032 Dr. Charles Ryan: The Virility Paradox | The Influence of Testosterone On Bodies & Minds

Dr. Charles Ryan is an oncologist and the author of one of Ruwan's favorite books of the year, The Virility Paradox. We ground from abstract principles around “masculinity” in science and derive some actionable items from understanding testosterone and behavior.

Transcript

Today's guest is Dr.

Charles Ryan.

Dr.

Ryan is an oncologist and he's also the author of one of my favorite books from 2018,

The Virility Paradox.

It's a book about testosterone and has all these interesting studies and understandings of the male sex hormone,

Testosterone,

And how it affects behavior,

How it affects relationships,

How it affects the human brain,

Whether you're male or female.

It was an incredibly interesting book.

It made me think a lot about masculinity.

It helped me ground a lot of the more abstract principles around masculinity into very objective science which I think is huge given the cultural discussions right now.

This recording was actually done a couple months ago for my mastermind group so you might hear me reference some things that are from some time ago.

This was an awesome conversation.

If you do want to be a part of the live discussions,

You can go to masculineunderground.

Com.

There's some free stuff there.

You can also get access to the recordings as soon as they come out and get an opportunity to be on for future podcasts live.

You can check it out at masculineunderground.

Com.

Without further ado,

This is episode 032,

Dr.

Charles Ryan,

The Virility Paradox.

You're listening to the Ruwando Podcast,

The Petrol Orgasm,

Infinite Play.

Please subscribe on iTunes and enjoy the show.

I loved your book.

I found huge applications in my work and personal development.

There's all this talk about masculinity,

A lot of abstractions,

A lot of cultural discussion arguments and whatnot.

Not only did it shed light on the reality of testosterone and masculinity,

I'm going to give you some suggestions.

I'm very excited to speak to you about this book ever since I read it a few months ago.

So yeah,

Thanks so much for being on.

Great.

I'm happy to be here.

I'm glad you found the book.

I'm glad you liked it.

How did you find it,

By the way?

I'm always curious.

The Art of Manliness.

The Art of Manliness.

Oh yeah.

I think I'll do the audio later.

Is this maybe in May?

When was the book released?

It was released in late February.

I think I did the Art of Manliness probably in April or May maybe.

So I suggested to everyone in the group,

There's about 35 guys to read it.

I think some of them did.

Could you explain what the Borrelia Paradox is?

Why the title?

What does that mean?

Sure.

Yeah.

So the idea that struck me the most about the paradox or about writing this book in general was that we have this molecular system in our body fueled by testosterone that does us quite a bit of good.

It produces masculinity.

And I think we could all say that it has done us some good in terms of our evolution and body strength and our ability to do certain tasks.

But the paradox is that that comes with a cost.

And I really kind of came to it from the standpoint of reading a little bit of this literature that men who take testosterone or women who are given testosterone in experimental situations may in fact lose certain aspects of what we might call healthy personality traits,

Empathy and things like that.

And of course,

I come to this not as a behavioral scientist,

Not as a psychologist.

I'm an oncologist.

I treat cancer for a living.

But I treat prostate cancer as I detail in the book and the fundamental way that we treat the disease is by lowering testosterone levels.

And it was always striking to me that over the years,

I thought,

Isn't this interesting that to treat this very common cancer,

Prostate cancer,

We deprive men of the most fundamental fuel of manliness or the most fundamental chemical associated with virility and even with our evolution.

And nobody to my sort of knowledge had written about sort of this existential moment.

And I used to call that kind of an existential moment for our patients where you're 65 years old,

You've lived your life,

You've had testosterone and libido and strength and manliness and virility and you shave every day and all these things.

And then you get this cancer and we just take all that away.

Sort of almost like,

Oh,

Isn't this easy to do?

And the paradox also was that some of the men that I would talk to as we treated them with hormonal therapy,

What I mean by that,

Of course,

We lower their testosterone levels by 90%.

As I talked to men,

Many of them and their wives and their partners would say,

They've become a softer person,

They've become nicer,

They've become less hostile and things like that.

And so I thought that was kind of paradoxical.

Of course,

That doesn't happen to everybody and that's the challenge.

And that's the interesting thing about treating humans in a clinical context is over the years,

You get to see the full spectrum.

And as you probably saw in the book,

I try to not say this is how it is for everybody,

But this is how it is for some and I think this is a valuable life lesson.

Yeah,

What I found so interesting was that in my work,

When people reach out to me,

When men reach out to me about dating goals or entrepreneurial goals,

Which is mainly the two things I talked to about with guys,

They're basically traits that they want to develop that we associate with higher testosterone.

They want to be more attractive and they want to be more driven.

And then culturally,

We have a lot of pressure in recent years to dampen these traits in men and you brought up basic clinical studies that say,

Yeah,

A lot of our associations with masculine traits are directly related to the testosterone hormone.

But it's also,

I think that with regards to men and their sort of seeking personal improvement and in personal development,

The kind of work that you do,

I guess the idea that I would get across is that there's a sort of a sweet spot,

Right?

There are these traits that are associated with testosterone and virility and other things that are desirable.

But I think our society has gotten to the point where,

I don't know if it's our society,

I think it's more just humanity has gotten to the point where too much testosterone can be an undesirable trait.

And I say this from sort of the evolutionary standpoint as well because we don't,

Testosterone helped us to get to be strong and fast and good hunters and to suppress our empathy so that we can kill and provide for our villages and provide for our people.

I'm talking about over the course of evolution.

And a lot of those traits are kind of gone,

Like the survival and strength aspects of testosterone that were needed to keep a society going don't really exist as much anymore.

