0:00:05 Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
0:00:14 I’m Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
0:00:20 My guest today is Tom Segura. Tom Segura is a renowned comedian, writer, and director.
0:00:27 During today’s episode, we explore the neuroscience and psychology behind comedy, and we explore the creative process more generally.
0:00:33 Tom shares his approach to capturing and developing ideas into narratives that are once funny and thought-provoking.
0:00:39 We discuss the interplay between daily life observations and larger cultural dynamics when developing comedy routines.
0:00:49 We spend a fair bit of time discussing the neurobiological basis of humor and what data and brain lesion patients have taught us about why we find certain ideas novel, funny, or exciting.
0:01:00 We also talk about how this relates to the activation reward circuits in the brain and the seemingly automatic way that things are either funny or not funny to people, suggesting that humor is like taste or smell.
0:01:03 You really can’t negotiate what works for you or what doesn’t.
0:01:14 We also discuss emotional contagion and how skilled performers like Tom become masters at reading, shifting, and dancing with the collective energy of crowds, whether in small comedy clubs or large arena shows.
0:01:25 So if you’re creative or you’re curious about human psychology, or if you simply love to laugh, you’ll come away from today’s episode having learned a ton of useful information about the creative process and human nature.
0:01:30 Before we begin, I’d like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
0:01:38 It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.
0:01:41 In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors.
0:01:44 And now for my discussion with Tom Segura.
0:01:46 Tom Segura, welcome.
0:01:48 Thanks for having me, cuz.
0:01:51 We’ll let people know who don’t already know.
0:01:52 Yes, we are related.
0:01:53 Yes, we are related.
0:02:11 People have asked me so many times the details, and I, you know, I was trying to, like, cuz I learned about it, obviously, later, that it was, like, my mom’s great-grandmother and your father’s great-grandmother were first cousins.
0:02:14 They’re both Basque, so northern Spain cousins.
0:02:22 And then, you know, generations later, they moved to South America, yours to Argentina, mine to Peru, and that’s how we’re cousins.
0:02:24 Yeah, like his distant cousins.
0:02:26 And my dad was on the podcast a little while ago.
0:02:27 How did that go?
0:02:29 Because I remember we talked about him coming on.
0:02:30 It was great.
0:02:36 I mean, he’s a theoretical physicist by training, so we got to talk about physics, but we also got to talk about life, and I learned a lot from him.
0:02:37 Did you?
0:02:39 I learned a lot about him that I never know before.
0:02:39 In that podcast?
0:02:39 Yeah.
0:02:40 Really?
0:02:40 Yeah.
0:02:43 I’ll send it to you if you’re ever suffering from insomnia.
0:02:45 I would love to listen to it.
0:02:47 He’s a theoretical, I didn’t even know that.
0:02:48 Yeah, theorist, chaos theory.
0:02:50 And now he’s into quantum internet.
0:02:51 Yeah.
0:02:52 Jesus Christ.
0:02:53 Where does he reside now?
0:02:54 Northern California.
0:02:54 Still working.
0:02:56 Wow.
0:02:57 Yeah, 81, still working.
0:03:05 Look at our different sides of the, your dad is a theoretical physicist, and my mom plays bridge.
0:03:08 Yeah, but you, but you can, uh, make a half, half court shot.
0:03:11 I saw the, the clip of you in Lethal Shooter.
0:03:12 Yeah.
0:03:13 We’ll put, we’ll put a link to it.
0:03:13 Okay.
0:03:14 Yeah.
0:03:16 Um, I mean, you’re an excellent basketball player.
0:03:17 I’m not.
0:03:17 High level.
0:03:18 So.
0:03:18 Very high level.
0:03:19 You know.
0:03:21 Did you play ball growing up at all?
0:03:21 No.
0:03:22 Are you skateboarded?
0:03:23 Foot sports.
0:03:24 Soccer.
0:03:25 Skateboarding.
0:03:27 I’m pretty coordinated with my feet.
0:03:30 Well, the kid has been Argentine.
0:03:31 You got to give it a shot.
0:03:31 Yeah.
0:03:33 Every kid where I grew up played soccer.
0:03:33 Really?
0:03:34 Oh, yeah.
0:03:34 Oh, yeah.
0:03:35 Obsessed.
0:03:35 Were you good at soccer?
0:03:36 I was all right.
0:03:36 Yeah.
0:03:37 Played goalie.
0:03:38 I like playing goalie or fullback.
0:03:40 I like to wait back there and just, and just stick people.
0:03:40 Okay.
0:03:41 That was fun.
0:03:42 Maybe you should have gotten into lacrosse or something.
0:03:43 No, I like running.
0:03:45 I ran cross country my senior year.
0:03:46 You ran cross country.
0:03:47 I did.
0:03:47 Yeah.
0:03:49 I was a little lighter than I am now.
0:03:50 I’m like 210 now.
0:03:52 It’s probably 160, 170.
0:03:53 Okay.
0:03:53 Yeah.
0:03:56 Like two mile races were okay.
0:03:58 I just did a 5K.
0:03:58 Oh, yeah?
0:03:59 Two days ago.
0:03:59 Yeah.
0:04:00 How’d that go?
0:04:03 I hated that I knew I had to do it.
0:04:07 And so I just made myself, I was like, you know, you got to do it.
0:04:08 So it’s going to suck.
0:04:09 You trained for it.
0:04:14 Well, the training for me is like just get in a bunch of three mile runs.
0:04:14 Right?
0:04:19 So, I mean, I would do them purposely at like a slow pace.
0:04:25 Like try to stay as close to zone two cardio as possible just to get like used to the mileage.
0:04:28 And then we get there because it was our 5K.
0:04:32 Like it was, I put it on with Burt and Spartan Race and like it was a huge.
0:04:33 Burt did a 5K?
0:04:35 Shirt off, the whole thing?
0:04:36 Of course.
0:04:36 What are you, crazy?
0:04:37 Weight vest, weight belly.
0:04:39 I mean, sorry for her.
0:04:40 Dude, yeah.
0:04:41 He was a…
0:04:44 We give him a hard time because we’re still trying to get Burt to quit drinking or reduce his drinking.
0:04:45 I think he’s reduced his drinking a little bit.
0:04:46 Oh.
0:04:46 No?
0:04:47 Okay.
0:04:51 So, yeah, we did one last year in Pasadena.
0:04:51 We did the Rose Bowl.
0:04:53 And so this time we did Raymond James in Tampa.
0:04:55 And it was called, it’s the Two Bears 5K.
0:05:00 We had more than three times people sign up this year for Tampa.
0:05:02 So we had like close to 8,000 people there.
0:05:03 Wow.
0:05:13 And, you know, Jelly Roll came out, Jason Kelsey, Tristan Wirth, like a bunch of, you know, John Feliciano, like all these football players and…
0:05:13 Fun.
0:05:16 And it was a very fun day, a very fun event.
0:05:17 But here’s the thing.
0:05:25 Like at the Rose Bowl, the path was like basically through the parking lot and then on these side roads in Pasadena.
0:05:32 And, you know, they loop it out and then you cross back basically across this parking lot and you hit the 3.1.
0:05:35 At Raymond James, I didn’t know.
0:05:36 They were like, oh, there’s some inclines.
0:05:38 I’m like, yeah, all right.
0:05:39 Did we get there?
0:05:41 It’s all in the stadium.
0:05:48 And the only way you’re running 3.1 miles in a stadium is we’re running through the corridors and then up the ramp.
0:05:51 Well, the ramp is nine stories up.
0:05:53 I mean, you’re literally…
0:05:54 One long incline.
0:05:59 Bro, so like you’re doing like a quarter mile up and then it would flatten out.
0:06:00 Then you go down.
0:06:00 You’re like, oh, this is nice.
0:06:01 And then you go up again.
0:06:04 So, but I was just…
0:06:07 I think when you’re also running with people, you kind of get tunnel vision.
0:06:08 Yeah.
0:06:11 And it caught, you know, you see somebody, you’re like, that person’s ahead of me.
0:06:13 Like this pig is in front of me right now.
0:06:14 Are you competitive by nature?
0:06:15 Yeah, I think so.
0:06:19 And so like I would, you know, like I definitely was like, I have to beat Burt.
0:06:20 I have to beat…
0:06:21 Yeah, you have to beat Burt.
0:06:23 John, my friend, Feliciano.
0:06:24 I was like, I have to beat these guys.
0:06:27 They’re both like, you know, fucking 300 pounds.
0:06:28 I’m definitely beating them.
0:06:30 And so that was just like in my head.
0:06:35 Every time I would see, like think of them, I was like, you just have to keep going.
0:06:38 And then Burt got beat by a guy in a wheelchair.
0:06:41 So that was also kind of sweet because I beat both of them.
0:06:43 Jerry, what’s up?
0:06:44 Shout out to Jerry.
0:06:48 I think he had a little advantage because those wheels on the way down definitely pick up some speed.
0:06:52 But on the way up, it’s pretty badass, you know.
0:06:58 But yeah, so like getting in those miles, like was the, just like the training for it.
0:07:00 And it was a whole thing.
0:07:01 And I don’t like running.
0:07:05 Like it’s not, you know, there’s some things you like, if you were like, let’s go work out, let’s go live.
0:07:06 I’d be like, cool, I enjoy that.
0:07:09 I don’t enjoy running, but I guess that’s the best.
0:07:09 You like running?
0:07:11 I love working out with weights.
0:07:13 I’ve been doing that since I was 16, but I love running.
0:07:14 You love running?
0:07:17 Running three times a week, a long run, a medium run, and a short run.
0:07:18 What’s a long run?
0:07:19 An hour, hour and a half.
0:07:20 Long and slow.
0:07:21 Every Sunday.
0:07:24 And then in the middle of the week, a 30-minute run.
0:07:25 Faster.
0:07:29 And then one day a week, I do that kind of max heart rate VO2 thing.
0:07:34 Warm up, sprint, walk, sprint, walk, sprint, walk.
0:07:35 Sometimes on the airdyne bike, but usually running.
0:07:37 I love running.
0:07:41 In fact, I mostly lift so that my body doesn’t hurt when I run.
0:07:43 I like being strong in the gym.
0:07:44 Wait, have you always been into this?
0:07:47 Yeah, since I was about 16, I started running.
0:07:48 I had no idea.
0:07:49 I just found I could just go and go.
0:07:51 Probably have a lot of slow twitch muscle.
0:07:56 And I’m reasonably strong, but I mean, if I train just for endurance, like if I start doing
0:07:59 two long runs per week, I just feel like I can just go forever.
0:08:00 Really?
0:08:00 Yeah.
0:08:01 It’s probably just a genetic bias.
0:08:04 What do you cover in that 60 to 90-minute run?
0:08:06 Depends on how in condition I am.
0:08:08 But, you know, you were talking about hills.
0:08:12 When I lived in the Bay Area, I used to do this run behind the Berkeley campus, the Strawberry
0:08:13 Canyon Trail.
0:08:17 And that’s all incline, basically winding up, winding up until you take the long cruise
0:08:17 down.
0:08:18 I would do that with a weight vest.
0:08:23 If I go from there out to Austin and on a Sunday, and then I can cover a lot of distance
0:08:25 in a 60-minute run.
0:08:28 But if I just train on the flat, then you get kind of used to just kind of going long and
0:08:28 slow.
0:08:29 Yeah.
0:08:32 So I don’t know the exact distance, but it was not unusual when I was in graduate school
0:08:37 to head out on a Sunday morning, just hydrated caffeine and do 10, 12 miles.
0:08:38 Wow.
0:08:40 But now it’s probably more like 6, 8.
0:08:41 Okay.
0:08:42 6 to 8.
0:08:43 But also with a weighted vest?
0:08:47 Sometimes with a, I use a vest, they’re not a sponsor, which it’s fun to always mention
0:08:49 things that aren’t a sponsor too, because I love this weight vest.
0:08:50 It’s called an amorpho.
0:08:52 And it fits pretty snug.
0:08:56 It’s not like one of these ones that looks like you’re a suicide bomber or a cop or something.
0:08:56 Yeah.
0:08:59 It sits really close to the body.
0:09:02 It zips up and it’s got these like heavy ball bearings in it.
0:09:04 So it’s only about 10 to 12 pounds.
0:09:04 Yeah.
0:09:06 So it’s not like a super heavy weight vest.
0:09:06 Right.
0:09:10 But it’s enough that when you take that weight vest off on a separate run, you feel like a god.
0:09:17 I will say that like, as much as I say I hate running, the fact that I made myself keep doing,
0:09:22 I was doing like daily runs almost five days a week just of like getting used to the mileage.
0:09:25 You know, obviously it becomes easier.
0:09:28 And then you kind of go like, okay, I can do this.
0:09:34 But yeah, I think I get, I get a lot of like mental anxiety about the running.
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0:12:38 What about the running itself?
0:12:42 I was going to ask you whether or not it changes your mental frame so that you, I don’t know,
0:12:44 do you get ideas while you run?
0:12:48 Do you get ideas after you run more readily, or are you just cursing the thing the whole time?
0:12:50 I feel like it’s a goal to let my mind drift,
0:12:58 because sometimes the negative side of it is, like, you’re doing a run and your mind is, like, this sucks, right?
0:13:05 You’re thinking about how much time is left, and that doesn’t produce anything, and it’s not an enjoyable thing.
0:13:11 But, like, if the mind goes, if you can let your mind drift, it’s less about ideas.
0:13:18 I feel like in those moments you’re kind of just, you’re off thinking about more like life, not like creative thoughts,
0:13:23 more like, you know, people and relationships and different, and, like, that’s kind of a nice place to be,
0:13:27 because then all of a sudden you’re like, oh, you know, a couple miles just went by.
0:13:33 Yeah, there’s something to be said for these states of wordlessness, where you’re not constructing things in complete sentences.
0:13:40 There’s no sensory input, like, through a phone or through even – I do listen to podcasts or books when I run sometimes in the long run.
0:13:46 But there’s this idea that a lot of learning and creativity is about purging all the noise,
0:13:53 and I find that those long runs, they just kind of – I come out of them just feeling like a bunch of clutter just got cleared.
0:13:53 Yeah.
0:13:56 More than I had some, like, insight during the run itself.
0:13:56 Yeah.
0:14:04 Incidentally, 90% of the effect of exercise on improving brain function when it comes to long, slow distance work
0:14:09 is that it raises your level of alertness and arousal, so you can do really great work afterwards.
0:14:09 Yeah.
0:14:13 High-intensity stuff has a bunch of other effects, brain-derived nootrophic factor, et cetera.
0:14:18 But when you see, like, exercise improves brain function, exercise makes you smarter.
0:14:25 Most of that is by way of the way – how exercise increases your level of alertness and kind of puts you in that nice state,
0:14:26 like, oh, now I can sit down and focus.
0:14:30 My busiest days – like, sometimes I have, you know, a very busy day.
0:14:40 If I start that day with a hard workout, I end up having no problem tackling that day.
0:14:41 Isn’t that wild?
0:14:41 It is wild.
0:14:49 Because, like, sometimes, like, I’ll have a day where, you know, I have to arrive at my studio, let’s say, at 10 a.m. for something.
0:14:57 And so – and it’s just, like, it’s going to be recordings, meetings, pitch meeting, you know, and then leave here, go to this thing.
0:14:59 Like, it’s going to be the entire day.
0:15:10 And if I get myself to the gym and I get in, like, a good hour lift, I come in and, like, I’ll notice everyone’s, like, you look like you’re in a good mood.
0:15:11 And I’m, like, yeah, feel great.
0:15:13 And I’m ready – and then I’m ready for the day.
0:15:16 But if I don’t do that, it’s a different experience.
0:15:31 Yeah, this is one of the real hidden secrets of exercise that I’m trying to make less hidden and less of a secret that Jocko clearly understands with his 4.30 a.m. wake-ups and workouts that you’re describing now is that –
0:15:34 I won’t go into too much detail here because I want to ask you questions.
0:15:45 But there’s this phenomenon where when you move the large musculature of the body, so a resistance training workout, a run, probably any workout where you’re doing some big movements or you’re working hard in that workout.
0:15:52 It triggers the release of adrenaline at levels that wake up your body, make it more willing to move.
0:15:58 So people who don’t have energy to exercise, exercise gives your body energy by way of adrenaline.
0:16:05 And then that adrenaline acts on this nerve called the vagus nerve, which communicates to the areas of your brain that release dopamine and something called norepinephrine.
0:16:06 It basically wakes your brain up also.
0:16:15 So that morning workout that you’re describing wakes up your brain and body for something like six hours by changing the neurochemical state of your body and your brain.
0:16:20 And so it’s not a surprise that when you work out before a long day, that long day goes better.
0:16:29 Whereas if you hit the work of the day, you know, kind of fresh, you’re generating the adrenaline drink from all that stuff.
0:16:30 This is when people feel a bit more anxious.
0:16:31 They feel a bit more irritable.
0:16:32 They feel a bit more tired.
0:16:35 So this whole concept of exercise gives you energy.
0:16:36 That’s how it gives you energy.
0:16:38 It’s not caloric energy.
0:16:39 You still need to fuel, et cetera.
0:16:42 But you’re talking about neurochemical energy.
0:16:45 It fundamentally changes the way you show up to everything else.
0:16:52 The way that I always feel like is, you know, a lot of times when you wake up, you have what I would describe as like a fog.
0:16:53 Sometimes, you know, like.
0:16:53 Oh, good.
0:16:54 It’s not just me.
0:16:55 Oh, yeah.
0:17:03 So like that fog, sometimes, you know, you can you carry it like it’s just it’s in the day and you’re just kind of like, oh, there’s this.
0:17:10 But I always feel like that that exercise just completely wipes it out, you know, where you’re like, oh, like I’m actually alert now.
0:17:15 And I don’t feel that post wake up just fog that sits there.
0:17:17 That’s my favorite thing that to knock out.
0:17:18 I love that.
0:17:20 I I’ve got this crazy thing that I do now.
0:17:21 You can try this.
0:17:27 I bought a 70 pound kettlebell about a third of my body weight and I have it set in the hallway.
0:17:35 So when I get up because I wake up really groggy, really foggy, I grab that thing and I suitcase carry it to the end and back twice.
0:17:41 And then I switch hands and I suitcase carry it back to the end and back twice, just trying to, like, teach my body that it can do work right away.
0:17:41 Uh-huh.
0:17:43 And I’m careful how I do it.
0:17:49 But I find that now I wake up and I’ve got like I think my body is anticipating that carry.
0:17:51 And so I’m more alert from go.
0:17:55 And I was like, oh, this is there’s something because your nervous system learns to anticipate things, right?
0:17:56 Yeah, yeah.
0:17:59 Because that phenomenon is setting your alarm clock for 7 a.m.
0:18:00 You wake up at 6.59.
0:18:01 Yes.
0:18:01 What happened?
0:18:03 Like your brain is clocking things in your sleep.
0:18:09 You wake up at me so many times and I always feel like that’s such a bizarre – like, also for – like, I’m not a big napper.
0:18:11 Sometimes I’ll be like, I’m going to lay down.
0:18:16 Like, I have an hour window before I have to go do something in a hotel, like I’m on the road.
0:18:20 And I’ll be like, well, just in case I fall asleep, I’ll set the alarm.
0:18:25 And I’ll lay there, eyes closed, and I’ll look as it’s one minute before.
0:18:27 Your brain is clocking it.
0:18:32 It was a study a couple of years ago where when people are in rapid eye movement sleep, you’re basically paralyzed.
0:18:34 The brain is very, very active.
0:18:36 That’s the phenomenon of rapid eye movement sleep.
0:18:37 It’s a very bizarre brain state.
0:18:39 Brain is super active, body paralyzed.
0:18:44 But people can blink and they can show some little, like, facial responses.
0:18:51 If you ask them to do simple math problems during rapid eye movement sleep, you say, hey, what’s two plus two?
0:18:59 They’ll, you know, blink with your – wink with your right eye if it’s four, wink with your other eye if it’s five.
0:19:02 You know, this kind of – people can do math correctly in their sleep.
0:19:07 They can answer not sophisticated questions, but the brain is tracking what’s happening all around you.
0:19:11 This is why taking the phone and putting it outside the room while you sleep, people sleep better.
0:19:13 People say, oh, it’s because of the EMFs.
0:19:14 Nobody really knows for sure.
0:19:18 But it’s because your brain is anticipating picking up the phone even while you’re sleeping.
0:19:19 Wow.
0:19:32 So there’s – I’m hitting with a lot of data here, but it’s well known now that if you give students a test and their phone is in their bag in the room, they perform less well than if their phone is in their bag in another room.
0:19:33 This is true for adults too.
0:19:39 Your brain is tracking sort of potential movements, potential thoughts, potential actions.
0:19:43 Like the way brain circuits work is to create sort of dominoes of circuit sequences.
0:19:47 So when you’re – for instance, you’ve gone on stage so many times to do comedy.
0:19:52 As you walk out, your brain is queuing up a whole library of things related to that without you realizing it.
0:19:52 Yeah, yeah.
0:19:53 Right?
0:19:54 It’s all context-dependent behavior.
0:19:58 And when you get home, it’s a different set of context-dependent behavior.
0:20:01 So your brain is sort of like a magic library.
0:20:09 I always think of this like as you get to a particular idea or thought or emotional state, the books change right in front of you to kind of match the set of things that you expect.
0:20:14 So if your phone is in the room, your brain is operating that way even if you’re asleep.
0:20:16 That’s insane.
0:20:16 Yeah.
0:20:18 What’s your writing process?
0:20:18 Let’s talk about comedy.
0:20:21 That’s – I’ve been – I’ve got about a gazillion questions.
0:20:23 I’m going to try and make them really succinct.
0:20:29 What is your typical process of capturing – you call them bits, right?
0:20:29 Yeah.
0:20:31 For stand-up, it’s a bit, yeah.
0:20:34 What’s your typical process of capturing ideas?
0:20:36 Like do you voice memo into the phone?
0:20:37 Do you write things down?
0:20:40 I’ve done pretty much every version of it.
0:20:43 Voice notes while high.
0:20:45 Sometimes you can listen to them later and you’re like, holy shit.
0:20:46 Are you a cannabis user?
0:20:47 I mean, sometimes.
0:20:48 I’m not like a heavy user.
0:20:55 But a lot of times at night, if you take something and you go to sleep, you’re trying to go to sleep, your brain’s like, nah, I got ideas.
0:20:55 Is that right?
0:20:56 Oh, yeah.
0:20:58 I haven’t done cannabis since a long time ago.
0:20:59 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:21:04 And then sometimes you listen because you’re convinced you’re like, this is one of the most brilliant ideas.
0:21:06 Have you ever had great ideas that stick?
0:21:06 Yeah.
0:21:08 I’ve had good ones that stick.
0:21:10 Sometimes the wording’s a little off.
0:21:14 But yeah, I’ve had ones that I actually do enjoy afterwards.
0:21:17 And then sometimes you’re like, this is, you can hear yourself smiling.
0:21:21 Like, you know, because you can tell someone’s emotion by their voice.
0:21:23 So I can hear that I’m like, dude, then.
0:21:24 Oh, because you’re recording.
0:21:26 I’m recording in my phone.
0:21:27 So let me get the process.
0:21:30 So you’re heading up to sleep and you take like an edible.
0:21:31 Yeah.
0:21:32 This is comedy school 101.
0:21:33 No, I’m just kidding.
0:21:35 Hey, listen, you’re the pro.
0:21:37 And you go to voice memos.
0:21:40 You’re there, eyes closed, and you start riffing on something.
0:21:40 Yeah.
0:21:44 It’s like you’re, it feels like it’s separate from you, right?
0:21:51 Because like the, you know, the right kind of, I guess, dosage of THC, it does make your mind run.
0:21:56 And sometimes you have less self-awareness.
0:22:06 It’s just like, like the way I, the nice way to think about it is that your brain always puts things on a shelf for you to get through your day.
0:22:08 Like things that make you uncomfortable even, right?
0:22:11 Like there’s things that you go like, I don’t want to think about that.
0:22:16 And then THC, I think in the right doses just goes, here it is.
0:22:18 Like it puts it in front of you.
0:22:18 Sounds terrible.
0:22:19 It can be terrible.
0:22:20 Sounds awful.
0:22:26 That can be like often what like too much is where you can get into like paranoia.
0:22:34 But I think if you have a dosage that is not too strong, so it’s not like uncomfortable, it just lets the mind run.
0:22:36 It’s like stream of consciousness happens.
0:22:44 And so when that’s happening, I feel like you go, oh, this is a, this is a, like, it feels like a new thought, a new, or a new perspective on something.
0:22:47 And you go, this is, it makes you laugh.
0:22:49 You say, oh, this is an idea that I should take this on stage.
0:22:53 Because I think for me, a lot of the thing is, here’s the kernel of the idea.
0:22:58 And then it’s not so much I’m going to write out long form how to do it.
0:22:59 It’s like, that’s the idea.
0:23:00 Take it on stage.
0:23:02 So you don’t actually write things out full form?
0:23:04 No, don’t, I don’t write them out full form.
0:23:17 And then I just go on stage with the kernel of the idea that I kind of have a blueprint of like, well, here’s what I’m sort of going to try to attack and then see what happens as I speak it.
0:23:24 Because the other way that I, like my favorite way to write comedy for standup is through, is conversations.
0:23:31 In other words, we’re talking, and I say something, and I either go like, oh, I should say that on stage.
0:23:36 Or I just find that I am naturally riffing on it and like making you laugh.
0:23:39 And then I go, I should try that on stage.
0:23:43 Because everything is like, it’s either, it’s funny here, is it funny there?
0:23:45 That’s kind of like how your mind operates, right?
0:23:47 Like, this is funny in this context.
0:23:50 Is it funny in the performing context?
0:23:54 But when you’re trying new material, you’re not doing that for a Netflix special.
0:23:56 You’re doing that, and it’s the term working out.
0:24:03 Like you go to the comedy club on a Tuesday night, and you’re working out, you’re trying new material, seeing how it lands.
0:24:09 You’ve never, is what you’re saying, that you’ve never actually built out the bit?
0:24:10 You’re building it out in real time?
0:24:12 In real time, yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:24:14 Whoa, is that typical of?
0:24:18 I think there’s like, there’s different, you know, camps of it, right?
0:24:23 Like, also there’s different, so many different, stand-up is so popular that there’s all these different styles.
0:24:28 And like, you know, there’s like, set-up punch guys.
0:24:31 Like, what you would call almost like pure joke writers.
0:24:35 Sam Murill, Dave Attell, Mark Norman.
0:24:40 Those guys, I feel like, dude, they do a lot of like, here is a, it’s the economy of words.
0:24:43 It’s like, clear premise, set-up.
0:24:45 And then, boom, punchline.
0:24:48 So it would be like, oh, like, I’m thinking about Norman, right?
0:24:52 I won’t try and do one of his jokes, but I like, I like Norman’s comedy, skateboarder too.
0:24:55 Same non-biological first family.
0:25:01 So he, I’ve heard him do things like, so my wife and I were on vacation recently, this kind of thing.
0:25:03 Like, a set-up where it’s very clear.
0:25:05 I mean, he clearly knows where he’s going with this.
0:25:10 We’re on vacation and we’re picking out rooms and then, and then at some point there’s a, there’s a punchline pivot.
0:25:10 Right.
0:25:11 Okay.
0:25:19 So there’s like, some of those are, especially when you, when you feel like they’re quite short, if it’s like a, it’s like over quickly.
0:25:27 That’s going to, a lot of times be something that you knew, I’m going to say it exactly like this.
0:25:30 It’s like the most traditional form of a joke.
0:25:32 Here’s the setup, here’s the punchline.
0:25:40 And like, I’ve written jokes like that in, in standup, but I do a lot more, you know, long form, I think, like storytelling stuff.
0:25:52 And so, you know, to write that all out, I feel like you almost, you almost get in your own way because you’re just like, you, you, you, because then what happens is what you write and what you say that it’s never quite the same.
0:26:04 So you, you kind of go through what you think is funny about what happened and then you take that on stage and then you take that on stage and maybe in a room with like 80 or a hundred people.
0:26:10 And then, you know, that’s the nice thing about standup is you learn right away if that shit is funny or not.
0:26:17 Like people are laughing hard and you’re like, and that’s what’s such a rush because you go, this was an idea, this thing happened, you try it, it works.
0:26:19 It’s like, it’s a really euphoric feeling.
0:26:27 And then if it doesn’t, you know, that’s when like kind of the, I guess like the, the real work of it comes in.
0:26:33 Cause then you’re trying to figure out, you’re like, especially if you’re like married to the idea, if you’re like, this is funny, but it didn’t work.
0:26:38 So then you start thinking about, did I, is there not enough information for it to work?
0:26:39 Is that the problem?
0:26:40 Is there too much?
0:26:42 Cause we always say like, trim the fat.
0:26:49 Like if you, if you have too much stuff in there that is not getting laughs, it’s like maybe just omit some of this information.
0:26:50 Right.
0:26:52 So that becomes like, okay, I’ll go back.
0:26:57 And instead, instead of saying, this is like useless information, it’s not adding to what’s funny or whatever.
0:26:58 It’s not adding to the story I’m telling.
0:27:00 You start dropping that.
0:27:02 And so you, you start experimenting.
0:27:09 And then, and then sometimes you just get into like, okay, is the actual line that I’m saying the problem?
0:27:12 Is it, is it that that’s not a good enough joke line?
0:27:14 And then you start experimenting with that.
0:27:22 And then sometimes you figure it out, which is again, like such an amazing feeling where you go, this used to not work and now it works.
0:27:25 And then sometimes you just got to go, fuck man, this just doesn’t work.
0:27:27 I mean, no, you just have to abandon it.
0:27:28 Yeah.
0:27:33 If something works or you feel like it’s a beginning, it’s the start of a thread that could work.
0:27:35 Do you end up writing it down for later?
0:27:41 Like, like you’re queuing yourself, like, uh, you know, the, the walk with my son bit or something like that, or it’s just, or it’s all in your head.
0:27:44 Uh, well, you, you kind of have it all in your head.
0:27:51 And then, oh, they’re going to show you, like, I have this, that’s all, I’ll look at this, like, before I go on stage.
0:27:52 Right.
0:27:53 Which is like.
0:27:56 Tom’s showing, we can get a photo of this if he lets us.
0:27:58 It’s, it’s a bunch of Sharpie written single words.
0:27:58 Yeah.
0:28:02 Gitmo, jail, teacher, duck, Huberman.
0:28:02 Just kidding.
0:28:04 Augusta, kill my wife.
0:28:06 Um, yeah, it’s like, so those like.
0:28:11 Hitler, um, Tunisia, make shit.
0:28:12 This is amazing.
0:28:16 Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s a, that’s a set list for the, for an hour.
0:28:20 If you think about the, the range of things in this relatively short list.
0:28:20 Yeah.
0:28:26 Um, as a partial representation of what goes on in Tom Segura’s brain, you get a little.
0:28:32 Well, what’s interesting is that I, with another way, like, I think comedians would look at it is you kind of start to go.
0:28:34 These are 15 minute chunks.
0:28:34 Mm-hmm.
0:28:39 Because when you do an hour, a lot of comics think of it as four 15 minute chunks.
0:28:40 Mm-hmm.
0:28:40 Right?
0:28:44 So you go like, okay, this is kind of like setting the table chunk.
0:28:44 Mm-hmm.
0:28:46 This is like a kid’s family chunk.
0:28:56 This is, you know, um, commentary on, uh, social issues or like things that I’m doing or, or consuming.
0:29:08 And then your last chunk is like, I always feel like you want to get into like your, some of your, uh, more, um, I don’t know, wilder takes.
0:29:08 Mm-hmm.
0:29:11 Like after the audience has gotten to know you.
0:29:11 Mm-hmm.
0:29:12 And like trust you.
0:29:16 They’re like, okay, is that way you can kind of like push it more the further into the set you are.
0:29:17 Yeah.
0:29:18 So you just kind of break it down.
0:29:19 Yeah.
0:29:19 Very different.
