#350: Dr. Andrew Weil — Optimal Health, Plant Medicine, and More

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Well hello, ladies and gents. This is Tim Ferris and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to tease out the habits, routines Favorite books. life lessons and so on from world class performers of all different stripes. And my guest today is Andrew Weil. MD, otherwise known as Dr. Wile. He is a world renowned leader and pioneer in the field of integrative medicine, and we've had a chance to spend some time together over the last few years and we dig into some very fun stories.

Andrew was born in Philadelphia in nineteen forty two. He received a degree in biology slash botany from Harvard College in nineteen sixty four and an MD from Harvard Medical School in nineteen sixty eight. After completing a medical internship at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco, he worked a year with the National Institute of Mental Health and then wrote his first book, The Natural Mind. From nineteen seventy one to seventy five, as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, doctor Wild traveled widely in North and South America and Africa, collecting information on drug use and other cultures, medicinal plants, and alternative methods of treating disease. F from nineteen seventy one to nineteen eighty four, he was on the research staff of the Harvard Botanical Museum and conducted investigations of medicinal and psychoactive plants. We spent quite a bit of time talking about that. Dr. Wall is the founder and director of the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, where he also holds the Lovell Jones Endowed Chair in Integrative Rheumatology and is clinical professor of medicine and professor of public health. Through its fellowship and integrative medicine and residency curricula, The center is now training doctors and nurse practitioners around the world.

Dr. Wild is the editorial director of the popular website DrWile.com, a regular guest on video programs on PBS. And the author of fifteen books. My God. I've barely done five. I don't know how One can do fifteen. It's a lot. Including bestsellers such as eight weeks to optimum health, spontaneous happiness, mind over meds, Fast food, good food.

And healthy aging. At Facebook dot com forward slash Doctor Wild and on Twitter at Doctor. While

So without further ado, please enjoy a very wide ranging And often hysterical conversation with Doctor Wilde. Doctor Warr, welcome to the show.

Thank you. I'm very happy to be here. I am thrilled to finally have you on the podcast be because uh it gives us a chance to also catch up. I have not had the opportunity to hear your latest and greatest adventures in quite some time and some of the memories that I have of the interactions we've had and I have to thank uh Kevin Rose, I think initially for making that connection.

relate to your incredible gardens and plants. So I thought That a A logical place to begin this conversation might be Discussing your love affair with plants.

Wha can you talk about how this started? I think it started with my mother when I was a kid. Uh uh and she got that from her mother who had a real green thumb. So I grew up in a row house in Philadelphia. We had very little uh ground behind the house. But uh my mother and I used to plant all sorts of seeds and I grew b flowering bulbs indoors So that started my interest and then as an undergraduate at Harvard I majored in botany, which was a very unusual major, very old fashioned in the in the those days, but I had the good fortune to have as a mentor uh Richard Schultees, the director of the Harvard Botanical Museum.

who is considered the godfather of modern ethnobotany. He had spent fourteen years in the Amazon was and one of his interests was hallucinogenic plants. So studying with him got me interested in medicinal plants, and that really became a career interest. And I I always dreamed of having Big enough space to grow a real garden. And uh I now have that both in Tucson where I live in the winter and in British Columbia where I am in the summer. So I grow a lot of my own food. I grow flowers. All that gives me a great deal of pleasure. Are there any particular

Go to plants, let's just say in uh in either of those places, uh perhaps they're different just based on the climates, that you use uh on a On an ongoing daily or weekly basis for food or for other health Purposes.

Well, in terms of foods, uh I I just say there's nothing like having fresh food from the garden. Uh and I I'm a very avid home cook. I like simple dishes that are easy to prepare, and many people who eat my food say They've never tasted such good food. Well, the secret is that it's fresh. And I think many people have never tasted the plants plant foods that come right out of the garden. In terms of uh medicinal plants, probably one of my go to's is garlic. Uh I grow my own garlic and garlic has many health benefits. It's an a very powerful antibiotic, it lowers cholesterol, blood pressure Many uses and uh you gotta use it fresh and raw. Uh anything you do to garlic lowers its medicinal properties.

You mentioned sh uh Schulte's a moment ago. and give give a snapshot of your your history with plants. Can you put the following in sort of chronological order? The The book Doors of Perception

Nutmeg and cannabis in terms of Of your interest. What what is the proper order of those three? Uh Doors of Perception First. That was written by Aldus Huxley. Um I

Not exactly sure the date, but he came to MIT to give a series of lectures on states of consciousness, on visionary experience, and that I remember was in uh nineteen sixty, and I was a Um freshman at Harvard and I listened to his lectures on radio, and that really inspired me to take mescaline, which he had written about in uh Doors of Perception. So I wrote him and asked him how do I get mescaline? And he wrote back and gave me the name of a lab in New York. I wrote to them, but they wanted all sorts of paperwork. And uh I found another company that would sell it no questions asked. This was in the days before thalidomide and the FDA did not require there weren't many regulations on getting drugs for experimental use. Anyway, packages of mescaline arrived outside my dorm door delivered by UPS

And so in nineteen sixty, never having smoked pot or really experimented with any uh psychedelics, I took masceline um A number of friends and I did it uh several times and I didn't really have a context in which to put it. You know, I didn't know people who were using psychedelics. Um Nonetheless, it showed me possibilities which I wasn't really prepared to follow at that time. I think if I had, I would never have gone to medical school. Elvis Huxley, doise of perception came first. Um under Schulte's Um

to I opted to get an honors degree in botany, which is part of the biology department. I had to write a thesis for that. So the thesis I wrote was on nutmeg as a narcotic. Uh nutmeg is a s is a psychoactive drug if you take enough of it. And uh it was being used mostly by people who couldn't get better drugs, such as prisoners. Uh you have to take a whole can of powdered nutmeg. I don't recommend that or eat one or two whole nutmegs. It it's pretty hard to choke it down. And uh you you do get high on it, but Um That's I'd say it's a pretty third rate high. Anyway, I wrote that paper. Uh it got picked up by a lot of people, including tabloids, uh talking about people getting high on nutmeg. So that was really my first academic paper. Then um

What was the third book that you asked about? Oh no, it was the the s the second well I suppose the third if we count mescaline, third of the s the compounds are plants, which would be cannabis. So uh back in those days in the early nineteen sixties, I didn't know people who smoke cannabis and I didn't really try it till nineteen sixty four Uh when I was a senior in college, I didn't get any effect from it. Um then I went to Harvard Medical School and I began using it and having, you know, very enjoyable highs from it. It amazed me that as as the cannabis was getting a lot of attention and causing a lot of controversy, there had been no research done with it. Uh really nothing. Astonishing. There had been one uh series of one experiment done in nineteen thirty seven, I think. Uh but since then nobody had given marijuana to human beings to see what it did. So as a senior in medical school I I devoted my elective time to research to try to do the first human controlled double blind studies with marijuana. I can't

even begin to tell you what a challenge that was. And many people bet me that there was no way I'd get permission. It meant coordinating the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the Massachusetts state authorities, the universities. Nonetheless, uh I did it. I uh gave marijuana to human subjects. and published this as a lead story in science. Um in uh nineteen sixty Eight. Uh it bec was front page news on the New York Times. It concluded that marijuana was a relatively mild intoxicant. Um I showed that it did not dilate pupils. Cops were arresting people who had dilated eyes and said that was probable cause for searching them for marijuana.

Uh showed that it didn't lower blood sugar, which was often invoked as the cause for the munchies. And that while In people who'd never had it before, you could demonstrate some impairment on basic psychological and psychomotor tests. If you gave it to people who were experienced with it, you couldn't really show anything like that. So the basic conclusion was relatively mild and toxic and I thought that That pot would be legal in five years. Boy was I wrong. Uh yeah I thought it was just a matter of getting the right information out there. Uh I quickly believe and don't Mm.

Now this is this this is a perfect segue. In terms of belief and expectation because my my understanding is that one of the just in doing some homework for this, one of the challenges of the experimental design And I don't know if it was the IRB or maybe a different acronym at the time.

for uh putting this study into practice was working with N naive subjects, people who had not had any exposure. Could you talk about why that's That was important to you.

Because I wanted to see what marijuana did in people that had no expectations of what it would do. My intuition told me that what you expected of pot at all drugs and the setting in which you took it uh were as important as the drug itself. So this idea that drug effects are a combined effect of drug set and setting, I think is a uh basic to understanding how mind altering drugs work. And with marijuana where the the physical effects are really relatively subtle, uh it there is I think you really have to learn to get high on it. You have to associate an altered state with it. Uh so it was very important to me to use people who've never had it. that became a great sticking point with the two universities, Boston University and Harvard, that had to give approval for this because they their fear was that if you introduced people to this drug, they would soon be heroin addicts in the street. Um anyway, finally got permission to do that. I'll tell you one funny story. The uh the cops who were involved in this, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, this was the old treasury department uh cops, um and the Massachusetts cops kept bugging me to come down to our lab and watch people smoke marijuana because they've never seen anyone smoke marijuana.

