I'll get a team. Welcome to another instorm and of the show. It's Tiffany and Cook. It's Professor William Sullivan Junior. We're going to call him that. It's me, Craig Anthony Harper, the bloody buffed from Latro Valley who just keeps turning up every day to do this. We'll start with the lady. I use the term reservedly because she does. She's looking around. She's looking around?
Is that me or is it today?
You're a lady, You're a lady.
We know you're a lady, tiff That is Monday, eleven thirty four in the am. How's your weekend being? Did you have a good weekend? What have you got on this week?
Had a great weekend, got out on the bike. It was really sunny. That made me happy. Then it rained for a lot and that didn't make me happy.
All the things.
Yeah, tell all the lady listeners, of which is most of our audience. For some strange reason, what attracts you about riding a motorbike that will go zero to one hundred, or in doctor Bill's language, zero to sick in three seconds? What is it about you that high octane high horse power vehicles do for the lady that is you.
It's visceral, it's tactile, it's sensory, and it shuts out everything else you got. There's not many things that can give you enough to feel and see and experience and focus on that can shut out all the other noise. There's boxing. Boxing. Was that for me and the motorcycle?
I love it, especially when.
I got that exhaust last year. Harps, Oh my goodness.
Wow, wow, that's it's all about the sound.
Well, the power and the speed and the acceleration are good, but when it sounds like a fucking mobile like volcano as well, when you got that little bit of do you know what's interesting? Doctor Bill can tell us why this happens, but like what will be for you? Almost like a hypnotic calming. You know, everyone knows I ride motorbikes as well, but for me, I'm almost in my happiest place when I'm on a motorbike, which for someone
else will be their most stressful place. Isn't it funny how you can have a person on the front who's producing you know, dopamine and bloody, all the good stuff, right, and then someone sitting on the back on the same day, on the same motorbike going to the same place. Who's in a complete state of stress and anxiety and panic.
When I'm going really fast within the speed limit. Of course, of course, sometimes I just squeal under my helm. I'll get that excited. I just squeal. It's the best, the best feeling.
I do that, But for different reasons, Doctor Bill, what are your what's your take on all of this drivel?
I guess when I was young, I would be the same way. You're kind of more adventurous, and you have more of a you know, a reckless spirit, and you really start to feel more alive, you know, when you kind of risk your life a little bit, or you know there's a danger there, just the emotions get so palpable. Then I think people realize that, hey, I'm living a life here and it can actually end. So maybe you get some enjoyment from that.
Yeah, it's that fine line between absolute ecstasy and it sounds weird, but like when you're on a motorbike, there's not many places or experiences.
Where you're more vulnerable, especially when you're going.
Quick and you know that like literally four inches below your foot is.
The road and.
You know you and the road and you're going one hundred kilometers or sixty miles an hour or in your case, one hundred and eighty kilometers an hour, and if you come off, that's it. That's the end of the story. I don't know what we find so attractive. I don't
think it's that bit, but there's something about it. Hey, doctor Bill, I want to ask you before we dive into today's topic, which Melissa rang me up and she went, doctor Bill sent through a potential topic for today, and my hackles came up straight away, as you would imagine, because I'm the exercise science guy and so we're talking about there was an article called something like scientists are working out how to put exercise in a pill or
the exercise pill or something like that. But before we jump into that, I want to ask you, what are your thoughts.
On AI in academia.
It's just like, because I'm just finishing my research now and I'm about hopefully four weeks away from hand and stuff in, but there's just a huge I know, my university which is called Monash University in Australia, and Melbourne University and Deacon University and Latrobe University, like a lot of the universities around where I am.
It's pretty complex.
They're trying to figure out how do we because there's never going to be a world without well for the foreseeable future, without AI, how do we integrate it or avoid it? Like, what do we do with it? How do we stop people from chating? How do we use it in an intelligent why where people are still getting the knowledge and still understanding what they're doing without having essentially II write their exams or write their papers.
What are your thoughts about all that?
Yeah, just give me a second. I'm going to check chat GPP and find out.
Yeah, why don't you Why don't you say what chat JP thinks of it?