0:29:26 But, um, I’ve done some lives and I have a, you know, four things I’m going to cover and then, but I don’t know how I’m going to cover them.
0:29:29 Um, Jordan Peterson, when he goes out for his lives, I’ve been to them.
0:29:35 He literally explores a topic in real time, walking back and forth across the stage for the first time.
0:29:39 I know this because people verify that every night he does something different, even the same city.
0:29:39 Yeah.
0:29:41 He’s exploring it completely in real time.
0:29:45 And then other people’s lives that I’ve been to, it’s clear it’s pretty scripted.
0:29:48 They know exactly what they’re going to say and when they have a sequence, they have slides.
0:29:51 And so I think it can be done any different number of ways.
0:29:58 How long do you go during your waking hours without making or thinking of a joke?
0:30:00 You know, that’s a good question.
0:30:07 I’ve really feel like, um, when you asked me that question, do you know, the first person that I think of is actually Rick Rubin.
0:30:12 And this is why I was, I remember reading the, that book he put out creative act.
0:30:18 And he was like, there’s something about, I’m paraphrasing here, but about like having your antenna up.
0:30:28 Like, in other words, you still put out some part of you puts out the signal, so to speak,
0:30:34 that you’re not like going, I need to find something funny, but you’re, you’re putting your brain in the mode of that.
0:30:34 Right.
0:30:37 And you can also choose not to.
0:30:49 And I think there’s times where you go like, oh, I haven’t thought of any, like, I haven’t looked at anything with like a humorous perspective today or for whatever, how many hours.
0:30:57 And it’s almost like that can shift either by you consciously making an effort to do it or by the company you keep.
0:31:06 Cause like, obviously if you’re hanging out with comedians, people, it’s like, just by being around them, your brain just shifts to like joke mode.
0:31:06 You know what I mean?
0:31:20 Like you’re just, you’re thinking in, in turn, in those terms, or if you’re working on something like you’re right, like writing a script or something, your brain is like actively, even when you’re not trying to, it’s like thinking of that story and thinking of jokes for the story.
0:31:26 So the answer is like, you know, depending on the day, it can be like all day, you’re just like joking, joking, joking.
0:31:33 And like, you’re, you’re just, in my case, like, you know, saying mostly like awful things.
0:31:34 Cause that’s what makes me laugh.
0:31:35 I think, you know what I mean?
0:31:42 Like whether it’s with friends or family, um, just like trying to make yourself laugh really.
0:31:51 And then there’s days where it’s like, you know, you’re in like a completely serious mindset where you’re like, nothing humorous is occurring to me at all.
0:31:53 You happen to be married to a comedian.
0:31:54 Yeah.
0:32:00 Which probably helps your home life in the sense that, you know, has she ever been offended by one of your jokes?
0:32:14 You know, early on, I remember like we would have conversations where I was, I, I more, it was more like the fact that I would, I remember I’d pitch like a joke idea and she would be like, that’s fucking awful.
0:32:22 And, and then I would, I told her, I go, you know, whenever you think something is awful, I know it’s going to be good on stage.
0:32:25 Like, and she was like, she was like, that’s horrible to say.
0:32:26 I was like, no, it’s true.
0:32:31 Like if, if you have disdain for what I said, then I’m pretty confident that it’s going to work.
0:32:35 And it was kind of like that, but, um, no, for the most part, no.
0:32:45 And she says wildly inappropriate and crazy, funny things like often way over my line, you know what I mean?
0:32:48 Not where I’m offended, but I’m like, Jesus Christ.
0:32:51 Like, yeah, she says crazy shit, really crazy.
0:32:56 Has she ever offended you to the point where you’re like, you, you can’t tell that joke in public.
0:32:58 Um, our family will suffer.
0:33:01 No, I’ve never had, we’ve never had that conversation.
0:33:16 Sometimes we have what makes this joke, uh, digestible conversations where like, we talk about a bit and we’re like, and then this is the punchline is like in this world.
0:33:26 And it’s like, okay, you got to find a way to say that, that is going to be digestible to the, to like, so you actually look for like your own advantage.
0:33:34 What I mean is like, you know, as a woman, I go like, you can shit on women harder because you’re a woman.
0:33:40 So like, you should find your way into that bit from the perspective that like, you’re actually, you know what I mean?
0:33:41 Like you’re actually shit.
0:33:47 Like I was like, if you’re a woman, you can, it’s like a black comic can talk about black people, right?
0:33:49 Like that’s it’s, you’re talking about your own.
0:33:51 So like, we’ll talk about things like that.
0:33:58 Like you can, you can take this angle and then that, and then the joke becomes digestible.
0:34:01 So we’ll, we’ll talk about like reframing material.
0:34:04 And then to me, she’s like, yeah, you’re just a white guy.
0:34:06 You can, apparently you guys can say anything.
0:34:08 Oh yeah, really?
0:34:16 On the other hand, comedians and what’s allowed in comedy at a given time as a powerful influence on culture.
0:34:16 Yeah.
0:34:19 What you can say, what you can’t say.
0:34:23 Has any comedian ever been canceled for what they said as part of a bit?
0:34:32 I mean, we’ve got these examples of these, I consider them kind of sad instances where people kind of break down on stage, have an interaction with someone in the audience and it really hurts their career and it’s super offensive.
0:34:34 But that’s clearly not part of the bit.
0:34:35 Right.
0:34:41 Has a comedian ever been canceled for like, here was the bit and they’re done?
0:34:49 Uh, I don’t, I can’t tell you that it comes to like the top of my head thinking about that.
0:34:59 I know there’s been like, I remember there’s a Canadian comic that in Canada has some like bizarre, to my experience, free speech rules.
0:34:59 Oh, okay.
0:35:05 I was like, I always think of Canadians as so, um, you know, kind of kind and well-behaved.
0:35:07 And they have some amazing comedians.
0:35:10 They also have some crazy serial killer stories up there I discovered.
0:35:10 Really?
0:35:11 Yeah.
0:35:16 I mean, this idea that Canada is just all like nicer, nicer Americans is not true.
0:35:16 No, no.
0:35:17 They were wonderful Canadians.
0:35:18 Yeah.
0:35:19 But, but they’re not all nice.
0:35:21 No, for sure.
0:35:21 They’re not all nice.
0:35:23 No, there’s some real fucking pricks up there.
0:35:23 Yeah.
0:35:28 I’ve, I’ve met a few, um, but there’s all, there’s a amazing, I mean, you know, obviously
0:35:34 you think of like Norm MacDonald and Mike Myers, uh, Ian Bagg, like all these, there’s really,
0:35:37 really funny, um, Canadian comics.
0:35:41 Uh, but I remember that there was not too long ago, I’m sure we could find it.
0:35:49 There’s a Canadian comic that like, he, uh, he went after some woman in the crowd, like,
0:35:54 you know, shut her down, said something offensive, whatever.
0:35:57 And he got arrested, you know, had been like, yeah.
0:35:57 Arrested?
0:35:57 Yeah.
0:35:58 Yeah.
0:36:00 Arrested and had to pay like substantial fines.
0:36:01 This is like Lenny Bruce days.
0:36:01 Yeah.
0:36:02 It’s really crazy.
0:36:04 And this was not, I don’t mean like 25 years ago.
0:36:06 I mean like sometime in the last five years.
0:36:06 Whoa.
0:36:07 Yeah.
0:36:11 So that, I know there, there are rules on, so that’s like the first thing that I think
0:36:13 of when you, when you, when you say that.
0:36:22 I also just don’t feel like when people talk about, you know, like cancel culture with comedians
0:36:28 or like Elon’s stupid fucking make comedy legal again, goofy shit that he said, it’s like,
0:36:28 what are you talking about?
0:36:32 Like there is no, you can say whatever you want to say.
0:36:37 The thing you’re pointing, the thing you’re really trying to talk about is the fact that
0:36:40 like people react and you know about it, right?
0:36:49 Like 30 years ago, there were people that hated, I’m sure Robin Williams and, you know, Carlin,
0:36:50 like they hated them.
0:36:55 The difference is they would just tell their friend and if they really wanted to make a point,
0:36:59 they’d get a pen and a paper and buy a fucking stamp and mail them a letter.
0:37:07 Like now you have social media platforms and people can make videos and like go crazy and
0:37:11 you just hear the noise, but that’s not like humanity has changed.
0:37:16 You just hear people telling you that they don’t like what you did or that they don’t think you’re
0:37:17 funny or whatever.
0:37:20 It’s not like they didn’t, that didn’t exist before.
0:37:26 But that’s also because thanks in large part to Rogan, but to others as well, most comedians
0:37:31 seem to control the venues in which they release their information podcasts.
0:37:31 Yeah.
0:37:36 You know, I guess you could be thrown out of a club and not be able to present your material
0:37:40 there, but there’s probably another one that you could open up and that’s happened too.
0:37:40 Yeah.
0:37:46 But podcasts, um, people will now release, um, their own specials where, you know, it’s
0:37:47 paid a view.
0:37:51 Um, there’s Netflix, there’s, there are a bunch of different venues where it doesn’t seem like
0:37:55 comedy is, is as centralized anymore, controlled by the major media houses.
0:37:55 That is true.
0:37:59 It’s in complete control of the comedians themselves.
0:38:06 Like you are, you can put up clips of you doing standup, you can make skits, you can do short
0:38:09 films, you can do whatever, and you can release it and, and find an audience.
0:38:12 Like they say, you know, like make, have an audience come to you.
0:38:17 But I just don’t buy this whole thing that like, you know, you can’t, you can’t joke about
0:38:17 that.
0:38:20 You can joke about whatever you want, man, but not at work.
0:38:24 I mean, if you, if someone makes a joke or repeats a joke, um, let’s say an academic
0:38:27 setting for instance or the office place.
0:38:30 No, your guy’s world is the worst when it comes to that.
0:38:36 The academic world is actually, it’s interesting in the last five to eight years, the academic
0:38:42 world has actually from this around this topic has become safer because the rules are very
0:38:43 clear.
0:38:45 They’re what I call thick black lines, right?
0:38:48 It’s when things are murky that people got themselves in trouble.
0:38:48 Sure.
0:38:48 Right.
0:38:52 So if you look 10 years back, it was really complicated.
0:38:56 Um, now everyone kind of knows what the standard is.
0:38:56 Yeah.
0:38:59 Might be uncomfortable for some, not for others, but they know what the standard is.
0:39:01 It’s very easy to adhere to a standard.
0:39:02 If you know where the fences are.
0:39:02 Sure.
0:39:07 Um, where it seems to be still murky is in the workplace, like in the boardroom, you’ll
0:39:11 hear about, you know, like tech companies or in finance or startups, right?
0:39:14 Because startups, when they’re small, typically don’t have an HR department.
0:39:19 HR department is kind of the standards that you create, um, around the, you know, the office,
0:39:21 which could be a garage.
0:39:21 Right.
0:39:26 So that’s typically when, when things aren’t well defined is when there are problems.
0:39:32 So yes, it’s rigid in certain areas like academia, law offices, et cetera, but everyone knows what
0:39:33 the rules are.
0:39:33 Yeah.
0:39:34 I’m not saying it’s good or bad.
0:39:36 I’m just saying, you know what they are.
0:39:45 But I feel like we’re talking about in comedy as a profession, like, you know, you can joke
0:39:49 about whatever you want, dude, but you can’t dictate is how people will react to it.
0:39:53 And if you’re, if you’re trying to say like, cause some comedians do this where they go,
0:39:55 this was the joke.
0:40:00 And what I’m mad about and what I’m going to be vocal about and complain about is that
0:40:01 not everybody liked it.
0:40:04 You’re like, yeah, that’s not, I mean, that’s essentially what they’re doing.
0:40:04 Right.
0:40:09 They throw a tantrum over the fact that some people are upset at the joke.
0:40:10 You’re like, yeah, that’s how it goes.
0:40:14 Like either it goes really well or it doesn’t.
0:40:20 And if you can’t go, oh, see, I can’t joke about stuff because look how they reacted.
0:40:21 You’re like, that’s, that’s how this works.
0:40:26 Like what you can also do is completely ignore that.
0:40:31 And if you want double down on your joke, keep going, do it, even do a crazier version of
0:40:34 your joke, but just be prepared that not everyone’s going to go.
0:40:35 That was the greatest thing ever.
0:40:41 And that’s what some comics do is they go, I can’t believe not everybody is applauding
0:40:42 me on this thing.
0:40:46 It’s they’ll, they’ll liken it to cancel culture, which is insane.
0:40:46 Right.
0:40:47 Yeah.
0:40:49 You have to be a professional.
0:40:54 And part of being a professional is how it lands is as important as you just have no say
0:40:54 in that.
0:41:03 I’m always fascinated by comics who will smirk or laugh a little bit at their own joke.
0:41:10 Um, and assuming that certain jokes and bits work exceptionally well and you carry them
0:41:15 forward from, you know, trying it out to, you know, Netflix specials or big venues, huge
0:41:17 venues, you do huge venues, huge venues.
0:41:23 Do you ever get tired of the material and worry that your response is not going to, um, that
0:41:25 your amusement won’t be there and therefore they won’t respond to it?
0:41:27 This is two questions woven.
0:41:31 I’m realizing, do you think your own amusement with it, with a joke has an impact on how it
0:41:32 lands?
0:41:32 That’s question one.
0:41:37 And woven in with that is how do you then work with the idea that, uh, every time you
0:41:40 tell a joke, it might not, um, be as funny as the previous time.
0:41:43 No, those are, those are great questions.
0:41:50 Um, yeah, I, I feel like if I’m smirking or laughing at a joke of mine, it’s probably organic.
0:41:52 I don’t try to like manufacture one.
0:41:57 Um, you still want to enjoy the process of performing it.
0:42:09 And when you lose that enjoyment of performing it, I do think the audience knows on like an unspoken
0:42:12 level, there’s something about it that doesn’t come across the same way.
0:42:16 And yeah, you, you sense it.
0:42:21 And I think typically what happens, what’s happened to me over time is if you’re on tour and you’re
0:42:25 kind of like, your brain is like walking up to this bit, like, you, you know, it’s next
0:42:32 and you start to like internally go like this fucking bit, like what happens naturally is
0:42:36 you start to drop it and it’s, you’re, you’re essentially listening to yourself.
0:42:41 It’s one of those, it’s like the same way you go, I should, I don’t like this person.
0:42:41 Right.
0:42:43 You go like, I don’t think I want to be friends with this person.
0:42:48 And you, you kind of like don’t return a text or you go, I’m not going to hang out with you.
0:42:49 Slow exit.
0:42:50 It’s a slow exit.
0:42:51 And what happens is you drop it.
0:42:57 And the great thing about dropping it is your brain goes, hey, you have room for something now.
0:43:02 And that room for something also prompts your brain to start thinking of new things.
0:43:07 That’s how you kind of come up with new material is that you, but you have to, this is the danger,
0:43:09 by the way, of these comedians.
0:43:12 Sometimes there’s these comics who are like really funny, really talented people.
0:43:17 And they’ll do, they’ll have a 20 minute set, right?
0:43:22 You’ll be working in clubs and you see them do a 20 minute set and then they murder, right?
0:43:24 They fucking kill so hard.
0:43:29 And then like five years later, you see them and they’re doing that 20 minute set.
0:43:35 And what happens is it’s a, it’s like a very natural thing that you just have to deal with
0:43:39 is they have this great fear of not killing that hard anymore.
0:43:43 So they don’t stop doing that 20 minutes.
0:43:47 And by not stopping, they just stop evolving and they stop creating.
0:43:50 And they, they’re just like, they’re the, they’re the 20 minute set guy.
0:43:52 You go like, yeah, they have that great 20 minutes.
0:43:55 And then it starts to get dated and then it, you know what I mean?
0:43:56 Mbop.
0:44:00 It’s exactly, only a fraction of the audience will know what I’m talking about.
0:44:03 There was a song that was like the song for a summer.
0:44:06 You could replace Mbop with any, like a song for a summer way back when.
0:44:07 Yeah, it’s a summer hit.
0:44:07 It was everywhere.
0:44:12 And then the band just disappears because the one hit wonder phenomenon.
0:44:12 Yeah.
0:44:17 You have, you have to like, cause you’ll, you’ll see the bet, the very best comics will do this.
0:44:20 And like, it’s kind of something you have to wrap your head around.
0:44:23 But then you, once you do this long enough, you go like, oh shit.
0:44:30 The, the most elite comics are completely willing to bomb at these workout shows.
0:44:47 Not like at their hour huge show, but like at workout shows, super elite comics will go up there and be like, I’m just going to do, cause they know that you have to be willing to eat shit to come up with something really good.
0:44:52 And sometimes you’ll watch them like bomb and, and your own insecurities flare up.
0:44:57 You’re like, oh my God, this is like, I can’t believe like all these people are going to be like, you suck, you know?
0:44:59 And these guys don’t care.
0:44:59 They don’t care.
0:45:03 Cause they know that’s, they know you have to train to get stronger.
0:45:04 It’s so beautiful.
0:45:11 You know, when Josh Waitzkin was on this podcast and he, he also did a conversation with Rogan, which is different.
0:45:15 And if somebody is interested in this stuff, they should check out both because they’re complimentary conversations.
0:45:18 But Josh was this child prodigy chess champion.
0:45:22 And then went on to do a bunch of other things at extremely high level.
0:45:27 He talks about the need and his lack of fear, which is very admirable for cutting ties with your previous self.
0:45:31 Just being willing to say, you know what, like that was a NBA championship.
0:45:33 He works with the Boston Celtics.
0:45:34 So this is very relevant right now.
0:45:35 Or, but that was last year.
0:45:36 We’re a new team now.
0:45:38 We’re not the defending champions.
0:45:38 Yeah.
0:45:47 Or musician had a platinum album or, or this was a particularly successful podcast run and just cut ties with it and be willing to just go completely now and future.
0:45:59 You mentioned Rick, one of the things that I’ve benefited so much from being friends with Rick, in addition to the fact that I just adore the guy, is that he has so many stories about things from the past.
0:46:03 If you ask him, but he never brings that stuff up, you know, he’ll, he’ll indulge you.
0:46:09 If you say, I tell me a story about Joe Strummer or something, he’ll tell me, but he really lives now and forward.
0:46:09 Yeah.
0:46:13 And I think it’s the wait skin that says, you know, you want, you don’t want to be on the train of life.
0:46:20 You want to be at the strap to the front end, you know, experiencing space and time as it’s unfolding, which is a very philosophical way to put this.
0:46:28 But that challenge of cutting ties with your previous self to continue to evolve your craft is so hard, but it’s exactly what you’re describing.
0:46:38 I mean, like I had this rule, I had this rule early on that I think it was, I was just lucky that I told myself this, which is that I recorded an album, I think in 2010.
0:46:45 And, you know, I, you kind of want to get like a special and a deal, but I, I didn’t have one.
0:46:58 So I, I’ve recorded an album and I put out the album and at that time, you know, people are buying these comedy albums and you start starting to stream stuff.
0:47:01 And also physical copies are still a thing because this is like 2010.
0:47:05 And so this was my work.
0:47:11 Like I, from when I started standup to this album, this was like the best I could do.
0:47:11 Right.
0:47:17 This was all the, all my best standup and I put it out and like, yeah, I mean, I had some marginal success with it.
0:47:19 Like I was selling a lot of copies or whatever.
0:47:30 Well, I told myself that even though I was not a ticket selling comedian, that everybody who was at a show had heard that album, like that they all knew it, which was completely not true.
0:47:36 But by doing that to myself, it made me go, well, I need a new hour.
0:47:36 Right.
0:47:49 So that, I was lucky that I thought that way because I could have stayed doing a lot of that album because those were like really, like really worked out bits that would just crush.
0:47:56 But I was just like, I’ll, I knew that like, I wouldn’t move on and evolve if I just kept doing them.
0:47:59 And that was a thing that I, and then I, the next thing I did was another album.
0:48:00 And I did that again.
0:48:03 I was just like, I got to like drop this stuff and move on.
0:48:10 And that’s, I think what helped me and a bunch of other comics who like now we’re in the practice of like shooting specials.
0:48:13 And then you just drop all of it and you go back to square one.
0:48:18 But like that helps you to continue being creative in, in standup.
0:48:19 You have to just drop stuff.
0:48:20 I love it.
0:48:24 And I think this pertains to so many, basically all creative forms.
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0:51:34 I’m going to make this very brief.
0:51:43 When I was an undergraduate, I was interested in what makes something funny, the psychology and neuroscience of humor, and there wasn’t a whole lot of neuroscience on it at that time.
0:51:54 But the basic takeaway from the literature, as I recall, was that the listener thinks that a narrative is going one way, and then there’s this surprise element, something you didn’t anticipate coming.
0:51:57 I think that characterizes a lot of bits and a lot of jokes.
0:51:58 100%.
0:51:59 Whoa, it’s the pop.
0:52:09 However, I’ve also seen you do bits, and other people do bits, where you’re headed down a trail, and I’m thinking, oh, no, he’s not going there, is he?
0:52:13 And you go there, and that’s hysterical also.
0:52:13 Yeah.
0:52:15 So is there a name for this, or how does it work?
0:52:17 No, I think, I mean, you’re right.
0:52:28 The most basic necessity for, I think, comedy at a very baseline level to explain it or define it is the element of surprise, right?
0:52:33 The surprise is, like, so it’s that thing, if you go, I know where this is going, you’re not going to react the same way.
0:52:35 If it gets you, it’s, oh, my God.
0:52:48 But that second description of, like, is that person going somewhere, I think that satisfies something in human beings, which is somebody saying the thing that we all want to say.
0:52:51 And you can’t say it.
0:52:52 You can’t say it.
0:52:54 You can’t say it in polite society.
0:52:57 You can’t say it at a nice dinner function.
0:52:58 You can’t say it at work.
0:53:01 And you’re just like, God, this is what I think.
0:53:02 And you know other people think it.
0:53:06 And then the guy’s up there, and he’s going, like, hey, you want to hear some shit?
0:53:11 And, like, somebody says it, and everyone goes, this is, it becomes a release.
0:53:17 It’s a release of, like, oh, he’s saying the thing that we all wish we could say.
0:53:25 And you’re saying it, you know, it’s a very particular thing because it actually is, it works because you’re in that building, too.
0:53:31 It works because you’re, you all have the unspoken agreement that this is a place to do this in, right?
0:53:32 It’s still different.
0:53:37 Like, if I just walk up to you on the street and start saying that shit, you’re like, Jesus Christ, dude.
0:53:38 Like, you’re a psycho.
0:53:39 Lock him up.
0:53:39 Yeah.
0:53:41 It’s like, but, like, in this context.
0:53:47 So both things are, satisfy something, I think, in the humor realm, right?
0:53:49 The element of surprise will always be something, like the unexpected.
0:53:56 But there’s also this, like, condition I think we live with where we go, we all think this, but we can’t say it.
0:53:59 And that’s a very satisfying thing when somebody says it.
0:54:05 Well, I had the great benefit of getting a sneak peek at bad thoughts.
0:54:06 Oh, yeah.
0:54:06 Thanks.
0:54:07 And it’s amazing.
0:54:09 People should definitely check it out.
0:54:18 And I don’t want to give anything away, but the second one in the sequence that I watched, I thought, like, there’s no way he’s doing this.
0:54:19 And it just kept coming at me.
0:54:20 And I was like, there’s no way.
0:54:22 Went to sleep last night.
0:54:24 And this doesn’t happen to me in a long time.
0:54:26 I woke up laughing.
0:54:26 Oh, yeah.
0:54:28 Which is a wonderful experience.
0:54:28 Yeah, it is.
0:54:34 There are only a few states of mind and body that you wake up in and you’re like, well, that was amazing, you know.
0:54:34 Yeah.
0:54:36 And I woke up laughing.
0:54:37 So it’s seeded into my unconscious.
0:54:41 So now I’m worried I’m going to say some of the things that you said.
0:54:41 I hope you do.
0:54:50 But one thing that occurred to me in watching Bad Thoughts is that you’re not just a phenomenal comedian, but you’re also a really good actor.
0:54:51 Oh, thank you.
0:54:58 And a number of comedians seem able to act, which is surprising to me for reasons that don’t make any sense to me.
0:54:59 I know.
0:55:04 You know, if you look at athletes often are terrible actors.
0:55:04 Yes.
0:55:12 I mean, some of the best acting that athletes have done is when they’re playing kind of a buffoon or they’re supposed to not be able to act well.
0:55:14 I think of some of like the Naked Gun movies and things like that.
0:55:15 Shout out to OJ, right?
0:55:15 To OJ, right?
0:55:17 I mean, he’s not a good actor.
0:55:17 Yeah.
0:55:20 And it worked because he wasn’t a good actor.
0:55:20 Yeah.
0:55:21 But you’re a very good actor.
0:55:22 Thank you.
0:55:23 Like, did you train for it?
0:55:25 I loved making people laugh.
0:55:30 And the first thing I did like in performing was, you know, I did like a play as a kid.
0:55:35 I did an improv troupe at 14, which is pretty young to be in an improv troupe.
0:55:36 I did that for like a summer.
0:55:39 And my whole thing was I wanted to make movies.
0:55:43 Like, I had a plan when I was in college.
0:55:48 I had the communications track, so we would do TV radio production.
0:55:52 And when we had video projects, I would always do like comedy things.
0:55:53 And everybody would be like, what are you doing?
0:55:54 Why are you making this?
0:55:58 Like, you’re supposed to be making like a video about the soccer program, you know?
0:56:04 And I’m like, this is a capsule you put in your ass and it freezes your shit.
0:56:07 Like, I would make like diarrhea commercials and they were like, don’t do that.
0:56:10 But this is the stuff that would make, I was like making me laugh.
0:56:15 And I wanted to make movies and I just was like, you know, that was what I wanted to do.
0:56:22 And then I moved out here and I had learned, I knew that at the time some of these big comedy
0:56:31 movie people were a product of SNL and that those people were usually products of Second
0:56:33 City or the Groundlings.
0:56:39 And since I moved to L.A., the Groundlings were big in L.A., the, it’s the improv school
0:56:42 and a performance plug they put on shows.
0:56:44 I was like, that’s what I’ll do.
0:56:46 I’ll just go to the, to the Groundlings.
0:56:53 And I took some classes there and I, I got through a few levels, but I, I had, I got into
0:56:54 standup shortly thereafter that.
0:56:57 Some of my improv friends were like, you should try standup.
0:57:02 And I got so hooked by standup, but I, and I also saw a path because I was also like,
0:57:03 well, you have to make a living.
0:57:03 Right.
0:57:10 And the actor’s life to me is so unsettling with like, you’re on a show.
0:57:12 And then they’re like, I don’t have a gig anymore.
0:57:18 Like to me, the fact that standup, even though it’s very, very, very low pay, especially like
0:57:23 as you’re getting into it, the fact that you can just like keep doing it, like to me, like
0:57:25 made sense that like soothed me.
0:57:32 And I, I feel like, you know, I kind of stopped training as far as I did another acting class
0:57:37 in L.A. at that time, like early on, but I, um, I always just wanted to keep doing it, you
0:57:37 know?
0:57:42 And so every once in a while I would make like a short film, like I made a few short films
0:57:46 with friends or like, you know, comedy, comedy shorts.
0:57:51 Um, and I auditioned for some things, you know, I did small parts here and there, but
0:57:55 I never really got to do all the, the types of things I wanted to do.
0:58:00 So this show became like this incredible opportunity where I was like, where are we going to tell
0:58:01 this type of story, this type of story?
0:58:06 Like, cause it’s, it’s essentially a collection of short stories is what, what the show is.
0:58:06 Right.
0:58:09 And some of them are self-contained.
0:58:12 Some of them are two part, three part, but it allowed me as an actor.
0:58:15 To play all these different roles, which was like, so fun.
0:58:19 It felt like I was doing like 20, like the 20 years I didn’t really act that much.
0:58:23 I got to like throw in all these different characters in the show.
0:58:26 Well, you’re a very fine actor.
0:58:26 Thank you.
0:58:29 As they say, it was, I was like, oh, he’s acting.
0:58:31 He’s, this isn’t just, you know, standup.
0:58:31 Yeah.
0:58:33 You know, standup is its own thing.
0:58:39 Um, in previous Netflix specials, but I’ve also seen you do these in, uh, these bits in
0:58:41 smaller clubs, like at the belly up in Aspen.
0:58:42 That’s right.
0:58:42 Smaller place.
0:58:42 That’s right.
0:58:46 Where we just coincidentally wore the exact same clothing.
0:58:49 So we’re same flannel, same jeans, same Adidas.
0:58:50 That was really weird.
0:58:50 That’s DNA.
0:58:51 We did not coordinate.
0:58:51 That’s DNA.
0:58:52 That’s DNA.
0:58:52 That’s DNA.
0:58:56 And the, the, um, cosmic correspondence of the butterfly effect.
0:58:56 That’s, that’s, yes.
0:59:00 I was like, my dad was trying to explain to me at one point.
0:59:06 Um, you do voices very well, in particular, the voices of your kids.
0:59:11 And you’re able, I always think that, um, when somebody, uh, impersonate somebody else,
0:59:15 it’s about grabbing the key elements and like not the whole piece.
0:59:18 They don’t like turn around and like come back as you know, like, right.
0:59:21 Like some people can just grab a few key elements of somebody.
0:59:23 In this case, someone we’ve never met.
0:59:29 It was your sons and we feel like we know them and we’re getting the, like, what clearly
0:59:32 are key features of their personality coming through.
0:59:35 Do you practice those or you just observe and it just is kind of embedded in you?
0:59:36 I think it’s observed and embedded.
0:59:41 And I think in that case in particular, cause with your kids, there’s this thing that happens
0:59:44 where you talk about your kids a lot, not on stage.
0:59:49 In other words, you know, I’m talking to my sisters or I’m talking to a friend about the
0:59:49 kids.
0:59:56 So you’re, you’re kind of like, you get this extra practice about them because they
0:59:59 are so much something that people always are like, how are your kids?
0:59:59 Right.
1:00:01 And so you’re just like, Oh, I got home.
1:00:02 This little shit came in.
1:00:04 He was like, Hey, fucking pick me up.
1:00:07 You know, like, so you start like doing impressions.
1:00:07 Which one is that?
1:00:08 That’s the little guy.
1:00:08 Oh yeah.
1:00:10 He sounds like a piece of work.
1:00:12 He is a piece of work, dude.
1:00:14 He is something else.
1:00:16 He’s like, it’s so funny.
1:00:19 We call it, sometimes we call him little Joe Pesci cause he’s just like, what the fuck?
1:00:21 We’re like, yo man.
1:00:23 Like, I don’t say that in front of him.
1:00:24 He’s six.
1:00:24 Oh my goodness.
1:00:25 He’s six.
1:00:28 And he’s like, he’s fucking, fucking with me all day, dad.
1:00:30 Did he get that from you or from your wife?
1:00:31 I feel like it’s more her.
1:00:32 I feel like she’s got those.
1:00:33 I’ll have to ask her.
1:00:38 She’s got those Hungarian roots where they, like when I was a kid in our house, there
1:00:39 was not a lot of cursing, dude.
1:00:41 Oh no, I’d get whacked if I, oh yeah.
1:00:46 No, no, I hit, but you know, I think if I talk back, it only happened twice in my life.
1:00:46 Yeah.
1:00:47 I spoke back.
1:00:49 I won’t say to which parent and I got hit.
1:00:50 Okay.
1:00:52 Nowadays people are like, oh, he was beaten up.
1:00:52 I’m fine.
1:00:52 Yeah.
1:00:53 Okay.
1:00:55 I didn’t, I don’t swear at people.
1:00:55 Yeah.
1:00:56 Very often.
1:00:57 It’s an extreme circumstance.
1:00:58 Yeah.
1:00:58 So, okay.
1:01:00 So, but he swears all the time, apparently.
1:01:01 Dude.
1:01:03 I mean, to the point where we’re, I mean, like,
1:01:06 I know people, whenever you talk about this, people are like, you’re a bad dad.
1:01:08 I’m like, shut the fuck up.
