Wild Cacao and Chocolate Benefits

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. During my day, Joe Rogan podcast my night all day . Yep . I'm Bron. Very nice me toet you man,. Me too. Thanks. Thank you. And thanks for doing this work because you want to talk about a subject that's confused so many people is the sun good for you? Is the sun killing you? Why does it give you vitamin D? It's bad for you , why do people get skin cancer if it's good for you? Yeah, it's super complicated and the messaging has not sort of admitted that and that was yeah, a big impetus for the book. What was your opinion of sun exposure before you started writing this? So I had, you know, I had inherited the conventional wisdom from the institutions that it was really bad. At the same time, I will admit that my instincts were that maybe it wasn't as bad as they were leading me to believe because whenever I was in sun, I felt good and I lived in Vermont. By the time winter was reaching like month six, I felt b ad, right? Right. So it's like, there's more here than we're being told. Yeah, that's that was my wife's opinion. She's like, The sun can't be bad. It always feels good when you go out there. I'm like, oh it's a little more complicated than that , but that is a the instinct like it feels great when you're in the sun. Like, it's like your body wants it. Your body wants it. I mean, we now know that it literally triggers the release of opiates in the brain. Sunlight. So yeah, your body wants it and your body rewards you when you get it. So what is the issue? Well, let's go back to the beginning. So you have this idea that sun exposure is probably giving people cancer and sunscreen is good. You need more sunscreen, stay out of the sun . So when you started going into the research, what made you shift your opinion? So it really started for me like seven or eight years ago . I was on this science journalism fellowship . So I was just doing research and some of those studies hit the one about opiate release in the brain , and other studies showing that when light hits skin , cognition actually improves. Like your metabolism cranks up a little bit when the body feels sunlight coming in . And I thought, that's interesting. That's all good stuff. Then I came across a couple other studies that seem to indicate that sunlight could lower blood pressure, which was really interesting. So then I still had the sense sunlight bad, right? So then I remember just like googling like, so how much does sunlight shorten your lifespan . And like the punchline is sunlight seems to extend your lifespan. So when I hit that, I was like, why are we not hearing this? So that was the beginning. And so then so what is the problem? What is the issue with sunlight? Like when you think about skin cancer, what are the confounding factors that lead to skin cancer? Are we completely aware of that? It's more complicated than we thought. So sunlight does increase your risk of skin cancer , but depending on the type of skin cancer you're talking about, it's not necessarily like a linear relationship . So yes, in general , too much sun increases your risk of skin cancer. But yeah, the question is, what are the confounding factors? How important is skin cancer compared to these other things? If sunlight reduces your risk of other diseases, how does that weigh again st the risk of skin cancer ? So it's not the type of thing that can be done in a thirty second PSA . Right. So sun cancer that does cause skin cancer, or excuse me, sun exposure that does cause skin cancer. What is causing it? Why is it happening? So ultraviolet light, which is the most energy intense part of the solar spectrum. When those photons of light hit your skin , they go inside, right? We absorb all wavelengths of light to a greater lesser degree . And that super high energy ultraviole t light, if it hits a DNA molecule, it can mess up the DNA molecule. And then that can lead to mutations and skin cancer . Then it can also indirectly cause skin cancer by creating what are called reactive oxygen species, which are free radicals basically. So it energizes these atoms that start to steal electrons from other atoms and cause a little chain reaction, which is what a free radical is . So ultraviolet light can increase your free radicals and it can directly damage DNA . So that's why it could cause skin cancer. So it was basically that learning that one fact back in the forties and fifties that made scientists start to say, uh , light skin cancer, maybe we should think about how much sun we're getting. But this wasn't universally accepted, right? There were some people that even back then thought that sun exposure was very healthy for you. Like when did we figure out that sun causes the body to produce vitamin D? Yeah, that was an important part and it's a big part of the story , I think, because that was really back in the twenties that we figured that out. And then even a little earlier, we realized that sunlight could prevent rickets . So Rickets. Yeah, so Rickets is a like soft bone disease. Like if you don't get enough calcium in your bones when you're a kid, when you're a baby, you get soft bones, you get rickets, really bad disease. And it was in the industrial revolution, kids started getting ricket, started getting rick . Farm kids never got rickets. Then suddenly kids are working factories, they are living in cities that are choked with coal smog , they're living in tenement buildings, they're never seeing the sun and they all start getting rick late eighteen hundreds. Is nutrition a factor in that? Vitamin D. It was all vitamin D. At first they thought maybe it was vitamin A , but it turned out that was how vitamin D was discovered was some doctors figured out that it could solve rickets in kids. And then they figured out that if sun hits skin, that's how we made vitamin D . Then they figured out how did they figure that out ? They tested they did some tests on dogs. Actually, one of the guys who figured it out, he was pretty he had a hunch that that's what it was. Like they noticed the kids in the country wouldn't get rickets and kids in the city did get rickets. So like, I wonder if it's sunlight. So then a guy took dogs this is I think Scotland stuck them in a they actually thought it was dietary. He stuck them inside in this like little like warehouse and fed them oatmeal, which is what everyone in Scotland ate at the time. And the dogs got rickets . And he thought it was the oatmeal. He's like, okay, so something about diet , but then he got lucky because he had deprived the dogs of sunlight. And that's why they got rickets . So then eventually they realized that light hitting cholesterol molecules in the skin actually converts the molecules to vitamin D. So vitamin D is like downstream of cholesterol , but it takes that same ultraviolet light that can scrub your DNA . It actually breaks a bond in the cholesterol molecule , which allows it to gives it some movement and it flips around into a new form that's vitamin D . So once they figure that out , then they're like, Sun's really good for you. So we had this error in the twenties, thirties, and into the forties when everyone thought sun would cure everything and they went after it hard Really? Yeah , like parents would send their kids up into the Alps in like the twenties to institutes for heliotherapy. Kids would ski around in their underwear, take classes in their underwear. There's awesome photos from this era . Like the instructors are in their underwear, in the mountains, outside in Switzerland , teaching the kids , and everyone looks really healthy, right? So there's kind of like this idea that you couldn't get too much light. So people are literally burning themselves on purpose for health. This episode is brought to you by Create, the leading brand in creatine. You'll love their gummies, but now they 've also launched creatine plus electrolytes mix, perfect for hot summer months. Creatine is proven to support gains in strength, lean muscle mass, and aid recovery, but it also has cognitive benefits, more energy, focus and neuroprotection. Plus they're NSF certified for sport and third party tested for safety and potency. Visit try create .co slash rogen or use promo code Rogan for twenty percent off and free shipping on your first subscription order. This episode is brought to you by Zip Rec ruiter. 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You just search the name you want, buy it, and then you're ready to build. No hidden fees, no weird upsells. Go to squarespace dot com slash rogen for a free trial and when you are ready to launch, use the code Rogan to get ten percent off your first purchase of a website or domain. Is that the issue? Is burning a giant part of the issue? Yeah, so to give it away now it looks like for melanoma, which is the most dangerous type of skin cancer, it's associated with burning strongly, but not with like gentle , moderate everyday sun exposure. So how much of a factor is skin type? Like people that are pale or have freckles and red hair or blonde hair How much of a factor is that in skin cancer? And can they mitigate that by gentle , slow exposure? Like a little bit here, a little bit there, and slowly build up. Yeah, huge. Like skin type is kind of everything. People who have really dark skin basically don't get sun induced skin cancer, almost never. And you know, the authorities don't tend to talk about that because they want things to be they want to have these one size fits all recommendations. But those recommendations to basically always avoid the sun are written for the super fair people, especially if you have red hair orange freckles , then you actually have a mutation in your melanin gene that makes you super susceptible to skin cancer from sunlight. So if you've got if you've got that phenotype, lots of moles, red hair, freckles , you do have to be really careful. And you can't you can only do so much, like you're not going to tan that much anyway. Your mel'ans justin different. Everybody else , yeah, you're much less susceptible and you can tan you can make more melanin pretty easily through tanning. I wonder what, if any effect? Have you ever heard of that? I can't remember the name of the peptide, but there's a peptide that people are taking now that causes their body to generate melanin and they get really dark . Yeah , yeah. It's really weird . Yeah, and I don't know what's going on there exactly. It seems like that peptide is maybe making you. There's things called photosensitizers that make your skin super sensit ive like you just absorb solar radiation really well then, but not necessarily in a good way . And that can make you make tons of melanin to try to compensate. So I wonder that peptide might be triggering melanin as a compensation mechanism for extra protection from sunlight. Or maybe it's just making melanin happen like independently of sunlight. Did you put it in perplexity? Oh, I hear it is. Melan oton, melanotan? Melanotan? Synthetic peptide analog of the naturally occurring hormone am stimulating hormone stimulates the body's melanocytes to produce melanin resulting in a dark tan. It's largely unrelated excuse me unregulated, illegal in many regions for cosmetic purposes and carry significant health risks. What's the risks ? It's not approved by the FDA for cosmetic use, an unregulated market means purity. Okay, but that's unregulated. Notable risks include dermatolog ical issues , rapid and uneven darkening of existing moles, the emergence of new moles and hyperpigmentation , concerns that could mask or accelerate the development of melanoma What is this? Potentially damaging erections ? What? Erections. Oh, that's right. This apparently gives people raging erections. Why? Prolonged, painful and potentially damaging a dam aging. Imagine you get a erection that goes so hard you redline the penis . Medical and dermatolog ical organizations strongly advise against the use of melanaton melanatan because it's unapproved. There are no clinically established safe dosages . Well so alpha MSH the thing that it is mimicking is that's how your body makes melanin. That's how your body's supposed to do it. You got to see the before and afters because they're kind of bonkers . I've seen some people get super well, the problem is it's Instagram. You never know what's real. That's that guy got a little tan. Let's see if there's any okay, look how pale that see but that's not how do we know if that's real? Just like there's like a light on him . Right . And then he's in a fucking dark closet in the last picture. I've seen. Is there a that one right there, the low no, the one yeah, that one, look at that guy . Well, you know, it's a look. It's an interesting look. He injected himself with unregulated tanny peptide, melanaton, Melanotan two . Click on that seems like a joke a little bit. No, no, this guy, this is the guy that I saw online. This guy's, he's the test rabbit . This dude went hard . Did he get an erection too? Yeah, he died from that. I don't know . So his before and afters . So let's see what is he just yeah, he just got darker and darker and darker . But I wonder if like if I understand that it's unregulated , but if it was regulated and this is something they're trying to work with right now with peptides and make them regulated. See, that's the photo's dark though . I mean that's like a shitty iPhone one camera That's crazy if that's like this is nuts there's something going on there . Like you know what it looks like? It looks like those bodybuilder guys who use that that ink that dye on their skin to make themselves darker so their muscles pop out more. So here's here's better. Tanning