[00:00:01] Luke: Do you really have over 250 patents?

[00:00:04] JP: Yeah. Just in the United States.

[00:00:06] Luke: What the hell?

[00:00:08] JP: Well, being a patent attorney means I get to slice and dice these things up a little bit more than maybe other people do, but yeah, it's been 25-plus years, coming up on 30 years of working in the healthcare space.

[00:00:22] Luke: What a trip. I know we're going to talk about HRV-- not HRV. Well, we are going to talk about HRV, but we're going to talk about the vagus nerve and nervous system in general. But what are some of the other categories within your bevy of patents?

[00:00:37] JP: Most of them started out actually in the orthopedic spine space, developing products for spine surgery, helping people who have debilitating back pain get out of the debilitating pain and be able to get on with their lives. My uncle is a world-renowned spine surgeon. Actually ran the spine service at NYU and the Hospital for Joint Diseases up in New York City for probably 35 years.

[00:01:05] Luke: Oh, wow.

[00:01:05] JP: And pretty early on, I was right out of law school. Had gone to MIT for engineering, then went to Duke for law school, did some engineering work down there, decided to become a patent attorney, and he called me up on the phone out of nowhere and said, "Why don't we sit down and talk? I've got some ideas."

[00:01:21] And literally, the very first day we sat down to spend four or five hours talking about spine surgery and what the problems were, what he saw as the deficiencies with the equipment that he was using, we ended up inventing five different things that I ultimately got patents on-- some for him, some for me, and sometimes it was the both of us. And that really started me on the path to where I am now, what I could call greatness because I'm not done yet. So we'll just say on the way to that.

[00:01:54] Luke: That makes sense. If you have a background in law and engineering, it would stand to reason that you're going to figure out how to make some cool things and then want to protect them and ensure that other people don't rip you off. I interviewed a guy named George Wiseman who created this device called AquaCure, and it uses something called Brown's gas.

[00:02:15] It's a combination of hydrogen and oxygen. You can drink it and inhale it. It's really cool. I use it every day in my office when I work. And he invented it. He was also an engineer and started getting interested in health. And so he put together-- he was making things like fuel savers for cars back in the day and things like that, and eventually he realized that you could actually inhale this Brown's gas and not just use it for welding.

[00:02:42] JP: Okay.

[00:02:43] Luke: But I was asking him about the process of patenting his technology because he does everything open source. You can just go buy the plans and make one yourself if you have the skills to do so. And he said that over the years he's wrestled with that because so many people have copied him and probably made more money than he ever made on it. But the reason that he didn't do so was because in the realm of health, if you have something that's very groundbreaking and effective and you patent it, that it can put a target on your back.

[00:03:16] JP: Oh, yeah.

[00:03:16] Luke: In terms of the institutions that don't want to see people naturally heal themselves and empower themselves. So it was really interesting. I was like, "Oh, that makes sense." He's like, "Yeah." Why do you think there's no free energy devices or cars that run on water? Because anyone that tries to patent them sounds the alarm and the powers that be come in and in some cases cause them to die of suicide due to a gunshot in the back of the head.

[00:03:40] JP: Yeah. You fall on a knife four times. That happens.

[00:03:42] Luke: Yeah, exactly. So have you run into that particular issue where you find something that's really useful for back pain or that's very innovative and is going to disrupt the medical system and you've wrestled with the idea of whether or not to patent it or just let it get out there and not take the heat for it?

[00:04:01] JP: Absolutely. And I'll tell you, my uncle and I, when we were working together, and we still do, but when we were really in the spine world working really closely together, we had a mantra, which is that if you want to introduce revolutionary technology, you have to do it in a way that appears evolutionary.

[00:04:21] It has to appear to just be a tiny little change. You can know that once it gets out there, it's going to change everything. But you don't want to signal that to everybody because, as you said, that's like shining the bat signal on the clouds for all the bad guys. They're going to know that something's coming, and they're going to gear up to block it.

[00:04:41] There's a tremendous amount of everything from not invented here syndrome to preserving the status quo, because they've got so much invested in keeping people either addicted to using their products or chronically ill. Listen, even in the spine world, when you treat somebody for debilitating back pain, yes, you're giving them their life back. That's what you're doing for the patient. But you're also taking them off medications. They no longer need the medication because they're not in pain. Pharmaceutical companies don't like that.

[00:05:19] Luke: Yeah. You just knocked out a revenue stream.

[00:05:21] JP: Exactly. So even the field itself is constantly having to battle and fight for its own position. So I was happy to be part of that. It was a fun run for a while. I started a couple of companies in that area, but I was absolutely fascinated by what is truly revolutionary stuff going on in neuromodulation. We'll get into how that happened, but man, that's as close to magical as I've ever seen.

[00:05:53] Luke: Yeah, I'm stoked. I've been using your device because I'm someone that, at various times, has had an easier or more difficult time self-regulating. I think it's true. Many of us, it's like life's busy, and if you're someone with high ambition and you want to accomplish a lot in the world--

[00:06:11] JP: You care.

[00:06:12] Luke: Yeah, exactly. It can come at the price of not feeling very relaxed. So I've worked with meditation and all sorts of different breathwork techniques and things and done pretty well with that. But I'm definitely a fan of getting assistance. So I'm excited to talk about that because it's something so easy to do, like two minutes twice a day, is a lot easier. That's a lower bear to entry than do an hour of breathwork every morning and meditate for 20 minutes.

[00:06:42] JP: I always joke about the fact that this is in two minutes, you get two hours of meditation.

[00:06:46] Luke: Really?

[00:06:47] JP: Yeah. It's basically the same effect. It lasts for hours and hours and hours. It's more powerful and more compact than you get with any of those different things. Not that those things are bad, because breathwork, yoga, stretching, and all the things you were talking about are great. But we just don't have that much time in our lives.

[00:07:08] In the Western culture, we're not spending time communing with nature the way we used to. And we didn't evolve that way, so we have to figure out ways to get back there. And this a miraculous way to do it. It's fun to be part of it.

[00:07:24] Luke: Yeah. I think there's one sect of people that's very purist. That it's like, no technology, no supplements. We just have to get back to nature. And then you have on the opposite end of the spectrum, people that are completely obsessed with technology and supplements and don't realize that a lot of the foundational issues are solely due to our disconnection from the natural world.

[00:07:49] And I tend to fall somewhere in the middle, and I find that technologies in terms of biohacking and things like that, to which I gravitate, usually have something to do with mimicking something in nature or amplifying something in nature that does it better and faster and allows you to adopt it into your lifestyle without having to go on a vision quest for a week in the middle of nowhere, which those are great too.

[00:08:19] So I think I was interested to talk to you because I'm like, cool, this is something that you can do yourself, but it's also cool to have a bit of an edge and be able to do it in two minutes. So I'm excited.

[00:08:30] JP: I don't know if I have the time to do a tour down to Central America to do an ayahuasca trip.

[00:08:35] Luke: Yeah.

[00:08:36] JP: There's other things you can do that are a little less of a commitment.

[00:08:39] Luke: Totally, totally. So let's talk about the different components of the autonomic nervous system. It's a great jumping off place.

[00:08:47] JP: Sure. There's basically two major components of the autonomic nervous system. And just to define what that is for everyone, think about your autonomic nervous system as the part of your nervous system that controls the things that you don't consciously think about. So it's things like your breathing. It's your digestion. It's your heart rate.

[00:09:06] All of those things are controlled by your autonomic nervous system, and it's basically got these two components. One is called the sympathetic, and that drives fight or flight. You're heart racing, pumping, and you're breathing getting shallow and fast. Digestion stopping because you don't have time to digest when you're out trying to run away from a lion or a really nasty boss or something like that.

[00:09:30] And then on the other side, you've got the parasympathetic, and that's your vagus nerve. But the parasympathetic is what controls your heart rate, slows it down, calms your breathing down. You start breathing more deeply. Digestion starts up again. We call it the rest, digest, and restore mode. And the trick is that it's not just controlling those easy things, the things I mentioned, like heart rate, breathing, and digestion.

[00:09:56] It also controls things that you wouldn't think of as being controlled by a nervous system, things like your immune system. At the cellular level, it even controls how your mitochondria function inside cells. And that, to me, is miraculous, because I always think of health in general as being held up by four things. And we talked about it a little off camera.

[00:10:19] You've got your immune system. You've got your energy, which is mitochondria. And then you've got your microbiome, which is our interface with the microscopic world around us. Can't live without it. And then it's your autonomic nervous system. And the fact that your autonomic nervous system has the ability to control those things, it's like the puppet master. It's controlling those things. That's what makes it so fascinating to me.

[00:10:47] Luke: Incredible. You just opened up so many different ideas I want to explore. But in thinking about the nervous system in relation to our gut and digestion, I'm sure many people listening will have had this experience in times of emotional upheaval, your digestion gets wrecked. I used to trip on that.

[00:11:10] I'd go through a break up or a career change or something, and all of a sudden I'd be having all these digestive issues. And it took me a long time to put that together, that I was locked in this limbic system, fight or flight energy, and that would basically shut down my digestion. Those little critters in there going, five alarm, fire, stop working, or whatever they're doing.

[00:11:34] JP: Yeah, no, it creates an environment where the bad bugs-- you've got trillions, literally trillions of different bugs. We won't call them bugs. We'll call them little microscopic helpers that are in your gut. And they're in your skin. They're in your eyes. They're in your nose. They're in your ears.

[00:11:57] And they have the ability to change their composition. And if you're in a stressed state, you'll end up with more of the bad kind. And if you're in a parasympathetic state, you create an environment-- the pH changes, the rate at which acid's being produced, the rate at which serotonin is being produced, the rate at which things are moving through the gut. All those things change what little helpers you have. And if you're in that chronic fight or flight state for a long period of time, it changes in a way that leads to uncomfortable situations.

[00:12:37] Luke: Disaster pants in the most extreme cases.

[00:12:41] JP: Yes, for sure.

[00:12:42] Luke: I was thinking about when you first started talking about the sympathetic and the parasympathetic, I've always found that terminology counterintuitive because if sympathetic is more the agitated state, it just seem backwards. And then I thought about it as you were saying that, and perhaps it is. There is some logic to it because it's sympathetic in the way that it's adapting. It's more like reactive. Have you ever looked at the terminology that it seems  counterintuitive?

[00:13:17] JP: I haven't, but that's exactly the way I think about it. Because I think about it from the standpoint of homeostasis. When you're in homeostasis, all the systems are humming along. It's like Newton's first law. An object will remain at rest unless acted on by a force.

[00:13:36] So your body is chugging along. It doesn't need anything to change, doesn't want anything to change because it's in that homeostatic state, and then you're confronted with a stress, and that stress could be physical, could be an injury, could be a bacterial invasion.

[00:13:53] It could be any one of a number of physical things. It can be emotional. You could be under stress. You could be having a fight with your spouse. You could have a child who's sick. You could have problems at work. It can even be cognitive. It can be thinking about your finances for too much, obsessing about things. All of those things are stresses, and your body responds to stress. And it doesn't care.

[00:14:19] It doesn't care where it comes from. It's going to give you the same immunological, metabolic, digestive changes based on the fact that it's being pushed out of homeostasis. You're being pushed out of your comfort zone. So that's when your sympathetic nervous system kicks in.

[00:14:39] And its job is to try to oppose that. It's fighting against those changes because your body doesn't want those things to change. Problem is, if it stays fighting for too long, it starts knocking you out of that homeostasis even further. So you have to get back-- it's almost like grounding. You have to get back to that grounded state where your parasympathetic is pushing you back into homeostasis.

[00:15:04] That's where the healing happens. That parasympathetic recovery state is the way your body gets back into balance. I describe it as the way Einstein used to talk about the fact that you can't simultaneously prepare for war and work towards peace. I don't know about the politics of it, but I know that that works with your immune system and your metabolism.

[00:15:28] If stress is pushing you out of that state, then you're preparing for war. You can't heal. You can't get back to a peaceful state until you give that up and push your body, allow it to drift back into a homeostatic state.

[00:15:46] Luke: I like the homeostasis and balance being the goal and model. Because when I first started tapping into this idea of sympathetic versus parasympathetic, I erroneously thought, oh man, I need to be parasympathetic all the time because I want to be chill. And I think that what we're going for, and correct me where I'm wrong, is adaptation. It's like the ability to adapt to stress and not get stuck in it. But if we were, say, a predominantly parasympathetic, would that not lead us to lethargic, brain foggy, and just sleepy?

[00:16:25] JP: I don't know about brain foggy, but certainly disconnected.

[00:16:29] Luke: Or not motivated, less ambitious.

[00:16:32] JP: Yeah. It's a problem that doesn't really exist very much in the Western world. You tapped into a bunch of different things. Just briefly on the motivation side of things, your neurotransmitter for motivation is dopamine. We think of it as the pleasure neurotransmitter, but it actually also provides you with the motivation. It's your reward system. And being in that parasympathetic state actually improves your dopamine levels. So you actually do get more motivation, but your motivation comes from an internal desire to do something.

[00:17:09] Getting back to that concept of resilience, being able to get back and forth between that sympathetic state and the parasympathetic state, because you're absolutely right, to exist solely in one state is bad. It’s not good. And so when you're in that chronic sympathetic state, you can actually just tell by talking to somebody.

[00:17:33] They're just amped up all the time. They're talking too fast. It's almost like they're on coke. They're just wired all the time. They're jumpy. They're skittish. You can't be in that state forever, but you have to be able to be in it for a little while. That's why we go out-- and I love the person, I can't remember who it was, who made me realize that exercise, when you and lift weights, or you go out and run, lifting weights is simulating fighting, and running is simulating flight.

[00:18:07] Luke: Oh, right, right.

[00:18:08] JP: So if you get into that fight or flight mode, that's okay if it's something that you're doing voluntarily or you recognize it's important. You got a project you're really excited about, dive into it. Get amped up about it. Get excited. Your sympathetic nervous system is driving that. That's not bad. It's actually a good thing.

[00:18:29] Go out and play a basketball game and be competitive. Wonderful. But get out of that, and know how to get out of it in a way that doesn't have a lot of residual, I'm going to call it, residual crap that you're carrying along with you. My dog at home, I always talk about Luna. She's a six-year-old, Samoyed, beautiful, white, Eskimo dog. I never should have brought her south, brought her to Florida.

[00:18:55] Luke: You live in Florida?

[00:18:56] JP: It's torture. And she deals with that by lying down on the cold marble tiles of the house. And so she's got her tongue hanging out. She looks catatonic. It looks like a throw rug, frankly. And she spends hours like that in a completely parasympathetic state. About 2 o'clock every afternoon, the UPS man shows up, and she jumps up. She's like a Maasai warrior who goes from sound asleep to ready to fight in five seconds.

