Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2420 - Chris Masterjohn
Uploaded: 2025-11-29T18:00:33.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2420 - Chris Masterjohn' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-11-29. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2420 - Chris Masterjohn' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-11-29. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2420 - Chris Masterjohn

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Hi, Chris.
Good, how you doing?
Very nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you as well.
I have enjoyed your content online for a few years now, so it's really solid
stuff.
And I thought, what better day than to bring Chris in right after everybody
fucked up their
diet.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, I just want to tell a public health message that you did not get sleepy
because
the turkey was high in tryptophan.
Yeah, that's weird.
Isn't that a weird one?
That's a weird myth that's persisted for a long time.
I mean, the weirdest thing is the origins of it.
Apparently, it came from researchers in the, I'm sorry, not researchers,
journalists in
the 80s who were trying to come up with a reason to explain why everyone was
tired after Thanksgiving
meal, and they just looked as far as, oh, turkey has tryptophan, which is an
amino acid that
is the precursor to melatonin, which is, you know, you could call it a sleeping
chemical,
so it makes you get tired at night.
That must be why.
But it turns out that A, turkey's not that high in tryptophan, like even whey
protein is
higher in tryptophan than turkey is.
And then B, tryptophan doesn't make you tired.
Yeah, I dare anyone to go out and have like just a slice of turkey for
breakfast and see
if it knocks you out.
It's overeating.
It's like so obvious.
Yeah.
I mean, people are eating tons of stuffing, tons of sides.
They're eating so much food.
You're gorging.
It's a gorging day.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, I mean, it's not good.
And if, you know, if you look at like a lion in the wild, one thing that you'll
notice is
that they are on the prowl when they are hungry.
They're alert.
Their body's revved up.
And then they have a feast and they just fall asleep.
And the reason is that we're, you know, our, you even see this in physiology.
They call the parasympathetic nervous system the rest and digest system.
And that's because we are biologically wired to be alert when we need to work
to get our
food.
And then we're wired to, you know, eat that food, feel like we've gotten our
fill, we've
done what we need to do, and we can, now we can rest and take a sleep.
Yeah, it's normal.
I mean, there's a great video of these lionesses, these female lions after they've
hunted and
killed and ate all this food.
And they're just lying there like this with these enormous bellies, just like,
uh, just
like your uncle on the couch watching football, just, uh, yeah, I, you know,
and I think one,
uh, so one thing that I think we should talk about today is I've been in
nutrition research
for 21 years and I'm, you know, I think the crowning thesis of my work so far
is that we
really want to be thinking about mitochondrial function at the root of all
health and disease.
And so I think an interesting way to see sleep is it's like, why do we have to
sleep eight
hours a night?
And I, I think with dreaming, there's obviously other things going on there,
but deep sleep,
the, one of the primary things that's happening is you need to give your
mitochondria a rest
because your mitochondria are what produce all the energy that you need for, uh,
for producing
everything in your body, for maintaining it, for repairing it, uh, and for
distributing it
properly and for keeping it going across the lifespan.
And so your mitochondria are going to essentially take a nap, take a rest.
They don't go off because you die, but they really turn down the volume of the
work they're
doing.
But then you take your metabolic rate way lower than that.
And so you can build up the reserves of energy that you had used up the day
before.
Um, and so it's, you know, that, that can explain a lot of recent findings that
are coming out
as well because there was that recent study where they looked at sleep deprivation
with creatine
supplementation.
And so they randomized people to either drink a placebo drink or drink 20 grams
of creatine
through the night and they kept them awake all night and they had them do brain
puzzle quizzes.
And when the subjects were getting the 20 grams of creatine, they did way
better on the brain
puzzles, but they also complained about being tired a lot less.
And so the conclusion is creatine is somehow acutely preventing your brain from,
uh, suffering
during sleep deprivation.
And the rationale there is, you know, mitochondria are the powerhouse of the
cell or the power
plant that's producing the energy.
Creatine is like the power grid and it distributes that energy throughout the
cell.
Um, and so if the purpose of sleep is to restore the energy that you used up,
but then you intervene
by putting creatine in there.
Now you can keep that energy going and you can go more hours before you need to
get rest and
restore that energy because you've increased your capacity to distribute it.
That makes sense.
Um, that, that is an interesting thing because it's fairly recent that people
have talked
about this, right?
I mean, it used to be people only thought of creatine as being a muscle thing,
uh, to, to, to help
you recover and help you build larger muscles.
But then over the last, uh, I would say year or two, I started hearing talking
about cognitive
function and maybe even more than a couple of years, but about how it improves
cognitive function.
And the sleep thing though is very recent, right?
Yeah.
The sleep thing was, uh, in the last year, there is some literature on
traumatic brain injury
where 20 grams of creatine for six months doubles the rate of healing.
Um, that's incredible, but it's, yeah, the, the, the field is in its infancy,
but I, I think
that I actually almost a decade ago did a podcast on just creatine.
I called it more than a performance enhancer because there's, if you just look
at where
it's distributed in the body, almost every cell and every tissue has the creatine
system.
