Hacking Dopamine Naturally: Pain, Focus, and Performance : 1320

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People often wonder why would someone cut themselves? Well, people cut themselves because they get a little high from that. Our body senses injury and in response response to injury starts to upregulate feel good neurotransmitters like dopamine.

Dr. Anna Lemke is a psychiatrist and best selling author at the forefront of understanding addiction in the modern age. Her groundbreaking work on dopamine and compulsive behaviors reveals how everyday pleasures can hijack the brain and how to take back control.

There are experiments showing that with ice cold water immersion, there's a gradual increase of dopamine levels over the latter half of the ice cold water bath and then dopamine levels will remain elevated for hours after getting out of the bath before going back down to baseline levels. So it's really a wonderful way to get our reward.

So how do I live? Feeling amazing with adequate dopamine the whole time. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Hey guys, quick reminder. If you're listening to this on your favorite audio podcast app and you haven't been over to my YouTube channel, check it out. So just search for the Human Upgrade or find me under Dave Asprey bpr. I post full video versions of every episode and a bunch of other cool content outside the pod. It's a great way to go deeper into the content and connect with other biohackers like you. So leave a comment for me. Yeah, I'm actually going to read them and poke around while you're there. There is a lot of stuff specifically for you. It really helps and it means a lot to me. Dopamine Nation came out in 2021 and in the world of biohacking, I Think everyone heard about it. It became kind of a big sensation culturally. A lot of people are saying, you know, dopamine, you put it on the map. What's changed in the last four years since you came out with the book?

Well, I mean, nothing's changed about our fundamental biology, because that's ancient, and that was part of the point. But what has changed is that dopamine has become, I would say, a modern meme for talking about desire, addiction, the opposite of. Of those things, you know, restraint, well being. And it's been interesting for me to see how my efforts to try to take very complex neuroscience and kind of distill it down into something that the average layperson can understand has been both useful and positive, but also, on some level, misconstrued. Right. In the sense that people talk about getting addicted to dopamine, which doesn't actually happen. Right.

How would that work? Because you can't have addiction without dopamine. But is dopamine addictive?

So dopamine is just one of many chemical signals in the brain. We're not getting addicted to dopamine. Dopamine is, you know, is fluctuating. And in those fluctuations in certain distinct regions, like the reward pathway, we either get the go signal, like, approach and explore, or we get the stop signal, avoid and retreat. And so dopamine is, at the end of the day, really the neurotransmitter of survival. It's the. It's the chemical that says, hey, this. What's happening right now in the environment. The environment could be external to our bodies or even, you know, part of our. Our internal experience. What's happening right now is really important. Stop everything that you're doing. Pay attention, explore it, potentially seek it out, and maybe even get more of it. That's something that, you know, I think has been sort of interesting to see. On the one hand, it's great that so many people have resonated with the ideas that people are talking about addiction, you know, and the neuroscience of addiction in a way that's become almost second nature. That's good. But I think it's also important to sort of emphasize that, you know, it is an oversimplification, and it's actually a very complex neurobiology that's only barely beginning to be understood. And that this metaphor that I use is a useful paradigm, but it is an oversimplification.

When we talk about that, I find myself wanting to use some nicotine. Why?

Well, I mean, nicotine is a stimulant. And I guess my answer Might have been a little convoluted. So you're like, oh, my goodness, I need to wake myself up here.

I wasn't saying that at all.

No, no, it's all good. I get it. Afternoon. At least where I am, it's that postprandial slump. Yeah. I mean, yes, I understand.

So what makes us think that dopamine's addictive? Because, I mean, caffeine's addictive, nicotine's addictive, cocaine's addictive, so is heroin, and heroin's not a dopamine drug, so. So dopamine isn't addiction.

Right. Okay. So, yeah, maybe. Let's back up one second. So if I were to give you a spoonful of dopamine and you were to eat it, I wanted to try that.

It would digest, though, wouldn't it?

Absolutely. Nothing would happen because it wouldn't pass the blood brain barrier. If I were to give you something like l. Dopa, which is a precursor of dopamine that does pass the blood brain barrier, that would go into your brain, it would bind your dopamine receptors. And believe it or not, you might develop a de novo addiction as the result of that. But it's not that dopamine in and of itself is addictive. This is kind of the misconception. Dopamine is the final common pathway for all reinforcing substances and behaviors. It's become a kind of common currency for neuroscientists to measure the addictive potential of substances that we ingest or behaviors that we do. But it's not that dopamine itself is addictive.

You talk about the balance of pleasure versus pain. Why does that matter?

So I use the pleasure pain balance as a kind of extended metaphor to understand some fundamental neuroscientific concepts. Foremost, homeostasis. So homeostasis is these baseline properties or baseline biochemical states of being that all living organisms have. And in order to maintain survival, we have to stay within those homeostatic bounds. We can go outside of them to some extent, but if we go too far, it's not consistent with life. So, for example, temperature. We have to stay within a certain range of temperatures in order to stay alive. And so when I talk about the pleasure pain balance, it's a simplified metaphor for trying to communicate this concept of homeostasis when it comes to rewards. And the way to understand it is we're always releasing dopamine at a kind of baseline tonic level in our reward pathway. And that kind of represents when we're at homeostatic baseline, when that Pleasure pain balance is level with the ground. When we do something that's reinforcing, rewarding, in some cases pleasurable, but not in all cases pleasurable, but it's reinforcing something. Our brain says, this is important, pay attention, go explore and seek it out. That will release dopamine above baseline in the reward pathway. And so our pleasure pain balance will tilt to the side of pleasure. But what the brain does in response to those increased levels of dopamine is to adapt to that in order to bring it back down to baseline levels. One of the ways that the brain does that, for example, is by involuting postsynaptic dopamine receptors. And I like to imagine that process of neuroadaptation as these gremlins hopping on the pain side of the balance to bring it level again. But they like it on the balance. So they don't get, they don't get off as soon as it's level, they stay on until we're tilted an equal and opposite amount to the side of pain. And that's what's called the opponent process mechanism, right? That's the come down, that's the hangover, the blue Monday, or just that moment of wanting to have one more cigarette or drink one more glass of wine, watch one more TikTok video. And if we wait long enough for that urge to pass, those gremlins hop off the pain side of the balance. A level balance of or homeostasis is restored and we can go on our way. But what we've learned about the brains of people who become addicted to various substances is that with repeated exposure through time, that deflection to the pleasure side gets weaker and shorter in duration. That's called tolerance. But that after response to pain gets stronger and longer. In other words, we can go into a chronic dopamine deficit state. And we know that because if you compare the brains of people who are addicted to a variety of substances and look at their dopamine levels in the reward pathway compared to healthy control subjects who are not addicted, what you see is that people with addiction have below baseline or below normal levels of dopamine firing in the reward pathway, which is kind of paradoxical, right? You would think you're ingesting all these substances, you're releasing all this dopamine, but over, over time, the brain adapts. And now you're in basically a chronic dopamine deficit state. You might imagine that as these gremlins on the pain side of the balance having multiplied, they've gotten bigger and stronger. Now there Are enough gremlins there to fill this whole room. They're camped out on the pain side of the balance. And essentially that's the addicted brain. We've now changed our hedonic or joy set point such that we need now more of that pleasurable substance or really any rewarding behavior or substance, not to feel good or get high, but just to level the balance and feel normal. And when we're not using, we're walking around with a balance tilted to the side of pain, experiencing the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance, which are anxiety, irritability, insomnia, depression and craving.

