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- [00:02]
A
Tetragrammaton. Learning about cortisol and what it actually does completely revamped the way I think about everything health wise. And it basically put things into bins that make it all make a ton more sense. Because I, like most people, heard everything bad about cortisol. It was like, cortisol is a stress hormone. It's not true, actually. Cortisol's job is not to combat stress. Cortisol's job is, is to cause the release of energy from your muscles, from your liver. So your brain and muscles have energy. Yes, to combat stress if there's something stressful. But the reason you wake up in the morning or in the middle of the night is because of a normal increase in cortisol, a healthy increase in cortisol. It's called the cortisol awakening response. In all my years of learning about neuroendocrinology, no one bothered to tell me that. But it's in the textbooks. It's just kind of hidden there. Cortisol's job is to create energy for the brain and body. If its levels get high enough, you wake up from your sleep. And so when you take a step back and go, okay, what do cortisol levels look like across the day? It's basically your cortisol wakes you up in the morning because it's rising. And that ing is important because it hits a certain level, cause the slope is steep. Then after you wake up, your cortisol continues to rise and you want your morning cortisol really high. This is what no one will tell you. Everyone's like, God, Cortisol, nuclear memory. Cortisol makes you lose neurons. That's a separate issue. There are contexts where that's true. But basically, in the first hour after waking, you have a unique opportunity to spike your cortisol even higher. And that's what you want to do. Because if you do that, you set up a wavefront of energy through the morning for alertness, for focus. And it makes sure that your cortisol is low in the evening and at night, which is also what you want. If you don't get your cortisol high enough in the morning, it leads to what's called a flattening of the cortisol curve. And that's bad. If you have cortisol that's too high in the afternoon, because your cortisol curve is flat, it's predictive of worse immune system, worse recovery from any kind of disease, serious or minor, and even reduced longevity. So you want this big spike in the morning. How do you do that? Well, in the first hour of the day, there's this incredible opportunity to spike your cortisol even further because I'll try and take any technicalities out of this, but basically cortisol is a hormone that is on what's called a negative feedback loop. It's like a thermostat. If the levels get too high in your bloodstream, your brain and your pituitary register that and they shut down the production of more cortisol. Cortisol comes from your adrenals, but they stop sending the signals to make more. But there's this one hour window right after you wake up where you can spike your cortisol. And the way you do it is by viewing bright light. That bright light ideally would come from sunlight. You could use a 10,000 lux artificial light if you're in the depths of winter or you don't have access to bright light. But there's something about nature that set it up so that this hormone that's under very tight regulation so that if it gets too high, it shuts down its own production. This is how you get that cortisol curve of higher in the morning and lower in the afternoon. There's this unique window in the hour or so after waking where viewing bright light will spike it even higher. And if you miss that window and you say wait until like 11am, I'm talking about a typical wake up time. You wait like three, four hours after waking, let's say, and then you get bright light in your eyes. The problem is you no longer increase cortisol, you actually suppress cortisol. So there's something truly important about that first, let's say hour to 90 minutes after waking where if you spike your cortisol, you're setting yourself up for the most energy and focus all day and you're setting yourself up for low cortisol at night. This is how viewing morning sunlight is. Improves your sleep. I've been talking about it for years now and Jack Cruz and others have been talking about view morning sunlight. It'll improve your daytime mood, focus and alertness and nighttime sleep. But we never really talked about how it improves nighttime sleep. It's because it reduces your cortisol later in the evening. And then the hormone that we're all familiar with, melatonin, which comes from the pineal that we know, starts to go up in the evening and at night. And it's what makes us sleepy and fall asleep. Cortisol and melatonin. Most people don't realize this, and I didn't realize that they are directly antagonistic to one another. If your cortisol is high, your melatonin is going to be low. If your cortisol is low, your melatonin is going to be high. I was always taught that melatonin was the hormone of darkness, that it rises because it's dark. But it turns out your melatonin starts to rise even while it's light out. And viewing the sun in the evening, this is kind of peculiar, actually increases your melatonin as you get toward night. How can that be? How can viewing sunlight in the morning spike your cortisol and in the evening it doesn't do that. Well, it's because there's that unique window early in the day where bright light from sunlight will spike your cortisol later. Like in the afternoon, if you view sunlight or you sit out in the sun, makes you feel kind of tranquil. You don't feel like more stressed or more energized. It helps your nighttime sleep. And that's because watching the sunset. Watching the sunset. So we can no longer say cortisol is a stress hormone. It's an energy deploying hormone. We can no longer say you want it low. You actually want it high early in the day and you want it low later. We can no longer say that bright light increases your cortisol. It only does that in the first couple of hours or really the first hour to 90 minutes after waking. And then in the middle of the day, if you get sunlight in your eyes or on your skin, you're in what's called the circadian dead zone. The circadian dead zone is when you can't shift to the clock. So that first 90 minutes after waking is a unique opportunity that once it passes, you're not getting it back until the next day. And once I started learning about cortisol in this way, I went, oh, my goodness, like, I want my cortisol high. And I'm somebody who has a pretty high caffeine tolerance. But as the years have gone on, I've started, you know, I noticed I was drinking a lot more caffeine. I love yerba mate, I love coffee, I love all those things. But I was drinking a lot more in the morning and my energy levels weren't increasing. And then I would take a break and I'd go back to it, same thing. And I started reading about what increases cortisol. Viewing bright sunlight will do it in that first hour to 90 minutes. The other thing is, caffeine, we were all told, increases cortisol does not increase cortisol. It extends the duration over which cortisol is available. So if you have a coffee in the afternoon, that cortisol is falling, but it's just going to extend that curve a little bit. Doesn't spike your cortisol. Now, for some people who are very caffeine sensitive, it might like if they have a stress reaction, but it doesn't. Exercise will increase your cortisol, but transiently. And then there's some things that are pretty interesting that can extend your cortisol and make that morning spike in cortisol even greater, like grapefruit or grapefruit juice. It inhibits the enzyme that breaks down cortisol. And then the real power player in all this is a naturally occurring thing, which is it's a compound in black licorice called glycyrrhizin. If you buy a capsule, say licorice root or a tincture of licorice root, you'll see some contain glycyrrhizin, some doesn't. Glycyrrhizin dramatically increases cortisol.
- [07:51]
B
Would licorice root tea do that?
- [07:53]
A
Absolutely. Unless it says without glycyrrhizin. Cause they'll sometimes remove it. Now, glycyrrhizin can increase blood pressure and increase cortisol, but if you have naturally low blood pressure or moderate blood pressure, you should be fine. I started taking a capsule of licorice root with glycyrrhizin. The smallest amount I could find was like. I think it was like 250 milligrams. And I started breaking them in half and just opening, putting half that capsule into my morning mate. Oh, man. Not only did it, I still do it. I did it this morning. Does it increase your energy? But I find I can get by drinking a lot less caffeine. So I wasn't suffering from, like, lack of energy. It was my morning cortisol spike, wasn't high enough, started doing that. And it's improved my energy, my sleep. Now, the one thing, aside from blood pressure that people need to be cautioned about is there's something else in licorice root, including glycyrrhizin, that can extend the life of pretty much any prescription drug. Some people like this, you know, some people are taking prescription meds that they don't wanna take more of throughout the day. It does a bunch of things to the enzymes that break down many of the common prescription drugs. So you just need to be wary of that. But once I started looking at cortisol this way, I thought okay. All the things that, like exercise, deliberate cold exposure, caffeine, licorice root with glycyrrhizin. Viewing bright, bright light, you want to stack those in the early part of the day, and then at night, you want to do exactly the opposite. Avoid deliberate cold exposure, Certainly avoid licorice root, certainly avoid caffeine too close to bedtime, certainly avoid bright light. And this is the really diabolical thing about light is early in the day, you need a lot of really bright light, ideally, again, from sunlight, in order to spike your cortisol. But later in the day, when your cortisol is low, remember that negative feedback loop? When it's very low, it takes very little stimulus to get the brain to trigger the pituitary and adrenals to make more.
- [09:45]
B
Because it's not natural, because you're.