And so now that we live in cities and we live in groups and really it's about getting along with other people and having empathy and understanding people and not necessarily being physically the strongest so that you can kind of get pushed over the edge by your testosterone a little bit.

And that's more of a feeling based on the aggregate of the data than sort of full on proven data.

And I think that one of the other things about testosterone that I come back to,

And I mentioned it a few times in the book,

Is I'm a little skeptical of some of this science too.

And some of the behavioral science that's been done with testosterone experimentation and looking at the anagen receptor is sort of directionally true but not necessarily cause and effect like a truly proven scientific hypothesis would be.

And so in my view as a non-behavioral scientist,

I kind of looked at all this in aggregate and said,

Yeah,

We probably need to be more empathetic,

We don't need to be as strong,

We don't need to be as this and as much this or as much that as we need to be in our evolution.

Yeah,

Yeah,

I mean,

Yeah,

We don't need to kill because we could buy our meat at Whole Foods.

But what's interesting,

And this is like digging into some of the common or popular anthropological theories right now on how pre-agriculture we live in more feminine societies that more of this empathy was more important,

Male dominance was less important because we're all in these egalitarian groups.

Many thousands of years later,

We're kind of back to that,

Reconnected with social media perhaps as this large tribe where men no longer need to be testosterone fuel,

But there's this like 10,

000 year period perhaps,

Or maybe a few thousand years where it really was a dominant strategy to be high testosterone.

Yeah,

Yeah.

Well,

The other thing is that we talk about high testosterone versus low testosterone and all of this,

But keep in mind that back in those generations and back in our evolution,

For the most part,

Our bodies were starving a lot of the time.

We were chronically infected and sort of had,

You know,

We weren't helped,

Our bodies weren't particularly healthy.

And so,

One of the things that I found really fascinating,

I didn't know this until I started writing this book,

Is this idea of the challenge hypothesis that comes up in anthropology and in the animal kingdom where you take a bird,

For example,

And a bird will spend part of its year sort of feeding and breeding and part of its year migrating.

And during the times of migration,

Their cortisol levels go way up because that's a survival hormone and that is needed to do all that birds need to do.

And what happens is that when that goes up,

Breeding hormones go down and then birds,

It's not testosterone,

It's DHEA,

But those levels go down to zero.

Then the bird comes somewhere,

It's springtime,

They feed,

You know,

They get their worms or whatever it is and their testosterone levels go up and they breed.

And that's a very simple sort of observation,

But what it ties to humans in that,

You know,

The anthropologists tell us that our ancestors,

When they were in this sort of chronic starvation and survivorship mode,

Yes,

They needed testosterone to survive,

But they also were in many cases kind of ill all the time and the testosterone was suppressed.

So that testosterone would spike when they had a successful hunt or when they were in moments or times of greater security and that's when they would breed,

Just like the bird model.

But fast forward to the 21st century,

Well,

There's not a lot of,

You know,

Those of us in North America and in the better part of the developed world,

We're not starving.

Those of us who aren't starving are not chronically infected and things like that.

We are walking around with earlier puberty's,

Higher testosterone levels,

And then we're supplementing it later in life.

And so what happens is we get a higher testosterone level for a more chronic period of time over the course of history.

And I talked to this anthropologist who I quoted the book,

Ben Trumbull,

Fascinating guy,

You should look up his work because he studies testosterone in these tribes in the Amazon but he says,

You know,

Testosterone levels are higher than it's ever been in humanity because we're well nourished and we're able to,

We're not quite suppressing it with sort of this chronic stress that a harsh environment would cause it to be.

That's interesting.

So we have like more,

Way more than,

We have more ammo than we need for this challenge that never comes up.

Right,

Right.

And that's why we have,

For example,

Prostate cancer and large prostates as men age.

What Ben did is he goes,

This is great,

He went down to this tribe in the Amazon called the Chimane,

Which I write about,

And I could have written a lot more about them and maybe should have,

But they live along the Amazon.

They're kind of like hunter gatherers and they have parasitic infections and they don't need a lot of meat and this kind of thing.

And he went down and he measured their prostates and what he found is that they basically,

You know,

A North American man,

The average testosterone level,

Like let's say at like age 30 is probably about 350,

Maybe 400.

They have an average testosterone level about 200 to 250,

So about half.

And he went down and he measured their prostates and found that they don't,

The older men in this tribe don't have enlarged prostates.

And the reason why North American men do is because we have this sort of,

The prostate is chronically stimulated by the long persistent elevation of testosterone that begins at puberty.

So anyway,

To the extent that the prostate is sort of a surrogate of our brains being chronically stimulated by testosterone,

It tells us a little bit about the difference between how we live today and how our ancestors lived.

So,

Would it be too much of a jump?

I guess this is really in your wheelhouse to say if people,

If men faced more stress or more challenges,

They'd reduce their risk of prostate cancer?

It's an interesting question.

I would say that,

You know,

Now we know that the stress and challenges of high cortisol and other things can have other health problems associated with it.

But I guess I would say that,

I would turn it around.

I would say it's not so much about the health,

It's not so much about the challenges like it is in the birds because we're a little bit more complex biologically.

It's not like when our cortisol goes up,

Our testosterone necessarily goes down.

Our bodies don't have to be that efficient.

In the bird kingdom,

They have to be that efficient.

Cortisol and testosterone are basically made from the same molecular precursor.

So,

If you're a starving bird and you need that cortisol to survive,

You just have less raw material for making the testosterone of the DHEA.

So I guess in a way,

You're right,

Like a chronically stressed individual would have a potentially lower testosterone.

And we see this in people who have diabetes and are obese and other things where their testosterone levels tend to run a little bit lower throughout life.