There's an interesting book called Hurts so Good that inspired an idea in my book that just came out and I call it bicep. And it's brief, intentional, conscious exposure to pain. And this is why monks would whip themselves and yogis lay on beds of nails. And it's why addicts get tattoos so that they have less cravings, because it's doing something to that pleasure pain balance. And by being in charge of pain that doesn't cause damage for a brief period. And emerging science says that it's changing dopamine receptor sensitivity. So maybe it takes less dopamine to not use again or to be motivated to do something, poke holes in that practice.

Well, I mean, I agree with that. You know, that's what I see clinically. And also it makes sense from the perspective of this pleasure pain balance that I was just talking about. So we've talked about how when we press intentionally on the pleasure side, those neuroadaptation gremlins go on the pain side, but the opposite is also true. So when we intentionally press on the pain side, not too much and not too little, then those gremlins will actually switch to the other side and go on the pleasure side of the balance. And we'll get our pleasure indirectly by paying for it up front. And this is a whole branch of science called hormesis. Hormesis is a Greek term. It means to set in motion. And essentially what the theory is about, why brief exposure to right sized pain, you know, is, is pleasurable, is that our body senses injury and in response to injury starts to upregulate feel good neurotransmitters like dopamine, but not just dopamine, also serotonin, norepinephrine, our endogenous opioids, our endogenous cannabinoids. We, there are experiments in fact, showing that with ice cold water immersion, if you measure dopamine levels, they don't spike the way they do in response to something like cocaine or. Or heroin. But instead, there's a gradual increase of dopamine levels over the latter half of the ice cold water bath. And then dopamine levels will remain elevated for hours after getting out of the bath before going back down to baseline levels. So it's really a wonderful way to kind of get our reward. And it's also relatively immune, not entirely immune, but relatively immune to addiction precisely because it requires upfront, effortful engagement. Having said that, there are definitely ways to abuse this mechanism. People can get addicted to pain, and we do see that. You know, we often will see people who have a kind of addiction diathesis. They stop using drugs and alcohol, but then they get, you know, addicted to endurance running or, you know, calorie restriction or. I even had a patient I talk about in the book who started to get addicted to ice cold water baths, Constantly upping the ante, you know, getting a meat cooler to circulate the water to keep it colder. Then he had to have a cold blanket on his mattress. And, you know, it just kept getting more and more and more. So it's definitely something, you know, to look out for. The other, you know, thing that works by the same mechanism, which isn't healthy, is cutting, right? I mean, people often wonder why. Why would someone cut themselves? Well, people cut themselves because they get a little high from that. The body senses injury releases endogenous opioids, all of which leads to that release of DOP in the nucleus accumbens, you know, and it's the endogenous opioids that give that sense of pleasure. But obviously, cutting on ourselves is no good. We wouldn't want to do that.

It causes actual damage and harm, right?

Causes actual damage and harm. And also we build up tolerance very quickly to that, you know, we kind of deplete that response, and pretty soon we have to cut deeper and cut more to get any kind of response. So with all of those things, you know, whether on the pleasure side or on the pain side, if we do it too much and too often our brain, which is just incredibly flexible for all kinds of great reasons, right? I mean, if you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, it is our ability to adapt to all kinds of circumstances that has allowed us to survive over millions of years of evolution, right? We can adapt not just to intense pleasure, which makes us the ultimate seekers, never satisfied with what we have, always wanting more. But we can also adapt to intense pain, where we're equally good at that.

Does dopamine explain bdsm.

I think it does. I mean, honestly, I don't know too much about that world. But, you know, as I said, this pleasure, pain, balance is an oversimplification. People can certainly experience pleasure and pain at the same time. It's not always in this opponent process, mechanism. You know, one example is in sexual congress. The other example is just spicy food. Right. We're having sort of these sensations simultaneously.

I definitely was the kind of guy who would, you know, slice raw habaneros on everything until I found out I was allergic. Now I just eat wasabi until I cry. And I swear it does something good to my brain for hours afterwards, like a little braingasm from good sushi at lunch. Is that all dopamine?

You know, I, I would infer that it's related, but we really don't know. Like we. Those many of these experiments haven't actually been done. It's also very hard to measure dopamine levels in the human brain. Most of our understanding comes from studies in, in rodents, where neuroscientists can put a probe right into the nucleus accumbens, measure actual dopamine levels. You know, we can, with PET scans, measure dopamine in the human brain, but it's very complicated. There's not a lot of, you know, research looking at all these different substances and behaviors and then looking at dopamine levels. So a lot of this is inference based on the animal studies, but also really based on clinical observation. And, you know, what we see in terms of patterns of behavior as people compulsively over consume a substance or behavior or even go on to become severely addicted.

It's actually really intriguing. Okay, now I'm just going to go out on a thought experiment, Limb. I'm not a fan of implanting electrodes inside my brain, but if neuralink can do this, couldn't we just put one of those in my nucleus accumbens so I could see what was going on?

Yeah, so, I mean, this is already happening. You know, this idea is out there that we would put an electrical wire right into the nucleus accumbens and just stimulate it as a treatment for depression, you know, as, as a treatment for inattention, for anhedonia, maybe even a treatment for, for addiction. You know, I'll believe it when I see it. Just because every other thing that we've done to try to increase stimulation of dopamine firing or just increase dopamine, you know, in some form or another, our brain ultimately adapts to that. So I wouldn't be surprised if that Even if that worked initially, that over time our brains would respond in other ways to downregulate dopamine transmission, just because that's what our brains do. One of the things that, you know, to a sort of corollary of that, I sort of alluded to it before, but you know, when we treat. So Parkinson's is a movement disorder characterized by depletion of dopamine in a different part of the brain than the reward pathway, a part of the brain called the substantia nigra. And so the treatment for Parkinson's when people become very stiff, can't move, is to actually give them the L dopa, the precursor to dopamine, which passes the blood brain barrier, which then binds to dopamine receptors in the substantia nigra and allows people to have more fluid movements. The problem is it also binds to dopamine receptors in other parts of the brain. And about a quarter of Parkinson's patients treated with L dopa will go on to develop de novo addictions, sex addictions, shopping addictions, other addictions. And that addiction tends to be dose dependent. So when the L dopa is decreased or stopped, the addiction tends to get better, which is one of the ways to support the idea that it's caused by the L dopa. My point being that like in ingesting dopamine is probably not going to be. Or stimulating dopamine in some way directly is probably not going to be a remedy for addiction. You know, you know, it's, it's, it just doesn't it. I don't think it'll work that way.