- [09:47]
A
Exactly. Because your cortisol is meant to be low. When your cortisol is low, it's very susceptible to increases. When your cortisol is high, it's hard to increase it further, except in that first 90 minutes. And I'm willing to wager that there are millions and maybe billions of people out there that because of devices, but also because there's a tendency for people to not seek sunlight in the morning that are waking up and they're like, God, I feel kind of like, eh. Maybe not miserable, but just kind of eh. And then by mid morning, they're slamming caffeine, they get their sunlight, but it's too late. You're just gonna extend whatever cortisol you have. They're chasing something that's not there. And then in the evening, cortisol drops. And because of that negative feedback loop, it's like cortisol wants to go up. You give it anything like a news story and a phone, and all of a sudden your cortisol spiked. And then people are having trouble falling asleep or they're waking up a few hours later because melatonin isn't high enough. And so I feel like once I learned about cortisol, and this was only recently that I really dove into the literature, I was like, oh, my goodness, I wish I'd known about this ages ago. Because it bookends everything. It takes all the things that we know, and it organizes them into when to and why. And it makes it very obvious. And if you can't get bright light first thing in the day, okay, maybe you take a little bit more licorice root. Although ideally you're getting that light every day. Or if you can exercise in the earlier part of the day, the first two thirds of the day, you do it. Then if you exercise late in the day, you're going to quadruple your cortisol levels. You need to do something to bring them back down. But here's the other thing. If you exercise too late in the day, like some people will exercise when they get home from work because of that negative feedback loop and because you spiked cortisol, and this has been demonstrated, the next morning, cortisol is lower. And so then people feel sluggish the next day. And then the whole thing just dominoes day after day. So I feel like most of the world is very. A circadian sick. We're out of alignment. And when people hear out of alignment with nature, they think, I have to wake up at dawn, I have to go to sleep when the sun goes down. And we're not really saying that. It's just that you just have to be cognizant of how these levers work. So for me, and I said this before the episode I did on cortisol, I think it was the most important episode I've ever done because it organizes all the other stuff in a way that hopefully makes sense to people, because any one practice besides sunlight, you can kind of replace with something else, but sunlight is the one you cannot replace with anyone else. And here it's only appropriate to do a hat tip to Jack Cruz. Right. You know, we have an interesting relationship. We did a seven hour podcast with you, gosh, three and a half years ago. You know, Jack's a. He's a spirited character and he's been talking about the sunlight stuff for a long time. And then the circadian biologists have been talking about it. That's where I got my education in it. But there were a few things that he said that if you don't mind, I'll just take the opportunity to highlight. Because when we sat down for that podcast, I wasn't quite prepared for the force that is Jack Cruise. I wasn't prepared for it. I was like, oh my goodness. And he said some things that at the time, I told myself to suspend my notions of what I knew and didn't know. To be honest, I was like, this is nuts. He said, for instance, and I'm not overstating this, that there are mechanisms in the brain that allow neurons and other cells to make light within the darkness of the brain. And I'll be honest, I thought about that and I was like, that's crazy. Like, that's crazy. I could imagine that there are cells in the brain that have opsins, which are present in the eye, of course as well. But like, besides the pineal, like, are there maybe. Turns out this last year there was a paper published from a very good lab about what they call ultra weak emissions that were detected and recorded in the human brain. And these ultra weak emissions are photon emissions. There's light created inside of the brain.
- [13:41]
B
So the brain does in fact create light, like Jack Cruz said it does.
- [13:44]
A
And I want to credit him for saying that the first time in me, I mean, I didn't sit there and say there's no way. Actually, I opened up my mind to.
- [13:53]
B
But your internal conversation based on everything you've learned was, that can't be right.
- [13:59]
A
I was wrong. I stand corrected. I don't think that's going to cause Jack to change his general sort of approach toward what I can't speak for him, but seems to be his feeling that I'm vastly misguided in my general stance toward science and medicine. But I like to think that we are in a sort of evolving conversation, albeit through the Internet and maybe someday more directly. I don't harbor any ill feelings towards him. In fact, after the paper on ultra weak emissions came to my awareness, I was like, oh, goodness, okay, what else don't we know? And I have to say that the ultra weak emissions paper changed the way that I think about most things, because now I don't want to say anything's possible, but things that seemed outrageous in terms of light and the way that our brain reacts to light, not so outrageous. For instance, it turns out that long wavelength light, like infrared light from the sun or from an infrared light source, which is long wavelength, it turns out, can penetrate the entire body. A paper from Glenn Jeffries lab at the University of College London showed that if people are exposed to, I believe it's 850 nanometer light, which is very. It's out past red. It's, you know, infrared. It not only goes through the skin, it can go through a T shirt. They showed this in the paper. It can go all the way through the body and out the other side.
- [15:35]
B
Wow.
- [15:35]
A
Now this is low energy compared to like UV and microwaves and things of that sort, which are on the short wavelength end. But then you ask, well, what's the function of this thing? And Glenn and others taught me something. Their papers taught me something, which again, this gets back to Jack Cruise, which is the mitochondria, which of course everyone knows as the energy production organelles within cells. But they do other things as well. They carry a charge across their membrane, what's called a membrane potential, just like neurons do. And that membrane potential, the difference in charge across the membrane, makes them like a battery. If the difference in charge is less, they have less energy to contribute to cellular processes, put simply. So, for instance, most neurons sit somewhere around, you know, minus 60, 70 or so millivolts, and then if there's a little opening in them, ions will rush in. The positive ones will move toward the negative to balance it out. And that's what leads to the activity of neurons. It's what allows us to move our limbs and think, et cetera. Mitochondria also have a membrane pot, and long wavelength light both restores the membrane potential to mitochondria whose membrane potential is getting weaker, as well as increases the membrane potential of mitochondria who are already fairly robust. In other words, when we say that sunlight gives us energy, what we're talking about is not just the increase in cortisol, that's one piece, but also sunlight of the long wavelength type at any time of day. And from infrared sources, if you have access to an artificial infrared source, goes through your skin into the organs of your body and is charging the mitochondria. So in many ways, we are like batteries in that way. And so once I learned that, I went back to some of the things that were discussed in that first podcast with you and Jack and I started to re examine some of the things he was saying about water and the way the electron chain is organized on these mitochondria and how long wavelength light might interact with it. And I'm still in the process of dissecting some of that rather than kind of get ahead of myself and talk about things that aren't quite resolved in my mind just yet, how it would work. I will say, once again, it was a number of things that he said in that first podcast. I go, okay, this is how this works. Now, in fairness to Glenn Jeffrey and the quote, unquote standard scientific field, it is very important that science and health information be packaged in a way that people can understand. And I think that's where Jack and I, we don't come to blows. And we're sort of more at like loggerheads around. This is, I want to understand things and I want to be able to articulate them in a way that people will understand so that they can make use of it. Not just, hey, believe me, I'm smarter than you, which I don't claim to be. I believe you should never disparage people for not understanding something in general. If somebody doesn't understand thing in general, it's because it wasn't explained in a way that they can really understand and they need that. But at the end of the day, the facts remain that long wavelength light from sunlight charges your mitochondria and prepares your body to produce more energy. Which is incredible, right? We're batteries. We're batteries. Which, you know, I think 90% of my colleagues would probably be. Oh yeah, that makes sense. It makes sense. But then if you look at the lifestyles that people lead, you know, well, no wonder you need all these other chemical supports to create energy. And yes, deliberate cold will do some of the same. And yes, exercise will do some of the same. If you deposit more muscle, if you grow your muscle tissue, for instance, by extension you have more mitochondria, more robust mitochondrial function. But I'm convinced that the long wavelength light piece is the major lever.
- [19:22]
B
Wow.
- [19:22]
A
Yeah. So as you can tell, I'm really hyped about like cortisol and sunlight and melatonin because the pieces are all starting to fall together in, in a structured way.
- [19:35]
C
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- [21:05]
B
In today's world, it seems like a hack to go out in the sun to get this benefit that's available to us when in reality, for the animal that we are, to wake up in the morning and go out in the sun speaks to how disconnected we are from nature and the way it works.