[00:19:28] She's huffing and puffing. She's growling. She's barking. She's making noise like she could just chew somebody up. Guy drops his packages off, walks away. Thirty seconds later, she does that, a big sigh.

[00:19:40] Luke: I'm jealous.

[00:19:42] JP: Human beings can't do that. We're not designed for that. We should be because that is supremely healthy. That ability to go from amped up to chill and back and forth, that's resilience. If you can get to the point where you can be that resilient, my friend, you're in good shape.

[00:20:02] Luke: That's a great metaphor. I've heard when talking about the nervous system, people often use, the example of how, say, a deer will be frightened and just prance off at great speed and hop giant fences. And then a second later, they're just grazing again, like nothing ever happened. Or you see two ducks get in a tussle, and then they just float away like nothing happened. I've observed that in animals myself, but I didn't think about it with the dog. That's a really good example that anyone that owns a dog can see probably every day.

[00:20:35] JP: They did actually a study about this because heart rate variability is tied to this. When you're in that sympathetic state, when you're really amped up, your heart rate variability drops like a stone. Your heart's practically at a metronome level at that point.

[00:20:52] Then when you're relaxed, your heart rate variability shoots up. There's lots of differences between-- these two beats are separated by one second. This is a second and a half. This is a half a second. It's not quite that much, but that type of variability is back when you're relaxed. The people who can do that almost better than anybody, are race car drivers, Formula 1 drivers.

[00:21:15] Luke: Really?

[00:21:15] JP: Yeah.

[00:21:16] I know there's an F1 race coming or that was just here that's a really big deal. Those guys, when they're going through hairpin turns, their heart rate variability is like one. It's nothing. And then they get in the straightaway, shoots right back up. So they have that ability. It's who they are. It's what makes them good drivers. I wish we could all do that when we're driving on the highway and somebody cuts us off and we're amped up and we're feeling it for the next half hour.

[00:21:47] Luke: That reminds me of this concept in the world of Vedic meditation that my teacher taught me many years ago, and the language they use is adaptation energy, which is how I perceived that. If you're spending time self-regulating, meditating, getting out of the confines of the mind, then the idea is the more you practice that and the longer duration in your life you practice it, it gives you that adaptation energy. It reminds me of the race car drivers. It's like they can be in a heightened state and then have the ability to self-regulate and go back into balance. It's a worthy goal.

[00:22:26] JP: It is. It is. And you can train yourself to do it. And there's lots of practices that are being-- they're old practices, but they're being made popular now, things like cold plunges, saunas, and things that stress you. Stress you not in a way that's going to make you emotionally or mentally carry it with us.

[00:22:48] Because that's the problem for human beings. We have the ability to carry our crap with us. My wife, she's an executive coach. She talks about petting your dead cat. When your cat's dead, you bury your cat. You don't continue to pet it. And we need to be able to do that. But when it's emotional or mental, or we attach some importance to the thing, then we have a difficult time doing it.

[00:23:11] But for something like a cold plunge, get out of the cold plunge, it's over. You don't have to think about it. If you train yourself by doing the cold plunge and getting out and then going to sauna, you're stressing yourself with the heat, getting out, these stresses that we put ourselves through voluntarily, we don't have the same level of emotional struggle to let go of it.

[00:23:36] And if you learn how to do those things, as I said, the immune system and the autonomic nervous system, they don't care whether that stress was physical, emotional, or cognitive. If you train your body how to do it, you'll be easier. It'll be easier for you to deal with things. Joe Rogan talks about the fact that-- he has coined a phrase like, I'm going to screw it up, but I think he says, the worst thing you've ever dealt with is the worst thing you've ever dealt with.

[00:24:06] And he says, if you do something that's a struggle first thing in the morning, like get up and run five miles, do something you don't want to do, it makes the rest of the day easier. It makes it easier for you to deal with things because you've set your resilience level by doing that thing you voluntarily did, can let go of it when it's done, and now you've set your markers for the day.

[00:24:31] Luke: That's been my experience, 100%. And I'm glad you brought up the cold plunge because I interviewed a guy the other day who created this beautiful one, the one I have in the back here called the Morozko Forge. And he was talking a lot about the physiological benefits, and he's really deep into the science.

[00:24:46] He's a brilliant guy. And I love learning all of that too, brown fat and whatever. But my practice of the cold plunge, I've been aware of the physical benefits and I'm not mad at that, but for me, it's been exactly what you described. It's voluntarily, albeit with some resistance at times. I did two today before you came here, so I'm pretty good at it now.

[00:25:08] It's easier in Texas when it's like 180 degrees out. But for me, it's not even about how long I'm in there. It's not some kind of macho thing, which it has been at times in the past before I became aware of the ego sneaking in there, trying to impress people for no goddamn reason, especially if you're by yourself.

[00:25:27] But in the early days I would time it and I would see how far it could go and just torture myself. But now it's really about, how quickly can I surrender to the experience and be completely relaxed? That's the game I play with myself. And I stay in as long as it takes, which has gotten shorter and shorter over time.

[00:25:46] I get in there and there's maybe a couple of shallow breaths. And then I just-- and the minute I'm not fighting it, I've won. And I really think that cumulatively, over the past few years, it has really helped my resilience and just ability to handle sudden shocks to the system, whatever they are, a scary piece of mail from the government or whatever, getting pulled over by the police, anything like that that just put you in that instant state of fear. I think that that has really helped to be able to just go, "Oh, hold on."

[00:26:24] JP: 100%.

[00:26:25] Luke: And have some buffer between my reaction or response to the experiences of life. There's a little pause moment there where before I would have been completely thrown. So I love that example, and I think that if anyone's going to make a practice of cold plunging, that's probably a really good reason to do it.

[00:26:43] JP: Yeah. And people talk about cold plunges and their effect on the immune system and cold plunges effect on your mental health and all of these other things. And every time I hear it, in the back of my head, I'm chuckling because I'm saying to myself, it's all because of the autonomic nervous system.

[00:26:59] That's the benefit. If you get into a cold plunge and you're stressed out about something else, it's much harder to get to that point where you're taking those deeper breaths and not [shallow breathes]. And going into the sauna with stress, you're just in there, like, I got to get out of here. I got to go do something.

[00:27:17] And all of that is about your autonomic nervous system. Now, imagine being able to do that regulation and testing yourself and putting yourself into those without having to take the effort of going into and putting yourself through the struggle of the cold plunger, not that being a sauna is a struggle, but testing yourself that way.

[00:27:42] And that's what some of these gurus have reached that stage where they can test themselves just by doing it mentally. They don't need to do the physical challenge. They can do it mentally. I'm not there. I wish I were. But that's the cool thing because it doesn't have to be a physical challenge.

[00:27:59] It could be a mental challenge, a cognitive challenge. It doesn't even need to be an emotional challenge. It could just be a cognitive one. Place yourself in that mode, and then get yourself out. And once you're there, man, then you can really deal with everything. Because most of the things that stress us out aren't physical things anymore. We're not out hunting and fighting lions for a deer. We're not doing that anymore.

[00:28:22] Luke: It's scrolling Twitter, looking at politics.

[00:28:24] JP: It's fighting with ourselves out of Instagram.

[00:28:29] Luke: I think that's one of the worst habits for my nervous system, is just the sometimes irresistible pull to engage with the outside world through social media. And obviously we know that they're designed to do that very thing to make it irresistible, playing on our instincts of wanting to have an awareness of what's going on in our outer environment. Back hunter-gatherer days, everyone would have come back from the hunt, sat her on the fire, and you would share what's going on with that tribe and this guy and that girl.

[00:29:01] JP: And they weren't arguing about tax policy.

[00:29:03] Luke: Yeah, we want to know what's going on. So it's a normal, natural part of our humanity. But man, when there's so much craziness going on and the filter through which you're finding out about it is so biased and toxic, it's really dangerous. What's your perception of things like social media and doom scrolling and how it affects our wellbeing?

[00:29:27] JP: I have four kids, so I've watched it. I've watched my 17-year-old daughter with three of her friends sitting on our couch, TV's on, they're not watching. No noise is happening, just an occasional giggle, an occasional thumb tap, and they're just scrolling.

[00:29:44] Luke: TikTok wormhole?

[00:29:47] JP: That's not normal. That's not social communication. And maybe I'm just showing my age here, but I just remember going outside, going outside and doing things bare feet, wrestling around, maybe not with girls, but out there just having fun, playing sports and all that. And I'm just not seeing that as much.

[00:30:12] Unfortunately, my sons are both really into basketball. So for them, they're constantly playing sports, and they've got friends that they're with, and they're not scrolling. But even them, I watch football on Sundays, and I realize down here it's more like Fridays and Saturdays. But I watch football on Sunday, and they're scrolling.

[00:30:35] They're not watching. I'm watching the World Series, and they're scrolling, and they're not actually watching, and I have to say, did you see that? And they'll look up, and they'll see the replay. I'm thinking to myself, that's not being present. So I do worry a lot about it, and I understand the neurochemistry of what it is that they're doing by scrolling. They're getting that dopamine hit, and that dopamine hit is a drug, and they're depleting their dopamine.

[00:31:05] So what you see is these kids scrolling. They're getting their dopamine hits, and then things like reading a book are totally boring to them. Doing your homework, what's the point? They're not getting any charge out of solving a math problem that they couldn't solve before, or learning something new in science.

[00:31:25] It's just not as strong a hit, and they've depleted their dopamine. And that's really, I think, one of the big problems that we have right now, is that our generation of phone addicted people, kids, are losing their ability to get motivated for things, even things that they say that they want. So I do view it as a problem.

[00:31:51] Luke: I'm so glad you brought up the reading a book comparison because I can absolutely unequivocally vouch for that effect because I used to be an avid reader. I have this library of spiritual books over there. Some of it's quite dense and not easy to read, and my reading in that particular category progressed over the years where early on it had to be something very simplistic, just new thought movement, Christian science, stuff that's just very plainly stated and plainly written and easy to intellectually take in.

[00:32:27] And then I started getting into deeper and deeper texts. And man, I'd be in there underlining things, highlighting, contemplating, and looking up the words in the dictionary, just these really deep studies. And then came audio books and then came podcasts and then came social media, and someone will send me a great book like yours right here, The Vagas-Immune Connection, by the way, and I'll sit down and read it. And I'm very interested in the topic, and I literally just can't read. I'm so bored.

[00:33:01] What the hell happened? And you just described what it is. And I've had a sense that that's what it is. I didn't know how to explain it in terms of neurochemistry, but it's taken a lot of retraining myself to be able to actually sit and read a book and remain present, and to find the reward in it that's so much more subtle than the ding, ding, ding, likes, comments, refresh, refresh reward, which it's digital cracks.

[00:33:30] JP: There's no question.

[00:33:31] Luke: Yeah. And I don't know what the equivalent of reading an analog book is. Maybe it's 1970s Mexican weed. It's just much more subtle, mellow, and not immediate in its reward. I'm glad we brought that up. For anyone listening, let's all support each other in getting back to reading. It's a different experience.

[00:33:54] JP: Video games are the same. It's not just to scroll.

[00:33:57] Luke: Oh God, I can only imagine.

[00:33:58] JP: I remember my uncle, my business partner, he talked about my cousin who at the time was probably 12 or 13 years old, and they went away on a vacation to a dude ranch, where they didn't have connectivity. We're talking 20-some-odd years ago. And he said he watched as his son went through the classic signs of withdrawal, a drug withdrawal.

[00:34:23] He was irritable. He was rude. He was isolating himself, wasn't engaged for 24, 36 hours. And then he slowly came out of his shell. And as he came out of his shell, he was more friendly. He was more engaged. He actually ended up having a wonderful time on the trip. It was two weeks long. They had a great time.

[00:34:49] But he said the first two, three days, it was a bit rocky. It was a bit rocky. And taking it forward now, again, back to my kids, my kids go to a pretty good school. I went for a parent-teacher conference, and my son last year was a freshman, but his teacher was sick, and they had the head of the department there to sit in for that.

[00:35:14] I got into a conversation with him, and he teaches the AP class, the Advanced Placement English for seniors. And we were talking about some of the books that they had, and I talked about the fact that reading in my freshman year, we read 30 books that year. And the purpose of that was to get our verbal scores up and get our verbal capabilities up.

[00:35:36] He just shook his head. He said, "We can't do that. Even at the AP level." Even at the AP level, we've had to remove books that are 3, 4, 500 pages long because the kids can't stick with it. They don't have the attention span. Even at the AP level, he said they had to replace-- I can't remember which book it was, but they had to replace it with The Great Gatsby.

[00:36:04] I'm thinking to myself, The Great Gatsby, you read that in eighth grade. He's like, "No, not anymore. It's a senior level class book because they can't keep their attention span." They don't end up reading it. And I'm thinking to myself, that's crazy. That's crazy. We did this. And there are ways to fix that. Part of it is take the drug away.

[00:36:27] The first thing is take the drug away. But the second way is with activating your parasympathetic nervous system. That's how you get back into that ability where you do have enough dopamine. The synthesis of dopamine in your brain is dependent on the state of your autonomic nervous system.

[00:36:47] Luke: Oh, interesting.

[00:36:48] JP: If it's in a long term stressed out chronically activated state, it actually disrupts the immune cells that are in your brain. And most people don't realize the importance of immune cells in your brain. Your brain is actually an immune organ. And I realize that most people go--

[00:37:05] Luke: Yeah. That's what I just did. What?

[00:37:07] JP: The brain is an immune organ. Yeah, we had 86 billion neurons up in our brains. But we have about 10 to 15 billion microglial cells. The name actually originally meant small cells that were glue-- they just thought they were there to stick things together.

[00:37:24] But they spend 94% of their time when they're in the right state, which should be all the time, interacting with the synapses, controlling them, modulating them, taking them away, pruning them away, spontaneously causing new ones to form. When you're in an inflamed state when you're sick, it's really difficult to concentrate and learn when you're sick.

[00:37:49] It's difficult to do that when you're in a chronically-activated stressed out state. Cortisol does that too, activates these microglial cells into an inflamed state, and you can't learn. You can't think clearly. That's what brain fog is. Brain fog is basically an inflammatory state in your brain. It disrupts this production of serotonin. It disrupts the production of dopamine. It disrupts the expression of GABA receptors. It's amazing.

[00:38:20] Luke: That's crazy. That explains why we feel so brain dead when we have a cold.

