Joe Rogan Experience #629 — Andrew Hill, PhD Transcript

Transcript

0:00 It's not that tight. like you have to, like, talk it down. Hearing sort of, you know, call to actions will change how you then react to things. I wanted to get you in here and sit you down because you said something really fascinating, Or, you know, I'm someone who has been abstinent for a long time and struggles with craving, struggles with, you know, choice.

2:02 It is pretty novel, yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, uh, the biggest difference, uh, for an alternatives approach or a harm So we help people figure out all the different triggers and cues that are driving their out-of-control use another, you know, sort of whole team approach. But then at the end of that month, if folks decide We buy lunch and they buy the alcohol

4:44 So you drank. And we get people to, in a very structured way, Yeah. everyone has this very rigid idea of what an alcoholic is supposed to do. be abstinent, then you aren't taught any skills about how to drink a little bit. You know, so Oh, you know, I've screwed up once. I forget if it's the mu or the kappa, but one of the opioid receptors in the brain,

7:51 But the way I've always thought of it, I don't have a genetic predisposition to alcoholism. This is, you know, reinforced behavior. Yeah, I think partially there's this idea of, well, you're powerless over alcohol, therefore accept that you're powerless. the common discussion when people talk about Native Americans and alcohol is that they didn't have alcohol in their diet. We introduced it

10:32 You know, there's always these studies showing that if you give a rat unfettered access to drugs and alcohol, It's only in the absence of stimulating enriched environments of Sex at Dawn, a very interesting book, but one of the things that he brought up is the And any escape that they could probably seek you know to to try to So their brains are programmed to seek out food, to seek out sex, and to seek out shelter.

12:56 have turned people into alcoholics because while they're at work all day, they're just constantly Boredom or... To the point where everybody repeats it. you get a dopamine bump. When you eat an ice cream sandwich, you get a dopamine bump. When you do a For things that are sort of drugs of abuse like cocaine, meth, you know, we would probably ask folks to abstain or encourage them to.

15:15 Then we would. In a way, they aren't going to get in trouble with weed. So I think the bar for risk versus And survive somehow or, you know, manage. Because this is the new form of distribution. They had pain management centers, for folks who don't know, and these pain management Literally, you would exit his door and go to the next door, were prescribed Oxycontin.

18:20 Yeah, they're there. They were this is elder John. This Wilson. Like, get the fuck out of here. So you think that if more people had heroin, Well, what concerns me about those pills more than anything else Yeah, and once you're addicted to pain medication, the doctors won't give it to you forever. Or is there a physical component to the heroin addiction? There's definitely a physical component to addictions.

20:23 Heroin is fairly addicting. He said it was like having a bad flu. body. It helps you not feel pain. It helps reduce pain and inflammation. So if you've been abusing with supra-physiological levels massive opiates, you feel like crap, you know, muscles are extra achy because now there's inflammation and, you abuse pain meds is they get multiple people to prescribe. And it sounds like, you know,

23:11 That was the big issue in Florida was that they didn't have a database up until recently. strain delivered at my door at this time. And it shows up at your door with a smile and a little detriments to health. You know, cortisol rises, your hippocampus dies and cells fall apart and It's just ridiculous. with certain substances than others. Yeah. And that's individual variability as part of it.

26:13 about people being addicts. Yeah. They don't consider the fact that this person might have Oh, sure. Yeah, there's multiple ways. It's a short answer. I do a lot of neurofeedback or biofeedback on brainwaves. So you might measure that like excess The brain starts to go, oh, cool, input whenever I'm doing one thing. And suddenly you put your arms down on the ground, you push yourself up and you could see more. You could see, you know, further in the distance. Your brain went, oh, cool. Remember this pattern

28:45 And so whenever the car slows down and peters out next to the race course because your brain got distracted or tense the brain doesn't like the lack of input For biofeedback, not generally. Wow, that's amazing. That's incredible. And how long is this process? Like say if 30 sessions is enough typically to make one and a half to two standard deviations of change.

30:56 To eliminate your ADHD, your anxiety, your trauma. I think what we have is a natural spectrum, continuum of attention management resources. really about what's going on. That's not a deficit of attention. yet they can focus extremely well on something that they're fascinated by, So, you know, I was always sort of not rewarded by being in math classes and really rewarded being in, you know, language or, you know, whatever, English class.