1:01:10 Like, you’ve never been around.
1:01:13 Like, these boys are, I have two little wild dudes.
1:01:16 They’re, by the way, I always share stories of the, of like extremes.
1:01:21 Like, they’re sweet, adorable, loving, wonderful kids.
1:01:21 Right.
1:01:26 But they’re just two little dudes who like, I come home and they’re like, it’s torture time.
1:01:31 Like, they call it torture time where like, I lay down and then they just get to like, fuck me up.
1:01:34 And then they’ll think they’re stronger than me.
1:01:36 And I’m like, bro, like, let me, do you want to feel this?
1:01:42 And then I just put them in like some crazy, you know, wrap where they, they go, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.
1:01:43 I’m like, yeah.
1:01:44 How old’s the older one?
1:01:45 He’s nine.
1:01:45 He’s nine.
1:01:47 Dude, I get home every day.
1:01:48 He’s like, check this out.
1:01:51 He takes off his shirt and he’s like, he flexes.
1:01:52 Oh, yeah.
1:01:54 He’s like, I’m going to be so jacked by high school.
1:01:56 I’m like, yeah, yes, probably.
1:01:57 And he’s lean.
1:02:00 Like he’s got like, he’s got the, the body for it.
1:02:04 He’s going to like, we go to the park and he’s just sitting there doing pull-ups and he’ll bring weights.
1:02:06 He’ll bring weights to the park.
1:02:08 And you see like other kids.
1:02:09 Dude, that’s the age to start.
1:02:11 There’s an Instagram account of this guy.
1:02:13 I’ll dig it up for the, for the captions.
1:02:20 His daughter is probably 11 and she’s doing pull-ups with a 45 pound plate and ankle weights strapped to her waist.
1:02:21 Really?
1:02:23 And she’s doing pull-ups to the chest.
1:02:25 She’s not, you know, built yet.
1:02:31 She’s clearly before puberty and she’s just, but just, oh my goodness.
1:02:34 That you just imagine like the tendon strength, the joint strength.
1:02:36 Going to be, yeah, a little gymnast perhaps.
1:02:40 He’s so into it talking about six packs.
1:02:42 I feel like I could have a six pack soon.
1:02:42 I’m like, yeah, sure.
1:02:43 Keep going, man.
1:02:44 He goes, why don’t you have one?
1:02:47 I’m like, just fucking, he’s already busting your balls.
1:02:53 You told me a story once over dinner about your son learning piano.
1:02:54 I don’t know if you remember that.
1:02:55 I think it was the younger one.
1:02:58 And it was something like, you know, like how’s piano going?
1:03:01 And you’re like, and you’re saying, he goes, it fucking sucks.
1:03:04 You know, like that’s, it sounds like that’s his response.
1:03:06 He’s just, he’s ready to pop back all the time.
1:03:08 Always, no, he’s completely ready.
1:03:13 He, um, he, the funniest thing that he did recently was, um, we’ve, they both go to jujitsu.
1:03:14 Okay.
1:03:17 And, uh, the older one’s really thriving.
1:03:23 Like he’s, he has a skill for it, you know, he’s, and he’s doing it well, moving up.
1:03:27 And the younger guy, I mean, you know, he’s like a puppy, like just a little, it started
1:03:28 when he was five.
1:03:30 Like they’re just, it’s just different, right?
1:03:31 You’re pretty young.
1:03:36 And so we’re, we’re at class and he goes, I’m not doing this anymore.
1:03:37 I’m like, what do you mean?
1:03:39 He goes, I’m too busy, man.
1:03:40 And I go, what?
1:03:43 He goes, he goes, my schedule.
1:03:44 I go, your schedule.
1:03:47 I go, okay, tell, tell the instructor.
1:03:54 So that guy comes over, you know, and he goes, Hey, uh, how, you know, how, how’d you enjoy
1:03:56 class today, Julian?
1:03:58 And he was like, good, but I’m done.
1:03:59 And he goes, what do you mean you’re done?
1:04:01 And he goes, I’m too busy, man.
1:04:04 He’s like, what are you, what are you too busy with?
1:04:05 He goes, I have kindergarten.
1:04:06 I have Spanish.
1:04:06 I have drums.
1:04:07 I don’t have time for this.
1:04:11 And I go, I’m sitting there like, this is insane.
1:04:14 And that guy goes, but you know what?
1:04:16 You got to be strong in this world, don’t you?
1:04:16 And he goes, yeah.
1:04:19 He goes, yeah, there’s no option for being strong.
1:04:25 So because you can’t have the option to not be strong, right?
1:04:26 And then Julian’s like, that’s right.
1:04:27 He’s like, great.
1:04:28 So I’ll see you Thursday.
1:04:30 And he goes, I told you I’m way too busy.
1:04:33 And then he just was like, I’m not doing this anymore.
1:04:34 I’m like, okay, dude.
1:04:35 He’s done?
1:04:36 He’s done.
1:04:38 He can really advocate for himself.
1:04:40 He definitely advocates for himself.
1:04:46 I’ve never been the type where you have to do these.
1:04:53 I feel like the fun thing about a kid, boy or girl with sports, is expose them to a lot of sports.
1:04:58 And I don’t want to like, you know, go, you have to do these.
1:05:00 Like, whatever sport you like, you can do that one.
1:05:03 Clearly, like, this wasn’t the one that drew him in enough.
1:05:04 And I’m totally fine with it.
1:05:05 It’s like, cool.
1:05:06 You want to try tennis?
1:05:07 You want to try soccer?
1:05:09 You want to, like, I’ll let him try all the sports.
1:05:11 I want them to be in activities.
1:05:14 But I’m not going to be like, you have to do all these sports, you know?
1:05:18 Meanwhile, they’re becoming comics in their mind.
1:05:19 Oh, they’re, yeah.
1:05:20 Both parents are comics.
1:05:20 They’re funny dudes.
1:05:21 They are very funny.
1:05:22 Yeah.
1:05:24 And they love to laugh.
1:05:32 And it’s fun because you see kids, when a kid says something that’s genuinely funny and you start laughing, you see, like, that look in their eye.
1:05:33 They’re like, oh, that was, that’s cool.
1:05:35 Then you just try to, like, do it again.
1:05:37 And if they do it too much, you’re like, yeah, it’s not funny anymore.
1:05:38 You can’t do it that much.
1:05:39 Yeah.
1:05:48 That is a perfect cue for me to ask what I was going to ask earlier when we were talking about when you are amused by something, you really delight in telling this bit.
1:05:49 Yeah.
1:05:51 It impacts the audience and how it lands.
1:05:56 There’s a very famous patient in neuroscience, probably the most famous patient, his name is H.M.
1:05:58 It’s a, you know, we don’t know his real name.
1:06:03 He’s dead now, but he had a lesion to his hippocampus, this brain area involved in memory.
1:06:06 And he was studied extensively for decades.
1:06:09 And most of what we know about human memory is from this guy.
1:06:12 All the other stuff we know from mouse studies, a little bit from monkey studies.
1:06:12 Wow.
1:06:20 So there’s a very well-known study where you go in and he has no retrograde memory.
1:06:22 He can’t remember anything that you told him before.
1:06:24 Like within a matter of seconds, he forgets it completely.
1:06:26 And they’ve tested this every which way.
1:06:26 Okay.
1:06:27 Holy shit.
1:06:28 His brain is now in a jar.
1:06:29 It’s been scanned, et cetera.
1:06:32 But so the study goes something like this.
1:06:38 You go in and you tell H.M. a joke and he laughs and he thinks it’s very funny.
1:06:41 Then you leave, you come back, and he doesn’t remember who you are.
1:06:43 This has been tested again and again.
1:06:44 He’s not fibbing.
1:06:44 Okay.
1:06:49 And there are a number of ways that you can measure this, especially if you make it, sadly,
1:06:51 like some survival-based things.
1:06:55 Like you tell him the joke again and he laughs again, but a little less.
1:06:58 And the next time a little less and a little less.
1:07:01 And eventually he’s like, yeah, that’s not really funny.
1:07:01 Yeah.
1:07:07 Same joke, he does not remember the joke, but there seems to be some unconscious memory
1:07:09 of the joke, which I always found fascinating.
1:07:14 So it’s like, it’s almost like the narrative around something, we get saturated to it.
1:07:20 We’re all familiar with a friend at a dinner party that tells a joke and everybody laughs.
1:07:24 And then they make the cardinal mistake, which is to tell the joke again at the same dinner.
1:07:26 And it just burns it.
1:07:29 It burns it there and it burns it the previous time.
1:07:33 I mean, I’m not asking you to be a neurologist or a neuroscientist, but what do you think
1:07:34 is going on here?
1:07:38 Not necessarily in HM and the patient, but there’s something about telling that funny punchline
1:07:43 twice that you just, I feel like men, like guys seem to do this more.
1:07:44 It’s like, you got it.
1:07:45 You nailed it.
1:07:47 Do not tell the joke again.
1:07:52 Well, every guy thinks he can fight, fuck, is funny, and can drive.
1:07:55 Those are the four things that every guy thinks he’s awesome at.
1:07:57 And you’re lucky if you’re marginal at one.
1:07:59 Every guy thinks, you know what I mean?
1:08:01 Every dude is like, I can do it.
1:08:01 I can drive.
1:08:02 I’m hilarious.
1:08:03 I can fight chicks.
1:08:05 Like every guy has this thing.
1:08:08 And then the more self-aware ones go like, I’m not good at these.
1:08:09 I’m good at this one.
1:08:10 So I’ll train.
1:08:11 You know what I mean?
1:08:12 Like that’s-
1:08:12 Cross train.
1:08:13 Cross train, man.
1:08:14 You got to do them all.
1:08:17 But the funny thing is when you were talking about HM, what I thought you were going to,
1:08:25 the point you were making is that you go back in and it’s not HM that is not laughing anymore
1:08:26 at the funny thing.
1:08:29 It’s that the person telling is that you lose something.
1:08:32 Because there is this thing in stand-up that is like a phenomenon.
1:08:37 Like I don’t have the answer to, but any comedian you talk to will tell you that this is true.
1:08:40 Where you go and you say this thing, right?
1:08:47 It might be like your opening thing or it could be a couple minutes in and you say the joke.
1:08:49 You tell the thing and it kills.
1:08:52 And you’re like, fuck yeah, this is awesome.
1:08:54 You know, like your brain just goes like, lock it in.
1:09:02 And then the next night you go and you say it and it gets laughs, but it’s like, it’s a little less.
1:09:08 And then this progresses, like you keep doing shows and it’s like two months later and you’re
1:09:11 like, the thing’s like not, it doesn’t really work.
1:09:15 And you go listen to like, like, I think I’m saying it the same way.
1:09:20 It’s like, there’s this, like, sometimes there’s this thing where it’s like a, there’s like a magical
1:09:26 quality of like, if it just streamed out of you once in this setting, in this room, at this moment,
1:09:32 there’s something about the way that you said it and the timing with which you said it,
1:09:34 that it evoked all this laughter.
1:09:40 And that for some reason, this thing no longer connects and just, it doesn’t register.
1:09:46 And you, you try to do the analysis of why that is the case.
1:09:49 And you, you essentially just end up doing this.
1:09:53 You’re just like, I don’t know why, but it just stopped being funny to all new audiences.
1:09:54 It killed over here.
1:09:55 It doesn’t work here.
1:09:56 So interesting.
1:10:04 I’m obsessed with mainly two things, time perception and state changes in the human brain.
1:10:07 Like we know so much about REM sleep and slow wave sleep.
1:10:11 We know very little about waking states, like alert and focused, or like we have these terms,
1:10:13 but like, there’s so much more going on there.
1:10:19 And so the question is this, we’re at a club or a stadium and you’re going to go on, but I go on
1:10:22 first, which means my bit sucks.
1:10:23 It just sucks.
1:10:23 Cause I’m not a comedian.
1:10:29 Someone else goes on, let’s say, um, Brian Holtzman, I find very funny.
1:10:29 Yeah.
1:10:29 Yeah.
1:10:30 He’s good.
1:10:30 Right.
1:10:32 I mean, when he’s, when he’s on, he’s really on and very funny.
1:10:35 Um, Holtzman goes on and does really well.
1:10:36 Yeah.
1:10:37 Who do you want to follow?
1:10:38 Holtzman.
1:10:44 Because the crowd is, is in a state of being ready to, to receive the jokes.
1:10:44 Exactly.
1:10:45 Yeah.
1:10:45 Yeah.
1:10:53 I feel like when you’re, when you’re newer, the, probably the typical answer for most comedians
1:10:55 would be like, I want to follow the guy that didn’t do well.
1:10:56 Right.
1:11:01 Cause then like I can save the day, but the longer you do it, you realize that’s not actually
1:11:09 like you actually want the guy in front of you to do well, even really well, because it does
1:11:12 generate this thing of like, this is what this is.
1:11:14 We’re at a place of doing this.
1:11:15 It’s jokes.
1:11:16 It’s fun.
1:11:20 And you know, we kind of borrow the term, ride their wave.
1:11:21 Like that guy just created a wave.
1:11:25 And if you can jump on it, sometimes you have to reset, you have to like, you know,
1:11:30 you’re kind of letting the audience know this is a different thing, especially if they like
1:11:31 absolutely murder.
1:11:37 Like if they destroy, you’re like, whoa, like you just kind of go, yeah, I’m a, I’m a new
1:11:38 person.
1:11:41 And the thing is you don’t want to go like, I’m scared that that happened.
1:11:48 You just go, this is my thing now, you know, but, but you have them in the state of this
1:11:50 is we’re here to laugh.
1:11:56 Whereas the guy who just like ate shit, they are all like, what the fuck is this?
1:11:59 And then, you know, they basically dug a hole.
1:12:03 So then you go up there being, you’re, you’re now the person that has to like set the table
1:12:07 and be like, so I know that last thing felt like a fucking eulogy.
1:12:13 So now I will try to get you out of feeling the way you feel and make you understand that
1:12:14 it’s joke time.
1:12:19 You’ll, you’ll often start slower by following the person that did poorly, right?
1:12:21 You think it’s, oh, you’re funny.
1:12:22 It’s now going to go well.
1:12:24 You have to like cook it back up.
1:12:28 So following the, the good comic is always the better choice.
1:12:31 I’m thinking of, I’m giving toasts at weddings.
1:12:31 Yeah.
1:12:35 Like if somebody gives a really great toast, giving the next toast, you’re saying, oh,
1:12:36 that’s a hard act to follow.
1:12:40 No, actually it’s an easy act to follow because everyone’s just kind of basking in whatever
1:12:41 just sounds, sounds similar.
1:12:42 That’s right.
1:12:45 State changes, whether or not we’re talking about running or you’re talking about cannabis
1:12:49 or you’re talking about, um, whatever it is.
1:12:54 I mean, I, I find that so much of the creative process or the constructive process, science
1:12:57 or comedy or whatever is about accessing these states.
1:13:02 And we learn how to do it through what kind of becomes an unconscious process, but you know
1:13:04 how to get there again and again.
1:13:07 And so much of becoming a professional is about going through the peaks and valleys of,
1:13:09 you know, bombing and coming back.
1:13:10 Totally.
1:13:18 You know, so I’m curious before you go out on stage now, given the size of the crowds is
1:13:22 just the kind of memory of what’s about to happen sufficient to put you in state.
1:13:27 So the thing is the longer you do it and the more shows you do, you’ve kind of performed
1:13:28 in every state.
1:13:33 Sometimes you have to remind, I like to remind myself that I’m at my funniest and I’m, I’m
1:13:40 the best version of myself on stage when I have a silly mindset going, meaning like,
1:13:45 just, just like, like goofing off, like being, like being a kid almost.
1:13:52 So if I’m backstage and I have you in there and I’m just saying, you know, I’m like poking
1:13:55 you, not like roasting you, but like, you know, being silly.
1:13:56 I can tell you, we’re related.
1:13:56 I can tell you.
1:13:57 Yeah.
1:13:58 Just like being silly.
1:14:04 I feel like that mindset is like the best version of me to go on stage.
1:14:06 And you can forget it by, I forget it all the time.
1:14:14 Cause I’ve performed tired, upset, sad, anxious, like I’ve performed in every possible state,
1:14:18 but I do like to, to tell myself like, oh yeah, don’t forget.
1:14:21 Kind of like get yourself into this silly state.
1:14:24 I also like some, like I’m kind of an introvert, right?
1:14:29 Like there’s some, there’s some true extrovert comics, like Buddy Burt’s like a true extrovert
1:14:32 and like his green room before a show will have like 80 people in it.
1:14:37 And I’m like, what, like, I like my green room to have either just me or like two or
1:14:42 three people and like chill energy, but still like, it’s still loose, right?
1:14:45 It’s not like a serious thing, but like loose fun.
1:14:48 And that gets me into the mindset of like, this is going to be fun.
1:14:54 I look over my set list, you know, like I, I’ll check in on, you know, you listen to like
1:14:56 what the crowd’s like and you’re like, oh, they sound, they sound hot.
1:14:58 Like that kind of gets you excited.
1:15:03 But I just try to, I try to embrace that mindset of like, let’s have, like, let’s have fun.
1:15:04 Let’s have fun.
1:15:08 That, that puts me in a, in a good place as a performer on stage.
1:15:12 Do you watch a lot of comedy, like the greats, the, like, do you?
1:15:17 I don’t watch a lot of comedy anymore.
1:15:22 I would say like, I, as a kid, I mean, I think the reason you kind of follow this path is
1:15:24 because you’re, you’re just such a huge fan of it.
1:15:31 So like growing up, I watched a lot of the, you know, evening at the improv, Def Jam, specials,
1:15:35 like a lot of, you know, it was also like specials were truly special, right?
1:15:38 Cause there was like, there was like six specials, maybe a year.
1:15:38 Eddie Murphy.
1:15:39 Yeah.
1:15:44 Eddie and Chris Rock and Carlin and like all those guys would like put out a special.
1:15:47 I mean, once every few years.
1:15:51 And there was only a few places, you know, HBO was just like the place.
1:15:54 And then Comedy Central became the other place.
1:15:59 HBO was premium, like really elite, like huge, huge talent.
1:16:01 And then Comedy Central was kind of everybody else.
1:16:07 And then now the landscape’s changed where, you know, we get, I don’t know, man, I feel
1:16:09 like there’s 300 specials a year, right?
1:16:12 Like, cause you can release them on, they’re on Netflix, they’re on Max, they’re on Hulu,
1:16:14 they’re on Amazon, they’re on YouTube.
1:16:18 Like there’s just, you’re bombarded with, it’s great in one regard for standup because
1:16:22 it speaks to how popular standup is and it’s so accessible and it’s cool that so many people
1:16:24 can put out their stuff.
1:16:27 But it’s just like overwhelming.
1:16:33 So I’ll only check out like, I feel like in the last couple of years, I’ve maybe seen
1:16:38 like two specials, you know, a lot of times I’ll start a special, turn it off after like
1:16:40 10 minutes, kind of want to see like what someone’s doing.
1:16:46 But I find, I find it personally hard to finish a special, but I also find it hard to watch standup
1:16:48 in the room, like at a club or something.
1:16:54 Like I get, I leave, like, I don’t mean like I leave the venue, I just leave the room.
1:16:57 Like it’s just harder for me to, I feel anxious.
1:17:02 I think it’s really about me internalizing what I feel like the feeling is on stage.
1:17:09 Especially if it’s not, like if it’s really, really good standup, then I sit there and I
1:17:10 go like, oh my God.
1:17:11 And I enjoy it.
1:17:17 But if there’s like any bit of it that like feels like maybe that’s not working or that
1:17:23 guy’s anxious or whatever, it reminds me of my own feelings on stage that are like that.
1:17:24 And I don’t want to be in that space.
1:17:27 So I like, I get, I leave the room and I’ll just go sit somewhere else.
1:17:32 I mean, so much of what we’re talking about today, I just realized is emotional contagion.
1:17:34 It really introduces this question.
1:17:39 This is very reductionist thinking, but how much of the success of a bit or a joke is the
1:17:42 emotion that the person telling it is carrying?
1:17:45 And how much of it is the actual words and content?
1:17:47 It’s probably that plus the rhythm and the timing.
1:17:48 There’s a lot of things.
1:17:49 It’s a combination of those things.
1:17:51 But emotional contagion is real.
1:17:54 You’re talking about it as a comedian watching comedy.
1:17:56 It kind of permeates you.
1:17:57 Is that what it’s called?
1:17:57 Emotional contagion?
1:17:58 Yeah, emotional contagion.
1:17:58 Really?
1:18:02 Some people are more emotional, emotionally permeable than others.
1:18:02 Yeah.
1:18:05 You know, we could put this on a spectrum.
1:18:10 We could even put it on the, so what used to be called the autistic spectrum, like people
1:18:15 who really contained in their emotions, like things don’t get them, but people are at the
1:18:16 far end of that spectrum.
1:18:22 They have a sensory sensitivity, you know, kids that are really like, like severely autistic,
1:18:26 you know, the amount of noise in a typical room is overwhelming.
1:18:27 It’s overwhelming, right.
1:18:33 I actually have discovered that that’s actually outside the brain, that their sensory endings
1:18:35 are tuned differently to the world.
1:18:37 They’re experiencing the world very, very differently.
1:18:44 You have these certain people get scared when they watch a movie and they jump when the monster
1:18:45 jumps out.
1:18:47 Other people are like less of a startled response.
1:18:49 I get startled.
1:18:50 I get startled.
1:18:50 Yeah.
1:18:50 Yeah.
1:18:52 I think that it’s natural to get startled.
1:18:57 I think that some people just have very kind of flat affect and some people can kind of
1:18:58 rot.
1:18:59 It’s like a seesaw.
1:19:00 And for some people, the hinge is tight.
1:19:02 It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re calm.
1:19:04 Some people are just like pissed off all the time and the hinge is tight.
1:19:06 Some people, they’re happy all the time and the hinge is tight.
1:19:09 Most people, that hinge can move.
1:19:13 And so this thing of emotional contagion is largely, this is what’s so interesting.
1:19:18 It’s largely fed through the way things sound, somewhat through faces, but largely through
1:19:19 the way that things sound.
1:19:24 And then there seems to be, and not a lot’s known about this yet, kind of a sixth sense
1:19:30 where actually an energy in the room can start to literally cascade from one person to the
1:19:30 next.
1:19:33 And this has been studied in animals with the fear response.
1:19:38 You can literally take an animal, scare it, take it out of that tube, put another animal
1:19:42 in there and it will show a fear response based on something molecular in the air.
1:19:42 Really?
1:19:43 Absolutely.
1:19:48 And they’re, I mean, they’re, hormones work within us, pheromones between two members
1:19:48 of a species.
1:19:51 They’re clearly pheromone-like effects.
1:19:53 We haven’t identified what those pheromones are.
1:19:54 Same thing can happen in crowds.
1:19:56 You can get a kind of a hysteria.
1:20:03 We do feel like, you know, the best, the best kind of experience as a comedian performing
1:20:08 is where you feel like the audience is one, right?
1:20:09 Like they are one.
1:20:12 It’s not 10,000 separate people.
1:20:14 It’s like, this is all together.
1:20:21 And that’s kind of like, when that’s going as well as it can go, that is like an incredible
1:20:21 rush.
1:20:25 And the feeling is that like, they do kind of mold.
1:20:30 It’s like they started as 10,000 people and then they just kind of become this one thing
1:20:35 and you’re, you’re kind of rocking this one entity out there together.
1:20:40 Same way that like the opposite when it’s like really bad.
1:20:45 It doesn’t feel like, you know, you can feel like, oh, they’re, they’re together in, in not
1:20:45 liking this.
1:20:50 This is one crowd going like, no, you know what I mean?
1:20:56 Like that feeling is, is the opposite of like bombing beyond like emptiness that you feel,
1:20:59 but you feel it like they are together.
1:21:02 They’re unified in, in how they feel about this.
1:21:06 This is why some people, including me, fear going to theater.
1:21:07 My sister loves theater.
1:21:11 We go to New York in the, um, in the fall for our birthdays and cause she loves theater.
1:21:12 We go to theater.
1:21:15 And if theater is great, it’s like amazing.
1:21:20 If theater is bad, like it leaves me feeling bad for the people.
1:21:24 Like the, the tone in the room is like, Ooh, it’s heavy, heavy.
1:21:25 It’s not like just like turn off the special.
1:21:28 It’s like, it’s, it sucks.
1:21:29 It takes you to a lower place.
1:21:31 Well, live is always, it’s just such a different experience.
1:21:32 You know what I think about?
1:21:36 I don’t know if there’s any science to this, but I always sometimes think about the fact
1:21:47 that I feel like comedy specifically as an art form might be the most involuntarily subjective.
1:21:53 Meaning that like, you know, if you look at like a photo or a piece of art, you might go
1:21:54 like, I don’t like that.
1:21:59 And then I might educate you in some way about it.
1:22:02 And then you kind of look at it differently.
1:22:05 And then maybe over time you go, you know, I actually love this painting.
1:22:06 Right.
1:22:11 Or like music is definitely one where you have like kind of an involuntary response, but
1:22:17 I have not cared for music and then actually started to like it more.
1:22:24 But I feel like comedy, it’s like, it’s not, you’re not really thinking when you like, like
1:22:27 when you laugh hard at something, you’re not like, Oh, I thought about it for a while and
1:22:29 I’m going to start laughing now.
1:22:29 Right.
1:22:30 Like you just, you laugh.
1:22:34 And if you don’t laugh, you’re just like, yeah, I don’t find that funny.
1:22:38 You don’t usually come back and go, you know, now that you’ve talked to me about it, I’m
1:22:39 going to start laughing.
1:22:45 Like it really is this experience where you just, it, it happens without.
1:22:49 So your, your kind of brain is telling you, this is what’s funny.
1:22:49 Right.
1:22:53 Like it, it’s happening like separate from you and there’s no faking it.
1:22:55 Like you’re either laughing or you’re not.
1:22:59 You got, if you laugh really hard, it’s like this, it’s this great experience, but you
1:23:02 can’t convince someone to laugh that hard.
1:23:05 A very important point that never occurred to me.
1:23:09 I love art history in part because I like art.
1:23:10 I’ve always liked art.
1:23:10 Yeah.
1:23:16 But by taking an art history class, I like literally fallen in love with certain artists and their
1:23:16 paintings.
1:23:23 And I, I look at certain paintings completely differently now, as you point out on the basis
1:23:28 of what I know about what the art represents, uh, the history of the artist.
1:23:33 Like if a joke isn’t funny to me or a bit, isn’t funny, I don’t care what the process was
1:23:34 for that bit.
1:23:35 I’m like, it’s just not funny.
1:23:36 It’s just not.
1:23:36 Yeah.
1:23:43 It seems like it’s one of the purest kind of, um, uh, yum, yuck or meh kind of things, which
1:23:44 is another point of neuroscience.
1:23:48 The nervous system has degrees of this, but it basically bins things very quickly into like
1:23:51 yum, like this is awesome or hilarious or whatever.
1:23:53 Um, yuck, like, oh, no.
1:23:54 And kind of meh.
1:23:55 Yeah.
1:23:58 They, they, there, there’s not a lot of very within each one of those bins.
1:23:59 There’s a lot of variation.
1:24:00 Yeah.
1:24:01 Love, love, love, hate, hate, hate.
1:24:04 But then, you know, but your brain makes a decision really quickly.
1:24:05 Very quickly.
1:24:06 About yum, yuck, or meh.
1:24:06 Right.
1:24:07 Right.
1:24:10 And, and, and like, especially with, with different arts, right?
1:24:15 Like, I mean, literally you look at the photo and your brain kind of tells you,
1:24:15 right?
1:24:20 Like, I just don’t feel like most of the time you’re not going to go back to that and
1:24:22 have a much different response.
1:24:23 Right.
1:24:26 I mean, uh, with comedy, you’re, you’re not going to do a response with art.
1:24:32 Like I, I also did, I did Spanish art history when I, when I was, um, studying in Madrid and
1:24:39 they would take us to the Prado museum and give us like our lectures in front of the pieces
1:24:39 of art.
1:24:45 And you just, yeah, your brain starts to not just appreciate, you start to fall in
1:24:48 love with the paintings and you go like, oh, I view this differently.
1:24:53 That type of experience doesn’t really, can’t happen with comedy.
1:24:56 I’m not going to be like, start laughing, dude.
1:24:57 Listen to how this, you know what I mean?
1:24:59 Like, it’s just, it is what it is.
1:25:03 Your brain, it’s so quick whether or not it makes you laugh.
1:25:08 And if something’s not funny, if you tell me, um, he toiled on this for 40 years, I’d
1:25:10 be like, well, then it especially sucks.
1:25:11 It’s really shit.
1:25:13 Whereas if you show me a sculpture, I might not appreciate it.
1:25:15 You sort of explain what went into that.
1:25:15 Yeah.
1:25:17 You can develop at least an appreciation for you.
1:25:18 Well, that’s interesting.
1:25:22 You know, versions of this happen all the time, especially now because everything’s shareable
1:25:26 where like your friend goes, check this out and you watch the thing and you’re like,
1:25:27 okay.
1:25:29 And they’re like, isn’t that the funniest thing you’ve ever seen?
1:25:29 You’re like, no.
1:25:31 They’re like, you didn’t like that?
1:25:32 No.
1:25:33 And that’s kind of like how it ends.
1:25:38 They’re like, yeah, but you know, he’s saying like that he’s late because he, I’m like,
1:25:39 yeah, it’s not, I don’t, I’m not laughing, dude.
1:25:40 I don’t know what to tell you.
1:25:41 And then they go, okay.
1:25:47 But they had a different experience with it that you can’t, you can’t like articulate and
1:25:51 intellectualize the experience to someone where they go, oh yeah, now I think it’s funny.
1:25:57 Well, I think this gets back to HM and this idea that there’s a subconscious, um, you know,
1:26:01 just an unaware process that dictates whether or not something’s funny or not.
1:26:06 It tickles our brain below the level of, of like precise understanding.
1:26:11 And, uh, I’m so fascinated by this because as you point out, there just aren’t other
1:26:11 things like this.
1:26:14 You could say this about people like, oh, liked this person right away.
1:26:14 Didn’t like them.
1:26:15 Yes.
1:26:19 But in general, the more that we learn about people, this is why all the efforts to try and,
1:26:23 you know, erase racism, for instance, the more you learn about a culture, the more you tend
1:26:24 to like the people of that culture.
1:26:25 Yeah.
1:26:30 Even if you were arch enemies for, for, you know, decades or hundreds of years before,
1:26:31 there’s just the way the human brain works.
1:26:36 But with comedy, it’s like a, um, it’s chem, it’s feels like it’s like chemistry.
1:26:37 It does.
1:26:37 You know?
1:26:41 And, and of course you could say, well, you like, or don’t like the comic, but I have to
1:26:47 imagine that you, that you like it or not probably represent the, the like bad boyfriend or the
1:26:52 abusive dad to somebody or the, uh, or the friend that they loved in college.
1:26:53 Let’s make it positive too.
1:26:54 Or that the guy they like to be around.
1:26:57 I mean, you, you don’t know that people’s relationship to you.
1:26:58 You never know.
1:27:03 And so the humor may land or not land depending on like all sorts of unconscious stuff going
1:27:03 on.
1:27:04 So much.
1:27:10 And you realize too, that like you could have a joke about a teacher, you know what I mean?
1:27:11 Like, you’re just like, it’s part of your bit.
1:27:12 You’re not thinking of that.
1:27:21 And like you saying that has a ripple effect that you don’t realize to, to different people
1:27:24 in the audience for, for dozens of different reasons, you could have just said the word
1:27:27 teacher and the person’s like, you know, I am a teacher.
1:27:30 Uh, and then that, that that’s pleasing to them.
1:27:30 They feel seen.
1:27:32 The other person hated their teacher.
1:27:33 You know what I mean?
1:27:37 They start thinking about like all these little things where you go, like, I just said one
1:27:42 word about this and you don’t realize that it, it triggers other thoughts in people’s
1:27:42 minds, you know?