[00:38:26] JP: It's why chronic fatigue goes with all sorts of different autoimmune diseases that are inflammatory in nature, goes along with fibromyalgia. Mental fatigue too. It's all a function of the fact that you've got an inflammatory state. And those microglial cells, to give you a sense as to how important they are, your brain was built by them.

[00:38:52] They are literally the construction crew. I liken it like this. When conception happens, now you've got this fertilized egg, begins to divide. At some point it's going to implant itself into the sidewall of the uterus so it can grow. It's like building a building. What's the first thing that the general contractor does?

[00:39:14] He sends out some messengers down to the town to authorize the building of a road, so he can bring in all the equipment he needs, and he's going to get the permits. That right there is the very first thing that the fetal, it's not the mother, it's the fetal immune cells do. They're called Hofbauer cells. They leave, and they go into the uterine wall, and they start building the blood supply.

[00:39:45] Those are the roads that are going to bring the material. They actually help to spawn angiogenesis that brings that maternal blood supply to the fetus. They also go and tell all the immune cells, "Hey, I know this is non-self and your job is to get rid of non-self. But this one's going to stay. We're going to keep this one."

[00:40:03] So they're super anti-inflammatory. Then what else, at a construction site, do they do? The general contractor brings out a mobile home, puts the mobile home in. It's not going to stay, but it's there so that the construction managers, the architects, and the GM, they can all be there in an air-conditioned environment instructing things and what's going to happen.

[00:40:28] And then they tell the workers what to do, and then the workers leave from that, and they go into the girders, and then they build the building. That's what happens inside that placental bubble, is there's a structure called the yolk sac. And inside the yolk sac, separate from the embryo, there's a group of cells that leave from there, go into the embryo, and the first place they go is the neural tube, which is just an empty tube. Goes to a spot where the heart is going to be, a spot where the liver is going to be, and they go into the dermal layers to grow skin, which should tell you how important skin is.

[00:41:08] So those four areas get infused with tissue resident macrophages, immune cells. And those immune cells literally build those organs, and then they go and build your reproductive organs. They build your lungs. They build your spleen. They build your kidneys. They build it all. They build your bones.

[00:41:28] They literally build every aspect of your body, and then they stay there. It's almost like you got chaperones. About 10 to 15% of every organ and every tissue in your body are these tissue resident macrophages. They're immune cells, and their job is to maintain, support, remodel when necessary, and protect.

[00:41:49] But you don't want them to have to go into that protection mode, because when they go into that protection mode, they stop doing the other things they're supposed to be doing. And when that happens, all hell breaks loose, and that's where degeneration happens. That's where tissue gets cancerous.

[00:42:05] All these things happen because these immune cells are no longer doing their job. Happens in the brain. Those microglial cells are there for your entire life. They have an 80, 90, 100-year lifespan. In fact, eight hours after you're dead, they're still moving around, still trying to fix things. It's pretty amazing. A little creepy on that one, but it's pretty cool.

[00:42:29] Luke: That's a trip. That also speaks to why it can be so detrimental to an embryo when the mother's in a stressed state for prolonged periods of time. There's all sorts of issues that arise as a result of the mom being in an abusive relationship, in a car accident, or any acute or chronic stress. If she's sympathetic too much of the time, obviously all of that signaling that you just described is going to be affected.

[00:42:56] JP: Yeah. And you just landed head on on one of the areas that I'm doing research right now up in British Columbia with a great partner, Marie-Ève Tremblay. She's a brilliant neuro immunologist. She knows everything there is to know at this point about microglial cells.

[00:43:19] She's been a pioneer. We actually had her on a podcast that I do, and we got to talking, and we talked about autism, schizophrenia, and other neurodevelopmental conditions. And there's something called maternal immune activation. So all those things you talked about when the mother is-- it can just be an infection.

[00:43:41] It can be being obese. Any one of a number of things can lead to the mother being in that inflamed state. They actually call it maternal immune activation. So the mother's immune system is activated. There's inflammatory cytokines circulating. And the effect that that can have on fetal brain development is pretty devastating.

[00:44:07] Now, it doesn't always do this, and I certainly don't want to be blaming moms for autism or schizophrenia in their children, but the animal studies are pretty convincing. And the human research that's been done is pretty spot on saying that this is the reason why you're seeing autism rates skyrocketing. It's a big part of it.

[00:44:33] Now, obviously it can also happen in early childhood. Froot Loops and the rest of it is definitely having an effect on it, but probably a third to half of autism is a function of the fetus being exposed to high levels of inflammation in the mother. And the inflammation can be stress related, can be as a result of that chronic stress state.

[00:44:59] So that old grandmotherly advice that pregnant women should put their feet up and eat bonbons, maybe that's not culturally what we're talking about today and not practical for most people, but maybe it should be something that we as a society recognize, that if a woman's going to make the decision to have a child, there should be more than just, okay, you get three weeks off, after the baby's born.

[00:45:27] Maybe it's what you're doing before the baby's born that's really, really important. And we got to take that into consideration in terms of what job expectations are, how we allow you to take that time off to have a child and then get right back into wherever you want to be. And not hold it against people.

[00:45:46] I think that's the bad part that happens. But the good part is we're learning about it, but the scariest part for me. And I don't understand why this isn't emblazoned on the front pages of the New York Times or any other newspaper you want to choose from-- it should be on all of them-- is that the same mechanisms that are driving autism will have the same effect on schizophrenia.

[00:46:17] It's just the timing of when it happens during pregnancy. It's the same exact insults that do this. And we are seeing this skyrocketing level of autism. And that tells me that 15 to 20 years from now, because autism is diagnosed typically by age five, schizophrenia isn't diagnosed until age late teens, early 20s, or even late 20s, it's 15 to 20 years delayed.

[00:46:46] So if we're seeing this skyrocketing level of autism, that's like the canary in the coal mine telling us that 15 to 20 years from now, we're going to have this same problem with schizophrenia. And we're seeing it already. We're seeing levels of mental health problems skyrocket. Whether it's mass shootings or homelessness, whatever,

[00:47:15] Luke: Any trip to an inner city will give you purview of that. And for those of us that are of the gen-- I think you're in your 50s.

[00:47:24] JP: Yeah.

[00:47:24] Luke: Yeah, I'm in my 50s. I grew up outside of San Francisco, and you'd go into San Francisco, and there'd be a few mentally ill people and homeless people here and there. But if you contrast that with a city like that today, and there are obviously socioeconomic influences and all sorts of things going on there that would be another podcast entirely, but there are clearly more mentally ill adults, diabolic mental illness than I ever remember. It's like a zombie apocalypse kind of situation in some cities.

[00:48:00] JP: And there's drugs that are leading to that, some of that, but even the use of the drugs, the decision to start using the drugs is something-- I think one comedian said, "You can't read a book. You can't listen to anything on the radio or on podcasts. You can't watch a television show or go to the movies and come out with somebody having said the message was, yeah, take drugs. It's a good idea."

[00:48:27] No. We know it's not a good idea. And yet we have lots and lots of people who are making that decision. And you say to yourself, okay, some of it may be socioeconomic, but my God, we've had problems before.

[00:48:41] What is it about the people that are making that decision? And that's where, as I said, I got four kids, age 12 to 17. And I know, and I'm not naming any names, but there are kids that I'm interacting with as a result of that. And they're not autistic, but they're not right.

[00:49:05] There's something not right going on. And as a parent, a parent who cares, I'm worried about it. Because I'm watching some of these decisions that kids are making. I'm thinking to myself, I would never have said those things. I would never have done those things. And yet, it seems so commonplace now. I think it's a decision kids are making. And I think that's a function of the fact that neurodevelopmentally there's some problems going on.

[00:49:37] Luke: Absolutely.

[00:49:40] JP: Yeah.

[00:49:41] Luke: Going back to the nervous system, something I thought of earlier, do you know anything about how the nervous system stores emotional trauma? And I bring that up because there are practitioners of, say, somatic experiencing. I've done a little bit of that, where different movement, breathing, body work.

[00:50:02] Next thing you know, you're reliving your childhood trauma. It's like, whoa, I didn't know that was stuck there. In fact, the first time I became aware of that, I didn't even know it was happening, but this is going back almost 30 years. I went to see this Maori family who did this traditional Maori healing, which included body work and things like that.

[00:50:23] And I had my face down, so I didn't know who it was or what they were doing, but I think they might've been standing on me. Big guys, big Maoris. But I remember this intense pressure on the back of my thighs and just grinding into that. And I'm wincing and yelling. And then at one point I just started bawling, but I wasn't crying because of the physical pain.

[00:50:49] I was crying because it was taking me back through all of these memories of painful emotional experiences that I'd had as a kid. And it was so weird. It was almost like a real-life flashes before your eyes kind of thing. I'm just seeing all these old '70s movies playing and have just gnarly shit that I experienced, and I was processing the grief as a result.

[00:51:11] And they didn't really explain what was happening, but looking back, I think that there was a memory in the nervous system, a memory in the tissues that stored those experiences and just held onto it and would probably never let it go unless I did something to try to release it. So thoughts about that aspect of the nervous system.

[00:51:31] JP: There's three different lines of thought that come. Let's tackle the first one, which is a great story that lines up with what you experienced. And this was shared with to me by a chiropractor by the name of David Yoder, Dr. David Yoder. Wonderful guy. Really thoughtful. He had a patient who was a guy probably in his 60s, and he had had this horrible rash on his legs that wasn't healing.

[00:52:05] And he had gone to people, dermatologists, and other partialists for years, trying to figure out how to solve this painful-- it didn't functionally stop him from being able to do things, but it was painful all the time. Couldn't resolve it, and he went to David finally after four or five years of dealing with this. And David Yoder asked a question, which sounds so benign, but he asked the question, sounds so normal, but he just asked it in a slightly different way.

[00:52:39] Doctors usually say, "Okay, when did this start?" He said something different. He said, "What was happening in your life when this started?" Which is an interesting way of phrasing it. And the guy responded. He said, "Actually, it was a pretty difficult time for me. My wife and I were up in Northern California, and my son had moved down to LA. And he had gotten a job, but he was having difficulties at the job, and he didn't know anybody. And we just got really concerned about him. And then we didn't hear from him for three or four days.

[00:53:17] "And so that Saturday morning, early, I got up, and I drove down. I went to his apartment, and I found that he had committed suicide. And he had actually done it several days earlier. So there was body decomposition and bugs and things that had gotten to the body. It was pretty grisly. And I had to stay there because the police and the coroners had to come and do their thing. And it was a horrible experience. And I got bitten. I got bitten by those bugs."

[00:53:50] And David Yoder is obviously listening to this, and he's saying, "It's terrible. Have you ever gone through any grief therapy?" The guy broke down, said no, he hadn't. And so David Yoder said, "Listen, we're going to work on the rash, but I think you need grief therapy." Sure enough, two weeks later, came back, 80% of the rash was gone. By a month, it was completely gone. His body had retained that experience of being bitten.

[00:54:22] So he's literally had five years’ worth of bug bites that just had never gotten better because his immune system was in constant fight or flight. His autonomic nervous system was in constant chronic sympathetic activation. He was actually in freeze mode. So people talk about fight, flight, but there's other pieces of it. It's fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. It's actually the four F's. It's a four-letter word and starts with F.

[00:54:49] Luke: I’m a freezer personally.

[00:54:52] JP: Freeze is where you see--

[00:54:55] Luke: That's my innate response. Obviously I've worked on it a lot, but I'm not the guy that's going to punch you in the face. I'm just going to sit there with a blank stare and go, "Okay." Disappear into the wall.

[00:55:05] JP: It's a sympathetic response. So that's a part of that memory. Now, triggering memories can obviously happen in a similar way if you're experiencing something. Smells are really, really important, powerful trigger for memories. But muscles, when you were basically having a deep-tissue massage that was happening at the time, painful, but it-- muscles actually are an organ.

[00:55:33] We've come to realize-- fat used to be, oh, that's just energy storage. No, it's an organ. It has its own set of communicating chemicals that get released and are important. Muscles have the same thing. We've discovered the hope molecules. I don't know if you've heard about those, but yeah, when muscles are contracting and you're exercising, it releases incredibly powerful antidepressant chemicals that actually are critical for your stability, your mental health.

[00:56:05] That's why Soren Kierkegaard, I think he was Scandinavian philosopher from 100 years ago, has a great, I actually have it up in my house, mantra about the power of walking. He says, "I've never had a problem so difficult that I couldn't walk away from. And nothing so horrible has happened in my life that I can't walk away from. Nothing has ever injured me, or no illness that I haven't been able to walk away from." So just moving your muscles. Movement is an incredibly powerful way to tell your brain and your autonomic nerve system that you're okay.

[00:56:47] Getting up and moving, even thinking about moving. We have mirror neurons in that area of our brain. You can actually learn how to play tennis better by simply watching people play tennis. And if you do an MRI and watch how the signals are bouncing around the brain, they move the same way, whether you're actually physically doing it or watching somebody else do it.

[00:57:09] So you're actually training. That's why film work is so important. I always talk about the way high school don't do film work the way they should. You don't do it AAU level in basketball. You should spend time watching film. And I watched my son. He watches hours of basketball every day.

[00:57:25] He's a really good basketball player. He was on the varsity team as an eighth grader. He's not Incredibly, let's say athletically gifted, but his body has just been trained. The memory is now installed because of how the brain tracks your own muscle movements and other people's muscle movements.

[00:57:49] Luke: Boxers too, right?

[00:57:50] JP: Yeah.

[00:57:51] Luke: He was watching hours and hours of their opponents fights, studying them?

[00:57:54] JP: Becomes instinctive. They don't even have to think. Now it's in their muscles, they do it. But the other thing I wanted to get to, the third line is a fascinating one. I'm sure it's going to open a can of worms here. But is intragenerational trauma, or intergenerational trauma. And this is the concept that if something bad happened to your grandmother, it affects you physically.

[00:58:21] When I first heard that, I said, "Okay, I don't know how that happens. That seems like it might be a little new age-ish, but I'm open to it. Let's start thinking about it." And I started reading about epigenetics and understanding that there's epigenetic mechanisms by which generational trauma can actually be passed down.

[00:58:49] And it can last for, at minimum, four generations. And they've looked at it from kids who had to live through a famine and then survived and then had children. How their children and their grandchildren respond to food, not just how they think about it, but how their bodies store food, how their metabolisms function.

[00:59:17] And it's because of the epigenetic changes that take place. Let me describe epigenetics, because it's been known for a while, but it's not out there in the public that much. We know, well, we got genes, and we got DNA, and the genes are in the DNA, and the genes code for proteins, and all that.