log photos. These are better photos . That's crazy . But I wonder if that offers skin protection. It would definitely offer skin. I mean, if it is, if it's if it's melanin definitely, I mean that guy can probably be outside all day. Yeah, so that's the question. Is that available to someone who's pale ? Like and if someone is pale see if you could find an example of someone who's pale who took it ? Because you would think like, oh, well maybe that maybe just we need to do studies and figure out what the dosage is and figure out how to activate that aspect of it Melanin clearly protects you from skin cancer. Like if you have super dark skin, like, you know, African ancestry , you're blocking like your melanin is absorbing like ninety seven, ninety eight percent of the UV rays. It's super effective. But didn't Bob Marley die from skin cancer? He did. That's pretty crazy. Okay, this is one. Wow . It looks like the same person . Hard to tell that f theit. Same mold. Yeah, it looks like the same mold . That looks pretty good . But I would just also wouldn't if you were trying to sell some of this stuff in maybe nefarious ways, this would be an easy one to market Tough and you know . Definitely. Look, this is part of the unregulated market problem is we don't know. And also, you know, you're getting ninety nine percent bro science on this stuff . You know, like what screams bro science? It screams it from the top of the hills. What legitimate scientist is out there injecting himself with Melanotan . But the other thing is if you do it naturally, right? If you just get a little sun every day and slowly build up, you're not just making melanin, you're also increasing your body's damage repair system. Like you have all these like nucle otide excision repair, things that fix your DNA and fix cells that have gotten screwed up. And that will also ramp up every day and it's not just not just sunlight, like exercise same thing. Like anything that stresses the body a little bit like Aormesis, right? So all those things are going to cause your damage repair system to crank up and be ready. So you probably want those to like the melanin and the damage repair to like go up together . Right. So you would want to if let's say studies were done, let's say we found what the effective and safe dose is and how to administer it. You would want to do it along with sun exposure slowly to try to ramp up your body's ability. Added note on this happened fourteen years ago. Woah, which is strange. Here's some of the side effects he said, but he also said he's pretty much impervious to UV at this point. Increased libido didn't see that one much either. He said he didn't get it. Okay, sides are decreased appetite, very mild nausea, more for some , none for me, decreased libido increased libido. He said it didn't see that one much either. Some get facial flushing like a niacin dose. Never got that either. And the most strange things is that it feels really good to st retch like when you first wake up interesting . Huh ? Did you do it for the skin coloring? Yes, I did it for the skin coloring. I'm pretty much impervious to UV at this point. I have faded about twenty five percent since returning from Florida january thirty fifth. We'll be dosing again probably March. Is this guy still alive? fourteen years what is that ? Click on that link where his profile Let's see if Homeboy's alive. Where this takes us to . Is this Reddit? See, a year ago he's commenting. I never did it subtle . Okay, so a year ago he's still alive or someone has taken over his account . In theory you could use an old school quartz tanning lamp. Okay, so you could tan with it. There isn't a weird reddit there so we're gonna stop looking. Why? I don't I mean, this is not for the show, but he isn't that weird. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I was afraid to go that way. That's a problem . Well, only crazy people are willing to try something like that. Like do you remember that there was a guy God I think, it was on Oprah, one of those shows where he was taking was it silver? Collidal silver? That's right. Colloidal silver. And his whole his skin turned blue permanently like a smurf . Poor guy. Yeah. And he wound up dying . Yeah. And how did it kill him during? I don't know if it killed him, but he's I believe he died now . That's homeboy. Not good. Yeah, that's just not a good look. You would think you'd start turning a little blue and you'd go, Hey, maybe I need to back off this colloidal silver. If we've dies . Yeah , I mean, what the fuck, dude , that guy, I mean, maybe he could have gotten some lanetan and even that out . It just been a nice chocolate . You know, like a bluish chocolate . I mean, he looks delicious. I'll say that . Yeah, this is Argya Argeria, Argeria, the rare disease that turns people blue , caused by a buildup of silver in the body which discolors the skin. Wow . twenty thirteen . He died from unrelated causes . Whatever that means . I mean, anybody's taking that much cloidal silver, you're probably making a lot of other mistakes. I mean Yeah, yeah., like you're a risky dude . So many options. This episode is brought to you by Ketone IQ . Here's something cool. 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He did die of skin cancer, and that confuses a lot of people. So he had melanoma on his toe . So and that was a kind of melanoma that's not caused by the sun . And everybody gets it, no matter what race you are, everybody gets it at this the same rate, which is quite uncommon . They know it's not caused by the sun , but it complicates things for people because people are like, I got melanoma on my toe and they think it's from the sun. And they're like, how did that happen, right? Like, what's me alanoma doing down there? But so it does not all melanomas are caused by the sun . There's, um , you know, most probably are, but it gets really weird with melanoma. It's associated with burning, with intermittent sun exposure. Like you work in an office all year and then you go to Cancun and get fried . That's a pretty good recipe for melanoma history of sunburns also will double your risk. Chronic exposure where you have an outdoor job every day, lower than average risk of melanoma. Really? Yeah, so it gets weird. Like landscapers landscapers have outdoor workers have fewer a lower incidence of melanoma than office workers . Wow. And we don't hear that. No , no. I mean, I was I was looking at Instagram the other day and some poor guy had this I don't know what happened to his face but he had some sort of skin cancer and they had to take a graft and his was on his nose so it was like a flap of skin was like almost covering over his eye . And you know, his message was, where sunscreen? This is what happened to me. Well, so I mean, yeah, so I don't want to downplay skin cancer because it sucks. What do you get it 's, you know, they have to cut off a hunk of your ear or something, that definitely sucks, even if it's not life threatening, sucks. Yeah . So and so yeah, like, but that's generally from overexposure. Like burnurninging. B. All the experts I've spoken with said don't burn . Right. Burning is the one that people always say that it's not just burning. It's burning causes damage that starts to appear years later. Yeah , and they're dialing in on that more and more. It can start much like burns during childhood is actually the highest association for melanoma. Don't burn when you're kids that we're all screwed. Oh, that sucks. That sucks because I fucking cook myself as a kid. Amy, I grew up in Florida, fried, you know? Well, when I was a kid in the seventies and eighties, you know, you wanted to get a tan , especially when I lived in Boston. It was cold as shit in the winter when it got warm, you know, you're a Vermont car. Yeah. You got out there like, ah, put baby oil on, we fried. Totally. I was just looking at some of those Johnson Baby Oil ads from like the sixties and seventies. Oh my god, yeah. Yeah, it was basically cooking lube totally. Yeah, it just helped helped you cook better. But you remember George Hamilton, like the actor Master Tan, he had yeah, he was all about that. Just the other day I was, like, How's he doing? eighty seven and ridiculously healthy right now. Really? Yeah, he's going strong. Yeah, I met that guy. He did an episode of News Radio once. Yeah, he was Tan as fuck. Yeah, that was that was his thing. That wasn't his thing. It became yeah, what he was known for. And still he's still going. That's so he's still tan? Yeah, you should see him. He looks cool. Pull a photo of George Hamilton. I mean, great for an eighty seven year old. Yeah, look at him, still tan How does he end a shiny? What a weird thing to be known for . He's the guy who gets tan . You know what I'm saying? I mean, try to remember a role that he played. That's true. I think he was Dracula in some bad nineteen seventies like comedy. Look at that. That's a tan right there. Right. So how was he getting it though? Like I remember when I was a kid in Boston, a lot of people used tanning beds, especially in the wintertime. And they still do. Those are actually like on the rise. And they do they seem to raise your risk of melanoma for sure. There you go. That's how we did it. Ah, look, he's got to reflect a tan thing. So he's just out there getting sunlight all the time and he didn't look bad . That's , you know, that 's a that's a weird one, right? He claims he's never had skin skin cancer, I think. Well, he probably was doing it so often that his body was prepared for it, right? Look at that photo of him with that lady in the corner. Yeah, look at that. That's nuts See, that's the thing. I think like if you're getting that regular dosage, your body is producing all these compounds whose entire job is to make sure your cells don't turn cancerous because living things have been working on this for five hundred million years. Like they get hammered by the sun every day and they got to deal with it. Right. So it's when it seems like when your skin is totally unprepared and you shock it with like a massive dose that it's not ready for , then you're in trouble. That's the kind of thing that triggers trouble. Was there any pushback on this research? Like when you first started examining this and realizing that sun exposure has a lot of benefits, were any dermatologists saying, Hey, this is dangerous information. You shouldn't say this. Hell yeah. I've been denounced multiple times by the American Academy of Dermatology. Like officially, they send an official letter when I write an article and they say nobody should be getting any sun exposure. That's their opinion . No one should be getting any sun exposure. Regardless of the benefits, the vitamin D, the no sun exposure without protection from either sunscreen or clothing. Wow . And if that makes you vitamin D deficient, take a pill. So that's what needs to change. Because those pills haven't panned out in tests. They don't work like natural D does for whatever reason. Really? Yeah, they don't work at all. What do you mean? So everyone thought like back in like the eighties , nineties, everyone started noticing, scientists started noticing that people who naturally had lower amounts of vitamin D in their blood had higher rates of all the classic chronic diseases. So I started thinking, okay, vitamin D it's like a magic pill almost. It'll cure it'll reduce everyone's risk of all these diseases if we raise their rates of D. So they started recommending vitamin D pills, which I think are still like the number one supplement in the world. I take it. So then they did all these clinical trials to prove that it would help. Huge huge, clinical trials, tens of thousands of people, follow ups that went for many years . None of them showed a benefit. No benefit in terms of your immune response? No benefit for any condition. Now, did they take vitamin D along with vitamin K two and with magnesium? Because that's what's recommended. So I don't I mean, there are a bunch of different apparently vitamin D by itself is not effective , that need v youitamin D with K two and magnesium. And I think there might be another one. See, put that into perplexity, please. See what it says, like, what are the benefits of vitamin D and what should it be taken with? Because I think magnesium and K two are the big ones and that together they have a sort of a synergistic effect. Yeah. And that could be like yeah, I'd be curious. Yeah, I think vitamin D by itself, the body has a problem absorbing it. It's like there's a lot of things like that. Like zinc is like that. You need an ionophore to absorb zinc. So you take it with cercines. Yeah . Well, one thing D, you know, the way it naturally comes in through the skin and it comes in with a whole bunch of related compounds. Right. And so yeah, I do think there's sort of a synergistic effect when it's combined with the right thing. But D from the sun has always been known as the best way to get it. The best way to get vitamin D, the most effective , the healthiest way is through sun exposure. Yeah. Like that's that's how the design is supposed to work. Proplexi says vitamin D helps your body absorb calcium, build strong bones, and teeth, support muscles and nerves, plays a key role in immune function. It's best absorbed and with a t meakenal or a snack that contains some fat and often paired with calcium for bone health. So please put in what are the benefits of vitamin D taken with K two and magn esium . See if it says that . Because this is what my doctor who is a vitamin specialist recommends Benefits when taken with K two and magnesium . Don't don't don't . Okay . Taking vitamin D together with vitamin K two