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1:29:33 Let’s talk about crowd work.
1:29:34 Yeah.
1:29:35 Fascinated by it.
1:29:36 Yeah.
1:29:39 Very, very distinct aspect of the comedy experience.
1:29:44 You know, I mean, at a big rock concert, I mean, the singer might like put out a fist to
1:29:48 someone in the audience or even let somebody sing for a moment, but maybe let someone up on
1:29:48 stage.
1:29:51 But crowd work is like, you’re really giving up a lot of control.
1:29:51 Yeah.
1:29:51 Right.
1:29:56 If you ask a question, I mean, you have to be able to work off whatever comes back.
1:29:58 Do you do crowd work?
1:30:06 I mean, I feel like crowd work is just part of the arsenal of skills you have over time
1:30:06 as a comedian.
1:30:08 You have to be able to improvise.
1:30:09 You have to be able to handle crowd work.
1:30:10 You have to be able to write material.
1:30:12 You have to be able to do all those things.
1:30:15 I don’t go up and do like crowd work shows.
1:30:18 Like some people, they’re like, this is a crowd work show.
1:30:22 But I’ve been doing stand up like, you know, 23 years.
1:30:29 And especially when you’re in the club system, when you’re an unknown and you’re just doing
1:30:37 weekends and people are drunk, like crowd work just becomes part of how you do it.
1:30:41 Like you don’t have an option to not, you could just not develop the skillset and then
1:30:42 just die up there.
1:30:42 But like, you know what I mean?
1:30:44 It’s like, it’s a necessity.
1:30:52 So at this point, like, I feel like I want to go on stage with like, I want to do X, Y,
1:30:52 Z.
1:30:53 I want to execute these things.
1:30:55 I want to get these jokes out.
1:30:56 I want to say these things.
1:31:02 But you’re never, ever to the point where you go, and therefore I am removed from having
1:31:03 to do any type of crowd work.
1:31:09 Because crowd work is usually, it’s a response to something happening.
1:31:09 You’re being heckled.
1:31:11 Somebody’s saying something.
1:31:17 You know, there’s this thing that like, if you’re in a huge venue, you don’t want to actually
1:31:18 go like, hey, what’s going on with you, buddy?
1:31:19 Right?
1:31:22 Because there’s somebody up in the 300 section who’s like, I don’t know what’s going on.
1:31:32 But the other side of it is you cannot ignore the obvious.
1:31:40 Meaning if a fight breaks out, if like somebody throws something, if somebody is like screaming
1:31:44 and you just go like, I’m just not going to, I’m going to act like that’s not happening.
1:31:47 I’m going to keep doing standup like what I wanted to do.
1:31:50 Then people go like, this is weird, right?
1:31:53 Because this person’s ignoring the obvious, right?
1:31:55 You’re no longer connected to them in the same way.
1:31:57 They know that like, there’s a disconnect now.
1:31:58 Like you’re ignoring that.
1:32:05 Like, so that’s how like you stay in kind of having, you have to maintain the skill set.
1:32:09 Some people make it more of an emphasis of their show.
1:32:12 And there’s like really, really good people at doing that.
1:32:17 I feel like it’s also like part, it’s more of like the DNA of New York comics too.
1:32:24 Like that you’ll see, I’ve always thought that like the level of proficiency there is really
1:32:25 high in that scene.
1:32:27 More of a back and forth, you know.
1:32:28 Because of small venues.
1:32:30 I go to the Comedy Cellar when I’m out there.
1:32:33 I don’t know if that’s, it’s still one of the main places.
1:32:33 Oh, absolutely.
1:32:35 If there’s a better one, let me know.
1:32:37 But my sister’s always like, are we going to go to the Cellar again?
1:32:38 Yeah, Cellar’s fantastic.
1:32:42 And we have our favorite nights there actually were nights where it was pretty bad and we
1:32:43 can laugh about that.
1:32:43 Yeah.
1:32:47 But there’ve been a few nights there where it just killed.
1:32:47 Yeah.
1:32:50 And actually there was one night, and that’s my sister, this happened.
1:32:55 Chappelle just like leaves Radio City Hall, shows up with his entourage and just like hops
1:32:56 up on stage.
1:32:56 Yeah.
1:32:58 And just, that only happens in New York City.
1:32:59 Yeah.
1:33:01 I don’t think that really happens in Los Angeles terribly often.
1:33:03 He’s done that quite a few times.
1:33:04 He just like rolls in.
1:33:06 Yeah, he’s done that in LA a number of times.
1:33:08 He’s done in San Francisco a bunch.
1:33:10 Like, I’m saying like, it’s pretty well known.
1:33:11 You know, he’ll come into the stores.
1:33:11 That’s his thing?
1:33:12 Yeah.
1:33:17 Like, he loves the stage, and sometimes he’ll be up there like legitimately like three or
1:33:18 four hours.
1:33:18 Yeah, he stayed.
1:33:23 We ended up going home because we eventually just called in a night and we were leaving
1:33:25 and his team was like, you’re really going to leave?
1:33:32 We had had enough, but it was just kind of unbelievable to me that this stage of his
1:33:34 career that he was just going to wander in and start doing comedy.
1:33:38 But it speaks, I think it speaks to the intimacy of those small clubs.
1:33:39 It does, yeah.
1:33:43 I mean, it’s still one of the few venues where like, you can see greats.
1:33:46 Like, I got to see you at the Belly Up in Aspen.
1:33:47 That’s a small-ish venue.
1:33:48 That was fun, yeah.
1:33:49 Or you can go to a stadium.
1:33:50 What’s the largest stadium crowd you’ve done?
1:33:52 It’s more than, you know.
1:33:58 The biggest crowd I did was like a little over 17,000 at a climate pledge arena in Seattle.
1:34:01 Yeah, so huge difference of scale there.
1:34:01 Yeah.
1:34:05 Not many public-facing things occupy those levels of scale.
1:34:08 I have a question about kind of cultural standards.
1:34:09 Yeah.
1:34:17 So if you look back to comedians where – at a time where like cursing on stage wasn’t
1:34:19 allowed, like kind of pre-Lenny Bruce.
1:34:20 Yeah.
1:34:20 Right?
1:34:23 Is any of that comedy funny?
1:34:29 Meaning, you know, now there’s been this kind of expansion of kind of what you can say,
1:34:35 even just cursing, and so like if we look at – earlier we were talking about working
1:34:40 out, you know, like bodies looked very – like muscular bodies looked very different in films
1:34:41 in the 40s.
1:34:43 Like you’d say, well, that guy – that person isn’t very big by today’s standard, but you’d
1:34:44 say they’re very fit, right?
1:34:45 Yeah.
1:34:51 Or she was very beautiful and very sexy in the 70s, but very different looked than like
1:34:52 90s and 2000s.
1:34:55 So standards change for what’s considered ideal.
1:34:56 Yes.
1:35:01 The male one, by the way, is hilarious for the leading man of like the 40s and 50s.
1:35:02 Oh, yeah.
1:35:03 They were very slender.
1:35:03 Now they’re like –
1:35:04 I mean like –
1:35:05 Not superheroes.
1:35:09 They’d be like – they’d be like slender and also like not even very well defined.
1:35:12 And they’d be like, this is the stud of the – you know what I mean?
1:35:16 Of the movie, like a guy who’s not wearing a shirt, and you’re like, this guy is not active.
1:35:17 Right.
1:35:20 And they’re like, no, this is like the stud of the movie.
1:35:20 Right.
1:35:22 That’s just a different time.
1:35:23 Just a different time, different standard.
1:35:27 And then, of course, you know, standards of women’s bodies have changed, sometimes more
1:35:30 voluptuous, sometimes like in the 90s it was the kind of wafy look.
1:35:34 And these things mirror what’s going on in society to some degree.
1:35:43 But if you listen to comedy pre-Lenny Bruce, pre-swearing, is any of it really funny to you?
1:36:03 Well, to me, I feel like I would probably listen to most of that with like that mind of – because what happens with comedy too is, to be fair to those people, is you end up hearing so many versions of what they did.
1:36:10 Things that are just derivative of other styles and types of jokes and types of performances.
1:36:26 That by the time – like if I heard this guy in 1945 doing these jokes and he’s killing in this room, you know, I would go – I’d probably hear the joke and be like, oh yeah, like I know this joke.
1:36:31 Like I know 10 versions of that joke because I’ve heard them.
1:36:34 So I – hearing it just doesn’t make me laugh.
1:36:35 Even though it’s the original?
1:36:37 Even though it’s the original, yeah.
1:36:43 Because I feel like – I feel like that even happens with like well-known comedians.
1:36:58 Like if – like I was born in 79 and so like my like exposure, like I missed – I wasn’t like really conscious and aware of like the prior era, right?
1:37:00 And like he’s like a god in stand-up.
1:37:05 He’s considered the best comedian ever by most, it seems.
1:37:06 By a lot of people, you know.
1:37:07 He’s on the Mount Rushmore of comedy.
1:37:09 He’s definitely on the Mount Rushmore.
1:37:25 But I felt like by the time that I heard prior, I had heard so many people that were influenced by prior that hearing the original version wasn’t like – it wasn’t like I’m doubled over laughing.
1:37:32 Like I’m hearing every other version – like they’re clearly inspired and, you know, taking from him.
1:37:37 But so now I hear the original and I go like, oh, I get that that’s the version of that.
1:37:38 It can happen with comedy films too.
1:37:40 It’s like you watch Animal House.
1:37:47 If you hadn’t seen it before and you see it now and you’ve watched a lot of comedies, you might just go like, oh, I get how this is the blueprint.
1:37:57 Because I’ve seen so many people take from this that now when you see the original, you’ll be like, oh, you’re like, yeah, but you don’t realize that’s the first time it was done.
1:37:59 Like these jokes were done here originally.
1:38:01 Everybody took from them, you know.
1:38:08 So I don’t think that I would probably end up laughing very hard at the pre-Lenny Bruce comic just for the reason I said, though.
1:38:10 Just because it’s been done.
1:38:12 I’ve heard so many versions of it.
1:38:18 So it seems with comedy, unlike with music or poetry or books, there isn’t that much carry forward.
1:38:29 So, for instance, I mean, I was very, very young and in some cases not born when the Rolling Stones were doing their great work or the Beatles or Elvis, right?
1:38:31 But that music is awesome.
1:38:32 Yeah, yeah.
1:38:32 That’s different.
1:38:41 The fact that many people have taken bits and pieces from those, like you can’t create an amazing Clash song the way the Clash did.
1:38:42 Like they did it best.
1:38:42 Right.
1:38:48 And it will always, like Death or Glory will be like, I don’t care how many songs were derivatives of that.
1:38:49 That song still kills.
1:38:49 That’s the song, yeah.
1:38:52 And so comedy seems different.
1:38:53 I think it’s different in that regard.
1:38:54 I definitely think it’s different.
1:39:00 I think that, you know, it’s one of those things where, like, it’s always shifting.
1:39:11 Also, like, what’s funny has, it really is directly related to what’s happening in the real time.
1:39:17 Like, in the time you’re living in, you can see, whether it’s from stand-up or movies, jokes.
1:39:27 That aren’t fun, that were, like, very funny in 1982, in 1995, in 2007, that you go, it just kind of shifted, right?
1:39:30 It’s like, it’s not, it’s not funny anymore.
1:39:33 Like, and I don’t just mean because it’s not, like, politically correct.
1:39:45 I just mean, like, there’s this unspoken thing that happens, right, where, like, you’re laughing at something, and then you kind of go, like, hey, we collectively are, don’t find this is just not funny anymore.
1:39:54 So, actually, a lot of those things might even strike you as not only, like, not great, you might just be like, that is, that’s not funny at all.
1:40:02 Yeah, I once went to this thing in San Francisco around New Year’s, and they literally wheeled out, is it, like, Henny Youngman or Benny Youngman or something?
1:40:06 He was doing these knock-knock jokes, and it was probably in his late 90s, he was forgetting the punchlines.
1:40:07 But occasionally, he’d nail one.
1:40:07 Yeah.
1:40:09 It was not funny.
1:40:09 Yeah.
1:40:17 It was almost embarrassing, you know, but, but you were like, wow, this guy’s still, like, thinks it’s funny, he’s still going, so there was some amusement, but you look at the older people in the crowd.
1:40:17 Yeah.
1:40:20 And they were like, oh, my God, it’s bringing me back.
1:40:21 Yeah, so some people have-
1:40:24 And you’re like, oh, my goodness, but, you know, no one else was laughing.
1:40:24 Right.
1:40:37 But as you’re describing, some people might look at some comedy, I’m not going to name names, because I’m not versed enough in comedy, but from the 70s or 80s, and be like, yeah, that’s just kind of, like, raw, but, like, it doesn’t really do anything for me anymore.
1:40:52 I’ll tell you, like, this is a very simple, like, example, but, like, I, I can recall that, like, 20 years ago, if a guy was in a club, and there was two guys sitting there in the front row together or whatever, a lot of times would be like, what are you guys, a couple?
1:40:56 And that, that would sometimes prompt laughs.
1:40:57 People would laugh.
1:40:59 They would be like, oh, they’re a couple.
1:41:02 And, like, today, if somebody was like, what are you guys, a couple?
1:41:03 They’d be like, yeah.
1:41:04 And everyone would be like, okay.
1:41:05 Right?
1:41:06 Like, it would be, like, it was-
1:41:11 Like, it was considered, like, oh, it’s funny you’re implying that they’re a romantic couple.
1:41:17 And, like, I feel like just the way society evolves, today, people would be like, and?
1:41:18 Oh, yeah.
1:41:20 I mean, growing up when you, I mean, I’m a little bit older than you are.
1:41:20 Yeah.
1:41:25 I remember, like, I remember, like, the first gay characters showing up in film and reality TV.
1:41:27 It was, like, a huge deal.
1:41:27 Yeah.
1:41:27 Right?
1:41:30 And then, so, things have really changed.
1:41:32 So, what is, yeah, things have really changed.
1:41:35 Like, no one’s ever been funnier than Eddie Murphy, ever.
1:41:41 I think he’s, like, him and his prime of being funny, like, there’s just nothing.
1:41:46 He’s a total prodigy, once-in-a-lifetime type of talent, right?
1:41:47 Like, so funny.
1:41:54 If you put, like, Delirious on for a 21-year-old today, they would be like, what the fuck is happening?
1:41:58 Like, it’s, there’s things in it that are just, they’re just too dated now.
1:41:58 You know what I mean?
1:42:05 Like, just concepts that are, he’s still funny as shit, but, like, those bits would not land like they would in 83.
1:42:06 They just wouldn’t.
1:42:11 Let’s talk about the darkness of comedy.
1:42:18 I once had the experience of going to the comedy cellar with some friends, and this guy got up there, I don’t remember his name, and it was super dark.
1:42:24 I mean, it was, like, clowns with vans doing terrible, I mean, it was just, like, so dark.
1:42:28 And the only thing that was hysterical about it was the fact that he seemed freaked out by it, too.
1:42:29 Uh-huh.
1:42:31 Like, what he was saying was, like, horrible.
1:42:33 He was saying horrible.
1:42:34 Horrible things.
1:42:34 Yeah.
1:42:36 That had gone through his mind.
1:42:36 Yeah.
1:42:40 But the fact that he thought it was horrible was what was funny.
1:42:40 Sure.
1:42:41 And we’re like, whoa.
1:42:46 Like, we walked out of there just from, like, we felt like we’d been transported someplace really unhealthy.
1:42:47 Yeah.
1:42:49 And I was like, man, I feel like I need a shower after that.
1:42:52 That was intense and scary and, like.
1:42:54 This is my favorite thing, by the way.
1:42:54 Whoa.
1:42:58 And then we had the experience of running into him and his girlfriend later that night.
1:42:59 Uh-huh.
1:43:01 And we were like, oh, my God.
1:43:03 And he just took off.
1:43:06 He just, like, could not handle the reflection about what had just happened in there.
1:43:07 Really?
1:43:10 Oh, yeah, no, he just, I’m sure he enjoyed the attention, right?
1:43:11 He’s a performer.
1:43:14 So, but two things occur to me around that example.
1:43:21 One is a guy who’s really dark on stage, seemed like a very loving guy, at least out in public with his girlfriend.
1:43:23 Almost always the case.
1:43:23 Yeah.
1:43:31 And the other one is that where he took us and where he went was so down in the dungeon.
1:43:32 Mm-hmm.
1:43:36 Like, I still kind of get a weird feeling in my body thinking about it.
1:43:36 Yeah.
1:43:43 But his shock at his own words was absolutely hysterical and brilliant.
1:43:47 And it was like, hey, let’s go down into the darkness of human nature.
1:43:47 Yeah.
1:43:51 I’m going to show you how dark it really is, and then I’m going to leave.
1:43:53 And you’re just, like, left spinning.
1:43:56 And it still sits in my body.
1:43:57 We’re talking about that visceral experience.
1:43:58 It still sits in my body.
1:44:00 I don’t know what to make of it.
1:44:03 It’s incredible, A, that, first of all, that he can access it is great.
1:44:18 It is, as, if you’re talking about just, like, as the art form, like, the best thing to do as an artist, any type of artist, is, I think, acknowledge and produce with the dark thoughts.
1:44:23 In other words, don’t act like they’re not there because they’re in everyone, and then put it into your art.
1:44:41 In other words, it’s, if you go, like, I want to fucking rob a bank, like, it’s better, if you’re an artist, to channel that into art, whether you write a story about it, you paint a painting, you write a song, you talk about, you know, as a comedian, you’re, like, your fantasy of doing it, than to actually do it.
1:44:44 So it’s actually, you’re channeling it in the healthier option.
1:45:01 And I also feel like, 20-some years of doing this, dude, the best people, as people that I’ve ever met, are the darkest comedians on stage, and the absolute most terrifying people are the super clean guys.
1:45:02 Like, really?
1:45:05 Yeah, dude, because they don’t acknowledge the darkness.
1:45:08 The darkness exists in all of us.
1:45:11 The Dalai Lama has dark thoughts.
1:45:12 Like, it’s just…
1:45:13 Jung said this.
1:45:15 I mean, it’s just the way it is.
1:45:15 It’s humans.
1:45:16 It’s human beings.
1:45:27 Like, we all, now, some of us have not as, you know, present and overwhelming dark sides and thoughts, but there is darkness in everybody.
1:45:39 The thing is, I feel like what some of the clean comics do is the lack of acknowledging it means that that darkness has to come out in some other way.
1:45:40 It just does.
1:45:41 So how does it come out?
1:45:44 Well, it might come out in their personal life.
1:45:44 I mean…
1:45:44 Not good.
1:45:45 Yeah.
1:45:50 I mean, there’s very famous cases of, don’t curse.
1:45:53 And then, you know, you’re doing some pretty dark things.
1:45:55 Like, that’s a real thing, man.
1:45:58 That, like, hey, I’m going to talk about cookies.
1:46:00 And where do you put your socks?
1:46:02 I can’t find my other sock.
1:46:03 Like, that’s your fucking bit?
1:46:04 Talking about socks?
1:46:04 Okay.
1:46:06 What are you actually really up to?
1:46:10 Because the thing is, those guys, some of those guys, look, I’m not saying they’re not funny.
1:46:12 There’s very, very funny clean comics.
1:46:20 Some of those guys are right on the line of, like, man, if you would just acknowledge some of this stuff, it would be even funnier.
1:46:21 Like, you’re just…
1:46:30 And then you don’t know how that darkness is going to show itself because it’s probably going to show itself in a way that’s not so pleasant.
1:46:33 Yeah, I completely agree with you.
1:46:36 I have a friend who’s a very, very well-known musician.
1:46:38 I won’t say what genre.
1:46:43 And what I love about his music is it encompasses every range of emotion.
1:46:43 Yeah.
1:46:44 Every range.
1:46:48 And I’ve seen him play to huge crowds and just get so pissed.
1:46:55 And I’ve seen him do love songs, hate songs, revenge songs, like, just everything.
1:46:55 Yeah.
1:47:00 But in person, he’s, like, the kindest dude ever.
1:47:01 I mean, that’s…
1:47:02 And it’s, he’s so grounded.
1:47:06 He and his partner are, like, the sweetest people.
1:47:08 And she’s got it, too.
1:47:10 She’s an artist, too.
1:47:13 And some of her art, you’re like, oh, my God.
1:47:17 And then you meet her and you’re like, so kind, so trustworthy.
1:47:18 Yeah.
1:47:19 So exactly what you’re describing.
1:47:20 They’re in touch with it.
1:47:21 They know how to channel it.
1:47:21 Yeah.
1:47:23 I think it’s about doing that.
1:47:35 And I think some people, look, I think it’s also a natural human instinct to not want to acknowledge or play with the dark thoughts that you have.
1:47:36 Right?
1:47:40 Like, it’s, you don’t want to sometimes because you go, that’s an ugly side.
1:47:45 And I don’t want to, I don’t want to use that for my art or even acknowledge that it’s there.
1:47:50 But I think it’s definitely the better way to go is to actually work with it.
1:47:55 A lot of comics die of drug overdoses.
1:47:57 It’s, like, not these days as much.
1:47:59 It seems like there’s now, like, the healthy comics.
1:48:00 Yeah.
1:48:06 And I don’t know what the numbers are compared to music, like rock musicians or something.
1:48:15 But if I compare to, like, science or I compare to, like, law, okay, one could say, you know, in law offices, there used to be a lot of drug use, especially in big cities and this kind of stimulants.
1:48:18 But let’s just focus on comedy for the moment.
1:48:31 Do you think that comedy pulls from a group that has a larger percentage of people that are just struggling with inner turmoil and they rely on substances to kind of manage?
1:48:36 Or are the substances part of the creative process for people?
1:48:36 Writers, too.
1:48:38 I mean, it used to be that many writers were drinkers.
1:48:42 If you ever want to, like, a voyage through alcoholism, read about the habits of writers.
1:48:43 Yeah.
1:48:45 Not all of them, but many of them drank a lot.
1:48:46 A lot.
1:48:46 A lot, a lot.
1:48:47 Yeah.
1:48:49 Metamine, sometimes, but it was, like, drinking.
1:48:52 It was, like, part and parcel with the writer’s life, sadly.
1:48:53 That’s not the case now.
1:48:59 But, yeah, what are your thoughts about substances in comedy and comics?
1:49:01 I think it’s a combination of things.
1:49:08 I feel like, you know, a lot of comedians, like, that world pulls from certainly people with traumatic backgrounds.
1:49:12 There’s a lot of mental health issues with comedians.
1:49:14 There’s a lot of clinically depressed comedians.
1:49:23 There’s comedians that come into it with, like, severe anxiety, for instance, severe depression, different mental health things.
1:49:35 So, usually, even outside of comedy, if you’re talking about people with this type of mindset, you know, these issues, you know, substances kind of come with that.
1:49:38 People trying to regulate and deal with those issues.
1:49:44 To also, you know, throw some more gas on that.
1:49:51 You’re talking about an environment that is a nightlife environment where these things are kind of readily available.
1:49:56 And it can, you know, it can be fun.
1:50:04 It can make you feel like you’re helping your art form by partaking in these things.
1:50:12 And then it’s really just, like, with most things, you just kind of, you see that some people go, oh, it’s getting, right now it’s getting in the way.
1:50:16 And they kind of acknowledge that, like, I’m better off without this.
1:50:18 And then some people are just too far gone in it, right?
1:50:20 Where they just, they’re addicts.
1:50:24 They become, we have a lot of addicts in comedy.
1:50:26 It’s just one of those factors.
1:50:27 Like, you just, you see it a lot.
1:50:31 People that are complete hardcore addicts.
1:50:39 So that coupled with mental health things and the fact that we’re up late and we’re with people that are also into nightlife.
1:50:42 I think all that together, you get a lot of substance abuse.
1:50:43 A lot.
1:50:46 Why is cynicism so unfunny?
1:50:47 Is it?
1:50:58 I mean, I feel like cynicism presented in the right way, like a cynical person can be funny.
1:51:10 I think what problem with cynicism is that it’s, um, it’s really not ultimately, there’s nothing hopeful in it.
1:51:14 Cynicism takes away any feeling that, like, things could get better.
1:51:17 Yeah, like in the world of improv, the yes and.
1:51:17 Yeah, yeah, that’s true.
1:51:19 I feel like cynicism, like, shuts it down.
1:51:20 Well, that’s true.
1:51:26 In the case of improv, I’m just saying, like, some people have this cynical kind of take on things that are still, like, funny people.
1:51:31 Yeah, if you negate a thought in improv, the whole thing is over.
1:51:32 It just dies.
1:51:33 You know, if you’re like, it’s hot.
1:51:34 And, like, I’m cold.
1:51:35 You’re like, okay.
1:51:37 Like, we’re not really going to do this then, huh?
1:51:39 Like, you kind of have to, like, add to it.
1:51:40 But that’s interesting.
1:51:48 Um, yeah, I mean, if you’re, if you’re a cynical, like, a truly a cynical person.
1:51:53 Because I guess the thing you find in comedy is there’s a lot of, like, faux emotion, right?
1:51:56 Like, the faux angry, you know what I mean?
1:51:59 Like, you put on this thing to sell your bit.
1:52:01 You sell an emotion with it, too.
1:52:06 So somebody can, like, manipulate that cynicism with humor.
1:52:14 But I think if you’re genuinely a cynical person, what you are really is usually someone that, like, actually people don’t want to be around.
1:52:15 Right?
1:52:21 Like, the very genuinely cynical person, another way to describe them is just negative.
1:52:22 And that’s a whole buzzkill.
1:52:22 Yeah.
1:52:26 So you just kind of go, like, I don’t want to be around that.
1:52:37 I think, ultimately, the best mode to be in for comedy is, like, you kind of actually want to be, like, inclusive.
1:52:38 You want, you know what I mean?
1:52:39 You’re kind of, like, right?
1:52:42 You’re saying things that people want to nod along with.
1:52:45 And if you’re just, like, shit’s not going to work out, it never does.
1:52:47 No one’s, like, this is fucking fun, man.
1:52:49 Like, this is really funny.
1:52:54 So that probably has some factor in it.
1:53:01 I mean, yeah, you learn early on, at least I felt like it, that there’s these really cynical comics.
1:53:05 But the thing is, I’m not talking about, like, the faux thing in a performance.
1:53:07 Like, they are just like that.
1:53:12 And you can feel the energy vortex that they are.
1:53:17 And you kind of go, like, I got to, like, not be around this guy.
1:53:23 Because early on, especially, you rely so much on hope.
1:53:27 The fact that you signed up to do this thing that, you know, on paper, it seems insane.
1:53:30 Like, were you going to tell jokes for a living?
1:53:31 Were you out of your mind?
1:53:32 I mean, that’s what people would say to me.
1:53:34 Like, they’re like, were you crazy?
1:53:35 I would say it worked out.
1:53:38 I mean, I got very lucky in that it worked out.
1:53:39 And you worked very hard.
1:53:40 You worked extremely hard.
1:53:42 I did work very hard at it.
1:53:50 But that is a thing where you go, like, oh, this is an insane path kind of to go down.
1:53:58 Like, I can’t have the guy who’s next to me, who’s also a comedian, being like, this shit, you know, they’re never going to pick us.
1:54:00 They’re never going to, this shit never works out.
1:54:04 You’re like, yeah, I can’t have that mantra in my head all the time.
1:54:06 And you have to, like, part ways with those people.
1:54:09 Because they are like a virus, you know.
1:54:10 They’re a virus.
1:54:13 Like, so, yeah, you’re right in observing.
1:54:14 Like, it’s not funny.
1:54:20 I think it’s more like that it’s just, it’s not productive to be around truly cynical people.
1:54:30 Along the lines of what we’re calling emotional contagion, I realized I’m not aware of any kind of, like, duet comics.
1:54:33 I know it sounds kind of silly, but in every other genre, like, with music, right?
1:54:37 Like, people play alone, they play with a band, they play, like, together, like, you offset voices.
1:54:48 I mean, but maybe in comedy, stage comedy, that is, the audience is the other member of the, I’m calling it a duet, which sounds so silly.
1:54:49 But you get the idea.
1:54:50 Yeah.
1:54:56 That they’re the one that you’re resonating with and that you’re playing off of and they’re riding with you.
1:55:00 Because I’ve had the experience of going to the comedy store.
1:55:01 I was there last year.
1:55:02 Tim Dillon did.
1:55:04 A bit.
1:55:06 Well, he went out for, like, 20, he came out for 20 minutes.
1:55:07 Yeah.
1:55:08 And just murdered.
1:55:08 Mm-hmm.
1:55:11 And some of that’s in his recent special.
1:55:12 Uh-huh.
1:55:12 Just murdered.
1:55:17 It was just, and he, like, crescendoed the whole crowd and then just, like, in typical Tim Dillon, I just, like, walked out.
1:55:18 Yeah.
1:55:19 You’re like, whoa.
1:55:21 And then you feel like you were part of something.
1:55:21 Yeah.
1:55:26 Even though you were a passive recipient of what was going on or participant.
1:55:28 So maybe that’s where it is.
1:55:30 Have there ever been two people that get up there and kind of, like, riff?
1:55:30 Together?
1:55:31 Yeah.
1:55:31 Oh, yeah.
1:55:32 And do it well?
1:55:32 Yeah.
1:55:34 There’s a couple twins that do that.
1:55:34 Okay.
1:55:35 Yeah.
1:55:42 That’s a good observation that it is, like, the audience is the other, you know, participant, right?
1:55:48 It’s you and the, but then, like, the Lucas brothers and the Sklar brothers are, they’re both, they’re twin brothers.
1:55:53 And they go up there and, because I’m, you’ve probably done something about the twin phenomena.
1:56:03 Like, how these guys operate, both of these sets of twins together, is, it is, like, an experience where you’re, like, whoa.
1:56:08 The way, they don’t go, like, always, like, set up, punch.
1:56:14 Like, the set up sentence can come half out of one brother and the other, and it’s seamless.
1:56:22 Like, it’s like, it’s like when you hang out with, you ever hang out with twins and they really answer in unison, even though they’re not looking at each other and they’re saying, like, the same thing.
1:56:25 Like, that’s how these guys work on stage.
1:56:29 And it is, you know, it gets you where you, like, you have questions afterwards.
1:56:31 You’re like, wait a minute, did you guys, like, how did you set that up?
1:56:37 Because it’s so seamless and they’re literally, like, going back, back, back, back, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
1:56:46 And it feels like you had to go, hey, when I say and, make sure you, but it’s another level beyond that.
1:56:52 Like, they really flow, even their talk over each other feels like it’s perfectly done.
1:56:59 Like, this, you’re hearing the end of this guy’s sentence, the next guy steps on top of it, but you hear him clearly and back and forth.
1:57:00 I have to check it out.
1:57:04 Those guys are like, it is like a phenomenon to watch them, to watch them work.
1:57:06 It’s, it actually is really, really cool.
1:57:19 I’m coming to the conclusion that by being a audience member in comedy, you, one is experiencing a kind of an empathy with what the comic is experiencing.
1:57:21 And that’s kind of where we’re getting here.
1:57:26 Like, I didn’t plan this out, but, you know, you have to feel it.
1:57:28 It’s got to be real for the comic.
1:57:30 The audience can sense that.
1:57:33 The delight, the silliness that you’re bringing to it.
1:57:38 Like, so much of that is in the audience’s nervous system as they’re getting it.
1:57:43 And it’s clear to me that, like, comedy is the one way.
1:57:49 I mean, you could say this is about music, but like you said, it’s so different because so much of it seems spontaneous.
1:57:50 It does.
1:57:55 And I also feel like, you know, my buddy Kirk Fox, he always, he’s a great comedian.
1:58:06 He always says this thing, like, when he’s on stage, he’s like, I plan on being open, inviting, you know, hoping to leave the stage a better, you know, leave the room a better place.
1:58:12 Like, but this thing about being open, inviting, vulnerable is like, it’s a very real thing.
1:58:14 Like, you, you learn it as you do it.
1:58:19 You start off pretty much operating in fear as a standup, right?
