 Hi everyone. Missed you. I still miss you. And it's 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 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 and 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 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 micro ethical things. Some of the things that don't save lives, but get you through the day, maybe a little more. Some of them may be safe 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 and the human behavioral biology of it. We 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 and 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 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. I'll try and put that here. We'll see if that actually works in the other thing. 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 of 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, 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 going to try and talk a little bit about some of those things. And it's one of those things that's very individual and it's very personal. 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 is all too common. And it's really sad. It's really sad and it's really enough to make you kind of angry when the same things 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 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, don't feel very good. And nobody likes to 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 of little things that you can do to make that just a little bit easier. The first one is an acetylcystine, often abbreviated as NAC. It's a simple dietary supplement that's 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 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 dangers of people using Vicodin is not the Vicodin, it's not the opiate inside there that I believe is 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. 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 Tylenol behind. You can look that up. Our friends over at Arrowhead 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 of 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, and maybe take two in the morning. It'll flush out of your system pretty fast. One of the magic things that you can do for hangovers, of course, give yourself a saline IV, which is very hard to get access to, depending on where you are. 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. Try and be conscious if you have a hangover of not damage yourself any further. Another big one is sleep. Oftentimes, people are having a hard time. Sleep goes, but it's, of course, hard to sleep well if you're not sleeping well. If there are 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 are 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. 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 that's something worth considering when you'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 is the sort of brain fog, the seeming degradation of memory, cognition not as sharp as it used to be, focus lessened. This is one of the things that seems to be a major issue in the long haulers. And it seems to be endemic anyway. Now there's a whole host of new tropics out there that people are expert in and you can get good advice about. Some of those are hard to come by though. The common things that again are more available, easy to find, include choline 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 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. 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 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. It's very well documented that 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 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 in this 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 when it is no longer incumbent upon you to orient yourself for whatever reason if you've offloaded it 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 but 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 or 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 I'm helping them imagine going to that place and coming back and what those landmarks look like and orienteering that 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 uh 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 here's the toast to the dead for children with cancer and age to cure existing you probably could have been saved sad to see medicine divorce morality corporate home records giving up a salary