Uh and I said, look, we can't have you there because that would be a major disturbance of set and setting. But I said if they were patient and we had time, we'd do a demo for them at the end when the experiments were finished. So one night we had two of my you know, friends who were labeled chronic users of marijuana agreed to smoke it in our laboratory. And this bunch of guys, two from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and I think we were two from Massachusetts, came um and these people they had to smoke two of these joints we had rolled. It was relatively mild by today's standards. And they smoked them and then we're we're giving them these tests. So the one cop sidles up to me and elbows me and says, You know, when is it gonna happen? And I knew it was after. I said, What do you mean? He said, You know, when when when's when When does it happen? And I said, What do you mean? He said, Well when do they get high? And I said, Well they are high. And he said, No, no. He said, When did they, you know, when to get high I don't know what his ripping off their clothes, running around screaming, but here were these two guys just sitting there, you know, doing their pursuit rotor tests and the numerical tests, and they weren't any different.

That was a very sober experience for these law enforcement agents. And you know, over the and At that time and since many people would ask me, how can you tell if a person is high? And I said that you really can't unless they volunteer that information. You know, maybe their whites of their eyes are red, but nothing else. After I published that study, I was in great demand as an expert on cannabis. This was in you know 1969, 1970, 1971. And I was asked to testify about it in front of Congress and be an expert witness in various things and give lectures. I made it a rule for myself that I would never do that unless I was stoned. So I would always smoke pot. But I had to test by I should say, by the way, I i it's you know, while I was a fairly serious user of pot in my twenties and thirties, I have not been much of a user of it in later in life. But anyway, it was fun to do that and also to be in a position where I'd be lecturing or testifying

And people would ask that question, how can you tell if a person is high on pot? And I would say you can't unless they volunteer that information. Of course I did not volunteer that I was high on pot. All right. I have so many follow-up questions here. I wanna rewind for a second because I think these two might be related.

Can you describe your first Masculine experience. Was it a what is a was it a Huxley like explosion of aesthetic It was as far from it as you could imagine. I was in a uh dorm room at Harvard in this old dilapidated building, Claverley Hall. It was on a Saturday afternoon, and I and one other uh roommate of mine took it. We took uh half a gram of Pure mesclin. And there was about seven people sitting around watching to see what would happen before they decided whether they wanted to try it or not. So uh

You know I f after about I didn't feel anything for a long time and after maybe an hour and a half I began to feel some physical effects. You know, I I just felt a little I didn't know how to the only drug experience I'd had up to that point was with alcohol. And so that was the only thing I could compare it to. So I felt a little different. At that moment, exactly, the phone rang, and it was my mother calling. Philadelphia. Uh sh we never t I ne we never talked except on Sundays we would call. I call my parents. So she called

And said, What are you doing? And I said, Well, I'm just sitting around with some friends and she said, Why aren't you outside? And uh I said, Well it's you know, I'm just s sitting here and she said, I hope you're not doing anything foolish like taking mescaline or anything like that. Now I had I had mentioned the word masculine at the dinner table maybe three months before and said I was interested I got such a reaction from my parents that I never said another word about it. Um there had been an article in the newspaper about a kid who died supposedly from an overdose of it. So talk about You know, mothers being psychic. I said, Oh no, mother, of course I wouldn't be doing anything like that. So that kind of affected my my experience. But I really had n no significant psychological change from that time. The second time I took it, I did have a very profound uh altered state in uh

I I'm hard to describe, but I have a real sense of of Oneness of everything and um a much larger reality out there that I had been aware of. And I think I had to put that in a kind of box and tie it up because if I had followed that, I don't think I would have been able to stay in school and get a medical degree. So I just Box that up until I had a chance to explore that.

I I think we will come back to the the exploration. You you mentioned one thing in passing that I wanted to just follow up on since I know people are probably wondering and that is you mentioned you used to be a heavy ordin. Uh consistently. cannabis user not so much so in your more recent years. Why why has that changed? You know, I found that um my

experiences with it changed over time. And in when I first uh was using it, uh in my I would say in my um you know, mid twenties, um my h the highs that I had with it were were light, bubbly, hysterical, a lot of laughing, you know, sitting around with Uh with people. Um sen sensual enjoyment of food and music and all that. Um

After several years of that, I think the highs changed for me. I was using it more heavily, but the highs changed for me uh to be more introspective. And it was in that period that I think it really stimulated my imagination. It was great for writing. Uh my first book, the uh The Natural Mind, that I wrote in I wrote it in 1971, it was published in seventy two, uh about drugs and altered states. You know, I think a lot of that felt channeled as a result of being in the states of consciousness that cannabis So there was a period of think of a uh then I was living in South America for s for a number of years. I used pot pretty regularly, and during that time I think the experiences changed more in the direction of being more sedative and it would tend to make me groggy and not creative and imaginative. And that went on for a long time. And um you know, I finally just felt that didn't do much for me. So I I I weaned myself off it, which took

Some doing. Uh and then I began to use it just occasionally with friends as a social thing. So now I just I personally don't like the effect of it very much. So I think my body has changed, my brain has changed. It was a real ally for me in the early part of my life. Now I'm more interested in in it for its medicinal uses, and uh you know, of course I'm um delighted to see our society finally coming to some sensible terms with that plan. We we are gonna get to South America because I have I I've I've have certainly a number of questions about about South America, but before we get to that You mentioned set and setting.

Uh for people who don't know. what that means. And I think you you you described it in brief. Sure. Can you explain what that means? And can you also explain how you first came across that phrase Because you y you are you were at Harvard at a very interesting time. Yeah. Well Timothy Leary was there and Richard Alpert. And uh I one of my other mentors besides uh Schulties was a Freudian psychoanalyst named Norman Zinberg. We became very close friends. He was a colleague of mine in the marijuana research. Uh we

got high together, you know, he was older than me, he was but great connection. And he was one of I think Leary was one of the first people I heard use the phrase set and setting, and Zinberg wrote about this a lot in his academic writing. So set is a psychologist term for all of the Expectational factors that a person brings to an experience. And so When you you know the effects of drugs. Or not just due to the drug. I mean one factor is the nature of the drug, the dose but then there is

what a person expects to happen when he takes that he or she takes that dose. And then there is the setting, which is the environment, the physical and social environment in which the drug is taken. And my experience has been is that the combined effects of set and setting can actually reverse the pharmacological effect of drugs, that you can give a a stimulant to a person in conditions of set and setting that cause the person to fall asleep. And you can give a sedative drug to somebody under conditions of set and setting that cause a person to become alert and stimulated. And this doesn't just apply to marijuana and drugs. I think this has an awful lot to do with medicine and healing as well. I think that the way we present treatments to people and their effects also are very dependent on expectation and environment. And it's the expectation both of the the giver of the treatment or the drug and the person who takes it. In the early days of LSD research, this is you know back in the in the late fifties, early sixties, there was very good research being done with it in terminal cancer patients, for example, showing that uh people near the end of life, if they had a structured LSD session um and then follow up with a skilled person had much less pain, required uh far fewer opioids, had much more productive interactions with family and friends, and much easier deaths.

People got excited about that research. And then other people who didn't understand that set setting drug interaction and thought the magic was just in the LSD tried to reproduce that by giving LSD to people without paying attention to set and setting, and they didn't get the same results. And that's one of the reasons I think people backed off from uh from doing research with it. Mm-hmm. How would you how would you suggest people these days Think about it

designing studies for researching these compounds because a as you are certainly extremely aware There are some incredible challenges with studying let's just take uh whether we want to call them psychedelics or hallucinogens as an example in terms of trying to placebo control. And some people will use niacin or some type of lower dose as an active placebo. Uh there's a great piece in the New York Times uh just in the last few weeks called What if the placebo effect isn't a trick? Uh looking at the biochemical basis. And it just gets the further down that rabbit hole you go, the more you realize how incredibly challenging it is.

