Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1842 - Andrew Huberman
Uploaded: 2022-07-12T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1842 - Andrew Huberman' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-07-12. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1842 - Andrew Huberman' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-07-12. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1842 - Andrew Huberman

The Joe Rogan experience
What's up man great to see you see - so we were just talking about Ari blacking
out trying to keep up with Shane Gillis who is a
Superhuman drinker, but it's bizarre the volume you could put down and you were
you were saying you're about to say something
Yeah, I mean obviously there's a tolerance that's built up with drinking a lot
But I believe the number is approximately eight percent of people have a
mutation in a gene
Such that when they drink alcohol it increases their dopamine levels very
quickly and
They get euphoric they feel great
These are the people like that character in Mad Men the Don Draper character
like he would go out and just get plastered and the next day
You know he's all fresh and and ready and pop
Part of that is tolerance but in certain Scandinavian countries northern
European countries this gene tends to be more prevalent and these people are
The people that can just keep drinking and drinking they feel great when they
drink whereas most people they feel disinhibited at the beginning
You know you have a couple drinks the forebrain shuts down a little bit because
that's what it does
They start talking more talking more, but if they keep drinking they're blacking
out, you know, they're stumbling they're slurring their words
This eight percent of people by way of this genetic mutation alcohol affects
them very differently
It offsets all that sedative property and they could just go and go and go
This is the person who's doing a case a day or at the party and you're shot for
shot and just looking like they're improving in function
And obviously they're not but you put one of those people against
Ares Shafir and that's what you get. Yeah, so it even for those people though.
It still has a negative effect on your body, right?
Oh, yeah, I mean the toxicity the alcohol is
Universal but in terms of how it impacts brain function and you see this across
all these different categories of drugs, too, right?
You know, somebody takes a ritalin adderall modafinil or are modafinil
These are the common prescribed drugs now and people use them recreationally
for adhd in fact in researching an episode for our podcast on adhd
It turns out that more than eighty eight zero percent of college students will
rely on adhd meds
Quote-unquote recreationally not prescribed they buy it from each other in
order to study
80 percent and those drugs work mainly by increasing dopamine and increasing
adrenaline and they make your focus like this narrow and you're you're in a
Trench and you can function but a number of people take them and feel super
distracted and lousy
But this is of course what they prescribe to kids with adhd. Yeah now when you
modafinil that's that's provigil. Is that what that is?
Yeah, now there's some it's very expensive
It's like a thousand dollars a month in some cases. Really? Yeah, it was
originally for a narcolepsy so to offset daytime sleepiness
That was the original use of the drug and then it also does work for enhancing
Focus, right? I mean what that has drawbacks. It's not perhaps as detrimental
as like recreational drugs to
to increase focus, but most of the students out there and the
Tech workers and this is big in the finance world too are relying on Ritalin Adderall
and things like Vyvanse and to be clear
They have legitimate clinical uses. What is Vyvanse? It's another one of these
drugs for adhd
Here's the the story around why these drugs initially came to be if you look at
kids or adults with adhd like true attention deficit
Disorder or hyperactivity disorder that you don't always have the hyperactivity
What you find is they can focus really well if it's on something they like so a
kid with adhd or adhd that loves video games
That kid will play video games with laser focus for three hours
That sounds like me
But then you put them in front of something they don't want to do and they just
can't anchor their discipline
They just don't have the discipline that also sounds like me
Although I doubt that I don't know we we maybe will come up later
But you're disciplined for fitness and ice baths and training calm like those
things, right?
Well, yeah, well and if you can arrange your life such that most of your stuff
is around that great, but
these kids if
Prove that if you like something you can focus and
Right it comes as no surprise and that the drugs for adhd
Universally increase dopamine because dopamine is this incredible molecule that
enhances focus motivation and drive and literally
Narrows the aperture of your visual attention and we've all experienced that
and of course drugs like cocaine amphetamine do that to a hyper extent and
Then there's a crash, but with these drugs have prescribed in the right way in
the right situation. They're terrific
They teach the kids brain how to focus but nowadays there is
Rampant adult adhd and addd part of that is probably do the phone probably part
of that is probably just due to all sorts of things
But there is also a lot of recreational use of these
prescription drugs not illicit drugs like cocaine amphetamine but prescription
drugs that increase dopamine and
Supplementation for increasing dopamine as well
I had read something about a modafinil
NuVigil ProVigil which whichever one it was that initially it was created as a
performance enhancing drug
But they needed some sort of an ailment for it to you know to be
Prescribed and that was when they decided to prescribe it for noculepsy had you
heard anything like that?