34:55 Don't eat that food. Don't, you know, it's no, no, no, no, no. It's a lot of what the PFC does. and activates it in a way that most ADHD people don't experience most of the time. Whoa. them. And is there some benefit from just dealing with this homogenization, dealing with the boarding, the curriculum that they're forcing upon you? It will allow more individualized.

38:12 And a lot of weird social shit goes on when you have a 12-year-old with a 6-year-old. Right, but aren't they all on different levels? It was all about age you know developmental age versus chronological age, but it would seem to me If you're lucky. People that are struggling or people that are advanced I mean, I'm a teacher. in our sort of modern Western culture.

41:30 you know, hunted a boar, who knows, got a tattoo. But nowadays people go from, you know, being In martial arts, you get belts. But meanwhile, I was the exact same person. I mean, the ordeal, I think, Mercedes Eliade, the sort of guy who defined shamanism, defined it as ordinary reality is what we all have. a fire until they flop on the ground speaking in tongues. The idea is to give yourself a chance

44:18 Well, you know, it's all... But, you know, I grew up on the East Coast as a hard-nosed East Coaster, What is your opinion of Ibogaine? you know, real clear firsthand experience to talk about the amount of people that have done it. it's one of the few things that works if drugs don't work for your depression ECT hippocampus. The hippocampus is involved with memory formation, also exploring the environment.

47:06 Wow, that's fascinating. depressed. Then their career turned around, their romantic life turned around, and they were no You're in a rewarding relationship where you feel supported and loved. depression or anxiety aren't always bad. You know, there's often a good When someone's life becomes less stressful, you're right. So there are many people, their lives get better, they get a new job, they have things perk up,

50:22 I mean, for the longest time. when it crept into the DSM. know the BMI for you and me would say we're overweight if not obese because It works pretty well at a population level. But the same is true of the DSM. It works pretty well at a population Yeah. Right. Because you're not at ease? Is it dis-ease? You're not at ease? you don't want to do anything.

53:44 I'm not buying the robes. And the same is true of anything else that's cognitive or psychological. You may have a doing clinical histories first, because I don't want to be biased. So I'll sit you down and, you know, record some baselines. And then after I have I want to get in there come down, come down to Beverly Hills, and we'll hook you up. I saw the look on your face.

56:18 training process. Neurofeedback seems to reset tolerance to cannabis in a few days. Neurofeedback seems to reset tolerance to cannabis in a few days And so whenever it tends to trend down, maybe I'll have you play one of your podcasts and the volume swell, the volume of your Areas on the scalp just measuring areas just measuring your you're playing with on the computers.

58:19 So you're never gonna this is not a cognitive process cats didn't make, in this case, cats got a dropper of milk. How dangerous is this, you know, hydrazine stuff we're using as rocket fuel? one brain wave that i thought was a nice target to go after it turns out that brain wave is the And after a couple of years, she went off all meds and was seizure free.

1:00:46 Now, what is the current protocol on this stuff today? and there's two of them. And this is not beyond the pale. This is very possible. just that but testify about the negative aspects of Well, all the Nixon studies. We're dealing with that today. She's got a very specific pattern of thinking and speaking that she's supposed to engage in and she won't vary.

1:04:34 2.5%. They said that they got a hold of some marijuana from the 1960s and 70s, and the variation But so that means that the good weed of today and the great weed of then are pretty similar. Everybody was scared of giving them the good weed. We know that whiskey is stronger than wine. I'm just gone and I work with people that are often like yeah, man. I'm professional. I know what I'm doing shut up

1:07:30 I couldn't talk to my wife. What did you do to it it must be this it must be both I haven't actually rigorously examined the It's not just lasts longer. And then they eat the brownies and they call 911, that you could give these people Well, that's the problem with eating it. Ibuprofen. And potentially long-term learning memory as well. I'm glad you brought that up, because a big problem in college today is Adderall.

1:11:15 who was a hilarious stand-up comedian a great guy he had a bunch of health issues himself and um motivated to get things done. And that, and that push of stimulants does happen. This is why That goes away as soon as you're used to the drug. He was like, those chicks would always be cleaning their apartments. So you get a motivation. So you're taking more.

1:13:53 like crap. They don't know how to like live their lives as adults yet, but they have no structure That's the cocaine response, right? Oh, that's my cocaine. You know, it's that's the that's the it's the it's the reward It's the pleasurable and dopamine gets boosted to super physiological levels. A methylphenidate is not a typical like Adderall or something.