That somehow isolates if that's even the objective, the the effects of the Particularly when you're going to be able to do it. maximally uh increase the chance of producing a positive experience. Now I'm fascinated with the potential of these drugs. In in

For healing in medicine, not just psychological problems, but you know real r things like autoimmune diseases, cancer. I think there's a tremendous potential for these Psychedelics especially. Um Ти ж гівці. That they can change

whatever's going on in their body. I'll give you one example that I I'll give you a couple that I've written about. Um In when I was about twenty eight, right before I left for South America, I started was starting to practice yoga and I I had problems with some poses. The one I had the most difficulty with is the plow where you lie on your back and try to touch your toes to the ground behind your head. I got so I could get my toes about a foot from the ground and I couldn't go any further. I had excruciating pain in my neck. So I tr I was about to give up. I thought I was just too old to be doing this at twenty eight. And one day I uh it was a spring day. I was living in Virginia. I took L S D with some friends outdoors. I was fabulous. It was in a Fabulous state. My body felt totally elastic. And I thought, gee, while I'm feeling this way, I ought to try to do that. So I lay on the ground, brought my toes down, and I thought I had about a foot to go, and they touched the ground, and I didn't have any pain. And I kept doing it over and over. I thought this is fantastic. The next day I tried to do it. I could get my toes about a foot from the ground and there was excruciating pain in my neck.

But I it was now different because I had seen it was possible. If I had not had that experience, I don't think I would have been motivated to continue to practice. But knowing that, I kept at it and in a few weeks I was able to do it. To me, that's a a a model of what these drugs can do. They can show you possibilities that you wouldn't have believed, but then it's up to you to figure out how to have that more of the time. That's uh I I love that example because it's it's

Parallel with many experiences people would tend to put into the box of psychological or emotional in the sense that you have someone like Sam Harris, uh very smart guy who came to meditation through seeing what was possible via

Certain psychedelic experiences. Uh I came across your name very unexpectedly at a the At the home of A friend's parents Uh and I was browsing their bookshelf and I came across a book with the very appealing title

To me at least, of Wizard of the Upper Amazon. Ah. And I I was astonished I hadn't come across this book before. And you wrote I I don't recall if it was the forward or the introduction to that book. I wrote a yeah, yep. And uh I I I became really engrossed in this, which was uh a bit of a problem because I was supposed to be at a party being social, uh but I ended up in the guest bedroom.

reading part of this book, can you explain what drew you to South America. Why did you go? How long were you there? What did you do? When you were there. Well Schulte sent me there. You know, as I said, he had really lived there. He'd lived in the Amazon continuously from nineteen thirty nine to nineteen fifty three, and he had he had great connections, especially in Colombia. So he wanted me to go down there, and I was interested in studying coca leaves, especially, but a whole range of plants. So Why were you interested in cocaine specifically? Because he w he got me interested, and he said he had shoot it every day during the time he was in the Amazon and he recommended I go down there. I just like the name and it seemed like something interesting. This is before cocaine was around in in up here.

I wrote The Natural Mind, uh sent it off to the publisher, and I got a fantastic fellowship from a group called the Institute of Current World Affairs, um that sent people far and wide, and all you had to do was write a monthly newsletter for them. Most most people did this on political subjects, and I proposed them writing about altered states of consciousness and psychoactive drugs and things like that. And they've never done anything like that. And so I got this great fellowship that paid all my expenses. I had that for three and a half years. So I first went to Mexico, uh lived there for three months to learn Spanish, which I did, uh just by living with people and having to speak Spanish. And then I drove my Land Rover all the way to Colombia. Um and that's an exciting trip for people.

Took a while. Anyway, and then um I spent about three and a half years in South America, mostly in Colombia, which I uh country I love, but also Ecuador, Peru, some in Brazil. Um I saw a lot of interesting things. I learned a lot about plant medicine. I spent time with shamans, some of whom which were who were a very mixed bag. I mean there were drunks who just wanted to be paid for giving people ayahuasca. You know, I saw a few real genuine healers. Um I I saw a lot of interesting alternative medical stuff.

Um Anyway, it was it was a uh a a very interesting period of time in my life and uh I still retain that connection. I look forward to going back and spending more time in Colombia. So I learned a lot of stuff, but interestingly I had been most interested in in finding healers and the When I at the end of that time my car I came back to the US, I was just gonna be here briefly and go back down to Mexico and um

the Land Rover agency that overhauled the car in Laguna Beach forgot to pack one of the wheels with grease and I drove through Tucson. I was just gonna get supplies and the wheel bearing shattered and uh took six weeks to get a replacement. It was February of a very warm, wet winter The desert was in full bloom, I met people I liked, and I never left, and here I am forty five years later, still living in Tucson. It turned out that the most Fascinating healer. The person I had most to learn from was in Tucson and had been here all the time. going down for South America. There's something perfect about that too. It was an old osteopathic physician named Robert Fulford, who was a master of cranial therapy and

the best healer I've ever seen. And he just put his hands on you and remarkable things happened. And he really made me aware of the healing power of nature. You know, he used to uh it felt so good to be worked on by him. And people would say, when should I come back? And he'd say, You don't need to come back. You're fixed. And he would say, you know, all you have to do is make these little adjustments and let old Mother Nature do her work. He charged thirty five dollars for a visit, use no equipment It was a very inspirational to spend time with him. Did he have anything in common with the as you mentioned, few genuine healers you came across in your travels in South America? Were there any commonalities?

You know, I think Mm-hmm. Fulford used a modality cranial therapy, which I think is terrific. I'm I'm a big fan of osteopathic manipulation. It's wonderful. And un it's unfortunately a very small percentage of osteopaths do that anymore, and fewer do re really good cranial therapy. I think Fulford was a healer and if he been working in some other means he would be as effective. So I think I've met people who are able to Catalyze that in other people, maybe

just by their own presence, by their own energy, people who are whole and healed themselves. That by the way goes back to your question about structuring uh research with psychedelics. I think the key thing is that the person running the show who's giving the drugs him himself or herself has to be fully experienced. I mean they have to be A shaman. This is what shamans are trained to do.

Uh and you can't just have Research hacks trying to give these drugs in clinical settings and expecting to get no wonderful results. Yeah. Yeah, it's e even even within the

clinical setting, of course, is a huge uh I mean the enormous range of experience, right? So you could have someone coming in fresh off the boat, so to speak, or you could have someone like Mary Cosimano at uh Johns Hopkins who's incredible and has uh just a a library of vast experience. Uh You mentioned Schaltes, a name I'm very fond of. And uh he he put out a book, I believe it was maybe co authored or just uh featured an introduction with Albert Hoffman called Plants of the Gods. Yep. Which is a fantastic book. You

Put out a book. uh that as I understand it had Uh I'm thinking of a senator in particular. mixed mixed responses that I'd love for you to talk about a little bit called Chocolate to Morphine, a subtitle Understanding Mind Active Drugs. Why did you write this book?

Oh yeah. Before I do that, let me ask you, did you ever see another book that Shultis book out, which is a real collector's item? You remember the little golden guides? I do. Well he did a little golden guide of hallucinic plants. If you can find a copy of it, it's amazing. I mean it it's every hallucinic plant done in that same style of minerals and birds and and plants, and it was on sale in museums and stuff like that. So let's see if you can find a copy of it. I'll have to do that before I publish this podcast. Anyway, I wrote a book um with a co author, Winifred Rosen, uh called From Chocolate to Morphine about mind altering drugs. Um I think it's an excellent book. It's still in print. It's much loved. Uh many parents have given it to their kids, many kids have given it to their parents. It came out in nineteen eighty three, just when the war on drugs started. um uh which was precipitated by the death of a basketball player, Len Baez, uh, and that started the Reagans and a whole crusade. So That book caused a lot of controversy because it did not say no. It's it said if you're gonna we're not gonna tell you whether you should use drugs or not, but if you are, this is what you should know about them. And these are the

the precautions that you might take. And it went through all drugs, the legal ones, nicotine, all the forms of caffeine, um, you know, all the psychedelic stimulants down or so forth. Uh so a senator Republican senator from Florida, Paula Hawkins, who was a crony of Nancy Reagan's made it a campaign to get the book banned. And she stood up on the floor of the Senate waving The book around it was on national news, which got more publicity than the publisher got for it. And uh There then followed a campaign to ban that book from libraries

And there was a personal campaign to try to keep me from speaking in places that was organized by the White House. Very interesting times. Uh anyway, I'm still here. The book is still in print and very popular and you know, I recommend it. It's great. What were the were there any uh Listening to that experience. And looking back at

Some of the blowback. that was experienced in the let's just call it the the Leary era. And wondering if there are things that can be done to minimize the likelihood of uh or t or just mitigate excessive blowback to current

research and attempts to uh reclassify things like MDMA, psilocybin, and so on for very legitimate medical applications. Did you have any thoughts on kind of best practices for people who are very enthusiastic Um I'm just uh you've you've you've been in this world for so much longer than most of the time.