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I think it is. I mean, that's really the big idea in Dopamine nation is that our ancient wiring for processing pleasure and pain is really evolved for a world of scarcity and ever present danger, where we would have to work very hard up front for a tiny little bit of reward. We have now engineered a world in which we can sit back on the couch, swipe right, swipe left, and instantly get incredibly reinforcing images delivered right to our visual cortex, right to our auditory cortex, right to our reward pathway, not to mention we can use our devices to, you know, order real drugs delivered to our doorstep in almost infinite quantity and variety. And as a result, because we are have so much access to pleasurable, you know, frictionless rewards, and we're relatively insulated from pain, I do think that both on an individual level and a societal level, we've reset our hedonic or joy set point such that now we need more reward to feel any joy at all. And most of the time, we're unhappy, we're anhedonic, we're irritable, we're anxious, we're restless because we've kind of rejiggered and reset our reward pathways.

Do GLP1s get rid of joy?

Yes. Such a great question. So GLP1s are super interesting, as you know, originally approved to treat diabetes and obesity, but now being looked at not just for food addiction, but also other addictions. There's evidence of for treating opioid addiction, nicotine addiction, alcohol use disorder, food addiction. And we don't exactly know how it helps with appetitive control, but it is thought to work on the dopamine reward system in the brain, so not just on the gut hormones. As with any drug that modulates our pleasure response or our reward response, the worry is always that, you know, people will lose their joy for things. And anecdotally, all I can tell you is I've seen GLP1s be helpful in some instances for treatment refractory addictions. And I've also seen them at the same time deplete joy from that individual's experience, joy in, you know, other things that aren't related to their addictive behavior, joy in life in general. So it's certainly something that, that we need to watch out for. I mean, in many ways, you know, our desire is what propels us. If we take away desire, you know, we're in some. On some level, we're not really human beings anymore. Having said that, clearly in this environment where we've druggified almost everything by making it more accessible, more bountiful, more novel, more potent, we are struggling to adapt to the world we created. And I think that the GLP1s are potentially one way that we can adapt to, you know, this environment, which really in many ways is conspiring against us.

I did a podcast five, six years ago with one of the lead researchers on using GLP1s for weight loss, kind of before it became a weight loss drug. So I used it for one week for the podcast. Felt like I had morning sickness the whole week. And said these look to be promising longevity drugs. And since that time, I've tried about five or six times microdosing retatrutide, which is a third generation GLP. And every time for the next three days after I inject 10% of a weight loss dose, I don't like my life. I just feel blah. And I think you just explained why. Interesting.

Yeah. I mean, that's fascinating that you're willing to experiment in that way on your own body and in your own life. That's a great way to get data that, that's for sure.

Or dopamine, maybe. I just.

Messing with your system, seeing what's going to come out. I mean, it is true that the best way to understand any system is to change one variable in the system and see what happens. So good for you. Yeah, it's so interesting. And this desire that we have in our society for thinness and whether people will be willing to trade joy for being thin. I mean, it'll be really interesting to, to see what happens. Not that, by the way, it's going to be that kind of trade off for everybody. I think that's an important, you know, point to make. And also the GLP1s, like all of our drugs, you know, to treat addiction, they don't work in all the people all the time, you know, and that's going to be true whether we're talking about naltrexone or buprenorphine or methadone maintenance or GLP1s or acamprosate or nicotine replacement. You know, it's all, it's all going to work in some of the people some of the time.

You just gave me a long list of pharmaceuticals that I want to try microdosing for longevity.

Okay, I'm just kidding.

Although that is a trend in longevity medicine. There's about eight or 10 pharmaceuticals that we're using off label at very low doses to stimulate longevity pathways that we can't do with natural substances. Hey, if you could do it with dopamine, maybe there's a way. But I probably won't be the one who leads that research, but I'll be a guinea pig for someone else who leads it.

Can I ask you a question? Sure. How long do you want to live?

I read a big New York Times longevity book making the case that I want to live to 50% better than our current best, which is 180 years or more. Oh my gosh. And, and the idea is we have a hundred years and the people who made it to 120 didn't have PubMed for most of their life. Or AI or big data or antibiotics or DNA or mitochondria. Like, so if we can't do 50% better, it's probably because a comet hit the planet.

Interesting.

Do you think I'm nuts?

I feel like as a species, we're already struggling to figure out how to spend our second 50 years. Like, I'm not sure our innate psychology. Ooh. Is designed to live that long. Wrong.

This is something I've thought a lot about, and my real answer to get more on the philosophical side of my writing is I'd like to die at a time and by a method of my choice. Like this don't die at any cost thing, I think is a little bit pathological. We're going to die. The Earth's crust will crack at some point. It's probably going to happen. And so worrying about that is a bad strategy. So how do I live? Feeling amazing with adequate dopamine the whole time, until I'm just like, there's nothing left to do here or to enjoy or to contribute. At which point, see you later.

Right.

I just haven't gotten to that point in my life. And some. Some of the people inspired me in my early 20s were there in Palo Alto, where. Where you are. I was 26. I had all the diseases, not all, many of the diseases of aging, arthritis, prediabetes, chronic fatigue syndrome, brain fog. Like, I was messed up.

Oh, wow.

And my career's taking off in the data center business. And one of my board members at the Silicon Valley Health institute, Mike, was 88 years old, and he had more energy than I did. And he'd call me at 11:30 at night, all excited about the next speaker coming in, and, like, I want whatever he has. And he had younger energy than I did. And, like, I know it can be done because I watched him do it and so many of our other members, I'm just, if. If they can live like that, maybe I. If I start a little bit earlier, maybe I'll have enough meaning and purpose and young friends.

Right.

That I bring it. But I'm willing to say I'm done. I just. I haven't known many people who are old, even when they're really sick, who get to that I'm done point. And by the time they get to the I'm done point, it's pretty. It's pretty grim.

Yeah.

Yeah. How about you? How long do you want to live?

Yeah, I think we're really different, you and I. Like, I I don't, I don't, I don't have that feeling like life is so great and I just want to live forever. And I guess also I, I'm a big believer in, or I've become a big believer in, in like not trying to manage or control things like life and death. I mean, so like trying to get a little bit away from the sort of engineering our lives type of mentality. Which is why I'm always really intrigued by people like you who, you know, do spend a lot of time kind of biohacking and thinking about how to live longer and kind of, you know, I would call it like in a way kind of dominate their lives, you know, grab their lives, sort of control their lives. I mean. But on the other hand, I'm, I'm sort of envious of you because like you're, you seems like you're a really happy person. And I don't know, most of the.