[00:59:35] Luke: It's funny that you stopped to do that because I used that term in some writing that I'm working on and my editor came back, and she's like, dude, you have to explain what epigenetics are. You can't just assume everyone knows that. So thank you. You'll help me learn so that I can explain it in a way that is relatable to people.

[00:59:51] JP: No problem. No problem. Happy to do that. And you're absolutely right. Everybody should know about this because epigenetics gets conflated with genetics, and they're not the same thing. The easiest way to describe is every cell in your body has the same DNA. But every cell in your body functions differently.

[01:00:09] It does different things. Your liver cells are different from your kidney cells, are different from your brain cells, are different from your skin cells. They're carrying the same DNA. So how does the skin cell know to be a skin cell? How does it know to make the proteins that are associated with being a skin cell and doing skin function things?

[01:00:27] It does that because as your stem cells differentiate and become a skin cell, become a brain cell, become a kidney cell, some of those genes that are in that DNA get turned off. So how do you turn it off? Well, you put a little chemical mark on it. Your DNA can actually have a little chemical methylation, so this is a carbon with a couple of hydrogens on it placed onto some of the nucleotides.

[01:00:54] And that then changes the accessibility of that gene to being transcribed and turned into proteins. If I took the DNA out of one of your cells and stretched it out all the way, it would be about 1.6 meters high, about 5 feet tall. But it's sitting inside a tiny little cell, so it has to be wrapped up really tight, really well-organized.

[01:01:22] And it is. It's wrapped around proteins called histones. Those histones can also be chemically marked. And when they're chemically marked, sometimes that marks them so that they stay open, and the gene is read frequently, or it can be locked down. So, again, you don't get access to that gene. And probably about 50% of the genes in any given cell are locked away, but they're different.

[01:01:50] The ones in the skin cell are locked away, and they've got one set of genes that are being used. Brain cells have a different set. Kidney cells have a different set. When you're under trauma, when you go through life and things happen, those marks get changed. They get damaged or new ones get put on.

[01:02:13] And that changes how you respond to your environments, the way the environment actually changes us, not genetically, but epigenetically. And that can be inherited. That can be inherited because now you're actually messing with those genes a little bit, not in their sequence, but in how they're accessible.

[01:02:36] And the accessibility of those genes just puts a layer of complexity on how the genome functions that is like astronomically more important than people ever realized before. In fact, cancer is almost certainly a function of the interplay between your mitochondria, the energy producing organelles of your cells and your epigenome.

[01:03:03] Think about cancer as being, oh, it's a phenomenon of genetic mutation. Now you're conflating genes and epigene. Because your epigenome is what's getting changed. When the mitochondria are inflamed and dysfunctional, they're producing all these reactive oxygen species that are damaging those epigenetic marks. So you're literally drifting away from where you need to be. You've got to figure out a way to bring it back into a healthy state.

[01:03:35] Luke: Wow. You're a smart MFer, dude. I'm like, "Wow."

[01:03:41] JP: I'm just curious. I'm curious to understand this.

[01:03:45] Luke: It's funny, I was saying to my wife, my famous last words, I'm like, "I think this one will be relatively short." Because we're talking about something so specific, the nervous system, the vagus nerve. How long can you talk about that? I didn't know that you were so well versed in so many different aspects of health. So I'm having a blast. This is fascinating to me. And my answers are being delivered in a way that exceeds expectations. So thank you.

[01:04:10] JP: I appreciate that.

[01:04:11] Luke: I've looked at the epigenetic thing really from, as you said, the new agey lens, more of a karmic, energetic, esoteric kind of lens. I had no idea that there was actually this much hard science involved in that. If my great grandmother had X, Y, and Z happened, she was raped, in a war, or something like that, it's not just the energy of that. It's actually the energy of the experience affecting gene expression in a trickle down way down to me. It's crazy.

[01:04:45] JP: Everybody knows Darwin. But before Darwin, there was a guy named Lamarck. Lamarck was the guy we see the pictures of the giraffe with no neck. And his argument was that giraffes that have no neck, well, they'll reach higher and try to reach the leaves and as a result of their lives stretching their necks, that will make the next generation have a longer neck.

[01:05:14] Anybody who's studied Darwin will just roll over his grave and be like, "That's not how it works." But people don't realize that Darwin was actually a big fan of Lamarck. Darwin actually thought Lamarck had a lot of really good ideas. And what we're finding is that there are two different forms of inheritance.

[01:05:36] There is Darwinian genetics, but there's almost a Lamarckian version of genetics that's epigenetics. That's where you do interact with your surroundings. How your body functions, how your body works, and how you transmit your features to your children is affected by how you interacted with your environment. Now, of course, it has to be prior to you actually having a child. Because if it happens to you when you're 50, not really going to affect your kids because that already happened.

[01:06:10] Luke: Right.

[01:06:12] JP: Especially childhood experiences do get transferred through genetics, but it's epigenetics. And the funny thing is that you need that. We need this. Evolution needs this. Because if you're just relying on genetic changes, well, that happens randomly. It takes a long time to ripple through the population. To give you an example, adults being able to drink and digest milk, most species don't have that ability to eat dairy.

[01:06:47] Human beings have that, and only some do, because you got all these people who are lactose intolerant. It comes back to just a one tribe that existed in the Caucasus which is southern Russia, that had this mutation. And as a result, their adults could drink milk. And that happened about, some people say as much as 15,000 years ago. Some people say it's only about 8,000 years ago. But that's still rippling through the human population.

[01:07:19] So there's a whole bunch of people who don't have Caucasian genes in them are lactose intolerant. African Americans are more lactose intolerant than Caucasians. I don't know the situation is with Asians, but at the end of the day, that's a very slow process. It's a very slow process.

[01:07:38] Epigenetics allows you to deal with it really rapidly-- one generation. Now, it doesn't do everything, but it allows your experiences to make your children, your grandchildren, and the children in the next generation more capable of handling more transient environmental changes.

[01:08:02] Things like if you lived through what we talked about before, through a drought or through a famine, your children and your grandchildren are going to be more capable of doing that and are going to be more motivated to move. It's actually interesting. They're going to be more motivated to be migratory.

[01:08:21] And the reason for that is because that makes your children more likely to survive. And so what we're finding is that those changes don't need to last more than three or four generations. So they reset after three or four generations. Because things like famines change. Like Eskimos. Their fat layers are different from people who live in the tropics.

[01:08:53] If you take a person who's an Eskimo and put her down in the tropics, it's going to have some heat issues. And that's going to probably be the same for his kids and his kids after that. But by three or four generations, it wears off because you want to be able to handle any environment that's on the planet, not just the one that your grandparents came from.

[01:09:17] Luke: So cool.

[01:09:18] JP: It is really cool.

[01:09:18] Luke: I love it. Nature is just amazing. Whatever it is that created us, the human design, the design of this reality is just-- that's why I never get sick of having these conversations. Every time there's something in a conversation where I go, "What? Whoa."

[01:09:36] JP: That's why I said, I'm curious.

[01:09:38] Luke: It's so fascinating. Yeah, I'm the same way. I'm the same way. I want to understand all the intricate aspects of what makes us tick. It's never ending, and it's fascination for me.

[01:09:49] JP: To me, it's like we have been gifted the most complicated machine in the history of the universe. Our brains, our bodies, nothing's even comparable. And yet we all have one, and we don't have an instruction manual. The instruction manual for this thing should be a million pages thick, and we don't have one.

[01:10:13] Now, we've been spending the last 15,000 years trying to write things down that make sense. Start writing things down. Very, very early on, I mean, we're talking 8, 10,000 years ago. They recognized the importance of those two states, that parasympathetic state and the sympathetic state.

[01:10:33] In fact, the very first medication that was ever made that's still lasting today is something called colchicine. It's made by the Egyptians. There's probably a million prescriptions of colchicine every year. It modulates your autonomic nervous system.

[01:10:47] Luke: Really?

[01:10:47] JP: Yeah. And what does acupuncture do? It's regulating the yin and the yang. It's those two states. They recognized it. They recognized it. They understood it. They didn't understand it the way we do today at the biochemical level, at the microscopic level. But I think they were more open to things. They were better observers than we are.

[01:11:11] I think we get wrapped up in the trappings of our technology, and we don't necessarily see the patterns that we need to. Hopefully we're going to get back to that. The whole process is a wonderful journey that I've been on about vagus nerve stimulation, is understanding that aspect of that million-page book.

[01:11:37] I joke that a wormhole opened up from 3,000 years in the future. And this book plopped down into my hands, and I got to look at it for five minutes and then they took it away. And it just bleeped back to 3,000 years in the future. But what I saw made me go, "Holy crap. This is totally cool."

[01:11:59] And it's just driven me. I'm just sitting here going, "I want to tell everybody." The autonomic nervous system is so critically important. And they spend literally half a day in most medical training. Most doctors, you talk to them about the vagus nerve like, yeah, that causes people to pass out. That causes bradycardia.

[01:12:33] I'm like, "No, only 20% of the fibers do that. Those are the C fibers. You need to get to the A and B fibers. Those fibers are the ones that we stimulate with the device, and they actually do the opposite. They actually calm you down. They relax you. They don't knock you out. They don't make it more difficult to breathe. They slow your heart rate, but they don't make it stop.

[01:12:56] So it's just been an incredible journey, and there's been so many little blessings that have come out of it that, even from my own family, things that have happened as a result of it, both physiologically, mentally, and emotionally, that are really, really cool. And I just want to share it with everybody.

[01:13:18] Luke: Epic. I'm excited to carry on. The show notes, by the way, folks, will be found at lukestorey.com/vagus. Not like Las Vegas, but like the nerve. V-A-G-U-S. lukestorey.com/vagus.

[01:13:31] So let's get into this technology created, the Truvaga. And I guess a good way to get into that, we've alluded to the Vegas nerve, but let's just start on framing that in a way that really lands for people, what it does, why it's important, and that we actually have the ability to impact it positively.

[01:13:54] JP: Okay. So I'm going to give you a little background history of how this happened. For literally hundreds of years, medical professionals knew that if a person was having something called supraventricular tachycardia, it's a cardiac condition where your heart's pounding and it hurts, and you've got high heart rate, that if you dug your thumb into the person's neck and rubbed the carotid artery, that you could stop it.

[01:14:23] It's called a deep carotid massage. Now, the thumb is not a very discerning medical instrument, but it worked. Now, sometimes it made people pass out. It was also known that it could stop an epileptic seizure, which was pretty cool. If the seizure wasn't breaking on its own, you could do the deep carotid massage, and it would help. Not always, but it was pretty reliable.

[01:14:45] And so in 1880, or in the 1880s, there was a neurologist from upstate New York. His name was John Leonard Corning. And I think he may have been a member of the Corning Glass family, maybe distant, but he was a brilliant guy. Invented a bunch of things, discovered a bunch of things. But he came to think that maybe it wasn't the carotid artery, but it was the nerve that ran right next to it, literally in the same sheath, the vagus nerve.

[01:15:15] And so he decided that he was going to stimulate it and press it at the same time. So he developed this technology where you could push something in and do the deep carotid massage like a thumb, but it was like an electric thumb. Now, fortunately for me, he was not a very good electrical engineer. And in fact electrical engineering didn't exist at the time. So that was a very short life on his electrocompressor.

[01:15:39] But it was still a good idea, and people over the next frankly 40 or 50 years started to think about, okay, what happens if we electrically stimulate that nerve? 1920s they did things. 1950s they did things. Fast forward literally 100 years to the 1980s, and a company right from this area down here, a company called Cyberonics, was founded in the 1980s to develop an implant that would treat epilepsy.

[01:16:11] It was like a pacemaker. Put a little pacemaker generator in your chest, but instead of running it to your heart, you run it to the vagus nerve. And they did their studies on epilepsy and found that, yeah, it worked. Works really well to stop seizures. Not necessarily seizures that are happening right now, but prevent seizures.

[01:16:32] So if you've got bad refractory seizure issues and you're having seizures multiple times a day, all of a sudden you're having them once a week or once a month. And that was pretty exciting. But they found along the way that it did other things, like people were talking about how their mood was improving. So they went after depression. They got an approval for depression. But all the time, they were thinking that its effects were on neurotransmitters in the brain, that it was directly affecting neurotransmitters. The whole loop was just that.

[01:17:10] I got interested in the area of neuromodulation because along that spine journey that I was on, spinal orthopedics, I got introduced to some neurosurgeons who were doing deep brain stimulation. They, at the time, were doing it for Parkinson's and essential tremor. So I got to sit in on some of these surgeries. It's the coolest thing. You got this person who's got really bad Parkinson's disease. They're shaking like a leaf, and they put them in this stereotactic frame, which means they basically bolt these screws into the skull. Patient is awake. And with just local anesthetic, they cut a hole into the brain, into through the skull.

[01:17:45] Luke: And you watch this?

[01:17:46] JP: Oh yeah. It's the coolest thing.

[01:17:47] Luke: Oh my God.

[01:17:47] JP: It's very tedious because it takes about six to eight hours for them to-- they take this very long electrode, and they stick it-- very thin-- into the brain all the way down the brainstem. They got this stereotactic frame. They've got all these video monitors and CAT scans, making certain that they get the exact right spot. And when they finally get there and they turn on, the shaking stops completely. Patient is completely normal. And you think to yourself, that's magic.

[01:18:15] They turn it off, shaking starts again. Turn it on, stops. You can actually get on YouTube and see people who have got these stimulators for essential tremor. And they turn them on and turn them off, and they start shaking. And then they turn them on and they go away. And I got so fascinated by it, I wanted to do something in the field. I didn't know what it was.

[01:18:36] So I started a company. We spent some money, hired some engineers, but I needed to figure out what I was going to do. And I remember along the way, this neurosurgeon I was working with said to me, he said, "Anytime anybody's cut a nerve, and as a result of cutting the nerve gained a clinical benefit, maybe you could find a way to stimulate the nerve instead and get that same benefit."

[01:18:57] And so it was literally Saturday afternoon. I was recently married. My wife was downstairs trying to rearrange my bachelor kitchen. I didn't want to go down and help. I was being a jerk. I sat upstairs, and I got online, and I just did a search anytime anybody cut a nerve. Came up with a couple of ideas, and one of them was this study from my birth year. It was done in the Soviet Union.

[01:19:22] They had taken dogs, and they had sensitized the dogs so that they would be allergic to egg white, and they gave these dogs lethal injections so they would have anaphylactic reactions and die. But in half the dogs, before they did that, they cut the vagus nerve. And what they found was that all the dogs where they cut the vagus nerve survived. And I said, "Okay, I can put two and two together." They cut the nerve and they got him to survive. I'm going to stimulate the nerve to see if we can survive.