1:58:19 You’re terrified.
1:58:22 You’re terrified that it’s, you’re not going to do well.
1:58:25 The longer you do it, you get more comfortable being up there.
1:58:34 You realize that if you’re vulnerable, if you’re willing to be vulnerable, which takes, like, effort and some, you know, some, like, courage.
1:58:46 The audience senses this on an unspoken level and will go with you more places and will definitely laugh more and will be, like, basically be on your side, right?
1:58:50 If you don’t learn to do that, it’s a different type of performance.
1:58:56 You’re basically, like, going up there with, like, I’m the boss, you know?
1:59:02 Like, if you’re going up there, like, I’m telling you what’s up, they still might laugh at things, but they don’t leave going, like, I care for this guy, right?
1:59:03 I empathize with him.
1:59:11 And if you can learn to be vulnerable on stage, your performances will get exponentially better.
1:59:14 And honestly, you’ll get way crazier laughs.
1:59:16 So interesting.
1:59:20 The reason I love comedy so much is that, A, it lets me forget about the outside world.
1:59:21 Yeah.
1:59:23 While hearing about the outside world.
1:59:26 And I think stage comedy is especially powerful.
1:59:36 And before we sat down and had this conversation, we were talking about how, like, some people think, you know, they’re like, oh, my friend is super funny, way funnier than any of the comics.
1:59:42 But like a professional athlete or a non-professional athlete in this case, can they do it on stage?
1:59:44 Can they do the dance?
1:59:46 That’s the thing.
1:59:57 That is the main question is, because sometimes, like I told you, people will be like, you know, my friend, Greg, is hilarious.
2:00:00 He’s like one of the five, he’s funnier than any of those guys on stage.
2:00:02 And you’re like, I believe you.
2:00:05 And you might hang out with him and be like, this dude is hilarious.
2:00:07 Like, he’s really funny.
2:00:23 The difference is that, can he do, can he be that funny when it’s just him with a microphone in front of people and take who he is in real life and be that on stage?
2:00:25 That’s ultimately the goal for every comedian.
2:00:32 Like, they say that, like, the longer you do stand-up, your goal is to be who you are offstage, onstage, right?
2:00:35 Like, it’s because you, it’s impossible when you start.
2:00:37 When you start, you are funny with your friends.
2:00:43 And then you get on stage and, you know, you kind of freeze and you’re, you’re trying to, like, convey, this is who I am.
2:00:46 Because you’re, what you’re doing is you’re going, this is how I see things.
2:00:48 That’s what your, that’s what your performance is.
2:00:50 Like, this is funny to me.
2:00:51 I’m going to tell you how I see it.
2:00:52 And that’s why it’s funny.
2:01:03 Some guys that are, or women, I’m saying, like, just people that are very, very funny offstage, just, they can’t do that to an audience.
2:01:07 They’re just, they’re funny to be around in life, but they’re not performers.
2:01:14 I mean, there’s an element to it that is, like, can you get up in front of strangers and make them laugh?
2:01:15 They don’t know you.
2:01:20 You have to convey who you are in a moment and make them laugh.
2:01:21 That’s a different thing.
2:01:32 It’s, it’s not unlike a guy that kills it at the YMCA when you play ball and it’s like, okay, well, like, let’s put you in an NBA arena, right?
2:01:34 Like, can you actually play with these guys?
2:01:36 It’s a, it’s a totally different thing.
2:01:37 Look, some can’t.
2:01:43 Everybody who ends up being a good, a good standup was super funny to somebody offstage years ago, right?
2:01:46 They just worked at it and they were able to translate it.
2:01:48 Some people just can’t translate it.
2:01:50 Do you think it helps to really like people?
2:01:57 As a, as a general group, you know, like you’re trying to entertain people.
2:01:59 You’re trying to be entertained by your own entertainment.
2:02:02 Like, do you think you need to like humans?
2:02:04 That’s an interesting question.
2:02:05 I thought I could answer that quicker.
2:02:14 And I started to think about it because I started to think about the fact that like so many comedians I know, like so many go like, God, I hate people so much.
2:02:25 You know, I mean, to put, I’ll frame it a little differently than my theory as to one of the, one of the main reasons why Rogan is the top podcast in the world.
2:02:36 Um, there are several reasons, I believe his work ethic, et cetera, but is because he has lots of different kinds of friends and he can sit down with intellectuals.
2:02:37 He can sit down with comics.
2:02:38 He can sit down with criminals.
2:02:43 He likes the understanding and communication with different kinds of people.
2:02:49 And when you know a little bit about him, like his, his life is filled with these people outside of the studio.
2:02:51 So he’s very comfortable in the presence of like anyone.
2:02:59 You put anyone in front of him and he can be genuinely interested in learning from them and sharing with them in dialogue.
2:03:00 He’s genuinely a curious guy too.
2:03:01 You can’t, you can’t fabricate that.
2:03:02 You can’t manufacture that.
2:03:02 I agree.
2:03:07 Whereas some podcasters, um, they’re not that interested in what other people have to say.
2:03:11 So then they’re not the best interviewers unless it’s someone like directly within their genre of interest.
2:03:12 That’s a good observation.
2:03:17 So as a comic, I guess it depends on the range of topics that you explore in your comedy, perhaps.
2:03:18 Yeah.
2:03:22 I don’t think you can hate humanity and be a good comedian, right?
2:03:26 I think like for sure you have to genuinely love making people laugh.
2:03:33 Uh, if you’re going to be like successful at it, you have to have an obsession with doing that.
2:03:41 Like a literal obsession because you go through these periods on your journey of standup of being like, Hey, I, I don’t have rent money.
2:03:44 I can’t, you know, I can’t pay for anything.
2:03:45 And you have the option.
2:03:48 You want to go get a job and you’re like, no, I’m going to keep doing like you’re obsessed.
2:03:55 You’re obsessed with it so much that you’re giving up things that people would otherwise in your position be doing in life.
2:04:00 Because you just are so in love with writing and performing jokes.
2:04:02 Like, you know, you have an obsession.
2:04:09 I do think you have to, on some level though, like I’m thinking about it, love people.
2:04:18 Cause you’re, you, if you love making people laugh, you enjoy people, you know, you could still be, cause so many comics are so bothered by so many things that people do.
2:04:22 You know, that’s like a very normal, like I’m very much like, I fucking can’t stand these, but you know what I mean?
2:04:24 Like always just like, look at this dipshit.
2:04:26 He’s bringing fucking eggs on the plane.
2:04:28 Like, you know, like you’re just like.
2:04:28 Tuna.
2:04:29 Yeah.
2:04:30 He’s like, you asshole.
2:04:31 You’re like Tupperware on the plane.
2:04:32 Eat that shit at the gate.
2:04:34 So like, you know, we’re always like.
2:04:36 You know what I mean?
2:04:38 You’re always just like complaining.
2:04:40 Complaining is part of being a standup.
2:04:40 You’re funny.
2:04:44 If you, if you never complain about anything, you’re probably not funny.
2:04:45 You know what I mean?
2:04:46 It’s like humanity too much.
2:04:47 Yeah.
2:04:48 I feel like if, here’s the thing.
2:04:51 If you go, I’m good with whatever, you’re not a funny person.
2:04:53 You can, you’re funny.
2:04:59 If you have a, you either love or hate something that can be funny.
2:05:02 You can love this and it could be funny.
2:05:03 You can hate it.
2:05:04 And that’d be funny.
2:05:05 If you’re like, I mean, I’m fine.
2:05:06 That’s not funny.
2:05:07 The me response doesn’t do too much.
2:05:09 It doesn’t do anything in standup.
2:05:09 Yeah.
2:05:16 So, but like, I think somebody that complains about people can be very funny.
2:05:19 You just, you can’t be like all people everywhere.
2:05:20 I can’t stand.
2:05:22 Like that, that would be too extreme.
2:05:29 There are all sorts of theories about how people’s kind of childhood issues or just their
2:05:33 fundamental struggle like feeds their art in incredible ways.
2:05:35 I think I saw an interview with Jim Carrey.
2:05:38 Um, who admittedly, I don’t know much about his comedy.
2:05:42 I said, I was so busy in school when he was kind of through his reign of physical comedy
2:05:43 movies.
2:05:44 I’ve never seen Dumb and Dumber.
2:05:45 I’ve never seen the Matrix.
2:05:46 I’ve never seen Goonies.
2:05:48 Sorry.
2:05:49 I just haven’t.
2:05:50 I love Stand By Me.
2:05:52 I love other movies, but I need to see those movies.
2:05:53 I just, I just, I’m busy.
2:05:54 I’m trying.
2:05:55 I got a lot I want to do.
2:05:55 Last night at dinner.
2:05:59 I just admitted that I had never, I’ve never seen Braveheart and I’ve never seen Gladiator.
2:06:00 Oh, those are amazing.
2:06:00 Yeah.
2:06:01 And then guess what?
2:06:02 I’m not going to see them.
2:06:02 Really?
2:06:03 No.
2:06:03 All right.
2:06:06 I’m just not, I’m not going to see them.
2:06:10 Well, clearly, um, just knowing a little bit about your children and the fact that they’re
2:06:11 related to you.
2:06:14 Um, I’m not going to try and push you to do anything because clearly you guys are stubborn.
2:06:15 Yeah.
2:06:20 Um, so the question I have after seeing this Jim Carrey thing, he said, you know, his,
2:06:26 the reason he did comedy is he wanted, uh, to make people laugh, to forget about their,
2:06:27 their struggles.
2:06:31 He had a chronically ill mother and he used to like throw himself down the stairs as a kid.
2:06:33 Like, I believe him.
2:06:36 So physical comedy became his thing.
2:06:42 How much do you think that, uh, really successful comedians, uh, tap into sort of a fundamental,
2:06:45 um, quest to resolve something?
2:06:49 Um, you know, you’re trying to, whatever it is, fill in the blank.
2:06:50 I don’t want to fill in blanks for you.
2:06:50 Yeah.
2:06:50 Yeah.
2:06:54 No, I think it’s, I mean, I can speak for myself.
2:06:59 I think in my own, in my own case, I was the new kid a lot.
2:06:59 Right.
2:07:06 I was, I was the, I went to one school for first grade, one for second and third, a different
2:07:10 one for fourth, a different one for fifth and sixth, a different one for seventh and
2:07:12 eighth, a different one for ninth.
2:07:14 And I switched again in ninth grade.
2:07:15 So I was a new kid all those times.
2:07:22 And I felt like whenever I arrived and I, you kind of like over time go, like you start
2:07:26 to develop this muscle for like, how am I going to get someone to like me?
2:07:28 And it was like, try to make them laugh.
2:07:28 Right.
2:07:29 Like that became a thing.
2:07:30 It was trying to make them laugh.
2:07:36 I think for me personally, there was also this, just my own insecurities.
2:07:45 I think I felt like, uh, if I got enough people to laugh and if I became successful at making
2:07:50 people laugh and like people acknowledged it, that I would no longer feel these insecurities
2:07:54 and it doesn’t happen, they stick with you.
2:07:54 And thank goodness.
2:07:57 Cause it sounds like it’s the, it’s the fuel for your art.
2:07:59 I think it probably is.
2:08:05 I mean, I just remember thinking like, you know, if I were to be like, had a special and
2:08:10 I got paid well, then I wouldn’t have any self doubts anymore.
2:08:10 Or like, you know what I mean?
2:08:13 Like you think that like, then I’ll be, I’ll feel fulfilled.
2:08:18 And then you get the thing and you’re like, yeah, no, it’s, it’s the same.
2:08:19 It didn’t go.
2:08:21 I mean, you, you start to address it in other ways.
2:08:28 Cause you just realize that the accomplishment or whatever, isn’t the answer to that thing,
2:08:34 but it is a thing that makes you, you think that it will make you feel complete.
2:08:35 Right.
2:08:37 And, um, it’s not the case.
2:08:45 Um, and I think, I do think that like being a new kid a lot is something that I’ll probably
2:08:53 never shake that kind of memory of just it’s, you know, when you’re a kid, your social acceptance
2:08:54 is so dominating.
2:08:56 It’s different as you get older.
2:09:00 I think, you know, you’re not, you’re not like so concerned with like being socially accepted
2:09:04 everywhere and you have a family and you’re just like, this is my, my group.
2:09:11 But as a kid, it’s like, it’s kind of everything, you know, and being new every time, like every
2:09:14 new school year is like, that’s kind of, it’s kind of traumatizing.
2:09:17 So it’s the friction that creates the spark.
2:09:18 I think so.
2:09:21 And so you don’t want to do too much therapy and resolve it.
2:09:22 I mean, I’ve done.
2:09:23 Seriously speaking.
2:09:24 I mean, I’ve done so much.
2:09:24 Yeah.
2:09:25 Same.
2:09:26 It doesn’t ever go away.
2:09:26 I, yeah.
2:09:31 It helps, you know, it helps in that, like you have certain awareness of things now, certain
2:09:32 dots get connected.
2:09:35 I love, I think therapy is phenomenal.
2:09:38 I would not have traded any of the therapy that I had.
2:09:40 I’m a huge advocate for it and I think it’s great.
2:09:42 Yeah.
2:09:44 It doesn’t, you don’t go like same thing.
2:09:45 Like now I’m done.
2:09:46 Everything’s fine.
2:09:48 Like it doesn’t work like that.
2:09:50 But I’m taking Jordan’s competitive nature away.
2:09:51 You wouldn’t want that.
2:09:51 No.
2:09:57 That was the, that was the friction that created the, yeah, the phenomenon that is Jordan.
2:10:00 A lot of comedians, I’m speaking, I spoke of myself, but I think a lot of us fall under
2:10:05 the, like the banner of, to put it simply, please like me.
2:10:07 You know what I mean?
2:10:09 Like you just go, please, please like me.
2:10:10 I want you to like me.
2:10:14 Because that’s what you are when you’re a new kid and that’s what you are when you walk into
2:10:17 a room and, you know, you just go like, I just want people to like me.
2:10:22 And, and a lot of comics might not admit it like that, but it’s definitely the case.
2:10:24 You’re just, you want to be liked.
2:10:27 Sounds pathetic, I think, but it’s true.
2:10:29 No, I don’t think it sounds pathetic.
2:10:31 It sounds incredibly open and honest.
2:10:36 And I think it’s going to be very helpful for people who seek to be comedians and just for
2:10:42 people generally trying to think about how their, their challenge, that inner friction can, can
2:10:43 create amazing things.
2:10:44 Yeah.
2:10:46 And you’ve managed to do it over and over again.
2:10:49 So maybe, um, you almost got me to cry.
2:10:50 We talked about, you almost got me to cry.
2:10:51 I can keep going.
2:10:51 No, no, no.
2:10:52 Keep changing topic.
2:10:53 What’s happening now?
2:10:54 What’s next?
2:11:02 Well, uh, it really, like, I, I know people use this expression, but it really, truly was
2:11:07 a dream come true to make the series like a, a, a, for real.
2:11:14 Um, you know, I made no, uh, secret about it that like the reason I moved to LA was not
2:11:15 to be a standup comedian.
2:11:18 It was to like, it was to like make movies and stuff.
2:11:19 Like, that’s what I wanted to do.
2:11:28 So like getting the opportunity to make the show, it felt like I got paid to make like 15
2:11:29 mini movies for the series.
2:11:35 And I, I mean, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve never had a more fulfilling kind of creative experience,
2:11:40 like from writing to producing it to, you know, being in the edits and, and seeing this thing
2:11:41 come together.
2:11:46 So for me, it’s like, it’s such a thrill to have that experience and to be able to put
2:11:51 that out as like, um, something that I made with, with a bunch of great people.
2:11:56 The difference standup is like, you’re alone and like on a show or a movie you’re with
2:11:58 like a hundred other people.
2:12:02 And it was, it was an awesome experience and I get to do some more of it.
2:12:09 So I get to do like a movie this summer and another show I got, um, asked to, to develop.
2:12:13 So I’m, I mean, I’m like over the moon that I get to do these things.
2:12:17 It really, it’s like, I get to do them 20 years after I thought I would do them, but it’s,
2:12:19 I’m super grateful to have the experience.
2:12:24 So, yeah, I’m most excited that I get to keep pursuing that because I feel like it’s
2:12:26 been in my head this whole time.
2:12:28 And now I actually get to act on it.
2:12:31 Well, listen, I’m so grateful that you came here to share with us about your process.
2:12:34 I mean, we talked about the art and science of comedy and humor.
2:12:35 I hope it was good, man.
2:12:37 I loved it.
2:12:43 It was excellent because you share so openly and you, you know, pull, pull back the curtain
2:12:45 on your process and, and comedy in general.
2:12:50 And, uh, I love what a deep thinker you are and at the same time, how much you just pour
2:12:52 yourself into your craft and enjoy it.
2:12:52 Thanks.
2:12:56 And, um, your reflections are really appreciated and I’m a fan.
2:12:59 Um, I’m also proud to have you as a, a cousin.
2:13:07 I, um, uh, and look, I, I look to you as somebody who really understands how to also balance work
2:13:12 and family and merge the, the insanity of life into a craft.
2:13:17 And, and people really, I can just say, I speak for many, many people, um, very confidently
2:13:18 on this.
2:13:23 Uh, people can really feel your benevolence, even when you’re pointing out like, like the
2:13:28 darkness and the, and the ridiculousness of, of the, the human experience.
2:13:31 So, uh, you make our lives better and I’m so grateful you came out.
2:13:33 Well, that’s, that’s very kind of you.
2:13:36 I’m also, like, I should say, I’m, uh, you know, I’m, I don’t know if enough people tell
2:13:40 you, but I’m also very honestly proud of you for like what you’ve done.
2:13:45 And, and, you know, being, uh, uh, a teacher is one thing, but being able to teach so many
2:13:50 people and share, like, I always feel like the most generous person is the person who doesn’t
2:13:51 hoard information.
2:13:55 It’s a natural human instinct where people have information about something and they just go,
2:13:56 I’ll keep this to myself.
2:14:02 And so the fact that you share, you teach so much, you know, I pick up things for you, from
2:14:03 you all the time.
2:14:07 And I, and so many people do, and then it’s become this thing where, you know, now people
2:14:08 are like, what are you fucking listening to Huberman?
2:14:10 And you’re like, actually, yeah, I am.
2:14:13 Like my, my wife’s like, what did Huberman tell you to fucking take a shit right now?
2:14:14 I’m like, yes, no.
2:14:19 But I mean, it’s, it is great that you, you don’t, you don’t hoard information.
2:14:20 You, you, you share it.
2:14:21 And I think it helps a lot of people.
2:14:22 Thank you.
2:14:23 It’s a labor of love.
2:14:27 And for people that know me as you do, that’s the same on camera and off camera.
2:14:30 So, um, you’re a great role model to me.
2:14:32 I’d love to have you back to continue the conversation.
2:14:33 I would love to.
2:14:34 We’ll do a five hour one next time.
2:14:35 Yeah.
2:14:39 Like, uh, and I’m going to finish the rest of, uh, of bad thoughts.
2:14:39 Please do.
2:14:42 Um, it’s amazing.
2:14:42 Yep.
2:14:43 Thanks so much.
2:14:43 All right, Tom.
2:14:44 Thanks so much.
2:14:47 Thank you for joining me for today’s discussion with Tom Segura.
2:14:50 To find links to Tom’s work, please see the show note captions.
2:14:54 I should point out that bad thoughts is not suitable for children.
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2:15:32 For those of you that haven’t heard, I have a new book coming out.
2:15:33 It’s my very first book.
2:15:37 It’s entitled Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body.
2:15:43 This is a book that I’ve been working on for more than five years and that’s based on more than 30 years of research and experience.
2:15:51 And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation.
2:15:57 And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included.
2:16:00 The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com.
2:16:03 There you can find links to various vendors.
2:16:05 You can pick the one that you like best.
2:16:09 Again, the book is called Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body.
2:16:14 And if you’re not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.
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2:16:27 And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information.
2:16:48 And if you haven’t already subscribed to our neural network newsletter, the neural network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries, as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure.
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2:17:09 Thank you once again for joining me for today’s discussion with Tom Segura.
2:17:13 And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.

0:00:06 I’ve had patients go from stage four cancer to stage zero so I have now seen where the end of
0:00:11 cancer is coming from I’ve seen how the war is going to finish and here’s how Dr. William Lee
0:00:15 is a Harvard trained physician and medical scientist whose work is revolutionizing the
0:00:20 way we understand and fight some of the most devastating diseases facing our world today
0:00:25 I’m going to give you a brand new view of thinking about cancer and this is shocking to some people
0:00:31 to hear but every 24 hours there are 10,000 mistakes that are made in your body each of those
0:00:37 is a microscopic cancer but the reason that we don’t become more sick from all kinds of diseases
0:00:43 including cancer is because our body is hardwired with its own health defense systems but here’s the
0:00:49 problem we are presently seeing the fallout of some of the not so good moves that we made in the 1950s
0:00:54 and 60s and 70s for example people might consume as much as a credit card’s worth of plastic every
0:00:58 single week which is very worrying and I will tell you why but there’s also the foods you eat which
0:01:03 contributed taking your health defenses down but the good news is that you can actually put shields up
0:01:07 as well so this is like our experiment and we’re trying to discover drugs that could be developed as
0:01:12 cancer treatments so we said let’s remove half of them and let’s swap them out with food I was a
0:01:18 skeptic but when I saw these results it made my jaw drop because the holy grail in the pharmaceutical
0:01:22 industry is to find something that kill cancerous stem cells and we don’t have a drug that can do that
0:01:27 turns out mother nature beat us to the punch and there’s more than 200 foods that I’ve studied that
0:01:32 can actually starve cancers and if you had to pick five based on the science you’ve seen what would
0:01:38 those top five be the good news is that it’s food that we can eat every single day so number one
0:01:46 I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio
0:01:51 channels the majority of people that watch this podcast haven’t yet hit the follow button or the
0:01:55 subscribe button wherever you’re listening to this I would like to make a deal with you if you could do
0:02:00 me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make
0:02:04 the show better and better and better and better I can’t tell you how much it helps when you hit that
0:02:08 subscribe button the show gets bigger which means we can expand the production bring in all the guests
0:02:12 you want to see and continue to doing this thing we love if you could do me that small favor and hit
0:02:16 the follow button wherever you’re listening to this that would mean the world to me that is the only
0:02:19 favor I will ever ask you thank you so much for your time
0:02:29 dr william lee if someone has just clicked on this conversation and they’re asking themselves they’re
0:02:34 wondering what they’re going to get out of spending this time with us for the next couple of hours what
0:02:42 would you say directly to them that they will learn gain and how will their life improve I would say that
0:02:48 you’re going to hear about food in a brand new way that you didn’t realize that a decision that you can
0:02:54 make after this listening to this or watching this that you can put into action to your life
0:03:01 immediately could actually help you for the rest of your life it could stave off disease help you feel
0:03:07 stronger even help you with longevity so it’s no single moves that you can make but it’s the
0:03:14 beginning of taking steps that can actually allow you to live the rest of a long enjoyable life and what are the
0:03:20 the key diseases that people are and should be most concerned about today based on that correlation to
0:03:28 the food that we eat yeah if you look at the biggest health crises in the world today in developed
0:03:33 countries um you know you’re really talking about cardiovascular disease being the number one killer
0:03:39 diabetes and all the consequences the devastating consequences that come out listen your blood
0:03:45 sugar is not being very well regulated that’s the definition over time of diabetes but the knock-on
0:03:53 effect of having high uncontrolled sugars is really underlying metabolic chaos there’s a whole litany
0:04:01 of terrible conditions that happens every downstream from that from eye disease to wounds that don’t heal etc etc
0:04:08 cancer is another one dementia is a big bigger and bigger problem as our population ages and a lot of people
0:04:15 don’t recognize this but you know the the saying that inflammation is a root cause of chronic disease
0:04:22 scientifically correct but there are many many inflammatory diseases that are out there that don’t
0:04:28 get enough airplay that really take away the quality of your life as you get older and so i think all of these
0:04:33 things it’s not just about mortality it’s about morbidity it’s not just about living long it’s about living well
0:04:39 and feeling good along the way and where do you think we are as a society especially as westerners as it
0:04:46 relates to our relationship with health and food because when i look at some of the stats around life
0:04:55 expectancy there’s been a bit of a stagnation in i think it was 2020 ish time but then also when you
0:05:01 look at a lot of these chronic diseases whether it’s diabetes whether it’s cancer these things seem to be
0:05:05 on the rise so as a nation it feels like we’ve got more information than ever before but when you look
0:05:10 at the objective numbers yeah for some reason we’re not going in the right direction what’s your
0:05:16 your 30 000 foot view on it 30 000 foot there’s more and more people in the world so once you get
0:05:24 the huge numbers uh the diseases that affect most people are going to magnify so just as a matter of
0:05:29 math we’re going to see more of these chronic diseases um but we’re also going to be seeing two
0:05:37 things that are happening that uh actually oppose each other one thing is that the lifestyle and
0:05:47 dietary harms that have occurred over 20 30 50 years from the industrialization of food from the
0:05:54 industrialization of health care from degradation of the environment those are all things that take time
0:06:02 to manifest and so to some extent we are presently seeing that the fallout of some of the not so good
0:06:08 moves that we made in the 1950s and 60s and 70s and so on and so forth so decades later we’re beginning
0:06:16 to see the consequences devastation of things that happened decades ago that’s one side of elevating
0:06:22 increasing the incidence and prevalence of of health conditions bad health conditions there’s another
0:06:29 side that is countervailing and the other side which is the side i that’s the team i play on is it really
0:06:36 exciting because one thing that’s different is that we have now tremendous scientific power to get in
0:06:42 there and probe diseases and also indeed probe health which is something we’re not doing often enough
0:06:51 and in so doing we’re actually able to find solutions to the problems that that counter some of those harms so
0:06:57 we’re beginning to discover now how do we actually prevent diabetes how do we prevent cardiovascular disease
0:07:05 can we reverse heart disease and even conditions that seemed like no win situations and i like to talk about this is that
0:07:13 in my career i never thought as a physician i would actually see the cure to cancer the end of cancer
0:07:20 but actually i tell you i have now seen where the end of cancer is coming from i’ve seen how the war is going to finish
0:07:26 because i’ve had well over a dozen patients and there are hundreds of people like this that are
0:07:32 starting to form that can go from stage four cancer that’s game over cancer to stage zero we can do this
0:07:39 and it not for everybody yet but we’re beginning to see where the light at the end of the tunnel is and
0:07:44 it involves your immune system and some of the remarkable scientific breakthroughs are teaching us
0:07:51 that our body heals itself against diseases as serious as cancer in ways that the pharmaceutical
0:07:59 industry can’t by itself do but it really relies on the body so when you talk about food as medicine or
0:08:05 medicine as medicine none of them are as powerful as what the body is hardwired to do by itself
0:08:10 when i think about something like cancer it’s slightly terrifying because it feels like a game of roulette
0:08:18 it feels like the the people that get cancer it’s completely random and that our outcomes are also
0:08:22 a game of roulette and this is someone that knows very little about cancer i hear someone that i thought
0:08:27 was very very healthy get cancer and then their outcomes whether they they beat it or not also seem
0:08:34 to be largely down to chance sometimes that’s how it seems what do you think of that view yeah i’m
0:08:42 going to give you a brand new view of thinking about cancer and that is that we are all forming cancer
0:08:47 in our bodies all the time from the time we were kids you don’t have clinical cancer you haven’t gone to
0:08:53 the doctor to get a diagnosis still start forming cancers and let me tell you why cancers are like
0:09:01 pimples in our body all right and this is shocking to some people to hear but our the human body is made up of
0:09:09 about 40 trillion cells that’s more cells in our body than stars in a clear sky all right and these
0:09:17 cells have to divide uh to be able to reproduce themselves uh copy and paste every cell has its own
0:09:24 genetic material called dna it’s our instructions for how our cells are work so you get a copy and paste
0:09:32 your dna all right now copying and pasting is a tricky thing to do really well so if i gave you
0:09:38 a sentence to write steven and i said copy it 10 times on a word document you’ll do it perfectly
0:09:45 if i get told you to copy it a thousand times you’re going to make a few mistakes good thing that we have
0:09:52 spell check to fix it to catch it and fix it but if i asked you to copy a single sentence
0:09:58 40 trillion times you’re going to make so many mistakes that your spell check isn’t even going to
0:10:03 be able to catch all of it okay and that’s what’s happening in our body every single day as we are
0:10:08 replicating ourselves we’re going to make mistakes and whenever there’s a mistake that’s being made
0:10:15 that isn’t caught and fixed that’s a mutation and so we have mutations that are forming in our body
0:10:21 just as a matter just as an outcome of being alive and doing our thing and we’re not sick
0:10:28 from those mutations but every mutation is the beginning of a microscopic cancer take a guess
0:10:35 of how many mistakes in dna of copying and pasting your own body uh are made every 24 hours take a
0:10:41 guess this has been calculated randomly well there’s so many cells in my body so
0:10:49 it’s going to be a big number a million okay every day every 24 hours there are 10 000 mistakes
0:10:57 that are made in your body that your body doesn’t catch that keep on that propagate in the document of
0:11:04 our body as it goes on 10 10 000 each of those is a microscopic cancer a microscopic cancer is just
0:11:10 that it’s microscopic it’s too small to be seen with the naked eye but it’s abnormal and that thing could
0:11:16 turn turn turn into a big tumor that could eventually kill you so why don’t we die from cancer all the
0:11:21 time now this is actually something that i see as a physician i have a patient diagnosed with cancer
0:11:28 they always ask me dr lee why me why did i get breast cancer colon cancer pancreatic cancer brain tumor
0:11:36 a very very uh natural question and i do my best to try to provide an empathic answer to that question
0:11:42 but as a researcher i have a more interesting question given the number of mutations that occur
0:11:48 in our body every single day why don’t we get cancer more often why don’t we all get cancer as kids you
0:11:55 know cancer can happen in children but not as often as we have mutations and it turns out this was the great
0:12:05 the reason that we don’t become more sick from all kinds of diseases including cancer is because our
0:12:12 body is hardwired with its own health defense systems so that we’ve got these swashbuckling defenses
0:12:19 that are firing on all cylinders all day long from the from the moment we’re born until our very last breath
0:12:24 these systems that are inside our body defend our health including the microscopic cancers
0:12:32 spots them takes them out kind of like a police cruiser patrolling a quiet neighborhood sees a drug
0:12:38 dealer on the corner pops them in the back of the police vehicle and takes them away cleaning up the
0:12:44 neighborhood that’s how our body naturally cleans up these microscopic cancers and so when you talk about
0:12:53 cancer as a scary disease you’re thinking about the person whose body has failed to detect and eliminate
0:12:58 the microscopic cancers and it’s become large enough to actually become a threat now here’s a question for
0:13:04 you so we tell women to actually do a self breast exam when they’re taking a shower you know look for
0:13:09 lumps or bumps and you know if you find one you know certainly go to your doctor immediately for an exam
0:13:17 the smallest cancer that you could feel with a trained person can feel with their with their hands
0:13:21 in the breast is one centimeter in diameter
0:13:29 a one centimeter breast cancer already has one billion cancer cells that have already multiplied that
0:13:33 microscopic cancer multiplied a billion times that’s the smallest one you can feel
0:13:41 now immune systems not taking them out all right so you need a better immune system if you want a shot at
0:13:48 this not just chemo or hormonal therapy and that’s where some of these incredible advances are taking place
0:13:54 but there’s another one in order to feed a billion cancer cells you need blood vessels to feed them so
0:14:01 the cancers as they get bigger they hijack our own circulation to feed themselves okay it’s kind of like
0:14:06 terrorists kicking in the cockpit door to take over the controls of the plane they want to actually get
0:14:11 your blood vessels to feed themselves now normally the body knows how to control those blood vessels
0:14:17 it’s called angiogenesis angio blood blood vessels genesis how the body grows and controls them that’s
0:14:23 my area of research so naturally our body knows how to prevent blood vessels from feeding cancers
0:14:30 and yet knows how to direct blood vessels to feed healthy tissues so guess what a one centimeter tumor
0:14:38 with one billion cancer cells is fed by 100 million blood vessels coursing into the tumor to feed them
0:14:44 and we’ve studied this in a laboratory the moment that a single blood vessel touches a tumor tiny microscopic
0:14:53 tumor it will grow 16 000 times in size in just two weeks wow all right so i’ve told you some scary
0:14:57 statistics but now let me kind of give you the where the breakthroughs are coming through right
0:15:02 so with this kind of knowledge what do we what can we do with cancer not just breast cancers but
0:15:09 in general number one we know that if you boost your immune system with foods with exercise diet
0:15:15 lifestyle you’re going to actually make your immune defenses a lot stronger to patrol your body
0:15:22 to wipe out those microscopic cancers that’s why healthy diet lifestyle lowers the risk of cancer
0:15:28 that’s why eating the right foods that boost your immunity can substantially lower your risk of cancer
0:15:37 as well we also know that you can eat foods that support prompt up fortify your body’s natural ability to
0:15:42 to control blood vessels keep those blood vessels where they’re supposed to be and get rid of those
0:15:48 blood vessels where you don’t want them to be which is kicking in the cockpit to take over your
0:15:53 circulation to feed cancers so if you eat foods like that are anti-antrogenic foods that got unstable you’ve
0:16:01 got coffee and tea both of those contain natural substances that cut off the blood supply and starve
0:16:07 cancers that’s a good thing so that’s why we know our what we do with our diet can actually help to
0:16:13 lower the risk of cancer as well i’m assuming the opposite also applies i i could eat foods i can drink