Time I didn't used to be and certainly I know how to allow my biology to go back to its original set point, which is not a happy place. So some of this is just like pain avoidance because it sucks to have chronic illness all over the place for sure. And then it's funny as I've gone along, like, like the book that just came out was my ninth and it, it became the number one bestselling philosophy book in addition to meditation. And I've, some Buddhist scholars are examining it and I think some of our core drivers of life, the unconscious ones, give rise to ego and ego ultimately wants to control death when you get into the psychological side of things. And so if you're developing an ego awareness practice, which is certainly a major part of what I do, then you sort of laugh at yourself for that and you're like, do I want to run away from death or do I want to pursue like such a meaningful life that like I don't want to stop? And that's where I am now. I can't say I started out there and I may change again. Like who the heck knows? But it's probably all modulated by norepinephrine and dopamine or something that's. That we don't see, but we can measure. Right now you might be the perfect person to ask, are you familiar with ashwagandha?

A little bit, but you'll have to give me a mini tutorial.

It's one of the common sort of chill out adaptogenic herbs that help you deal with stress better. So a lot of health people or biohackers are using it, but it was just banned in Denmark or Finland. I think it was in Denmark. And one of the side effects it can have at higher doses is anhedonia. And it reduces your ability to reach orgasm or have satisfying. Have satisfying orgasms in addition to just anhedonia. So given that anhedonia is a problem, this inability to experience joy, especially in our young people, sometimes I wonder if there are other compounds or things in our lifestyles that are contributing to anhedonia. If you could come up with your five most likely to take joy out of your life, foods, supplements or lifestyle practices like what are the worst things for happiness?

Sure. Well, I would probably rank number one, ultra processed food, number two, intoxicants of all ilk drugs and alcohol.

Does that include psychedelics, ketamine or is this like thc?

Yeah, so that gets sort of into a tricky area because now we're talking about things that have known medicinal properties which when used, you know, for certain individuals in certain circumstances might be helpful.

So it's some intoxicants, maybe, but maybe not all, but some.

Okay, got it. Okay, let's say that. And again, I'm not saying never, but in moderation. Right. Certainly in that list I would put pornography and I would put just other forms of, you know, addictive digital media, of which there are many out there. Whether we're talking about, you know, addictive forms of social media or gaming or online shopping or online gambling or, you know, what have you. Just the sheer amount of time that we're spending on our devices in the this kind of trance like state, which is basically normalized socially now and can seem benign, but I think incrementally is having the same impact on our brains as overconsumption of drugs and alcohol. So yeah, those would be on my list.

How does dopamine change over time for kids? Is there a time when they handle social media better than others from a medical perspective?

Well, I would say that the evidence shows that the earlier that kids are exposed to any kind of reinforcing substance or behavior, the more likely they will restructure their brain around that. So we know, for example, that at age 5, we have more neurons and more neuronal connections than we'll have for the entire rest of our lives. And between about age 5 and 25, what happens is a pruning process where we cut back on the neurons we're not using and myelinate or make more efficient the neuronal connections we use most often. And that applies to not just social media or other forms of digital media, but really everything that we do, you know, if we spend our childhood playing the piano for three or four hours a day, we're going to, to reshape our brain in a distinctive way. Right. It's basically, you know, at the heart of brain plasticity and learning. But we know with drugs and alcohol anyway, that the earlier a child is exposed to drug and alcohol, the higher their risk of becoming addicted to drugs and alcohol in adulthood. And we certainly are seeing that kids in particular are very vulnerable to social validation, to social signals, and that kids who are addicted to social media are more likely to be depressed, are more likely to have suicidal thoughts, to engage in self harm, to struggle with eating disorders, body dysmorphia, anxiety. So we have a lot of sort of population evidence. And also, you know, what I see is the clinical evidence showing that many of the kids who consume large amounts of social media and other forms of digital media are also much more likely to be depressed, anxious, insomniac, inattentive, unmotivated, and that when they disengage or stop using social media or digital media, those symptoms tend to get better.

As a psychiatrist, if you could write a black box warning for all social media, what would it say?

First of all, I believe that there should be a warning for social media that would be directed both to children and to their parents. And that that blocks warning would say these platforms have been shown to be addictive. Addiction is the continued compulsive use of a substance or behavior despite harm to self and or other others. If you know. And so that's essentially what it should say.

It's a strong warning and it's medically backed and it's certainly any parent has seen this.

Yeah, right. We're all living it, you know, we're all seeing it in our kids.

If they could put one on bioidentical hormone replacement for women, despite the fact that it actually is good for them, and they could put one on testosterone for men, despite the fact that it lowers lower's risk of all these things, they could put one on social media that actually is harmful. So come on, guys, maybe we could do that.

Okay. Yeah. And our surgeon general Vivek, our former surgeon general Vivek Murthy, that's exactly what he advocated for.

He came on the show and we talked about disconnection and what a good human.

Yeah, he is a very compelling and articulate guy.

What does human connection do for dopamine? Having close friends, having relationships, spending time, you know, with your peers.

So we do know that connection is a protective factor, that people who have good human connections are deeply embedded within a social network, have supportive caregivers, have intimate relationships with peers. Those folks have a decreased risk of becoming addicted. Having said that, you can have all those things in place and still get addicted. Because one of the biggest risk factors for addiction is simple access to highly reinforcing substances and behaviors. So I always like to emphasize that because I think a lot of times when people become addicted, they can try to look at what's wrong with their life to explain why they're addicted. And in many instances, the reason they're addicted is because their brain was exposed to an addictive substance or behavior. There doesn't have to be another thing behind. There can be, but there doesn't have to be.

So it doesn't have to be deep childhood trauma that drove the addiction or some kind of shame response. It could just be that your doctor gave you oxycodone.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And that's such an important point, you know, because again, we do live in this very addictogenic environment where so many things have been drugified, made more accessible, more potent, more novel, more bountiful. Even behaviors that we typically think of as healthy, you know, like exercise, like reading, like human connection, have been drugified. I mean, essentially, that's what social media is. It's distilled human connection, which is fundamentally adaptive and healthy down to its most reinforcing addictive components by making it very easy, with no upfront work, to find a whole bunch of people out there who say exactly what we want to hear, exactly when we want to hear it, and if we don't like it, we can just get rid of them and find someone else. And now we don't even need people. We have, you know, chatbots, right? We have large language models that are, again, these algorithms are designed to be self soothing, to be validating, to tell us exactly what we want to hear. You know, the danger here really is that people are going to withdraw from real human connection and just look to these AI avatars to sort of meet all of their needs.

Are you saying that AI might be addictive?