[01:19:50] And sure enough, about four months later, we were at Columbia University Hospital in New York, working with some research anesthesiologists who we hired to do that study. And miraculously, it worked. We could literally take an animal that had been sensitized and was going to have a lethal anaphylactic reaction. And by stimulating the nerve-- at that point we had to cut in, actually expose the nerve and wrap a lead around it, etc.

[01:20:14] But we could stop the anaphylactic reaction from killing the animal. And so we started doing more work around this, and we thought it was fascinating. And the anesthesiologist said, "It's really interesting because when a person has an anaphylactic reaction, one of the things you see is their lungs. It's almost like an asthma attack. They get all this edema, and they have bronchospasm. They get locked up." Not seeing that.

[01:20:40] And I said, "Maybe we should try it in asthma." And they all sort of went, "Why didn't we think of that?" I was like, "You did. You just told me to do that." We did, and it was remarkable. We could literally stop an asthma attack like that. It was better than albuterol. Literally, a person's having an asthma attack, they're huffing and puffing, wheezing. We did this in a clinical study. We have the papers to prove it. People hunched over, struggling to breathe, nebulizers, all that stuff not working.

[01:21:13] Stim them, and they just sit back. And they're like, "What did you do? I can breathe. My lungs feel 10 feet wide." It was the coolest thing. But we started to also hear that it was helping with people's headaches. And that's when I would say the company went and had this fork in the road. Merck, the pharmaceutical company, came in. They wanted to invest. But they wanted us to drop the whole asthma line. They wanted us to focus only on headache.

[01:21:45] Luke: They want to sell inhalers.

[01:21:46] JP: They said the inhalers. Listen, it was a business decision. They said, "Listen, albuterol is slightly less expensive than sand. But these little pills that we give people for headaches, they're like 20 bucks a piece."

[01:21:58] Luke: All right.

[01:21:59] JP: You can keep your price high. I'm like, "Yeah, but I want to know two things. One, I want to know that we can do that also. And two, I want to do more. I want to understand why it is that this is affecting asthma and migraines." And also, we know it works on epilepsy and depression. And I'm reading papers here that say that it might work for fibromyalgia.

[01:22:26] Either we're selling snake oil or we're doing something pretty fundamental. They weren't that interested. Merck didn't want to spend any money on that. They wanted to, let's just make a headache product and go. I was fortunate enough to be the CEO and one of the big investors in the company at the time, and I just did my own thing. I did what they wanted to do, but I also did what I wanted to do. And along the way, it's been this incredible journey.

[01:22:56] And I mentioned, one of the things that really got, I wouldn't say suppressed because that's not really the right way of saying it, but was not the focus of the company for many years when it should have been, is DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They're the guys who are making the hypersonic planes and night vision goggles and rest of it.

[01:23:21] Back in 2015 or '16, they started a program called the TNT program, and they spent 100 million. And the idea was they wanted to see whether or not any of this neuromodulation technologies, and 20 of them that they looked at, could make people smarter, could actually have a cognitive improvement effect.

[01:23:47] And so their studies went on for a couple of years, and they came back to us and said, "Yours does that. None of the others do." But it's not just a small effect either. It's pretty big. It's like 30, 40, 50% improvement in people's ability to concentrate, focus, learn, apply knowledge, make memories, maintain those memories.

[01:24:11] We want to take this forward. Okay. Military money. Go for it. But then they came back to us, and they were convinced. They said, "Listen, we want to deploy this. We want to go out there and do this. But we can't have this be a prescription product because we're going to be using this on people who are healthy normals.” And the military's got a bad track record of using prescription medications on people. I'm not saying anything, but Tuskegee.

[01:24:41] Luke: Especially DARPA. There's a light and shadow side to all things. They've definitely been up to some shenanigans over the years.

[01:24:49] JP: They built the night vision goggles so they could walk through the dark. But I was sitting there saying, "Of course, we can do this. Of course." And they said, "We need you to make it a wellness product also. We need you to create a wellness product." Now, at that point, I wasn't the CEO. I was the chief science and strategy officer.

[01:25:07] I was on the board, but I was overwhelmed by the fact that the people that were in control of the company said, "No, we're not going to do that. We're going to keep it as a drug. You're going to have to get a prescription. We're not going to do that. We want to maintain our super high pricing."

[01:25:23] And I just said, "I don't like that. I don't like that. I think this has benefits here that could really help everybody." Literally as a species. If we generally have an IQ of 100 and this is the state of the world, don't you think it would be better if everybody's IQ is 115?

[01:25:46] I think everybody would be a little more chill. Everybody would be a little more intelligent. Everybody would be making better decisions. And I think there'd be a lot less conflict and a lot better economic policies and all the rest of it. So I thought that was a bad decision.

[01:26:03] And the funny thing was that the military did too. The military actually said, "We're going to pursue this, whether you follow suit with what we want or not." And they went out and they tried to find other people to basically break our patents and try to make a product. And fortunately for us, we changed the leadership in the company, and the guys that they went to were honest people. They came back and basically told the military, “We can't do this. We can't break their patents. We can't figure out a way around it. You got to work with them.”

[01:26:45] And so they called us back and said, "We really want this." Now, at that point we had smarter people at in leadership who said, "Oh my God, we still have this opportunity? Absolutely. Let's do it." And so we went forward and created the wellness product that is now TAC-STIM.

[01:27:06] So the military has their own version. It's called TAC-STIM. It's being deployed for special forces. They actually just published a great paper in Nature, science communications around its use at the Defense Language Institute, like the CIA foreign language school.

[01:27:22] You got these top guys who can learn languages. Well, they're focusing 30% better. They're learning things 40% faster and remembering them 50% better when they use the device. And I know why. I understand the science behind it, but I'm looking at that and saying, "That is an application that everybody should want." Everybody. You want a cognitive improvement? You want a little boost to your brain power? Use the device. It will help you learn.

[01:27:53] Luke: I didn't even know that. When I got the device, I just thought, oh. I think I just looked at the four bullet points-- improve sleep, you feel more relaxed, migraines, whatever it was. And I said, "Oh, that's all good." But knowing that--

[01:28:07] JP: It's pretty cool.

[01:28:07] Luke: Yeah, knowing that I'm like, all right, I need to put this thing on my nightstand. It literally does two minutes twice a day if you're going to do the whole thing. It's a very low barrier to entry even for very busy people.

[01:28:20] JP: I know people are supposed to brush your teeth for two minutes and they don't. Take the rest of the two minutes and use this.

[01:28:24] Luke: That's cool.

[01:28:26] JP: And the coolest part, I didn't get to the coolest part, which is not only does it do it that for adults, but part of what I'm studying along the lines of autism and schizophrenia is what it can do to a normal person during childhood development. Because your brain goes through lots of development as you're growing.

[01:28:51] I actually did the experiment in my own house inadvertently. Because I had one child who had a real serious inflammation problem, eczema, headaches, stomach aches, all the classic symptoms of this inflammatory problem. And I started using it on her at a time when her teachers literally said, "She's a little slow."

[01:29:16] Now, of course, I was saying, "She's not slow." But she started using it twice a day. Not only did it utterly clear up her eczema. Not only did it completely eliminate the four to five headaches a week that she was having to zero. Literally, overnight gone for the rest of the--

[01:29:35] Luke: That was just from the inflammatory response being quelled by modulating the nervous system?

[01:29:42] JP: Yea, absolutely.

[01:29:42] Luke: Wow, that's crazy.

[01:29:45] Luke: How old was she at the time?

[01:29:46] JP: She was seven.

[01:29:47] Luke: Oh, okay. Did she have any resistance to it?

[01:29:50] JP: No, not at all because it was instantaneous. I actually didn't even realize how fast it was. They call eczema the asthma of the skin. And I knew how fast it worked on asthma, but it was the coolest thing. I thought maybe it's going to be a long-term thing.

[01:30:04] It'll take maybe a couple of weeks or even a couple of days if it's fast to help her with her eczema. It happened instantly. She literally was scratching and itching. I put it on her neck, and you can just see it in her eyes. The itching went away. And I just looked at her and I was like--

[01:30:24] Luke: For those that are listening, this won't mean anything, but for those that are watching the video, and he's talking about putting it on your neck, there's little conductive electrodes. And so you put this conductive gel on there and then you hold it. Is that the right spot?

[01:30:39] JP: Yeah, yeah.

[01:30:37] Luke: Okay.

[01:30:39] JP: It's where you feel for your pulse, because that's--

[01:30:40] Luke: Okay. I didn't follow the instructions that well, but I noticed when I would crank it all the way that I go, ah.

[01:30:46] JP: That's actually what you want.

[01:30:47] Luke: Yeah, it would start contracting my muscles and my jaw. And I was like, well, that must be the spot because it's clearly doing something.

[01:30:55] JP: Getting that lip to pull down, there is muscle. It's called the platysma muscle, which I only know because we did the studies. And that muscle sits right next to the vagus nerve and that sheath. And so when you activate that nerve and you get that pull down, you're getting the vagus nerve.

[01:31:13] So that's the little hack. Now, it doesn't work for everybody to get to that lip pull, but for most people it does. And when you get that lip pull, I don't have to go any higher. I'm good at that level. So I ended up with my daughter at age seven, being told that she's slow. We started using the device on her, and within six months, she's the best student in her class.

[01:31:41] Luke: What?

[01:31:42] JP: Actually, at the end of that year, we started in September-- I remember my wife was on a trip to Las Vegas, a business trip. I asked her, I said, "We got to do something. I want to do this." And my wife said, "Absolutely. Let's do it." By the spring, by March or April, she had to do her biography.

[01:32:04] And at that point, I think she was in second grade. She chose to do it on Albert Einstein. And by the end of studying it with me and herself, she went in and explained to her class the difference between special relativity and general relativity. She explained that he got his Nobel Prize for something different from relativity.

[01:32:27] She explained Brownian motion. She explained the photoelectric effect, and she got it right. She was getting it. In fifth grade, she came to me and said, "The school I'm going to, which was the best school around, is not academically challenging enough for me." Mind you, a fifth grader, "I have found a school in the area. It's an hour away, and it's the best school in the state. Will you let me go there?" "Of course, absolutely. I'll do whatever."

[01:33:03] We actually moved the whole family south so she could go there. And they could ultimately too. She ended up being the valedictorian of her class for three years running. She took five years of math in three years. She's already taken multiple classes that are at the high school level.

[01:33:21] And I said, "What else do you want to do?" And she said, "What can I do?" And I said, "You can't really take college level classes in math or sciences because you need to have the basics. But you can study law." So she got it in her head that she wants to try to pass the bar exam before she graduates high school. I'm like, "That's crazy." And she'll tell you that she remembers how her brain worked when she was seven and how it changed.

[01:33:54] Luke: Have any of your other three children observed those results and developed an interest in using your technology?

[01:34:04] JP: Yes and no. Let's just leave it at yes and no. Some of them yes. Some of them no. I love my kids. They all are different.

[01:34:19] Luke: Well, when your parents do something, depending on the age and your level of rebellion, it's like your parents are never cool. You go through stages. When you're really little, maybe your parents are like a God and they're super cool. And then you start going into puberty, and you're like, "Anything my parents say is not cool." So without you having to go into detail, I'm guessing it has something to do with age variations and receptivity to your ideas and guidance.

[01:34:43] JP: I think you are a wise man.

[01:34:45] Luke: Yeah, there you go.

[01:34:46] JP: Exactly it.

[01:34:47] Luke: I'm looking at my dad's mom, my grandmother, my nana. In my 20s, she used to just harp on me about how important sleep was. I was an addict, playing in a rock and roll band. I'm like, "Sleep?" I rarely slept. And I just thought, "Oh, it's cute." It's a granny. And she lived to 99. And it attributed a lot of that to her passion for sleep. And now I'll tell you what, man, at 54, I turned 54 yesterday, I'm like, "God damn it. Nana was right, man."

[01:35:20] It's really, really important. And maybe I didn't feel it as much when I was younger, but I'm sure like the need I have for sleep now is probably a lot of deficit for the decades that I didn't care about it at all because it didn't seem to matter.

[01:35:34] JP: My father, who's passed away a couple of years ago, he had a great line, and I use it with my kids all the time. The older I got, the smarter he got. And I always said it to my kids. I was like, "The older you get, the smarter I get." And that's because they start to learn. They have to learn for themselves. And I try to tell them experience is a hard teacher, but fools will learn from no other.

[01:36:00] Luke: In terms of kids using this device, granted there's a reason to do so and they're interested in doing that, I'm sure there are a lot of parents listening that may have a kid that's had some cognitive deficit or some issue like eczema or whatever. Is there any minimum age recommendation?

[01:36:20] JP: So the prescription product is approved down to 12 years old. The implanted devices, believe it or not, for epilepsy and depression are actually approved down to age five. There's nothing other than the physical size of the device that would prevent somebody from using it on somebody that young.

[01:36:41] Now, I'm not with the company anymore. So when I say what I'm saying, I'm not saying this as the company spokesperson. But vagus nerve stimulation is something that will benefit people from literally gestation if your mother uses it all the way through your life. At no point is there a stage of your life that you're going through where this isn't important and valuable.

[01:37:13] And your grandmother was right. Sleep is important. Sleep is another way to make certain that you get into that restore state, that parasympathetic recovery mode. So I would encourage anybody who wants to use it. I started with my own daughter at age seven.

[01:37:29] Luke: That's an incredible story and that's like a powerful anecdote there.

[01:37:35] JP: I know the plural of anecdote is not evidence, and I'm looking forward to running the study. In fact, I actually want to do it in an autism study. I want to do a study where we take children who have autism and their siblings who don't and start them on the device and show that not only does it improve the autism, get them to be less hyper, less sensitized, hopefully restore some level to their microglia functioning properly, but in the healthy siblings, show that it improves IQ, that it improves their academic performance.

[01:38:21] It makes them smarter. I think both of those things are critically important, and to do it that way will help us segregate out the genetic differences because siblings have a lot of genetic similarity.

[01:38:39] Luke: It's be cool to do it with twins.

[01:38:40] JP: Yeah, it would be. Except you don't typically have one twin who has autism and other not.

[01:38:44] Luke: Oh, really? Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're swimming in the same soup, so to speak.

[01:38:50] JP: Yeah. Fraternal twins, yes. But they don't have the same genetics. They're similar but not the same.