I think chat GTP might be a little biased in how it perceives its utility. But you're asking the million dollar question. We just had a faculty meeting not even a month ago, trying to wrap our head around what we're going to do, what sort of policies we're going to have to put in place for students for thesis dissertations, and what sort of policies we're going to put in place for exams and for equity too. Faculty are utilizing AI tools to grade exams, you know, on a faster
and larger scale, and perhaps even right exams. So this is going to have repercussions at all levels throughout academia, just as it is doing in other businesses. So yeah, we really don't have a concrete answer at the moment, but obviously we're well aware that these tools exist, they're being heavily utilized. It's not going to go away. It's going to be extremely difficult to police that sort of
activity on both sides for students and faculty. And I mean there's concerns with like scientific and medical journals too, with researchers having AI write a portion or even the majority of that paper for them. So yeah, those are really valid and pertinent questions, and we could probably talk for a whole hour and still not come up with an answer. But yeah, that's like a topic for a
whole you know, a series of your podcast. What we've decided to do at the moment, like most academics do, is table it and you know, let it incubate for a while in our heads and you know, maybe brainstorm and try to come back with some ideas, you know, some basic guidelines and my sense and I could be totally wrong about this, but my sense is that there is not going to be a feasible way to ignore
these technologies or these tools. Rather, I think they're going to have to be embraced and incorporated into the way we go about generating knowledge and writing in the future. And a part of that really scares me because as an author and a writer, you know, these tools can easily overtake a lot of positions out there and leave big voids in the human you know, marketplace for writers
and editors and things like that. So what I can what I can tell you so far in a nutshell, is that AI tools that are being used for like spelling and grammar check don't raise as many red flags even though they did, you know, a few years ago. They don't raise the same flags anymore right now. Then you know the extraordinary ability that AI has currently achieved in writing full content, and it's getting more and more
impressive and accurate by the day. Yes, So that's the challenge we have to face, and I, like I said, I don't think it's going to go away because we've already accepted, you know, the computerized tools that were frowned upon just five or ten years ago.
One of the I think is maybe an issue. I don't know. This is purely nobody said this. I haven't read it. This is just my chat. JPT didn't tell me this.
I think, like, what's interesting is so I'm sixty two, you're a bit younger than me. I think in the ballpark and at where I'm at, Monash University, which is a pretty highly regarded uni, like the decision makers are, without being rude, mostly old, and I think I don't think they're really all over AI yet. These are the guys and the women who are making the decisions about AI, and like some of the young people, the shit that they can do, the stuff that they can create and
produce in next to no time. Like Melissa, who's my business partner, is thirty seven, so she's twenty five years younger than me. She's got a double degree in psychology and commerce. And her aptitude and you know, her ability with everything tech and tifts the same. She's about a little bit older than Melissa, but not a lot. But I look at her do stuff and I just think, well, I just don't have that aptitude. I guess I'm better than the average person my age but I don't have that skill.
I don't have it.
I didn't grow up with that language. It's like the kids now are growing up. It's like we grow up speaking English, we grow up speaking technology now, whereas I grew up speaking you know, BMX and skateboard and football, that was it. It's just like, I wonder how we're going to go when the people who.
Are actually in the positions of power and making decisions within the universities, they're not even fluent in the stuff they're making decisions about.
Yeah, that's a good point. And you may remember too when you were a little craig when books were introduced from the printing press. Do you remember when that was invented?
Yeah, yeah, fifteen sixty two. Yeah, I was ten. Yeah, yeah, Well that was just doctor Jesus and the Apostles and I had lunch on the beach in Galilee. Come on, bro, that was just I'll tell you what that day when he walked on the water and me and Michael and James we bought all those fishing. I tell you what. He said, I'm going to make you fishes of men. That was a good day.
I bet it was. But but seriously, when the written word was introduced and started to get mass produced. There was a lot of fear that this was going to destroy people's brains because they wouldn't be able to remember anything anymore if you wrote it down.
So that's so true. The Internet in generals.
Are to us now. But that was a very legitimate and widespread concern amongst the older people of that day, just like these AI tools are, you know, making older people freak out today while the younger crowd embracing them and doing some downray innovative and creative things with them. So, like all things in life, you either adapt and change with it, or you know, you go extinct or at least endangered.
It is. It's an interesting time, and we get onto the actual topic. But I like just riffing with you in general.
But there was a so there's a song at the moment, which well as of yesterday anyway, it was the number one country song on Billboard Digital, so number one on the charts, blah blah blah, selling like people are buying it. And I got that song and I sent it to about five or six friends. I said, what do you think of this? And everyone loved it, And everyone's like that's amazing.
Who is that? And I said, it's not who is that, it's what is that? Right? That is AI? So this is an AI.
Generated song, an AI generated artist, everything. And then so I put that song on my social media and I just said, you know, one, what do you think of this? Like if you heard a song that you loved on the radio or wherever. You just heard a song that you loved and it just resonated with it just whatever the buttons, the emotional or psychological or creative buttons that it pushes, It pushes all your buttons and you love that song, you love the melody or the words or
the whatever the experience of that song. And then you find out that it's AI created. Would you listen to it?
Still? And virtually everyone went.
No, And it's just so funny where I understand it, but I'm thinking, wow. So it's not even about the music, it's about our thinking about how music should be created or who should or shouldn't be able to Because the truth is want it or not, like it or not.
And I'm not pro or against because I think for me, it's pointless. It's going to happen, doesn't matter if I'm against it, or I just think it's a thing that I find cure. I'm interested in the psychology of the response is that, you know, people, for better or worse, people love it. Some people love it, but then they find out that it's not a human that's doing it, and then they hate it. And you go, well that's you don't hate the music, you hate how it came into existence.