0:16:21 things that cause my body to malfunction i makes the blood vessels unregulated makes and starts to feed
0:16:26 the cancer right yeah absolutely so let’s talk let’s talk a little bit about that so okay so i told you the
0:16:31 the body’s hardwired with these defenses shields up right that’s what we want to do because shields
0:16:36 are already normally up you want to raise them higher but what about and this is a brilliant
0:16:40 question you’re asking a very probing question what are the things that take your shields down
0:16:48 right what are the things that turn off the smoke alarm in your house that unlock the doors can i take
0:16:58 a good guess is it this okay now i know the answer that you’re setting this conversation up for which is
0:17:07 a burger with meat uh is that actually uh disease causing and i would i would tell you that yes and no
0:17:16 a burger is something that many people enjoy eating and i would say eating meat eating burgers even eating
0:17:23 ultra processed foods once in a while is not going to harm you if your health defenses are naturally
0:17:34 strong but if you make it a habit a regular habit of eating this at the expense of eating healthier foods
0:17:44 more plant-based foods less processed foods okay um you are actually going to tip the uh your odds
0:17:50 where the diseases are more likely to get you but that what that means is that over eating fast foods
0:17:57 like burgers will actually contribute to taking your uh health defenses down shields down so what are
0:18:03 those things then that bring the shield down you were saying okay excess sodium too much salt which can
0:18:09 be present in a lot of restaurant foods people eat out a lot go to restaurants all the time you ever
0:18:13 you ever go to the back of the kitchen or restaurant to see how they’re salting seizing their food
0:18:19 patrons love salty food it makes food taste really great there’s a you know our brains uh respond very
0:18:27 well to salty food that high sodium levels actually speeds up accelerates our cellular aging so we actually
0:18:34 age faster but it also um is a huge wear and tear on our health defenses specifically our circulation
0:18:41 our our blood vessels our androgenesis system is taken down by excess salt okay i’ve got a question
0:18:47 here obviously there’s a big movement at the moment around hydration and electrolytes and these
0:18:52 electrolytes have magnesium potassium they have sodium in them yeah so a lot of people are now taking
0:19:00 electrolytes to hydrate themselves is there a risk here so the great news is that the healthy body
0:19:10 has got its own titration system for electrolytes if you drink a electrolyte fortified beverage you get
0:19:14 your body’s going to take everything it needs and it’s going to pee out the rest you’re going to
0:19:22 eliminate through your urine all right however sodium uh is one of those electrolytes is present like
0:19:25 you’re not drinking electrolyte fluid all day long but sodium you’re eating it in almost every food that
0:19:31 you actually have except perhaps dessert but maybe even then and so this is one of the things that we
0:19:36 realize is sodium is a high risk for hypertension high blood pressure inflammation of the lining of
0:19:41 your circulation and that that sets up for a lot of badness downstream when it comes to your health and
0:19:46 it takes down your circulation um health defenses that we talked about high blood sugar can also do the
0:19:53 same thing so if you’re eating an excess of added sugar we all have heard by now glucose spikes and
0:19:59 glucose crashes i don’t actually use those words by the way i don’t like to actually cast our body’s
0:20:07 metabolism in terms of spikes and crashes i think those are fear words that get attention uh they they do
0:20:14 make you pay attention to it but in fact really our the healthy body sort of has you know smooth
0:20:20 ups and smooth downs they’re gentle slopes up and down of our blood sugar and that’s completely fine
0:20:26 all right and and it should be like that however if you have an uphill climb of your blood glucose and
0:20:34 it continues to stay up that can actually happen if you’re eating too much added sugar okay added sugar
0:20:42 ultra processed foods what happens is that your blood sugars your intake of the sugar glucose rises up up
0:20:47 up up up up and now your body has your metabolism chase that blood sugar down and it’s got to work
0:20:52 harder and make more insulin and eventually you just wear out that system and then you have a high blood
0:21:00 blood glucose and an insensitive metabolism and that’s the beginning of sort of the the dominoes
0:21:06 starting to fall apart in your body and so sugar high blood sugar added sugar is a problem you get it from
0:21:12 fruit not a problem okay no one’s going to be eating a crazy amount of fruit this is why extremes aren’t
0:21:18 good diversity switch it out keep it interesting for yourself this is what our human nature uh wants
0:21:25 anyway uh it’s how we’re hardwired you’ll you’ll actually be fine so salt sugar those are two offenders
0:21:30 okay um alcohol is another one that actually can take down your health defenses over time
0:21:36 you know people say well what about red wine isn’t red wine healthy what i would say is that actually
0:21:43 the fermented products the or the bioactives that come out of red grapes from the skin of red grapes
0:21:50 that’s found in red wine those there can be some healthful properties of the resveratrol and other
0:21:55 polyphenols that come out of uh that are in wine but it’s never the alcohol it’s not the alcohol in the
0:22:01 beer the wine the whiskey nope none of that is the alcohol is a universal toxin toxic to your brain
0:22:07 toxic to your liver toxic to your heart can’t get away from that your body will recover shields up
0:22:12 little it can take a ding it’s like a you know like a drink is sort of like a driving behind a truck
0:22:18 and it flings a little pebble right into your windshield you might get a little spider in the
0:22:23 windshield okay don’t worry it’ll repair itself you’ll fix yourself you’ll bounce back it’s not going to break
0:22:28 your windshield but if you keep on drinking you’re actually going to smash your windshield and that’s
0:22:34 why alcoholism is so devastating to the health but you know regular a small amount of alcohol so
0:22:42 alcohol itself is is a toxin do you drink uh i i rarely drink and when i drink it’s in moderation
0:22:49 and i was thinking about stress as well does that bring down there so besides the foods you eat other
0:22:54 things that can compromise your health defenses uh and by the way there are five health defenses we
0:22:59 talked about blood vessels we talk about immunity but there’s three other ones uh that are core to
0:23:04 functioning in the healthiest way possible but you want to if you have longevity you need all five of your
0:23:10 health defenses and more to be working in your favor but stress what does stress do lowers your immune
0:23:16 system shields down all right those microscopic cancers whoa that’s why stressful people are
0:23:23 more vulnerable to develop diseases like cancer all right stress also causes your blood pressure to go
0:23:29 up and causes neurotransmitters hormones to be released from your brain and your kidneys your adrenal glands
0:23:37 that actually wear down your circulation now your androgenesis system is also uh not functioning uh
0:23:42 as well to protect yourself and keep good blood flow going where it needs to go now your circulation is
0:23:48 actually down um so again stress also can actually damage the dna we talked about naturally copying
0:23:53 pasting and having errors add some stress to it now it’s kind of like um you’re trying to copy that
0:23:57 sentence i was telling you perfectly now i’m going to come and just smash your fingers down every now
0:24:02 and then and let’s see if you actually make a mistake you will all right stress will actually
0:24:08 do that it’s devastating to have so much stress continuously listen by the way i want to be really
0:24:14 clear to anybody listening or watching this a little stress is actually good for you you know like just
0:24:19 being coddled all day long and living in a happy bubble that doesn’t that’s not that’s not good for
0:24:26 our health either we kind of get lackadaisical we let our guard down little stress i mean anybody who’s
0:24:32 hard-working you know successful knows that you know it’s not the no pain no gain it’s that the that the
0:24:38 grit that goes along with us which gives a little stress keeps us sharp you know uh which is a which
0:24:44 is a good thing you want to be on you want to be on so a little stress is good but when that stress
0:24:50 is unabated it literally sinks your health defenses it is just taking those shields down yeah i’ve noticed
0:24:55 that with myself i’ve spent the last 10 years running businesses a little bit more than 10 years now but
0:25:01 probably like the last 13 years running businesses and the only times when i really get sick where i’m
0:25:12 like out for a week and i really really feel it is one week after two weeks of stress so when i say two
0:25:17 weeks of stress what i mean there is when something happens in my life business where that it’s kind of
0:25:22 chronic and it’s enduring stress i can deal with having a stressful day i can deal with having two
0:25:27 stressful days in a row but when i’ve had like two weeks of an enduring issue like an enduring angst
0:25:34 or a problem almost perfectly predictably a week later i’m sick and i’m extremely rarely sick because
0:25:39 i think i sleep really well like i think i eat really clean and so it’s taught me something about
0:25:43 if i zoom out on that and see what’s going on in my body well eventually like my body’s kind of my immune
0:25:49 system is running out of energy yeah more than in your immune system so when you’re super stressed it
0:25:55 also interferes with your ability to sleep well yeah when you’re sleeping well you know sleeping is
0:26:00 something that i was taught when i was a kid when you’re sleeping you’re resting and when you’re
0:26:05 resting you’re not active right well that’s just our physical self it turns out when we’re sleeping
0:26:10 even though our muscles may not be moving like we are during the day in fact a lot of other systems
0:26:17 including our health defenses are being repaired renewed regenerated rebooted while we’re sleeping
0:26:23 so in those ideally eight hours seven to nine hours eight’s the sweet number sweet number you know
0:26:30 our brain is cleansing itself detoxifying itself releasing you know about the glymphatic system in the brain
0:26:37 not as well as you do okay well there’s a there’s a um sewer system of the grain in our brains that’s
0:26:44 called the glymphatic system and it’s shut tightly during the daytime when we’re using our brain doing
0:26:52 our work uh whatever we’re doing and during the day we accumulate a lot of uh toxins in inside our brain
0:26:56 during the day it’s just a matter of functioning all right and what happens is that those toxins
0:27:03 accumulate which is that you know at the end of a really really tough hard day you got if not a headache
0:27:09 you’ve got your you feel like your brain is it’s full it’s the cup runneth over right all right so when
0:27:16 you go to sleep guess what this sewer system it’s like the sewers appear underneath paris the grates open up
0:27:23 suddenly and it drains those toxins out while you’re sleeping and only when you get good sleep so when you’re
0:27:28 stressed and you’re not getting good sleep you start to accumulate these toxins that are never quite
0:27:33 cleaned up and your brain is not that cleaned up when your brain’s not cleaned up you’re feeling foggy
0:27:39 so think about uh you know when you’re in college you pull an all-nighter or go to a party or whatever and
0:27:43 you’re and you’re staying up all night you’re never quite the same it takes a while for your brain
0:27:48 to clean up itself and when your brain is foggy you tend to not make as good decisions
0:27:53 i’m too tired to work out i’m too tired i don’t care what i eat i’m just hungry i’m gonna eat anything
0:27:59 you start to make bad decisions when it comes to diet and lifestyle you see so it’s it the stress
0:28:04 can cascade on your health like that is there a certain stage of sleep where the glymphatic
0:28:10 system kicks in yeah it’s during like the deep REM sleep okay that dreaming sleep okay and that
0:28:15 usually comes later in the night as well correct correct and in more quality quantity later in the
0:28:20 night so you need to really be getting a lot of sleep now the other thing about deep sleep is while
0:28:27 you’re sleeping really deeply your metabolism is also burning down fat so you think that you’re not
0:28:32 working out during the night you’re right you’re not actually exercising but in fact your metabolism is
0:28:38 burning fat because while you’re sleeping and your insulin levels don’t need to be high because you’re
0:28:45 not eating insulin levels go down your metabolism shifts gears i i sort of give people the analogy
0:28:54 it’s like your your body is a race car sports car like a ferrari during the day you are in gear to drive
0:29:01 accumulate speed and in your your revenue engines at night you shift gears where you’re actually
0:29:07 burning down fat you don’t need to accumulate more fuel now you’re burning down the fuel so when
0:29:12 you’re sleeping you’re actually burning away fat but when you don’t sleep well well you don’t sleep
0:29:19 long enough you’re not burning down that fuel that fuel accumulates day or two of not good no sleep
0:29:25 that’s that’s okay think about flying overseas getting some jet lag you got to catch up once you get
0:29:29 catch up you feel better all right but think about this like day in and day out chronically stressed people
0:29:35 who are never getting good sleep add a little booze alcohol to the to the equation you can kind of see
0:29:38 the problems they’re going to build up your brain is going to be foggy your metabolism is going to be
0:29:44 out of whack you’re not burning as much fat from the calories you ate during the day now inflammation
0:29:51 starts to rise in your body and that inflammation really takes down your health defenses and now you’re
0:29:59 much more vulnerable so in your own example of where chronic stress leads to poor sleep and then
0:30:05 you get sick no surprise if we go back up the thread there we were talking about the sort of individual
0:30:09 perspective on cancer and i was looking at some stats here and it says that the number one google search
0:30:13 related to cancer is breast cancer one in two people will develop some form of cancer during their
0:30:19 lifetime that’s according to the nhs cancer is the second highest leading cause of death worldwide and by 2040
0:30:23 there will be 28 million new cases of cancer each year worldwide but one of the most shocking things
0:30:32 that i saw was that globally early onset cancer incidence has risen by about 80 percent by 1990
0:30:36 and 2019 and there was an article which i’d sent to my team a couple of weeks ago
0:30:43 it’s called the worrying puzzle behind the rise of early onset cancer and it says that there are rising
0:30:48 cases of breast collateral and other cancers and people in their 20s 30s and 40s and it posits
0:30:55 the question what is going on over the last 10 years rates of colorectal cancer among 25 to 49
0:31:01 year olds has increased in 24 different countries including the uk us france australia canada norway
0:31:12 and argentina i mean what is going on yeah that’s a big question so are we seeing the results of more
0:31:19 harms in our environment that we’re being exposed to that are more toxic and leading to earlier
0:31:26 incidents of clinical cancer they’re talking about clinical diagnosed cancer not the invisible microscopic
0:31:31 ones that are forming all the time um it’s yes it’s very worrying are we be exposing ourselves
0:31:38 to something that is more commonly encountered today than before number one number two
0:31:46 are our defenses being taken down by forces that we didn’t appreciate are compromising it’s most
0:31:52 likely both it’s most likely uh i mean the human makeup hasn’t changed and so it’s got to be the fact
0:31:58 a combination that we’re being exposed to more harmful things and though some of those harmful
0:32:02 things are actually that you know provoking more cancers but and we’re also being exposed
0:32:08 to things that take down our health defenses so the balance is being tipped against us and
0:32:13 it’s true i can tell you that when i went to medical school i mean colorectal cancer was something that
0:32:22 you rarely saw in people even in their 50s it was for much older uh people uh now to see i mean there’s
0:32:28 even teenagers that have actually developed colorectal cancer which was unfathomable so i will tell you
0:32:32 one thing that’s actually arisen in terms of like what are some of the clues of these things that could be
0:32:37 happening right so we are talking about climate change and all the things that are happening in
0:32:43 our environment that’s a that’s almost too big uh a conversation to have to answer a question like
0:32:51 this but we i think we cannot afford to ignore the fact that the environment the climate that we live in
0:32:58 has changed but there are other things that we’re beginning to unearth that we didn’t realize until just
0:33:04 within the last few years and one of them is the is how many inflammatory microplastics we are ingesting
0:33:16 when i was growing up uh my mom very uh well-intentioned would store foods in plastic leftovers uh
0:33:22 and we’d buy foods that came in plastic packages right we didn’t think think second have a second thought
0:33:28 about it a plastic cup styrofoam cup go to a picnic you’re eating off of a plastic plate right i mean
0:33:35 these are all common uh experiences that we all have uh in the modern developed world well what
0:33:42 have i told you that we now realize that the plastic touching food can shed the plastic itself as
0:33:49 micro particles into the food and then we eat the food and okay we’ve known this for maybe more than
0:33:55 a decade maybe there’s a little plastic particles uh that come off but you know hey there’s no harm
0:34:00 right we haven’t been able to discover it i used to say that now just within the last few years we’re
0:34:09 beginning to pinpoint that number one it does plastics can actually embed themselves in our body we even
0:34:17 know where we also know that these plastics uh are associated with inflammation that is a big red flag
0:34:24 the klaxon alarm should start going off and third is that the volume of plastics that we’re consuming
0:34:31 is crazy there was a study that came out recently that showed that in normal autopsies of people that
0:34:38 didn’t die of a brain problem that when they were doing the autopsies and looking for plastic
0:34:43 that we could find them and the amount of plastic that was found in the average human brain
0:34:51 is about the amount you’d find in a typical plastic picnic spoon just distributed throughout the brain
0:34:56 this is like a normal it’s a person who’s died of something else wow does that mean that you know like
0:35:01 you and i are actually you got a plastic spoon worth of plastic in our brain there’s been some people
0:35:06 that calculated and this has been the actual calculator math has been challenged but there
0:35:10 was an estimate that you know some people might consume as much as a credit card’s worth of plastic
0:35:14 every single week in their food if they’re not careful about it and let me just tell you where
0:35:19 we’re finding microplastics and you know i want to get to the point where we’re talking about the healthy
0:35:25 foods that can actually turn the ship around how do we turn the battleship of of unhealth back to health
0:35:29 so we’re back on the course that everybody wants to go to we want to go to that north
0:35:34 how do we find our north star for health so i do want to get to that but let me just say something
0:35:38 about microplastics we’ve now found microplastics in the brain as i mentioned to you
0:35:46 we found it in a bloodstream a group in italy actually looking at men who had narrowing of
0:35:51 the carotid artery that’s the blood vessel feeding the brain from that comes from the heart
0:35:56 right to the brain the carotid artery through the neck through the neck they found that the narrowing
0:36:02 that can occur in some men can accumulate plastic they can actually find plastic particles there’s
0:36:07 photographs of the chunks of plastic the particles fragments of plastic in there and they followed
0:36:14 them over a period of time those men who had plastic embedded in their blood vessel lining had a four-fold
0:36:20 increase in the chances of having a fatal heart attack or a stroke late years later four hundred percent
0:36:26 four four fourfold yeah okay now that’s that’s not kidding right so now you’re now we’re beginning to
0:36:32 take notice of this but we’re also finding microplastics in breast milk we’re finding
0:36:37 microplastics in testicles we’re finding microplastics in human semen
0:36:44 how’s it get there and urologists who are doing surgery on the penis are finding that in
0:36:50 in the human flesh when you look into the microscope we never used to look for this now we’re looking for
0:36:58 it that there’s even microplastics in the flesh of the penis okay so if anybody listening isn’t taking
0:37:04 notice about microplastics now it’s time to start thinking about this so one of the questions is and
0:37:10 i’m not saying that the rise in rate of cancers that we’re seeing is due to microplastics what i may
0:37:17 what i am saying is that we’re beginning to wake up to the fact so let’s close off on microplastics what
0:37:23 are the the easy wins in our lives do you think when you think about microplastics is it just removing
0:37:28 anything plastic that i eat from or are there some sort of easy cheap wins is it my shampoo is it
0:37:35 my frying pan is it a container yeah so i always tell people that the easiest way to lower your exposure to
0:37:41 microplastics is to throw out your plastic cups your plastic plates and your plastic silverware
0:37:49 okay and get ceramic or glass uh that’s the best way to actually avoid those and also when you’re
0:37:56 buying food try to avoid food that comes clearly packaged in plastic all right now i do want to point
0:38:02 out one thing because right here on this table we are looking at a tray full of beverages and i can
0:38:09 already identify the matcha and this looks like a cup of coffee and we’ve got english breakfast
0:38:14 tea i’ve done a lot of research on tea all right but i’m noticing something that green tea which is
0:38:21 universally healthy the polyphenols in green tea lower the risk of inflammation they actually improve
0:38:27 your metabolism lower your risk of cancer their heart healthy before you take that sip though let me tell
0:38:34 you i see a tea bag in there okay and there’s different ways of brewing your tea it turns out
0:38:39 research from the university of montreal have now shown that um tea bags can shed microplastics
0:38:47 so you can have a billion particles of microplastic shed from a single tea bag okay all right so i just
0:38:53 changed your mind right so look this is the power of awareness and understanding i probably should have
0:38:58 stopped you yeah what it was you were like why didn’t you save my life no you let me drink it first but
0:39:05 i’ve i just as you were doing it i was like uh all right but look there’s another there’s another one there
0:39:10 that’s got uh lemon ginger tea this is like an herbal tea that’s fine listen um i i would also tell
0:39:17 you with flavored teas just be cautious like always check anything that’s been machined to be a little
0:39:21 bit more than nature tea bags are supposed to be paper right well in order to prevent the paper from
0:39:27 ripping the the manufacturers of the tea bags spray it with a small amount of plastic to have it hang
0:39:31 together better and that’s the plastic that comes off but what about the lemon and ginger in this lemon
0:39:38 ginger tea that that sounds so appealing and calming right and and something that most people would find
0:39:43 nice as an herbal tea well listen you’re you’re relying on a factory to actually put that lemon
0:39:49 flavor ginger ginger flavor is it real lemon or is it real ginger always look at the ingredient label
0:39:55 to know what’s in there or just buy your own tea and squeeze your own lemon and and add your own piece
0:40:03 of ginger these are ways to actually kind of avoid the uh potential exposures to toxins that come from
0:40:09 ultra processed food so all this conversation about you know avoid ultra ultra processed foods and watch
0:40:14 out for all those harmful things you know it’s actually quite easy to dodge them if you just have
0:40:18 in your mindset that you’re just going to make it yourself and it’s uh absolutely easy now i will tell
0:40:24 you in something interesting about english breakfast tea we did research at the androgenesis foundation
0:40:29 the non-profit i i looked at to look at um different types of teas different types of green tea
0:40:38 japanese tea chinese jasmine tea uh english tea and we were always assuming again this is the power of
0:40:42 food as medicine research we were always assuming that the green tea is going to be the best i’d
0:40:49 always heard that japanese green tea is going to be like the ultra best and what we found was that english
0:40:54 tea specifically earl grey tea actually was the most potent when it actually supported your blood
0:41:00 vessels your body’s defense system for angiogenesis to keep your circulation healthy wow what a surprise
0:41:07 that is and this spoke to me about the fact that we can’t make assumptions we need to look at facts we need
0:41:14 to look at data and so i’m a big fan of earl grey now now what could what what might make earl grey give
0:41:20 earl grey its superpower well this is where knowing a little bit about what you’re eating is actually
0:41:28 useful because earl grey is a fermented uh it’s a black tea it’s got bergamot in it and bergamot is a kind
0:41:35 of a citrus so maybe it’s combining those uh ingredients that actually provides the superpower but i do see
0:41:44 matcha on this uh uh tray i want to tell you about matcha because it is a matcha is truly a super
0:41:49 enriched polyphenol enriched tea a lot of people don’t realize that there’s no tea bag in it so don’t
0:41:58 worry so a lot of people think about matcha uh as just another green tea but it’s not another green tea
0:42:03 it is made with green tea leaves the same kind of green tea leaves but uh as you would find in any
0:42:11 green tea however it’s what’s the composition of matcha matcha is green tea that is before it’s
0:42:18 ready for harvest is grown under a shade that changes its chemical structure natural chemical structure a
0:42:23 little bit so it’s got a lot of potency to it and what happens with matcha is they take the tea leaf
0:42:30 they take out the stem of the green of the of the green tea leaf and they ground up the actual leaf
0:42:36 into a powder now what’s in that green tea leaf you’ve got not just some of the polyphenols that
0:42:43 might steep out in the cup whether you’re using a tea bag or loose leaf tea you’re getting all the
0:42:50 polyphenols suspended in that so now you get 100 polyphenol okay in matcha so go ahead you’re go ahead
0:42:57 do it okay that one’s good all right okay for matcha and because you’re getting the tea leaf
0:43:02 ground to it you’re also getting your dietary fiber that dietary fiber is good for your gut health your
0:43:09 microbiome good for uh your metabolism good for lowering inflammation and the polyphenols found in
0:43:18 green tea have also been uh matcha matcha tea have also been found in the lab to kill breast cancer
0:43:24 stem cells what’s a breast cancer stem cell what’s a stem cell cancer stem cell well look stem cells are
0:43:32 these renewable cells all right and um cancers contain stem cells that help the cancers come back
0:43:36 right if you get cancer you get it treated one the one thing you don’t want it to do is to come back
0:43:43 so um and by the way other foods can also do kill cancer stem cells purple potatoes uh that you might
0:43:49 might have seen in the market they’re kind of purpley looking on the outside slice it open dark purple on
0:43:55 the inside all right turns out that those purple potatoes have something called anthocyanins purple
0:44:01 potatoes have been studied in a lab okay at penn state university and been shown to kill colon cancer
0:44:08 stem cells which contribute to the colon cancer coming back so full disclaimer i am i made a very very big
0:44:16 investment uh a seven-figure investment into a matcha company a couple years ago and if you look at the
0:44:20 search trend data on the subject of matcha i don’t know if you’ve seen this but that’s
0:44:26 i’ll throw it up on the screen for anyone that’s watching on video but you can see how it’s just come
0:44:32 out of nowhere it seems it’s exploded and when you say that matcha cells have an impact on breast cancer
0:44:38 cells what does that mean in reality does it because obviously the the conclusion one might
0:44:43 jump to is that if you drink matcha you’re lowering your risk of breast cancer but that’s not necessarily
0:44:49 what you’re saying what i’m at what i am saying is that drinking green tea in its most healthful form
0:44:56 okay um raises your body’s health defense systems yeah and by having better health defense systems better
0:45:02 immunity better control over your blood vessels better control over your dna and those mutations
0:45:07 and if you can actually kill some of those stem cells cancer stem cells that’s going to be in your
0:45:15 favor as well that is overall going to actually lower your risk of cancer and so i think that and by the way the
0:45:21 other thing that green tea and matcha can actually do is improve your metabolism it’s really pretty much
0:45:30 all good my my great uncle by the way lived to 104 years old vital intact uh independent he told me that
0:45:38 he attributed his longevity and his vitality to the fact that he lived at the base of a mountain that
0:45:46 grew tea that every morning he got up and he walked up he walked up stone steps a stone path to a tea garden
0:45:52 and he had freshly picked tea it’s all organically grown and everything and he and he drank tea all
0:45:57 day long he probably had 10 cups of green tea a day and this has been his whole life he sat with his uh
0:46:05 uh uh close friends who are also very vibrant and and elderly um social connection all right watch the
0:46:12 sunrise it’s very calming do you drink it absolutely um i’ve got just going up the the thread again a
0:46:18 little bit you mentioned the word colorectal hmm where is the colorectal all right so we have a
0:46:24 little uh model here because i’m asking this because i’m wondering why that type of cancer is increasing so
0:46:34 is there is there a particular reason why well okay so let’s do a quick uh medical school uh course crash course
0:46:43 for podcasters um the the gut we talk about gut health most people think of the gut as sort of lower
0:46:49 down in your belly or maybe even just your stomach but the gut actually starts in your mouth and it runs
0:46:55 down down down about 40 feet worth of stuff organs uh your esophagus your stomach your small intestines
0:47:01 your large intestines by the way these squigglies are your small intestines all right this blue is your
0:47:07 large intestines this is like a it’s shaped like a horseshoe it’s big thick uh tube that that’s kind
0:47:14 of uh framing your small intestines and then it goes down the poop chute direct on the anus that’s the
0:47:24 end of your gut all right so the colon is really the large uh framing thick part of the gut it’s near the
0:47:30 very end all right so all this squiggly small intestines winds up here uh at the beginning of
0:47:36 the colon the colon goes up it’s called the ascending colon and then it makes a sharp angle turn right
0:47:41 across your belly kind of like a belt right across your belly this is colon here and then it goes to the
0:47:47 descending colon take the elevator down down down down down down you see the blue downs going down and
0:47:52 then it kind of takes a little jog at the very end and goes down into your rectum and your anus okay
0:47:58 right so the blue thing is my colon so this is where cancer incidence is rising in young people so
0:48:03 you’re talking about the rising in instance of colorectal cancer that could be a cancer that’s
0:48:10 typically uh either on the right side of the colon either the going up up the upside up the elevator yeah
0:48:16 or down the elevator on the right side of the left side okay yeah okay it turns out that we’ve known for
0:48:24 a long time that unhealthy diets are linked to a higher risk of colorectal cancer specifically
0:48:32 processed meats so the world health organization contain considers processed meats salami bologna
0:48:40 ultra processed you know kind of deli meats delicates you find a delicatessen all right um those would be uh
0:48:49 considered uh considered uh carcinogens and and they’re they are uh highly linked to an increased
0:48:54 risk of bowel cancers now why would that be well it turns out that think about it if you’re eating a ton
0:49:01 of meat all right you’re actually exposing the gut to a lot of those processed meat carcinogens that when
0:49:07 it sits around your colon not one not not once in a while go to the ball game have a hot dog enjoy
0:49:15 yourself but if you eat it day in and day out you’re giving a lot of exposure uh to your gut this term
0:49:22 angiogenesis you’ve talked about the link that that has to cancer angiogenesis from my um novice
0:49:28 understanding is how the blood cells provide blood to different parts of our body right and in the case of
0:49:37 cancer there’s this the angiogenesis system is making a mistake is that a simplified version of
0:49:45 it yeah so angiogenesis which is the field i study study we break it down uh it to what its elemental
0:49:51 parts of angio blood blood vessel genesis how the body grows and maintains them so angiogenesis is how
0:49:57 our body grows and maintains our circulation a lot of people don’t know this but our circulation is one of
0:50:03 our body’s health defense systems and it’s so extensive that in a typical adult there are 60
0:50:09 000 miles worth of blood vessels packed inside our body these are the highways and byways that deliver
0:50:16 blood to every organ and tissue but that means that they also deliver the air we breathe the oxygen
0:50:20 we’re breathing in and the nutrients that we’re eating so we eat good things are going into our bloodstream
0:50:25 and our blood vessels our angiogenesis systems develop delivering to every cell in the body now you eat
0:50:31 something bad similarly or you breathe something in bed similarly your those blood vessels are delivering
0:50:38 something negative now inside the blood vessels um is a lining it’s called the lining is like a clear
0:50:47 like a plastic wrap inside the blood vessel called the endothelial layer that’s like a layer of ice like on an
0:50:53 ice skating rink to ensure that everything in the blood vessels are flowing smoothly without getting
0:51:00 caught on the walls so when you have cardiovascular disease too much uh uh too much salt to hypertension
0:51:04 when you have diabetes where you’re actually wearing down the lining of the blood vessels
0:51:10 endothelial layers being damaged it’s like um damaging the lining of your angiogenesis defense
0:51:17 system has really deadly consequences because it’s like scraping up the ice on an ice skating rink
0:51:23 you know uh if you actually have a lot of ice skaters on a rink after a while it’s unskatable right
0:51:28 you can’t get on it and what will happen in your bloodstream is then elements in your blood get caught
0:51:34 along the walls and they build up and that’s actually how blood vessels narrow up so that’s
0:51:41 one of the areas of of so androgenesis actually is intended to deliver oxygen and nutrients to the
0:51:48 tissues that need it for to maintain your health but because it’s so critical it’s also very very
0:51:53 carefully controlled so you don’t have blood vessels growing where they should not be growing
0:51:59 like in your joints in your eyes or of course to cancers you don’t definitely don’t want to be
0:52:06 feeding cancers by delivering oxygen or nutrients to them i’ve got this graph which shows different
0:52:13 things that cause more or less angiogenesis if you’ve seen this graph but okay so you are showing
0:52:20 a graph that i i generated my my organization generated and this is actually you’re looking at the
0:52:26 experiment that got me into food as medicine let me explain to you the experiment um i’ll just put it
0:52:35 i’ll put it over here so um so we were studying at one point drugs and we’re trying to discover drugs
0:52:40 that could be developed as cancer treatments so we were looking for our drugs that could cut off the
0:52:48 blood supply to tumors so we were screening uh lots of chemicals that biotech companies were developing and