[01:38:57] Luke: I want to let people know if you want to check out the Truvaga, I've been using it off and on. When I first get something, I'm very committed. It says do it twice a day, two minutes, and I do it for a while, and then I get busy and there's other stuff that enters my awareness or home and I start using that. But I'm like, "I'm super into it. I'm going to be doing this every day." But I think what you mentioned earlier before recording, as I said, when I had it on my desk-- I have a bunch of technologies on the desk.

[01:39:24] And then if I want to clear my clutter, then this thing would go in a drawer. And then I forgot about it. So I like the idea of keeping it in the bathroom, where I'm going to go brush my teeth in the morning or keep it on the nightstand. I'm pretty good at habituating myself to something like that.

[01:39:38] So I'm super into it. But for other people that want to check it out, go to lukestorey.com/truvaga, T-R-U-V-A-G-A. We'll put all this in the show description with clickable links. And it looks like if you use the code LUKEPLUS you'll get 30 bucks off the Truvaga Plus, or code LUKE350 for 20 bucks off the Truvaga 350. Explain the difference between the two model because the one I have--

[01:40:06] JP: The one you have downstairs is actually the prescription.

[01:40:08] Luke: That's the medical one. Yeah. It seemed very serious. It wasn't just something you could just go online and buy. So I thought, "What kind of doctor is going to give me a prescription for that one?" So I'm glad you've rolled out the consumer models here. But tell me the difference between the two of them since I haven't tried either of them.

[01:40:27] JP: Sure. So the first one is the Truvaga 350. I view that like a trial device. It has 350 doses. If you use it twice a day, it'll last you five or six months. By that point, you're going to know whether or not it's helping you. And nothing helps everybody. But if it's helping you and you're getting benefit from it, then you can transition to the Truvaga Plus device that will last you for the rest of your life.

[01:40:52] It interfaces with your phone, there's an app, all that kind of stuff. So the Truvaga 350 is cheaper. I think list price is 299. You can get it for 279. Sometimes there's deals online. And then the Plus device is the newer device. And it's a regulatory reason in terms of why the Plus came out later. It's around just certain things when you recharge something versus having a battery-operated. There's different regulations. But the Truvaga Plus is now available. It's been available for about six months. And business is growing quickly.

[01:41:31] Luke: Awesome. I'm glad we had this conversation after there was consumer stuff available. It sucks talking about things that are unattainable. Yeah, this thing's really cool and innovative, but guess what? You probably can't get it because you live in a place where-- whatever. You don't have a doctor that's, no pun intended, sympathetic to your needs and desires. A couple of things I wanted to ask you in relationship to the parasympathetic, etc., is metabolism.

[01:42:05] JP: This is fascinating.

[01:42:07] Luke: Yeah. Because I think now many of us are starting to realize a lot of these diseases are, at their core, just metabolic issues. They're just have to do with energy. So I'm wondering how the relationship meets up here.

[01:42:20] JP: This is absolutely the coolest thing. I told you the story about how I came to develop the vagus nerve stimulator. There was another scientist who actually beat me by about five years. His focus was on the immune system and treating septic shock. His name is Kevin Tracey. And Kevin Tracey started looking at vagus nerve stimulation.

[01:42:44] Now he never got away from making the implantable device, so he was just using the ones that were off the shelf. I think of him as the scientist and I'm the engineer. I'm not the Wright brothers. That's the way I always say it. I'm not the Wright brothers. I didn't invent man flight, but when everybody else was flying around in a biplane, we made the F-16.

[01:43:02] So that's our claim to fame. Obviously, we've done more than that. But the thing that he and his team did-- he's out of the Feinstein Institute on Long Island, which is part of Northwell, which used to be Long Island Jewish. He discovered what's called the cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway.

[01:43:26] It's like the immune reflex. He discovered the way that the nervous system interfaces with the immune system. And it does it by releasing acetylcholine, which is a neurotransmitter. It's the neurotransmitter that's associated with the parasympathetic or the vagus nerve.

[01:43:44] And so he discovered that when acetylcholine is released, that immune cells have a very special receptor. You don't have to remember all the details about what I just said, but this one detail I would remember. They have this receptor, and the receptor is called the Alpha-7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor. Don't have to remember the name. Just remember the Alpha-7 receptor.

[01:44:04] Alpha-7 receptor is on-- those macrophages we were talking about, they're on monocytes. They're on platelets. So it actually affects how you clot, whether or not you're going to hemorrhage or whether or not you can stop bleeding. It's a cool study that they did, and we can talk about that if you want to.

[01:44:19] But the goal here of this line of explanation is to say that they also discovered that that same receptor sits on mitochondria. So mitochondria have the same Alpha-7. So that means that they change how they behave based on acetylcholine. Now you say, "Okay, but that's great. But the acetylcholine, that's in your bloodstream. How is it going to get into the cell down to the--" The cell has specific channels that are designed to bring in acetylcholine.

[01:44:53] So when acetylcholine levels are high, there's acetylcholine coming into the cell that binds to the mitochondrial Alpha-7 receptor, and it changes how well those mitochondria function. That's one way in which it works. Another way is, and this is one of those things where it's like Mother Nature is so freaking cool.

[01:45:18] We talked a little bit about the fact that when you have inflammation, when there's inflammatory cytokines like TN-alpha, IL-1, and things like that floating around in your bloodstream because your immune system is kicking in, what happens is, your cells say to themselves, "There's a reason why there's this inflammation. It might be because there's a virus around, or there might be a bacteria that's going to invade me. I got to make my inside really inhospitable to any invader."

[01:45:49] So how does it do that? Well, it does that by stopping producing melatonin, glutathione, superoxide dismutase, and catalase. Those are the four antioxidants that protect mitochondria. Because mitochondria are constantly producing reactive oxygen species. Those are free radicals--

[01:46:16] Luke: It's like the exhaust when you burn gas.

[01:46:19] JP: Exactly. You're going to create some smoke out of your coal-fired power plant. It's going to happen. Those antioxidants are the scrubbers. They take all the soot out of it, and they block it from damaging the mitochondria and the cell itself.

[01:46:37] Luke: I'm glad you mentioned melatonin in that context because there's so much misunderstanding. People think of it as--

[01:46:43] JP: Sleep hormone.

[01:46:44] Luke: Yeah, the sleep hormone. It's like, dude, it's the mitochondria booster of all time. I love melatonin.

[01:46:51] JP: Exactly. Getting deep into the science here, tryptophan is an amino acid. We know it. It's in warm milk, it's in turkey. That's why everybody gets tired and falls asleep when they've had turkey dinners and why warm milk is good before you go to bed. Because tryptophan, activated tryptophan, when it gets into the cell, it can go in two different directions. It's metabolism, other than being used to make proteins.

[01:47:16] One is to make serotonin. So there's a two-step process taking you from tryptophan to serotonin. Serotonin, we all know that that's the happiness neurotransmitter. It's also really important in your gut for peristalsis, for moving things through your gut. But serotonin, I think, it's actually one of the most important things. It's the precursor for making melatonin. So it's two steps from there down to making melatonin. And melatonin, as you said, is critically important for the health of your mitochondria.

[01:47:48] Luke: That's why I wear these freaking glasses all the time. Usually not in the daytime because I want cortisol in the daytime and not melatonin, but these lights, after nine years, I just can't do it anymore. I drive my wife crazy because I have all these red lights on in the house, and she's like, "Dude, I can't see anything. I get it, but I need to be able to walk." So we're always having this light--

[01:48:08] JP: It's like spending time in a submarine.

[01:48:10] Luke: Yeah. I definitely have learned through these interviews how crucial and also just how dynamic melatonin is. It's crazy.

[01:48:20] JP: Oh, it's amazing. So what happens is the cell, it's experiencing inflammation. It says, "Oh my gosh, I got to make myself less hospitable. How am I going to do that? Well, I'm going to shut down serotonin and melatonin production, and I'm going to increase the reactive oxygen species and free radicals because that's going to damage those viruses and damage those bacteria. I'm going to take a hit too as a cell. But maybe it won't be for that long.

[01:48:49] And then it shunts that tryptophan metabolism down a different pathway, which starts with kynurenine. You don't have to remember kynurenine, other than the fact that, hey, that's a chemical that's found in high concentrations in people who are depressed. Well, if you don't have serotonin, you're going to have kynurenine. And what is serotonin? That's the happiness. That's the mood stabilizing molecule.

[01:49:15] If you stop having serotonin produced, then you're going to end up with more kynurenine. And then there's a whole list of chemicals from kynurenine all the way down to the penultimate molecule. It's called quinolinic acid, which is actually toxic. The last step actually turns it into NADP, which is used for energy production in the mitochondria.

[01:49:37] So it's not terrible. You are using that pathway. So we use that normally, but when you stop making the serotonin and melatonin, you produce more of this other stuff, you get depressed. You get anxious. You get damaged to your mitochondria. You get damaged to your epigenetics. All that's happening.

[01:49:58] They actually call depression sickness behavior. That is a root cause of depression, which could get me talking about SSRIs and SNRIs and why I think that that's not the right route to go. Not that they don't work for some people, but it doesn't answer the question of why is there not enough serotonin. It's trying to do something but in a bassackward kind of way. We don't have to go down that route. But at the end of the day--

[01:50:30] Luke: I've done quite a few shows on it.

[01:50:31] JP: Yeah, yeah, yeah

[01:50:32] Luke: Jarrod, you could put those in the show notes. Yeah.

[01:50:35] JP: The bottom line is that inflammation is a critical disruptor of homeostasis. If you can re-regulate using the autonomic nervous system, the vagus nerve, and the parasympathetic recovery mode to get yourself back into homeostasis, your brain's going to function better. Your body's going to function better. You're going to have less heart disease, less cancer, less diabetes, all that stuff because not only is it regulating the inflammation but it's affecting the mitochondria.

[01:51:12] And that mitochondrial dysfunction, getting back to that, that really is one of the four pillars of disease. You've got the four pillars of health. You've got the four pillars of disease. When your immune system is in an anti-inflammatory state, then it's doing all the jobs it's supposed to do.

[01:51:30] It's maintaining everything. It's functioning properly. When it's in an inflamed state, it's disrupting homeostasis. It's damaging energy production. It's damaging your autonomic nervous system. You're just degenerating. When your mitochondria are functioning in a healthy way, you're humming along and making energy. Nothing's damaging. Nothing's disrupting the epigenetics of your cell. Nothing's disrupting your genes. Nothing's damaging the other organelles.

[01:52:01] When you're in mitochondrial dysfunction, it's doing all the opposite. When your microbiome isn't functioning properly, or when it is functioning properly, you're making serotonin. You're making short chain fatty acids that your mitochondria need. Your leaky gut is not happening because you've got an integral barrier.

[01:52:24] That barrier is only one cell thick, and all the adherens are functioning properly to keep that barrier functioning. When it's not and you're in dysbiosis, you're getting inflamed. You've got bacterial overgrowth. You've got mitochondrial dysfunction. All those things, they go together.

[01:52:44] And the autonomic nervous system has the ability through this pathway of keeping you either in that homeostatic state where everything's going great, or it can disrupt the whole show. So I say those are the four pillars of health or the four horsemen of death.

[01:53:02] Luke: I love your systems approach, and I'm excited that this understanding of the body is a more comprehensive, holistic organism, not this mechanistic thing. You had a word earlier you used for a specialist.

[01:53:18] JP: I knew you would go to that, so I got to tell that it's true.

[01:53:20] Luke: I caught it.

[01:53:22] JP: Partialist.

[01:53:23] Luke: Yeah, partialist.

[01:53:24] JP: I can't take credit for that. That was the head of the Royal College of GPs, general practitioners, over in the UK. We were over there. We were working with neurologists around headache. I was getting frustrated, but I had the opportunity to meet with the head of the Royal College of GPs.

[01:53:39] And I started, not bashing, but complaining about what I was dealing with with these people who didn't understand what they were dealing with. They understand this tiny little thing, one cell deep, and she said, "You mean the partialists." And I said, "I'm not familiar with that term." She said, "Yeah, they know one organ. They know part of the body, and that's it."

[01:53:06] And listen, that's the reductionist view. That's the splitter mentality that's dominated medicine for the last 50 to 100 years. Casey Means talks about when she says-- she was a chief resident at Stanford as an ENT surgeon, and she was doing all the things that they told her to do.

[01:54:27] She understood this one tiny piece of the equation, but she started looking at her patients and realizing there's a lot of things that were similar about them that shouldn't because there was no western medicine explanation why they should all also have headaches, why they should all also have gastrointestinal dysfunction, why they all have fibromyalgia, why they all have these other conditions that we think are separate?

[01:54:51] And I came to the realization, they're not separate. They're symptoms of the same underlying condition. And that's what mitochondrial dysfunction is. That's what chronic inflammation is. That's what autonomic nervous system dysfunction is. That's where that deregulation of your autonomic nervous system comes from. And so I think we're on the cusp of changing things. I think we're going to make differences.

[01:55:14] Luke: The systems thinking, the systems approach, and honoring the whole body as a one intelligent being that doesn't want to be siloed and parsed, it wants to be treated holistically, which is why I love talking to people like you and getting this message out. I want to go back to the neurotransmitters, when you were talking about the metabolites of tryptophan, melatonin, and serotonin.

[01:55:42] I remember being in a Joe Dispenza retreat, and he was explaining this model as it pertained to endogenous dimethyltryptamine, of DMT. And I forget the order, but he explained part of why his meditations-- not his, but just these techniques he's developed and some of them are borrowed and some of them he expanded upon, but doing certain breathing techniques and holding it, squeezing your pineal gland, and all this, people trip.

[01:56:12] I took my dad when he was in his late 70s to a-- the guy has never done drugs his entire life. It was actually in Florida. And it's one of my favorite moments of my entire life, because I've worked with psychedelics a lot, both early in life, very unconsciously and recklessly, and in recent years with great results.

[01:56:31] My dad never has. So to me, I love those meditations. Yeah, you're going into the really deep theta quantum space. It's beautiful, but I don't really have visions and things like that. So my dad comes out of this four-hour meditation, takes off his eye mask, and I go, "Dad, how are you doing?"

[01:56:49] And he looked alarmed. And he said, "Man, that was weird. I started seeing all these lights, colors, and shapes. And then I freaked out because I realized my eye mask was on." And I was like, "It's DMT." My dad is tripping on DMT through just his own practice that he'd been instructed on.

[01:57:11] And so when you started talking about that, that's so fascinating that these metabolites of these different neurotransmitters within them have the potential for us to have our own psychoactive medicine.

[01:57:23] JP: Yeah, of course.