and magnesium can make each of them work more effectively, especially for bones and heart, as long as the doses are appropriate for you. The trio mainly improves how your body handles calcium. Interesting. Delps you absorb it, magnesium helps activate D , and K two helps send calcium into bones instead of arteries . D increases calcium absorption from your gut and supports bone, muscle, and immune function. Magnesium required to activate vitamin D low magnesium can blunt vitamin D's effect and also directly support bone structure and many enzymes. K two activates proteins that move calcium into bones and teeth and keep it out of the arteries and soft tissues, helping bone and cardiovascular health. Potential benefits of the combo, better bone support, heart and artery protection , more efficient vitamin D use . Okay , so the doctor is correct . So maybe that's the problem is that these people were taking it with low magnesium , low calcium , didn't have K two. Yeah, I'd be curious like I'd be curious if like if there was an effect on disease incidents for the combination I don't know because the D on its own yeah it didn't show any any effect but sun exposure. Let's put that in. Does vitamin D taken on its own have any health benefits ? Let's see what it says to that. Because I'd never heard that D on its own was not effective at all. I just heard that it was minimally effective that you had to take it with other . It seems like it only helps people who are really deficient. Like if you're super low like below like sixteen nanograms per milliliter , then probably is a good idea. But like for people who already had at least twenty nanograms per milliliter, it didn't seem to have any of these benefits that they were seeing in people who naturally had high rates to sunrise it the way you're looking for. It says, Yes, vitamin D on its own has several well proven health benefits, especially for bones, muscles, and immunity. Huh ? Bone strength and fracture prevention, muscle function, adequate . I didn't own sorry. What's that? I missed the word own taken on it. On its own . Try why the answer was weird. So let's say yes as clear, proven benefits, especially for bones muscles and correcting deficiency. Yeah, so that's going to be for people who have super low levels. Preventing rickets. There it is. Yeah. But so they had thought that it might reduce incid ence of all these other diseases based on what they're seeing for people who naturally had high levels through sun exposure and it didn't . So then you met people who had high levels through sun exposure. Yeah, because your natural level of vitamin D is sort of a direct like meter of vamination. Right. But this is a natural level. You're not talking about supplementation . Right. Right. Okay. So that was why like people who had high levels of D without supplementation have lower r ates of all like every disease you can think. Right . So the hope was that raising everyone's D to those levels would have the same effect . And it didn't. New England Journal Medicine did actually actually did an editorial in twenty twenty two saying stop prescribing D. It doesn't work , which is sad. God, that seems incorrect though. Because if you're taking it with magnesium and K two, it seems that they do work synergistically and there seems to be proven health benefits One of the problems I think is like I think people generally want to avoid recommending supplement ation for some reason . It's kind of a weird thing. Like they want to dismiss it. Like I had a doctor once that told me don't bother taking vitamins. Just eat a bal anced diet. And I was like, look at you . Guy looked like shit. He didn't look as good as you, right? It looked terrible. Yeah, I'm amazed how poor what poor health they generally like seem to be. I can't blame , it's so hard to take seriously a guy with a gut when just he looked terrible and he was telling me that I just need a healthy diet. And I'm like, okay, I do have a healthy diet, but also I feel different when I take vitamins and my blood work reflects that. Yeah, I noticed that when I was I started going to all the conferences of the sun researchers and they're all in like the basements of hotels. And those guys all look are as pacey as it gets. Like, do none of you guys like practice what you preach, really? How strange is it that human beings with all of our knowledge, with I mean, obviously, there's much more to learn. We're still confused about how we interact with our environment. Yeah, absolutely. A hundred percent. With sun, which seems to be like it's there. It's everywhere. It's like you're always in the sun in normal in a normal world environment where human outside of cities and all that stuff. It seems like we would have an understanding of what happens when you're interacting with sun . Yeah. And light period, like light of all kind s. Like it seems like there's this sense in biology that light didn't matter. It's like just ephemeral , which, you know, the quantum physicists a hundred years ago understood that light and matter are just like two halves of the same coin, right? And that light totally affects the behavior of molecules. We're made of molecules. Light's gonna matter. So I actually think that's where I eventually got to with the book. I was like, we need to think about our light d iets and our like lightscapes that we're surrounding ourselves with like more seriously than we have. It seems like your work is based entirely on the data. So what did these dermatologists have to say about the data if they're denouncing you and they're saying that this guy should not be listened to, the things you're saying are dangerous. But you're talking about data. So I don't understand how they can just make those flat statements like that. This episode is brought to you by Simply Safe. 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This episode is brought to you by Traeger Grills if you enjoy food and I mean really good food. Traeger is a game changer. This isn't just a grill, it's the ultimate way to cook outdoors delivering unbeatable wood fired flavor thanks to the all natural hardwood pellets that fuel everything you grill, smoke, or bake. That's it. Just wood and fire and flavor. And what's truly wild is how easy it is. Just set the temp , load the grill, and let Traeger handle the rest. Grill steaks, smoked ribs, even baked pizza, all on one grill. If you're into fire, flavor and doing things right, check out Traeger Grills . Right. And I think we just need to have a conversation about the data. And you know, there's no right answer ahead of time. But they don't like their job is to prevent skin cancer . So if that's your only job , you're gonna tell people stay out of the sunlight. Forever. Forever , right? And no one can call you on that. No one can say, hey, like, I got skin cancer, and it's your fault. Right, but doesn't sun exposure improve cardiovascular health and lower blood pressure. And isn't cardiovascular disease a far more dangerous problem than skin cancer in terms of numbers? It's number one, twenty million deaths a year, cardio . So anything that moves need thele in that is awesome, you know ? And it does. And it seems to, like, all the studies show it does and they're all observational studies, right? You look at populations, you're like, o,h these people have more sun exposure, lower blood pressure, lower rates of cardiovascular disease. But then, you know, the other side will say , you know, correlation does not prove causation. Like prove, show us that it's, you know, do your giant clinical study where you stick half the people in the sunlight and they live longer , which is not gonna happen. Right . Yeah . But it's like are they willing to have a conversation with you? They're not willing to they don't want to look outside of the sun and skin cancer question. Like they're not willing to entertain any of the other benefits that are outside of their field. So there's got to be somebody out there who can be the generalist who can like think about it holistically. That seems so ignorant . It's the state of science now. Like the science is , you know, like a field of microspecialties. Would you like some coffee? Yeah, I'll take a little. That looks good when you're pouring it . It's also a very shiny press. Yeah, you got there. Cheers, sir. Cheers Is coffee good for you? Coffee is awesome for coffee is shockingly good for you. Talk to me, let's go. It's it is fucking crazy how good coffee is for you. I've been like startled power of the evidence. Yeah , I've read both. I read It's Bad For You and I dismissed it because I'm biased and I love coffee . And I just it just tastes too good. It feels too good. I like it. It's but I've read a lot of benefits about it. I think it's the best possible supplement. Really? You think if it's a supplement? It's the best . And I think it's all due to mitochondrial function. I think it makes your mitochondria just spin, you know . And is particularly because of caffeine or coffee itself? The coffee bean. You know, I mean caffeine, I think it's caffeine, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's other stuff in coffee that's contributing because you know, like tea doesn't seem to quite deliver the goods like coffee does. No , but caffeine is actually the plants are making it to kill bugs. Right, right. Because it makes the bugs, mitochondria run out of control and they basically like blow up. It does that to us, but we have these other like governors like that come in and slow down that ramp up. So we get the nice ramp up without the explosion . So it's good. So it makes we produce energy more efficiently with less wear and tear. That's all I need to hear. I'm in . I just love coffee. I'm not giving it up. But I've heard many people say that Michael Pollin had a really interesting anecdote . He laid off coffee for I think three or four months as an experiment. And then he had a cup of coffee and he said, it was like taking a psychedelic . He said, I just felt so amazing the effect was so profound. He said, I really wanted to do it only that way where I only take it, you know, very rarely because but then I fell right back into mind. Right back. Yeah. Like I remember that article it was great. And also he said none of the the like caffeine researchers touched the stuff . I'm like, that's not good. But yeah, he went right back to it. And I think he's a proud coffee drinker. Yeah, he is. He went right back to it. But so have you had any conversations with these dermatologists that are denouncing you? No, but I'd like to actually. Are they willing or have they avoided them? They have so far really avoided. Like they just say, you know, we're not ready to look at any of that research. So weird. I think it's going to change. I think actually like I said, I think light medicine is actually going to become very important in the next ten, twenty years. And dermatologists are kind of positioned to be like the leaders on that stuff because skin is the primary interface with light for our bodies. And you know, they should be experts on all this . You know, you know, red light therapy is a big thing now . And dermatologists are doing that even though the evidence isn't great for that, but I think there's probably something there . But they should basically I think they need to be thinking more about all of these different wavelengths of light as healing modalities and how to, you know, work them into like regular programs. I've talked about this before, so I apologize to anybody listening, but I've essentially completely stopped my macular degeneration with red light therapy. Wow, yeah. Not just stopped it, but reversed it. Like I don't need reading glasses anymore. I've been using a red light bed for about two years now and from the time I started using it within about a month I started seeing benefits and so Gary Brecker was on the podcast and explained it to me . And so I went out and bought one of these really expensive. It's like a tanning bed, this is the thing you lie in. And I do it three times a week for twenty minutes. So all over? Yep. You naked. Slide down and there. And I keep my eyes open . And I went to a tanning bed once, not a tanning bed, a red light bed once at a health clinic. And they were like, got to wear these goggles and make sure you close your eyes before the light goes on. I was like, okay, I did all that. And apparently there's some benefit that even when blindfolded it increases your vision. Yeah, for sure. And again, I think mitochondria are part of that answer. There's a guy at University of College London, Glen Jeffrey, who this is his whole field optometry and red light . And he has shown in multiple different animals, including humans , that red light improves mitochondrial function and improves vision. Yeah, I mean, I'm fifty eight . And for me to be fifty six and saying, I'm fucked. I had these fucking things everywhere. I had these all these reading glasses, I had them all over my house. I'd gotten up to three X. These are cheap Amazon ones. I had a nice pair, but I kept losing them. So I just went and bought cheap ones. They seemed to work. And it was just fine for looking at a computer, you know, reading my emails, reading my phone. And I needed them to read my phone. I don't need them anymore. Like at all. I don't use them anymore. My vision's not perfect. It's not as good as it was when I was twenty, but it's way better than it was when I was fifty six . And yeah, I think so in the mitochondria in the eyes have to fire faster than any mitochondria anywhere else in the body. The eyes burn through energy no other cells because it's like, you know, it's kind of the toughest