I thought it was in the reverse, but I'm open to to hear it
And listen that the course of a lot of these drugs and how they hit market is
super interesting
I've been learning more and more about this because one of my colleagues who
works on aggression and mating behavior which fascinates me
Has identified some peptides that can really reduce anxiety
They put these to the pharmaceutical industry pharmaceutical industry wasn't
interested in them at all even though the safety margins are huge
So you say why why wouldn't they want this what turns out these same drugs
failed in a schizophrenia trial a long time ago?
So no one will go near it with a ten-foot pole so what the way the
pharmaceutical industry generally approaches drugs is
They love to remarket drugs for which there's already fda approval because then
they don't have to go through all the safety stuff
Right and when they do that they can renew the patent
This is crucial right because if you can get the generic version now with
things like good rx and these like little apps
You can get them you can go into a pharmacy hit good rx and it'll say oh, yeah
We've got some stuff that's about to expire this $300 a month drug is ten
dollars
I've had this happen. It's a you know amazing if they can keep it out of the
generic market
That's huge and the way to do that is to find a new clinical use
So I don't know which one came first narcolepsy or these these focusing ADHD
uses, but or as a performance enhancer
but if the
Pharmaceutical industry the people that own the patent to that drug can find a
new legitimate use they just bought themselves
I think another ten years on on the on the patent
So this was originally prescribed for schizophrenia and then they were going to
use these peptides for mating
Ah, yeah, so here so in terms of the aggression. This is really interesting
This is the work of a guy at Caltech named David Anderson and he works on
mating and aggression and the relationship human beings in
Well, he has work related to humans and the neighboring lab works on humans
But in mice and in humans, but these areas of the brain are really conserved
this this we can talk about which brain area
But what he discovered is serve meaning. I'm sorry that in mice and in humans
these brain structures look identical
Okay, and that the same classes of neurons exist that if you were to stimulate
them because neurosurgeons have done this people go into a rage or in animals
If you stimulate them the animals go into a rage in fact, there are these
videos online
They're incredible where this is da you lens work when she was in david andrew's
lab
So you take two mice a male mouse and female mouse and they're mating right as
it were and then they stimulate these neurons because they can do that now
You know using light believe it or not and those and the male immediately tries
to kill the female
You can even just put him in a cage alone with a glove filled with air
It's walking around you stimulate these neurons and he just goes into a rage
right just just trying to destroy this glove
But here's what's super interesting and no one understands if you put this
animal into a cage alone and stimulate
It looks pretty normal. It doesn't do anything. So it's not like it attacks
itself and you know and every time
There's this you know horrible news event like the school shooting thing or
something like that
I always think you know like what's going on in the there's a certain brain
area. It's called the ventromedial
Hypothalamus and this is a brain area that's really interesting because it has
a population of neurons that control mating you stimulate them and
Animals will just start trying to copulate with basically whatever is around if
you give them a choice of their usual
Preference of you know females if they're male males if they're female because
that's the way mice mice go
One or the other they will just try and start mating you stimulate the other
group of neurons and they will try and kill the other mouse is so
These are like switches in the hypothalamus
I mean are these like very distinct like when you talk about like neurons and
switches like how do you distinguish between the one?
Can you see them like what is the difference great question?
so for many decades it was known that if you stimulate this brain area you
could get aggression
this is actually Nobel Prize winning work of a guy named whose last name is
Hess and
What they found was if you stimulate this brain area cats would go into either
two kinds of of aggression
It was either defensive aggression kind of with with you know hair up
Right or you would stimulate a little bit more and they would do the that you
know predatory aggression
All right, I'm probably doing this wrong, but you know like ears forward and
you know, you're the hunter last time
I'm still learning about you know animal behavior in this way
But what's really interesting is that for years?
No one could understand why if you also stimulate this brain area and you used
a different pattern of stimulation you get mating behavior
It turns out that the neurons are mixed in there like salt and pepper
David Anderson's lab
Figured out that these are molecularly distinct neurons and what makes them
distinct is really interesting if they stimulate only the neurons that have the
estrogen receptor
They become aggressive and this again goes back to this thing that we talked
about a while ago, which is that
testosterone
Aromatized converted into estrogen has these incredible effects on aggression
and masculinization of the brain and a lot of people think
In fact, people heard me say that last time and said, oh, you're trying to say
that estrogen is doing everything testosterone is doing no
It's that things like testosterone and estrogen control gene expression and so
the fact that it's estrogen or testosterone
It doesn't really matter. It's the fact that these are molecular distinct
neurons
They can trigger these neurons and they can get very distinct outputs of
behavior
But what's crazy is you stop stimulating the animal just goes back to doing
whatever and then it goes. Oh, yeah
I think I'll try and mate again now eventually the females like hey, this is
getting confusing but
This it's clear that these sorts of things are also happening in humans
But normally we have kind of a weighting of aggression versus mating behavior,
right?
Some people choose to combine those right there's kind of extremes of that rape
there