[01:57:24] Luke: And in darkness retreats too. I've interviewed people about darkness retreats, and they go in for a week, and they're just flooded with melatonin, and then they're having psychedelic experiences.

[01:57:33] JP: And people don't realize--

[01:57:34] Luke: Just from cutting off light.

[01:57:36] JP: I think it's a function of the fact that people don't fully realize what's happening in their brains with that hallucinogenic-- and to the extent that, it's unfortunate, but schizophrenia and the hallucinations and things like that, it's similar. In one case, it's not reversible, schizophrenia. In the other case, it's totally. It's just chemically-induced. And it can be self-induced. Kids actually do it all the time. Kids do it all the time. Kids are brilliant at it. Here's how it work. And it's cool because there's actually AI, generative AI programs actually do exactly the same thing.

[01:58:19] It's one of those things where the software engineers converged with the neuroscientists. Totally cool. They did the same thing with the language models, the specific architecture of the neural network actually mimics what's actually happening in the areas of the brain that are involved in language processing.

[01:58:40] But what happens is, creativity is a function of three systems in your brain working in partnership. The first is the default mode network. That's in your prefrontal cortex. And it's what happens when you're daydreaming. You're just coming up with random stuff, crazy ideas, hatch all the time.

[01:59:08] What if I mixed eggs with wine? Would that be good? What would that change? How would that change? And what happens is that is then carried-- that idea is carried very rapidly by what's called the salience network, and it's carried to the area of the brain, which is called the central executive function network. That's like your police officer.

[01:59:32] That's the rule keeper. That's the judge. And he sits and says, "Yeah, there's parts of that that actually conform with reality and social constructs, all work and stuff. But you got to change it. And marks it up like a teacher, red pen. Sends it back up to salience network to the default mode network.

[01:59:52] And at the default mode network is still active and interested in this topic. You'll tweak it a little bit. Tweak it, make it better, send it back down the salience network to the central executive network. Central executive network says, "Ah, better. Okay." It's like machine learning.

[02:00:08] It's going back and forth. Literally, it's what a generative AI does. They've got the artist and the critic, and they're going back and forth. The artist is creating something. The critic is saying, "No, humans wouldn't do that." Artists says, "Okay. I'll change it." And then the critic says, "Ah, that's a little more like what a human would do but not really that good."

[02:00:26] And it goes back 1,000 times, and all of a sudden you've got the Mona Lisa. Same thing is happening in the brain going back and forth. If the salience network gets injured, it can happen from toxins. It can happen from an injury. It can happen from not being constructed properly by microglial cells that are disrupted. Maternal immune activation problems. It can happen chemically temporarily.

[02:00:53] And when that network, that salience network breaks down and you're not sending things back and forth, then that crazy wild hair idea that got created in your brain in your default mode network, it's not getting modified. It's not getting changed. And it just sits there, and you say, "Wow, you look like you have the face of a dog." And they're like, "Why are you drooling?" Same thing happens with mushrooms, LSD, and a bunch of other psychedelics.

[02:01:25] You're just shutting down that salience network and allowing the default mode network to just go to town. And kids do it all the time. Little kids, they saw a monster. They want to fly down a dragon.

[02:01:43] Luke: Imaginary friends all day long.

[02:01:46] JP: And it's interesting because there's actually some theologians who believe that humans actually were much more in touch with that and much more capable of that 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, 10,000 years ago. And that a lot of the mythology and the theology is actually a function of that being in touch with that default, which is why almost every ancient civilization had some communing through hallucinogenic chemicals, whether it's ayahuasca or peyote. What's the one that comes out of the rye grain or barley? I'm trying to remember this.

[02:02:34] Luke: Oh, how they synthesize LSD?

[02:02:37] JP: No, no, no.

[02:02:38] Luke: It's ergot?

[02:02:40] JP: Yeah, yeah. Ergots, yeah.

[02:02:42] Luke: Yeah. I'm assuming you've read that book.

[02:02:45] JP: About LSD, The Bicycle Ride.

[02:02:48] Luke: No. Oh God. What's that freaking book? It's a book, I wish I could remember the name or the author, but essentially it's a historical treatise on world religions and philosophers, and he goes back and essentially makes the case that a lot of these ancient mystery schools and rituals involved hallucinogens and things like that.

[02:03:13] JP: I haven't read that book.

[02:03:14] Luke: Yeah. So embarrassing that I can't remember the name.

[02:03:17] JP: Put it in the show notes. You'll remember.

[02:03:18] Luke: This is a book, you guys. And I totally don't remember the name, but yeah, it's very interesting. So he goes back to some of the roots of our religions and things and says, well, yeah, these guys were tripping that these are these mystical experiences that they're describing.

[02:03:30] JP: Not having done it myself personally, but I have a question for you, which is my understanding scientifically is that drugs like opioids, cocaine, and other drugs like that are addictive, even tobacco.

[02:03:50] Luke: I can vouch for that with both of those specifically. Yes.

[02:03:56] JP: But not so much hallucinogens. They're not addictive at all.

[02:04:00] Luke: I've never ever once met a person--

[02:04:03] JP: Addicted to LSD?

[02:04:05] Luke: They could be harmful, of course. And so I always encourage people to exercise prudence when entering into that realm.

[02:04:14] JP: The reason I haven't done it is.

[02:04:16] Luke: Yeah, it's not for the faint at heart, and there's so many different guardrails that I think should be applied if you want to do so safely, albeit it's not always a pleasant experience.

[02:04:28] JP: So is race car driving. So is hang gliding. So is jumping out of airplanes or swimming the English Channel.

[02:04:33] Luke: But to your point, I think all of these different molecules that nature has given us or that scientists have synthesized mimicking something in nature, like the case of LSD, everything is a tool, and it serves its own purpose. Alcohol is a great tool if you want to numb your experience, and it's good for that.

[02:04:55] Is it going to help you in the depth of your relationship with God and your understanding of the nature of consciousness and so on? Probably not, but yeah, I have so much to say about this, but as someone who used drugs that were very addictive, like those that you mentioned, for a very long time, and in a few months here, I think it'll be 28 years since I've used any of those substances, thank God-- literally, for the grace of God.

[02:05:27] And so I took a good 20-year break on any mind-altering substances, and just through interviewing people on this podcast and just studying things as I do and my curiosity, I was eventually led to start working with psychedelics, and I had a lot of trepidation because I didn't want to be triggered back into my old addiction.

[02:05:46] I really value my sobriety and so on. It's something I took very seriously and contemplated for about a year before I ever did it. And I did, and I realized that there is such a vast difference between the spectrum of tools. Something like an opiate can be very useful. And if I, God forbid, break my leg, I'll probably be happy to take some opiates under a doctor's care and supervision.

[02:06:13] But if I want to enhance my understanding of the human experience, if I want to deepen my relationship with God, if I want to heal deep emotional issues that are trapped in the subconscious, that's a job that's better suited for a tool like ayahuasca or something like that. So in my experience, in fact, the opposite.

[02:06:39] At this point, after, I don't know, I probably started working in this space five, six years ago, something like that-- yeah, six years ago-- I'm terrified of psychedelics in a different way than I'm terrified of using cocaine, alcohol, or something, which I'm not even terrified of them. I'm just not stupid.

[02:06:59] I know what will happen based on past experience. It's like, how many times do you have to touch the hot stove? But I have such a-- terrified isn't the right word, but I have such a respect and a reverence for psychedelics because they really amplify whatever is going on within your own consciousness, and they're just going to amplify whatever's there.

[02:07:19] And that's why, if you're in a really good place in life, you might eat a bunch of mushrooms and laugh your ass off for 10 hours straight, which I've experienced. It's beautiful. But if I was going through a difficulty in life, I would never take a bunch of mushrooms and try to escape the emotional experience of that. Because what would happen is I would be forced to confront it in a way that would make it even more painful.

[02:07:42] JP: Yeah.

[02:07:42] Luke: Therefore, the idea of taking some acid today-- actually, I did take some acid today. Now that I think about it, a very small microdose. Yeah. But the idea of like, oh, I have an LSD trip tonight and tomorrow morning and wake up and go, "Oh, man, I want a little more of that." Literally, that's never going to happen. For me, it's a totally different category of experience. And so, yeah, I've never heard of anyone ever in a classical sense of addiction becoming dependent on anything in that realm other than ketamine, but it's not really a psychedelic.

[02:08:19] JP: It's dissociative.

[02:08:20] Luke: Yeah. It's anesthesia really.

[02:08:22] JP: Although it has potent effects on depression and other conditions, especially among people with autism. So depression among autism, it's amazing one dose in three months of-- but that's the same thing with migraines. If you're a chronic migraineur, and you're experiencing migraines on a daily or every other day basis, and you take a trip on LSD, it's going to most likely eliminate your migraines for three months.

[02:09:08] Luke: That's wild. I've never heard that.

[02:09:10] JP: And it's just interesting because it ties in with the very first indication we got an approval for, was migraine, was headache. Actually, it was cluster headache. And what do cluster headache patients use as their illegal approach to treating their condition? Psilocybin. They use mushrooms.

[02:09:27] Luke: Oh, wow.

[02:09:31] JP: I look at this in ketamine depression. It mirrors what vagus nerve stimulation-- in fact it's interesting that we did a study out at the MIND Research Institute in New Mexico, which is part of the University of New Mexico. And the researcher we were working with, it was early on, trying to figure out which neurotransmitter systems we were activating.

[02:09:54] Was it acetylcholine? Was it noradrenergic? Was it GABA? Was it serotonin? It turns out we were affecting all of them, but at the end of the research, he said, "So what do you think?" And he said, "I have to tell you that I've had this concept in my head for months now working on this. The only thing that I've ever dealt with that has the same profile, ketamine.

[02:10:24] He said, it doesn't have any of the effects on a person that ketamine has cognitively or-- I won't say emotionally, cognitively or personality change. But in terms of the neurotransmitter systems that are being affected, it's very similar.

[02:10:44] Luke: That's really interesting. Wow.

[02:10:46] JP: It's fascinating because ketamine is got to be taken under doctor supervision. But it's just interesting how all these things are regulated the way they are and why they are. If you go back, LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs were not illegal in 1950.

[02:11:10] Luke: Yeah. LSD was used in psychiatry. MDMA later the same way.

[02:11:16] JP: It was not until--

[02:11:16] Luke: And God only knows. We don't have the records to prove how long human beings, indigenous peoples have been brewing up different versions of ayahuasca. You tell me. The prevalence of psilocybin, mushrooms that contain psilocybin, and they're everywhere on the planet.

[02:11:35] JP: Ergots, I'm pretty sure they've been around for 500 million years.

[02:11:38] Luke: Yeah. They just naturally occur. You're telling me, oh, it was in the '60s when people were picking mushrooms out of cow pies and listening to Jimi Hendrix? This goes way back.

[02:11:46] JP: Absolutely. Actually, it's probably a little bit beyond the pale, but do you know the original idea of why witches were considered flying on broomsticks?

[02:12:00] Luke: No.

[02:12:01] JP: Because a lot of the Wicca practitioners used to use wooden sticks coated with a resin and apply it to certain area, a tissue that would be highly absorbent of that, and hands and things like that aren't quite so absorbent.

[02:12:23] Luke: Mucous membranes.

[02:12:24] JP: Mucous membranes, and they would ride a broomstick.

[02:12:29] Luke: And trip?

[02:12:30] JP: And they would trip.

[02:12:31] Luke: That's classic. Of course, the institutions, the powers that be wanted to shut that down.

[02:12:37] JP: And you can say even in the 1950s and 1960s, what group adopted psychedelics as their thing? It was the counterculture movement and the counterculture movement was promoting it. So everybody else was opposed to it in civil society. And not a lot of really good science was done other than by pharmaceutical companies, and pharmaceutical companies looked at it and said, "Wait a minute. This can cure migraines for three months versus selling them a pill every day?"

[02:13:12] Luke: For life.

[02:13:13] JP: And we can fix depression versus SSRIs, SNRIs, tricyclics, and MAOIs? I don't know. I'm just speculating, but it seems like it's time to open the door to some of these things again.

[02:13:33] Luke: I'm very hopeful. I talk to brilliant people like you all the time in and outside of those realms. Obviously, humanity is at a turning point. This world is absolutely nuts.

[02:13:48] JP: If it's not, maybe we're going over the falls in the barrel.

[02:13:53] Luke: Yeah. The Rubicon is at the doorstep, if not already crossed. I truly feel, and there's going to be fallout, of course, but I truly feel that this third or fourth wave of psychedelics, despite how sloppy it might get in certain aspects could very likely be the thing that carries us over. Because of the profound changes that are possible.

[02:14:21] JP: If it has beneficial effect on ultimately treating schizophrenia, which I think there's at least reasons to believe that the science being conducted on them will help us. That is truly, honestly, my biggest fear right now. People fear third world war, all this kind of stuff. I think those things burn themselves out.

[02:14:47] What doesn't burn itself out for generations is if all of a sudden 1 in 25 kids is schizophrenic. And we're at 1 in 25 in California who have autism. And if 4% of the population-- literally walk down the street and pick one out of the 25 people, you go to a stadium, the 50,000 people in there, there's 2,000 people who have schizophrenia. Do the math. Man, that's a problem.

[02:15:23] Luke: That's crazy.

[02:15:24] JP: And that scares the crap out of me.

[02:15:25] Luke: That's wild.

[02:15:26] JP: I can't remember the author who said the thing that she feared the most was being in a room with a wild animal. Because there was no way to have a rational dialogue. There was no way to talk your way through it, no way to think your way through it. And if we have a world in which 1 out of 25 people is schizophrenic, that's a problem. That is a problem.

[02:15:57] Luke: Yeah. Big time.

[02:15:58] JP: So to the extent that we can take vagus nerve stimulation work and we can take work that's being done on just normal schizophrenia medications and work through the hallucinogens and understand what they can do and how they might be at play here and fix that problem, that along with making the world a smarter place, making the world a saner place, just think about it.

[02:16:25] Luke: Dude, just think about if every person in the world had one of these things and used it. Just regulated nervous systems. Just what that would do. With how reactive people are and how triggered people are, people by and large don't have the ability to respond to stimuli and stress in their environment.

[02:16:46] People cannot adapt to day-to-day stress. That alone, it's just like how many road rage incidents and someone hitting their kid when they could've resisted had they been more regulated. I think it's super huge. It's just crazy. It's like something that's this simple has such potential? It's super cool.