0:52:53 inventing and professors were inventing and said hey can you take a look to see this could be a
0:52:58 worthwhile drug that could cut off the blood supply to a tumor as a cancer treatment all right and at
0:53:04 the time there were no such treatments so it was all discovery like this was you know like the like
0:53:08 the golden age of discovery when it came to angiogenesis we’re testing oh my gosh this thing could
0:53:13 really stop blood vessels could we develop this into our cancer treatment ultimately yes the answer
0:53:18 was yes but we were looking for them and we would and so we developed a system where we could add a
0:53:27 substance into a laboratory test system to see if blood vessels would grow or shrink and so here on
0:53:35 this graph you can see at the very top a very long bar of blood vessels growing that’s normal healthy blood
0:53:41 vessels growing out as long as they can and then what we would do is we’d throw drugs into it and we would
0:53:48 see if we could actually shrink them up and so some of the uh shorter bars uh uh are cancer drugs uh you
0:53:55 can see them uh in this color in blue not surprisingly some of the cancer drugs were making the blood
0:54:01 vessels smaller hey this could be a good candidate drug and we were also testing other uh drugs that
0:54:07 were available not used for cancer to see if they would work sure we discovered some of those too but i did
0:54:11 something a little bit subversive and as you know you know if you want to be disruptive you got to
0:54:16 sometimes um disrupt yourself in order to be able to do this so this is like our experiment that we were
0:54:22 doing at the androgenesis foundation we decided to disrupt ourselves so we said we have a whole system
0:54:28 of drugs to test let’s remove half of them and let’s swap them out with powders that came from food
0:54:37 all right just to see what would happen and when we actually tested foods in the same system used to
0:54:43 develop drugs food as medicine tested in the same system that medicines are developed we found what
0:54:51 you see on this bar chart in red we actually found that dietary factors stuff that’s found in food could
0:54:57 actually cut down the blood supply that would be growing to feed a cancer in other words there’s
0:55:03 anti-angiogenic foods you could see the green tea you could see the onions and garlics and red grapes and
0:55:11 strawberries um it was really an eye-opener to me for when i saw these results it made my jaw drop
0:55:20 and i said my god foods have potency just like drugs i was a skeptic all right and it just made me realize
0:55:28 like this is something that i had to pursue this was an area of research that i absolutely had to actually
0:55:34 look further into a drug takes a decade and a billion or more dollars to be able to develop from
0:55:41 from scratch to reaching a patient and then not everyone who needs a treatment can actually get the
0:55:47 drug but a food has immediacy if you discover something amazing about a food whether it’s
0:55:53 matcha whether it’s purple potatoes whether it’s a strawberry that could that that immediacy could
0:56:02 be used beneficially without toxicity all right uh and affordably and so i just saw this as this was
0:56:06 this experiment is what brought me into the realm of food as medicine so i’m gonna ask some stupid
0:56:14 questions here so on here i can see that for example soy extract causes less angiogenesis which what i
0:56:20 understand is the the growth of these blood vessels but does that mean that if i have lots of soy extract
0:56:29 or artichoke or parsley or berries that it’s gonna cause other parts of my body not to grow blood cells so
0:56:36 this is the great question let me kind of reframe the question as you’re asking it if uh experiments
0:56:43 are able to show that certain foods can uh prevent blood vessels from growing will that actually cause
0:56:49 a problem with your body’s health defenses to keep blood vessels from growing in healthy tissues yeah all
0:56:58 right answers no and here’s why as a health defense system our angiogenesis system is completely designed to
0:57:04 in the right number of blood vessels to give just amount just the right amount of blood flow not too
0:57:11 much not too little i call it the goldilocks zone you know goldilocks a fairy tale um you know the bears
0:57:15 were home invaders they broke into the house and they were looking for chairs and porridge and beds
0:57:21 not too hot not too cold but just right all of our health defenses including the angiogenesis health defense
0:57:29 is a hard wire to keep the body just right so what that means is that eating foods like artichokes or
0:57:36 strawberries or soy can actually help your body prevent extra blood vessels from growing towards cancer for
0:57:44 example and and other disease tissues but it will not override the body’s natural ability to get the
0:57:48 right amount of blood vessels to the right tissue so you don’t have to worry about starving your healthy
0:57:54 tissues you’re just uh cutting off the uh bad blood vessels that you show i can i call it like
0:58:01 a landscaper on a golf course that that breaks out the lawnmower to mow that uh the golf course so it’s
0:58:08 got a perfect level um of the lawn you’re not going to actually uh carve out a bald spot uh in on in
0:58:14 a country club you’re going to get just the right amount similarly and um we’re not talking about this
0:58:18 graph there’s another graph that can actually show foods that you can eat that can grow blood vessels
0:58:25 healthy blood vessels where you want them and it turns out things like fruit peel uh uh can actually
0:58:30 do that and barley can grow new blood vessels and dark chocolate can actually help to support blood
0:58:34 vessels as well and some of these things can also work on both sides of the equation that can prune away
0:58:40 the bad but extra blood vessels and they can grow them whenever you need them so your body is sort of like
0:58:46 the gardener extraordinaire it knows exactly how to actually tend you give them the right ingredients
0:58:50 they know exactly where to put the grass seed and they know exactly where to mow the lawn have you
0:58:58 ever had cancer in your family yes um cancer has touched my family like it has for most people
0:59:05 um i had two uncles uh years ago that passed away one passed away from colon cancer one passed away from
0:59:16 liver cancer and you know i was a doctor at the time and so i felt so uh helpless uh because as a doctor i
0:59:25 could i could diagnose i could lay hands on i could feel the hard liver i could feel the masses and i felt at the
0:59:32 time helpless even though i was doing the research cancer research and finding future paths i felt like
0:59:40 this was we we’re not there yet and we can’t i couldn’t help him i felt i felt powerless fast forward
0:59:46 we’re now at a point where we’re beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel
0:59:54 and my mother when my mother had cancer so my uncle’s sister my mother wound up having endometrial cancer
1:00:02 she was 80 years old one day um had some bleeding went to the hospital found a mess she had a
1:00:09 hysterectomy to remove her uterus and ovaries and they found in there an endometrial cancer that’s a
1:00:13 cancer the lining of the uterus the surgery and a little bit of radiation is supposed to take care of
1:00:20 it unfortunately in her case those little cancer stem cells and it was microscopic cancers that were
1:00:27 her present took off raced off in her 80 year old body which you know look weaker immune system when
1:00:34 you’re 80 and within a few months after successfully recovering from the surgery she had stage four
1:00:42 cancer everywhere all right and her oncologist told me uh dr lee you know you’re a doctor as well you know
1:00:50 know this is serious and this is pretty much the time of game over and now times have changed science
1:00:56 has advanced progress has advanced at that time when my mother was diagnosed with stage four cancer
1:01:05 immunotherapy the latest and greatest i think advancement in cancer treatment had just broken
1:01:12 through and become approved immunotherapy immunotherapy is not chemotherapy it doesn’t actually poison the
1:01:19 cancer immunotherapy is a medicine that you give a cancer patient that wakes up your own immune system
1:01:24 whether you’re a young person or an old person it can wake up your immune system all right and
1:01:30 my mother had immunotherapy she was one of the early patients that got immunotherapy and her own 80
1:01:38 year old immune system woke up like a super like an army of super soldiers and went after that cancer
1:01:46 now we completely adjusted her diet to so that her body between treatments would be as strong as
1:01:51 possible shields raised as we’ve been talking about and we give her a little bit of radiation to
1:02:00 to help the uh the the her immune system spot the cancer guess what happened three treatments of
1:02:08 immunotherapy three three weeks apart so time zero is the first treatment three weeks later the next
1:02:14 treatment three weeks after that the next treatment all right so we’re talking about a total nine weeks of
1:02:21 three treatments all right of these three treatments we scanned her stage four went to stage
1:02:28 zero zero zero and she never had chemotherapy now chemotherapy can be helpful too with immunotherapy but
1:02:37 this was where i saw firsthand close up in my own family the ability to harness your body’s own health
1:02:46 defenses in a way that i couldn’t do for my uncle 15 years ago before and we lost him and we were to save
1:02:54 my mom and i can tell you i literally had dinner with my mom two days ago and she’s 90 91 10 11 years later
1:02:59 completely healthy completely cancer free and by the way this immunotherapy
1:03:07 if we could only get this to work as well for everyone this is where we are in the history of medicine
1:03:13 we can see an end we know how we can get to an end we’ve actually seen successes we just can’t get it
1:03:17 to work for everyone yet and there are different ways to actually wake up your immune system another
1:03:24 way that i’m working on now that um a colleague of mine in germany is working on is also absolutely
1:03:32 jaw-droppingly amazing imagine this somebody has cancer and you’re gonna they’re gonna get a biopsy no
1:03:36 matter what they’re gonna take some tissue out to look at it under the microscope what kind of cancer
1:03:41 is it their brain is a breast is a colon is a pancreas where is it coming from you’re gonna get
1:03:46 a diagnosis right now up until recently that’s all we did with the tissue the biopsy you just got a
1:03:51 result and it’s kind of like a death sentence depending on what type of cancer and you’re supposed
1:03:57 to then go to the guidelines and open up the the the treatment book to say well what’s the pathway we
1:04:02 should what’s the recipe we should follow for treatment too often those recipes don’t work very
1:04:10 well or for very long now what if i told you that where we are headed with cancer therapy is a new
1:04:18 frontier where you take the tumor of the biopsy sure look at it in the microscope call it out uh define
1:04:26 what it is and then you send it to a lab where you do complete full-on genetics you sequence the entire
1:04:33 cancer genome all right right now we do sequence we take a dozen two dozen three dozen i’m talking
1:04:39 about doing 20 30 000 genes right right now most people say it’s not worth it we don’t know what we
1:04:45 do with all that information what if i told you if you took a tumor and sequenced all the genes you find
1:04:52 every mutation every typographical error that we talked about earlier that’s in that cancer those are the
1:04:58 smoking guns of the cancer now what if i took a piece of a little normal blood normal cells and sequence
1:05:05 that too all right now people are hearing me talk who are oncologists or scientists would say i don’t
1:05:08 know what you’re talking about that’s double the waste of effort because now you’re going to sequence
1:05:12 the human genome twice in a single patient and what are you going to do with all that information ah
1:05:20 this is where technology sits in artificial intelligence machine learning let’s now have a
1:05:26 computer compare normal cells with tumor cells back and forth and back and forth and back and forth
1:05:33 subtract out all the mutations that are found in normal cells leaving only the smoking gun mutations in the
1:05:40 cancer a couple hundred may left those are the smoking guns those are the doers that led to this cancer now
1:05:47 imagine and i’m going to give you an analogy here do you remember that tom cruise movie uh minority report
1:05:51 yeah so you remember that like he was wearing these gloves and you have a glass pane and you can actually
1:05:58 move the uh things around on the glass with your fingertips right so now imagine you can take these
1:06:04 human uh the the cancer mutations on the bottom of this glass screen and you can just randomly with
1:06:10 your fingers pick out 20 random mutations and move them up on the screen all right now you’ve just
1:06:15 picked out the mutations and now you can connect the mutations together i call it a pearl necklace imagine
1:06:20 every mutation is a pearl and you connect them together with the string that connects the pearl necklace
1:06:26 now you get what i’m saying like now we’ve taken the tumor find out the doers the the the the uh
1:06:33 the smoking guns now we’ve strung them together okay this is the most wanted sign that you would
1:06:41 actually place out for the criminal and now imagine you hit print technology and now you have a protein
1:06:49 printer that prints out those smoking guns as a protein as a protein full of your own individual
1:06:55 cancer of that particular person now you take that protein and you inject it under the skin and you’re
1:07:00 challenging your own immune system you’re vaccinating yourself with the with your own cancer and you’re
1:07:07 causing your own immune system to say aha this is a bad guy we’re going to develop antibodies to go
1:07:14 find our immune system we’re going to get ratcheted up to go find that cancer well this is happening right now
1:07:22 in clinical trials i have a colleague named saski a biscuit that is actually developing peptide vaccine
1:07:28 treatments against cancer and if you want to see some amazing results there was a paper we published in
1:07:37 nature communications about a year ago that showed in more than a hundred people with glioblastoma that is
1:07:44 a game over brain cancer nobody lives more than a couple of years with us all right that with this
1:07:50 treatment we’ve been able to actually show that some patients with their own immune system woken up
1:08:00 can actually keep them alive and cancer free brain cancer like that is no win situation impossible to
1:08:05 possible and actually somebody who i’ve just recruited as an ambassador to my nonprofit organization the
1:08:11 androgenesis foundation i strongly encourage people who want to have a modicum of hope who wants to see
1:08:17 what i’m talking about in real life on social media there’s a woman named rebecca divine she’s okay with
1:08:25 me giving her name her handle is that brainy blonde it’s a it’s a triple entendre she’s blonde she’s
1:08:32 very smart but she had a glioblastoma seven years ago and she is thriving alive with his immunotherapy so
1:08:38 between my mother rebecca divine i’m just telling you like i’ve had well i’ve known well over a dozen
1:08:46 people who there’s no way they’d be here today if it wasn’t for this scientific advances that all
1:08:53 shore up the body’s health of health defense systems specifically the immune system but that’s
1:08:59 but the drugs alone aren’t enough you really can take advantage at home of your own diet and lifestyle
1:09:03 to be able to tip those odds in your favor i’ve heard you say that immunotherapy is more likely to
1:09:16 be successful if you have certain bacteria in your gut yeah that is okay so in 2017
1:09:24 i helped to convene a cancer research conference in paris uh and we called it rethinking cancer
1:09:33 and we brought the world’s best minds out there and one of the um researchers uh uh named dr laurence
1:09:39 zitvogel she’s at the in paris works in paris at the institute gustav russi she is an immuno-oncologist
1:09:47 so she studies immunotherapy for cancer and at the time we had uh we asked her to present uh
1:09:54 some uh groundbreaking results that were embargoed at the time so our research our conference was the
1:10:02 first time it was ever presented and she said in a hundred people who were receiving immunotherapy
1:10:10 for uh different types of cancer that if you looked at the difference between people who responded lived
1:10:17 did well versus people who didn’t respond didn’t do well died all right and that’s the frustration
1:10:22 with the types of treatments my mom had um you know some people do well some people don’t do well
1:10:27 we pull our hair out trying to figure out like what’s going on how do we make people do better
1:10:33 well it turns out that when you compare everything gender age comorbidities uh
1:10:40 uh all the other genetic factors the research that was presented showed that there was no differences
1:10:45 between the groups of responders people who did well versus people didn’t do well for immunotherapy
1:10:54 except for one thing that one thing was one bacteria the responders had one bacteria called
1:11:00 acromantia mucinophila so most bacteria have a genus and species first name last name first name is
1:11:07 acromantia uh last name is mucinophila okay it likes to grow in mucus mucinophila where is there a lot
1:11:14 of mucus in the colon where’s the colon that’s the on this model the blue area so acromantia grows
1:11:19 right here in the cecum which is the pouch uh in the colon right at the beginning before you take the
1:11:25 up elevator to the top of the colon that’s where it grows if you if the people had that acromantia
1:11:32 they would respond to immunotherapy so what what the researcher did they she took out the acromantia
1:11:38 and brought it to her lab of the responders from humans and and gave it to mice who were
1:11:44 not responding to immunotherapy boom she’d reckon she’d resurrect the immune response to kill the
1:11:49 cancer so this is one of the first bacteria and there there may be many many that we haven’t yet
1:11:54 discovered all right so like my whole career has all been about discovery there may be more bacteria
1:12:01 but we discovered at least one the presence of which seems to be absolutely vital if you are a
1:12:07 patient receiving immunotherapy uh the type of immunotherapy called checkpoint inhibitors if you
1:12:15 want to uh tip the odds in your own favor of being a responder now how do you get acromantia well at the
1:12:21 time uh there was no acromantia probiotics now you can actually find acromantia probiotics but but at
1:12:27 at the time this was coming out you you had to grow your own acromantia diy acromantia all right so how
1:12:32 do you grow it well it turns out that there are certain foods you can eat that grow acromantia what
1:12:39 are those foods pomegranate pomegranate juice pomegranate seeds will grow acromantia cranberries
1:12:45 uh cranberry juice dried cranberries will grow acromantia conquered grape juice or conquered grapes will grow
1:12:53 acromantia chili peppers will actually grow acromantia chinese black vinegar you ever go to dim sum and have
1:12:58 soup dumplings oh yeah the black vinegar sauce that they use for for as a condiment to the soup
1:13:04 dumplings chinese black vinegar that will prompt your body to grow acromantia as well so what is your
1:13:08 diet of preference then there’s so many different diets that we’ve people speak about when they talk
1:13:14 about cancer and other chronic diseases um as i think i said to you beforehand i’m on an extremely
1:13:21 low carb diet which is like verges on keto but i kind of bounce in and out of ketosis what what do you
1:13:26 think of let’s start with the ketogenic diet do you have a view on on that kind of diet yeah so let me
1:13:34 just give you my my perspective on diets lots of different diets out there they’re all designed uh
1:13:41 with kind of a specific perspective and a particular goal in mind oftentimes diet whether you’re talking
1:13:47 about south beach or keto or carnivore or vegan you know um they’re all designed to achieve a certain kind
1:13:55 kind of goal uh most of them are very very difficult to maintain for a long period of time now people are
1:14:00 vegans uh and vegetarians and they’re eating that’s something that because of the diversity of the food
1:14:04 that you can you can actually maintain that but you know if you’re only doing pure keto that’s very
1:14:14 difficult to do so most popular trending diets are short-lived short-term solutions and they’ll kind
1:14:20 of force your body to do something all right but you can’t keep it up and so a diet that you can’t keep
1:14:29 up isn’t to me a very practical diet because you’re going to bursts of activity that you just can’t do your
1:14:40 whole life i find that it’s much more healthy in the long run if you can find a sustainable way of eating
1:14:45 that works for you personally that you can maintain and that you’re going to enjoy your life as well
1:14:50 most people who are on really strict diets they’re not enjoying their diet you know like people will
1:14:58 only eat eat meat only carnivore diet or only eat raw food listen you can’t don’t con me you can’t be
1:15:04 enjoying eating raw food you know your entire life you know navigating through society and seeing other
1:15:09 people you know eat a big steaming plate of pasta or something you know or going to a chinese restaurant
1:15:16 so what i’m saying is that trending diets are well-intentioned they often are designed to do
1:15:21 one thing but you can’t keep it up so it doesn’t really at the end of the day contribute to the
1:15:29 ultimate goal what i prefer and where i think the science takes us where the next frontier for like
1:15:37 lifetime health is carrying a page from the playbook of some of the healthiest cuisines in the world and i would
1:15:44 say mediterranean is the hotbed the crucible of a lot of healthy diets not just the blue zones i think
1:15:49 but but there but there are blue zones in the mediterranean also asia uh there’s a blue zone in
1:15:53 asia as well but you know look there’s also blue zone in latin america if you take a look at the common
1:16:02 denominator of what’s going on in the mediterranean and asia is a very healthy plant forward fresh
1:16:11 seasonal uh healthy cooking oils healthy preparation style absolutely delicious way of eating i mean come
1:16:17 on take if i were to take you to a mediterranean restaurant or to a asian restaurant i would find it
1:16:21 hard to believe that you wouldn’t you and i opening the menu couldn’t find something that we would enjoy
1:16:29 eating right so mediterranean is what how i tell people i actually eat that’s my quote diet why do
1:16:35 the japanese seem to do so well on when we think about the world’s healthiest countries looking at
1:16:40 some data here some a variety of different graphs that have in front of me and japan seems to continually
1:16:47 seem to come out on top as it relates to health span yeah okay well um there’s no one single
1:16:56 factor i think that was responsible for it but it is true um the the japanese uh demographics uh show
1:17:04 uh consistently some of the uh oldest longest living people you know they tend first and foremost okay
1:17:09 before we talk about what they eat let me tell you what they don’t do they don’t overeat
1:17:19 and i’m giving a purposeful pause there because overeating caloric loading okay uh is very damaging to
1:17:27 our metabolism it actually counters uh our ability for long to to live long it actually speeds up our
1:17:34 cellular aging it’s it it sets up inflammation so by cutting down on your caloric intake
1:17:42 every day that’s one of the things is that the japanese culture that the the the culinary and
1:17:50 gastronomic approach to food in japan tends to uh favor modesty uh uh uh under eating rather than
1:17:58 overeating i’ve got a question here how do how do i know if i’m overeating okay so so there’s a
1:18:04 a confucian saying uh that’s been translated into the japanese that they that’s a mantra which is
1:18:11 hara hachi ban mi which means stop eating when you’re 80 full i asked this question because i
1:18:16 have a friend who was i think it was on this podcast so um i don’t think i’m revealing anything he actually
1:18:22 sat next to me um when peter atia was talking to him he’s jack who um runs production for us he had
1:18:27 his dexa scan done which looks at your visceral fat subcutaneous fat muscle mass bone density those
1:18:35 kinds of things yeah and he’s a slim guy he’s much slimmer than i am and the diagnosis that came back
1:18:40 from the doctor basically said you’re overnourished and when i look at him he doesn’t look like someone
1:18:47 that’s overnourished and the the doctor essentially said to him that you need to reduce your calories now
1:18:52 i’m looking at this guy thinking this is a slim guy this guy’s like much much slimmer than i am
1:18:59 yet the doctor’s telling him that he’s overeating yeah so i wrote a whole book on this called eat to
1:19:06 beat your diet which is not a diet book it’s an anti-diet book that really um uh uh uncloaks the new
1:19:15 science of your metabolism and what i try to say in terms of sharing that science is that first of all
1:19:24 body fat which societally is regarded as a bad thing we don’t nobody wants fat right um is actually a
1:19:30 good thing body fats an organ in the body did you know that like it’s it’s one of our body organs um
1:19:36 our body fat it is distributed throughout our body and what does it do as an organ well it’s got some
1:19:41 cushioning effect so you know like if you didn’t have any body fat by the way you tripped on the stairs
1:19:47 and you hit the ground you might rupture your organs all right that’s so it has a little bit of a
1:19:55 cushion effect marshmallow cushion effect but our fat also is a fuel tank to store fuel so where we’re
1:20:01 eating calories our calories are energy we’re eating food we’re eating calories that’s our energy that’s
1:20:07 that’s a fuel our body runs off of i always tell people if you have a car and you’re filling it up with
1:20:13 gasoline at the petrol station or the gas station um you don’t even think about your gas until your
1:20:18 fuel gauge starts to run low and the same thing for our our our bodies is that we don’t think about
1:20:24 our fuel until we’re hungry and our our hunger and our brain and our gut is really as our fuel tank that
1:20:31 signals oh you know we’re getting towards that red line better go fill fill up now unlike a gas station or petrol
1:20:37 station there’s no clicker on our body we can keep stuffing food into our system we can very easily
1:20:43 overload our fuel tank okay that is you’ve got you’ve got to cut back on your calories that’s what you
1:20:47 your your friend heard when the doctor was saying you got to cut back on your calories because you’re
1:20:53 overloading on fuel so where does so where does the fat build up it’s there’s different areas that fat in
1:21:01 your body builds up now the fat can there’s white fat and there’s uh uh brown fat white fat can be
1:21:06 under your chin could be under your arms could be in your thighs and your butt could be your your the
1:21:12 muffin top you know around your waist but that’s not where the most dangerous fat builds up the most
1:21:20 dangerous fat inflammatory fat is a fat that builds up in the inside the tube of your body so if you think of
1:21:27 your body like a poster tube okay inside that tube and all this gut is i’m sorry the the body cavity
1:21:33 if you were to slice this body in half and look at a cross section all right it’s a tube you can fill
1:21:39 any of these uh interstitial areas between organs you can pack with fat so think about you’re going to
1:21:47 fedex something to somebody overnight mail uh a vase or a glass or bottle one or whatever you’re going to
1:21:51 pack it full of peanuts and you’re going to put into a package well look you can get a big box and put
1:21:55 a lot more peanuts on or you can take a skinny box that would just fit it and you’ll put it in so it
1:22:00 doesn’t really matter the size of your tube you could be a skinny person and you could pack it with a
1:22:06 lot of peanuts in this case visceral fat and that’s what you’re talking about in a skinny person with
1:22:12 too much visceral fat too many peanuts packed in there and that is a result of over consumption of calories
1:22:17 that fat that energy the fuel tanks building up within a skinny body yeah and that’s what we call
1:22:26 skinny fat i am still like mildly in shock about it because because i saw his results i i panicked so
1:22:32 the next day i also went to the same clinic as him i had my dexar scan done and it came back and said that i
1:22:40 i had quote zero visceral fat so my results from dr peter atia said i had zero visceral fat which he
1:22:48 said was rare but i had subcutaneous fat which is the fat on the outside more than jack did so jack had
1:22:55 visceral fat which is the fat inside us and he had he has like almost no subcutaneous fat and i’m kind of the
1:23:01 inverse of that and i don’t understand what like i was trying to figure out why is my body when i eat
1:23:06 something putting the fat subcutaneously on the outside whereas jack’s body is putting the fat on
1:23:13 the inside which is the the dangerous fat here is um an interesting thing let’s look at the opposite
1:23:19 of building up subcutaneous fat which is the external fat not not the dangerous external fat yeah so okay so
1:23:25 there’s two kinds of body fat white fat and brown fat white they’re all good they’re all beneficial
1:23:32 um white fat can be subcutaneous subcutaneous means under the skin under your jaw under the skin of your
1:23:38 jaw under your arms on your thighs that’s subcutaneous white fat can also be visceral fat that’s deep inside
1:23:44 the tube of your body and then brown fat is not wiggly jiggly like the other like white fat brown fat is
1:23:49 wafer thin and it’s plastered around our neck it’s behind our breastbone a little bit behind between
1:23:55 our shoulder blades a little bit in our belly and brown fat actually is metabolically active and it
1:24:02 fires up a process called thermogenesis to burn down harmful visceral extra body fat so you can use
1:24:08 good fat to burn down bad fat which is the amazing thing again fat is not universally bad it’s actually
1:24:16 quite good and uh so one of the things that i think is really important to know is that when you’ve
1:24:20 got too much visceral fat you’ve got too much inflammation but you can actually use your brown
1:24:28 fat to try to um control that to try to burn it down brown fat by the way is activated by foods and
1:24:36 activated by cold temperatures so when you talk about your cold plunge brown fat can actually light up so you
1:24:44 you’ve just handed me a card i’ll describe this in which there’s two pictures of a figure and one of
1:24:50 the uh picture on the left is room temperature and it’s not cold it’s regular room temperature and this
1:24:55 is the same individual by the way and you can’t see anything lighting up because the brown fat is
1:25:02 just adjusted to normal room temperature now on the right hand side is when you actually um lower the
1:25:06 temperature in an ice bath or something no no this is actually just lowering the room temperature really
1:25:12 really cold like a like a laboratory condition lowering the room temperature and boom you see all this brown
1:25:18 fat lighting up remember i told you it’s plastered around the neck behind the breastbone uh a little bit in
1:25:26 in your belly and this is mother nature’s adaptation in evolution to help animals survive cold temperatures
1:25:33 so before we had thermostats and room heaters um uh i think about a by the way brown fat was discovered
1:25:43 in hibernating animals um there was a zoologist uh who was looking at plucked out a uh kind of a muskrat
1:25:49 looking animal from hibernation and dissected it and found that there was this brown lump
1:25:56 that was between its shoulder blades and nobody knew what it was they just and the more researchers
1:26:01 and biologists and zoologists looked at animals that were hibernating they they found this very
1:26:09 consistently in fact they called that brown mass first at a hibernoma hiber hibernating oma a mass we
1:26:16 don’t know what it does okay um a hibernoma that’s what it was known until 1930s in the 1930s at ucla
1:26:21 a researcher who in the beginning we didn’t have microscopes then we had microscopes and we had
1:26:29 really great microscopes and all of a sudden in 1930s the researcher uh at ucla said you know that
1:26:36 hibernoma is actually made of fat cells and those fat cells are brown and the reason they’re brown is
1:26:42 because they have a lot of mitochondria in it mitochondria being the fuel cells of our body like
1:26:47 the batteries of our body they’re packing the they’re the energy generators in our cell and
1:26:54 mitochondria are very rich in iron and when iron is oxidized it turns brown like a pile of nails that
1:27:01 you put outside your door and the outdoors silver nails will turn brown brown fat packed with mitochondria
1:27:06 energy generating the packed with iron oxidizes turns brown that’s why brown fat is brown
1:27:13 and and so what happens is that in cold temperatures like in hibernation in winter the brown fat fires
1:27:18 up and that’s what keep keeps these hibernating animals warm throughout the winter so they don’t freeze to
1:27:26 death now humans we can actually use that to our advantage we can actually activate our brown fat cold
1:27:32 bath will do it um sleeping in cold cooler worms will actually start to activate it as well when
1:27:36 that by the way that when those mitochondria fire up they’re burning energy you know where they draw that
1:27:42 energy from from your white fat from your visceral fat first so you want brown fat good fat to burn down
1:27:47 bad fat visceral fat white fat you want to sleep in a cool room or you want to go into a cold bath and
1:27:55 there are lots of foods that will also you can eat foods to activate your brown fat to burn down harmful
1:28:01 fat um and then the last thing is cortisol the job that we have i know that doesn’t sound like a hard
1:28:06 job to be a podcaster but the in jack’s role he’s basically working seven days a week sometimes you
1:28:11 know he’s working early hours of the morning he’s traveling around the world with me to come to these
1:28:16 studios it is i observe it it’s a stressful job so i was wondering if these if all of these factors
1:28:22 play a role in in how our body chooses where to store things and really like the role of cortisol
1:28:28 in determining fat storage is so interesting to me like the role of stress in determining where our fat
1:28:36 is stored yeah well i mean cortisol is a stress hormone it actually snaps us into uh action it actually
1:28:41 is also healing cortisol is a got multiple job descriptions it’s kind of like a swiss army knife
1:28:50 of hormones uh and uh you know in small bursts cortisol incredible like and it makes you feel
1:28:57 good as well i mean it’s a kind of basically it’s a type of body steroid so cortisol is a very very useful
1:29:05 hormone for all kinds of reasons but long-term stress uh will lead to excessive prolonged
1:29:13 unabated cortisol secretion and when your cortisol levels are up up up up up and and unrelentlessly
1:29:21 that then actually changes your metabolism it definitely alters your the ability for your fat
1:29:26 to actually conduct its metabolism i mean fat releases itself about 15 different hormones
1:29:31 so when you mess up the hormonal structure the endocrine structure of your own body fat
1:29:37 with something like excessive cortisol you’ll actually begin to derail your own metabolism so
1:29:42 it’s not the short-term cortisol it’s a long-term cortisol that’s actually the most damaging why is
1:29:47 visceral fat dangerous because people refer to it as being linked with a lot of chronic disease and
1:29:51 cancers and stuff like that but what evidence do we have that it’s dangerous and what why is it dangerous
1:29:57 yeah because the tube of your body with all the organs packed into it just like we’re seeing here
1:30:01 look at all these organs packed in you got your liver you got your stomach you got your your colon
1:30:07 and your small intestines that’s packed into the tube all right it is it’s kind of like uh packing
1:30:13 for vacation you know some people are really really skilled at packing they can actually uh fold their
1:30:18 socks and underwear and their pants and it’s like oh my you’re a genius you’re you’re packing genius right
1:30:25 now visceral fat grows between those folded shirts and pants and it and it fills a lot space in there
1:30:33 when you have too much of it not only does it fill up that the suitcase of your body the tube of your body
