Mostly Wise: Matt McCusker, Andrew Huberman & Tom Segura - #1102

I keep seeing people say every guy should be on ED meds—are we really doing that, or is it a push to normalize it?

Low daily tadalafil, around 2.5 to 5 milligrams, was built for prostate blood flow and gives gentle brain vasodilation; a Stanford urologist even suggested most men over forty could benefit, though you might see a small blood pressure dip and a bit of extra firmness.

I take five to six milligrams in the morning; higher doses are for performance, while lots of athletes use the low dose for blood flow.

I used to slam coffee and basically induce a panic attack; now I’m up early, take the kids, hit the gym, and I’m paying for a couple of rough food years.

I tried a GLP-1 after I’d already lost most of my weight and stopped eating, then rebounded; a five-day fast reset me, a shoot schedule of light daytime meals leaned me out, and now I’m steady around 190 by training mornings.

Why are comedians so good at acting?

Some can do it because they can go dark and play it straight; comics chase feedback on set, while seasoned actors don’t, and the whole “never break character” thing is rare aside from a few extreme cases.

Tiny physical cues—like how someone uses the whites of their eyes—can land a joke, and once a bit imprints on you, just seeing that comic can prime you to laugh.

Comedy hits involuntarily, so you can’t be talked into laughing, yet real greatness still reads as greatness.

Music and beauty feel undeniable, and even a chaotic artist can still pack stadiums; with podcasters and YouTubers the gap between person and art is so small that people judge the human more than the work.

Solo riffing is a rare skill—Tim Dillon is lethal at it—and Alex Jones showed the format’s power even as it veers into real-world fallout fast.

Love Island was reality boot camp: hidden cameras, producers pushing story beats, zero clocks, controlled sleep, and forced pacing to get conversations and kisses on schedule.

Your belief about your sleep score changes next-day performance—good scores lift you within reason, bad ones drag you—even if the actual sleep was similar.

I wasn’t there long enough to fall in love, but the whole setup was wild.

Have you seen this “retard maxing” thing?

It’s the meme Mark Andreessen boosted about doing instead of ruminating; Dana White echoed action-first, and while feelings matter, endless therapy and brooding can stall you out.

Check in with yourself, then move; staying in your feelings without acting doesn’t change anything.

Big achievers often have rough edges, and today video has become the referee—people want footage, not rumor, before they judge, which is why clips like the Diddy assault or that Coldplay fiasco hit so hard.

It’s wild that the rallying cry is tax the rich instead of help the poor.

Everyone still uses the tech built by the people they claim to despise.

People are now building chatbots from old texts and photos to simulate an ex, which seems like emotional purgatory even if it stops a relapse DM.

It’s private so it skirts likeness fights, but it’s a brutal coping strategy.

Surveillance is everywhere—from ring doorbells to robotaxis that literally warn you if you touch anything.

Even short rides flag unbuckled kids and ping you, so the machine calls you out in real time.

All that video is why serial-killer epics faded and quick sprees get wrapped up fast.

NASA posts get swarmed by hoax claims; the Apollo doubts just won’t die.

If someone like Elon ever called the moon landing fake, I’d revisit it, but until then NASA should just explain basics—like how those calls worked—clearly.

Conspiracy chats can turn into a race to the deepest rabbit hole.

Epstein united both sides because the files were real-time emails, and while government secrecy is messy, that paper trail was powerful.

People still died around that story and many ignored his prior conviction because his network was huge.

The attempt on Trump’s life basically evaporated from the news, which makes no sense.

They closed it fast as a lone-wolf case with little narrative, which feels thin for something that major.

Watching a shooter climb a roof with snipers supposedly around was surreal.

Secret Service actually started as an anti-counterfeiting unit and still handles the big counterfeit cases.

We were laughing about counterfeit bills and fake IDs, but is that stuff really as risky as it sounds?

It is, and it can escalate fast; kids selling IDs in college ended up in a federal sting, and parents who “host” underage drinking can face real legal fallout if something goes wrong.

The landscape’s shifted since high school keggers; rideshare lowered drunk‑driving deaths and teens drink less, but phones record everything, so one bad night can live forever.

Alcohol down, THC up—what’s your read on cannabis right now?

Some people tolerate it fine, but if you’re prone to psychosis or bipolar, high‑potency use can trigger lasting problems, and the politics around weed swing so much it’s become culture‑war ping‑pong.

Even setting health aside, weed isn’t a productivity booster; coffeehouses flipped society from ale‑soaked to alert, and that shift built things.

Caffeine can make you edgy, sure, but no one comes home and wrecks their life because they overdid espresso.

The 90s nostalgia wave bugs me; there was great indie culture then, but access to information and health tools is way better now, so let’s not tell teens their era is doomed.

You can love a decade’s music and movies without dumping on the present, and someone will call this era a golden age in twenty years anyway.

Phones killed daydreaming for me; if there’s a gap, I grab the screen, which makes it too easy to numb out.

I picture a narrow daily path with drama on one side and numbing on the other, and algorithms are so good they’ll find your trigger—fight video, cute clip, whatever—and pull you off course.

After shows the adrenaline is crazy, and comics either party, eat, or, yeah, take matters into their own hands to crash, but I ditched porn because it wrecked my readiness when it counted.

What’s actually happening in the brain after a big performance, and how do you land the plane?

You’re drenched in dopamine and adrenaline, so you want more stimulation and your focus is locked on it; slow exhales, heat then cool to drop core temperature, or sex will flip you into a calmer state, but porn can push thresholds so high that real connection and arousal get harder—especially for young guys.