The other thing that's interesting is that if you take a healthy 30-year-old man with the normal testosterone level,

Let's say something tragic happens.

He's in an automobile accident and he is put on a breathing machine and he's put in an ICU and he's fighting for his life,

Right?

He's just like the bird,

His testosterone level will go down,

His cortisol level will go up to fight off,

To fight that stress.

And so,

This is another thing Ben Trumbull,

The anthropologist has done is they've actually done this.

They've studied people with acute life-threatening illness,

Looked at their testosterone levels and saw that they go down.

It's interesting in my new job,

Just as an aside,

I was talking to one of my colleagues who is doing a study of people who go through bone marrow transplant,

A very stressful treatment for leukemia.

And she said that they did a study where they were looking at hormone levels and found that the men's testosterone levels went down during bone marrow transplantation.

And I said,

Well,

That's another example of sort of a situation where an acute illness is going to affect that.

So if you just compound that over time,

You think about somebody leading a life of chronic illness,

Chronic poor health,

Other things,

Then yes,

They may have lower testosterone levels,

Potentially as a result,

Lower likelihood of prostate enlargement or prostate cancer.

But I don't think we've ever,

I don't think we've proven that.

Yeah.

It seems like a strange way to go about avoiding.

That's right.

But actually before your book,

Most of what I read about DHEA comes from the strength training world,

Like,

Yeah,

The Olympics driving coach speaks a lot about how if a man wants to gain the benefits of testosterone,

He really needs to cut out any stressors from his life.

And he does extensively say the same thing,

But obviously the rates of testosterone.

One thing he mentioned just now with the hunts and stuff,

Because one of the most interesting things I found for your book was the winner effect.

And I was like,

Yeah,

This is like a life hack.

If you could just,

And I,

With all my clients now and with myself too,

I'm like,

Oh,

How can I perceive winning?

Because it seems so subjective,

Like with the example you gave with Italy and Brazil,

Like the fans had the spike,

Even though they're just watching the game and he just tries to be a fan of one of the others.

This might be a bit of a jump,

But can we just use this as a way to spike our testosterone if we end up games?

Oh,

You mean like artificial?

That's a good thing.

That's a good question.

I think that if you were to,

I think the winner effect comes from a true feeling of,

You know,

It's a feedback almost from the cognitive aspects of winning.

And I think that if you were to be in a game where you knew you were going to win because it was rigged,

It probably wouldn't work.

Right.

But,

I mean,

This is maybe why we like to compete,

Right?

Men all like to compete about things because we like winning and winning makes us feel good on a lot of different levels.

And I think testosterone is part of that.

I doubt that testosterone is the sole reason why we feel good when we win.

I mean,

You know,

One of the challenges in writing this book is I really focused on one molecule and things like the winner effect are probably driven by the relationship between dopamine and testosterone and what happens in very specific circuits in the brain.

But I do write a little bit in there how the dopamine circuits for reward are connected to,

If you will,

The testosterone circuits in the brain.

And so I think your point about the winner effect is a good one,

Which is it explains why we like success and how sometimes success can fuel upon success.

And in terms of,

You know,

A life coaching,

That's a really interesting question.

Like how do we harness what we know about the winner effect in terms of a life coaching strategy?

It's a good question.

Yeah,

Because like a lot of,

If you're familiar with BJ Fogg's stuff and Stanford about motivation,

Like he made popular the idea of it's futile to try to build a flossing habit if you've ever flossed,

But commit to flossing one tooth a day and you'll like start to enjoy it and you'll create a reward circuit and eventually you'll floss all your teeth without needing willpower.

That's kind of like almost a miniature version of the winner effect.

It's so interesting because I grew up as a huge New York Jets fan,

But they lose a lot and I would always be depressed Monday morning and I just stopped watching football a few years ago.

So I feel so bad the next morning.

I was like,

Why am I doing this to myself?

I mean,

Not.

And it was like,

Oh,

My testosterone is probably dropping.

I watched,

I grew up near,

I'm from here from Wisconsin and grew up near Green Bay and I was a big Green Bay Packer fan,

But I'm 48 years old.

And so when I was a kid in the 1970s,

They were horrible.

The Packers would go 4 and 12 and just were a terrible team.

But I remember when they got good in the 1990s,

It was this huge rush of like,

Oh,

I've been a loser my whole life and now we're winners.

It's funny how much we put into football.

But so you went the other direction and you basically said,

I don't need this negative stimulus in my life.

I'm going to give up watching the Jets because it was not bringing me the winner effect that I needed.

Yeah,

But it makes sense why people become diehard fans of anything,

Right?

Because they,

For whatever reason,

Chose to make this matter to them and it actually affects their hormones.

Right.

And then I'm also thinking of like little kids.

It was interesting from a developmental perspective in that when someone is good at sports as a kid,

We assume they're going to grow up more confident as opposed to a kid always getting picked last.

He probably doesn't care about competition.

This is more anecdotal thing.

I don't know if there's been studies on this exactly,

But when you see someone who's like a very competitive stockbroker,

For instance,

You can almost assume that they won at sports in little league and whatnot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So there's a great book on this called The Hour Between Dog and Wolf.

And it's written by a guy named Ben Coats.

And I quote some of his work.

He's the one who did the stuff that I quote in the book on the stock market traders and the winner effect and how when they looked at the 11 a.

M.

Testosterone level and that these traders would,

They would be in and out of stocks all afternoon.

But what he found is that the 11 a.

M.

Testosterone level predicted their success over the course of the day because he was basically saying that those who started out with an early day,

You know,

First couple hours of trading got a little boost from their from their winter effect.