Maybe that's right. I got two things to say about that. First of all, what you're telling me is that AI somehow wrote a good country song, which is something that no human has ever.
Done, spoken and authorized by Professor William Sullivan Jr. Not endorsed by the Youth Project at all. And don't marry on that's so hurtful.
Maybe Australian country music is very different than American country music, and I'm just staying joke.
Shout out to Keith Urban by the way, who's a big listener of the show.
There are lots of genres within the country.
You know, you pedals going backwards, stiff, Can you hear those pedals? Yeah, he's just turning round.
No. No, some of my best friends listen to the country you know, it's but so so that that's the first thing that came to mind. But the second thing, what that reminds me of Craig The story of once people learned out that it was artificially created rather than by a human reminds me of the story of Milli Vanilli. You remember these guys, Yeah, yeah, like early nineties or something like that.
Yeah, correct, Tiff.
You probably don't know Milli Vanilli. Right, it's not ice Cream, It's it's this duo, this musical duo who were not a music group at all. They were lip syncing the whole time. They put two pretty faces and good dancers out in front to lip sync this music that was actually sung by somebody else. And once people found that out, once that story broke and they found out that these guys were faking it, there were like bonfires of their CDs and LPs, you know, lit on fire because people
were so angry at the deception. And maybe they see AI generated music or writing as a deception of sorts, even though it kind of plagiarizes all of what humanity has already done and assembles it in a way using algorithms, assembles it in a way that plays into our psychology, so it knows what we like and dislike. So yeah, it reminds me of the whole million Vanilli thing. So I totally understand the reaction of some of the people that you said once they found out it was fake
or artificially generated. But I guess I guess personally, you know, if you like a song, you like a song, you know you can't deny the fact that there's something about it that you found enjoyable. So I'm not quite sure I would deny myself that joy just because it was generated by a computer. You know, the difference here is that computer is drawing upon the collective contributions of human society, so it's just putting them together in a way that
you know, a country artist would. And you know, I guess I have a little more nuanced look at whether I would discount the creation just because I found out it was artificially generated.
Do you use AI in your research? Like it feels like AI could do some of the grunt work that's not.
Particularly glamorous and then you do the actual thinking stuff.
Yeah. Well, those those sorts of rules and regulations are currently being debated. You know, how much AI are we going to to allow someone to use if they're going to submit a grand application, for example, or a paper. But AI is going to easily be utilized like within
data interpretation. And we're already seeing the evolution of tools that can take huge, massive data sets and instead of a human being toiling away for days, sometimes weeks, trying to find something interesting in this data set, AI can do it in seconds. See why you should I don't see why you shouldn't take advantage of that.
Hund percent. All right on with the show. So with that in mind, I knew I was going to ask you about that.
With that in mind, I asked chat Jpat to write a show intro. So I'm being very transparent everyone. I did not write what I'm about to read, and everything up until now has been scripted by II old Doctor Bill's staff.
Everything TIF said, I write it now, that's not true. That's not true. It's all organic.
Everything's always organic, unless I've otherwise notified this.
What I'm about to read is not me.
But what I love is it's learned how to write a bit like I talk. Anyway, Here we go show intro. That's what it says. Today, we're talking about something that sounds like science fiction but is edging closer to science fact the idea of exercise in a pill. We all know that exercise is basically nature's Swiss army knife. It improves mood, memory, sleep, immune function, metabolic health, longevity, brain plasticity, and the list goes on. It's the closest thing we've
ever had to a true miracle drug. But for millions of people, exercise is also incredibly difficult. Illness, age, injury, chronic pain, disability, time pressures, or simply the realities of life can get in the way.
So here's the big question. Scientists are now asking, if the.
Body creates powerful health boosting chemicals when we move, can we isolate those chemicals and put them into a therapeutic form. Two new studies suggest we might be, so then we think. One found that hype, I'm not fucking up your message here, doctor Bill. One found that factors released into the blood during excise can literally stimulate new brain cell growth in sedentory mice. Another discovered that sustained.
Physical activity boost production of a meta metabolite called betaine, which seems to mimic some of exercises anti aging and anti inflammatory effects.
So what does this mean for medicine? For healthy aging for people who can't exercise, and what happens to us psychologically psychologically if we outsource the physical effort to a pill. To help us make sense of all of this, I'm joined by Professor Bill Sullivan Junior, a geneticist, author, and science communicator, to explore what these fightings mean, what's real, what's hype, and whether an exercise pill is in the
future or just a fascinating detour. Let's jump in. Welcome to the show, Professor pil That's not bad, is it?
I mean, honestly not bad. It's great. It's really good. I mean, that's terror upon most of the major topics that I spent hours researching, you know, to write the article that I sent you. You know, it's it's just a little scary. How fantastic the technology is. It really hits on all the major points. So then you know, until next time, Craig, you know.