- [21:25]
A
100%. You know, the word hack and biohacking always frustrated me because to me a hack is, is something that you do that's like a trick, it's a workaround. It's like looking at some video online and seeing how you can, you know, you can fix your glasses with a Q tip and a pin or something. It's not what the thing was originally designed for. But what we're talking about here is what our biology is there for. In fact, we can say with absolute certainty, based on the genetics of these opsins, the pigments, as they're called, that absorb light in the eye, that we didn't develop color vision to see colors. We love the colors that we can see with our eyes if we have color vision, and most people do. But color vision evolved first to have a short wavelength, so blue detecting blue and green detecting essentially, and a long wavelength orange, red detecting photo pigments in animals that don't even see patterns, but they can register time of day. These are animals that are blind, but can register morning and night. Humans have a visual pathway that is an unconscious visual pathway. It's not for pattern vision. And it's composed of cells that take short wavelength light and long wavelength light and compare them. Now why short wavelength, long wavelength? What is all this? Okay, it's what's present when the sun is low in the sky. When the sun is low in the sky, you'll notice it looks yellow or orange and the background sky is blue or gray. This is true in the morning, this is true in the evening. And that's because when the sun is low in the sky, the atmosphere creates something called Rayleigh scattering, which it filters out some of the uv. This is why it's very safe for the eyes and the skin to view and get sunlight when the sun is low in the sky. And so as we know, the sunlight contains all the colors of the spectrum. You think of the Pink Floyd cover, you know, send light through a prism and you get the rainbow. The presence of blues and greens and oranges and reds in the sky signals to your eye and then to your brain, it's early day or it's evening. And so there's nothing that's a hack about viewing sunlight when the sun is low in the sky. This is the primordial way that we understand where we are in time. And we think, okay, what does that have to do with color vision? Well, eventually those photopigments were co opted for pattern vision. And we can see colors. But what this tells us is that it's more important to be able to register when we are in time than where we are in space. It's more important to know when we are in time than where we are in space. And we know this for mental health too. There was a beautiful study out of the UK last year, it was the year before, 80,000 plus subjects. And they looked at how much bright sunlight or light people are getting during the day and how much darkness they're getting at night. And what they found that those two things independently control mental health. The brighter your mornings and days and the darker your nights, the more mentally healthy you are. And even if you get bright days and you have brighter nights, you're less mentally healthy. This is true for ocd, trauma, depression, all the mental health conditions. Even if you don't get much light during the day, which you should, but even if you don't, if your nights are dark, you tend to be mentally healthier. So none of this is a hack. This is the way that we are supposed to live. And I'm not anti technology, right, I'm not a Luddite or anything, but we have completely inverted this. But to call it a hack to get sunlight or as if we're returning to some ancient way of being. These quote unquote ancient circuits in us, they govern us, they're far more.
- [25:06]
B
Whether we believe it or not, it doesn't matter.
- [25:09]
A
Does not matter, does not matter. And you know, I realize there are certain people that like to stay up late. I didn't say you have to get sunlight in your eyes to boost your cortisol before 10am or before 8am, within 60 to 90 minutes of waking is what I said. There are true night owls and there are true morning people and there are people that are more typical hours of waking somewhere between 6:30 and 8:30, depending on time of the year, going to bed sometime between 9:30 and 11:30, depending on time of year. That's kind of typical. But I think when we start to look at our biology and go, most everything is governed by these circadian rhythms. And sunlight is by far the most potent factor in all of this. You know. How is it the most potent factor? Well, because it sets up cortisol, which sets up melatonin, which sets up serotonin, which sets up, you know, and, and the morning cortisol boost, by the way, is associated with increases in dopamine, epinephrine and norepinephrine. And so you start to think all the things that we're chasing with pharmacology and it tends to be one, one or two of these little slices, but you start anchoring to sunlight and darkness in the right way. And it's a promise that I can make anyone if you start doing Those things regularly. Everything else will be significantly better. And for many people, it resolves everything. For some people, they still need to tweak certain things and you still need to exercise, you still need to eat right and all that good stuff. But these are such powerful levers. No one on Earth, even if they only need four hours of sleep a night, which is exceedingly rare. But no one on earth escapes circadian rhythm. No one. It is the.
- [26:42]
B
It's how we're programmed.
- [26:43]
A
It's how we're programmed. It is the most important aspect of our biology, full stop.
- [26:48]
B
So the hacks would be things like wearing sunglasses, which would prevent the natural relationship to the environment, or lathering on sunscreen, which would prevent our ability to do what nature has programmed us to do, or watching television at night, staring at a screen in the dark, a bright screen at night.
- [27:15]
A
Yeah. And, you know, we can touch into each of these, I think now in a way that we couldn't a few years ago, because there are more data. So, for instance, the sunscreen thing, let's just deal with this head on because nothing has created more unnecessary drama than this sunscreen description. Let's just talk about what's undisputed. A physical barrier can help. If you're concerned about excessive uv. A physical barrier. And you say, well, what physical barrier? Well, people wear light colored clothes which reflect all the wavelengths. That's why white reflects all the wavelengths, black absorbs all of them is why you feel hotter in dark clothing than you do in light clothing. And if you just say, okay, what's the best way to get the best of what the sun has to offer? When it's very intense at a time when it would be almost uncomfortable to be outside, you wear light colored clothing. And that Glenn Jeffrey paper shows that the long wavelength light permeates your clothing and still stimulates your mitochondria in ways that you want. How do you know if you're getting the right stuff from the sun? Because it feels warm, because you can feel the heat. That infrared, those long wavelengths of light, those are what provide heat. You know, this is why people have infrared saunas. And this kind of thing, the short wavelength light, you're not going to feel the heat from it is why on an overcast day it feels colder because all the infrared stuff is eliminated. So, you know, the stuff about sunscreen that people argue so much, I mean, I think it's very clear that the chemicals in chemical based sunscreens, they go transdermal and they cause issues. And, you know, a few Years ago I said this and I was attacked pretty vehemently until I had a dermatologist who's a derm oncologist. So he literally studies skin cancer. On my podcast, Dr. Teo Soleimani, and he said to me something super interesting. He said, the deadly melanomas don't come from sun exposure. And I was like, this is a dermatologist telling me this. The deadly melanomas do not come from sun exposure. I'm like, that. This is crazy. Is that true? He said, yeah, that's why we find them on the bottoms of people's feet between their toes. I think it was Bob Marley that I think died of a melanoma between his toes. It's on the places that don't get much sun exposure.
- [29:27]
B
Hmm, that's interesting.
- [29:29]
A
That's interesting. And then there are these other mutations in skin that can occur with excessive uv and it's when people have too much UV exposure and they haven't been conditioned for the UV exposure. And so this is where some people opt for a mineral based sunscreen. They opt for like a zinc or some people will even use a clay type sunscreen. But here's the thing, nobody likes those because they're grainy. And I said, why don't, you know, why don't people just like default to those? He said, oh, because you can't put it on over makeup. So you start to look at the reasons why people like don't do the right things and go, this is crazy. This is vanity is what it really is. And look, I'm not a dermatologist, but now I've talked to him several times and I did a podcast episode about this. And so I'll stand up to anyone in the standard medical profession who says you're saying you want people to get skin cancer. Of course I don't want people to get skin cancer. But we have to be rational about this. And everyone agrees that a light colored physical barrier, if you're super concerned about this, can help. Like, I was hiking in the Yosemite Mountains. It was very high altitude and I did wear a hat because I found it hard to see otherwise. My eyes were not conditioning for how bright it was that day. And I did feel at times that like I was overly warm. So on my arms and on my legs and it was fatiguing me. So I wore a light colored long sleeve shirt and it felt great. And I could still feel some of the warmth of the sun and get those long wavelength rays.
- [30:58]
B
And you didn't put any chemicals into your bloodstream.
- [31:01]
A
No, I didn't, because I'll be 50 next month. And I've been around long enough to realize that the DEET bug spray that we were told to put on at high concentration when we were at summer camp, the junk that was added to so much of our food and our detergents and these other things, while they're not the only basis of modern health issues, they're a huge basis. And I'm also. I'm very tired of the kind of response when somebody like me says that. I'm not saying there aren't a bunch of other things that are useful, but there seems to be something like a deliberate contortion of the messaging nowadays where if you care about the food supply or you care about microplastics, or you care about not slathering your skin with chemicals that somehow that makes you anti science or medicine, it's ridiculous. I stopped using. Like it or not, I stopped using deodorant a long time ago because my grandfather, who was a nutritional biochemist, he told me that there were things that could go transdermal. And you got a lot of, you know, the armpits are. The skin there is very permeable to things. I was concerned about that. I also have used non fragranced soap for a very long time because my skin would react to it. I had a very irritated reaction to it. And then now we're learning. I had several obgyn and female endocrinologists on my podcast, and one of them in particular, who's a fertility doc, Dr. Natalie Crawford, who's just a brilliant physician and knows a ton about endocrinology and women's endocrinology in particular. She said that products that contain evening primrose oil, tea tree oil, and artificial, like synthetic forms of lavender are massive endocrine disruptors. She said if somebody puts it on every once in a while, perhaps not a problem. But if there are people that are slathering themselves with this stuff every single.
- [33:03]
B
Day, it's very ordinary. Fabric softeners, detergents, they have those things in them.
- [33:09]
A
Yeah, exactly. And the argument is, well, my grandparents fathered and mothered eight kids and they slathered themselves. Yeah. And if you look at people when they were in their 50s and 60s 30 years ago, they looked much more aged, much less healthy than they do now. And certainly if you look at people who are in their 80s and 90s now, I mean, they're what we call escapers. These are people generally that didn't do the right things. But were able to push through all these challenges and more power to them. Just think about how much better life is when you're not altering your biology in these ways, especially when the decision is to not do something. And that something is very optional. We're not talking about whether or not to drive a car or use a smartphone at all. We're talking about things that, if anything, save cost to not do and that perhaps have an outsized positive effect on our health. To me, I mean, I guess maybe I'm talking like this because it's perplexing to me, like, why wouldn't people take steps in the right direction? But it's become so politicized and so touchy. I don't know, maybe I'm just. Maybe I'm still just baffled as to why people react in that way.