It actually the spike in testosterone,

He alleges,

Drove them to take more risks in the later part of the day,

Which actually helped them in that business of day trading.

The other thing that he did was looked at,

He did this thing with the 2D to 4D ratio,

You know,

With the finger length that you read about.

And he found that those who had a more testosterone driven finger length pattern made higher year end bonuses than those who had the lower ones.

So that was his sign or sort of a,

You know,

Demonstrating that this prenatal,

The pre-birth testosterone exposure may in fact drive this.

And this could be,

You know,

This issue about winter effect may be less important to the scenario that you describe of the kids who are on the little league team who go on to become stock brokers or whatever.

Those are probably kids who had a higher degree of fetal testosterone and that their brains were wired even before they were born to be primed for the winter effect,

Right?

So it's not that their brains were primed for them to become super competitive.

It was that their brains were primed for them to get a reward out of the winter effect.

So that when then they're seven years old and 10 years old and they're doing little league that they get more of a boost from that victory.

Other kids,

You know,

I wasn't a particularly competitive kid.

I played on teams and I liked winning,

But I was never viewed as an ultra competitive person compared to some of my friends that I played on teams with.

So I think there's a spectrum on that point as well,

But that much of that could have been driven by the prenatal testosterone exposure.

Can you say a little bit about the Borrelia triad?

I have a few questions on that.

Yeah.

So Borrelia triad was basically something I made up,

Which is as I read through all of this,

I found that there were really three components to how researchers and others have linked testosterone and it's,

You know,

I call it a system.

I think we need to think about it as a system.

And there were three main components of the system,

The testosterone level in the blood,

The androgen receptor and the degree to which the androgen receptor is responsive to testosterone and the prenatal testosterone exposure,

Which sort of,

You know,

In a way sort of hardwired the brain in particular for that response.

And so,

You know,

I just was reading about these three components and you'd read one paper that said,

Testosterone does this and you'd read one paper that says androgen receptor does that and one paper that said,

You know,

Prenatal testosterone does this and nobody had sort of linked them all together.

And I think that that was,

You know,

Something that just came across as a way to try to get the idea across that we're not just talking about a hormone,

We're talking about a whole system.

And it is interesting,

There was one paper,

For example,

Where I did find a triangulation of those effects,

For example,

And it was a study where they looked at men with anxiety disorders and they looked at testosterone levels in the androgen receptor and looked at how they interacted.

And they found that the men with the shorter,

Sorry,

The longer CAG repeats on their androgen receptor,

Which meant that they had these,

If you will,

Bigger and heavier androgen receptors that were less responsive to the testosterone,

But they found that men who had these slow androgen receptors and low testosterone levels had more anxiety than men who had faster androgen receptors and higher testosterone levels.

And I found that very interesting because they're able to sort of connect those two.

And one of the things that we're going to be doing in my own research now with prostate cancer patients is we're going to actually be looking at the relationship of men's cognitive abilities as they receive hormonal therapy for prostate cancer and we're going to look at the androgen receptor and we're going to look at,

Of course,

Their testosterone levels and then we're going to look at their cognitive effects.

We're kind of,

We and even in my own oncology sort of research program,

We're going to look at how these things interact.

What's exactly the connection with anxiety?

Like how does that affect?

Yeah.

So it just,

It's,

You know,

How to make that leap between anxiety and testosterone is not really fully worked out,

But,

You know,

Thinking about this and that men who had low testosterone are not necessarily more,

They looked at a group of guys who had anxiety disorders and I think they compared them to men who did not have a diagnosed anxiety disorder.

And what they found was that,

And then there's a way that you can score the severity of your anxiety disorder.

And what they found was that the men who had the greatest anxiety or the greatest problem from their anxiety disorder were those who had slower androgen receptors and lower testosterone levels.

So just flipping that around logically,

Men who have their testosterone system a little bit more ramped up either through higher levels or through faster receptors may be able to sort of calm their anxieties.

I think of anxiety,

If you think about what is the opposite of anxiety,

It's maybe not calmness,

Maybe it's confidence.

And so it's possible that just at the higher testosterone levels,

Faster androgen receptors may be more confident in individuals as a result of that or that may be a contributor to more confidence.

Yeah,

This is maybe a silly aside,

But I was listening to your book on audio while I was in Bali and I was playing on an ultimate Frisbee team and sometimes you win,

Sometimes you lose.

And of course,

This is all just completely subjective.

I'm not checking my testosterone,

But I'm trying to see how my behavior would change on days that I lost.

Am I more anxious today?

Am I more affected by certain things?

Am I less able to handle my daily challenges?

I don't know.

I would love to actually check my testosterone regularly.

I don't know where to get such testosterone strips.

Yeah,

So it's funny you said it because there was a company that I came across,

A link where they had this test strip where you could actually do just exactly what you want to do,

Which was spit,

I think on a strip and then put it into a little machine and then it would tell you not only your testosterone,

But it would tell you some other tests or you'd have to mail it in.

I forget,

But it was like a startup and I don't know what ever happened to them,

But they were basically trying to propose that we should do just that.

And I think it's a little bit more complex than that.

Your ultimate Frisbee example is an interesting one and I think it's interesting that you were thinking about that as you go through your day and I can see that because think about it,

Something good happened.

You do something in the morning where you get a lot of validation,

You get good news,

You have some projects accepted,

You make a bonus or you compete in a tennis match and you win.

You generally feel better throughout the course of the day,

I find.

And so there probably is an effect.

But I would also argue that an ultimate Frisbee game in Bali is probably a relatively low stakes event in your life,

Right?

And so if you were to ratchet up the stakes on that,

Where the competition had more,

If you will,

Value in your life,

Like it meant more,

You were going to make more money or whatever was going to happen as a result of this,

You might experience a greater winner effect.