I don't know if you have any any particular thoughts. On how to not unnecessarily jeopardize things, I guess is uh Okay, first first of all Don't be angry. because I I see many people out there

Who talk about subjects and get tremendous blowback and think that people are reacting to the content of what they're saying and it's not, it's the tone of what they're saying. Right. I've gotten away with saying the most outrageous things. because I'm not angry and people listen and we can have actual dialogue. Secondly, I think it's very important to suggest possibilities for uses of these agents for which we don't have that that address problems for which we don't have solutions. For example, the opioid crisis is a fantastic opportunity at the moment, both for integrative medicine in general and for cannabis medicine. Uh you know, uh doctors working in states where uh cannabis is legal say that it has tremendously improve the lives of patients who were dependent on opioids and imp

and tremendously improved their lives as practitioners who are faced with how to deal with chronic pain management. So That's w one area that I think is very important. So the demonstration that uh psilocybin, for example, is can be used with obsessive compulsive disorder, that MDMA produces these tremendous results with post-traumatic stress disorder, you know, this is all helping greatly to legitimize the uses of these. Yeah. And uh Let's talk about uh because something uh that

hours and days and weeks probably, but just for for the sake of of definition Could you define for people Uh ooh. w uh integrative medicine, the the combination of these two.

Sure. Uh First of all, I think this is medicine of the future and the term integrative medicine is now totally accepted in academic discourse. There are textbooks of integrative medicine. You know, all medical journals refer to it. So The short answer is it's the intelligent combination of conventional medicine and natural and preventive medicine and uh useful alternative therapies. The longer answer is that it's a a system that emphasizes the natural healing power of the organism, um that looks at people not just as physical bodies, but also as uh mental, emotional beings, spiritual entities, community members, that's sometimes called whole person medicine. That places a great deal of emphasis on lifestyle and all of the lifestyle factors that influence health and illness. uh that really values the practitioner patient relationship and makes use of all available therapies that show reasonable evidence of efficacy and aren't gonna cause harm. And we often butt heads against the

evidence based medicine people who say we're trying to advocate unscientific or anti scientific ideas and practices. You know, my feeling has always been uh that Um A good way to use evidence, a good rule to follow is that the greater the potential of a treatment to cause harm, the stricter the standards of evidence it should be held to for efficacy. Uh if we had followed that principle in standard medicine, we'd save ourselves a lot of trouble. Uh I often teach patients commonly teach patients breathing techniques. There hasn't been a lot of research on the health effects of breathing because nobody takes it seriously. It doesn't involve a drug or a device. But the chance of of these breathing techniques causing harm is so negligible.

that I'm not bothered by recommending in the absence of a great deal of evidence for them. Anyway, integrative medicine is the future. I found it and direct Uh Center of Excellence at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, the Center for Integrative Medicine. We're the world leader in educating physicians in this new system. So we give um two-year, thousand-hour fellowships for MDs and DOs that uh teach nutrition, mind-body interactions, uh herbal medicine. including uses of cannabis and psychedelics, uh the strengths and weaknesses of alternative medical systems, uh Spirituality in medicine, all these things that are left out of conventional training. And we've now graduated about sixteen hundred physicians from that intensive fellowship there in practice all over the country and in many other countries. We have uh our curriculum in 80 residencies throughout the country. We teach medical students. Uh we're about to open an integrative primary care clinic in Tucson Society. So we're really on a roll. And as I say, I think this is the future because the great promise of integrative medicine is that it can lower health care costs while maintaining or I think improving health outcomes. And I think it's the only way out of this mess that we have with health care in this country.

So there's a lot to dig into here. Uh I I'm looking forward to it. So you have Just for people who may have missed this earlier, uh but th they must have been smoking something of their own if they missed it earlier. You do have experience with and familiarity with double blind placebo controlled studies. And

Uh their I don't I don't think and correct me if I'm wrong that you would argue that there is no place for that uh and and and that It it has a place, it is a source of information. It's one kind of information. Right. U and it has its own limitations. I think there are other kinds of information that are valid. For example,

the information that comes from your own experience. And uh I like to point out to people that in all languages derived from Latin, unfortunately not English. The word for experience and the word for experiment are the same. In Spanish experimentar means both to experience and to experiment. So your own Experience is a form of experimentation that produces useful information. You have to check it against other kinds of information. With double blind studies, you know, this is held out as the gold standard, and many people think this is the only kind of information we should pay attention to. But here's an interesting

thing you can try this yourself and it's an assignment that I give to medical students and doctors. Go into a medical library and pull out any medical journal that reports results of placebo controlled double blind testing. Turn to the you know, pick an article, turn to the back of the article where there's a summary that summarizing the t a table summarizing the results. In the placebo group, there will always be one or two or a small number of subjects who show all of the changes produced in the experimental droop who got the The drug. That is fascinating.

And that means that any change that we can produce in the human organism by giving a pharmacological agent can be exactly mimicked. And at least some people some of the time. Purely by a mind mediated mechanism. The placebo response, if you want. Anyway, we should be trying to take advantage of that, find out how to make it happen more of the time. Uh also, I would just say that. There are a great many worthless and dangerous drugs on the market at the moment, and many of them have a lot of placebo controlled randomized trials behind them, you know, supporting their use. So

Things can be structured in ways to produce results that people want. S I I want to spend some time on this because I find myself, and I think you probably uh certainly, not probably, have found yourself kind of straddling what at times people perceive to be mutually exclusive.

world. So I have on one hand a lot of interaction with uh you name it, right? Clinical psychologists and Different. researchers at UCSF, at Johns Hopkins, at at uh many different institutions where I'm funding Or helping to fund

the the types of studies. Yeah. And then on the other hand, uh I experiment with a lot of what people would consider esoteric and probably just outright crazy stuff. Some of it below the border, not all of it below the border.

And Uh I I would love to hear Since you've spoken you've spoken uh s I think quite quite a bit about some of the limitations of

the the types of studies we're talking about. Among others we haven't even talked about, but it that that these are not necessarily the first place to go if you're looking to generate hypotheses that are innovative for testing in the first place. But if if we were to flip the coin and look at the other side. Uh because you mentioned tone earlier and how a lot can be dismissed if you are angry and you g you it's it's not a response to the content, but it's it's a response to the tone. Where do people in the integrative medicine field or in the complimentary or alternative uh treatment realms make mistakes. Like w uh where what are some of the

ways in which they think they have all the answers or Uh alienate themselves from people who might actually be open with a different delivery to some of what they're experimenting with. Well, with the the people that I come in contact with who come through our training programs, I always emphasize this not being angry and to have some uh published data to support things that you're doing with patients so that if somebody asks, you know, why you

giving this treatment you can cite something. Um So I I think To me, that's most important. Uh I I don't see many people today who I mean the common mistake is just to antagonize colleagues or to um reject conventional medicine out of hand. I uh you know a primary I I don't like the term alternative medicine. I suggest that you're trying to replace conventional medicine. And that's not my goal. I I wanna make

conventional medicine better. Uh And and You know, knowing when and when not to use that system is Extremely important. Uh I I said earlier.

drawing on your own experience for hypotheses. Um Let me give you two personal experiences of mine that suggest um possibilities that I would love to see tested Um At this about that same time that I had that experience with yoga in L S D, uh, on another occasion I took L S D also in a wonderful outdoor setting, feeling great. I had a a lifelong allergy to cats.

Uh this is again when I was twenty eight. If a cat uh came near me, my eyes would itch and I my nose would run, and if a cat licked me, I'd get hives where it licked me. So I always you know tended to avoid them. So on this day when I was high on LSD feeling great, a cat came up and jumped in my lap and I had a moment like you know trying myself against it. And then I thought this is silly. Uh you know, I'm I'm just gonna drop this and I Began petting the cat and enjoying it. I had no allergic reaction and I never had one since. So instant disappearance of allergies. How about

You offer allergy treatment centers where people come in and on the first visit they take a full dose of the substance and then over say ten visits you reduce the dose until at the end they're taking nothing and they've learnt to unlearn the allergy. Uh also around the same time. Another dramatic physical change in me. I grew up I was told I had very fair skin, I could never get tan. And uh we used to go down to the Jersey Shore in the summer beaches. I I can't tell you how many times, you know, uh sheets of skin peeling off. you know, horrible and then I'd never you know never get tan. So that's I just accepted that. So also around the same time when I was doing all this experimentation, and I think this is again with LSD, outdoors, running around naked in the sun, and I was lying down looking at the sun and I thought

