But yeah, you were talking about a love potion and it got so good that you had to like back off of it because- I

did actually.

That was so sketchy.

That was wild.

Yeah, I was like, oh my gosh.

I mean, I wanted to study the neurobiology of love and it turns out psychedelics are love drugs and certain ones, if you combine them, can reliably reproduce the early feelings of romantic love.

Which I thought, oh, my God, I've got the power in my hands to change the world for the better.

Well,

But will you talk about what inspired you to write the book? And what is the work that you're doing now that has given you the impetus to talk about these things?

I would say that my entire life, I've been trying to figure out why is it that people get sick and how do you become healthy? It's a big question.

This is a big question about existence, right? It's a core question of how we thrive in a world, right? Yes.

So I've always been interested in first principles thinking, which is like looking underneath the surface under the biggest whys of existence, right? And that led me to becoming a doctor.

And as I became a doctor, I was like, okay, this system we've built is a really great system for emergencies, for like really acute emergencies.

But the thing that really drove me crazy about working in the hospital, and I worked in hospitals since I was in ninth grade.

So it's been a lot of hospital time.

Those are the universal truths.

Oh.

I lived up the, up there in this room, and it was...

I actually had a place down the street, but I subleased it because I really didn't have enough friends, and I was isolated, and I was like, "I need to have people." So I moved into Safe House so I could have community.

And fast-forward many, many years later, I'm back here, and life has changed a lot, right? This was 2019 before- when I left, and now it's 2026, and we all went through a pandemic together.

And I don't know about you guys, but when I got really isolated during the pandemic, I experienced real damage to my health.

I really didn't feel like I changed my lifestyle that much, but my, but I felt like my physiology was shifting.

And what I didn't really know at the time was even though I was studying mitochondrial health and studying metabolic health and studying metabolic flexibility and studying, you know, what we eat and how we exercise and how we take supplements and how we feed our gut and all of that we do, I missed something really important, and that is that mitochondria are social organelles, and we are social creatures.

Yeah [laughing]

It's hard

... and you have to practice exerting your boundaries.

And it doesn't make you a bitch, and it doesn't make you a bad person.

It makes you a human that needs to, you know, actually can actually manage her energy.

And I do not have energy for people that try to create chaos in my life.

I just don't, I don't allow space for them anymore because I don't ha- I don't need to.

I've got enough going on in my life to deal with.

Yeah.

Mm

... and norepinephrine or ma- which, which makes you feel like super, um, excited about, like, your partner, but also you, "I can't sleep, I can't, you know, eat.

I'm just so...

I can't stop thinking about them." And then in romantic love, interestingly, initially serotonin goes down, so you- you're, you're kind of driven p- to your partner so that you can get more of the serotonin.

And then serotonin release leads to oxytocin as well as orgasm.

So the more you have sex with someone, the more likely you're supposed- you're turning on the romantic love drive and the more you're basically having, uh...

It's a, it's a, it's a, it's biological- biologically has engineered us for mate selection.

Do you think we could make up a name for that disease? I think I'd call it Fauci Syndrome.