task. It's like they got to go super fast . So they yeah, they those mitochondria need to be on top of their game and it seems like red light benefits that in particular. What seems so closed minded that these dermatologists aren't willing to say maybe we're looking at just an insufficient amount of dat a, maybe we're looking at this wrong. Maybe the whole thing is much more nuanced and maybe there's benefits if it's done correctly. I just don't understand why they're not if there's all this data, which clearly you show in your book, that there's a tremendous amount of data. Why? You know, like so there's this like saying attributed to Max Planck, who's this like quantum physicist. Science advances one funeral at a time. So I think we got to let the old guard die off a little bit, but I guarantee there's a young generation coming in who's going to be really interested in the light and how they can use it. Certainly. Well, I think there's so many conversations available online now from actual researchers and people that have put in the time and put in the work and explored things from this position that like, hey, maybe the old guard are not correct . And the data seems to show that that's true. Yeah, and it's fun. I mean, playing with light, it's super fun. So like this is a way you can make your world a little bit richer is starting to think about this stuff. Well, it's also like don't you want to be informed ? And there's if we do understand that it has an effect on mitochondria, and there is all this evidence that red light seems to have some benefits. Like, wouldn't I just don't understand how someone could be an expert in skin and ignore that. They won't object to the red. Some of them are using red light therapy because there's no risk of skin cancer from red. It's only the UV and maybe a little bit of the blue that contributes to skin cancer . So that it's the UV where they get a little wigged out . But even that, it seems like there's a like in your book you show the tremendous amount of data, there's health benefits to it. So I just don't understand. And that data's it's come from all different other fields, like immunology, cardiology . So and like scientists are sort of increasingly like hesitant to trespass on their other domains , you know? Like they're not going to walk across campus to the other building anymore . Yeah. That needs to change, you know? Yeah, we've had those discussions too with scientists that are super frustrated, especially when they try to get interdisciplinary groups together to study one particular thing and everyone's resisting because they have their own work that they're working on and they don't want to get involved. And it's like guys , this is what you're here for . There's not a lot of scientists. You gotta do your job because like you're the only ones that are doing it. There's without you guys we're fucked and if you're out there relying on old insufficient data , or you have this very small data set that shows that there's negative outcomes to the sunlight. And so you just throw the baby out with the bath water. Like you're doing the whole field a massive disservice. And the other part of it is that science, it's sort of very self reinforcing. It's all grant based essentially. Like if you're a scientist, you want to do a study, you have to apply for a grant to get the money to do the study . And there's generally a handful of entities that are like handing out the grant money and it's the old guys waiting to die who are going to approve what they think is the truth, but they're going to fund the study that fits with what they already know about the world . So it's this kind of crazy system where the only way you can get money to do a study is if you're already telling them what they know. Right. Right. So it's very diffic ult to get funded to do something that goes against the grain increasingly so. And that's a problem. And so much of it is dependent upon the ego of the people that are at the top of the organization. Ego's definitely part of it. It's a giant part of it because they've if based their entire career on telling you one thing that turns out to be incorrect, they're very reluctant to correct themselves . Yeah, there's not just it's very rare to find the individual who's well known in the field and is eager to self correct, you know? So have you had any conversations with any of these dermatologists ? No, but I'd love to. Not one . That seems crazy. Have you reached out to any of them? I have. I've reached out and I get the boiler plate. Like we don't want anyone in the sun , take your deep pills . It doesn't matter. And the one that really I think has got to change is the skin color question because fine to go with recommendations for avoiding sun for people with fair skin. But for people with dark skin who have almost no risk from sun induced skin cancer and can benefit hugely from like things that will lower blood pressure and lower cardiovascular disease . It seems like you're not being fair to those people. Not only that, it makes you feel better , which is very important just for sanity . I mean, that I think that gets underplayed. Like mood and happiness is kind of the whole deal, right? Yeah. And there's just no question that sun exposure makes you happier. I spent a week with my friend Brian Callan and Steve Marnella in Alaska and Prince Edward's Island . And it rains there like three hundred and fifty days a year and we got rained on for the entire week. And then when I came back to LA , I was driving around and the sun was magnificent. It felt so good. I stood outside, I closed my eyes, I like stretched my arms wide like I was just taking it all in. And I called my friend Steve up and I said, Dude , because we were in the rain for like a week, I go, I'm in L. A. right now in the sun and it feels amazing . I never felt the sun like this before. It's 'cause like my body was saying you didn't get enough of this for a week. Now take it in and we're going to reward you with all these amazing endorphins and good feelings. Like if that was a drug, that drug that I took, like if depressed people could take whatever I felt when I was out in the sun after a week in the rain, they would take it every day. It would change the world. I could feel like this all the time and it went away. You know, it went away because L. A. It's sunny all day long every day. So eventually I got accustomed to it, but that feeling that I get that I got after the week in the rain and coming back and just be like it was incredible . It was like a drug, an amazing drug, a happy drug. Yeah, it's an awesome drug. I've felt it for sure. You know, especially like early spring. If I leave Vermont and I like have something in LA, I'm just like, why is everyone not just dancing on the streets this feels so you know? But the problem is Los Angeles they're so used to it. Yeah, they're they're so spoiled . Everyone there is so spoiled weather wise. It's the perfect weather on Earth. It's incredible. Yeah, especially if you live in Lake Malibu where it barely even gets hot. So you're dealing with that cool ocean breeze and it's sunny every day. You know, like, oh yeah, but how about here? Like do you end up spending a lot of time outside here or oh yeah? Oh yeah, I do. But I'm outdoors all the time. I work outside, I do a lot of farmer's carries outside. I practice archery, so I shoot my bow outside every day and I love it. I feel better. Even when it's hot out, I don't mind because I'm kind of accustomed to it because of sauna use. I use a sauna every day . I'm pretty religious about it . So my body is really acclimated to heat, so it doesn't really bother me that much. I just bring a big jug , a sixty four ounce jug of water with ice and electrolytes and I just drink that while I'm out there . So I shoot my bow for hour and a half, two hours and one hundred and five degrees and I'm fine. I love it. Actually it's good. Yeah too. Like as a kid in Florida, you know, we'd play basketball after school for hours or in summer it'd be one hundred and five degrees and then you just kind of turn the hose in your mouth for quite a long time, you know , yeah, I mean it feels great. It's just you have to make sure you're not dehydrated and you have to make sure you don't burn. That's that's kind of all it is. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's all it seems to be. But we do see like truckers that have you ever seen those? You talked about that famous photo? Yeah , that is a crazy photo. Crazy photo. So what we're referring to is there's a photo of this trucker and the left side of his face from the sun coming in from the window looks like he's twenty years older on his left side than it is on his right side. It's like special effects somebody melted the left side of his face. What's that all about? Yeah, there's the guy. There you go. That's literally nuts. Yeah, that's literally nuts. Like left side is just sloping off basically . His left side looks like a hundred year old man truck driver face . Years behind the wheel driving a truck . Damage typically limited the left side of the face. So it's literally called truck driver face . Yeah. Now so this that photo in that study got used to like scare the shit out of a lot of people try to keep them out of the sun. Especially people that are vain and don't want that fucked up wrinkly face. This episode is brought to you by Paleo Valley. 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Oh, that's crazy. Look at the difference between wow, that's literally bananas. So what they're showing back and for th is they're just taking the skin from the left side of the face and switching sides so you can see how much damage he's received on that side, the driver's side. Yeah. And so there's a couple interest ofing things there. One , that is shocking, but the question to ask is, why doesn't every trucker look like that, right? Like if that's the problem, why him? Like because I've been driving a car for forty five years and you know my face is the same in the left as it is in the right. Yeah. Hang it in there. But the other thing is window glass, I think is actually a really interesting problem to talk about. Yeah , because window glass blocks UVB , but not UVA. And there's two different wavelengths of UV . The UVB is the super high energy one. UVA is a little bit lower lower. It's kind of on the way to blue . And they used to think back in the day that UVB was the only one that caused skin cancer. And those old sunscreens that we used in the seventies eighties only blocked UVB, window glass blocks UVB blocks only part of the UVA. So anytime you're driving or you're hanging out in a window in your house , you're getting a bunch of UVA. You're not going to burn because UVB is the one that causes burning, but you're still gonna get a bunch of UVA, which they figured out like in the nineties does cause skin cancer. Oh , wow . So so sun through the windows, sun through the windows. It's not as good as sun outside. It blocks the UVB, but the UVA comes through, but never you'll never have a burn reaction because of it . But you might be getting damaged. Yeah. And so like in the US , people get slightly more slightly higher rates of skin cancer on the left side of their body. In the UK, they get slightly higher rates of skin cancer on the right side. Ah because they drive on the opposite side of the road. Yeah . So window glasses slightly? Slightly. It's like fifty two, forty eight. It's not huge. Okay, but it's statistically significant. Statistically significant. Yeah . Huh . So do you think it's this guy's particular genes? There must be something weird about that guy. Right. Well, how many instances of truck driver face do they have? I just googled the condition and it's only him coming up in the photos. So this is the thing one lady but I don't she clearly doesn't seem to have the same issue . There's a lot of truck drivers that have been doing it for fifty years. That's not the same thing. Oh, that's not real. Is that real? It's a different thing. She's got something wrong with her jaw. Oh , but it's coming up as the same condition. Unilateral derma derma taught it. Oh, so she had some sort of cancer that made her way its way into her jaw , but I can I' wouldt have assumed that more cases would pop up, but it's literally just him. So that's the thing. It's the real question is what's up with that dude. Yeah. That's not the same . I don't think that's the same guy. No , it doesn't seem like the same person, but might be. It's hard to say. Yeah. So different lighting. But so the thing is if so those sunscreens that were acting kind of like window glass in the seventies and eighties and even into the nineties before we got the broad spectrum sunscreens . They're blocking the UVB, so you weren't going to ever burn. And that's what SPF actually measures is how many more times you can be out in the sun without burning. So if you got but it's based totally on UVB. So if you got SPF thirty, in theory you can spend thirty times as long outside before you start to burn. That's a long time, right? But all that time, UVA is just pouring into you and they now know that UVA is the one that probably is most likely to cause melanoma. Oh, that's crazy. Wow. So sunscreen . Now I use a natural suns creen when I use it at all. It's the stuff that's like beef tallow based and a zinc in it. It's very white and obvious . You know, it's the spray stuff goes on clear. You can't even tell you have it on, but it's very effective . But I'm always like super hesitant. I'm like, what's in that stuff that we're going to find out fifteen, twenty years from now? Like if it can block the sun, so it's a chemical