This is silly. I mean uh the sun is not my an enemy. I got tan the next day, and I have ever since. Now these kinds of changes I have not seen much written about. And to me that's that's the stuff I would love to see tested. I'd love to see us figure out, you know allow more people to experience them. And this is why I say that when you're dealing with people with chronic illness, whether it's chronic pain or autoimmunity, uh where they don't n see a possibility of changing it, you can I think

arrange conditions of set and setting uh with the right agent in which you can show people that it's possible to experience your body in a different way. Do you do you recall how many roughly Oh, my guess is was some somewhere around uh You know, maybe two hundred, something like that. Got it. And how would you if you had to, how would you

Attempt to explain that like what It do you Do you have a hypothetical mechanism. The allergy thing is easier to explain than the than the reaction. Uh because there's obviously a a mind body component of allergy. You can show uh if a person has an allergy to roses, you can show them a plastic rose and they'll have al allergic symptoms, uh, for example. Um

I think many people with allergies can see that um um changing emotional states really affect the allergic expression. So that to me is more understandable, although the fact that it was was a permanent change I find very interesting. With tanning, I mean that's a little more complex the physiology of that um So I I haven't thought about that. I'm I'm sure there is a a physi uh p physiological mechanism underlying it, but it again suggests that many aspects of um Our

reaction to the environment are modifiable. By changing our internal state. Mm. And and you mentioned breathe I want to come back to breathing since that seems to also tie into this. A as you mentioned, and I think you've also discussed publicly having this this sliding scale of

Uh Evidence. in the sense that the the the more something has the potential and a demonstrated potential for harm, the greater the burden of proof should be. Uh and um

You know hormone replacement therapy and so I mean there are many examples that come to mind that uh seem to be a great idea at the time, uh with certain populations which demonstrably could have been predicted to have known dangers. Uh the breathing, right, compared to benzo's and all these other drugs that are available. Uh what uh is there a sample breathing technique you could describe for people who are looking to

Reduce anxiety. Uh there's a A breath that I teach, which I learned from Dr. Fulford, that I call the four seven eight breath, and if people will just Google my name and four seven eight breath, you'll get demonstrations of me doing it, it's all over the place these days. But uh basically it's it it's a y yoga technique. Uh you let all the air out through your mouth and you breathe in quietly through your nose to a count of four, hold your breath for a count of seven, blow air out your mouth forcibly to a count of eight. And you repeat that for four breath cycles.

You gotta do it. At least twice a day. It's a practice and By doing this You change the tone of the autonomic nervous system. You decrease sympathetic tone, increase parasympathetic tone, the relaxation response. And after practicing this for

you know, several weeks, months, it becomes an amazing tool for um all sorts of things. One is is controlling anxiety, lowering blood pressure, heart rate, improving digestion, and so forth. And uh breath is really it's the key Uh to controlling involuntary functions. Um and the Breath is breathing is the only thing you can do completely consciously or completely unconsciously. Uh the theory is that by using your voluntary system to impose rhythms on the breath, gradually those are induced in the involuntary nervous system, which you can't get at directly. So I've seen tremendous results of people doing this four seven eight.

uh breath practice. Um just amazing things, stopping atrial fibrillation, um having cold hands become warm, uh chronic digestive problems disappearing. But for anxiety It is far and away the best method I've ever found that makes uh benzodiazepines look very pathetic by comparison, and I've seen even the most extreme cases of panic disorder respond uh to this breathing technique once people practiced it enough. Yeah.

You you have a history of Uh spotting uh or uh and or popularizing Concepts, terms. uh even fields of of of study long before they hit the mainstream.

If if to right now we're we're edging into some territory that that might lead into this. For instance, uh and the and the question's gonna be what what what current accepted concepts or practices do you think are going to be obsolete in the near future or significantly revised, right? Because we have m we have mind this like Cartesian mind-body separation, which to me is hilarious also because it's It tends to overlap. Almost perfectly with people who have a uh

sort of um hyper materialist view of brain brain equals mind. Uh just very hard to reconcile since it's an organ. But the Uh The the the reason this came to mind for me is you mentioned autonomous Nervous system, right? And the these are things that

I I suppose most would assume you do not have any conscious control over and yet Uh, I've spent time as as an example and no I haven't seen this studied in a uh clinical setting because who the hell would actually do it and uh study it and who would want to put their career on hold or for two to three years to do it. But there's a uh a a professor formerly from Stanford Medical School, life lifelong meditator uses neuro feedback very consistently and he can do some very strange things. I've seen him do this multiple times where you can pick one of his eyes and he can hyper dilate his pupil in the eye that you choose. You can watch this happen. It is one of the strangest things.

Uh I've seen. Um So that that's a long winded way of asking a question, but w what are what are certain concepts or beliefs held to be true Or uh things that are held in strong conviction now in medicine or or tangentially related to it that you think are Going to be a

Significantly revised. Well first let me tell you two quick stories. Relevant to this. I grew up in uh Philadelphia, late nineteen forties, nineteen fifties. All shoe stores had fluoroscopes in them. Uh these were big consoles and to check the fit of shoes. So you went in as a kid, the salesman got you shoes and then you would go to the scleroscope, stick your feet under it, and there's a a viewing thing you could look into, and you'd see the bones of your feet, this big glowing green screen, and the shoe salesman would point out to your parents how well the shoes fit. And as a kid, your job was to distract the shoe salesman and your parents so you could spend as much time under there as possible. I mean unbelievable fluoroscopes in shoe stores. What were they thinking? Going back a little earlier, I when I was at Harvard Medical School, I found this old attic of medical curiosities

And one item in there is from about the turn of the uh you know early nineteen hundreds was a belt. With two pouches that held radium ore that was supposed to be worn around the waist. The pouches could How just fit over the kidneys to deliver health radiation to your kidneys for several hours a day. Now, whenever I see things like that, I wonder what are we doing now that we're going to look back at fifty years from now and not believe that we did. I'll tell you one area is dentistry. I think the whole the whole idea of drilling cavities and filling them with foreign materials, I think that's we will not believe that we were doing that. Uh I really think that chemotherapy and radiation will be obsolete as cancer treatments, probably in not too distant future. Uh and you know the problem with those is they just don't distinguish well enough between

uh malignant cells and normal cells unless you're dealing with a cancer that has a very rapid uh cell division rate, which you know most of them don't. So uh I think that'll be replaced by things like gene therapy and uh immunotherapy, antiangiogenesis therapy, so forth. Um I think the whole field of regenerative medicine is right on the horizon. Uh this recent research that was done in uh Japan of being able to take cells from skin and uh get them to reverse to an embryonic state where they can differentiate into any line. I mean this we're really close to being able to regenerate Organs, spinal cord injuries, damaged hearts. I think that's all on the horizon and will replace a lot of the things that we have now. Um I think a lot of the diseases that we consider incurable, that's just, you know, a concept that we have. And and once you see it's possible, then it's possible. And if it's possible in one individual, why shouldn't it be possible for everyone?

The Uh You've talked about the certainly uh I think it was through a quote. Um

Maybe it's full uh The Fulford? Am I getting the right the Fulford? But related to the body healing itself, right? And um the for people who are interested, I just want to mention also in the meantime As it relates to cancer, there's some very interesting work being done looking at

The impact of fasting. Mm-hmm. when comb uh when combined, typically pre treatment with different types of uh chemotherapy and radiation. Uh And f from a anecdotal perspective I can I can certainly vouch

For the Protective effects. f of nor related to normal cells. of fasting uh with a friend who is part of a cohort, this group of people who were going through these very intense treatments for a later stage cancer that he had. And those who did not fast in his group, they were there were a few experimenting with fasting. And sure you could explain this away in a number of different Ways but

Uh The people who did not fast were laid out for days afterwards. basically on the couch, not moving, and he and a few others were going for five, ten mile training runs the next morning. Uh really fascinating stuff. Uh the the dentistry that you mentioned, uh you you talked about some of the potential replacements uh that uh that that That are certainly being

uh explored quite a bit now related to cancer. With dentistry, what would you see replacing the current approach to drilling and filling? One possibility is a a vaccine uh that would inoculate you against the bacteria that uh cause Decay. Um you know that's one thing.

Um I think it's an also a place for regenerative medicine that uh possibly being able to stimulate the growth of new teeth. I think that's all within the realm of possibility. Mm-hmm. And and there are th this is probably not specifically intended to

help people regenerate teeth, but there are services now which may be outdated shortly, but for people who are curious, uh where you can you can take the Uh Baby teeth. As they are I suppose discarded, I'm not sure if the proper word is, released from the mouth by your children and then uh have them immediately shipped for storage so that you can harvest the

uh the stem cell pulp. later for regenerative uses. Uh there are great I didn't know about that. Yeah. That's neat. It's pretty cool. Yeah, there are services that do that, so you don't necessarily have to drill into your kid's hip or whatever it might be. Which is of course part of the part of the uh of what makes the the research in Japan and so on uh so exciting. The the possibility of getting to the kind of embryonic uh starting point.

w without having to Uh What else are you most excited about right now?