1:15:59 reaction to it. And people that have attention problems, and I grew up ADHD, people that have I mean, when you're prescribed, take it every day. This is just before I launched TrueBrain, which was one of the reasons I did it. erythema multiform minor. And there's a major form that's called Steven Johnson syndrome. So you raise histamine, you raise dopamine, raise histamine, raise serotonin.

1:18:02 benefits from it the first couple of weeks. It's just nothing compared to psychostimulants. In the R modafinil, which is NuV in the modafinil product in the in the our where you get one hump six hours in, another hump about 12 hours in. R-monafinil has the same sort tried NuVigil. I haven't tried ProVigil. the more discreet, theoretically fewer side effects. It's a bit stronger in some ways, more of a stimulant effect,

1:20:46 of puffy and itchy. And by the end of that day, there was like deep, deep soreness in a lot of So I had no idea, but the only thing I've added in to my sort of regimen, Well, I found that to be the case. an airline pilot, commercial airline pilot, where you're up for many hours having to remain on. Tim Ferriss who wrote a book the four-hour body or Tim

1:23:27 and unless you're an arcoleptic, it's just not for you. Cannabis? Yeah, everybody's smoking tobacco out of these wacky things. Sorry, acetylcholine receptors. But you see the carcinogenic effects or the people that have an issue with cigarette smoking, Yeah, I'm not sure. you know, cigarettes, A lot. But is it really helping you be generative in new ideas?

1:26:51 Yeah. Well, A unicorn is a donkey from the future. What a unicorn is a donkey from the future doesn't make any sense. Yeah, not really sort of you know genetic, if you will. all the other cannabinoids beyond THC. We're starting to examine the endocannabinoid. We have the binding compound in the body. I think we have at least two categories of cannabinoid systems.

1:30:08 it can shut down an illness in my experience. Really? Yeah. Um, I've always wondered whether which is something that is being researched quite a bit lately? And do it better than CBDs. It may, yeah. So too much CBD and you aren't going to get high off your pot. Yeah. It used to exist, like the same suppression that caused this reluctance of pharmaceutical companies

1:32:42 Yeah, the decorticator was the first time that they developed a system of processing hemp fire It's just way tougher. Yeah. He owned, you know, all the newspapers he owned. So when Congress was outlawing marijuana, they didn't exactly understand that they were outlawing hemp as a textile and as a commodity. walker bush that was what his parachute was made of when he parachuted to safety in World War II.

1:35:22 Right, right. realize that okay there's money to be made with this one solution this new But I don't see any ethical or problematic use, even with children, if you're using it as an anti-epileptic intervention. of inflammation issues diet and things that change that for, Like hemp. It's got a lot of resistance about medical marijuana. We would love to buy it from America, from American farmers.

1:38:47 If aspirin was invented today, if aspirin was invented today, aspirin would be a scheduled substance. Aspirin is an amazing, amazing anti-inflammatory. And chew it, and then you'll get acetylsalicylic acid, yeah. Yeah, that's what I mean. druid brewing it in tea or something to a certain age, you should just take aspirin every day anyway, just to mitigate the natural

1:41:00 And TrueBrain, you have it right here. Why is it different? I know, I know. That's like a cup of coffee, though. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, caffeine's somewhere betweeni is 200 milligrams of caffeine. More than that. Is it? Probably, yeah. Really? Yeah, yeah. People think, oh, give me the dark roast. Is that a Venti? Foreign words of GMOs. What? demonification. Yeahification knee jerk yeah when

1:43:58 That freaks people out, rightly so, right? Yeah. It's sort of like the old sharecropping model where you, you know, rent the land, sell the seeds, sell the tools. False. I guess so. Just for Pete's shit, you're fine dare you. You're one of those guys. I guess so. How dare you. It was on the internet. Right. inflammatory titles and then you read it.

1:46:42 And, you know, where does three meals a day come from? and that one of the real concerns about peanut allergies is that keeping kids from peanuts when they're very young That's the most bitter of all three. What do you think about, like, you ever try that Kopi Luwak? Like a weasel. most because you have to bring the oils out of the bean to the surface and caramelize them or oxidize them to produce the flavor you're looking for.