1:30:38 but it starts to push on organs which is not healthy because it’s all packing inside the between
1:30:43 the spaces the potential spaces in there and then when they grow when it grows beyond its own blood supply
1:30:48 the visceral fat um starts to starve it becomes hypoxic meaning it’s not getting enough oxygen
1:30:53 bigger than the amount of blood vessels that are growing in there and now you’ve got the center of
1:31:00 the fat start of oxygen uh the inflammatory cells start moving in and now you’ve got this fat
1:31:05 that’s outgrown its own blood supply that’s now becoming very inflammatory and because it’s packed
1:31:10 all throughout your the tube of your body into the suitcase of your body it’s leaking out that
1:31:15 inflammation everywhere so think about it like if you have been neatly packed suitcase and you’re like
1:31:21 i’m you know i’m going to put um i’m going to put some uh uh lotion and cream canister to lotion and
1:31:28 cream i’m going to pack it everywhere in between spaces okay look uh uh steven pack a few but but
1:31:32 let’s stop right there and you’re no i’m going to pack like 20 or 30 of them and you keep on stuffing
1:31:38 it even though the suitcase it’s a hard suitcase and you can you can put a lot in there now you’re
1:31:42 starting to press on the the clothing you’re going to scrunch up your pants and here in the body you’re
1:31:51 scrunching up your organs now why don’t we make the one of those tubes uh uh of uh of cream let’s
1:31:57 break one of them open now it’s leaking all right that’s what’s happening when your fat is so inflamed
1:32:03 so inflamed it starts to leak inflammation now imagine that that cream uh starts to leak out into the
1:32:08 interstitiously of your suitcase now you’ve got a suitcase looks skinny on the outside looks like
1:32:14 it just looks like a suitcase it could be a carry-on but now all the organs all the clothes you packed so
1:32:22 neatly are squeezed and scrunched off and now the lotion is leaking everywhere that is the analogy of
1:32:28 excess body fat in a small container spreading out compressing the organs and leaking out and that’s why
1:32:34 it’s dangerous oh gosh and that there’s a link there to cancer yeah so studies have actually shown that
1:32:45 and this was a study uh done uh by cornell in new york um looking at swedish women who were normal
1:32:51 body size or skinny so you’ve heard of skinny fat this is what they were studying and they looked at these
1:32:58 women uh uh to see uh they did dexa scans as you described um to see how much body fat they had
1:33:07 and then they followed them over 13 years and then she found that women who did not have extra body fat
1:33:12 had you know normal risk of breast cancer but women who had skinny fat don’t remember all the women in
1:33:19 the study and so 3 000 women actually were normal body size not i mean they weren’t supermodels but
1:33:24 they were they were just normal size women some of them were slimmer than others but none of them were
1:33:31 obese none of them were overweight uh just normal size um and they but they knew at the baseline what
1:33:39 the dexa scan showed and what they found is that women who had excess body fat over the period of 13 years
1:33:45 had a three-fold increase in the risk of developing breast cancer and it’s linked to higher inflammatory
1:33:51 markers in their bloodstream which makes total sense the leaking body cream the leaking inflammation
1:33:56 you know in a skinny tube all right or normal size tube normal suitcase look the suitcase can’t expand
1:34:03 bigger it’s got a finite size um but it’s leaking out and and this is because cancer thrives in an
1:34:08 inflammatory environment if you have inflammation without even a microscopic cancer like we talked
1:34:14 about but a small tumor putting inflammation in the environment of a cancer is like pouring
1:34:19 gasoline on the embers of a fire you ever go camping you have a campfire it’s almost out
1:34:24 at the very end now if you pour some gas in it boom whoosh you’re gonna actually create a bonfire all over
1:34:30 again that’s how dangerous inflammation is so that’s why excess visceral fat inflammatory fat is so
1:34:36 dangerous and linked to cancer and by the way not just breast cancer it turns out that excess visceral fat has been
1:34:45 linked to 14 other cancers increased risk of 14 other cancers everything from colon ovarian lung breast
1:34:54 prostate uh it it’s the it’s a it’s a it’s a growing list of cancers that seem to be at a put you would be
1:35:00 at a higher risk if you had high levels of visceral fat and it makes total sense given the inflammation
1:35:05 don’t you hate it when you have a good idea and then you forget for the last two years i’ve been
1:35:09 writing my brand new book and my book writing process is a little bit atypical in the sense
1:35:14 that i have all of these great conversations on the diary of a ceo and i might stumble across a great idea
1:35:19 while my guest is speaking to me in the middle of a conversation or i could be walking the dog i could be
1:35:25 out and about with my friends i could be anywhere when i have an idea for my upcoming book this is why
1:35:30 notion who are a show sponsor of mine now has been an incredible platform for me i’ve designed my notion
1:35:36 so that i can pull out my phone super quickly and store the idea in this section about my new book and
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1:35:47 that point of inspiration in a flexible way and i’m no longer losing good ideas i imagine many of
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1:36:07 there was a shocking study that i read about this a while ago in jammer and it examined the impact
1:36:14 of illness anxiety disorder which they call iad formerly known as hypochondriitis
1:36:20 and the impact that being avoidant of health and illness has on your mortality rates and they the
1:36:26 research analyzed data from approximately 45 000 individuals over a 24 year period comparing 4 000
1:36:32 patients who had this anxiety around their health and were avoidant and the findings showed that those
1:36:38 with iad that were anxious about health and getting checkups and those kinds of things had an 84
1:36:43 higher risk of death during the study period dying on average five years earlier than those without the
1:36:46 disorder and again causation is hard to establish there because it could mean that being an anxious
1:36:51 person means your cortisol is up and anyway being an anxious person means you make worse dietary choices
1:36:58 but i i’ve always remembered that and thought about how how um how it’s i find it much more
1:37:03 much better especially as i age and i’m going to be now confronted with more risks especially things
1:37:10 in men like prostate cancer being on the front foot um is probably a better approach well uh and if you take
1:37:16 some proactive approaches using food as medicine where you got to eat three you know you got to eat every day
1:37:21 most most most of most people eat three times a day most people encounter food about five times a day
1:37:26 breakfast lunch dinner and a couple of snacks if you realize every time you’re encountering food
1:37:34 is an opportunity an opportunity to choose a food an ingredient that actually supports raises your
1:37:40 shields support your health defense systems and know that and trust your body trust your health defense
1:37:46 systems that if you raise your shields you’re less likely to actually have uh have problems later
1:37:51 won’t eliminate them okay there’s no guarantees in life but it’ll lower the risk here’s an example
1:37:59 steven you know research studies have shown that tomatoes are good for overall um health you mentioned
1:38:06 prostate cancer so studies have shown that men who eat tomatoes regularly cooked tomatoes actually have
1:38:13 a 29 lower risk of developing prostate cancer it’s pretty good uh what’s the dose of the tomatoes
1:38:18 that you need to cook tomatoes you need to eat two to three servings per week all right now
1:38:23 i can probably i can probably accomplish that how much each time do i gotta eat a wheelbarrow of
1:38:31 tomato each time no the the typical serving that the study supports is just half a cup of tomato
1:38:35 salt cooked tomatoes is per serving why do they know this stuff because obviously how do they isolate that in a
1:38:43 a test so these are from large-scale population studies in this case it’s a it’s a uh epidemiological
1:38:49 study called the uh health professionals follow-up study where they looked at they developed hypotheses
1:38:54 and they looked at outcomes over the course of 25 years and they look for statistical correlations so
1:39:00 they found that um tomatoes lower the risk of prostate cancer based on people reporting their tomato
1:39:04 eating then they actually went back and look at the report within the data collected how much
1:39:10 how much do they eat on average every week so that then you can actually back calculate the dose
1:39:15 all right now i i told you earlier about the way that i do research foods investment research
1:39:22 let’s take it further let’s figure out what’s in a tomato well tomatoes have lots of it’s got it’s got
1:39:30 sugar it’s got uh some salt it’s got uh carotenoids which are bioactives one of which is lycopene well
1:39:37 okay what does lycopene do guess what lycopene does lycopene in the lab will cut off the blood supply
1:39:44 to tumors anti-angiogenesis shores up your health defense systems prevents cancer from getting a blood
1:39:54 supply and in fact in correlative studies um uh they’ve actually taken the prostate cancer biopsies
1:40:01 of men who did not avoid prostate uh cancer so they were tomato eaters who went on to develop prostate
1:40:06 cancer anyway there’s no nothing takes your risk to zero and they looked at them and what they found is
1:40:12 that those men who ate more tomatoes had fewer blood vessels in their prostate cancer and the prostate
1:40:19 cancer was also less aggressive so people who ate four times and five times and six times had fewer and
1:40:25 less aggressive blood vessels growing into their prostate cancer so that’s an example where you know
1:40:33 if i told you um consider having some cooked tomatoes a few times a week and you don’t need a lot even
1:40:41 have a cup is enough oh why cook tomatoes well because it turns out lycopene is uh a natural chemical
1:40:48 that in its native form pick a tomato off the vine and eat it that like an apple it’s absorbing your
1:40:56 body but not avidly not as much as possible um what is that that is coffee okay and we’ve been
1:41:00 talking a little bit about brown fat yeah is there a link between fat and coffee because i had someone
1:41:04 the other day saying that if you want to lose weight drink coffee and i wasn’t sure if that was well so
1:41:12 coffee is a beverage made with coffee beans coffee beans are plant-based foods coffee beans contain
1:41:18 many polyphenols including chlorogenic acid chlorogenic acid is anti-inflammatory chlorogenic
1:41:24 acid also turns on your brown fat so it activates it triggers your brown fat and it causes your brown
1:41:32 fat the mitochondria to fire up undergo thermogenesis to burn down harmful white fat or visceral fat so cup of
1:41:37 coffee a day or actually the dose is actually about three to four cups of coffee a day will definitely
1:41:43 cause your brown fat good fat to burn down your bad fat your harmful fat your visceral fat what about
1:41:50 fasting people people often talk about fasting as a as an intervention as a form of medicine for the
1:41:56 body and i wondered if you had a take on that yeah fat listen fasting is beneficial fasting is good and
1:42:01 fasting is very old it’s not just a recent trend uh if you go back thousands of years i mean if you look at
1:42:05 some of most some of the oldest religions of the world fasting was part of their ritual that would
1:42:10 happen you know throughout the year now people go well what about intermittent fasting how long should
1:42:18 i fast i try to tell people there is no magic formula for success for fasting because we’re all different
1:42:23 and our bodies are different our lifestyles are different there’s no universal fasting protocol
1:42:29 that’s going to be one size fits all however i will tell you an easy way to fast because fasting is very
1:42:38 natural to us is just paying attention to what you do every day and be mindful so when you’re sleeping
1:42:43 you’re not eating when you’re not eating you’re fasting so i try to be reassuring so guess what
1:42:48 you’re fasting every day anyway when you fall asleep you’re fasting all right and the longer you’re not
1:42:56 eating and sleeping the more time your metabolism the ferrari of your metabolism of your body can switch
1:43:02 gears to burn down any extra fat that’s accumulated now if you’ve been eating whatever you want over
1:43:08 time you probably built up a lot of extra fat now from your scans apparently not you don’t have too much
1:43:15 all right but you if you you’re fasting regularly you’re burning down all that extra stuff okay and so
1:43:22 then how do you optimize that without having to calendarize your fast and figure out you know how to
1:43:31 uh schedule your meals i try to make things um as scientific but as practical as possible and so i tell
1:43:37 people you want to really get involved in intermittent fasting easiest way is take advantage of what you’re
1:43:43 doing already and that is if you’re sleeping try to sleep eight hours a day so how do you sleep eight
1:43:47 hours a day i don’t know i said if you go to bed 11 o’clock get up at seven o’clock you get to eight
1:43:52 hours of sleep all right we know that that’s the mad the sweet spot for your brain for your metabolism
1:43:57 for you know for burning a harmful body fat how do you get more out of that how do you turn that
1:44:05 eight hours of fasting into more well what i say is that the night before when you’re eating dinner
1:44:11 let’s say you eat from seven to eight o’clock in the evening what i say is that when you finish dinner
1:44:17 and you put your dishes away in the sink or the dishwasher that’s it no more eating stop eating
1:44:24 nothing until the next day um if you’re going to have dessert or whatever squeeze in there but don’t
1:44:30 take a snack with you and sit by the television or you know add some minorly gobble food and don’t
1:44:36 before you bet you go to bed eat a big chunk of whatever okay now you got three hours before you
1:44:43 go to bed at 11 again this is all a theoretical model three hours of not eating your blood sugar goes down
1:44:48 your your insulin goes down because your blood you’re not eating anymore all right now your metabolism
1:44:53 shifts gears three hours earlier okay now you’ve got those eight hours plus three
1:44:59 hours you got 11 hours now when you get up in the morning okay let’s say you get up at seven in the
1:45:05 morning don’t do what our moms told us to do right so when if you were like me growing up my mom when i
1:45:09 got up it’s like hurry up and get to breakfast and eat something so you have enough energy to actually
1:45:14 go to school and learn something all right so that’s i i developed this instinct of actually just
1:45:19 getting up and eating as quickly as i can getting some breakfast in what have i told you that what i
1:45:26 do now when i get up in the morning i deliberately don’t do what my mother told me to do i get up i
1:45:32 take my time getting ready uh i get dressed um i don’t need anything right away in fact if i’m
1:45:36 dressed and i’m ready for the day i’m gonna go check it out i might go outside and take a look at the
1:45:42 outside i might go for a quick walk or check my emails or i might read a chapter of a book or read
1:45:49 a few pages of a book i wait at least an hour before i eat anything now let’s do the math uh steven eight
1:45:54 o’clock stop eating eleven o’clock go to bed three hours eleven to seven eight hours three plus eight is
1:45:58 is equal to eleven hours i got eleven hours of fasting and now i get up and i don’t eat for
1:46:06 another hour boom 12 hours of fasting just like that okay now if you really want to do that 16
1:46:14 hour fasting 16 eight just skip breakfast and get to lunch and as long as you don’t overeat at lunch
1:46:20 which does require a little discipline after you go for your fasting window that you don’t overeat and
1:46:24 you’re eating the right foods that’s how you actually get to do intermittent fasting in the
1:46:29 most natural way possible so there’s one part of the body that we haven’t talked about which is
1:46:35 and my little mannequin here inside its head the brain yeah and i’m wondering how some of the themes
1:46:39 we’ve talked about link to one of the most common brain diseases which people talk about which is
1:46:46 alzheimer’s and dementia we talked about i can’t say that long word but um angiogenesis is there a
1:46:53 link between angiogenesis what we in the brain health dementia alzheimer’s yeah absolutely so
1:46:59 i mentioned to you that the human body has got 60 000 miles worth of blood vessels that are coursing
1:47:05 through the entire body bringing the uh oxygen and nutrients these the highways and byways of health
1:47:12 all right 400 miles of those blood vessels are in your brain 400 miles of blood vessels are actually
1:47:18 coursing through our brain and our brain is super metabolically active you know we’re we’re the engine
1:47:25 of the brain is functioning all the time regardless of your iq regardless of what type of tasks you do
1:47:31 our brain is very very metabolically active highly dependent upon a healthy circulation now what we do
1:47:41 know as people get older is that problems can occur with uh brain function and the reason i’m framing it this
1:47:48 is that it’s quick to jump to a term that people use like dementia or alzheimer’s disease thinking
1:47:55 is one thing but in fact dementia is just a descriptive term for your cognition not working properly
1:48:02 most commonly as you actually age alzheimer’s even though it is one type of diagnosis is probably
1:48:07 several different kinds of disease as well and we do know that there are different types of dementia
1:48:13 alzheimer’s is a subset of dementia of dementia alzheimer’s dementia there’s there’s a more
1:48:18 common type of dementia called vascular dementia and that’s where those 400 miles of blood vessels in
1:48:25 your body actually narrow get hard get clogged up and don’t have good blood flow so you can imagine
1:48:31 if you were to actually interrupt the sprinkler system the tubing the blood vessels the tributaries
1:48:37 bringing oxygen to your brain within those blood vessels okay over time your brain is not going to function
1:48:43 very well so vascular dementia is is by far the more common type of dementia so what can we do
1:48:49 to maintain healthy angiogenic blood vessels throughout the course of our lives for anybody who wants
1:48:56 aspires towards longevity all right you should be thinking about how to avert that path where your
1:49:04 blood circulate your blood vessels your circulation to your brain gets impaired the more uh vascular
1:49:10 blood vessel healthy angiogenesis supporting diet and lifestyle and medications that you take the
1:49:15 better it’s actually going to be now well here’s what what’s interesting what are some of those things
1:49:22 turns out that dark chocolate plant-based foods that the cacao actually um produces helps your body produce
1:49:29 something called nitric oxide nitric oxide nitric oxide actually widens your blood vessels so you get
1:49:36 better blood flow so dark chocolate is one of those foods that actually can see seems to be able to
1:49:41 promote better vascular health including in the brain now there are other foods that can produce
1:49:48 nitric oxide as well beets beetroot actually can produce nitric oxide spinach can do produce nitric oxide as
1:49:54 well those are vascular healthy now here’s the other thing when you produce nitric oxide like with
1:50:01 these foods you know what nitric oxide does it recruits stem cells healthy stem cells not cancer
1:50:07 stem cells but healthy stem cells from your bone marrow stem cells are stem cells are primitive cells
1:50:15 that can turn into anything you need them to be turn into a brain heart lung liver skin hair um our stem
1:50:20 stem cells actually regenerate us from the inside out now you know that one of the things that happens as
1:50:27 we get older is our brain atrophies and can start to degenerate it shrinks literally a scan of an older
1:50:34 person the brain the brain matter the mass of the brain shrinks inside the skull it’s like a like a cotton shirt
1:50:40 that shrank and you see this actually in a scan and so in order to be able to try to keep the shrinking from
1:50:45 happening you want to make sure there’s good blood flow going which actually helps to keep the brain
1:50:50 growing in a healthy and maintained in a healthy sort of way so um stem cells that are recruited by
1:50:56 nitric oxide actually can help to also regenerate the blood vessels and keep the blood vessels helping
1:51:00 healthy feeding the brain that’s the connection between alzheimer’s and energy i mean a dimension
1:51:07 angiogenesis now for alzheimer’s um i worked with a colleague dr anthony vagnucci some years ago and we
1:51:15 published uh uh what was then an editorial in the lancet uh you know very prestigious uh british medical
1:51:21 publication and we were connecting the dots between angiogenesis and alzheimer’s disease and here’s how
1:51:26 it works most people assume that if you’ve got alzheimer’s disease or someone has alzheimer’s disease
1:51:30 they don’t have very good blood flow they’re not going to have a lot of angiogenesis they got
1:51:36 problems right of their of their circulation of course and in fact if you look at um the blood
1:51:42 flow studies scans brain scans looking for blood flow in alzheimer’s brains indeed you see
1:51:51 poorer blood flow in people who have actually alzheimer’s disease but it turns out the brains of
1:51:57 people with alzheimer’s disease have more blood vessels more blood vessels that aren’t working well
1:52:02 so their andrew abnormal angiogenic blood vessels are not working well so you don’t get good blood
1:52:08 flow so the scans don’t show them and just not creating blood flow guess what those blood vessels
1:52:16 are doing those abnormal blood vessels they have been discovered to secrete a neurotoxin that kills your
1:52:24 brain cells so abnormal angiogenesis in alzheimer’s disease grows blood vessels that don’t create blood
1:52:30 flow but they secrete a toxin that kills brain cells and they also secrete the precursor to build up the
1:52:36 plaque so we we publish this as a as a hypothesis and editorial in the lancet and now there’s a whole
1:52:41 field looking at androgenesis and and alzheimer’s disease it’s crazy how this all stems back to
1:52:48 this idea that food is medicine yeah i mean listen before we had medicine as medicine before we had
1:52:56 pharmaceuticals in the 1930s so we had that’s all humans had our diet and lifestyle for medicines you
1:53:03 know and so i think that that’s really i think what’s happened is that in during the industrial revolution
1:53:12 that occurred with pharmaceuticals we put aside a tool in the toolbox that we’ve always had in fact
1:53:17 that’s the only thing we had before and we focused myopically just on what pharmaceuticals can do now
1:53:22 i’m telling you as somebody who’s developed biopharmaceuticals and who is still very much
1:53:28 involved in that new medicines can be life-saving old medicines can be life-saving and so you never want
1:53:33 to throw out the baby with a bath water what we have forgotten about is that tool in the toolbox
1:53:39 it’s been with humanity forever which is what we do with our food and and what i’m saying is that
1:53:44 what we can do now with the work that i’m doing in food is medicine so we can take the modern science
1:53:53 that deep probe that it’s a extraordinary level of sophistication that we use for drug development
1:54:00 and we can use it apply it to understand why our foods help us which foods help us and what types
1:54:05 of outcomes we’re actually looking for and so food is medicine bringing it back into the fold is just
1:54:10 replacing a tool in the toolbox but now we are actually fortifying it with the knowledge
1:54:18 provided by science of what we should choose and when and why supplementation are you a fan of
1:54:21 supplementation because i take a couple of supplements every morning things like creatine
1:54:27 and omega-3 and vitamin d do you take supplements yes i do and i’ll i’ll first say
1:54:36 um my my first off approach is that uh we should get most of the micronutrients that we
1:54:44 need to be healthy from our food use your food uh to our advantage because uh single foods will have
1:54:49 hundreds of different uh polyphenols and fiber and all kinds of other beneficial things so and my and
1:54:56 vitamins and minerals so our food is a much more efficient way to get all of our micronutrients
1:55:03 however supplements can be helpful in that literal translation of the world supplement which means
1:55:09 topping off so if you can’t get everything that you need from your food then feel free to top it off and
1:55:15 that’s what i actually do as well but vitamin d vitamin d i do it as well omega-3 fatty acids another
1:55:23 good uh top off uh to actually use for a supplement and by the way there are some probiotics that um i feel
1:55:29 that it’s prudent to actually get have in my body so i’m not giving a general recommendation i’m just
1:55:36 telling you what i do right that’s what we’re talking about everything is personal it’s personal to them but i you
1:55:40 know we talked earlier about the acromantia right so i do eat the foods that support acromantia
1:55:45 the pomegranate etc and the chili peppers but i’m going to take the supplement because i’ve seen
1:55:50 the data that shows how important it can be oh and acromantia improves your metabolism lowers the
1:55:56 risk of metabolic syndrome there might even be some clues that acromantia um might also lower the risk
1:56:03 of dementia development later on as well so hey this is a pretty safe natural bacteria i’ll take that
1:56:06 probiotic and another probiotic i take is called lactobacillus
1:56:12 rooteri l rooteri what does this do lowers inflammation builds immunity
1:56:17 it actually texts this is the bacteria that text messages the brain we talked about the brain
1:56:24 and it causes our brain to release social hormones like oxytocin that’s a social hormone that makes us feel
1:56:31 good so you know uh why wouldn’t i actually take that and oh one last thing lactobacillus rooteri has been
1:56:37 i the kind i take is chewable why wouldn’t you just take a capsule well it turns out that the
1:56:42 same bacteria lactobacillus rooteri it’s good for the gut but if you chew it up this is the bacteria
1:56:51 that kills the bacteria that causes cavities and gum disease i haven’t had a cavity in well over a decade
1:56:57 you know and so again this is one of these types of practical things that um just knowing the science
1:57:03 and knowing what i do and where where i don’t eat enough it’s hard to get enough vitamin d um
1:57:09 uh uh hard enough to get omega-3s i will actually top off on those i’m wondering you know you’ve got
1:57:13 these two great books in front of me eat to beat disease which is a new york times bestseller and
1:57:18 eat to beat your diet which is really about burning fat healing your metabolism and living longer
1:57:25 i know that you must have some favorite people use the term superfoods all the time but there must be
1:57:30 some foods where you look at them and just think they are little miracles in their own right so i
1:57:36 wanted to a little challenge for you is if you had to pick five of your favorite foods based on the
1:57:42 research that you’ve done the science you’ve seen what would those top fives be i would bring coffee
1:57:48 okay um because of all the polyphenols in coffee i’d bring tea um i tend to drink coffee in the morning
1:57:54 and i have tea at night um and i can i’m not caffeine sensitive so i can have the tea at night
1:58:01 if if you allow me i’ll actually lump those into my beverages okay under one category um i’ll bring tree
1:58:10 nuts tree nuts tree nuts walnuts almonds macadamias pistachios um i love nuts uh tree nuts and you know
1:58:14 not the pack pre-packaged kind but i like to you know kind of like toast them up myself and seize
1:58:20 flavor them myself um i would bring that because of the dietary fiber the healthy pro it’s a good source
1:58:27 of protein help some healthy fats in it as well and can kill some cancer stem cells while we’re at it
1:58:33 okay so tree nuts are actually good i would bring tomatoes because i love tomatoes okay it’s a great
1:58:38 source for hydration good source of lycopene which you talked about good for metabolism i would take
1:58:46 berries berries blueberries strawberries raspberries are among my favorites raspberries you might be
1:58:52 surprised at this but raspberries are pound for pound or weight for weight one of the most fiber
1:58:59 rich foods out there they’re light they’re hollow packed with fiber um and they’ve got polyphenols
1:59:04 and that are useful for lowering inflammation as well berries um are actually really good and then you
1:59:14 know i because i follow what i call the mediterranean uh style of eating i love to have those vegetables
1:59:22 that are actually used in both the mediterranean and asia mediterranean style cooking the bok choy
1:59:30 the kale chicory escarole you know all of those types of um of of leafy greens so those would be the
1:59:34 five i would actually take with me and what is the most important thing that we didn’t talk about that
1:59:42 we should have talked about you know i think that uh the most one of the most important things that
1:59:47 that i want people to walk away with is that there’s more than 200 foods that i’ve studied and
1:59:52 i’ve written about my books eat to be diseased need to be your diet that you know i’ve done all the heavy
1:59:58 lifting to help you figure out what foods are healthy that you could consider adding to your diet but if you
2:00:07 notice i didn’t actually give you a formula or a set menu on what to do for health because the most important
2:00:14 thing i i want people to walk away with is that my humanistic approach to this is um you should love
2:00:20 your food to love your health and if you could actually do both at the same time you have to find
2:00:25 out what are the foods that resonate with you what do you prefer what do you enjoy so if you could look
2:00:30 look at 200 healthy foods which is what i have in my books and just take a highlighter or pencil and
2:00:36 circle them circle the ones you already love start and stick with those you’re already way ahead of the
2:00:42 game and that builds confidence that you’re actually doing the right things and that’s what i love about
2:00:46 this book in particular eat to beat disease is that it also comes with lots of great recipes
2:00:52 um inside the book and um i think that’s super helpful because there’s a lot of information here
2:00:57 but this makes it actionable it’s a it’s a really iconic book it’s such it’s sold so incredibly well
2:01:02 because also it’s so unbelievably accessible to people who aren’t scientists and that are trying to
2:01:08 find some things that they can add to their plates and i think that’s essential to the approach that you
2:01:12 take as well you’re not someone that’s telling us we can’t eat nice things and enjoy our life you’re
2:01:16 talking about the things that we should be adding to our plate to make our lives more
2:01:20 healthy and increase our longevity which i’m very excited about actually because you’re writing a
2:01:27 book about longevity i hear and um i’m very much awaiting that book which when when do you think
2:01:31 that will be due and ready i don’t know i’m working on a manuscript so i’m not ready to give a release
2:01:35 date yet but you’ll be the first to know okay good we have a closing tradition on this podcast where
2:01:38 the last guest leaves a question for the next not knowing who they’re leaving it for
2:01:46 and the question that’s been left for you is how would you be able to tell that your time
2:01:53 here on earth has been successful that you’ve achieved what you set out to achieve
2:01:58 wow i think i would have
2:02:04 two sides two answers for that that represent different sides of the coin
2:02:12 for me i think if i’m able to have made my immediate community my family better
2:02:22 that would uh be meaningful a meaningful life uh having been lived and if you look at the whole
2:02:27 rest of my career and existence and how i spend my time
2:02:36 i want the work that i’ve done to resonate with others in a way that can improve their lives i’m
2:02:41 you know what i do i kind of say i’m taking one for the team the team being the rest of the world
2:02:47 and if i can contribute even a small piece that makes other people’s lives better than i feel like
2:02:51 you know i’ve done it i’ve done my job well that’s what you’re most certainly doing
2:02:56 and my friend because you when i was looking through what you’ve accomplished in your life
2:03:02 whether it’s the all of the fda approved treatments for over 70 diseases including cancers diabetes
2:03:07 chronic wounds and blindness that you’ve helped to develop and more than i could possibly count
2:03:10 or whether it’s the work that you’re doing through your foundation which i think people should check
2:03:14 out which is a non-profit organization which helps develop treatments for chronic diseases
2:03:18 that are based on angiogenesis you’ve most certainly done that and you continue to do that
2:03:23 but even maybe more importantly of all because there’s so many billions of people out there that
2:03:28 are starved of the information that you have and that you find in your research laboratory is you’ve come
2:03:34 out into the world into the public forum and you’re helping to articulate and demystify these incredibly
2:03:38 confusing things that people like me who didn’t go and get a phd or didn’t go to harvard
2:03:44 don’t understand and you’re masterful at it you really are masterful your ability to break down
2:03:49 you know i sit here week in week out speaking to very very smart people and not all of them have the
2:03:54 very important skill of being able to turn something very complicated into something understandable
2:03:57 and that is a skill you have it’s a real real gift and especially your use of like metaphors and
2:04:03 analogies which really cement these ideas in our brain in a way that we can all understand that for me is
2:04:07 a really really important gift so long may you continue to continue your work of public communication
2:04:12 as well because for people like me it can cause a penny drop moment that then leads us to change
2:04:16 our lives for the better so thank you thank you well thank you for inviting me but you know i would say that
2:04:23 you know we also live in a time again this is about going into the future i’m always about moving
2:04:28 into the future well we have the platforms we have you know i i went on to i developed a youtube channel
2:04:34 because i realized it was a place for me to take to drink from the fire hydrant distill it and figure
2:04:40 out how i can deliver it in swift fashion which would have been impossible 10 years ago so for example
2:04:47 you know we talked about how you know uh when my uncles had cancer and passed away because and i felt
2:04:53 helpless then my mother had it some years later and we had progress we had the ability to be able to do
2:04:58 something different similarly for me i look at my books i look at my social channels my youtube
2:05:04 platform as ways of being able to actually solve a problem that i felt like needed to be solved but i
2:05:09 wasn’t really sure how to do it until now dr william lee i highly recommend everybody goes and checks out
2:05:14 your youtube channel because it is fantastic and that’s a great place to get more of this information
2:05:17 but also i’m going to link the youtube channel and all of these books below for anybody that
2:05:22 wants to continue their journey of learning thank you thank you i really appreciate you being so generous
2:05:30 with your time and wisdom i find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of
2:05:35 spotify and apple and our audio channels the majority of people that watch this podcast haven’t
2:05:39 yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button wherever you’re listening to this i would like to make
2:05:44 a deal with you if you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button i will work tirelessly
2:05:49 from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better i can’t tell you how much
2:05:53 it helps when you hit that subscribe button the show gets bigger which means we can expand the production
2:05:57 bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to doing this thing we love if you could
2:06:00 do me that small favor and hit the follow button wherever you’re listening to this that would mean
2:06:18 the world to me that is the only favor i will ever ask you thank you so much for your time