Well I I I have to say that um the mainstream integrative medicine. Uh thrills me. You know, I've been writing and saying the same things about medical education, medicine, health for probably forty five years. And in the early years nobody paid attention to me, and then I got a larger and larger following in the general public, but none of my medical colleagues took me seriously. And that didn't change until the early nineteen nineties. And it was then when the the economics of healthcare began to go south, uh that institutions began to open to this. Lesson I draw from that is that no amount of ideological argument moves anything. It's only when the pocketbooks of institutions get squeezed enough that they begin to open to change. But the change is quite remarkable. Uh

You know, there's a group called the uh Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine, and now uh two thirds of the medical schools in the US have joined this. Uh and this uh requires uh the dean or chancellor of an institution has to request membership and the school has to show that they've got activity in uh two of the three areas of clinical medicine research and teaching. So I it's quite wonderful to watch this happen. Mm. Okay.

What uh I'm just I'm I uh I mean we could talk for uh hours and hours and hours, and we definitely have to hang out again and maybe We can go for a hike with our mutual friend, certainly you've known him long enough, Paul Paul Stametz. Just be amazing. What books have you gifted the most to other people outside of your own books? Are there any books that you've gifted Uh often to other people. Yes, one is a um a translation of Lauza.

uh by a man named Witter Binner. It's called The Way of Life, according to Loutse. That's beautiful translations. And I find those, you know, verses, which was the sole output of this philosopher to be, you know, remarkably right on. Uh I Um I another book that I've given out a lot recently is We By Robert Johnson, a Jungian psychoanalyst. It's subtitled The Psychology of Romantic Love, a very short, easily read book about the traps that people get themselves into in romantic relationships. Um Geez, I have a whole bunch out there.

Or led you to to gift we. Just because I see so many uh my friends who are trapped in uh repetitive patterns with other people that are are very unfulfilling. And I I you know we is all about um how we project something onto another person which really is inside us. And that uh totally fits with my ideas about uh drug highs and healing that these are all

within us and we sometimes need something external on which to project our uh our belief in order to experience what we want to experience. On that note, I I've I've heard you talk about the The drive To experience

Uh I don't want to use the that I don't know. human beings, right? That we have an an innate drive to alter consciousness. Not necessarily with drugs, there's all sorts of ways of doing it. Children children spinning around. Yeah, children spinning around and so forth. Um that also got me in a lot of trouble when that was first fr uh first published, you know.

But I think this is absolutely the case and it's in all societies. And I think th the inability of our society to allow for for that drive and to help channel it in good directions is one reason why we have the kind of drug problems we do today. Um so I think teaching people how to um experience these states, how to get them in ways that are uh manageable and will hold up for you over time. We should be doing that. And the people who to be teaching that are people who have mastered that themselves, whether you know the the equivalents of shamans uh in our society. W when you look at

periods in your life where you Feel like you're in the zone. Uh however you would define that. What are Some of the

daily or weekly practices that you that you spot just in terms of the pattern recognition. When you look back at these sweet spots when you've just really been performing and feeling Uh performing well and feeling good. Uh are there any particular daily, weekly practices, morning habits, whatever uh comes to mind that that you see is consistent? Well, I I do have a sitting meditation practice, sometimes quite brief, but I do it when I first get up in the morning. Um and and I've done that quite regularly for a long time. Part of that is my

Um Another is uh being physically active and the forms of my physical activity have changed over my lifetime. Uh in my twenties I ran and I got signals from my knees that they didn't like that and I started biking instead. Uh always did a lot of walking and hiking in uh in later life I've really gotten into swimming. I mean that's my favorite physical activity at the moment. Uh I've lived with dogs for most of my adult life and I can't imagine life without dogs. And that has been a very important part of my uh uh emotional well being, I would say. My connection with plants, which we started out talking about, um brings me a great deal of fulfillment, but growing plants, uh using them as medicine, cooking, uh cooking and food preparation have always been uh very grounding for me. I I've often said and written that for me cooking is a meditation, uh chopping vegetables, uh

Also manifesting I have a a concept in my head, something that I want to prepare. I think Uh cooking is great. training and practical magic. You know, how do you manifest things? How do you take things from inside your head and make them real in physical reality as close to your uh imagination as possible. And to be Cooking is a great For doing that. So that's been very important to me and I love uh I love turning people on to

New experiences, including experiences of food and plants. Um Uh a lot of people over the years have said to me that Uh reading in reading my books that I've put Into words, things that they always knew to be true, but hadn't put words. uh into words themselves. That makes me very happy. Uh I I have many people come up to me who say that uh

Reading my books or taking our training programs has really changed their lives for the better. That makes me very happy. It makes me feel I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. Do you uh I don't know what your current Troop looks like, but do you still have your I wanna say Rhodesian ridgebacks. I have two Rhodesian Richbacks, a male and a female who are this is my third generation of them and they're stellar. They've also, you know, uh for me, uh living with them has really

taught me to be good at nonverbal communication. You know, we're really good at reading each other's uh needs and wants and intentions. Uh and that that's been remarkable training. There's been also some um you probably have seen some of his research on uh some of the positive interactions with dogs especially. Uh one is that dogs are the only animal that hold our gaze and most animals regard looking into the eyes as a threat. And dogs have evolved the ability to hold our gaze. And there's research showing that When a dog holds your gaze, there is oxytocin released both in the dog's brain and the human brain. And the longer the eye connection is, the greater the release of oxytocin, which is the the bonding hormone. Uh there was also a paper that came out in this past year showing that when you exchange saliva with a dog. I won't go into how that happens, but it happens. that this does very good things for your microbiome. Uh and in particular it changes it in ways that seem to protect against obesity.

I cannot wait to see the products that come out of that comment. The dog salivus morning swish. The uh the morning meditation, uh could could you elaborate on that just a second in terms of the the format. Like when you s What does that look like in practice? Okay, I I first uh you know, I uh long, long ago, around the time that I was writing The Natural Mind, I became interested in meditation. I began reading about Zen. I met people who were practiced Zen, so that's what I first tried of sitting down, counting breaths. Uh then I took some Vipassana training uh mindfulness meditation. And so what I do now is a kind of combination of that. I sit down, I first do my uh breathing, I I do some um Uh bellows breath, breath of fire, and then I do that four, seven, eight breath for at least eight breath cycles. And then I

Try to keep my attention on my breath. on sensations in my body, um on actual s uh sensory s uh signals in the room around me. Uh and if I'm aware that my attention is in my thoughts or on images, I just try to bring it back to those things. Um so that's really all that I do and uh

You know, a simple sitting. But to me Um Meditation is not about doing it just in a special time of sitting, it's carrying that experience and training into all aspects of your life. So whether it's driving, walking, chopping vegetables, you want to be As much in that state as possible. To me, that's the essence of mindfulness.

And you mentioned Vipassana. Um you you may have uh You may have other recommendations which I'd love to hear, but the for people who are uh a whole uh a ton of language that perhaps they don't speak natively, uh s we meant or we using the royal we. I mentioned uh Sam Harris earlier. His his waking up app, I find to be very, very uh Very good.

Uh for this, particularly if people have previously had an allergy to Uh how it's how how meditation can somehow sometimes be presented. I'm a great I'm a great admirer of his uh work, and another one of the books that I have commonly given out to people is The End of Faith. The combination of being a neuroscientist, uh you know, somebody who really questions religious dogma, and also

uh accepts the mystery of existence. I think that's a very unusual combination. It is. Yeah, it is very unusual. Uh the I was thinking about your cooking res uh remark because I only in the last handful of years discovered cooking in the process of of writing my third book, and have often wondered why I find cooking so meditative, as you put it. And uh one the one theory.