1:49:28 Westerners get more antioxidants from coffee a strict nootropic. I mean, my, my definition for the word nootropic is qegs i asked him to abstain from coffee that day or tea or whatever. And then when they're done, I hand them a, you know, Well, it's just one of those things. I use a mix of small origin organic batches. there you know um i had this guy peter giuliani giuliano giuliano giuliano he's um a coffee expert

1:51:35 Arabica. South America. It was like, he doesn't drink it with any cream or anything in it, so it was just black coffee. Like, Kona is one of my favorites from Hawaii. There you go. Let's drive one of those old cars they have down there. I was like that is fascinating like we have this idea that cars we have to get a new car every year It just would fall apart.

1:54:11 That stuff wears out. it was inflammatory more than real, Where a Hummer has like a three hundred thousand mile lifespan is not the only benefit of having a Because you just, you don't have the access to charging. that, oh yeah, we don't actually make jokes about LA smog. It's like, well, it's actually not that Well, the smog laws that they put in place and the smog screens that you have to

1:56:40 getting smogged, getting smog cleared. say it runs on vegetable oil, where do you get your I mean 20 years ago you could do that. These days, there's entire companies that have relationships with the Japanese, Chinese restaurants still a big one that's not very heavy 3500 is that really heavy compared to a modern car? Sure. Really? Yeah. What do you think a modern car weighs? 18 to 2,500

1:58:15 with everything stripped out, Oldsmobile Delta 88, big old lanyard, and that thing was only 4,200 pounds. I mean, it has carbon fiber seats. They strip out all the sound deadening. And it's like, they It's extremely light. I mean, it has carbon fiber seats. Like, they drill into foot pedals to make the car lighter. a fucking psycho you can get it down to like maybe 1,800 but you have to use carbon fiber fenders

1:59:44 That's very lightweight, yeah. But an M3, which is not a big car is 3900 pounds Wow. I'm surprised Yeah. Oh, my God. Wow. The way they construct them is a little bit different, but so far no detriment. Yeah. Isn't that amazing? Okay. And he had a GoFundMe or a Kickstarter or some shit like that. You spend your money. I mean, never went anywhere. So to take this compressed sound and convert it into something that has like more depth,

2:02:58 No. Nobody's buying that fucking thing, Neil Young. It looks like a cell phone. I want to talk to you about mindfulness. But the practice is not quieting your mind. Well, there's many different types of meditation, right? you release whatever it is you've gotten distracted by and bring your attention back to the anchor. Again and again and again and again. And that's the entirety of most classic meditation is noticing when you've gotten distracted. Oh, let it go. Not now. Back to the focus. Again and again and again and again.

2:05:46 That's what they do. The point is doing it. Just think, okay, I'm going to leave you here for three hours. So I often tell folks 20 minutes, you know, even that can be a big ask for some folks. By the end of that time, your mind's probably a little more stable. mind after doing some concentration And so then later on, when you're walking around the world, you have a more spacious mind,

2:08:43 function. I sort of feel like a lot of people operate on momentum and that they kind of, that momentum I'm on my mind. You learn to choose and to act versus history. You have? You have not? I have not. excited about it, read John Lilly's book the deep self and if not to just exhale all your air right away. But in doing so, that's like the base. That's how I

2:11:28 It's like. Take a ping pong, cut it in half, Keep your eyes open and stare at the insides of these curved spaces. Yeah, you certainly do. You just have a better understanding of things. I'll send you down to the float lab in Venice. You're in the west side. Okay. Your head's not immersed, is it? Scalp. There might be. Crash is also developing some sort of a weird video component to his tanks

2:15:41 And he believes that in the absence of sensory input, if you had videos of people learning things from first-person perspective, tanks putting you into this receptive state and deep state quickly and it When you're floating for a while, you feel like you're flying, of salt in this water, and the water being Total darkness. a lot of different careers. Sounds like it, you crazy shaman,

2:17:58 That must have been fun. That's why you started lifting weights? to like one a month because it was some of it was the expectations we were setting on the patients depression relapse based on brain changes when people withdrew their meds. So really a pretty thing when you're head injured. Yeah. Impulsivity is a weird one, isn't it? Yeah. It's pretty

2:20:42 think I've worked in the past decade with about seven or eight TBI people. don't make results. It doesn't happen very often, but I say, let me stop billing you and then just Does insurance cover that? So this gentleman that you weren't getting results with, what was his issue? He had some Just to not having any mental stamina and so for him it, let's get your sleep better because he wasn't sleeping well. Let's make your daytime energy better. And let's

2:23:30 Ambient type things? there, it takes over and you fall asleep. But it didn't put you in a sleep state. It put you in a So they're able to fall asleep more easily, stay asleep more easily, wake up more refreshed. And usually the answer is, I can't. I mean, do a brain map and brain assessment, figure out which patterns are driving their sleep issues.