The World Cup soccer example,

Which was a while ago,

That was the World Cup and this was Brazil and Italy.

And these are like the two countries that were the whole country,

The most rabid soccer fans in the world.

And the researchers went to a facility,

A bar I think it was,

Where the fans were aggregating.

So that was a time and a place where even though it was a soccer game being played by other people,

It was a high stakes game for all of those involved in watching it.

Yeah,

Actually I had one specific example where a business deal of mine fell through because it was actually incompetence on my part.

So I felt like my ego was bruised.

And I noticed that day in the gym,

I was weaker and I was wondering,

Oh,

This is the loser effect.

And it was clear that that was the case,

Who knows,

There were plenty of variables.

Yeah,

There's a lot of variables,

But it's kind of fun to think about that.

You know,

On the flip side,

Or getting to the paradox point of this,

And getting to football,

There are two examples that I can think of where winning was tied to negative consequences.

And there's one where there was a researcher's did,

And I think I quote this in the book,

Researchers looked at the Washington DC reports of domestic violence.

This was many years ago.

And then they went back and they looked at Sunday night reports of domestic violence.

And then they looked at whether the Washington Redskins had won or lost on that particular Sunday.

And they found that on Sundays when the Washington Redskins had won,

There was an increase in domestic violence reports.

And that was just one city,

One report,

But kind of interesting.

And then there was a paper,

It was relatively recently,

A couple years ago,

And they looked at colleges in Texas.

And I think it wasn't just one school,

It was many schools in Texas.

And they looked at domestic violence,

I guess you'd call it campus sexual assaults.

And they looked at campus sexual assaults as a function of the football team.

And if the team was playing a home game,

Sexual assaults went up relative to if they're playing an away game.

If they're playing a home game where they won,

The sexual assault reports were higher than in the other two scenarios.

And so I point this out as yet another paradox of the winter effect.

Like why,

If on a Balinese beach,

You're playing ultimate Frisbee,

And that gives you a little feeling of euphoria and goodness,

That's a great thing.

But if you think about,

For some people,

That winter effect can be a little bit too much and kind of push them over the edge.

Think about how many years was it where the NCAA basketball,

The final game would be played,

And then the campus of whatever college would win,

They would go light cars on fire.

And so that happened,

I know at Michigan when I was there,

And it's happened at a few other places where there are people just get a little crazy on college campuses after their team wins.

So yeah,

I'm curious about that because you kind of framed,

Or maybe this is the truth about a frame it,

Testosterone and oxytocin are kind of opposites.

And first thing I was wondering when I was reading about that in the book was,

Is it not possible to have both high testosterone and high oxytocin?

It's a good question,

It probably is.

They have dual effects,

They both have receptors,

You could probably have both high relative to both.

In other words,

Well,

It's a good question.

Some might say,

First of all,

There's nothing in biology that's going to be,

If one goes up,

The other goes down,

An exact lock step.

There's always mushiness on things like that.

If you think about it,

The classic example of oxytocin overriding testosterone is in men who are with a partner who has a baby.

So if your partner has a baby,

You bring a baby into the home,

And she's breastfeeding the baby and you're the father,

Your testosterone level is down.

And that's something that's been shown in animals and in humans,

Where you're just not in breeding mode,

But your oxytocin level is going to be high in that scenario.

And so,

Over time,

Evolution has produced us in such a way that higher oxytocin is a favorable nurturing environment.

It creates a favorable nurturing environment.

And one could argue that because of what we know about testosterone,

Its effects on empathy and other things,

That maybe it doesn't create a nurturing environment to the extent that the other ones do.

So it's a great question.

I actually don't know the answer.

I'm wondering now,

I don't know how these chemicals are produced at all.

Is it that the body uses some similar resource,

If only energy,

To produce one or the other?

Because you don't need both at the same time.

Yeah,

It's not that.

That example is what applies to the challenge hypothesis with the birds and testosterone,

Which is that these are all made from DHEA,

Testosterone,

Estrogen,

Progesterone,

Cortisol.

These are all made from a cholesterol precursor.

So you have cholesterol produced in your body.

It's converted.

It's a steroid molecule,

Has four rings that most chemists will know that structure.

And you make little adjustments on the cholesterol molecule and then you might get progesterone or testosterone or whatever.

This is how the adrenal glands function in humans.

And to some extent,

These hormones are made in the brain as well.

But oxytocin is something that is made in the brain.

It's not made in the adrenal glands of the testicles.

The main place obviously where testosterone is produced is in the testicles,

Which has the same enzymes that would be responsible for the construction of testosterone as would be for cortisol and other things.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Yeah,

Because I thought of this a lot because in the more esoteric side of the personal development world,

Like the yoga world,

They speak about these terms like the divine masculine and the sacred feminine,

Like a lot of his flowery language,

Which I would translate to testosterone behavior and oxytocin related behavior.

Probably.

Sure.

Yeah.

A lot of the goals in this world is like,

Can you balance both?

Can you develop your yin and yang side?

And I was wondering if this means can you regulate both testosterone and oxytocin to have both positives?

Yeah.

It's hard to know how we can consciously regulate these things other than to try to put ourselves in environments where they each are nurtured.

So and to recognize which system may be in control during a particular moment.

And so for a man to feel differently after his wife has had a baby about things is natural.

That's evolution.

That's your hormones.

And that's to be counterbalanced with what might happen with people when they're changing mates or they're looking for a mate.

Their testosterone level is going to be higher.

And the data would suggest that they're more likely to be engaging in different types of behaviors,

Not just sexual behaviors,

But more aggressive behaviors and things like that.

