divorce morality corporate home wreckers
vaping up for salary
hi everyone
i missed you
i still miss you
and
it's been
been weird
for everybody
i know you guys know
and nobody wants to talk about
you know
the big thing that made
the last
while
real difficult
and i understand
so
i'm not going to talk about that today
and usually when
i do talks and get to see all of you
it's a real celebratory thing and
i get to talk about all the great things
that all the amazing people that i'm
lucky enough to work with have managed
to do
and
they have managed to do
a lot
of really amazing things in the interim
but
i'm not going to talk about those today
either we have a lot of announcements
and those will come soon
but
just didn't seem like the right thing to
talk about this time
so often
the things that we work on and the
things that we talk about
are very grand in scale we're always
trying to work on things that have
it's very high impact very
politically controversial
very
broadly applicable very macro ethical
but i thought i'd shift gears a little
bit and talk about some of the
microethical things
some of the things that
don't save lives but
get you through the day maybe a little
more some of them maybe save lives but
smaller things everyday things survival
things
because we're all kind of wired into a
bit of a survival trip right now
and there's this
danger
that we're all in
of being in a mode of survival
that we never come out of
if you want to look at some of that i
recommend
the neurobiology of it the human
behavioral biology of it was studied
very well by a guy named robert sapolsky
i'm a huge fan of his and
he
has been generous enough to put all of
his lectures on
youtube in a playlist
i'll try and put those here
so that you can watch them if you want
additionally i am so much a fan of that
that i
managed to put together an entire bundle
of
all of the books and all of the articles
that he referenced so that if you work
through his course you can
read through them
um
i'll try and put that
here
we'll see if that actually works in the
editing
we've all
felt
the impact
things have shifted
despite whether
you've actually been touched
by
the virus in question
we've all felt health impacts
slowing metabolisms
increasing myopia
depression
fitness degradation
all these things happen
and
one of the things that's really
disappointing
about
thinking about all the ancillary health
effects that have been coming along
including all the secondary outbreaks of
other things that are
also quite scary is that
they seem to get left by the wayside
there's this rather
disappointingly callous approach that so
many people seem to bring of the
oh but did you die
sort of question and if the answer is no
it's
you're not going to get a lot of
attention or care or
help or solutions or people working
towards those sorts of things
which is
sad
and needless
and disappointing
so
i'm gonna try and talk a little bit
about some of those things
and it's
one of those things that's very
individual it's very personal and it's
personal to all of us and i know that
i have lost a lot of people to
depression
in general and especially during this
era
and
that
the typical advice
that
is given in the cases of looking at
things like self-care
is
of a very
childish and kind of condescending
nature
where
rather obvious
or entirely impossible
or
fairly useless things are talked about
the
sort of
you know
have you looked behind the sofa
no no my goldfish are dead
sort of problem that um
is all too common
and
and it's really sad it's really sad and
it's really uh
enough to make you kind of angry when
the same thing is get repeated over and
over again oh
well you should drink less you should
quit smoking you should go out and
exercise
there's not a single person
that
doesn't think
that those things would be good to do
the very fact that those coping
mechanisms are necessary is indicative
of the fact that things are in a much
more dire state
and
there are other people who will sort of
throw out these panaceas of saying that
if you take enough ketamine or mushrooms
that you know everything will
come up roses and of course everything
is much more complicated than that the
human psyche is much more complicated
than that
your life is much more complicated than
that everyone's life is more complicated
than that and
that's one of the things that there
needs to be a little more recognition of
for all the great
things that
science and western medicine have
managed to unpack about
human biology and
neuropsychology
we don't have good fixes for most things
so
i think this is going to be kind of
short
but i just wanted to throw out a couple
of
little fixes for
mostly little things
that don't
solve things per se but make them a
little bit better
and
i've found aren't terribly well known
you might know some or all of these
already
but i haven't found a lot or at least
enough
being discussed about most of these
things and so
maybe this handful of tricks will
make things a little easier for you or
somebody you know or somebody you care
about
so the first one
is that
i imagine most people
are
probably drinking a little more than
they
used to or maybe a little more than they
should
a little more often
and
yeah of course that's another one of
these stopgap coping mechanisms that we
all use it's it's very simple it's
ubiquitous it's legal
almost everywhere
and
there are
repercussions to that of course but most
of them are pretty long term and so
they're reversible if you're careful
but in a more immediate sense sometimes
when you've had a few too many and you
wake up in the next morning you don't
feel very good
and
nobody likes a hangover of course it's
not pleasant and at the same time also
it can keep you from
being very productive the next day
so
there are a couple little things that
you can do to make that just a little
bit easier
the first one is
an acetyl cysteine
often abbreviated as nac