Uh that I have is that much like why I f for sim i i it is for similar reasons that I find certain types of sports and physical training meditative, and that is that there are actually some consequences built in. Like you have to pay attention if you're chopping if you're finally dicing vegetables. Yeah. Or you have three things on at on different heats uh uh on the on the stove top. Uh But I was uh kicked out of the kitchen growing up. My mother said, you know, I should be out playing, but I was always fascinated watching people do it. And uh I didn't I really got into it when I was in medical school and I found you know I in those days you had to work really long shifts in hospitals and it they were ghastly places and when I came out of them

Uh I I I was in such bad mental and emotional states and I found that imagining something that I could cook for myself and getting the ingredients and then doing it, that this put my head back in a very good place. So from a a very early time I discovered that power of cooking for me. And I've gotten to be a very good home cook. And over the years, uh many people said you ought to open a restaurant. And I never was interested in that because uh I knew I knew nothing about the restaurant business and it looked like a very tough business. And then uh about twelve years ago a mutual friend introduced me to a successful restaurateur here in Arizona, uh and I proposed to him the concept of a restaurant that would serve Delicious food that was also healthy. He his immediate response was health food doesn't sell. Uh he thought I think he thought I was talking tofu and sprouts. I eventually asked him and his wife to come out to my place. I cooked dinner for them. They like the food. But he was very skeptical and but his wheels turned and he said he was willing to give this a try, but he was very doubtful but

We got a he got a piece of real estate in Phoenix. Um and which was a coffee shop and we converted it and opened the first true food kitchen eleven years ago. Um It was from the moment it opened an immediate success. Uh a lot of my recipes, um you know, my concept based on my anti inflammatory diet. Uh It's delicious, wonderful looking food. It also happens to adhere to good nutritional guidelines, and we now have twenty five of these around the country. Uh very successful. We're gonna open eight more this year. Um I'm a still a minority owner in and oversee the menu and that's been great fun. Uh and watching people eat the kind of food that I eat and loving it is great.

It's uh it's there's location. Here in Austin. True Food Kitchen about uh a few blocks from where I'm sitting and recording, and I was actually there two nights ago. having dinner uh for those people who might be interested to the seasonal ingredient salad with chicken added to it.

Uh And uh Uh with Dan Engel, who is also a uh a previous uh guest on the podcast. So I'm a I'm a fan. Uh why do you think given the fatality rate and not just the fatality rate, but like the infant mortality rate of restaurants and uh new concepts To what do you attribute it being

successful from the get go. Did you guys do a lot of testing beforehand to you? No we didn't. No we didn't. Um I I think my my partner Sam Fox uh his taste and mine couldn't be more different. He likes cheeseburgers and steaks. Uh and we butted heads over a lot of things. But he knows the restaurant business, so in our compromises, I think we worked out a formula that worked. Uh one reason for the success is we have something for everyone, uh something for meat eaters, vegetarians, vegans, gluten free people, and we're willing to modify recipes to whatever diners want. Uh the the restaurant has created its its own culture that's very distinctive and it draws people to work there who live the lifestyle. The servers, the cooks, uh really all follow the kind of lifestyle that that I preach and that's visible when you go into one of these places. Um Uh the uh I I I just can't tell you. A lot of people tell me that they uh that people eat there four and five times a week. Um some of our dishes like the kale salad have become

So popular we created a shortage of organic kale on the West Coast some years ago. And uh I've had, you know, kids come uh m parents come up with kids and say their kids' favorite dish is the kale salad and they have to make it for'em at home. I mean who would who would have ever thought that American kids would be eating kale salad? So I think The There's the this culture that's apparent when you go into the restaurant. We've had really no successful competition, and the food speaks for itself. It's it's beautiful, it's delicious. Uh flavors come through and the fact that it makes you feel good when you leave, I think is you know what draws people back. So uh you know I was just thinking as you mentioned the kill shortage. I was thinking for all the the hedge fund managers listening to this, they should they should try to get inside information on on on pending menu editions so they can go long whatever that or this look at the secondary and tertiary effects of whatever the shortage will be.

Uh which is a real thing. I remember Almonds in California. Do you mean so so you mentioned True Food Kitchen. This this is a good This isn't this is a good opportunity for me to ask you about uh investments. I mean you you've thought about investing in many different ways, and I'd like to talk about investments not of money, but time, energy, and so on. Is is Can you think of One of or

any of the best or most worthwhile investments you've ever made. Th it could be money. It could be money in the sense that I've had uh people on the podcast like Amelia Boone, who is uh an attorney, but Uh competitor ticket to the world's toughest mother. She ended up being a four time uh world champion and it really changed her life. So it could be it could be money, but not in the in

The strict sense of investment into a stock or a a company, if that makes sense. Trevor Burrus Well one of them has to be True Food Kitchen. I was a I did invest money in it, but I invested a great deal of time and the reward that I've gotten back has been many fold. I've created a private foundation, the Weil Foundation, which funds integrative medicine um education and research in this country and other countries and uh been able to give away um seven million dollars in the past few years since that was created. Um that's been very fulfilling to me. Uh in in terms of Uh time investments. I guess you know I've invested an awful lot of time in writing, and uh that's not the easiest uh occupation, as you know. Um, but that has also been incredibly rewarding to me. You know, I publishing is a very uncertain business these days.

And I was fortunate enough to be in it at a time when, you know, it it worked and and to reap the benefits of that. And that's been very satisfying. But that's been a major part of my life. What about on the convert if we look at the the other end of the spectrum. Uh can you think of any failures or apparent failures that set you up for later success. Do you have uh any favorite failures? Think about that. Um

Or just things you viewed as catastrophes or real awful occurrences that turned out to be blessings in disguise. Well you know, for a a lot of years uh the kind of medicine that I advocated, uh, people thought I was nuts. Uh and uh U no uh as I said, none of my medical colleagues took me seriously. They thought I'd gone off the deep end. Um So you know I I I knew that I was on the right path and I've always had great

trust in my intuition and my, you know, inner light and even in periods when I did not get much um Confirmation of that from the outside world. Um, I think I developed the ability to just hold true to what I knew knew to be right and Keep following my footsteps.

Are there are there any uh positions or opinions in the last few years, uh or or could be way back. It doesn't have to be in the last few years that you've changed substantially, where you've shifted shifted your position or completely changed your mind. And uh you know, I think that's uh uh that's one thing that people respect about my work. I'm quite willing to say that I was wrong about something or to as new information comes out. You you mentioned though I do have a very good ability to spot trends and to Uh

pick up on things that may take the mainstream culture years to come around to. And for example, um I was warning people about trans fats probably fifteen years before people saw how dangerous they were and there was any attempt to ban them from food. Um so I'm I'm just really good at stuff like that. How did that come about? Do you mind giving us a little bit of background on how I just I I I I s a lot of information comes across my desk, and now that I have You know, all of these students out there that I've trained, uh you know, they constantly send me things. I don't have great patience to read whole articles, but I'm very good at uh getting the gist of things very quickly and putting together with other information that I know. And uh so

Uh uh. You know, with with s or with the anti inflammatory diet. I I saw this. No, it must be again fifteen, eighteen years ago, but there was this hypothesis out there that chronic low level inflammation, uh may be the root cause of many diseases that we had thought were unrelated, like heart disease and Alzheimer's disease and cancer. And uh I picked up on that idea very early and that led me to develop this anti inflammatory Yeah, eating plan. There's now a tremendous amount of uh validation of that. So uh all I can tell you is I I'm very intuitive about that. I pick up on things, I see the connections to other things, and you know, I'm willing to start uh advocating them before the the evidence is all there, but most of the time the evidence comes in.

And you've been there's certain things you've done for a long time. Uh like you mentioned the cooking really beginning in uh uh if I'm remembering correctly, medical school. Mm. In recent memory. It uh

could be the last few years, last five years. Are there any new beliefs or behaviors or habits that have really improved The quality of your life that come to mind? Well I'm fascinated by uh the the stuff that's been out there on intermittent fasting. That's something that I've been experimenting with. I think the biochemistry of it is fascinating. I think there are all different ways of doing it. Um I haven't figured out exactly what's right for me, but I'm sure there's something there that's valuable and I will continue to experiment with that. Um Are there any resources or particular people who led you to to look into that closely?