and you're spraying this chemical on an organ, which is your skin . So your skin's absorbing it. And I'm like, what's going on there? And they used to say, Oh, no, no, it's not absorbed very much. And then the FDA CDC did studies a few years ago and discovered that it's absorbed at very large amounts. Like it turns up at high doses higher doses than they would like it to in blood, breast milk, urine, you name it. What specifically turns up and what's dangerous about it? So there are suspected to be hormone disruptors, all those classic chemical filters like oxybenzone . There isn't there isn't much proof that they're dangerous in the amounts used , but they definitely are absorbed at much higher rates than we thought. And the FDA has refused to approve them as safe pending more testing And nobody's done the testing? Oh, but they're about to get phased out anyway. Like just as of a couple months ago The government changed the rules and is going to let in for the first time in thirty years new ingredients , which they've been using in Europe and Asia and Australia for decades , and the sunscreen companies have been asking to use them and haven't been allowed to, but now they're finally going to get to use like one of the main ones. And one of these ingredients ? So it's called like BEMO Trizinol or something . And there's another one that you see in Europe called Mexicil four hundred , but they're way better. Basically, US sunscreens are a generation behind everyone else because in the US, sunscreens are regulated as over the counter drugs. Metrozino. Yeah. Motrizonal highly effective broad spectrum UV filtered blocks both UVA and UVB approved by FDA's over the counter sunscreen ingredient in June of twenty twenty six. Oh wow,. So this must have happened. Yeah. Celebrated for being highly photosable, doesn't break down the sun, transparent on the skin without leaving a white cast and gentle on sensitive skin. So this is RFK Jr. stuff. Yeah, this one looks really good . So this other stuff that has been in there why didn't it get examined if Europe and Asia and all these other places were using these different versions? Yeah, they all bailed on it long ago . Because it was all we had. And damn it that drives me crazy. Yeah. Well, so it's because FDA so in the US sunscreens are regulated as drugs counterdrugs. So you have to do all this safety testing if you want to get a new ingredient in. Everywhere else, they're just cosmetics so you can use kind of whatever you want with more minimal safety testing . So the companies wanted to use the stuff in the US forever, but the F DA said , sure, just do the testing, but they didn't want to do it was too expensive to do the testing . They would have to test it on animals. They didn't want to get the blowback on that. There are a bunch of reasons that they weren't willing to do it. Also I think they're a little scared of what they might find . So anyway, so our sunscreens have not been nearly as good as what's used elsewhere . Both in terms of performance and like maybe safety suspicions. So that's going to change by the end of this year. It's going to get better. Well, that's good. Are there with the traditional sunscreen ingredients that we used to use, is there any negative health consequences of using them that they've sh own. Like is there any diseases that occur more readily or more frequently ? Not that have been proven. There's like toxicologists are a little suspicious about some of them. Like they've definitely been shown to mess up coral, right? Like people coral reefs, yeah. Yeah. That's one of the things they found after COVID, right? They used to think . They used to think that it was the warming of the environment. This was one of the things that climate change people used to say. The climate change is destroying the coral reefs . And then it turns out actually , it's all these people that have sunscreen all over their body and they jump in the ocean and they're essentially poisoning the reef. Yeah, I mean it,'s all the above, I'm pretty sure, but yeah, the sunscreen at that kind of concentration, if you got a, you know, a bazillion snorkelers in the water can definitely mess up the car and bring back. Wasn't there some sort of a study that examined what happened to the reef after COVID . There was one particular reef that was in this highly visited area where people would jump in and they showed a massive increase in the reef after COVID . Yeah, like banned use of those sunscreen? A bunch of places banned banned those that style of sunscreen . But the but they don't really check your bags though. Yeah, yeah, right. You know what I mean? When they say banned, like people are gonna take it anyway. But it doesn't look like I don't think it has a much impact on us unless you're using a ton of it, which of course now some people are so it's not great for you, but it's not the worst. Yeah, there's been a bunch of studies that just looked at like lifespan and sunscreen doesn't seem to have any impact whatsoever, like positive or negative on lifespan. So it just might have some sort of an impact on hormonal function . Yeah, it could well. Endocrine disruption. Endocrine disruption. There's a guy named Grand Peasley at Notre Dame , who found that many, many cosmetic products of all kinds are actually contaminated with forever chemicals . And it's even if they don't have it on the ingredients , like anything that's like water resistant or super smooth is quite possibly going to have forever chemicals in it. And some of it is actually coming from the plastic containers because those get they basically get like fluorinated with this with like fluorine gas before they get anything in them, which is supposed to make them like a little smoother inside of the containers. But it turns out that actually leaks forever chemicals into the product, whatever's in there. That's what he found. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, this is a problem with hot coffee when you drink it out of a paper cup. Very similar . Yeah. People don't realize like the paper cup is not capable of keeping that liquid . It would turn to mush. Yeah. The reason why it doesn't turn to mush is because there's essent ially a condom like around the inside of the coffee cup. And you know, Paul Saldino broke a coffee cup down to show what it looks like on the inside and you're like, oh no, you're pouring hot liquid into plastic, which you're never supposed to do. And it's also like most coffee machines . Like a giant percentage of coffee machines have just plastic everywhere. I got rid of mine. That's why we use French press at the studio and I use that at home too. And I have one of those little arrow presses to make an individual cup of coffee. Yeah. It's like the plastic is a real problem and heating it is terrible. We know that about water bottles. Like you're never supposed to drink out of a water bottle that you leave in the hot su n in your car. So now picture that bottle of sunscreen that's sitting in your car, right? Cooking and leeching into the material . Yuck . Yeah, not good. People don't think of the skin as an organ. And I was explaining to a friend of mine the other day, he was using hand wash, that fucking hand sanitizer stuff. And I'm like, man, I don't think that's good for you. I think if you want to wash your hands, you should just use soap and water. And then I read this article about it. Oh yeah, that's a toxic chemical. Hand sanitizer, when you're using it every day, you're essentially exposing your skin , your organ to this like , what exactly is in hand sanitizer and is it bad for you? Because I remember this article but I just like went over the headline and briefly started reading it and then I had to do something and I put a bookmark to it that I was going to go back to it later and I never did. Okay, I thought you could say like something happened to the bookmark. No I just I never went back to it. But I remember during the COVID times, everybody was just like hand sanitizer everywhere. I'm like, I just don't think that can be good for you. I mean, anything that's antibiotic, right? Anything that's killing biological life, probably you want to be at least a little bit hesitant with alcohol mostly alcohol. Well even alcohol going through your skin like that . Isopropyl alcohol sometimes used instead of or with ethanol similar levels. And then this word benzo kinonium chloride in many alcohol free products . All right , but see if you can find articles on the dangers of using hand sanitizer because this is what I had read briefly just say overuse it's going to fuck up your skin biome, but they don't. Yeah, that's what it's saying overuse. I just know that . I know a guy's got OCD and he's you know, a hyperchondriac a little bit and he uses his hand sanitizer all the time kind, it of' csra zy. And a friend of mine without knowing went to look at his house because his house was for sale. And he's looking at the house. He's like, this is a very nice house. And he opens up a closet and one of the closets was filled with hand sanitizer. And he got so freaked out. He didn't want to live in the house anymore. He's like, I don't want to buy this house. Like this guy, like whatever weird thing he's possessed with, that he needs fifty thousand fucking bottles of hand sanitizer. Skin issues are just laughing. Overuse and then don't not use it on your hands, obviously. Don't breathe it, don't drink it. Right. Only use it on your hands. Yeah. Right, Jamie's right on the skin biome. Skin biomes are turning out to be really important. Like there's, you know, they call it the gut skin act is where your skin microbiome and your gut microbiome are like chatting all the time and you can change the composition of your skin microbiome based on all kinds of stuff, like products, sun exposure, you know, everything you do. Probiotics? Probiotics. Yeah . Yeah. Well, in the jiu jitsu world , in the early two thousand s, people started really getting into probiotics. They started really getting into acidophilis , yogurt, kimchi, fermented vegetables and stuff like that just to prevent skin issues . Interesting . Because Jujitsu, because you're getting scratched up and you're rolling around and there's a lot of infections. And a lot of people get not just infections like staph infection, but they also get ringworm and a bunch of stuff like that. And so some people started using antibacterial soap. And the problem with that is it just nukes all the good flora of your skin . So then there's a company called Defense Soap and they developed a soap specifically for grapplers . And this soap has tea tree oil and eucalyptus and it's very healthy for the skin . So it promotes healthy gut flora, but it does kill all the cuties. It kills all the matte cuties . Yeah. Yeah, that's I think that's basically what you want. Like that microbiome, it can take a lot of natural , you know, abuse. It's there. You know, it actually lives on skin. So it's usually getting like roughed up by the world . But yeah, chemicals that are too strong can take it out. And the gut flora is important as well. It was like you got to think of the whole thing as one sort of ecosystem , your whole body it all works together . And if your gut biome is all fucked up and you don't have healthy gut flora, it can affect all sorts of different issues. And yeah, it shows up on the skin for sure. That's well known. What do you get when you combine bingo style bonuses and slots? Cashing . 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But it actually detracted like now at I think those old sunscreens really were like margin detrimental, like the ones that only blocked UVB . So I think I kind of got it right, but also the title detracted from the information in the article in a sense. But why? Because margin sucks. Margin sucks, those old sunscreens did suck. The new sunscreens are they're fine. But so it's a good comparison. It turns out to have been, yeah, like the more we learn about those old sunscreens, the more it looks like a sort of like a catastrophic mistake that then got fixed. But yeah, so that like so now the books is out, suddenly I've got all these like beauty magazines contacting me And they have this image of me as like , you know, the unibomber, like hanging out , hanging out in my cabin and firing off these missives . Really? Yeah, from my beauty magazine. They were nervous to talk to me because they thought I was gonna be, you know, a cook, a cook . Yeah Wow . So the first art so is sunscreen the new Marjorine. So that was the first one. And what was the response to that? So do you remember the first like really negative response and how you felt about it? So yeah, so there was an official letter from the AAD like, you know, we and you know, they're very, they're very polite , but they're like, here we think this is misrepresenting, you know, the information . And this is and we think this is dangerous. If you're telling people that they benefit from more sunlight, that's dangerous . So that's probably and then you know, when that came in, I was like, so that needs to change. If we have in our heads that exposure to any sunshine is dangerous . We, you know, we're not seeing the forest for the trees. We've lost the thread on this one. So then so I did a bunch of other articles. I did one another article that focused specifically on the skin color issue , like do people of color do we need to stop telling people of color that they need to protect themselves from the sun ? And then I did a couple more recently for the Atlantic just on like what should recommendations be? How do we can we do recommendations that are not one size fits all? Well, skin color