- [34:30]
D
LMNT Element Electrolytes.
- [34:37]
A
Have you ever felt.
- [34:38]
D
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- [35:42]
A
So.
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D
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- [35:58]
B
What do you think the other things that synthetic fragrances do that would warrant us staying away from them?
- [36:07]
A
Well, after having an expert in olfaction and chemical biology on my podcast Noam Sobel, I'm convinced that we are far more driven by our sense of smell and pheromones than we ever believed. He told me that we actually our sense of smell is incredible. People are smelling themselves all day long. Unconsciously. You're smelling your own odor cloud, people. You know, you can sense fear and upset and there's chemicals in tears of female spouses that are partners that are controlling testosterone levels in men. The smell on the back of a baby's head makes men more docile. It's a known chemical and makes women more aggressive. Very interesting. I mean, we're very chemical creatures. And also the neurons that respond to smell sit right behind what's called the cribriform plate. It's like a Swiss cheese shaped plate with little holes in it just at the back of your nose. And those neurons are very susceptible to odorants in the environment in ways that shape your cognition, your memory. I mean, it's fascinating, but, you know, it's been shown over and over again now that when people on the inhale phase of a breath, people's memory for what they hear and see is much better than it is on the exhale.
- [37:20]
B
Wow, that's cool.
- [37:21]
A
The memory centers are primed to learn when we're inhaling. Wow. Yes. And not just about odors, which is incredible. Right? So they've actually measured. So you can have people, you know, draw in longer and they'll remember more. And then you look at elements that they remember. They don't know that this is what's happening during the experiment. And on the inhales, they just better encoders because inhaling was the. It was the primordial way that we learned about our environment before we had vision, before we had hearing. You're sensing, is this an enemy? Is this someone is some critter to mate with? Is this food environment, is this a toxic environment? And so these patterns of breathing have a profound impact on what and how we can remember and encode new information. And so inhaling smells amazing. Yeah. So like we were talking about walking through the duty free in airports for me is a very noxious experience. I can smell it right now just thinking about it. Just thinking about it. I could smell it right now. It tends to kind of bombard my senses. And I'll do it, obviously, but yes, I hold my breath. Smell is huge. And in fact, I think a lot of pair bonding is based on smell. You know, just the smell of the person we love's skin gets into our brains and our biology at a level that I don't think any text message or gift can really compare to. And I think it's also why if you break up with someone that you didn't want to break up with, or they break up with you, or you're separated by something, the yearning for them and the time that it takes to, quote, unquote, get over them, I think a lot of it is your memory system not missing their smell anymore. I think it's a big part of it. The people who lose a spouse.
- [39:02]
B
On a practical basis, what are decisions you've made to protect your olfactory system? What will you use? What won't you use?
- [39:12]
A
No scented candles. If somebody gifts Me, a scented candle, I gift it right back. And it's amazing how hard it is to find just candles that don't have any scent whatsoever. Detergent, I want non fragranced soap. I use non fragrant soap. I also, I, I pay more attention now to what my olfaction tells me. Like, does this person and environment smell right to me? Does it smell safe? Does it smell good? I know this sounds crazy, but as somebody who missed a lot of signals in the past, in certain environments and situations when my eyes and ears were at very high acuity, I'm learning to tap into those kind of smell senses.
- [39:50]
B
It's funny, there's an old phrase like, I don't like the smell of this. I don't like the way this smells. This stinks. It really is true.
- [39:57]
A
It's true. And oh, and another way it's really impacted me. It turns out that we have these olfactory receptors in our gut.
- [40:05]
B
Wow.
- [40:05]
A
So when you eat something, your gut lining is detecting the chemicals in those foods. This makes perfect sense when you think about it. You can't taste it anymore, it's already passed through your mouth. But your gut is figuring out like, are the chemicals in this thing. I'm breaking down, do I like this? And if you like it, it will signal through your vagus nerve to a little cluster of neurons called the no dose ganglion. And that triggers to your dopamine reinforcement areas to pursue more of that food or drink.
- [40:36]
B
And it does it through smell.
- [40:38]
A
It does it through smell receptors and taste receptors expressed in your gut.
- [40:42]
B
Wow.
- [40:43]
A
Not just in your mouth and nose. Right. Everyone knows that smell and taste are linked. Because if you lose your sense of smell, your taste suffers and vice versa. Like, if you numb the mouth, your sense of smell changes. And if you have a stuffed up nose, your sense of taste changes. But you have smell and taste receptors throughout your gut. And if you eat something that doesn't seem quite right, it doesn't even have to make you nauseous. Right. That's kind of the extreme. Your smell and taste receptors in your gut as it's breaking down that food signal to areas of your brain that then signal to the memory areas of your brain, like, hey, like maybe not next time. I don't like that food so much. Like I've come to loathe the smell and taste of artificial truffles. Like to me it's like a blasphemy compared to like real truffle, which smells delicious and earthy and rich. But sometimes you'll find a salt that's truffle salt, and it's synthetic, and it's like, ugh. And now if I were to even take a pinch of it, it would be noxious. Yeah. So. But I think that learning to touch into these more primordial senses, I think it adds a layer to our experience, and I think it's really the foundation of our experience, upon which our vision, our hearing, everything else is built, and we don't pay attention to it terribly often.
- [41:59]
B
So if someone washes their clothes with a scented detergent every day, in addition to the synthetic fragrance having a negative effect in a toxic way on the body, they also numb our ability to, when they're not there, to really smell smells.
- [42:18]
A
That's right. That's right. Noam went so far as to say, I love this. He said, you know that all day long, you're smelling yourself. People will do this. They'll catch them. You'll smell yourself. You kind of know, like, you'll smell your shirt. You're smelling, like, a smell off today or people. And he said, we are constantly smelling ourselves, whether we admit it or not, whether we're aware of it or not, in ways that are giving ourselves feedback as to whether or not we're eating well, we're sleeping well, we feel well. And he said, how we respond to other people. You know, I had an offline conversation with him where he essentially said, you know, you hear so much these days about, like, oh, you know, you got to pick your relationship based on how it impacts your nervous system. Everyone likes to say, like, he or she calms my nervous system. My nervous system feels safe or not safe around this person. And we now accept that the gut feeling is very important. And people talk a lot about the gut feeling. Noam and I were having a discussion about the research that's been done on this, and people are losing touch with their sense of smell and their pheromonal sense because we're masking all of that in our efforts to not smell anything bad, what we think is bad, or to just create these artificial odor clouds on us and other people and in the room we were losing touch. It's like numbing our skin.
- [43:39]
B
It's really interesting what you said about gut feeling. It's another case where if we have a gut feeling about something, but we don't act on it, and we push down our internal voice to follow somebody's orders, let's say, or follow some rule that doesn't feel right in our body, same thing happens. We start losing the ability to have those Feelings anymore.
- [44:07]
A
That's right.
- [44:08]
B
If you push them down on a regular basis, yeah.
- [44:10]
A
It's almost like they are innate until we suppress them and then we lose touch with them. If I look back on my life, I think that 99% of the really bad decisions I made were because I learned to override my innate sense in those situations. And this has reasons that relate to kind of my personal history. But I think at an early age I wasn't the most daring kid or I wasn't the kid to hold the firecracker till the very last second. And as I hit puberty and got through high school and in my 20s, I learned to override my fear response. And that was very useful in certain circumstances, like taking on challenging courses and things that, you know, it's important to lean into challenge. But I applied it too broadly. And now part thanks to the encouragement of good friends and just in understanding more about the biology of circadian rhythms and old fashioned these like quote unquote ancient systems that are very alive in U.S. still, I've come to understand that like 99% of life is just energetic, like, does this make me feel good or not? And removing that cognitive like assessment like, do I want to be here? Like, maybe you just leave. The same way a fish would leave water that was contaminated because it smelled the contaminants and it would approach another fish, you know, long ago a fish.
- [45:38]
B
Would never think, I'm supposed to stay here, so I'll stay, right?