I can't think of one person I think it's been hearing that from a variety of sources and and uh reading the medical literature about it. Mm-hmm. So I have a maybe a strange question to ask you, but I feel I feel like I I want to ask nonetheless. It's it's not a scary question, but it might be might but it might be odd. Which is when is the last time you remember crying tears of joy? And this is a question that was used as an op but opener at a group dinner once and I thought and I thought it was gonna completely fall flat and could be a catastrophe. Uh Michael Heb, I want to give him credit, and it opened the portal to such a

conversation among strangers that I I've I've jotted it down. Uh I I don't know that I've actually cry tears of joys, but I feel myself welling up. Uh in certain circumstances and I think a uh a number of times when Um People have written me or told me in person

Um that's something that I wrote or said. uh had really Um saved their life literally. Uh and uh You know, that's I I just

I have a very strong emotional response to that. Yeah. Is there anything Yeah. that you besides looking into interm intermittent fasting, is there

Anything in particular that you are working on these days? Do you do anything like New Year's resolutions or d or do you have any rituals around the New Year? No, first of all I don't believe in the new year. I think it's just an artificial uh You know, I I was always fascinated by the fact that the Jewish New Year is at the time of the autumn equinox and it's not in the first month of the Jewish calendar. So that's odd that the first the new year begins not in the first month. And in some ways it's calling attention to the importance of the autumn equinox. And I think that's a very special time. You know, I think the uh image, the symbolism that I have there is that if you plant root crops at that time, um they

develop in the dark, they put roots down, you don't see any sign of them, and then in the spring shoots come up. And the result of all that Work in the dark. No, manifests itself. So the idea is that that that time of year and that equilibrated time of year, that the mental patterns the the life patterns that you set Uh may

Manifest. you know when spring comes around. So I I I sometimes at that time of year I think about what I want to do. But since I want to do I don't have to change too much say sixty minutes or ninety minutes of your day uh fairly Script it at this point? Uh i if so, I mean it what is it what is it what does it look when do you wake up? What does it look like? Although it changes through the you know, I tend to wake up when it gets light, but my pattern now is I wake up at four, and I usually go to bed at nine, so I like to get seven hours of sleep. And I sleep with my dogs, and if I don't wake up at four, the female dog wakes me up exactly at four by licking my head very vigorously. Anyway, so I get up, I brush my teeth,

And then I sit down and do my meditation. Um however long that takes. And then I go in and um I uh I usually feed the dogs. Um I may feed myself, uh, and then um As soon as it gets light, I take the dogs out. There's a a pretty wild wash near my home and uh where they run off leash fairly early in the morning. What what are your diff Default breakfasts if you do have breakfast. You know, I love Japanese breakfasts, uh, and I know you and I are both Japanophiles. I hated breakfast. I hated breakfast growing up as a kid. There was nothing I was served that I liked. And I went to Japan when I was seventeen. This was in nineteen fifty nine.

Uh I was there with a student exchange group. I lived with uh Japanese families outside of Tokyo in Kobe. And I suddenly discovered this is what I want to eat for breakfast, you know, that a piece of broiled fish and miso soup and steamed rice and some seaweed and pickles and green tea. That just suits me fine. Uh and U if I can, I have things like that for breakfast. It's gotta be the best breakfast on the planet. I've tried so many breakfasts and that's my favorite. Breakfast make me feel horrible. And when I'm on the road, that's the meal I have most difficulty with.

Uh by the way, let me also tell you another story. Uh at that When I was first in Japan, it was I arrived in I think it was November first of nineteen fifty nine, was with this family outside of Tokyo and Orawa City, and there was no language in common. There was none of them spoke English. I didn't speak Japanese, so there was a lot of gesturing. But on the second night that I was there, the mother of the household uh took me next door to her neighbor who was a practitioner of Chanoyu tea ceremony, and uh I experienced a tea ceremony for the first time and was served matcha and uh Two things about it fascinated me. One was the color of the powdered tea. I had never seen a more beautiful green powder. And the other was the chain, this whisk that's made from, you know, one piece of carved bamboo that's just a a miracle of carving and something about the shape of that just fascinated me. It was used to whisk the tea into a froth. So

Uh As you can imagine, when I um came back to the States in nineteen sixty, uh you know, nobody knew about Japanese food. Uh there was one every city had one Japanese restaurant that was named Ginza or Sakura. And they had miso soup and clear soup. They had uh Uh some tempura and uh some kind of broiled salmon. I mean the idea of eating raw fish would never be there at all. And if anybody had told me that Americans would be eating sushi the way they are now, I would never have believed it. So anyway, I became a fan of matcha from that time, and that's another example of something that I came across and turned people on to many many years before it became popular and uh in recent years. I uh found uh uh sourced really good matcha in Japan in uh from Uji, which is the town outside of Kyoto where most of the tea growing goes on. Um and I've been making this available to and I helped start a company called uh Macha Kari. The website is macha dot com and uh it's just amazing to me to watch

matcha suddenly being discovered here, and I've seen it on you know, I there was a recent episode of Madam Secretary where is preparing a bowl of matcha for somebody. I mean that's amazing. So I was I think forty or fifty years ahead of that one. And uh Matcha, for those people wondering on the spelling, is M A T C H A. Matcha.com. That's a hell of a URL. I know, not bad. And Matcha it literally means powdered tea. And this is the only form of tea in which the whole leaf is consumed. So you're getting all of the uh nutrients, phytochemicals there. Um and it's a labor intensive process of making it, but it's just it's a Matcha's a beautiful thing. It is it is a a fantastic tea. I consume matcha regularly. I have some at home and um you can use the whisk if you want to be sacrilegious but really efficient. You can also use one of those battery powered fathers.

Yeah, I like uh iced matcha also, especially in warm weather. And I I just put the matcha in cold water and use one of the uh electric whisk to whisk it and then add ice to it. I don't sweep it and it's again beautiful green and uh wonderful drink. Yeah, green is my favorite color and I if people were to ask me what Shade of green. But it is it is It is W they're one and the same really. It's the color of maple leaves in July on eastern Long Island or when the sunlight hits the back side.

Or matcha green tea. Right. Uh Let me ask just a a few more questions. And then uh maybe we'll do a a round two sometime, but but uh I'd I'd love to

uh in the in the meantime, at some point. But uh If you could have Actually no, I'll start with a different one. The the I'm gonna ask you the my my usual what would you put on a billboard question. But we'll we'll get to that.

Th in terms of small purchases, are there any purchases of say a hundred dollars or less that have positively impacted your life in recent memory. Anything and it's specific people always love specifics, but is there any sort of little thing Yeah. Well one of them I'm holding in my hand right now, and my daughter turned me on to these. She's now twenty eight, uh, computer glasses, which I got on Amazon um I don't know, they were less than twenty dollars. But these are yellow tinted uh glasses that enlarge things slightly. That has totally changed my comfort in sitting in front of a screen. You know, it cancels out the blue light and uh it just that's been a great thing to have in my life. Mm-hmm. Perfect. So we're going from the micro to the macro. So we have the the computer glasses and then something that

probably wouldn't require glasses, which is a gigantic billboard. This is more of a a metaphorical question, but i if if you could get a message out to millions or billions of people, it could be a word, could be a sentence, could be a quote, could be anything noncommercial. Uh What might you put? On such a billboard. I think it's that you know, it's all the good stuff is inside you. I mean, that was the main point of the natural mind is that The highs that you get from drugs are inside you. They're in the nervous system. The drugs acts as r as a releaser. Healing is a potential inside you. Various treatments or people can activate that or release it. But it's that you know, it's that

Everything really is within. Mm. Yeah, and the and uh You don't have to as as I'm d not saying this for you, I'm saying this for people listening. You don't have to believe in witchcraft and fairy dust.

to come to that conclusion. Uh if you read the the article that I mentioned, I'll put it in the show notes for everybody as well on the placebo effect, on how the placebo effect varies culturally, on how it's become stronger in the United States, on looking at the outliers in the control groups, these placebo groups, like you mentioned, if you're looking at the tables of studies It's so exciting. to explore and um I am so excited to see Uh how it is.

further studied and utilized in medicine because it's Tim This is another one that I think I was on to long before, you know, the people got into it. Uh if you I don't know whether you've read my book called Health and Healing, um that came out shortly after From Chocolate to Morphine. It was the first book that I wrote on medicine and medical philosophy. There are two chapters on that. in that on placebos. And uh I would recommend go back and read them because it's it's all this stuff that we've been talking about. Medical nostradamis strikes again. You know, uh Andrew, people can find you at drw dot com, uh medicine. That's W E L Do you have any other uh or any

final asks or requests or suggestions for people listening to the podcast, uh just in the process of uh Of of of finishing up. No, I think you know my work is out there. It's easily uh accessed and um I I think it's relevant to many people today and um I I really enjoyed talking to you. I uh it's been a while since we worked together in person. I hope we can remedy that.

Yes, definitely. Well I guess you know, th there might be more locations. I won't uh True Food Kitchen popping up in the very near future and uh not not necessarily too far away from either of us. So perhaps we can we can rendezvous at one of those or even better if uh if I could sample some more produce from your garden, which was just incredible. Uh And uh you know, maybe we can bring invite some bald eagles, which was also something I had never seen before while we're after it. Um that would be that would be really wonderful. But uh I really appreciate you taking the time. I've I've been wanting to have you on the podcast for for quite a while, so it's nice. to finally reconnect and certainly hope it's it's not the last time any time soon. Good. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so thank you and for everybody listening.

Everything we talked about, the books the uh various websites uh the matcha you name it, all of those will be available in the show notes, as always at Tim.blog forward slash podcasts. So you can find links and extended links to everything, studies and so on. And uh Andrew, thank you again and to everybody listening. Be safe.

Experiment and experience widely. You use your brains, pay attention to your body, and until next time, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered, it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up. in the uh the world of the esoteric as I do, it could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off.

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