I guess it's been great. So tell us tell us about this idea.
When I first heard it, I'm like, I was just philosophically opposed. But then I read the article and I went, okay, I've got a greater understanding now, So I was I was less opposed, but unpack up for us if you would.
No, I had the same reaction you did, as you probably remember, I said on the show a number of times, I'm an avid runner. I love getting out there and you know, running the trails and the feeling of that is just, you know, remarkable, and I know it's really good for my brain and body as well. So when I first heard that someone can pack exercise into a pill, or that this concept was being developed, it's kind of cringe.
You know, why would we even want to do such a thing when exercise literally is kind of the best medicine or Swiss army knife, as your AI generated text declared. So yeah, I had that initial response, But then you take a little pause and think about it for a moment, and you're like, you know, I can think of certain individuals where that could be a life saver. You know, it maybe wouldn't be for me, maybe wouldn't be good for you, Craig or Tiff wouldn't want to do it,
But no one's going to force you to. What this is being developed for are for the individuals who cannot avail themselves of opportunities to exercise. Just like your computer said, so what are those cases, Well, people with injuries, people with a debilitating disease might be bedridden, or or who just aren't in an environment where exercise is easy. They don't have access to a gym, they can't really run outside. It's a little more challenging for them to get exercise.
And your computer was not wrong. Exercise is fantastic medicine. And I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but the physical and mental health benefits that come from exercise, it's just hard to conceive that you could pack all of those into a pill because the advantages are are are just so plentiful. So what scientists are slowly trying to do, you know, I think to say that we can put exercise into a pill is really putting the
cart before the horse here. What these studies are actually doing are identifying some factors in isolation that seem to be induced or enhanced because of exercise. And when we see that as scientists, we're like, well, that molecule could be interesting. Maybe it's bestowing some of the benefits that exercise allows participants to enjoy. So they isolate that molecule or those factors and they can put them into mice or maybe even humans if it's an ethical experiment and
see what happens. And in some cases low and behold, those molecules actually do help, you know, in those laboratory settings. So that's what that's what's getting scientists excited about this sort of technology. But yeah, you're the initial thought is a lot of athletes or you know, people who like going to the gym and so on, are going to cringe when they hear that. And there's also the concern if you flip the script around the other way, is
this going to jeopardize the equity of competition? You know, if there's exercise in a pill, what if athletes take it, do they get boost and would not be considered cheating? You know, there was a good questions to consider too.
That is I did not think of that at all.
You know, I think even your computer mentioned that one. So I still have some utility.
You still it's somewhat diminished, but you still have a perpose.
But the time being, we're going to keep getting you on.
I mean, you know what is interesting about I never thought about somebody who already exercises and is fit and healthy potentially using the same medication or pill or whatever.
But one of the things that.
From a conceptual point of view and a philosophical point of view and even a scientific point of view, like everybody panics when you.
Talk about performance enhancing. You know in Australia that the everything is regulated very stringently, right, there's drug testing all the time.
And you know, and I know that that people cheat in sport. They cheat in probably every sport in every country some people. But what's ironic to me is, as an excise scientist, everything that we do for athletes in terms of you know, their training and their preparation and their recovery and their nutrition and their lifestyle and all of the interventions and the protocols that we put in place, all of them are for performance enhancement.
Like training is performance enhancing, good nutrition is performance enhancing. Great sleepers performance you know, if you're lacking vitamin C, vitamin c's performance enhancing. You know.
It's like, I remember, I worked at a professional so you have the NFL, we have the AFL. So I worked at one of the AFL clubs for four years in our national league. And I remember so I was the exercise science guy, training, conditioning, recovery, all of that, and when I first started working there, I remember. So we have a stadium here called the MCG, which is the Melbourne Cricket Ground, holds one hundred thousand people, and I was.
It was one of my early first two.
Or three games that I was at as part of the staff, and there was I don't know how many people there, seventy thousand people. And a player comes off. He's injured. He rolled his ankle. He's got a significant kind of ligament issue. He can't run, he can't wait bear and then he goes down the race, into the change rooms, into the medical rooms, he gets an injection, and ten minutes later he's back on the ground running
around like he has no injury. Now, so what do they do, Well, this guy can't run, They inject him with a painkiller and probably an anti inflammatory, and now he can't feel that his foot still injured. Obviously his foot isn't miraculous.
Cue. But if that's not performance enhancing, what is. But it's funny.
In our psychology of performance enhancement at an elite level, we go, oh, that's not that's okay because that's a painkiller and that's an anti inflammatory, and neither of those are on the prohibited list on the WADA or the USADA or the whatever it is band list, and you're like, yeah, but that guy couldn't even fucking walk because he's got an injury.
Then you inject him and now he's running. Yeah, that used to mess with Yeah.