- [45:41]
A
We're the only species that can think ourselves into trouble in that way. You know, physical contact, we're exchanging microbiome all day long. When you shake hands, when you hug, when you eat something, when you meet someone new, when you go into a new, new environment, you're exchanging microbiomes all the time. And the more intimate the relationship, the more an in depth the exchange of microbiomes. So when people talk about quote unquote chemistry, I think that's what they're talking about. And I think we think ourselves into situations where I'm sure that if we were to take a step back, we'd be like, you know what? The chemistry was off. But I pushed myself in and through that. And I don't know a single person that doesn't come to regret those decisions. And I also don't know a single person who follows this deeper intuitive sense who says, oh yeah, I wish I had gone with a more cerebral decision because this is the same way that Steve Jobs would talk about kind of the character of objects or artists will talk about. And art critics will talk about the feeling of a piece or I hear you talk about the feeling of a musical piece or the chemistry of a band. And it's like to those of us that aren't musicians, it's like kind of vague. But I'm guessing, I'm certain, in fact, that some of what was going on in the room when there was amazing chemistry with musical artists you've worked with, some of it was probably that they're literally secreting chemical odorants that feed back on them and feed their sense of well being or creativity, whatever it is. I'm 100% convinced.
- [47:09]
B
I wonder if that's why we like to go to certain events with large groups of people is to feel an energetic, a combined energetic feeling that comes and maybe it is based on scent, even though we don't smell it on some level, some energetic presence that's generated by a group of people, especially a group of people, all into the same thing, like at a concert.
- [47:33]
A
These systems are so sensitive. Noam, who really is the world expert on this, will tell you that human beings have such a sensitive olfactory system that there are certain odorants that at the concentration of essentially one drop in Olympic sized swimming pool, you would be able to say, that swimming pool doesn't smell like that swimming pool. Even though you wouldn't know consciously what the difference was.
- [47:59]
B
One drop in an Olympic, in an.
- [48:01]
A
Olympic sized swimming pool. And you think to yourself, nah, that can't be. And this must be because it's like ammonia or it's in a contaminant. No, it's because you have certain systems that are hardwired to be ultra, ultra sensitive because they're important cues for information. So you could be at the concert, people are smoking weed, people are dancing, people have bo. This person threw up, she's wearing perfume. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the odorants and pheromones that at tiny, tiny concentrations your system is picking up on without your level of awareness, without any awareness, rather, and are shaping the way that you feel. They're ecstatic. I'm ecstatic. They're in bliss. I'm in bliss. They're calm, I'm calm. And this is a lot of what emotional contagion is about. It's hard to overstate just how powerful this is because this came first. This came long before vision, long before hearing, long before touch even. It was smelling and pheromones first that evolved first. We know this based on all the biology. Then it was the detection of electric signals, like the lateral lines of fish, like who's nearby. What an enormous, important step in biology to not just. You don't have to contact something. You can detect it at distance, you know, if it's dangerous, you know, if you want to approach it. Then came touch, then came hearing. Vision came last, Vision came last. And yet we're so visual as creatures. But the vision that we experience, what we think is beautiful or disgusting or we just don't care for, is layered on the foundation of olfaction and pheromone detection in the same way that what we think of as like, happiness or sadness is layered on top of that circadian biology that we were talking about first. There's no escaping it. It's at our core. The rest is not just window dressing. It's also important. But this is like the central scaffold of how we work.
- [49:56]
B
It's interesting because so many people use cologne or perfume, and that immediately makes whatever natural essence you have unreadable, Right?
- [50:09]
A
And many of those perfumes now and colognes are designed to include pheromone like compounds to try and attract mates. I mean, they are the bullshit of interpersonal relations. They're like wearing a mask. And what I'm saying is the real information about whether or not that's a great mate, whether or not that's somebody that you're truly attracted to, is their smell. Is the pallor of their skin when there's nothing on it, is the kind of state that you tend to be in when they're near. Is it comforting? Does it arouse you? Does it stress you out? I've been around people that just stress me out for reasons I cannot understand. I'm convinced it's through the nose, 100% convinced.
- [50:50]
B
Anything else about gut feeling you should talk about?
- [50:53]
A
Only that you can recover your sense of it very quickly if you allow it to be free of these other things like perfumes. And if you stop overriding it for a short while because it's so primordial, it comes back fast. This is also the beauty of sunlight. It's like, you know, I get very frustrated, as you can tell, that when people call it a hack. Because if it were a hack, it wouldn't be the case that if you do it for two or three days, you feel significantly better. Like, significantly better in a way that very few things can compare to. So the wonderful thing about these primordial aspects, these foundational aspects of our biology, is that if you give them a chance, if you tap into them, A little bit. You quickly learn to follow them because like a new mother who finds that they have a very intuitive sense of how to take care of their infant. You know how to work with this, but you have to become aware of it first. You have to let it work. You have to let it be present.
- [51:54]
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- [53:22]
A
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- [53:30]
B
Tell me about the psychology of turning 50.
- [53:34]
A
Oh man, I can't believe it.
- [53:38]
B
You made it.
- [53:38]
A
I made it. And when I say I made it, I've outlived my graduate advisor who sadly died. She died very young at 50. It was super sad. I outlived a lot of my friends because I grew up with a lot of maniacs who unfortunately, despite being incredible people, many of them ended up getting addicted to drugs. A lot of them, they killed themselves. There's not a lot of like softer ways to put it. Super sad. Awesome people.
- [54:09]
B
If you think back to the friends of yours who committed suicide, would you say there's any thread running through them?
- [54:19]
A
Intense fire like that, you know, you hear this term, like they're flame burned bright.
- [54:24]
B
Yeah.
- [54:24]
A
Like I think about one kid we grew up with. It was a kid that lived up the peninsula from us. He just had so much fire. Like he just for some reason, like in like the 9th grade, he nicknamed himself Johnny Dagger. And he was just so intense. He always had new music to share. Awesome skateboarder. He just used like a ball of energy. Challenging situation at home, et cetera. But just the raddest kid. And I don't know what eventually brought him to the decision to take his life, I mean, it happened, I think it was right at 2016, 2017, transition. I have three friends, Johnny Farrer, Aaron King, who was an amazing graffiti artist. He also went by Aaron Curry, he went by Orphan Orfn, who when we were younger just started tagging, doing graffiti. He was a bike messenger in San Francisco, skateboarder. And he did the most outrageous stuff. Like, it's so much energy. There's the Debose tunnel, the Muni tunnel in San Francisco. There's very little space between the tracks and the walls. And he tagged orphan in like 1 inch high lettering the entire length of the tunnel, which meant he had to run back in and out, time it with the trains. He didn't do it all at once. He didn't commit suicide. He died of stomach cancer in the same month that Johnny took his life. And then their other friend, the three of them were in a tagging crew and a guy named John Eichelberry, who was Marvel Eichelberry, unfortunately, Fentanyl overdose. And I went to the high school Gun high school G U N N that is known for a lot of suicides. A lot of kids killed themselves, unfortunately on the train tracks in Palo Alto. This was after I graduated. But even in my sister's class, for some reason, there was like spinal meningitis and this and heart attacks. I mean, I can name it Stiff Let Singer. You know, there are all these names of these kids. Like so many kids died. It's weird. Or killed themselves. And what do you think it is? I don't know. You know, it's interesting that for a guy like me who didn't grow up in the inner city, who was not in the military, it's really weird, right? Would know that like a third of my friends now are like dead. That I grew up with, not the, like neighborhood kids. But when I got into skateboarding, I started going to San Francisco. So that expands your world. I don't know. I think the 90s were a complicated time where there were mental health issues. There were a lot of what they used to call broken homes. And it was new. We didn't know that many kids with divorced parents. I mean, I was one of the few ones in my school. And then you started meeting more now it's super common. And it transcended income level too. So I don't know. I wish I had an answer to it. I think drugs definitely played a role. I was fortunate that I never really got into drugs or alcohol. Never liked it, you know, tried a few things here and There never hard drugs. I've never done hard drugs. Never really had an interest. I don't know. But you know, like that movie, Kids, you know, a bunch of my friends were in that. Lavar McBride. There's this kid in there who talks about, I'll smoke so much weed, I'll hallucinate. That's Lavar. Grew up with him. He's still alive, as far as I know. Great skateboarder back when Nick Lockman, I mean, you know. But Harold Hunter's dead. He was a really interesting looking guy. He got put in a lot of clothing ads and stuff. It was just wild times. And there just didn't seem to be that many things to catch people if they were falling. Like, you didn't know until someone checked out. It's sad. I mean, you asked, what's the common thread? I mean, I'll say that, like, Orphan Aaron, that guy showed up in our school. He was a foster kid and he showed up in