Non‑prescription ways to sleep on the road—what actually helps?

Take a hot shower to trigger a cooling drop, do long exhale breathing, and consider magnesium with chamomile‑derived apigenin and saffron; a peptide called pinealon can boost REM if you get it from a legit compounding pharmacy and don’t use it nightly, and remember cannabis slashes REM, so your dreams will rebound like crazy when you stop.

Eye mask, earplugs, cool the bed if you can, be cautious with trazodone and the pricey orexin blockers like Quviviq, and if you ever use melatonin, stick to a tiny, fast‑acting dose and don’t give big doses to kids because it can tinker with puberty timing.

My kids are night‑and‑day personalities—one’s hyper‑competitive and the other is a miniature comedian who roasts me and breaks things, and we keep phones out of the house for now.

Same here—one kid polices my swearing, the little one throws it back at me, and they’re way more socially skilled than I was.

Kids can generate sentences they’ve never heard because language has built‑in brain templates, and with today’s exposure to endless dialects and media, they combine words in ways we didn’t at their age.

AI is getting weird—there’s a student making real money running a synthetic OnlyFans model that chats and posts around the clock.

Studios already use AI for sets, and some agencies are taking over creators’ accounts, pushing AI versions into more extreme content, then handing the login back like nothing happened.

The default British voice on a major text‑to‑speech platform is basically me, and my voice is popping up in ads I’d never approve while they hide behind a similarity score.

Your voice is part of your likeness, and there are technical ways to prove it; you can push back without loving litigation, but you don’t have to accept it either.

People also fall for “clang” thinking—linking words or shapes to meaning—so walnuts look like brains, therefore they’re brain food, which is magical thinking, whereas classic psychedelics sometimes reveal real structure under careful use.

There’s even a whole site of hilarious fake correlations that look perfect on a chart, which shows how easy it is to fool yourself.

Johnny Depp’s likely Pirates return is a monster deal with guaranteed money and a fat slice of gross from ticket one, and the reset could repair years of financial chaos detailed in that epic spending profile.

Fame that starts young plus shredded sleep is a recipe for unraveling; Elvis lived in circadian chaos and you can literally push people toward psychosis that way.

A teen once stayed awake for roughly eleven days for a science fair and bounced back, but age makes sleep loss brutal.

Inflammation climbs as we age, cortisol gets jagged with sleep debt, and you feel every bump compared to your twenties.

Those backyard ultras are savage—four and a bit miles every hour on the hour until only one person’s left—so runners trade pace for short naps and keep going for days.

I’m tempted by a half marathon and train with one long slow run, one faster session, and one day of sprints alongside lifting, but I was a hundred pounds lighter when I raced cross‑country, so I’m realistic.

There’s a fringe idea that running low protein with lots of sugar spikes certain growth factors and energy; a guy swore he got shredded on fruit and candy plus a lean dinner, but I bailed by mid-morning and wanted eggs and caffeine.

He’s bounced from carnivore to sugar-maxing, from rope flow to snake diet to kettlebell sport, and he keeps testing himself without hawking products; I rate Nsima as a rare natural with insane work ethic while Mark’s been open about experimenting.

On the marshmallow test, every kid eventually ate it; the real measure was how long they could wait, and even after accounting for trust in the researcher, delay capacity predicts life outcomes and can be trained.

One of my kids would out-wait anyone out of sheer competitiveness, and the other would inhale it right away.

I tried it at home and told my oldest, in no uncertain terms, not to eat it because it felt like everything hinged on that choice.

These days so much of thriving is about restraint, whether that’s limiting social media or, for some, stepping away from porn.

I finally quit because it never sat right, the industry harm bothered me, and the after-feel was lousy enough to be a wake-up call.

Funny aside: in Beef season two a character masturbates, cleans up, then runs while listening to my show on dopamine; we approved the clip, but it was not exactly something I could proudly text my mom.

Once you have kids, the risk of being caught at home is a hard no, which made quitting even easier.

It’s wild how as kids we feared parents walking in, and as parents we fear our kids doing the same.

Quick one on sunscreen—are we hurting ourselves with it or not?

You want regular sunlight beyond vitamin D, especially morning and late-day when UV is lower, and you should avoid midday burns, use clothing when needed, and if you need lotion choose zinc-only mineral formulas to dodge endocrine and reef issues, especially for kids.

Longer wavelengths like red and infrared support mitochondrial function and can pass through thin clothing. LEDs skew very blue, so the best fix is real sunlight or, second best, some red-light or incandescent exposure; even a major review backed a balanced spectrum, and greenery reflects infrared, so get outside without burning.

Sun nerd note: the gamma rays born in the core bounce around inside the sun for tens of thousands of years before emerging as the light that reaches us in minutes, which is why we are not fried.

Electromagnetic exposure is a spectrum—x-rays are clearly harmful and microwaves heat tissue—yet we trust shielding and even elevator doors with zero thought, which is a funny contradiction.

When I travel I haul my heavy bag up stairs for a mini ruck, and by the way, thanks for being so open about the porn topic.

Bad Thoughts season two is back, we led with a gnarly poop story, and there are fresh, twisted targets all season.

I’m on the road in Toronto and Chicago this weekend.

My book, Protocols: a user manual for the brain and body, is up for presale now and drops in September; thanks for hosting, and see you next time.

If you want great reads, grab the Modern Wisdom list of one hundred impactful books at chriswillx dot com slash books.