And so it really is this, and if you look at the literature, they'll say, well,
it's more
important in certain cells, like it's really important in your muscles because
your muscles
have this very polarized.
Sometimes they're at rest.
Sometimes their energy demand is going through the roof.
Um, and it's really important in, uh, like long cells.
So for example, your retina is part of your central nervous system and it's
really long cell
that's, uh, coming from the brain into the eye and, uh, creatine helps move
energy back
and forth. But if, if you just look at where, instead of where is it most
important, you're
just like, where is it? It's like almost every cell in your body has creatine
and it's helping
distribute the energy that the mitochondria make throughout your whole body.
And that includes
pumping stomach acid. It includes, uh, sperm, uh, swimming up the vaginal canal.
And so if
you, if you just look at where it is, you would think that creatine would help
a lot more than
muscles. Um, and it just turns out that all you need to do is start studying it
to start
seeing those effects.
Is there any studies on creatine, the improvement of eyesight?
I'm not sure. They're not that I know of.
Cause that kind of makes sense, right?
I mean, it makes complete sense. Like you would, uh, when it comes down to it,
your, your ability
to produce energy is producing, maintaining and repairing everything in your
body. So you would
expect to see anything that does improve your energy metabolism, improve
literally everything.
So it would be kind of shocking if you had no effect on that. Um, but I'm not
sure if, if
there are good, uh, trials done that I haven't seen them.
Um, speaking of improving eyesight, uh, I started doing red light about, I
guess, about a year
and a half, two years ago, got a red light bed and, uh, completely stopped
whatever macular
degeneration I was going through and reverse some of it. So I don't have
perfect vision, but
my vision's better. Like it's, it's definitely better. And it's not
just through the red light. It's also, it's gotta be some of the supplements
that I'm taking.
One of them, uh, I take a supplement from Pure Encapsulations, no affiliations
with them.
I just buy it. It's, uh, called macular support and, uh, let's see what's got
in there. It's
got lutein and a few other supplements that have been known to.
Yeah, that'll do it.
Is that it?
Well, yeah. I mean, so with the red light, it is very interesting. Whenever you
think of
red light, you want to think of your mitochondria because the main thing that
we know about red,
near infrared and far infrared that they're doing is they're actually going
straight into
the mitochondrial engines that produce the energy and helping them produce more.
And they're
also ordering the water structure inside the mitochondria to make those engines,
uh, produce
energy more easily. And there was a study a few months ago that it's, it was
just like
a one day study, but it showed that blasting people in the chest with red light
improved
their eyesight when it was measured the next day. And they covered their eyes
to make sure
that the red light didn't go into the eye.
And, and so the, the conclusion is, you know, it's not a clinical study, right?
And it's not
like a one year, how does it, you know, does it really improve your eyesight
over one year?
We don't know.
But it shows proof of principle that red light is doing something systemically
that does not have
to go to your eye that does improve your vision. And to me, that makes sense
because
your vision is going to be improved by anything that acts directly in your eye
to improve energy
production. But you've got coordinated energy metabolism going on through your
whole body.
Like your liver is doing tons of stuff to try to make your eyes healthy and
make your brain
healthy and, and so on. So it makes a lot of, a lot of sense, but that, so I, I
don't doubt
at all that the bed is a part of that, but the lutein and zeaxanthin are well
known to accumulate
in the macula where they have a very specific role in, uh, protecting against
macular degeneration.
And actually the best source of those is, um, egg yolks from chickens that are
fed, um, anything
that has them, but marigolds are super high in them. So if they feed the
chickens marigolds,
they get super high levels and, um, the egg yolk has fat that helps them get
absorbed. So
in terms of, I mean, this is, this is, you could take this with some eggs, but,
um, but, uh,
I would should feed my chickens marigolds. Yeah. If you have, if you have
chickens and if you're,
and if you're spending your money on a, on a lutein zeaxanthin supplement, you
might, you might be
able to get a, uh, maybe the marigolds are cheaper. So maybe I'll just double
it up. Um, so this is all
the ingredients. Does this stuff make sense as something that would help, uh,
support eyesight?
It does. I mean, the, the vitamin A is going to, uh, that's going to depend on
your genetics in terms
of how good are you at converting beta carotene into the, into the form of
vitamin A that we need,
which is most abundant in liver and egg yolks. Um, and-
It's dependent on genetics. It's yeah. So there's, you need, uh, beta carotene
is this big. And if
you chop it in half, you get vitamin A. And so you have an enzyme in your
digestive system that does
that. But that enzyme is dependent on a lot of things going right. So you need
to have good zinc
status, good iron status, good thyroid status, and all kinds of stuff like that.
And actually seed oils,
uh, decrease the conversion. So if you, if you take that with canola oil, you're
going to get
less vitamin A out of it than if you take it with, you know, eggs and butter.
Um,
and then vitamin A activation is also dependent on mitochondrial function too.
So I, you know,
but it makes sense. Vitamin A is great for your eye. Vitamin C is a great
antioxidant and a seal
cysteine, great antioxidant, the glutathione, the Cetria stuff. I'm, I'm kind
of, um,
I think it's, I think it's a little bit of a over, overhyped in terms of some,
you know,
