, I probably would be able to lift more weights if I had some fruit first. Uh-huh. I'm pretty sure I'd have a little bit more energy. Probably

104:51measurable. But it's not difficult to have a a vigorous workout in the morning when you're fasted. You just got to get used to it. Yeah, I often do either hot yoga or run first thing in the morning. Weightlifting seems to be a bit of an issue. Weightlifting I don't like. I like to eat something before I lift weights. Huh. Yeah. But swimming? What about you? You ever fasted swim? Yeah, I have. I it's fine. No problem with it. Now, why'd you get off the pot? You know, it changed for me and I I really used it regularly in my 20s and 30s and when I first started using it, it was great. I mean I was like hilarious highs, laughing, you know, a lot of Then it then it turned after several years more introspective. You know, and and interesting I got like creative, my writing for helping writing stuff like that. And then gradually it transitioned into making me groggy and

105:49not doing much for me. And for you know, it it took me a while to separate myself from it but in the last years of it, it was groggy and sedated and it I think I changed. You know, my body changed. That's interesting. Have you ever tried different strains? I have First of all, I don't like to smoke because you know, I'm really into breathing and I just can't put smoke into my lungs. I've tried vaping. I don't I just don't like the effect of it these days. Yeah, I just don't like the effect. You know, I don't like oral feels you know, it's too strong for me. Yeah. Well, when you're talking about that half of a half a grain of sand putting you on Pluto for 12 hours. Greater eyes, yeah. Greater sand that'd be funny. Imagine that. That would be like acid. Yeah, it was felt like acid. Yeah, well, boy I'll tell you um for me the most profound and intense experience I ever have in the sensory

106:40deprivation tank are edible marijuana. Mhm. Edible marijuana in that tank, that combination is just woah. Huh. A real strong dose because have you done the tank at all? Yeah, but not with not with pot, not with psychedelics. That was a long time ago, yeah. Well, even sober you have some pretty trippy experiences while you're in there. But there's something about the what what I experienced with edible marijuana is that when you close your eyes, you get a lot of really cool visuals. Huh. Like I've had it before when I take pot and then get on a plane. Like I'll I'll eat right right when I park my car at the airport or when I'm leaving the house and it kicks in when you're on the plane. You're like yikes. Closing your eyes, Huh. something about closing your eyes that you have like really brightly covered colored visuals often times. And I get that a lot inside the tank if

107:33with with marijuana. Huh. I had that with that real strong stuff. I definitely had a lot of visual stuff. Yeah, that's what's weird about it, right? It's like it does become a psychedelic especially at high doses. Why are they making that stuff so strong? Like half a grain of rice What how many milligrams did they say it was? I don't really remember. Wasn't much. Cuz they've got these damn Cheeba Chews that are like 500 milligrams for one little cake. One little thing like that big, 500 milligrams. Like Why do you need that? Because you started out with 10 and then you you worked your way up to 500. You know what I mean? I guess there's a tolerance issue with a lot of folks, right? Yeah. Huh. Do you do you regularly meditate or try to I do. Yeah, I every morning when I get up. What kind of meditation? I first practice Zen and then I took some Vipassana training and now I you know, I

108:31get up, I sit down, I do my breathing routine and then I just try to uh focus on body sensations and uh sounds in the room and when I'm caught up in my thoughts, I just bring my attention back to my breathing. Mhm. But you know, for me I think that the sitting sitting meditation, that's fine but I think the goal is to be able to carry that state in all of your activities. So, for me cooking is meditative. You know, chopping vegetables, working with knives and that's very meditative for me. So, when do you think that when you're having this meditation, whether it's Zen or whatever, that you're you're resetting the way you're going to go through life for the rest of the day? Hopefully. I mean, that's the goal is to carry that state. No, the goal is to carry that state throughout the day. Well, you kind of have a responsibility, don't you agree? Like you're a guy who's

109:30teaching people how to live a more productive, healthier life. You kind of have a responsibility to live your own productive, healthy life. Right. I wouldn't feel right doing that if I didn't practice it myself. right? Yeah. But I don't tell people to do things I don't do myself. Do you when you have some thoughts about things, like something like iboga, would you be interested in trying it yourself? Like Sure. Yeah. Yeah, I haven't had an opportunity to do it. It's supposed to be ruthlessly introspective. Uh-huh. I've never done it either. Huh. But I've had I've had friends who had a pill problems who who did it and cured them. But they said the ride is just 24 hours of like, "What in the am I doing?" And then once it's over, you have zero desire. the way that it's used traditionally in Africa, the root? Um it's these tribes that use it, it's hunters take it. And they remain

110:18motionless for many hours on it. Animals come close. I mean, that always fascinated me. Hmm. That is that is fascinating. Yeah, I wonder if taking it from the root, I wonder if they have a if it's they're getting the exact same experience as they're getting in these clinics. I don't know. Yeah. It's just to to me, in terms of advocacy, if you look at the recidivism the rates of relapse, rather. They're I mean, they're so low. high. Yeah, it's crazy, right? How successful that stuff is. And yet nobody wants to talk about that. These all these clinics, like it's crazy how many rehab clinics there are. They "We need you for 6 months." Really? Mexico says they kill it all in 3 days. I'd go down there and get into an an iboga clinic. Yeah. I want to find out more about it. Yeah. It's on my list. Well, listen, man. Um thanks for being here. Thanks thanks for all the information that

111:15you've shared over the years. I want you to do studies on burning yourself and getting punched. I will. Report back to me. And uh tell people how they can find out about you. What is your website, social media stuff? my website is drweil.com, drweil.com. And also check out integrativemedicine.arizona.edu, which is my academic website. See the range of that. And matcha.com uh for high-quality matcha. And we have a special offer for your fans. If you go to matcha.com/pages/joerogan, uh your listeners will get a special discount code. And matcha's m a t c h a, ladies and gentlemen. All right. Thank you, sir. Good talk to you. Good talk to you, too.