our school. And I was like, I gotta be friends with this guy. He had so much energy and he was constantly drawing and he was constantly doing awesome art. I once went over to his house and he had converted his entire room into a sculpture made out of cereal boxes. And he was like, living in the corner one. And, you know, now you'd be like, oh, well, okay, whatever. YouTube. There was no YouTube. He just did it. So I think he just, you know, there's something in us when we're younger. You got, you know, some people just have that fire and I feel like it's compacted into fewer years. My undergraduate advisor, this guy, Harry Carlisle, he was an amazing teacher at UC Santa Barbara. He was the one that got me hooked into Physiology of Cold Cold Thermogenesis and essentially got me into neuroscience. I worked for him. He's an amazing guy. He was a Quaker, I'll never forget. He showed us this video in class of a guy with schizophrenia who was acting wild and hallucinating and all this stuff. And he turned it off. And we were talking about the biology of schizophrenia. What little was known, still very little is known. And I'll never forget what he said. He said, I kind of like the guy. And I was like, what? And he said, you know, everybody's got a little light in them. And I remember thinking, light almost makes me well up. Like, he had a real sensitivity to people. I worked for him, went off to graduate school, published a paper in science. Wasn't my first paper, but, like, in science, which is very, very stringent, like 99% of papers that get submitted in science get rejected. So here I'm a graduate student. I get first author paper in science. I'm super happy. So I write to him and I tell him, hey, got paper publishing science. He's like, great. You know, next time you come through Santa Barbara, let's get together or something and chat. And then, like, two weeks later, I get a email from another professor. We know the guy blew his head off in the bathtub. Wow. And for years, I would go back down to Santa Barbara and sit with his wife, Jane, who was the head of counseling services there at Santa Barbara. And we would talk about him. And she gave me his flannel and gave me some stuff. And she always talked about him really fondly. And I never had it in me to ask her, like, why or what happened, but you could tell she was super confused. It's so confusing to people around. But, yeah, he just got on the phone call his daughter, I was told and said, hey, I'm gonna say goodbye. And she was like, no, please don't. She called the fire department and he just. He killed himself. And so, yeah, I don't know what goes through somebody's mind. I mean, I think that you asked about turning 50. I default to the great Joe Stromer, who I never met. I think it's only recently that I stop asking you questions about Joe. Every time we see one another, maybe every third time, I have an obsession, healthy obsession with his arc and who he was, and he died at 50. Every time I go to New York City, I go to the Strummer Memorial down in Alphabet City. There's a mural with Joe with his aviators. It says, the future is unwritten. It's on the side of a bar there. And I don't know who put it up. Probably the people that own the bar. But I love stories about Joe. I just watched the Future is Unwritten documentary twice. I feel a relationship to him not because I'm the biggest Clash fan, but because I'm the biggest Mescaleros fan that ever lived. His band that he did later. And I also was so surprised the last time I was here and you and I watched that documentary about the Clash. I didn't realize that they were only five years. They were only went for five years. And then he went into this long, creative desert and kind of wandering doing these movies. He was not a very good actor, but he did that film Walker or something or an album. And, like, there were a couple good songs. But then the Mescaleros like brought it all together. I love hearing stories about him because I feel like I'm not a musician. God, that makes me well up. But like, he's just like, that's a beautiful human, you know, like just somebody who he just was so all in. And then the fact that he brought hip hop artists out to open for, for the Clash and people booed and he was like, the punks aren't even punk now. It's like he, he had to leave or something. It was like, it was like the, the rebels like were not even embracing their own values. Reminds me a lot of nowadays a lot of people I grew, I'll just say it. A lot of guys I grew up and gals I grew up listening to because they were punks, self declared punks. They're like completely politically disorienting to me because they're just like anti things just to be anti. I'm not for or against either side. I just look at things on a case by case basis and I'm like, okay. So Stromer saw that the punks, the rebels, were suddenly being dismissive of something new and different. That's not punk. And he had the guts to say like, you people don't know what you're talking about. So I don't know. These days I think about him a lot. I've probably watched that documentary, the Future is Unwritten maybe like six times. And I think there's something really there. And his friend sitting here at the campfires thing is amazing. I will say that he knew something.
- [63:16]
B
About the UV sitting around the campfire at night.
- [63:19]
A
That's right. And that's a really good point. Firelight, candlelight has that red orange glow and the heat from it as well. And that infrared is healthy for us. Late at night, it doesn't shift our circadian rhythm. Bright moonlight even. You know, we think the moon when it's really bright is really like going to bombard our circadian system. No, it actually helps entrain our circadian system. It's very healthy for us.
- [63:42]
B
So bright moonlight and firelight, but not man made light, right?
- [63:47]
A
It's this short wavelength uv, blue and green, that's coming from screens. That is. I'll go so far as to say it's toxic, like any toxin at low levels. It's not going to kill you. I mean, this morning I spent a lot of time looking at these papers showing that blue light from devices thins the retina, the light sensing tissue at the back of the eye. Because of the ways that it depletes mitochondria in these photoreceptors. It's a cause of macular degeneration, like, literally retinal degeneration. Now, there can be a genetic predisposition to macular degeneration, which can make that all a lot worse. But I'm convinced that the light from the screens, especially at night, is toxic to the visual system.
- [64:31]
B
So that would be a phone, a.
- [64:33]
A
TV, iPad, essentially any screen, computer, unless you do the thing that you taught me. Where you go in the settings, you have to go into the accessibility, and then you have to go to the color. You have to essentially strip out all the blue. And then you can program in the triple click shortcut so that at night your phone is red, makes it a little harder to read, and you can't see anything that's blue, but you want that stuff out. Or you could wear red lens glasses, which you do and I do after sundown or once it's dark. You just don't want to drive with those because sometimes it can be hard to see things. But the other thing that we didn't talk about earlier that this relates to is it's not just the light you see in the morning or the light you see at night. The. We evolved to see these gradual transitions between darkness and daylight. That's what really raises our energy levels. So when. Here we go again. Jack Cruz. I'm not going to call you Uncle Jack.
- [65:29]
B
Jack Cruz was right last time when.
- [65:31]
A
Jack Cruz, right. So when he talks about viewing sunrise, the transition to sunrise is important because the way the visual system works is it's a matter of, like, moment by moment, contrast. And yes, if you wake up after the sunrise, it's still good to get sunlight in your eyes.
- [65:45]
B
It's better than not getting it right.
- [65:47]
A
But seeing that transition is the best, is the best. And that's why in the evening, seeing that transition is really great. Watching the sun is really great. But when you flick on a bright screen at night, after about 15 seconds, your melatonin levels are floored out. They're supposed to be high. I mean, this has been shown by Chuck Zeisler's lab at Harvard Medical School. Boom.
- [66:05]
B
It turns them off.
- [66:06]
A
Flatlines. Flatline.
- [66:08]
B
15 seconds of screen.
- [66:09]
A
15 seconds of screen. Like, think about a bathroom light in a Hotel. Yeah, 15 seconds. Yeah, done. So.
- [66:17]
B
And some of them you can't turn off. You know, in some hotels, when you walk into the room, they turn on super bright.
- [66:25]
A
I invested in. It's very inexpensive, but I bought a satin Velcro sleep Mask.
- [66:32]
B
I use one of those.
- [66:33]
A
It's awesome because it breathes. Because sometimes the eye masks are like, they make you hot. You lose a lot of heat through the upper half of your face, your palms, and the soles of your feet. So sometimes you put an eye mask on, you can get really warm, which you don't want, obviously, for sleep. You want to be cooler. So those satin masks are nice. There's a study in Proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences showing that if kids sleep in a room where there's a 100 lux, which is very dim, 100 luxury nightlight, their morning blood glucose levels are elevated in ways that are not healthy. When I first saw that, I thought, oh, well, that's not good. But interesting. Blood glucose how? Ah. Remember, cortisol's job is to deploy glucose. So what happens is their cortisol levels are too high all night, and then in the morning, the blood glucose spikes. So it all hangs together, like all the pieces are starting to fall into a nice solid block, like a good Tetris game, you know. And at night, dimming the lights will work. And staying off screens, or dimming the screens will work. Or wearing red lens glasses, it will really, really help. Turning 50 is a trip, and I'm excited for it. I mean, I feel physically better than ever. Better than in my 20s, probably because I don't drink. I never really drank that much. And I pay attention to my sleep. I think I have more peace in my life than ever before. I have amazing friends. I mean, my life is a bit of a dream in many ways. And I also look at things like my advisor dying of cancer at 50, my graduate advisor, or Strummer having a heart attack, and like, oh, shit, this picture is going to end someday. Hopefully a long time from now. It is a trip. I spent the last two years really shoring up my relationship with my parents. Even though it was good, it had pieces that needed work from my side. No matter how clean and clear I thought we were, that was really important to me. I had my dad on the podcast.
- [68:37]
B
How did you decide to have your dad on the pod?