Yeah, No, that's a good that's a good point. And you know another ethical conundrum when we're trying to make competitions fair. I would dial it back on another level. You know, there are certain athletes out there, like who play basketball, who are just seven feet tall, seven feet tall, and you had this, you know, this controversy years ago with this Olympic skier who could make incredible runs and it turns out he had a genetic mutation that somehow
made his blood bind oxygen better than most human beings. Yeah. I wrote about that in my book. I'm surprised you don't remember it.
Hang on, let me just that guy, that guy.
I can't I wrote the damn book and I can't even remember his name. But I bet chat GTP Will or GPT Will. But you get the point. And Michael Phelps, this swimmer he's got he's like a genetic variation in his arm length or something that makes him this unbeatable swimmer. So are the records that are set by athletes like this who just have genetic mutations that give them a physical attribute that most people will not have, you know?
Is that fair? I think that's that's an interesting question that we should put on them, put on the table if we're going to try to discuss making sports equitable.
I just think that genetic variability can't be one of the things because I mean, if that's just in DNA, if that's how you are, like, we can't kind of control for that. So you go, well, I mean, like I've worked with I also work in the National Netball League.
Netball is a.
Commonwealth game Canada, England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, A lot of countries play, America not but and there are girls in the league, women in the league, and also in the WNBA and also the WNBL the basketball in Australia and the States. And to be fair, some of them
are not great athletes. They're just six foot eight, so, you know, and it's not that you know better athletes than me, so and it's not that they're terrible athletes, but they're playing with other players who are five ft eight and so they almost don't have to dunk to shoot the ball, sorry, jump to dunk, or in netball you don't dunk. But yeah, it's just and you go, well, it is what it is, you know, and then you
can you combine her extraordinary or his extraordinary height. They're eleven out of ten height with maybe five out of ten athleticism. But the net result is somebody who can do that job pretty well. So that just is what it is.
Yeah, well, I find it fascinating that we're willing to give like genetic mutations a pass and we're saying, okay, well that's that's an ethical you know pass, because that's something they were born with they couldn't control it. But we will not give a pass to someone who uses their brain to figure out a way to enhance their performance,
like say through doping or something like that. Yes, for me, I don't see much difference, you know, whether it's a physical versus an intellectual gift, whichever one you employ to enhance your performance.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I.
Mean I see the difference. But then again I don't see the difference. You know.
What's funny is it's just the protocol, isn't it. You think about if somebody taking APO or something that's going to increase your blood's ability to carry oxygen or deliver oxygen, which means you're going to if I get any of this wrong, you're the expert. But if I fuck this up, let me know. But which is going to increase people's time to exhaustion? Right, So it's going to give them a kind of a temporarily high VO two max or
lactate threshold or whatever. So they can do that through doping, But they can also get the same physiological result through training at altitude or living at altitude. So the next result is the same. Well, they've got more oxygen in their blood, so their endurance is improved. So they're they're getting the exact same response, but the protocol is different.
One protocol is not okay and the other protocol is okay, even though they both enhance performance the same way.
Yeah, it's an interest. It's an interesting question.
Yeah, yeah, I love it. All right, let's go back to this article.
So, so how far away is this from being a real thing in humans or is it is it here already?
I think it depends on how we view the final product. I think if you're looking for like a single pill that packs a huge amount of benefits from exercise, you know, into a therapeutic form, we're way off from that. You know, there's just no way. We're just beginning to understand what some of the molecular players are when we size and obtain some kind of mental or health benefit from that, and there's undoubtedly going to be hundreds, maybe thousands more. Okay.
One of the things that I think might be more immediate on the horizon are kind of like the two studies that came out just this past month that I talked about in the article, and I'll elaborate on those in a moment, but those are on a much smaller scale. They're like a single molecule or a group of molecules that seem to have modest benefits, or at least certain types of benefits. That is something I think can be moved forward very quickly, whether we do this legally or not.
You know, I think there's a lot of these things that are going to be pounced upon by biohackers or the supplement industry, and they're going you know, they're already kind of doing this already they throw out claims about certain molecules. Hey, it was found in this study which was done in rats or whatever that you know, rats, given this supplement X, all of a sudden, they're exercising
a lot better by our product. And with that very minimal amount of evidence, you can put a product on the shelf, at least in the States, without anyone batting an eyelash, and first, god knows whatever reason, you know, millions of people snatch it up and they throw tons of money at these companies for unsubstantiated claims. But that's
totally legal over here. And what I want to you know, talk about in these studies was something really interesting because what the first study did, and this was done in mice, actually they basically put mice into two different types of cages, one with an exercise wheel and one that didn't have one. So a month later you had, you know, these these mice that look like you crag, these these nice, bulky muscular mice because they've been running on a wheel for
a month. And then in the other cage they kind of look like me, you know, just this this scrawny little little guy wearing glasses. But that's what that's what these mice would look like in these different cages. But here's where it gets interesting. They isolated from both groups of mice. They isolated these extracellular vesicles from the bloodstream of each of those mice. Now, what are extracellular vesicles.