[02:17:09] Like I said, I'm committed. I'm getting back on this thing because if I'm honest, I tend to take on-- I'm a very ambitious person, very driven person. I have a lot of energy. I'm not ever tired. I go, and I'll push the edge of anxiety because of just taking too much on it's something I'm really working on. So just pacing myself and don't have to say yes to every single shiny thing that flies by. It's a self-care issue of just pacing myself, and I have more anxiety than I would like to admit, especially for someone who's been meditating for as long as I have with as much consistency as I have.

[02:17:47] JP: We could get two hours back of your day because you get two hours [Inaudible] two minutes.

[02:17:49] Luke: Yeah, exactly. But sometimes I just think, mm, I think I should be a little more chill than I am considering how hard I've worked to overcome some of these challenges. So I'm recommitting myself. I'm saying it here on the mic to myself and anyone listening.

[02:18:04] One thing I wanted to ask you about before we wrap up is, being an extreme person, when I find something that's good and works, and it says to do it twice a day, my inclination is to be like, cool, so what you meant to say was 10 times a day. Is there any added benefit to using the Truvaga more often, or is it detrimental at a certain point? Could I do a midday, a third one, or something like that?

[02:18:30] JP: So the short answer is yes. The slightly longer answer is, I mentioned before that the company that invented the implantable devices for epilepsy and for depression is Cyberonics, and they're based actually in the Austin area. They actually merged. Now they're over in England.

[02:18:46] But when they were founded, they were here, and one of their founders is a guy by the name of Reese Terry. He's a really nice guy. He actually ended up coming on our board of directors for a while. Always was amazed that we managed to do it non-invasively. And he told me about their very early studies that they did in epilepsy.

[02:19:04] And I'm a dog lover. I know you are too. So it bothered me that they did this work in dogs. But what they did was they created an animal model using dogs of epilepsy. And the way they did it was they poisoned the dogs with strychnine. Because when a person has strychnine poisoning, they will go through a period of seizing continuously.

[02:19:23] And they would then stimulate the vagus nerve and stop the seizure. But the dog was still dying of strychnine poisoning. And so what they found was that after about four or five minutes after they stimulated for a little bit, stopped the seizure, turn the stimulation off, that the seizure would stay gone for about four or five minutes.

[02:19:45] And then it would recur. So they figured, ah, we don't have to have it on all the time. We can quintuple our battery life by only having it on once every five minutes. One minute every five minutes. And right now, even today, those things are programmed to be on for 30 seconds to two minutes every five minutes.

[02:20:03] So people who have those implants put in them are having 300 doses of stimulation done every day to them. And everything that we've done and everything that that guy Kevin Tracey has done has indicated you don't need anywhere near that level of stimulation. It doesn't hurt.

[02:20:21] And so I actually asked him, I said to Reese Terry, the founder of Cyberonics, "Did you do any studies suggesting that when people turned it off for a little bit, that they had more seizures, or did you ever do a study where it wasn't on that frequently?" And he said, "In our very first pilot study, we implanted people who had epilepsy with this device, and it was on for only one minute per hour."

[02:20:50] And I said, "So it was a safety study." He said, "Yeah, it was really for safety." I said, "But what was the efficacy?" He said, "Worked just the same, worked great." I said, "So what made you go back to having it on 12 times an hour?" I said, "Did you dose range it in your studies?" He said FDA never asked them to dose range. They never asked them to dose range it.

[02:21:13] And when they started thinking about it, they said, "We want to have that battery replacement surgery. Because every 5 to 10 years, they're going to have to do another surgery to replace it. We could sell another one." And I was like, "That's cynical." But at the same time, we also recognize that if people thought that all they had to do was stimulate once every couple of hours, they might not be so believing that they needed to have surgery for that.

[02:21:42] And so we kept it on once every 12 hours thinking it couldn't hurt, 12 times an hour. And I said, "It's just not the way I think about things. I think you walk into a room, you turn the light switch on, and the lights are on timers. You can hit the lights switches many times as you want. It's going to last for as long as the timer's on. Timer's going to last for eight hours. Go back and turn it back on in eight hours."

[02:22:06] And that's what we did. We said, "Listen, we've got a handheld device. People don't have to worry about paying $30,000 to have one implanted, $299 for six months, or just 499 for a lifetime. Use it as many times as you want. Use it as many times as you need." Generally we tell people, use it twice a day.

[02:22:28] And then if something happens, like if you have a really stressful situation or you have a panic attack that breaks through, it not going to hurt you. It's actually going to be wonderful. I did it on my older daughter. She broke up with her boyfriend. She was having a complete meltdown for 90 minutes.

[02:22:44] She was just inconsolably freaking out. And I finally looked at my wife and said, "Oh I'm going to stim her." Stimmed her. Thirty seconds in, she just started laughing at me. She looked up at me and she's like, "How does it do that?" I said, "What?" She's like, "I'm just completely calm down now." In 30 seconds. So yeah, if you need it, do it.

[02:23:11] Luke: That's good to know because I never actually had the idea until right now of using it before an important meeting or a podcast. If I'm just scattered and stressed out, or if I'm having anxiety about something, I have to have a difficult conversation and so on, or on an airplane, which always stresses me out, I'm going to start doing spot treatments and track my results doing that rather than just the twice a day standard.

[02:23:36] JP: Yeah. What I'd really like to see, and we have to do the clinical studies, or they have to do the clinical studies, since I'm not part of the company anymore, is to show that in therapy, for people who are dealing with, and not just PTSD, but just anything in their lives that they're having a difficult time processing through, you have that autonomic response. You're crying. Your heart's beating fast. You're afraid. That blocks you from being able to process what you need to process cognitively. EMDR does that really well.

[02:24:13] Luke: Yeah, yeah.

[02:24:14] JP: But this does it really well too. So what I'd like to see is that before every therapy session, where you're going to tackle something difficult, stim. It will make it so much easier to just process through what you need to process.

[02:24:27] Luke: That's a great idea.

[02:24:28] JP: They're out there, and you're doing that. You're in the third--

[02:24:31] Luke: That leads me to think it could be a good thing to do before doing some intentional plant medicine or psychedelic work.

[02:24:39] JP: I think you should try it.

[02:24:40] Luke: I will. I'll do it, and I'll keep you posted.

[02:24:43] JP: Can't wait.

[02:24:44] Luke: Yeah. Well, cool, man. There's one more thing I wanted to ask you. Just my geek brain wants to know every nuanced detail. What's up with the specific frequency coming off the electrodes? Because it doesn't seem to change as far as I can tell other than an intensity if you turn it up or down. But not wii, vru, vru. It's not running through some sequence of frequencies. It's one consistent one. Am I right in that?

[02:25:09] JP: Yeah. What your nerve experiences is 25 hertz.

[02:25:12] Luke: Okay.

[02:25:13] JP: It turns out that what we do is bursts of 5,000 hertz sine wave to get through the skin painlessly. So if you try to do this with a TENS unit, man, at the amplitude we're delivering, I'd have to peel you off the ceiling with a spatula. So we have this super high frequency that gets through the capacitance of the skin so we don't activate the pain receptors.

[02:25:33] You still feel it, but you're really more feeling the muscle, as you know, than the skin. There's a little skin tingling, but it's not that intense. If I tried to do that with a TENS unit, that would be painful.

[02:25:44] Luke: I have a really powerful TENS unit downstairs, and it has a very sensitive, slow dial for that reason.

[02:25:50] JP: It even says on it, do not use on your neck.

[02:25:54] Luke: Oh, really?

[02:25:55] JP: The TENS units can, but don't use on your neck.

[02:25:57] Luke: I have this thing called the Neubie, this company, NeuFit. It's incredible. It's such a cool technology. But man, you put the electrodes on, and you dial it up real slow. You don't want to just hit it on 80. You know what I mean? Like you said, you would hit the ceiling.

[02:26:13] So I'm always very careful with that thing because I've made the mistake of like, it's on high and then the electrode falls off, and I put it back on. I was like, "Ah." It'll shock the hell out of you. It's a DC current, so it's not going to hurt you, but it can be very shocking. Well, that's cool. I'm glad I asked that. That's really interesting. And yeah, I don't find it to be painful at all. It takes a little getting used to when the muscles start contracting, and your--

[02:26:40] JP: It's a weird experience. Most people haven't had it.

[02:26:41] Luke: Your jaw does that thing.

[02:26:41] JP: Most people haven't done anything that's even remotely close to that experience. But it's funny. When we did it with dogs to treat their epilepsy, because that idea of doing it non-invasively, within really one or two stimulations, the moment you bring it out, the dogs roll over and show you their neck. They like it. They like the anxiolytic effect. We've already talked about how their autonomic nervous systems are really good.

[02:27:09] Luke: They're dialed. Yeah.

[02:27:10] JP: They love it. They'll roll right over and show you their neck because they want the stimulation.

[02:27:16] Luke: That's cool. Don't tempt me because I'll try it on my not epileptic dog.

[02:27:21] JP: Actually, any dog that has separation anxiety or--

[02:27:26] Luke: She has that. Big time.

[02:27:28] JP: Thunder, stim.

[02:27:29] Luke: Wow. I'm assuming on a very low setting.

[02:27:32] JP: No. You'd be surprise. I'm cracking it up to 40 on them. No problem at all.

[02:27:36] Luke: That's cool. That's cool. All right, dude. Well, in closing, we'll tell people, again, or for those that care to, go to lukestorey.com/truvaga. And we'll put all those links and codes and stuff in the show notes. Last question for you, my friend. Who have been three teachers or teachings that have influenced your life and made you who you are?

[02:27:56] JP: That's great. So I have to first my hats off to my grandparents. My mother was an only child, and both of her parents were teachers. They dedicated their lives after retirement to working with me and my sisters, but I was the oldest, and they really focused a lot of attention on me. So I have to give credit to my grandparents first.

[02:28:28] Second was a math teacher I had in high school. His name was Mr. Lepore, and he was just a really kind person who I had math with for four years. They actually got him out of a college to come and teach our class because we had a group of really good students. And so hats off to him.

[02:28:58] And then the last one would be my co-inventor of the Truvaga. He's also an MIT grad, but he graduated 20 years before I did. He has a PhD in physics, and he was not just a good teacher. He was a great friend and still is a great friend. Shout out to Bruce.

[02:29:24] I was running the company, raising tens of millions of dollars, and having the time of my life mostly because I got to sit in his office and go in. I would lose, I wouldn't even say hours, I would say days just sitting in his office talking about anything that was interesting.

[02:29:51] I remember one time we actually had a trip to Europe, and he and I sat in a-- this is a last, I promise. We're sitting in a bar in the airport in Heathrow. This is a crowded bar, waiting for our flight, and we're having a conversation about how to calculate from first principles, the number of particles in the universe, the number of protons. How many protons are there in the universe?

[02:30:21] We're having this intense conversation, and all of a sudden there is this roar of screams, yells, and shouts. And we nearly spilled-- I think I actually did partially spill my drink. And it was because there was a soccer match going on and somebody had scored. And everybody else in the whole bar was watching the game.

[02:30:45] We weren't. We were utterly unaware of it. He and I could have conversations like that. And I learned so much from him. I didn't just learn things. I learned how to learn. I learned how to learn, and he and I just fed each other's love for learning and being open minded to new thoughts and just thinking that it's possible. Let's go find out if it's true.

[02:31:17] Luke: Epic.

[02:31:18] JP: Yeah, he was a good guy.

[02:31:18] Luke: I just thought of one more question.

[02:31:20] JP: Sure.

[02:31:21] Luke: This is a selfish one because I've been dealing with a really wild ass tinnitus for the past couple of years, and I'm just putting it out in the universe every day. What is the solution? Because I've tried a lot of things. Have you heard about any research or any correlation between vagal nerve stimulation and that particular issue?

[02:31:39] JP: There is. In fact, there is a company, I think it's local here. They're focusing on implantable devices to treat tinnitus, but using it where they're tapping into the neuroplasticity amplification that vagus nerve stimulation offers. So they're pairing up the stimulation with tones, so listening to tones and trying to reorient the auditory centers to not have that ringing. But the problem is it would only potentially work for about half the people because half of tinnitus is literally just due to just loud noises.  

[02:32:36] Luke: Wear and tear.

[02:32:37] JP: And wear and tear. And it sounds to me like--

[02:32:39] Luke: Roger Waters concerts.

[02:32:41] JP: Yeah, yeah.

[02:32:41] Luke: Would that be considered bimodal stimulation?

[02:32:45] JP: To the extent that you're doing it from two different directions. Yeah.

[02:32:48] Luke: Okay, yeah. I got this device called the Lenire. I think it's from Ireland. And it's one of the new hopefuls in the tinnitus space, which I'm unfortunately in. And it works with a stimulator on the tongue combined with specific tones and frequencies and things like that. And my dad had incredible results with it. I have not so far. So I'm hoping I'm not in the 50% for which nothing works except a miracle. But I'm going to keep at it. I'm going to keep at it.

[02:33:22] JP: We have an investor in the company, very wealthy guy who basically had nerve deafness in one ear, and he started using the device, and about a year in, he came back to us and just said, "Listen, I had the weirdest thing happen." He said, "I was in my office. I got a little fatigued, tired, decided to put my head down, took a nap, woke up, and I realized that the ear that I can't hear out of was the one that wasn't in the pillow. I could hear." And so he said, I don't know, but the only thing I've done for 40 years that changed is stimulation. So I'm going to throw it out there as a possibility.

[02:34:09] Luke: Cool. I'll take it. I'll take it. I appreciate that. Well, thanks for coming out here to join me today. It's been way more fun than I even imagined it would be. We covered--

[02:34:17] JP: I guess that's a compliment. I'm going to take that as a--

[02:34:20] Luke: I just thought we were going to really focus on one thing. I was interested in that one thing because it's valuable and I think it will help a lot of people, but I had no idea your breadth of knowledge and that we were going to be able to just fly around in so many different areas. So it's been super fun.

[02:34:35] JP: Well, next time, we'll focus on the other passion that I have, which is aging.

[02:34:40] Luke: Oh, cool. And you have a new book coming out about aging, right?

[02:34:46] JP: Yeah, I'm working on it right now.

[02:34:48] Luke: Okay, cool.

[02:34:48] JP: It's called The Great Unified Theory of Aging.

[02:34:50] Luke: Epic.

[02:34:51] JP: Yeah, there's stuff going on in the aging field that is just absolutely remarkable.

[02:34:58] Luke: Awesome. Yeah. Hey, man, when the book comes out, come back. Open invitation. Because I happen to be aging, and I would like to do so as slowly as possible.

[02:35:06] JP: I have a family history of it myself.

[02:35:07] Luke: Totally. All right. Well, thanks for coming, man.

[02:35:10] JP: Sounds great. Thank you.