And so that's really interesting how there's this book that was written 20 years ago by James Dabs.

I cite him a few times in the book,

DABBS,

And he passed away.

But he was a psychologist who studied testosterone for like 30 years.

And he had,

This was before we knew about the anadryceptor quite so much and before we knew about the prenatal testosterone and things like that.

So he just studied salivary testosterone levels.

But he did this forever.

He did all these experiments and it was quite interesting.

He wrote this really nice book called Heroes,

Rogues and Lovers,

Which I love that title.

And basically,

He documented the evolution of testosterone in a human being based on different life events,

Whether it be living in a fraternity house or your spouse has had a baby or the one that was very interesting to me was people who are undergoing a divorce,

Their testosterone levels are higher.

Divorced men have a higher testosterone level than married men or men in stable marriages,

For example.

And when you think about that,

It makes sense,

Right?

But you don't know cause and effect.

Does the man with higher testosterone levels,

He more likely to get a divorce or is the man whose marriage is falling apart,

Is his testosterone level rising in response to that because he's going to need to go out and be out in the world again.

And consistently,

It shows that men who are partnered have lower testosterone levels and higher oxytocin levels,

Generally speaking,

Than men who are unpartnered.

It makes me think of,

There's a term in a lot of the men's forums when it comes to dating advice called beta-zation,

Like men fear falling in love because they notice they become more of a beta male when they're in love.

So there's a community that are very against that.

They try not to fall in love so they don't use their manly qualities.

But it's a thing that a lot of guys actively fear,

Especially if they go through divorce and they find themselves not having the edge that they did pre-marriage.

Yeah.

Well,

Interesting.

I would say that trying to avoid falling in love is depriving yourself of one of life's great events.

Right.

I'm curious about the causal thing too because I don't know if I'm taking it too literally.

Because I have wondered with oxytocin is when you see something cute,

I've read that there's an oxytocin release in your brain.

So if you're actively looking for things to find cute,

Like how literal is it?

Like is it anytime you speak in a baby voice and you feel kind of cutesy,

Is that releasing oxytocin?

I think that's the oxytocin speaking for you,

Not the other way around.

So there was an article on this in the New York Times a couple of years ago.

And it was based on some experiment published somewhere.

But the researchers looked at humans with dogs and they measured oxytocin levels in male and female dog owners when they were with their dogs versus when they were without.

Imagine,

I don't know if you're a dog lover or not,

I certainly am.

But my dog comes in and I give her hugs and kisses and I speak to her in kind of a baby voice.

My oxytocin level is probably going up.

What they found is really interesting is they measured the oxytocin level in the dog owners,

But also in the dogs.

And what they found was that when the dog comes to run to you and you pet the dog and you're speaking to it in a baby voice and everything,

The dog's oxytocin level goes up as well.

And so cause and effect,

Who knows?

The interesting thing is you can take pretty hardened people and show them a puppy and they'll get kind of soft and there's sort of stereotypes,

Right?

Like biker guys and whatever,

They get little puppies and then that's where they concentrate their oxytocin.

Yeah,

I'm thinking it was one example for my life.

I used to work at a company that was very matriarchal in its structure.

A lot of women in power,

Mostly women in the company.

And it was the only situation I've ever been in where like at work people would talk in a baby voice once in a while.

I noticed I became more feminine just because of the culture,

Which is mostly what I'm in.

And I would talk in a baby voice,

Which I'd never done in my life.

It was kind of a weird thing.

I was wondering like,

Oh,

Has my brain been changing?

Yeah,

Well,

It probably is.

Probably was.

Yeah.

Cool.

So I just want to say we have a couple of people here now.

If you guys missed,

If you have any questions,

Just type in the chat and I'll unmute you.

So far,

This has been great.

I've been looking forward to this and I enjoy the conversation so far.

We actually have a couple.

.

.

Actually,

One thing I want to ask you about was with obsession.

So the feminist writer Camille Paglia spoke about how there are no female Jack the Rippers,

But there's also no female Mozarts.

And she was saying that masculinity is something associated with obsession.

And it seems like some of the studies you mentioned do show a relation between testosterone and obsession.

I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that as far as.

.

.

Yeah.

So I cover that a little bit.

I was pretty cautious.

I think I was pretty cautious overall in this book because I'm not a psychologist and this is not something I've been studying for 35 years.

I do this clinically in men with cancer,

But I studied this issue with autism and that there's this theory of autism that's widely debated called the extreme male brain theory of autism.

And this gets back to the prenatal testosterone and it's chapter two of my book.

And I highlight the work done by this research team at Cambridge,

England,

Where they looked at amniotic fluid.

There was a scenario in which women had amniocentesis.

Amniotic fluid had been taken out and was in a bank.

It was stored somewhere.

And they went and they found the kids.

They called the mothers in and mothers who volunteered brought in their kids at six months,

A year and two years and I think even older.

And what they studied was the kids' attentiveness and whether the kids did systematizing type behavior,

Which is a characteristic of autism,

Which is being kind of upset,

You refer to it as obsession,

Kids who are focused on,

They know every brand of car or they have collections and they sort of focus on one thing,

A specific interest.

And what they found was that kids who tended towards that,

To use your word,

The obsession,

Kids who were really sort of focused on systematizing and things like that,

Their mothers,

When they looked at what the amniotic fluid had been before they were born,

Their mothers had higher levels of testosterone.

So it's that and a series of other sort of observations that have made these researchers think that autism is sort of,

If you take maleness and you apply it to the extreme to the brain,

That that's what creates this.

And that gets to your point.

This is a nice quote from Emil Palia about no female Jack the Ripper,

But no female Mozart.