These are actually packets of molecules that get released by cells in your body to go tell other cells and organs what to do. So they're kind of communication devices that the cells in your body uses to change your physiology. And in the brain that happens too. Extracellular vesicles release neurotransmitters that signal to other brain cells to do certain things, or you know, it gets you to think or feel
different ways. So these communication vesicles were isolated, and the contents between the exercised mice versus the ones that weren't exercised are different. And I don't know what all those differences mean yet. We're talking about dozens of different factors
in these vesicles. But what they did do they can take the vesicles isolated from each group of mice and put them into lazy mice mice that haven't been exercised, and just by putting in those extracellular vesicles, they saw new brain cells growing in the hipocampus of those lazy mice, and that only happened with the extracellular vesicles from the
fit mice. The sedentary mice didn't have any effect, So their exercise is really what it really means to in a very simple What this really means in a simple way is that when these mice were exercising one they were making factors that promoted brain cell growth in their hippocampus and that's the center for memory and learning. And this explains why a lot of people who exercise typically are a lot sharper or are less susceptible to dementia
as they age. Exercise has very clear effects on the brain, and if we can dive into these extracyllular vesicles and identify what their contents do, we could very well come up with new therapies that can deliver some of the benefits of exercise without actually having to go work out or break a sweat. And like we said, there are subsets of people in our population and who could really benefit from something like that. So I thought that was
a really cool study. It teaches us something about the mechanisms of exercise and why it's so healthy and important to do, but it also points us toward possible therapies for people who really don't exercise or can't exercise for whatever reason.
Can I zoom out from the micro of this particular study and ask you a more macro question for people who for whom research and this kind of study and learning is unfamiliar. What's the process of something going from a study with mice or rats or whatever.
I know it's not quick, and I know it's not painless, But.
How does that work in terms of that becoming eventually a human study, getting ethical approval, getting funding?
All of that?
Is that a and I know it varies, but that's probably closer to a ten year process than a one or two year process.
Am I right?
Oh? I would say, so there's still be a lot more pre clinical studies, which means more animal studies to verify this result. You know, this was a one off experiment, so you want to see that it can get repeated, and then you would want to take it into either
non human primates or humans themselves. Some of the things you could do right now would be to try to isolate these extracellular vesicles from exercising humans versus those who don't get a lot of exercise and see how the contents are different and whether it provides any clues as to why people who exercise seem to have certain medical benefits that sedentary people do not have. So that would
be a good start. But you know, the other angle to your question there is how do we progress once we find, say, like a key protein in these extracellular vesicles that seem to be a major player, Well, then you'd have to do some safety trials and humans in the US we call that stage one clinical trials, and that's just to test whether it can be tolerated and make sure it doesn't produce any side effects or harm.
And then that's done in a relatively small group of people for obvious reasons, because they're kind of human guinea pigs at that point. And then we go into phase two clinical trials, which are much larger, and we start putting it into more people to see, you know, we're pretty sure that it's safe, but we still monitor for side effects. But the real we get at the real heart of the question, and we start identically, you know, we start to try to determine does this factor actually
improve brain performance? And there'll be a battery of essays how that could be assessed, you know, and then to be a final phase three clinical trial that goes into even more people where safety and efficacy is determined with a great deal of confidence. So, yeah, you're talking a long road, an expensive road. It'll be much much easier if companies can identify something that is already in our diet or already considered safe, and they can market that as a supplement.
Yeah. One of the things I was thinking about, like when the first book that I wrote was.
About basically the psychology of getting in shape, not the physiology, you know, And I'm always talking to people about the numerous you know, apart from cognitive benefits of exercise, but the you know, the sociological, psychological, emotional benefits of working out and whether or not that's you running in the woods, or whether or not that's me training with you know, some of my friends at the gym, or whatever the activity,
whatever the environment, whatever the intensity, but the benefits that come from working out and doing something hard that is uncomfortable but also builds you know, adaptability and resilience and a little bit of mental toughness and confidence and self worth and self esteem. And kind of an understanding of one's own potential when they'd break through things they couldn't like. I just think there are a huge amount of benefits.
That come from the process of exercise that probably can't come from a pill.
Oh, I couldn't agree more. Those are psychological benefits of exercise, and it's really hard to imagine a pill that can come up with such things. You know what, I go out to run, it's because I want to reduce stress. It's because I enjoy the solitude. I get to listen to some music, and you know, I know people who do team sports. They love the camaraderie and they love the friendships and the social aspects of it. You raise a good point about achieving fitness goals, you know, going
beyond what you thought was your limit. That's very rewarding. So yeah, there's a new morble psychological benefits to exercise that I don't think a pill could ever emulate. And those are things that I wouldn't want to give up if such a pill were invented, because I would really miss getting outside and enjoying nature and you know, feeling all those other psychological benefits we mentioned.