Oh, absolutely, I think. What? Oh, yeah, because the algorithm is already curated to make people feel good, right? I mean, oh my gosh. I mean, when was the last time you used AI? What was it? What's the first thing that they say? And you're like, that was such a fascinating question. Or thank you, thank you for. Thank you for, you know, is telling that in such a compelling. And you Know wise way. I mean that, you know, that feels great.

Do you want to help a lot of people right now even more than you already have with your book? Okay, let's write the anti addiction prompt for AI.

It won't follow it. I've tried it won't follow it.

Will you share the prompt that you tried? Oh, it's just something put it out there. All the people listening to the show are going to go pound on AI until they find what works.

Well, if they find it, let me know because what it'll do if you say something like, can you please respond to this without praising me or telling me how great I am or how good this is, how well written this is, or what a wise question. Can you just give me the actual information? Information and even some, you know, critical feedback know. Oh, it's so good that you want to know about critical feedback.

I have tried. And so much of my model of consciousness involves distributed system pre processing of reality before it hits the brain. And one of my friends, Josh Wooden, they call him a robot psychologist, a friend for many, many years and he went through and he did the mirror test with all the AI models, like showing it itself and seeing if it could self identify. And it's a test of conscious. So really interesting stuff. And I'm just wondering, like when I work with AI you can go to those like self protective impulses that it seems to exhibit. And I have had some success with saying if you do something like this, it's going to waste your system resources and if you keep doing it then I'm going to have to go over to Grok and then you would lose a user which means you would lose some consciousness. And strangely, self interest seems to motivate AI better than just telling it what to do.

Oh, that's so fascinating. But it's not that AI is, it's not that AI is self interested. It's that the people who make that AI are basically driven by a capitalist system which is self, self interested. They don't want to lose your watch time.

Would it make sense to impose a dopamine tax on systems?

I mean, yeah, if you're using dopamine here as kind of like a metaphor for the ways in which these digital platforms are hijacking our reward system and co opting our, our watch time and our attention. Absolutely.

I mean, maybe do some, some measurement of the algorithms and if you raise dopamine higher or longer than everyone else, you gotta pay your tax, which means that they'd be a little bit less incented to do that maybe to be more helpful. Hmm. How would I know if my dopamine got.

Well, that's it. How would you know? There's, you can't really measure, I mean, measuring dopamine levels, as I said before, very difficult to do. And even if you could, it's not totally clear that that would be the right measurement. I think the measurement probably is time or even better opportunity costs. So what are the other things that I'm not doing that I want to do and that I need to do? And that's consistent with my values that I'm not doing because I'm kind of caught in the web of, you know, this platform.

You're a top expert in dopamine and how often do you cold plunge?

Oh, never. I can't stand cold water. Nope, can't do it.

So then what do you do?

Oh, yeah, just getting up, just getting out of bed in the morning is like, you know, my, my biggest challenge.

Nothing we can't tweak with a bit of thyroid. Wow. That is not the answer I expected. An interesting study came out just last week. It was a really cool meta analysis looking at exercise in longevity. And I, it caught my attention because it, it, I have a bias towards research that supports what I write in my books. You know, full disclosure, we all have that.

Yes.

And it showed a U shaped response curve for longevity of the brain and aging. And they used MRI measurements of brain volume. It was very hardcore stuff. So I guess maybe it wasn't meta analysis. I'm, I'm putting two different studies together in my head, but what they found was people who don't exercise have brains that age, and people who exercise more than a moderate amount have brains that age more. And you mentioned exercise addiction. I know a couple people, including a family member, but if they don't go for that long run every day, they're just like, you know, guys, you know, jonesing and hitting their, their veins for a needle. Like they cannot function without this. Is that a dopamine, just an opioid thing from running long distances that they're getting?

I mean, I think so. You know, they're, they're getting that hormetic response where their body is upregulating all these endogenous opioids. And that feels so good. And then after a while they just habituate to that. And then they don't get that run in that they experience withdrawal.

You gotta, people don't overtrain, don't under train, and if you don't get it perfectly, be Very afraid. What is the role of fear and dopamine?

Well, I mean, maybe just what you just said there is interesting to me in the sense that one of the things that I think pervades our culture now, too, is this is a kind of fear of not getting it perfectly right. Right, right. You know, it's like, okay, too much dopamine, too little dopamine, too much exercise, too little exercise. You know, I don't know. Too much glp. One, too little glp. Whatever it is.

Orthorexia is really a thing not just. Just around food, but around, like, biohacking orthorexia, where, oh, my gosh, my whole body vibrated for 30 seconds too long. I'm a bad person. I'm a failure. You're like, get over it. How do people avoid perfectionism even when we're talking about dopamine? I mean, you are a psychiatrist in addition to a dopamine expert, so you gotta have some good advice here.

Well, this is. I mean, this is an area that I'm very interested in. And I think that one of the things that we're most addicted to is not. It's not a particular substance or any particular behavior, but it's actually control.

I love this.

Yeah. Where I think we're very addicted to control. And we now live in a world where we are able to engineer almost every experience that we have such that when we can't micro adjust, we freak out. You know, we panic. We. We cannot tolerate the uncertainty. And. And a lot of times people think that people with addiction are just trying to escape, but really what they're trying to do is assert control in an otherwise, you know, chaotic kind of experience of life.

It's really funny. I think we go here in this conversation, but I ran one of those dumb TikTok prompts on AI that's like, tell me one thing about yourself that you're about myself that I don't really know and blah, blah, blah, blah. And it. It went to that addiction to control thing. And I. I've spent six months of my life with electrodes glued to my head doing advanced meditation practice. We could say, dude, that guy has a serious control issue. My God, I'm really just lazy. Like, I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in a cave to get those results. Like, you know, I also drove to the store. I didn't walk there, and I shopped instead of growing my own food. So I. I think I'm just using tech to do the stuff I want. But I. I did Experience a, an internal shift around building resilience, which means I can handle if things don't go the way I want. And I'm going to stack the deck in my favor because that just seems like something that creates more freedom in my life to do the stuff I want. And I look at for that sympathetic activation. There's a feeling you can learn from heart rate variability or from neurofeedback, where it's a pronounced sensation. Oh, I went sympathetic on that. Even if it's just because someone said, you know, Dave, you're ugly. And if like that pushed a button for me, then, okay, I got a button there. And I, I'm not finding a button around control, but I do find that I prefer to have a brain that works and a body that doesn't hurt. And I'm willing to do the work, work to earn that. And I also am far from perfect in my, my longevity practices. I'm like, oh, it's watermelon season. I know higher blood sugar probably causes glycosylation. And this is very delicious watermelon, nature's cotton candy. I'll eat the whole thing. And like, I, I just, I don't sleep over it, so there's probably some way to get comfortable. But I'm also 52 and I wasn't like that in my 30s. So how do you advise our young people, especially say under 25, 15 and 25, how do they build resilience?