- [68:39]
A
Well, my dad's a scientist. He's a theoretical physicist by training, and he turned 80. And we have a good relationship. But I felt like there's just a lot of things about my dad and my mom that I just, just didn't know. And there were also, to be totally honest, there are a bunch of things about physics that I wanted to understand. And my dad is very good at explaining things. And so I was like, shit. Like, maybe he'll explain relativity to me in a way that I can really understand, because I don't. And maybe he will explain chaos because he was one of the founders of chaos theory. There were several, but maybe you could explain it in a way that I understand. So a lot of it was just the way I'd want any other guest on. But then I kept flashing in and out of, like, being his son and the interviewer, like, not consciously, just, you know, And I started to realize I was like, wow, like. Like me, his dad, and probably like every male. You know, we're, like, stammering through life, trying to get it right, trying to build things and make really good decisions, and it's all happening in real time, you know, I think some of the people listening probably thought we were going to get into our. Our dirt or our history or our friction, and it was interesting. We didn't at all. And then at the end, I said, people are probably thinking we'd get into our dirt, our chemistry. But my dad and I had already worked all that out. We had done our work. We had had our hard conversations.
- [70:10]
B
Yeah, you didn't need to repeat the performance.
- [70:12]
A
Yeah, we didn't need to. And I feel like I'm not disparaging of people that, like, want to work their stuff out publicly, but, you know, my dad's Argentine. He's like a real blue blood Argentine. And I know he always felt a little bit out of place in the United States because of that. And as a kid, I wanted a dad that would be excited to go to soccer games and do all things. And he wasn't that kind of dad. And that was hard for me, to be honest. And he knows that. But in that conversation, I was also like, oh, my God. My dad taught me about science. And even more importantly, he taught me how great a life of inquiry and discovery was. And my dad's a bit of a romantic in his notions about life, and he loves art and he loves music, and he's an intense guy. And I took a step back and I was like, well, what am I doing lately? It's like, well, I'm building these fish tanks. I'm gonna have an octopus in it in one of them. I'm trying to teach an octopus how to use an iPad and stuff. I'm sure my kid, you know, hopefully I'll have at some point soon, would probably look at me and be like, my dad was weird. He had an octopus, an iPad. And I'm sure. And I'm going to try and do all the things like soccer games and all that other stuff, too. But I don't doubt for a second that my kid wouldn't also be like, my dad's pretty. Pretty weird and different. It's not like the other dads. And so I. I think in that moment, I was just like, man, I'm like, the luckiest son ever. I really felt lucky. Like, I wasn't thinking about what I didn't get. I just was like, this is a really amazing life experience. It made less sense for me to do one like that with my mom because she's not a scientist and it's a science health podcast. But it motivated me in recent months to, like, just pay a bit more attention to the things that might move her. And, like, my mom is an amazing gardener. She has this sense of plants. And she was telling me for years that you have to talk to the tomatoes. And I thought she was crazy. I was like, who talks to the tomatoes? But then I started talking to people, like florists and people that really understand gardening and plants. And, like, they all. They all tell me they talk to the plants and they listen, and they're sensing things like this and listen. She's as sane as can be when it comes to, like, maneuvering through life. But I'm pretty convinced she's. She's right on about the tomato thing. So I don't know. I think there's something that just happens at 50 that's. It's different. It's different than 40. It's different than 30 in a way. That's not just a number. I think it's also the halfway point of my life. If I'm lucky. I think I'm at the halfway point, and that's also kind of scary. So I don't know how much longer they'll be around. I hope a very long time. But they're both now in their 80s, and I'm just leaning into the richness of it.
- [72:55]
B
When I asked you about turning 50, you turning 50 somehow connected to you wanting to interview your dad on the podcast. Why do you think that is?
- [73:07]
A
I think it's because I've gotten a lot done in my life that I want to do, and I never imagined the podcast or anything public face or any of that. Like, I have a. Like a fantasy life. In many ways. It's crazy. I converted an art gallery into a living space. It's the art gallery of probably my favorite artist. I won't say who it is, because then people might. I know where it is. But I have incredible friends like you. One of my childhood heroes is one of my best friends, Tim Armstrong. And we have an art project together. He does these paintings and I'm drawing neuroanatomy on top of them. Like, my life is like, I can't believe it, right? I can't believe it. On the other hand, I think it's because I realized my dad, by time he was 50, had a 20 year old son, had navigated a career in a very challenging field. I mean, biology's hard, theoretical physics is super hard. I don't care what anybody says. And it's super hard because there's a limited time window where people do their best work. And I remember because we used to be surrounded by them when I was. The personalities are like beyond intense. Like, he was close friends with Mary Gel Mann, who discovered the quark Nobel Prize, who used to beat up on Feynman. Feynman used to beat up on him, but in kind of more playful ways. I mean, to be weaned in that kind of environment. Whereas, like my graduate advisor, she was tough on me, but like, it was a nurturing kind of environment. So I realized that. And my dad came from another country and he always felt a little bit like an alien in certain environments. And he didn't like drugs or alcohol. And he came to the US in the 60s and 70s and he always felt like he, you know, couldn't be part of certain environments because he didn't want to do that, which I respect. So I think I was realizing, like, holy shit, like, he got a lot done. I've gotten a lot done too. But like, he was shouldering a lot. I think without him saying it, I think he was shouldering a lot. And my mom too. I mean, I think about raising two kids and then, you know, because I was alone at home with my mom in high school with a teenage kid like me who probably worried her every single night, like, I was so feral and so wild. I was like, wow, like, like it was not a formal token of respect. It was like, wow, they got a lot done. I want to know who these people are.
- [75:37]
B
Yeah. How do you think the conversation with your dad on the podcast was different? Because there were cameras rolling versus if you would have just had a one on one with him at home for.
- [75:51]
A
The first 10 or 15 minutes, it was a little awkward. And then in what is kind of the beauty of podcasting, the cameras just melted away. Just melted away. I think every podcast I just go into that sphere where it's like cameras Cameras, like, it doesn't matter if they're rolling.
- [76:13]
B
You're just thinking about what you're thinking about and you're there.
- [76:15]
A
You're in it. Yeah. There were moments where I had to. Am I going to guide this conversation one way or the other? But I also have to say, my dad, having never done a podcast, he was like a fish to water, you know, I think a lot of that stuff had been in him for a long time. The same way that when I launched the podcast, it just, like, geysered out of me. I think my dad's been carrying a lot inside, and it just came out, and I'm so glad I did it. I do think that people should interview their parents if they have a curiosity, especially if you can't stand them, especially if you have beef, if you can be present but be back from it in a way that, like, you're not going to take things personally.
- [76:57]
B
Yeah.
- [76:57]
A
Yeah. It was pretty magical for me. I like to think for him, too, you know.
- [77:03]
B
How would you say the pod has evolved from the time you started till now?
- [77:09]
A
Well, I look at it year by year. Year one, it was like Essence Energy, like, that stuff had been in me for 25 years. I'd been learning about this stuff. It's funny because sometimes I'll get criticized for my love of supplements and partnership with supplements. That has never bothered me one bit because from the time I was like 15 or 16 years old, I was going to health food stores, I was going to gyms. I was learning about the stuff, taking this stuff. And like, it's like, yeah, okay, whatever. It just felt like it just poured out of me. All the stuff about the nitty gritty of neural circuits and hormones and thermoregulation and yeah, we were. We had ads for supplements that people could listen to or not, or I was talking about supplements that I had no financial relationship to and still don't. Like Tonga Ali, which I still take, or Sheila G. Things I think are super interesting and they're interesting data on. And I know work. I know they work because I use them and I do my blood work. Then I feel it, and they're data. And so I think year one, it was just Rob and I in that little room in Topanga. Could not be stopped. You could stop the cameras, I'd probably keep going. It was so much energy just pouring out of me. Year two was kind of that way. Year three is when the pieces that go with being public facing kind of started happening where people, like, criticizing the supplements or you know, or I said the thing about sunscreen and, you know, and people really contorting our messaging and try to put it back on us. And then that's when it was very useful to have friends like you or Armstrong. And Rob, my producer, who's really my manager, one of my closest friends, and he's like a brother to me, explained to me, like, this is what media does. Like, they're making money off of you by saying this, because if they disagree with you, they're not going to get any clicks because it's so Year three.
- [78:48]
B
In some ways, it was a sign of success, definitely.
