Joe Rogan Experience #1842 - Andrew Huberman

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The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music plays)

And we're up. All right, here we go. What's up, man?

Great to see you.

Good to see you too. So, we were just talking about Ari blacking out trying to keep up with, uh, Shane Gillis, who is a, a superhuman drinker. Like it's, it's bizarre the volume he can put down. And you were, you were saying? You were about to say something?

Yeah. I mean, obviously there's a tolerance that's built up with drinking a lot, but I believe the number is approximately 8% of people have a mutation in a gene such that when they drink alcohol, it increases their dopamine levels very quickly and they get euphoric. They feel great. These are the people, like that character in Mad Men, the Don Draper character, like he would go out and just get plastered and the next day, you know, he's all fresh and, and ready. And pa- part of that is tolerance. But in certain Scandinavian countries, northern European countries, this gene tends to be more prevalent, and these people are the people that can just keep drinking and drinking. They feel great when they drink, whereas most people, they feel disinhibited at the beginning. You know, you have a couple drinks, your forebrain shuts down a little bit 'cause that's what it does. They start talking more, talking more. But if they keep drinking, they're blacking out. You know, they're stumbling, they're slurring their words. This 8% of people, by way of this genetic mutation, alcohol affects them very differently. It offsets all that sedative property and they can just go and go and go. This is the person who's doing a case a day or at the party and just shot for shot and just looking like they're improving in function.

(laughs)

And obviously they're not, but you put one of those people against, uh, Ari Shaffir-

Yeah. (laughs)

(laughs) ... and that's what you get.

Yeah. So i- i- even for those people though, it still has a negative effect on your body, right?

Oh, yeah. I mean, the toxicity of the alcohol is universal, but in terms of how it impacts brain function. And you see this across all these different categories of drugs too, right? You know, uh, somebody takes, uh, Ritalin, Adderall, Modafinil, or Armodafinil, these are the common prescribed drugs now and people use them recreationally for ADHD. In fact, in researching an episode for our podcast on ADHD, turns out that more than 80, eight zero, percent of college students will rely on ADHD meds, quote unquote, "recreationally," not prescribed, they buy it from each other in order to study.

80 percent?

Eighty percent.

Wow.

And those drugs work mainly by increasing dopamine-

Wow.

... and increasing adrenaline, and they make your focus like this narrow and you're, you're in a trench and you can't-