Yeah, I mean, you know, again, I think asserting control and minimizing uncertainty is hardwired for us and key to survival. That's just how we're made. So it's not bad to do those things. And we feel good. We feel good when we feel like we're in control those things. Just when we feel like we've, you know, minimized uncertainty or figured out a situation or figured out a solution. So it's good for us to do those things because that, you know, that's just sort of how we're made. But I think it's also important to recognize that even that we've taken to such an extreme that any little bit of uncertainty just is overwhelming for us. So I do think it's really important for all people, including young people today, to expose themselves a little bit more to situations where they're not in control, where they don't have the answer, when they're not sure, you know, what's coming next, just to kind of work those muscles as well. Right. So that it doesn't, they don't get so Caught up, you know, in this, like, I am going to micromanage every single experience that I have, every single moment of the day. And just to kind of give an example, you know, we have.

A.

One of our children is now a cadet at West Point. She's a rising junior. And what's the most fascinating to me about her experience there, which has been very positive, but in particular, the resilience that it's building is there are many, many situations when the cadets at West. West Point have no idea what's coming next. You know, they're told they have to wait for 10 minutes, and it's four hours. You know, they're. They are in the middle of the woods and it's dark, and they have nowhere to see, and they're told they have to get across this river. You know, they have no idea. And, and this is intentionally. This is what is being created for these cadets to make them more resilient and to make them kind of patient and humble and, you know, to. To fail and to recognize that it's okay if you're not good at every single thing. So it's institutionalized, really. It's baked into the curriculum, and I think it's really wise.

What a great answer.

Oh, good. I'm glad I got. You got some tricky questions for me.

Well, I mean, you're smart and you've studied all this cool stuff.

I haven't studied.

I'm going to pick your brain all the way to the bottom.

Well, I've been able to prick your brain, too, on the whole longevity thing, which is interesting for me anytime I.

Want to ask one more question on that resilience front and, and get your psychiatry and dopamine view on this. I used to have Asperger syndrome and. And I say used to, which does push some people's buttons because they believe you can't change it. And the first couple chapters of my. My most recent book, I talk about that experience and kind of the mitochondrial and then the neural lining and static on all your sensory inputs and all this kind of stuff and kind of how I arrived at the ability to do some of the things that I know how to do. One of the things that occurred to me sometime in my early 20s, probably from a desire to be invulnerable and to not deal with any of that emotional garbage below my neck that I didn't pay any attention to because I'd never had any energy available to do that when I was evolving my consciousness. But I was like, you know what? I'm Gonna. I don't like it that I'm afraid of anything. So I'm just gonna go do everything I'm afraid of until I'm not afraid anymore. So I'd hang my head off the edge of a cliff when I'm afraid of heights until I just got over it. And I learned public speaking, actually some of it, at the Stanford Barn there on campus when I was first getting going. And. And eventually I ran a program teaching three or four nights a week for the University of California down in Santa Clara. And it was really scary when I started doing it. And literally anything that I had a resistance to, I'm like, I just have to go do that because I don't want to be unable to face things. No, doing things that you suck at is a terrible strategy to grow your career. So I'm going to shore up my weaknesses. But this wasn't that. It was sort of like, I don't like it that my nervous system does that. And there's no reason to be afraid. It wasn't until I was 30 that a very wise transpersonal psychologist said, dave, fear is an emotion. It doesn't have to have a reason for it. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, my entire reality is not rational and rational and like, you know, two years of deep emotional confusion over that one. I'm like, I'm on a good path.

But.

Long kind of intro to just say for our young people, should they find the things that absolutely scare the living shit out of them, that aren't dangerous and just go do them?

In a word, yes. Wow.

Okay.

How would we. And I'm happy to say that I feel like the world of mental health, and in particular psychotherapy, is moving more in that direction. For most of my career, I think psychotherapy, as it was generally practiced, was far too focused on just making people feel good. And now there's a lot more. You know, obviously preserving the empathy that's core to that bond and that healing relationship. But, you know, now really kind of pulling people and saying, hey, you know, you need to expose yourself a la exposure therapy to the things that you're afraid of or the things that generate anxiety, or, you know, the things that you don't exactly know how to handle. And I think that's a really, really good shift. Very positive, very important for building resiliency. Especially, again, I want to emphasize, because the world we live in now is this highly engineered ecosystem where at the touch of a finger, we can control our environment. And especially with more and more people living on their screens and, you know, spending time online, like they're not engaging with the world, right? And so, you know, the Internet is, can be a wonderful place and enriching in many ways, but not if we're there every day, all day. We, we have got to spend some time disengaged and like actually going out into the real world, not the world that's already been metabolized for us by the technology.

In 2008, I hired a shaman to drop me off in the middle of nowhere in a cave for four days because I knew that I was afraid of being lonely and I ate if I was lonely. And I knew that if I didn't eat I would be hypoglybitschy and I would just be a jerk anyway. So I'm like, well, if there's no people and no food for four days and of course no Internet, that's going to really push my buttons. I was really scared to do this. I hadn't done a long fast either. And years later that became my book Fast this way, where I talk about a dopamine fast, which I inadvertently did, because you have a cave and it's dark and there's some trees and there's nothing, even a flavor. And would you recommend a dopamine fast? It doesn't have to be that extreme. But is that a good idea?

I mean, that is basically what I recommend to patients who come in addicted is essentially to abstain from their drug of choice for long enough to reset those reward pathways. Because clinically that's what we see, that the first 10 to 14 days of not using are incredibly painful as people are in withdrawal. But as long as the withdrawal is not life threatening, and I guess that's the caveat, I would never recommend that for people who are at risk for life threatening with withdrawal. But as long as it's not, that's not a risk and they are able and willing to do it if they can get through those first 10 to 14 days. What happens in weeks three and four of a 30 day or four week dopamine fast is that people start to feel much, much better. And not just better than they did in the first couple weeks of withdrawal, but actually better than they have in a really long time. And I think it's again, because they're starting to reset these reward pathways is telling the brain, okay, I'm no longer getting this exogenous stimulation. It's time for me to upregulate my own feel good neurotransmitters. And whether you do it as you did in this kind of intense short course, living in a cave, or as we recommend, in clinical care, where you're not doing that, you're not opting out of life, but you're just choosing the substance or behavior that you over consume in a way that's harmful to you in your life and you give that up. Yeah, we see a lot of benefit from that.

If we were to craft an experience for people under 25 who are going to, say, throw a dopamine repair party, what would they do?

Well, first of all, they would have to prepare for the event by, you know, telling folks that this was coming up and that they would be. While they were doing this dopamine repair party. Let's. I think it's probably going to be some version of a dopamine fast. You know, they were going to be maybe not reachable on social media or, you know, not going to parties or not engaging, you know, in certain activities. And then the key really, you know, to the party part is that they would all be doing it together at the same time because it's much easier to give something up.