- [78:51]
A
And I look at it completely differently now. At the time, it was confusing to me because I come from a world of science where you publish something. It's interesting when people say, talk about what's right about it, maybe the things that need work, but it wasn't this. We're going to use this to our own means by cutting and contorting things. Year four was kind of hard at first, if I'm honest. I mean, the podcast had been sitting in like the top 10 overall for a very long time. And the amount of criticism that year really seem to balance the praise. And I'm not really attached to praise or criticism for whatever reason, probably because I started doing public facing anything when I was 45. Like, if people come over and they say, hey, I love the podcast, I really appreciate it, I'm happy for them. I want to know what, what it was, that, how it impacted them and what they're doing with it. I want to know their name, etc, but I wouldn't say I get like a dopamine hit off. I don't feed off of it. And if it doesn't happen, I don't mind. Critique, I love, because I come from the land of science, where critique is how you get better. Year four was when I felt that the critique wasn't designed to make me better at my job. It was designed to supply the media with a certain kind of narrative. And I was like, just to smear, it was to smear. And I was like, I was told, this is part of the business. This is what being public facing is about. It also, paradoxically, at least to me, had the opposite effect in terms of it grew the podcast like crazy. And from the perspective of the people that really love the podcast, they seem to love it even more. So it was confusing to me how this all works. Mixed messages, mixed messages. And I think that despite that, thanks to you, thanks to Rob, thanks to the support of too many people to list off. But the last half of that year of 2024, we did some of our best work. It was a little bit strained on my side because I was still trying to put the pieces together about what media was all about and how these competing media houses were talking about us because we don't talk about them. I don't really care what other people are doing. But it was weird. But we had Esther Perel on the podcast, Martha Beck, who I respect tremendously on the podcast. We did a podcast with James Hollis, who then 84 year old psychoanalyst, he wrote Under Saturn's Shadow, which is about healing and trauma of men, which I knew. I wanted to sit down with him for a very long time because I'd seen a YouTube video of him with terrible audio years before and I was like, this guy's brilliant. And that was transformative for me. And that podcast was voted by Apple or whatever one of the most top episodes of the year. So the numbers didn't matter to me so much. It was the impact these were having. And for reasons that were important to me, I revealed a bit of myself that I never thought I would reveal publicly. I cried on two podcasts. On Stephen Bartlett's podcast, I was tearing, talking about the strain of a breakup, talking about having to resist saying things because I don't believe in saying bad things about people, even if they're true sometimes, and about the contortion that sometimes exists in the media. I just don't partake in it. And also I was sad because Steven was tapping into some of the same stuff we were talking about earlier. You know, like, I grew up in this crew of like amazing dudes who were doing incredible things in skateboarding and music and art. And a lot of them were dead or in jail. There were only a few that went that got in a lot of trouble, but they got in a lot of trouble for really bad things. And at least in one case, I was a really good person that did a really bad thing. This wasn't anything to women. I know people are probably thinking this wasn't. It was, it was violence, right? He screwed up real bad and he ended up in prison for 20 years.
- [82:46]
B
Wow.
- [82:47]
A
So, you know, there was a lot of sadness and kind of heaviness of like my all three advisors dying, right? It was, it was Harry suicide, Barbara Chapman cancer, Ben Barris cancer. I was like, whoa. The heaviness kind of came out in that podcast. And then when Martha Beck came on the podcast, she's a life coach and an incredible person, and I've loved her books and her work for years. And I was meeting her for the first time, and she started asking me questions and kind of tapping into some things, and I'm like, crying on my own podcast. Not what you want your science professor doing, right? I'm a science health guy. But at the time, it felt right. I wasn't trying to prove anything. It's just. It was in the moment. And when we finished those, I was like, I don't know if we roll these. And Rob's like, we definitely roll these. And I trust his judgment. But when 2024 came to an end, I was like, I'm done with that. I'm done with kind of like, it's not about me. It was never supposed to be about me. It was never supposed to be about me. It's supposed to be about sunlight. It's supposed to be the information, the reason I wear all black, in addition to the fact that Strummer played some of his last shows in long black sleeve and was sweating and black jeans, and he just would not. He didn't even roll his sleeves up. So punk. In addition to that reason, it's because I don't want people to see my tattoos. Not because I'm embarrassed about them, because I don't want people focusing on them. I want people hearing the material. I want them focused on the material. So it was never supposed to be about me. I don't care about me when I'm teaching science. It's about photoreceptors and sunlight and cortisol. That's what it is for me. That's the energy I'm trying to let pass through me and for people to learn and benefit from. So at the end of 2024, I was like, I'm done with this. You know, I'll talk, you know, if you want to talk personal stuff like we are today. But there's. There's a bit of a wall up inside of me because around that.
- [84:34]
B
Because it's not what your intention from the beginning was.
- [84:37]
A
I'm excited about that. I know. I'm so glad you asked about cortisol first, because that's what I'm excited about lately. So this year, year five of the podcast, it's been about getting back to the essence of learning, even if I have to dig longer and harder, because as time goes on, there's, like, less novelty there, because a lot of these themes have been around and I've talked about them. But when. When it came time to really understand Cortisol I was like, oh, I'll do an episode on cortisol and it'll be about how it's. And I was like, oh, it was like discovering a treasure trove again. And I'm like, okay, I don't know if people will understand what a treasure trove this cortisol information is, but sure as hell going to try and let them understand that and just keep talking about this because it's that important. It can help so many people. And so this year, the morning meditation I do is around getting the noise out, getting myself out of the way, because frankly, my story is not that interesting anymore, even to me. I've noticed this. Like I used to think about, oh, my first high school girlfriend in our story. Like, it's a beautiful story. And guess what? That's an old story. You know, I don't talk too much about my tattoos, but long ago I got a tattoo that I didn't understand until very recently. I wrote on my chest new stories. I don't even know why I did it. I just like new stories now it's covered up by a bunch of gray hair. But I said new stories. And I think my unconscious mind clearly put that there. I like new stories. I'm not really interested in the past so much. It's closed. It's there, but it's not relevant right now. So this year has been all about, like, what's new, what's exciting to me, where are the real gems that I haven't been able to tap into and forgetting about, like, what people expect of me. Because there's this funny thing in media and you've probably seen this in music too, and you're involved in media as well, which is, well, Gwyneth Paltrow said it on your podcast. People kind of want to see you how they found you or if there's something that really sticks out to them. Like you shed a few tears talking about your past or you were associated with a particular topic or narrative. They kind of want to keep you there. But my life's an evolution. I'm not interested in being my 49 year old self. At least not after my birthday this month. I'm not interested in my 35 year old self. I think I understand him and what he was doing right and wrong for himself. And I think now I just like, I want to be my 50 year old self. Josh Waitzkin, when he was on the podcast, the chess prodigy turned jiu jitsu turned all these other things, he said something I'm still trying to get my head around. He's much smarter than I'll ever be. But he said. I think he said this on the Rogan podcast that he went on. He said there are two ways to go through life. One is like. Like in the dining car of a train, looking out the window and looking at your food, and kind of experiencing life that way. He said, but the best way to experience life is strapped to the front of the train, experiencing life as space, time as it goes by. And I thought, what the hell is he talking about? But the one thing I know is Josh doesn't just say stuff. He's not like that. And he doesn't say stuff to be cryptic. And so I spent a lot of time thinking about it. And I think what it comes down to is that our perception of time is very different when we're at the front of the train because we can't look back and we're not watching experiences as they happen as much as we're experiencing things in real time without kind of notions of how they link to the past or the future. Yet when you look out of a train car from the side, you can kind of link experiences to the past.
- [88:19]
B
And you can turn your head to follow.
- [88:21]
A
Turn your head like, God, this guy is smart. So nowadays, the ending of my morning meditation is really about that imagery and seeing, can I experience life that way? And anything that doesn't fit into that kind of feels like contamination. And also now I have to say, I'm embracing the fun parts of being public facing. You know, I don't think we're, like, supposed to say that. Like, you're not supposed to say that. Like, I couldn't even say the word famous a few years ago. But then eventually it's like, oh, wow. It's kind of hard to go places without getting stopping you. But people are gracious. I guess if they hate me, they're either not saying anything or they're saying it on the Internet for once. I'd love somebody to walk up to me and be like, you know, I hate the way you said this. Could you say it differently? Because at least they'd be giving me some feedback. But anyway, people are very gracious, but I also am really enjoying the life I have. I mean, it's opened enormous opportunities. I'm in direct contact with the Director of the National Institutes of Health, J. Bhattacharya. I have his ear. I can say things that I agree with and disagree with. I can. Unlike many of my colleagues who just complain and complain and complain, I can pick up the phone and call him and be like, hey, this feels kind of not right. What are you doing with this? I can impact things potentially. I also have the opportunity to hear the public and hopefully filter that information. I feel very honored by that. And it's also just transformed my quality of life, including the kind of interactions I can have with people. And so I'll tell anybody that you have to be very careful what you chase in life. I would not suggest anyone chase fame. I certainly wouldn't do that because you won't get it. You will not get it, or you'll get it for the wrong reasons and then it'll get punctured. But if you can tap into your that essence energy and give people something of value, yes, the world will reward you very handsomely. Tetragrammaton is a podcast. Tetragrammaton is a website. Tetragrammaton is a whole world of knowledge.
- [90:55]
E
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