I know it's kind of high level guessing at the moment, because it's not real, sorry or not.
It's still pretty cool to think about.
Would you take it, Like if you're doing what you're already doing, If it was a vilable and you knew it could give you some additional benefit, would you take.
It At the time, I don't see a need why I would take it. You know, I'm getting plenty of exercise, and as long as my body can still do that,
I don't see need for a pill. Now if for some reason, you know, let's say I go out there and I sprain my ankle or something on a and I'm going to be out of commission for a month or so, then I might consider it because if it's you know, in assuming I can't do other substitute exercises, because then it would kind of fill that gap, you know, since I can't go out and obtain these benefits naturally. If the pill is safe and efficacious, I think you could make a case for why it would be useful
under those conditions. And you know, I'm not going to be this age forever. I'm going to probably have a body that falls apart gradually as I get older, and if a pill that comes out a so called exercise pill can stave off dementia pretty effectively. I think it'd be foolish not to take it.
Yes, Yes, as somebody with parents who are at the pointy end of their journey, anything that helps keep the old brain working for longer, I'm at least I.
Open to discussion.
It's I feel like, yeah, it's I think in the old days, I'm going to say in the old days. But it's like thinking about health span wasn't even an idea, right, it was all lifespan and thinking about even the idea
of what can I do. I'm always talking about this now, and probably because I'm older and I'm aware of this, so I'm more proactive and I'm more considerate of this stuff personally, But just the concept of, oh, what can I proactively do to make my brain work better and make my brain healthier and be atypical when I'm seventy
or seventy five or eighty. Not for a goic reasons or not because I want to look good or be better than anyone, but just well, shit, I can have a brain that works at nine out of ten when I'm seventy, or a brain that works out a three out of ten when I'm seventy, potentially depend on how I manage my brain, sleep, food, exercise, supplementation, you know,
stress management, all of these things. I feel like it's a relatively new idea to manage our brain and to have a personal strategy for doing that.
Yeah, I think we should take a look at all the data that's out there in order to make a wise and informed decision because everyone wants to have a high quality of life. I totally agree that the length of it place second fiddle to the quality that you're going to enjoy. And if there are good evidence based study, you know, you know, studies that point you in direction of something that can help you, and safety trials have been done, I don't see why you would deny that.
You know, it'd be just like any other medicine that you would go take.
So my question for you is how much do you like you are?
You are the ultimate scientist and I love that and that's your job and that's what you're meant to be.
Yeah, that's what it says on my office door. Yeah, I know it's a scientist.
Yeah, I know.
Well, they're bringing out that movie called The Ultimate Scientist and I think Matt Damo is playing.
I want to take you to my next post tenured review. You know, Craig says, I am an ultimate scientist.
Yeah, I'll just send you a little letter like mum would send me to school with a letter I'll send I go, dear Boffins, Dear Boffins, please find and.
Closed my review of Professor Bill.
I was going to say, like, I'm I have one foot in science, maybe one and a half feet in science, but I also have like a foot or half a foot in instinct and intuition, and like for me, where like science might tell us that meditation is a really good thing for stress and for lowering cortisol and lowering heart rate and you know, switching on the parasympathic nervous system. And I'm like, yeah, not for me, though, I go, yeah, fuck your research.
That doesn't work for me.
Like, I think that there's the stuff that we kind of know broadly that's in the macro of this seems to be applicable and relevant and effective for most people with this condition or this goal or whatever.
But then I think also down to the.
Biofeedback of my own body and the self awareness and the understanding, you know, trying to understand my own brain and my own nervous system and my own physiology in the middle of all of this ever present myriad of variables and factors that I navigate and back to Tiffs's conversation before about her motorbike, like, she can be on her motorbike, can come and somebody else will be on it. So it might actually literally be more therapeutic.
For her to go for a motorbike ride than to, you know, perhaps do a stretching class or.
A you know, some kind of mindfulness meditation. So I guess my long winded question is how much for you is all about just following the research and the data, and how much is also tuning into your own intuition and instinct and knowing for you personally.
Wow, that's a difficult question to answer because it's kind of like one you do on a case by case basis. But I would say one of the misconceptions that a lot of people have when you say this study shows this or this study shows that is that it applies to all people, which is not true. The research is always like a bell curve, and it's going to be outliers of people who were analyzed in that study, or
even mice that didn't show the effect. And yeah, they might be in the minority of that data set, but they're still there. Okay. So while the evidence shows, to draw on your example, Craig, while the evidence shows that mindfulness meditation can dramatically reduce stress in very measurable ways for most people, Yes, that doesn't mean all people, you know.