in particular is one of the best signs of adaptation to environment. I mean, that's how human beings were able to get vitamin D from the sun in a place like Scotland. When people moved there, they got pale as shit. It completely makes sense. Yeah, and you can track it. It's like the gradations of lightning go with that move northward. Yeah. So you can tell like white skin is like a desperate attempt to get enough light in a, you know, screwy northern environment. Right. But when those people that have ancestors from that screwy northern environment move to California or Arizona or Australia ? Yeah. And Australia is real bad, right? Because there's all the people that use hair spray in the eighties . They cause fucking giant hole in the ozone layer over Australia. Well, yeah, essentially. Yeah, Australia when I was there, they have these signs on buses , like these warnings that show skin cancer, like these horrible lesions on people's faces and stuff. And it's just this warning to wear sunscreen. Protect yourself. They're right. For that, like, that's the textbook case where you've got a horrible mismatch between the population and the place. Like super, super high levels of sunshine in Australia, weak ozone , like redheads from Scotland who are trying to deal . So their skin cancer rays are literally like two or three times what they are anywhere else in the world. Wow. Now how much of that is because of the skin color of the general Australian population other than the indigenous people and how much of it is because the ozone ? So the ozone is healing itself slowly. We're getting there . So that's probably less of an issue now. It's really it's a really fair skinned population in a super bright intense environment . So they do need to worry about it. But the problem is the rest of the world has kind of set its rules about sun exposure based on Australia. What's interesting also about Australia is like I wonder how long it takes for human adaptation to start to show itself . Like do you think like in a hundred thousand years from now people that live in Australia will be dark . Well , David Reich did that great episode with you, right? Did you have David Reichon? David Reich. He's the Harvard ancient DNA guy . Did we? No. So he so he just came up with a new study. Like we met so many people on it. I don't remember whoever head on. I can't either. I was like, if I didn't hear, what would I hear? Anyway. It might Le bex. It n't. It just that movement started a few thousand years ago. Suddenly, like that pale redhead jean came out of nowhere and like skyrocketed. So it can change pretty quickly when the environmental factors change. Really energy. That's only a few thousand years old , the red headed gene. Yeah , yeah. It was kind of like lingering quiet ly in the background and then like maybe that's why gingers get so much hate because they're just brand new. They are they are like the next new thing . But yeah, four or five thousand years ago it sudd,enly explod es in popularity, but in a very particular place in Northern Europe . And most likely as a result to the environment? Yeah, for one hundred percent. Wow . Yeah. So I wonder how long it's going to take . I could wonder if we could go into the future if the same population lives in Australia now . Well, except here's the weird thing. Like so Australians versus UK, right? Similar genetics . Australia super high rates of skin cancer because of that sunny environment, but also way better lifespan than in the UK . Really? So skin cancer is a factor, but that sunlight is actually benefiting Australians more than it's hurting them compared to the UK. I wonder if wonder if that's a healthy user bias as well because one of the things about Australia is a lot of outdoor activ ities. A lot of people are doing stuff outside . Yeah. And a lot of activity, period . And that could be a factor. And actually, that's one thing I come down to in the book is it's really hard to disentangle all of these factors , but what's really obvious is just outside good, too much inside, bad. Yeah . So whatever , like you don't even have to like break it down too much , more outside , covered up whatever you want is probably going to be good for you. One of the things a friend of mine who's a doctor said that he when he was working in New York City, in the wintertime, he would find people with undetectable levels of vitamin D. Yeah. And he said it was a particular problem with people with darker skin . Because if you have darker skin, you're going to get less vitamin D from the sun for whatever exposure you do get. And then these people were all indoors all the time . Yeah that's a really bad formula. Like, yeah, if you have dark skin, you need to five to ten times as much sunlight to make the same amount of vitamin D. So you're really, if you have really dark skin, you're kind of designed for a very bright tropical environment where you're where you're outside all the time. Outside all the time, you can handle twelve hours a day of sunshine. And in fact, you're going to benefit from it. You get moved to a really dark environment that's not going to be good for you. So you probably need to compensate in other ways. It's going to be very interesting when genetic engineering reaches a level where we can turn those things on and off in people . And how do people react to fair skinned people all of a sudden getting dark ? Like yeah, you know, like well, we are one race . We are the human race. There's a bunch of different ancestors where people came from different areas, where they adapted to different environments, but the reality is we're just human beings. And we all started in Ethiopia and we spread out. And that's just what we are. We are the result of whatever environment our ancestors evolved in. Yeah, totally. And with skin tone, it's clearly like very, very specific reactions to that environment and trying to figure out what's best in each situation. But there's so much racial identity that's tied to these characteristics of your appearance and where your ancestors are from . And it's going to be very weird if all of a sudden you could like people get like dark thick curly hair and they used to be gingers. I wonder how people are going to react to that. I mean, it's coming, right? Right. It's coming. And that's her off . Yeah. I just wonder how many people are going to be claiming cultural or racial appropriation with people just deciding to have a healthier skin tone that protects him from the sun more. I say very good. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. Like that guy with the Melanotan, I wonder I wonder if anybody got mad at him . Right, right? Like what are you supposed to look like? Yeah, what are you supposed to look like? Yeah , yeah. There was a lady that was on a television show once that was turning herself black. It was in the UK . And this lady looked she looked like she had other issues. She had giant breast implants, she looked like a kook, a bunch of plastic surgery, but she was dark as a date like that lady . That's a white lady . So that's what she used to look like . And she's getting her boobs bigger and bigger. She wants them bigger and so look . She keeps getting that little too far, maybe. Maybe why that's her? That's her . So what did she do via intense use of tanning injections? Yeah, so she's she's the ultimate Melanitan hero . Wow. I mean, that guy, that lady got like cameroon dark . Like look at that photo again, go back to that video . Like, that's crazy. That is crazy. That's crazy. I don't know. Maybe if you're in Australia, it works for you. Maybe. Well, it would, right? It would protect because it is melanin, but obviously she's got she's got other things going on. Like you yeah, at some point you might have too much melanin. Well, here's the funny thing about melanin as well. Like so it's made by our melanocytes , which are what can become melanoma if they get screwed up. And those are in the very bottom of the epidermis, the outer layer of the skin . And it's incred anibly good absorber of UV, better than anything we've come up with. It's almost perfect at it. But what you want when your skin gets hit with sunlight, that melanin that's just been produced is at the bottom of the epidermis where the melanocytes are. So it has to migrate to the surface and then it kind of acts like little umbrellas. Like it'll like cover the nucleus of the cell and protect it. So you get these little like umbrellas, a line of umbrell as on the very top of your epidermis, but it has to migrate up because of sunlight. If melanin is lower in your skin, then it's going to absorb all that radiation farther down and actually it can cause more free radicals deeper in this game. And what would cause it to be lower? So it starts lower , and it only goes up in response to sunlight . So if you're never, ever in the sun and you suddenly go out and get hit by a bunch of sunlight, your melon's gonna be down too low and can actually create free . It can exacerbate the problem. So this lady might be exacerbating the problem if he's just getting the melanin that way. So yeah, I don't know because I don't know about this specifically, but you probably, yeah, you don't want to just be like messing around with melanin to the extent that she is. Oh boy . That's interesting. Because like the Melanotan stuff, I have heard about it before and I never really looked into it, but the idea kind of makes sense that if you can make your body produce more melanin that would protect itself, but I didn't realize that it has to be melanin from sun exposure. You want in the right place . Could both things work? Could you do it that way and with sun exposure, increase increase both? And would it would it give some sort of a benefit to have a higher level of melanin that could eventually get to the surface of the skin? Does that make any sense? You're above my pay grade now. Like, I think you might be above everybody's pay grade. I don't know if anyone has looked at that. They seem it seems like something to look into though. If we know that there's a benefit to having melaninas. Yeah, that may be interesting. But if I think this stuff's new enough that there probably hasn't been a ton of research on it. So what does a pale person do? What does the old pasty white do? Yeah . So full pasty white, like really pale? Yeah. Like my friend I have a friend who my daughter said he's white. And I said, she was really little. And I go, yeah, she goes, No, no, he's white like paper. So if you're white like he's paper . Yeah, yeah. You do have to be really careful. You're not gonna tame that much. You just don't make that much melanin . Can that change over time? Can they like slowly expose themselves to the sunlight like five minutes a day and just ramp it up. Depend if it depends on your genetics . If you're like a full on ginger, like true redhead then you have a type of melanin called phyllanin , not you melanin, which is what everybody else has. And phyllanin just does not do a good job of absorbing sunlight. Oh no . So you use no hope for gingers? There's no hope for gingers in terms of sun exposure. Damn . The hope is just, you know, avoid that midday sun, that's high in UV, get the morning and like the sunrise and sunset stuff that doesn't have the UV in it. Okay, so they can benefit from sun exposure , but they can't have like full on outdoor sun exposure. Yeah. They're the ones who need to be really careful. So for those people, sunscreen is recommended . Yeah. Or just cover up even, I think, better , you know ? How many other people are working on this stuff? And is everybody sort of in agreement with the data? The people that are examining it. I mean, there's a ton of science coming out, but it's early days for sure . Doesn't it seem crazy that sun and our reaction to sun is unknown or at least poorly studied? Yeah, yeah. But yeah, but it's amazing how many things in medicine , you know, you dive into the research and you dig down a little and you realize that we're just kind of guessing still on many levels . Like it's early days for a lot of this stuff. Well, certainly for like stuff that they use for antidepressants . Yeah. But that's yeah, yeah. Yeah. Sun exposure is competitive with antidepressants in terms of lifting depression. Isn't that nuts? And you know, it's way better ? Exercise . Yeah. Many times better than any known antidepressants, regular exercise. I mean, exercise is number one for everything Ginger people with melod the peptide here. Seeing a few posts about it changing their hair color. Interesting. And this must be permanently. What? Yeah. Click on that. This is Yeah, I guess this just takes us to the Reddit. It's just gonna show a YouTube video here, but there's multiple changes hair color. Other posts about it. Whoa . And there's I was just seeing that. What if that would work with people that are old that have like white hair What that would be like a melt page says like how it can affect hair color? I read through real quick at this is not the best website. Isn't it weird that women with red hair are hot and men with red hair are not ? It's very weird women with red hair are considered very attract ive . Yeah, this one's this guy's got a sprayed tan. Okay , but the people that take it, that one guy, is he like a one of one where it changes his hair color? So that just like I said, so this website click on that click on the video. Let's watch it for a couple seconds. See what this guy's showing . So this is him before and this is him now . His eyebrow and his beard colors changed. Also we clicked on the video this might not even be him. He could be reporting the video about someone else