it's a simple dietary supplement that is
sold in most health food stores
and
it's a free radical scavenger and
oftentimes if you take some of that in
the morning when you're not feeling so
great it can help after a little while
and of course if it's a really severe
hangover it probably won't do a whole
lot and you might not even be able to
keep it down but in the case that you're
just feeling a little bit rough and you
had maybe one or two more than you
should have it can take the edge off
another thing that's maybe a little more
serious
it's actually a lot more serious
is
when you take a painkiller you should be
careful about which one you take
now
oftentimes when we think of painkillers
they're just kind of different brands
but they have different active
ingredients and there are basically
in this particular case kind of two
categories there are the ones that have
acetaminophen in them and the ones that
don't and these include
brand names like tylenol or panadol
and acetaminophen also goes by a few
other names i'll try to list them here
and
the
brands that have them maybe i'll try and
put over here
these are things you shouldn't take if
you have a hangover and the reason for
that is because
they're very hard on your liver now
normally that's not a big deal if you
have some pain you can take something
that's going to be effective
and your liver can do a little bit of
extra work and that's fine
but
one of the things about alcohol is that
it's keeps your liver very very busy and
so if you already have an overtaxed
liver
and then you take
acetaminophen
on top of that
it can kill you
and
this is not something that's even
terribly uncommon this happens a whole
lot more often than usual
in fact
one of the
biggest
uh dangers of people using vicodin
is not
the vicodin it's not the opiate inside
there
that i believe is uh hydrocodone but
it's the fact that there is tylenol
mixed in there
and i personally know people who have
died who were self-medicating with
vicodin
uh not in huge amounts but over a long
period of time
and eventually their liver gave out
and their kidneys gave out and they died
and by the time they found out
it was too late and they were told they
had three days to live and that was the
end of it and it was really sad and i've
seen that happen
in fact more than once in different
cases so
be wary of that and if you are the sort
of person who is using
vicodin
for one reason or another
keep in mind that you can do a fairly
simple what's called a cold water
extraction to remove the opiate
and use it exclusively while leaving the
tylenol behind you can look that up our
friends over at arrowwood have some
instructions i'll try and put those here
as well
so
just be careful
of course
there are a few other things that you
can do for hangover one of the things is
that you sap your body with b12 pretty
strongly so you can get high-dose
versions of that the
methylated versions of b12 are probably
a little bit better and you can get a
sublingual form the high dose tends to
be 5000 micrograms
maybe take two in the morning
it'll flush out your system pretty fast
one of the magic things that you can do
for a hangover is of course give
yourself a saline iv which is very hard
to get access to depending on where you
are uh
the united states centauriously blocks
citizens from having access to saline
which is about the safest thing in the
world but there are ways of getting
around that of course
so
keep yourselves healthy keep yourself
safe and try and
be conscious if you have a hangover of
not damage yourself any further
another big one is sleep often times
people are having a hard time
sleep goes but
it's of course hard to sleep well if
you're not sleeping well if they're the
sorts of things that are affecting you
that you're suffering from bad sleep
then the sorts of things that are going
to be recommended again in this sort of
paternalistic condescending way or not
going to be terribly effective
there are a couple of stop gap
treatments i know most people have heard
of melatonin
i tend to
recommend to my friends who are having
trouble sleeping that they
do a
dose of three milligrams of
instantaneous release and three
milligrams of extended release melatonin
and that can
be sort of a combination one that helps
you fall asleep and one that helps you
stay asleep
on top of that oftentimes one of the
things that will
make sleep difficult is anxiety and
5 htp which is a
again another supplement available in
health food stores is a serotonin
precursor and it can sometimes take the
edge off a little bit
you know 200 milligrams or something can
help
some people even go so far as to take
benadryl and of course it's one of those
things where yes benadryl is not the
sort of thing that is going to be very
friendly to your system if you're taking
it chronically repeatedly over and over
but again when you're in a desperate
situation where you can't sleep and
nothing else is possible and
and that's something worth considering
we're trying to
reduce histamine levels in the brain and
that
helps
you
fall into an unconscious state so
maybe try that
and one of the other things that a lot
of people in very difficult and
stressful times seem to suffer from
the sort of brain fog the
uh
seeming degradation of memory
cognition not as sharp as it used to be
focus lessened
um
this is one of the things that seems to
be a major
uh issue in the long haulers and it
seems to be
endemic anyway
now there's a whole host of nootropics
out there that
people are expert and you can get good
advice about um
some of those are hard to come by though
the
common
things that again are
more available easy to find
include
um coin enhancers and two key choline
enhancers include
alpha gpc and dmae both generally
recognized as safe and easily available
alpha gpc is something that can help
tremendously with memory it's important
to take it
uh with food in order for it to be