Mozart's probably not the best example because that was probably somebody who's just truly gifted.

But you have people,

I would say like somebody like,

Let's take a more modern example,

Like Steve Jobs with this sort of vision of creating something or Bill Gates,

Sort of this obsession with computer science to the point where they were able to create something new.

And I think that that is potentially a testosterone kind of driven behavior.

I think that can be a good thing because it fuels creativity and it fuels understanding,

Fuels science and engineering.

We've created rockets that go to the moon and come back.

That's pretty amazing when you think about it.

But it can also pull people outside of interpersonal communications too.

So life's all about balance and understanding this,

I think.

Understanding this for me has actually,

I think made me a little bit better in terms of figuring out where I am on that spectrum.

Yeah,

With examples,

Modern examples.

I just heard an interview with Henry Rollins and he was speaking about how when he goes on tour,

He works literally every day.

He doesn't like days off.

He's very obsessed with his work and he also doesn't care about friendships or anything.

He doesn't care about getting married or having a relationship.

He doesn't even talk to his friends.

He seems to be a pretty extreme,

Perhaps low oxytocin.

We actually on the systemizing,

One guy sent in a couple of questions.

You can be on the call.

He asked in balancing,

Systemizing and empathizing,

Are there any,

This is kind of an advice thing.

Are there any habits,

Actions that you would recommend to manipulate one's hormonal levels?

That's a great question about how we can manipulate our hormone levels.

I think I would come at it from the reverse angle and I would say the first step to all of this is understanding,

Right?

And saying that if I'm in a situation where my testosterone,

My systematizing is required to sort of understand that and roll with it.

If I'm in a situation where my testosterone,

A higher testosterone level is not going to be rewarded or particularly useful to understand that.

There's probably,

There's a guess,

But there's probably a self reinforcement that comes with that,

You know,

Like getting to the winter effect,

The idea.

If you're going to go off for a weekend with a bunch of guys and you're going to play football and do guy stuff,

Your testosterone level is probably going to go up because you're prepping your body for that type of an environment.

You're going to go spend a weekend with your grandmother and some babies and her puppies,

Probably going to be a different type of an environment and so your testosterone level may go up.

But as far as I know,

There are not natural ways to long term boost these things.

Of course,

Working out and lifting weights will raise your testosterone level.

That's interesting.

There are drugs in development,

I shouldn't even call them drugs,

There are ways to administer oxytocin that people are studying.

And yeah,

Nasal spray.

And this is really fascinating.

I used to chair our IRB at UCSF where we reviewed human research studies that were being approved and there was one in autism that I thought was really fascinating,

Which was there were ideas that kids with autism might benefit from greater nurturing and affection from parents.

And this was a theory that more affection will breed more oxytocin in the children.

But what they did was the experiment was the mothers took the oxytocin nasal spray.

And so the idea was to induce a behavioral change in the mothers that would induce an oxytocin change in the children,

Which from a research ethics point of view is quite interesting.

And so it's not within the realm of possibility that someday there will be oxytocin sprays,

But that would be a potential drug of abuse really.

And that could be a very challenging thing to see out there.

So it's only by prescription.

It's also quite expensive because it's actually,

And the reason it has to be a nasal spray is that you actually have to spray the peptide.

It's not a drug,

Like if you take oxytocin orally,

Your stomach will just digest the peptide.

So it either needs to be injected or inhaled or something like that.

But those studies are out there in autism and they show that kids with autism and even adults with behavioral problems become more docile when they take oxytocin.

So I didn't answer the question,

But that effect is there.

Oh,

It just made me think of,

I meant to ask you about this earlier.

So like I'm an older millennial and my generation is accused of being entitled and all these other things.

And a lot of things have been criticized.

And one thing that's cited as a reason is the participation trophy.

I'm wondering if you have thoughts on that.

And I don't know if it's related to,

I don't know if it's in your book,

But I've heard the statistic that men nowadays have one third of the testosterone of our grandfathers.

I don't know if that's true.

I don't remember where I read that.

I don't know that.

That's interesting.

I'd like to look that one up and if you find that,

Send it to me.

I believe I read it first in the Four Hour Body,

Which is a fitness book.

I'll have to verify that.

So as a researcher,

If you said that to me,

I'd say,

Okay,

That's based on what data?

Like who has testosterone from their grandfathers,

Number one,

Right?

And how is that data collected?

But I think it's reasonable.

I think that the millennial generation for sure is a more,

I think it's a more empathic generation.

You could talk about more entitlement.

I mean,

That's been said.

I think that the,

And I do write about this in the book.

In fact,

This is sort of the,

One of the driving theories behind the book,

Which was that pure testosterone like trait behaviors don't get us where they used to,

Right?

It doesn't pay off.

It's not useful for you to go to bars and get in fights.

Being sexually aggressive isn't going to get you very far in life,

Right?

And so,

Those are things that are probably less common than they used to be.

And there's been a lot of news about campus sexual violence and things like that.

But I would argue that that's just because people have collected the data and are reporting it now as opposed to it's actually happening.

I think actually men are probably less aggressive and less violent than they have been in the past in that generation is emblematic of this.

Whether that corresponds to lower levels of testosterone,

I don't know.

It could just be that the higher testosterone traits that some of us have are not being rewarded in society like they used to be.

By the way,

Just a great book if you've never read it,

Not related to testosterone at all,

Is Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature.

It's about a 10-year-old book now,

But it was about the decline of violence over time.

And he goes through in painstaking detail all of the data they have about violence,

Whether it be wars or massacres or rapes or other kinds of violence and how even though we think we live in a violent world,

It's so much less violent than it used to be.