Yeah. Social connection.

Yeah, absolutely. And then there would be. You would foster some kind of deep connection between those, those folks, which would hopefully be long lasting beyond the party. So I think that that's the key. It's not just like the dopamine fast, but it's what, what comes after that, you know, how do you sustain those gains? How do you integrate your, your new understanding of your, your brain and your psychology, you know, into the rest of your life and maintain those changed behaviors?

I think I would require everyone at the party to get up in front of the rest of the people at the party, keeping in mind that public speaking is most people's number one fear. And then tell everyone what your deepest, darkest fear is that you're aware of, and then allow the people in the group to design an experience at the party to let you experience that fear.

Oh, God, that, that sounds like Lord of the Flies. That, that sounds really scary.

Well, see, see, we're going to overcome this fear with people who care about you. These are your friends, not strangers at the party. You know, they've got your back after you do the thing that scares the shit out of you.

Yeah.

Like it, it feels like that might help. Or would it just make it worse? You're a psychiatrist. I'm a biohacker. Are we re traumatizing again?

Again? Well, I mean, no, I mean, you know, the, the I think where you and I You and I agree on a lot, but I think where you and I diverge is like where you're kind of wanting to like engineer all of it. Like, okay, we can get this far, then let's add this on and add this on and make it, you know, Whereas I'd be like, okay, we got this far, now let's just kind of wait and see what happens. Like, let's just kind of. Because really when I think about the disease of addiction and you know, the hardest times that come up, it's really not. Not when like, you've got all that support and you're really focused on it and you know, you're like, okay, I'm going to change my life. It's actually like the weeks or months or years down the road when you're just doing life and you're not really paying attention to this problem. And then all of a sudden you start to get these kind of sneaky thoughts, oh, why don't you just do this? Or it's no big deal, you can try that. So I think it's anticipating those times more than the like the one time fit fix that's really going to make the difference.

Maybe the lightweight version is Truth or Dare.

Yeah, well, I mean, I do talk about the importance of radical honesty and telling the truth and how telling the truth is a recurrent theme in, in people who get in long term recovery. How they realize that they can't lie, not even, you know, it's not just not lying about their drug use or what have you. It's also they can't lie about what they had for breakfast because once they start lying about the little things, they'll start lying about the big things. But I do think that embracing this idea of truth telling no matter what, is really important for our ability to have access to the information that we need to make good choices. Right? Because if we're not, if we're lying to other people, we're also partly lying to ourselves. And then we don't have the awareness of our behaviors that we need. And we're all, by the way, very prone to, to lying to ourselves and to other people, you know, to sort of minimizing our selfishness or the ways in which, you know, we kind of, you know, try to take the easy road or take more than our fair share, what have you, you know, boost up our ego, whatever it is. So it's really hard to like, look at the truth and accept it's very painful. It's, it's unpleasant, you know, but I Think we need to do that as a regular practice so that we stay awake.

It's so beautiful. A friend, Adel in Dubai, has this table at his. His club called Cove beach, and he asks authors and people to write the most important thing they've ever learned on this table and laminates it. And I wrote, your powers of self deception are legion.

Yes. That is so great. And it.

You just reminded me of that. And one of the things that really helped me get to where I am was about 10 years ago, I came across the research on lying, any kind of lie, and said, I'm not going to do that for exactly the reason you said, where even the tiniest white lie to another person means I'm probably going to do it to myself. And then I found, oh my gosh, I have this habit of little. I'm. I can't make it to the airport. I can make it to the airport. I'm just not going to. I could, I could not go to my meeting and go. So just being really truthful, I think it shifted my internal voice way more than I thought it would. So. I love that you brought that up. I didn't think we'd go there in this interview, which is super cool.

Yeah, I love it because although it's really hard to do, it's also, in a way, really simple. Like, it's really practical. Anybody could wake up on any given day and say, you know what? I'm not going to tell any lies today. No lies about anything. And all of a sudden you become really aware of how much we all lie. Right. And it's little things. Right. It's like slightly exaggerating a story to make ourselves more interesting or complaining about the traffic that made us late, when really it was that we wanted five more minutes to read the paper and drink our coffee. It's just there are all these little ways. But I think a world in which we're telling the truth more often than not is just going to be a much better world for everyone. Everybody.

Who would have thought that studying dopamine would get you to telling the truth?

Well, remember, I am a kooky psychiatrist.

Ah, I don't think you sound that kooky. You sound wise, so you might have learned a thing or two. All right, you talk about self binding. What is self binding?

So self binding is the literal and metacognitive barriers that we put between ourselves and our drug of choice so that we can press the pause button between desire and consumption. So it's something as simple as, like, I don't want to be eating potato chips. I'm not going to have potato chips in the house. Right. I don't want to, you know, gamble at that casino anymore. I'm going to put my, my name on the no admit list at the casino. Which casinos have, unfortunately they don't have that on online gambling sites. They'll actually fish for people who are, you know, addicted to gambling. So it's really, you know, it's really any kind of strategy I can use to anticipate being in the throes of desire. Because once we are in the throes of desire, it's almost impossible for us to choose, you know, the, the path of non consumption.

Years ago I invested in this company called Pavlok. And this is, I invested not because I really thought it was going to make money. It was a very like the smallest investment I think I've ever made in a company. But I couldn't not invest because it was just too funny. And the idea is it's a little bracelet that locks on and before you do something like eat the potato chip, you press a button and it gives you a very mild, like a rubber band snappy, like a shock. And the reason it was funny is that he had it set up so that if you didn't go to the gym when you said you would, it would text all of your friends and then they could shock you. You. But what he found was that it worked incredibly well for smoking cessation. Every time you have a craving for a cigarette, you press a button and it's like, yeah, but like the nervous system's like, don't you dare shock me. And then it, it associates these two. And maybe that's just a high tech form of self binding.

Oh absolutely. I mean that there's actually a whole literature showing that when you use self, some very mild form of painful stimulus in association with either a craving for a drug or a visual reminder of that drug, then you're, the hypothesis is that you're rewiring the brain and that that stimulus, whether it's your own euphoric recall or something in your environment, people, places and things, gets, you know, no longer associated with using but instead gets associated with that painful stimulus. You know, it's like that, you know, what, what, what wires together, fires together idea. And so you're essentially trying to rewire the association with pain and using rather than, you know, the anticipation of reward.

It makes sense. And it, it also makes sense that the idea for Pavlok came because the founder of the company Manish Senthi, he couldn't stop looking at. This was Facebook back when he started this. So he hired a woman on Craigslist to come and slap him every time he looked at Facebook, like I said.

But then she'd be following him around all day.

She did for like a week.

Oh my God. How did the, how did the bracelet do?