too. It looks pretty good, like , yeah.ad gray actually used to be ginger. Now I was bullied a lot as a kid because I was ginger, I was weird and I was chubby. That's the winning trio for being s from this going through a lot of changes up here, down there, you know, the stuff that happens during puberty. So I didn't immediately notice that my hair had gotten much darker. It was actually other people asking me what the hell I had done to my hairline, you know? On this picture, it's probably much clearer. That's a picture of me and my brother. We have the same genetics in regards of skin color and the color of our hair. And as you can see, my hair is now completely different from his used to have the same skin and the same hair, especially the collar. Now this is only from using one vial of melanotan two in the span of a year, even more than a year. And it was at low dosages . But with our genetics of big tall, white ginger, Belgian gingers, it completely changed the color of my hair and my skin and the effects were very strong . So the effects are permanent, so he still has dark hair. But what's interesting is in the beginning, he had gray hair. He seems older, obviously, right? Right, but he had gray hair. He was showing and his hair's not gray anymore. Right. I mean gray, gray, yeah, gray and ginger. Gray is a loss of melanin. Like melanin's will make your hair dark as well as your skin dark. So he's he's resupplied his melanin for his hair as well. It seems like. That seems kind of nuts . He said one vial for a year. Olivius even know over a year. Right. So for a year, so his skin has gotten pale again , but his hair is permanently dark. So that's what he used to look like. He had red hair, he had a red beard and he had gray hair . His hair had gone gray and now his hair is dark. I got to know if this guy's full of shit. Yeah, that's again it's like only one person saying that. Yeah, that's the problem. It's like you don't know what you're looking at. This episode is brought to you by blinds. com Texas summers don't mess around with patio surfaces easily reaching one hundred fifty degrees hot enough to make your backyard feel like a punishment. And if your windows are bare, indoor temperatures can go up twenty degrees. Get ahead of it, with custom solar shades for your den and your patio from blinds. com Whether you want to do it yourself or have a pro handle everything. They've got you covered. It's all online so you can shop whenever you want, but still have access to real design professionals. They'll even send free samples. Blinds. com has been doing this for thirty years and they back everything with a one hundred percent satisfaction guarantee so you can order with confidence. 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Get the alerts that could make all the difference. Don't wait, join Life Lock Now, Visit dot com slash jar e and save up to thirty percent your first year. That's life lock dot com slash jar e for thirty percent off terms apply . But that's crazy . But it is yeah. Melane is the pigment for all of it for put that in, does melan aton , how does it say? How do you say it? Melanotan. Melanotan . Does melanotan have an effect on hair color? Put that into perplexity. See what they say ? Yeah. What does it say? Because I know a lot of people with gray hair that bums them out and they dye it and shit and that can't be good for you. You're putting fucking dye in your hair. I know. It makes me hesitant. I'm stuck with the gray hair I think. Well, mine would be gray if I had hair. It's all gray in my beard now. It's gray I'm gonna try it. I want to try some Mel otan and see if I get dangerous boners . Melanotan does not have good human evidence of changing scalp or body hair color. Its main effect is on skin tanning and freckling, not on turning hair darker or lighter, but how's that guy? Maybe he's like just a weird case . Yeah, but it's got to be a hormone dependent. What about the lady with the giant boobs? She had dark hair too. She's saying when I was looking through her thing, it says she went through a permanent tanning process . So I don't know. She would have extreme dosages. But I'll show her Instagram account is a mess . If it's even hers, it's the one that Google showed me. But what's the what's the erection connection? I don't understand , you know, it became more melanin. Was M theelanotan? Erection connection. I have heard that though. Actually Brigam from Was to Well, the local wellness clinic was telling me about that that some people have crazy erections because of Melanitan. Yeah, like, what? How and some people don't. Like that one guy that had taken it he said it didn't affect him that way but maybe maybe he's broken does it say anything about what's coming up right now? Melanitan causes boners . Okay , it can increase libido and trigger erections in some men, but it's not approved for well , I know it's not approved. How does it affect it? Stimulates melan chortin, melanocortin receptors in the brain which are involved in sexual arousal and erection control, not just tanning. Controlled tiles, controlled trot geez, I can't talk today . Subcutaneous melanatan II caused erections in most men with erectile dysfunction, often without sexual stimulation . Same studies found increased sexual desire in a majority of doses compared with placebo. Interesting . I wonder what the connection is. It's the Melanocortin. Like you said, the MC was MC four R up there . So yeah, MC one R is the gene for that determines whether you've got the red hair or not. Look at this common side effects were yawning . Nausea, yawning and stretching, flushing with decreased appetite. Some participants had severe nausea at higher doses. Yawning and sexual desires are interesting combination. Yeah, that's weird. Yeah, I'm really horny, but I'm too tired of doing anything about it . Hypoactive sexual desire for pre menopausal women. Interesting interesting also shows a rectogen ic, I like that word, a rectogenic effects in men with ED including those who fail PDE five inhib itors . What is that? What was a PDE five inhibitor ? Interesting . Someone should someone out there with gray hair should give it a go. Find out . Doesn't sound like other than dealing with boners, doesn't seem like there's any real problems . I keep going back to this you getting a tacked thing and I don't understand how someone could attack you with the data that you're showing because you're not making any dangerous or you know any claims or any you're not advising people to do anything that's reckless ? Yeah, no, I mean, I purposefully I've sort of well I really haven't I basically tell people to figure it out for themselves, right? But it's only small amounts of sun exposure that seem to be necessary to get most of the benefits. Like the jump isn't going from zero to some . You don't need it a lot. Nobody really needs a lot. Unless you have really dark skin, then you can probably get away with a lot . So yeah, just a little bit of sun exposure doesn't seem like a crazy recommendation , but it's just because the messaging has been sort of so extreme and unyielding . Like they've worked for so hard to sort of scare people away from any sun exposure that I think backing that up a little bit is sort of uncomfortable , you know ? I understand, but I mean, isn't history filled with new discoveries and changing courses ? Yeah , and I think it'll change, but it's going to be year old at a time . And it's gonna be ugly all the way. When you do this kind of work, like have you discovered any other things that people thought were unhealthy that turned out to actually probably be good for you, at least if used correctly? Yeah, that's a good question. So the one like the metaphor that I think we're all familiar with and that I think maps pretty perfectly here is diet and fat, right? Like twenty, you know, twenty five years ago, Gary Tobs does that article in the New York Times magazine, what if fat doesn't make you fat. And we were still back in that era of, you know, carbs cut all the fat out of your diet, carbs are good for you . Margin, right? The margin era the top experts got it one hundred percent wrong back then . And when they got called on it by like, you know, Tobs and others, Nina Taishals, you guys have had Nina. I had TOBs on as well. Oh yeah, okay. You know , they fought hard and they were totally wrong . And we now, you know, we flipped, but it took a long time and, you know, there was a little blood in the water during that process. Oh, yeah, I was in the early days of that and people were just warning about my cholesterol. What about your cholesterol? Yeah. What's really interesting is during the heart of that , when I ate a lot of meat, my diet's mostly meat. And I went to the doctor and I got all my levels checked and he said , Are you on some anticholesterol medication ? And I said, No, why? And he goes, You're very low cholesterol. It was weird. And I go, Dude, if you saw my diet, my diet's like mostly meat and eggs and bacon . That's like a giant percentage of my diet. I thought that was really interesting. I think I mean, yeah, I think the evidence is pretty good . Like for keto, I think it's pretty stress saladino, I think is pretty much spot on a lot of this stuff . But but so yeah, so that like the ultimate experts all said that was going to kill you. Right. You know, Atkins back in the day , and they were all completely wrong . So there's a long track record of the pros being wrong, I think on a lot of things, but that's a really good example. And people can wrap their heads around that one because we now I think a lot of people understand that low carb really works well for them. I mean, they completely flipped the food pyramid. Right, which was a beautiful thing to do, and I can't believe it happened so fast. Yeah . Well also, with very little pushback. It's kind of interesting . Because the evidence had already compounded to the fact that listen, for sure, margarine is not a good thing. It's not a good substitute, but also that all these healthy fats that you're getting from milk, that you're getting from eggs, eggs in particular. We've been told eggs are bad for you, the cholesterol and eggs, eggs, you could live off just eggs. Yeah, probably the perfect food. Yeah. Like eggs are fantastic. I always tell my friendsing that are vegans. I was like, listen, man, just get some chickens and they're your pets and they give you free food. It's like, I have sixteen chickens now and I get eggs every day and these chickens are pets . Like I go, hey ladies. You know, I feed 'em, I throw the worms down. They're not afraid of me. They listen to me. When I open the door, they come running out and they run her around the yard . It's like a great relationship. You get free food, you take care of them, you feed 'em , and they eat all the bugs in your yard and you get these delicious healthy eggs from them. With those beautiful orange eggs. Yeah. So if you're worried about if it's an ethical thing, you don't want animal cruelty and good for you , that's a wonderful way to live. But you are sacrificing your health by not eating pasture raised eggs. Just get the real ones . the Not bullshit ones , the real ones. Unfortunately, they're tricking people now. Some companies have been exposed for feeding their chickens turmeric . They feed them curcumin and turmeric and they're making it because it makes their eggs a darker, more attractive yolk . I know, right? That's like it's so screwy. So bizarrely backwards. It is, but isn't turmeric good for you and wouldn't turmeric that you're getting from those eggs also be good for you? It's like, yeah, it can't hurt. I mean, right? So it's not like they're getting them food die. So you know what I mean? So it's like, yeah, you're getting these darker eggs because people like that. And the darker eggs come from turmeric or turmeric, but yeah. Still you're getting turmeric then, aren't you? Is that how it works? I mean, that's fine, but I think the chicken, I think like it's the bugs that sometimes help turn them on. Yeah, we get we get eggs from our neighbor. Like in Vermont, everybody raises, there's chickens running around the road everywhere . And yeah, they're delic ious. And yeah, you can tell that they're getting it from the bugs and the greens and yeah. And it's super healthy. I mean, but that color of things is also why they dye farm raised salmon , which is really gross. So salmon are getting that from bugs in particular. Yeah, exactly. Little arthropods , like miniature shrimp kind of Yeah, that's why they have the wonderful looking pink skin orangy pink skin. So in that case, the dye is maybe a little more suspect. Yeah, well the dye is very suspect because it's like, you know, these farm raised salmon they have pale skin because they're eating bullshit. Yeah, yeah. Are there any other things that you've stumbled across that turned out to be good for you that people were averse to? I'm still curious about alcohol. You know how everything has flipped on alcohol First, it was like, drink or two a day is good for you. And then suddenly they flipped like a year or two ago and say, any amount of alcohol is bad for you. I looked into those studies . And it seems like the takeaway really should have been , you know , moderate drinking doesn't do much of anything to you. Like maybe it makes is slightly good for you or slightly bad for you, but for like a drink a day or like one to two a day didn't seem to have a whole lot of impact on mortality at all . And also probably reduces a little bit of stress little bit of social anxiety. And that alone is really beneficial. Like how do you feel? Like are you happy or are you