And I quoted that book a little bit in mind and,

You know,

So much respect for that effort that he did in writing that book.

It's a really fascinating read.

Yeah,

I'll check that out.

Edward has some questions.

Sorry,

Edward,

I just saw your message,

So I'm going to unmute you.

Hey,

Charles.

Nice to meet you.

Can I just jump in here and talk?

Yeah.

Okay,

Cool.

I'm really enjoying this and I've been taking some notes and there's a couple of different things going on in my head,

So I want to try to talk them out.

Okay.

The first one is you just said a second ago,

Right,

Higher testosterone doesn't pay off like in previous generations where you could start,

You know,

Working on the railroad and work your way up to become a shipping market or something by the end of your life.

I think the reason that is though is not just as if there's some evolutionary reason for testosterone not paying off.

It's because the world is,

Not that the world is smaller,

But there's no uncharted territory in the world anymore.

You know,

Like back in the day when people thought the world was flat,

At the edge of the maps they would put here there'd be monsters and it's like people would go off to find them and fight the monsters and sail off the edge of the world or whatever's going to happen.

There's no spots anymore.

We know,

You know,

It's a checkup of the world and you know where everything is.

So it's,

So that being the case,

It's like how can we,

You know,

How can we invent or create those spots for ourselves in the new completely mapped out HGTV world?

Yeah,

Fascinating point.

I think that you're,

You know,

You're touching on this,

The good side of the virility paradox here,

Which is testosterone driving exploration and discovery and I think that all of us would agree that that's something that,

You know,

If we look at our human evolution is probably the result of a survival instinct that testosterone helps to create.

I would push back and say that I think that there's lots of discovery that needs,

That is yet to be happening in the world.

It's not geographic maybe,

That's a good point.

But you know,

If you look in the worlds of engineering and science and things like that where people are creating new things all the time,

You know,

This is nothing to do with the work I do,

But I'm just fascinated in what we're seeing people developing in terms of machines,

In terms of scientific knowledge about biology and other things.

And so I think that there's plenty of exploration that can be done and plenty of ways that we can satisfy that urge if we want to.

Yeah,

I hear that.

So kind of piggybacking on that and going to a related topic,

Going back to the winter effect for a second,

It's interesting,

Right?

Because it's not just testosterone,

It's the relationship you said between testosterone and dopamine,

Right?

Yeah.

Okay.

And so that's kind of mysterious and yet it's also really specific at the same time as it's mysterious.

So it's like how to find the right sort of mysterious specific thing.

For instance,

I'm a writer,

My ambitions are writing anyway.

It doesn't play screenplays,

That kind of thing.

And I've always noticed that when I find the right words or the right phrases,

When it's yelling then yeah,

There is totally that sense of like,

Got it.

I hit the bullseye and if I get a few pages like that,

Then later in the day I'll be imagining what it's going to be five years down the road when I'm being successful and I'm being interviewed or whatever and I'm data.

When I don't have a few pages of the right words,

Then I don't imagine any of that stuff.

I just eat lunch and get on with my day.

So yeah,

How do you like.

.

.

So you in that setting,

So that scenario,

Which I know very well of like you write something and it comes out great and you're really proud of it.

That scenario is a dopamine scenario.

You got a reward from that.

You got a high off of that.

And again,

I'm an amateur neuroscientist,

Right?

But there's a reward circuit in the brain that basically fires from one part of the brain to the other part of the brain.

And the chemical that it fires is dopamine.

And if you put a cannula in a rat's brain and you inject dopamine into that after whatever behavior,

They will do that behavior over and over and over again.

It's rewarding.

And there are many things that can reward that behavior or trigger that reward circuit.

It could be doing something you love like writing or something you're good at like writing for you.

It could be winning an Ultimate Frisbee game.

It could be doing any number of things.

It could also be taking a drug.

It could also be taking testosterone because testosterone feeds into that reward circuit.

And so,

This is how addiction happens and other things happen where you trigger the reward circuit by something that's not productive.

And in your case,

If it's writing that's triggering it,

That's a very productive thing.

It's going to make you a better writer.

And yeah,

Maybe testosterone is going to be part of that because there's a winner effect in there.

I wouldn't say that taking testosterone is going to make you a better writer though.

But it's just that it's part of your complex,

Unique chemical mix.

That leads to that dopamine circuit being fired.

I mean,

In the guys you were just talking about,

The guys in engineering fields or scientific fields who are making all the discoveries that we've been seeing in the last few decades,

What pushes a successful scientist who achieves the level of superstardom as opposed to someone who just publishes a few papers here and there,

Lives,

Dies,

Maybe has a nice family and friends and no one ever knows their name and doesn't contribute as much in the long run as the people we do know and that we read and look back on after the dawn.

Yeah,

Well,

Those people are a rare combination of- I mean,

I'm basically asking how do you achieve immortality.

Yeah,

That's my next book.

So you have to wait on that one.

Awesome.

Cool.

So we're right at the hour mark.

This has been awesome.

Thank you so much,

Charles,

For coming on with us.

My pleasure.

I'm glad those of you who read the book enjoyed it if you did.

It's always a fun topic.

It's a complicated topic because it's so varied in different people.

As I said at the outset,

The more and more I delved into the science,

The more and more I realized there's more that we don't know about all of this than what we do know about all of this.

So conversations like this are revealing because Everett's point about writing is a really good one.

I never thought of it that way.

It just goes to show you that we all have our own different inputs on this circuit and what it does to us.

So it's really been fun.

I'm glad you got in touch with me.

Yeah,

Thanks a lot.

All right.

All right.

Thanks,

Everybody,

For being on.

This has been great.

Okay,

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Hey,

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