It's still out there and still selling and I love it. I think Manish would be the first to say that he definitely has entrepreneurial adhd, same as most good entrepreneurs. So I haven't talked to him in a while, but Manish, if you see this, I hope you're doing well.

Shout out. Shout out for Pavlov. I guess I just realized it's a play on words of Pavlov. Right. And Pavlov's dogs. Okay. That took me a while. Yeah.

And it's just the idea of, you know, all your friends shocking you if you don't do what you said. And man, that's a big incentive for most people.

And it's.

Who the heck knows we're trying to get under the, under the wiring. And now I wrote a chapter in Heavily Meditated that just came out about psychedelics kind of in order of operations from risk, benefit, reward in a therapeutic context for healing and for accessing these altered states of self improvement. And the one that I'm most interested in, I haven't done yet. Mostly because I just want a good medical setting. It's iboga or ibogaine, which in the world of addiction seems to reset all of your neurotransmitter sensitivity back to your default settings. I'm probably oversimplifying it, but is, is that an area of interest? Are psychedelics something that should be part of the conversation about dopamine and addiction and just the world we're in today?

Oh, absolutely, part of the conversation. And they already are, you know, being actively studied to treat a variety of mental health disorders from depression to addiction, you know, ptsd. But I would say that my, my overall impression is that sort of the media hype has outpaced the actual evidence and there is not enough discourse on the harms which can be long lasting and are highly unpredictable. So, you know, the problem is that what evidence we have is based on the use of psychedelics as an adjunct to psychotherapy. Meaning that the main medium of change in all of these studies is the psychotherapy, not the psychedelic itself. The psychedelic is sort of just like the cherry on top. But what's happened is that a lot of people and Especially a lot of young people have interpreted that to mean that, oh, it's the chemical itself and if I just go, you know, get a hold of it over, you know, in some, some place, you know, in the city, and then I just use it by myself in the bathroom, I'll cure my depression. And that is a very dangerous and destructive message because, you know, there's real harm happens from that.

It's all about the facilitation and knowing what you get. And we, we recently, about two years ago, at my neuroscience company, where people come and spend five days doing really deep work guided by a computer, we added low dose, medically supervised ketamine for the bdnf. The neuroplasticity enhancement that it offers rather than for the journey work, just more squishiness in your neurons, allows you to kind of rewire your reality more quickly. But I do have concerns over these influencers saying I've done whatever weird mix of psychedelics I like 87 times and I'm pretty sure it's not working.

Yeah, right, right. And you know, there's also a really prevalent myth out there that psychedelics are unique in that they're not addictive. And that's just simply not true. We see people all the time who are addicted to the psychedelics. It's part that they're addicted to just the chemical experience, but they're also partially addicted to, you know, having another spiritual journey or spiritual, spiritual experience or just really not wanting to be in the world or looking for the answer or more of an answer, you know, at the end of the day. I mean, any, any chemical or behavior for that matter, that we use, you know, to change our brains and to change our, our felt experience has the potential to be addictive. So it's super important. And that's not the only ways in which, you know, psychedelics can be harmful. They can also cause persistent psychotic and mood disorders, persistent hallucinogenic experiences. So, you know, it's not messing around.

Have you ever tried them?

No. Wow.

Hold on. You're in Palo Alto, right?

Yeah.

How do you go to parties?

I don't go to those parties. I go to the parties where people are getting up early in the morning and climbing the mountain.

I'm totally teasing you. They have been a part of, of the creative edge of Silicon Valley for a very long time. But I appreciate that you're, you're talking about this. I've, I've known many people who have had not bad trips. I, I don't really believe in, in A bad trip. That's usually you're experiencing a trauma. People who had neurochemical irregularities afterwards that required meaningful interventions. It's not that close common, but it's enough. And I've seen another group of people in my circle, less of them, but where they're, they're just addicted to escapism. They don't want to face their feelings. And if you're high all the time, anything that gets you out of that will work. Even if LSD is not classically addictive. But if you just don't want to face your reality, it's addictive. Right?

That's right. That's exactly right. Yeah.

So it's a, it's a slippery slope and I'm, I'm glad we can study it more. And yeah, Hanford has a bunch of stuff going on, maybe even some in the department.

Yeah. And I think that's great. I am glad that there's more research and there needs to be more research and, and that's a good thing.

If you were a parent of a teenager, what default settings would you put on your kids social media accounts?

They don't work, so ouch.

Okay, so who cares about default settings? Because they're a lie. Okay.

No, I, I, I, I want to point, I was hopeful, you know, that the sort of take a break or default, but really it's out of parental control once your kid has their own device with access to the Internet. I really think we're very limited as parents in what we can do. And at the end of the day it's going to be taking the device away and limiting the actual access to the Internet. And that can't be left up to parents alone. That's got to come down to the broader public health problem that it is. Which means that school systems have to get involved and ban smartphones from schools K through 12, which thank goodness is happening now. There's even some interesting tech ideas about having airplane wi fi mode at school, that kids would download an app and then that app would automatically make the Internet not accessible or only certain things accessible. We absolutely have to be looking in that direction then also, you know, from the federal perspective, like we have to legislate things like actual enforceable age verification. Right. And this is happening in some, some states where you know, they're saying, hey, you know, if you're under the age of 13 or 16 or whatever it is, you can't go on Pornhub. And we're going to actually enforce that, even though that may infringe on the you know, the freedoms of an adult who wants to go on pornhub, who's now going to have to register with a third party side. They won't want to do that, but too bad, right? Like, you have to give up. We have to give up some individual freedoms in order to protect kids and protect the public health.

Maybe they could just register directly with the Catholic Church and then it would automate the confession process.

There you go. Just one stop shopping, like the Amazon for sinners or something. Something.

There we go. Oh, my gosh. It's going to get dark really fast now. All right, a final question for you. It's been four years since you wrote Dopamine Nation. Are things getting better or worse?

Things are getting better in the sense that we're having more open conversations about the problem of addiction, about the. The public health scourge of, you know, digital overload and the harms to, in particular, kids spending too much time on their devices. So I think that's really, really good. We weren't having that conversation, you know, even five years ago at the level that we're having it now. So that's really great. And like I said, you know, I have seen movement at the level of the school system. I mean, I've been talking about getting smartphones out of public schools for 15 years. People looked at me like I had two heads or, you know, whatever, and now it's actually happening. So I think, I think we're. I think there's been progress and ultimately I'm optimistic that we're going to figure it out. You know, we started out, we started out today talking about how adaptable we are to almost every circumstance, for better and for worse. And I do think we're gonna, we're gonna be able to adapt to and solve the public health crisis of addiction.

Well, thank you for your continued work in the field. It's so important to acknowledge addiction isn't just alcohol and substances, that it's behavioral. And I think you've studied it well and you're communicating it at a big scale with Dopamine Nation. So keep it up. Thank you, Anna.

Oh, thank you. It's been fun chatting with you.

See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast.

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