stressed out? Sometimes a drink or two you're like, Ah, fuck it, we're fine. Everything's good. Like that alone has benefits, like what it does to your mood, that it's a social lubricant. It'll allow you to like maybe laugh a little bit more, have a little bit more fun. Totally, which is why I can't give it up. Like that social environment is a really nice environment to be in, you know , and if you know a couple beers helps make that happen, it's a good thing . I gave it up for about eight months. I completely problem is I own a comedy club and I was there a lot . And so everybody's like, have a drink, have a drink. Let's do shots. And then next thing you know, you look, I was in the gym the next day feeling like shit. I got tired of doing that to myself. And so I said, I'm just gonna stop drinking. Not because I'm an alcoholic, wasn't hard to stop , it was super easy. I just stopped. And then I started feeling way better. I was like, God, why was I drinking for so long? This is so bad. And then out to dinner with my wife, had a margarita, like eight months later, I'm like, let's have a drink. She wasn't drinking either. And let's have a drink. I'm like, this is nice. I like it. So now I limit myself. I just I won't have more than like two drinks. Two drinks is kind of my mat. But two drinks is right. Two drinks is like, We as long as you don't have to dri ve, you're not going anywhere. You know, if I go to the club, I'm there for hours . Completely sober after it's all over. It's like I wake up in the morning. I don't feel like shit. It doesn't seem to be affecting my workouts . However , if you wear a whoop or an aura ring or one of those tracking devices, you will notice in your sleep in your recovery. You're not sleeping as well. You don't sleep as well. You don't get the same deep sleep . I can tell. Yeah, just one glass of wine can fuck you up a little bit. Yeah, yeah. And for me that hit in middle age, like before that wasn't a problem . But now, yeah, like two drinks, two does seem to be the cutoff where you know, life functions normally still. yeah, the sleep's not as restorative somehow. Somehow, but I wonder if it's the timing of when you're drinking. So I wonder if you have like a glass of wine at dinner at like six o'clock , but you don't go to bed till midnight. I wonder if then your body has a chance to process it and then you're okay. Well, the Italian style, right? Like the Mediterranean lifestyle they got this pretty much nailed down like two thousand years ago . Right. It seems to work pretty well . Which also brings us back to food . Right. Because the way they eat is so it's so interesting how thin they are, and yet they mostly carbs. I know, I know. Something's different there. A lot's different and we know what it is now. We know that there's a lot of additives and preservatives. And it's also like they don't use glyphosate and they have heirloom wheat, so they have wheat that hasn't been optimized to have a higher yield so it doesn't have as much complex wheat glutens. And so there's a lot of issues with our food , unfortunately. And if you eat American bread, you know, the bromine all the, different additives, all the shit that we put in our food . That's so disturbing. Whenever I go to Italy, I'm so angry that when I come back home, I can't have food like this. Like you have to seek it out, you have to go to like certain restaurants that only use like Italian flour . Yeah , yeah. But yeah, you look at the Mediterranean cultures and it just works for them. And yeah, like you say, you can't explain it in terms of macronutrients or anything like that There's something like synergistic about that lifestyle. I do actually think light is part of it too. Like they got great light there. Yep, they have great light, especially like Malfi Coast, those people. Yeah . But the other thing is also less stress . They're not as career focused. They're more family oriented, very tight knit family groups. They eat dinner together , there's a lot of laughing, a lot of drinking wine. A lot of them smoke cigarettes. You go over there like cigarettes never went out of style over there. They're all smoking cigarettes . And you're like, how are you guys so fucking healthy? This is weird.. Yeah Yeah, it'll be interesting on cigarettes if it turns out that in a certain context they're not that damaging. And then out of that context, they're super damaging. I have heard that with polyphenols. I've heard that and this is I think controversial as well, but it's cigarettes taken along with olive oil and that a lot of these people have high olive oil rich diets in that cigarettes along with olive oil that the olive oil tends to balance out whatever damage that the cigarettes are doing. That is super interesting. This episode is brought to you by Dodge . The new Dodge Charger Scatpack is built for people who still believe driving should be exciting. You want to talk about performance? Let's start with a twin turbo six pack gas engine, all gas , no mercy , five hundred and fifty horsepower, zero to sixty in just three point nine seconds and a top speed of one hundred seventy seven miles an hour. Whoa. 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Yeah, like my first sort of big magazine story outside magazine sent me to the Amazon on this like crazy hunt to with this German guy, it was basically apocalypse now with chocolate with this German guy was going up river into the Amazon to try to find this wild cacao, like to work with some of the indigenous groups to harvest wild cacao and make the world's first wild chocolate . So I went with him . Crazy, crazy trip . But yeah, I sort of fell in love with cacao on that trip. But it was like we landed we took a small plane and we were going to land on this river and meet a canoe that was going to take us up river to meet with these indigenous groups. So we found a runway, right? This is in the Bolivian Amazon . I've been in the Amazon all of four minutes, right? The plane drops us off on this flooded runway where it was a crazy landing. We hop out of the plane. I'm glad to be alive and then these four guys with guns come out of this little cabin and we're like, we're this is actually a landing strip that our Colombian boss owns and we're guarding it for him and what do you two white dudes doing here? So like all the cocaine traffic comes through this part of the Amazon and we had just done what people actually have been kill ed for, which is, you know, like if a couple of white guys drop in there, they assume you're like the DEA or something. Right. So they're super suspicious. And they were speaking Spanish, so I was like catching every fourth word or something. I'm like, this can't be good because of the guns, but anyway the guy was with, the German guy, he negotiated with them. And finally, they're like, Okay, just give us a landing fee. So we're like, sure . But yeah, so that was but that was the beginning of my chocolate journey . So what part of the Amazon were you where Bolivia , which you know, Bolivia, you think of like mountains, lapaz, but they have these lowlands, which are like straight up like tropical rainforest. It's called the Beni . And it's like truly lawless area, like huge swaths of jungle, a bunch of cattle ranching as well, and all the drug traffic comes through there from the And And you went there just as a journalist? Yeah. So this guy, this German guy, he'd been living there for twenty years, and he was trying to get this cacao and he'd be like, yeah, I'm gonna go meet with these groups . You want to come? And outside had just come to me and they'd like something else I'd written and they're like, Hey, we're outside magazine . What's the freakiest thing you ever wanted to do , will, you know, we'll send you there. And I had like a little kid at the time. So I was like, you know, I'm not going to be going off a two hundred foot waterfall and kayak for you guys . But then this like, you know, heart of dark chocolate thing came up . I was like, I could do that for I could be like the comic guy for them. So it was this like ridiculous journey where like everything went wrong , but we did get some really good chocolate at the end of it . So what is the benefit of wild cacao It tastes really, really good, like better than the industrial varieties of cacao that most chocolate's made with , and it's just like kind of a cool story. And it can be used to support those indigenous groups so that the forest doesn't get cut down and turned into more like cattle ranch . Because cacao grows in the understory of the rainforest . So it's kind of a way to monetize the full rainfore st and keep the canopy intact. Exactly. Yeah . What is the benefits of cacao like health wise ? It's right there with coffee , you know, tons of polyphenols, a little bit of caffeine it seems to, you know, be anti inflammatory, gives you a little boost, makes you happy for some of the same reasons and maybe some different ones as well. And when you say it tastes better, in what way, like when you try it a lot more like aromatics and less bitterness . Like basically what happened with cacao is when it became a global product , the Europeans selected varieties that were high yielding. Same thing that happened with tomatoes and everything else. They were high yielding, but they lost some of the great aromatic qualities that like the old Maya cacao had had. And that's what gets grown all over the world. Most cacao comes from Africa now , and it's more bitter , less interesting , but way cheaper . So then there's this movement that started like ten, fifteen years ago of people trying to go back to Latin America to find the ancient heirloom varieties that had this great flavor and make better chocolate than had ever been made before. And sort of the most ancient is the stuff in the Amazon, which is where cacao originated, still growing wild . So , you know, it's kind of cool if you can go back to the, you know , primordial days and make chocolate. I mean, the example of tomatoes is a perfect example because heirloom tomatoes are sensational. They're so delicious. So much better. They're so much better. And then you have one of those bullshit McDonald's tomatoes that looks like a piece of paper. Yeah, is that ? Is that cacao? That's what it looks like. That is , so it's these pods and you open up the pod, it's kind of like the size of like a little nerve football or something. Oh , wow. Yeah. I had no idea. And so chocolate is made from the seeds inside. You got to ferment them and then roast them and then you grind them into chocolate. Where can one get heirloom chocolate made from ancient cacao ? So the company? Yeah, so the place I send people is Caputos , which is online site. They're like the main importer of specialty chocolate. There they are. Those are the people? Yeah. So Caputo's has most of the like the great wild cac os available on their website. It's just like retail. Capudos . So is it Caputos dot com? Yeah . Yeah. It's from Salt Lake City. Yeah, they've got a cool shop in Salt Lake. interesting . Preserve Bolivian rainforests Ritual chocolate. Yeah, I've heard of people like ritual cacao ceremonies. I'm like , what are they doing? So that 's doing that it's that's a green go thing. Everyone thinks it goes back to some like we're referencing some ancient Maya ceremony. Of course it is. It's it was a white dude in Guatemala. Look at the name people. Yeah, there you go. Look at these people . It's kind of like Ayahuasca with training wheels. They do cacao . But like what 's what can come out of a ritual where you take cacao? I mean, you know, same thing that can come out of a ritual where you do anything else. Like you're focusing, you know, in some mindfulness . You get a little, you know, you get a little boost from the cacao, but not much. Yeah, it's it's more about the ritual. Why is cacao what is a cacao ceremony? Why are they suddenly showing up all over L. A. Yeah, you can answer that one on your own. So I mean J,amie if you, can call up Keith's cacao, there's this guy named Keith. I think he died recently. He's like the classic Gringo Guru with a big white beard who would like have people in Guatemala. And he's just invented this cacao ceremony thing. Oh waite people , but he's tam at white people . And then everyone else sort of took it from him. There he is. Well, he looks like the type of guy. Look at him, big old fucking dirty pot of cacao. Dunkin' across him . So he started Okay , poor Keith . These silly people . So but what there's like antioxidants in it. Like there's other ton. Yeah. It's good for you. It's totally good for you . Yeah, it gets your heartbeating a little faster. There's some happy drugs in there. It's got a tiny bit of cannabinoids in it . And it tastes great. So you know, what's not to like? Anything else, any other foods or substances or different things that you found out that were beneficial? Well, how do you feel about oysters? I've read a book about oysters too. I eat them all the time. Are you a fan? I like 'em. Are they okay? I mean they're great but there's no but they're great. But I think we haven't figured out why you know they're like, you know, you're eating like a little living being . So I think, you know, there's like some chi factor there where the reason people get so excited and feel so good when they eat oysters it's not because of like the nutrients , it's like there's something else that's in there , you know ? Well, isn't there zinc in oysters? And they're supposed to have an Aphrodisiac effect, right? Yeah. So I think that Aphrodisiac thing is like, it's more about the chi, like this living force that you're ingesting than this sounds like hippie target.