2:25:36 With biofeedback, you know, measure, because you're making all brainwaves all the time. And gamma traditionally stops at 40 hertz, 40 cycles per second. You know as a baseline and so when I'm doing the brain maps, this is a really good question when doing the brain maps than the population, statistically. But if there are a little bit of vagaries in sleep here and there, don't actually affect the sleep. If somebody's really sleep deprived, there are some differences in the QEG, but if there are

2:27:59 back might mean you're uh anxious you know different asymmetries in the front mean you're anxious. You know, different asymmetries in the front, maybe you're depressed. about what might be true. But the pattern, the brain mapping patterns don't fit into nice He has got that stupid robe on didn't he have a major health crisis recently? I don't know I think he did

2:29:38 Or a spiritual leader? Really? but I'm not that impressed with Seagal's lineage or his on-screen Aikido. To me, it looks cool, flipping people around. Yeah, it looks like you have to cooperate Right, exactly. Yeah, but you take an NCAA D1 wrestler, You bring your best guy. I'm gonna look at there's an exposition video from like the 70s Knowing what you know about the mind.

2:32:25 You think that a guy can knock a guy over with his mind just by giving him subtle cues? Okay. from the mountain. He created it from of course, a derivative of That guy's willingly cooperating. This guy's running towards him and letting this guy clothesline him. Come on, that doesn't ever happen. Exposition, I think. I think it was in There's a lot of fuckery when it comes to martial arts and a lot of people that get trapped into all this fuckery.

2:35:33 and was standing on my feet watching the bike spin away tear in my shoulder because I that kind of shit it's also it this is hard to see with that kind this old judo but the way he moved was logical i mean i i understood that what he was doing was That sounds interesting. Mount. Okay, here he goes. Grabs him. Th throws him to the ground again grabs him throws him to the ground yeah this is what

2:38:19 Right. to kill. When the goal is either. The goal is to just hold on Well, there's a lot of people that don't like the idea of mixed martial arts because it's not in, Most of that stuff doesn't work. Yeah, but you know, that's that's also competition. I mean i've been attacked in bars That's what an unskilled asshole does. You're assuming they do though.

2:42:15 It doesn't work the way wrestling or Krav Maga or karate or judo. there's a whole team of them from 10th Planet Jiu Jitsu you'd never think of breakdancing being a martial art. I'm very nervous about people getting inaccurate ideas in their head. Nobody in an Aikido center has an idea of themselves as a sparring fighter. I would have stepped to one side and just not been in the way.

2:44:40 Maybe not much longer. That was my job. You know, violence, conflict causes a huge surge in adrenaline, cortisol, which is a stress hormone, and it shuts down the connections between the executive, the CEO of the brain, and the other parts of the brain. And the top-down ability for your intentions, your perceptions, your moment-to-moment perspective on your brain or on your reality, that goes away in a crisis.

2:46:46 The adrenaline kicks up. It's state-dependent learning where you learn skills in one set of contexts, state dependent learning so that's that's that's always overblown it's not A little more stress, better performance. Yeah, it seems like there's a wall that they hit that's unexpected. Yeah, I do actually this sleep spindle that we tend to train up called SMR sensory motor rhythm in the brain

2:49:35 zone now, and then they release and you hit the you're in that Zen state, Oh, Is it difficult to replicate when you have a guy there with a laptop? when they stepped in and where the losers were. Okay, right. as they were about to step into the cage, That might be worth studying. All of the winners were in this zone. which happen when you're dreaming or creative or checked out. So my guess is as the performance

2:52:54 The universe yeah, I'm like I'm done. Yeah, I can't you can't radically the human brain can store more bits of information It's actually the rule versus the exception. than the estimate That's insane. It's been an amazing, amazing conversation. And your center is called Alternatives. we'll be back in a couple of hours with Duncan Trussell.