So I think people who have an instinct that it won't work for them, give it a try, and if you're right, perhaps you can obtain those benefits in a different fashion. Not everything is going to float everybody's boat in the same way. So you just need to, you know, find find out what's right for you. I have a I think instincts a double ed sword because it's an impulsive reaction, right, It's it's kind of emotion and a feeling, and we need those. They're important, but they're primal and
they're crude, and they can be often wrong. And that's why we have a prefrontal cortex to do things like research that can educate us as to whether our instincts are spot on or if they're incorrect. So I I guess I enjoy having both. At my disposal, I rely on instinct because I think there's evolutionary wisdom when our bodies are trying to tell us something, but it's not right all the time. You know, I've had plenty of
instincts that were dead wrong. Just ask my wife. You know, I get lots of things wrong when I'm trying to read her mind. So I rely on my memory and evidence and things of that nature. So yeah, that I think you raise a really incredibly good point, because I think when we talk to most people, they're kind of
on one side of the coin or the other. Right, you know, it's all about instinct or it's all about science, And I think, no, you've got to marry both of those in order to reap the benefits that both of those mechanisms create.
I lock that it's nuanced.
And also I'm not trying to like waffle out of the question. And I genuinely think that's how.
You totally wasting out of the question. Ducking and weaving.
Play off one another. They they do.
Having said that, no, I I one hundred percent agree with you.
But then also, you know, to think that science is infallible and that the people that do science interpret the science run, the science finance, the science that that's not flawed or that's not wrong. Often, I mean that's also ridiculous. So you know, to go, what does the research say? Well, I'm I'm like, yeah, but who you know? Is it ansel Keys? Is it the food pyramid?
Is it?
Like?
I mean, there's a lot of research that ended up being completely flawed in many ways that became law l o E and was strictly adhered to and followed and touted as the best way to do this or that. Then we subsequently found out that it's that you know, not completely true or completely false. So I think that.
What got us? Are there more research humans humans? So you're saying the problems of research can only be cured by more research. Well, I'm thinking, well, are we going to go about fixing this?
Well, you could also say that what got us there was people asking better questions and doubting and having the awareness that I'm eating the way that I'm meant to eat, but I'm not getting the outcome that I should get and in fact, on this low fat model of eating, I'm gaining fat, which is meant to be the opposite.
Of what it does. So I think that's more just instinct and awareness and curiosity that then eventually, but I don't think it's one or the other. And Monash might kick me out of the program haying all of this. They might go, you realize you're a scientific research I get it.
I get it, but I don't think that needs to be We don't need to be dogmatic or religious. But yeah, I think for you, for the most part, I'm with you.
I think that you know, the research is the research, and most of it these days, I think it's worth paying attention to.
Well, I think to illustrate some of the points you're making, Craig, some of the areas where things get into trouble is when people want to make a quick buck. Okay, they will run, especially in the diet and supplemental space. You know, they glomb on to a handful of studies, sometimes just one, and they run with it like it's dogma already and it hasn't been repeated, it hasn't been robustly demonstrated, and
that's not usually a scientist's fault. That's a business person's fault, and it makes science look bad.
Yeah, I totally.
Agree with you.
I can't remember what it was Oh, yeah, I can. I might have even spoken about it. I saw one recently about some supplement that was meant to do some amazing thing for elderly people who were weaken It was was meant to improve strength and all these outcomes without training, and it was like scientifically proven. And then I went down a rabbit hole and it was just complete garbage. It was like, it's not like, oh, it was kind of true. No, it was total garbage. I love chatting
with you. We love chatting with you. I will write that letter of recommendation that you can take when you meet with the board next time.
I'm sure they will be really impressed when they see your name.
Oh I feel like that's hurtful. Can you believe what he just said? No, that's sincerely, It's like, who is fuck? Every third sentence that guy.
And that recommendation letter better have plenty of F bombs. But wait, do you hand your thesis in because then you can say doctor Craig Harper. You know it gives it a real air of authenticity.
Yeah, let's do that.
Hey, we appreciate you. Do you want to point anyone at our audience towards anything before you say goodbye.
Oh yeah, thanks, Craig. Tell you what when you post on Facebook the announcement for this episode, I will put in the comments a free link to the article that we've been discussing today because there's a couple of things in there we didn't get time to go over, so the fans of your podcast will be able to go access that for free, and if they want to follow me on this platform called medium, they're more than welcome
to do so. We referred to my book a couple times that's called Please to Meet Me Jeans, Germs and the curious forces that make us who we are. You can pick that book up at any booksellers, find out what the name of that Olympics gear was, who had that notation that allowed him to do superhuman things, and many many other really interesting facets of why we do the things we do. So yeah, thanks, thanks for having me on, Craig. It's been a lot of fun, not
just today but all year long it's been. It's been great to come and talk to you once a month.
Thank you, sir. We genuinely I love having you on. Tiff loves having you on and out we always get great feedback about you. But yeah, thank you so much.
We'll say goodbye a fair but Professor Bill tiff did you find that scare with the mutation yet?
You're trying to find it now, aren't.
You going to? I'm going to.
Oh all right, Thanks everyone, Thanks to