effective but it's something you can
take after breakfast and
you'll know if it's effective for you
after about a week
worth trying and it's not expensive as
well
dmae is another choline enhancer that
works by a slightly different mechanism
that a lot of people indicate
helps them
focus better it can sometimes make you
a little less patient a little more
agitated because your brain is going at
a faster pace than most of the people
around you once you have it in your
system so just be cautious and try to be
friendly and nice to the people around
you if you're trying to do that
so
the last thing
i'll mention just a little bit about
again is this question of depression
now
the 5-htp i mentioned before of course
is a
good tool because serotonin precursors
and the adjustment of serotonin in the
body can be helpful it can sometimes
take the edge off and of course there
are degrees of depression as to how
severe it is and how it's affecting a
person
and
how much those different techniques can
help varies if somebody is in the major
depression where they can't even get out
of bed then it's very hard to sort of
break out of that cycle to make things
better but
here are some tools that will work
sometimes for some people
in
some brackets of the depression spectrum
and again sapolsky the guy i mentioned
in that lecture series the depression
lecture is notably missing often
i'll try and mark that especially here
there's a place where he gave the
lecture that was outside of stanford and
you can
hopefully watch that separately
again i mentioned that often there's a
lot of really useless advice out there
where people say things like hey have
you tried not being depressed or hey why
don't you
exercise or change your diet or
and and of course
those things aren't wrong but they're
often inapplicable for the people who
are really suffering
but there is one thing
that i have come across that's not very
well known
but it is
fairly well documented
and it seems like a lot of action
in the neurobiology of depression
happens in the hippocampus
very well documented the people who are
chronically depressed
their hippocampus will actually atrophy
it will actually shrink and the action
of it will lessen and the hippocampus is
a really fascinating thing it's
covers all sorts of interesting forms of
cognition it's very complicated and
connects a lot of dots and
to have it shrink is a really
interesting thing to witness
the other time the hippocampus atrophies
is when people
utilize turn-by-turn directions when
they are navigating or in other cases
when
they are
not
in control of
some sort of navigation and the sort of
way that the human brain
orients
itself is really critical and when
you're no longer in charge of doing that
when you're no longer
uh
when it is no longer incumbent upon you
to orient yourself for whatever reason
if you've offloaded to a machine or
another person or you're just not going
anywhere
then again the hippocampus will atrophy
now interestingly
in a
somewhat predictable form of symmetry
in people who spend a lot of time
navigating very carefully using only
their brain and not a machine
you will see people with a hippocampi
that are
larger
and more active the
very
classic cases that of old london cab
drivers who were required by law to
memorize the structure of london streets
and be able to
from memory give the
most
efficient route from point a to point b
utilizing the
really bizarre one-way system that
exists in london
and and they have
huge growth in the hippocampus
so
one of the things that is suggested by
the research is that if you go out and
do some navigation
without
the help of a machine telling you where
to go
that
it can
start to grow the hippocampus and that
if you do grow the hippocampus it can be
a tool in combating depression
so
if you know somebody who's depressed
and they're in a state where
trying to go outside isn't an
inaccessible thing
try offering that to them
sit down with a map or print out a map
and say let's pick a place that's close
by
that you've not gone before and we're
going to
pick out a route in advance
and we'll go there
and then you go with them and they
leave their phone at home where they
leave their phone in their pocket and
you stay with them
and you let them lead the way
you tell them that you're there that
they're safe
you're not going to get lost
but you're just going to navigate to
this point and then turn around and head
home
and if that's too much even just the
thought exercise of course can help this
just um helping them imagine going to
that place and coming back and what
those landmarks look like and
orienteering there he have even been
suggestions of playing video games that
require you to explore uncharted
territory in a virtual space being
helpful that might even be worth trying
but working with map and compass or
working with just a map
even if somebody is really really
emotionally attached to their phone
have them just turn off gps and they can
still use the map but they'll have to
figure out where they are from looking
around and they'll have to figure out
where to go
from consulting the map and that will
activate that system in the hippocampus
and can maybe make a little thing a
little bit better
especially if it's done repeatedly
so
hopefully that can help somebody a
little bit
and
we can continue to try and get things
together
so
again
i will be
back online soon with a lot of really
exciting things to announce about four
thieves and what we've done
in the past year
and i look forward to the possibility of
seeing you all in person again before
too long and i i
hope that that all works out
if you like four thieves and what we do
in general and you want to support the
cause
find somebody who
needs your help and help them
and do it whether you think they deserve
your help or not
keep each other healthy keep each other
safe
thanks so much
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